It’s pretty amazing that they actually managed two successful ISA migrations. Hard to think of anyone else who pulled that off.
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TSMC to Remain Sole iPhone Chip Supplier, Could Provide ARM-Based Chips for Mac in 2020, Apple Car Chips in 2023
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Didn’t Apple receive royalty free silicone being part of AIM (Apple,IBM,Moto) during the PPC days.
People don’t know what waiting for new Apple hardware is like, crossing fingers on that G5 PoweBook
Didn’t Apple receive royalty free silicone being part of AIM (Apple,IBM,Moto) during the PPC days.
People don’t know what waiting for new Apple hardware is like, crossing fingers on that G5 PoweBook
They paid for the chips, so hard to separate royalties from the price they paid. I was a cpu designer at Exponential technology, designing fancy powerpc chips. Good times.
If anyone can pull this successfully it’s Apple.
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Part of me is still disheartened to see the “G” branding EOL
It just has a better ring to it compared to “I”
LOL - you probably meant G5 PowerBook/Portable Hot Plate. It would have been a great camping accessory.People don’t know what waiting for new Apple hardware is like, crossing fingers on that G5 PowerBook
Couldn't this all just be to continue to augment x86-based Macs with additional SoC/SiC components?
I'm sure there's already an ARM-based Mac running OS X somewhere on the Apple campus as part of a new Marklar project. But even if they do go this route, the G4/G5 transition to Intel began in the consumer lines (Core Solo/Duo MacBooks) and slowly worked it's way up over several years, IIRC.
Having Mac be "Also PCs" may or may not still be a major selling point - it was in the G4/G5 years. But, I've slowly dwindled down in my use of the BootCamp partition on my 2013 MacBook Air (began as Win8, upgraded to Win 10), and perhaps the world has as well, and now it really is about price point: anecdotally, a lot of my friends who own Windows machines either buy them because, "That's what I've always used," or they simply don't want to pay for a Mac. A lot of us who were running around building our own custom machines (for which the only option was a version of Windows) don't seem to be doing that much anymore, either.
If it runs Office and costs less, I'd guess that would be adequate enough for the consumer world. With so much of my own desktop-based activities either moving to the Cloud in some form, or, having desktop apps that support both Windows and OS X, I could see some definite advantages to Apple pivoting this way. My new iPhone Xs could have run the entire Apollo program, and with Moore's Law being stretched to it's limits, unless one of the newer computing innovations gives us an entirely new desktop/laptop experience, it seems like cheaper hardware and universal application compatibility are going to be what gets the greatest market share.
Without jumping through hoops like x86 to A-Series emulation (which people should remember is theoretical at this point in time) the simple answer is no, no they will not.
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Boy you're optimistic aren't you? You think Microsoft is going to develop a version of Windows that will:
A. Be sold to Mac users only.
B. Not even be sold to all Mac users just the small niche of users that have picked a Mac yet want to run Windows programs.
Realistically you can't have your cake and eat it anymore. You want the benefits of an AX series processor? that's your playground now. You want Windows programs? you're going to have to use a Windows machine going forward.
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Yeah, but are they?
I’m not for a second saying they’re anything less than excellent but need some comparisons that show the two in the same ‘environment’.
It’s all well and good saying my engine is better than yours because we drove the same distance on the same road, but if yours was in a lightweight open top two seater and mine is installed in a 2 ton SUV with permanent 4 wheel drive all the options on air con running, the comparison isn’t exactly apples to apples if you excuse the pun.
If anybody can link me to a valid and fair comparison I’ll be glad to look at it.
Excellent. I was hoping even more of my audio software would die as Apple keeps breaking compatibility because of their insistence to control literally everything.
Geez. If "Boot Camp" was a "lifesaver" for your company, then that only means that you made a wrong strategic decision in the first place by buying Macs. Using Boot Camp means using a PC with Windows that just costs more than a regular PC because it has an Apple logo on it -- and usually a weaker graphics card, weaker CPU and a bunch of other disadvantages over a regular Windows PC. It just doesn't make ANY sense at all to buy a Mac when Windows or Linux are the platforms that you need to make a living.
And how do you expect that an ARM processor will ever be able to run x86/x64 Windows software...? Because that's what you're asking for when you ask whether future ARM-based Macs might have Boot Camp as well. Without an additional Intel or AMD chip on board, that just won't work in any meaningful way. And no, that level of transition is not even remotely comparable to the PowerPC to Intel transition -- there at least the whole core OS was running natively on Intel and only parts of the application code needed to be translated. Here, you will need to emulate the CPU at all times -- think of Microsoft's Virtual PC for Macs back from the PowerPC era. That thing was just horribly slow.
Unless you're a Pro who spends most of his time writing software for Unix systems, preferably in a language like Python, or unless you're an iOS developer, it hasn't made much sense to use a Mac for years now. There's nothing there in the Mac ecosystem that you couldn't do in Windows - or Linux - for less money but with better performance (aka "more bang for the buck").
The only reason to buy Apple Mac hardware is when you're after the design of their machines and want something on your desk that really looks nice. I spend most of my time these days either in the Unix side of the Mac or in Office applications, but I just love the noiseless "trash can" Mac Pro on my desk. It's a gorgeous machine. Yes, a PC would have been cheaper, and macOS is completely replaceable for me -- my notebook is a Dell XPS 15 with Ubuntu 18.04 on it. But what can I say? I love tech that's also nice to look at, so I'm okay with having spent way too much money on a technically out-dated machine like the trash can Mac Pro -- but I am well aware that this decision is highly questionable from a pure business perspective.
As Apple having "screwed Pro content creators" and for having "a hard time trusting a leadership who have animoji faces". Well. I'm still not getting why people refuse to look at the facts and accept reality. Apple is NOT a company that produces ANY enterprise-ready products -- NONE AT ALL. They also don't care AT ALL about professional users -- read: people who use a computer as a tool to earn a living. Apple's not a tool manufacturer. Wake up and face it: Apple designs and sell lifestyle consumer products that look great on you in StarBucks or some other fancy place. Their products are not meant for actual grunt work -- and they usually fail miserably at real work. But that's a lesson that people usually only learn when work at a place with at least several hundred people and when you then need to integrate, let's say, a hundred or so Macs into a heterogeneous network environment and have to maintain and administer those Macs on a daily basis. Then you'll quickly learn how bad Macs suck in the Enterprise.
Apple is skating on thin ice with its Mac Hardware. Once upon a time they shipped superior hardware and updated it once every single year for each of their Mac lines, all when the company was a 10th the size. They used to be serviceable where it counted (e.g, Ram, hard drive, wireless card), expensive but only by a little.
Now Apple update perhaps one of their computer lines a year. They are not user serviceable, the hardware is seriously middling and underclocked to boot, at sometimes up to 200%+ the cost of a similar priced windows machine especially when you consider some lines have gone on 4 years without an update.
I am a scientist, I use a mac because 1) I don't have to deal with the BS of viruses and malware, 2) Mac currently is a swiss army knife able to run Mac, Linux, and windows through boot camp natively.
If Apple switches to ARM what reason would I have to buy an underpowered, grossly-overpriced, incompatible machine? None.
They clearly don't want to make computers anymore. They should just licence MacOS and be done with hardware.
Now Apple update perhaps one of their computer lines a year. They are not user serviceable, the hardware is seriously middling and underclocked to boot, at sometimes up to 200%+ the cost of a similar priced windows machine especially when you consider some lines have gone on 4 years without an update.
I am a scientist, I use a mac because 1) I don't have to deal with the BS of viruses and malware, 2) Mac currently is a swiss army knife able to run Mac, Linux, and windows through boot camp natively.
If Apple switches to ARM what reason would I have to buy an underpowered, grossly-overpriced, incompatible machine? None.
They clearly don't want to make computers anymore. They should just licence MacOS and be done with hardware.
The car thing is a completely mystery to me.
As much as I’d love (I think?!) to drive around in an Apple car, they’d have to follow the Tesla model with car and battery manufacturing, showrooms, charging network, servicing and all the rest. It’s too messy for Apple, surely?!
I also don’t see them selling their self-driving tech to other manufacturers.
Certainly exciting if they do get into the car business though. And how strange it’d be to have Apple, Dyson and Tesla all competing in the same space.
As much as I’d love (I think?!) to drive around in an Apple car, they’d have to follow the Tesla model with car and battery manufacturing, showrooms, charging network, servicing and all the rest. It’s too messy for Apple, surely?!
I also don’t see them selling their self-driving tech to other manufacturers.
Certainly exciting if they do get into the car business though. And how strange it’d be to have Apple, Dyson and Tesla all competing in the same space.
Why would Apple follow Tesla? Their "affordable" model 3 is losing the company $6000 on every car sold.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/21/ubs-repeats-tesla-will-lose-money-on-35000-model-3.html
Not only that the company can't even keep up with pre-orders so they are never going to reap economies of scale. Elon Musk go public, sell your company to suckers and get out of this dumb market.
Ming-Chi Kuo has been anything, but reliable.
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Almost none of the Model 3s being sold are the $35,000 model. lol
Makes no difference:
Apple. We make 30% profit on everything we sell.
Tesla. We lose 17% on every $35000 car we sell.
Does that sound like an Apple market to you?
Agree with you that this is a sketchy proposition. But it doesn't mean Microsoft won't sell Windows for ARM in a general sense, and Apple, like with Bootcamp, can simply make some drivers and an installation "kit" (a la Bootcamp) that works. Not counting on that though.
But, why do you think x86 to A series emulation is "theoretical"? You can run an x86 emulator on any iOS device right now. Oh, it's slow as hell and only practical for old stuff, but it works. And this isn't exactly special A series hand-optimized code or code that has first party access to deep parts of the OS or hardware. Or maybe you mean, theoretical that it can be made good enough to run Windows 10...? Definitely not theoretical that someone would release it, even if not Apple.
And of course, Windows running on current ARM "PCs" has a built in x86 emulator. Slow, sure, but: it works, and the chips it's running on are inferior to what Apple is apparently capable of.
Theoretical in the sense what we have now is for the general ARM platform; not in anyway optimized for an Apple Ax-series chip. If Apple were happy with general ARM chips they wouldn’t have bothered with taking the design under their own wing with the A-series of chips.
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Everytime i hear Apple car i roll my eyes. It's hard to believe anyone is dumb enough to think Apple will ever ever do this.
People seem to be very stuck in the old way of doing things on these forums. I don't think Apple has ever been in the business of holding onto legacy platforms or ideologies. Apple moving to it's own chips gives them a distinct competitive advantage and allows them to push computing forward instead of having to hold onto old ways of thinking. Even if they leave the dinosaurs of computing behind, there's a whole group of people comfortable with moving to mobile, comfortable with adapting their workflow to new ideas, and comfortable trying new software to accomplish their tasks. For those that can only think inside their box, it is likely best to move on now as I don't think Apple is going to keep holding onto the old way of doing things. This doesn't mean there won't be creative apps, productivity apps, coding apps, or whatever other arguments are typically thrown my way - there will be. They just may be from a different developer or handled differently than you are used to.
I almost agree with everything you said apart from "leave the dinosurs of computing behind". While that's fine when talking about other platforms (Windows) when you're talking about Apple leaving another Apple platform behind (MacOS) that's a bitter pill for some to swallow.
I agree, all of this is a bitter pill for some to swallow, but I don't think Apple is concerned with appeasing users who want the same old thing to continue on forever. I think they are more concerned about the users who are quick to adapt, thinking differently about their workflows, and push computing in a new direction. I don't think macOS is going anywhere, it just won't be the same as it has always been. I left macOS for iOS a few years back, but I look forward to what they do on the Mac side. I think in the end, it can be good for everyone if looked at with an open mind.
You know what, I hope you're right. Perhaps new thinking with iOS programs is what we need (get away from Microsoft, Adobe etc) and if Apple can pull it off with nice laptop hardware then good for them.
There's a general perception that some Apple moves are motivated by other companies timelines. This article says Apple is doing it's own chips because of Intel's chip delays and that is not true. Apple is moving to do it's own chips because it is better for them. Intel has updated the Xeon processor found on the Mac Pro at least 4 times since 2013 and Apple is the one lagging behind on that front, by a few generations!! Apple completely screwed up their pro offerings and its concentrating on consumer level stuff, we have to deal with that choice.
Made me laugh and remember every time I have been told it should only take a day...
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Not everyone can move to iOS
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If all you do is consumption, I'm guessing that is all you do if your only computer is an iPad or iPhone.