ARM-Based MacBook Air Unlikely Based on Analyst Talk with Tim Cook

[prowlmedia]

And what percentage of the population worldwide needs that kind of computing power on the desktop? Maybe 2%, tops. The most processor-intensive thing the rest of the world does is probably run Microsoft Office. An iPad already has enough horsepower to do that.

Well you completely ignored everything I said... The latest mac pro is over 60 times the speed and power of an iPad 2 - What is going to create the content for ipad3!? The Infinity blades, the grand theft autos. Do you understand how making software works?

The ipad office apps like pages are nice but completely crippled even for office use. Fonts image imports etc. It's great for occasional use... but even accountants I know have 24"+ monitors for spreadsheets.

Your figures are so off it's stupid but even if it was right 2% of 80 billion is still... 1.6b... oh lets just forget all that money shall we.

The mac pro for example is the cheapest product to develop. well used understood component tech and once again capable of being 10's of time faster than an iPad

Apple could give a crap about the special needs of high-end users. They're a pain to support, the product line consumes a ton of development resources that could be better directed toward the other 98% of the market, the margins are worse than they are on the iPhone and iPad and Apple still has trouble attracting a robust developer community (especially compared to iOS, which is absolutely on fire).

Well no by their very nature they are not a pain to support as they are used by pros! I've never had to call Apple support. Worked it out via process of elimination or forums... I wonder how noob calls they get about the iphone every single day.

So all the massive push of high end mac's into the medical - automotive architectural - design and video - means nothing? Apple are just going to say sorry all your massive processing needs are not something we are interested in any more...

The fact is that iOS are introducing people to apple and driving the sales of all their other products - Mac sales whilst looking minimal to the cheaper devices have gone from .8 million macs in 2007 a quarter to 5.5 million this quarter and that's with an older product line.

How do you know the margins are worse! You work for them? Robust developer community my arse. MS are even bringing out more and more software for osx. Autodesk are redeveloping. Adobe integrating all the core OSX technologies into their software - and if you know anything about the differences in iOS and OSX - OpenCL / Grand dispatch etc that's massive amount of difference there.

Staying in the PC market with the Mac also leaves them beholden to Intel, a company that's increasingly going to become a rival as Apple develops newer and more powerful chips based on ARM technology in-house.

Clearly shows you know nothing about chips - ARM licence the tech to Apple and it's completely different to Intel. So apple are utterly beholden to ARM - Their chips are low power low performance chips - and they are very very good at that. Their whole pipeline is based on that...

Apple will migrate most OS X users to iOS over the next 5 years as they slowly pull X features into iOS and begin to release smartphone and tablet hardware that can dock and be used with keyboards, monitors and such. Their TV plans will probably also include the option to utilize the device as a "desktop" PC (with a 42" double HD-resoultion screen - yowza!).

You are pulling this out of thin air. I don't deny there will be more convergence but your fundamental misunderstanding of the ecosystem and power of the devices and macs and how you actual create iOS apps etc is a bit embarrassing.

The vast majority of OS X users will be overjoyed to own a single device, an iPhone, that doubles as a replacement PC and goes with them everywhere they go. A handful of power users will whine and moan and nobody in Cupertino will give a flip. They will in fact be glad to get rid of the professional crybabies.

So you are saying apple is going to stop pushing tech boundaries as they (almost) always have and start selling junk like HTC for the sake of the bottom line...

Handful = about 22 million pro mac users in the world. Oh and all the people in Cupertino what they going to design the iphone 6 on... an iphone 5 according to you? Or how about a windows 8 machine...

Genuinely the most misinformed posts I have ever read.

 

[theluggage]

An ARM MacBook Air would be very cool BUT right now an ARM processor would be a little lacking in processing power over Intel and, assuming we're talking about an OS X machine, we'd be limited to applications that could be easily recompiled.

...you're not going to be running Adobe CS or pro video editing software on it, but an ARM-based Mac could certainly handle your email, wordprocessing, presentations, web browsing etc. which is all an awful lot of people ask of their Macs. With a bigger screen and a bit more RAM than an iPad, but thinner and with better battery life than an Air, it could have a niche with people who could almost, but not quite cope with an iPad.

Also bear in mind that Apple are the experts at switching processor architectures - they've already done 68k to PPC to Intel - and OS X supports the concept of "universal binaries". I'd also guess that most apps which follow the App Store regulations could be re-compiled in a jiffy. Given that the "fat iPad" customers aren't going to want pro graphics apps, the dealbreaker would probably be MS Office... but that hasn't hurt the iPad...

The ARM processor in an iPad is miles and miles ahead of a 486. It's a bit ahead of the fastest Pentium IV processors ever built. The graphics is quite decent.

Heck, back when the 486 was new the contemporaneous ARM chips could thrash it for integer work. The reason the Acorn workstations began to lag behind PCs was that nobody got round to making graphics accelerators and floating point units for the Acorns (although you could plug a 486 into an Acorn RISC-PC and get the ARM to use its FPU that didn't really catch on...)

 

[theluggage]

I've seen post after post saying that the tiny USB 3.0 controller is too big for Apple to put on any laptop.

No, its more a case of there was no point going to the effort of shoehorning an extra chip on the board (and maybe having to tweak the case to accommodate a bigger board) when, one year down the line, they'd be getting it for free as part of the next Intel chipset (and might be going to completely re-design the case anyway).

Apart from being prohibitively expensive, this would also take up too much space in a device the size of a MacBook Air. A software solution of some kind - like Rosetta - would be much more feasible.

...or they could replace the whole display section with, effectively, an iPad (sans-battery) so it could check mail, play music etc. without firing up the Intel space heater. That's not even a new idea - I'm sure I've seen blurbs for PC laptops and media PCs with a similar arrangement .

 

[kalsta]

Post pc era... Ring a bell?

'Post-PC' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means—at least not to Steve Jobs who I assume you are trying to quote here. Here's what he actually said when asked by Walt Mossberg if the tablet is going to eventually replace the laptop:

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn't care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars.

PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by one out of X people."​

 

[jameslmoser]

'Post-PC' doesn't mean what you seem to think it means—at least not to Steve Jobs who I assume you are trying to quote here. what he actually said when asked by Walt Mossberg if the tablet is going to eventually replace the laptop:

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn't care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars.

PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by one out of X people."​

Right, and this means apple isn't merging iOS and Mac os x why? In fact the fact they are both still going to be around would be even more incentive for apple to merge the them.

I think your in for a surprise if you don't think that's their goal. The only reason they won't is if all the people refusing to upgrade to Lion makes them take notice.

 

[kalsta]

Right, and this means apple isn't merging iOS and Mac os x why? In fact the fact they are both still going to be around would be even more incentive for apple to merge the them.

I think your in for a surprise if you don't think that's their goal. The only reason they won't is if all the people refusing to upgrade to Lion makes them take notice.

You've yet to provide a single piece of convincing evidence that they are merging. Why is the onus on me now to prove that they aren't? I've already explained why it doesn't make any sense. How about this quote from Steve Jobs (since you brought him into the debate):

'We've done tons of user testing on this, and it turns out it doesn't work. Touch surfaces don't want to be vertical.

It gives great demo but after a short period of time, you start to fatigue and after an extended period of time, your arm wants to fall off. it doesn't work, it's ergonomically terrible.

Touch surfaces want to be horizontal, hence pads.

For a notebook, that's why we're perfected our multitouch trackpads over the years, because that's the best way we've found to get multitouch into a notebook.

We've also, in essence, put a trackpad -- a multitouch track pad on the mouse with our magic mouse. And we've recently come out with a pure play trackpad as well for our desktop users.

So this is how were going to use multitouch on our Mac products because this (he points at someone touch laptop screen) doesn't work.'​

So let's recap. 1. He said that PCs (which includes Macs) won't go away, they will just become more specialised. 2. He said that Apple isn't going to do a touchscreen desktop or laptop. These, he says, require a horizontal trackpad or mouse, separate to the screen. And so we get back to what I was saying before, about the fundamental difference between user input on OS X and iOS—one expects input from a pointing device (where the user can always see what's behind the cursor), the other expects input from a finger (where the user can't see what is behind their hand, and there is no such thing as a cursor).

Still not convinced? No, I didn't think so. That's okay. Apple could do anything in the future, so I suppose you have a right to believe anything you want. It would be nice though if you stopped pretending there was any serious evidence for it.

And yes, I will be very surprised if they ever do turn around and produce a device that runs both Mac and iOS software, combining both a touchscreen and a pointing device—because IMO that would be an absolute dog's breakfast.

 

[wizard]

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"It is very naive to think the mainframes are going away and replaced by PCs."

I understand the market revenue for mainframes and special purpose clusters has seen continuous growth despite the introduction of the Desktop, the laptop the net book, the tablet or the smartphone.

Beyond that what are today's data centers if they aren't mainframes in the common sense of a centralized computer running virtual OS's? In some cases those data centers are built on PC hardware in others "mainframes" but the end result is the same a big machine that you and others connect up to.

 

[wizard]

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Yeah I don't really see it happening because It would mean Apple would have to add support for ARM Processors..

And while I can't say for sure I just don't think they will capable of powering an operating system like Mac OSX Lion with ARM Processors..

The only benefit I can see is better battery life..

Ptsssst... iOS is Mac OS X, don't get confused. It's just a name to categorize devices. Remember the introduction of the iPhone how Steve Jobs was amazed about running Mac OS X on it and how good it was for it. Later they call it iPhone OS ( Mayor Error ) and at the end it has been named iOS but since the begining it has always be Mac OS X (AKA NextStep OS).

I really don't know why people can't grasp this! Obviously they have reworked the GUI and process manager but many of the programmer APIs are identical. The vast majority of the changes are there to help with power management or the touch screen interface.

 

[wizard]

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Ptsssst... iOS is Mac OS X, don't get confused. It's just a name to categorize devices. Remember the introduction of the iPhone how Steve Jobs was amazed about running Mac OS X on it and how good it was for it. Later they call it iPhone OS ( Mayor Error ) and at the end it has been named iOS but since the begining it has always be Mac OS X (AKA NextStep OS).

They aren't the same. iOS can't run x86 code and OS X can't run ARM code, i.e. you can't run iOS apps in OS X and vice versa.

Of course not that doesn't matter, in many cases you can compile your source code to run on either platform. Obviously the GUI APIs are different but most of the other APIs are the same one platform to the other.

I really have to suggest that you read the documentation thatcomes with XCode. It will become very clear to you that iOS is Mac OS driving a different GUI.

 

[wizard]

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I don't care if it's an Intel CPU, an ARM chip or a hamster. -What- I care about is that it will run real operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X -- and not that crippled piece of junk that iOS is. And I don't care if Apple makes more money with iToys and iOS than the entire African continent makes in a year -- the entire iOS experience sucks.

Thank you for your comments!

Unfortunately you don't know what you are talking about. Feel free to live in darkness though.

 

[MattInOz]

Right, and this means apple isn't merging iOS and Mac os x why? In fact the fact they are both still going to be around would be even more incentive for apple to merge the them.

I think your in for a surprise if you don't think that's their goal. The only reason they won't is if all the people refusing to upgrade to Lion makes them take notice.

Apple has a very clear hi low product strategy. Each product family has a brute product or pro product that aims to offer as much power and flexibility suitable to clear product definition. As the product matures and that power exceeds the market demand then we see the slick version of the family the mini nano product that holds power but tests the lower limits of the design.

Osx is the brute sometimes you have to brute force solve a problem before you can refine.
iOS is the slick locked down to stay nibble instant on always there version.

A merge would be a middle ground. Apple just doesn't do middle ground. to the lament of some product families.

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Beyond that what are today's data centers if they aren't mainframes in the common sense of a centralized computer running virtual OS's? In some cases those data centers are built on PC hardware in others "mainframes" but the end result is the same a big machine that you and others connect up to.

Yes the similarities between those machines and a personnel computer are only really manufacturing.

 

[sunspot42]

Dock It

The problem for me with iPad and other tablets is purely the form factor.

People obsess on the form factor of the phone or the tablet. Dock it. Suddenly, it can have whatever form factor you want. Want to drive an external HD monitor? That's possible already, and will be universal a few years down the road - heck, tablets and even smartphones would be able to drive multiple HD monitors. Want a keyboard and a mouse? That's already perfectly feasible - iOS would simply need built-in support for a mouse-driven interface, a "desktop" mode. Again, perfectly feasible - it's sister OS X has sported that mode since inception.

Most consumers flat out won't continue to purchase desktop or laptop PCs if their mobile devices become usable in desktop mode, because most consumers only NEED a device that can function like a desktop or laptop occasionally. But they want a mobile device with them at all times.

The only folks who will continue to seek out the desktop or laptop form factor are people who need tons of processing power, and that's a tiny slice of the market. Apple isn't going to support obscure niches going forward.

 

[KnightWRX]

People obsess on the form factor of the phone or the tablet. Dock it. Suddenly...

... it's still a tablet. No really. I don't need to "dock" my laptop or drag external accessories to make it useful.

What's wrong with me not liking the tablet form factor ? Laptops are fine, fill my needs fully and with things like the MBA, provide all the portability of a tablet with the power of not needing to "Dock it".

 

[sunspot42]

Missing The Point

Well you completely ignored everything I said... The latest mac pro is over 60 times the speed and power of an iPad 2 - What is going to create the content for ipad3!? The Infinity blades, the grand theft autos. Do you understand how making software works?

Yes, do you? Do you think iOS software can only be created on a Mac? You might need a Mac to compile the code - at least for the moment - but there's nothing preventing Apple from either making the SDK available in iOS itself, or from releasing it for other platforms like Linux or even Windows, or from making virtual Macs available in the cloud for developers to work on (the scenario I find most likely, with Apple rapidly migrating everything into the cloud).

And there's absolutely nothing stopping you from creating all of the graphic content, music, sound effects, etc. etc. on whatever platform you desire.

There's no compelling reason from the iOS side for Apple to remain in the desktop hardware business.

The ipad office apps like pages are nice but completely crippled even for office use. Fonts image imports etc. It's great for occasional use... but even accountants I know have 24"+ monitors for spreadsheets.

That's nice. Does Apple care about supporting accountants and their spreadsheets? Probably not - they've shown little interest in supporting the enterprise space for the past decade. That having been said, there's nothing preventing them from releasing an iPhone that could dock with and drive a 42" QFHD 3840x2160 monitor.

"Problem" solved. Your hypothetical accountant could happily gaze away at a spreadsheet the size of Alaska.

Your figures are so off it's stupid but even if it was right 2% of 80 billion is still... 1.6b... oh lets just forget all that money shall we.

Yes, exactly. That's how Apple became the most valuable company on the planet - by trimming away a bunch of garbage and concentrating on the most profitable things they did well, in growing industries. The desktop PC isn't a growing industry - it's a dying industry.

Well no by their very nature they are not a pain to support as they are used by pros!

Supporting the enterprise space means making hardware configurations available for years after they've been discontinued. It means having service and support available, support for multiple configurations of expansion hardware, external storage arrays. It means keeping drivers updated, keeping security updated on devices where anyone can install any software they like at any time, etc. A whole host of problems - and liabilities - that the mobile space simply doesn't possess. iDevice users are vastly more profitable than desktop users, as Apple's own financial reports demonstrate.

The fact is that iOS are introducing people to apple and driving the sales of all their other products - Mac sales whilst looking minimal to the cheaper devices have gone from .8 million macs in 2007 a quarter to 5.5 million this quarter and that's with an older product line.

Yes, and most of those users are surfing the web, updating their Facebook pages, watching YouTube and reading their e-mail on those Macs. That's all stuff even an iPhone could do, provided it supported a keyboard, mice, an external monitor and a desktop-style interface to work with those input and output devices right out of the box. Which obviously it will someday . . . probably someday fairly soon.

How do you know the margins are worse!

Because Apple's own financials demonstrate it. The iPhone 4 has a 75% profit margin. The Mac has a 28% profit margin. Which product would you focus on shipping more of?

Apple would have to be idiots NOT to migrate users to the iPhone.

Clearly shows you know nothing about chips - ARM licence the tech to Apple and it's completely different to Intel.

ARM licenses core technology, but Apple dramatically expands on that for their own customized processors. This is starting to place them into direct competition with Intel, which in addition to being a huge chip fabricator, also designs its own rival processors. As Apple migrates more and more customers to their ARM-based mobile platform, Intel and the desktop PCs it drives will become more and more of a rival. At some point, Apple isn't going to want to continue funding a direct competitor.

So you are saying apple is going to stop pushing tech boundaries as they (almost) always have and start selling junk like HTC for the sake of the bottom line...

Pushing tech boundaries has nothing to do with selling a $2,000 boat anchor full of hard drives, CPU fans and Blu-ray players. The iPhone is pushing more tech boundaries than anything we've seen in the PC space in the past decade.

Handful = about 22 million pro mac users in the world.

Source? I can't find anything on the Web to indicate Apple has sold 22 million Mac Pros, let alone has 22 million active Mac Pro users. From what I can find online, there are only ~90 million active Mac users worldwide, period. The vast majority of those are using laptops, and their best-selling desktop machines are the iMac and the Mac Mini.

I'd be surprised if there are 10 million active Mac Pro users. In contrast, Apple sold 4 million iPhone 4S devices in its first weekend on the market.

Genuinely the most misinformed posts I have ever read.

That's a pretty bold statement from someone who clearly doesn't know what the heck he's talking about...

 

[sunspot42]

Dock It

... it's still a tablet. No really. I don't need to "dock" my laptop or drag external accessories to make it useful.

What's wrong with me not liking the tablet form factor ? Laptops are fine, fill my needs fully and with things like the MBA, provide all the portability of a tablet with the power of not needing to "Dock it".

Since your tablet needs to be docked anyhow to recharge, I fail to see how this is an issue. Plug it in and voila! You can now use it just the same way you used your old desktop or laptop PC without having to actually own a desktop or laptop PC.

Same goes for your iPhone.

I could see this as an easy way for Apple to invade and conquer the enterprise, where the iPhone is already stealing marketshare away from RIM. Get enterprise users on the iPhone, then upgrade iOS and allow the devices to connect with and utilize external keyboards, mice, monitors and networks via an inexpensive docking station.

Now, why buy your users PCs, when they can utilize the iPhone either to run software locally, or use desktop virtualization to run Windows software on some remote, shared server (something the enterprise has already been migrating to).

If I were Michael Dell, I would be very worried.

 

[AidenShaw]

What's wrong with me not liking the tablet form factor ?

Nothing is "wrong with you".

You have a very rational worry that Apple will decide (again) that "less is more" and "form over function", and eliminate a form factor that you find better suited for your needs.

You worry that "Apple doesn't care about professionals like me" - and you're 100% right in worrying.

MBA Tim is looking at ROI and profit margins, and taking care of Apple's traditional professional market just doesn't make the grade.

 

[theluggage]

MBA Tim is looking at ROI and profit margins, and taking care of Apple's traditional professional market just doesn't make the grade.

...but then the alternative might be no Apple at all. Apple & 3rd Party Apple developers pretty much invented the "creative professional" market back in the days when the "Wintel" hardware/software architecture simply weren't up to the job. That isn't the case any more - the hardware is much the same and, love it or loathe it, Windows is no longer the joke it used to be. Big-name graphics and video software is available for the PC - sometimes exclusively, and sometimes a release ahead of the Mac. If you spend your days using a particular video editor - probably on a machine more-or-less dedicated to it - PC or Mac doesn't make a lot of difference. Meanwhile, although the Mac Pro is reasonable value and beautifully built, if your main concern is throwing together a tower system with the grunt to run your video editor and you don't care what it looks like, PC will be cheaper.

By the end of the 90s, the "Pro" Apple market was surviving on momentum and brand loyalty, rather than any overwhelming practical advantage. That was looking like a slow war of attrition as the "corporate" PC with its commodity pricing gradually became more capable and encroached.

Meanwhile, it still seems that nobody can turn out laptops and small-form-factor systems as attractive as Apple's or quite get the user friendliness right. And with the iPhone, iPad they've pulled Microsoft's shorts up over their head and tied them in a knot. They're even managed to open a new front in the corporate market as people start insisting on using their own iDevices at work.

Which horse would you back?

On the other hand, the whole Thunderbolt malarkey seems to be directed at the pro market: home/SOHO users will be happy with USB2/Firewire until Apple switch to the new Intel chips with USB3, but Thunderbolt offers the chance of external PCIe expansion which means that creative pros can consider using laptops/SFF where they were previously tied to towers, so maybe they haven't given up yet.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as I can run the Terminal and MacPorts alongside things like MS Office, sitting on top of a Unix-style filesystem (proper symlinks FTW) then OS X offers the best of Linux and Windows. Take that away and I'll just have to stick Debian on my Mac.

 

[mectojic]

Reviving this old thread… just to say… how times have changed…

 

[whiskersld]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA