Tuesday, February 25th 2020
Apple to Launch Arm-Powered MacBook in the next 18 Months
Apple is currently designing a custom series of CPUs, for its Macbook laptop lineup, based on the Arm Instruction Set Architecture. Having designed some of the most powerful mobile processors that are inside the iPhone series of devices, Apple is preparing to make a jump to an even more powerful device lineup by bringing custom CPUs for MacBook. Tired of the speed by which Intel replaces and upgrades its Core lineup of CPUs, Apple decided to take the matter in its own hands and rumors about the switch to a custom solution have been going on for a while. However, we now have some information about when to expect the first wave of Arm-powered Macs.
According to the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who is a well-known insider in the Apple industry, we can expect the first wave of the Arm-powered Macbook in the next 18 months, precisely in the first half of 2021. Supposedly, the first chips for these new Macs are going to be manufactured on a 5 nm manufacturing process, possibly over at TSMC since Apple had a long-lasting history of manufacturing its chips at TSMC foundries. In the meantime, we can expect to see Apple providing developers with tools to transition their x86-64 software to the new Arm ISA. Without a software ecosystem, the hardware platform is essentially worthless. And Apple knows this. We will see how they plan to play it and will report as soon as there is more information.
Source:
9to5Mac
According to the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who is a well-known insider in the Apple industry, we can expect the first wave of the Arm-powered Macbook in the next 18 months, precisely in the first half of 2021. Supposedly, the first chips for these new Macs are going to be manufactured on a 5 nm manufacturing process, possibly over at TSMC since Apple had a long-lasting history of manufacturing its chips at TSMC foundries. In the meantime, we can expect to see Apple providing developers with tools to transition their x86-64 software to the new Arm ISA. Without a software ecosystem, the hardware platform is essentially worthless. And Apple knows this. We will see how they plan to play it and will report as soon as there is more information.
34 Comments on Apple to Launch Arm-Powered MacBook in the next 18 Months
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This is going to be interesting, though being successful or not depends a lot on the software side.
But I get the feeling that it would be really complicated to make.
These results are not comparable. Stop doing it!Why would it make sense to team up with AMD?
I may be wrong but AFAIK the only ARM-based CPU AMD makes is a sole Opteron from 2016 (A1100)
Intel, on the other hand, sells quite a few modern ARM products in their FPGA lineup. And there's really no reason why they wouldn't make ARM-based SoCs.12.9 iPad Pro with 1TB and their keyboard case costs $1700. There's almost no reason why a similarly equipped ARM MacBook would be any cheaper.
There's a reason WindowsRT was an unmitigated disaster, yo.
It does come to my mind that Adobe users will probably not worry a lot, since Creative Cloud is always running the latest version. Hence, Adobe will probably work on an ARM version of their software suite, which could easily get switched from x86 to ARM during a software update.
For bootcamp, though... Is it really that common to use a non-Apple OS on Macs?Just like it happened when Macs ran on PowerPC.
Generally though one would think Apple would simply start to encourage software developers for their current hardware platform to support ARM. They have already done so with Adobe Photoshop. If Adobe can do it then other developers can as well.
And it already runs its own OS. So, very unlikely.
Besides, Apple wouldn't do it, simply because it doesn't make sense to them (why let you keep your current Mac instead of making you buy a new one), and using the T2 for things that were never considered during its design and implementation may be technically very difficult (or not).
Mac users have a list of options ranging from VPN to a remote session and treating their macbook as a thin-client that does nothing natively at all, all the way to bootcamp where everything is local and running natively. There is no one-size-fits-all approach because everyone has different requirements. All I know for a fact is that some kind of x86+Windows API support is often mandatory - however it is achieved.
As popular as OSX is in the US, it has only a 9% global marketshare. From a software developer's perspective, 9/10 customers are running Windows on x86 architecture, which is why so much stuff simply doesn't end up on OSX at all.
I was simply saying it would be interesting to see if Apple could make it work in some way. It is probably unrealistic to think the T2 could take the entire workload of ARM software and yield a good user experience given that T2 wasn't initially designed for this purpose. However, if in later iterations of the chip some improvements were made and the task was addressed more like a math co-processor then perhaps,....
How Apple would approach an ARM Mac support is anyone's guess but an ARM only Mac book seems a little harsh. ARM emulation on x86/x64 hardware seems a bit harsh too.
It's likely that they'll add something to their current product lines (overpriced laptops/overpriced workstations): overpriced Apple equivalents of the Chromebook. After all, the majority who buy Apple laptops don't intend to use them for anything more than productivity, and MS already has Windows for ARM which means they have Office for ARM. No need for x86/x64 emulation if you're using the thing as a status symbol more than doing actual work on it.
As for software, I’m curious if Apple will depend more on ports from iOS instead of x86. They’ve already laid out the framework for apps to bridge the gap, and external storage and primitive mouse support was added in iPadOS 13. We own a few iPads, and I could totally see the value of a MacBook that sits in the gap. Price is the mystery. Will Apple price this to be an entry level device so it can work in education? I bet Apple can source its own chips for cheaper than what Intel can provide, and they can reuse their chip in iPad as well. It’s probably not going to be a pro device, so I can see it being cheaper than iPad Pro.