About the Rosetta Translation Environment

Sure it’s possible, but I think it’s exceptionally unlikely that Apple will try to lock down the Mac the way the iPhone is.

The reason is they think of them as fundamentally different products with fundamentally different purposes, and for the most part the trend line has been moving to more opening of the iOS ecosystem rather than more lockdown of the Mac.

(For instance in the last few iOS releases they’ve added file system support, removing the default apps, and in this new release they’re allowing users to set alternative default apps, etc.)

Apple views the iPhone as a pure consumer device where the most important thing is that everything “just works.” It’s locked down in the same way a video game console is locked down, and for the same reasons: they gain a lot of “just works” benefits from keeping things very standardized. And most consumers LIKE that. Most consumers hate that their PC (or even Mac) often fails them in “mysterious” ways that require tech support or just living with a broken experience.

Apple talks about iOS as a “car” and Mac as a “truck.” They see Mac as their development platform, and literally called that out in their keynote.

There is certainly a desire on Apple’s part to make the Mac also an excellent consumer product, hence things like the existence of the App Store and app signing, but on the Mac there have always been “escape hatches” for those who know what they’re doing.

Now, the part that Apple does want to lock down and is able to lock down even more with this move is the Hardware. They’ve never made Hackintosh easy and have never done anything to indicate support for tinkering with their hardware, to the point that when the pro community began to bail they brought back a highly “configurable” Mac Pro (configurable with official parts but not really tinkerable).

But anyway, I don’t think Mac OS is going to get locked down substantially more than it already is. It’s a nice OS with some trade offs, if those trade offs have worked for you in the past they’re likely to keep being fine, and if not then you probably wouldn’t be a Mac user anyway.

Example. Apple ship ~10M MacBook Air a year. Current spending on MacBook Intel chip is roughly $200 per unit. As long as Apple could make it below $200, they make more profits or lower the price.

That is a per unit, per model angle. i.e Apple could easily have fitted an A12Z inside Macbook Air, and save them at least $150.

Or you could look at it from a company total perspective.

Apple currently spend $2B annual R&D ( a made up number )on its Chip design. How much more additional would we need if we need to design for Mac CPU as well. $500M / $1B? Great, and do it. ( If you follow Apple closely, Apple's Net Profits and R&D has been at a fixed percentage for a fairly Long time )

>And finally, I am also curious about the accounting and financial disclosures required in such decisions.

There is nothing that needs to disclose until these decision make material effect on its stock performance.

It is worth pointing out Apple receives $10B annually from Google for having it as default search engine on Safari alone. While it is expensive to design its own chip, comparatively speaking it is still peanuts for Apple.

At the rate things are going, Apple could have spend more money on Apple TV+ Originals than R&D spend on Mac CPU alone.

Indeed true, good point.

> That wouldn't help because two threads could be running at the same time on different cores against their respective L1 and store buffers.

Of course, this was related to the cost of switching coherency protocol during context switch. But as you say the overhead of just making it switchable is prohibitive in itself.