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Does no one remember the PowerPC days when applications were so few and far in between, every single one of them could be reviewed in Macworld? It's amazing how mainstream Macs are nowadays and the vast array of choices we have for programs. Trouble is, I don't know what to attribute to Apple's success and what's made accessible by Intel and x86
Apple never sold more than 21 million Macs in a year. iOS has transformed Apple and I think they see an opportunity to integrate Macs into the ecosystem a lot more tightly if they switch to ARM.
 
I can prepare a table of contents and table of authorities on Word on iPad.

A paralegal or an assistant can clean up any formatting problems.

The use of acronyms in your question was adorable, by the way.

Those acronyms are pretty commonly used in law offices. I assume you are manually typing the tables in? Not fun to keep things up to date when you move stuff around.
 
Every company looks for routine stable revenue, iPhone for example every year to five years people upgrade. iPad usually every two to six years. Laptops usually every three years or longer. When you compare the development costs spread between many years and the number of your present customer’s upgrading and future growth then it makes sense for a company such as Apple to keep developing ARM as it also streamlines OS development costs and developers commitment. Having a platform such as x64 does not fit with Apple’s vision. Rather than think of what you won’t be able to do think of what will be possible like having one ARM device and having iOS automatically scale to iPadOS or macOS ARM similar to the cursor adapting when using the trackpad on iPadOS. New software developed that maybe better than what exists today.

Agreed, I realize this. I agree that once Apple starting making headway with the A-Series, it was only a matter of time before the x86 Apple era is relegated to the history books.

Apple always, ALWAYS wanted to control ALL the hardware, so I think NOW is the right time to do this.

Thing is, everyone (including myself) is working off of computer technology perceptions that don't really apply anymore today. This is why I think people keep comparing the iPad to the Mac.

MacOS is NOT going away. It will coexist with iOS. But we live in the era of disinformation-based FEAR.

Personally, I'll wait and see.
 
Personally, I'll wait and see.

Wise to wait and see what Apple’s official plan is rather than get worked up on rumours even if there is a slight possibility. Many companies have moved to services such as AWS, Chrome, 365, etc. Swift programming language allows for quicker porting to iOS it is all up to developers.
 
If Apple makes it clear Arm is the future of the platform, all development efforts will shift to making versions of software for Arm Macs. It might take a while for the software ecosystem to populate, but it will happen because that's where the market will be heading. The only software that won't be updated is that which is either no longer supported full stop - in which case it's on borrowed time anyway (and that's if it's 64 bit, 32 bit abandonware is already gone), or that which the developer sees no value in recompiling, tweaking and refining for the Arm systems, in which case again, it's days were likely numbered anyway.

We don't know if software developers such as Adobe willing to create apps for ARM-based Mac until Apple announces powerful hardware such as Mac Pro so that software developers can use it to develop their own software.
 
Since much of iOS/iPadOS has cloud based apps I would imagine that major software developers will also offer some cloud computing on ARM macs. Basically just install the front end or some host app and everything else happens on the cloud.
 
No, most of us don’t.

Very few macs are sold.
Even fewer of those run windows.

It’s a minority of a minority.

The future of mac is compatibility with iOS (a much bigger platform than mac, and more important than windows)
I use bootcamp for games and macos for everything else, so no, i don't agree. Fusion of iOS and macos just increases internal competition macs vs. idevices... i don't think this is a win-win situation. macos and bootcamp is win-win.
 
365 is still available to use on any platform and I have yet to hear compassions that it is limited other than paying a subscription. Having features removed is a developers decision not necessarily the limitations of a platform. Sometimes developers remove features that are not used by most of the customers and decided to include it later that does not mean it is a toy. It takes software many years to reach market maturity and companies make calculated decision to extend its life by introducing on a new platform and reintroducing features, a business decision. As long as Office lives to it’s core operation Microsoft can call it what it wants, don’t like it find an alternative and I know there are many options. Complaining about cross platform compatibility gets you nothing, subscribe to 365. Cannot afford it maybe your business is not profitable enough or you have not heard of tax write-offs. In any case options exists and excuses get you nowhere.

I (and my business) use Office 365 on other platforms to get things done. It is probably one of the most important business software platforms that exists. (That we use) It is used with a lot of the features and resources (macros, scripts, Object embedding, links etc.), working in conjunction with other business systems (SAP) etc. Virtually none, even some of the simplest spreadsheets, word documents work on the iOS version of Office...other than basic viewing and basic entry editing. Im not sure you can even open more than one spreadsbeet yet in iOS?

I’m not even sure what your point is? Just because IOS runs on ARM and gimped software runs in IOS doesn’t make everything even across all platforms.
 
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Facts don’t care if you agree with them
Only a small percentage of Mac users need to run Windows. I do and you do, but most don't.

IMHO, the first ARM-based Macs will be MacBook/iPad Pro hybrid and the iMac. Apple may release the Mac Mini Pro with the X86-64 in the future and convert the Mac Mini to ARM as well.

So, everything named Mac without the Pro monicker will become ARM-based. Everything with the Pro monicker will remain on X86-64. It's possible that Apple will transition X86-64 to AMD processors, though, to completely disengage from Intel.

I don't see Mac Pro, MacBook Pro, or iMac Pro being ARM-based in the next 5 years.
 
Apple’s only a tiny part of Intel’s business. And, as these CPU’s will be only for Apple’s use, even if it does run circles around Intel‘s solutions, Windows users and the greater computing world will still use Intel. The bigger impact to Intel will be if AMD beats them. Oh, AND if Qualcomm is able produce ARM processors anywhere near the performance of Apple’s A-series.

Exactly.

While I'm sure Intel would hate to lose Apple as a customer... Intel still has Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, and the rest of the PC manufacturers. And plenty of data centers who use their processors.

ARM is something Intel should keep their eye on... but I don't predict ARM destroying Intel anytime soon.

And you're right... AMD is much more of a threat to Intel than Apple is.

But if ARM really is the future... and Intel somehow completely fails with x86/x64... is there any reason Intel couldn't start making ARM processors? I'm not familiar with ARM licensing.
 
But if ARM really is the future... and Intel somehow completely fails with x86/x64... is there any reason Intel couldn't start making ARM processors? I'm not familiar with ARM licensing.

Intel actually used to have ARM processors, branded XScale (formerly StrongARM). They sold that off basically just as ARM saw the big smartphone renaissance.

ARM comes in two licenses. Most license ARM's designs, a.k.a. ARM Cortex. Apple and a few others instead license the ISA, and then make their own design for that.

Intel could do either of those. But I suppose, in theory, ARM could simply refuse to hand out a new license.
 
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No, most of us don’t.

Very few macs are sold.
Even fewer of those run windows.

It’s a minority of a minority.

The future of mac is compatibility with iOS (a much bigger platform than mac, and more important than windows)

Apple sells close to 20 Million Mac's annually.
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Exactly.

While I'm sure Intel would hate to lose Apple as a customer... Intel still has Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, and the rest of the PC manufacturers. And plenty of data centers who use their processors.

ARM is something Intel should keep their eye on... but I don't predict ARM destroying Intel anytime soon.

And you're right... AMD is much more of a threat to Intel than Apple is.

But if ARM really is the future... and Intel somehow completely fails with x86/x64... is there any reason Intel couldn't start making ARM processors? I'm not familiar with ARM licensing.

Nothing ARM designs offers will touch Zen 3/RDNA 2.0 never mind the near feature complete Zen 4. The team Lisa Siu has put together, with their collective backgrounds is the best in the business.
 
If Apple tries to lock these down in some way - like make users install all software via the App Store - I think that would be a huge mistake...

I sincerely hope they don't do that.
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Intel could do either of those. But I suppose, in theory, ARM could simply refuse to hand out a new license.
Intel, or anyone else could go risc-v for computing solutions... I'm sure that will start to happen very soon.
 
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Apple sells close to 20 Million Mac's annually.
Yes. I posted that. And a small fraction of those won’t be able to cope with Arm. But even if it’s 100%, they sell 200M+ iphones annually. And 10-20million ipads.

So macs are small change to them.

Like I said above. With those numbers.
 
Can't wait. Lots will bemoan the demise of x86, but I'm looking ahead, not to the past.

I classify Santabean's comment as written in the style of political spin. It implies that the person, who needs x386 compatibility, is looking to the past.

You can look forward, look to the past, or look to the side because of the need to work alongside the majority of people who use x386 computers.

I love Macs - or used to love Macs, until I realised Apple's decisions are solely for money, and not for the users - and I'll be sad to leave after many decades of Mac use, probably before you were born. I work with software that our company uses, and I've been able to use that running VMWare Fusion. That's what it means to work alongside.

So I am looking to the side, and realise I need a computer that helps me do that.

I value cross-compatibility of software for professional work, more than having a faster/efficient processor that can give me longer battery life.

ARM efficiency might be marginally useful for laptops, but of questionable advantage when we plug our notebook into an AC outlet at the office.

Funny thing is, those who've been brought up being influenced by the media, probably do not realise the spin they are putting on their words. The media has influenced the way people speak. Thus, propaganda controls the masses without them realising it.
 
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I (and my business) use Office 365 on other platforms to get things done. It is probably one of the most important business software platforms that exists. (That we use) It is used with a lot of the features and resources (macros, scripts, Object embedding, links etc.), working in conjunction with other business systems (SAP) etc. Virtually none, even some of the simplest spreadsheets, word documents work on the iOS version of Office...other than basic viewing and basic entry editing. Im not sure you can even open more than one spreadsbeet yet in iOS?

I’m not even sure what your point is? Just because IOS runs on ARM and gimped software runs in IOS doesn’t make everything even across all platforms.

Can you run 365 in a web browser on an iOS device, if so then there is no excuse. Can you make a direct app link for 365, if so then there is really no point of having a native app. Even Microsoft much rather people use 365 then purchase a one-time app. If by your own admission use and Office is important to your business then a company 365 license would be worth the cost and you can write it off as a business expense so there is really no excuse why you are complaining calling it a toy, gimped, etc what is the point you are still getting your business done with 365.
 
Not entirely sure if it was you or someone else, but the question seems to be coming up every time there is a discussion on ARM performance.


That is KeyDB performance on AWS Graviton 2. Using the N1 Core from ARM with half the Cache, likely to save cost.


A review on Graviton 2. In multiple synthetic benchmarks. taking into account the Graviton2 is likely using less TDP, it is designed with maximum throughput per socket with slightly lower clock speed. AWS has also published a few stats on M6g being faster than their M5 based on Intel Skylake / CooperLake and AMD Zen 1.

Along with all other major software dev currently beta testing it saying it is indeed faster than M5 while being cheaper.

If you were to ask me if I trust ARM's roadmap 2 years ago and think N1 would have performance roughly equal to top performing x86 chip I would have been very skeptical. But we now have data to prove it.

Anyone claiming ARM is not performing compared to x86 or something doesn't have anything to support it.

Disclaimer: I own AMD shares and I neither endorse or against ARM on Mac. And performance on Server do not accurately represent ALL desktop usage performance. Data and Results must be taken in context. Opinions are my own.
This is for a distributed key store, which is highly parallel in nature, a very different workload from what you'd run on a Mac. People use Intel and AMD in mid-to-high end personal computers, where there's not even an ARM CPU to compare to. If there were and it were comparable or even faster, that wouldn't surprise me, but there's no data.
 
That's true. For example when the Mac switched from PPC to x86 processors, the emulation layer called Rosetta would reduce performance by about 50%.

The fact is... the new ARM processors will probably be twice as fast as current intel offerings. Let's see why.

Let's compare the performance of the current iPads to the performance of the current MacBook Pros.

View attachment 901657View attachment 901658

Can you see it? Roughly same performance. BUT there is a big difference: the Intel processor in the 13-inch MacBook Pro consumes 28W of power, while the A12X in the iPad Pro consumes about 7W of power (estimated figure based on iPad Pro battery life).
Also another interesting fact: the iPad Pro has a 36 Wh battery, while the MacBook Pro has a 58 Wh battery (almost double the size), but the battery life is still better on the iPad Pro!

Can you see the trend here? The A12X offers 2-4x the performance-per-watt compared to the Intel processors found in the current MacBook Pro.

What does this mean? It means that a future Apple built ARM processor, let's call it "A14 Max", will be built to take advantage of the thermal and battery specs of the MacBook Pros. It will be a 28W ARM processor with DOUBLE the performance of the current Intel offering.

So the old apps (and x86 virtual machines) will run as the same speed as before through emulation, while the OS and the new apps that are compiled for ARM will simply FLY.

And this is just the beginning. At the current rate of development and with Apple being able to optimize the CPU design and features for their specific OS, in a matter of 2-3 years, ARM MacBooks will be faster than x86 PCs even when running old x86 apps or virtualized x86 environments!

It's really a win-win scenario. I can't be more excited.


"...the Intel processor in the 13-inch MacBook Pro consumes 28W of power, while the A12X in the iPad Pro consumes about 7W of power (estimated figure based on iPad Pro battery life)."


Excuse me, but is that iPad's power estimation of 7W under normal usage? Or heavy usage?

I'm asking that because if you are comparing performance-per-watt of two devices, and both the numbers of performance you used are from Benchmark tests (so under heavy usage), then the watt numbers must also be obtained under heavy usage.

Is that true that an iPad Pro under heavy usage consumes only 7W?
 
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True wireless power has the problem of interference in a very mobile wireless world we live in today compared to what Tesla envisioned and demonstrated when he was alive. Is it possible, maybe but something tells me there are too many things competing for RF spectrum that it does not interfere with each other to not cause reliability issues. Look at how limiting both 5G technology is. Simply emitting even low levels of power would make it less efficient compared to Qi. There is a method to make wireless power feasible but not in the sense you are thinking.
WiTricity doesn't use RF, it uses magnetism. Hence why I had high hopes for it, since magnetism is far safer.
 
WiTricity doesn't use RF, it uses magnetism. Hence why I had high hopes for it, since magnetism is far safer.

Near-field magnetics has problems of its own for example if someone has a medical implanted device it would cause issues. I suspect these were some concerning issues that made it impossible to implement safely on mass.
 
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They can leverage all that work to make processors for lower end products (and vice versa).

When I designed CPUs for AMD, for example, we designed first for the highest end product. Once we did that, it was easy to modify those designs for the middle and bottom of the market (reduce clock speed, shrink caches and buffers, reduce number of cores, etc., remove one pipeline per core) It’s an incremental cost, but the difference isn’t as big as you’d think.

Perhaps you can answer this -
What is the comparison that we really should be making? That is: we can't just compare clock speeds, and we can't compare instructions per second (because from my understanding, the x86 cores accomplish more per instruction than ARM chips do). So how do we compare? or can we even do so at the moment?

It is find to say that they are lower TDP or that there are more cores, but in reality, will a switch over help us get more done?
(I'm assuming here that people are going to be doing more than just surfing the web and checking FaceBook...)

Also, with the increasing inroads that ML is making into our everyday world, would ARM chips be better suited to handle some of the work, or is that likely to remain the domain of GPUs for the foreseeable future?
 
Perhaps you can answer this -
What is the comparison that we really should be making? That is: we can't just compare clock speeds, and we can't compare instructions per second (because from my understanding, the x86 cores accomplish more per instruction than ARM chips do). So how do we compare? or can we even do so at the moment?

It is find to say that they are lower TDP or that there are more cores, but in reality, will a switch over help us get more done?
(I'm assuming here that people are going to be doing more than just surfing the web and checking FaceBook...)

Also, with the increasing inroads that ML is making into our everyday world, would ARM chips be better suited to handle some of the work, or is that likely to remain the domain of GPUs for the foreseeable future?
Nothing about Arm that is inherently lower IPC than Intel. In fact, when you see A13 beating a lot of intel chips at benchmarks while running at similar frequencies, it shows that apple’s implementation has a competitive IPC. (i wish we knew more about Apple’s chips, but unlike Intel and AMD and others they don’t publish academic papers or conference papers on them).

I like to look at performance per watt. Because if you have a higher value of that, you can always increase your watts to compete for speed, and turn down your watts to win for power.
 
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