Apple CPU vs. Intel CPU.. Fight!

That’s interesting blog posts Mark. The same logic however led me toward using a MacBook 12. Basically every significant issue I had with the iPad always led back to the 12 - programs, keyboard, ability to login remotely to workstations. But it’s wasn’t and isn’t a complete solution. I actually enjoy writing on iPads more, reading is superior on iOS to Mac OS by a pretty signicsnt margin, and the quality of what you might call “AA” level applications seems orders of magnitude better on iOS than MacOS. Battery life kind of sucks as wel - the iPad can easily go days without charging but actually using the MacBook and you’re on the clock. It’s pretty good battery life for what it is but just doesn’t compete with a tablet.

I gave the MacBook 12 some thought. CGP Grey melting his while he was transcoding video turned me off. It was slower than my 11" 2014 Air, and 2009 15" Pro I had. Other than the retina screen, it was a downgrade in every way.

I always have a desktop though, I’ll never make a laptop my (personal) primary, so this just will never be an issue for me. The 12 as your only computer? Eek. The 12 as iPad 10 / 12 alternative? Hmm, more reasonable.

Yeah, that’s true.

For me the iPad is my primary mobile computer. And the 15" is smaller and lighter than my old 2011 boat anchor (I was wrong on the year of the MBP above). It actually fits in the Tom Bihn Ristretto I got for my 11" Air/

It is a complete mystery to me why Apple hasn’t introduced a Mac OS X device by now on their own (extremely fast) ARM SoCs. The performance has been there since iPhone 7 and now with the iPhone 8, a tablet level A11X would almost certainly even reach the 4400 geekbench 4 score I originally proposed.

I think it’s a few reasons. I’m not sure Apple really wants to invest that level of effort into macOS and the Mac at this point. They sorta grudgingly realized they still need a Mac Pro. Also, I’m not sure they want do another chip transition, especially for a one-off device. The developer support might not be there.

I think the big boy Pro is their answer to that.

It would take Steve Job’s grit and dare to cannibalize their own market and invent a new market segment.

i just dont see that in caretaker Tim Cook.

ARM chips can’t run win32/64 executables, so they would need to develop a translation layer like Microsoft did for win10. That’s a lot of work for really very little benefit-- intel laptop CPUs are fantastic.

They already did that in the transition to PowerPC though. And there are lots of rumors that a parallel OS X build running on ARM has been up and running as an anti-intel contingency plan for many years.

Apple could and should make iOS devices dock and be able to be used as desktop devices. They’re clearly fast enough now to handle much of what desktop does, and all you need is a suitably iOS-y dock and keyboard and away you go. Makes a ton of sense in business (maybe not corporate) and academic settings. They could even make a “laptop sleeve” you plug the phone into. The idea that your powerful phone “plugs into” something and powers the brains of it could with a little imagination just blow up into a hundred different use cases.

At the least I’d hope they’d try to make the Apple TV the “computer on your Big Screen”, but alas. All Apple can do now is iterate. They’re iterating on the best SoCs in the business and don’t have the vision to really use them to their full potential.

Yes they did it before. It’s just a lot of effort for very little gain.

A challenge with this is iOS doesn’t understand the concept of a pointing device (like a mouse). I’m not saying it’s not an insurmountable problem, but an immediate one that needs to be addressed.

Also, outiside of Apple’s control are apps like Office, which work pretty good on iOS, but still fall well short of the desktop versions.

The belief is that the AES benchmark ended up running on one of the little cores for some reason (e.g. no warmup phase, so the phone was still in low-power state). There’s other submissions now with more reasonable looking AES scores:

Though the second one looks dodgy in its own way, with claiming to run iOS 11.1.

Regardless, there is no way that result is jumping to 4300 much less 4450. That can only happen with A11X in ~12 months.

I’ll increase my Patreon monthly subscription from $1 to $5 to cover the bet.

(I already “donated” $24,000 to Tom in more or less a lump sum – 2 years, $1k/month – so we’re good otherwise.)

You are a gentleman, a scholar and an acrobat!

New iMac pro will include A10 fusion chip with 512mb ram, for a number of functions including secure boot:

Makes sense to me; the touchbar macbook pros contain an ARM chip (a T1 in this case, same as the apple watch 2) to handle the touchbar and such. Not clear why they’d go all the way up to an A10, which is a much more expensive piece of silicon to produce, just to handle EFI and hey siri. But I guess they need some way to justify the iMac pro price. It needs its own cool feature beyond just “it’s faster”.

It’s Space Grey too!!

Yeah, that chip is doing something else in there, IMO. Is there any reason for the iMac to have a straight up iOS environment for developers? Would that be helpful or is emulation in MacOS perfectly fine?

Or it could just be that they’re making millions of those chips for iPads and cranking out a couple hundred thousand for the iMac Pro is just the easiest solution.