The rumors are true and Apple announced today at WWDC that the company will be moving to its own processors for future products. The company’s’ A-series chips have been used in iPhones, iPads, and its Apple TV boxes for years and the transition to the laptop/desktop is about to finally happen.
This should not come as a big surprise, the company has been touting how powerful their homegrown chips have been for years and they love to compare them to Intel’s offerings as well. By moving to use their own chips in their laptops/desktops, they are further consolidating the integration across software and hardware and reducing their reliance on third-parties for improving the performance of their devices. Further, by owning the chip process as well, they can release products on their own schedule, no longer when Intel/AMD says that they can update their hardware.
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This is a monumental shift for Apple but it’s not the first time they have done this either. Most will remember when Apple switched from IBM’s processors to Intel and there are even a few other changes further back than the IBM transition. Apple knows the hurdles ahead of them and has outlined a plan to help move users, developers (and hopefully apps), to the new architecture.
To help make the transition, Apple announced Rosetta 2 and a host of new frameworks, including the ability to run iPhone and iPad apps, on the new hardware. The company also showed Adobe and Microsoft Office running on Apple Silicon (A12Z bionic) too.
There is also a new dev kit but more importantly, a transition kit that uses a Mac Mini with the A-Series chip inside to start building apps, or transitioning your apps, to Apple Silicon. These kits will start shipping this week and you can sign up here.
The first Mac with Apple Silicon will ship this year and they expect the transition to take two years. Apple will continue to support MacOS on Intel chips for several more years.
The big question will be if consumers and developers follow Apple? Considering that the company has a loyal following, it will likely have an easier time making the move than Microsoft has experienced with its attempts to support an ARM ecosystem. But with all major changes, time will tell if this was the right move for Apple or if Intel/AMD was the better path forward.
Stooks
<p>On one hand it is a gamble. Then again the market for Mac's is so small it does not matter really. You have two kinds of Mac users. </p><p><br></p><p>The very small group of professionals that use the few apps that are only on MacOS, basically Xcode and FinalCut are the only ones left worth mentioning and then you have the larger trendy anti-Windows crowd…look at me there is an Apple on my phone and computer!</p><p><br></p><p>The larger group will be able to move easily since they probably use a web browser on their Macbook for 98% of the Macbook use. The smaller pro group will have to stick with the Intel Mac's until they make ARM chips powerful enough to render 8K video in FinalCut. That is the true gamble, because if Apple does not get a powerful alternative for those users they will continue to walk away from Apple.</p>
Stooks
<blockquote><em><a href="#548018">In reply to dftf:</a></em></blockquote><p>Agreed on all of your points. </p><p><br></p><p>I have no doubt probably 80-95% of Mac usage could be done on a powerful ARM based Mac with the included GPU. Like I said the typical Mac user is browsing the internet/Google docs, photos app etc that a iPad can do just fine now.</p><p><br></p><p>As far as Apple having a GPU that can rival AMD and NVIDIA, I highly doubt that especially the high end NVIDIA stuff. The again they have mountains of money.</p><p><br></p><p>I think the real question is software vendors. How much does Adobe want to spend to migrate something like Premiere over to an ARM based Mac? </p><p><br></p><p>Mac market share is sitting at 9.4% according to Netmarketshare. Lets be nice and say 50% of those Mac users are using Adobe premiere or photoshop to do high end work. So 95% of high end premiere or photoshop users are NOT on Mac?…as in Windows users. Now they have to rewrite those apps to retain the 5% of users that are on a Mac???</p><p><br></p><p><br></p>
Stooks
<blockquote><em><a href="#548050">In reply to spullum:</a></em></blockquote><p>In my experience any emulation sucks in terms of performance. Rosetta was slow on the first Intel Mac's. VM's are slow on your average desktop/laptop computer. x86/64 apps are slow on Windows 10 for ARM via emulation.</p><p><br></p><p>Rosetta 1 was coming form a slower CPU (PowerPC) to a faster CPU Intel at the time. Not knowing any real details about these new Apple ARM chips for a Mac will they be faster than the current Intel CPU's or will the coming from a faster (intel) CPU and going to a slower (gen 1 Mac ARM) CPU and then trying to "emulate" X86??? Ugg not thanks.</p><p><br></p><p>We are missing so many details no one can really answer that question right now. One thing is for sure after many, many years of using Apple products……You DO NOT want to be the version 1 customers. If this takes off V2 or better yet V3 is where native software is plentiful and the the ARM chips are way better and finally the need for emulation is greatly decreased.</p>
Stooks
<blockquote><em><a href="#548051">In reply to Jeffsters:</a></em></blockquote><p>MacOS has 9.4% of the desktop/laptop OS market according to netmarketshare. Lets round up and call that 10% of the desktop/laptop OS market for simplicity. 90% of desktop/laptop users are NOT using MacOS. </p><p><br></p><p>If 50% of all MacOS users use Adobe CC….that would translate to 5% of the desktop/laptop OS market use Adobe CC on some kind of Mac. </p><p><br></p><p>The rest of the Adobe CC users are on something else….lets say Windows since it owns 89% of the OS market share and the last time I checked Adobe CC does not run on Linux or Chrome OS.</p><p><br></p><p>What is missing from my crazy math is the real number of Adobe CC users in total. Maybe 90% of Adobe CC users use a Mac….but I kind of doubt that, especially since Apple pretty much abandoned the Pro market for 5-6 years and lots of those Mac users moved over to Windows for the hardware power.</p>