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See my comment on another part of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292762

1. MacOS and iPad are similar, but distinct user experiences. Its more than hardware (one with keyboard, one without), its about those differences in experience. Apple is nothing if not patient about introducing change to computing paradigms and experiences, so it's fine to co-exist for a while. Switching to ARM gives them better margins, better control over price, better control over physical chassis constraints, better control over features offered, access to a better chip team than Intel's, and now TSMC and/or Samsung's better EUV processes. E.g. features-wise, Intel still isn't shipping LPDDR4 chips, something the 4 year old iPhone 6S had.

2. Basically, x86 becomes a co-processor, just like how discrete GPUs are handled. This avoids having to compete with tiny sliver of market that wants Xeons.

3. AMD is a lateral move, with exactly the same lack of control over core technologies problem. Also AMD is historically not as reliable a supplier for volumes that Apple has.

4. See #2 and my comment. Also, they needed to intro Mac Pro to satisfy / shore up existing Mac contingent before they abandoned entirely. This is a multi-year journey.

Because all these hypotheses assumes Co-Processor model works. And as far as I know,It doesn't. You cant move process between different ISA, not to mention memory access.

> 2. ... x86 becomes a co-processor, just like how discrete GPUs are handled ...

That's become my hunch too in the transition to ARM, with Apple producing a SoC that integrates an entry level x86, with usual 2 upgrade options. Eg the next product line would be:

$1599 -- Dual-Core 1.5ghz A14 + Dual-core 1.2ghz x86

$1899 -- Quad-Core 1.9ghz A14 + Quad-Core 2.4ghz x86

$2199 -- Quad-Core 2.5ghz A14 + Quad-Core 2.7ghz x86

To me that sounds way too costly (especially if they need to be an x86 licensee). And managing a heterogenous platform (HW/FW/OS) is damn hard without even considering the user experience standards that Apple are proud of.

I think they will take a different approach. Put a decent keyboard on a future iPad Pro. Make iOS more like macOS. And then they'll eventually kill macOS.

> In the case How is the Macbook different to iPad Pro with Keyboard?

Why is this a problem? Maybe they phase one of them out when they make the change? Or maybe leave them as slightly differentiated products like the jumble of different laptops they already have.

> Is Apple going to spend hundreds of millions a year just to invest into Mac Desktop / high performance CPU, for [Pro]

This seems like a number you just made up. Here is a comparison of last year's A12 ($50?) and a 2017 Xeon 8176 ($5K?):

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/9midcx/apple_really_...

> If Apple want to lower its reliance on Intel ( After it has all of its modem and wireless patents sort out with Intel ), why not just use AMD to leverages the price or switch to AMD. AMD gets the PR win for Apple using it, win win for both companies.

Well they're fed up with Intel and there's the price gap but the primary reason is that the chip performance is rapidly converging so there is a massive opportunity to create a unified platform. Further they've been able to create a year plus performance gap between themselves and the competition in mobile on a commodity platform and with third party fab - if they do the same thing in desktop the Mac platform could really take off and they could go after the console market too.

>This seems like a number you just made up. Here is a comparison of last year's A12 ($50?) and a 2017 Xeon 8176 ($5K?):

You will have R&D just for the high TDP CPU, you don't just magically scale up your Phone CPU and expect it to work in a Server / Workstation. And that CPU has comparatively small volume. I.e The Unit Economics does't work.

The only Unit Economics would work better is to follow a similar strategy as AMD, where you have a single die and they are replicated across the 45W to 220W product line. This is a small sub 100mm2 Die Size with 4M yearly unit. But that is excluding the complexity of I/O where EPYC had a 400mm2 I/O die.

Reasons?

- Cost

- Motherboard size

- Performance per watt

- Battery life

- Custom optimizations

I see no impediment to Apple running two CPU architectures in parallel for a decade. Arm for ultra-portables and base model Macs, Intel for mid/top spec macs.

Then eventually once the worldwide ecosystem becomes less x86 dominated, I could imagine Intel chips being a BTO option for people who need it, possibly even implemented as a secondary CPU available through a hypervisor.

But why does anyone really care about x86 vs ARM anyway? Assuming 100% of Mac software is recompiled, the only thing which would affect me is having Windows VMs with native speed... And I could easily replace that with a headless NUC and Remote Desktop.

> No one has even try to give any convincing argument for ARM on Mac. And yet everyone seems to believe it as Fact.

Yes, everyone believes it is coming, just like they believed the iPhone was coming, the iPad was coming, the Apple watch was coming.

So will this be released before or after the Apple Television?

After: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_TV

The Apple Car too! Wait...

I will: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20280920 (Apple buys autonomous driving company Drive.ai)

There are enough news to support such rumors than there are news to discredit them.

But of course, there are stories like AirPower too.