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Comment by akmarinov | Hacker News Reader

No wonder apple is jumping ship...

Apple would be switching to ARM regardless of what the x86 industry is doing.

Yeah, they switched to Intel and went "Hey, you can run windows on it in VM or in bootcamp, maybe even play some games!". Then iPhone came along and propped the sales of macs.

Now there are people tightly locked into Apple ecosystem that doesn't exist anywhere else. Saying it as someone who left that eco-system not that long ago and boy do I miss it.

Now is a good time to switch to their silicon.

What supports that proposition? Plenty supports the opposite, such as Intel causing massive problems for several years e.g. to the MacBook Pro line, with overheating and thermal issues. They've been failing to innovate at the speed Apple would otherwise be able to, for a long time now.

> "Intel causing massive problems for several years e.g. to the MacBook Pro line, with overheating and thermal issues."

Do you not realize how ridiculous this statement is? Apple knows what CPU models are going into their laptops, they could properly design hardware and software to prevent overheating and degradation.

They could. But that means the macbook pro would perform worse on all the superficial benchmarks.

There are plenty of arguments, but E2E control is probably the strongest one.

It's not only about CPUs. Remember Nvidiagate or Radeongate? If Apple takes full control of the hardware like they did with iPhone/iPad/Watch they will (most likely) end up making better products.

But also:

- Single architecture on all their products

- More perf per watt

That ship has sailed in early 2010s.

Once Apple started making their own silicon there's no going back.

There's no good reason that so much of the world is using an architecture that has consistently shown less efficiency, especially since the rise of distributed computing. It is bound to happen.

i wonder about others. Someone posted a video discussing RISC-V, which i just finished.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23934078

I haven’t heard much about it but the video makes the point that Chinese firms will be adopting it.

An open source cpu, with no licensing fees, is bound to catch on.

Presumably Apple began working on and set the ship date without any regard to this particular development.

It was about the previous problems. This is just more of the same.

They would have switched anyway.

Apple is all about controlling all parts of their phone and software.

Now they have a well working ARM chip they have all the control over which is good enough for at least the non developer models of their laptops so it was just a question of time until they switch.

I mean why _long term_ maintain two OS'ses and two CPU archs when you can just focus one one. (And yes I'm convinced Apple will turn macOS into iOS+some desktop features in the long run).

Is there a legit case for doing it as an exercise for the experience (shaking out bugs, making discoveries by having 2 discrete development platforms), or as a strategic card, so they “have options”? I don’t know how the costs scale - whether it’s <2, ~2, or >2, and at what cost any (potential) benefits are simply cost prohibitive. Anybody have insight into this business, esp with something approaching a major player like Apple?

There's a pretty in-depth video analyzing the motivations and perceived strategic benefits here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgEKDGNjqsk

I'm not sure he's entirely right, but I found it pretty compelling, overall.

Whatever Apple is switching to won't compare to x86_64 anyway, especially AMD.

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