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.
I've been following Apple and the rest of the industry since the mid 90's. Based on what I've seen I suspect that they already have built a handful of ARM Mac prototypes and maintain an ARM version of macOS, probably in a fairly serious way since the A7 shipped. macOS shares quite a bit of code with iOS and has been multi-architecture from the beginning. First bring-up was probably on actual iPhone or iPad dev hardware but they have the in-house fabrication capability to make machines that are visually the same as an existing model (probably 13" Air) with more or less the guts of an iPad. My guess is there are a small number of these floating around campus.
With those assumptions I still would bet against us seeing ARM Macs in the next couple years. There are a lot of advantages to keeping Macs single-architecture. Recent Intel CPUs are efficient enough that saving power there won't make a huge difference in user-available battery life (screen, DRAM, network, etc all use some too). Intel can price their CPUs aggressively enough to make cost not a major issue.
I do think it will eventually happen mainly because it will give them more control over their product line. Indicators of an upcoming shift will be if Intel screws up another generation of mobile CPU (it happened with Skylake, could happen again), Apple adds features like PCI-e for discrete GPU support (ok, they did in A9), and if Ax series performance starts to exceed corresponding Intel mobile parts by >50% (enough to compensate for the overhead of binary translation for legacy x86 apps).
> if Ax series performance starts to exceed corresponding Intel mobile parts by >50% (enough to compensate for the overhead of binary translation for legacy x86 apps).
Another milestone for an Ax laptop would be a good power efficiency story. If Apple can show an Ax based laptop with exceptional battery life under real working conditions that would be quite attractive to many people, even if translated programs experience a 50% drop in performance.
In addition to the Appstore bitcode stuff other comments mention, the Universal Binaries tools that were used for the mass powerpc->intel migration will also help to diminish the need for binary translation in many cases. UBs mean that you don't solely need to rely on Bitcode translation via the iOS/Appstore, either, so these fanciful Ax laptops could run all normal non-appstore apps quite easily.
>Apple adds features like PCI-e for discrete GPU support (ok, they did in A9), and if Ax series performance starts to exceed corresponding Intel mobile parts by >50% (enough to compensate for the overhead of binary translation for legacy x86 apps).
When it happens, it might not need binary translation.
For real -- having most of the *nix niceties in a visually appealing, hassle free environment is so nice. We are on Red Hat at work, and the hoops one has to jump through to get reasonable fonts up and running and the huge inconsistencies between desktop apps makes me pine for the Mac.
It's true for enterprise distributions, sure, but something like Arch Linux+GNOME 3.20 is REEALY nice. I use a Mac at work and my Arch with GNOME setup at home is easily matching the Mac and even outperforming it in terms of package management etc. Mac still handles high DPI a lot better, (but GNOME is getting there too) and if I was doing media content production, Linux probably wouldn't cut it for me, but I'm programmer and Linux is just the sweet spot of power + choice + usability for me.
Arch + Gnome 3.20 is what I use on my desktop too. The UX is excellent. Too bad that linux battery life and gpu-switching is still not up to scratch for laptops.
Very short sighted of parent post. One of the main reasons I don't consider (very hard) switching away from iPhone is the integration with my Mac (which I do still think is worth using, at least unless they ruin this platform).
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)
Yeah I think you're losing perspective that outside of startup hipster tech bubbles, Windows is still the most popular desktop computing platform.
Mobile/tablet devices have struggled heavily at overcoming the one thing that's preventing their full adoption: making them great for content creation, not just content consumption.
A lot of big tech companies aren't building their products on .NET, for a variety of reasons that mostly boil down to it not being the right tool for the job. Recently the .NET web dev situation has improved. (Whether it has improved relative to the alternatives is arguable.) But when those companies were getting started the original iteration of ASP.NET was the only game in town, and it was very much not something you'd want to use for what any of those companies do. Nor was it intended to be.
.NET's always been more of a player on the in-house enterprise dev front, and probably always will be. (That might change with .NET Core, but it also might not.) Which means that you're not going to see much about .NET on TechCrunch. Inventory & financial management for Fortune 500 companies might be the silent majority for software development work, but it's rarely newsworthy.
Their consumer product escapades are very visibly, famously star-crossed, but their revenues have always shown consistent growth, and over the past few years they've had some realizations and made some re-alignments that put them in a good strategic position for supporting all their other operations.
That is a Silicon Valley view of Starbucks full with Macs and iPhones.
Here in Europe Microsoft is doing just fine across the continent companies, not only enterprise. Including selling Windows licenses for computers used in Android development.
Anectdote, but all Android developers (and WP devs forcwhat it's worth) are uding Macbooks Pro as their work machines. That's in Europe, and not even in Western.
I wonder how many of those devs "pivoted" from being web devs.
Best i can tell, Mac got a inroad in the web development world thanks to:
A. Being unix based and thus similar to the then prevalent LAMP stack.
B. Apple having a entrenched position in media production, and web development, via newspapers and broadcasters going online, becoming a part of that economy.
A) was important: Windows was going through some painful transitions and still required paid compiler licenses, which meant porting open source apps was painful, and while Linux was many things, a comfortable desktop OS was not one of them, especially if battery life or not crashing mattered to you (usually video driver or power management bugs rather than the kernel but people with jobs to do don't make that distinction).
A Mac was the one OS where it was easy to run PHP and Photoshop, and the small size + long battery life era starting with the Titanium PowerBook didn't hurt at all. I knew it was going to be interesting when all of the developers and Unix admins I knew started buying Mac laptops for daily use. If only I'd bought more AAPL at $17…
Well, I am yet to work in any client that uses Mac for any kind of development besides iOS, and even when they do, they timeshare an iMac across teams.
That is one thing to ponder. For MS the home/consumer desktop has been pretty much a means to an end.
This in that they can point to the consumer sales and say that those are people already familiar with MS products, and thus require less training when hired by a company.
That is, if said company base their computing environment on MS products.
MS going cloud is basically saying to said companies that MS can handle all the day to day support issues, for a fee. Thus the companies can reduce the size of their IT department.
How is it going to kill Intel? Apple's percentage of the desktop market is still a rounding error. If you think they're interested in selling CPUs to others, you need only look back to history to see it's VERY unlikely that will ever happen. If they aren't selling to others, they aren't killing Intel.
Not to mention, even if Intel managed to be "defeated" in the processor space (which I consider just about impossible at this point) - they've got better fab production than anyone else in existence. They've also got lots and lots and lots of products that aren't x86 CPUs.
7.4% of the worldwide computer market is hardly rounding error. Lenovo/HP/Dell put together account for a hair over 50% of the market, although it wouldn't surprise me if the total profits from Apple's 7.4% were greater than the total profits from the top three's 50% due to significantly higher margins.
By comparison, that's roughly equivalent to Honda's market share in the automotive industry, and I don't think anyone would dismiss Honda's sales as being a rounding error.
Other than that, I agree, they are clearly not the sort of company that would be interested in selling chips to other vendors, at least based on their history up to this point. If there were to start selling CPUs to others, it would not be playing to their strengths and would be a huge departure for them as a company.
Exactly. A lot of people seems to think Apple with only a 7% marketshare is small. But Apple are using some of the highest margin chips on their Laptop. I dont think it is anywhere close to 50% of Intel's PC market profits, but definitely in the range of 20-30%. Not to mention the marketing value of being inside Apple.
The next interesting question is at what price point would Intel give and Apple accept to continue using Intel x86 CPU inside Mac.
What you don't understand is that they're changing the game like the iPhone did to the blackberry. The iPad Pro is a computer that can work for most general use cases, which don't require heavy computing power or large storage onsite. With more computing power, it allows for more business applications to be ported over as well. Apple isn't aiming to replace intel in computer chips, it's aiming to replace the need for a laptop or computer.
Well you've got to consider what's going on at the low end of the market too. If Chromebooks are eating into Windows laptop sales and mostly running ARM, and Apple switches to ARM for some or many of its high end computers, which make up more than 50% of that market segment, that's definitely some bad news for Intel. It won't kill them though, just push them out of the consumer desktop/laptop market.
Apple sales are less than 1% of Intel's revenue. It will mean literally nothing.
You can paint me a GIANT skeptic of chromebooks in any setting outside of education. My step-mom got one as a present (as in for FREE) from her daughters. She's BUYING a Windows laptop because of how frustrated she is that it works with exactly nothing. Can't use her fitbit. Can't update her GPS. No way to sync her iPhone. etc. etc. etc.
It's a niche product for nerds. Any standard consumer will purchase one and never buy a second once they figure out all the limitations of their "cheap" Chromebook. That's ignoring the fact that I've seen more Intel based Chromebooks in the wild than ARM. I completely disagree with your "mostly running ARM" assessment and the only facts I can find on it do as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromebook
Respectfully I disagree. It's actually a great product for the majority of non-geeks who surf the web, take a few photos and watch Netflix.
Most newer devices sync over wifi to the cloud. I am pretty sure your Mom's iPhone can do that. The number of things you need a full blown PC for are diminishing.
If she has an iPhone why would she need to hook her Fitbit up to a computer? You can do everything you need from the phone via Bluetooth. And what is she syncing her iPhone with? I've not needed to sync my iPhone with a computer in years.
Every non-tech person that I know that has a chrome book loves it.
If you have an iPhone -- iTunes for music. Since I only use Linux at home now (yes, yes -- I should look at BSD variants, another discussion), I reluctantly got an Android this year. :-(
Any song you've downloaded from iTunes will be available on your phone through the iTunes app. If you've ripped a bunch of music then I guess you are right, but I find I don't use either, and instead use Spotify and Amazon Prime Music for all my music needs.
As for ARM inside the chromebooks : currently Intel sells chromebooks chips at low prices , and for a relatively smaller segment of the market - so they're OK with that.
What happens when ARM chips improve, and chromebooks hold a much larger share?
It is my understanding that Apple purchases the highest-quality chips of the highest-quality runs and pays a premium for it. What fraction of Intel's profits do Apple represent?
A relatively small part. Apple computer sales are not that impressive. They may be a large individual conntributor, but they alone do not sell enough to make a big difference.
Yes, Macs are a pretty small figure. The new iPhone modem deal Intel struck with Apple for around $1.5 billion is a bigger deal, which would be in the ballpark of 2% of Intel's ~$55 billion in revenues.
But Intel likes Apple Macs as a show pony. Intel has for years been desperately trying to convince hardware manufacturers to make both more consumer appealing PCs and new consumer devices around their chips. PC makers kept making the same old big beige towers, with the only differentiating factors being price (race to the bottom) and speed.
Apple doesn't like to compete in that space and likes to do other things and pushes on different features of chips that allow them to make smaller machines, quiet machines, fully integrated machines, battery friendly machines, and focus on industrial design.
Intel knows this and likes to use Apple to push other manufacturers to think in similar ways. The results have been pretty good as there are now PC competitors that make things like the All-in-one-flatscreen iMac, and the Macbook Air. If you remember way back before the iPhone, the original Apple TV was Intel based and showed Intel chips in mainstream consumer non-PC use cases. (This is different than concept demos because this was a real shipping product that actually managed to make enough money to sustain itself.) Also, Apple's obsession with reduction, like eliminating ports has been good for Intel because Apple helps encourage adoption of new standards they want to put out. For example, Apple embraced Thunderbolt at the beginning and was willing to drop legacy ports while most manufactures would normally hedge by keeping legacy ports. Apple pushing hard on this helps makes the 3rd party adoption faster which emboldens manufacturers to migrate faster themselves.
I agree with you, Intel is here to stay. But let's remember that Intel only has better fabs because they've had almost unlimited resources to reinvest in them as a result of the incredibly high margins on their processors which is the result of almost no competition. If the margins on those processors fall, their investment in fabs is sure to follow.
Can't find a good source for how much of intel's sales are Apple x86, but AWS does indeed use Xeons exclusively (with some Nvidia Tesla stuff) for EC2 according to https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
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.