Apple announces two year x86 to Arm Mac CPU transition period

[kompukare]

"biggest mistake in more than a decade"

Edit:
"It costs $500 for developers as part of the kit but it must be returned to Apple at the end of the Universal App Quick Start Program."

Question: Are they also going to return the $500 to you or not? Amazing Thieves

Well, Apple don't really want to sell anything: they prefer that everything is rented and subscription-based.

Now the developers get to try the subscription hardware model too. Version 2 will have fuses which can be remotely activated turning it into landfill item and it will then also put an etching on the case saying "Apple takes its environmental credentials seriously" which is Orwellian newspeak for "we are worried about getting the resources back so we can sell/rent you another new hardware with planned obsolescence" (and I managed to get the second 1984 reference into this thread).

[kompukare]

yawn, ARM performance is way below what intel and AMD offer.

Is it though?
Obviously all processors are designed for their market and until recently for ARM that has mean phones and tablets where ARM have done really. And Apple (who only licence the ARM instruction set) have by most metrics done exceptionally well - naturally at the kind of things a phone or table can run. But the benchmarks for the iPad Pro are pretty impressive with single-core up there with the best Intel and AMD can offer while using 5W or so.

This doesn't meant they can scale up to 15W, 25W, 35W or so. However, Apple design team is very good, and the other recent ARM news is that the world's fastest supercomputer is now the Fujitsu Fugaky and that's totally ARM without any GPUs:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15869...-415-petaflops
At that scale, Fujitsu obviously used their experience to have build the buses and memory system so it is not really comparable to a phone SOC. ARM just gives vendors the freedom to licence whatever they need and customise it.

[samuraiweasel]

I'm betting in 5 years all the intel stuff will be "Unsupported due to age" and everyone with an older mac will have to lump it.

[Spud1]

well, it will be interesting to see if this works for them.

Microsoft tried - and it failed into a big heap. At least twice (maybe more often). They are trying again this year, outcome looks dodgy but remains to be seen!
Google then tried with chromebooks. Thats failing into a smouldering heap, but not quite as dramatically as MS. Kinda clinging on by the fingernails at the moment, saved only by Android app compatibility.

Apple....well yes I am sure it will work for them in the main - 90% of users (maybe more) won't notice a thing, as they spend most of their time in Safari with a bit of iPhoto & iMovie chucked in for good measure. All things that will work perfectly out of the box on day one.

The professional market though, well that will be really interesting. It's become a smaller and smaller % of apples revenue over time, despite their image, and whether they can really make a "mac pro" work built on these chips? Really not sure. They ultimately don't need to though, as even the majority of "professionals" using macs don't need much power for what they do, and there are much better systems for video rendering etc than any mac at the moment. (could have been so different if Apple offered the right GPUs with their mac pro, but well, they don't).

They have been slowly killing off the "benefit" of using Intel in recent years - there was a time when it actually made sense to buy a mac and put windows on it, as you got some amazing hardware (at a premium) but could put useful software on it. For the past 5 years or so Apple have purposely crippled their devices when running Windows however, whilst also pushing up prices and dropping quality standards, so that side of the market has died off or is dieing anyway.

We'll have to wait and see. I'm fairly sure this is the right thing for them to do as a company, but less convinced it's good for the industry as a whole. Plus the eWaste this will generate...urgh...

[AGTDenton]

Intel must be feeling a bit lonely lately. They seem to be in a state of bother

[s000m]

Louis Rossman puts me off buying anything Apple to be honest!

[alpha channel]

There is so much wrong with Apple machines I'm surprised anyone buys them for anything serious.

Unfortunately you just can't tell some people (I know, I've tried).

[John_Amstrad]

"biggest mistake in more than a decade"

Edit:
"It costs $500 for developers as part of the kit but it must be returned to Apple at the end of the Universal App Quick Start Program."

Question: Are they also going to return the $500 to you or not? Amazing Thieves

Well, Apple don't really want to sell anything: they prefer that everything is rented and subscription-based.

Now the developers get to try the subscription hardware model too. Version 2 will have fuses which can be remotely activated turning it into landfill item and it will then also put an etching on the case saying "Apple takes its environmental credentials seriously" which is Orwellian newspeak for "we are worried about getting the resources back so we can sell/rent you another new hardware with planned obsolescence" (and I managed to get the second 1984 reference into this thread).

laughing to tears with this

[selfishtoaster]

I love a quick visit to the Hexus comment sections for out-of-touch, old-man whinges. Haters gonna hate, I suppose.
Better control of hardware? Yea, I can see why they'd want to do that. If it results in a better product for me I'm all for it.

As for e-waste, I've never had products last as long or be so well supported as my apple stuff...

[excalibur1814]

I love a quick visit to the Hexus comment sections for out-of-touch, old-man whinges. Haters gonna hate, I suppose.
Better control of hardware? Yea, I can see why they'd want to do that. If it results in a better product for me I'm all for it.

As for e-waste, I've never had products last as long or be so well supported as my apple stuff...

Something tells me that you don't know Apple that much or, possibly, you're blinded by the bling to realise how Apple treats customers and their issues. "You're holding it wrong!" springs to mind.

[John_Amstrad]

ARM’s designs, which have, from the outset, been about lightness and efficiency, are working to build up its credentials for heavier workloads. Its future vision is one of taking the strengths of the smartphone and expanding them in size and might to larger and more potent machines. Intel, on the other hand, is expending a lot of energy on optimizing the environment around the processor. Its idea for what will sell more chips is a holistic product proposition, along the same lines as Apple offers with Macs and MacBooks. And AMD is just ticking along nicely, concerning itself primarily with performance-per-dollar and performance-per-watt efficiencies. source:https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18643905/intel-amd-arm-cpu-computex-2019-future-announcements

[Psihomodo]

I love a quick visit to the Hexus comment sections for out-of-touch, old-man whinges. Haters gonna hate, I suppose.
Better control of hardware? Yea, I can see why they'd want to do that. If it results in a better product for me I'm all for it.

As for e-waste, I've never had products last as long or be so well supported as my apple stuff...

Something tells me that you don't know Apple that much or, possibly, you're blinded by the bling to realise how Apple treats customers and their issues. "You're holding it wrong!" springs to mind.

He's an out-of-touch young whiner that comes here to treat his information/common sense deficiency.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Is it though?
Obviously all processors are designed for their market and until recently for ARM that has mean phones and tablets where ARM have done really. And Apple (who only licence the ARM instruction set) have by most metrics done exceptionally well - naturally at the kind of things a phone or table can run. But the benchmarks for the iPad Pro are pretty impressive with single-core up there with the best Intel and AMD can offer while using 5W or so.

This doesn't meant they can scale up to 15W, 25W, 35W or so. However, Apple design team is very good, and the other recent ARM news is that the world's fastest supercomputer is now the Fujitsu Fugaky and that's totally ARM without any GPUs:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15869...-415-petaflops
At that scale, Fujitsu obviously used their experience to have build the buses and memory system so it is not really comparable to a phone SOC. ARM just gives vendors the freedom to licence whatever they need and customise it.

Actually it does have GPUs,because of the way it is designed. They basically made it such the CPU cores can also do GPU tasks. The A64FX is made to be a homogeneous system,and has a very lower power interconnects,so is built for massive scaling and has 3X time the cores of the previous IBM based system. Despite this,in terms of performance/watt it's not actually really any better than the previous system.

Something tells me that you don't know Apple that much or, possibly, you're blinded by the bling to realise how Apple treats customers and their issues. "You're holding it wrong!" springs to mind.

That chap is talking like an old man themselves....they seem unaware of teh problems which have been reported in the last 12 months,especially regarding the voltage regulation issues.

[lumireleon]

what about RISC-V anyone serious?

[ilh]

I love a quick visit to the Hexus comment sections for out-of-touch, old-man whinges. Haters gonna hate, I suppose.
Better control of hardware? Yea, I can see why they'd want to do that. If it results in a better product for me I'm all for it.

As for e-waste, I've never had products last as long or be so well supported as my apple stuff...

And I love the whole if you don't agree with me then you're a "hater" BS. Surprised you didn't throw in a "hate on" even though you don't put hate "on" something, you just hate it.

I have developed for iOS at work and the whole ecosystem for iOS and Mac is an absolute joke. Got a MacOS update? Sit and wait for an hour for it to actually start to download. The Mac we used ground to a practical halt after a year because of their "well supported" updates, makes you really wonder about the whole slowing down of iPhones because of older batteries or is it just they're actually gimping them to get you to upgrade? As for the development side of it, a simple example of you having to manually code moving a form up on the screen because the keyboard is being shown tells you how bad their platform is.

My self build PC is nearing 11 years old and still running strong.

[Spud1]

As for e-waste, I've never had products last as long or be so well supported as my apple stuff...

I know you are likely trolling, but even so.

Simple example here - lets say a fuse blows on your logic board. $2 part, maybe $100 labour via an independent repair shop. Take same fault to Apple? New logic board, $500+ and likely they will just say you need a new entire machine.

Applecare examples are largely irrelevant here given that is effectively under warranty and only lasts a few years, but even then they won't fix your board - they will swap out for a replacement.

Huge amounts of eWaste, flat out lies told to their customers...but a great way for Apple to make more money. Recently it's gotten even worse as Apple are now making changes to their designs specifically to prevent repair - things that offer no other benefit (and often increase the number of traces...) other than to make the board non repairable by a 3rd party.

Don't believe me? Rossman and many others have done a whole series of taking macbooks et al with known, easy to fix faults to apple stores/geek squad/a.n.other "authorized repair center" and its the same story every time.