Finally! (tvOS 14)
Ahh Apple finally supporting webm. Good stuff there too.
Apple used to be on 680x0 architecture, then they transitioned to PowerPC, then they transitioned to Intel. At each step of the way, the previous software would run in compatibility mode, and it was usually fast enough because the new processors were so much faster than the previous ones. Apple has gone through this transition enough times before that I’m not sure why it would be different this time.
Their ARM processors aren’t faster than Intel. They’re probably a bit more power-efficient, they offer much faster and performant standby and wakeup, and Apple controls production so there are huge benefits to them being vertically integrated, but you will see a performance impact from running x86 programs in translation.
When Apple left the 680x0 and PowerPC CPUs behind they were dead, not competitive. This is different. They’re doing it because it allows them to differentiate their products with (hopefully) better battery life and because it lets them control another aspect of their production line.
ARM laptops are dead on the Windows side because Microsoft doesn’t have the sort of leverage Apple does. Developers wouldn’t play ball, and MS lacks the conviction to say “we aren’t going to support intel on new releases after Q4 2024, so you’d best move with the times”. Apple lacks many things, but “courage” isn’t one of them.
It’s a thing on iPadOS and has been for a while. It might be available on iOS for the Max size phones, or I might have imagined that, but I know it’s not on most iPhones.
I have to point out that so far we’re just talking about their phone and tablet CPUs. The fact that it’s even a conversation is impressive. Who knows what the 12Z (or whatever they ship with) will bring in terms of scaling.
Of course, Intel is finally, after 5 years, allegedly (I know… but hey, they earned that) not sitting still either. Should be fun!
It’s AMD who’s really kicking ass in x86 CPUs right now. Their new mobile chips whip Intel’s.
We do know what the A12Z is capable of, because it’s in the iPad Pro 2020.
But yes, of course, they said they’d be making chips specifically for computers and spoke about the power/thermals tradeoff, so I do expect their laptop and particularly desktop CPUs to be much faster than their mobile parts.
I don’t think Apple will have any problems competing with Intel and AMD on raw performance at the low and mid-end, assuming you’re using ARM compiled programs. I anticipate they’ll have a lot of trouble competing with Intel and AMD on both IPC and raw performance once you remove power efficiency and thermals from the equation.
Oh right. I was thinking the current unit was a 12X.
It seems like they already compete with Intel on IPC. Just to make sure I’m not losing my memory, here’s a source.
And it goes without saying that Apple’s pedigree in chip designs is nothing less than top-tier at this point. The company has continued to iterate on its CPU core designs year after year, making significant progress at a time when x86 partner Intel has stalled, allowing the company’s latest Lightning cores to exceed the IPC of Intel’s architectures, while overall performance has closed in on their best desktop chips.
Other than the long-anticipated ARM news, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the iPhone 6S gets another update, to iOS14. It shipped with iOS9! It rivals the iPad 2 for longevity.
While the camera is certainly subpar by today’s standards and the processor has finally been surpassed by the newest Qualcomm offerings, it’s the last iPhone with a headphone jack, and one of the last with no notch, and it looks like I’ll be using it for at least another year.
And yet there were no “it goes to eleven!” Dad jokes from Craig :-)
Which will shock no one, ATP is going to be at least 3.25 hours. They even tried to do a “speed run”, didn’t work. (He’s editing it tonight, should be out in a few hours.)
It doesn’t happen often, but couldn’t agree more with Marco on Big Sur. Don’t like the looks of it.
Zero chance of that happening IMO. Much of the point of transition is to use the Apple-designed & more efficient ARM cores. Each one of those is packaged with an appropriate GPU for the application.
What?
I think the big winners from the ARM announcement will be Dell, Lenovo, etc. for the next couple of years. What business is going to touch Apple until they sort this ARM stuff out? And being able to run Microsoft Word on ARM is one thing (there’s already an iOS version) but being able to run a feature complete version (at these unbelievably faster speeds) is something entirely different.
If they rolled an iMac or MBP on a stage and ran a live demo, I would have more faith. This looks like
a great marketing campaign until somebody other than Apple plays with this.
Good lord they need to edit or break down what they are going to talk about better.
Seeing that they said/implied this will take awhile and they will still be making Intel Macs, I think any business that want to use Macs is fine for the short term. Are there really that many of them anyway? And they probably have specific needs for Macs so can’t move to Windows easily.
Apple does things all the time that people say will fail or hurt them and then it never does. At least for modern Apple.
My biggest complaint is making macOS for touch screens. It’s stupid, and really not as useful as most people like to make it out to be. Every time I see a Surface in the wild people are using it like a laptop. Maybe they have hand on the side to scroll, but when you have decent trackpad/mouse there is no need. I noticed even with my iPad “docked” I rarely touch the screen, usually only when something doesn’t work with the trackpad.
It’s like widgets. Everyone says iOS needs widgets, last time I had Android stuff they were pretty meh. According the Rene Ritchie (tech journalist), Android users don’t even use them much. In this case it won’t hurt the OS by adding them at least.
I don’t know, I enjoyed most of it. It’s like a good audio book.
Maybe, but I get it. It’s a weekly two-hour podcast during regular news cycles, hard to begrudge them going longer in one of the year’s biggest weeks for Apple news.