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Pool: How many customers will loose Apple because M1 migration

V

victor.espina

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 6, 2015
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It's old news that Apples earned a lot (A LOT) of new users when they made the transition from PowerPC to Intel, because the possibility of running Windows on Apple hardware, either via BootCamp or virtualization.

All those customers face now the situation where Apple may decide to stop building Intel-based computers in the near future to focus on their own chips... Do you think this situation may cause Apple to loose many of those customers that still need to run windows-based apps in their workflows?
 
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As above.

It’s great Apple are working on their own Silicon as I imagine it’ll take macOS/iPadOS in directions we’ve never seen before, maybe, but I don’t know if I’d ever own one for a number of years now as I’m ‘bummed’ about the Unified Memory-you are at the mercy of Apple’s pricing in terms of configuration if you want additional memory instead of being able to use a third party option.
 
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They will definitely loose some, but they will gain more ultimately. The Mac software ecosystem is much more mature now that during the last transition and Nacs never had better value proposition.
 
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Wouldn't stop me buying using macs, eventually I'd just be stuck with the extra hassle and inconvenience of maintaining some separate Windows laptop and Desktop purely for windows VMs

To what extent depends on whether microsoft were to licence Windows for ARM or not - if they did I'd likely only have a couple of Windows XP VMs that would need acess to an older intel mac or a PC
 
iGeek2019 said:
As above.

It’s great Apple are working on their own Silicon as I imagine it’ll take macOS/iPadOS in directions we’ve never seen before, maybe, but I don’t know if I’d ever own one for a number of years now as I’m ‘bummed’ about the Unified Memory-you are at the mercy of Apple’s pricing in terms of configuration if you want additional memory instead of being able to use a third party option.
Click to expand...
Well it’s the same things as before when they were doing the soldered RAM. You were at the mercy of whatever they wanted for more memory increase. I guess gone are the days were u could upgrade the ram later on.
 
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Well they are losing $3k from me this year. I am totally happy with my free M1 air (traded 3 year old macbook pro) so I probably wont be buying a macbook pro anytime soon..
 
They might gain the pro/hackintosh crowd again if their high-end chips are worthwhile.
 
I think it’s normal to have doubts when such a drastic change happens. I remember when Apple announced the change from PowerPC to Intel and some people thinking Macs would become more vulnerable to viruses (no warrant). It didn’t slow down sales and in fact pushed Apple further mainstream. I’m very optimistic for the future of Apple and Apple silicon. I posted a video of my early on impressions of my M1 MacBook Pro.
5 reasons why you should upgrade now to Apple silicon
 
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Less than Apple will gain. M1 is an improvement across the board, and many people will never miss the apps that don’t get ported over when they are mostly using office and google docs. Nor will they care about the inability to upgrade the specs because it’s not something they would have done at any rate.
 
Kinda hard to say since the high end stuff hasn’t dropped. Or something beyond the performance of an iPad Pro.
 
Apple risks losing more experienced users that require x64 compatibility and Windows/Linux multiboot while possibly gaining more casual users that only need a better iPad with MacOS. Seeing ads on Facebook marketplace for people trading their Macbook M1 for Windows laptop.
 
mi7chy said:
Apple risks losing more experienced users that require x64 compatibility and Windows/Linux multiboot while possibly gaining more casual users that only need a better iPad with MacOS. Seeing ads on Facebook marketplace for people trading their Macbook M1 for Windows laptop.
Click to expand...
I see ads for people trading windows laptop for Macs.

See how useless anecdotes are?
 
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As @cmaier says, recent earnings call, demonstrates a huge increase is Mac sales. So they are gaining far more new users than losing existing users. As for running Windows, I have a M1 MBA, which is the best Mac laptop that I have every owned. Fast, Silent, amazing battery life. As well as running of my Mac Apps it is also running Windows 10 Pro (for Arm) under Parallels. Windows performance is great, and runs faster than my colleagues who use Dell Laptops.
 
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The Intel switch helped make my transition from PC to Mac easier as I couldn’t have afforded two machines at the time, and still wanted to run some Windows apps (mostly games).

Today for most people, a significant part of their computer use is within a browser, so the underlying OS matters less.
 
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mi7chy said:
Apple risks losing more experienced users that require x64 compatibility and Windows/Linux multiboot while possibly gaining more casual users that only need a better iPad with MacOS.
Click to expand...

How many users would that be? Most users of Windows on Mac only need it tor unspecific legacy software, they don't need x86 compatibility, they only need software compatibility. Many of those users will be still be able to run their software via Windows ARM VM.

And of course, given that ARM is quickly gaining traction in the server and HPC world and that Apple is the only company making a decent ARM computer, one would expect an influx of developers targeting server and HPC backends. Macs are already a very popular developer platform and Apple Silicon will boost it even further (and it also does not hurt that a quad-core M1 builds software faster than 8-core x86 machines).
 
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mi7chy said:
Apple risks losing more experienced users that require x64 compatibility and Windows/Linux multiboot while possibly gaining more casual users that only need a better iPad with MacOS. Seeing ads on Facebook marketplace for people trading their Macbook M1 for Windows laptop.
Click to expand...
There is just too little use cases where a virtual machine cannot fulfill the need, and I am never a big fan of "multi-boot" due to the fact I have to reboot which interrupts my workflow. However, I do agree that Apple's HVF need lots of improvements to match Linux KVM level. Linux kernel provides lots of para-virtualization apis for network, filesystem, graphics, which is either lacking or only implemented by commercial 3rd party software on macOS. KVM also supports Memory Ballooning which does not require reserve whole memory spaces for VM, in other words the host can take RAMs back from the VM by telling VM give back the part it does not need. Currently on a Linux host, you almost have no good reason to reboot to use Windows(perhaps the need of all memory space is one?), because you literally got everything in the virtual machine.

Also, the fact you pointed to does not back you claim. Do you mean one uses Windows laptops are "experienced", and one uses Mac is "casual"? There are about 23 million developers enrolled in Apple Developer Program, are they casual or experienced?

Speaking about multi-boot, it will take a long time but it can be there. There are initial Apple M1 support patches submitted to Linux 5.13 kernel which surprised me as there is definitely no documentation on how, and most work is done by reverse-engineering. I don't know the support would ever be good enough for day-to-day usage, but looks like those really experienced users are more interested in the platform than you are.
 
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mi7chy said:
Apple risks losing more experienced users that require x64 compatibility and Windows/Linux multiboot while possibly gaining more casual users that only need a better iPad with MacOS. Seeing ads on Facebook marketplace for people trading their Macbook M1 for Windows laptop.
Click to expand...

OSX is my platform of choice for hosting VMs but I'd never ever use an intel mac to boot a physical instance of Windows

In my line of work if a mac hosted VM wouldn't cut it for a particular task (and they do manage it 95 percent of the time) its because I'm needing to test on something as close to the hardware deployed in the field as possible

and oddly enough, that's almost invariably *not* a dual-booted intel Mac

Just because I might be forced to add some sort of Windows PC to deal with VMs when my existing intel macs die a death and I can't source anymore, it doesn't mean I'd be migrating everything else over from my preferred platform

Grown ups can have more than one computer, and I'd still be buying Macs to deal with the everything else
 
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I highly doubt they will lose many customers. Rosetta works very well and software continues to be ported to ARM, so unless virtualisation of Windows is a critical feature, I can't see many drawbacks to going with Apple Silicon.

And as others have commented on, Apple has actually gained a lot of new customers as a result of the transition - so any losses would be offset anyway.
 
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