This suggests that the MacBook will be priced well below the Air, at, say, $749. I'm not sure that's what Apple is shooting for.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple's Path to Arm-Based Macs Could Start With a New 12-Inch MacBook
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
This suggests that the MacBook will be priced well below the Air, at, say, $749. I'm not sure that's what Apple is shooting for.
Ah, the heady days of Clipper, DEC Alpha, SPARC, MIPS, PowerPC, PA-RISC before the lackluster shadow of x86 eclipsed then and now all we’re left with is f***ing Intel...miss them all, including 6502, Z80, et al.
Last edited:
the show stopper for me is the ability to have multiple users on one device plus those users also have a shared folder or space. iOS lacks this ability
take a look at the picture in this article... that is not something that became a mac pro. that is either an off-the-shelf itx 486 motherboard (albeit one with TPM), or an intel-built dev board, or something... but it is not a mac pro! there were never any 486-based macs.
“This Is Not a Product”: The Apple Developer Transition Kit
In his keynote introducing the switch to Intel,1 Steve Jobs introduced the weirdest Mac of all time: the Apple Developer Transition Kit. After announcing the change, Jobs revealed a secret. The Mac he had been using to demo software all morning actually had a 3.6 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor...
www.macstories.net
i don't see what has changed in our universe that a similar ARM-based board sold by apple would not make a feasible developer kit. pre-iphone, post-iphone, who cares? developers need a hardware target and all i said is that apple may do something similar again.
The MacBook 12" is a machine targeting journalist with editing simple photo editing task and for word processing. Most of what they do can be done with the Apple apps. I know quite a lot of professional photograph working for the press that are still using their old 12" Mac Pro every day while there on the road. The type of photo editing they do could be done on an old iPhone.
The people who use iPhone or iPad exclusively do so because they prefer iOS or iPadOS to macOS. Having an ARM Mac catered to that market won't automatically make them switch over to a Mac.
That’s the device I wanted when I ended up buying the 2018 MBA. Somewhat makes the product lines easier and differentiates products better, rather than the blur between the MBA and 2 port MBP. For me the issue with the MB was the price. If they can offer this at the current MBA price point with some great ARM performance, that’s a great device.
Cannot wait to see everyone’s reaction to that new 23” iMac when Apple announces that it’s the 2020 Arm Developer Transition Kit and only registered devs can buy one, with everyone else having to wait until January 2021. The collective cranial explosion will be EPIC!!! Stockpiling popcorn already. That and a rain poncho...yuck, brains!
They should stick with MacBook or MacBook Air for names for the 'entry level' and MacBook Pro for the "pro" versions. Too much confusion as they are getting ridiculously thin and dont have much separation.
The revised MacBook (unibody 2015) did not have fans.
The revised MacBook (unibody 2015) did not have fans.
Depends how much. No reason to go ARM unless the price goes down tremendously. A MacOS device at a Chromebook price? Win!
What does that buy you over giving each student (or other user) their own iPad and having them share a dropbox (or other cloud) folder?
Packs a toy OS, not comparable.
[automerge]1591995113[/automerge]
Haha, sure.
They are not expecting this to be a top seller, they are using it to introduce developers and the curious to ARM, with the hope, of course, the verdict is "OMFG AMAZING" and therefore make the unaware believe there is nothing to fear the change.
I mean a 12" MacBook with ARM has been rumoured for ages now.
I mean a 12" MacBook with ARM has been rumoured for ages now.
The price doesn’t need to go down if the performance is doubled and the battery life is way up. This won’t be some flaccid Chromebook or Surface.
I’m expecting something very thin and light, like a MacBook Air or MacBook, but outperforming a MacBook Pro quad core i7.
Last edited:
From reading their reddit manifesto, it doesn't sound like Fudge is an insider. They may have a contact somewhere that's point them to the 12", but a lot of the phasing and justification sounds like its based on public information and, frankly, like someone who is knowledgable but trying too hard to pull too many threads together.
I don't put much more weight in their post than I would in the speculation of folks around here who know a bit more than average about how a computer is built. I used to pay a lot more attention this kind of stuff, but now I don't put much more faith in my own intuition that I would in Fudge's, so with that in mind I'll just add my own groundless speculation...
Yeah, I see why you'd say that. Basically the 12" has been replaced by the iPP and magic keyboard-- but then that's pretty much what this machine would be except it would presumably give a more MacOS like experience.
A lot depends on whether the product ships able to run existing applications-- in particular the Microsoft suite. Is Office uploaded to the Mac App Store in LLVM bitcode and is that sufficient?
I think it also depends on whether Apple is about to make the next step with Gatekeeper and force all installations through the App Store-- here I'm looking squarely at Adobe.
Seems to me the first product is going to want to make the argument for why they're transitioning. If they could release a 12" that matches the 16" in performance, it would definitely make a statement. Mostly a marketing statement though-- it would still get a development machine out there, but it's a bit overpowered for the form factor. The 12" is mostly a casual computing and travel machine-- so web and Word, basically. Anybody wanting to take advantage of higher performance would need to attach a couple external monitors to edit code, or do anything with photos or video.
The other choice is to put out a machine mostly aimed at breaking the chicken/egg conundrum knowing that most people are going to wait to buy in. I hold to the view that's what the 2020 iPP was meant to do-- get that lidar out in the world so devs have a platform to develop on before introducing it more broadly into the product line. That would lean more strongly toward the 16" form factor. If they have Adobe and a few other heavy hitters on board, then I could imagine them replacing the current 16" with an ARM based model. If they don't, I'd expect both models to continue to be available for now and for Serif to get a lot of stage time showing how awesome the Affinity products work on these new ARM processors.
So I'd guess that:
I don't put much more weight in their post than I would in the speculation of folks around here who know a bit more than average about how a computer is built. I used to pay a lot more attention this kind of stuff, but now I don't put much more faith in my own intuition that I would in Fudge's, so with that in mind I'll just add my own groundless speculation...
Yeah, I see why you'd say that. Basically the 12" has been replaced by the iPP and magic keyboard-- but then that's pretty much what this machine would be except it would presumably give a more MacOS like experience.
A lot depends on whether the product ships able to run existing applications-- in particular the Microsoft suite. Is Office uploaded to the Mac App Store in LLVM bitcode and is that sufficient?
I think it also depends on whether Apple is about to make the next step with Gatekeeper and force all installations through the App Store-- here I'm looking squarely at Adobe.
Seems to me the first product is going to want to make the argument for why they're transitioning. If they could release a 12" that matches the 16" in performance, it would definitely make a statement. Mostly a marketing statement though-- it would still get a development machine out there, but it's a bit overpowered for the form factor. The 12" is mostly a casual computing and travel machine-- so web and Word, basically. Anybody wanting to take advantage of higher performance would need to attach a couple external monitors to edit code, or do anything with photos or video.
The other choice is to put out a machine mostly aimed at breaking the chicken/egg conundrum knowing that most people are going to wait to buy in. I hold to the view that's what the 2020 iPP was meant to do-- get that lidar out in the world so devs have a platform to develop on before introducing it more broadly into the product line. That would lean more strongly toward the 16" form factor. If they have Adobe and a few other heavy hitters on board, then I could imagine them replacing the current 16" with an ARM based model. If they don't, I'd expect both models to continue to be available for now and for Serif to get a lot of stage time showing how awesome the Affinity products work on these new ARM processors.
So I'd guess that:
- If they have the MS Office suite available, they'll go with the 12".
- If they have Adobe available, they'll hit big and replace the 16".
- If they have neither, they'll release a machine aimed squarely at devs.
Last edited:
Don't let leaving the processors of the PC world. It was a mess when Apple was outside it. Its been great being inside it. Going out into the wilderness doesn't seem useful.
Great points on the importance of native commercial software. I’m expecting they’ve got a deal with Microsoft to have Office available as a native app very soon, if not on shipping date. Adobe has historically been awful at this sort of thing, which is one of the reasons I’m not expecting Apple powered higher end devices until late 2021 at the earliest.
One thing I’m curious about is whether these Apple powered laptops will support thunderbolt 3 eGPUs.
Duel processors have been done before, way back in the 68040 days. Apple sold a NUBUS card with an x86 processor. The details are a bit fuzzy, but I believe I'm at least mostly correct.
unfortunately I don’t think such a machine would offer the power envelope some software would require for good measure of performance tweaking needs.
We’ll see though.
ps: at this point the Air doesn’t need to exist any more, MBP and the previous MacBook is very close to thinness. Peak performance weakness if beginning to show or similarities in performance are as well. How would Arm chips be able to differentiate?
is the ARm chips apple creating able to be implemented symmetrically? What do we know do the speed of RAM on theA12/A12Z ??
This:
I mourned the end of the PowerPC era more because it introduced a monoculture than because it really impacted me much. I thought the PPC was the better architecture, and still think x86 is ugly and rude, but the point was they were different and I could hold an opinion like that.
For people who like competition, this is what it takes to revive the PC industry. The only ways to compete right now are OS services, and subtle optimizations to how you wrap an Intel chip in a box. OSes have become ungainly beasts and I'd welcome a shift of focus from feature releases almost as much as I would welcome a shift from innovating via heat pipe.
In truth, the world is in a better place for this kind of fracture now than they ever were. A lot of people are already living in a split x86 / ARM world between their desktop and mobile devices. A lot of jobs need nothing more than a web browser these days, so there's a market for anything that can run one. Microsoft has found new humility and is much more open minded than they ever used to be, which means they can push their core competence and influence to more platforms more readily.
Turns out the wilderness may be more like a theme park.
Last edited:
Exactly — and at that point, it really confuses the line-up if they're going to have both an Intel-based MacBook Air and an ARM-based MacBook, at similar price points.
Which is why I don't think that'll happen. The Air either gets replaced altogether (with perhaps one online-only Intel option for a few years), or it doesn't become ARM.