That would be a huge distraction for Apple. The phone is where the action is and they need to compete as hard as they can.
Shifting any engineering talent towards laptop/desktop chips is fighting last decade's war, for a shrinking (relatively) pie.
The only reason to do that would be if it gave them some research edge that they could use elsewhere. Like cloud servers or something.
As the article says, already more iphones than PC's. Why bother.
The way to use this power is to keep pushing where they have the advantage (mobile) and hammer PC's until you have all the power you need in your phone/tablet. Software will grow up around the ecosystem until it eats PC's, and Apple can ignore the PC market entirely. Forget about PC's, focus on beating Android and they'll beat PC's as a bonus.
One of the reasons to do this would precisely be to free up engineering talent that would otherwise have to be dedicated to developing specialized laptop logic board designs (and other specialized parts). If you can build a relatively flexible internal hardware platform that can handle laptop, tablet or phone use cases, then your production teams can focus on core problems for a specific product while borrowing whatever solutions they need from other teams. Apple already has similar chips and boards running iPads and iPhones, so why not consolidate laptops too?
For some evidence that this could be happening, look at ifixit's macbook teardown[0]. The logic board seems to be approaching the size of an iphone logic board [1]. Someone at Apple has to be asking a what-if question here when looking at this thing and thinking about how they could go all the way.
As sidenote I should mention after reading your comment (which I agree completely) I felt sad for Microsoft, they are really in bad position, they lost mobile war and their most important income (PC sector) shrinking.They are late, and they are losing already.(I know MSFT is strong in enterprise sector)
My prediction is that we will see a new MacBook (Air) next year (probably October-November), with an ARM CPU running MacOS 11. Apple with bump MacOS (nee OSX) a major version number and keep it in parity with iOS, which will also be version 11 next year. Essentially iOS and MacOS becoming front ends to the same OS (which they almost are).
They will start with the ARM CPU on a single MacBook (an entry level one) for a few years before pushing it our across the whole range once app compatibility has been achieved.
The shift to Intel was a move of necessity, a huge risk, and ultimately a major pain for Apple's customers not talk about third party developers. Apple took a huge hit to their goodwill. That was predictable, but they went ahead and did it anyway. Why? Because they had to. PowerPC was falling further and further behind. It was alright for Macs to be more expensive than PCs, but more expensive and slower? Furthermore, PowerPC was holding Apple back from taking the Mac where they wanted it to go (ultralight laptops).
None of the issues that caused the Intel transition apply to Apple now. Intel is not holding Apple back, because Apple already uses its own chips in what it considers the future of computing: iOS devices. At the same time Macs use exactly the same chips as PCs, which means there is no risk that PCs will suddenly leapfrog the Macs. There is in other word no major need to make a shift. But the risks in doing so would be the same. Apple would once again be pissing of its customers and 3rd party developers. And for what? A marginal improvement in battery life? To save a fragment on bill of materials on a product line which already enjoys healthy margins, but which also is a tiny fragment of their overall business?
PowerPC to Intel had some built in advantages: Intel was really pulling away from PowerPC and it gave Apple immediate hardware parity. Before Intel you could love their software but there were real questions about performance.
The advantages with arm seem less obvious, why would you do anything but let the market decide? Build up bigger and better iPad pros until it erodes you MacBook market.
Arm on desktop (win or Mac OS) has to happen now that the chips are this quick. I don't really need a phone with desktop perf, but I'd love a laptop with phone class battery life.
A shift to ARM is a big deal for developers, so they'd probably want to give them a year like they did the last time this happened. It's also the kind of thing that Apple would want to announce at WWDC. We just had one of those a couple months ago, so that makes the next opportunity for a switchover more like summer 2018.
Shouldn't the iPad simply become the MacBook Air? There will be a convergence with the low-end laptop. It's simply a matter of getting desktop software running on iOS. As with the new Airpods, you instantly pair your keyboard, if it's not attached, and mouse. Apple's strength is iOS so they should grow it into the laptop.
I have been predicting this for a while. I keep saying "hmm maybe in a year or two" but it never seems to happen :)
I still believe the future of macOS will be ARM though. Apple have invested so damn much in making their own SoC that I can't imagine them not going that way. Soon (within a year or two? heh) they will have an SoC that they can pop in the MacBook and performance will be so close to the m-series Intel chip that only lab benchmarks will show a difference (and even that will be tiny).
Once that happens Apple will own the own compute process. While very cool it also sucks as I have no doubt the Mac will become as locked down a iOS. No sideloading and certainly no dualbooting. The Mac will essentially be yet another appliance albeit it one with some kind of development environment. It won't be something you can hack on though (well not without having to actually hack it first).
I'm pretty skeptical of the notion that iOS could replace macOS any time soon. Here's an experiment if you don't believe me: grab a mac, run the iOS emulator on it full-screen and try to do all your normal tasks in the emulator, without jumping out to the desktop. Let me know how that feels after a few hours.
You could argue that with some engineering time they can add some affordances to the iOS interface to make it more pleasant on desktop. Sure. But every app is also going to need to adapt for this -- they need to drag along the entire ecosystem. Honestly it would be way easier to make macOS run on ARM than it would be to make iOS run on desktop. They already did this whole processor shift thing once and it worked out just fine. Just package things in universal binaries and emulate the old CPU for legacy software. Not to mention with something like LLVM it's not crazy to imagine distributing applications in a near-native bytecode that gets JIT'd to the target machine.
I know microsoft has gotten pretty close to accomplishing the entire one-os-for-everything model, but look how much time and money it's taken them, and the amount of good will they burned through getting there.
A lot of people forget, but iOS shares the same underpinnings as MacOS X. In fact, when Steve Jobs announced the original iPhone, he didn't say it ran iPhone OS, he said it ran MacOS.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's macOS already ready to go for ARM, much like there was an Intel MacOS for years before the transition was announced.
As for whether iOS could replace macOS, if you go back to my first point, think about iOS as a version of macOS that was stripped down and has been built back up over the intervening decade. I don't think they could make the switch tomorrow, but in a couple of years, it's not unreasonable to think there could be a reunification of the iOS and macOS codebases, creating, essentially a fully-featured iOS for desktop hardware with the features we've come to expect from modern desktop OSes.
My wife was commenting the other day, when she noticed a photo of the iPad Pro 12 with the Smart Keyboard, that Apple should make a touchscreen laptop that would let people install either Mac OS or iOS. I don't personally know if such a device would be accepted but there are some people interested in such a device.
Personally, I prefer they keep Mac OS and iOS separate.
What does this have to do with anything? Mac OS is totally portable (at one point. OpenStep provided transparent support for four CPU architectures), and server-side software even more so. Similarly, Apple could presumably port whatever subsets of Mac OS are needed as the mood takes them.
Both the iPhone 7 and the next next iPad Pro will be significantly faster than the current Macbook (and Macbook Air) and that's probably also the case for the next iteration, if it sticks with Intel. That alone is reason to switch to ARM. Compiling to ARM will be relatively easy, but still emulation will be needed for many applications, and that might be harder than emulating PowerPC.
I wonder where the performance ceiling is going to be for the Apple processor line. Looking at Intel, I'd have expected them to have hit it already, but given the huge increases in single threaded performance so far year on year, it's hard to believe that it'll peter down to <15% per year from now on.
If performance is going to keep improving at the current rate, then the A11X will be significantly faster than Intel's 2017 Cannonlake mobile lineup. Switching away from Intel would give Macs another big leg-up relative to Windows laptops.
Macs will never switch to iOS though. Processes on macOS have a freedom that's incomparable to that on iOS, and once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in again. But Apple will keep working to make iOS sufficient for increasingly more people, and Macs will keep getting more niche. Apple could even introduce a laptop-like form factor like the Surface Book with iOS on it (the iBook Pro?).
I doubt we will ever see a laptop running iOS. iOS was designed solely for a touch interface. At the same time, apple has been outspoken about not wanting touch screens on laptops because of ergonomic issues and other things.
- Most 3rd party Apple development is already happening on ARM. This would inject new life into the desktop/laptop product line. Think of the thousands of apps that could now run on those platforms.
- Apple gets rid of a massive chunk of BOM cost improving margins, i.e. Intel CPU.
- No need to emulate X86 if Apple can do binary translation instead. There are already OSS projects like MC-Semantics (https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema) that can take an X86 binary and emit LLVM IR. In theory you could give that to the ARM LLVM backend and relink to ARM frameworks. This would be an interesting problem to solve vis-a-vis code signing. One way would be for Apple to sign a code signing identity for each user, have the OS translate the binary, prompt the user for a password to get the private key from the keychain, sign the new executable, save it, and then run it.
- I actually wonder how many desktop apps are commonly used on the macOS platform, and how big of a problem in 2016 an arch switch would be. Muggles are already predominantly using mobile devices. I'm guessing 99% of users use one of 100 (or less) desktop apps. I imagine it to be quite the long-tail.
How plausible is it to stick an ARM chip and a (lower-end) Intel CPU on the same board and make them work together? The transition to an ArmBook would be much smoother and I'm betting it won't affect cost of the laptop that much. After all, an Apple TV, which is essentially an iPhone 6 board without the battery and screen, costs just $149.
The iPhone 7/7 Plus single-core score is 3,450 and the multi-core score is 5,630.
The current top intel chip (i7-6700K) single-core score is 5326 and that same chip multi-core score is 17003 and the i7-6950X multi-core score is 29877. http://browser.primatelabs.com/processor-benchmarks
That's still a pretty good lead. Now perhaps with the added room of a laptop they could make an arm chip that was closer in performance but would it be worth it?
You're comparing a chip with two[1] cores to a 4 or 10 core chip so the comparison is complicated. It'd be straightforward for them to add more cores – and we'll see that with the next iPad Pro, I'm sure – but at some point they're going to hit scaling issues for things like memory bandwidth.
The real difference, though, is power: that 6700-K uses 91W and the A10 should be around 2W. There's no way you can put a 6700-K in a normal laptop and the mobile processors appear only to be delivering single-core scores which are already within iPhone 7 range.
The other question is how often single-core or even multi-core performance matters for the average user vs. GPU performance since that's often the only place where people are limited by something other than network or storage speeds. I think a growing number of people are within the range where their needs would be satisfied with perhaps an extra core or two but a lot more GPU capacity.
The i7-6700K is a 91 watt chip. Remove that and they are fairly close, worse the A10 line has been improving much faster than Intel's chips over the last five years.
Also, don't forget it's really the mid range chips that matter and the A10 is very much a mid range chip without the benefit of excessive binning.
When the next iPhone has a single-core score with a wide margin over the single-core score of the fastest current normal i7, and an equivalent multi-core score against the same i7, then we can say Apple has caught up.
Why wide margin of single? Because artificial benchmarks are not a good measure, and due to unrelated factors, and also due to how most programs are strongly single threaded in performance, program execution performance in the real world no longer linearly scales with raw IPS increases, nor does it scale linearly with IPS + cache/memory performance increases.
Also, the whole "but the iPhone chip is only dual core, and modern i7s are quads"... too bad. If you're going to make the argument of desktop performance, then you have to apples-to-apples the comparison. You can say, however, the new iPhone CPU has good performance, because it legitimately does... for a phone, not for a desktop.
Pretty bad article. Why recommend the move to iOS on laptops instead of simply recompiling MacOS to the ARM architecture. Not an issue in the Linux world, dont see why Apple would have any issue with that if they really wanted to.
Given that Apple control their own CPU designs, how hard would it be for them to add a hardware x86 ISA emulation layer over their ARM CPU for use with MacOS? That way the OS and newer software could be compiled for ARM, and legacy software could be run in x86 mode with reasonable performance without the need for rosetta-style emulation.
This is one reason I quit the whole CPU commentating thing. People kept rewriting the same article (with the same comments thread attached!), and I kept rewriting the same responses.
I think the future is very powerful mobile devices that have a very smooth docking experience. In business environments this is good because knowledge workers don't have to lug around laptops. Instead, walk into a conference room, sit where there is a monitor/mouse/keyboard and your work environment is right there on you phone. Sort of like Google's multitude of mini-conference rooms with audio/visual setups, but augmented with shared peripherals.
While technically it would be fascinating to have an ARM based MacBook - just imagine what Apple could do with more power/thermal budget - the big deal breaker will be the compatibility with x86 baseded code. Currently Macs are very popular because they can run (partially via VMs) basically any program written in the last decade. This is not easy to give up, especially on the MacBook Pros. There could of course be an entry level ARM MacBook. Unless of course, they make some processor which can run both ARM and Intel code, but that sounds a bit far fetched.
I am not sure how good of a benchmark geekbench is, but ever since AMD stopped pushing Intel, they have been a little complacent. When AMD introduced Athlon 64 it really forced Intel to step its game up. The core 2 duo was pretty impressive. AMD hasn't had a competitive product in years and Intel has just been providing some incremental improvements here and there.
With shrinking transistor sizes they can shorten their pipeline maybe add a few more front end decoders, add even more cache. If you have a shorter pipeline the branch misses aren't as bad. There is a lot of stuff they could do which they probably aren't since they haven't had a real incentive to do so.
I think sometime next year when the A10X is released the question of MacBook Pro or iPad Pro will come down to the following:
“What device of, which both have the same performance and storage, do I choose? The one with the USB ports, the inflexible keyboard, bloated software and costs 600$ more, or the other one with a touchscreen, optional keyboard, and much much simpler software?”
Also I think that Apple won’t do any ARM MacBook at all. If we consider a RICE scheme for gauging priorization for such a feature like ARM CPUs in MacBooks:
Reach: Modest, there aren’t that many Mac users compared to iOS
Impact: Positive impact on Mac users is limited. Performance won’t be that better, mostly equal. Software availability could be limited for a while during a transition.
Confidence: Apple has made a couple architecture transitions on the Mac before, so they know how it works. But they don’t know how app developers will react. Will Adobe, Microsoft etc. get onboard, or jump ship?
Effort: Rather high. It’s one of the things where 10% of the implementation will need 90% of the effort. Mostly it’s just a recompile to run. But optimizing software for x86 is different than for ARM. The performance critical parts of many system frameworks which have no existing iOS port have to be rewritten to be efficient on the new architecture.
- Comparing the brand new A10 to a 2013-era Intel.
- Asserting iOS for workstations.
While many people could probably get by on iOS, it is particularly crippled for people that need to do technical work.
However, I found the idea intriguing, of having a workstation with multiple ARM or Apple chips in it with a proper OS. I know they exist already, but having Apple behind them would make a big difference.
I sometimes wonder if iOS and OSX will end up merging and Apple notebook, iPhone and iPad hardware becoming more of the same thing, all running on Apple chips and the same appstore.
I guess that Apple would be already able to produce laptop SoCs running at 5-15W TDP, with e.g. 4 to 6 CPU cores at 2-3GHz, outperforming newest Core i7 chips for laptops.
That could allow to maintain, or even increase, profit margings, with margin for lowering product price. Running that path, in my opinion, Apple could take 50% of laptop market. E.g. high quality laptops with BOM (bill of materials) of 150 USD selling for 400-600 USD. Or even less.
[+] [-] richardw|9 years ago|reply
Shifting any engineering talent towards laptop/desktop chips is fighting last decade's war, for a shrinking (relatively) pie.
The only reason to do that would be if it gave them some research edge that they could use elsewhere. Like cloud servers or something.
As the article says, already more iphones than PC's. Why bother.
The way to use this power is to keep pushing where they have the advantage (mobile) and hammer PC's until you have all the power you need in your phone/tablet. Software will grow up around the ecosystem until it eats PC's, and Apple can ignore the PC market entirely. Forget about PC's, focus on beating Android and they'll beat PC's as a bonus.
[+] [-] bazizbaziz|9 years ago|reply
For some evidence that this could be happening, look at ifixit's macbook teardown[0]. The logic board seems to be approaching the size of an iphone logic board [1]. Someone at Apple has to be asking a what-if question here when looking at this thing and thinking about how they could go all the way.
[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown... [1] http://www.cultofmac.com/315469/new-macbook-logic-board-is-o...
[+] [-] flippyhead|9 years ago|reply
Man, I hope they don't do that. I love my Mac!
[+] [-] 0xFFC|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxzero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbin|9 years ago|reply
https://developer.apple.com/library/content/releasenotes/Gen...
[+] [-] Zoon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|9 years ago|reply
They will start with the ARM CPU on a single MacBook (an entry level one) for a few years before pushing it our across the whole range once app compatibility has been achieved.
[+] [-] adamlett|9 years ago|reply
None of the issues that caused the Intel transition apply to Apple now. Intel is not holding Apple back, because Apple already uses its own chips in what it considers the future of computing: iOS devices. At the same time Macs use exactly the same chips as PCs, which means there is no risk that PCs will suddenly leapfrog the Macs. There is in other word no major need to make a shift. But the risks in doing so would be the same. Apple would once again be pissing of its customers and 3rd party developers. And for what? A marginal improvement in battery life? To save a fragment on bill of materials on a product line which already enjoys healthy margins, but which also is a tiny fragment of their overall business?
[+] [-] TheCondor|9 years ago|reply
PowerPC to Intel had some built in advantages: Intel was really pulling away from PowerPC and it gave Apple immediate hardware parity. Before Intel you could love their software but there were real questions about performance.
The advantages with arm seem less obvious, why would you do anything but let the market decide? Build up bigger and better iPad pros until it erodes you MacBook market.
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bunderbunder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satysin|9 years ago|reply
I still believe the future of macOS will be ARM though. Apple have invested so damn much in making their own SoC that I can't imagine them not going that way. Soon (within a year or two? heh) they will have an SoC that they can pop in the MacBook and performance will be so close to the m-series Intel chip that only lab benchmarks will show a difference (and even that will be tiny).
Once that happens Apple will own the own compute process. While very cool it also sucks as I have no doubt the Mac will become as locked down a iOS. No sideloading and certainly no dualbooting. The Mac will essentially be yet another appliance albeit it one with some kind of development environment. It won't be something you can hack on though (well not without having to actually hack it first).
[+] [-] camillomiller|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] overgard|9 years ago|reply
You could argue that with some engineering time they can add some affordances to the iOS interface to make it more pleasant on desktop. Sure. But every app is also going to need to adapt for this -- they need to drag along the entire ecosystem. Honestly it would be way easier to make macOS run on ARM than it would be to make iOS run on desktop. They already did this whole processor shift thing once and it worked out just fine. Just package things in universal binaries and emulate the old CPU for legacy software. Not to mention with something like LLVM it's not crazy to imagine distributing applications in a near-native bytecode that gets JIT'd to the target machine.
I know microsoft has gotten pretty close to accomplishing the entire one-os-for-everything model, but look how much time and money it's taken them, and the amount of good will they burned through getting there.
[+] [-] fredfoobar42|9 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be surprised if there's macOS already ready to go for ARM, much like there was an Intel MacOS for years before the transition was announced.
As for whether iOS could replace macOS, if you go back to my first point, think about iOS as a version of macOS that was stripped down and has been built back up over the intervening decade. I don't think they could make the switch tomorrow, but in a couple of years, it's not unreasonable to think there could be a reunification of the iOS and macOS codebases, creating, essentially a fully-featured iOS for desktop hardware with the features we've come to expect from modern desktop OSes.
[+] [-] Esau|9 years ago|reply
Personally, I prefer they keep Mac OS and iOS separate.
[+] [-] Tloewald|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nattofriends|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdemare|9 years ago|reply
I wonder where the performance ceiling is going to be for the Apple processor line. Looking at Intel, I'd have expected them to have hit it already, but given the huge increases in single threaded performance so far year on year, it's hard to believe that it'll peter down to <15% per year from now on.
If performance is going to keep improving at the current rate, then the A11X will be significantly faster than Intel's 2017 Cannonlake mobile lineup. Switching away from Intel would give Macs another big leg-up relative to Windows laptops.
Macs will never switch to iOS though. Processes on macOS have a freedom that's incomparable to that on iOS, and once the genie is out of the bottle, you can't put it back in again. But Apple will keep working to make iOS sufficient for increasingly more people, and Macs will keep getting more niche. Apple could even introduce a laptop-like form factor like the Surface Book with iOS on it (the iBook Pro?).
Interesting times...
[+] [-] jhasse|9 years ago|reply
Source? I don't believe that this is true.
[+] [-] valine|9 years ago|reply
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/15/9738504/tim-cook-says-app...
[+] [-] sjtgraham|9 years ago|reply
- Most 3rd party Apple development is already happening on ARM. This would inject new life into the desktop/laptop product line. Think of the thousands of apps that could now run on those platforms.
- Apple gets rid of a massive chunk of BOM cost improving margins, i.e. Intel CPU.
- No need to emulate X86 if Apple can do binary translation instead. There are already OSS projects like MC-Semantics (https://github.com/trailofbits/mcsema) that can take an X86 binary and emit LLVM IR. In theory you could give that to the ARM LLVM backend and relink to ARM frameworks. This would be an interesting problem to solve vis-a-vis code signing. One way would be for Apple to sign a code signing identity for each user, have the OS translate the binary, prompt the user for a password to get the private key from the keychain, sign the new executable, save it, and then run it.
- I actually wonder how many desktop apps are commonly used on the macOS platform, and how big of a problem in 2016 an arch switch would be. Muggles are already predominantly using mobile devices. I'm guessing 99% of users use one of 100 (or less) desktop apps. I imagine it to be quite the long-tail.
[+] [-] agumonkey|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jccalhoun|9 years ago|reply
The current top intel chip (i7-6700K) single-core score is 5326 and that same chip multi-core score is 17003 and the i7-6950X multi-core score is 29877. http://browser.primatelabs.com/processor-benchmarks
That's still a pretty good lead. Now perhaps with the added room of a laptop they could make an arm chip that was closer in performance but would it be worth it?
[+] [-] acdha|9 years ago|reply
The real difference, though, is power: that 6700-K uses 91W and the A10 should be around 2W. There's no way you can put a 6700-K in a normal laptop and the mobile processors appear only to be delivering single-core scores which are already within iPhone 7 range.
The other question is how often single-core or even multi-core performance matters for the average user vs. GPU performance since that's often the only place where people are limited by something other than network or storage speeds. I think a growing number of people are within the range where their needs would be satisfied with perhaps an extra core or two but a lot more GPU capacity.
1. They apparently activate either the fast or slow cores based on load but don't have all 4 active at the same time: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/09/iphone-7-and-7-plus-rev...
[+] [-] ejdyksen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retric|9 years ago|reply
Also, don't forget it's really the mid range chips that matter and the A10 is very much a mid range chip without the benefit of excessive binning.
[+] [-] DiabloD3|9 years ago|reply
When the next iPhone has a single-core score with a wide margin over the single-core score of the fastest current normal i7, and an equivalent multi-core score against the same i7, then we can say Apple has caught up.
Why wide margin of single? Because artificial benchmarks are not a good measure, and due to unrelated factors, and also due to how most programs are strongly single threaded in performance, program execution performance in the real world no longer linearly scales with raw IPS increases, nor does it scale linearly with IPS + cache/memory performance increases.
Also, the whole "but the iPhone chip is only dual core, and modern i7s are quads"... too bad. If you're going to make the argument of desktop performance, then you have to apples-to-apples the comparison. You can say, however, the new iPhone CPU has good performance, because it legitimately does... for a phone, not for a desktop.
[+] [-] ekianjo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhandley|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vertex-four|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] threeseed|9 years ago|reply
Whilst Apple does have an excellent history with these transitions using software I suspect in this situation hardware might be easier/better.
[+] [-] DeepYogurt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|9 years ago|reply
That's just asking for trouble, and making their chip consume more
It will be done in software
[+] [-] jonstokes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ph_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkot|9 years ago|reply
http://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curposti...
[+] [-] samfisher83|9 years ago|reply
With shrinking transistor sizes they can shorten their pipeline maybe add a few more front end decoders, add even more cache. If you have a shorter pipeline the branch misses aren't as bad. There is a lot of stuff they could do which they probably aren't since they haven't had a real incentive to do so.
[+] [-] hochchristoph|9 years ago|reply
“What device of, which both have the same performance and storage, do I choose? The one with the USB ports, the inflexible keyboard, bloated software and costs 600$ more, or the other one with a touchscreen, optional keyboard, and much much simpler software?”
Also I think that Apple won’t do any ARM MacBook at all. If we consider a RICE scheme for gauging priorization for such a feature like ARM CPUs in MacBooks:
Reach: Modest, there aren’t that many Mac users compared to iOS
Impact: Positive impact on Mac users is limited. Performance won’t be that better, mostly equal. Software availability could be limited for a while during a transition.
Confidence: Apple has made a couple architecture transitions on the Mac before, so they know how it works. But they don’t know how app developers will react. Will Adobe, Microsoft etc. get onboard, or jump ship?
Effort: Rather high. It’s one of the things where 10% of the implementation will need 90% of the effort. Mostly it’s just a recompile to run. But optimizing software for x86 is different than for ARM. The performance critical parts of many system frameworks which have no existing iOS port have to be rewritten to be efficient on the new architecture.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|9 years ago|reply
- Comparing the brand new A10 to a 2013-era Intel.
- Asserting iOS for workstations.
While many people could probably get by on iOS, it is particularly crippled for people that need to do technical work. However, I found the idea intriguing, of having a workstation with multiple ARM or Apple chips in it with a proper OS. I know they exist already, but having Apple behind them would make a big difference.
[+] [-] trynumber9|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Boothroid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neals|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mentos|9 years ago|reply
Sadly I don't think so.
What about a thin foldable screen rather than a headset? (http://www.sciencealert.com/lg-unveils-its-new-flexible-pape...)
Bottom line is if your phone is as powerful as your laptop how can you interact with it naturally on the go?
[+] [-] faragon|9 years ago|reply
That could allow to maintain, or even increase, profit margings, with margin for lowering product price. Running that path, in my opinion, Apple could take 50% of laptop market. E.g. high quality laptops with BOM (bill of materials) of 150 USD selling for 400-600 USD. Or even less.