Apple will begin selling Macs with its own processors in 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Apple will begin selling Macs with its own processors in 2021

arstechnica.com

34 pointsJacobHenner9 comments

Existing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22954656

This rumor has been floating around for 5 years now and the date keeps getting pushed back. I’m on the fence on this. On one hand, Apple can reduce its COGS, and perhaps the incremental cost is low to develop a true desktop-class processor when they have the best phone and tablet processor. And, it is consistent with the Apple’s philosophy of absolute control.

However, this seems like the external signs of empire building by the internal CPU team, like the touch bar for what I can only assume was the display team. Unlike the mobile space, the laptop and desktop space has two competitive and highly competent companies selling parts.

There's some benefit if you're Apple.

1. You don't have to rely upon whatever Intel/AMD decides is good enough for you.

2. You can design custom chips that fit your needs / possibly more secure chips to prevent hackintoshes if they wanted to swing that way.

3. It's competition to Intel/AMD if they wanted it to be.

4. It's another piece of the supply chain for your products that you control. You have to trust Intel/AMD's manufacturing chain.

>>> The report does say that one of the chips Apple is developing will be "much faster" than those used in the iPhone or iPad, though they will not yet be sufficient to replace the fastest Intel chips in the MacBook Pro or Mac Pro

Is it possible that Apple will include both Intel x86 as well as AX processors? Let the A chip handle certain tasks that are low power to be energy efficient and the Intel chip handle everything else? They did something similar with the Touch Bar.

That seems implausible. It's far more likely that they just have a split product line for a while (as they did with the Intel transition; the PowerMac didn't get replaced by the Mac Pro for a while)

Regardless of how many processors they cram in there, the only relevant one is the one powering the OS and applications. Making that ARM-based will be a massive change.

If this happens it is very exciting. They have been doing amazing things in the mobile space.

My guess is that all "Pro" hardware will stick with Intel for the foreseeable future (both because of performance and software compatibility), but everything else will switch to custom ARM chips.

After the keyboard debacle, I can’t feel positive about this, much as I want to.

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