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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

It may be a fool's errand but that's the way Apple is going. And I do not see them having any lack of market success with their approach.

I don't think it's really a matter of desktops becoming like mobile devices. I think it's "desktops as we know them will be going away (except in specific use cases)".

My wife's Macbook has seen better days. When it finally dies, we're going to replace it with an iPad, a bluetooth or docked keyboard and a camera connection kit. It does everything she needs. I imagine this will be the same when my kids get old enough.

And why is ARM a bad choice? Have you heard about performance complaints from iPad users? Have you seen Rage HD on iOS yet?

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> "I think it's "desktops as we know them will be going away (except in specific use cases)"."

I tend to agree with that. But that's a wholly-different argument than suggesting Apple would make their desktop OS ARM-only.

OS X is Apple's solution for those use cases where desktops do and will persist for the next decade, at least. As such, making it ARM-only would require the use of currently-inferior chips, chipsets and tools. It would murder Apple's steadily-growing share of the very market OS X exists to serve.

iOS is already serving their mobile devices, and doing it very well. It stands to gain very little from a hypothetical OS-merge and stands to lose quite a lot by becoming more PC-like. (simplicity, stability, performance, etc)

"Mac OS 11" (sic) is a marketing term. It doesn't necessarily have to imply anything relating to the existing product. I'm not trying to be pedantic, just trying to illustrate that I see Apple going strongly towards the iOS route as their main computing platform and I think the facts illustrate the genesis of that.

It may be true that the current ARM offerings are inferior in terms of benchmarks, but as far as general computing use they're probably overpowered. I don't really need an i7, a Core 2 Duo is fine. Nearly everything seems generally overpowered these days.

@ runjake

To you maybe. Some of us also do stuff like Video and Audio editing, processing and mixing on our machines, not to mention photoshop and stuff. Remember, the industries that made Mac cool in the first place? yeah, we're still here, just getting addressed less and less. i everything is nice, but there's still millions of people who use this shit professionally.

Apples attitude - i.e. killing the xserve when there's hundreds of the things in usage in render farms and video asset serving etc. - is, while typical, somewhat frustrating.

Yeah, you didn't get my point. I said general use, which video and audio editing isn't.

Apple's "attitude" is called meeting market demands and eliminating the cruft from their product lines. They're here to make money not do you (or me) favors.

iPads certainly perform well. With hardware acceleration for h.264, the ARM chip may not be seeing the toughest loads it would otherwise. I believe there's an ARM build of VLC. I've been meaning to check it out to see how video playback is with other codecs. (It's easy to use a USB tuner to record HDTV on a laptop or desktop, but the MPEG2 used in the U.S. is a bit of a chore to transcode to 720P h.264 which is the Apple default for iPad/iPhone/iPod-touch/ and the current Apple-TV (all on ARM now).

I'm not sure how far towards the high end ARM will go, but it sure makes sense to have things like Apple TV on ARM. It uses less than 6 watts.

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