- Apple just announced
what many of us have been anticipating for years now,
with equal measures dread and excitement.
They're ditching Intel.
Yep, the longest-lived CPU partnership
in Mac history is done,
and Apple has confirmed not only the development
of their own ARM-based chips in house,
but also their intention to complete this migration
away from Intel systems over the next two years.
Macs, and potentially even PCs, may never be the same.
But me, you can always count on me,
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Since the development of the A4 SOC began in 2008,
Apple has been consistently designing
their own silicon in house,
thanks to ARM's generous licensing model
that allows third parties
to implement their instruction set in standard ways,
but without limitation in terms of core layouts.
This flexibility gave Apple the ability
to control the entire design of the iPhone,
and since the iPhone 4S, they've consistently defended
their fastest-smartphone crown.
Apple's chip design prowess
has brought them to the point now
where the current iPhone 11 Pro, a phone,
can offer up single core performance
that's competitive with their current MacBooks
in synthetic benchmarks,
and that's to say nothing of their other in-house silicon.
Meanwhile, it's no secret that Intel
hasn't been performing up to expectations.
For years, Apple's efforts to build slimmer and lighter Macs
with longer battery life have been frustrated
by the enormous heat that they've had to deal with,
or have outright refused to deal with.
Now, Intel's upcoming 10-nanometer
Tiger Lake microarchitecture with Xe graphics
has been making headlines
for its promising performance improvements.
But, here's the thing,
if Apple's promising to launch a laptop
with their own silicon this calendar year,
they clearly got sick of waiting
anywhere from 12 to 36 months ago
and have been well past the point of no return
for quite some time.
Furthermore, Tiger Lake's thermal performance
is yet to be seen.
So, with 12 years of experience designing CPUs
and having achieved a claimed
100x performance improvements since they started,
why buy CPUs that might turn out to be flops
from Intel, or from AMD for that matter?
If you want it done right, do it yourself.
And I don't even blame Apple for seeing it that way.
I mean, I love Android as much as anyone,
but look at how much runtime Apple squeezes out
of a comparatively small battery
next to their Android competitors,
and this is all while offering a snappy user experience
with, in many cases, half the system memory.
It's this control and consistent execution
that makes Apple so darn profitable.
Here's the thing.
There's always a trade-off between your upfront R&D costs
versus your ongoing costs.
You can allow someone else, like Google or Qualcomm,
to handle your operating system and your CPU design.
That keeps your engineering staff requirements lower.
But, you might need to make up for some sloppiness
with a big fat battery and some extra RAM.
Or, if your Apple, you spend upfront,
optimizing that hardware perfectly
so that every unit you ship is as inexpensive as possible.
This model works out great
as long as you can sell enough
that your units times cost savings
is greater than that upfront R&D investment.
We see the same thing in game consoles.
Sony for example, built a custom RAD Tools
Kraken hardware decompression chip for the PS5.
That was a complicated undertaking,
but without it, Sony would need a bigger, faster SSD,
or a much beefier CPU, in every console unit they ship.
So that initial investment could turn out to be
absolutely game-changing.
Pardon the pun.
But, while using Apple silicon in a laptop
might not be painful, the transition could be.
Going from PowerPC to Intel was a lot smoother
than from Motorola to PowerPC,
but it was still fraught with compatibility
and performance implications early on.
While universal binary eventually became standard,
until PowerPC died out,
the Rosetta translation layer's first incarnation
didn't run especially well,
and Apple prevented their Pro suites,
like Final Cut and Logic, from running under it as a result.
This time around, Apple says
Rosetta can translate an application at install time
rather than at runtime,
potentially making things much faster overall.
Only time can tell how that works out though.
As with the transition to Intel,
eventually all applications will be ARM-only,
and that has some both frightening
and exciting implications for consumers.
First, iPad OS apps can basically just work on a Mac,
Apple arcade, and the new Maps and Messages apps,
are working examples,
but the possibilities go much, much deeper.
Because iOS and iPad OS are based on Mac OS,
it's relatively easy for Apple to unify
the entire ecosystem now
around their custom ARM architecture,
effectively erasing the distinction between
what's a Mac and what's an iDevice for developers.
The iPad is even getting relative mouse input for gaming,
and desktop-grade Spotlight search now.
However, this convergence isn't without danger.
There's nothing official, but it seems that the App Store
is being emphasized far more right now
than alternative ways of installing applications,
and that's a big problem for services
with external monetization schemes.
Now, to be clear, the App Store offers a valuable service,
and Apple should make money from it.
But the thing is, if I already have something in place,
why should I as a developer be forced to use it,
least of all on a desktop operating system
where there isn't really much precedent for this?
That's where things get frightening,
because it's not clear who Apple is putting first right now.
I mean, promising custom hardware solutions
tailor-made to what their customers need
might actually be worth some monopolistic behavior,
to some people.
But there's one small problem.
Does Apple even know
what their customers want to do with their computers?
The last few years have been spotty at best
when it comes to listening to both customer
and developer feedback.
I mean, who asked for the touch bar?
And then, how did it take an unacceptable three years
for the company with the world's eighth highest R&D spending
to get rid of a fundamentally broken keyboard design?
To be fair, Apple has demonstrated
a willingness to change lately.
User upgradeable storage on the Mac Pro for example,
that's a great step forward.
There's just a lot of questions still to be answered
in how this whole thing is gonna play out,
like how did the iPad Pro with Magic keyboard
and MacBook differ now?
What if intel gets their shit together?
Will PCs completely overtake them,
like what happened during late-game PowerPC?
Or, what if the opposite happens?
The computer industry has a long and proud tradition
of doing something kinda half-ass at first,
waiting for Apple to do it properly,
and then finding a 100 slightly worse ways to copy that.
Will Windows for ARM become more widely available?
What's gonna happen to Boot Camp?
Only time can answer these questions.
But in the meantime, I do have some predictions
for how things are gonna play out.
One, Intel has tried to make low idle power consumption
and always-on computing a thing for years,
with initiatives like Smart Connect,
but it's never actually worked very well.
Meanwhile, Apple has this absolutely on lockdown with iOS.
You can leave your iPad untouched
for literally weeks at a time, pick it up,
and all your files, notifications and settings
are right there waiting for you,
and you probably still have 20% battery to boot.
This, along with the instant-on experience
that we take for granted on phones, is coming to Mac,
which means that Apple
has a major selling point on their hands,
even for people like me
who do basically everything in a browser anyway.
Next, this is going to completely fix the thermal throttling
that we have criticized Apple for mercilessly
over the last few years.
Now, putting a TDP rating on Apple's SOC
is a little bit challenging,
but a non-text performance data indicates
that the A12Z's Vortex cores in the iPad Pro
can draw about four watts in a single-threaded workload.
If we were to extrapolate that out
to all four Vortex cores,
which is unlikely to be possible on a tablet,
but very possible on our laptop
with better cooling and power delivery,
that's about 16 watts fully unchained,
which curiously happens to be almost exactly
the cooling capacity of the 2020 MacBook Air
with it's weird fanless heat sink,
which is why my conspiracy theory
might actually not be that far off.
They could stick an ARM processor
into that same cooling and chassis design,
and it'll run faster, cooler,
and probably with better battery life
thanks to its ability to use low-power cores
to handle background tasks.
Now, I actually doubt that they will change
much else on the first go,
because the marketing practically writes itself, you know?
Same Mac as before, more Apple than ever.
Magic.
Probably a little catchier than that,
but I think you guys catch catch my drift.
Prediction number three.
If they want this to be a success on the desktop,
either Apple's ARM cores
need to get competitive with x86 cores
in single-threaded tasks,
and I mean heavy desktop ones,
or they need to augment them.
Now, desktops are definitely coming,
and based on these performance claims,
I think Apple is taking the latter path here,
giving themselves two years to finally push developers
to both properly take advantage of many-core CPU designs,
and to properly take advantage of heterogeneous compute,
which is, using a combination of CPU and GPU,
or neural processors for that matter,
to do conventional CPU work, faster.
When it comes to performance though,
there's more to consider.
ARM, given that it's a RISC architecture,
is able to do more work in fewer clock cycles
and with less power than a CISC architecture, like x86 can.
That's an advantage that Apple used to enjoy
with early PowerPC Macs
outperforming their Intel counterparts
at much lower clock speeds.
But, there are some drawbacks to this approach.
While RISC is more streamlined,
with no microcode, for example, it also lacks flexibility.
Meaning that, if your application uses an x86 instruction
for which there is no ARM equivalent,
you as a developer are looking at
either having to work around it manually,
or simulate it with many more cycles
than you would otherwise need.
That's part of why Microsoft's Windows RT
didn't support x86 emulation when it launched.
What makes this different is that,
compared to PowerPC, or even Windows RT,
many developers are by now well accustomed
to working with ARM, thanks to mobile devices.
Although, there are still unknowns.
Will Adobe, for example, be able to quickly implement
every feature in the ARM version of Creative Cloud?
I mean, given they can't even get every feature
working in the regular. Anyway,
Will Apple try to force them into the App S--.
(laughing) (cameraman laughing)
I mean, I can't imagine Adobe
giving up 30% of their subscription fees.
Come on.
The bottom line, anyway,
is that nothing quite like this has happened before.
We're watching history being made today,
and whether Apple succeeds or fails, one thing is clear,
and that's that the computer industry
will never be quite the same.
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If you guys enjoyed this video.
Actually, sorry, Anthony, I'm gonna hijack this.
I'm gonna send them over to the sub-zero water cooling
on the 2020 MacBook Air video,
because that's where we found out
that that laptop is designed around,
seemingly, an A12Z processor.