It is a rumour, you’re correct, but the industry has been pretty certain they’re heading that way for some time now. It’s a fairly safe bet.
They been saying this for at least 2 years
If not longer
Ming Chi Kuo, the person who seems to be the origin of this rumour as far as I can tell, has been pretty accurate overall compared to most analysts
But he has also been wrong from time to time
So, “we’ll see” - its only a handful of days anyway until we know for sure
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It’s not ANY rumor heard from unknown sources. Apple is going ARM for some lines of notebooks and probably Mac Mini (this part is a guessing). The plans are not new, the MacOS for ARM exists for years, the complete tooling and OS features to get most of it not, as we all have noticing the convergence of core features from iOS and MacOS. We never had a firm date before… until now. It always was like in the next few years, probably in the next 2 years… but now they sources says: 2021. Let’s wait, but I see a glass half full instead of half empty and I guess that the other half will suddenly appear in few weeks. I can assure you, ARM is coming. I can’t assure a date, but there’s no IF here.
Yep. If you desire to have the new line, and keep the Intel going, it will cost you an ARM and a LEG.
I am so glad that I returned that 16" MacBook Pro earlier this year, as I’m expecting to have to buy a new ARM Mac, just to test my apps on.
Let’s hope that the OS isn’t such a shit show as Catalina.
It will, as it will be the result of such convergence. 
I thought that’s why Catalina was a disaster, because they’re merging the two OSes (again).
I can’t belive how slow macOS Vista (er. Catalina is). I needed to copy a 13.5 driver from the latest Xcode into my Mojave machine. I have Cat running on an external boot drive. It took 2.5 HOURS to UPDATE (from 13.4 to 13.5), then another HOUR to update Xcode… 3.5 HOURS to UPDATE… not install … just update… And it takes nearly 5 minutes to boot… Mojave boots in <1 minute.
I would say something is wrong with your setup or install then …
well it was a clean install on a reformatted drive … and all that has been done is updates as they have occurred… no external software of any kind has ever been installed.
Now it might be a 5400rpm HDD… but still 3.5 hours?
Is it USB 2?
And still doesn’t exclude the possibility that something went wrong during installation.
my biggest indicator of how slow it is, is starting up. The 2012 rMBP can boot Mojave in ~ 25 seconds. A 2020 16" MacBook Pro with ~2x single core performance, faster RAM, faster SSD; took ~ 20 seconds to boot.
2012 running macOS 10.6, took ~ 4 seconds.
Btw Apple do not recommend APFS for HDD disks.
The HD might also be failing - it usually happens after a lot of dusk activity. You could use the test version of DriveDX to see if it has problems.
Sorry, but this seems somewhat nonsensical. Boot times depend on what the system has to check and do - it is not a like for like comparison. Security alone has massively improved. And how can you run 10.6 on a 2012 MBP? I presume you cloned a system partition in targetdisk mode? Earliest system you can install should be 10.7 Lion.
Cant say I find this install any slower
My old MBP was a 2.7 Ghz 4 core with an internal SSD
Booting from that was pretty quick - maybe a minute
My new 16 is a 2.6 Ghz 6 core with internal SSD
Boots at least as quickly
But the old MBP when booting from en external USB 3 drive, even an SSD, was way slower
I gave up an actual HD to boot from externally - way too slow
In sum, it will be Catalina for ARM - abandoned features + novelties. It means Inheritance of old problems + new bugs.
As Catalina is Mojave - abandoned features + novelties.
If the speed of snowball rolling > speed of snow melting, while the quantity of fresh snow along the track increases, the snowball will get bigger.
I’ll agree that this isn’t a fair test as I’m unwilling to risk my work machine by putting Catalina on it, and I couldn’t get Mojave installed on the 16". However many other people have confirmed the same overall report as I. In that the 16" should be 2x faster than the 7.5 year old 15", but in anything other than long tasks, it feels the same.
As for running 10.6 on a 2012 rMBP, IIRC it’s what it shipped with, and at the time I kept restarting it in front of my PC using friends as it totally blew their minds. It was one reason as to why a friend converted (who’se now gone back to Windows because of various reasons with Apple’s current offerings).
IMHO this performance issues is akin to buying a BMW X6 with a twin-turbo V8, capable of 0-100 (km) in ~ 4 seconds. But finding that you’re getting toasted by 4 bangers at the lights, because the immobilizer is badly coded.
Apple have outdone themselves with security in Catalina, no single-user mode, no target-disk-mode, the OS is on it’s own “locked” partition and various other people have told me that it auto-engages file-vault. Which means hardware failure, the data on that machine is toast, and if it fails out of warranty, the cost to repair is about 75% of the initial price.
No longer can you plug it into another Mac and run disk tools on it. If you can’t boot the machine from the recovery partition, I suspect that you can’t even boot from USB any more.
Well that sounds great! Something to look forward to.
Both the retina and non-retina 2012 MBP shipped with Mac OS X 10.7.4 (which I skipped as I thought it was awful).
As for speed: Intel chips have not progressed that much in the last 6 years. In single-core tasks the 16in should be about 50% faster according to GeekBench, in multi-core about 100% (that’s one reason why AMD and ARM have caught up and even overtaken Intel). How much of that Catalina sucks up I can’t say, but I would say from what I have read that Catalina isn’t faster than Mojave on the same hardware.
Btw in my experience you won’t really notice much of a difference going forward 50%, but you will notice it going backwards.
As for the criticism of Catalina - no argument from me. Personally I don’t like that Macs become more like Gadgets, but everyone else around me couldn’t care less as long as I keep their Macs running if something happens (that’s why I get really nervous about backups!).