June 5None of any of that requires ARM over Intel.
Profitability is one just one of the many critical elements in the equation. They can make smaller, lighter, more efficient and faster chips for a lot less money then whatever they can buy them from Intel. AFIK Apple does not own Intel stock or have have any fiduciary responsibility to the company, but they do to Apple shareholders, the people who own the company.
Integration has never required a common ISA as Apple has demonstrated themselves for the past decade. Just because one thing makes sense on mobile does not mean it has to make sense on a MP.
To grow and increase profits in the future, Apple must innovate way beyond all the their innovations of the past decade. People are buying fewer and fewer PCs and taking a lot longer to replace the PCs they have. They are using mobile devices more and more to do more and more things. Robo vehicles, AR, VR, streaming entertainment, etc. are areas of tremendous potential growth. Mobile is now the predominant type of computing and PCs are being used less and less in business and in home.
Unfortunately, Intel has not been known for innovation for years. And when the press covers the Consumer Electronics Shows (which I attended for over 25 years when they were strictly a trade show) why do they no longer talk about the latest model PCs from Dell, Lenovo, etc.?
As I mentioned, there are currently 100 million active Mac users and 1 billion active iPhone users. That’s at the very least 900 million potential primary targets to switch to Mac. They are also good targets for Watch, Apple TV, iPad, Music, Air Pods, Home Pod, Pay, iCloud. the branded credit card Apple is scheduled to release soon, Books, and the as yet to be announced streaming service, etc. App compatibility between Apple devices will be a huge selling point for Macs among the 1 billion + 100 million + hundreds of billions globally who have never owned an Apple device, as well as an incentive for owners of older Macs to upgrade.
Size does matter when it comes to mobile as well as desktop devices, and lighter, slimmer and faster are important too. So is optimizing battery life.
Intel and x86 will be with us for many years to come in the performance computing area no matter what happens in mobile doohickey world.
Then why is Intel focusing on drones, cloud services, robotics, etc. and continues to shift away from innovating in the PC chip market? And just because Intel is there isn’t a justifiable reason for Apple to pay more for any of their products when they can make better, cheaper custom designed chips that will enable everything to run better.
And if this ARM thing does actually happen on the Mac, it would either mean ARM and Intel Macs will continue to co-exist (possibly even within the same product) or Apple would essentially have to abandon the pro market (and likely desktops) entirely.
This is BS. They’ll develop a chip or chips that will make all Macs run better and play nice with other Apple goods and services. Macs have survived because they always evolved along with the way people use them, and people will be using differently as time goes on. Personally, I’m planning to buy the next generation MacBook Pro as my million year old model’s trackpad is about to explode, and I’d love for it to have Face ID and 3D Touch, but that’s impossible with Intel Inside.
And I hope eventually there will will be one OS that can do everything.
Marilyn