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Originally Posted by kscherer
Two things to say about this:
1) Yes, the MacBook Air is a great place to start, and so is the Mac Mini. However, neither of them is likely to be called that.
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I don't see why not. Nothing about either product name screams Intel. They may not even want to emphasize the architecture change in marketing at all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer
2) It is not a problem in search of a solution any more than it was for iPhone. Intel is not giving Apple what they want, and Apple is going to take matters into their own hands. Plus, Apple will develop ARM-X and Mac OS-X alongside each other and optimize performance just as they have on iPhone.
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I think you have a very different vision there. I don't think there will be an "ARM-X" any more than there was an "Intel-X". It will simply be another architecture. Some old apps won't run. Some might run in an emulator. Some new stuff might happen (honestly, probably not that much, since T2 is already a thing).
iOS was different in part because the original iPhone was so severely resource-constrained (at this point, I'm certain they regret some of its early design decisions!), and in part because they wanted a clean break. How do you market a clean break on the Mac? And why, for that matter? No amount of marketing will significantly grow the Mac ever again (that ship has sailed for any PC manufacturer), so you want to gradually modernize as they have been, not radically alter things.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kscherer
This will give them a future performance advantage—and it may take ten years or more. It won't be right away, but it will happen eventually. They have the best chip design team on Earth, and I bet they already have it (Air/Mini at least) running in the labs.
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Of course they have Macs running on ARM. (They might also have Macs running on RISC-V. Heck, they might move from ARM to that at some point, if only to save on licensing costs.)
But there's simply zero outside knowledge on how Apple's chips scale to the needs of a MacBook Pro, let alone a Mac Pro. And even if it does scale great, what's the point of manufacturing a CPU with such low volume as that on the Mac Pro? At best, you're angering your existing customers because you broke their stuff again. At worst, you also don't really deliver a performance advantage.
"Best chip design team on earth"? Well, these things come and go. One of the key designers of Apple Ax is now at Intel.
They've been doing terrific work. Don't jinx it by having expectations that cannot realistically be met.