The real question is was it worth it in the end? Would it have been better if we stayed on PowerPC?
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Bloomberg: Apple's First Arm Mac to Launch by 2021 With 12-Core Processor
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Apple doesn’t price on margin. They research, try to evaluate EVC and price to capture as much of the willingness to pay as possible. The pricing decision is independent of cost except as a floor
Why? Would you use a lower priced, smaller, ARM Macbook to connect to super high resolution displays. Omitting a TB controller saves power, money, and logic board space. And loads of people make due without TB. Its nice to have, but is not neccessary.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did go to ARM that they also use an intel x86 CPU onboard for, wait for it... X86 required executions! This is the most likely scenario IMO and could be a BTO option. Think of it, ARM for everything MacOS and everything that ARM can run natively and then the secondary x86 CPU for Bootcamp, etc, etc, etc... The cost of Intel (or AMD for that matter) CPU's in bulk is super cheap for Apple. You also wouldn't need the biggest baddest x86 CPU either.
So instead we should get a ultra-high performance Desktop Class TDP custom Mac chip just to see what its capable of? It makes sense to design X and Z variants for the iPads, but does Apple sell enough Macs to justify designing a whole new chip for certain Macs?
This was indeed the best WWDC ever, I have watched it so many times, I could do all the dialogues, I still don't understand the lack of clapping when Steve announced how well the Mac was doing at the beginning, I still laugh in advance at the Informatica guy jokes, I still cringe at the Microsoft MBU Girl presentation despite suffering from acute yellow fever, and the Otellini part is even more powerful now that he's gone. None of the WWDC after this one ever came near with the exception of WWDC11 which is extremely powerful today when you think it was done by a guy who knew he had less than 6 months left to live.
This would mean a very complicated motherboard to cover the few X86 only applications. It would raise the Bill of Material dramatically for very limited benefits. There was once a PowerMac with an X86 Daughter board. They probably sold 10 of them.
What could possibly be faster than an A14 for the Mac? A14X likely to be used in iPad. A14Y? Probably not as we know what the Z extension now stands forOhhhh, I know, the A14X-X Pro Max!
Apple is going to use the new A14XXX in Mac
You say that as if you know something Apple doesn't about chip design and performance. That seems unlikely. Besides having some of the best chip designers in the business, they hired Anand, who was peerless (and probably still is)
Then you may need to contemplate buying or building a gaming rig and moving to a Windows full-time.
I'd be curious to see exactly what their current chips are capable with a beefier cooling system. Obviously the core counts can't compare, but it seems like their per-core performance can.
While it's definitely true they don't sell a ton of Macs, I can't really see them long-term staying with a bifurcated lineup of Intel or AMD on the high end versus ARM on the low end. The reasons they would want to switch are less pressing in desktops, but they're still there.
Given how far the iPad Pro lineup has come recently, I think it's certainly possible for Apple to just tweak their Pro chips and put them into desktops and get equivalent or even better performance on everything but highly multi-threaded workloads. But ultimately it's all just prognostication until we see actual proof in real-world tests.
And everyone will say it's a catastrophe because _____ (fill in the blank with an app from Adobe) hasn't been ported.
Yeah, iPhone battery life is rubbish compared to all of those wonderful Intel-based phones you can get with longer battery life... in fantasy land. Think you've found a phone that has better battery life than an iPhone? Inconvenient truth: it will almost certainly be running on an ARM.
Sorry, but outside of topsy-turvy alternative fact land, ARM uses less power than Intel for comparable processing power. Whether the designers of particular devices use that advantage to give longer battery life, thinner/lighter devices (smaller batteries) or faster processors is a trade-off. With the iPhone, Apple's preference is usually "thinner and faster".
Wine is an implementation of the Windows API under Linux rather than a "virtual machine" runnimg actual Windows, which is why they make the "not an emulator" claim - but you're pretty clearly in "my mind is made up, don't confuse me with the facts" mode...
Some people are acting as if all x86 Macs are going to turn into pumpkins the moment the (still hypothetical) ARM Mac is released. The reality is that they're not going to be replacing (e.g.) the new Mac Pro with an ARM version this June, and the last Mac Pro was on the market for about 6 years... Yes, the Intel transition was over in a year, but in that case, PPC development had hit a complete dead end - especially for pro laptops which were stuck at PPC G4 - and all the existing models were rapidly getting dated. A switch to ARM could be a bit more leisurely.
Long-term, though, there's no reason why everything shouldn't go ARM. Bear in mind that the higher-spec Mac Pros already rely on loads of (individually slower - look at the specs) cores, GPUs and Afterburners for their performance - and cramming lots of cores, vector processors and shaders onto a chip is one of ARMs advantages. The MacBook Air/12" MB end of the market is the low-hanging fruit, though - less urgency for native "pro" software and existing A12/A13 chips are more than powerful enough.
Most people don’t realise that ARM started out as a desktop CPU, but intel became dominant then ARM found that it was ideal for mobile low power devices due to its design now that laptops and workstation have slowly evolved moving away from mains power and running on batteries ARM is ideal were intel needs a drastic redesign that would make it a different CPU so ARM is ideal RISC finally won the war no one could of imagined it would of been won in this way
They could. With 8 performance cores, they could and get reasonable performance. What people like Insignia Solutions didn't have 25 years ago was a high performance compiler available to them, that could get the same performance from code. Whether it's worth the money - I doubt it.
Nope. Intel CPU’s are not super cheap for anyone. Even for apple, an intel cpu would cost several times the cost of its arm cpu. And it would add ridiculous amount of complexity to the operating system, and all sorts of potential security problems. And they CERTAINLY aren’t going to do it just so people can run boot camp. Boot camp was essentially a free bee that resulted from switching to x86. The idea that apple is going to create an incredibly complicated system that has to handle communications securely between two different cpus, running at different frequencies, with separate cooling solutions, etc., just so people can run a competitor’s operating system, is silly.
I believe Anand was hired by PR department. I have not seen any evidence he was working on chips for Apple.
The 12” and 13” ARM-Based Macs will be a good start without active cooling and offer up to 2-4x improvements on battery life. The price drop will be an important role in accelerating the adoption of ARM-Architecture for Apple Laptops. Are you listening Tim Cook?
In a way I’m happy as my 8 core trash can wont get upgraded soon. My windows gaming system is a 4790K @ 4.8 and every generation I get the itch and then hold off.
From around 2005 to 2015 I’d upgrade something just about every year. I’ve only done 2 over the past couple of years, and one was for my son to go to a 4790K after I upgraded a VST slave to i7-8700 (more cores), and the other was to ”upgrade“ my 2500K slave to his old 3570K.
intel has been nothing more than incrementalist since 2nd gen Core.
Many on these forums have no idea what it was like back then. I still love Apple, but things are just "different" nowadays. Glad you share the excitement and nostalgia for this piece of Apple's history.
Unlikely.
The ARM Mac rumor is 2021.
The "low cost" 23-inch iMac rumor is 2020.
I could see Tim putting a recently discovered cache of 1.8" iPod hard drives in iMacs to make them "low cost".
Or giving them pathetically low storage and upselling perpetual iCloud subscriptions as "cloud storage".
Is "By 2021" the beginning or end of 2021. Let's say beginning. So Apple would have to announce it at Virtual WWDC 2020 and offer a $900 iMac running on an A13 chip for developers. This would, of courde, be traded in against the real release machine. The question is "Which secret building is the one where the development is being done?"
I agree with battery life but am doubtful about any “price drops”. More like margin improvements and price stability.
I have a Parallels subscription, but only launch it a couple times a year to open a Publisher file in Windows 10. Speaking of which I don't think Microsoft has updated Publisher in about a decade. Can't think of any other Windows-only software I care about.