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If they do announce a migration to ARM I'm going to be really interested to see how they manage the transition:

- Porting support

- How long they say they will support X86 binaries on the ARM platform

- How the prices compare

This is all about Apple having full control over the chip set, so they get the packaging they want, the power consumption they want and the performance they want. The idea of having a machine that could completely power down some parts of the hardware because it isn't needed is pretty interesting.

How long they say they will support X86 binaries on the ARM platform

Presumably about as long as they supported Big-Endian binaries on the X86 platform when they switched over

How the prices compare

Probably slightly cheaper to begin with, but will creep up as the Intel based machines are discontinued. Why charge less when the customer is going to buy it anyway?

To increase market share?

There are two lines of thought possible here:

1) Apple is going ARM in order to control hardware outcomes, TDP, power usage,and performance.

2) Apple is going ARM in order to control software outcomes, creating a walled garden for its Mac line from which they can take their 30% App Store cut from sales of software to their now exclusive hardware.

Guess which one I believe to have been a primary motivator, with the second option being simply a very convenient, perfect solution of the the means to the end?

re: your 1) above,

It is clear that being dependent upon Intel for the CPU's worked in the beginning but in recent years... Intel's performance has clearly sucked big time.

I see that as the initial motivation for them to shift now. The raw CPU performance of their recent SOC's has been shown to outperform a lot of what Intel is offering.

We shall have to wait and see what transpires today (if anything) especially wrt price.

They won't announce anything to do with price now, they are just announcing the transition to developers and will get some prerelease hardware into their hands so they can begin the porting process so there is less x86 only code for them to worry about when the real announcement comes in 6-9 months.

But I think it is probably a safe bet the price will be exactly the same as the x86 machines they replace, but they will have better performance and better battery life. Apple haters will whine that they aren't passing any of the savings from dropping Intel along to their customers, their customers won't care because they will be getting something with better performance and better battery life.

Why not both? Though Apple doesn't need to change CPU architecture for the second one. But you also forgot: margins. Intel chips are not cheap. If Apple can use the same chips in desktop devices as phones and tablets then it has even more margin to play with.

Why does the pragmatist in me believe that this move is only another way to lock users into an Apple-only supply ecosystem? Will third party developers go fully ARM, or are we looking at an expectation of Apple's App Store being expected to supply most necessary applications (for the usual fees, of course...!).

I truly don't understand this logic. Not for one second do I think Apple would mandate that you could *only* install apps from the app store... And due to that, I believe it renders your argument null and void.

For example, whilst you can download Office apps from the Apple App store, Apple sees not one penny of any office licenses.

Netflix: You can happy sign up outside of the iOS app, should you feel strong enough about it

Before the app store, app distribution was a complete mess. And now, as a developer, you don't have to worry for a second about distribution, updates, content hosting, metrics, billing, etc, etc. It's all done for you. And if you are going to charge for your app, then isn't it fair that Apple gets a cut, given you get all of the above included?

Now, if Apple mandated that the ONLY way to get a subscription for something was through the app, then I think everyone would have a valid argument. Whilst you can spend your monies outside of the app, then, well...

They don't need to go ARM to do that, they could have done it with x86 Macs anytime in the past decade if that was their plan.

These guys know much more about this than I do but it seems off that the first transition will be the Macbook Pro and iMac - or to put it differently, the first to iron out the issues will be the creative professionals who use high end equipment for their work.

I would have thought that a transition using the Air range would have made more sense as this plays to battery life and cooling plus the target user is more likely to sit in coffee shops using a browser so are less reliant on the system being 100%

Maybe the online rants of 1000's of fanbois who are having minor problems watching youtube is seen as worse PR than a few 100 upset professionals who cannot meet deadlines? As I say, I am not in marketing.

Is that you, Genghis, from hfP?!

I'd assume that Apple would go after the best selling products first, to get the new architectures into the hands of as many as possible, so, given the the MBA was updated this year, it makes sense to target the iMac and MBP

Definitely not... (hfP?)

This has been planned for a long time - at senior management level, their internal roadmap would have shown the Intel transition to ARM for the last 2 years so they can have everything in place for the end of this year. The decision to replace MBP was not because they updated MBA this year - the decision was to update MBA on Intel instead of moving it to ARM...

This is not move fast and break things territory, this is carefully planned corporate strategy. The question is still relevant as someone senior in Marketing made the decision to transition the 'professional' model(s) before the 'consumer' models It seems odd to me but, that's why I don't get paid big bucks for making the decision :)

Thoughtful, well reasoned commentary that is on point? In El Reg's comment section? Who stole the interwebs? Well done.

Sorry, normal idiocy will resume after the break

I don't think Apple would make this move unless they were fully committed to replace their whole lineup top to bottom, including the most high end Mac Pro workstations. Half-measures like only doing the low end of laptops first is not their style. They could have made that move years ago, the older A-series chips were more than capable. Apple will not want to split their Mac lineup between 2 different architectures.

Well as a developer I spend a lot more of my time on *nix machines and windows than MacOs

Apple is also known as a Creative company for Creatives and Designers etc

more of a workhorse for creatives and developers

I like how El Reg thinks development isn't creative.

As a developer I'm very keen not to be labelled as a "creative", thank you. Management hear the c word and will think I can design newsletters and logos and corporate templates and rebrand stuff and if you've seen my level of design skills, you'll know that nobody wants this to happen. The results are, literally, not pretty.

I tried apple. I really wanted to love it. I hated it.

If you spent loads of money keeping hardware and software bang up to date you could get about 1/4 the performance of anything running Linux or windows.

This will be the death knell of Apple as a power workstation machine. Unless they keep intel for that.

It's more about battery powered toys for consumers

OSX is much, much faster than Windows for some workloads.

They should do very well if they can manage to keep (or improve) the performance in the right areas - and no delays due to silicon being prioritized else where.

OSX is much, much faster than Windows for some workloads.

I doubt that. If the application code is well written then it should be running as fast as possible on the same CPUs. There are always edge-cases relating to I/O speed, networking, etc. but in most cases the OS no longer makes much difference and, indeed for things like video-encoding, Windows is easier to get hardware acceleration working.

Where MacOS generally shines is the integration of tools for certain workflows. For me, as a developer, I find the posix side of MacOS just so much more convenient, not least because of the path names.

"If you spent loads of money keeping hardware and software bang up to date you could get about 1/4 the performance of anything running Linux or windows."

Really? I get infinitely more performance out of a system that works than one that doesn't.

Bearing in mind it's many years since I ran anything from Redmond.

A factor of four is rather unlikely, though I'll readily concede that you get more power if you get a decent free OS. But you also, in my experience, spend more time playing with that rather than your day job.

Sources close to my imagination have revealed that every piece of Apple hardware is going to be updated to have a round screen instead of oblong. The iPhone will now be a sphere because Apple's ergonomics lab have revealed that it's easier to keep hold of a ball in your hand.

Ah yes. That brings back fond* memories of the original iMac puck mouse - so gloriously round that it didn't matter which way you grabbed it, it always seemed to move the mouse cursor in an unexpected direction!

Also, I fully agree that holding balls in your hand is easy and comfortable - though, for some reason, the staff in Marks & Sparks take a completely opposite point of view...

* for negative quantities of "fondness", of course!

I still remember the road bumps caused when Apple went from 680x0 to PowerPC and later to Intel x86. And also from MacOS 9 to OS X. I used to have a lovely Power Mac G4 at the time which migrated through one of these transition periods. But at least in those earlier cases, the new architecture was sufficiently powerful that the emulation worked pretty well and smoothed the transition.

I don't see that being true in this case at all. We already know from Windows on Arm that x86 emulation is abysmally slow and that assumes Apple even provide emulation. And either way Macbook owners can kiss goodbye to Boot Camp and the ability to run Windows 10. I can't see much if any benefit in this to end users at all really. It might save Apple some money but that's small consolation to Macbook users who suffer detrimentally from it.

It will be interesting to see what they offer here. Given that they control the silicon, they may be able to produce something that's up to the job.

Bootcamp has never been a "must have" to me, as running a Windows 10 VM has always been perfectly acceptable to me. And you can have multiple VMs running at the same time.

I've only run Bootcamp a couple of times and that was 10 years ago. Since then virtualisation has been more than good enough, assuming you have enough RAM.

Am I missing something ? 21.5 to 24 inch is 2 1/2 inches in my neck of the woods. Not worth bragging about.

I've often wondered why Apple don't just buy AMD and a semiconductor manufacturer. No more need for Intel.

No idea whether they could actually extract a tax from Intel for using the x64 technology AMD came up with actually, I'm totally clueless on that point, but I bet you Apple's M&A department know the answer to that question already.

Volume. They don't use enough (laptop) parts unless they are being sold else where as well.

The advantage of ARM is you can license the IP, customize it to do exactly what you want and then have it made at a very large fab (TMSC and the likes) without being tied to a specific foundry, process or regime - economy of scale is much lower as you don't have a very, very expensive silicon fab running on low volumes.

If the last 20 years have told us anything, they've told us that Intel is the only company that manages CPU desing and manufacturing effectively and even then it's become increasingly difficult. This is why contract manufacturing from TSMC, Samsung, etc. where the enormous capital can be spread out making CPUs, GPUs, memory for phones, routers, PCs, TVs.

Of course, Apple will pass the savings on to the customer won’t they ;)

It wouldn't need for much for them to be able to cream off the higher end Windows users. Currently, similarly specc'd Intel notebooks are similarly priced whether they're from Apple, Dell, Lenovo or HP. Microsoft has a far higher investment in the x86 software stack than Apple. But let's wait and see what is actually announced.

From the article

Similarly, will Apple offer discrete graphics on par with the current Radeon cards found on its premium laptops and desktops?

There’s no particular reason why they can’t just keep using Radeon cards, surely? It’s just a matter of getting drivers rebuilt, mostly. They’re still going to have a PCIe bus, and the bulk of OSX will simply recompile too.