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Will it run OS X or iOS?

If iOS, what difference is a MacBook over an iPad Pro with a keyboard?
If OS X, how will it perform when it needs to emulate native OS X apps?

I’d say it would run neither. Why couldn’t it be a custom design? And I think if they think they can nail it like they did with iPhone why keep those iPads anymore. They could simply do their marketing trick (and they are insanely good at it) and in a couple of years we will forget PCs and tablets like we did Nokia. It’s a thought...
 
So pretty much they’ve invented a longer lasting, heavier, less useful, cumbersome-to-use iPad?
 
It would have to run macOS. iOS is for toys, it's a joke. Perfect if you want to take selfies and share with friends, useless for actually doing anything.

This.

Like I said before....full orchestral setup on Cubase with Vienna Symphonic Library and mix on Protools with ARM?

Rendering intense 4k 3d After Effects projects with ARM?

Nah.
 
Why? The current iPads are capable devices, what holds them back is the file system, ingesting footage and I/O. An ARM capable Mac would surely remove those restrictions and sport a massive boost in both speed and efficiency!
Moreover, an iPad has to be 1/4" thick, weigh 1 pound, have no cooling system, and use a CPU designed to run all day on one charge of a comparatively small battery. A laptop, or desktop, based on ARM would blow off all those limitations. Use 20 or 30 watts instead of 1 watt, run, say, 64 cores. Have an actual cooling system. Apple has the capability to build an ARM-based desktop system that could eat x86 systems for lunch. I expect they'll do something like that eventually.
 
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Because the popularity of portable devices has most CPU development efforts focus on power efficiency rather than brute force power.
Rendering solutions like PRMan and Arnold, as well as simulation software like Houdini, or DCC tools as used by the Visual Effects industry still very much rely on the concept of 'the more CPU+GPU+RAM the better'. Rooms filled with racks filled blades decked out with multi CPU/cores and oodles of RAM are needed to create your average Hollywood block buster, or content seen in games like Battle Front. In those settings iPads are rarely used as anything other than devices for 2D illustration, but nothing more strenuous than that.

Furthermore, until the aforementioned software can run much faster/cheaper on ARM than it does on x86 there simply won't be much of an impetus from the developers to port their code. Look how long it is taking some developers *cough*solidangle*cough* to add GPU support to their existing products. (answer: it's been years and still nothing).

That said, I'd welcome the addition of an ARM based Mac. Just not as a replacement for the current line-up (underwhelming as it may be for some at the moment).

But from what I gather... Apple barely has a foot in that game anyway? Most high end hardware in those scenarios (these days) is specialist, custom designed rigs or high specced PC workstations from the likes of HP.

Apple would be targeting mainly prosumer. There's a healthy creative app market on iOS (photo, drawing, print and publication) thanks to the power of the A chip, form factor and smaller elements like Apple pencil but take the custom hardware and apply that to the Mac and we could have efficient ways to handle the various content/assets required for video combined with huge speed increases in smaller footprints, less power draw, mouse input and solid graphics performance (based on Apple's previous developments on iOS).
 
Is 'Video' really the right thing to be worried about? 3D? haven't those been GPU reliant for 20 years?

What about data analysis (big data), or augmented reality, those are CPU dependent, right?

This isn't the 90s where you need Silicon Graphics to edit video. Our phones edit video and have for almost 10 years. I'm just saying 'video' isn't a CPU issue, right? Isn't the real issue having local and server storage platform for massive video projects, modular towers with graphic cards and local storage expandability? (a proper pro tower would be a good start)

Given the improvements in Apple's ARM CPU, already challenging laptop Intel, I think if they were to design a CPU with more thermal overhead I don't think the CPU will be the limiting factor for 'video'.
More likely problems: Apple's interest in a video editing platform (computer, server), and a proper pro mac.

you must not know much about video rendering then as it is just as reliant on the cpu as it is on the gpu. the faster the processor the faster your render time will be. same thing can be said about better gpu. thats why you don't see high end render farms with lowly i5s or i7s in them
 
you must not know much about video rendering then as it is just as reliant on the cpu as it is on the gpu. the faster the processor the faster your render time will be. same thing can be said about better gpu. thats why you don't see high end render farms with lowly i5s or i7s in them
I admittedly don't know much about video, but when the iPad Pro 12.9" was first announced, didn't they claim you could edit multiple 4K video streams simultaneously on it? Or does that work differently?
 
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But from what I gather... Apple barely has a foot in that game anyway? Most high end hardware in those scenarios (these days) is specialist, custom designed rigs or high specced PC workstations from the likes of HP.

Agreed. What little footing they had, they sadly squandered. My point was merely to express my concern about the general swing of the CPU market towards goals other than those best served to the 3D DCC market and high power users.
 
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This needs to be a wake-up call for Apple.

Microsoft, yes Microsoft, has a better grip on what pros want and are innovating in vectors pros care about.

Apple is blindly making things thinner and thinner, shipping a joke of a keyboard, under-powering ports, no quad processsors in 13” form factor, and removing things like sd slots which videos and photography pros need.

Sure, make one laptop as thin as possible. There is a market for that. But for pros, we care about a decent and quiet keyboard with key-travel, speed, memory, storage, io, and an amazing display. And long battery life, especially for professional intense cpu workflows. Apple”s joke of 10 hours, but really 6 hours in reality, is utter nonsense.

When you have a bag full of camera or video equipment, it’s completely meaningless if something is a fraction of an inch thicker. When you are coding in a keyboard for a living, you don’t care if it’s thinner or a gram or two lighter when it’s hard to type. A bag full of dongles in not elegant.

Sadly, Apple is optimizing for vanity product shots, not users and workflow. And that has opened up a huge gap for Microsoft to run plays to win. Creator”s Edition, indeed.
 
On a positive note this could mean:

Longer battery life for laptops.
Lower power usage for all Macs.
Better iOS emulators for developers.
Potential iOS apps running on macOS.
Better integrated graphics - now designed in house.
Cheaper production costs.
Faster and more predictable product release cycles.


Reading through the threads the only 2 downsides I could find appear short-sighted:
Speed: Foolish to judge a CPU architecture's potential performance based on existing usage in a different form factor
Legacy software : re-compile from the developers or emulation.
Legacy software Windows: Windows for ARM on bootcamp.

The A11 is currently a match for some power books, iMacs and the Mac mini. That's without active cooling.
 
Industry sources claim that Apple would instead build its notebook chips using ARM Holding's technology, a British company that designs ARM architecture and licenses it out to other companies.

Not a British company any more.
 
How about iPad Pro's with enough power to emulate/run legacy macOS apps, AirPlay to AppleTV-connected screen? Then all you're missing is the trackpad/mouse as your other input device..
I guess they could add mouse support but the pencil is great in that aspect already. :)
 
Yet another try by Microsoft on ARM. I think $200 cheaper Laptop which doesn't run full x86 Desktop apps natively and has a performance worse than Android's performance doesn't deserve, even by 2 hours longer battery life than Intel based Dell XPS (22 hours battery life Claimed already).....
I think Microsoft thinks of future, but let's see how Intel will respond to M$........
DELL XPS 13: the laptop endured an epic 16 hours and 5 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi.
Weight? 1.2kg is good for a 13 "...


Thanks!
 
People are forgetting something. MS have already had an ARM Windows system in near past, Windows RT. It failed big time. However, when Windows Phone was still alive, Microsoft published UWP (basic idea is that when you are compiling software on x86 to x86, you could compile the software to ARM and have the software in MS Store at the same time, to all devices, regardless what HW the device is having).

Dated 10/10/2017, coincidence? :rolleyes:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/layout/design-and-ui-intro

If I had to do a wild guess, MS is going to ship ARM machines with Windows 10 S and the machine is locked up, that there is now way to install linux on it. Direct competition against Chromebooks.


Windows Phone died based on this, from what I've been reading, soon you'll just get "10 S" on handheld sized devices that also have the capability to call and text...
 
If apple made a desktop class system with their A11 4GB ram 256 SSD and supported visual studio code and Xcode I would be happy. I’m nervous about buying a new Mac now because of the potential arm transition. It happened with PPC to x86.
 
If apple made a desktop class system with their A11 4GB ram 256 SSD and supported visual studio code and Xcode I would be happy. I’m nervous about buying a new Mac now because of the potential arm transition. It happened with PPC to x86.

We haven't had development boxes with 4GB of RAM since about 1998.
Anyway, on what benchmark are the A series chips faster than Core chips? It's obviously not multithreaded performance.
 
Raw performance. Not sse Mmx etc but raw cpu calculations. I see apple shifting towards these cpus in the very near future. Mix that with multicpu arch and well is the Xeon iMac pro any better?

Edit. Oh geekbench was the benchmark tool.
 
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Windows Phone died based on this, from what I've been reading, soon you'll just get "10 S" on handheld sized devices that also have the capability to call and text...

That would be awesome. However they are still fighting intel for the emulation rights. Arm without win32 or a beefed up App Store is really the downfall
 
Yet another try by Microsoft on ARM. I think $200 cheaper Laptop which doesn't run full x86 Desktop apps natively and has a performance worse than Android's performance doesn't deserve, even by 2 hours longer battery life than Intel based Dell XPS (22 hours battery life Claimed already).....
I think Microsoft thinks of future, but let's see how Intel will respond to M$........
DELL XPS 13: the laptop endured an epic 16 hours and 5 minutes on the Laptop Mag Battery Test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi.
Weight? 1.2kg is good for a 13 "...


Thanks!

Windows 10 on ARM does run native x86 programs and it is not restricted to store apps.
 
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