191–200 of 1001 posts
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And before that they successfully managed the transition from m68k to PPC. The processor doesn't matter.
The processor doesn't matter to Apple because they don't mind fucking over their customers and their third party developers.
This is not necessarily the wrong move for Apple, but it is fraught with danger. Here be dragons.
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What if it turns out not to be based on the ARM architecture?
That would definitely be an interesting and very surprising development. Like I would really like to hear Apple's rational for developing an x86 CPU. x86 is a far more complex CPU architecture which they have zero experience in making. ARM in contrast they have experience with all the way back to Newton, and it has a nice licensing preposition. I can't see them doing something different than ARM and x86. That would b…
People buy computers to run software. If they can't run their existing software on it, the computer has no value. Just like with the original PPC-to-Intel transition, where Apple provided a PPC emulator on Intel, if they go with ARM, Apple will have to provide Intel-to-ARM translation software in macOS for several years.
But now, a significant number people are using Macs as hosts for x86 Linux and Windows virtual machines. This changes the calculus a bit. It's one thing to emulate an ISA to run software in a user context; quite another to perform cross-ISA virtualization. QEMU can do the latter, but at a significant performance penalty.
It should also be noted that Apple is sitting on _much_ more cash than Intel. At the end of last year, Intel had $14B in cash on hand, while Apple had $285B.
Tim Cook has repeatedly stated that the iPad is "the clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing" and Apple only sells around 4M Macs per quarter, while iOS devices dwarf this stat. If their plan is to continue moving users from desktop/laptop devices to their iOS ecosystem, and the software can be transformed to cross between both classes of devices, then it only makes sense to unify the pr…
I can't take that seriously without them demonstrating an equal amount of work on the software end of the iPad. I am a huge believer in the potential of the iPad -- I was blown away by the original iWork and even more so by Garage Band, they both demonstrated honest attempts at providing differentiation from the desktop computing model. But then they just kind of ... stopped developing the OS and associated apps. We…
Yeah, it felt a little stuck for a while, but iPads are ridiculously more useful and viable as work platforms than they were in the iOS 8/9 days.
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Apple did a pretty decent job when they transitioned from PPC to x86_64, it has Rosetta to translate PPC to x86. Microsoft and partners released ARM based Windows Laptops this year that can run Win32 apps in emulation. What's stopping Apple from shipping Macbooks with a custom SoC that can run existing Apps in emulation until developers can recompile? I would argue that most Air and Macbook owners aren't developers a…
Creatives who want hardware optimized Adobe apps to continue to be fast will care. I wouldn't count on emulation of vectorized code to work all that well.
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And before that they successfully managed the transition from m68k to PPC. The processor doesn't matter.
The processor doesn't matter to Apple because they don't mind fucking over their customers and their third party developers.
I have no doubt some customers were caused pain by the transitions, and some left the Apple world entirely, but characterizing them as being "fucked over" seems a bit over the top.
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And before that they successfully managed the transition from m68k to PPC. The processor doesn't matter.
It does matter that the new processor is a lot more powerful and faster than the old processor. This wouldn't be the case this time.
But compare the Intel Core m3 to the Apple A11, and a completely different story will emerge. The A11 is already comparable to relatively recent Macbooks in terms of performance.
Great, we can go back to the macrumors nonsense about how this PPC is "just as fast" as the x86 days. With their focus on iOS vs MacOS, this doesn't surprise me. MacOS will simply die once they port their tools to iOS. Terrible choice IMO.
Apple will not suffer in 2020 from having lower performance than intel. It wont matter. Form factor, screen quality, memory speed, memory size, touch pad, battery life etc will matter so much more.
Multi threading is also so much more common on pro app which require performance. They can just match intel by using more cores. ARM is way cheaper than intel so I don't see how they can lose this game. PPC was an entirely different world.
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And before that they successfully managed the transition from m68k to PPC. The processor doesn't matter.
It does matter that the new processor is a lot more powerful and faster than the old processor. This wouldn't be the case this time.
They will not compete at the high end against the Core i7s with 6 cores running at 3.8GHz (12 with HT) though.