Close your eyes and picture something with me for a second.
Come on… close em.
It’s September 1999.
The air is brisk with dog days nearing their end as I’m driven by my mum to my new elementary
school to continue my second month of first grade.
I enter the new, staggeringly spotless computer lab at my school and my eyes glisten with
excitement upon seeing an entirely fictitious Power Mac G4 because this entire story is
made up.
I press power, hear the famous Macintosh boot chime, and realize this computer is going
to change everything.
There’s a lot of hubbub about Apple ditching Intel and the x86 platform in favor ARM (which
is the instruction set Apple has been using on iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and AppleTV
since inception (okay, so the first AppleTV wasn’t ARM but we don’t talk about that
(or should we talk about that?
I still have mine from 2007—lemme know in the comments below if you want to see a video
on that)).
With this rumored transition to ARM on Mac, Apple would presumably develop custom-designed
processors just like the iPhone’s A-series chips, but specific to the Mac.
I think a lot of people believe Apple’s innovation has flattened out or that they’re
not trying anymore.
People said this very same thing in the late 90s but Apple proved them crazy wrong by developing
the fastest home computer on the planet that absolutely crushed any Windows Intel machine
from the era.
Back in 1991-1993, Apple’s chip architecture—which had been in use since the original 1984 Macintosh—was
aging rapidly.
Their Macintosh lineup was still wicked fast and running on the 68k family of microprocessors,
but they were becoming bulkier, hotter, and more expensive than ever before.
Apple was trying to squeeze as much processing power out of the old technology as possible
and it showed.
Wintel computers (that’s a Windows-Intel computer btw) were less expensive, far more
efficient, and were catching up in the speed department.
Apple CEO John Sculley had commissioned an internal project called “jaguar” to develop
a new four-core RISC-based CPU designed to succeed the Motorola 68K chips.
But this would mean no backwards compatibility for old software and without the market share
to force people into the new machine, they’d have created a platform that died before it
was born.
And in the 80s, Steve Jobs had already made this error with Lisa an insanely powerful
computer that was made useless due to the lack of software.
Luckily, a veteran engineer at Apple, Jack McHenry, saw the new, incompatible computer
was doomed to fail and started the “cognac” team.
Long story short (and it really is a very cool story), McHenry’s team developed a
RISC-based machine that was able to run old Macintosh 68K software with essentially full
compatibility thanks to an incredible hypervisor emulator (it was one of the first computers
ever to do this well by the way) and the PowerPC was born.
For over 10 years, Apple was making hardware with an extensive software library that absolutely
obliterated any Wintel machine in its path.
In fact, that 1999 G4 I mentioned at the beginning of the video was the first personal computer
with a gigaflop of performance and it made such a mockery of Intel’s Pentium III system
in terms of the operation—at over 2x the speed in many workloads—that it was actually
less expensive to own and operate over time than even the best Intel PCs.
The PowerPC architecture, like the 68K platform before it eventually met its demise
and Apple, well… [insert Jobs clip] Intel CPUs were more efficient per watt, ran far
cooler than PowerPC, and showed far more forward facing potential.
And it was a good move for numerous reasons.
Sharing an x86 platform between Windows and Mac made apps more easy to port between systems,
allowed the Mac to run Windows natively through Boot Camp, permitted the Mac to integrate
into the business and enterprise market for the first time ever, allowed for increased
system stability, and more.
But it also came with some huge drawbacks: Apple’s hardware advantage that existed
with PowerPC was gone.
Apple was a systems builder and moving to off-the-shelf parts limited Apple’s design
capabilities; it required that all performance benefits be made in software optimization
since the hardware was the same as everything else on the market, the hackintosh market
flourished with reverse-engineered and custom EFI kernels, and Apple became beholden to
Intel’s update cycle.
So ARM—why would Apple care to move to it?
And why should you care?
1.
Apple can continue its quest of vertical integration and supply chain control.
Apple won’t be waiting on Intel to release new products and we won’t be waiting on
Apple to integrate those new Intel products.
. It allows Apple to have a unique market offering.
Nobody else (at least, not for a while) will be making flagship ARM computers.
Microsoft has attempted albeit unsuccessfully in part because they require backwards compatibility
and enterprise support (both of which Apple has a history of disregarding).
. Unit cost decreases.
Intel is a ripoff because they own an essential monopoly and while AMD is giving them a run
for their money, they’re still the defacto supplier of enterprise hardware and the prices
reflect that.
The tray price of the dinky little 8-core Xeon in the new Mac Pro is $749.
That’s insane.
In theory, Apple could reduce the price of their machines and become cost-competitive
with low-margin PC manufacturers but with better hardware.
Would modern Apple do that?
I hope so, but they almost might maintain pricing and just increase their margins.
. The hardware may truly be better.
If Apple’s current silicon is anything to go off of, they’ve demonstrated extreme
proficiency in chip design and they continue hiring some of the best SoC engineers in the
world.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
Now, don’t expect a complete transition to happen on day one.
Steve Jobs said in the 2005 Macworld keynote that moving from PowerPC to Intel would take
a few years and Apple actually got it done faster than expected, but I’d expect the
same for ARM Macs.
This new Catalyst project, which ports iOS apps to x86 Macs is a great way for Apple
to test emulation and app compiling and allows developers to get comfortable with the Swift
coding language.
It also allows customers that own existing x86 processors to run most of the software
that will be available on ARM Macs for a smooth transition over to different platforms.
. It will pretty much kill-off hackintosh computers even though Apple probably doesn’t
care about as much as people think they do.
. In theory, it will allow for much better battery life as the RISC-based system will
be more efficient and generate less heat.
Maybe we can finally say goodbye to thermal throttling on Apple comptuers.
. There are potentially massive security benefits.
. There could be multi-platform app purchasing since the OSes will share similar code bases.
So you buy an app on your iPhone and it works on the iPad and Mac as well.
And if all the platforms are easy to develop for, the number of quality Mac apps should
skyrocket.
I could go on.
And that’s not to say that this thing doesn’t have potential downsides.
There definitely are.
It’s a huge gamble for Apple with exponential increases in R&D with no guarantee for return
and at the end of the day, Apple is liable to its shareholders.
They’ll have to maintain a competitive edge on x86 and Windows ARM machines and continue
innovating for years to come—they can’t rely on Intel to do the work for them.
Apple also may erroneously seek power over compatibility and if the Catalyst transition
isn’t a smooth one, things might be buggy for a number of years, etc.
But I think this future is brighter than it is dull.
I hope that Apple can ditch the often-accurate stigma that they’ve become anti-consumer,
overpriced, and incapable of innovating.
There are people out there that don’t even know Apple used to make the fastest computers
in the world.
And as a life-long Mac user, I’m hoping Apple will finally live-up to Phil Schiller’s
famously smug and unfulfilled words.