Apple Plans to Ditch Intel and Use Custom Mac Chips Starting in 2020

[tubular]

"With its own chips, Apple would not be forced to wait on new Intel chips before being able to release updated Macs"

Oh, if only there were more up-to-date processors available, and then the desktop Macs would be instantly upgraded!

 

[panjandrum]

Well, so it's beginning. I wonder how many people will choose to move on from Apple due to lack of X86 support. I for one will not be buying a Mac that I cannot run windows on

Exactly. Let's hope that if this rumor is true that Apple will be using chips that, even if they support special functions, remain fully Intel compatible. For many, many years Apple used non-industry-standard chips. I would absolutely argue that, for a considerable amount of that time, the Motorola chips were far superior, but in the end one of the things that allowed Mac systems to be adopted widely turned out the be full Windows compatibility. The ability to fall-back to necessary Windows apps has been huge in the Eduction market, where it's not at all unusual to find state-mandated apps that are Windows only. Slow emulation (VirtualPC) solutions won't cut it, whereas "close to full-speed" VM solutions do work, making easy adoption of Mac systems possible. For most uses outside of gaming, solutions like VirtualBox work great. And let's talk gaming - I'm a gamer, my daughter is a gamer, our friends are gamers, their kids are gamers. Guess what? They all own MacBook Pros of various types (p.s. Apple, you need to build a 13" MacBook Pro with a real GPU someday). Guess what they do when they game? Yep, reboot in Windows. Guess what's more important, using a Mac, or gaming? Yep, gaming. If forced to choose between a laptop that runs Window games well and a Mac laptop in the future I can absolutely guarantee where their $$$ will go, and it won't be to Apple. So let's hope this rumor is unfounded, or that Apple knows what they are doing when designing their own chips... (Of course, streaming gaming might eventually make all of this moot, but we are nowhere close to that yet - even Steam's in-home LAN streaming can have some relatively significant quality and latency issues, not to mention no support for advanced controllers such as FFB wheels.)

 

[Falhófnir]

If Apple can make their Mac software more like iOS on my iPad Pro, I will consider coming back to the Mac platform. Better apps, better features, better stability/security, and better battery life. I can see this being a major boost for the Mac as it has been stagnant for years.

Yeah I think it's fair to say that the move to x86 hasn't spurred the vibrant developer community for mac that Apple wanted - if it becomes the same community that's already developing for iOS though, well that's a whole different ballgame. They already have the skills to apply and this might actually mean the traditional form factor machines get some attention.

 

[pankajdoharey]

You are mixing up price and cost. The Intel chip's price is a $1000, it obviously costs much less to manufacture - accounting for manufacturing and vendor margins. If Apple had to design a similar chip in house, it would still have to pay for its own R&D behind such a massive processor and manufacturing and vendor margins at a semiconductor fab supplier, without the advantages of scale Intel has catering to the entire computing supply chain.

Actually Apple does manufacture massive chips atleast based purely on per transistor count on silicon. Both Apple A11 Bionic Chip and 15-core Xeon Ivy Bridge-EX has the same transistor count 4.3 Billion transistors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

 

[Naimfan]

Bye, bye Mac . . .

 

[Smartass]

I thought this was april fools day joke lol

 

[tubular]

Incidentally, although I recently trimmed off my grey beard, I'm going to mime stroking it.

So I've been through

• 24-bit to 32-bit-clean transition on 68K family
• 68K to PowerPC transition
• old-world to X transition
• PowerPC to Intel transition

And every time I had to say goodbye to some software. I never enjoy that, but it's the price of progress, I suppose.

The bigger problem is that this takes Apple desktops that much further away from repairability and after-purchase customizability and modification. The Secure Enclave may be secure, but it's also code for "only Apple can repair it, and 'for your sake' you're locked out of your own box."

 

[obitow]

As a technology enthusiast and a developer, I'm very excited. This is one of the reasons why I prefer open source dependencies and native code using official tools, despite the troubles Xcode gives to me: It would be just a recompile to support this arch.

As a consumer, I'm mostly OK with this. I use few 3rd party apps and haven't installed Windows in a long time.

Also, I'm finding some conclusions here out of reality. This potential transition would be very different from PPC -> Intel, because Macs aren't the major Apple product anymore. We can't compare this to Windows on ARM either, because MS lacks an already successful consumer platform running on ARM.

 

[BenTrovato]

Interesting move. Apple's already been down this similar path and it did not go well, running over to Intel to save the day. I feel like they will mess up the execution because they keep trying to merge laptops and tablets and it just doesn't work.

 

[bruinsrme]

I am a purist and running Windoze on a Mac always felt like Sacrilege which is why i dont run windoze on it.

Purist?
that’s funny.

I’ve run “windoze” on MBP for 5 years now. MBPs run it better than most PC laptops I’ve owned.

 

[curtvaughan]

Not likely, as CPU designs are completely incompatible.

If they come up with a new CPU platform, it would be nice if they accomplished something like DEC did 25 years ago with the Alpha RISC chip. Not only was it 64-bit that long ago, but it incorporated a hardware abstraction layer which allowed any of three OS's to run natively on it (VMS, DEC Unix, Windows NT). DEC had to have had a shake hands agreement with Microsoft to make that happen. Unfortunately, DEC had a losing business model and ultimately went out of business, and the Alpha architecture died soon thereafter, leaving Intel to dominate the CPU market. Hopefully chip design will take a giant leap in the near future, whether it's via Apple, or preferably, with cooperation among all of the big players in chip and OS design.

 

[Moshu]

Well, so it's beginning. I wonder how many people will choose to move on from Apple due to lack of X86 support. I for one will not be buying a Mac that I cannot run windows on

+1

And Parallels or Fusion won’t allow you to do so?

They cannot make magic like re-writing the whole set of instructions. So no, they won't. Remember that Microsoft had a special version of Windows for ARM architecture ( Windows RT ) that was compatible with nothing and failed miserably?
That's where we are heading, bye-bye Parallels or Fusion or VMWare or whatever.

 

[pankajdoharey]

To an extent yes.

The tech world is very much like an ice berg. The consumer side is the top above water that most people see.

However, under the water line obscured from site, the entirety runs a combination of windows platforms or a un*x platform (BSD, AIX, Linux, etc).

Those of us who support the back end (we are legion) need compatibility with the hardware, software and infrastructure tools to do so. Many can use macs today in this role because of that cross compatibility.

If Apple goes so proprietary that we can no longer run the tools we need on their hardware, It’s Apple we ditch, not the billions (if not trillions) in infrastructure that powers the world.

Do not ever underestimate the actual power of Unix based OS in the world, or even windows for that matter.

Apple is a consumer focused company, but consumers are not the largest tech purchasers. When a financial institution is spending 1/2 million to upgrade their infrastructure to support high loads, nobody is asking “is my Mac compatibility with that?” As part of the decision.
[doublepost=1522758842][/doublepost]

Because tech are tools not religions? And this kind of thinking really doesn’t make you sound like you know what you’re talking about in here.


Just a grown up version of “what’s a computer” kid.

Maybe but the reason i switched from Windoze was those frequent formats every month or so. Or spontaneous slowing down of windoze on its own after a couple of months of updates, i never felt such things on a Mac or Linux desktop. On windows i could never have uptimes of 1-2 months, but i rarely restart my mac. OSX is actually that good. Even my current uptime is 5 days.

 

[cmaier]

Exactly. Let's hope that if this rumor is true that Apple will be using chips that, even if they support special functions, remain fully Intel compatible. For many, many years Apple used non-industry-standard chips. I would absolutely argue that, for a considerable amount of that time, the Motorola chips were far superior, but in the end one of the things that allowed Mac systems to be adopted widely turned out the be full Windows compatibility. The ability to fall-back to necessary Windows apps has been huge in the Eduction market, where it's not at all unusual to find state-mandated apps that are Windows only. Slow emulation (VirtualPC) solutions won't cut it, whereas "close to full-speed" VM solutions do work, making easy adoption of Mac systems possible. For most uses outside of gaming, solutions like VirtualBox work great. And let's talk gaming - I'm a gamer, my daughter is a gamer, our friends are gamers, their kids are gamers. Guess what? They all own MacBook Pros of various types (p.s. Apple, you need to build a 13" MacBook Pro with a real GPU someday). Guess what they do when they game? Yep, reboot in Windows. Guess what's more important, using a Mac, or gaming? Yep, gaming. If forced to choose between a laptop that runs Window games well and a Mac laptop in the future I can absolutely guarantee where their $$$ will go, and it won't be to Apple. So let's hope this rumor is unfounded, or that Apple knows what they are doing when designing their own chips... (Of course, streaming gaming might eventually make all of this moot, but we are nowhere close to that yet - even Steam's in-home LAN streaming can have some relatively significant quality and latency issues, not to mention no support for advanced controllers such as FFB wheels.)

If every single Mac user rejects ARM macs, and they lose their entire Mac customer base, but the new ARM macs appeal to a tiny percentage of non-mac-using iOS users, then Apple will be very happy with the decision.

And, of course, they won’t lose their entire Mac customer base, because the percentage that care about Windows is small.

As for gaming, there are a lot more hours spent in the world playing iOS games than windows games.

 

[Stella]

This shortcoming of laptops has already been solved with native support of eGPU.

Its also a very expensive option, plus AMD only. AMD cannot compete with Nvidia 1080ti - still to this day, despite the Ti being several years old.

 

[cmaier]

If they come up with a new CPU platform, it would be nice if they accomplished something like DEC did 25 years ago with the Alpha RISC chip. Not only was it 64-bit that long ago, but it incorporated a hardware abstraction layer which allowed any of three OS's to run natively on it (VMS, DEC Unix, Windows NT). DEC had to have had a shake hands agreement with Microsoft to make that happen. Unfortunately, DEC had a losing business model and ultimately went out of business, and the Alpha architecture died soon thereafter, leaving Intel to dominate the CPU market. Hopefully chip design will take a giant leap in the near future, whether it's via Apple, or preferably, with cooperation among all of the big players in chip and OS design.

DEC support for running other architectures was one in software, not hardware.

 

[H3LL5P4WN]

Especially with crazy PC component prices, mainly DRAM and GPU, some say the "Future of Gaming" is in Streaming:

So platform won't matter.

Hence why you see Sony is more into streaming old games rather than backwards compatibility like MS....

As an owner of an Nvidia Shield TV...

...it's boxed up and is waiting for my girlfriend to take it home with her to have access to YouTube on her TV.

 

[cmaier]

Incidentally, although I recently trimmed off my grey beard, I'm going to mime stroking it.

So I've been through

• 24-bit to 32-bit-clean transition on 68K family
• 68K to PowerPC transition
• old-world to X transition
• PowerPC to Intel transition

And every time I had to say goodbye to some software. I never enjoy that, but it's the price of progress, I suppose.

The bigger problem is that this takes Apple desktops that much further away from repairability and after-purchase customizability and modification. The Secure Enclave may be secure, but it's also code for "only Apple can repair it, and 'for your sake' you're locked out of your own box."

Nowadays not a lot of people repairing their own iMacs. We will see if the new Mac Pro is more accessible, but as a rule the days of buying fix-it-yourself Mac hardware have already sailed.

 

[H3LL5P4WN]

Perhaps you might have grown out of playing 'real' games by then? I do a lot of different stuff on my computers now than I did 5 years ago?

I'm 36 now. I've been gaming for over a quarter of a century at this point. You'll pry my Logitech G-devices from my cold, dead hands.

 

[Chupa Chupa]

Potential downside, is it being more like iOS may mean behind a walled garden. Apple's security approach is to lock down the device so we may h

Personally I don’t see it as “potential” downside. If it happens it’s depressingly the beginning of the end. iOS Desktop is not MacOS.

 

[cmaier]

Actually Apple does manufacture massive chips atleast based purely on per transistor count on silicon. Both Apple A11 Bionic Chip and 15-core Xeon Ivy Bridge-EX has the same transistor count 4.3 Billion transistors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count

Good thing that when you fab a chip the cost is not per-transistor. What matters is the die area, and the number of layers.

 

[Arm64MyMac]

My username says it all. Yes, I think is great. I've had this username for about 4 1/2 years. I deserve a cookie.

 

[Stella]

If Apple can make their Mac software more like iOS on my iPad Pro, I will consider coming back to the Mac platform. Better apps, better features, better stability/security, and better battery life. I can see this being a major boost for the Mac as it has been stagnant for years.

Just buy a keyboard for your iPad Pro. If you are happy with iOS applications, that are cutdown versions of their PC counterparts, you really don't need a desktop / laptop computer. If you want more security on Mac OS today, you can. Just install ALL your apps from the Mac AppStore.

Mac OS has stagnated because Apple has allowed it to.

Many Mac applications cannot get onto the Mac AppStore due to Apple's requirements ( sandboxed etc ), because technically it is not feasible. These applications, personally, I find the the most useful and use day to day for home and work.

Company I work for uses mostly Macs. If Mac OS became iOS like, as you suggest ( walled garden - because thats how you'd get better security ) , we'd be forced to stop using Macs, which would be a shame , because we wouldn't be able to use the software we need to. Many other companies would be in the same boat.

 

[Heineken]

Maybe but the reason i switched from Windoze was those frequent formats every month or so. Or spontaneous slowing down of windoze on its own after a couple of months of updates, i never felt such things on a Mac or Linux desktop. On windows i could never have uptimes of 1-2 months, but i rarely restart my mac. OSX is actually that good. Even my current uptime is 5 days.

My uptime is usually as long as it takes Apple to push a new update, but OS X is so stable that i could run it for months without reboot. Actually i have a mini in my closet doing just that.

 

[DNichter]

To an extent yes.

The tech world is very much like an ice berg. The consumer side is the top above water that most people see.

However, under the water line obscured from site, the entirety runs a combination of windows platforms or a un*x platform (BSD, AIX, Linux, etc).

Those of us who support the back end (we are legion) need compatibility with the hardware, software and infrastructure tools to do so. Many can use macs today in this role because of that cross compatibility.

If Apple goes so proprietary that we can no longer run the tools we need on their hardware, It’s Apple we ditch, not the billions (if not trillions) in infrastructure that powers the world.

Do not ever underestimate the actual power of Unix based OS in the world, or even windows for that matter.

Apple is a consumer focused company, but consumers are not the largest tech purchasers. When a financial institution is spending 1/2 million to upgrade their infrastructure to support high loads, nobody is asking “is my Mac compatibility with that?” As part of the decision.
[doublepost=1522758842][/doublepost]

Because tech are tools not religions? And this kind of thinking really doesn’t make you sound like you know what you’re talking about in here.


Just a grown up version of “what’s a computer” kid.

Thanks for the info. So if Apple developed a new chip/architecture for their laptops and desktops and created the tools needed for development and support of the platform, you don't feel that developers would consider adoption of that platform? I am trying to understand the details, but it seems like wouldn't consider any other platform viable in the future. I'd imagine it is iOS based, but built for the point and click environment. Your insight is valuable here so I appreciate it, I know my views can be short sighted.