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So, is Kuo saying that the 2020 and 2021 ARM-based Macs won't have Thunderbolt 3 capability, and only the 2022 models will be compatible with Thunderbolt peripherals via USB4?

Every single Mac has been Thunderbolt 3 compatible for a few years now (once Apple discontinued the 12" MacBook), and now Apple will release multiple Mac models that have no Thunderbolt 3?

I don't think so.
 
So this means what? That Apple will be transitioning their Macs to AMD processors come 2021?
Likely first AMD based Mac to release as 2021 models, maybe there's an issue certifying those Mac as thunderbolt 3 compatible devices, requiring instead to wait for it to be certified as USB4 (indeed the same compatibility but avoiding Intel screening/thunderbolt trademark).
Who knows.

I have done a bit of research on these 600 series chipsets from ASMedia, and actually promises a lot of performance: ddr5 by itself will put it apart
 
So, is Kuo saying that the 2020 and 2021 ARM-based Macs won't have Thunderbolt 3 capability, and only the 2022 models will be compatible with Thunderbolt peripherals via USB4?

Every single Mac has been Thunderbolt 3 compatible for a few years now (once Apple discontinued the 12" MacBook), and now Apple will release multiple Mac models that have no Thunderbolt 3?

I don't think so.
Kuo didn’t say that. He didn’t address TB3 in 2020 at all.
 
You can't ask the tech world to hold back progress just to benefit a tiny group of people who run certain software applications (that are most likely available directly for PC or have a PC equivalent).
Tiny group of people? LOL Musicians, producers, songwriters, mix engineers, video producers and the entire community that makes digital content is far from being tiny. That's a head in the sand response if I have ever heard one.
 
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Kuo didn’t say that. He didn’t address TB3 in 2020 at all.
Quote from the article:

"Kuo expects ASMedia Technology to become the exclusive supplier of USB controllers for Arm-based Macs, adding that the Taiwanese integrated circuit designer will benefit from Macs gaining support for USB4 in 2022."
 
People saying that those that run windows on their macs are in the minority might be right, but I can assure you apple will not just leave those users out in the cold. Not a chance. No point in having a super powerful machine that can't virtualize x86. Maybe they will offer models that have an embedded x86 CPU just for that purpose?
 
Tiny group of people? LOL Musicians, producers, songwriters, mix engineers, video producers and the entire community that makes digital content is far from being tiny. That's a head in the sand response if I have ever heard one.

Apple sells less than 20 million macs a year. Not all of them go to the people you list, but even if they did, it’s still tiny. Apple sells more than 200 million iphones in a year. They sell about 10-20 million ipads a year. Any particular contingent of mac buyers is tiny.
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Quote from the article:

"Kuo expects ASMedia Technology to become the exclusive supplier of USB controllers for Arm-based Macs, adding that the Taiwanese integrated circuit designer will benefit from Macs gaining support for USB4 in 2022."

Yes. That says nothing about what happens in 2021, or anything about TB3.
 
Mac x86 transition announced in 2005.


Doubt it. They have been avoiding "i" on new products (no iWatch, iTV, etc.)
The "i" could return to indicate ARM products. Eg. iBook (ARM) would sit alongside MacBook (x86).
 
Tiny group of people? LOL Musicians, producers, songwriters, mix engineers, video producers and the entire community that makes digital content is far from being tiny. That's a head in the sand response if I have ever heard one.

What percentage of computer users belong in that group? Maybe 0.001%? And that is being very generous.

If every one of those users stopped buying Macs tomorrow, it wouldn’t have any noticeable impact on Apple’s bottom line.

And before you tell me about all of the people who do those things as a hobby, they can continue to do so just as well, if not better, on a machine running Windows.

And all this ignores that there would obviously be ARM Mac software designed for those same tasks.
 
Quote from the article:

"Kuo expects ASMedia Technology to become the exclusive supplier of USB controllers for Arm-based Macs, adding that the Taiwanese integrated circuit designer will benefit from Macs gaining support for USB4 in 2022."
Meh...

Actual quote from Kuo:

"ASMedia to become exclusive supplier of support chipsets for Macs with Apple's manufactured CPUs
" (likely x570/trx40 +intel sourced Titan Ridge to run on Ryzen CPU manufactured by Apple with AMD license for almost Total supply chain control), "adding this will benefit from 2022 from Apple adopting USB 4 , Apple to save among 40-60% (likely Macs based on 600 series chipsets with native USB 4 compatible with thunderbolt 3 but without Intel brand licensing). Current Mac if based on Ryzen could cost apple among 40-60% less, specially Mac Pro/iMac Pro.
 
Apple sells less than 20 million macs a year. Not all of them go to the people you list, but even if they did, it’s still tiny. Apple sells more than 200 million iphones in a year. They sell about 10-20 million ipads a year. Any particular contingent of mac buyers is tiny.

To be fair, selling 20 million Macs at an average of $1K makes that roughly $20+Billion in gross revenue. This is far from a tiny amount.

Apple would be foolish to ignore this, which I don't think they will.

I believe there will be mitigations in place for a transition if ARM-based "Macs" are not sold alongside X86 ones.
 
If "The boy who cried 'Wolf!'" was instead, "The boy who cried 'new Apple product'", the story would have ended very differently.
 
To be fair, selling 20 million Macs at an average of $1K makes that roughly $20+Billion in gross revenue. This is far from a tiny amount.

Apple would be foolish to ignore this, which I don't think they will.

I believe there will be mitigations in place for a transition if ARM-based "Macs" are not sold alongside X86 ones.

To be fair, again, they sell 200 million iPhones at not-too-different a price. IPads too. It’s still a small amount.

Which is why they want to make it a BIG amount, by addressing the needs not of current Mac customers, but of potential future ones.
 
They sell about 10-20 million ipads a year
About 40 to 45 million iPads a year, actually.

 
To be fair, again, they sell 200 million iPhones at not-too-different a price. IPads too. It’s still a small amount.

Which is why they want to make it a BIG amount, by addressing the needs not of current Mac customers, but of potential future ones.
Yes, OK, a comparatively small amount, but calling $20B (and I'm being REALLY conservative here) in revenue "small" seems disingenuous.

Regardless, I agree that Apple always has skated to their vision of their devices, so that it is the quality and use cases that drive sales. It's all about the reason why Mac users prefer Macs, and that is mainly software-driven in my opinion.

Also, while I doubt Apple will actually do it (in one shot at least), I don't think going all-ARM will change the user-base significantly, so long as current (major) app compatibility is there.
 
Yes, OK, a comparatively small amount, but calling $20B (and I'm being REALLY conservative here) in revenue "small" seems disingenuous.

Regardless, I agree that Apple always has skated to their vision of their devices, so that it is the quality and use cases that drive sales. It's all about the reason why Mac users prefer Macs, and that is mainly software-driven in my opinion.

Also, while I doubt Apple will actually do it (in one shot at least), I don't think going all-ARM will change the user-base significantly, so long as current (major) app compatibility is there.
Remember that the $20B you refer to is NOT entirely made of customers that cannot adapt to ARM. The thing I was responding to originally was the idea that Mac customers who absolutely must have x86 is a tiny amount. Some fraction of $20B is a tiny amount for Apple, who makes more than $200B revenue a year.
 
Wireless is still inefficient though there are ways to make it comparable to a wired connector the question remains will it be similar to USB-C an all for one connector.
The one thing which will keep wires in business is the fact that wireless charging today is very limited. I had high hopes for WiTricity, but that seems basically dead, except for a few implementations in the automotive industry.
 
... So **** it, drop all hardware-level compatibility, and prevent customers using a Virtual Machine to run previous releases, everybody has to just find something to use from the apparent "explosion" (not your term I know) of iPad apps that will suddenly (magically) be available?


... what? You could argue that being tied to Intel release schedule is detrimental, and I'd accept that. The "A12Z" seems to indicate that it isn't just Intel pushing out very incremental updates to CPUs, and it's not like AMD is a figment of my imagination - but sure, Intel are not always on time with CPUs Apple can use. You could argue that the power used by x86 CPUs is less efficient than ARM. I haven't really seen much in the way of actual desktop (as opposed to mobile phone/tablet) ARM CPUs so I can't comment on how well they scale up in terms of power usage, but let's assume they're fantastic...

But how can compatibility be a detriment? HOW? Just ****ing how?



Which, yet again, is ****ing irrelevant.

I will bet you my ass virginity that an iOS app will no more run directly on an arm-powered Mac, than it will on an Intel powered Mac.

Every single iPad and iPhone app that is compiled for Arm, could be compiled for Intel. They already have been, multiple times, during development, whenever the author runs the iPhone/iPad simulator. It compiles the App, from the code they've written, against iOS/iPadOS frameworks and libraries, on the Intel CPU in the Mac. Zero Arm code involved.

I cannot understand how so many people can fail to understand this, after all the ****ing tech press coverage and discussions there were about Catalyst.


Let's look at this another way, because people don't seem to be ****ing getting it.

An Intel Mac has the same processor as a Windows PC. The Mac will even run Windows. So, the applications on a Windows PC and the Mac are compiled for the same processor. And yet. The windows App does not run on macOS. The macOS App does not run on Windows. It's literally the same scenario with iOS apps and macOS.

Sweet baby Jesus does anyone understand this concept? How many times does it need to be repeated? What ****ing **** are you people reading that makes you think macOS + arm = "I can run any iOS app I want"?

You cannot honestly believe Apple was just going to use Intel CPUs forever and ever and that this was never a possibility? This has been a staple of Apple since the very beginning...from 6502 to 68000 to PowerPC to Intel. NeXTstep/Openstep was compiled for 68xxx, Solaris(SPARC), Intel, PA-RISC and Openstep ran under WindowsNT. This sort of portability is built into Apples DNA after the NeXT acquisition and existed before at Apple before Jobs ever came back.

Compatibility is a detriment when that is your primary consideration to making any change. Why is Windows still such a candy coated piece of **** to this day? Because they are a complete slave to backwards compatibility. They wont ever give it up...they’ll try to go around it, but they wont ever give it up.

YES, I am saying being tied to Intel compatibility is a detriment at this point....people around here are starting to lose their minds over it already. Virtualization is not going anywhere but it will change. If the majority of users on this forums losing their minds are because they wont be able to run BootCamp anymore, that is your own ****ing problem. You buy a Mac to run macOS, not Windows. I sure didn’t go through the past 31 years of using a Mac just to damn boot Windows. Screw that. If Apple are such greedy SOBs, why are people here crying about this? All I hear in this forum is “I can build a Windows machine with twice the performance at half the cost!”, “If Apple changes this or that, I’m going back to Windows!” “Apple should switch to AMD and NVIDIA because Lara Crofts tits aren’t detailed enough and don’t bounce as well with Intel and Radeon.” I translate that as, “I spent all my money on a Mac to run Windows, because Windows PCs genuinely suck and I cannot find a decent one, cant build one myself and Apple should be grateful I bought their overpriced sh**te, anyways, but the Hell if I will admit it here, because I measure my self worth by what computer I own.

Good grief, I never insinuated that you would directly be able to run an/any iOS app on a Mac from day one. That’s absurd...what this change means is that Apple can allow developers to package a single binary for distribution that contains the iOS and Mac version and upload that to the App Store while allowing the individual stores to parse the bundle and only install what’s needed to each OS (iOS, iPadOS or macOS). Thats also why Catalyst exists...you're ranting to the wrong person.

Imagine Xcode on iPadOS being a distinct possibility and allowing devs to move from iPadOS to macOS seamlessly or allowing devs to use an iPad with a monitor instead of a full on system. There are certain things that are still not available for devs yet, but its coming.

Apple, as of 13.4, allows devs to sell a single product SKU that works across all three platforms right now. I already have a semblance of that with Drafts and a couple of other apps, but this is akin to when Apple started allowing Universal apps that would work on iPhone or iPad without separate purchases.

Ive been through all of these transitions.....68K—>PowerPC—>Intel and MacOS—>MacOS X/macOS...there will be some bumps in the road and some apps and users left behind. Please do not come at me saying that Apple doesn’t have the right to do this or shouldn't do this because they HAVe to continue to worship at the Altar of INTEL/AMD.

Intel has burned through all the damn goodwill I have left and God love AMD, but they aren’t just not the solution. Telling me that x86 compatibility is the end all be all is a disingenuous load of horse****. I don’t want to be held back by Intel and their crap anymore. I’m tired of reading articles about how they cannot get their 10nm node up to snuff and that the next shrink is right around the corner. They are sitting on their damn hands overcharging for 14nm++++++++++ while they struggle with 10nm STILL. Look at the damn clock speeds. It’s embarrassing. The IPC gains hardly make up for the crap clocks and the only saving grace is LPDDR4X support and Iris Plus EUs that could have been back ported to 14nm+ except that would prove that Intel is holding that stuff back artificially. I suspect Apple has had enough. Intel can go choke on it. I’m done with them. I am not the only one who feels that way.


PS - Please keep you ass virginity to yourself. No one wants to see that.
 
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Remember that the $20B you refer to is NOT entirely made of customers that cannot adapt to ARM. The thing I was responding to originally was the idea that Mac customers who absolutely must have x86 is a tiny amount. Some fraction of $20B is a tiny amount for Apple, who makes more than $200B revenue a year.
Yes, agreed.

But only in Apple-land can they choose to ignore, say 0.5% of users, and leave $100M on the table.

My point is that even Apple's weakest product produces HUGE revenue numbers.
 
Yes, agreed.

But only in Apple-land can they choose to ignore, say 0.5% of users, and leave $100M on the table.

My point is that even Apple's weakest product produces HUGE revenue numbers.

True. But Apple can’t chase every $100M segment. They have difficulty spreading focus. They don’t sell printers, networking gear, etc. anymore either.
 
The "i" could return to indicate ARM products. Eg. iBook (ARM) would sit alongside MacBook (x86).
This was done for marketing purposes. At the time, Apple was about to release iPhone, and eventually iPad, not to mention, change their name from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc. They knew they were about to no longer be making only computers and iPods, so it made since for them to put "Mac" in the names of their computers.
 
True. But Apple can’t chase every $100M segment. They have difficulty spreading focus. They don’t sell printers, networking gear, etc. anymore either.

Which made it so much easier to escape the walled garden.......

I have jumped ship myself to a 16 core Ryzen based system myself, it is nice. My Mac Pro is just used for Zbrush now. When the current unpleasantness is over, I'll get a new copy and retire my last mac.
 
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