Apple Plans to Use Its Own Chips in Macs from 2020, Replacing Intel

Intel painted itself into a technological corner, where they have to pursue yields with larger die sizes than AMD. Or, looking at it from the other side, AMD won by steering themselves a course where they could avoid the trap of ever larger die sizes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctgAzn5Wx8o

If Apple can come up with something like Infinity Fabric, then they could steer the same course.

Apple was always their own world, their "openess" came from almost closing doors around 1994 and with NeXTSTEP they played the same game as NeXT did, pretending to be open to get UNIX devs into the platform.

Now that they have the upper hand, they are free to go back to their old ways without much considerations about opennesses.

With the PC sales declining and most OEMs following back to the old ways of integrated computers, before of PC components revolution, I guess most regular users will use follow along.

If the macOS/iOS developers still can get their share of the cake, most things will hardly change, although they might loose those that only use macOS as a pretty UNIX.

The question is how relevant are those sales currently.

> "A decision to go with ARM technology in computers might lend it credibility where it has failed to gain a foothold so far."

> "Apple is working on a new software platform, internally dubbed Marzipan, for release as early as this year that would allow users to run iPhone and iPad apps on Macs"

Two things here:

1) I'm OK with breaking the Intel near-monopoly on x86. I'm not OK with moving to a walled garden where Apple forces you to publish apps through their App Store with a paid dev account, etc. just for the privilege of users on their platform. ARM doesn't necessarily mean this, but it is a different CPU arch. When Apple transitioned to Intel/x86 from PowerPC, Intel processors were performant enough compared to PowerPC processors to provide a pleasant emulated PowerPC environment for applications build for PowerPC. I don't think that a switch to ARM would provide this benefit, and afaik Intel's mobile offerings aren't that far off from ARM efficiency. So what's the benefit? Just vertical integration, I guess? Escaping Intel's backdoors and high prices?

2) iOS apps on OS X. Why? Does anybody want this? The way I see it, web apps are perfectly adequate for the desktop environment when it comes to stuff like checking my bank account or browsing Hacker News. I don't want to deal with a desktop app to do any of the stuff I can currently do via a browser. Is there actually a use case?

3) Given the hellscape of bugs currently present in iOS/macOS, does anybody have faith that Apple is going to be able to navigate a rewrite of macOS on this scale? It sounds like the sort of thing that requires a lot of talent and a lot of focus. Apple has the capital for this, but not the environment, imo.

Seems to me like this could be the nail in the coffin for Macbooks that's been pending since the merger of the macOS/iOS teams and the introduction of the controversial TouchBar/USB-C Pro.

If apple uses its own chips, I would assume that they would be aarch64 and not x86_64. Also, Microsoft has some magics for executing x86_64 binaries on aarch64 with good performance, so Apple may have a similar technology. We could end up with another situation similar to the Power->x86 transition that happened back in 2006.

Or it could be nothing. This is a pretty thin article.

I would argue technical reasons too. x86_64 is a huge and complicated beast.