Apple Could Announce Its Switch to ARM-Based Processors This Month

[Tsing]

Image: Apple



Sorry, Intel. According to today’s report from Bloomberg, Apple is about to officially declare that it’s dropping Core processors from its Mac products and replacing them with ARM-based chips. The announcement will supposedly be made during the company’s annual developer conference, which takes place this month.



Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices are already powered by ARM processors, so the switch seems like a natural transition. The in-house effort will certainly give the company much freedom in terms of design, logistics, and more.



“This will be the first time in the 36-year history of the Mac that Apple-designed processors will power these machines,” noted Bloomberg. “It has changed chips only two other times. In the early 1990s, Apple...

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[Uvilla]

I thought it was last month.

 

[Eduardo_Domingot]

I am seeing a lot of Apple Devs talking trash about these moves. They were already annoyed at Apple seemingly trying to fuse iOS and Mac OSX, this would be the ultimate slap in the face to those Devs.

 

[Brian_B]

As a Mac user I am intrigued but not really pro or con.

i recall the switch from 68k to PPC. And the switch from PPC to Intel. Both were handled fairly well - some bumps in the road but nothing insurmountable and each change was a net positive.

This change does not worry me. I am even a frequent VMWare user, but I recall the older days of emulation versus virtualization - so even that can still be made to work, just with some performance hit. Native Windows via Bootcamp will be the only thing that certainly gets the axe.... but then again, there is Win10 for ARM so even that may not be totally dead, depending on if Apple can talk MS to supporting it.

I would welcome a lot of the things ARM brings to the table. Much better battery life, always on, similar performance metrics, etc. The only real issue I take with iOS over OS X is the walled garden approach. I enjoyed Intel while it latest but won’t exactly cry over losing them right now either.. its not like they have releases anything too exciting to make me upgrade my 7 year old machine (that is a ding on both Intel and Apple).

And while Apple has handled past migrations decently, that isn’t exactly a guarantee this one would be as good or better... so it could always be a dumpster fire like the keyboard was

 

[Grimlakin]

Go for it apple. Make everything you have as proprietary as you can. That'll make you revolutionary... Oh your keyboard messed up... you're no longer under support buy a new mac.