Bloomberg: Apple's First Arm Mac to Launch by 2021 With 12-Core Processor

[FaustsHausUK]

This is going to be the death of the Mac computers as a whole. Arm Macs won’t have any compatability with any of the software available until the software developers update their software and most will be left behind. Microsoft tried to transition to ARM with the Surface Pro X and Windows 10 on ARM has been a failure. I expect this to fail as well, especially since ARM will probably not have the same performance for all tasks compared to X86-64.

The Surface RT (Microsoft's first ARM-based tablet) didn't fail because it was ARM-based. Not specifically.

Windows users are a very demanding group of people who expect certain things. Windows is traditionally backwards compatible to a ridiculous degree, Windows RT was not backwards compatible at all. The Surface RT was the first to insist on all apps being installed from Windows Store, which in the "we demand choice!!!" world of Windows users is a bad thing. Metro was still new, and not loved by power users despite being nicer than "classic" Windows in many ways. It wasn't clear who the target audience was.

It didn't help that Windows Store was so devoid of apps. When iOS and Android came around, Microsoft totally bungled the response, and the resulting Windows Phone did not get the same developer support as users adopted app-centric smartphones from rivals en masse. A computer with few apps, no way to use software you already own, and inferior performance and user experience compared to rival devices is DOA.

I'm not an active Windows user anymore, so I don't know if their ARM support has improved at all. Still, an ARM-based Windows machine has a lot of the same headwinds today as it would have had in 2012.

These are the things I think ARM-based Macs would have going for them:

- Apple already has the ball rolling getting their huge developer community to think about porting apps from iOS/iPad OS to mac OS. Catalyst is still fairly early doors, but it's clearly designed to lay the groundwork - aided by a lot of API consistency between their operating systems.
- It's likely a lot of apps would "just work" if you ran them on an ARM-based Mac as-is, although you'd have the Android tablet issue of blown up phone apps being janky.
- Microsoft and Adobe, two of the bigger software companies everyone thinks you have to court, already have versions of some of their bigger apps on iOS/iPad OS, so it's not going to be a ground-up rewrite.
- Apple's ARM SoCs are achieving significant benchmark scores, besting a lot of Intel-based laptops in many key benchmarks and common uses. A 12-core A14 paired with the larger battery of a laptop would almost certainly crush those scores.
- For all those common tasks, battery drain would be significantly lower. ARM chips are much more power efficient - hence their popularity in portable devices.

 

[xraydoc]

Now if Apple were to release a machine with an iPad + Magic Keyboard configuration that could run both OS X and iPadOS apps, that would be something indeed.

 

[Arne-IC]

I predict: Most programs will run just fine. And then even better once developers update their programs to run natively.

You said it: IF THEY UPDATE THEIR PROGRAMS!

 

[Falhófnir]

I'm not sure I want my Mac running on an iPhone processor. It just doesn't sound right in terms of performance.

It won't anyway, it will be a processor designed specifically for the Mac from the ground up.

 

[dmelgar]

I can't wait.
This is the machine I've been waiting for.
Hoping for super long battery life, no fan, decent speed, lighter weight.
Hoping for touchscreen. Some sort of a blend with an iPad. Ability to run iPad apps.

 

[Stella]

It is going to be interesting. However one of the many reasons I prefer Macs is that they can run anything. I can use VMWare, Parallels, VirtualBox or even Bootcamp to run and develop for Linux and Windows at nearly native speeds. Moving to ARM would most likely eliminate that option. I don't know how big of group that is, but I do know that Macs have become many developers primary systems because of that ability.

I'm starting to consider Windows 10 for development platform if Apple can't deliver. Microsoft are doing good things with Linux support in Windows 10. WSL2 coming in May will improve support and performance for Linux, for example, Docker will now run in WSL2.

Added:

What makes you think the x86 CPU will be more powerful than a Mac specific ARM CPU? The current low cost/low power A-series CPU in the iPhones already competes/beats the i3 series from Intel and there is no reason Apple can't (or didn't already) design a MacOS dedicated ARM CPU that can compete with the latest i7/i9 Intel CPU's while consuming much less power and costing significantly less as well.

Apple will not pass any cost savings on to the consumer ( if there are any to begin with). Guarantee 99%, ARM based Macs will cost the same as Intel based Macs.

 

[Bruno Castelló]

- For all those common tasks, battery drain would be significantly lower. ARM chips are much more power efficient - hence their popularity in portable devices.

Here comes the big lie about ARM chips...

 

[PortoMavericks]

AMD has a custom design business and that’s where Apple should go.

Simply because the customer owns the design of the chip.

 

[Bustycat]

Most people here even don’t know the existence of AMD Ryzen.

 

[ph001bi]

When you watch the full keynote of WWDC 2005 at the transition section from 9-10 and also at the end he explains that OS X is set for the next 20 years (in the short clip) and at the end he speaks to us as a fatherly figure or as our boss (around 58 min) to go and recompile our code for the next transition. He'd be saying the same thing today for ARM transition.

This is one of my favourite Stevenote. The informatica guy cracks me up every time.

 

[dmelgar]

This is going to be the death of the Mac computers as a whole. Arm Macs won’t have any compatability with any of the software available until the software developers update their software and most will be left behind. Microsoft tried to transition to ARM with the Surface Pro X and Windows 10 on ARM has been a failure. I expect this to fail as well, especially since ARM will probably not have the same performance for all tasks compared to X86-64.

Its MUCH easier for Apple developers. Those who use Xcode (most these days) will just be able to flip a compile switch and be done. For those that don't, the OS will provide an emulation layer that will slow it down but let it work.
I think Apple has more pull than Microsoft.

I bought an Windows 10 ARM laptop and have been VERY disappointed in the software support. Google ported Chrome but refuses to release it due to some political licensing issue with Qualcomm or Microsoft. Overall, there's been little support for the platform. Typical of crappy Windows laptops, Lenovo already abandoned the Yoga C630 laptop they just released last year (the one I bought), even though it hasn't reached its full potential. I love the laptop hardware for design, but its software support SUX.

 

[eatrains]

This is not that simple. If it were, then why developers like Panic didn't do a linux version for ARM of their most successfull app - Coda Editor? Yeah right... it's not that simple.

What? Going from one operating system to another is nothing like going from one processor architecture to another.

 

[DakotaGuy]

This should give Mac laptops a shot in the arm😏

iOS is simply feels so much more snappy. It’s does make me wonder where MacOS is headed.

That has more to do with the fact that iOS is a lot lighter than Mac OS. If your iPhone or iPad was running a full version of Mac OS it wouldn't be "much more snappy" then a current mid to higher end Mac with Intel processors.

 

[ssgbryan]

Spot on.

The iPad is blazingly fast. There is no 'death of Mac.' The iPad and iPhone are 'Macs.'

Put a custom Arm chip in the iMac and nobody would tell the difference. The last PPC/Intel transition was seamless. It's consigned to history. The Intel Mac was no less a 'Mac.'

Azrael.

You remember it very, very differently than me. I ended up reworking major portions of my workflow because many of the nifty utilities I depended on never made the transition. I stayed on 10.6.8 for 4 years. All of my software had to be replaced, and most of them didn't become feature compatible with the PPC versions until the 2nd iteration, two years later.

Just out of curiosity, how many years do you think it will take Adobe CS on ARM to be feature compatible with the current X86 version? It took 2 iterations (CS2 to CS4) last time.

 

[aero7]

I wonder if this 12-core is passively cooled, wouldn’t be surprised if they resurrected the 12” Macbook (but with larger screen / smaller bezel).

Difference to the old 12" MacBook would be, a 12-core A-something chip would blow out any current Intel or AMD chip out of the water. Like so badly. A14 single-core is almost on-par with whatever Intel currently has. And that is comparing a passively cooled phone with heavily, actively cooled workstations that draw 10x-20x the power.

At this point I'm convinced they are going to transparently emulate x86-64 and it will still be decent performance. It's insane.

 

[macduke]

I thought they’d really go ham on the cores, not just 8+4. This must be for the MacBook Air or something. The thing about ARM is with the thermal envelope and available power output of the Mac you could really scale up the cores for multithreaded professional workflows. I was thinking 32-64 cores in a 16” MBP, with further work being done on Apple’s side to take advantage of large multithreaded CPUs across the entire macOS stack for apps that traditionally run better on faster single threaded CPUs.

Really torn about when to get a new MBP now. On the one hand there could be a lot of issues with these first-gen CPUs, from unforeseen defects to issues with software compatibility. On the other hand, it may be foolish to buy an Intel-based system that will likely see limited future support from developers and Apple themselves in OS updates. I can easily see something like “macOS 10.18 will be the last version to support Intel CPUs as we move to remove legacy support which slows down the OS.” Maybe not quite 10.18 but you get what I’m saying. A Mac that might normally get updates for 8 years might only get 5-6 if purchased this year and have half the battery life of what comes next, lol.

 

[aero7]

This is going to be _insanely_ fast. If you look at details on benchmarks of A14 (passively cooled, in a phone, running on low power), one can only imagine what a properly powered and actively cooled A-chip with more than 2 cores (there are only 2 high-performance cores in the current chips) would be capable of. And this is going to be _way_ beyond what Intel or AMD can do currently. Like off the scale. Exciting times!

 

[Ma2k5]

We already have this, it’s called the iPad.

 

[phenste]

Apple's notebooks have had flawed airflow + cooling designs for years causing the processor to constantly overheat and run at slower speeds. I don't want to hear excuses about Intel's bad performance before they haven't at least tried to get the best performance out of their hardware.

Honestly, having owned an MBP for 10+ years, don’t really have any qualms with Intel performance—I’m just saying “finally” relative to how long these rumors have been going around. Apple’s A-series is fantastic, and it’s obvious they’ve been working towards putting them on the Mac for a while now. I’m interested to see how it goes even though my MBP probably has another 5-10 years of life in it.

(Unless they make macOS incompatible with it of course! 😜)

 

[ThisBougieLife]

I'm looking forward to this, especially to see how the cooling can be improved. My 16" MBP gets so hot just playing music and watching YouTube videos. ARM would greatly improve that, I'd think.

 

[Orionfox]

I know I will be dis-regarded as 1% and that I don't matter, but this change will most likely stop me from buying a new Mac. I can do 99% of what I need the internet for on my phone (or iPad). The only thing I needed a computer for was playing games (which is the vast amount of my time on a computer or tablet). With Intel, I could bootcamp if I needed to, now I cant. I preferred stay in the Mac environment whenever possible, even when it cost more, but I still had options that worked. Having been through processor changes and played with all kinds of emulation, it never works for games.

I have been an Apple fan since I started work on a IIfx when my printing company started in electronic pre-press. I even kept to Apple the whole 12 years I worked for "the enemy" and got all my certs.

 

[cardfan]

This is going to be _insanely_ fast. If you look at details on benchmarks of A14 (passively cooled, in a phone, running on low power), one can only imagine what a properly powered and actively cooled A-chip with more than 2 cores (there are only 2 high-performance cores in the current chips) would be capable of. And this is going to be _way_ beyond what Intel or AMD can do currently. Like off the scale. Exciting times!

Doesn't matter if it can't run any essential software. And hardly anyone would want to develop for it.

 

[theluggage]

I despise the ARM architecture. I had a RPi 3B+ for the last three years, and could never do any real good s**t on it.

Are you serious?

The Raspberry Pi costs $35 - it was cobbled together from surplus set-top-box components with the specific aim to make it so cheap that you could use it in a DIY hardware project or give it to a kid to play with and not lose too much sleep if it got fried. Yes, it has some flaws and isn't very powerful but did I mention that it costs $35?! ....

I could never do any of my personal projects on it with success

Hmm. I used one as the DNS/DHCP server on my home network for years. I used one as a set-top-box running Kodi for a long time. I've got another acting as quite a nice little audio player (the only failing is difficulties with Apple's proprietary Airplay protocol, which is hardly the machine's fault). I've been experimenting with another one controlling a synth... No problems that can's be adequately justified by that whole it costs 35 freaking bucks (plus some bits and bobs that the sort of people playing with Pis have around anyway) thing.

I am extremely linked to Coda because it is so easy to use, has plugins that make my life easier as a web dev and I doubt that Panic will do an ARM version of it exactly like it is, because they've been developing the new version (Nova editor) with a terrible experience from what I saw in beta versions.

So, let's get this right: you suspect that the developers have stopped development of your favourite tool in favour of a new product that you don't like and that is somehow the fault of the ARM architecture? You don't even know that they won't produce an ARM version of Coda (it's a modern written-for-MacOS X app which is exactly the sort of thing that should be trivial to re-compile for ARM) or that it won't be perfectly usable under emulation (its only a html editor - no heavy lifting). Here's a newsflash: if the developers have abandoned it, it's dead and you need to switch to something else anyway. Even if it still runs on MacOS 10.16 (x86 or not) web development is a fast moving field and it will be obsolete in a couple of years.

As for Adobe CC - maybe, just maybe, Apple are smart enough to realise that, if they're ever going to use ARM beyond maybe a 12" iPad/MacBook crossover, that Adobe CC is a must, in which case they will already be talking to Adobe about it. What Adobe are currently trying to do - produce "full" Photoshop for the iPad - with all the constraints of iPad hardware, a locked-down OS and touch-centric UI - is far more challenging than just porting it from x86 MacOS to ARM MacOS.

Put as many cores you want on it, it will eat battery power like a possessed demon.

...and now we really are in total post-truth reality-denial territory. Let's forget that Amazon and others are looking at using ARM in their cloud services principally because ARM is more energy-efficient than Intel (partly through not needing all that complex x86-to-micro-op translation circuitry that Intel depends on). Clue: they're using ARM processors designed for server workloads (just as Apple would use ARM processors designed for laptops/desktops - although the A-series iPad chips are already halfway there) - not $35 Raspberry Pis (yeah, the RasPi4 runs stupid hot, but did I mention that the Pi is a cheap kludge aggressively designed-down to a "disposable" price?)

Hence why I've been preparing myself to switch to any linux distro (like elementaryOS), so I can stay on x86.

Good luck running things like Adobe CS and Coda that you absolutely and non-negotiably need to do your work then... Well, Adobe CS might kinda sorta work -ish (for a given and limited definition of "work") under Wine - but frankly I'd put more faith in ARM/MacOS versions of those appearing long before the current x86 Macs get end-of-lifed.

You seem to be suffering a bit of confusion in the distinction between processor architecture and operating system... Porting between operating systems is a major faff, but well-written modern software only depends on processor architecture in a few unavoidable cases (because it is hard work, fragile and software developers aren't stupid).

Meanwhile, I despise the x86 architecture: I tried an IBM PC in the 1980s - it was expensive, the screen flickered when it scrolled and it only supported 640K of RAM. Note: /scarcasm

 

[ssgbryan]

AMD still doesnt have a complete product portfolio and I still don’t believe that AMD would be able to supply both Apple and their PC OEM customers with enough CPUs should Apple become a customer.

What are they missing?

EPYC at the server level, destroying Intel's server lineup
THREADRIPPER at the HEDT, destroying Intel's HEDT lineup
Ryzen at the "LEDT" (if 16 core/32 threads can be considered "low end")

The 4000 series, destroying Intel's mobile offerings.

And all at a lower price, I might add.

Apple is small potatoes afa computer sales - and AMD has purchased almost all of the 7nm capacity available from TSMC.

 

[yurc]

Arm Development For The Office: Unboxing an Ampere eMag Workstation

www.anandtech.com

Waiting for this being fully reviewed, after that I think I can imagine how arm based Macs would stacks.