[AppleInsider] Apple may abandon Intel for its Macs starting with post-Broadwell

[Eug]

People saying Apple may abandon Intel in their ipads, or macs has been going on for years.

It is always in the near future this will happen. Always the near future just like people calling for an economic depression always 5 years in the future. A stopped watch does have the right time twice a day so if it does happen they are not some oracle, and if it does not happen they they are plain old fashioned wrong.

People saying Apple may abandon PowerPC in their Mac had been going on for years.

And then they did it. It caught everyone including me by surprise, but not the tech writers who predicted it. In fact, it even caught IBM by surprise. All of a sudden, Jobs simply stopped taking IBM's calls.

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Personally I don't think there will be a big push from Intel to ARM any time soon for the Macs, but as mentioned I won't rule out the possibility of a low end Mac tablet/laptop hybrid with ARM, esp. since that's a product that I'd actually consider buying myself.

 

[witeken]

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There's a distinction between rumor and speculation.

 

[ShintaiDK]

People saying Apple may abandon PowerPC in their Mac had been going on for years.

And then they did it. It caught everyone including me by surprise, but not the tech writers who predicted it. In fact, it even caught IBM by surprise. All of a sudden, Jobs simply stopped taking IBM's calls.

---

Personally I don't think there will be a big push from Intel to ARM any time soon for the Macs, but as mentioned I won't rule out the possibility of a low end Mac tablet/laptop hybrid with ARM, esp. since that's a product that I'd actually consider buying myself.

Apple abandoning PowerPC wasnt a surprise to anyone. PowerPC had been far behind for a long time. And it hurt Apple hard that they couldnt compete anywhere performance wise. Also why these ARM rumours are so silly. Because its essentially the same as going back to PowerPC in terms of performance.

 

[Mushkins]

This is all kind of funny, considering it's taken so long for companies to start embracing Mac versions and multiplatform support for their software to the degree we see now.

The moment Apple ditches x86 in the desktop space is the moment 90% of those companies go back to simply not making their software for Macs. And nobody wants to run watered down iphone/ipad apps on a $2000 desktop.

This isn't even one step forward, two steps back. It's *just* two steps back.

 

[Eug]

Apple abandoning PowerPC wasnt a surprise to anyone. PowerPC had been far behind for a long time. And it hurt Apple hard that they couldnt compete anywhere performance wise. Also why these ARM rumours are so silly. Because its essentially the same as going back to PowerPC in terms of performance.

It was a surprise to the whole industry at the time, or at least the timing was, except for a few tech writers. Remember, not even IBM itself thought this was coming when it did, and they actually supplied the chips. They were completely shocked. If IBM was surprised, you can imagine that the little one-man-show developer types were also surprised.

Why was it such a surprise? Because it was thought that essentially no 3rd party software would run on Mac-Intel. And they were right for the complex stuff. For the simpler stuff, Apple had Rosetta for on-the-fly translation, but it was horrible performance-wise for obvious reasons, and there were lots of bugs.

Yet, Apple weathered the storm.

So like I said, there is precedent. I agree with you on the performance issue of switching to ARM, but that doesn't stop Apple from beginning the process, with an iDevice Pro.

 

[ShintaiDK]

It was a surprise to the whole industry at the time, or at least the timing was, except for a few tech writers. Remember, not even IBM itself thought this was coming when it did, and they actually supplied the chips. They were completely shocked. If IBM was surprised, you can imagine that the little one-man-show developer types were also surprised.

I sure dont hope it surprised IBM. A look on their roadmaps for PowerPC was more than telling. Barren wasteland.

 

[Eug]

I sure dont hope it surprised IBM. A look on their roadmaps for PowerPC was more than telling. Barren wasteland.

Yes, it surprised IBM. If you read the articles from the big newspapers (WSJ) at the time, they described the situation as having IBM executives calling Apple and Steve Jobs repeatedly to discuss future chip orders and just being met with silence. ie. Nobody at Apple would take calls from IBM's VPs. Imagine that.

Then a few days later, Steve Jobs announced Apple was switching to Intel.

BTW, they actually gave a very, very big hint earlier during the year. Jobs was demoing something. Sherlock? I can't remember. However, the gist of it was he typed in a shipping code and the delivery date or something popped up. Oh whatever, no big deal everyone thought.

Well, in fact it was a big deal, because it was actually a real shipping invoice number, for a shipment from Intel to Apple, but nobody picked up on that.

 

[exar333]

People do realise it could be more that Apple is going to expand the iPad line, with a higher end hybrid model which replaces the MacBook Air laptops??

The MacBook Air line has not seen massive updates over the last few years either(more CPU refreshes) - its almost like Apple are in a holding pattern with it.

Also,people using MacBook Air laptops are probably only doing office work,light image editing and internet browsing on them - a scaled up A series SOC would probably have enough power to do such things IMHO,especially in the 2016 to 2017 timeframe when there would have at least been another revision of the SOC(or maybe two) by then.

They will probably keep their desktops and high end laptops for compatability and performance reasons on X86 for a while IMHO.

A SOC MacBook Air would be a terrible product. It would turn a very small, lightweight, full-featured laptop into a iPad with a keyboard. iOS is a terrible OS for anything other than a phone or small iPad. Even then, it's way behind Android and WP8 for multitasking and so forth.

It would be a huge step backwards...

MacBook Airs currently serve a group of people who want OSX on a mobile platform. It is small, lightweight and powerful enough for most Desktop applications.

 

[Essence_of_War]

And then they did it. It caught everyone including me by surprise, but not the tech writers who predicted it. In fact, it even caught IBM by surprise. All of a sudden, Jobs simply stopped taking IBM's calls.

I don't think I see your point. Broken clocks are still right twice a day. Apple doesn't fab chips. Writers can freely speculate and then employ all kinds of post-hoc rationalization about how they were right all along. Predictions aren't useful if we only evaluate them retroactively when they were correct.

 

[NTMBK]

A SOC MacBook Air would be a terrible product. It would turn a very small, lightweight, full-featured laptop into a iPad with a keyboard. iOS is a terrible OS for anything other than a phone or small iPad. Even then, it's way behind Android and WP8 for multitasking and so forth.

It would be a huge step backwards...

MacBook Airs currently serve a group of people who want OSX on a mobile platform. It is small, lightweight and powerful enough for most Desktop applications.

Why would it have to run iOS? They probably already have OSX running on ARM in a lab somewhere.

 

[Eug]

I don't think I see your point. Broken clocks are still right twice a day. Apple doesn't fab chips. Writers can freely speculate and then employ all kinds of post-hoc rationalization about how they were right all along. Predictions aren't useful if we only evaluate them retroactively when they were correct.

Dvorak had been predicting an Apple switch to Intel for quite some time before that actually. And it did make sense for a couple of reasons: Increased performance, and the fact that Jobs himself pushed it before OS X came out to the masses. Remember, Jobs himself ran NEXT OS on a ThinkPad. He tried to get developers on board with an OS X Intel right from the beginning of OS X, but it was the developers who balked. They absolutely refused, so Jobs relented and stuck with PowerPC.

The surprising part though was that after all the effort that had been put into OS X on PowerPC, Apple would make such a huge switch, esp. when the 3rd party software wouldn't even run on it. Think Windows RT, but with no more regular Windows.

But a few tech writers stuck to their guns and said it would happen, and it did.

Why would it have to run iOS? They probably already have OSX running on ARM in a lab somewhere.

Guaranteed. In fact, they had OS X running on Intel right from the beginning too, despite the fact that few people at Apple actually knew about it. There is another article that came out after the Intel switch that described how the project managers of the big iApps had to submit their applications to a nameless department to ensure the compiles were up to snuff. What this sekrit dept. was actually doing was compiling the apps on multiple platforms (although the articles only mentioned OS X PPC and OS X Intel) and if it worked fine, they sign off on the release. If it didn't compile properly, they'd ask for code tweaks.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Dvorak had been predicting an Apple switch to Intel for quite some time before that actually. And it did make sense for a couple of reasons: Increased performance, and the fact that Jobs himself pushed it before OS X came out to the masses. Remember, Jobs himself ran NEXT OS on a ThinkPad. He tried to get developers on board with an OS X Intel right from the beginning of OS X, but it was the developers who balked. They absolutely refused, so Jobs relented and stuck with PowerPC.

The surprising part though was that after all the effort that had been put into OS X on PowerPC, Apple would make such a huge switch, esp. when the 3rd party software wouldn't even run on it. Think Windows RT, but with no more regular Windows.

But a few tech writers stuck to their guns and said it would happen, and it did.

Everyone with half a brain saw the change to Intel a mile away. PowerPC had nothing to offer and it was a massive liability for Apple, not to mention the countless lies they got humiliated on to try and defend PowerPC. x86 was superiour to PowerPC in all metrics. Plus x86 had a roadmap with progression on.

However if we move the tables around as ask why ARM? Then its quite hard to find any reason.

 

[Eug]

Everyone with half a brain saw the change to Intel a mile away. PowerPC had nothing to offer and it was a massive liability for Apple, not to mention the countless lies they got humiliated on to try and defend PowerPC.

As I've said before a few times: They saw the change maybe coming eventually, but almost nobody predicted the timing. Not even Apple's own coders or IBM.

However if we move the tables around as ask why ARM? Then its quite hard to find any reason.

Why ARM? Because they can for low end hybrid laptops, and they design ARM SoCs themselves. For example, let's just look at something as simple as H.265 HEVC. Right now, it's an iPad and iPhone feature, because not even Broadwell has proper H.265 HEVC hardware decode. It's a small example, but an example nonetheless.

In the very least, building such a hybrid would keep Intel on its toes, in terms of pricing, and feature completeness.

 

[RampantAndroid]

As I've said before a few times: They saw the change maybe coming eventually, but almost nobody predicted the timing. Not even Apple's own coders or IBM.

I sure hope "apple coders", if you mean their engineers, knew it was coming. You have any references?

 

[ShintaiDK]

As I've said before a few times: They saw the change maybe coming eventually, but almost nobody predicted the timing. Not even Apple's own coders or IBM.


Why ARM? Because they can for low end hybrid laptops, and they design ARM SoCs themselves. For example, let's just look at something as simple as H.265 HEVC. Right now, it's an iPad and iPhone feature, because not even Broadwell has proper H.265 HEVC hardware decode. It's a small example, but an example nonetheless.

In the very least, building such a hybrid would keep Intel on its toes, in terms of pricing, and feature completeness.

Broadwell got hybrid support for H.265. Dont let the rigged demo mislead you.

And let me remind you why Apple changed in the first place.

I will spare you from the PowerPC laptops.

 

[Eug]

I sure hope "apple coders", if you mean their engineers, knew it was coming. You have any references?

No references off hand, but I did read a LOT of articles on the topic at the time. No, most of the software engineers did NOT know it was coming. They were as shocked as everyone else. Only the top tier elite at Apple knew about it.

Jobs had a secret department that ensured that OS X was built to be platform agnostic, and even went as far to make their project managers submit their iApps to a department to ensure they were compiling as desired, but never told them exactly what they were doing.

 

[Eug]

Broadwell got hybrid support for H.265. Dont let the rigged demo mislead you.

And let me remind you why Apple changed in the first place.

I will spare you from the PowerPC laptops.

Uhh... Those last four graphs are mine, from my blog, using my own Macs for the benches. So, I'd say I'm well aware.

EDIT:

Here we go. Here is the actual blog entry:

http://everythingapple.blogspot.ca/2006/09/imac-core-2-duo-benchmarks-its-fast.html

You'll note the name of the blogger is Eug.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Uhh... Those last four graphs are mine, from my blog, using my own Macs for the benches. So, I'd say I'm well aware.

EDIT:

Here we go. Here is the actual blog entry:

http://everythingapple.blogspot.ca/2006/09/imac-core-2-duo-benchmarks-its-fast.html

You'll note the name of the blogger is Eug.

Yet you now advocate for something that is more or less equal to going back to PowerPC. Whats changed since then?

 

[Eug]

Yet you now advocate for something that is more or less equal to going back to PowerPC. Whats changed since then?

I'm not advocating anything of the sort. I'm advocating Apple release an iPad Pro 12" hybrid with detachable keyboard, and updating iOS to support proper laptop keyboard functionality and trackpads. (This is currently a problem with both Android and iOS.)

In other words, I'm looking at it differently than others in this thread. I'm not at all suggesting Apple should or will ditch Intel (in the near term) and run all new Macs on ARM with OS X ARM.

What I am suggesting is expanding the role of iOS ARM to include something more than just 10" iPads. Such a hybrid would find a real audience (including myself) yet would let Apple keep both its existing iOS and OS X customer base, while at the same time let Apple get its feet wet.

It's a Surface RT-like solution that might actually work.

 

[Arkaign]

If Apple does this, it would doom them. Full-feature notebooks, imacs, and mac pros are NOT suitable for low end performance processors.

Think about it, why mess with success? Apple has built a huge empire by repeating their moves in x86 carefully year after year. If anything, they're closer to Intel than ever before with replacing low-end dGPU stuff with Intel IGP (bumpgate to start and the desire to get smaller/cooler/thinner/more power efficient all rolled together make this a no brainer).

Play it out :

(A) - Apple achieves some kind of low-end sub-i3 chip, running a different architecture and manages to get OSX to emulate x86 to run standard apps. They replace the Intel options in low end and macbook air type devices. What do they gain? A small amount of margin on a per-unit basis? The chips R&D, the huge work needed to make OSX and the software work, the custom entire new board/bios designs, all of that would cost HUGE money. It would probably actually lose them money if anything. And customers would go from high performing 2015-era models to units that perform more like 2007 models. Lose/lose.

(B)- They keep using Intel stuff for their full-OS products, and continue to stack crazy cash with that winning recipe. Performance is never a question, no ludicrous amount of R&D needed, and they can continue to expand their Ax line in their ipads, iphones, and idildos, which will continue to make them silly money on that side as well.

If anything, what Apple's main concern has to be is getting stalemated at the business level in terms of growth, and their receding influence in digital media. The Apple TV underperformed, iTunes is receding, and they don't seem to have a plan in place to prop that up. People forget that Apple's relevancy today doesn't even have anything to do with Macs, or even the iPhone itself. What put them on the map from doom to huge paydays was the iPod and iTunes. The iPod was what sold people on the iPhone, and then the iPad. Now iPod is basically irrelevant, but iTunes and that continual stream of cash is declining, so they have to find a way to expand their digital empire, not see it diminish.

And juggling in-house chips vs. Intel chips for the MBA/MBP/iMac/etc world is a wasted effort. Even if things went absolutely perfectly, it would be massive effort for little gain, and they'd risk completely being shut out of the business market, and much of the consumer market to boot. "Hello business sir, would you like to consider a MBA with the power of a potato, or this Skylake i7 Surface Pro 5?" Derp, derp.

 

[Arkaign]

However, Eug's perspective of just offering more iOS options and expanding it to hybrids is perfectly reasonable.

Replacing Intel for MBA/MBP/Mac Pro/etc is stupid beyond belief.

But expanding their in-house stuff for iOS devices, that's perfectly sane.

 

[RampantAndroid]

However, Eug's perspective of just offering more iOS options and expanding it to hybrids is perfectly reasonable.

Replacing Intel for MBA/MBP/Mac Pro/etc is stupid beyond belief.

But expanding their in-house stuff for iOS devices, that's perfectly sane.

You don't need an ARM CPU to run iOS all the time; Apple has the sources and could compile the whole OS for x86...some extra work would be needed, but it isn't as if iOS and ARM are joined at the hip.

 

[kimmel]

It's a Surface RT-like solution that might actually work.

I think the last thing that Apple wants to replicate is Surface RT. IOS "pro" on ARM would be very similar to what Surface RT was trying to do.

On a more generic level. Apple is very particular about not regressing performance, generation on generation. If for some reason they can make a faster chip than Intel, then sure they'll switch. Till that point there really is no point.

 

[Arkaign]

You don't need an ARM CPU to run iOS all the time; Apple has the sources and could compile the whole OS for x86...some extra work would be needed, but it isn't as if iOS and ARM are joined at the hip.

That's true, but it's the mirror argument I have for replacing x86 with ARM (Apple Ax or otherwise). It's a needless move with little to gain.

Performance of iOS devices is not a source of complaint for their users, nor do competitors have sizable leads over them that compel more than a nanoscopic number of people to move from iOS devices to competing options.

Now a couple-three years from now if Intel is suddenly crushing ARM stuff in price/performance/power/heat/package? It gets more interesting. I don't think we see anything that drastic happening though. Intel will steadily improve and become more competitive in the small-die space, but it's not enough to make it a pressing issue for now, or the near future.

Bottom line :

Apple wins with x86 in 'big' devices MBA and up.
Apple wins with ARM in 'small' devices iPad and down.
Apple has no need to change either of those paths for a good while yet.

 

[Nothingness]

However, Eug's perspective of just offering more iOS options and expanding it to hybrids is perfectly reasonable.

Replacing Intel for MBA/MBP/Mac Pro/etc is stupid beyond belief.

But expanding their in-house stuff for iOS devices, that's perfectly sane.

That's exactly what I think.