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Comment by flamedoge | Hacker News Reader

The day that apple flips switch in opt and ships OS X in Arms means Intel could be in trouble. They did it before with PowerPC->Intel.

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I think this becomes more and more viable with every Apple A-series release and that this is the year where if they were to release the right machine, I probably wouldn't flinch switching to an ARM "daily driver" computer

Intel will be ok, Apple don't sell that many chips. And it is not going to affect anyone else.

And Intel are looking at helping Apple out with the next versions of their chips, possibly fabbing them.

It would be a powerful statement that Intel is not the given choice for the CPU in a "real" computers (as opposed to smartphone/tablet) anymore.

It's not that Intel's not given the choice -- that would still be very far away. It's that Apple's move would be the first real example of overlap in computing space. Others can follow and eventually claw at Intel's market share in laptop/desktop market.

It would send a signal that Intel isn't the given choice if you've made a vast investment developing your own CPU line over the years.

The rest of the ARM ecosystem is trailing behind Apple, but it is following. If Apple switched, 2-3 years later the rest of the laptop/desktop space would be in the same position.

No, you can already use other vendors chips. What it would say for consumer products is that it isn't the given choice provided you developed and ported your own OS (or -ha- use linux).

I am betting this will happen in 2018. Likely to be announced in Summer 2018 WWDC. TSMC announced their 7nm will also comes with a High Performance variants. Most leading nodes has always be Mobile first, and I cant think of anyone other then Apple who would pay to get this. Other CPU and GPU makers no longer compete with Mobile's Soc Fab capacity, they just sit and wait until the yield and price is acceptable.

All this, is assuming the Mac dont just fade out, where we will simply dock our Personal Computer ( Our iPhone ) and OSX UI running.

PowerPC -> Intel worked because more software was shipping in x86 than PPC. The Mac software library actually grew after that.

Intel -> Arm locks out almost all pro software

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