Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

One thing that is ignored by the punditocracy is that a laptop has a lot of other silicon beyond the CPU.* Apple would have to have all the support chipset as well. Internal connections like memory controller etc they already have from iPhone/iPad, but Intel provides support for peripheral access. This works for the iPad, but note that the iPad Pro doesn't have laptop-class USB-C support much to the annoyance of some people. A laptop would have to, and probably would need USB4/TB4 (since if you're designing your own you might as well go straight there -- classic Apple move) which would need all the PCIe, DP etc plumbing they are currently getting from Intel.

Certainly doable, but there's a lot more boring spadework needed beyond the sexy CPU.

* This is why I always laughed when I saw articles comparing laptops by CPU clock speed rather than actual performance.

View on HN

> Apple would have to have all the support chipset as well.

Hasn't Apple been pretty obviously moving in that direction? Their T2 chip does a lot. Given how Intel doesn't let third-parties make alternatives to their own southbridge chipsets any more (a change that screwed Apple's product strategy at the time), there's not much more that Apple could move into the T2 until they're ready to abandon Intel CPUs, too.

The counter to this argument is that why is Apple putting so many resources to making a keyboard case for the iPad Pro and adding trackpad support.

Is this some kind of test for when they move to ARM? Or do they want to do what they have done before and cannibalize the Mac platform for non professionals?

It could be that their customers are growing up with their platform.

Kind of like how the Honda Civic has gotten bigger with more features over the years, to where it surpasses the original Accord. I'll bet the Honda Fit from now will grow in the same way and they'll have to invent a new "budget honda" for the next generation of young people.

A reason cars keep getting larger is fuel-economy laws.

> Expanding a car's footprint — the wheelbase multiplied by the track width — gives it a lower fuel-economy target to meet under the CAFE standards negotiated by automakers and regulators.

https://www.autonews.com/article/20160814/OEM11/308159946/is...

Huh, so why do cars in Europe tend to be smaller, where I was under the impression that emission laws are stricter?

Because the CAFE standards are a US thing

During diesel gate I did a lot of research, none of which I still have sadly. Diesel emissions regulations were generally slightly stricter in the U.S. I found that pretty surprising at the time.

That may explain why diesel is so rare for consumer cars and SUVs in the US compared to Europe.

The cars are smaller than in the US but they are getting bigger. For example, the VW Golf is 0.6m longer between the first model and the last one.

The obvious answer is buyer preference and cheaper gas.

https://www.theonion.com/a-statement-followed-by-a-question-...

The latter, of course. It's not even subtle, they've tried to tell us that you can do (almost) everything on a tablet ever since they announced the original iPad Pro. Then MS proved their point with the Surface, except they also proved people like to work with real keyboards. So now Apple are doing keyboards.

That's why I'm skeptical that we'll ever get an "Arm MBP". Apple would rather do away with laptops, they see them as annoying and expensive legacy that just happens to be unreplaceable at the moment. There is no point investing into a massive and bloody transition of a segment you are trying to divest from.

It's worth noting that the original iPad also had a keyboard available - it was just a keyboard stand, not a cover. Not the same as the portability that a keyboard cover offers, but it was what could be feasibly offered with the technology at the time.

Uhm, I'm pretty sure Asus was shipping Surface-like models already, back then. They were not great (because Asus is not Apple, with all due respect), but sold out the initial runs.

Also, part of the UI rethink has to happen in the OS, which is why Apple eventually spun out a dedicated tablet OS. They are coming around.

Logitech had keyboard covers in the start of 2013 for the iPad (including for the iPad Mini).

It was not technological limitations preventing Apple from making one themselves.

Apple released a very janky keyboard stand for the original iPad.

If they did away with laptops how could they expect developers to respect their license to only compile Apple apps on their OS? They can’t expect super users to work from tablets. I’d be curious if they would put this constraint on their own developers given their strict deadlines and work hours.

Uhm, maybe I'm parsing you wrong, but MS proved Apples point? The first Surface was released 3 years (!) before the first iPad Pro!?

This is about using tablets for real work, which is what the Pro is supposedly about.

You can get USB RTL cores off the shelf, they're basically a commodity.

And they've been shipping PCI-e on their chip for T2. I'm pretty sure the iPad displays are Embedded Display Port, but don't have a source for that.

I'm not sure if this[0] counts as a source, but people have been re purposing iPad LCDs by making DP to eDP breakout board for awhile now.

0: https://emerythacks.blogspot.com/2013/04/connecting-ipad-ret...

> note that the iPad Pro doesn't have laptop-class USB-C support much to the annoyance of some people.

What would make it laptop-class, other than by adding more USB-C ports?

In short, thunderbolt. I suspect they went to the USB Type-C connector (on the iPad Pro) mainly for power delivery and while they got DisplayPort, they don’t have full peripheral support. USB 3.1g2 (putatively 10 GBPs) is the fastest supported; may be ok for an iPad but not really suitable for a non-archival external disk.

These limitations are perfectly reasonable for an iPad but not for a laptop.

FWIW nothing but a single TB 4 port (not even an audio jack) would work just fine for me, but I know some others feel differently for their use.

Thunderbolt is built on PCIe, which iPhones don’t use except for the SSD.

Thunderbolt is almost entirely Intel-only; IMO not having Thunderbolt on type-C ports certainly doesn’t make something not “laptop-class.” By that metric, the most powerful AMD laptops wouldn’t qualify either.

> Thunderbolt is almost entirely Intel-only

Considering that USB4 will be Thunderbolt 3 compatible, I'd guess that we'll start seeing more Thunderbolt ports soon.

Intel used to only make the CPU in the PC platform. It joined the chipset game sometime in the late 80s or early 90s and eventually pushed everyone like VIA, SiS, OPTi out.

Just about all peripheral communications standards for consumers are open standards, like PCIe, USB, SPI, Ethernet, SATA, SAS, and even Thunderbolt now. The only problem I could think of would be the Intel-owned HDMI but it's nothing DisplayPort + a simple dongle can't sidestep.

I know Apple couldn't depend on Intel for it's basic GMA acceleration anymore but it could simply use what's in the iPhone for basic display acceleration.

It's almost certain this is why Apple has taken so long to move their laptops (and desktops, eventually, probably) to ARM. The top-of-the-line iPhone has been benchmarking at or around MacBooks for the past 2-3 years.

I think backwards compatibility is a bigger stumbling block than support for peripherals. x86_64 emulation on ARM is still pretty bad AFAIK and there is a tremendous amount of Mac software that won't be ported on the first day, or ever in some cases.

I wonder if there are (legal) hurdles to Apple adding an additional x86_64 front end to their custom Mac chips to have hardware 'emulation' for backwards compatibility.

They could get around that by simply buying AMD who has an old-but-still valid second source license from intel plus of course the true 64-bit x86 architecture.

They could also just license it from Intel. AMD has some hot designers (some who cycled through Apple!) but overall has little to add to Apple (in my ignorant-of-the-true-state-of-Hines opinion. And I admire both companies).

Apple’s never been afraid to license something rather than do a perfectly legal legal clean room but-almost-perfect clone.

I doubt they’d bother.

I’ve heard that AMDs license gets voided if the company gets sold.

I suppose that’s possible but quite hard to believe. That license dates back at least to the 286, perhaps And more likely to the 8086 (I’ve long since forgotten) and dates from a time when multi-source parts were not just very common but required for military and most commercial design-ins. So common that when a part didn’t have a second source it was noticeable. The second source agreement had to be transferable else it would defeat its own purpose (if the second source went out of business nobody would buy your part).

Now of course I’ve never seen the intel/amd agreement so I’m just speculating as to what it says. But the weight of precedent/tradition makes a prohibition on transfer unlikely.

Microsoft has an x86 emulation, so it seems to be okay. It notably doesn't work with 64 bit software. From what I've been able to gather the issue is technical, but I'm very uncertain about it.

Worth remembering it was AMD who created x86_64. It was Intel who created x86. Granted, they’ve both added their own features on top of the basic x86_64 set, so it would be a legal hurdle.

I don't see how multithreaded stuff will ever emulate well given arm's more relaxed memory consistency model.

Throw more cores at the problem?

If anything that just makes the problem harder.

They control the architecture and in theory could put in some hardware support for emulation. I can’t speculate as to what that might look like.

They only have two options there as I see it. Either the emulator only runs on a single core per process, or they have an ARM with (maybe optionally?) stronger than required for ARM consistency guarantees.

Both options kinda suck.

>I think backwards compatibility is a bigger stumbling block than support for peripherals.

The recent Catalina update that caused a bunch of older programs to simply stop functioning strongly implies Apple doesn't care that much about being backwards-compatible any more.

But they never really have. iDevices seems shorter than laptop/desktop, but either way, they definitely have short support in terms if iOS hardware compatibility.

There were many years of warnings that 32 bit apps would ultimately stop running. It was hardly a surprise.

As for hardware lifetime...I’m still using a 2014 iPad, 2015 iPhone and only stopped using my 2015 MacBook because it got caught in the rain.

My theory is that the 64-bit only migration was done to weed out old apps and APIs that won't be ported to ARM and won't work in emulation. Killing 32-bit removed stuff like classic QuickTime and the whole Carbon API.

I don’t think backwards compatibility is an issue.

A device that initially only runs what Apple ships (web browser, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers) plus a few essential iOS apps (Facebook, WhatsApp, etc), priced competitively, is good enough to create a sizable market.

MS Office, FireFox, Chrome, and the like only are only nice to have at launch. It’ll be fine if it takes a few months for them to become available. They probably can do without Photoshop for years.

I tend to disagree. It might be possible to do something like this, but it'd certainly be hard, as the initial public perception will be "nothing works" - that's a pretty dangerous way of entering the feedback loop.

Apple isn't Microsoft, but their consistent failure attempting something like this may be a tale of caution.

I think Microsoft and Adobe are probably the easiest ones for them to get on board for launch (or 6 months after launch), since both of them have their core code ported to ARM already.

Adobe has a pretty poor track record with updating their software to keep up with Apple API changes.

That has been very true historically (Intel/Cocoa shifts), but Apple and Adobe have been publicly shaking hands and smiling a lot about these new full Photoshop for iPad builds lately, so things look a bit better now.

Graphics designers are a huge market for Apple, they probably can't do without PS for years.

Cautionary factor with those benchmarks: peak performance and sustained performance aren’t the same and Intel’s desktop and server chips have historically done much better in regards to sustained performance.

I’ve tried using an iPad Pro as a computing platform to run some of my code (mostly for fun but also it makes for a more interesting demo) and this is quite noticeable.

I think part of up this is simply because of Intel’s design approach, and also because Apple’s target is devices that can run quickly and then go to sleep to save power/heat.

Not to imply that Apple couldn’t design for that but it isn’t a mobile use case that they have been shooting for to date, and I suspect the current, publicly released chips would not be appropriate for a laptop much less an iMac.

Seems like apples and oranges to compare a passively cooled iPad to an actively cooled desktop/server. Does the iPad even have a heatsink or does it radiate through the case?

That’s my point: Apple’s parts are designed for a different design point so the benchmarks, while fun and interesting, don’t really compare like to like.

Apple’s ipod designs remind me in spirit of the design of the Alto: focused on the display before anything else.

Generally, the more difficult problem is to design the power-sipping, energy-efficient cpu that runs on a battery with passive cooling, than the relative power hog that plugs into the wall and has active cooling.

I work at one layer above that so I’ll take your word for it.

>The top-of-the-line iPhone has been benchmarking at or around MacBooks for the past 2-3 years

This just isn't true. I looked up some benchmarks. The iPhone X with the A11 Bionic got a Geekbench score of 918 for single core and 2368 for multi-core. To put that in perspective an old 15-inch MacBook Pro from 2013 with a Core i7-3840QM clocked in at 820 and 3199 respectively.

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/52

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/1997421

Reply on news.ycombinator.com