Give us one example of ARM chips making such performance gains that would indicate that in 2 years ARM might beat Atom (let alone mobile x86 CPUs). Have you looked at the progress of ARM chips in iPhone CPUs lately. Do you see any such leaps? I do not.
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Apple to Move from Intel to ARM Processors in Future Laptops?
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Give us one example of ARM chips making such performance gains that would indicate that in 2 years ARM might beat Atom (let alone mobile x86 CPUs). Have you looked at the progress of ARM chips in iPhone CPUs lately. Do you see any such leaps? I do not.
To all the people who said this is a bad move or not a good idea; I say eat a pie. This is is going to be the best thing since slice bread, seriously. I thought I would die with my old powerbook and G4 Mac Mini, but now I have something to rejoice for. The worst mistake and I mean WORST mistake Apple has ever done in our life time is moving to the still intel cpu. I have a rule in my house you try to bring an intel based device over, I am sorry you are not allowed in until that garbage is out of site. I don't care if it has an Apple logo on it still not allowed. Hell, I won't even touch an intel based device.
You know why they are doing this because Steve Jobs is stick and heavily tired of people using OSX on their piece of garbage PC competitors, and moving to the ARM will solve many of those issues.
And too those people talking about Windows CE yeah it ran on ARM and RISC architectures, but it still was a bathroom-fest. Sure, it lead the way to Apple competing better in the sector in some ways, but still was a bathroom-fest.
JW I know this is not really suppose to be talked about here, but I know people have put OSX on their garbage based PCs, but can you put IOS on an ARM based device with equal specs?
You know why they are doing this because Steve Jobs is stick and heavily tired of people using OSX on their piece of garbage PC competitors, and moving to the ARM will solve many of those issues.
And too those people talking about Windows CE yeah it ran on ARM and RISC architectures, but it still was a bathroom-fest. Sure, it lead the way to Apple competing better in the sector in some ways, but still was a bathroom-fest.
JW I know this is not really suppose to be talked about here, but I know people have put OSX on their garbage based PCs, but can you put IOS on an ARM based device with equal specs?
You are funny. Much more people use Windows on their Macs than people who use OS/X on their PCs. OS/X is not that good. Have you checked the stats lately? People prefer Windows by a wide margin (like 20:1). Did not you know that Macs got more popular only AFTER Apple switched to x86 and people finally could use them to run Windows? Do you really want to do video editing on a CPU almost as powerful as Atom?
So you're not a Mac user, I guess.. I didn't even notice it when I used my first Intel based Mac. It was still a Macintosh, just as before, ran the same OS, just as before, looked just as before and the only noticeable difference was that it was much faster than my previous G4 based Mac.
But what you wrote was very funny! Thanks for that. I too had mixed feelings about the Intel switch, but it went very well, I hardly noticed it (except for the immense performance boost)
Yeah, Steve is losing sleep over those five people who can be bothered to make a Hackintosh. Grrrr.
There is no ARM based device with equal specs to what Intel offers. The current A5 offers similar performance (much less FPU but better GPU) as was found on a dual processor G4.
Your benchmarking skills are broken. The iPad 2 is already nearly an order of magnitude faster than an iPhone 3G at CPU intensive crunching.
Could you qualify what "CPU intensive crunching" means? One synthetic benchmark does not mean much. Besides, iPhone 3g used 620 MHz CPU underclocked to 412 MHz. You should not really compare CPU performance in phones and tablets for they are tuned very differently.
Your analysing skills are seriously borked.
More people use Windows on macs than PC owners Mac OSX because Windows is the far better OS. Yep. Totally.
Your analysing skills are seriously borked.
More people use Windows on macs than PC owners Mac OSX because Windows is the far better OS. Yep. Totally.
I am glad we could agree. How else one would explain so high popularity of Boot Camp?
I agree. Especially considering the fact that it came from Charlie Demerjian who does know a thing or two about computers (unlike some so called "market analysts"). arstechnica published a reasonably critical analysis of this joke. But I am surprised that any analysis was even needed for such a stupid suggestion.
Faulty reasoning. There are more Mac users that have windows than there are Windows users that have Mac OSX installed because you can't run Mac OSX on PCs.
Wow another person who drank the Intel koolaid. I don't care if Apple sold more computers because of the Intel switch. They lost their essence and way going with garbage that intel spews out daily. I don't care about windows in fact I have gotten in trouble at school when I was 10 for refusing to sit down at the windows machine to do classwork(that and I told the teacher to eat a pie and sit on it). Real Mac fans know what is up.
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And that is the biggest blasphemy of them all. I really despise that osx86 project that helps people ruin the good name of OSX and put on garbage based PCs.
Yup, and those that do, need to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and plus spend a week being Steve Job's butler or maid.
People are so ready to believe that Apple will go ARM. It's a 20 page thread of contant face->palm.
If apple's so interested in moving away form intel for "control" as so many says and some seems to be rejoicing another step toward total domination of their computing life by apple. Then why aren't they looking at POWER 7 chips? Already ready, faster than any existing ARM chips and something they have used before. So why ARM? Why bet on a horse that hasn't even been born yet? Especially when there's a thoroughbred call the POWER 7 ready and available and PROVEN? And for that matter why not just take the horse that's been winning over and over call x86?
At this point I am sure people will point to Jobs supposed talk about iOS and OS X convergence. When did he says that eventually there will only be 1 OS? No he said: "What is the philosophy about Lion? That's where Back to the Mac comes from. We started with OS X and we created a new version called iOS -- it's now used in the iPad as well. We're inspired by some of those innovations. And we want to bring them back to the mac. Mac OS X meets the iPad." Notice he didn't say 1 OS no he said bringing features back to the Mac.
If people would stop to think for a second ignoring the rush of excitement about a new apple product (and isn't that part of apple's business methods? Taking the additive items lust from WOW into the real world? I digress) they might start to think that maybe 1 OS isn't the solution. I mean look at android tablets. Most agree it's not as good as it can be because there wasn't a tablet specific android OS. And what about Microsoft's insistant that windows can run on tablets? How hard did everyone laugh at that idea? One OS is a bad idea. It leaves you with baggage from desktops and laptops slowing down mobile. And it leaves you with issues with mobile OS which doesn't bug anyone in mobile form but is going to drive you nutes on a laptop or desktop. For one example how about the inability of being able to access the file system on iOS out of the box? Where's your finder? Where's your ability to set permissions etc etc?
Ok now if people accept that well it's likely for the next N many years we'll have OS X and iOS then some might say "what about universal apps? using ARM will allows iOS apps to run on a Mac that's gota be a good thing". To that I answer. A switch to ARM might bring about the use of iOS apps on the Mac but at the same time Apple would have lost for a while all the heavy weight apps that they just recently got on the Mac. For example AutoCAD which they said they coveted for many years. And lets not forget the other aspects such as device driver support for things like printers, scanners, graphics etc.
Simply put there's more to lose from moving ARM onto the Mac than, for the sake of argument, moving iOS onto (gasp) x86. I mean think about it. In general the apps on iOS is less sophisticated so in theory should be easier to move them onto a new architecture than moving Mac apps onto ARM based machines. Don't think so? Well how big is a typical iOS app? And how big is Office 2011? How big is Photoshop?
Finally, I'd like to point out that this "leak" that SA talked about is about something that's 2 years away. If he's wrong most likely none of us will remember by then. No rather mostly we'd all be more interested in what's new with Apple. So him making this rumour is of no consequence to him. Few will come back and point a finger at him. Also, it's hard to believe that Apple would make a choice 2 years away. Further more if they are, I would seriously doubt they let unreliable people know about this nugget of information. Cause does Apple really want to potentially piss off Intel? Intel can slow the delivery of chips to Apple instead of giving them early access to shipments. Or if they really feel threatened cut off supplies all together. Too far fetched to believe? It's not like Intel hasn't played those tricks before.
If apple's so interested in moving away form intel for "control" as so many says and some seems to be rejoicing another step toward total domination of their computing life by apple. Then why aren't they looking at POWER 7 chips? Already ready, faster than any existing ARM chips and something they have used before. So why ARM? Why bet on a horse that hasn't even been born yet? Especially when there's a thoroughbred call the POWER 7 ready and available and PROVEN? And for that matter why not just take the horse that's been winning over and over call x86?
At this point I am sure people will point to Jobs supposed talk about iOS and OS X convergence. When did he says that eventually there will only be 1 OS? No he said: "What is the philosophy about Lion? That's where Back to the Mac comes from. We started with OS X and we created a new version called iOS -- it's now used in the iPad as well. We're inspired by some of those innovations. And we want to bring them back to the mac. Mac OS X meets the iPad." Notice he didn't say 1 OS no he said bringing features back to the Mac.
If people would stop to think for a second ignoring the rush of excitement about a new apple product (and isn't that part of apple's business methods? Taking the additive items lust from WOW into the real world? I digress) they might start to think that maybe 1 OS isn't the solution. I mean look at android tablets. Most agree it's not as good as it can be because there wasn't a tablet specific android OS. And what about Microsoft's insistant that windows can run on tablets? How hard did everyone laugh at that idea? One OS is a bad idea. It leaves you with baggage from desktops and laptops slowing down mobile. And it leaves you with issues with mobile OS which doesn't bug anyone in mobile form but is going to drive you nutes on a laptop or desktop. For one example how about the inability of being able to access the file system on iOS out of the box? Where's your finder? Where's your ability to set permissions etc etc?
Ok now if people accept that well it's likely for the next N many years we'll have OS X and iOS then some might say "what about universal apps? using ARM will allows iOS apps to run on a Mac that's gota be a good thing". To that I answer. A switch to ARM might bring about the use of iOS apps on the Mac but at the same time Apple would have lost for a while all the heavy weight apps that they just recently got on the Mac. For example AutoCAD which they said they coveted for many years. And lets not forget the other aspects such as device driver support for things like printers, scanners, graphics etc.
Simply put there's more to lose from moving ARM onto the Mac than, for the sake of argument, moving iOS onto (gasp) x86. I mean think about it. In general the apps on iOS is less sophisticated so in theory should be easier to move them onto a new architecture than moving Mac apps onto ARM based machines. Don't think so? Well how big is a typical iOS app? And how big is Office 2011? How big is Photoshop?
Finally, I'd like to point out that this "leak" that SA talked about is about something that's 2 years away. If he's wrong most likely none of us will remember by then. No rather mostly we'd all be more interested in what's new with Apple. So him making this rumour is of no consequence to him. Few will come back and point a finger at him. Also, it's hard to believe that Apple would make a choice 2 years away. Further more if they are, I would seriously doubt they let unreliable people know about this nugget of information. Cause does Apple really want to potentially piss off Intel? Intel can slow the delivery of chips to Apple instead of giving them early access to shipments. Or if they really feel threatened cut off supplies all together. Too far fetched to believe? It's not like Intel hasn't played those tricks before.
Yes, almost any message board induces face-palms, but as long as people keep open minds and read, some learning can happen...
Re: POWER RISC
It's a processor architecture while much more elegant than Intel, it's designed for speed and not for efficiency. The PowerPC was an adaption of the Power architecture that was supposed to bring consumer level chips to the masses. It didn't really work out. (I've still got a water-cooled G5 I'd like to find a new home for) Case in point, we never saw a G5 laptop. IBM had the talent, but obviously not the interest. Would Apple really want to put their fate back in IBM's hands?
Keep in mind that ARM started life as a CPU for a desktop computer. Anything's possible.
And why would the ARM CPU need to be that fast anyway. With OpenCL perhaps the GPU will become more important.
Because OSX86's hacks are really user friendly, 100% working on all hardware and common knowledge.
Yep I'm really running Mac OSX on a PC. Who needs fully working OpenGL and Quartz, thats for them Mac using nubs. In maybe 5-10 years we will start to have programming languages that have implicit parallelism that are commercially available. So in theory we could have programs that will be system independent like Java but also automatically take advantage of hardware in the computer.
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When Apple went to Intel, one of the benefits I gained was the ability to run "Windows"; and to run Virtualized i386/X64 environments. This open a huge door to use Macs for much more than we could in PPC. With Parallels and VMWare, I can run Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc, all from MacOSX!
Right now you can't beat the number of O/Ses that can run well on the i386/X64 platform.
I don't see Apple [and I hope Apple doesn't] switch to ARM anytime soon. ARM is going to have to gain more desktop/laptop market share; until ARM just needs to dominate the mobile space.
Who knows in 5 years after ipad 6, it might be more feasible. Then again, you'll see Intel and AMD advancing the i386/X64 architecture further along too.
Right now you can't beat the number of O/Ses that can run well on the i386/X64 platform.
I don't see Apple [and I hope Apple doesn't] switch to ARM anytime soon. ARM is going to have to gain more desktop/laptop market share; until ARM just needs to dominate the mobile space.
Who knows in 5 years after ipad 6, it might be more feasible. Then again, you'll see Intel and AMD advancing the i386/X64 architecture further along too.
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Sounds like just the kind of move that will elevate iToys to the top of every little kids xmas list.
It's the post PC, post Mac, post Apple era.
Welcome to iToys Inc.
For ages 3 and up.
Made from Revolutionary iPlastic, It's Magical.
It's the post PC, post Mac, post Apple era.
Welcome to iToys Inc.
For ages 3 and up.
Made from Revolutionary iPlastic, It's Magical.
Give me quad core (or hex-core) with turbo boost (or equivalent) with the same or faster speeds than what Intel has... then we'll talk.
Really, why do you hate Intel so much?
Would you really hold your career [and education] potential back that much because you dislike the company and its chips?
I have my preferences, and I use what ever pays my salary. And I use my salary to pay my bills, mortgage, and other life expenses.
Principals are one thing. Supporting yourself, and your love ones are much more important.
Isn't it obvious?!!!!
ISN'T IT OBVIOUS?
1. The alleged upcoming "ARM-based" "Mac" laptops will NOT run Mac OS X; they will run iOS and will be incapable of running any Mac OS X Desktop software. (SJ will "Apple TV" the Mac.)
A third party will of course hack a solution for running Mac OS X and OS X applications on these iOS "Macs," but any limitations on these iOS "devices" will limit the power, capacity and capabilities of a powerful Mac OS X Desktop application under emulation or virtualization.
I won't be using one of these iOS "Macs" to run Autodesk AutoCAD, Autodesk Alias Design Suite, Alias Design, Automotive, Surface, Maya, Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Server, Ableton Live Suite 8, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, PhotoShop CS5 Extended, Dreamweaver or the Adobe Creative Suite Premium, Logic Studio, ZBrush, Oracle Database 10g, ComChart Electronic Medical Records, Aladdin 4D, Animation:Master, CINEMA 4D, all kinds of human genome, DNA sequencing, and biochemistry and molecular biology software, etc.
"Real" Macs currently not only have dual, multicore CPUs (adding up to 12 physical cores, and with MultiThreading, 24 virtual cores), but their CPUs are of "64-bit" architecture, meaning that whereas an application written for a 32 bit CPU could only access a maximum of 4GB of RAM at a time (again, per app; more than one app could be running concurrently, and the magic of the "behind the scenes" Virtual Memory made it all "no muss, no fuss" for the user) with the Westmere-EX Xeons they will address a theoretical 16 exabytes (or 16 billion gigabytes). When Intel shrinks its Westmere architecture to 28 nanometers (or twenty-something), these CPUs will each have 12 physical cores and with MultiThreading, 24 virtual cores (dual-chip: 24, 48). Grand Central Dispatch has its work cut out for it. And Intel's QPI better be able to keep up (maybe a scaled up Thunderbolt or other "light technology" could feed the CPU RAM data faster).
And while Apple works on its next AxPoP, SoC, combining CPU and GPU, but only able to handle a mobile subset of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, graphics card makers are already supporting desktop OpenGL 4.1 (like the top BTO graphics card option for the just-announced iMacs -- a card which can perform at 2.7 Teraflops/sec. and carry 2GB of GDDR5 memory). OpenCL has its work cut out for it. (And dual-GPU card versions are in the making.)
The ARM architecture isn't expected to move to 64-bit until late 2013, then they need to be fabbed and manufactured in high enough yields that Apple can manufacture enough final products ahead of the product's announcement that demand does not exceed supply.
2. Steve Jobs hates "moving parts" (though I agree with him on this example, the first iteration of the iPod with a mechanical scroll wheel was quickly replaced with a non-movable touch scroll wheel).
He "tolerates" the few mechanical buttons that are absolutely necessary on iOS products (but would have zero mechanical buttons if he had his 'druthers).
So hard drives that come in capacities of 3TB (with 64MB cache) for $149 retail will be gone from Apple products as quickly as is "feasible." Trouble is, a 60GB Solid State Drive currently costs $140. And they aren't dropping in price as fast as was predicted. The venerable Winchester hard drive is still getting faster and more capacious and at a shockingly low price -- it's too soon to "deep-six" them; it would not be pragmatic. Much as we might hate it, they're still the best at the moment for sheer capacity and trivial cost.
So with the power of dual, 12-core (24 physical, 48 virtual cores total) 64-bit CPUs able to address up to 16 billion gigabytes (16 exabytes -- comprised of even tinier "squares" on a die that if stacked atop one another would span the distance from the Earth to the Sun -- or, 93,000,000 miles), FULL-SIZE graphics cards that are getting astonishingly more powerful, OpenCL, HyperThreading, QPI, SSE 4.2 SIMD (like AltiVec), Grand Central Dispatch, physical data connections (ports) that are getting faster (Thunderbolt) and wireless data connections that are not, the entire line of Macs and Mac OS X should not be sabotaged internally by Apple so it can be justified to the Board that their "time has come," and it's all iOS from here on.
3. Glaringly obvious at Next, with NextStep and OpenStep, with their bullet-proof hardware abstraction layer and incredible ability to be ported to 680x0 CPUs, IBM Power architecture, i386, Sun SPARC, HP PA-RISC, was STEVE Jobs' appreciation for SCALE...scalability! Why concede higher-scale computing? Why leave servers and server farms and larger scale computing to HP, Dell, IBM, etc.? You KNOW those new Apple Data Centers aren't being powered by Xserves and Mac OS X Server, and it appears no effort was made to transition Pixar from servers from other companies to Xserves with XGrid and XSan.
Remember this? Ahhhhh, those were the days...
Why are they being forsaken now?! Apple's computing efforts should run the gamut. OS X is so incredible that it can scale to a Supercomputer and an iPod touch. Why change this policy now?
The Mac is being sunsetted. It may be an agonizing 4 year process, but it will culminate in a typical Steve Jobs one-track-mind focus on iOS and "poo-poo" anything else (except he will use a different word).
He turns on products all the time.
Oh--and we know nothing about the form factor of ARM-based "Macs." Will they be tablets and quasi-laptops only? Bye, bye Mac Pro with your ample slots and bays....sigh....
4. Bye-bye optical media. Even with the demands of exabytes of data, with Blu-ray sloooowly catching on and coming down in price, and with Holographic Versatile Discs feverishly being developed by top-notch companies, optical discs are one their way out on "Macs." It may take awhile, but the only Mac Steve Jobs doesn't hate is the MacBook Air. That "Bag of hurt" licensing terms for Blu-ray that was SJ's alibi for not offering Blu-ray on the Mac was just that -- an alibi -- with the ulterior motive of shaping the computing landscape to kill the optical disc altogether.
I have a third-party (of course) Blue-ray burner, and I don't use it just to back up. Sometimes, DMGs and installers and documents and photos are just sitting there idly on my hard drive, slowing it down, so I burn files to 25 or 50GB Blu-ray discs. I like them. I want them. And if Apple lets every PC desktop and laptop that's made eventually feature Blu-ray burners as standard, he will be putting the Mac at a serious competitive disadvantage (which may be by design).
And that "Bag of hurt"? Licensing has been renegotiated MUCH more favorably, that's why Blu-ray is rapidly appearing on PCs and PC laptops.
5. Bye, bye mouse. Soon it won't be offered as an Apple product. It's another thing on Steve Jobs' hit list. Hello Magic Trackpad.
6. Mechanical moving parts covered earlier? Soon we'll all be typing on a virtual flat touch keyboard a la iPhone and iPad. Notice how every year, Apple's "full-travel" keys are getting less and less full-travel? Type on a MacBook Air, and you'll wonder why they bothered to make the keys depressable at all. They depress maybe a micron. What's the point?
Now, what we'll get in coming years is a flat, virtual keyboard, just like the iPhone's and iPad's. Longtime detractors of the Atari 400 "membrane" keyboard and the even worse Timex/Sinclair's keyboard will be craving them by the time Apple's through.
I don't know about you, but I can't edit and filter and process in Final Cut Pro or Premier or Photoshop with my memory and scratch disk in a wirelessly accessed cloud.
Hope I'm 100% wrong about everything.
meek
ISN'T IT OBVIOUS?
1. The alleged upcoming "ARM-based" "Mac" laptops will NOT run Mac OS X; they will run iOS and will be incapable of running any Mac OS X Desktop software. (SJ will "Apple TV" the Mac.)
A third party will of course hack a solution for running Mac OS X and OS X applications on these iOS "Macs," but any limitations on these iOS "devices" will limit the power, capacity and capabilities of a powerful Mac OS X Desktop application under emulation or virtualization.
I won't be using one of these iOS "Macs" to run Autodesk AutoCAD, Autodesk Alias Design Suite, Alias Design, Automotive, Surface, Maya, Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Server, Ableton Live Suite 8, Microsoft Office, Lightroom, PhotoShop CS5 Extended, Dreamweaver or the Adobe Creative Suite Premium, Logic Studio, ZBrush, Oracle Database 10g, ComChart Electronic Medical Records, Aladdin 4D, Animation:Master, CINEMA 4D, all kinds of human genome, DNA sequencing, and biochemistry and molecular biology software, etc.
"Real" Macs currently not only have dual, multicore CPUs (adding up to 12 physical cores, and with MultiThreading, 24 virtual cores), but their CPUs are of "64-bit" architecture, meaning that whereas an application written for a 32 bit CPU could only access a maximum of 4GB of RAM at a time (again, per app; more than one app could be running concurrently, and the magic of the "behind the scenes" Virtual Memory made it all "no muss, no fuss" for the user) with the Westmere-EX Xeons they will address a theoretical 16 exabytes (or 16 billion gigabytes). When Intel shrinks its Westmere architecture to 28 nanometers (or twenty-something), these CPUs will each have 12 physical cores and with MultiThreading, 24 virtual cores (dual-chip: 24, 48). Grand Central Dispatch has its work cut out for it. And Intel's QPI better be able to keep up (maybe a scaled up Thunderbolt or other "light technology" could feed the CPU RAM data faster).
And while Apple works on its next AxPoP, SoC, combining CPU and GPU, but only able to handle a mobile subset of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, graphics card makers are already supporting desktop OpenGL 4.1 (like the top BTO graphics card option for the just-announced iMacs -- a card which can perform at 2.7 Teraflops/sec. and carry 2GB of GDDR5 memory). OpenCL has its work cut out for it. (And dual-GPU card versions are in the making.)
The ARM architecture isn't expected to move to 64-bit until late 2013, then they need to be fabbed and manufactured in high enough yields that Apple can manufacture enough final products ahead of the product's announcement that demand does not exceed supply.
2. Steve Jobs hates "moving parts" (though I agree with him on this example, the first iteration of the iPod with a mechanical scroll wheel was quickly replaced with a non-movable touch scroll wheel).
He "tolerates" the few mechanical buttons that are absolutely necessary on iOS products (but would have zero mechanical buttons if he had his 'druthers).
So hard drives that come in capacities of 3TB (with 64MB cache) for $149 retail will be gone from Apple products as quickly as is "feasible." Trouble is, a 60GB Solid State Drive currently costs $140. And they aren't dropping in price as fast as was predicted. The venerable Winchester hard drive is still getting faster and more capacious and at a shockingly low price -- it's too soon to "deep-six" them; it would not be pragmatic. Much as we might hate it, they're still the best at the moment for sheer capacity and trivial cost.
So with the power of dual, 12-core (24 physical, 48 virtual cores total) 64-bit CPUs able to address up to 16 billion gigabytes (16 exabytes -- comprised of even tinier "squares" on a die that if stacked atop one another would span the distance from the Earth to the Sun -- or, 93,000,000 miles), FULL-SIZE graphics cards that are getting astonishingly more powerful, OpenCL, HyperThreading, QPI, SSE 4.2 SIMD (like AltiVec), Grand Central Dispatch, physical data connections (ports) that are getting faster (Thunderbolt) and wireless data connections that are not, the entire line of Macs and Mac OS X should not be sabotaged internally by Apple so it can be justified to the Board that their "time has come," and it's all iOS from here on.
3. Glaringly obvious at Next, with NextStep and OpenStep, with their bullet-proof hardware abstraction layer and incredible ability to be ported to 680x0 CPUs, IBM Power architecture, i386, Sun SPARC, HP PA-RISC, was STEVE Jobs' appreciation for SCALE...scalability! Why concede higher-scale computing? Why leave servers and server farms and larger scale computing to HP, Dell, IBM, etc.? You KNOW those new Apple Data Centers aren't being powered by Xserves and Mac OS X Server, and it appears no effort was made to transition Pixar from servers from other companies to Xserves with XGrid and XSan.
Remember this? Ahhhhh, those were the days...
Why are they being forsaken now?! Apple's computing efforts should run the gamut. OS X is so incredible that it can scale to a Supercomputer and an iPod touch. Why change this policy now?
The Mac is being sunsetted. It may be an agonizing 4 year process, but it will culminate in a typical Steve Jobs one-track-mind focus on iOS and "poo-poo" anything else (except he will use a different word).
He turns on products all the time.
Oh--and we know nothing about the form factor of ARM-based "Macs." Will they be tablets and quasi-laptops only? Bye, bye Mac Pro with your ample slots and bays....sigh....
4. Bye-bye optical media. Even with the demands of exabytes of data, with Blu-ray sloooowly catching on and coming down in price, and with Holographic Versatile Discs feverishly being developed by top-notch companies, optical discs are one their way out on "Macs." It may take awhile, but the only Mac Steve Jobs doesn't hate is the MacBook Air. That "Bag of hurt" licensing terms for Blu-ray that was SJ's alibi for not offering Blu-ray on the Mac was just that -- an alibi -- with the ulterior motive of shaping the computing landscape to kill the optical disc altogether.
I have a third-party (of course) Blue-ray burner, and I don't use it just to back up. Sometimes, DMGs and installers and documents and photos are just sitting there idly on my hard drive, slowing it down, so I burn files to 25 or 50GB Blu-ray discs. I like them. I want them. And if Apple lets every PC desktop and laptop that's made eventually feature Blu-ray burners as standard, he will be putting the Mac at a serious competitive disadvantage (which may be by design).
And that "Bag of hurt"? Licensing has been renegotiated MUCH more favorably, that's why Blu-ray is rapidly appearing on PCs and PC laptops.
5. Bye, bye mouse. Soon it won't be offered as an Apple product. It's another thing on Steve Jobs' hit list. Hello Magic Trackpad.
6. Mechanical moving parts covered earlier? Soon we'll all be typing on a virtual flat touch keyboard a la iPhone and iPad. Notice how every year, Apple's "full-travel" keys are getting less and less full-travel? Type on a MacBook Air, and you'll wonder why they bothered to make the keys depressable at all. They depress maybe a micron. What's the point?
Now, what we'll get in coming years is a flat, virtual keyboard, just like the iPhone's and iPad's. Longtime detractors of the Atari 400 "membrane" keyboard and the even worse Timex/Sinclair's keyboard will be craving them by the time Apple's through.
I don't know about you, but I can't edit and filter and process in Final Cut Pro or Premier or Photoshop with my memory and scratch disk in a wirelessly accessed cloud.
Hope I'm 100% wrong about everything.
meek
I was reading the micro code article and thinking similar. Isn't LLVM doing much the same thing but in software. Code is complied to an intermediate form which can then either be left in that form or cover to machine specific code.
I understood when apple went on it's space saving rampage for snow leopard it change Universal Binaries from being two complete code sets to one in LLVM IF.
I guess what I'm wondering how close are LLVM IF and the Intel code are?
Now that LLVM has mutured could intel build a runtime that tied directly to cores avoiding the x86 decode completely.
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