Great, we can go back to the macrumors nonsense about how this PPC is "just as fast" as the x86 days.
With their focus on iOS vs MacOS, this doesn't surprise me. MacOS will simply die once they port their tools to iOS.
Terrible choice IMO.
With their focus on iOS vs MacOS, this doesn't surprise me. MacOS will simply die once they port their tools to iOS.
Terrible choice IMO.
Now that they have the upper hand, they are free to go back to their old ways without much considerations about opennesses.
With the PC sales declining and most OEMs following back to the old ways of integrated computers, before of PC components revolution, I guess most regular users will use follow along.
If the macOS/iOS developers still can get their share of the cake, most things will hardly change, although they might loose those that only use macOS as a pretty UNIX.
The question is how relevant are those sales currently.
If they had any doubts all they had to do was say nothing -- which is their strong preference -- and it would have remained clear that the Mac Pro was dead.
Making a strong "trust us, we're working on it" statement and then canceling would be a pretty bad unforced error. Not impossible, but with their top-down, forward-looking decison-making process it seems very unlikely to me.
It's much more reasonable that they'll do a "best effort" in the high end space but it won't be comparable to a Xeon. You can see the iMac Pro as a prelude to that. A beefy machine to be sure but not what you'd expect for top of the line.
But if they really are committed to the Mac Pro (and if this rumor is essentially true), then they must be planning something pretty extraordinary:
1. They actually have a solid plan on how they are going to make CPUs competitive with Intel Xeons over the next ~2-4 years.
2. They're planing on a bifurcated line, where some Macs have Apple CPUs and some have Intel CPUs... presumably with different architectures. I guess 2b. would be that the Apple CPUs will actually be x64 compatible.
It all seems pretty crazy, but Apple has done this kind of thing before, and done it rather smoothly. I guess time will tell.
Intel has been iterating their design decades longer and was in stiff competition for much of that time period. They will be hard to catch in the desktop/laptop space for anyone starting with a cell phone CPU.
ARM has not had real competition in their market, most chipmakers are licensing ARM tech, so they should be easier to catch up to, which Apple has done (with a healthy dose of borrowed ideas from ARM).
Apple will not suffer in 2020 from having lower performance than intel. It wont matter. Form factor, screen quality, memory speed, memory size, touch pad, battery life etc will matter so much more.
Multi threading is also so much more common on pro app which require performance. They can just match intel by using more cores. ARM is way cheaper than intel so I don't see how they can lose this game. PPC was an entirely different world.
The mac mini is essentially 1700 days old since they downgraded the processors.
I only have macs because I build apps on them. I buy used and as inexpensively as possible. Using an old i5 for development currently.
I wanted to be an Apple fanboy, but having to rebuy critical software for even point releases because of stability killed that off for me long ago.
Best Apple I've ever owned (beyond my //e) was the Dual Processor Quicksilver. Case opened on the side, you had many upgrade options and it even looked nice (irrelevant to me but I'm sure that matters to some).
ARM will simply be the new PPC. You think things like supporting external graphics cards (yay they just got limited AMD support) and having high end rigs isn't what people want, especially in the gaming community?
Before they went to Intel, they were at the mercy of Motorola, which couldn't keep up with Intel.
The problem Apple had with IBM was that IBM didn't care enough about power efficiency to make the chips viable in laptops. They also weren't that interested in fast iterations of incremental improvements.
When the G4 first game out, it was far, far ahead of x86. Apple offered it at 350, 400 and 450 MHz but shipped maybe a few hundred or a few thousand at 450 MHz and a few tens of thousands at 400 MHz. Those computers blew the Pentium out of the water. Intel eventually caught up and passed them purely on manufacturing ability.
Then the G5 came out, which was a beast of a processor. But it never came out for mobile, and IBM only upgraded the speed once or twice before Apple went for Intel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been named Power ISA, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture-based processors.