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Comment by paulpan | Hacker News Reader

Is Apple even going to refresh any of its Mac products with Intel CPUs at this point?

When they first announced the transition last year, it was implied that some products will still get refreshed during the 2-year transition period. But based on this article and common sense, there is minimal incentive to do an Intel refresh. Refreshing both discourages buying of Apple silicon-powered Macs and lessens the performance jump that Apple is so eager to publicize.

For example, Tiger Lake H-series was just announced/released and it'd logically target the Macbook Pro 16.

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I'd be a little surprised if Apple release _any_ new Intel machine. I'd be _amazed_ if they release an Intel laptop. It would be generally slower than the 13" M1 (Anandtech has Tiger Lake H _just_ beating the M1 in for multithreaded workloads in short synthetic tests, but given the throttling shown (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performanc...) even in a presumably friendly reference laptop it wouldn't be competitive in the real world) and have far worse battery life, and be replaced in under a year; what would be the point?

They refreshed the iMac with new Intel processors two months after the Apple Silicon transition was announced, I think that is what they were referring to. I doubt any other computers will get new Intel processors at this point.

Large integrators like Apple usually have a tie line to inside Intel (in this case, probably at the CEO/VP levels) that would feed information to Apple regarding product lines.

Yes, Tiger Lake H-series was just announced, but it's likely Intel proposed selling this chip to Apple 2.5 years ago, and Apple didn't like the roadmap, and said No Thanks.

That's how much time supply chain changes like the move to apple silicon chip will need - I wouldn't be surprised if Apple already knew of all of Intel's roadmaps 5 years into the future, and decided, nope. No thanks. Not giving any more money to Intel.

From this point of view, you can tell, it's detrimental to Apple to go back to Intel now, if they wanted to use the Tiger Lake H they would have used the threat of M1 as a bargaining chip to lower the pricing on upcoming chips. It's obvious they didn't do that.

After using M1 for some time I don't really want any Intel machine any more.

Perhaps the Intel Mac Pro?

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