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What does this really mean Apple dumping Intel

This is false. As far as standard computing systems Apple already has a strong hardware and software ecosystem, Windows has nothing comparable on Arm and it's why the Surface Pro X was largely a dud. Makes no difference if they have been out longer, the practical usability is not there, and emulating on Windows arm takes a performance dive. The benefits of Arm are only there when the software is designed for it (not emulated). The main takeaway is that because Apple is so large and influential, their transition to Arm is a big incentive for software developers to get on board, and they already have some experience making apps for ipads on arm.
LOL Windows was on ARM in tech terms a long time ago now, the Surface Pro X is not a dud the problem is no 3rd part software companies are recompiling ARM versions of their software. Microsoft control the Surface hardware no different to Apple and brought out an ARM version to test the waters. The thing is there are a thousand and one other hardware manufacturers who make Intel based machines for windows and they have seen no demand to make an ARM version, with no hardware then no software will come chicken n egg situation.

With Apple they control the chicken and egg so they can change to ARM, there is no incentive at all for software developers they are been forced by Apple as there is no alternative, its either recompile or you wont work anymore. Your point of Apple been for "large and influential" is pretty mute, look at the market shares of Microsoft, Apple, Google etc. Yes they write and compile "Apps" for iOS believe it or not i do as well professionally and guess what I write and compile them on a Windows machine and deploy to iOS, Apps are a different ball game. Recoding and recompile the likes of Logic and Final Cut is not a simple process, imagine what would happen if some of the big 3rd party software companies turned round and said they werent going to support ARM and stick with Intel

So as i said before if your a Logic Pro user start saving for the next upgrade which will cost thousands and comes with a free new MacBook.
 
This is a simply a matter of business for Apple to generate revenue. As stated they are a victim if their own success. If their hardware wasn’t so stable/reliable/robust then people would upgrade more frequently. It’s got to the stage where they need to force a change to generate new revenue.

I'm sorry but your entire thesis is simplistic garbage. Do you actually imagine this is how the SVP's of a $1.5 trillion company actually think? Like a mom & pop store needing to bilk their customers out of a few extra dollars to pay the rent? "It’s got to the stage where they need to force a change to generate new revenue" WTF are you talking about?
 
I'm sorry but your entire thesis is simplistic garbage. Do you actually imagine this is how the SVP's of a $1.5 trillion company actually think? Like a mom & pop store needing to bilk their customers out of a few extra dollars to pay the rent? "It’s got to the stage where they need to force a change to generate new revenue" WTF are you talking about?
I am walking away from this, 30+ years in the software industry and having worked at and for both Microsoft and Apple as well as having good friends and contacts at both i know what i know. Apple sales are falling faster than a comet and they have to do something to respond if you knew anything about Apple's history this is actually all happened before.

Simple question if your a Logic Pro user will you fork out $2500+ for the next version which requires a new MacBook even though though the one you have is fine. Oh and also expect levels of support to dimish along with any OS updates etc.
 
Well everyone has been bitching about the performance and thermal issues with the MacBook Pros (some of which I know are self inflicted with the 'thin' obsession).

So Apple decide to do something about it. Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel back in the day proved to be a smart move, despite the short term pain that lasted a couple of years. If the advantages of ARM are significant, and I've no reason to suspect they won't be, I think it could end up being the same story - short term pain for long term gain.

It's easy for me to be philosophical though, as I replaced my MacBook Pro with a Razer Blade 15 last year before the 16" MacBook Pro was released. If I'd just bought a MacBook Pro, or even worse, a new Mac Pro, I'd be less impressed.

Whilst the Razer is a great machine, and half the price of the MacBook Pro, I do miss OSX and a number of other things, so I may well be tempted back to Apple land when they are sorted out. In fact, I believe the by the time the Razer is 4 years old might well be the perfect time to jump back into Apple.

In the desktop arena, My faithful old Mac Pro 2009, which has been fully upgraded, has proven yet again to be the best computer I have ever owned. Now mainly used as a VEPro Slave for My 2015 iMac 5k, it just keeps on going, and going, and going... what a machine !

So I think it's time to sit tight and wait for things to play out over the next couple of years.

In so many ways, however, Apple is not the company it was under Steve Jobs. It's the little things that they do that don't make sense, the things he would have obsessed over, the minor details that Apple used to take care of, that they simply don't any more.

For example, in Staffpad on the iPad, if you need to re-download a sample library you previously bought, you effectively have to 're-puchase' it and it looks like you are going to charge another £ 99.00 to your card.
After you've 'purchased it', only then are you informed you have already bought it and will be downloading it for no charge. It's clumsy, misleading and most 'un-Apple' like, and wouldn't have been tolerated under the 'ancien regime'....
Exactly. Like WTF did they ditch the mag safe power adapter? Utter genius, and they threw it away!
 
LOL Windows was on ARM in tech terms a long time ago now, the Surface Pro X is not a dud the problem is no 3rd part software companies are recompiling ARM versions of their software. Microsoft control the Surface hardware no different to Apple and brought out an ARM version to test the waters. The thing is there are a thousand and one other hardware manufacturers who make Intel based machines for windows and they have seen no demand to make an ARM version, with no hardware then no software will come chicken n egg situation.

Not trying to be rude but I don’t know how you can plainly contradict yourself here. The exact point was that the surface pro x was in fact testing the waters and was a dud on that basis, because they don’t have a software ecosystem in place to make it anything other than an experiment currently. It has a couple apps that run natively on arm and everything else gets run on poorly emulated x86.

It doesn’t matter if Microsoft has been experimenting with Arm based machine for X years, Apple has a flagship product running arm with an entire ecosystem of native / non emulated software that runs circles around any windows Arm device, on this basis Microsoft doesn’t have anywhere near a comparable product. Developers have been making software that is already running on Apple arm devices, it is a no brainer that developers are going to get on board.
 
Be interesting to see how quick the new arm based machines will ship as nobody is going to buy a new Intel machine now unless apple agree to replace it with an arm machine
Not trying to be rude but I don’t know how you can plainly contradict yourself here. The exact point was that the surface pro x was in fact testing the waters and was a dud on that basis, because they don’t have a software ecosystem in place to make it anything other than an experiment currently. It has a couple apps that run natively on arm and everything else gets run on poorly emulated x86.

It doesn’t matter if Microsoft has been experimenting with Arm based machine for X years, Apple has a flagship product running arm with an entire ecosystem of native / non emulated software that runs circles around any windows Arm device, on this basis Microsoft doesn’t have anywhere near a comparable product. Developers have been making software that is already running on Apple arm devices, it is a no brainer that developers are going to get on board.
whatever you obviously know nothing about software development, the difference between an iOS app and a native application, the fact that Apple silicon has baked in emulation for x86

all this just to get more battery life lol , thermal overheat etc is a fault of the Apple design under jobs this would have been addressed. I write, design, architect software for a living I know what’s involved
 
I do wonder if many of the new systems may be a closed system, say 3-4 levels with HD and Ram and for iMac screen sizes. I'm not saying I like it, but really hate dust in the system slowing things down. We don't know, but I don't think we'll have performance increased.
For some of the smaller plugin vendors, I hate the though of them postponing a new project to spend time porting stuff over. The bigger crew, likely have staff just for that and its what they do.
Maybe we will be lucky and a plugin developer will chime in and say, hey we got the mini, ported our stuff over in 2 days, its all good.
 
I do wonder if many of the new systems may be a closed system, say 3-4 levels with HD and Ram and for iMac screen sizes. I'm not saying I like it, but really hate dust in the system slowing things down. We don't know, but I don't think we'll have performance increased.
For some of the smaller plugin vendors, I hate the though of them postponing a new project to spend time porting stuff over. The bigger crew, likely have staff just for that and its what they do.
Maybe we will be lucky and a plugin developer will chime in and say, hey we got the mini, ported our stuff over in 2 days, its all good.
I actually think it could be some of the bigger crews that question things, as now they are going to have to maintain 2 separate products/code bases rather than a single base that is compiled for each target

will depend on their consumer base, for instance stienberg might say well only 10% of our consumers use Mac so it’s not cost effective

the other factor is take up, how long will it take until the Mac user base has more arm than Intel. Based on how well macs seem to perform and last it seems they hang on to them for 6/7 yrs so how will Apple convince people to replace units a few years old
 
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Be interesting to see how quick the new arm based machines will ship as nobody is going to buy a new Intel machine now unless apple agree to replace it with an arm machine

I don't see it that way. first Apple has said they still have Intel machines in the pipeline yet to release. So intel is not over. Secondly people will continue to buy intel machines because its going to take some years for 3rd party software to transition over and also, we have yet to see an actual functioning ARM mac that performs as well as their Intel machines. I'm sure they are planning to release something that performs and let's hope they make that happen, but until that is done, many performance oriented folks, including most people on this forum, will continue using Intel Macs for the next few years at least, probably more like 5 more years in my view. Since Apple is yet going to release some Intel macs..we can safely say Intel will continue to be supported by Apple for around 10 more years. Its yet to be seen how long 3rd party devs will continue to support Intel...

But in the audio community, I expect that the first ARM macs are going to hit the audio community like a lead balloon and underwhelm everyone...and it will take some time, in years, until the audio community will be moving in a big landslide over to ARM when stuff finally comes out in ARM form that satisfies our DSP hunger.

Until then, IMHO, the vast majority of audio related mac users will continue using (and buying) Intel based macs. Intel is not over yet. It is a dead man walking no doubt, but there are going to be some years ahead of Intel Macs, particularly in the audio community.

But hey we'll see. I do think that in about 5 years there is going to be great conflict because there will be a period of time where a lot of non-audio software will have moved to ARM, 3rd party developers will probably stop supporting Intel at some point, etc.. while audio devs will hang on longer due to performance requirements. That will put many of us in a situation where we will be on the fence, waiting for the right new mac to come out, while being less and less able to use whatever productivity software we like to use that is not getting updated on Intel any longer, etc.. That is when the landslide to ARM will be ripe to happen as soon as Apple puts out a machine powerful enough to pull everyone over. In my view that is 3-5 years away though.
 
I am walking away from this, 30+ years in the software industry and having worked at and for both Microsoft and Apple as well as having good friends and contacts at both i know what i know. Apple sales are falling faster than a comet and they have to do something to respond if you knew anything about Apple's history this is actually all happened before.

I know Apple's history inside out and unlike you it seems I understand how they are structured, what the development philosophy is, and how they think. Firstly it is preposterous to imagine that this move is somehow a reaction to falling sales. All PC sales fluctuate cyclically and Apple remains the 5th or 6th seller by volume and by far the #1 in profit margin, regularly making more money out of the Mac division that all other vendors put together. Also, Mac sales only constitute 10% of Apple revenue, so to suggest that this is somehow a panicked scheme to generate cash is beyond stupid.

This move will have been in the works for five years at the very least, probably instigated once it became clear that the A-series chips will successfully scale to desktop level performance, which they subsequently have. What has also become clear is that Apple has built significant design expertise in the peripheral chips that can add speed and functionality, and that TSMC has built significant manufacturing expertise that eclipses Intel.

Apple thinks strategically. Here is finally an opportunity to differentiate the Mac from the PC herd and achieve performance advantages. Here is finally an opportunity to unify software and hardware development platforms across the entire product range. From Day 1 Steve Job's central design philosophy was the integration of software and hardware. iPhone showed how successful that integration could be. Now there is an opportunity to have complete vertical control of the Mac platform and not be beholden to the development cycles of Intel, Nvidia, AMD etc.

Simple question if your a Logic Pro user will you fork out $2500+ for the next version which requires a new MacBook even though though the one you have is fine. Oh and also expect levels of support to dimish along with any OS updates etc.

Again, WTF are you talking about? The next version of Logic Pro will work fine on existing Macs and probably the one after that. There is always at least a 6 year support window for these transitions. Personally I change my laptops and desktop machines about every six years and in the last one or two years will freeze the software so that I know I have functioning machines for professional work to the end of their useful lives. There are ALWAYS on-going transitions to new operating systems, hardware specs etc. It's called progress.
 
I know Apple's history inside out and unlike you it seems I understand how they are structured, what the development philosophy is, and how they think. Firstly it is preposterous to imagine that this move is somehow a reaction to falling sales. All PC sales fluctuate cyclically and Apple remains the 5th or 6th seller by volume and by far the #1 in profit margin, regularly making more money out of the Mac division that all other vendors put together. Also, Mac sales only constitute 10% of Apple revenue, so to suggest that this is somehow a panicked scheme to generate cash is beyond stupid.

This move will have been in the works for five years at the very least, probably instigated once it became clear that the A-series chips will successfully scale to desktop level performance, which they subsequently have. What has also become clear is that Apple has built significant design expertise in the peripheral chips that can add speed and functionality, and that TSMC has built significant manufacturing expertise that eclipses Intel.

Apple thinks strategically. Here is finally an opportunity to differentiate the Mac from the PC herd and achieve performance advantages. Here is finally an opportunity to unify software and hardware development platforms across the entire product range. From Day 1 Steve Job's central design philosophy was the integration of software and hardware. iPhone showed how successful that integration could be. Now there is an opportunity to have complete vertical control of the Mac platform and not be beholden to the development cycles of Intel, Nvidia, AMD etc.



Again, WTF are you talking about? The next version of Logic Pro will work fine on existing Macs and probably the one after that. There is always at least a 6 year support window for these transitions. Personally I change my laptops and desktop machines about every six years and in the last one or two years will freeze the software so that I know I have functioning machines for professional work to the end of their useful lives. There are ALWAYS on-going transitions to new operating systems, hardware specs etc. It's called progress.
Ok fanboy , support doesn’t equate to upgrades/new versions , enjoy your now defunct current hardware or is it upcoming new hardware running x86 software through baked in chip emulation

apple was about a marriage of design and technology each pushing the other, now its a mess with each blaming the other.
 
Ok fanboy , support doesn’t equate to upgrades/new versions , enjoy your now defunct current hardware or is it upcoming new hardware running x86 software through baked in chip emulation

apple was about a marriage of design and technology each pushing the other, now its a mess with each blaming the other.

Look man, I actually get the basis of your sentiment. Apple has frequently done things that get in the way of the user experience. Outside of their phones and tablets I have never and will never use them as a main workstation unless they gained some enormous lead performance. So my opinion comes from someone with no allegiance to them.

Regarding the shift to Arm they are totally on the mark, both for tech and as a business. (Setting aside desktop platforms for a moment), the tiny A12 chip in their phones currently hits 26% lower in geekbench singlecore performance than the 10900k, while pulling SIX WATTS of energy. That is insane, and this is just a mobile phone processor on what is largely an undeveloped platform. I say undeveloped not because it's new, but because there has been no good reason to take it further because software endorsement was limited in the past. The first ipad came out in 2010 and had little going for it. Fast forward to 2020 and there is a slew of software support. There are tons and tons of professional software available for the ipad, and they typically all fly on it performance wise. So there is already a well established market and userbase for software on arm.

Now they take this proven method and can confidently back it financially and put it at the front of the line for development priority. They have control over the whole stack, chip to OS. It's hard to say what this will look like on a major desktop platform in two years. But I would find it extremely unlikely that a major tech monolith worth $1 trillion, who makes computers that are a first choice for a ton of people, and is the only competitive alternative to Windows, doesn't have a really solid plan in place for such a major transition. It's not unreasonable at all to believe the tech has to be there when this large of a company is leveraging their entire computing line into it.

In the interim this will have zero effect on someone like me, because I don't use Apple computers. But if they are able to push this tech and something cool comes out of it, I think that's great.

Also, I don't think your concerns are entirely unfounded about support going forward from the two year gap that they stated. But, In the transition from PowerPC to Intel Machines, the first MacOS to only support intel came out four years after their announcement. And that was on a terrible platform, not a mainstream one like we are talking about now with an enormous userbase. So it's likely that support will continue for a fair amount longer than that.
 
Look man, I actually get the basis of your sentiment. Apple has frequently done things that get in the way of the user experience. Outside of their phones and tablets I have never and will never use them as a main workstation unless they gained some enormous lead performance. So my opinion comes from someone with no allegiance to them.

Regarding the shift to Arm they are totally on the mark, both for tech and as a business. (Setting aside desktop platforms for a moment), the tiny A12 chip in their phones currently hits 26% lower in geekbench singlecore performance than the 10900k, while pulling SIX WATTS of energy. That is insane, and this is just a mobile phone processor on what is largely an undeveloped platform. I say undeveloped not because it's new, but because there has been no good reason to take it further because software endorsement was limited in the past. The first ipad came out in 2010 and had little going for it. Fast forward to 2020 and there is a slew of software support. There are tons and tons of professional software available for the ipad, and they typically all fly on it performance wise. So there is already a well established market and userbase for software on arm.

Now they take this proven method and can confidently back it financially and put it at the front of the line for development priority. They have control over the whole stack, chip to OS. It's hard to say what this will look like on a major desktop platform in two years. But I would find it extremely unlikely that a major tech monolith worth $1 trillion, who makes computers that are a first choice for a ton of people, and is the only competitive alternative to Windows, doesn't have a really solid plan in place for such a major transition. It's not unreasonable at all to believe the tech has to be there when this large of a company is leveraging their entire computing line into it.

In the interim this will have zero effect on someone like me, because I don't use Apple computers. But if they are able to push this tech and something cool comes out of it, I think that's great.

Also, I don't think your concerns are entirely unfounded about support going forward from the two year gap that they stated. But, In the transition from PowerPC to Intel Machines, the first MacOS to only support intel came out four years after their announcement. And that was on a terrible platform, not a mainstream one like we are talking about now with an enormous userbase. So it's likely that support will continue for a fair amount longer than that.
Fair points buddy sorry for the way I might have come across, let’s hope Apple aren’t leading themselves down a path they have trod before with the Mac and then the Newton , don’t think bill will bail them out this time lol
 
One thing is clear: Intel seriously f’d up in their planning years ago. AMD besting them again. And now Apple dumping them to roll their own chips.

The other clear thing: a lot of Apple fans will continue to pay huge sums of money regardless of what they have to submit to.
 
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