First ARM based Macs revealed, 13-Inch MacBook Pro and Redesigned iMac

[suicidalfranco]

there must be a sliver of truth in Linus' conspiracy theory: Apple kneecapping their cooling solution so much so that they can come on stage and boast about how cool their ARM solution is in comparison.

 

Personally if it happens it's just going to be to resurrect the 12'' MacBook, worst case they also put it on the Mac Mini.

 

Still wouldn't buy even it finally brings a Mac that doesn't run at skin burning temps.

[Spindel]

2 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

there must be a sliver of truth in Linus' conspiracy theory: Apple kneecapping their cooling solution so much so that they can come on stage and boast about how cool their ARM solution is in comparison.

 

Personally if it happens it's just going to be to resurrect the 12'' MacBook, worst case they also put it on the Mac Mini.

 

Still wouldn't buy even it finally brings a Mac that doesn't run at skin burning temps.

I actually don’t think there is a conspiracy to it.

 

If we take the recent LTT video when they try to ”fix” the MBA cooling, that design choice rather tells me that it was made with ARM in mind. 
 

Maybe something happened along the way; the destined ARM cpu for it didn’t preform satisfactory, a contract with Intel Apple couldn’t get out of, delays in production of destined ARM cpu, strategic decision to wait with the move to ARM until cpus for the more powerful lineups where ready (so they can move over more models in the same time), licensing problems of thunderbolt, licensing problems of x86 instructions (to allow compability with old software) etc

[RejZoR]

If Windows 10 for ARM really has such low overhead it would be interesting to try one out. I often adopt early weird tech. Like I tried first version of Atom, tried first version of AMD's APU, first generation of mobile Ryzen (2500U, still amazed how powerful it is)... In a way low power chips have excited me for quite a while in mobile devices. Running Windows 10 on an ARM would also be one of those things. Especially since ARM chips in laptops have more relaxed power restrictions compared to smartphones so they can really unleash their potential. Might do something stupid like get an ARM laptop in the future...

[suicidalfranco]

57 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

If Windows 10 for ARM really has such low overhead it would be interesting to try one out. I often adopt early weird tech. Like I tried first version of Atom, tried first version of AMD's APU, first generation of mobile Ryzen (2500U, still amazed how powerful it is)... In a way low power chips have excited me for quite a while in mobile devices. Running Windows 10 on an ARM would also be one of those things. Especially since ARM chips in laptops have more relaxed power restrictions compared to smartphones so they can really unleash their potential. Might do something stupid like get an ARM laptop in the future...

meh, not impressed

 

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, Spindel said:

licensing problems of thunderbolt

Since Apple is a co-developer of Thunderbolt, I don't think they'll have licensing issues with it.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

meh, not impressed

Looks nice though

[hishnash]

53 minutes ago, captain_to_fire said:

Since Apple is a co-developer of Thunderbolt, I don't think they'll have licensing issues with it.

Yep but i expect these device to be the first to ship with USB4 so it is a non issue.

 

Since dropping the Floppy disk updating to the latest USB spec 2 to 4 years before the rest of the industry has been apple's MO.

 

 

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

meh, not impressed

The CPU in that is ~= to an iphone 8

[Raytsou]

9 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

 

I think it's a bad move, but apparently Apple thinks it's more important to allow tablet "apps" on a computer than it is to have people do real work on their machines.

I talked briefly with my supervisor about this situation and he thinks its a good change. In his words, Apple laptops usually throttle hard enough under stress that it basically negates the performance advantage over ARM, so it makes sense to just use ARM.
Granted, I work for VIA and we've been out of the CPU market for close to a decade now so maybe my supervisor doesn't know what he's talking about.

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, hishnash said:

Yep but i expect these device to be the first to ship with USB4 so it is a non issue.

If that's the case. Can Apple make their iPads especially the upcoming iPad Air 4 to be more compatible with third party USB C hubs? I've seen a lot of times in my class where an iPad Pro fails to deliver a presentation because of an incompatible USB C hub to HDMI/VGA but works fine on a MacBook Pro.

[Ashleyyyy]

11 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

What about the Mac Pro? Do people that need real processing power want this move? 

in terms of power you can get close, sinc eyou can just scale up the corecount while still remaining very efficient. the iPad Pro is competitive in performance with a low end macbook pro, but that's a fanless tablet. all they'd have to do is put 50x the amount of cores in it and slap a heatsink on. 

[Fasterthannothing]

This is going one of two ways either Apple gets people to really push developing full scale desktop applications on arm or the backlash is so great they switch back. 

 

Who am I kidding it's Apple they will just tell you how amazing iPad apps are on a laptop and tell you your holding using the device wrong if your trying to use a laptop for actual productivity. 

[Nena Trinity]

Apple if aiming for high perfromance they need a dGPU still... Anyhows can these new MACs even run Steam? :I

[AndreiArgeanu]

To be honest I feel like Arm is just going to be like the PowerPC architecture, it won't last and Apple will return to Intel or AMD. I could be really wrong but to be honest I have to see how well a laptop oriented Arm CPU that has higher power and temperature limits, with heat pipes or not, since the most powerfull Arm cpu's I've seen are low power mobile phone one's which use under 5W.

[Jotoco]

8 hours ago, captain_to_fire said:

Unless Apple give Windows 10 on ARM via Bootcamp a green light, chances are the new macOS for ARM will exclusively run on Apple’s in-house chips unless someone tampers the OS to make it run on Qualcomm Snapdragon chips but even if that’s possible, it’ll probably be useless because Qualcomm doesn’t have drivers compatible for macOS. 

It was meant in jest. 

 

Apple will probably wall that garden up even more now. The T2 chip will probably be beefied up and you won't be able to even boot without it checking the SN on the SSD to the CPU, RAM and other components. Probably even checking against screen, keyboard and other components just to be sure and to make repair impossible. 

[Guest willies leg]

1990's all over again.

Remember PowerPC with the "velocity engine"?

People will only put up with that crap for a while before they leave for industry standards.

[Doobeedoo]

What's next, Mac Pro with ARM server chips? I mean I really wonder how this wil go. 

[BigDamn]

I'll be interested to see how these stack up to AMD's offerings. AMD's Ryzen 4000 laptop CPU's are exceptionally power efficient and I would assume they will most certainly outperform Apple's ARM chips. Makes you wonder the true reason for this change. A company doesn't switch CPU architectures like this for little reason, so there must be more at play here.

 

 

 

 

Unless that company is Apple, in which case they love delivering massive change, growing pains, and historically bad price-performance for little reason.

[Commodus]

2 hours ago, willies leg said:

1990's all over again.

Remember PowerPC with the "velocity engine"?

People will only put up with that crap for a while before they leave for industry standards.

This definitely isn't the 1990s.  Apple didn't have its own chip design wing (let alone one this successful) a quarter-century ago.  It wasn't using a Unix-based OS or universal binaries, didn't have a PC industry that focuses on mobility and always-on internet, and wasn't dealing with an Intel that was struggling to catch up to everyone else.

 

For that matter, ARM is an industry standard.  If you're using a phone or mobile tablet to browse this, you're using ARM right now.

 

Yes, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, but if we're going to borrow truisms, the past also isn't automatically indicative of the future.  The circumstances are very different this time around.

[Commodus]

59 minutes ago, BigDamn said:

I'll be interested to see how these stack up to AMD's offerings. AMD's Ryzen 4000 laptop CPU's are exceptionally power efficient and I would assume they will most certainly outperform Apple's ARM chips. Makes you wonder the true reason for this change. A company doesn't switch CPU architectures like this for little reason, so there must be more at play here.

 

 

 

 

Unless that company is Apple, in which case they love delivering massive change, growing pains, and historically bad price-performance for little reason.

I wouldn't speculate about performance versus AMD when we haven't actually seen a laptop-sized ARM chip from Apple yet.  The common expectation is that it will be at least competitive with what's out there in x86 land, if not faster, and should have good battery life.

 

There's not much mystery to why Apple is doing this: it's frustrated with Intel's manufacturing problems and wants to be in control of its destiny.  The company has a long history of taking charge if it feels like it's chained to another company's fate.  Hence HTML5 (instead of Flash), Safari, iTunes, the iWork suite, the processors in iPhones... the key is that it doesn't accept being screwed over by a partner like you often see in the Android and Windows worlds.

[Bombastinator]

13 hours ago, leadeater said:

There is still microcode, the fly over from above difference (quick and dirty) is basically the name itself. PowerPC also had to release microcode updates to fix Spectre vulnerabilities. https://www.ibm.com/blogs/psirt/potential-impact-processors-power-family/

 

Modern processors today take input of large instructions but end up breaking them down (the decoder) in to many smaller ops which is where the comments about everything basically being RISC comes from. Actual RISC processors don't have these decoders though so your doing more of that yourself in code and compilers, and you might not be better at it than Intel optimized compilers and CPU decoders are.

Huh.  Perhaps I was misinformed or I misunderstood an explanation given to me.  It wouldn’t be the first time.
 

I thought the whole idea behind the development of risc in general originally was they wanted to get rid of microcode, so they developed the reduced instruction set to make that possible.  There are many types of risc though and that may refer only to a few or one or none of them. Also the development of risc was a long time ago and things may have changed.  Or they weren’t able to but found other useful things.  That’s been known to happen with research

[Bombastinator]

For me at least These new CPUs are going to need a lot more grunt than an iPad.  This can AMD has been done with RISC.  I understand there are some pretty hardcore RISC server CPUs out right now

[Roswell]

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

There's not much mystery to why Apple is doing this: it's frustrated with Intel's manufacturing problems and wants to be in control of its destiny.  The company has a long history of taking charge if it feels like it's chained to another company's fate.  Hence HTML5 (instead of Flash), Safari, iTunes, the iWork suite, the processors in iPhones... the key is that it doesn't accept being screwed over by a partner like you often see in the Android and Windows worlds.

Has nothing to do with it, this has been in the pipeline far longer than Intel has been having issues.

[Commodus]

32 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Has nothing to do with it, this has been in the pipeline far longer than Intel has been having issues.

The "wants to be in control of its destiny" part is still true, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had this in the works for a while simply because it wanted a failsafe in case Intel didn't pan out.  Remember, Apple had Macs running on Intel chips for several years before the transition -- it just started the switchover once it was clear PowerPC hit a dead end.

[Brooksie359]

48 minutes ago, Vitamanic said:

Has nothing to do with it, this has been in the pipeline far longer than Intel has been having issues.

Wait you work at apple and know what has been in their design pipeline for years? Or are you just making blind assumptions based on one guy predicting that apple will switch to ARM soon? This is still a rumor at this point and until apple themselves comes out and says they are switching I am not going to listen to these rumor as they have been saying this for years now. 

[Roswell]

6 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Wait you work at apple and know what has been in their design pipeline for years? Or are you just making blind assumptions based on one guy predicting that apple will switch to ARM soon? This is still a rumor at this point and until apple themselves comes out and says they are switching I am not going to listen to these rumor as they have been saying this for years now. 

What? They literally released all of the information today and are shipping out dev units in a week. They also said it's been in development for over 10 years.

 

Beyond that, logic would dictate Apple changing the basis of their PC platform would have been in the works for a long time as opposed to a YOLO spontaneous decision after Intel had a recent issue with fabrication.