Only our chips, running our OS, on our hardware, under our license terms and conditions. If it breaks, we dictate the repair cost.

Why? Because 65.2 billion cash in the bank just isn't enough.

I'm leaving it.

It’s a luxury Apple have because they were and still are a minor player in the market.

I get that there is no real choice in the marketplace: it’s Apple, Wintel or Linux on Wintel.

Aren't you forgetting all those Raspberry Pi and other ARM boxen running Linux (and other OSes)?

If I were Intel or AMD, I'd be getting quite worried these days. Even Windows is dipping its toes into other CPU architectures (again)…

And ARM might also see RISC-V come along and take some of its share…

That's a cynical take. Apple's chip development progress is nothing short of miraculous.

On the one hand, if you bought an Intel Mac two years ago, this sucks.

On the other hand, if you didn’t notice the writing on the wall - written more than five years ago - what the hell were you doing dropping so much money on a computer? It’s like buying a house when you know that it has serious subsidence and is built on an ancient cemetery.

If you needed serious memory, then even now you can't buy ARM Macs with that much

... And thanks to OCLP, I plan to use it (as a Mac) until fall 2028, so 10 years.

And beyond fall 2028, thanks to Windows Server 2022 with desktop experience, it will be a windows machine until ~2033

And beyond that Linux Mint T2 will keep it running, and out of the Landfills for many more years.

Yes, at some point it will be handed down to someone else, but having options is nice.

In another note, 2028 will also mark the aproximate year when my Synology DS1515+ will become unsupported (after hacking it to accept DSM 7.2) So, it will be the year of reckoning, buying new desktop, Laptop and NAS.

Thing is, if Apple and Synology do not change their ways, I may end up buying some other brands.

PS: To sysnology, get moving FAST with 3rd party disks and NVMe in the compatibility list, to apple, make at least one desktop and one laptop that can get upgradeable memory and upgradeable NVMe drives in industry standard formats, should not be that hard if you do the MxPro with integrated memory, while the Maxs (and ultras) use CAMM2/SO-DIMMs

But from here on to Fall 2028, may things can happen, so I'll think about it in 28H1

The Intel builds of macOS are the only ones that can be re-installed without DRM / activation.

Horde them whilst they are cheap. They might sell for a little bit of money in the future when Apple shuts down the DRM service for the aarch64 builds.

Apple Silicon is great but don't see why Apple didnt just share TSMC capacity with AMD to build them a customised SoC design.

Like they do for consoles.

Then we could still have an x86 SoC and compatibility.

Has compatibility with x86 ever been a selling point for Apple?

Being able to run bootccamp (and therefore windows on bare metal for things like gaming) and being able to run VMs with Windows exclusive things (like SAP clients or Visio) is a boon for certain types.

Having said that, that was from 2006 to 2018. With the advent of Win10 for ARM in 2018, Windows AMR VMs can be had, but not all the SW is still ARM (Visio probably is, SAP is still not). So, nowadays, less than before.

There were reports at the time of Steve Jobs joking/trolling that Apple would be delighted to run windows on intel macs, but Windows could not do UEFI and was stuck in BIOS land.

Guess I need to dye my grey hair. My last Apple computer purchase (1993 Quadra 610 with Motorola 68040 CPU) could read 3.5in MS DOS disks and would mount them with an icon with "DOS". I could read/write to the disk and move files to PCs as needed.

Or, rather, royalties are a good bit of the answer.

How much does the *A* in *ARM* pay in IP royalties for its cores?

Maybe that has something to do with why they can stuff scores of them in their SOCs.

That is the big draw of RISC-V; royalty free designs for all.

"How much does the *A* in *ARM* pay in IP royalties for its cores?"

Apple isn't the A in ARM. That was "advanced" and before that, it was "Acorn". Apple was there when the corporate version of ARM was created, but they didn't stay with it all the way through. They are a licensee like others, and while they probably got a discount on their license by planning to build so many of them, they got the full-strength license which lets them design their own cores, so the answer to your question is probably a lot plus the cost of doing the design themselves.

"That is the big draw of RISC-V; royalty free designs for all."

You are mistaken. The ISA is royalty-free. The designs are covered by whatever terms the designers put on them. If you want to use a core today, not by designing your own, then you'll be paying royalties to whatever design company you select for that chip design. The difference is that the design company didn't have to pay the RISC-V people to make it.

Why would Apple want to stick with x86 and simply trade horses? Their CPUs are superior to both Intel *and* AMD in single thread performance AND performance per watt. The only reason they don't beat them in multithread as well is because Apple doesn't make CPUs with as many cores as they do.

> Apple generally makes security updates for macOS available for three years after release. So Intel hardware under macOS 26 Tahoe should linger at least until late 2028.

This time around, there's no "generally" or "should" required, as Apple has taken the rare step of explicitly stating it:

> macOS Tahoe will be the last release for Intel-based Mac computers. Those systems will continue to receive security updates for 3 years.

[1]Source

[1] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple-silicon/about-the-rosetta-translation-environment/

I worked at Intel as a fab integration engineer when the Apple contract landed. Shortly after the announcement, Jobs apparently was unhappy with the wafers he was supplied for the photo ops since they had some scuffs on the back where the stainless steel vacuum paddles handled the wafers through the backend processing. He made an equivalence to a carpenter hiding blemishes in unseen wood trim to mounting a chip to a package with scuffs on its backside. The idiot required additional backside polish processes to be added which added tool purchase cost (to the consumer). And guess what? Now the front side (aka transistor side) of the wafer needed handling in order to polish the backside. Brilliant, just brilliant. Jobs was a f---ing primadonna and the Cooks-ucker is no different.