No More Intel Inside, Apple Plans To Use Its Own Custom-Built Chips in Mac (bloomberg.com)

Apple is planning to use homegrown custom-built processors in its Mac line of computers, ditching Intel, the processors by which powers Apple's current line of computers, Bloomberg reported on Monday. The company could make the switch to its own chips as early as 2020, the report said. From the report: The initiative, code named Kalamata, is still in the early developmental stages, but comes as part of a larger strategy to make all of Apple's devices -- including Macs, iPhones, and iPads -- work more similarly and seamlessly together, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. The project, which executives have approved, will likely result in a multi-step transition.

The shift would be a blow to Intel, whose partnership helped revive Apple's Mac success and linked the chipmaker to one of the leading brands in electronics. Apple provides Intel with about 5 percent of its annual revenue, according to Bloomberg supply chain analysis. Intel shares dropped as much as 9.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop in more than two years, on the news.

Comments

Whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all, just whoa

Re:Whoa

[supremebob]

Yeah, a story like this is kind of hard to believe. I know that Apple isn't as good as keeping secrets as it used to be, but a leak about Apple's product line 2 years from now almost never happens.

I'd love to see a second source of this information besides Bloomberg and the various tech blogs who are just pointing to the Bloomberg article.

Re:Whoa

[Z00L00K]

And the Bloomberg article is from second of April, is this a late April Fools on Bloomberg?

Re:Whoa

[Pinky's Brain]

Few of Apple products involve as many people as this would 2 years ahead of time. If they can ship this in two years, they've been working on the desktop processors and chipsets for a couple years already. Hell, if this ships in 2 years they would need to be involving third party software parties already. Unlike their Chinese factory workers they can't just suicide a couple of those to make an example of leaker's either :p

Re:Whoa

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Hard to believe because such leaks don't happen, or hard to believe that this could be Apple's actual direction? After one of the more recent Ax chips showed very interesting performance levels, numerous people speculated that Apple might be heading in the direction of ultimately replacing x86 with their own chips.

Re:Whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably started when these guys got it wrong, eh?

"Why You’ll Probably Never Own A Mac With An ARM Processor" - 2012

Re:Whoa

[Penguinisto]

I'd love to see a second source of this information besides Bloomberg and the various tech blogs who are just pointing to the Bloomberg article.

You and me both. Yes, Apple tends to go its own way when it comes to hardware (and often ends up being the 800-lb gorilla-like agent that pushes for changes in the PC/laptop/mobile industries). However, unless Apple's rumored new chip suddenly kicks the crap out of an equivalent-gen Intel chip (without turning a MacBook Pro into a room-heater **), this rumor is likely just that - a rumor.

The rumor checks off a few plausibility benchmarks - Apple preferring to be its own unique thing, its history with PPC chipsets, its history with the ARM chipset (moving towards and then making its own w/o buying someone else's), its Uber-flexibility with Fat/Universal PPC/x86 Binaries... ...they could totally do it if they wanted to, *if* they managed to come up with something in the back room that can do it (which is quite plausible). Thing is... why would they bother? Mac growth was/is nowhere near as steep as the mobile/ARM-based device growth, and unless the results are a powerful enough leap ahead to beat up Moore's Law and then bang its girlfriend? Not seeing the ROI here.

** Before Apple finally gave up on PPC and went Intel, they were stuck with G4 chips on the laptops because the G5's were frickin' near-nuclear furnaces that required massive cooling to keep healthy - something that a laptop could never provide. Unless PPC radically changed, I'm not seeing them go back to PPC anytime soon.

Re:Whoa

[MachineShedFred]

Also, isn't Apple buying MORE Intel stuff now, with their spat with Qualcomm? Like at least half the radios in iPhone through what used to be Infineon, now Intel?

Re:Whoa

[MachineShedFred]

Also, it's that experience with PowerPC that should have taught them this lesson. They did this once already with the so-called AIM alliance and PowerPC - Apple, IBM, Motorola.

Well, we saw how that worked out - at first, PowerPC was competitive with Intel. Then it pulled ahead in the G4 (PPC 74xx) series. Then Intel pulled their head partially out of their ass and started destroying everybody performance-wise, just as Motorola Semi was dying and spun off as Freescale, who was more interested in embedded controllers; and IBM was only ever interested in chips they could put in big iron systems in cooled rooms, leaving Apple with no play for the laptop space, and some ridiculous liquid cooling for the Power Mac.

Re:Whoa

[MrLint]

This remains another step in the inevitable end of "MacOS" as its currently known.

Bringing a shared HW base to all lines of HW, along with a a integrated SW build base, and brinign iOS apps to the Mac Desktop https://appleinsider.com/artic...

Brings closer the drive of moving to what the future of iOS will be, as opposed to the MacOS is. By bringing iOS apps to the 'Desktop' OS, it allows those apps to encroach on the otherwise conceptually separate desktop environment. Donig so also open up the changing of those apps to work better on a 'desktop' environment which is to really begin to work the semantics of the 'mobile' in with the less touch oriented uses. As time goes on the apps will dual target, until the HW platforms become no long different and the semantics are all interchangeable.

Re:Whoa

[Tough Love]

is this a late April Fools on Bloomberg?

Apple has a lot to gain by avoiding the Intel tax on PC-class processors, there is no theoretical reason why the ARM architecture cannot match Intel/AMD superscalar performance, and the days when customers cared about type of processor are long gone. That said, "as early as 2020" seems wildly optimistic. ARM is closing in on high end processor throughput, but is not quite there yet. For the time being, this rumour smells like a negotiating tactic to hammer down Intel's price point, if it has any substance at all. Maybe the next one will be, Apple is switching to AMD?

Re:Whoa

[jwhyche]

This will not be a good move for Apple. It might turn out to be the final nail for apple as a computer manufacture.

Back when Apple was 68K there where lots of companies that developed exclusively for Mac. Then Apple switched to PowerPC this forced all these companies to spend millions to rewrite code to support the new chips. To compound all this a few years later apple switched to x86 architecture. Again sending developers scrambling and spending millions to rewrite old code for the new architecture. The switch to x86 allowed some of these companies to mitigate some of the cost because now they had a code base that shared a common processor with windows.

Because of these processor switches and the millions that had to be committed to rewrite old code send an number of developers, Adobe, looking for another market. Where Adobe used to develop their flagship products for Mac first and Windows as after thought, that is no longer true. Now Adobe and many former Mac companies now develop for windows first then mac as after thought.

With the prospect of another processor switch and having to spend millions now to develop a code base for two different processor lines, I imagine many will simply drop Mac as a native platform all together. They simply will not see the value in supporting a shirking market place with millions of dollars worth of research. Not when they can develop one code base for windows and macs can run it under a windows emulator.

Re:Whoa

[painandgreed]

Yeah, a story like this is kind of hard to believe. I know that Apple isn't as good as keeping secrets as it used to be, but a leak about Apple's product line 2 years from now almost never happens.

I'd love to see a second source of this information besides Bloomberg and the various tech blogs who are just pointing to the Bloomberg article.

There have already been stories out on rumor sites about how Apple planned to have iOS apps running on Macs. At the time it was described or at least assumed to be two chips in the laptop, but still, this isn't coming out of nowhere. It was probably about two years before they switched that rumors started coming out about MacOS X being able to run on x86. It became known that they had pretty much made sure it was portable to x86 the entire life of OS X.

Re:Whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple don't care, why would they? They just crippled thousands of 32bit apps and games by switching to 64bit only and removing all references to 32bit in iOS. The chips still support 32bit, just Apple wont.

I spent thousands on the AppStore, now half my stuff doesn't work, and that's conservative.

Lesson learnt. I am not spending a dime on iStore software anymore. Why should I? I am on the last iPhone I will ever own and my macbook pro 2011 is the last of a great line of Apple computers that I upgraded to 16GB ram and 1TB ssd. Still going strong, and dual boots. (Duel lol), not that I need to as parallels is fucking brilliant. But even they will have a hard time with this as their upgrade path for each iteration of windows cash cow is about to be a big money spender instead of incremental updates.

Re:Whoa

[jwhyche]

if it survives at all.

I will be a sad day if the Mac finally dies. It's the sole survivor, in name at least, from the golden age of desktops. When Amiga, AtariST, and Macs where all in a head to head battle. Then Windows came in and squished everyone but the Mac. It would be sad to see the Mac survive that only to die because of a stupid company decisions . .

Re:Whoa

[nine-times]

With the prospect of another processor switch and having to spend millions now to develop a code base for two different processor lines, I imagine many will simply drop Mac as a native platform all together.

Right, because Adobe would never develop software to run on Apple's processors.

I don't know if they're really going to switch processors, but if they do, I don't think they'll do it without developer buy-in and some serious upside. One of the possible benefits is that it puts all of their devices on the same platform. You could possibly have the same binaries on a MacBook and an iPad-- though you probably don't want the same UI on both.

Re:Whoa

[the_B0fh]

PA Semiconductor already had plans for a 64 core Power CPU back in 2006. Guess who bought PA Semiconductor a few years ago? The same people designing the A-series chips.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/...

If you think the A11 is powerful, think how much more power 64 cored A11 would be? Oh, parallelism and concurrency? That's what Grand Central Dispatch is for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What would be interesting would be a MacBook running a small 2 core Intel chip as a co-processor, and the main OSX things all running on ARM...

Re:Whoa

[Elad Alon]

I spent thousands on the AppStore

How did that happen?

Re: Whoa

[nowwith25percentmore]

Even if it recompiles cleanly on the first try (big if), there is still substantial cost in testing.

Re:Whoa

[jwhyche]

There are still plenty of applications that at certain levels are still written in assembly. Device drivers and gaming engines come to mind. It doesn't matter how good your compiler is, nothing beats hand optimized assembly for just raw speed.

Re:Whoa

[StikyPad]

Not really. Ditching IBM/Motorola made sense because the PowerPC chip didn't hold a candle to x86 in either performance/$ or pure performance. The cost was a complete rewrite of all software, not to mention the OS, but it was worth it to make Macs competitive. But ditching Intel at this point? That's like switching horses mid race when your horse is winning. Intel dominates the desktop/server/laptop CPU market by almost every measure, and for good reason. Even if Apple can wrench similar price/performance out of a desktop ARM processor, which is far from a foregone conclusion, the disadvantages are numerous:

• Users lose Bootcamp, which affects something like 20% of users at last count
• ARM has limited virtualization support - or usefulness for that matter
• Apple loses the economies of scale that Intel enjoys, eating into cost savings
• All existing MacOS apps and games, gone (without either substantial developer support for rebuilds or else subpar emulation, which is not a UX Apple is likely to support)
• At the end of the day, it's really just trading one master (Intel) for another (ARM)

I agree though, that this is probably Apple trying to extract some sort of concession from Intel, be it pricing, input in, or influence on, the feature set or direction of development, or all of the above. The threat of a switch to ARM may seem more credible than the threat of a switch to AMD, perhaps, but either seems incredible to me.

Re:Whoa

[jeremyp]

The ARM architecture absolutely cannot match Intel in terms of running native apps designed for Windows. There are many people, me included who sometimes need to run Windows applications on their Macs. At the moment, I just run up a Windows VM or use Bootcamp. Not having that capability would force me off the Mac.

There is no Intel tax btw. You give them some money, they give you a processor. It's called doing business and if you want to call it a tax, then every business transaction involves a tax.

The only way I could see this happening is if Apple are developing or have developed an x86_64 compatible processor.

Re:Whoa

[jwhyche]

Right, because Adobe would never develop

Adobe used develop its flagship products for the Mac market first. Then they would back port their software to Windows. This is no longer the case. Now they develop for Windows first then back port to Mac, if they even port at all.

This change in policy came about because of the processor switches that the Mac went through. Over the years Adobe support has continued to be scaled back for the Mac and shifted to Windows.

There is a very good chance that if this switch comes about Adobe will pull all its support for the Mac.

Re:Whoa

[Rakarra]

Except the headline didn't specify that.. on the other hand with "But there is next to no chance Apple will replace Intel chips for ARM-based ones any time in the next five years.".. next to no chance? Go ahead, be bold, take a stand, dammit!

You're on Slashdot, so you should be used to stories whose headlines were written by different people than the stories themselves. :-)

Re:Whoa

[DontBeAMoran]

Apple has done two successful CPU transitions in the past, from 86K to PowerPC then PowerPC to x86. I'm sure they'll be able to handle x86 to ARM quite successfully.

Apple's A-series processors now have comparable power to Intel and better built-in graphics capabilities. We can only imagine they would be even more powerful within laptops (bigger batteries) and desktop computers (no battery limitations at all, much better heat dissipation).

Apple loses the economies of scale that Intel enjoys, eating into cost savings.

Apple would gain even better economies of scale because they already need to manufacture their A-series CPUs for the iPhones and iPads. If they can somehow simply link more ICs together for parallel processing, their cost per IC would be even lower. As a bonus, they would stop filling Intel's bank account.

Re:Whoa

[Freischutz]

This will not be a good move for Apple. It might turn out to be the final nail for apple as a computer manufacture.

Apple's cash reserves are considerably bigger than both of Russia's sovereign wealth funds were combined when they still had a respectable amount of money in them back before Putin pissed off everybody except China, North Korea and the Assad regime. So assuming you are right, I think Apple can afford to handle a several major mistakes of this nature and that your hopes of seeing Apple go down in flames over this are excessively optimistic.

Re:Whoa

[Plumpaquatsch]

Yeah, a story like this is kind of hard to believe. I know that Apple isn't as good as keeping secrets as it used to be, but a leak about Apple's product line 2 years from now almost never happens.

Well, technically the news about Apple working on a tablet (now known as the iPad) was reported on Slashdot (and not just there) more than 5 years before it came out (and even 2 years before the iPhone was announced). Sure, they thought it was a Mac tablet back then, but still. https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

Re:Whoa

[jwhyche]

Apple go down in flames over this are excessively optimistic

You should spend more time reading and contemplating than posting. No where have I even implied that I'm looking for Apple to "go down in flames." In-fact, I'm already stated in this very thread that it would be a a shame if the Mac was to die off because of this decision.

Re:Whoa

[Plumpaquatsch]

I spent thousands on the AppStore

How did that happen?

He must have been one of the 8 people who bought the I Am Rich app.

Re:Whoa

[supremebob]

Recompiling apps to work on ARM is the easy part. Finding replacements for all of these legacy apps that are no longer being developed is harder.

I'd imagine that companies like VMWare will have the toughest job, as they'll be expected to emulate x86 Windows and Linux apps on these new ARM Macs with decent performance.

Re:Whoa

[StikyPad]

As I said, IBM and Motorola CPUs were sinking ships. Intel is not that.

Apple does not manufacture their own chips, or anything at all actually. So they are either paying Intel, or they are paying TSMC/Samsung for manufacturing + ARM licensing. I doubt the costs are substantially different. The gain would be in control. But for all the reasons I listed, that would be a high price to pay for control.

Moreover, end users would bear the brunt of those costs, and have little or nothing to show for it at the end of the day in terms of performance improvements. When Apple jumped CPU ships in the past, it benefitted end users. I am hard pressed to think of a single benefit of an architecture swap to end users at this point, but I am all ears if anyone has any ideas.

Re:Whoa

[Plumpaquatsch]

PS: https://hardware.slashdot.org/... Apple iPhone Rumors Resurface 5 years before the iPhone.

Re:Whoa

[MightyMartian]

Wiping out bad mod

Re:Whoa

[Space cowboy]

Apple was one of the founders of ARM. An ARM license doesn't cost them very much at all.

Manufacturing chips on the scale of Apple's iPhone means the cost per chip is relatively low. The NRE is done; at that point the more you can manufacture the cheaper it is per unit. Certainly paying Intel to manufacture chips and sell them (even at the margin that Apple can command) is going to be more expensive for Apple.

As for benefits... Apple has always wanted to own the whole shebang. They get to know ahead of time what the schedule's going to be, they get to dictate the chip's abilities, and they already have the design capability in-house. I *think* it'll be cheaper for Apple, with lower thermals and higher efficiencies with potentially a better designed chip. Whether the user sees benefits from that is up for debate.

There are certainly issues with compatibility and emulation, and I don't have a good answer for that. I suspect, if Apple go ahead and do it, they will have a good-enough answer for a transition. As for recompiling etc., they'll just require an ARM64 variant of any app in the app-store for a year or so ahead of any transition in order to be listed. That'll be sufficient IMHO to get almost everyone on-board.

Re: Whoa

[Bruha]

Already did. The price and features were compelling in the past. Now windows has WSL and everything else as an advantage.

Re:Whoa

[Eravnrekaree]

What code has to be rewritten? I thought nearly all app code is written in Objective C or one of the higher level languages. Who writes app code in assembly? It mainly looks to be an issue for Apple's OS developers and compiler writers.

Re: Whoa

[Eravnrekaree]

The desktop is not dying. The industry has matured and people are simply happy with the desktop they have and not replacing as often. Mobile devices are absolutely miserable for anything other than a quick message or notification while on the go, not a good form factor for heavy duty work.

Re: Whoa

[fortfive]

>benefit

Security?

Re:Whoa

[WorBlux]

Who says it's an ARM chip. Doesn't via still hold cyrix patents on x86? Maybe the Mill will be ready by then.

Re:Whoa

[kriston]

The first big performance stumble Macs on PowerPC was the huge external L3 Cache chip that was grafted to some PowerMac G4s.

*sigh*

Today, Intel achieves middling multiprocessor performance because some high-end models of processors have a very large dedicated L2 cache per core (at great expense) and by loading up the processor pipeline via HyperThreading. Lower-end models and consumer models have shared L2 cache and the lowest end, e.g. Pentium Anniversary Edition, omit HyperThreading entirely.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

PowerPC never had a performance issue.
Apple ditched it because IBM could not provide mobile versions of it in the numbers Apple needed it.
And IBM had no real plans to improve the mobile version, that is all.

The PowerPC architecture is a really nice one and has nothing to hide versus Intel.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

Apple was not a founder of ARM, how do you come to that idea?
ARM stands for Acorn Risk Machines, a spin off of Acorn.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

Then Apple switched to PowerPC this forced all these companies to spend millions to rewrite code to support the new chips.
That is nonsense.
In the old times Mac software was written mostly in Pascal. You just recompile to switch from 68k to PowerPC ... considering that the new PowerPC based OS had an emulator for 68k software, a recompile was not really necessary anyway.

Re:Whoa

[klui]

From Wikipedia

In the late 1980s Apple Computer and VLSI Technology started working with Acorn on newer versions of the ARM core. In 1990, Acorn spun off the design team into a new company named Advanced RISC Machines Ltd.,[24][25][26] which became ARM Ltd when its parent company, ARM Holdings plc, floated on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ in 1998.[27] The new Apple-ARM work would eventually evolve into the ARM6, first released in early 1992. Apple used the ARM6-based ARM610 as the basis for their Apple Newton PDA.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

And?
What exactly is your point?

Apple joined late ... they did not 'found' or 'invent' ARM, that is pretty clear from your wikipedia excerpt.

Re: Whoa

[c6gunner]

lol. Sure, switching to ARM will somehow make OSX more secure when they leave the root password blank.

Re: Whoa

[c6gunner]

I spent thousands on the AppStore

How did that happen?

What do you mean? On the apple store that's like 5 apps and a song.

Re:Whoa

[thegarbz]

Right, because Adobe would never develop software to run on Apple's processors [adobe.com].

That's no great success. Adobe *used* to favour Apple's platforms first and Windows would get a delayed release. Not only is that no longer the case, but in the big shift to 64bit, Apple's insistence on an API change meant several versions of Photoshop CS products never saw a 64bit release on Mac. This saw a huge rise in PC use for content creation, because who would use the awesome power of a Mac if you can't even open a decently sized photo or video on it anymore.

Now Mac finally caught up with a 64bit release 2 versions later, but just what do you think the few remaining content creators would do when suddenly faced with under-performing ARM chips to do real work, and more importantly what do you think Adobe would do when faced with a platform without any serious users?

Re:Whoa

[TheRaven64]

There are a few other issues. It's not just Bootcamp, it's also WINE. A lot of the 'Mac' games are actually Windows games with a bundled version of WINE. Note that this is WINE, not WineLib. The WINE team now actively discourages use of WineLib because you get odd issues from programs that expect COFF linkage behaviour instead of ELF, for example, and porting is a lot easier if you ship WINE's PE/COFF loader rather than relying on the host platform's ELF loader.

ARM has limited virtualization support - or usefulness for that matter

I'd disagree with the first part of this. ARM's hardware virtualisation acceleration is on a par with Intel's. I'd agree with the latter part though. The common use of virtualisation on macOS is to run Windows in a VM. Unless Qualcomm's ARM Windows platform becomes a lot more popular, I don't imagine there being much call to run ARM Windows on Macs.

Apple loses the economies of scale that Intel enjoys, eating into cost savings

That one depends a lot on how much they can share designs with the iPhone / iPad. If the Mac chips are just a higher core count and clock rate than the iPad versions, then they may get some of this back. Mac, plus iPhone, plus iPad sales add up to about 50% of the total number of PC sales, so they're only a factor of two off.

All existing MacOS apps and games, gone (without either substantial developer support for rebuilds or else subpar emulation, which is not a UX Apple is likely to support)

Note that Apple has done this before. In both the PowerPC and Intel switch, they shipped emulators that allowed you to run existing code. Modern emulators are now pretty good at adjusting call frames so that you can call from emulated code into native code. If you keep the same structure layouts in your legacy and emulated platform then you can share pointers between them. Most Mac apps spend a huge proportion of their total CPU time in Apple-provided system libraries, which is a big part of why Rosetta was so fast in the PowerPC to Intel switch: most existing code (including all of the standard UI drawing, text rendering and layout, and so on) code ran as native x86 code, so the emulator only had to be fast enough that the rest didn't become a bottleneck. OF course, it helped that the laptop Intel cores were about twice the speed of the Freescale ones that they replaced (and had more cores).

At the end of the day, it's really just trading one master (Intel) for another (ARM)

Again, not quite so clear cut. One of the big reasons for the Intel switch was their relationship with Intel versus IBM / Freescale. Apple was the sole customer for both IBM and Freescale in the relevant markets, which meant that they were paying a huge proportion of the total R&D, yet someone else was in control. When they switched to Intel, they were the single largest customer, but were only about 20% of the total.

I suspect that, given the massive growth of cloud stuff, that at least one of Google, Amazon, or Microsoft (possibly all three) is now a larger customer than Apple, which means that Apple is no longer able to demand exactly what they want. There's some evidence for this: Apple customers keep complaining about not being able to buy MBPs with 32GB of RAM, Apple says they'll ship them as soon as Intel produces a CPU that can handle 32GB of LPDDR4, Intel still isn't producing laptop chips that support LPDDR4.

Their relationship with ARM would, again, be very different. Apple is an ARM Architecture Licensee, which means that they are allowed to (and do) design their own ARM-compatible cores in house and ship them as long as they pass the conformance tests. There are also over half a dozen other ARM Architecture Licensees (you can find an abridged list of these in the ARM ARM if you look at the hardware register value that provides the vendor ID, though some companies - including Apple - request not

Re:Whoa

[TheRaven64]

PowerPC code often used Apple's C extensions for vector intrinsics. They provided some shims implementing most of the PowerPC builtins in terms of SSE, but some weren't available. It also didn't help that Apple's vector extensions and GCC's used different syntax for describing vectors, so porting was quite painful. These days, it's comparatively easy to write vectorised code that will take advantage of both SSE and NEON, though don't expect it to have the same performance characteristics on both (or in different Intel or ARM microarchitectures, for that matter).

Re:Whoa

[TheRaven64]

However, unless Apple's rumored new chip suddenly kicks the crap out of an equivalent-gen Intel chip (without turning a MacBook Pro into a room-heater **), this rumor is likely just that - a rumor.

Everyone in this discussion seems to be conflating CPU chip and CPU core. It's entirely possible, given Apple's relationship with Intel (and Intel's attempts to move into the SoC market) that Apple would ship an Apple-designed SoC that incorporated an Intel CPU core with a load of other Apple-designed cores (GPU, Secure Element, other accelerators).

Re: Whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

Geekbench is a terrible cross architecture benchmark and should be ignored. As your linked article actually pointed out burried in the text.

Re: Whoa

[backslashdot]

If Apple could afford testing it back in 2005, they sure as hell can afford it now. Or, they could so what Microsoft does and have their customers test it for them.

Re:Whoa

[kelarius]

I disagree that this is a negotiating tactic, Apple has indicated through inaction for several years now that they don't really care that much about the professional market, who are really the only people that are going to care about the switchover. Switching to ARM allows Apple to merge the iOS and macOS platforms, easing development costs and grab more control over their environment. They've already made it clear that this is the path they want to take with products like the iPad Pro, if they could take that and expand it into a full iMac like experience, why wouldn't they?

Re:Whoa

[Space cowboy]

From the Wikipedia page: "The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology."

One of my colleagues was working with Acorn at the time (yes, I'm old, so is he) and he will talk your ear off about how the groups collaborated, and what IP Apple contributed, as well as the improvements made to the chip layout to help out the board-design people.

Re:Whoa

[Thumper_SVX]

PowerPC is really nice for well pipelined and predictable workloads, but tends to fall apart when the workloads get more "randomized". Client-side workloads tend to have highly randomized input (read: human beings) which can lead to pipeline crash frequently. This is why PowerPC has done really well in servers and mainframe type workloads.

Though what you've said is all mostly correct.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,
that is ARMs Holding.
That is not the original "Acorn Risc Machines".

I'm equally old and had one of the first ARM RiscOS computers, and I'm sure at that time Apple was not involed, it was big news when they suddenly got involved.

But it might be I'm just to old and mix up the events on my timeline :D

(I still have the computer, an Archimedes, with an ARM3 extension card and some extra RAM soldered on top of the original chips ... I fear the HD wont start anymore, would be interesting to boot it ...)

Re:Whoa

[Space cowboy]

Don't get me wrong, I think the Acorn team did an amazing job with the first ARM chip, and when I saw the "Lander" demo running on an Archie, my jaw dropped. I spent the next term's student grant money on buying one, then worked 2 jobs to pay for it. Worth it.

I don't think Apple was involved in the first chip (that was an Acorn thing), but by the time ARM had morphed from the marketing "Acorn RISC Machine" slogan to an actual company, they were there, contributing quite a bit if you believe my colleague.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

If I recall correctly that game (Zork?) was actually written in Basic.

The basic implementation on that machine was faster than any C program on an 33MHz intel x486 D2.

Re: Whoa

[reanjr]

ISO C has a standard lib for threads. .NET has standard lib for threads. Visual C++ has standard lib for threads. Who exactly is writing Windows apps in an environment with no standard library support for threads and what are they writing in?

No, availability of threading libs does not explain any disparity in application utilization of threading.

I don't know about Mac, but on Linux, the Unix philosophy of small programs that get tied together means many apps are multi-process, with IPC mechanisms in place to make that work. Most apps on Linux - in my experience - rely on multi-process apps, and not multi-threading.

Re:Whoa

[Space cowboy]

Yeah. It was.

And during the demo, which was running full-screen (windowed), they reduced the size of the window to 1/4 screen, and you could see 3 other ones running at the same time.

The word I was looking for is "Gobsmacked" :)

Re: Whoa

[pots]

We're talking about Macs here. The only heavy duty work that Apple really supports on Macs is graphic design / video editing.

Apple has been moving their Mac line away from being multifuntion computers and towards being locked-down devices for years now. This is just one more step in that direction. As long as they get Adobe on board with this, they'll retain almost all of their business customers.

Re:Whoa

[nine-times]

Adobe *used* to favour Apple's platforms first and Windows would get a delayed release. Not only is that no longer the case... This saw a huge rise in PC use for content creation...

I've seen a few people comment on this, but I think that's a bit of a tortured interpretation of what happened. First, it should be no surprise that Adobe started focusing on Windows in the late 90s and early 2000s. Microsoft had won the OS wars, and Apple appeared to be a company in decline. Besides that, Adobe can (at times) be a shitty company that drags its feet whenever it might mean ceding their dominance or making investments in their products.

The reality is, this shouldn't be a controversial story. Processing power has become less of a consideration, as even the "lightweight" CPUs have become powerful enough for all but the most demanding applications. Apple's processor lineup has been making big gains. A lot of Apple developers are already writing code for Apple processors (on iOS). A lot of stuff already runs on ARM, and even Microsoft has been working on an ARM version of Windows. More and more, people use either mobile applications or web applications. Android phone makers have been experimenting with making docks that turn their phones into desktop computers. Google has been working on unifying ChromeOS and Android.

Of course Apple's at least experimenting with bringing their desktop OS to ARM. If anything, I'm suprised that there's not already an iPad Pro model that can run a full desktop environment when docked.

Re:Whoa

[david_thornley]

AFAICT, the changeover from MacOS to MacOSX was much more of a problem. The classic MacOS interface had a lot of cruft, including four different file managers, so they simplified it to Carbon, which was supported on OSX, but not for all that long. Going from Classic to Cocoa did require significant rewriting.

Re: Whoa

[kenh]

How will Apple avoid the perception that your MacBookPro and MacPro are more than glorified iPads?

I have a hard time believing Apple can ship a comparable CPU (let alone a superior CPU) to any of Intel's offerings, along with all required 'glue' components Intel also supplied, after just two years of engineering.

Maybe they can, I don't know, but I think there will be Xeons in MacPros well after 2020.

Re: Whoa

[kenh]

Come 2020, Apple will be offering:

IPads that fit in your pocket (cellphone)
IPads that are page size (tablet)
iPads that have built-in keyboards (laptops)
IPads that have built-in power supplies (desktops)

It'll be awesome.

Re: Whoa

[kenh]

The only way I could see this happening is if Apple are developing or have developed an x86_64 compatible processor.

That doesn't infringe on any Intel/AMD intellectual property?

Is AMD for sale?

Re:Whoa

[DontBeAMoran]

I knew something wasn't right at the time I wrote my comment. Now I know why.

Thank you.

Re:Whoa

[david_thornley]

Sure - and dropping it caused problems. Cocoa was more than a mere recompile of Carbon.

Re:Whoa

[Plumpaquatsch]

As I said, IBM and Motorola CPUs were sinking ships. Intel is not that.

Apple does not manufacture their own chips, or anything at all actually.

So? Neither does AMD, and people here keep claiming their chips are better than Intel's (and that yes, Intel is a sinking ship). The chips they don't make themselves.

Re:Whoa

[Plumpaquatsch]

And? What exactly is your point?

Apple joined late ... they did not 'found' or 'invent' ARM, that is pretty clear from your wikipedia excerpt.

They joined late? They saved ARM (the ISA) by co-founding the company ARM. Nobody claimed they invented ARM, you bloody imbecile, just that it wouldn't exist anymore (neither the ISA nor the company).

Words have meanings, and you don''t know them.

Re:Whoa

[Plumpaquatsch]

Well, that is ARMs Holding. That is not the original "Acorn Risc Machines".

In case you missed it: Acorn is dead - just like your moronic argument.

Heck, at the time ARM Ltd. was founded, Acorn Computers already was no longer independent, but was taken over on the cheap by Italian computer make Olivetti.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

The file manager on Mac OS was "Finder" and still is on Mac OS X and on macOS.
No idea what you are talking about ...

Carbon is a GUI library, not a file manager, same for Cocoa (seeing your other post).

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

You seem to mix up the several companies called ARM.

The first ARM was Acorn Risc Machines. Nothing to do with the later "Advanced Risc Machines Holding" or Ltd. Except well, obviously sprang out of the first ARM and had Apple as a partner.

My first ARM processors, never had anything to do with Apple ...

Re:Whoa

[Plumpaquatsch]

You seem to mix up the several companies called ARM.

The first ARM was Acorn Risc Machines. Nothing to do with the later "Advanced Risc Machines Holding" or Ltd. Except well,

Wow, for the first time in this thread you are right. Because there never was a company called Acorn Risc Machines. You fucking imbecile.

Re:Whoa

[lsatenstein]

Apple was one of the founders of ARM. An ARM license doesn't cost them very much at all.

Manufacturing chips on the scale of Apple's iPhone means the cost per chip is relatively low. The NRE is done; at that point the more you can manufacture the cheaper it is per unit. Certainly paying Intel to manufacture chips and sell them (even at the margin that Apple can command) is going to be more expensive for Apple.

As for benefits... Apple has always wanted to own the whole shebang. They get to know ahead of time what the schedule's going to be, they get to dictate the chip's abilities, and they already have the design capability in-house. I *think* it'll be cheaper for Apple, with lower thermals and higher efficiencies with potentially a better designed chip. Whether the user sees benefits from that is up for debate.

There are certainly issues with compatibility and emulation, and I don't have a good answer for that. I suspect, if Apple go ahead and do it, they will have a good-enough answer for a transition. As for recompiling etc., they'll just require an ARM64 variant of any app in the app-store for a year or so ahead of any transition in order to be listed. That'll be sufficient IMHO to get almost everyone on-board.

IBM wanted to also own the whole thing. And technology suddenly left IBM behind. IBM has a few specialty products now, but it's main business is in consulting and cloud computing.

Re:Whoa

[david_thornley]

That's what Apple told developers. Remember when Microsoft told developers what was going to happen? Lots of programs still caused lots of UAC alerts in Vista. Developers don't listen.

Re:Whoa

[hazydave]

Right. Apple currently sells around 15-20 million macOS machines a year. And they're nearly all relatively low-to-midrange PCs; the Mac Pro is chronically out-of-date. That's compared to 200 million iOS machines.

The macOS market may be relatively stable, but it's not growing. Apple spends far more effort per model on macOS systems than they do iOS systems, particularly given the large number of macOS models versus the numbers selling. If they evolved the today's Macintosh into less of a PC and more of a desktop iPad, they'd perhaps lose some or many of the remaining higher-end Mac users, but they might stand to gain a whole mess of iOS people, looking to extend their iOS experience more directly onto a more powerful laptop.

They probably could match lower-end Intel performance on their ARM chips. Apple is delivering faster cores today than anyone else in mobile. None of the other mobile ARM vendors really see value is jacking up their CPUs as much, and of course, Apple depends more on single-tasking performance in iOS than does Android. So freed of tight power constraints, they might hand you an i5-ish performance laptop or with 20 hours of battery life, or a cooler running iMac.

And sure, it might be a negotiating tactic. But they're certainly paying much, much less for their CPUs than the would from Intel's. A 20 million unit production isn't necessarily enough to really keep costs down, but they're sharing that with their 200 million unit mobile business, since both lines of CPUs will share technology. Apple doesn't have to differentiate in expensive ways; a few different packages with the same CPU but different speeds/cores/cache and they're probably filling out most of their current Mac sales.

And Apple's probably not paying much in royalties. Sure, ARM orginally meant Acorn RISC Machine, but the company was spun out as Advanced RISC Machines in a joint partnership between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Technology. Not sure if Apple actually kept any ownership long-term, especially after the Softbank purchase. But that wouldn't have necessarily affected their long-ago negotiated Architecture License.

Re:Whoa

[hazydave]

There was never anything called "Acorn RISC Machines".

There was the Acorn RISC Machine -- the V1.0 ARM Architecture and all that began at Acorn Computers Ltd. When the CPU company was split off from the main body of Acorn, it was launched as Advanced RISC Machines, and it was a three-way partnership between Acorn, Apple, and chip maker VLSI Technology.

Re:Whoa

[hazydave]

The real problem Adobe had wasn't Apple changing processors, it was Apple not selling enough computers. At one point Apple fell to about 1.5% of global PC shipments. Adobe did what every other successful company did -- it concentrated on supporting the platform with actual paying customers: Windows.

That prompted Apple to get more serious about their own in-house professional media content creation software. And that didn't help the rift between Apple and Adobe at all. Then there was Jobs, going in full attack mode about Adobe Flash... not that he was wrong about proprietary Flash vs. standard HTML5. And Adobe didn't fundamentally care, because Flash was just a means to the end of their selling Flash development tools. But a smack-down is a smack-down.

Today, the Mac is 10% of less of Apple's business. They don't want to kill it, but it's also a ton of work compared to iOS per unit sold. RIght now they have to have several different laptops at different performance levels, they have to have iMacs, they still have Mac Pros though they only seem to sell in the first year or two of their 5-year-or-so lifespan. As that market continues to shrink, Apple's going to contiune to lose interest unless it becomes, essentially, part of the iOS product lineup.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

Well,
I bought my Archimedes from them ... or was the company still simply called Acorn then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/...

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

Thanks for the clarification.

Re:Whoa

[Hognoxious]

Acorn RISC Machine (singular) was the name of an architecture. It was developed by Acorn Computers Ltd.

The spinoff company was called Advanced RISC Machines Ltd right from the start. It later became ARM Holdings.

He's right, and you're wrong - again.

Re:Whoa

[angel'o'sphere]

Acorn RISC Machine (singular) was the name of an architecture. It was developed by Acorn Computers Ltd.
That is actually what I was talking about, so I'm not wrong.

Apple joined with Advanced RISC Machines and had nothing to do with development of the original ARM ... go figure.

Umm yea.

[jellomizer]

Am I surprised? No.
Apple has a track record of moving across chip lines. Being that they make the OS and the Hardware, the processor isn't that big of a deal, and they have a really good track-record of keeping compatibility across different processor lines. Compared to say Microsoft who barely made the 64bit transition.

That being said. The real question is for the people who duel boot their Macs, or use Virtualization. My biggest fear is if OS X moves to the closed infrastructure that is iOS. I can deal with Apple approved apps for my phone, but for my laptop, I will want to install whatever I feel like.

Re:Umm yea.

[UnknowingFool]

I am surprised by the time estimate. Five years? Maybe. Two years: I don't think they are ready for that. Their Ax CPUs are good enough to power mobile devices and their small electronics like the AppleTV and the HomePod. I don't think they are ready for laptops and desktops yet.

Re:Umm yea.

[thegarbz]

and they have a really good track-record of keeping compatibility across different processor lines. Compared to say Microsoft who barely made the 64bit transition.

You're joking right? Compatibility with what? A whole version of Adobe's creative suite was missed on Mac due to one of their transitions, and software vendors almost universally hated them the last few times Apple dictated the move.

I am surprised. I wonder if software vendors will continue to support the Mac line. I mean it's not like their shitty mobile apps are what laptop and workstation users want. There's some real effort involved in pleasing the fruit's decision of the day.

Re:Umm yea.

[Not_Wiggins]

To add to this... I think a bunch have forgotten that Apple used to use its own non-x86 processors for their PowerPC.
Them getting back into manufacturing after 12-14 years just shows they feel they can get more value out of doing their own processor design and manufacturing rather than "outsourcing" it to Intel. This is moving back to a vertical integration of their hardware supply chain.

Re:Umm yea.

[tatman]

I am surprised. I wonder if software vendors will continue to support the Mac line. I mean it's not like their shitty mobile apps are what laptop and workstation users want. There's some real effort involved in pleasing the fruit's decision of the day.

10 years ago I would say yes. Especially in the audio and visual software application markets. Today those applications are just as performance capable on the PC. When I hear of someone working in those fields, I asked what platforms they use and I'm hearing more say PC whereas the answer used to be exclusively a "Mac". There's a shift going on. And I feel, this time, Apples decision will hurt them more than help.

Re:Umm yea.

[MightyYar]

They don't use FreeBSD kernel, they use a Mach derivative called XNU.

Though to be fair, the BSD stuff does sit on the kernel, so it could be what is leaking - but since they split off so long ago, it seems unlikely since the leaks started more recently.

Re:Umm yea.

[Anubis IV]

The last few generations of A-processors have been beating increasingly higher-tier MacBooks in performance benchmarks these last few years. They may not be ready to replace the highest-end chips yet, but they were ready to replace the low-end ones a few years ago, and that lead has only been growing.

Re:Umm yea.

[Ryanrule]

Moving to intel saved them.

Re:Umm yea.

[greenwow]

> leaks memory from the kernel

That problem is made worse by the fact Apple hasn't increased the max available amount of memory in their laptops in six years!

I'm doing pretty heavy duty Java development with IntelliJ (which just sucks memory) and Eclipse, and every developer also has to run three virtual machines running Windows. We're having to reboot more than once a month. It sucks.

Re:Umm yea.

[realmolo]

Apple didn't design OR manufacture the PowerPC processor. It was a variation on the Power architecture that IBM created. Motorola helped with design, to some degree, and manufactured them for a while, too. But at the end, the PowerPC line was an exclusively IBM-designed-and-manufactured CPU.

Re:Umm yea.

[mrbester]

Yes, it certainly helped. However, a two year lead time seems awfully short. I'm thinking there have been plans afoot for some time in order to be ready by 2020 and jumping on the recent Intel woes is just capitalising on that. Much better to say "we've got a new line coming out in 2 years" than "due to recent events, we're going back in-house and we'll be ready in 2 years" because no one would believe the latter.

Re:Umm yea.

[Guspaz]

PowerPC wasn't the first. They started on the Motorola 68000 series processors. If you include changes in bit count as architectural changes, then there was:

16-bit Motorola 68K (starting with 68000)
32-bit Motorola 68K (starting with 68020)
32-bit IBM PowerPC (starting with 601)
64-bit IBM PowerPC (starting with 970)
32-bit Intel x86 (starting with Core)
64-bit Intel x86 (starting with Xeon/Core 2)

The bit transitions sometimes involved software compatibility solutions (the transition to 32-bit had stuff like MODE32), and all of the full architectural changes involved full blown software emulation (several different internally and externally developed 68K emulators were used for the PowerPC transition, while Rosetta was a licensed copy of Transitive's QuickTransit).

The 68K to PowerPC transition was particularly interesting, because the emulation was integrated to the OS at a very low level, allowing the mixing and matching of 68k and PPC code: almost the entire operating system was running emulated at first, with it gradually being ported over as time went on.

Re:Umm yea.

[Streetlight]

Some of the things I would want to install are Chrome browser, Microsoft Office and any or all of Adobe's graphics stuff such as the full Photoshop software. And it better run just as fast as on a PC with the latest Intel hardware. Others will have other software preferences. Microsoft now has Windows on ARM, but first reports show Excel being kind of slow and probably not ready for business users.

Re:Umm yea.

[HornWumpus]

Laptop processors/GPUs are basically a thermal problem.

x86-64 (whatever the AMD one everyone is using now is named) carries architectural overhead, which has been overcome by simple market size/R&D budgets.

Desktop processors are basically a bandwidth to RAM problem.

Similar issues exist as in laptops, the 'same but different'.

In the 'long run' old architectures won't compete, it's not a railroad gauge analogy. Who knows what and when though.

Android has been poking it's nose into the laptop space.

It's really about tool sets. Once you buy into the 'webapp for everything' mentality. That is a big market, likely most of it. Everybody who can't keep their desktop OS running and uninfested to start.

Just wait for the malware to really start going. Always keep the write protect tab on your autonomous car. Watch out for teenagers showing you car's cameras videos with their phones.

Whatever happens, CPU is commodity. It's already commodity priced. Intel better get comfortable with ADM level margins. I don't think Apple would like the margins they find.

Re:Umm yea.

[MachineShedFred]

They are NOT using FreeBSD kernel. They develop their own called XNU.

It has some borrowed BSD code, but it's the Mach microkernel with Objective-C API hooks for drivers.

Re:Umm yea.

[MachineShedFred]

You're probably right that Apple could stand to do some more testing and QA on the kexts they ship as hardware support, but there's only so much they can do.

Apple: "Hey Nvidia, your drivers suck. We're not shipping the latest version because it leaks memory like a fucking sieve."
Nvidia: "Fine by us - you don't currently ship any of our hardware anyway, so you are only screwing your own past customers by giving them garbage ass-old drivers when newer less garbage drivers are available. Have fun with the support calls!"
Apple: " ... "

Re:Umm yea.

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

I am surprised by the time estimate. Five years? Maybe. Two years: I don't think they are ready for that. Their Ax CPUs are good enough to power mobile devices and their small electronics like the AppleTV and the HomePod. I don't think they are ready for laptops and desktops yet.

I disagree. Their A10X Fusion chip is already "desktop class," and I'm SURE part of the limitation on its processing power is thermal dissipation, and the need for balance between performance and battery life. They could very well introduce a touchscreen MAC, with a keyboard... oh, wait, they kind of already have that, it's called an iPad Pro, (the 12.9 is almost the size of a MacBook Air or Pro, 13", and almost indistinguishable from a MacBook... Nothing. You know, the new MacBook? Add a keyboard and all it's really missing is the ability to run Mac Apps and Programs.

Anyway, imagine what Apple could do if they built a Mac using, oh, a couple, or a trio, or a quartet of chips out of the new iPad 9.7 they just announced? The WHOLE THING costs like, 330 bucks, which is kinda crazy... the parts you can leave OUT mean the processor alone is only probably like, 50 bucks, maybe? A board containing several of these, with a heatsink to help provide extra TDP capacity, could mean they could clock them up by a factor of... well, I don't know enough about the specifics to speculate on the specifics, but given how the iPad doesn't heat up much in use, with NO external fan ports, I'd have to guess they could kick it up to double or triple its current speed, then as for graphics, again, they could jam several together to get enough GFX grunt to drive a 4k monitor.

They COULD maybe start out with a new MacMini. Discontinue the archaic one now, introduce the NEW... hmm... what could they call it? OH! How about a solid glass square-based pyramid, and call it the iMac Pharaoh, a limited edition Mac that runs macOS apps UNDER iOS, starts out like the original Apple computer at $666, outperforms the iMac Pro, uses less power, and while we're dreaming, projects a holographic display using laser into the user's eyes, allowing for total privacy, and reads microscopic eye-movements for the interface... users would just lay there, eye's half-way glazed over, drooling on themselves quietly, while experiencing the raw computing power of a modern-day supercomputer which they wouldn't have to move a muscle beyond just their eyes, to operate...

Sorry, what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah. Chips. The A-line of chips are more than adequate, I think, especially if scaled up by adding more power, more ability to dissipate heat, and the proper infrastructure underneath to direct and drive it all, i.e., data bus, cache memory, and so on. But all kidding aside, they DO have the opportunity to make something new, to replace the ridiculously agèd MacMini line, and make a clean break from it. Consider this: the eMac and PowerMac or whatever they called that stupid little tower, had those god-awful, ugly plastic cases, which while they had the fun colors, to set them apart from the beige boxes of yeaster-year, or the looming, towering, usually black behemoth towers people (including yours, truly put together themselves,) to appeal to teenaged girls, gave way to generally unfinished aluminum chassis MacPro's and then aluminum clam-shell laptops, the MacBook Pro, then Air, then just "MacBook" and the MacMini followed a similar trend, if you'll recall, they originally had the white plastic chassis, (or was it just the top, and then the surround on the sides and back was aluminum?) then went to all-aluminum, and they eliminated the formerly built-in Super-Drive... and these days it's been several years since the last MINOR update, and so now the base-model, $500 MacMini has, (just checked RIGHT NOW at https://www.apple.com/mac-mini... ,) LITERALLY the exact same specifications as a mid-2013 BASE MODEL MacBook Air, except i

Re:Umm yea.

[b0s0z0ku]

The spinning-platter HDD? Count your blessings. At least it has a standards 2.5" SATA form factor and connector. Meaning you can upgrade it to the SSD of your choice. The next Mac Mini (knowing Apple's penchant for locking power users out) will likely have an SSD with proprietary connector or one that's integrated with the main board.

Want to upgrade? Buy a new Mac Mini like a good little consumer. Upgrades are so 2008 and not courageous enough for us.

Re:Umm yea.

[R3d M3rcury]

The last few generations of A-processors have been beating increasingly higher-tier MacBooks in performance benchmarks these last few years.

And, let's face it, Apple has done a wonderful job of keeping their MacBooks up-to-date with the latest Intel chips...

Re:Umm yea.

[imgod2u]

With the exception of "full photoshop", all those other pieces of software are available on iOS and Android today.

And on the app side, there are tools that, while not quite Photoshop, do rival 95% of the tasks that use Photoshop.

Re:Umm yea.

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Agreed. I can see the logic on say a Mac Mini or MacBook, but anything with "Pro" in the name probably needs to remain Intel for some time... then again, TFA does say by 2020 so maybe it will work then. Otherwise, I'd say they could go ARM on the lower end Macs right now and most people could deal with that.

Re:Umm yea.

[Quarters]

What?

I can run ancient MS DOS code in Windows 10, no problems.
There's no way I'm ever going to get any Mac software coded for the 68K MacOSes or PPC MacOSes to run on modern hardware. Heck, even 32bit OSX software may not still work.

Apple's track record for maintaining backwards compatibility is that they don't care about it. They sacrifice it regularly. Microsoft, conversely, pours enormous effort into ensuring old software continues to function.

Re:Umm yea.

[jeff4747]

10 years ago I would say yes. Especially in the audio and visual software application markets. Today those applications are just as performance capable on the PC.

That's kinda the downside of Apple going from PPC to x86. Those software vendors got to consolidate to mostly one codebase. (The UI code would run differently, but that's not the hard part of the code, and part that has limited room for optimization.)

So now when they went to optimize their code, they got faster on both Apple and Windows....and people started looking at the price/performance of Dells versus MacPros.

Re:Umm yea.

[dryeo]

I'd call the 68000 a 32 bit processor as it had 32 bit registers. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The Motorola 68000 ("'sixty-eight-thousand'"; also called the m68k or Motorola 68k, "sixty-eight-kay") is a 16/32-bit CISC microprocessor, which implements a 32-bit instruction set, with 32-bit registers and 32-bit internal data bus, but with a 16-bit main ALU and a 16-bit external data bus,[1] designed and marketed by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. Introduced in 1979 with HMOS technology as the first member of the successful 32-bit m68k family of microprocessors, it is generally software forward-compatible with the rest of the line despite being limited to a 16-bit wide external bus.[2] After 38 years in production, the 68000 architecture is still in use.

So 32 bit internally with a 16 bit bus (and 24 bit address bus), much like the 80386SX.

Re:Umm yea.

[jaymemaurice]

My young stepson has been a walking iPhone X commercial since his father got one. He said something about the iPhone X being faster than laptops. Facts don't matter anymore when the masses are misguided, right from the ripe ol' age of seven... and what do you even do in this situation...

Re:Umm yea.

[AbRASiON]

I agree, I get the impression that PC is doing fine for the kind of work that Mac was the only choice for ten years ago.

Why would they make this move and render their devices less useful to their fringe users. Yes Apple some people use the MacBook for more than just browsing.

Re:Umm yea.

[KingMotley]

ARM has come a long way, but it has serious problems trying to scale up. Those issues haven't been solved yet. Taking the current top of the line desktop processor vs the current top of the line A11 from apple, it has a LONG way to go: https://browser.geekbench.com/...

That's the iPhone X putting up just shy of 10k in geekbench, and the intel platform putting up just shy of 70k. That is a pretty big difference to make up, but I look forward to seeing what Apple does.

Re:Umm yea.

[blindseer]

The 68K to PowerPC transition was particularly interesting, because the emulation was integrated to the OS at a very low level, allowing the mixing and matching of 68k and PPC code: almost the entire operating system was running emulated at first, with it gradually being ported over as time went on.

I remember that and it was an interesting time. One thing I was tasked with was upgrading a file and print server, a then mildly old 68040 based system. I was given a new PowerPC upgrade card for this server and I had to get it running again. After the upgrade the server ran slower than before. That was because the PowerPC had to emulate almost everything. We eventually took the upgrade card out and just bought a new server.

You touched on the software changes but I'll point out more. There was the early System 6 and prior days which were a mix of 16 and 32 bit code. System 7 was a long lived operating system which was 32 bit pretty much all the way through. MacOS 8 was the transition to PowerPC and lots of changes to the UI. MacOS 9 shed itself of most of what remained from the early days of the Macintosh. MacOSX was a whole new beast and really more of a family or operating systems itself. Mac OSX up to 10.4 had support for "Classic" applications and early PowerPC processors. 10.5 to 10.8 supported 32 and 64 bit processors. 10.8 to now is 64 bit only.

Each architecture transition was, at least in my opinion, handled quite well. I do remember in college a friend of mine swearing up and down on how he could not take the hard drive from his Dad's old Mac (with a 68030 processor) and put it in his Dad's new Mac (with PowerPC) and just boot it up. He did this with Windows computers all the time, he said, without problems so why should Apple have to be so different? Well there might be some understanding of a need to support old systems for a time but there is a point of absurdity, isn't there? I seem to recall trying to see if a 25 year old trackball would still work on Windows 10 through the serial port, and it did. Perhaps I don't recall correctly and it was Windows 7 or 8. Point is that a mouse from the days of Windows 3.1 is still supported on a "modern" OS. That's nice, I suppose, but is that necessary?

I've been looking real hard for my PS/2 to nine pin adapter to verify I can still use this old trackball on Windows 10, but I can't seem to find it. Anyway, the point is that things change and this means people need to change with it. Apple did transitions like this before and did them well with supporting old hardware and software for a long time, and I expect this to continue. I just don't expect my ADB keyboard to plug in or be able to run WarCraft.

Re:Umm yea.

[DontBeAMoran]

If it means a much lower price on the future MacBook Air replacement, I'd buy one only if it could still run my old x86 programs. I only need basic programs so I would probably not even notice a 50% drop in speed.

Re:Umm yea.

[Guspaz]

And yet we bill the Sega Genesis as a 16-bit console :)

If you're doing 16-bit math (16-bit ALU), it's hard to call it a 32-bit CPU. The Z80 has 16-bit registers and a 16-bit address bus, but we call it an 8-bit CPU.

Re:Umm yea.

[Guspaz]

It was basically a driver/OS support limitation that stopped you from doing that. There were releases of System 7 that supported both most 68030 macs and the first generations of PowerPC macs (some requiring a system enabler). For example, 7.5.5 can run on both a Mac Plus (8MHz 68000) and the PowerMac 9600 (200MHz PowerPC 604e) with the appropriate system enabler.

I'd imagine that if you updated the 68030 mac to 7.5.5, installed any necessary system enablers as appropriate, removed any extensions or control panels that were specific to the 68030 mac, and then swapped the drive, you might be able to boot off it... assuming both systems used the same hard drive interface, which they probably didn't.

There was a long time when trying to move a hard drive between two dissimilar Windows machines didn't usually work either (usually just resulted in a bluescreen), so your dad may have been lucky.

Re:Umm yea.

[Pinky's Brain]

A Surface Pro wipes the board with an IPad pro in application benchmarks.

I'm sure if Apple actually tried to design for desktop they could do it, but what they have as of yet is lacking.

Re:Umm yea.

[dryeo]

And yet the first Macs (and Lisa) were considered 32 bit. Likewise with the Amiga and Atari ST.
I guess it shows bitness to be complicated and perhaps best to call it 16/32 bit.

Re:Umm yea.

[squiggleslash]

The UI code would run differently, but that's not the hard part of the code, and part that has limited room for optimization

The CPU hasn't really been the "hard part" since the mid-nineties, perhaps even earlier. Most applications have been written in high level languages since the late eighties, and the major problem until the mid-nineties were assumptions over endianisms.

If it's easier to write platform independent code now, it's because of changes in development practices combined with the fact Mac OS X runs a hell of a lot more like other mainstream operating systems than Mac OS ever did. OS X and Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/10... (and 95-Me) both have the same fundamental model of how computers work and how resources should be allocated, which means high level code works in a similar way on both.

But compiling for a different CPU, well, that's just a compiler option. That's literally been a compiler option since the 1970s. And the compilers that support those options have been in common, mainstream, use since the late 1980s.

Re:Umm yea.

[sfcat]

I am surprised. I wonder if software vendors will continue to support the Mac line. I mean it's not like their shitty mobile apps are what laptop and workstation users want. There's some real effort involved in pleasing the fruit's decision of the day.

10 years ago I would say yes. Especially in the audio and visual software application markets. Today those applications are just as performance capable on the PC. When I hear of someone working in those fields, I asked what platforms they use and I'm hearing more say PC whereas the answer used to be exclusively a "Mac". There's a shift going on. And I feel, this time, Apples decision will hurt them more than help.

There is a very good reason for that. The video cards have evolved quickly over the last decade, as have the hardware interfaces they use to talk to the CPU. Apple basically stopped trying to keep up in that market about a decade ago as they assumed that graphics folks wouldn't care about the quality of their hardware. In the video space, this was suicide. It got to the point about 5 years ago where you couldn't do pro video work on any Mac of any cost at the same speed as 5 year old PCs. And the situation hasn't improved in the last 5 years (but it hasn't gotten worse as Apple has been trying some in this area after realizing their mistakes). But its still the case that you can't really do pro 3-D video/graphics on Macs today (or for quite some time). So even if Apple suddenly fixed this situation it would take 5 years or more for the market to readopt their platform if that even happened. I can't remember the last time I saw someone do 3-D graphics on a Mac as their main workstation.

Re:Umm yea.

[ImdatS]

That site compares a 4.4GHz, 18 Core, 36 Thread Intel-CPU to a 2.39GHz, 6 Core, 6 Thread A11 Bionic.

Just linearly scaling the A11 to the Intel-Specs would give you (at core-level): 54,655 Multi-Core Score. On Thread Level (assuming 80% efficiency) that would give 87,449 Score.

When you look at the single-core score, you see the difference is lower. If the A11 ran at Intel Clock-Rate (assuming linear scaling), it would even achieve a score of 7,865 vs. Intel's 5,728. Impressive? Yes

Re:Umm yea.

[angel'o'sphere]

Point is that a mouse from the days of Windows 3.1 is still supported on a "modern" OS. That's nice, I suppose, but is that necessary?
And I suppose you have no idea how a mouse is working.
There is no 'special support' needed for an 'old mouse' or 'old track ball'.

A mouse/trackball is connected via serial port. It literally sends "-X25,+Y13" as ASCII text via that port when it is moved.
If you ever had used a decent operation system, like any Unix, Linux, MacOs and cared to make a "> cat /dev/mouse" you would know that.

Yes, if you find a serial to PS/2 adapter your mouse will still work ... or serial to USB.

Re:Umm yea.

[angel'o'sphere]

There are ADB to USB connectors, I happily use my Apple extended keyboard from my 1992 Mac SE on my laptop ... since a decade or more.

Re:Umm yea.

[angel'o'sphere]

Apple has no build in 68k compatibility, that is true.
But if you want to run an Apple 68k program, you just can download an emulator, facepalm.
But why would you? Most software is ported to OS X/macOS and runs on an 86x just fine ....

Re:Umm yea.

[thegarbz]

When I hear of someone working in those fields, I asked what platforms they use and I'm hearing more say PC whereas the answer used to be exclusively a "Mac".

And there was a good reason for this. Apple forced an API change when transitioning to 64bit which pissed off developers. Adobe missed several 64bit versions of CS on the Mac. What good is an awesome Mac if the only platform that lets you use your hardware is the PC. Many people I know including myself moved to PC during that time.

Creative industries is one of the areas where performance matters, and during that transition period performance was really kneecapped on the Mac as far as many software applications go.

Re:Umm yea.

[SEE]

In the 'long run' old architectures won't compete, it's not a railroad gauge analogy.

People have been saying that for four decades. Yet, the only time from the announcement of the MITS Altair to the present that the dominant personal computer processor architecture was succeeded by one not machine-code compatible was the 8-to-16-bit transition, in a time period when nobody offered a 16-bit processor machine-code compatible with the 8080/8085/Z80. And in that transition, the victor was the only 16-bit architecture designed to be assembly-code compatible with the 8080/8085.

Nobody, no matter how well-financed, no matter how powerful, no matter how insistent, no matter how much their design was obviously "superior", has managed to divert that. Not even Intel itself, which failed to change the market's course with the iAPX 432, and then failed with the i860 and i960, and then failed with Itanium.

Re:Umm yea.

[jellomizer]

They are faster in short bursts, they can't keep the speed up for a long time like Desktop/Laptop chips can.

Good for scanning your face, and interpreting its movements and applying 3d graphics to manipulate it. But not good for a long term game or long term processing.

The iPhone X isn't more powerful then a modern laptop, but it does some things faster then a modern laptop.

Re:Umm yea.

[jeff4747]

But compiling for a different CPU, well, that's just a compiler option

We're talking about optimization. Not "will it run at all". So yes, the CPU family is actually important and has an effect on how you optimize the code.

Also, these applications are written in C or C++, not Java or Python. You can write C/C++ code that is more or less efficient on a particular processor.

Re:Umm yea.

[HornWumpus]

It isn't that simple. x86 was not the only processor family, saying it was dominant from day 1 grossly simplifies history.

While Moore's law was alive an well, nobody could compete with the money in x86. Even when processors were clearly better (Alpha, AMD-64), 'x86' won because they outspent the competition. The next Alpha will be different.

Re:Umm yea.

[blindseer]

And I suppose you have no idea how a mouse is working.

You suppose incorrectly.

There is no 'special support' needed for an 'old mouse' or 'old track ball'.

That's the problem. A serial mouse has been a very very rare device for decades and yet Windows 10 will still search for them on bootup. If it finds something chattering away on the port, such as a GPS unit, the OS assumes it's a mouse or trackball, will install the driver for such a device, and therefore messing with the proper function of this not-a-mouse device. I verified that Windows 10 still supports serial mice and people have been complaining about Windows assuming something is a mouse (or mouse-like) device and have been looking for ways to disable this for years.

https://what.thedailywtf.com/t...

People have been complaining about Windows still supporting serial mice since Windows XP and Windows 2000, more than 15 years now.

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo...

If you ever had used a decent operation system, like any Unix, Linux, MacOs and cared to make a "> cat /dev/mouse" you would know that.

I did know that. I have never needed to use a serial mouse because they've been obsolete since the PS/2 port came out in 1987 and was widely adopted less than 10 years later. Maybe serial mice were relatively common in the days of Windows 98 but they are all but extinct now. I bought a serial mouse just for grins and giggles 20 years ago because I happened across a serial mouse driver for MacOS and thought it would be fun to play with and have a three button mouse. (A multi-button mouse for Mac was a rare and expensive thing back then, but a serial mouse with three buttons could be had for less than $10. I suspect you knew that already.) Any "decent" OS will support USB mice and therefore not have a need to support something so rare today as a serial mouse. I suppose a "decent" OS might be expected to support a serial pointing device for someone that wants one, but this should be handled better than how Windows does. The serial mouse support in Windows appears to have become more troublesome than useful 15 years ago, and yet it remains.

Yes, if you find a serial to PS/2 adapter your mouse will still work ... or serial to USB.

Yes it will, I don't know why anyone would want to though. Any "decent" OS will support a USB mouse and there are all kinds of USB mice, trackballs, and other pointing devices that a serial device should be a special case, and the person should be expected to have to install a driver for it themselves. If someone is buying a serial to USB adapter today to plug in a serial mouse then they are an idiot. They would be a double idiot for using a PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter, to plug in the mouse. A triple idiot would have a USB to PS/2 adapter, PS/2 to serial adapter, and then a serial to USB adapter. I suppose that might be fun to experiment with, or somehow necessary for someone using a real odd operating system, but no one should even want to use a serial mouse any more. It would be cheaper and easier to just buy a new mouse instead of trying to force into service a mouse that must be 30 years old now.

A "decent" OS would be able to tell the difference between a serial GPS receiver and serial mouse on the port. Since Windows 10 can't do that then therefore Windows 10 is not a "decent" OS.

Re:Umm yea.

[blindseer]

There are ADB to USB connectors

Yes, they do exist, and I own one too. They were very expensive a long time ago and even more expensive now. They made sense back then when the adapters were $50 and a nice keyboard cost over $100. My point is that people should not expect to be able to keep old hardware working indefinitely, especially something with so many moving parts like a mouse and keyboard.

Also, a protocol converter like that ADB to USB adapter could still require a driver in the OS to get working right. That ADB to USB adapter won't allow use of a scroll wheel mouse, and the keyboard mapping can be funny, if there isn't a driver. I might be able to find a serial port adapter too but that doesn't mean my fancy 16 button mouse from 1998 is going to work now on a new system like it did then with Windows 95 or Mac OS 8. Someone might make case with an ISA slot and connect to a computer by USB but that doesn't mean I can get an old modem card to work on a new OS.

Re:Umm yea.

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

I thought they already made the RAM and the HDD not upgradable in the MacMini. I thought they'd already done away with that in the last update; I expect the next MacMini, all kidding aside, if there even IS one, to be locked from the inside in such a way as to make opening them impossible without an angle grinder.

Re:Umm yea.

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

They could very well introduce a touchscreen MAC...

I have several of those. No, really, I do. I Hackintoshed a Surface Pro, Surface Pro 3, and I'm currently using a Dell XPS 15 with a 4k touchscreen. Using touch is a terrible experience, mainly because the UI elements are so small. Trying to minimize a window or close a tab is an exercise in frustration. Apple would need to redesign most of the GUI in order to accommodate touch.

You make it sound far harder than it is. You just tweak it so that, for example, where the close, minimize/iconify, fullscreen/resize buttons are, is a single button, that when you touch, pops up a larger area with those three buttons, AROUND the spot where you touched. So you touch anywhere in that area, and the buttons all stretch out, inwards towards the window in question, into three sectors, and you slide along the sector to do the action in question. (Basically, a quadrant of a circle (Quadrant IV, from geometry, if you'll recall,) trisected from the center to the edge, expands into the window space, and you slide your finger or Apple iPencil along to activate the button.) You could do the same with the lower right corner of a window, with it expanding a quadrant split into two, resize or move, or three, resize, move, and sticky/stays-on-top options, or "other" which then pops up a semicircle from the nearer edge, with additional options, like "move one virtual desktop to the left" or "... to the right" in addition to sticky/stays-on-top.

The very idea that it would be a huge deal to add a few of these elements for Apple would be like saying, "I'd ask Superman to help me open this jar of pickles, but I'm not sure he's strong enough." It's... kinda their thing. It's what they do. "Innovate." Remember? It'd be nice to see them ADD a feature in the name of innovation, for once, rather than ripping them out so they can sell more of their other products, like their headphones that you wouldn't need to buy along with a new iPhone because you already have ten pairs of perfectly good wired ones... with integrated remote controls and microphones, (which is the reason, by the way, why I won't by another iPhone until they put the goddamned headphone jack back).

Re: Umm yea.

[UnknowingFool]

I have never seen any benchmarks that show that the A11 beats Intel CPUs in pure performance. I've seen benchmarks where the A11 beats the Core processors in performance per watt which is more about efficiency.

Re:Umm yea.

[KingMotley]

And bicycles are a good replacement for semi-trucks, because if you can just scale up the speed at which they go, and scale them up to 5 tons, they will carry more than our current semi-trucks and use no gasoline at all!

I think my first sentence bears repeating...

ARM has come a long way, but it has serious problems trying to scale up.

So completely ignoring that they have issues scaling up, if they COULD just scale up (which they can't) and do it at 100% efficiency (which they can't), it would be competitive.

Re:Umm yea.

[SEE]

Um, yeah, there were plenty of other processor families. And none of them were ever dominant in personal computers except for the 8080 family and the x86 family. (The MOS 6502 possibly had a brief period of being #1 in volume thanks to the Commodore 64, but nobody actually cared.)

You know what's actually grossly simplifying history? Pretending it was just money. That was maybe a halfway-decent excuse starting in the late 1980s, but is obvious bullshit prior to then. It also fails to explain why Intel couldn't manage to beat x86 any of the times it tried (iAPX 432, i860, i960, Itanium). At the very height of Intel's dominance, with all Intel's money behind Itanium (IA-64), it still got beat by AMD selling a mere 64-bit version of x86 (x86-64, also known as AMD64). Beat so badly that Intel had to admit defeat and copy AMD's extensions to x86.

Re:Umm yea.

[angel'o'sphere]

A USB mouse works exactly the same like a serial mouse.
It just sends +/-X and +/-Y text and MWU/MWD text

And so does the GPS module, it simply sends "053.122N/002.45E" via the serial USB port.

Since Windows 10 can't do that then therefore Windows 10 is not a "decent" OS.
Of course windows 10 is no decent OS ... some people argue that Win NT was one, or that XP was not so bad ... As far as I can tell there never was a decent Windows, but NT and 95/98 was at least useable.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Drethon]

PPC anyone?

Um, wasn't April 1 yesterday?

Bootcamp compatibility?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple switches to ARM based A-series processors then people dual booting macs with Windows/Linux will be out of luck. It would make Mac a more closed ecosystem as Apple will probably use the switch to make only App store apps run on ARM macs. Stock up on Intel macs while you can.

Re:Bootcamp compatibility?

[cdsparrow]

Don't forget MS is launching full(ish) windows for ARM now... So as long as apple keeps their flavor of ARM compatible with what MS is targeting, dual booting will or at least may work.

Re:Bootcamp compatibility?

[TeknoHog]

If Apple switches to ARM based A-series processors then people dual booting macs with Windows/Linux will be out of luck.

Are you seriously suggesting Linux doesn't run on ARM? I'm not sure where to even begin, but I guess you could begin with your router, phone etc. and any other ARM device you can think of, and guess what they're running right now.

Linux probably won't boot immediately when the first Apple Risc Machine comes out, but the issues are relatively minor. The same issues were solved for Linux on PPC/x86 Macs in the past. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple put in some extra barriers against dual booting.

Re:Bootcamp compatibility?

[TeknoHog]

Windows is all about binary compatibility, so it doesn't help much if just the OS is ported. Meanwhile, those using open source software on Linux will have a much easier time, since it's already well supported on ARM.

Re:Bootcamp compatibility?

[angel'o'sphere]

OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple put in some extra barriers against dual booting.
And why would Apple do that after it invested so much to make dual booting Windows and OS X so easy, aka "Bootcamp"?

Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[JoeyRox]

To date, Apple has stridently refused to incorporate a touchscreen on their notebooks, which would be the most obvious step in bridging the development/user-interface divide between iOS and OSX, yet they feel it's useful to switch to a single processor architecture to achieve the same goal?

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[Pinky's Brain]

For a laptop the use cases are so minimal that the downsides (reducing the quality of the display) are just not worth it. The niche of people who need touch on a laptop is too small for them to bother with. With the unified ecosystem they'll probably do 2-in-1 devices and you'll be able to get a touch screen.

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[greenwow]

Plus, who wants a dirty laptop screen?

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[edtice1559]

Why the heck is this modded to zero? Really anybody who uses their laptop for anything other than content sipping wants a clean screen. And if all you want to do is content sip you can buy a tablet. Touch screens on laptops look cool in demos and have practically zero real value.

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[Kjella]

To date, Apple has stridently refused to incorporate a touchscreen on their notebooks, which would be the most obvious step in bridging the development/user-interface divide between iOS and OSX, yet they feel it's useful to switch to a single processor architecture to achieve the same goal?

And I pray they keep it that way. Adding a touchscreen would be incentive to start creating the horrible Win8 hybrid UIs that are made to fit 5-10" screens and sausage fingers. I hope they manage to unify the system while keeping the touch and keyboard+mouse interfaces distinct. If there's a dual-purpose device or docking solution I'd rather see a switchable/morphable interface, if you attach it you go into k+m mode and detach it you go back to touch mode but it's one or the other.

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[nine-times]

I'm not sure it's relevant to the conversation, but I've never seen the value of a touchscreen on a laptop. It's one thing if it somehow turns into a tablet, but for real work, I'd much rather use the keyboard and touchpad than a touchscreen.

I'd see more value in a phone or tablet than can be docked and run as a full computer. I imagine the A11 chip is fast enough to do that, but it'd require that desktop apps are compiled to run on it. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the first step in this process, to enable developers to create Mac apps (appropriate for use with a keyboard and mouse) that run on Apple processors.

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[angel'o'sphere]

Ever used a laptop with a touch screen?
Guesses so ...

The amount of use cases is not minimal, nearly 90 of the time you are _reading_ something ... for that a touch screen is superb.

If I ever get a Hackintosh it certainly will be a laptop with a touch screen.

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[synp71]

You know, Dell doesn't do laptop features to be cool. Dell is never the "cool company". If Dell is putting touchscreens in half their line-up, it's doing it because customers want it. And it is.

Re:Seamlessly work together without a touchscreen?

[edtice1559]

Who are those customers? I'm guessing they are consumer content sippers. There's nothing wrong with catering to that market. But there's also nothing wrong with recognizing that people doing more serious work don't want touch screens. If you are actually creating things (Software, digital art, et cetera), your laptop is plugged into a docking station and you have a large non-touchscreen monitor most of the time and the touchscreen has negative value.

Who wants this?

[torkus]

I don't want my Mac to behave like my iPad. I don't want a dumbed-down experience where I can't do anything that Apple doesn't permit.

Re:Who wants this?

[thegarbz]

Thats weird. You run a closed source OS on your Mac. Freedom doesn't seem very important to you.

Freedom comes in many forms. Sometimes the freedom people seek is freedom from association with OpenSource Zealots.

Re:Who wants this?

[Pinky's Brain]

They probably just want to be able to deliver apps which can work well both on 2-in-1 devices and tablets ... and of course save all the money they are paying Intel at the moment. I doubt much will change for pure desktop apps, other than the ISA.

Re:Who wants this?

[grub]

Do you run open source firmware on your PC, various chips, etc.?

Re:Who wants this?

[Freischutz]

Thats weird. You run a closed source OS on your Mac. Freedom doesn't seem very important to you.

Contrary to popular belief, Apple's macOS is open source: https://opensource.apple.com/ right up to and including the lates macOS release.

Re:Who wants this?

[SurenEnfiajyan]

Mac OS is partially open source. The open source parts are mostly low level stuff, the rest 85+% of GUI / high level parts are closed source.

Re:Who wants this?

[b0s0z0ku]

The problem is that Apple actually WAS a pioneer of only allowing people to run approved software. I know closed-source is a different thing, but they may well be moving in that direction.

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

Yes. What about you?

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

No it isn't. That is the problem with the "open source" term. The biggest spyware on the planet calls itself "open source". Until the bits that ship on your Mac match what is in the sourcecode, it isn't "open source".

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

Yes, it is equally as bad. If you don't care about Freedom, that is your business.

Re:Who wants this?

[grub]

Me? Nah.

You might run OpenBIOS. Do you have the source code the firmware on your network, graphics, USB, Bluetooth, etc. add ons?

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

Yes I do. Do you?

Re:Who wants this?

[grub]

Cool, I've wanted a pure, open machine for ages. What do you run and recommend for something that will give me complete source for all operational aspects?

Re:Who wants this?

[torkus]

If they plan on cross-compatible apps, then one of them would need to be re-complied/re-coded. I don't see their iOS world taking that hit given it's some ridiculous number of times larger than the OSX world.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I definitely don't want the iPad version of all my apps to be my desktop version.

Re:Who wants this?

[torkus]

Freedom? Is this now a (insert political hot topic) debate or are we still talking about CPUs?

On OSX root access is still permitted. There are some minor limitations, but generally you can run whatever software you want including a different OS, VM, etc. iOS doesn't allow any of that and you're completely locked to their walled garden and the dumbed-down version of apps there. No. Thanks. It's good for what it's good for, but it's not good for everything.

I'm kind of (not) surprised Apple is considering making this mistake. It's not like going intel helped their computer line at all /eyeroll

Re:Who wants this?

[torkus]

Nah. I prefer to be able to use my computer.

Re:Who wants this?

[jwhyche]

Freedom comes in many forms. Sometimes the freedom people seek is freedom from association with OpenSource Zealots

This can be labeled as a troll but there is truth here. I've encountered several people that don't want anything to do with linux because they have encountered some opensource zealot.

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

https://puri.sm/

Re:Who wants this?

[grub]

Thanks! I'm leery of most PC hardware. OpenBSD opened my eyes to 'binary blobs' many years ago.

Re:Who wants this?

[Rockoon]

It will be nothing but crickets now that you got the liars lies nailed down.

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

And the corporations prefer that too. Good job!

Re:Who wants this?

[serviscope_minor]

I've encountered several people that don't want anything to do with linux because they have encountered some opensource zealot.

Then you've met some pretty dumb people. After they meet a Windows zealot and a Mac zealot they'll have to swear off computers entirely.

Re:Who wants this?

[jwhyche]

Well all zealots, computer, religious, or otherwise, tend to be pretty dumb people to begin with. People who go to purchase a Mac usually know what they are going after to start with, so an encounter with a Mac zealot tends to be a non-issue. As for Windows, it being the dominate player in the field the zealots are spread pretty thin. That and most windows zealots don't have to preach because to most people windows is a done deal.

Re:Who wants this?

[Pinky's Brain]

I doubt something like Media Composer would get any tablet-mode version. I suspect they will keep desktop only APIs much the same as they are, just introducing new APIs to develop 2-in-1 applications which can do both.

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

The source is contained on the laptop itself. There is no magic here, it is Debian with carefully chosen hardware to avoid binary blobs.

Re:Who wants this?

[Quarters]

The company that designs and builds the laptop you prefer to use is focused on devices for consumption, not creation. They will most definitely make the laptop line closer in behavior to the iPad line and not the other way around.

Re:Who wants this?

[serviscope_minor]

Well all zealots, computer, religious, or otherwise, tend to be pretty dumb people to begin with.

Yep.

As for Windows, it being the dominate player in the field the zealots are spread pretty thin

I've met plenty of zealots in my time. Funnily enough probably more a decade or more ago when windows was hugely dominant. Now it's borderline irrelevant in some industry sectors.

That and most windows zealots don't have to preach because to most people windows is a done deal.

It is? You must work in a different industry from me then. Linux is very dominant in the cloud services space, for example.

Re:Who wants this?

[Freischutz]

Mac OS is partially open source. The open source parts are mostly low level stuff, the rest 85+% of GUI / high level parts are closed source.

He said closed source OS, the GUI is not part of the OS, it is user-land software.

Re:Who wants this?

[Freischutz]

The biggest spyware on the planet calls itself "open source".

You must mean Android which, according to that definition, is also not 'open source'.

Re:Who wants this?

[Freischutz]

> Contrary to popular belief, Apple's macOS is open source:

No, Darwin is open source. macOS != Darwin.

Darwin is an open-source Unix operating system first released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, Mach, and other free software projects. Darwin forms the core set of components upon which macOS (previously OS X and Mac OS X), iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and audioOS are based. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Who wants this?

[DontBeAMoran]

ARM does not requires iOS. Apple probably already has macOS running on ARM laptop prototypes.

Re:Who wants this?

[AHuxley]

Security services. One CPU thats part of the brand doing your user crypto.

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

MacOSX is a closed source OS. You are confused. You are probably thinking of a kernel (or not thinking at all)

Re:Who wants this?

[110010001000]

Exactly. And Chrome.

Re:Who wants this?

[Waccoon]

The nice thing about Windows is that the community doesn't pretend that their platform is awesome. You need a 3rd-party tool to fix anything, but everyone still tries damn hard to fix things because they all agree it sucks.

Re:Who wants this?

[jwhyche]

things because they all agree it sucks

Do you have a link to where it can be proven that "they all agree that it sucks?" Lets see, I don't think it sucks so therefor you line that "they all agree that it sucks" is clearly wrong on that example alone. I'm sure Bill Gates doesn't agree with you that it "sucks" so there is another example. Oh I know someone we can ask if it sucks. No, never mind he is dead so his option doesn't count. Oh look, here is my cat. I'll ask her. She says "meow." I'm not sure if that is a ringing endorsement of windows or not. I think she was just happy I was scratching her back.

So as you can see your statement, "because they all agree it sucks" is clearly not true. You probably should refrain from making such absurd statements in the future.

Have a awesome day.

Re:Who wants this?

[mjwx]

I don't want my Mac to behave like my iPad. I don't want a dumbed-down experience where I can't do anything that Apple doesn't permit.

What you want is irrelevant. Apple tells you what you will have.

Best chip designers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple probably have the best chip designers in the world. A10X is far superior to any rival and theyâ(TM)ll probably do the same for desktop type computing.

Re: Best chip designers?

[cyber-vandal]

But they can't figure out how to turn off "smart" punctuation by default.

Re:Best chip designers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm sure they will start from ZERO and overtake AMD and Intel.

There is a truism, "the last 10% takes 90% of your resources". I'm sure they can whip up some processor that can take them up to the 90% mark. But that last 10% is what AMD and Intel do for a living, day in and day out., and they do it better than anybody. Apple is in for a rude awakening, and any company so arrogant will deserve its comeuppance.

Re:Best chip designers?

[MikeMo]

Yeah, I'm sure they will start from ZERO and overtake AMD and Intel.

That’s what Palm and Nokia said in 2007...

Re: Best chip designers?

[harperska]

To be fair, nobody thought they could start from zero and overtake established smartphone vendors like Palm and Blackberry, either. Not to say they will absolutely be successful in this venture, but I wouldnâ(TM)t dismiss them out of hand, either.

Re:Best chip designers?

[HornWumpus]

It's not hard to get to 100% of 'good enough'. But Apple won't like the margins in the CPU space.

Apple isn't after the servers or the gamers. Those spaces are where the last 10% might matter.

It's asymptotic. Each '50% there' takes 'half your resources', better find a resource stream.

Re: Best chip designers?

[omnichad]

That's Slashdot's problem, really. No one else needs backward compatibility on that. UTF-8 supports it just fine.

Re: Best chip designers?

[torkus]

For one, they didn't start from zero. Apple had enormous experience designing hardware including computers, UI, and portable devices - you might remember the iPod?

The pieces were already there and they out sourced much of the hardware (ex. the famous click wheel). They are (were) a great integrator that used creativity and cutting edge tech to deliver an amazing product.

They certainly do not have the expertise in-house to design a CPU from the ground up. Even the A11 SoC is still ARM based. I won't say they can't, but they certainly aren't in the same league this time. If they bought AMD, which is completely within their financial ability, that changes the whole perspective and gives them a ton of relevant IP.

Re: Best chip designers?

[omnichad]

And before someone else comes along claiming that text boxes need to turn off smart quotes so you can properly express feet and inches, the proper symbol there is prime and double prime - not straight single and double quotes.

Re:Best chip designers?

[omnichad]

the last 10% takes 90% of your resources

If those resources can be bought with cash, Apple has more than 10x the amount Intel has.

Thought April Fools was yesterday...

[Anonymous Coward]

This should mark the last gasp of professional's use of Macs...

Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I know! They could use PowerPC based chips!
That way they could re-package all their pre-2006 software as new.
Nothing say "the future" like software that comes on 3.5" inch floppy disks...

Re:Idea

[Hognoxious]

Nothing say "the future" like software that comes on 3.5" inch floppy disks...

Claim they give more visceral transients and an artisanal soundstage and the hipsters will be all over them.

Re:Idea

[DamnOregonian]

I find that floppies just sound warmer

Re:Idea

[powerlord]

Once they introduced the hard shell of the 3.5" disk it really removed a lot of the soundstage that was inherent in the 5 1/4" model.

Still, if you insist on going that route, Cassette at least provides a reasonably diverse dynamic range while preserving the warmth of the Zeros and Ones as they were originally compiled.

Re:Idea

[HornWumpus]

I only fap to dithered 16 color porn when I can't find ASCII line printer porn.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Z00L00K]

ARM is more likely today.

But they could as well be reviving the 68K line.

It makes total sense...

[MindPrison]

...If Apple want to keep their exclusivity and a niche market, they will have to go on their own, completely.

Today, An Apple computer is nothing different from a glorified designer laptop with a PC (typical Intel based architecture) inside, which means you could basically without too much effort just run Windows or Linux on it.

What Apple has gotten much grief for, is that they often use 2-4 year old hardware, instead of bleeding edge hardware. While this is usually good for "tried and tested", meaning that it will result in a relatively stable, well supported computer - it's offering very little new to its userbase, but who are the Apple userbase, this is what you got to take a closer look at:

The Apple userbase is often designers, musicians, artists, film people and basically people working within the creative industry. They like design, and they're willing to pay for it. It may not be the latest, greatest or best - but it sure looks the part, and it gives them a sense of community as they're not "mainstream", but still like to see themselves as the ones considering the computer just a tool, an accessory - and secondary to their work.

They don't want hassle with updates, compatibility issues, endless drivers - they just want to get about their workday without getting into "the computers" themselves.

Apple GET that, but in order to stay really truly "off" the rest, they have to find their own way again...

Re:It makes total sense...

[Hognoxious]

The Apple userbase is often designers, musicians, artists, film people and basically people working within the creative industry.

I think it used to be. Now it's people pretending to be those things.

Re:It makes total sense...

[MeNeXT]

You describe an Apple ecosystem not an artist, musician, designer, film ecosystem. People need more than Apple proprietary stuff they need to get a job done. As of yet I haven't seen anyone who uses exclusively apple products. In most cases the iOS products are limited and restricted.

Re:It makes total sense...

[King_TJ]

I have to disagree with you there. I work for a company that does communications marketing and they're primarily on Macs. They most assuredly are not "just pretending" to be designers or artists.

I also took a tour of some of the major recording studios in Nashville last year and guess what? They still used Macs almost exclusively, even when doing so required special effort (such as finding custom rack mount kits to mount the "trash can" 2013 Mac Pro in their acoustically isolated rack enclosures).

The Apple userbase may be declining in areas it traditionally dominated, like the education sector and 3D animation work. But the creative fields, in general, are still big customers for Apple products.

I don't think it's necessarily bad if Apple parts ways with Intel and makes its own CPUs .... but as others said, the whole switch to Intel enabled a lot of possibilities with running Windows in a dual boot mode, or ensuring virtualization software worked 100%. I think that's a big negative if Apple discards it as unnecessary with the new chips.

Re:It makes total sense...

[sfcat]

I have to disagree with you there. I work for a company that does communications marketing and they're primarily on Macs. They most assuredly are not "just pretending" to be designers or artists.

I also took a tour of some of the major recording studios in Nashville last year and guess what? They still used Macs almost exclusively, even when doing so required special effort (such as finding custom rack mount kits to mount the "trash can" 2013 Mac Pro in their acoustically isolated rack enclosures).

The Apple userbase may be declining in areas it traditionally dominated, like the education sector and 3D animation work. But the creative fields, in general, are still big customers for Apple products.

I don't think it's necessarily bad if Apple parts ways with Intel and makes its own CPUs .... but as others said, the whole switch to Intel enabled a lot of possibilities with running Windows in a dual boot mode, or ensuring virtualization software worked 100%. I think that's a big negative if Apple discards it as unnecessary with the new chips.

That's true for some types of creative work, and not true for others. For 3-D graphics, you would be laughed out of the building for demanding a Mac. For 2-D stuff however, its mostly Macs. Here's the rub though, you can do 2-D on Windows just fine but can't do 3-D on the Macs. So if you do both then you have to have a PC. If you do music, then its mostly Mac (latency from anti-virus kills the Windows offerings). The view we engineers have about "creatives", comes from engineers often working with 2-D graphic designers (or UX designers) who often only do 2-D graphics and often use a Mac as a result. However, as the tools and artforms progress, it will inevitably be pulled in the 3-D direction both for artistic reasons and because creatives will be pushed to do multiple modes for a common concept to save money. So this doesn't bode well for the Apple in the video and graphics market(s) unless they start offering decent graphics cards in their laptops again but I don't really see that happening right now.

Re:It makes total sense...

[Hognoxious]

How do you get the raw material in and the finished product out without any ports?

I called it!

[Thud457]

Apple Computer
-- proudly going out of business since 1976!

Re:Everything old is new again

[DigiShaman]

ABC

Apple Bodacious Chip

Yup

[Ryanrule]

Here comes macOS. Only runs on macs, and macs only run it.

Finally!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to get my G5 MacBook Pro! I've been waiting a long, long time for this!

How well will virtualization work?

[Anonymous Coward]

How well will Intel virtualization work with these? If I can't run my various VirtualBox VMs on this, no sale.

Re:How well will virtualization work?

[krray]

I'm with you ... and THEN what???

Mac's going Intel was the selling point to put them all over the office at work. A handful of people (myself included) have to run Windows -- for accounting software (which I chose). There's the corner -- just boxed myself into it I guess (?)

Most of the employees here have -0- use for Windows (and don't run it accordingly). Once in a blue moon we'll hit a website for a bid, to collect money, whatever ... that absolutely REQUIRES Internet Explorer (not Edge thankfully).

Fuck.

Re:How well will virtualization work?

[powerlord]

Windows is also aiming for running on an ARM processor, so as long as they have similar standards, they may still be able to Dual Boot?

Re:How well will virtualization work?

[BoRegardless]

The minute Apple stops me running Parallels or other virtualization EFFECTIVELY and quickly, I'm out.

Then it is back to the Intel PCs. Probably Boxx.

This was inevitable

[SuperKendall]

Apple has learned; first from Motorola, now Intel, this deep truth:

Over a long enough timeframe any chip maker is an incompetent asshole.

Of course, by taking this action, Apple will become more and more a chip maker themselves... hmm.

Re:Say goodnight

[FictionPimp]

The company I work for is already moving to linux. Dell has a nice line of Ubuntu supported notebooks and many of our devs and engineers have requested them. I think our office will be Mac free in 2 years.

Unanswered questions

[93 Escort Wagon]

It’s not like we haven’t heard these rumors for years now... we even heard stuff like this before Apple move to Intel. But still, some things are out of their control.

- Will Adobe play along, or walk away? Much as I hate Adobe, they’re a necessary evil when it comes to doing real work on many Macs.

- How locked down will these “computers” be? Right now, I can install just about anything I want... and I have a bash/zsh shell, to boot.

- What about the few Apple pro apps which remain? They’ve already shed a huge number of customers - it seems unlikely the remaining nes will tolerate another backwards jump.

One would hope that Apple would do their homework on this, since people who still use a laptop or desktop generally have very different requirements than people who use an iPad with a keyboard. A “laptop” which is just a glorified iPad would serve no purpose.

Re:Unanswered questions

[tgetzoya]

I have no inside knowledge of this, but I think I can answer your questions with some business logic.

1. Adobe CS/Apple Pro apps will work on Mac Pro hardware with XEON. So you'll pay $10k for professional work. You will, because Apple.
2. iOS/MacOS will become the same thing for non Mac-Pro devices. If you want the full power of MacOS, see above.

I read the article and while it says "All Macs" I am extremely skeptical that Apple would abandon the full horsepower that Intel gives. Then again, it is Apple and I am probably dead wrong.

Re:Unanswered questions

[b0s0z0ku]

Or you'll pay $2k for an Intel machine that will run the same software for Windows 95% as well... Apple will be throwing away a lot of middle-of-the-line professional market share.

Re:Unanswered questions

[omnichad]

All Apple Pro apps except the new FCP X and Logic Pro require not just Intel, but 10.12 or earlier (no High Sierra). So you won't be buying new equipment at all, just repairing it.

Re:Unanswered questions

[imgod2u]

With modern toolchains, I question how much porting is really required for the vast majority of software (including Adobe) these days. It seems the things that actually need to be "ported" from ecosystem to ecosystem is the UI/UX flow (works differently on a small touchscreen than a laptop with keyboard/mouse).

I doubt there's much architectural-specific code in Photoshop these days...if any at all.

Re:Unanswered questions

[omnichad]

Given how many of Apple's own (unsupported) pro apps broke between 10.12 and 10.13, maybe not porting but loads of patches.

Re:Unanswered questions

[walllaby]

Much as I hate Adobe, they’re a necessary evil when it comes to doing real work on many Macs.

Not entirely true, depending on your design industry sector. Raster and vector-based graphics editing will always be a necessity, but web designers can get away with focusing on the latter. That means programs like Sketch and Affinity Designer can fill in the gap quite nicely. Online raster-based photo editors like Pixlr can do your photo sizing and cropping for you, which is 80% of the job on the web. Chances are your clients are uploading their own photos, so it behooves you to have some sort of setup that takes your typical digital camera photo and sizes it properly for your home page "hero" headers.

I'm a designer and I use Adobe's CC suite, but mostly because I'm already familiar with Illustrator, InDesign, and PhotoShop. Along with Adobe's other apps, it gives me the potential to produce anything, even if I'm only using 10% of their apps, and could probably find alternatives.

As long as no one suggest using The Gimp. Fuck Gimp.

Re:Unanswered questions

[imgod2u]

But that's binaries that needed a recompile. I'm questioning how hard it really is to just run it through LLVM/GCC/XCode to get an app running on a different architecture.

Re:Unanswered questions

[omnichad]

But that's binaries that needed a recompile.

It's the same architecture and yet still needs a recompile. I'm not sure if that agrees with what you're saying.

The real question

[smooth wombat]

Will we still have to throw out our Mac after three years when something goes bad because we can't replace it?

How much will all those extra welds add to the weight of their MACs?

Walled prison ... I mean garden ... strategy:

[b0s0z0ku]

Once they make the move ...
(1) Any new native apps will likely ONLY run if they're "approved" by Apple, meaning that they are either from the App Store, or if they are signed with an Apple certificate.
(2) They'll drop support for "legacy" apps within 2-3 years.

Closing the walls of the walled garden: complete.

Re:Walled prison ... I mean garden ... strategy:

[david_thornley]

They can't do that and keep support for developers. I've seen no sign that Apple wants to restrict desktops and laptops to a walled garden. They want to provide one, and they're better at it than Microsoft, but unless they want to remove development software entirely they can't go mandatory walled garden.

iOS already runs on x86. Why not just 2nd compile?

[JoeyRox]

It's trivial to run iOS apps natively on x86 chips - Apple already does so with their iPhone emulator in Xcode. Why not just have Xcode perform two compiles for iOS apps - one for ARM and the other for x86?

Kalamata

[Tsolias]

has great olives and olive oil, but here in Agrinio we produce even better.(civil war now)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

anyhow, I was looking forward for an AMD custom chip in those situation, but don't think that Intel is out of the door. They depend a lot on intel. What about macs with Xeons? What about Macs with high end desktop cpus? I am not throwing amd out of the equation because amd has IPs and products out in the wild based on Arm... and never forget that amd is ready to supply with embedded gpu solutions.

Re:Say goodnight

[harperska]

The only reason Macs are usable to people who dual boot is because you can dual boot.

Your use case isn't the only use case.

Re:Everything old is new again

[HornWumpus]

PPC was a partnership. IIRC IBM, Motorola and Apple.

Apple isn't going to open a foundry.

I suspect someone had Intel shorted and used Bloomburg like the whores they are.

Isn't 'unified experience' what got us Windows 8?

inevitable

[profssrfink]

This has been an ongoing story fro a few years now. Anyone paying attention to Ax development has seen how fast they have become. They are putting up x86 numbers (in some cases) while running in a passively cooled no ventilation phone. Pretty amazing. But Apple has an issue using third party products. Not because they don't like the tech, but because they can't release features until someone else's silicon supports it. That isn't something a company planning on shipping 100+ million devices a year needs to worry about. Intel and AMD showed some major vulnerabilities in their chip designs, and probably lost a lot of support from companies like Apple regarding those vulnerabilities. Apple knows it can design and market its own chips now. No doubt they will take care of the backward x86 compatibility through virtualization. Imagine 2 or 3 or even four A10X chips running in a laptop, sucking almost no power, running custom GPU tech designed to work in a low power environment. Imagine 5-10 A10X chips running in a workstation spitting out 2-3 Teraflops of compute and supporting eGPUs for additional compute capacity and imagine Apple refreshing their lineup more regularly because they didn't have to wait for Intel to develop XYZ features in their chips for their custom boards. Not to mention RISC V chips are getting some attention from major companies as well. Apple knows RISC processing well. I think all of this points to the fact that x86 is starting to show its age and major companies are looking for alternatives. Apple just happens to be sitting on 20+ years of chip development experience and manufacturing acumen to pull off making it themselves.

Re:inevitable

[DontBeAMoran]

This guy gets it.

Lag...

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

You guys do realize that the news is THIRD hand, posted on April SECOND, which could mean that the information originated on April FIRST... just saying.

Might as well kill the whole macbook pro line

[Anonymous Coward]

No real geeks will really buy macbook pro if it comes with ARM. Might as well buy a chromebook. When geeks are unhappy they will start talking crap about apple to all their friends and next thing you know Macs will be associated with computer illiterate people only.

Apple can't beat Intel on high end chips. Hell, Apple can't beat AMD on high end chips. Apple can't beat AMD/Nvidia on graphics either. Sure they did well in mobile graphics, but that's competing with Qualcomm.

Apple is lost. It's pretty obvious that they lost many of their best people.

Re:Might as well kill the whole macbook pro line

[imgod2u]

"Macs will be associated with computer illiterate people only."

When, in the history of Apple, has this ever not been true? It's literally their slogan: "it just works".

Ugh

[s0nspark]

If true this is one more reason I'm glad I got off the Apple train and am back on Linux. Apple is growing too full of themselves.

If I were doing this

[AlanObject]

It seems like a counter-intuitive movement but I can think of some things I would wish for if I could spec this design from scratch. For example:

* Hardware execution of x86 instruction set to support VMs compiled for x86.

* Tightly coupled 3d graphics support with the ability to expand graphics memory.

* Encryption/Decryption support.

* Power saving logic and features as good as ARM

* All integrated peripherals. Your portable devices as close to one-chip-on-a-PCB as possible.

* At least 64 qbits.

Now I realize that all of this already exists in one form or another in existing architectures but not (as far as I know) in one set of silicon devices (from small to large) tailored to Apple's intended view to an fully integrated OS and tool chain base. Even if it were available, if Apple could save $5 per unit production cost by doing this it would pay for itself in greater profit margin in no time.

And what else is Apple going to do with the billions of dollars they have stockpiled anyway?

Re:Everything old is new again

[93 Escort Wagon]

PPC anyone?

I’m finally gonna get that G5 PowerBook!

Re:Say goodnight

[rjstanford]

Yup. I bought a 2016 touch bar model, and it SUCKS. Wish I could have got the previous model, as that was the last worthwhile MBP. If they do this, and basically force everything to go through their App Store, I'm done with them. I guess I'll go Linux, Sure as hell don't want to go back to Windows. And yes, I have a Win10 laptop, for a couple of Win-only apps, and it STILL sucks.

Its not as if the processor choice has anything to do with the application installation policies. I mean, sure, they might choose to do app-store-only at some point (although I personally doubt it), but they could do that on intel or leave things wide open on A14 (or whatever).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Different analysis

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been in the works since the start of the LLVM project.

A few years back, Apple and the LLVM project made the announcement that code compiled for x64 with CLang was finally able to run unmodified on the ARM architecture. By compiling into an intermediate language, Apple has made it possible to write code that should run unmodified on any LLVM platform so long as all libraries are present to support it and that the code doesnâ(TM)t depend on hand written assembly or code which needs direct access to the stack for the platform ABI.

With the transition from PPC to x86, a lot of transitional APIs such as Carbon were introduced. Also, the principle of fat binaries were made common place in such that each application or framework could be compiled for two or more platforms. Consider that Apple had Yellow Box running in house on x86, PPC and Sparc.

Over the years, Apple has progressively deprecated any API which was too tightly bound to a single architecture one by one. All code not compiled with LLVM has been slowly killed off. The App Store on IOS and MacOS have set restrictions as to what system calls could be made. Most performance oriented libraries such as QuickTime have been altered, enhanced, etc... to slowly eliminate the need for hand written code. Apple has bullied developers into never writing Mac targeted compilers and instead focused them on compiling to IL or Swift/Obj-C first.

Just like Microsoft has been trying to universally move to .NET for a retargettable platform, Apple has moved to LLVM.

There is no technical reason why Mac couldnâ(TM)t run on ARM today. Iâ(TM)d imagine Apple has had Mac OS running on an iPad Pro for some time. The main difference would probably be the type of SSD they employed.

Performance wise, current Apple chips should have more than enough CPU to handle tasks at least as well as the m3 chips in the Mac Book. 4GB or RAM should be enough for most users as well. PCIe for M.2 storage should be a trivial change for Apple. And Apple has already said they are preparing their own GPU core. I would expect that GPU core to be comparable to Intelâ(TM)s from the beginning. Unlike other GPUs, OpenCL and even most of OpenGL are optional as Apple will dictate the OS graphics API. Of course they already have a strong enough following among game developers that if they cut corners, the developers will suck it up and continue.

What most people mention is a problem is that Mac has a huge dual boot audience. I would expect an agreement with MS or Amazon to happen to push cloud based virtual desktops. Many enterprises get security by using Mac because malicious Mac software doesnâ(TM)t tend to screw with virtual machines. So they deliver the enterprise desktop on a VM and let the user mess with their Mac however they want.

What I expect to really shake things up will be an announcement from Apple to support Windows for ARM as an application/subsystem. Then I expect to see Microsoft support their x86 emulator possibly with acceleration on Mac. Unlike Transmeta. Apple working with Microsoft could easily make their x86 JIT perform better than real hardware. This has to do with how branch prediction, pipelines and cache work.

I honestly donâ(TM)t see anything particularly amazing about this other than the long time it took to get here. Apple must have assessed that the lost business will be offset by the profits gained. Of course, I have been hoping to buy a new Mac Mini this year, my 2012 model is getting old. If Apple releases something âoerespectableâ for $500 or so, Iâ(TM)m in. I only need it for testing Mac builds.

Re:Different analysis

[serviscope_minor]

Apple working with Microsoft could easily make their x86 JIT perform better than real hardware. This has to do with how branch prediction, pipelines and cache work.

that sounds deeply unlikely, or Inte would aready be doing it.

Re:Different analysis

[bjb]

The Mac has no game community so no game developers to worry about.

I can't say that I know the whole community since there are games you can buy for the Mac outside of Steam, but the latest statistics on Steam report about 1.64% of their users are on Mac.

http://store.steampowered.com/...

Re:iOS already runs on x86. Why not just 2nd compi

[Marillion]

That's what they already do. Xcode has compilers that target both ARM and Intel. When you run the iPhone simulator it's running the version that came out of the x86 (x64 really) compilers.

More like Microsoft Metro I think

[goombah99]

MIcrosoft tried to unify the OS on desktops and phones. Well that stank. really screwed things up for a whole OS generation till Win 10 go things back on track.

THis seems like courting the same disaster for apple.

the PPC isn't as good an analogy, though it's not bad. In the ebb and flow of things, PPC was a better chip than intel for much of it's heyday. It eventually fell behind.

Samsungs 8 core processors seem to be stuggling too. and Nvidia keeps wanting to become a CPU make as well.
THe problem is that market size matters in the processor world. Intel dominates CPUs and Nvidia dominates GPUs so most compiler and software targets those.

But remember ARM. Who started ARM? well Apple was one of them. And now ARM is back and eating Intel's lunch.

I think what will save Apple's bacon here is the effer they have put into making good compilers and even good languages (swift). With that and the abstractions of the OS, it's no longer going to be a software title dominated contest. All titles can be compiled for all platforms so it will matter less who makes the GPU or CPU.

Re: More like Microsoft Metro I think

[Anonymous Coward]

Win 10 got things back on track.

Bwahahahaa... oh, you crack me up.

Re:More like Microsoft Metro I think

[serviscope_minor]

But remember ARM. Who started ARM?

Acorn. ARM stood for Acorn Risc Machines. Apple got involved when it was spun out.

Re:More like Microsoft Metro I think

[serviscope_minor]

ARM stands for Advanced Risc Machines. ACORN was a different company.

Bro did you even read the link you sent me? The article starts:

ARM, previously Advanced RISC Machine, originally Acorn RISC Machine, is a...

Re:Everything old is new again

[Megane]

As one of the early ARM licensees, Apple has a license allowing them to make their own original chip designs. And as I understand it, they do, in the chips the use for the iPhone/iPad. Most other ARM chip makers have to use a standard core from ARM, then they build their own stuff around it.

I don't doubt this story at all

[rickb928]

Apple hasn't made a secret of their intentions to homogenize the experience, the OS, the apps along their product lines. iPhones drive the business, iPads are a shrinking market, Macs are still busy, and Apple TV is probably better defined as 'we wish it was viable', but they keep their feet wet in it. Speakers are an also-ran. Siri needs to be upgraded to offer value to Mac users.

Making an 'A" style CPU makes sense, and developers who can't learn iOS will find life hard for other reasons. It remains to be seen if iOS is useful for traditionally desktop apps, but this could encourage devs to start building cloud-dependent apps for Macs, and that lets Macs be lightweight and have longer battery life. Add an LTE modem and that's that.

I was at an Intel facility the day Dell announced they would sell servers with AMD processors. You would have thought people had lost their firstborn. The rumor that a team member had been fired just because they were laughing in the cafeteria was partly true; they weren't in the cafeteria. Miserable day. I wonder what's going on there today...

I'm not there any more. Completed the project.

Re:I don't doubt this story at all

[b0s0z0ku]

"Cloud dependent lightweight apps?" No fucking thanks. Part of the charm of a PERSONAL computer is that I can work on it and keep my work confidential. Not "care and share" parts of my work with a "cloud service provider." Also, it still works without Internet access. On a plane, while in a rural area with poor coverage, whatever, abroad where my connection is limited to 128kbit. Local SSD storage doesn't use much battery life. I'll take the tradeoff in battery life to maintain my privacy and be able to use the device without 4G/wifi everywhere.

Re:I don't doubt this story at all

[h8sg8s]

Why would a prospective Mac user want to buy now - instead of just waiting? This leak may have cost Apple more than Intel.

Re:I don't doubt this story at all

[b0s0z0ku]

Because they want a computer, not a glorified, locked-down iPad?

Re:Say goodnight

[apoc.famine]

After 3 years of waiting for a decent upgrade to the MBP, last year I ditched Apple and bought a Dell Precision laptop running Ubuntu. It's got some quirks, but in general, I'm far more pleased with it than I had been with Macs for the last few years.

Re:Ummm no.

[MachineShedFred]

He's likely referring to the certification by UNIX labs - not that it's a full license of UNIX System V.

After all, the XNU kernel that macOS runs on stands for "X is Not UNIX".

Not the same level of switch

[SuperKendall]

You're joking right? Compatibility with what? A whole version of Adobe's creative suite was missed on Mac due to one of their transitions

But they made it. And with a codebase that is much more easily shifted to other architectures, as they had to support Intel and PPC for a while...

Apple has had over ten years of supporting tools that easily moved between Arm and Intel processors. I do not think the next switch will be nearly as much of an effort as the PPC switch was.

I wonder if software vendors will continue to support the Mac line.

That's pretty humorous considering how many high-level creative and technical professionals use macs. Go to any conference and look around you at the laptops they are using...

There's some real effort involved in pleasing the fruit's decision of the day.

Right because this was SO SUDDEN a change, in that it's many years from now and Apple last changed platforms over ten years ago...

Re:Not the same level of switch

[thegarbz]

But they made it.

They were late with it. The once leading release cycle of Mac shifted to being behind the PC, and then finally on par with it.
At least until the Cocoa transition where two whole releases didn't get 64bit support on Mac.

That's pretty humorous considering how many high-level creative and technical professionals use macs.

I would be laughing if that comment wasn't something from back in 2000. Mac used to be *the* platform for creative professionals. Now it's just another choice and often not even a first one. There was a mass exodus during both previous transitions, the bigger one being the Cocoa one because of performance reasons that took several years to resolve.

Right because this was SO SUDDEN a change, in that it's many years from now and

This change is has just been announced on a far more "sudden" timeframe than all the previous ones.

Apple last changed platforms over ten years ago...

Architecture yes, APIs no. Apple has fucked with developers a few times in the past 10 years.

I'd say you're cherry picking history to help your argument, but even the bits you cherry picked are good examples of how badly things go when changes like this are introduced.

Re:Say goodnight

[powerlord]

Considering I can count the number of times I've dual-booted any Mac I've owned over the last 15 years on Zero hands, I'd tend to disagree.

Now, the amount of times I've fired up a Virtual Machine to run something/check something, etc? ... lots more times.

Something has changed between then and now

[mbkennel]

The iPhone.

Apple has much more experience and importantly, money, now than it did with PowerPC in 1998.

And today, Apple makes ARM-instruction-set CPUs/modems/GPUs integrated system on a chip as good as, or better than long-time chip designers, Qualcomm & Samsung. Intel is not competitive here despite major investment.

It also learned from that event as well: do it yourself, if your partners don't have the same interest that you do. Motorola and IBM didn't have an interest in the medium-performance low-power consumption mass-market priced design that's central to notebook computers. And that's what Apple has concentrated on with the iPhone fiercely.

Today, Apple has 100% of the chip design ability to do this for Mac---and the manufacturing capacity, as the Mac will be certainly lower sales numbers than iPhone. It's software design & developer relations that's the hard part.

Intel doubled Mac sales

[perpenso]

Going Intel doubled Mac sales, going back to non-Intel may cut it in half. Intel CPUs removed a huge barrier to Mac purchases, needing Windows support. Windows emulation was available with non-Intel but not practical due to having to emulate the CPU architecture. Going Intel made dual boot and effective emulation possible. Consumers no longer had to chose Mac or Windows, they could have both on the same box.

I'm going with the theory that Apple routinely builds macOS on non-Intel just to ensure the code base is portable. It also helps with debugging, a hard to manifest bug on one architecture/compiler pair can sometimes be easy to manifest on another.

Or maybe its a specialized version of the MacBook Air without support for Windows? The MacBook (non-Pro) and MacBook Air are getting a bit too similar. Perhaps the Air will be dropped or morph into a specialized high endurance machine (long battery life) for people who only want macOS?

Or maybe its Intel GPUs they are abandoning, not CPUs.

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[cayenne8]

Or maybe its a specialized version of the MacBook Air without support for Windows? The MacBook (non-Pro) and MacBook Air are getting a bit too similar. Perhaps the Air will be dropped or morph into a specialized high endurance machine (long battery life) for people who only want macOS?

Do chromebooks run Windows?

I just did a quick glance and on the chromebook page it didn't appear to run windows...so, if google can do it without win support, why not Apple?

Hell, looks more and more like MS is trying to get out of the windows game these days, so maybe by the time this thing might come about, losing win support might not be a big deal?

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[perpenso]

Chromebooks are partly the inspiration for this macOS-only Mac Air notion. Although an important distinction between the two is that users would still have the flexibility of macOS and installable native apps from the Mac App Store, fat-binaries with Intel and ARM support of course. I'm sort of thinking an education market focus. Schools possibly being more OK with Apple's productivity apps (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, etc) or Microsoft's and Google's online web-based counterparts.

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[blindseer]

Going Intel doubled Mac sales, going back to non-Intel may cut it in half.

I saw nothing in the article that stated explicitly that the new processors would be incompatible with Intel. It's quite possible they want to have better control of the Intel compatible processors they use. This kind of a shift is not taken lightly, and has likely been considered for a long time.

The current 64 bit architecture used by Apple, and shows in chips made by Intel, was developed by AMD. If Apple wants to make their own "Intel compatible" processor then they could enter a licensing agreement with AMD to do so. Intel might not be happy about this but I don't know what they'd do about it. Maybe they'd offer to fabricate these Apple designed chips under license from Apple?

What I got from the article was that Apple has been using portions of the iOS in their desktops for some elements of running the system and wants to share more code between the two. That could mean a lot of things besides abandoning the Intel architecture. It might mean designing a CPU with asymmetric processing. They might put an ARM core and three x86-64 cores on a die for desktops and laptops, That means not having to put a separate ARM processor in the computers like they do now. If they want to have some x86 fun on the iOS devices then maybe a chip with a two ARM cores and a x86 core on it.

Is it feasible or even desirable to have cores with different instruction sets on them in the same device? It must be because it sounds like Apple does this already, only the cores are in separate packages. If they believe the future is in having ARM running alongside x86 then they might just want to put those cores in the same package. To make that happen might mean having to design their own processors.

I've seen things like this proposed before. I seem to recall someone at least planning to build a laptop had a tablet mode where the tablet used a low power processor and tablet based OS for most tasks in that mode. If there were things that required more processing power, or was opened up to become a laptop, then the higher power processors was "woken up" so it could run a standard desktop OS.

Perhaps Apple wants a processor that is in every way compatible with what Intel offers but they just want a few "tweaks" so they can stay ahead of the performance curve. Apple is already in all kinds of technology licensing agreements so to pick and choose from, and to put them on a chip that they'd put in their own computers might not be that big of a burden for them. They might even be able to get in a deal to sell them to other computer makers, most likely after it's "old news" so as to not compete with their own products.

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[perpenso]

macOS and iOS have always shared a bit of code, various frameworks. iOS has some frameworks that are derivatives of macOS. Were these derivatives inherently necessary or the result of scheduling pressure to release some version of iOS? If the latter it would make sense to refactor this code and have a common framework between the two OS.

Or the additions are to support running iOS apps on macOS. These seems far more likely than some sort of unified desktop and mobile OS.

Regarding Apple outperforming Intel on 64-bit x86, doubtful. Been there, done that, with PowerPC. PowerPC had all the advantages, should have outperformed Intel, but Intel worked f'n miracles and got x86 to performance levels that no one ever expected. Apple is doing great things with ARM designs, but the competitors they face there aren't exactly in Intel's league. No one, not even Apple, has the resources to throw at x86 performance that Intel has. I think a more likely option would be that Apple wants their GPU integrated into the package rather than Intel's GPU.

Being their own tertiary source for x86 CPUs (Intel and AMD being sources 1 and 2) might make sense. However is getting x86 fab'ed as "easy" as getting A11's fab'ed? How much capacity of the necessary process level is there outside of Intel and AMD (Global Foundries in recent years)?

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[Space cowboy]

Apple are supposed to be "completely re-thinking" the Mac Pro. Maybe their solution is to have a "compute brick" plugin architecture, for which you can either have N fast cheap ARMs, or N fast expensive x86s. Similarly for GPUs...

Silicon Graphics did it with the Origin 350. With today's miniaturization, it could be possible to do it on a much smaller scale.

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[Dog-Cow]

It's a fairly-widely held belief amongst Apple-platform developers that the iOS frameworks are of a superior design to the macOS equivalents. Apple had the luxury of abandoning source compatibility with iPhoneOS, and they took complete advantage.

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[tigersha]

> I'm going with the theory that Apple routinely builds macOS on non-Intel just to ensure the code base is portable.

They certainly did this with the PPC->Intel change. When Steve announced Intel he said that MacOS has been running on Intel for 2+ years if I recall. Rumours to that effect had been around for quite a time.

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[hazydave]

It's not really close to the same situation.

When Apple went PowerPC, they were going there for performance, to support the huge percentage of the media content creation market they had wound up with, back when PCs didn't support such things very well. Motorola wasn't competitive with Intel, in a big part because in 1996 Apple was the last standing 68K personal computer company and didn't have the market share to sustain that kind of development for Motorola/Freescale.

The idea with the AIM Alliance was to promote a standard PowerPC platform (PReP, I mean CHRP, no PPCP, ok, maybe CHRP... ) to rival the Intel/IBM Ad Hoc standard. That was not a bad idea.

The problem was that, immediately, other comapanies did this better than Apple. Power Computing won a big chunk of the market. My company at the time, PIOS AG, launched the first 300MHz Mac Clone available. And then when SJ came back, it was curtains for the gherkins... he was the original closed, appliance computer, and it had to be "mine, mine, all mine". Of course, SJ neglected one of the main points of AIM -- enough volume to keep hardware competitive with Intel. So in 1997, it was absolutely obvious that Apple would eventually leave PowerPC. The PPC970 was nice... for about two weeks. Intel pretty much invented the way all successful modern chip comapnies work, with multiple tweaks of each technology and three independent teams always working on the Next Big Thing. So there's a new thing every six months. That's how nVidia won on GPUs... doing the Intel thing.

But these days, Apple's scared off their high end media content creation people by phoning it in on the Mac Pro. A new major upgrade every five years, whether you need it or not. They have built market share mostly from iOS coattail people... like my sister Kathy. Maybe this report is nothing, but it makes perfect sense for Apple to move macOS closer to iOS. It saves on development efforts. It lets them push out more advanced ARM tech before it's possible to make that low enough power. It will win more coattail customers. The average desktop PC user today doesn't need a faster CPU than a decent ten-year-old PC, and Apple's ARM cores are already faster than that.

Not my next computer, but then again, the last Macintosh I'd even have considered using was the one I was the CHRP machine I was developing back then Jobs put the kebash on the whole thing. Apple doesn't build serious computers today, anyway.

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[hazydave]

The 64-bit instruction set used in 64-bit x86 processors was originated by AMD. The ISA these days is a mix, since Intel designed most of the new instructions, SSE (AMD has a competing thing called 3D Now!), etc.

The machine architecture to run those instructions changes from processor family to processor family, and was certainly designed by Intel, when it's in an Intel chip. Both Intel and AMD use their own version of the technique first used in the NexGen's processors, the idea of converting x86 instructions on-the-fly into one or more RISC-like instructions. But just the idea (well, AMD bought NexGen and used some of their technology directly in the K6 series).

Re:Intel doubled Mac sales

[perpenso]

My recollection from those days was "twice the performance for half the price", that CISC designs like x86 were peaking and that only RISC could continue on with performance increases. Maybe they were correct, x86 went RISC behind the scenes with its x86 to micro-ops scheme.

If I remember correctly CHRP was the "holy grail" that would finally let us natively run MacOS and Windows on the same box. Something we didn't really get until Apple went Intel. Microsoft was ready, supported PREP but Apple failed to deliver their CHRP box. I was eagerly awaiting the ability to have it all (native Windows, Linux, MacOS). However Apple did not undermine PowerPC and cause low volume. High volume required Windows users to migrate from Intel to PowerPC. The WinNT4 retail CD offered Intel and PowerPC binaries, dual PowerPC Windows boxes were reviewed and compared against dual Intel (P6 ?) Windows boxes in Byte magazine and found to be better performing in general (not media creation specific), better at multitasking. But consumers chose Intel, price and compatibility won. Would there be more interest had MacOS been available, sure, but that "more interest" was still minor in the grand scheme of things. The post-Intel doubling of Mac sales still only took Apple from 3%'ish to 6%'ish overall, not enough for high volume.

Media creation moved from Mac to Windows long before the modern Mac Pro. Intel nullified PowerPC's general performance advantage with high clock rates and as Intel offered improved SIMD functionality over the years the performance gap in specialized media creation operations narrowed.

Yes, computers have far greater longevity these days, even low end PCs offering vastly more power than average users require. Double the factory installed RAM and 8 years is plausible even with keeping your OS and apps updated. OK, maybe a GPU upgrade around year 4 would help. Yes Apple does not offer serious performance to consumers, the Pro is ridiculously expensive, but few consumers need serious performance. Where I have seen performance issues on friend and family Macs its generally been due to the modest amount of RAM installed at the factory, not the CPU. To be fair no one was trying to run video games on these Macs, the gamers knew to have a Windows box. My 7 year old MacBook Pro (i5 2.4GHz) is doing fine running macOS and Windows 10 natively since I upgraded RAM to 8GB back when I initially purchased it. Other than native execution of ARM iOS binaries I see no performance advantage for an ARM CPU in a Mac; and to avoid performance problems with legacy Intel apps that ARM would likely need to be a coprocessor, the Mac having both Intel and ARM (isn't the MacBook Pro Touch Bar driven by an ARM?). Again, I could see a specialized MacBook Air with ARM only, running mostly Apple apps which would have native ARM binaries, for consumers with modest needs. But for MacBook and especially MacBook Pro I think native Intel execution will be needed for a while yet.

Re:Say goodnight

[harperska]

Reread my comment again more carefully and compare to the AC comment I am replying to, and you might find that you do in fact agree with me.

Re:Which ISA?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why was this post modded -1? It's an important question that nobody else in the thread has asked yet.

Bloomberg Misunderstood

[organgtool]

Apple is getting rid of Intel but they're not making their own chips. Instead, they're getting rid of processors in their computers entirely. Their new computers will be .2mm slimmer and processors will be made available via dongles for primitive people who refuse to let go of outdated technologies.

Re:Bloomberg Misunderstood

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL - for some reason that doesn't sound too far-fetched!

This story has been popping up for years...

[Tangential]

This story keeps popping up every year or two. Iâ(TM)ll need to see something more official from Apple before I waste many cycles on this.

Nothing to see here. Move along...

Optimizations

[Dirk Becher]

One of the reasons the PPC -> Intel transition was hailed back then was that a lot of processing intensive software ( games, video editing etc. ) had x86 optimized assembler code. If the underlying instruction sets are not available anymore, won't it mean a huge slowdown for a lot of this software?

Why does it have to be a switch?

[InvalidsYnc]

What if all they are really doing is adding some compatibility so that they can access an on board A series (A10, A11, whatever) processor that is placed into the mac (I'll call it the iOS processor)? At that point, they could have 100 percent complete compatibility for their iOS apps on Mac, without having to worry about writing emulators (not that they don't already have those), because the machine could run the iOS apps native on the iOS processor.

Re:Everything old is new again

[Tailhook]

IBM, Motorola and Apple.

Apple was the A in AIM Alliance.

People here are not understanding what this is

[Schnapple]

Man, people here on Slashdot are not understanding this report at all.

According to this report, Apple is planning on replacing the processor in the Mac with an ARM-based processor. That is all. This is something they have done, successfully, twice before. The original Macintosh from 1984 ran on the Motorola 68k architecture. In 1994 they switched to PowerPC and in 2005 they switched to x86. Now they're considering switching again to their own ARM-based chips like the ones they use in the iPad Pro. One would assume that the processors for the Mac would be more powerful than the ones they use in mobile devices and less concerned with things like heat since you can actually use fans and the user can be OK with a shorter battery life.

When they did this with the x86 switchover they told everyone in 2003 to start using Xcode and if they weren't, switch to it. When the switch occurred in 2005, everyone who was using Xcode could just do a recompile and their app was good to go. The version of Mac OS X that ran on Intel processors for years had a software layer called Rosetta which would allow you to continue to run your PowerPC-based apps for a while. In 2011 when they released Mac OS X 10.7 they removed it but that was a five year stretch where people could upgrade their apps. Some apps never got upgraded but that was part of the gamble Apple took.

However, nothing else about this announcement even begins to imply that anything else is going on. They're not trying to turn macOS into iOS. They're not adding a touch screen to the Mac. They're not looking to lock down the Mac and make it a walled off platform like iOS. They're not looking to make fundamental shifts in how the Mac operates. They're just looking to switch out the processor. And we know basically how they'll do it because they done it before. Twice.

Apple's roadmap on the Mac is beholden to Intel's roadmap and when Intel's roadmap gets delayed, Apple's roadmap gets delayed. This is not something they would be able to tolerate on the iPhone where they want to put a new one out every year. Switching from Intel to an Apple-made ARM processor will make one more item that they're not dependent on an outside company for.

Re:People here are not understanding what this is

[Zobeid]

I wonder if this is related in any way to the upcoming "phase-out" of 32-bit applications?

In an abstract, theoretical way, I like the idea of finally leaving X86 in the dustbin of history where it belongs. However, as you noted, Apple has changed the Mac's processor architecture twice before, and they changed the OS (from Mac OS Pre-X to X) and each time there was significant cost to the users. I'd hoped we were finally through with such upheavals for a while, but no It almost seems to be coded into Apple's corporate DNA that they just have to overthrow their own platform from time to time.

Re:People here are not understanding what this is

[Flaming Cowpie]

Apple has done a pretty good job in shooting themselves in the foot, in regards to the Pro Markets. Intel chips didn't make the current MacPro a 5 year old boat anchor, their non-expandable design did and their refusal to address the needs of their users.

Re:People here are not understanding what this is

[DontBeAMoran]

Yes there was a change between classic macOS and the new macOS (previously known as OS X). However, one of the CPU change (PowerPC to x86) happened on OS X and there was no real change for the end-user, things just continued to work (apart from old PowerPC apps that were now running via Rosetta).

Apple switching to their own A-series CPUs will probably be more of the same, you'll be running your old x86 OS X apps via "Rosetta 2". I wouldn't be surprised to see most apps running even faster if Apple can make a really powerful, 16-cores "A12" and some brilliant emulation tricks, using half the watts of the Intel equivalent.

Re:People here are not understanding what this is

[Zobeid]

Yes, Mac OS Pre-X programs continued running with Rosetta for a while. And 680x0 programs continued running PowerPC for a while, and then PPC programs continued running on X86 for a while until they didn't anymore, and it wasn't really all that long. The older programs were always phased out at some point. Programs that aren't still being actively maintained will be phased out, and sometimes that's a problem. Old programs sometimes get left behind by Windows or Linux, but not in the wholesale, aggressive way that it keeps happening on the Mac.

Perhaps the return of the dumb terminal.

[catsRus]

The heavy lifting will be done in their "cloud".

It's more general than that..

[Roger W Moore]

Over a long enough timeframe any chip maker is an incompetent asshole.

That's too specific, over a long enough timeframe any company is an incompetent asshole...and it is becoming increasingly apparent that Apple is no exception.

Linux FTW

[cheesyweasel]

2020... year of the linux desktop

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Been There

[PollyAnna]

I am nearly positive that Apple's priority will not be making their chip platform compatible with other operating systems. Why? Because that has never been Apple's priority. Apple has maintained its pristine hardware/software environment by limiting its responsibility. I love my MacBook Pro for many reasons, one being that I can run many operating systems on it. Apple has already made its own processors and it knew when to outsource and expand. I am disappointed that it is limiting its vision and going backwards.

Re:Which ISA?

[DontBeAMoran]

I think Apple will blow everyone away and use PCI instead of ISA.

May as well switch back to Linux

[mfearby]

I switched to Mac back when Ubuntu started doing freaky things with Unity, but with that abomination being killed off, it might be safe to switch back to Linux again (I think I'll just go pure Debian, thanks). I find that I'm only using Chrome and Open Office most of the time anyway, so I could easily make the switch again. I'm so glad I didn't convert all my spread sheets and documents to Numbers and Pages.

goodby finder / non store apps / pro users etc.

[Joe_Dragon]

goodby finder / non store apps / pro users etc.
adobe is about time for an Linux build of adobe CC.

does Apple's A-series have the pci-e needed?

[Joe_Dragon]

does Apple's A-series have the pci-e needed? For say 10-GB networking + PCI-E storage + PCI-E video cards + TB bus?

Re: does Apple's A-series have the pci-e needed?

[reanjr]

By 2020, Apple will have already deprecated all those technologies, and they'll all be replaced by some new quasi-proprietary bus replacement.

Re: does Apple's A-series have the pci-e needed?

[tigersha]

Thunderbolt inside baby!

Re:does Apple's A-series have the pci-e needed?

[hazydave]

Most embedded application processors have at least one PCIe link... no idea about Apple's, specifically, but that's a standard everyday module on the Chinese Menu of ARM components. I don't know if Apple is using AMBA/AHB for high speed internals on today's SOCs, or something else, but it's available right now up to 1024-bits wide. I doubt they'd have a performance bottleneck for laptop/desktop things.

And they're not building a Xeon or i7, either... Apple's been slowly killing off their high-end users through years of high-end neglect. They could pick up more sales, and lower development costs, by pushing the Macintosh into more of a desktop/laptop iPad Pro kind of thing... still mouse & keyboard but more like what iOS users expect. Not that I'd buy one, but I'd never buy a Mac PC either.

Are we sure they are ditching x86?

[Dorianny]

Apple has been slowly integrating OSX and IOS much like Microsoft did with Windows10, integrating Windows and Windows Mobile. Microsoft's solution to the x86/ARM problem was the "universal apps," basically a package with 2 set of binaries, one for x86 on for ARM.

Perhaps Apple is looking at a solution where they add a second ARM processor to their iMac/Mackbook lines that can run ARM apps negatively.

if anyone can pull this off, it's Apple.

[shm]

68k to PowerPC to Intel.

They have a track record of making this work.

Having said that, I don't think I'll be buying a Mac again anytime soon. The last few releases are more like iPads than computers. If I can't swap out the battery or the drive, I'm not buying.

Hopefully they will stay with x86

[Eravnrekaree]

They may very well be staying with x86 which would be advisable considering the Virtualization issue, perhaps they will use their own x86 chips. A big issue as well is the fact that it would break binary compatability to switch instruction sets. This is the nuiscance for vendors and consumers to not have all of the old distributions of software work on newer computers. Backwards compatability means a lot.

Will they run Linux?

[Subm]

> Apple is planning to use homegrown custom-built processors in its Mac line

Will they run Linux?

Would be nice if they were to choose RISC-V

[kriston]

It sure would be nice if they were to choose RISC-V.

Makes sense

[acey72]

Consider a few things:

• Apple (and the other big players) have a much better idea of where the PC market is going over the next 5, 10, 15 years. My bet is they see more and more movement to cloud-based services, less need for local CPU power (and storage), more demand for portability and long battery life, more and more sophisticated security attacks which the current open/trusted architecture doesn't deal with well.
• Compared to iOS users, macOS is a minority platform (I'm part of that minority). On top of which most Mac users don't care what the architecture is so long as it works, runs a web browser and apps, looks nice and doesn't need charging too often. Hell, I work in IT but that pretty much describes even me when it comes to my laptop - so long as I can do my job with it, I don't care what's 'inside'.
• Virtualisation, Boot Camp, etc. are just a particular era's solutions to a particular problem - most 'normal' users don't virtualise, dual-boot. Those who do can probably get the same result now/in the future using PaaS, IaaS from Amazon, Azure, etc. If local, hardware, virtualisation is really important than maybe Mac isn't the platform - Linux/*BSD would be a better option.
• Apple have already pretty much given up on the high-end desktop market, viz. Mac Pro. Even the new iMac Pro is more rich amateur creative than professional as all the best 'pro apps' are now Windows.
• Microsoft seem to agree considering their repeated attempts with Windows RT, Windows S, both running on ARM. OK, they're not roaring successes but the fact that even so, MS keep trying, means they know it's an important tech branch to follow.
• Intel haven't exactly covered themselves in glory recently, delayed launches, security exploits and worse, poor response to these exploits.

Kalamata...

[veg]

...sounds dangerously close to calamity to my ears.

What did they use before Intel?

[Daralantan]

I never paid much attention to Apple since I never bothered getting any of their computers... But I remember in college that all my MacBook using friends were happy when some Intel chip came out because they finally could use their pirated copies of Windows on their Macs to play games or use whatever other Windows only software. Would this new CPU will still let them use Windows if they want?

Re:What did they use before Intel?

[DontBeAMoran]

Imagine a deal with Microsoft where the next version of macOS could run Windows applications natively, without having to install or use Windows at all? If they did that, x86 compatibility wouldn't matter to 95% of users.

Re:Everything old is new again

[OneAhead]

Not so many years ago, AMD started releasing roadmaps showing that it would largely ditch x86 in favor of a high-performance ARM architecture. Mebbe ask them how that worked out for them?

To save you some googling, they did eventually release an ARM product, but it's only seeing niche use, and AMD's chips are firmly on x86 once again.

The more they work to make the Mac into an iPad...

[tastyrerun]

... the less I want one. I'm an Apple guy. Or, at least I was. I have owned the first seven generations of iPhone, three iPads, and at least one variant of pretty much every major Mac made since 1996. But I am just done with them because they have been slowly killing the Mac for years by starving it and feeding iOS. I see this as yet another step in that progression and I am happy to say that it won't affect me because by 2020 I will no longer be an Apple customer. It was fun while it lasted but I still desire a real computer, not a walled-garden-lifestyle-device, and the Mac formerly was a real computer until Apple decided to treat it like shit for, oh, the last 5-7 years. Ain't no way this leads to more innovative Macs. Zero percent chance.

Re:Plot twist: Apple using cloud for EVERYTHING

[DontBeAMoran]

You assume everyone has access to a fast reliable and low-latency connection all the time. There's a reason some people never store anything in the freakin' "clouds" of companies.