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

[firewood]

An ARM-based computer would be a joke.

iDevices are ARM-based computers, and they are such a joke that they make up the vast majority of Apple's revenue and profits.

Not everybody needs a supercomputer, which 604e's and G4's were advertised as at one time.

And the main reason it's not a joke is probably a billion $$$ worth of FUD to use against Intel during negotiation season.

 

[cosmichobo]

Macbook Air and ibook Air?

 

[Renzatic]

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

Not exactly the best analogy in the world. Mainframes were huge, building spanning machines that were eventually replaced by far more powerful machines that could sit on your desk.

Comparing a laptop to a tablet is, well...one is a bit easier to carry around, but the other is better suited for doing heavy work. I see them existing side by side, at least for the next few years.

 

[GSPice]

If you kept reading you'd see it came straight from Tim Cook's mouth.

Lol you must not know much about CNet..

 

[thekev]

Old timers might not like it, but Mac OSX's life is now limited. Apple will probably continue developing and supporting it but the future is in iOS. FCPX is clearly suited for a touch screen UI. Aperture for iPad appears to be on the horizon and third party CAD tools are already developing into being as fully featured as their cursor based UI counterparts. Writing professionals such as journalists and bloggers are beginning to adopt iPads as their main tool, accompanied with a keyboard.

In my opinion, this is what Tim Cook is referring to. There is no need to port iOS to a traditional notebook, as existing and future iOS devices will work just as well or better.

Regarding CAD tools and anything else that requires subtlety and precision, even if you have thin fingers, a non stylus type design isn't exactly ideal. Something like an ipad won't replace the need for quality displays and precisions devices. At most you could see such a thing adapting as a hub or slim client type device, but even that is few years off. I'm wondering if you have any idea how much cpu/gpu power cad software can employ.

Here's all the information you need to know: in just 5 years of iOS (under 2 with the PC successor, the iPad), iOS devices now make up 72% of Apple's earnings as of last quarter.

... and the graph is on a sharp uphill climb. In another year, it's predicted that that number will breach 80%. When 8 out of 10 of your customers are buying an iOS device, when does it make sense to continue supporting the remaining 2 customers? In another 5 years, it'll be under half of 1 customer per 10.

You are remarkably bad at projecting statistics. Do you understand new/emerging markets? You're watching a new market and attempting to extrapolate its growth from its current tangent. I'm glad you aren't in charge of analyzing this for Apple . In the end this is just way too simplified.

I'd give more credence to a merging on the Air and Pro lines than a switch to ARM, at least in the near future. ARM processors are certainly impressive, but they don't hold a candle to the i5 and i7. And the iPad, while incredibly functional, can't replace a "real" laptop yet.

They don't have a currently available path to merge these lines within the next couple cycles without significant compromise. I've mentioned this before. If you take all available upgrades on the Air, you're at the limit of what technology they can presently offer in such a device. Small embedded gpus seem to be under development, but there aren't any (that I know of) that are currently suitable for the macbook air. Small stick type ssds are expensive given their density. Apple uses the fastest ULV cpus available. After that you jump from roughly 17W to around 45W.

If you're throttling or disabling turbo boost to get them into such a device, what would be the point? I don't see this happening unless Intel is able to mostly merge their ULV and standard voltage lines, which could eventually be possible. It's more likely that we'd see a 15" Air. If they tried to merge them today and wanted to maintain the thin enclosure, it would mean basically deleting the macbook pro line as the Air is as close to it currently as technology allows.

They're probably doing it so LTD will quit sending Tim Cook all those angry letters about not being able to buy a Macbook Air because the CPU isn't forward thinking and innovative enough.

I mean seriously. The things get stocked up on a pallet, and dumped right on his desk. It's a bunch of letters.

That was pretty funny.

Yes it would be extremely STUPID if Apple would put ARM into a MacBook Air and I believe that is exactly Apple Haters would hope will happen. As for iPad with Intel processor - I would love it if happen - and if you think of it - it is a logical choice with desire to merge the best of iOS with power of Mac OS X.

I have both MacBook Air and iPad 2 and the MacBook Air gets used more. The iPad 2 has limited uses

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How about completely destroy Apple MacBook Air line and respect for Apple.

Intel seems pretty focused on low voltage performance currently. What would matter here is the direction and success of their Atom line.

 

[Can't Stop]

If Apple decided to use ARM chips for laptops those laptops would be less powerful than Android phones

I dare you to stop amusing people here.

 

[kalsta]

Care to explain the whole "back to the mac" concepts then and the ridiculous ios inspired features in Lion.

What's to explain? 'Back to the Mac' meant two things possibly: a return to talking about the Mac after all the focus on iOS devices, and the adoption of some iOS-like user-interface ideas. Mostly these are tweaks to the top layer—an attempt to make the Mac seem a little bit more familiar to Apple's huge and growing iOS customer base. Sure, they've also integrated multi-touch gestures into OS X, but always with a trackpad in mind, which is still at heart a pointing device like the mouse.

Mac OS X and most every app on it were designed with the precision of a keyboard, a pointing device, and a cursor in mind. iOS and most every app on it were designed with the convenience (but somewhat less precision) of our fat, greasy fingers in mind. Mashing the two together would serve no one, and Apple's not stupid enough to try it. (But watch and see how it works out for Microsoft. That might be interesting.)

Apple is trying to merge them even though what you said about the two really needing to be different.

Evidence? Oh I forgot, the fact that Apple stuck 'Launchpad' on the Mac and reversed the scrolling. Uh huh.

 

[MattInOz]

"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.

 

[jameslmoser]

Evidence? Oh I forgot, the fact that Apple stuck 'Launchpad' on the Mac and reversed the scrolling. Uh huh.

I don't need any MORE evidence. Apple's neglect of Mac OS X in general, and the features of Lion are more than enough. If you don't see it, then no more amount of evidence I could provide would be sufficient short of Steve Jobs himself coming back from the dead to tell you it himself.

 

[Can't Stop]

I don't need any MORE evidence. Apple's neglect of Mac OS X in general, and the features of Lion are more than enough. If you don't see it, then no more amount of evidence I could provide would be sufficient short of Steve Jobs himself coming back from the dead to tell you it himself.

Maybe people don't see it, because it isn't there. Not the first and most certainly not the last time i see these "the sky is falling" 'arguments'. Same was going on when they switched architectures, when Jobs left, when Jobs came back, when they released OS X.

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Evidence? Oh I forgot, the fact that Apple stuck 'Launchpad' on the Mac and reversed the scrolling. Uh huh.

There are people (some old people that don't like change and some just plain stupid) that don't understand that we are standing at the crossroads. Things will change, not today, maybe not next year, but until this decade is out some major changes will occur.

So they keep running with what they don't like about Lion as "proof" of X, Y, Z.

 

[firewood]

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

Mainframes haven't gone away. IBM still make a big chunk of revenue selling and supporting Z-series mainframes. Some companies still need Big Iron, supercomputers, and other specialized forms of room filling compute power.

It's just that PCs outnumbered them and became massively more ubiquitous for smaller more mundane tasks, especially those where many 9's of reliability isn't important.

And smartphones and tablets are now starting to do the same thing to PCs.

 

[bdkennedy1]

"Mac OS X has been leading a secret double life." -- Steve Jobs -- WWDC 2005

Apple common sense dictates that the experience is about the software and the hardware working together. Apple's last dependence is the processor which they will eventually make on their own because they want to have control over the power consumption. Several years ago, they did not have the money to create their own processors. Now they do.

 

[carmenodie]

Why the hell would you want an ARM based MBA? WTF!
From what I have been hearing that chip ain't ready for big dog, OS primetime.
I have the latest 13 inch MBA and it is ******** awesome as is.
The screen has a resolution of 1440*900!!!!
My 17 inch imac g4 has the same resolution!!!!

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Well, just look at all the posts who gave it a half second thought, used their amazing powers of deduction, decided ARM/iOS inside a notebook must mean nothing but, and wrote it off as an Apple being stupid.

Pretty safe bet none of you are in product development. If you can't imagine how a MBP can be functionally enhanced by augmenting an iOS display into the mix, you haven't even tried thinking about it.

It's inevitable. OS X + iOS on one device. OS X on a tablet, not so good. ...but a small tablet built into a notebook, handy & easily done. Remove glass trackpad, insert iOS mini-tablet. Remove trackpad & keyboard, insert big iOS tablet. Instant data previewing without requiring OS X, custom UI's & gestures by app, the ergonomics work...

If Apple doesn't do it, someone else will. ...and then they will.

 

[flottenheimer]

...I don't know why we have these persistent debates about OS X merging with iOS, and hybrid touchscreen devices capable of running Mac software...

Well, I guess it all started with Apple themselves. Releasing OS X Lion under the headline "Back to the Mac", which meant that the company wanted to port some ideas and some functionality from iOS into OS X.

And voila, the "persistent debates" are, indeed, persistent. : )

 

[macsmurf]

And the other option, converting iOS to support the full Developer tool chain would pretty much make it Mac OS X on ARM.

Exactly. Developing content for the iPad (or content creation in general) simply works better with a keyboard and mouse. Thus, a GUI optimized for keyboard and mouse is needed.

I find it a bit funny that people are now saying that OS X is no longer needed because you can just attach a keyboard to the iPad. That's equivalent to people saying that a special touch optimized GUI is not needed because you can just use your finger as the mouse. Maybe the "iOS generation" is not as forward thinking as they'd like to think

 

[andrewlgm]

I wouldn't mind a macbook with a 10 hour battery life. Considering the kind of work I do - writing and reading reports daily for hours on end, traveling from place to place with not much time for a recharge, a macbook with a very long battery time would indeed be much welcomed. My current 09 unibody macbook had an advertised 7 hour battery which lasts around 4.5. By all reports the current generation lasts around 6 hours - which is not much progress - battery wise - 3 years later. Hopefully ivy bridge will bring out the 8 hour mark.

 

[adder7712]

Victory!

No ARM in my Mac, they belong in embedded applications.

 

[I WAS the one]

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).

 

[Hellhammer]

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.

 

[Marx55]

What is needed is a true a full Mac with just 400 to 600 g. The Mac in your pocket. Always. And I mean a true Mac with Intel x86 inside; not an ARM-based iOS device.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Binary compatibility is important to Apple.

Yeah, like Rosetta in Lion...

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The MacBook Air is the Mac of the future.

MR users, who assume too much are certainly not part of the future.

 

[theluggage]

Doesn't matter. ARM based means you are stuck with whatever ARM provides. Whether it's Cortex-A9 or Cortex-A15 doesn't really matter.

All ARM provides is designs for everything from complete chips to "mix'n'match" building-blocks to allow fabricators to assemble their own custom chips. It's also quite feasible that ARM would work with a big customer like Apple on developing new designs - at one point Apple owned a substantial chunk of ARM, and the chips used in the Newton were an Apple/ARM collaboration.

Plus you need all the software to support ARM as well. That's too much for just one computer, Apple would go ARM-only if they did that.

This is far less of a big deal now that most software is written in high level languages, if not scripting languages, and everything works through hardware abstraction layers. For an awful lot of software, supporting ARM is, in theory, just a matter of changing a flag and re-compiling - or compiling to a virtual machine-based byte code (which AFAIK xcode already offers - as does Microsoft .Net). Note that Linux and many of the big open source projects which form the Linux ecosystem happily support x86, PPC, ARM and other processors.

Of course, reality is never quite that simple, but I'm willing to bet that following Apple's development guidelines will go a long way towards ensuring this works. Apple could probably have the entire OS X App Store ARM friendly in record time. Its things like MS Office and Adobe CS (not to mention all those Photoshop plug-ins) that would take time.

I'd actually be very surprised if, behind some locked door on Infinite Loop, they don't have an ARM-based OS X system lashed together. That doesn't mean it will ever see the light of day.

If Apple identify a worthwhile share of the market that would happily restrict themselves to the contents of the OSX App Store in exchange for longer battery life/reduced weight - and maybe iOS compatibility thrown in - then an ARM-based Air might fly. Feasible, but maybe not likely.

 

[Mr. Retrofire]

Macbook Air and ibook Air?

iBooks Reader for Mac OS X would be enough. ;-)

 

[Luis Ortega]

iOS is, to some extent, Mac OS X on ARM with frameworks adapted to the display size and input available...

I for one think that in the near future once ARM CPUs, but more importantly PowerVR GPUs, have become powerful enough, smartphone and tablets will replace desktop computers for most people.
For those that need to do serious work dock station with physical keyboard and external display will be usable (an extension of airplay), for even more computational intensive work, there would be cloud options an VMs.
The desktop computer as we know it is going to disappear during the next 10 years if only because it isn't great business anymore.

Without true connectivity and file management, tablets will never be able to take the place of computers.
They will remain media consumption gadgets.