Are you on a Mac just because of the CPU?

What do you do that solely depends on the CPU and would improve so much by moving to AMD, at the cost of a completely different OS and software?

It would still be beleaguered by Windows, the main reason most of us moved to Macs. :)

I mean honestly the only reason I would stay with Mac would be the 4 TB3 ports, the heat and performance of MacOS pales in comparison to their Windows software production counterparts.

macOS' thermal management of macOS appears to be better than Windows': https://youtu.be/LGOmbNRlZdM?t=495 (8:15)

It also gives a better battery life on average compared to Windows on the same machine.

And the new Mac Pro is apparently a beast in performance and cooling.

I will say I consistently get better benchmark scores on CPU in macOS than Windows, but anything that involves the GPU is hilariously poor on macOS compared to Windows.

> but anything that involves the GPU

Even on Metal?

> It also gives a better battery life on average compared to Windows on the same machine.

Only if you have a dedicated gpu. Because OSX can easily switch between integrated and discrete.

On my Macbook 12" I get 2 extra hours out of Windows 10. But on my old Retina Mac Pro I get almost half the time out of Windows 10.

It's a shame that Apple wont go AMD because the battery life would be awesome on OSX with discrete gpu.

> It's a shame that Apple wont go AMD

I think they're probably just gonna go with their own custom ARM processors, which may have even better battery life.

I feel like going to ARM will alienate the customer base of developers that Apple has, won't it?

The developers that use XCode with Objective-C probably won't feel any difference as XCode will likely just silently compile the code into ARM (or both a la universal package from PPC days). It's too early to tell though.

there are a lot of programmers that use mac OS that don't even touch Swift or Objective-C. I'm in the web development industry, and I'd say 50% of the developers I know use apple computers for their job. Java, Ruby, even C#.

After Java/Ruby/C# runtimes are recompiled for ARM, these guys not gonna feel any change as well.

that seems a little simplistic. It isn't just the runtimes, but also all the tooling that goes with it. There would be a lot of work involved with recompiling all tooling and runtimes to work on ARM, and would probably alienate a large portion of developers currently using Apple products as a result.

This was already done twice in the past, once on transition from Motorola 68000 to PowerPC, and once on transition from PowerPC to Intel. All arrived with updated versions of interpreted language runtimes. We'll have to see what will they do this time.