[theluketaylor]

The near total lack of the word "intel" at the keynote was certainly quite noticeable. The question is how much was that a negotiating ploy for better pricing/stock with intel and how much was positioning for arm macs. I think a bit of both.

I went back to remind myself of the details of the switch from powerpc to intel. It was announced at wwdc 2005 (june) when they released a developer transition kit. The announcement included a commitment to ship computers running x86 by wwdc 2006, so there was pretty much 12 months lead time even for outside developers. Apple also committed to moving to intel fully by the end of 2007, a 30 month total process.

I think Apple is further ahead of the game this time around for how quickly they can go from announcement to shipping product. OS X had been running internally on x86 for years, but this time tons of apple software has been publicly running aarch64 for many years. I do think they need more than 30 months to complete a transition this time around as the user base is much larger and apple may never want to invest the serious dollars it will take to build the giant chips they get from intel. It's one thing to swap out the macbook processor. It's a whole other world to do 130 watt dies.

I'm expecting either wwdc 2019 or 2020 we get an announcement, with products shipping after the OS release in the fall of that year.

Apple's laptop naming has been getting steadily worse since the introduction of the retina macbook pro. The macbook modifying words have lost all meaning when systems labeled pro have major expansion and repair limitations, the device named air isn't the smallest or lightest and the model without a modifier isn't the cheapest. They missed an opportunity to restore some naming sanity this year, but a switch to arm could present it again.

As great as A12X is, it's not touching discrete GPUs and CPUs allowed to burn wattage approaching triple digits. If I was apple I'd lean into this and restore "pro" as a designation that means something. Pro devices would stay x86 and be marketed as supporting more software. Non pro devices would make the jump to arm on their regular update cadence. It would give Apple tons of time to get their custom chips to xeon level scale for core count and interconnects. Even gives apple the option to continue using x86 indefinitely as investing in 100+ watt chips may not have the returns to make it worthwhile. Then the ipad pro becomes poorly named, but I can't solve all of apple's self created problems.

If I was apple this is the mac product matrix I'd have when the dust settles:

macbook: First to move as it's perfect for A12X since it already only has one usb-c and due for a refresh. Drop the intel tax and now it's around $1099. Apple could even use the exact panel from the 12.9 inch ipad minus the touch gear.

macbook air: would need the next generation A chip to support more usb-c and more ram. New sub-$1000 price for the 128 gb model and outrageously long battery life for web browsing or note taking. No need to make it any thinner or lighter.

macbook pro: Kill the weird non-touchbar model that was clearly supposed to be the new air but priced way, way too high. spec bump the 13 and 15 inch, especially discrete GPUs

imac: switch to arm or kill and replace with giant beautiful screen that ipad and iphone docks with.

imac pro: spec bump, but this is as close to a perfect device apple has released in a long time.

mac mini: Use the apple tv case to build an arm mac with A12X or higher that can be sold quite cheap. Use as great PR to give away xcode development systems to schools and developing nations and get swift into the hands of people learning to develop applications

mac mini: relabel as mac mini pro and pretty much keep as is

mac pro: Make it unbelievably expensive but also user repairable, multi GPU on their own standard cards, tons of ram and big xeon chips.

[jimbokun]

"The macbook modifying words have lost all meaning when systems labeled pro have major expansion and repair limitations, the device named air isn't the smallest or lightest and the model without a modifier isn't the cheapest."

This eloquently summarizes much of the disconnect customers have been feeling about the Mac product lineup. Jobs never would have allowed this to happen.

[theluketaylor]

Playing the "Steve would never have done this" game is always dangerous, but in the past apple has been much more focused on having obvious product differentiators.

I think Tim tries to extract all the possible pennies from the supply chain possible. In a vacuum it's a responsible way to run a business, but it has left apple selling some products they should be ashamed to feature and customers unsure which product is built for their needs. When apple sells old iphones more cheaply the number in the name gives people an clear indication they are trading price for newness. The mac line is a confusing mess of exactly what you get when you put down hard earned money.

It's a weird combination of some devices with touch id, how many usb-c you get and whether the usb-c port is also tb3 or not. For those really out of the loop what the hell a touchbar is. The fact every laptop apple makes is thin, light and retina doesn't help.

For something as core to the experience as touch id it really should have triggered across the board refreshes, but apple seems interested only in substantial updates (though I would certainly consider the addition of touch id very substantial).

There is a lot to be said for shipping incremental updates on a regular basis so customers know the expensive product they spend their money on is being given attention. I don't need each revision to blow me away and every customer might not buy every refresh, but every time a product is refreshed it's a strong indicator if I buy this product it will continue to see investment. When it is time for me to put down my hard earned money I can be confident I'm getting good value and not missing some key improvement that is available but not on this particular line yet.

I'm experiencing this problem with ipad mini right now. Adore my ipad mini. Adored the 1st one. 2nd one was a huge upgrade so got that. 3rd and 4th didn't justify the cost, but now that my mini 2 is really showing age buying a 4 doesn't offer very good value when it's unchanged for 3 years. There are finally rumours a new one might be coming, but when? Do I move to a different size class (that I don't really like)? Continue to stick it out for a product I have no reason to believe apple intends to continue developing?

[m_mueller]

I think one thing you’re missing is how good Apple’s GPU have become (and will be in 1-2 years).

I’m thinking you’re going to have a hybrid architecture for MBP. The T2 will expand to support all of Apple’s own software plus all upgraded one sold through a revamped Mac Appstore (plus hopefully your own compiled stuff when security settings are off). This can power down (all but ~2 cores) and instead power up an x86 coprocessor that supports everything else. If Intel doesn’t deliver that, AMD will. For Macbook I think you’re on the right track, just that the Air will be replaced with a 13 inch Macbook model with the same architecture.

[kllrnohj]

> I think one thing you’re missing is how good Apple’s GPU have become (and will be in 1-2 years).

Not compared to other discreet GPUs they haven't. They are still 5 years behind consoles. The only time mobile ever "catches up" and achieves "console-class" is near the end of a consoles ~5-8 year lifetime.

The performance is superb for mobile, and certainly good enough for integrated (it'd be perfect in something like a macbook air), but it's still getting destroyed by the relatively crappy Radeon Pro 560X in the 2018 MBP.

[m_mueller]

Right, but I figure this could be scaled up with larger dies. Sure, Apple is not yet on eye level with Nvidia & AMD, but given their massive R&D budgets I don’t think that’s for long. Also, AR & VR drives demand for GPU FLOPS/Watt in a tight envelope, which has proven to scale quite well to larger chips in CPUs (see mobile ARM -> Cavium & co.).

[kllrnohj]

Scaling up is one of those easier said than done things. Until Apple actually does it there's no reason to assume they could do it.

Cavium is sort of your proof that scaling is hard. The 32-core ThunderX2 @ 2.2ghz with 56 PCI-E lanes has the same TDP as the 32-core AMD Epyc with 128 PCI-E lanes. And it's slower than the competition from AMD & Intel at comparable power budgets.

[m_mueller]

Sure, Cavium is not yet competitive for compute heavy workloads that make use of vectorization. For everything else, e.g. memory bandwidth bounded algos from what I gathered in benchmarks they are quite competitive. And those kind of workloads are actually quite common in HPC from my POV.

[theluketaylor]

I'm a little scared to consider the hybrid approach since I think it's highly likely Apple will only let mac store code execute on the ARM side of the house. They can tout the security benefit (which is real), but they get to collect their 30%. If apple ever gets to a point where they ditch x86 macOS is no longer a general purpose OS and that's pretty much its whole appeal.

I'm not personally that interested in a hybrid mac as getting rid of the power draw of an intel cpu and all the weight and technical baggage it comes is the real draw of an arm mac for me.

What I really want is to hand apple a little over $1000 and walk away with a laptop form factor with nothing but one of their fantastic A series SoCs inside and running full macOS where I make all the decisions. The gpu being so much better than the anemic intel integrated stuff in my current air is a big part of the attraction of the A series chip running macOS.

I don't think the air branding will go away. Apple spoke so much during this last event about macbook air being people's favourite mac I can't see them giving up on such positive branding. It's far and away the best selling mac and has been for close to a decade.

[ksec]

>The question is how much was that a negotiating ploy for better pricing/stock with intel.

From an Apple perspective you could easily justify the price for all the old Intel Chip. 1. Intel has a 2 years+ node advantage which you cant get anywhere even if you pay. 2. Intel has the best performance / watt CPU on the market, also highest performance Core on the market, you cant get it anywhere even if you pay. 3. x86 compatibility, which is more like a x86 tax. Although you could get it from AMD.

Now the first two is gone. TSMC has now edged Intel in node, Apple themselves has the best Pref / Watt work in A12X. AMD has proved to be very competitive at the high end. And Intel is still charging Apple the same when they have far less value.

Apple is now being hold up by Intel, but I don't think Apple could dump Intel just yet. There are two thing that is holding Apple up.

Thunderbolt - TB is currently still an Intel only technology. There are no other host controller on the market other than Intel's one. And they cost a fortune ( relatively speaking ) Apple has invested a lot into TB, but Intel is making all the same Firewire mistakes. May be Apple is working on a USB 4.0 solution, and they would dump TB once and for all in 2020. Intel promised to make TB as an open standard in 2018 but has yet to do so.

Modem - Apple relied on Intel Modem for iPhone, which is Apple's bread and butter. Before any move on the Mac side Apple will need to think about its consequences on Modem. In worst case Apple could switch away from x86 and Intel decide to hike the price of Intel Modem. I think the revenue of Modem is roughly the same as revenue of x86 from Mac. Intel 10nm isn't performing. And Apple is not happy with Intel on both front.

[theluketaylor]

The modem business from apple represents a huge amount of leverage over intel. It doesn't really matter what part it is, if you sell 50 million of something per quarter you're going to do whatever it takes to keep that business. Even if apple stops buying x86 processors modems alone make them one of intel's most important customers, especially when intel is trying to grow their modem business.

thunderbolt is a hurdle to arm macs but I don't think an insurmountable one. As you mentioned Intel already committed to opening the spec and if apple can't negotiate getting tunderbolt host controllers tossed in super cheap and forcing intel to honour its own commitments with modem sales they don't deserve to be valued at 1T.

TB is one of the big reasons I think macbook would be the obvious 1st mac to switch. It currently only has USB-C (no TB) and it's due for a refresh since the lack of touch id makes it an outlier.

When apple switched from ppc it was a multiple year effort and I don't see any reason a switch to arm, whether it's a full move or particular products would be any different.

[tambourine_man]

I really like and share your vision for the Mac line, but I doubt keeping two instruction sets simultaneously is the Apple way.

I hope I’m wrong though.

[theluketaylor]

They have been fully supporting two instruction sets (at times three with arm32 and aarch64) since iphone came out in 2007.

I agree it would be odd for the mac line to bifurcate like that, but even in the ppc -> x86 days they supported ppc macs for quite a long time.

Apple has been getting great returns from its chip investments because they have been able to reuse the blocks in so many devices. If they do go ARM for mac there is diminishing returns as they move up the product line about how much of the silicon they can reuse. They are right at a point where power hungry multiple memory controllers, complex core interconnects and other things that will likely never make it into an iphone are going to be necessary. I suppose they can use the highest end macs as test beds to see if ideas work out, but is apple really going to have chips fabbed with 20+ big cores and complex intercore transport for products they will never sell in huge numbers?

I think for the highest end apple is better continuing to piggy back off intel's server investments and focus their chip team where it has been been absolutely dominating: sub 10W incredible performance per watt.

macOS on two instruction sets would require some extra developer time, but volunteers keep debian running on 18 arches. After the initial port there is some care and feeding, but it's manageable. The biggest issues are cross compiling, something apple is already really good at, and device drivers. Apple has that covered with the T2 chip. Move more and more of the peripheral connectivity into something like the T2 chip and then you only have to write/maintain aarch64 drivers.

The more I think about it the more it makes really good sense.

[nicoburns]

I reckon they'd be room on the market for a battery life focussed laptop. If they could hit 24 hours+ they'd be laughing. 2 archs would be a pain, but quite a lot of software already supports aarch64, so it probably wouldn't be too bad..

[wbl]

How often do you need assembler in device drivers?

[tambourine_man]

To everyone citing transitions and Mac & iPhone, I meant two architectures for the same product, not as stop gap, but fully supported going forward.

And it’s not that the can’t techically, it’s that they are all about focus and unambiguous messages to developers and costumers.

But after reading it all, I guess they could fork the Mac into two categories. Air, light or whatever, and Pro.

I actually like that idea a lot.

[threeseed]

They've had dual instruction sets almost continuously since the company began:

MOS/68k, 68k/PowerPC, PowerPC/Intel, Intel/ARM

[CoolGuySteve]

When I worked there, we had to support ppc32/ppc64/x86/x86-64/arm32.

Now I'm guessing the dwarf format is: x86-64/arm32/arm64 with arm32 being legacy.

Back then we were also switching from GCC to LLVM, which at the time I thought was ludicrous because we'd be losing all of the flexibility in architectures GCC gave us. But I guess my worries were without merit.

[Shivetya]

with the iPad line there is no reason to move the computer line to ARM. They would alienate a lot of the current user base who has software there are no Arm equivalents nor likely to ever be one.

while I have seen many laud the iPad Pro for its power I haven't see any mention of heat or how long it can sustain a workload. Personally I do not want to see the Mac line change processors again for two reasons, like I mentioned prior many of us have a lot invested in software that runs on OSX as well as Windows that these machines can run, second I don't need that wall to go any higher.

[theluketaylor]

iPad, especially with the limitations artificially imposed by iOS is a content consumption device first. You can trick it into other tasks, but it's not a primary computer.

If I was apple I wouldn't go all in on arm macs. I'd build arm thin and light laptops to get incredible battery life and leave the pro line as x86 for at least the next 3+ years. Even if I did decide to stop building new x86 devices I'd support macOS on x86 for at least 5 additional years.

[scarface74]

From an OS standpoint. I only see two real limitations keeping iOS from being a desktop replacement for most people -- support for mice/trackpads and adding support for USB Mass storage devices to the Files app and treating mass storage devices like they treat Dropbox/iCloud/OneDrive, etc.

[theluketaylor]

iOS is getting close to being all the computer my grandparents could ever need. My mother as well. My father and I are both in tech and would run into too many hard (and fairly artificial) limitations pretty quickly.

I won't ever switch my primary computer to something that needs an optional accessory to hold the screen up. ipad may be magical, but there is plenty of wonder left in a device can open up and start typing on a real keyboard immediately. It's been many years since my primary computer has been a desktop, but I'm not willing to compromise on the permanently attached keyboard and freedom to decide what executes.

[jimbokun]

An iPad is already the only computer my parents own. They don't even have smart phones.

[ryacko]

And that iPads + keyboard are significantly cheaper than MacBooks.

[theluketaylor]

Cheaper yes. Significantly? Not so sure. Unlike iphone apple hasn't been selling the old ipad pro as a cheaper, more entry level product. The base price of ipad pro has gone up each time we've seen an updated one until now we're firmly in macbook price land once you get functional storage. The modifier-free macbook is a similar size to 12.9 inch ipad pro, but ipad is actually more once you get 256 gb of storage and the optional keyboard.

[briandear]

Besides compiling code, what can’t an iPad do in terms of “creation” that a similarly priced laptop can do? You can edit movies on it, heck, you can even film movies with it, you can write, edit photos, do drafting and drawing (something that laptops can’t easily do,) you can make music on it, use it as a Logic Pro controller. The only think you can’t easily “create” on iPad is code. You can do spreadsheets, work processing, create Keynotes, take notes, manage a calendar. You can manage your HomeKit stuff.

Seems far cry from being just a consumption device. That canard is getting old. A guess since you can’t run Linux on it or run a sever with it, somehow it isn’t creative?

[chongli]

It's more than just code. A "real" computer lets you do so much by piecing together work from different applications. For example, you can use a text editor like vim to transform a CSV file with powerful tools like regular expressions and shell commands, then load the CSV into your spreadsheet to work on. Yes, you can use the files application on iOS to manage your files but all of the other applications tend to stick to keeping all their files in one place.

On iOS it's very hard to build your own custom workflow with a bunch of applications and other tools, the way you can on a desktop OS.

[scarface74]

It could probably be done with the Workflow app introduced in iOS 12 if you were so inclined that can stitch together different apps.

[chongli]

What workflow app? I'm on iOS 12.1 and I don't see a workflow app.

[ryacko]

Well, ackshually, you can run a server from your phone.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8417321/run-a-webserver-... https://github.com/robbiehanson/CocoaHTTPServer

[ubercow13]

It might be randomly killed if the app isn't in the foreground with the screen unlocked, though.

[scarface74]

Just play a silent audio stream and it will keep running.

[theluketaylor]

just a consumption device is hyperbole for sure. I certainly don't mean to imply ipad is useless or it can't meet the needs of tons of people.

For my particular needs it takes more more effort and time to complete the same set of creation tasks on my ipad compared to my mac. That includes working with media files.

I love casually browsing the web on my ipad, but the moment I want to write more than a few sentences I reach for my mac.

[yurishimo]

Just curious, but how would custom silicon work with something like gaming engines? I know there are engines out there that support an ARM architecture, but as it is currently, you can run a lot of games fairly easily on Macs. And with eGPUs being officially supported now, gaming on a Mac is not a terrible experience.

Would moving off of traditional desktop CPUs harm that? Is there a way to do compatibility at the OS level without sacrificing half of the performance gains?

[theluketaylor]

At one point intel had committed to releasing the thunderbolt spec to the industry, so at least in theory arm macs could also support egpu. Games would have to be complied to support macOS on arm, but nintendo switch is also arm so that isn't necessarily taking game companies somewhere they don't already have to go.

https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/envision-world-thunder...