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Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

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Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#721

Post by askafriend »

ianhowson wrote: post #650
Teknoman117 wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.

Bingo. Estimates vary wildly, but I've seen figures saying that Axx CPUs cost Apple about $50 each. Even if it's more like $100, that's still an insane amount of additional profit per unit to be extracted. They don't need to deal with single-supplier hassles and they get much more control over what cores go into their SoC. This is sort-of-OK for consumers but amazing for Apple and its shareholers.

> amazing for Apple and its shareholers

This only makes sense if you know nothing about Apple's business.

You really think they're doing this to save $50 from ~5m Macs? You really think all this upheaval is for a mere $250m a year in savings? It'll cost them 10x that in pain alone to migrate to a new platform.

Come on now....$250m is nothing at Apple scale. Think bigger. Even if you hate Apple, think bigger about their nefariousness (if your view is that they have bad intentions - one I don't agree with).

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#722

Post by Sleaker »

vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…

Wont this move result in more software compatibility issues from developer side though? Like why would you buy the update if the developers don't want to move to the new platform or determine it's too big of a change now?

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#723

Post by kps »

AlexandrB wrote: post #645
kps wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't a surprise to anyone paying attention; NeXTSTEP had run on 68K/x86/Sparc/PA-RISC. Removing architecture support would have been remarkable. What's important, for those paying attention, is that Apple promoted PowerPC emulation with the first x86 Macs in OS X 10.4 and then removed it after 10.6. If you think Apple won't screw you again, well, go ahead, it's your money. [Dis]claimer: I have no long or short i…

> [Dis]claimer: I have no long or short in AAPL. Anyone posting or voting in this thread should similarly disclose. It’s extremely weird to me to assume that an opinion someone posts in an online message board will be heavily influenced by their stock portfolio.

I still think that comments here, which require some minimal creative effort and are attached to identifiable user names, are usually somewhat legitimate, and more likely to be from fanbois than financiers. Voting to amplify or silence perspectives, on the other hand, entirely lacks accountability.

(I'm curently taking bids on an HN account with 4575 interweb points.)

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#724

Post by wpm »

paxys wrote: post #683
originalvichy wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what this will do to Electron. If the iOS apps are really 1:1 on macOS, then the need to maintain an electron app will probably diminish. As long as they both support the same OS APIs I can see devs that can learn a new language (Swift) ditch Electron.

Is there anyone building on Electron and only targeting the Mac desktop environment? Windows is still the king there.

Is MS Teams for Windows written with Electron? It is on Mac.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#725

Post by DrJokepu »

tgv wrote: post #439
ksec wrote: post #258

Apple ported many Pro Apps to ARM , especially their Logic Pro, Photoshop and they were showcasing Maya on ARM. That is about as Pro as it gets for Mac. That reads to me Apple isn't going to have Intel for some high end Pro machine. They intended to go all in with ARM. i.e There will be a Mac Pro with High TDP ARM Chip. I wonder what are the owner of Mac Pro feeling now having just spend a $5K+ Mac Pro with Intel. Qu…

> Logic Pro Logic isn't worth much without plugins, and I expect many smaller developers not to port to ARM, and there's nobody to fill the gap in the first years. If that is indeed the case, Apple will begin losing market share where it currently reigns. When there's no pro software, the mac will be just an iPad with a keyboard. It's quite a gamble. But I've been too pessimistic before.

Professional users of Logic (but also Pro Tools) tend to be very conservative with their upgrades. People who use Logic for a living won’t be using this for years to come.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#726

Post by ogre_codes »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #642
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…

I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.

> I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.

Apple's margins are consistent, if their costs go down significantly, pricing comes down or features increase. The iPad is a perfect example, for years it was $500 and they just kept increasing the feature-set until eventually they could deliver the base product for significantly less.

Shareholders benefit from increased market share just as much as they do from increasing margins, arguably more. The base iPad and the iPhone SE both "cannibalize" their higher end products, but significantly expand their base. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a $800 MacBook enter their lineup shipping with the same CPU as the iPad.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#727

Post by colejohnson66 »

looping__lui wrote: post #624
vessenes wrote: post #305

Commenters here seem dubious. I’ll take the contra-position. This feels to me like it’s going to be great; a big win for consumers and developers. Current A12z chips are highly performant; Apple is roughly one chip cycle ahead on perfomance/watt from any other manufacturer. I presume their consumer hardware will launch with an A13Z, or maybe an A14 type chip. Apple has consistently shipped new chip designs on time; I…

“Apple’s own pro apps will be updated to support the company’s new silicon in macOS Big Sur, and the company is hoping developers will update their apps. “The vast majority of developers can get their apps up and running in a matter of days,” claims Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. []... Microsoft is working on Office updates for the new Mac silicon, and Word and Excel are alrea…

> So the bottom line is: “your previous tools won’t work, will have to be rewritten, the burden is on the developers so we can rake in more cash”

Did you miss the part where there’s going to be a “Rosetta 2” AOT/JIT translation layer?

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#728

Post by efficax »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #642
ianhowson wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, I’m predicting an MBP 13 - 16 range with an extra three hours of battery life+, and 20-30% faster. I'm predicting the opposite: you won't actually see any difference. Once you look closely at power profiles on modern machines you'll see that most energy is going into display and GPU. CPUs mostly run idle. Even if you had a theoretical CPU using zero energy, most people are not going to get 30% battery life gain…

I fully expect any reduction in costs for Apple will get sent to their shareholders, not the consumers.

undoubtedly, that’s capitalism! but they may also introduce some price cuts. These would probaby increase units sold, so they could better take advantage of their increased margin.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#729

Post by valuearb »

damnyou wrote: post #685
valuearb wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn’t being hostile to Hey! They are being hostile to Apple. Imagine building a large new Paid App that you expect Apple to host and distribute for free worldwide by gaming their payment system.

Why do you think that is not a completely reasonable expectation?

It’s entirely reasonable for a free service. Apple hosts and distributes terabytes of free apps.

But Hey! isn’t free, they just charge you using a different platform. Maybe 30% is too much for Apple to charge them, but zero percent is definitely too low.

Re: Apple announces it will switch to its own processors for future Macs

#730

Post by megameter »

I reckon this move will drive an arrow straight through the entire desktop market.

Why would I say that? Because the assumption desktop developers have made for decades is that Wintel/Lintel is the norm, everything else is a side dish. And Macs since their Intel shift have conformed to this, if not in terms of API, then certainly in the core architecture decisions. And that means that you design the software "for x86". If you try to run Linux software on a Chromebook you'll often have a nasty experience with these assumptions making things break. And nobody is paying much attention to Win10 on ARM chips.

But now you have a top-down mandate from Apple, which is in a strong position to direct the desktop platform again, possibly the strongest it's ever had. Everyone who follows Apple knows that they tend to obsolete things quickly; they have played this game before. The move they've made is to usher all the developers, not just the mobile ones, to ARM. And that means throwing out a substantial part of old codebases optimized for many generations of Intel chips. It pressures the Linux junkies to be more cross-platform, which in turn topples over some assumptions around Linux desktops themselves. The major distributions will scramble to support Apple hardware.

And a consequence of the assumptions in Linux changing is that you can start doing some ground-up rethinking too. "We're redoing this part of the codebase, let's change the design." And with Apple support may also come Surface support, Chromebook support - giving all the ARM platforms equal treatment. So it's likely that multiple operating systems will see a generational shift, not just Apple's. A big chain of events that will explode some projects and leave others untouched.

And then at the end of that, we might have RISC-V hardware coming over the horizon.

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