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Comment by rcarmo | Hacker News Reader

The fun bit for me (no real pun intended regarding Bitcode) is following the speculation that the delays in upgrading the Mac line might be tied to a switch to ARM at the low end. Would make a lot of sense for Apple to vertically integrate their macOS hardware line as neatly as iOS-based devices, but would kill the Mac as an agnostic development platform (i.e., no more Docker x64 binaries and so on).

Can't say I find that much of a problem these days (VMs are plentiful in the cloud), so the prospect of having thinner, lighter laptops seems a decent trade-off.

I just wish they'd actually fix their bugs, though.

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They could have both ARM and x86 chips in their laptops and only spend the extra energy powering on the x86 chip when x86 compatibility is required. They already do this with GPUs in their laptops and they do a similar thing for their CPUs in iPhone 7.

They'd get a big battery life improvement for the typical case once people migrate away from x86-only software, and developers would have an incentive to port to ARM, while people who absolutely need x86 software won't get left behind.

An interesting idea. I know that most of the apps I use on my mac are Apple's, so if they ran on a low power arm cord while everything else was on an x86 core I imagine I'd have significant power savings.

Apple would have to get the GPU vendors to write drivers for their processors though, which would be a tremendous engineering effort. Intel would likely resist any such proposal for their Iris GPUs though, they're having enough of an existential crisis as it is without worrying about one of their largest customers moving away from their main product.

> They already do this with GPUs in their laptops and they do a similar thing for their CPUs in iPhone 7.

They do very different things on those. Both GPUs "speak" opengl/metal/whatever, and both core types of the iPhone 7 speak ARMv8. Handling concurrent ISA in the same machine is a very different problem (early PS3 did it to retain PS2 compatibility, they actually embedded PS2 hardware directly).

Most of Apple's low end customers probably don't need to run Docker x64 binaries.

Most wouldn't even notice a change I guess, unless they need to install Windows, for example.

Precisely my point, although I didn't quite get to it :)

I think that at least ten poor little rabbits die when someone excuse himself for the pun.

Their SDKs (like SpriteKit) have been blurring the lines between iOS and MacOS and I wouldn't be surprised if a new touch screen Mac allowed all iOS apps to run on the desktop. The question is, would that require switching to an ARM processor or adding it as a secondary chip?

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