Apple Ditching Intel?

It’s significantly slower on macOS. I don’t know why. I have a beefy MBP and in Windows I can open an Excel sheet with 150k rows of Arabic data in 5 seconds. The same sheet in the latest version of Excel on macOS might take 5+ minutes to open, rendering it completely useless to me. Maybe it’s Excel? Maybe it’s macOS? I have no idea, but it sucks and I wish it would be fixed.

Edit: maybe it’s macOS integrating other things? I don’t have or use Dropbox. Who knows… ms office - Why is Microsoft Excel 2016 so slow when Internet connected - Ask Different

Excel is a disaster on anything but Windows, far as I have ever seen. So anecdata++ I guess.

We already have a topic in this, at least from a perf perspective:

With an Intel i7, my MacBook Pro already takes a long time to render Final Cut … final cuts. I can only imagine how slow an ARM chip would be. And even if it brought over iPad software (all designed for touchscreen use), it would birfurcate the Mac software base.

Not denying Apple might do it, but can’t see it being a good thing for customers.

MS just released new WIndows devices that run on ARM but also run x86 apps. The only issue is that it’s not fast, and it’s 32-bit only for now. Wonder if Apple has something similar in mind?

Yes, they might offer a translation layer too.

A bunch of reports on this, but this 9-to-5 Mac story also links to some good thoughts by Steve Troughton-Smith.

A WWDC announcement with a ship date of next year seems plausible. Apple needs to give developer’s time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the big devs (Microsoft/Adobe) have already been seeded with demo units.

The real writing on the wall for Intel was the iPad Pro announcement last year. Apple said the new iPads were faster than 95% of the laptops out there, and their laptops were included in that. An Intel-Arm transition makes sense for at least their consumer laptops. If the A-series SOCs can run that fast without active cooling, imagine what they can do with a fan on it.

What I am not sure on are things like the Mac Pro. My gut feeling is that will stay on Intel for a long time. I don’t think the iMac Pro is long for the world, though. It was created to be the new Mac Pro, and once Apple announced they were actually making the Mac Pro, the iMac Pro seemed to exist as a bridge device until the more powerful Mac Pro came out.

If I were betting to win money, I’d say the MacBook returns, or the Air, are the first ARM Macs. My double-or-nothing bet is everything but the Mac Pro is ARM within a year of the first units shipping.

I would be all over this, except I use Excel a lot. I worry the split will cause MS to drop support. And then gaming, almost no one will bother I bet. As much as people say you can’t game on a Mac, I have a lot of Mac ports on Steam.

The switch to Intel sucked back in the 90s(?). I really don’t want to go through that again. It took awhile, but I remember having to worry about my old iMac still getting software as everything moved to Intel.

Anyway, we all kind of knew this was coming, except for @Enidigm. :-)

The Intel transition was mid-2000s, and I don’t recall it being a tire fire. Rosetta worked fairly well. The 6800-PPC transition, I think was in the 90s. That, I recall, was rougher.

MS is a SaaS company now, and will make a version.

Steam, and Homebrew-type stuff is a worry I have. Apple doesn’t care about that one bit, but I do. Plus virtualization, Boot Camp, etc.

Wouldn’t a transition to ARM kill Bootcamp? I mean maybe nobody actually uses Bootcamp, but I thought it was a selling point to get people to switch from Windows.

I get the idea of switching. But I wonder if it’ll be more selective, like for Macbook Airs and other tiny devices only.

I don’t know the state of Windows on Arm. If MS releases a consumer version of WoA, then it could live.

I’d doubt it. it’s harder to keep versions of apps in sync. I’d expect everything consumer-oriented would go to ARM.

Now, what I could see is some sort of iPad/Mac Hybrid that runs a different OS that is half macOS and half iOS. I’d also be very curious if you could use an iPad as a transition dev device.

Heh. If there’s anything to this, because Apple tends to follow nowadays, it’s probably because of the Surface Pro X being mildly? successful / not a disaster? And also Microsoft might well have more ARM based Surface devices in the near future as they work through the performance issues of using Qualcomm. There are a bunch of near-laptop foldable devices that Apple might be pondering.

I think it’s more about Intel’s lack of progress. ARM is faster and cooler.

Apple should do it, but not transform their entire Mac product line to start. ARM should start out only at the lowest-end, to compete with Chromebooks in education. That allows Apple to sell cheap laptops with an all-new brand and avoid compromising the rest of their line. Then if/when it’s successful and the software exists a couple of years later, move the rest of their products to ARM as well.

That’s what Apple should do but I agree, they are more than willing to inconvenience their customers and damn the critics.

Well, one person’s inconvenience is another’s…

A lot has changed since my comments in this thread a few years ago. almost everything on my Mac is from the MAS, with the exception of Warcraft and Steam games – a factor not to be ignored, mind you.

Now, if Apple came out with a MacBook Pro with their own SoCs that had better performance than my current MBP, but had battery life to dream of, I’d take that. I’d even take it if it meant losing Steam. Not everyone would mind you. Which is why I think there has to be a version of Rosetta in there to handle the transition. Rosetta lasted ~4 years, and I can see Apple keeping it around for 2-3 years. Rosetta was in 2 major Mac OS releases, but they were less frequent.

I also think Apple’s solution will attempt to handle most of the use cases a majority of people use their Macs for. What is less certain is how developers will react and if they will do the work.

They totally will, but it will be extremely disruptive for a couple of years. That’s why Apple should ease into it. But I do not think they will.

yeah, on the one hand, I think it’s better to rip off the band aid and just do it.

However, given this is the same company that shipped iOS 13 and Catalina…

There’s no way they would change everything to ARM in one fell swoop. Those of us that use bootcamp would leave (small number that we are) but without Microsoft Office support on par with Windows Office (which iOS Office is not), a bunch of corporate users will leave. Just like I’d love to use a working ARM Surface Pro X with more powerful Windows laptops and desktops, I can see the same scenario with an ARM MacBook or MBA that augments my lovely MBP 16.

But they did make the butterfly keyboard that sent many of us to Thinkpads, so who knows what Apple is thinking?

They absolutely could and likely will do that. But it won’t be out of the blue, it’ll come a year after they ship hardware to developers or something similar. When these machines do eventually release every common use-case will be covered, but long tail uses will be screwed for years.

There has to be a transition layer like Rosetta in the PPC to Intel switch. If Apple doesn’t do that – assuming such a device isn’t meant to be souped-up iPad – they will earn every bit of courageous criticism.