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Apple Expected To Move Mac Line To Custom ARM-Based Chips Starting Next Year, Says Report (axios.com) 356

Developers and Intel officials have told Axios that Apple is expected to move its Mac line to custom ARM-based chips as soon as next year. "Bloomberg offered a bit more specificity on things in a report on Wednesday, saying that the first ARM-based Macs could come in 2020, with plans to offer developers a way to write a single app that can run across iPhones, iPads and Macs by 2021," reports Axios. "The first hints of the effort came last year when Apple offered a sneak peek at its plan to make it easier for developers to bring iPad apps to the Mac." From the report: If anything, the Bloomberg timeline suggests that Intel might actually have more Mac business in 2020 than some had been expecting. The key question is not the timeline but just how smoothly Apple is able to make the shift. For developers, it will likely mean an awkward period of time supporting new and classic Macs as well as new and old-style Mac apps. The move could give developers a way to reach a bigger market with a single app, although the transition could be bumpy. For Intel, of course, it would mean the loss of a significant customer, albeit probably not a huge hit to its bottom line.
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Apple Expected To Move Mac Line To Custom ARM-Based Chips Starting Next Year, Says Report

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  • Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @12:23PM (#58172596)

    If they're going to make new laptops, maybe the freaking morans will fix the keyboards at the same time.

    • Agreed (Score:2, Insightful)

      by AmazingRuss ( 555076 )

      ... this keyboard is a bad joke.

    • by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:03PM (#58172734)

      Recently Linus ranted about how server class ARM development was a deadend because of the lack of sufficient "home" computers for normal use (he didn't literally mean home, but rather personal-computers). The answers that! On the otherhand for those of us who rely on libraries like say TensorFLow that doesn't look too good since a lot of that is X86.

      It will be interesting to see if Developers will flock to this as the optimum ARM development platform or flee from apple due to lack of x86 in their primary laptop.

      • but apple is moving to app store only so this will not help any other ARM dev's

      • by weilawei ( 897823 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @02:06PM (#58172944)

        I personally look forward to this. I like the ARM ISA. I thought Torvalds was being short-sighted. For starters, it's a more popular platform by number of chips in the wild. These Intel and AMD CISC designs are all RISC under the hood now, anyway.

        We're just doing away with the cruft of a legacy architecture that grew off track.

        • The "cruft" barely matters any more. On super low end chips, sure the instruction decoder matters. On laptops, it really doesn't. The out of order and wide floating point units and wide, fast memory bus are far far more expensive than three decoder.

        • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

          by spire3661 ( 1038968 )
          ARM is utter shit for actual computing. Its a fucking toy. You under appreciate the inertia and gravitas x86 has. ARM is wonderful for the low end, but for development, you can fuck right off with that noise.
        • by caseih ( 160668 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @05:15PM (#58173620)

          It may be popular but it doesn't mean it doesn't suck. Torvalds was right. But maybe for different reasons, many of which probably don't apply to Apple.

          The main problem with ARM, at least as I as a Linux user am concerned, is the lack of any standardized, open, boot system like the much-maligned BIOS, or EFI, and the lack of a standardized, minimal device tree. There are literally dozens of of cheap single board computers you can get to run linux on. But how many of them can boot a standard distro off of a hard drive or usb stick you just plugged in? How many can run a standard, generic, Linux kernel and a standard, generic, Linux distro? I don't know of any. And it's very frustrating. Those boards that can run android can run a particular version of android, obtained from the manufacturer, limited to their whims to update it.

          The promise of ARM is awesome. But so far I remain disappointed. I've got a drawer full of ARM devices that I used for short periods of time. Sheeva Plugs, a GuruPlug, several raspberry pis, and various random chinese boards. All powerful machines in their own right, but not as useful as I thought. Mostly due to the proprietary (or at least esoteric) boot systems, custom kernels, special device trees, proprietary graphics cores, etc. I just don't really want to mess with U-Boot and flashing special images to partitions just to get the latest version of Debian up and running, or install a 5.0 kernel.

          If intel produced a board at the price point as these ARM boards, but could boot regular old Debian with a generic x86 kernel, supporting the GPIO that makes Pis so popular, I'd ditch ARM in a heartbeat (SBCs, not phones).

          Again, none of this applies to Apple necessarily, though. They control and access every bit of the hardware to make it sing their song, so I'm sure many users won't know or care, as long as they keep buying from the Apple Store. But it's a definite step towards a completely locked-down appliance. Might take another decade, but that's where Apple seems to be heading.

          • The promise of ARM is awesome. But so far I remain disappointed. I've got a drawer full of ARM devices that I used for short periods of time.

            Please pry those out of storage, and sell them to some geeks who can use them, for a reasonable price. People could use them. Unless you're keeping them for posterity?

            • by caseih ( 160668 )

              I'm helping others declutter by storing them.

              In terms of time (mainly) and money it would be cheaper for someone to buy one new than for me to wrap one up and ship it to a fellow geek.

      • by robi5 ( 1261542 )

        > (he didn't literally mean home, but rather personal-computers)

        Thanks for the clarification!!!

      • by short ( 66530 )
        TensorFlow is free software (Apache License 2.0) and it is not written in assembler, you can build it for (mostly) any arch. Google distributes x86_64 binaries but that is just to save people from building it.
    • If they're going to make new laptops, maybe the freaking morans will fix the keyboards at the same time.

      They will do something to get you to stop complaining. Notice how no one mentions the horrible touch bar anymore? Well not to worry, but making the next Mac completely unusable you won't ever worry about sticky keys again!

  • by Proudrooster ( 580120 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:01PM (#58172720) Homepage

    Ladies and Gentlemen, step right up to witness another technology train wreck where they try to achieve the illusive singularity. Apple is going to merge iPhone, iPad, and MacOS into a single platform. Other greats like Microsoft tried to achieve the singularity between mobile and and the desktop, but they failed. Their Windows Phone is just a memory and but the strange tiles on Windows 10 still remain and, Windows 10 tablet mode is still unusable.

    Now, a company which doesn't have a touch screen computer, but only a lousy keyboard that everyone hates, is going to try this amazing feat again. Using a mobile ARM processor with a touch screen UI/UX/OS called IOS, they are going to merge it with another mouse driven UI/UX called MacOS. Can they pull it off without a touch screen? How will users dual boot to Windows 10 to run their CAD software? And will it have a headphone jack? So many questions, so few answers. Without the reality distortion field of Steve Jobs this could be a headless company recycling failed ideas from other companies. Did anyone from Microsoft recently take on a leadership role at Apple?

    Not matter how you slice it, it will be painful drama for users. You won't be able to look away, it will be like watching a car crash in slow motion, you know you should look away, but you just can't.

    The singularity, can it be achieved? Stay tuned..

    • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:30PM (#58172842)

      Apple has stated repeatedly they want nothing like the singularity, that desktops are inherently different than tablets or mobile devices.

      All that is happening here is a processor switch, because Intel has dropped so many balls they are more balls than company now. Apple wants to be able to control the processor so they can actually realize some gains, and avoid some of the shoddy design issues that have come to light in intel processors recently...

      I for one am fine with the change, these days adding support for another architecture is not THAT bad and Apple pulled it off really well before.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        No less than Google has announced that Spectre vulnerabilities are here to stay and cannot be resolved in hardware or software. Researchers presented a new Spectre attack that cannot be defeated. Existing x86 and high-end ARM designs are all vulnerable and will remain broken for any kind of meaningful security.

        Google: Software is never going to be able to fix Spectre-type bugs [arstechnica.com], 2/23/19

        If Intel's top CPUs are unfixable, that may be influencing Apple's decision to move to ARM, especially if Apple's chip guys

        • Yes, exactly - and Apple automatically gains some comparative performance boost with other systems by simply not having to have the system performance impacting workarounds Intel chips have to use today, which as you noted don't even really solve the problem entirely.

      • Iâ(TM)m fine with it as long as I can use off-the-shelf components to build my own. Right now, Iâ(TM)m not aware of that potential for an ARM based system, but that could change I suppose. I donâ(TM)t really want to be locked into Appleâ(TM)s hardware though.

      • Apple has stated repeatedly they want nothing like the singularity, that desktops are inherently different than tablets or mobile devices.

        As a Mac user, I will be curious to see if Apple truly believes that or if it was basically just an anti-Windows 8/10 talking point. Certainly some of the bits like Mission Control *look* like iOS, and at seemed like they spent a bit of time talking it up until it became obvious their users realized it was pretty useless on a laptop.

        And I honestly do wonder if one of the reasons they’ve moved to those extremely low-travel keyboards (which many of us abhor) is to try and make the eventual shift to a no

        • I don't see any reason to doubt Apple on this. It's not like they aren't aware of the disasters of Windows 8 and Ubuntu's failed Unity experiment, all done in the name of trying to merge mouse+keyboard and touch-first paradigms.

          As for the keyboards, I think it's probably mostly power users who hate those, and it seems evident that Apple isn't really focusing on power users these days. With their iPhone's success, they're clearly focused on the mass market, and those keyboards are (apparently) fine with mo

  • by crashumbc ( 1221174 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:07PM (#58172744)

    I'm pretty sure, this is how Apple killed the Mac the first time... History repeats itself?

    • by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

      You must be remembering wrong. Apple Mac switched CPU twice already, and it was after Jobs returned to the company so that was the rebirth of the Mac.

      They (almost) killed the Mac once before, while doing nothing with it.

      • They (almost) killed the Mac once before, while doing nothing with it.

        Yeah, you have it right. Apple almost killed Mac by sticking with 68k. But they had an ARM core that would rival the 68k processors of the day in the last of the Newtons, and they neglected to go ARM then like they should have.

        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          They were on PowerPC in "the last days of the Newton" and while the DEC StrongARM was definitely amazing in MIPS/Watt, the PowerPC chips had better absolute performance, and definitely better memory bandwidth. (But yes, they completely crippled it with brain-dead designs at times, like the Performa/LC 5000 series with its half-width system buses. They'd done the same thing previously putting 16-bit memory on 32-bit 68k chips. There were a disturbing number of Macs that should've and would've performed a

  • I can't see this being a very happy transition, especially for developers and product support.

    Looking back, it took 5+ years to end support for PowerPC Macs, I can't see it being any less and I would expect it to be twice that especially for Mac Servers.

    Maybe this is why Linus made his comments about ARMs a couple of days ago: https://slashdot.org/story/19/... [slashdot.org]

    If this is all a reason for having apps that work on iPhone, iPad & Macs, I again point to HTML5 and WPA. I can see that their growth could result in a downfall of Apple specific hardware and apps.

    • I can't see this being a very happy transition, especially for developers and product support.

      Apple has done transitions before: classic MacOS to MacOS X, Motorola 68000 to PowerPC, and PowerPC to Intel. They survived all three. Given their history, they're obviously capable of handling transitions well enough.

    • Looking back, it took 5+ years to end support for PowerPC Macs, I can't see it being any less and I would expect it to be twice that especially for Mac Servers.

      Apple doesn't have servers any more. "macOS Server" is an app in their desktop app store which costs twenty bucks, and provides some of the functionality which comes with NT server. The last time Apple had a server hardware product was 2011.

      If this is all a reason for having apps that work on iPhone, iPad & Macs, I again point to HTML5 and WPA.

      Ugh. What a PITA. If that's the best Apple can do, their best isn't very good.

  • I am not tied to AMD64 if I can get the same or better performance elsewhere at the same or better price. However, I expect that single-core performance will be pretty lacking and that would be a show-stopper.

  • The plan all along? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:12PM (#58172770)

    Apple's own CPUs are not strictly "ARM-based", as they do not have cores developed by ARM itself.
    They have their own cores that are merely using ARM's ISA.

    Apple's CPU designs are likely to have lineage to P.A. Semi [wikipedia.org] which Apple acquired in 2008.
    Before then, P.A. Semi had made processors running the PowerPC ISA. Apple had previously been interested in using those, but opted not to in favour of x86.

    • They *are* strictly ARM based â" they use a strict superset of the ARM specifications. They add on a few of their own SoC features and performance enhancements, but anything written for an ARM processor will run on Appleâ(TM)s Ax processors. Itâ(TM)s not like Apple uses unique instruction sets or anything.

    • by robi5 ( 1261542 )

      I bet they license a lot more than an ISA (which may actually be free to replicate, not sure) - ARM is an IP company and have modular hardware designs which Apple likely uses to a great extent, tweaking it here and there and adding or removing modules.

  • by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:14PM (#58172786) Journal

    Linus Torvalds has stated that ARM won't win the server space because developers want to run their apps on the architecture it has been developed on and almost all are developing on x86. Many application bugs are still architecture specific. Application performance optimization is also highly architecture specific, especially for database applications.

    Given the Mac's popularity among developers, this argument should apply to the Macs too when looked at from the opposite angle. The vast majority of servers are x86, and developers want to run their apps on the architecture they are developing for. Running in an emulator is nowhere near the same experience. I would think a switch from x86 to ARM would decimate the number of developers calling the Mac home.

    Separately, I don't see the appeal of running phone apps on my laptop or desktop. Smartphone apps do not have the feature density that I'm looking for with a desktop app and desktop apps are not generally appropriate for smartphones. On my desktop, I don't want simplicity. I want to see everything I can at once and to be able to do almost everything with my keyboard.

    • Linus Torvalds has stated that ARM won't win the server space because developers want to run their apps on the architecture it has been developed on and almost all are developing on x86.
      Almost all are developing in Java, so the actual hardware does not matter. (*facepalm*)

  • Hybrids? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:25PM (#58172818)

    If Apple is making their own ARM chips, presumably they can put them in at-cost as a co-processor along with an Intel chip on their home computer line.

    Benefits of the Hybrid:
    * Increase adoption of ARM as you deprecate Intel chips over a few generations
    * Run iOS apps at full speed while the Intel processor handles i86 tasks
    * Not be shackled by poor performance of ARM on desktop for individuals running apps that are processor-dependent and slow an Intel chip to a crawl.
    * (if you choose to make hybrid a long term solution) Have apps that run in multiprocessor mode with some processes running on each chip, making your home computer faster than all other manufacturers who are not selling multi-processor solutions.

    • Seems reasonable.
      Their ARMs must cost them very little esp. compared to what they pay Intel.
      Less worry about heat would give better potential performance.
      Xcode will make porting a matter of setting a build option or two, if that.
      Apple's GPU future also looks promising.
      It's time we finally say goodbye to everything that is 1981's PC.

  • by Major Blud ( 789630 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @01:30PM (#58172840) Homepage
    I'm sorry but I can't take anything they say seriously since they claimed that SuperMicro servers were compromised. It's been months since that claim was made and we still haven't seen any proof.
    • by Durrik ( 80651 )
      And it was a very stupid way to claim that they were compromised.

      A low pin chip connected at the ethernet port. Or where the PHY is. By this point the data should have already been encrypted and secured. Especially if its in a secure facility, even communications inside a rack are usually encrypted. Besides if they were wanting to get any unsecured data off the network then it would be better just to compromise the switch. That way they get what they need from multiple sources, and compromise the thing
      • Because it's Hollywood magic, when it sends the zoomed and enhanced data, it displays at 120 cps and each character will make a little chirp sound.

  • Basically I expect them to be laptops/desktops with the iPhone/iPad/iWatch business model and an i-name like iBook or iNote or whatever. Runs a version of iOS that's adopted Mac interfaces but is locked down with no dual boot to anything else. All applications come from the store so no backwards compatibility with Mac apps, just windowed iOS apps until developers make a store version. The question is just if Apple can resist the temptation to price it crazy, I mean their latest phones are really getting out

  • So everything Apple does, did, or will do is doomed to failure,
    but we loves us some x86 architecture from 1979 and can't imagine an alternative.
    The future has spoken.

    • So everything Apple does, did, or will do is doomed to failure, but we loves us some x86 architecture from 1979

      Nonsense. All common x86 processors have been internally RISCy since AMD introduced their Am586 chip, and Intel its Pentium. The only thing they shared with x86 processors from 1979 was an instruction set, with its primitive use of a limited number of registers — literally none of which were "general purpose", as various instructions required operands to be placed in specific registers, and results to be delivered to others. These failings were addressed by the amd64 instruction set, which largely per

  • Numerous of my customers use Mac on Intel as development machines for Linux on Intel servers, to provide mass-market GUI tools and target-specific development tools.

    Apple is about to make that unpopular.

    This will put a push on Linux distros like Fedora and hardware companies offerings like Dell's XPS 13 Developer Edition, to finally deliver the year of the Linux Desktop. Well, for developers, at least (:-))

    • They could launch new server modules at the same time, they've been in the space before. With the whole Spectre clusterfuck and the diminishing process lead of Intel, an ARM solution from Apple might well be superior. If so with Apple's weight behind it a transition could happen very quickly IMO.

      It would be a scary situation for a vertically integrated company to be responsible for so much of computing though, so let's hope not.

      • They could launch new server modules at the same time, they've been in the space before.

        Who would trust them? Their first servers were grossly overpriced, so were their second servers, and they dropped their third server line just about the same time people got used to using them.

  • Please, enough about bitching about the butterfly keyboard, $1000 phones, and the RDF.
    Tell us again about how Jobs ripped off Xerox PARC. That's always a hoot.

  • What was the ARM's floating point coprocessor again? what chip competes against the intel 8th gen?

  • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Sunday February 24, 2019 @04:20PM (#58173476) Journal

    When Apple did the huge transition over from PowerPC to Intel CPUs, it was near the height of Apple's success selling OS X based computers. Even then, there was a big fear it would hurt certain markets, like native OS X game development, as it would make an excuse to "just write a Windows only version and let the Mac users boot into Windows to play it". And that, in fact, DID happen. But by and large, Mac users accepted it as a "win" because Intel CPU development was so much further ahead and drove more competitive Macs with their Windows counterparts. Plus, it wasn't half bad being able to run Windows in virtual environments - where a bunch of processor instruction conversion between x86 and PPC didn't have to happen in the background to make it work.

    This time around? It's far less clear.... Intel still cranks out great CPUs and nobody I know is complaining that their Mac is under-powered, CPU-wise. The big push seems to be Apple's continual insistence that "most people can just use an iPad and iPhone instead of a computer", and an interest in selling their own CPUs instead of giving all that money to Intel.

    I think we're going to see a lot of "dumbing down" of OS X apps if they all start getting coded to run universally on iOS and OS X with ARM. If features in software don't translate well to a touch-screen UI, they'll rip them out instead of keeping "Mac only" versions with more capabilities.

  • I'm looking a two Mac Pros in front of me with seven drives shoehorned into the nearest one and nearly all of the PCI cards used. I've changed so many parts in it the thing has become the Ship of Theseus. They promised a new pro machine and nary a peep so far other than they've got 'top men' working on it. Well, where is it already?
  • Their next computers will absolutely stink at designing the ones after. They will also stink at working on the advertising video and renderings.
  • TL;DR https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] will be horrible for users, as no bootcamp nor virtual machine for Windows and Linux anymore
  • I'm not saying it's NOT happening, but everybody should remember that we've been seeing similar reports to this every year since at least 2011, when it was reported that Apple had internal prototypes of ARM-based MacBooks running OS X. All of the current talk about a 2020 shift to ARM can be traced back to this single unverified Axios article.

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