Apple's rumored shift to its own CPUs for Mac may parallel the 2005 transition to Intel and brings up similar questions of emulation, developer transition kits
Mark Gurman: … I'm not sure what the hedging is about there, other than the fact that anything reported about anyone's future plans could, in theory, change.
Intel loses one of its highest-margin, most visible design wins if Macs move to Apple-designed Arm chips, ending a supply relationship dating to the 2005 transition the article invokes.
Mac developers face the same fork the 2005 switch created: recompile for the new architecture, rely on emulation for legacy software, or get a developer transition kit to bridge the gap.
Second-order effects
Apple's control of both silicon and OS removes the CPU-vendor dependency that shaped Mac release cadence and specs since 2005, letting it bundle processor improvements into its own roadmap rather than waiting on Intel's tick-tock.
Other PC makers watching the largest Mac transition since 2005 will face pressure to justify x86-only lineups against a rival whose phones, tablets, and now laptops share one architecture.
Third-order effects
If Apple executes a second architecture migration cleanly, the precedent strengthens the case that vertically integrated, workload-specific silicon beats merchant CPUs for consumer devices — a template other device makers have already begun copying.
The trend: Consumer computing is consolidating around vertically integrated, architecture-controlled silicon, with Apple's Mac transition marking the point where even general-purpose PCs exit the merchant-CPU model.
Intel's been trying to do graphics longer than Apple has had its own chip-design group and Apple's laptop/desktop efforts are even newer, and yet it's already ahead of Intel on graphics. This is Olympic-tier plateauing. https://twitter.com/...
This is ... kind of bad. Bad for Mac users, bad for PC users, bad for competition. Because this is essentially killing the Mac as a viable platform. https://arstechnica.com/...
14/n So here's my probably wrong but fun/absolutely 20% sure 😉 prediction for the WWDC keynote: After announcing the ARM Mac transition, Tim Cook welcomes AWS CEO Andy Jassy onto the stage to introduce a partnership to highlight the availability and future of AWS's ARM-based...
If Apple does a desktop ARM devkit, say a Mac mini or something, then I might consider replacing my 2012 iMac with it. If it's a laptop, forget it. I lived on the Apple Intel Developer Transition Kit from the moment I got it, and it was the fastest I ever remember OS X running
Apple doesn't need to eschew AppKit for an ARM transition on the Mac; both Catalyst and SwiftUI rely on it heavily — it's not an either/or. What they could get, effectively for free, is binary compatibility with existing iPad apps. A single, shared app platform, SDK & App Store
Don't think so. Apples cost to TSMC per iPhone chip is already very high ~$50. So a beefier chip could cost more. My guess is beak even roughly. But, again, control.
Oh, but I disagree! Boot Camp and having that ability to fall back on Windows was massive! I was in college at the time and it was almost overnight how quickly laptops went from Dell to Mac b/c of the combo of Vista and Intel Macs.
SS posts a lot of smart stuff but he missed this one. Carbon/Cocoa was about OS X transition, not move to Intel. I want an iPad laptop too, but macOS isn't going to provide it to you, iPadOS will. MacOS is for Mac stuff. That's Cocoa for the foreseeable future. https://twitter.co…
One of the most interesting questions about the Mac-to-ARM transition is how badly Adobe will handle it, and how many years of pain Adobe users have to look forward to.
Porting a Mac app to ARM may just be a checkbox in Xcode, but all of your dependencies are going to have to have checked that checkbox before you do — and updated their makefiles, and their build scripts. If they don't, you're going to have to. This is why transitions take years