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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

> which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks.

How so? Apple's market share is something like 10% so it's a minority of Intel's market.

Beyond what others have mentioned, we also mustn’t discount the possibility that Apple Silicon could be a strategic move to lower device MSRP, thus increasing market share and Apple services revenue.

People will instinctively write off this idea, but this is the new pricing strategy Apple has been employing with the $329 entry level iPad, $399 iPhone SE, and the new $279 Apple Watch SE. The Macintosh now remains Apple’s only major consumer product line that hasn’t seen aggressive price reductions to make Apple services accessible to a broader range of consumers. The move to Apple Silicon, which could save Apple potentially hundreds of dollars per device, is the perfect time to move the Mac to this pricing strategy. If this happens, it would absolutely eat into Intel’s consumer market share.

Not by much unless they come with Windows as default OS.

Eh, every chip company has lower-end models that are cheaper. There's nothing stopping Apple from putting i3s in Macs.

The point is that apple's models would not be lower end, just cheaper.

But what if Apple offers a Macbook with i7 performance and i3 price?

Typical Apple - undercutting other companies on price \s

I know you're joking, but looking at some Geekbench scores there doesn't seem to be a single Android phone on the market that can outperform the iPhone SE in single-core performance. The OnePlus 8 is the closest, but still not really that close.

iPhone SE: 1321

OnePlus 8: 898

On multi-core it's a little better since there seem to be seven Android phones that can outperform the iPhone SE:

iPhone SE: 2737

OnePlus 8: 3281

OnePlus 8 Pro: 3216

Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G: 3107

Samsung Galaxy S20+ 5G: 3102

Samsung Galaxy S20 5G: 3078

Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G: 2918

Huawei Mate 30 Pro: 2835

However, all of those Android phones cost quite a bit more than the SE.

https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks

https://browser.geekbench.com/android-benchmarks

They do in the mac mini.

With low-end branding and possibly sub-par performance.

Because Apple is going to prove TSMC is capable of building x86 destroying processors. Not in theory. Not academic or institutional one offs... no, it’ll be mass-produced and in the hands of consumers.

Intel’s failure to get their fabs running has put them into a death spiral unless they pull off a miracle.

Also, if Apples ARM chips are really that fast they will be purchased by the shipload to be sent to performance critical operations like HFT. They will be put into servers or turned into them to squeeze and eek out every possible advantage... which will shit on intels most profitable lines (Xeons for single threaded workloads).

It’s gonna be a crazy time.

There is no scenario in which Apple's ARM chips will be sold to 3rd parties.

Why not? Apple used to sell servers. It could easily sell its chips to Azure or GCP to compete with Amazon’s Graviton chips.

It’ll help Apple cement their dev tools as industry standard, it’ll further amortize overall dev costs by increasing volumes, people can develop better algorithms with their custom hardware accelerators for ML and etc, it’s a great way to fight the current anti-trust cases against Apple.

There are some pretty good reasons for Apple to sell their chips to 3rd parties.

They could probably make money there, but it would take time and energy to do, doesn’t seem like it helps their brand, and seems generally a bit afield for them.

Then again, they started their own TV studio, so what do know.

> It’ll help Apple cement their dev tools as industry standard...

They're just ARM chips. So long as Amazon otherwise plans to build their own ARMs, there's no real benefit. Apple is looking out for #1.

Apple has a similarly onerous history of monopoly action - watch what you wish for, you may get it.

The situation is a bit different though. If Apple's plan was to produce processors for the likes of HP, Dell, etc, then maybe that would be an issue. But I highly doubt they will move into those markets. It's AMD that's poised to take over that space.

x86/x64 is such a terrible bloated messy instruction set. It really needs to die.

I'd like to see the ARM16 and ARM32 variants die too, as they are also bad.

Apple haven't ever been really interested in or committed to non-consumer markets.

“Haven’t ever” is simply not true. Apple has had plenty of historical server products, including dedicated rack servers with the Xserve line. That’s not to say it’s likely but it’s not unprecedented ;P

I don't think they were really interested in the market honestly. They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps. It was all about supporting the Apple developer community. They cut it as soon as it wasn't necessary, IMO.

> They did it because they felt the needed to, to support use cases like CI for macOS and iOS apps

Actually, the Xserve platform really had nothing to do with that. Xserve’s were partly designed and built for the high end video production industry (as an extension of the Mac Pro hardware) and partly as a general purpose small to medium size business file server / web server (which the Mac Mini has subsumed what’s left of that space).

And they scrapped them. That's exactly my point. They were not committed: they made an uncompetitive product for a few years and bailed instead of trying harder. Compare to the Mac.

yes, yet cloud changes it as the naturally non-consumer thing - cloud datacenters - are needed by the Apple itself to serve the consumer oriented cloud based functionality. So, it may so happen that the major money saving from their own chip would be not on the consumer devices, instead it would be Apple's datacenter/cloud costs/density/efficiency/etc., and that improvement on those metrics can also enable and push Apple further into cloud business.

Apple is a trendsetter, though: I think, as a rule, Apple’s decisions are copied by a large part of the market so its market share isn’t an adequate measurement of its influence. This will be especially true if Apple Silicon MacBooks are impressive in some way, like extra-long battery life.

Will manufacturers start to demand Windows on ARM? ( WARM? )

Windows on ARM only runs on lame processors like 8cx/SQ1/SQ2.

Apple Silicon may beat Intel/AMD and Apple Silicon is ARM, but that doesn't mean that ARM is beating Intel/AMD.

Yes. Microsoft is happy to oblige and Qualcomm seems to be ramping up their Snapdragon 8cx program, with it in a few recently released devices.

https://community.arm.com/developer/ip-products/processors/b... They are making some.

I hope bootcamp will be updated for the new macbooks eventually. I don't expect it to be out on day 1 but maybe a couple months after release?

Absolutely, better performance per watt means longer battery life. Windows already supports ARM. Microsoft doesn't really have a choice here but to improve support for ARM. Office on Mac seems like is going to be ready for Apple Silicon if that effort also helps Office on Windows ARM then they are half way there.

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