This is why Apple will soon abandon Intel entirely, which is why Apple abandoned the PowerPC as well. Either you progress forwards or you get run over.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/09/15/iphone-7-faster-than-mac...
This despite the A10 running on FAR less power.
Apple's definitely within shouting distance and is a serious threat to just replace Intel entirely, at least for its own needs.
Apple has to surpass the Core i series to make any sense to switch.
And then there's the whole clusterfuck that would be porting all the x86 software to ARM. When Apple switched to Intel emulation of Power PC was usable via Rosetta but AFAIK emulation of x86 with ARM is extremely slow.
...Though at that point I suppose they'd basically be building an x86 co-processor into it. No idea if that would actually help performance or not.
If only getting a hold of their mobile processors wasn't so difficult because they're OEM parts. Perfect for things like fanless mini-ITX media center builds.
Then again, Intel will be refreshing its NUC line soon, and those tend to use mobile processors.
A lot of the appeal of the Intel based Macs is the ability to run Windows at native speeds. That wouldn't be possible with ARM.
Finally, Apple only sells 16-20 million Macs a year. I can't see it being worth the investment to switch to ARM and creating all of the auxiliary supporting hardware it gets to use by using standard PC hardware.
*edit: would be interesting to see an elasticsearch cluster running on a high clock speed arm cluster... I wonder how it'd run... (and yes I know it's not that simple)
As evidenced by the fact that Intel has failed to compete in mobile, this is obviously false.
We've been hearing nonstop from message board enthusiasts that Intel is going to kill ARM for years and years now. In reality there's absolutely no sign of that happening, and in fact their recent deep cuts to the Atom line suggest the opposite.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/16/12939310/iphone-7-a10-fusi...
I can list about 150 programming languages that are "faster than C" if you apply similar restrictions.
Also it's 4 year old Xeon. If you're going to compare it to a 4 year old Xeon, compare it to the 2 core versions, which will have much higher clocks.
If recent leaked benchmarks are true, AMD's Ryzen shows CPU performance similar to Intel at similar power usage. That means Apple could offer an 8 core CPU on iMac with the same price.