Whilst most of the discussion has been on Intel vs ARM performance and power consumption as a rationale it's probably worth mentioning two others:
- Complete control of the Silicon. Apple will be able to place its own silicon IP on the new ARM chips. Does this mean the integration of the T2 onto the main SoC? Adding Neural Engine hardware? None of this would be possible with Intel and this would seem to provide interesting opportunities for Apple to differentiate the Mac from the PC market.
- Economics. It seems likely that the ARM chips will be materially cheaper for Apple to buy than comparable Intel chips, although Apple will have fixed design costs to meet that it wouldn't do if it stuck with Intel. Any advantage would grow if Mac volumes increase which would make it advantageous to try to grow market share. Is this the start of a push to grow Mac volumes significantly?
I think the lower heat density of ARM, and the increasing heat of AMD and Intel is another interesting point.
AMD and Intel are racing to smaller manufacturing processes that inevitably will increase heat density.
Today the most powerful laptops are those huge PC gaming bricks which of course are much more powerful than any MBP. This is only going to get worse as heat density increases, at least for demanding applications (gaming, 8k video editing, vfx, etc).
By moving to ARM, Apple will be able to offer much more performant laptops in a much smaller form factor which will only differentiate Macs even more from the PC world. At least in theory.
If this works I wouldn't be surprised if PC laptops moved to ARM too a couple of years later.
> If this works I wouldn't be surprised if PC laptops moved to ARM too a couple of years later
Hasn't PC world ALREADY started the transition to ARM? Snapdragon based laptops already started shipping with SD835, Microsoft already has Windows S for such ARM laptops and many OEMs are already making experimental foldable ARM based devices that can take advantage of these small chips. Apple would be just retro-fitting their ARM chips in the shell of Macbooks 2 years too late.
- Complete control of the Silicon. Apple will be able to place its own silicon IP on the new ARM chips. Does this mean the integration of the T2 onto the main SoC? Adding Neural Engine hardware? None of this would be possible with Intel and this would seem to provide interesting opportunities for Apple to differentiate the Mac from the PC market.
- Economics. It seems likely that the ARM chips will be materially cheaper for Apple to buy than comparable Intel chips, although Apple will have fixed design costs to meet that it wouldn't do if it stuck with Intel. Any advantage would grow if Mac volumes increase which would make it advantageous to try to grow market share. Is this the start of a push to grow Mac volumes significantly?