Author Topic: Apple plans on leaving Intel architecture even for their PCs and laptops.  (Read 16460 times)

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Offline TerraHertz

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Maybe Apple got sick of building machines with inescapable CPU-harware level backdoors courtesy of Intel, and are determined to instead build machines with all-new Apple proprietary CPU-hardware level backdoors.
Collecting old scopes, logic analyzers, and unfinished projects. http://everist.org
 
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Offline Bicurico

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The future is Cloud computing and Pay-Per-Use. The industry wants people to have thin client computers and pay subscription and pay per use services. That is how they can have maximum profit, especially on closed platforms. Most applications are mature and there is no real need for maintenance contracts or purchasing new versions. Heck, many here on this forum still use Windows XP. Why? Because it is good enough! Same with Office and CAD/CAM products. What have been the top 5 new features of CATIA (considered the "best" CAD software) in the last 5 years? I have no idea!

And the truth is that 75% of all internet connected users would be perfectly happy to use an iOS/Android style device with keyboard. As said in this thread before: Apple users normally don't care about hardware and OS, they just want to USE the computer, NOT KNOW how it works.


So, apart from the "fan-boy discussion, if Apple is great or not", the intention of dropping x86/x64 in favor of Arm might be a real indicator that the future is now, unfortunately. This thought actually scares me, since it means losing more and more control over privacy in all kind of forms, plus people will understand less and less how things work.

Regards,
Vitor

Offline Marco

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The future is Cloud computing and Pay-Per-Use.

That's where Microsoft wants to drive it. Apple has no horse in that race, since they make their money on hardware.

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The industry wants people to have thin client computers and pay subscription and pay per use services.

Any sane company which can operate without an internet connection would be insane to go to the cloud if it's not absolutely necessary and it won't be. The past, present and future for most sanely run companies will be mainframing, or as they call it nowadays Local Cloud :)
 

Offline mtdoc

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When I say idiot, it's more of a jab than anything serious. The same way someone who supports an opposing sports team is an idiot, someone who is an Apple fanboy is an idiot.

Yes, it's that kind of tribalism that leads to these pointless my OS is better than your OS arguments. (as well as my political party/country is better than yours, etc. arguments.)

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I guess OS/X isn't that crippled. I'd have a much better time with pretty much any other version of Unix.
Horses for courses. There's plenty of  hard core Unix/Linux geeks who chose to use OSX as their GUI in addition to lots of time spent with the command line.


PCs did eventually catch up, but through a period from the late 80s through the mid 90s the Mac was so far ahead it's not even funny.

That's right. At the time I was working at as a lecturer and research assistant at UC Berkeley. Part of my responsibility was purchasing and supporting a whole fleet of computers used for data acquisition and display (primarily using NI daq boards and LabView).  The Mac specs where better at the time.

As someone whose been using both Apple computers (First Apple II then Macs) and DOS/Windows for 40 years, these continual Mac versus Windows arguments are tiresome - with the same tired arguments of the haters on either side.  I continue to enjoy using both depending on the task - with a house that currently has 3 Macs,  6 Windows (2 XP, 3 W7, 1 W10), plus 2 IPads and 3 Android tablets.  Horses for courses.

I'm glad to hear Apple is moving to their own CPUs.  It will be interesting to see what this brings.  Intel has gotten a bit stale IMHO.
 
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Offline Halcyon

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I was always a PC guy, never cared for Macs, and then I ended up accumulating a number of vintage 68k Macs along side my vintage PC gear and then I really started to appreciate just how far ahead the Macs were at the time. 640x480 256 color graphics with 8 bit sound and everything plug n play (that actually worked) back when I was using DOS on a primitive VGA graphics system that could do 640x480 with a paltry 16 colors, sound through a beeper and fighting with IRQ, DMA and address settings. The Mac came standard with SCSI, it could use the entire installed memory without silly tricks, it was polished. There's a good reason why it became the defacto standard in the graphic arts industry.

PCs did eventually catch up, but through a period from the late 80s through the mid 90s the Mac was so far ahead it's not even funny. Where they failed most is in not encouraging or in fact even discouraging game development. Steve Jobs notably said "The Mac is not a toy" which ignores the fact that in the consumer market gaming has long been a major driver of PC purchases and upgrades.

Something that has bothered me for decades is how much time and effort people spend childishly promoting their platform of choice while bashing the other platform, instead of actually doing something useful with their computer.

You are absolutely correct! Especially regarding your last point. It seems the Apple lovers out there seem to get their knickers in a knot every time someone is critical of their beloved platform, I suspect that it's because they've spent so much money locking themselves into a particular 'ecosystem' (whether they knew it at the time or not) and now find it difficult to revert to anything else.

When you put forth an argument, they revert to the old "oh you haven't provided proof", "you just have something against Apple"... and so it goes...
 

Offline james_s

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Both sides do that. Apple does have more of a cult following but I know lots of Mac users who are not stereotypical Mac cult members, they just like the machine for one reason or another and I have no reason to care. I myself am very happy with my Lenovo but it's not perfect either. Mac, PC, Linux, they are more similar than ever before, and all can do more or less the same tasks.
 

Online tooki

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Everyone should remember that until Apple makes an announcement about this, it's nothing more than unsubstantiated speculation. I'd take it as a given that Apple has an ARM version of macOS running internally, but this alone is not indicative that they will make the jump. Apple made an x86 version of System 7 "just in case" and never used it, and made x86 versions of Mac OS X for almost 10 years "just in case" before announcing a switch to Intel.

Apple knows very well that running on the Intel architecture has been a huge boon to the Mac, with Windows (and to a lesser extent Linux) VMs having facilitated the Mac's introduction into many environments. Similarly, running on Intel has also allowed for WINE (and more importantly, its commercial counterparts, Crossover and above all TransGaming's Cider engine), which have formed the platform for nearly all Mac game releases in the past 10 years. Abandoning Intel for ARM would be a huge loss in this regard.

Additionally, as it was explained to me by an OpenBSD kernel developer, the ARM architecture has (compared to Intel, PPC, m68k, etc) some significant limitations regarding how it handles hardware enumeration or dynamic kernel module loading or something, the upshot being there has to be a specific OS build for a given hardware configuration, without the possibility of a build for multiple models. Unless Apple fundamentally changed this in its ARM implementation, it would make any expandable Mac impossible (including Thunderbolt, which is essentially PCIe over a serial cable).



Both sides do that. Apple does have more of a cult following but I know lots of Mac users who are not stereotypical Mac cult members, they just like the machine for one reason or another and I have no reason to care.
Having sold Macs for years, I can agree and expand: the vast majority of Mac users are not "cult members", they just want a computer that works without fuss. And frankly, that's been the case from the beginning. The "cult" myth is based largely on a small percentage of super enthusiastic users, who do not actually represent the majority. But every platform has those. People's perception of Apple is wildly distorted due to the bizarre way the media treats Apple, schizophrenically bouncing between adulation and baseless criticism, since they a) know that putting "Apple" in a headline will get reads, regardless of what the article says, and b) fundamentally do not understand the reasons behind Apple's success.


Something that has bothered me for decades is how much time and effort people spend childishly promoting their platform of choice while bashing the other platform, instead of actually doing something useful with their computer.

You are absolutely correct! Especially regarding your last point. It seems the Apple lovers out there seem to get their knickers in a knot every time someone is critical of their beloved platform, I suspect that it's because they've spent so much money locking themselves into a particular 'ecosystem' (whether they knew it at the time or not) and now find it difficult to revert to anything else.

When you put forth an argument, they revert to the old "oh you haven't provided proof", "you just have something against Apple"... and so it goes...
If there is resistance to argue with you, it's got nothing to do with buyer's remorse or investment in the platform. It has to do with years of stupid arguments with Apple haters who argue with you based on stereotypes, myths, and willful misinformation. We get defensive because of being constantly attacked and dismissed as "idiot" (we're not) cult-like lemmings (we're not) who are "too stupid" (we're not) to use "real computers" (Macs are real computers) and "wasted" money on "overpriced" (also untrue, given lower TCO and the value of time), when in fact we merely like using devices that work with less fuss, or just work in a way we prefer. In my experience, the majority of people who "discuss" Apple and its products and are not actually Apple users themselves, do so with little basis in facts and reality. (I've been a Mac user since 1992, FWIW, and have heard every myth in the book, and then some…)

To be sure, there's misinformation among Apple users about the competition, but I don't think it's quite as factually untethered from reality.



As for the ecosystem argument: everyone has some kind of investment in a platform, meaning that switching will incur some kind of cost, be it monetary (re-buying things you already have for the existing platform), time, learning, etc. It is eminently reasonable to factor this into a decision, and certainly isn't a valid reason to deride someone for staying on a platform. For example, I have a significant investment in hardware and time on the Nikon camera platform, and so there would have to be some massively huge benefit to switching to justify the cost of rebuying hardware and spending the time to practice with the new hardware until I knew it as intimately as I do the Nikon gear. Does this mean I hate Canon or Sony, etc? Not at all. But the friction to switching is significant.



Finally, as always, we mustn't forget that we are, by definition, not "normal" users. We are engineering types, and as such, atypical compared to the 95%. Most people don't know how computers work, don't want to know, and don't need to know. They need a tool they can use which has been designed to eliminate errors (or allow recovery from them) with as little learning curve as possible — basically, a tool that gets out of the way. The Mac's designers understood this from the beginning, Windows' designers learned this eventually, and these days Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android are all reasonably good for the typical user. (The open source world like Linux, on the other hand, is struggling to wrap its head around this concept.)
« Last Edit: April 09, 2018, 01:05:57 am by tooki »
 
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Online tooki

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I would have half a mind to actually buy an Intel-based Apple machine if I could just install Windows on it natively without resorting to trickery and messing around […]
Uhhhh…. what? Boot Camp is Apple's Windows installer tool, which prepares the Mac to dual-boot a bare-metal Windows installation, and then provides all the drivers for the hardware so you don't have to scour the web for them. No "trickery" involved.
 

Online tooki

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Uhhhh…. what? Boot Camp is Apple's Windows installer tool, which prepares the Mac to dual-boot a bare-metal Windows installation, and then provides all the drivers for the hardware so you don't have to scour the web for them. No "trickery" involved.

No latest High Sierra file system driver, no support for encrypted HFS+, buggy trackpad support, and I can't choose to boot to macOS of my OS uses new High Sierra's file system in Windows, holding Option is the only way.
Other than the trackpad driver (where Apple has always only provided a barebones driver for Windows, sadly), none of those things negate my reply: no "trickery" is involved to install Windows. Your complaints have nothing to do with the installation process, and indeed may be of zero consequence to many users.
 

Online tooki

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... and indeed may be of zero consequence to many users.

I stay in macOS for 90% of the time, and I only use Windows to run Altium in a pinch.
Being able to access my documents and musics from macOS partition is very important.
Now since the latest BC can't read files from latest macOS, I would call it marginally useful.
I said it MAY be of zero consequence to many users. Not that it WILL, and not to ALL users. In other words: Not talking about you specifically.

Again: I was dispelling someone else's incorrect assumptions about the Boot Camp installation process. They, and I, made no claims about its file sharing capabilities.
 

Offline Bassman59

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I would have half a mind to actually buy an Intel-based Apple machine if I could just install Windows on it natively without resorting to trickery and messing around […]
Uhhhh…. what? Boot Camp is Apple's Windows installer tool, which prepares the Mac to dual-boot a bare-metal Windows installation, and then provides all the drivers for the hardware so you don't have to scour the web for them. No "trickery" involved.

I've never even bothered with Boot Camp. I use VMWare, and it works well enough. By that, I mean, it runs Windows 7 Pro with no fuss, and in that environment, it runs the software I need. That is: Altium, Xilinx ISE and Vivado, Lattice Diamond, MicroSemi's tools, ModelSim, and for my other life, the off-line editors for Avid, Midas and DiGiCo professional audio mixing consoles.

And yes, the various USB JTAG dongles all work in the virtual environment.
 

Offline Nusa

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So even further restricting what the end-user can and can't do with their machines and forcing them to buy Apple hardware and software?

Oh please. They'll be forced to buy Apple hardware because it's got an Arm CPU? That's like saying you'd be forced to buy Intel hardware because the current Apples have Intel CPUs, or were forced to buy Motorola or IBM hardware when they used PowerPC architecture CPUs.

What do you mean "oh please", this is typical of Apple's business model. Has been for decades. Where have you been living? I don't doubt for one moment that it won't just be a typical ARM processor, it'll have some kind of Apple-specific goodness in it.

That wasn't the bottom-line reason in the past. Back in the old Mac vs PC days, one had to buy the hardware the software you needed ran on. A number of the leading packages of the day only ran on one or the other. Used to be ALL the professional A/V people had macs, because that's where the best software was for a long time. They also stuck with the BetaMax up to the digital age, even after VHS won the consumer market battle, because it was the better technology. But that's another story.
 

Offline james_s

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That wasn't the bottom-line reason in the past. Back in the old Mac vs PC days, one had to buy the hardware the software you needed ran on. A number of the leading packages of the day only ran on one or the other. Used to be ALL the professional A/V people had macs, because that's where the best software was for a long time. They also stuck with the BetaMax up to the digital age, even after VHS won the consumer market battle, because it was the better technology. But that's another story.

"Better" is subjective, VHS offered substantially longer play times which is something that was important to a lot of consumers. It's also worth noting that the short lived Betamax home format was quite different than the professional Betacam format that saw long term success in professional fields.
 
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Offline Mr. Scram

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Could we please have this thread be about the new Apple plans, rather making it yet another generic pro versus con Apple thread?
 
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Offline Nusa

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Do we actually KNOW anything beyond what the title says? It seems to all be speculation at this point. There are even some that say it's only a bluff to put pressure on Intel pricing.
 
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Offline Marco

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These form part of why I dislike Apple products. They are not what they used to be in the 1990's.

If they weren't such assholes about repairability and third party repairs, the limited number of models could make repair of macbooks very cheap. They shoot themselves in the foot for minimum extra profit ... I dislike Apple though, so more power to them.
 

Offline Marco

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Do we actually KNOW anything beyond what the title says? It seems to all be speculation at this point. There are even some that say it's only a bluff to put pressure on Intel pricing.

They steal employees from the NSA to control their leakers, speculation is probably the best we can expect till third party software developers are involved.
 

Offline Halcyon

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These form part of why I dislike Apple products. They are not what they used to be in the 1990's.

If they weren't such assholes about repairability and third party repairs, the limited number of models could make repair of macbooks very cheap. They shoot themselves in the foot for minimum extra profit ... I dislike Apple though, so more power to them.

Precisely. Louis Rossmann sums that up nicely in this video... it's not just specific to "Error 53", it's specific to a whole myriad of problems and design failures that plague Apple devices. This is why I raised the point earlier, if Apple are switching from Intel to ARM or some other type of CPU, I bet they aren't doing it for you, the customer.

Louis' comments in this video apply pretty much across the board when it comes to Apple...



 

Offline bd139

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I don't buy the hate. Stuff fails. Recently my iPhone 6s died. First the screen developed a white spot, then a chunk of the screen died.  Walked in Apple Store, walked out with a brand new handset in 30 minutes. £0 spent. No argument. Try any other vendor for that one. All daily use tech has a lifetime of 2 years at most. Take the AppleCare and use it (or use consumer legislation in the UK). After 2 years, sell the damn thing and buy a new thing. Never do you have to employ the likes of Louis Rossman to do hooky last minute hacks and repairs then. If you can't afford to do that, pick another platform but TCO works out about the same over a couple of years.

Third party repairs are literally a shitfest. It's not worth it.

Apple are doing this change so they have control over the architecture and engineering, nothing more. It's much more difficult to integrate a 3rd party CPU which is poorly documented (Intel!) into a design than build on your mobile core experience.
« Last Edit: April 10, 2018, 08:37:17 am by bd139 »
 
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Offline Mr. Scram

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I don't buy the hate. Stuff fails. Recently my iPhone 6s died. First the screen developed a white spot, then a chunk of the screen died.  Walked in Apple Store, walked out with a brand new handset in 30 minutes. £0 spent. No argument. Try any other vendor for that one. All daily use tech has a lifetime of 2 years at most. Take the AppleCare and use it (or use consumer legislation in the UK). After 2 years, sell the damn thing and buy a new thing. Never do you have to employ the likes of Louis Rossman to do hooky last minute hacks and repairs then. If you can't afford to do that, pick another platform but TCO works out about the same over a couple of years.

Third party repairs are literally a shitfest. It's not worth it.

Apple are doing this change so they have control over the architecture and engineering, nothing more. It's much more difficult to integrate a 3rd party CPU which is poorly documented (Intel!) into a design than build on your mobile core experience.
You bought insurance for your phone in the form of AppleCare, so it seems obvious that they'll honour that and replace your phone. There have been reports by consumer organisations that Apple isn't so forthcoming when it's just regular consumer laws.
 

Offline bd139

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They are because my other half got hers replaced no questions asked and she doesn't have AppleCare. This is UK though so YMMV elsewhere.

The only reason I bought it was to get the priority replacement service where they send you a new device out first by mail. Downtime costs me money.
 

Offline Mr. Scram

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They are because my other half got hers replaced no questions asked and she doesn't have AppleCare. This is UK though so YMMV elsewhere.

The only reason I bought it was to get the priority replacement service where they send you a new device out first by mail. Downtime costs me money.
Consumer law is basically the same all over Europe. I don't doubt there are examples of people getting easy replacements and have seen some cases myself, but I've also seen the opposite happen. These consumer organisations don't speak up for no reason.

Tl;dr: getting a no hassle replacement is not a given. This seems to apply to whatever manufacturer.
 

Offline jazz

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Looked for some benchmarks and found these Geekbench scores:

Apple A11 (iPhone X):     4205 single core / 10123 multi core     (6 cores, but 4 of them low power)
Intel Core i7-7920HQ (top 2017 MacBook Pro):     4261 single core / 14176 multi core     (4 cores + ht)
Intel Core i7-7700K (top 2017 non-pro iMac):     5705 single core / 18773 multi core     (4 cores + ht)

That's actually a similar single core performance to the MacBook and 73% of the iMac's single core performance.

They could probably improve the multi core performance by making a chip with more high performance cores instead of the low power cores. On the desktop there might be room for higher clock rates due to better cooling etc.
Also, Apple has improved their chip's performance by at least 25% every year for the last couple of years (by their own account anyway).

Benchmark links:
https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/52 (iPhone X)
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/2040 (i7-7920HQ)
https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/1779 (i7-7700K)
 
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Offline Halcyon

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I don't buy the hate. Stuff fails. Recently my iPhone 6s died. First the screen developed a white spot, then a chunk of the screen died.  Walked in Apple Store, walked out with a brand new handset in 30 minutes. £0 spent. No argument. Try any other vendor for that one. All daily use tech has a lifetime of 2 years at most. Take the AppleCare and use it (or use consumer legislation in the UK). After 2 years, sell the damn thing and buy a new thing. Never do you have to employ the likes of Louis Rossman to do hooky last minute hacks and repairs then. If you can't afford to do that, pick another platform but TCO works out about the same over a couple of years.

I have to disagree. The iPhone 6 series are among the biggest pieces of crap I've ever used. They all eventually develop LCD problems (among others). You were lucky, I've used phones where the touch just responds randomly to different things (or not at all). I also don't agree that daily-use technology lasts 2 years, it SHOULD last longer. I've owned Blackberry's, LG, Sony and Motorola smart phones, all of them (including the batteries) lasted far longer than 2 years. The only time I replace my phone is when new functionality that I could actually use comes out or the handset fails.

Also in Australia, other than phone support, AppleCare doesn't give you anything more than what is already guaranteed under consumer law for free. AppleCare is essentially an extended warranty and with consumer gear, it's almost always a total waste of money.

Louis Rossmann has made a business out of these repairs because Apple refuse to touch them and I reckon he knows a hell of a lot more than those guys in the "Genius Bar". I don't always agree with the method on which he goes about some of his repairs, but who am I to judge? It's not always pretty, it's not always "best practice" but he gets it done and actually takes the time to look after his customers, unlike Apple.

In one recent case, a single resistor was the cause of the problem, Apple quoted $750 for the repair (which was blindly, swap out the main board, toss out the old one). In another case a single crumb of food in the JTAG port caused the entire machine not to even boot. How is this good design? Going back to my point from page 1, Apple couldn't give a shit. They charge too much for their products which really aren't any better than other consumer brands out there and they get enough repeat business due to clever marketing and locking their users into a specific system.

Apple was great in the 1980's and 1990's. They were actually innovative and had products in the market which shat all over the competition. In the last decade or so they just churn out rubbish, even to the point where some of their machines look like actual garbage cans.
« Last Edit: April 10, 2018, 12:02:22 pm by Halcyon »
 

Offline BradC

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they get enough repeat business due to clever marketing and locking their users into a specific system.

Or providing hardware/software their users are happy with at a price they are willing to pay.
 
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