Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

It is easy to reason for switching to their own CPU on MacBooks or MacBook Pros, roughly at 16M Unit per year. But what about Mac and Mac Pro? Combined to less than 2M Unit.

Are we going to have Split in platform where developers is expected to debug on both Arch? This isn't the same as moving from PowerPC to x86, where majority of Pro Apps are already on WinTel. ARM is still relatively new on many Pro Apps. Adobe may be slightly better equipped, but not AutoDesk.

If not, would Apple spend additional hundreds of millions on 100W+ CPU design that are sold in tiny quantities?

It is also worth pointing out Mark Gurman has been saying this since before he joined Bloomberg when he was at 9to5Mac. And since 2016 when he joined Bloomberg the rumours were taken more seriously.

And the first rumours to suggest Apple is working on ARM Mac goes back as far as 2010.

There were no PPC Mac apps and developers shipped “far binary apps” that worked on both 68K and PPC Macs.

They don’t want to be dragged along by Intel failing to meet deadlines.

Or they just want to fold the hundreds of dollars per machine going to Intel into their own profit margins.

Intel forced Apple to support 32bit computing for almost 10 years because they couldn’t meet deadlines.

Apple has been dreaming about this day for years.

It's hard to imagine this is really Intel's fault and not just Tim Cook looking at a multi-billion dollar per year expense as an opportunity - they buy like 20 million processors a year it's a ton of money even by Apple's standards.

Even Intel's lacklustre results in recent years seem like an unlikely catalyst - Apple couldn't have foreseen 14nm++++++++++++ back in 2015. In 2008 though, Apple acquired PA Semi to design chips. This project has probably been percolating since shortly after that.

> the company plans to eventually transition the entire Mac lineup to its Arm-based processors, including the priciest desktop computers, the people said.

It's Bloomberg, they don't have a great track record on Apple.

It’s Mark Gurman, he has one of the best track records on Apple. He and Ming Chi Kuo are the two most consistently accurate Apple leakers/predictors.

It’s better to view Gurman as talent writing for Bloomberg than as Bloomberg itself.

https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11835514/bloomberg-mark-gurman-...

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