Apple’s Advantage (Premium)

Apple’s announcement today that it is moving the Mac to its ARM-based A-series processor chipset is indeed historic. And now that we know its plans, we can examine what the firm is undertaking and compare it to the similar effort by Microsoft part to port Windows 10 to ARM.

At a high level, one might argue that both companies are chasing the same dream, to bring a legacy desktop OS to a more modern and mobile hardware platform. But that’s where the two diverge.

Microsoft sees ARM as an alternative to Intel and AMD chipsets that is consigned to thin and light mobile PCs only. Apple, meanwhile, is literally replacing Intel and will use its own A-series chips in all of its Macs, as it does in all of its other devices.

Because Microsoft can’t make its own microprocessors, it must partner with another firm, in this case Qualcomm, to bring customized silicon to market. But Apple now makes the hardware and the software, so it can continue to evolve each to meet the needs of the other in ways that Microsoft and Qualcomm simply cannot. Indeed, it is striking that Microsoft and Qualcomm also effectively compete with each other in new-generation ARM chipsets for Windows, Qualcomm with its 8cx line, and Microsoft with the SQ-1.

But the biggest difference between the two firms may be the ways in which each, respectively, has come to customers.

After announcing Windows 10 on ARM (WOA) in 2017, Microsoft slowly brought the solution to market with its partners, not just Qualcomm but also a very small handful of PC makers. The initial results were, to put it mildly, terrible: First-generation WOA PCs ran on the same Snapdragon 835 chipset that Qualcomm provided to phone makers, and it ran slowly, especially with emulated 32-bit x86 software. In subsequent years, Qualcomm forked its chipsets in ever more aggressive ways to accommodate the unique needs of Windows and PCs. But that wasn’t good enough for Microsoft, which partnered/competed with Qualcomm by co-creating its own SQ-1 processor for the Surface Pro X.

None of this mattered. WOA PCs have always sold poorly, overall performance has only risen slightly and at a great cost in battery life, and the underlying compatibility issues have never been solved: WOA PCs still cannot run 64-bit (x64) software and they will never be able to utilize standard Windows software drivers. This platform is, at least to date, a failure.

By comparison, Apple says it began its effort to port macOS to its own A-series chipsets a decade ago, though that work was of course done in-house and secretly. During that time, it has evolved both its software and its hardware in lockstep to ensure that they are optimized for each other. And it has created the necessary software solutions to emulate existing (Intel-based) software on new ARM hardware while letting developers automatically support ARM Macs by recompiling apps using Xcode.

Once this work was completed, Apple finally announced its plans. An...