The iPhone's new chip should worry Intel
theverge.com
theverge.com
Shifting any engineering talent towards laptop/desktop chips is fighting last decade's war, for a shrinking (relatively) pie.
The only reason to do that would be if it gave them some research edge that they could use elsewhere. Like cloud servers or something.
As the article says, already more iphones than PC's. Why bother.
The way to use this power is to keep pushing where they have the advantage (mobile) and hammer PC's until you have all the power you need in your phone/tablet. Software will grow up around the ecosystem until it eats PC's, and Apple can ignore the PC market entirely. Forget about PC's, focus on beating Android and they'll beat PC's as a bonus.
Their consumer product escapades are very visibly, famously star-crossed, but their revenues have always shown consistent growth, and over the past few years they've had some realizations and made some re-alignments that put them in a good strategic position for supporting all their other operations.
Here in Europe Microsoft is doing just fine across the continent companies, not only enterprise. Including selling Windows licenses for computers used in Android development.
Are you aware of the amount of countries where even software developers hardly earn more than 1000€ per month on average?
How many apps are you selling on southern Europe, south America or across Asian countries?
Best i can tell, Mac got a inroad in the web development world thanks to:
A. Being unix based and thus similar to the then prevalent LAMP stack.
B. Apple having a entrenched position in media production, and web development, via newspapers and broadcasters going online, becoming a part of that economy.
A Mac was the one OS where it was easy to run PHP and Photoshop, and the small size + long battery life era starting with the Titanium PowerBook didn't hurt at all. I knew it was going to be interesting when all of the developers and Unix admins I knew started buying Mac laptops for daily use. If only I'd bought more AAPL at $17…
Mobile/tablet devices have struggled heavily at overcoming the one thing that's preventing their full adoption: making them great for content creation, not just content consumption.
.NET's always been more of a player on the in-house enterprise dev front, and probably always will be. (That might change with .NET Core, but it also might not.) Which means that you're not going to see much about .NET on TechCrunch. Inventory & financial management for Fortune 500 companies might be the silent majority for software development work, but it's rarely newsworthy.
How many boring companies producing products do exist out there?
This in that they can point to the consumer sales and say that those are people already familiar with MS products, and thus require less training when hired by a company.
That is, if said company base their computing environment on MS products.
MS going cloud is basically saying to said companies that MS can handle all the day to day support issues, for a fee. Thus the companies can reduce the size of their IT department.
Not to mention, even if Intel managed to be "defeated" in the processor space (which I consider just about impossible at this point) - they've got better fab production than anyone else in existence. They've also got lots and lots and lots of products that aren't x86 CPUs.
You can paint me a GIANT skeptic of chromebooks in any setting outside of education. My step-mom got one as a present (as in for FREE) from her daughters. She's BUYING a Windows laptop because of how frustrated she is that it works with exactly nothing. Can't use her fitbit. Can't update her GPS. No way to sync her iPhone. etc. etc. etc.
It's a niche product for nerds. Any standard consumer will purchase one and never buy a second once they figure out all the limitations of their "cheap" Chromebook. That's ignoring the fact that I've seen more Intel based Chromebooks in the wild than ARM. I completely disagree with your "mostly running ARM" assessment and the only facts I can find on it do as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook
A tiny FRACTION of chromebooks run ARM.
It is my understanding that Apple purchases the highest-quality chips of the highest-quality runs and pays a premium for it. What fraction of Intel's profits do Apple represent?
But Intel likes Apple Macs as a show pony. Intel has for years been desperately trying to convince hardware manufacturers to make both more consumer appealing PCs and new consumer devices around their chips. PC makers kept making the same old big beige towers, with the only differentiating factors being price (race to the bottom) and speed.
Apple doesn't like to compete in that space and likes to do other things and pushes on different features of chips that allow them to make smaller machines, quiet machines, fully integrated machines, battery friendly machines, and focus on industrial design.
Intel knows this and likes to use Apple to push other manufacturers to think in similar ways. The results have been pretty good as there are now PC competitors that make things like the All-in-one-flatscreen iMac, and the Macbook Air. If you remember way back before the iPhone, the original Apple TV was Intel based and showed Intel chips in mainstream consumer non-PC use cases. (This is different than concept demos because this was a real shipping product that actually managed to make enough money to sustain itself.) Also, Apple's obsession with reduction, like eliminating ports has been good for Intel because Apple helps encourage adoption of new standards they want to put out. For example, Apple embraced Thunderbolt at the beginning and was willing to drop legacy ports while most manufactures would normally hedge by keeping legacy ports. Apple pushing hard on this helps makes the 3rd party adoption faster which emboldens manufacturers to migrate faster themselves.
Every non-tech person that I know that has a chrome book loves it.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3086871/chromebooks/how-andro...
As for ARM inside the chromebooks : currently Intel sells chromebooks chips at low prices , and for a relatively smaller segment of the market - so they're OK with that.
What happens when ARM chips improve, and chromebooks hold a much larger share?
Respectfully I disagree. It's actually a great product for the majority of non-geeks who surf the web, take a few photos and watch Netflix.
Most newer devices sync over wifi to the cloud. I am pretty sure your Mom's iPhone can do that. The number of things you need a full blown PC for are diminishing.
By comparison, that's roughly equivalent to Honda's market share in the automotive industry, and I don't think anyone would dismiss Honda's sales as being a rounding error.
Other than that, I agree, they are clearly not the sort of company that would be interested in selling chips to other vendors, at least based on their history up to this point. If there were to start selling CPUs to others, it would not be playing to their strengths and would be a huge departure for them as a company.
The next interesting question is at what price point would Intel give and Apple accept to continue using Intel x86 CPU inside Mac.
For some evidence that this could be happening, look at ifixit's macbook teardown[0]. The logic board seems to be approaching the size of an iphone logic board [1]. Someone at Apple has to be asking a what-if question here when looking at this thing and thinking about how they could go all the way.
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown... [1] http://www.cultofmac.com/315469/new-macbook-logic-board-is-o...
With those assumptions I still would bet against us seeing ARM Macs in the next couple years. There are a lot of advantages to keeping Macs single-architecture. Recent Intel CPUs are efficient enough that saving power there won't make a huge difference in user-available battery life (screen, DRAM, network, etc all use some too). Intel can price their CPUs aggressively enough to make cost not a major issue.
I do think it will eventually happen mainly because it will give them more control over their product line. Indicators of an upcoming shift will be if Intel screws up another generation of mobile CPU (it happened with Skylake, could happen again), Apple adds features like PCI-e for discrete GPU support (ok, they did in A9), and if Ax series performance starts to exceed corresponding Intel mobile parts by >50% (enough to compensate for the overhead of binary translation for legacy x86 apps).
When it happens, it might not need binary translation.
Another milestone for an Ax laptop would be a good power efficiency story. If Apple can show an Ax based laptop with exceptional battery life under real working conditions that would be quite attractive to many people, even if translated programs experience a 50% drop in performance.
In addition to the Appstore bitcode stuff other comments mention, the Universal Binaries tools that were used for the mass powerpc->intel migration will also help to diminish the need for binary translation in many cases. UBs mean that you don't solely need to rely on Bitcode translation via the iOS/Appstore, either, so these fanciful Ax laptops could run all normal non-appstore apps quite easily.
Man, I hope they don't do that. I love my Mac!
(The point is, that all systems have their nice and not-so-nice aspects.)
If I had a Linux laptop………
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Gen...
- Fat binaries (Mach-O binaries can support multiple platforms).
- A PowerPC emulator for applications that are not ported.
I think they are even better positioned for an architecture change than during PowerPC -> Intel. They now have the app store where they can impose certain requirements (like supporting two architectures). And they now have their own compiler backend, which opens the possibility of supporting architecture-independent IR (along the lines of bitcode).
Also, isn't Apple already encouraging the use of some intermediary bitcode for iOS (and macOS?) apps? Wouldn't that already made apps architecture-agnostic?
Serious question: Do you have any evidence to support that claim?
I could well be in the minority, but I don't publish through the Mac app store and I don't know anyone else who publishes exclusively through the Mac app store (except Apple).
Desktop developers have their own solutions in place and have for a long time. You'd be forcing them to give up a ton, in exchange for nothing of value. I'd expect many would just stop developing applications at all instead of comply with store requirements as they stand right now.
That's not to say those problems couldn't be resolved in the future.
Those developers can choose between stay in business or go broke, because I doubt GNU/Linux or *BSD users would pay for desktop software as their current Mac OS X customers.
You're not being serious are you? MAS holds such an insignificant role in Mac App development that any requirements it sets around the transition would weaken its cause.
Also mo, bitcode would not be able to be used to facilitate an Intel to ARM transition - bitcode is still fairly processor-specific. Bitcode is more for being able to adapt to minor changes in instructions in the same arch
That says something
Valve would have to pull Steam because you can be as sure as hell they aren't going to give Apple a 30% cut of Steam sales. There goes Skype as well.
Without special deals with lots of developers, I doubt we would see many more apps on the App Store and instead we'll see the Mac be an unsuitable platform for many/most people. It would turn into a glorified Chromebook.
So, just like any technology adoption that comes from above those developers would just shut up and follow along.
Or do you think they would earn any money selling to GNU/Linux users?
Mind you, it would be a completely insane move for Apple (or Microsoft) and I can't see them doing this any time soon. It would be absolute suicide.
Adobe has managed to get thousands from users without any 'help' from Microsoft.
The only way will be the store, or why do you think Microsoft is making it easy to port Win32/WPF (legacy) applications to the store model?
When the applications that matter like Adobe are on the store, and Apple has proven the "my way or the highway" works, they will slowly disable the "legacy" model.
I have been through enough computing changes to believe this will indeed happen.
Negligible? If you exclude Adobe and MS, most apps people use are available through the Mac App store. And more can be made available if Apple pushes more for it.
And they certainly won't be too happy about having to rewrite, again, their applications (I think Office for Mac is not yet fully 64bits, but I could be wrong, haven't checked in a while.)
Microsoft must care somewhat because they have spent a lot of time fully sandboxing Office 2016. Since OneNote is already available in the MAS [1], I reckon Microsoft will eventually add the remaining Office apps at some point in the future.
> I think Office for Mac is not yet fully 64-bits
Microsoft released the first 64-bit version of Office 2016 for Mac (15.25.0) last month [2] [3]
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-onenote/id78480155...
In fact, Battle.net, Origin, or SmithMicro would care more for Mac to do a rewrite than Apple would care to lose them.
Besides, Apple changed to Intel and didn't give much of a care about MS or Adobe apps having to be rewritten.
And for a lot of the older Mac developers, iOS was kind of like another migration. And iOS has gone from armv6 to armv7 to arm64, plus the x86 and x86-64 simulator targets. Not to mention that there is now an LLVM Bitcode requirement for Apple TV and watchOS.
Apple and its developer community has a lot of experience with architecture migration. Each transition built on the experience of the previous and got smoother each time. Apple has been very good insulating their frameworks and tools from the architecture, and the Apple developer community has gotten very good at following Apple's guidelines to minimize disruption since there have been so many of these transitions.
In the PowerPC days, Apple had trouble convincing people to switch to Mac because Windows being so dominant, everybody was afraid they might need Windows for something and that would make a PowerPC Mac an expensive mistake. The Intel switch alleviated many fears because in the worst case and Mac OS didn't work out, they could just install Windows. Bootcamp and virtualization provided additional options.
Apple has always seen Mac and iOS as different markets. Mac is still a small market compared to Windows. They are still trying to grow which means still trying to convince Windows users to switch and the safety net of Intel is still useful. (Windows RT isn't a realistic option.) I personally haven't seen iPhone users wishing for a big laptop or desktop that runs their same apps.
People are concerned that they have some mission-critical, unreplaceable app that only runs on Windows, that has no acceptable Mac analog (doesn't exist, doesn't have feature parity, data formats are incompatible).
Windows on ARM doesn't solve anything because almost no Windows apps that people care about were ever ported to Windows RT. (It was probably more likely there was a Mac port.)
Windows was already on ARM with Windows RT, for which I believe Microsoft did the work of porting UEFI and standardised bridge (PCI) technologies to ARM.
While speculating: Apple could conspire with Microsoft to standardise these technologies together to lock up their ecosystems against the Linux / Android monster :-)
The reason Windows on Mac is useful to people is because people have may programs that do not have acceptable equivalents on Mac OS. These apps are usually legacy programs that probably fill special niches, and the cost of "modernizing" is usually not justified. This effort would be required to port these apps to Windows ARM, which last time around also required porting to UWP which Microsoft is still pushing, but not easy to actually do for a lot of code bases.
A new Microsoft irony kicks in here is that if they are successful in convincing the huge Windows ecosystem to migrate to UWP away from Win32, et. al, they may actually kill their lock-in advantage. A serious rewrite at this stage may also invite Mac, Linux, iOS, Android ports. In this case, Apple no longer needs to care about Intel Windows and this bullet point becomes less compelling and maybe they could reconsider.
(But I'll freely admit that me being able to run games at sub-30fps on my MacBook Air is probably not Apple's intention.)
It wouldn't work for side loading unless doing it via Visual Studio.
Say, does anyone know who owns the IP for FX!32 nowadays?
Remember they were called Powerbooks back then? I miss that name.
https://www.engadget.com/2012/06/10/how-marklar-os-x-on-inte...
They say in the article that the entire PC market shipped fewer units than the iPhone alone, one quarter last year. There's certainly a risk that the consumer end of the laptop/desktop market gets dragged in behind as an 'additional device' for the mobile operating systems, bringing with it its walled gardens and concept of 'devices as utilities' rather than generic computing platforms.
I suspect as strange as it might seem to us a lot of people would jump on a laptop with the managed qualities of a utility device, especially if it meant they could get a Macbook for $150 less.
They will start with the ARM CPU on a single MacBook (an entry level one) for a few years before pushing it our across the whole range once app compatibility has been achieved.
Contrast this with the situation on Apple platforms, where nearly all developers use Cocoa and the vast majority of third party libraries already support ARM in addition to x86. Most of today's Mac apps could be running on a hypothetical new ARM based Mac with developers doing little more than ticking an additional architecture box in Xcode and recompiling.
Apple has everything that kept MS from succeeding with their ARM desktop OS transition and could even make the leap relatively smoothly.
They have started to move to platform independence with UWP, but legacy software must also work otherwise it's not Windows.
They need an ARM version of Windows that runs Win32 Intel programs. They already have an emulation layer for compatibility with 16-bit win32 Intel programs in Windows today. An ARM compatibility layer would be slower, but still doable (c.f. Apple when switching to intel)
PowerPC to Intel had some built in advantages: Intel was really pulling away from PowerPC and it gave Apple immediate hardware parity. Before Intel you could love their software but there were real questions about performance.
The advantages with arm seem less obvious, why would you do anything but let the market decide? Build up bigger and better iPad pros until it erodes you MacBook market.
None of the issues that caused the Intel transition apply to Apple now. Intel is not holding Apple back, because Apple already uses its own chips in what it considers the future of computing: iOS devices. At the same time Macs use exactly the same chips as PCs, which means there is no risk that PCs will suddenly leapfrog the Macs. There is in other word no major need to make a shift. But the risks in doing so would be the same. Apple would once again be pissing of its customers and 3rd party developers. And for what? A marginal improvement in battery life? To save a fragment on bill of materials on a product line which already enjoys healthy margins, but which also is a tiny fragment of their overall business?
Right now the basic MacBook is 1200$ has a larger screen and lower weight than the smallest Air. The 11" Air on the other hand is much cheaper.
Isn't that becoming the case with iPads and (low end)Macbooks? If the rumored performance of new A10X chip is any indication, that is the direction we are going.
I still believe the future of macOS will be ARM though. Apple have invested so damn much in making their own SoC that I can't imagine them not going that way. Soon (within a year or two? heh) they will have an SoC that they can pop in the MacBook and performance will be so close to the m-series Intel chip that only lab benchmarks will show a difference (and even that will be tiny).
Once that happens Apple will own the own compute process. While very cool it also sucks as I have no doubt the Mac will become as locked down a iOS. No sideloading and certainly no dualbooting. The Mac will essentially be yet another appliance albeit it one with some kind of development environment. It won't be something you can hack on though (well not without having to actually hack it first).
You could argue that with some engineering time they can add some affordances to the iOS interface to make it more pleasant on desktop. Sure. But every app is also going to need to adapt for this -- they need to drag along the entire ecosystem. Honestly it would be way easier to make macOS run on ARM than it would be to make iOS run on desktop. They already did this whole processor shift thing once and it worked out just fine. Just package things in universal binaries and emulate the old CPU for legacy software. Not to mention with something like LLVM it's not crazy to imagine distributing applications in a near-native bytecode that gets JIT'd to the target machine.
I know microsoft has gotten pretty close to accomplishing the entire one-os-for-everything model, but look how much time and money it's taken them, and the amount of good will they burned through getting there.
Personally, I prefer they keep Mac OS and iOS separate.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's macOS already ready to go for ARM, much like there was an Intel MacOS for years before the transition was announced.
As for whether iOS could replace macOS, if you go back to my first point, think about iOS as a version of macOS that was stripped down and has been built back up over the intervening decade. I don't think they could make the switch tomorrow, but in a couple of years, it's not unreasonable to think there could be a reunification of the iOS and macOS codebases, creating, essentially a fully-featured iOS for desktop hardware with the features we've come to expect from modern desktop OSes.
I wonder where the performance ceiling is going to be for the Apple processor line. Looking at Intel, I'd have expected them to have hit it already, but given the huge increases in single threaded performance so far year on year, it's hard to believe that it'll peter down to <15% per year from now on.
If performance is going to keep improving at the current rate, then the A11X will be significantly faster than Intel's 2017 Cannonlake mobile lineup. Switching away from Intel would give Macs another big leg-up relative to Windows laptops.
Macs will never switch to iOS though. Processes on macOS have a freedom that's incomparable to that on iOS, and once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in again. But Apple will keep working to make iOS sufficient for increasingly more people, and Macs will keep getting more niche. Apple could even introduce a laptop-like form factor like the Surface Book with iOS on it (the iBook Pro?).
Interesting times...
Also, if you want to see a list of crazy shit this guy has done, see: http://bellard.org/
Source? I don't believe that this is true.
I wouldn't call this "significantly", especially when looking at the multi-core scores:
MacBook Air (11-inch Early 2015) 6419 iPhone 7 5308
The iPhone 7 was just released, the MacBook Air is over a year old.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/15/9738504/tim-cook-says-app...
But snark aside, apple is always outspoken against things... until they release their own version of it. That's not some apple specific trait of course.
It would not be good for a laptop though, and that is almost all of Mac sales. Too much space and power consumption.
- Most 3rd party Apple development is already happening on ARM. This would inject new life into the desktop/laptop product line. Think of the thousands of apps that could now run on those platforms.
- Apple gets rid of a massive chunk of BOM cost improving margins, i.e. Intel CPU.
- No need to emulate X86 if Apple can do binary translation instead. There are already OSS projects like MC-Semantics (https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema) that can take an X86 binary and emit LLVM IR. In theory you could give that to the ARM LLVM backend and relink to ARM frameworks. This would be an interesting problem to solve vis-a-vis code signing. One way would be for Apple to sign a code signing identity for each user, have the OS translate the binary, prompt the user for a password to get the private key from the keychain, sign the new executable, save it, and then run it.
- I actually wonder how many desktop apps are commonly used on the macOS platform, and how big of a problem in 2016 an arch switch would be. Muggles are already predominantly using mobile devices. I'm guessing 99% of users use one of 100 (or less) desktop apps. I imagine it to be quite the long-tail.
The current top intel chip (i7-6700K) single-core score is 5326 and that same chip multi-core score is 17003 and the i7-6950X multi-core score is 29877. http://browser.primatelabs.com/processor-benchmarks
That's still a pretty good lead. Now perhaps with the added room of a laptop they could make an arm chip that was closer in performance but would it be worth it?
Also, don't forget it's really the mid range chips that matter and the A10 is very much a mid range chip without the benefit of excessive binning.
To the extent you're comparing A10 power usage to Intel's published numbers, keep in mind that Intel's TDP is what the processor uses to operate at the rated clock speed at full load indefinitely. In typical usage (where the CPU operates in short bursts and sleeps the rest of the time), the average power consumption will be a lot lower.
All of which suggests in a laptop with active cooling and higher energy budget say 20W you could sustain 2+ ghz x6 cores or 20,000 to 24,000 with minor adjustments. Which is in the ballpark of Intel's high end desktop performance and faster than their mobile chips.
The real issue is Intel is dealing with a well funded competitor who does not care about x86. And the computer history has a long line of companies who where eaten from below as people where happy to pay a lot less for fewer features.
The real difference, though, is power: that 6700-K uses 91W and the A10 should be around 2W. There's no way you can put a 6700-K in a normal laptop and the mobile processors appear only to be delivering single-core scores which are already within iPhone 7 range.
The other question is how often single-core or even multi-core performance matters for the average user vs. GPU performance since that's often the only place where people are limited by something other than network or storage speeds. I think a growing number of people are within the range where their needs would be satisfied with perhaps an extra core or two but a lot more GPU capacity.
1. They apparently activate either the fast or slow cores based on load but don't have all 4 active at the same time: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/09/iphone-7-and-7-plus-rev...
When the next iPhone has a single-core score with a wide margin over the single-core score of the fastest current normal i7, and an equivalent multi-core score against the same i7, then we can say Apple has caught up.
Why wide margin of single? Because artificial benchmarks are not a good measure, and due to unrelated factors, and also due to how most programs are strongly single threaded in performance, program execution performance in the real world no longer linearly scales with raw IPS increases, nor does it scale linearly with IPS + cache/memory performance increases.
Also, the whole "but the iPhone chip is only dual core, and modern i7s are quads"... too bad. If you're going to make the argument of desktop performance, then you have to apples-to-apples the comparison. You can say, however, the new iPhone CPU has good performance, because it legitimately does... for a phone, not for a desktop.
What is being discussed here is the trend. No one is claiming that the A10 chip is faster than the 6 core i7-K line.
The switch to ARM is largely a matter of 'when' not 'if' at this point.
But it used to be an x86 emulation product.
In the case of Apple, the situation could be different because they're guaranteed to ship in significant volume, their potential budget for R&D is massive, and most importantly they control the entire OS and have significant sway with the application developers, not to mention how far dynamic binary translation has improved. It'd still be a huge project but it's not unrealistic to image something like running a slow, offline binary translator over the entire contents of the App Store, which simply wasn't the kind of thing anyone could do in the 90s.
Whilst Apple does have an excellent history with these transitions using software I suspect in this situation hardware might be easier/better.
That's just asking for trouble, and making their chip consume more
It will be done in software
It is more useful for supporting a new CPU feature or maybe working around a compiler bug without fully recompiling.
Apple controls both the hardware and the operating system, so they could build such an emulation layer into the OS. I have no idea how crazy this idea is in reality, but in my imagination it could be done.
http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti...
I did some searching and found the following quote concerning the Geekbench 4 benchmark:
“These updated workloads include several well-known codebases that are used every day on mobile devices, such as LLVM, SQLite, and PDFium. These updated workloads model real-world tasks and applications, and provide an objective measure of the performance of the CPU in your phone or laptop.”
That sounds like it is testing a lot more than hardware accelerated encryption.
With shrinking transistor sizes they can shorten their pipeline maybe add a few more front end decoders, add even more cache. If you have a shorter pipeline the branch misses aren't as bad. There is a lot of stuff they could do which they probably aren't since they haven't had a real incentive to do so.
“What device of, which both have the same performance and storage, do I choose? The one with the USB ports, the inflexible keyboard, bloated software and costs 600$ more, or the other one with a touchscreen, optional keyboard, and much much simpler software?”
Also I think that Apple won’t do any ARM MacBook at all. If we consider a RICE scheme for gauging priorization for such a feature like ARM CPUs in MacBooks:
Reach: Modest, there aren’t that many Mac users compared to iOS
Impact: Positive impact on Mac users is limited. Performance won’t be that better, mostly equal. Software availability could be limited for a while during a transition.
Confidence: Apple has made a couple architecture transitions on the Mac before, so they know how it works. But they don’t know how app developers will react. Will Adobe, Microsoft etc. get onboard, or jump ship?
Effort: Rather high. It’s one of the things where 10% of the implementation will need 90% of the effort. Mostly it’s just a recompile to run. But optimizing software for x86 is different than for ARM. The performance critical parts of many system frameworks which have no existing iOS port have to be rewritten to be efficient on the new architecture.
- Comparing the brand new A10 to a 2013-era Intel.
- Asserting iOS for workstations.
While many people could probably get by on iOS, it is particularly crippled for people that need to do technical work. However, I found the idea intriguing, of having a workstation with multiple ARM or Apple chips in it with a proper OS. I know they exist already, but having Apple behind them would make a big difference.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813190...
and there is Raspberry Pi for micro apps, perhaps they aren't as developed as I'd heard.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9766/the-apple-ipad-pro-review...
1. Apple is working hard to make the switch from Intel to their own ARM chips and in a few short years we will see MacBooks and MacBook Pros with ARM architecture.
2. The iPhone becomes the new ultra portable desktop computing device. You plug it into a dock (maybe backside of an Apple 27" monitor) and boot up an ARM version of macOS from your iPhone.
Why would they do that - Apple is very profit oriented and if they can sell you Apple monitor, Apple iMac, Apple iPhone and all the dongles to connect them together, that maximizes their profit.
Plugin your iPhone into a monitor is not a good way to extract maximum profit - well maybe if it'll only work with Apple monitor and nothing else.
If the question was just “iPhone or iPhone + MacBook?” there's no doubt they'd prefer the latter but if the question is instead “iPhone or iPhone + Windows PC” I have no doubt they'd throw the Mac under the proverbial bus if it would keep your money from going to a competitor.
Sadly I don't think so.
What about a thin foldable screen rather than a headset? (http://www.sciencealert.com/lg-unveils-its-new-flexible-pape...)
Bottom line is if your phone is as powerful as your laptop how can you interact with it naturally on the go?
That could allow to maintain, or even increase, profit margings, with margin for lowering product price. Running that path, in my opinion, Apple could take 50% of laptop market. E.g. high quality laptops with BOM (bill of materials) of 150 USD selling for 400-600 USD. Or even less.
Basically Apple will still be selling at a similar price range and not entering the low end market. But they just offer much better value.
Apple's "special sauce" only remains special as long as it remains an Apple exclusive, and in no way will that be a Intel threat no matter how much the SV goes round the infinite loop...
Thank God we will always have BSD/Linux.
If Apple is already able to match some of Intel's mainstream CPUs with an inferior process, what do you think is going to happen when Apple can use the same 10nm process Intel uses?
a) Apple embarrasses Intel with a much cheaper chip (I'm talking ~5x here) that can surpass some of its most powerful notebook chips, while both using the same process.
b) Apple replaces Intel in most of its Mac lineup with the exception of Macbook Pro (and even those chips could be replaced with cheaper AMD Zen chips soon).
c) Intel is ultimately chased to the more profitable "up-market" (typical innovator's dilemma), and loses control of the consumer market.
d) All of the above.
I hope Apple does switch to its own ARM chips for the Mac line. It's what Steve Jobs would've done and would've wanted, but it remains to be seen if Tim Cook is willing to follow in his footsteps to that degree.
For those still worrying that "Mac performance would suffer" - newsflash - Macbook Air has already been using the lower (than Core i3) performance "Core M5" for at least a generation. So if you have the latest Macbook Air, you're already benefiting from less performance than you did 2-3 years ago with Core i5.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if Apple announces an A11-powered Macbook Air next year that is 30%+ faster than the previous "Intel Core" Macbook Air. It would also be a great and very smart way to launch the ARM-powered Macbooks because people would have little to complain about (other than perhaps a few initial compatibility issues, but I think they will get over those quickly as developers update their apps).
Next developer conference: Apple announces that all macs are moving to their chips. Developers, get ready to port your apps.