[Thread] A deep dive into the technical issues related to the rumored Mac transition from x86 to ARM architecture
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 @BenBajarin : 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. @film_girl : 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. Quinn Nelson / @snazzyq : If these redesigned iMac and new ARM Mac rumors at WWDC are true, this is gonna be an expensive few months. Excited tho! Jason Snell / @jsnell : 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.com/... Sascha Segan / @saschasegan : 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. Steve Troughton-Smith / @stroughtonsmith : 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
Context & Ripple Effects
This thread lands between two anchors of the ARM-Mac arc: Ming-Chi Kuo's February report that Apple would ship its first ARM-based Mac within 12 to 18 months, and the confirmation weeks later that Apple silicon Macs would run iOS apps natively on a shared architecture and App Store. Steve Troughton-Smith's argument here — that binary compatibility with iPad apps comes 'effectively for free' — is precisely the mechanism Apple then made official.
The debate in the thread maps the real fault lines: Ben Bajarin counters that TSMC per-chip costs (~$50 for an iPhone chip) mean a beefier Mac chip roughly breaks even rather than saves money, so control is the prize, while Quinn Nelson recalls how Boot Camp plus Vista drove the college laptop switch from Dell to Mac — a Windows fallback the ARM move forfeits.
First-order effects
- Developers, with Adobe the named stress case, face dependency and build-script rewrites that stretch porting over years — the same incumbent transition cost pattern Carbon/Cocoa users remember from the PowerPC era.
- Apple trades away Boot Camp's Windows dual-boot entirely, removing the exact safety net that Quinn Nelson credits for the original Dell-to-Mac campus shift, while gaining sole control over its silicon roadmap at TSMC.
Second-order effects
- Intel's socket monopoly ends, forcing PC rivals like Dell to answer a Mac line no longer constrained by Intel's cadence — pressure visible when Mercury Research measured ARM climbing to about 8% of PC chips by Q3 2021 from 2% a year earlier.
- Native iOS apps on Macs pull the iPadOS and macOS platforms together, setting up the convergence later seen when iPadOS 16 added resizable windowed multitasking toward desktop-style workflows.
Third-order effects
- A single shared app platform, SDK and App Store across iPhone, iPad and Mac restructures software distribution around one gatekeeper storefront, with Adobe-class incumbents either rebuilding their suites or ceding ground to apps born native.
- Once Apple silicon leads, Intel Macs become a managed legacy tier — Monterey already withheld Live Text, Portrait mode and unlimited on-device dictation from them — signaling feature stratification by chip generation as the norm.
The trend: Personal computing is consolidating around vertically integrated ARM silicon, where the vendor controls the chip, the OS features and the app store — and Intel-architecture machines inherit a shrinking feature set.