At WWDC this month, Apple announced its own ARM-based processor that will power a new generation of Macs later this year. Ahead of the hardware arriving, Cupertino is giving developers a chance to work with the processor. Dev’s can access a developer kit comprised of a Mac mini with the A12X ARM processor, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. This chipset is what Apple has used in its current generation of iPad Pros. There is already plenty of interest in Apple’s ARM push because of the power the chipset generates. Steve Sinofsky, an ex-Microsoft Windows executive, says the new Mac’s will be the “ultimate developer PC”. Early benchmarks suggest improved performance over Microsoft’s Surface Pro X. “In two years, there is only Arm hardware and in four Intel will be ancient memory. The ecosystem will have rolled over. And Mac will be the ultimate developer PC. iPad will be used for more and more ‘work’,” wrote Sinofsky.
VS Code Support Coming
However, to become a true developer platform, users will need access to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. The problem is Microsoft has never made VS Code – which is used by 11 million developers – available for Mac. That is likely to change as Microsoft is now working on bringing VS Code to Apple’s new platform. “We’re definitely looking at adding support for Mac/ARM in VS Code. We don’t have a timeline yet but our team is looking into it. A large number of VS Code users are on macOS so we’re committed to support them on the new hardware too,” a Microsoft spokesperson told ZDNet. “Supporting a new architecture requires also ensuring that VS Code extensions work on that chip,” the spokesperson said. “Most of the extensions in the VS Code Marketplace are written in portable languages such as JavaScript or TypeScript. But some have dependencies on native binaries. We’ve identified the most popular extensions with native dependencies. And we’re working with their maintainers to ensure that they are updated to run on ARM too, for all operating systems.”
