8 ms·

That would be a huge distraction for Apple. The phone is where the action is and they need to compete as hard as they can. Shifting any engineering talent towa

That would be a huge distraction for Apple. The phone is where the action is and they need to compete as hard as they can. Shifting any engineering talent towards laptop/desktop chips is fighting last decade's war, for a shrinking (relatively) pie. The only reason to do that would be if it gave them some research edge that they could use elsewhere. Like cloud servers or something. As the article says, already more iphones than PC's. Why bother. The way to use this power is to keep pushing where they have the advantage (mobile) and hammer PC's until you have all the power you need in your phone/tablet. Software will grow up around the ecosystem until it eats PC's, and Apple can ignore the PC market entirely. Forget about PC's, focus on beating Android and they'll beat PC's as a bonus.

0xFFC 10y ago
As sidenote I should mention after reading your comment (which I agree completely) I felt sad for Microsoft, they are really in bad position, they lost mobile war and their most important income (PC sector) shrinking.They are late, and they are losing already.(I know MSFT is strong in enterprise sector)
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  Microsoft is doing fine. Their consumer product escapades are very visibly, famously star-crossed, but their revenues have always shown consistent growth, and over the past few years they've had some realizations and made some re-alignments that put them in a good strategic position for supporting all their other operations.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  That is a Silicon Valley view of Starbucks full with Macs and iPhones. Here in Europe Microsoft is doing just fine across the continent companies, not only enterprise. Including selling Windows licenses for computers used in Android development.
  - rimantas 10y ago
    Anectdote, but all Android developers (and WP devs forcwhat it's worth) are uding Macbooks Pro as their work machines. That's in Europe, and not even in Western.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Well, I am yet to work in any client that uses Mac for any kind of development besides iOS, and even when they do, they timeshare an iMac across teams.
      - bennyg 10y ago
        You're both being super anecdotal here. Look at sales numbers to get a more accurate view of what the actual landscape looks like.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        What sales numbers regarding Mac OS world wide!? Are you aware of the amount of countries where even software developers hardly earn more than 1000€ per month on average? How many apps are you selling on southern Europe, south America or across Asian countries?
    - digi_owl 10y ago
      I wonder how many of those devs "pivoted" from being web devs. Best i can tell, Mac got a inroad in the web development world thanks to: A. Being unix based and thus similar to the then prevalent LAMP stack. B. Apple having a entrenched position in media production, and web development, via newspapers and broadcasters going online, becoming a part of that economy.
      - acdha 10y ago
        A) was important: Windows was going through some painful transitions and still required paid compiler licenses, which meant porting open source apps was painful, and while Linux was many things, a comfortable desktop OS was not one of them, especially if battery life or not crashing mattered to you (usually video driver or power management bugs rather than the kernel but people with jobs to do don't make that distinction). A Mac was the one OS where it was easy to run PHP and Photoshop, and the small size + long battery life era starting with the Titanium PowerBook didn't hurt at all. I knew it was going to be interesting when all of the developers and Unix admins I knew started buying Mac laptops for daily use. If only I'd bought more AAPL at $17…
- kelseydh 10y ago
  Yeah I think you're losing perspective that outside of startup hipster tech bubbles, Windows is still the most popular desktop computing platform. Mobile/tablet devices have struggled heavily at overcoming the one thing that's preventing their full adoption: making them great for content creation, not just content consumption.
  - ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
    Is Google still a startup? How many .Net devs do they employ? Netflix? Facebook? All hipster startups?
    - bunderbunder 10y ago
      A lot of big tech companies aren't building their products on .NET, for a variety of reasons that mostly boil down to it not being the right tool for the job. Recently the .NET web dev situation has improved. (Whether it has improved relative to the alternatives is arguable.) But when those companies were getting started the original iteration of ASP.NET was the only game in town, and it was very much not something you'd want to use for what any of those companies do. Nor was it intended to be. .NET's always been more of a player on the in-house enterprise dev front, and probably always will be. (That might change with .NET Core, but it also might not.) Which means that you're not going to see much about .NET on TechCrunch. Inventory & financial management for Fortune 500 companies might be the silent majority for software development work, but it's rarely newsworthy.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      You just listed three Silicon Valley darlings. How many boring companies producing products do exist out there?
    - IOT_Apprentice 10y ago
      Isn't Tesla a windows shop?
- rbanffy 10y ago
  I don't feel sorry for them. They have a lot of inertia but I sincerely hope their days guiding the evolution of personal computing never come back.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Microsoft is repositioning as a cloud service provider.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    That is one thing to ponder. For MS the home/consumer desktop has been pretty much a means to an end. This in that they can point to the consumer sales and say that those are people already familiar with MS products, and thus require less training when hired by a company. That is, if said company base their computing environment on MS products. MS going cloud is basically saying to said companies that MS can handle all the day to day support issues, for a fee. Thus the companies can reduce the size of their IT department.
nxzero 10y ago
It might help kill Intel though, which would make it harder for someone else to enter Apple's core markets.
- mcintyre1994 10y ago
  Aren't Intel selling way more to people that aren't Apple? That's even ignoring AWS and friends who I assume all run on Intel processors too.
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Can't find a good source for how much of intel's sales are Apple x86, but AWS does indeed use Xeons exclusively (with some Nvidia Tesla stuff) for EC2 according to https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
- tw04 10y ago
  How is it going to kill Intel? Apple's percentage of the desktop market is still a rounding error. If you think they're interested in selling CPUs to others, you need only look back to history to see it's VERY unlikely that will ever happen. If they aren't selling to others, they aren't killing Intel. Not to mention, even if Intel managed to be "defeated" in the processor space (which I consider just about impossible at this point) - they've got better fab production than anyone else in existence. They've also got lots and lots and lots of products that aren't x86 CPUs.
  - jsmith0295 10y ago
    Well you've got to consider what's going on at the low end of the market too. If Chromebooks are eating into Windows laptop sales and mostly running ARM, and Apple switches to ARM for some or many of its high end computers, which make up more than 50% of that market segment, that's definitely some bad news for Intel. It won't kill them though, just push them out of the consumer desktop/laptop market.
    - 10y ago
bazizbaziz 10y ago
One of the reasons to do this would precisely be to free up engineering talent that would otherwise have to be dedicated to developing specialized laptop logic board designs (and other specialized parts). If you can build a relatively flexible internal hardware platform that can handle laptop, tablet or phone use cases, then your production teams can focus on core problems for a specific product while borrowing whatever solutions they need from other teams. Apple already has similar chips and boards running iPads and iPhones, so why not consolidate laptops too? For some evidence that this could be happening, look at ifixit's macbook teardown[0]. The logic board seems to be approaching the size of an iphone logic board [1]. Someone at Apple has to be asking a what-if question here when looking at this thing and thinking about how they could go all the way. [0] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown/62149 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown... [1] http://www.cultofmac.com/315469/new-macbook-logic-board-is-only-twice-the-size-of-iphone-6s/ http://www.cultofmac.com/315469/new-macbook-logic-board-is-o...
- hedgehog 10y ago
  I've been following Apple and the rest of the industry since the mid 90's. Based on what I've seen I suspect that they already have built a handful of ARM Mac prototypes and maintain an ARM version of macOS, probably in a fairly serious way since the A7 shipped. macOS shares quite a bit of code with iOS and has been multi-architecture from the beginning. First bring-up was probably on actual iPhone or iPad dev hardware but they have the in-house fabrication capability to make machines that are visually the same as an existing model (probably 13" Air) with more or less the guts of an iPad. My guess is there are a small number of these floating around campus. With those assumptions I still would bet against us seeing ARM Macs in the next couple years. There are a lot of advantages to keeping Macs single-architecture. Recent Intel CPUs are efficient enough that saving power there won't make a huge difference in user-available battery life (screen, DRAM, network, etc all use some too). Intel can price their CPUs aggressively enough to make cost not a major issue. I do think it will eventually happen mainly because it will give them more control over their product line. Indicators of an upcoming shift will be if Intel screws up another generation of mobile CPU (it happened with Skylake, could happen again), Apple adds features like PCI-e for discrete GPU support (ok, they did in A9), and if Ax series performance starts to exceed corresponding Intel mobile parts by >50% (enough to compensate for the overhead of binary translation for legacy x86 apps).
flippyhead 10y ago
> Apple can ignore the PC market entirely Man, I hope they don't do that. I love my Mac!
- santaclaus 10y ago
  For real -- having most of the *nix niceties in a visually appealing, hassle free environment is so nice. We are on Red Hat at work, and the hoops one has to jump through to get reasonable fonts up and running and the huge inconsistencies between desktop apps makes me pine for the Mac.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    Well, getting reasonable fonts from RHEL7 is quite easy (once you know, how). Getting OSX machine enrolled into IPA domain is still PITA. (The point is, that all systems have their nice and not-so-nice aspects.)
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    It's true for enterprise distributions, sure, but something like Arch Linux+GNOME 3.20 is REEALY nice. I use a Mac at work and my Arch with GNOME setup at home is easily matching the Mac and even outperforming it in terms of package management etc. Mac still handles high DPI a lot better, (but GNOME is getting there too) and if I was doing media content production, Linux probably wouldn't cut it for me, but I'm programmer and Linux is just the sweet spot of power + choice + usability for me.
    - Aeolos 10y ago
      Arch + Gnome 3.20 is what I use on my desktop too. The UX is excellent. Too bad that linux battery life and gpu-switching is still not up to scratch for laptops.
- scoates 10y ago
  Very short sighted of parent post. One of the main reasons I don't consider (very hard) switching away from iPhone is the integration with my Mac (which I do still think is worth using, at least unless they ruin this platform). If I had a Linux laptop………

0xFFC 10y ago

As sidenote I should mention after reading your comment (which I agree completely) I felt sad for Microsoft, they are really in bad position, they lost mobile war and their most important income (PC sector) shrinking.They are late, and they are losing already.(I know MSFT is strong in enterprise sector)

bunderbunder 10y ago
Microsoft is doing fine. Their consumer product escapades are very visibly, famously star-crossed, but their revenues have always shown consistent growth, and over the past few years they've had some realizations and made some re-alignments that put them in a good strategic position for supporting all their other operations.
pjmlp 10y ago
That is a Silicon Valley view of Starbucks full with Macs and iPhones. Here in Europe Microsoft is doing just fine across the continent companies, not only enterprise. Including selling Windows licenses for computers used in Android development.
- rimantas 10y ago
  Anectdote, but all Android developers (and WP devs forcwhat it's worth) are uding Macbooks Pro as their work machines. That's in Europe, and not even in Western.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Well, I am yet to work in any client that uses Mac for any kind of development besides iOS, and even when they do, they timeshare an iMac across teams.
    - bennyg 10y ago
      You're both being super anecdotal here. Look at sales numbers to get a more accurate view of what the actual landscape looks like.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        What sales numbers regarding Mac OS world wide!? Are you aware of the amount of countries where even software developers hardly earn more than 1000€ per month on average? How many apps are you selling on southern Europe, south America or across Asian countries?
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I wonder how many of those devs "pivoted" from being web devs. Best i can tell, Mac got a inroad in the web development world thanks to: A. Being unix based and thus similar to the then prevalent LAMP stack. B. Apple having a entrenched position in media production, and web development, via newspapers and broadcasters going online, becoming a part of that economy.
    - acdha 10y ago
      A) was important: Windows was going through some painful transitions and still required paid compiler licenses, which meant porting open source apps was painful, and while Linux was many things, a comfortable desktop OS was not one of them, especially if battery life or not crashing mattered to you (usually video driver or power management bugs rather than the kernel but people with jobs to do don't make that distinction). A Mac was the one OS where it was easy to run PHP and Photoshop, and the small size + long battery life era starting with the Titanium PowerBook didn't hurt at all. I knew it was going to be interesting when all of the developers and Unix admins I knew started buying Mac laptops for daily use. If only I'd bought more AAPL at $17…
kelseydh 10y ago
Yeah I think you're losing perspective that outside of startup hipster tech bubbles, Windows is still the most popular desktop computing platform. Mobile/tablet devices have struggled heavily at overcoming the one thing that's preventing their full adoption: making them great for content creation, not just content consumption.
- ZanyProgrammer 10y ago
  Is Google still a startup? How many .Net devs do they employ? Netflix? Facebook? All hipster startups?
  - bunderbunder 10y ago
    A lot of big tech companies aren't building their products on .NET, for a variety of reasons that mostly boil down to it not being the right tool for the job. Recently the .NET web dev situation has improved. (Whether it has improved relative to the alternatives is arguable.) But when those companies were getting started the original iteration of ASP.NET was the only game in town, and it was very much not something you'd want to use for what any of those companies do. Nor was it intended to be. .NET's always been more of a player on the in-house enterprise dev front, and probably always will be. (That might change with .NET Core, but it also might not.) Which means that you're not going to see much about .NET on TechCrunch. Inventory & financial management for Fortune 500 companies might be the silent majority for software development work, but it's rarely newsworthy.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    You just listed three Silicon Valley darlings. How many boring companies producing products do exist out there?
  - IOT_Apprentice 10y ago
    Isn't Tesla a windows shop?
rbanffy 10y ago
I don't feel sorry for them. They have a lot of inertia but I sincerely hope their days guiding the evolution of personal computing never come back.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Microsoft is repositioning as a cloud service provider.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  That is one thing to ponder. For MS the home/consumer desktop has been pretty much a means to an end. This in that they can point to the consumer sales and say that those are people already familiar with MS products, and thus require less training when hired by a company. That is, if said company base their computing environment on MS products. MS going cloud is basically saying to said companies that MS can handle all the day to day support issues, for a fee. Thus the companies can reduce the size of their IT department.

nxzero 10y ago

It might help kill Intel though, which would make it harder for someone else to enter Apple's core markets.

mcintyre1994 10y ago
Aren't Intel selling way more to people that aren't Apple? That's even ignoring AWS and friends who I assume all run on Intel processors too.
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Can't find a good source for how much of intel's sales are Apple x86, but AWS does indeed use Xeons exclusively (with some Nvidia Tesla stuff) for EC2 according to https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/
tw04 10y ago
How is it going to kill Intel? Apple's percentage of the desktop market is still a rounding error. If you think they're interested in selling CPUs to others, you need only look back to history to see it's VERY unlikely that will ever happen. If they aren't selling to others, they aren't killing Intel. Not to mention, even if Intel managed to be "defeated" in the processor space (which I consider just about impossible at this point) - they've got better fab production than anyone else in existence. They've also got lots and lots and lots of products that aren't x86 CPUs.
- jsmith0295 10y ago
  Well you've got to consider what's going on at the low end of the market too. If Chromebooks are eating into Windows laptop sales and mostly running ARM, and Apple switches to ARM for some or many of its high end computers, which make up more than 50% of that market segment, that's definitely some bad news for Intel. It won't kill them though, just push them out of the consumer desktop/laptop market.
  - 10y ago

bazizbaziz 10y ago

One of the reasons to do this would precisely be to free up engineering talent that would otherwise have to be dedicated to developing specialized laptop logic board designs (and other specialized parts). If you can build a relatively flexible internal hardware platform that can handle laptop, tablet or phone use cases, then your production teams can focus on core problems for a specific product while borrowing whatever solutions they need from other teams. Apple already has similar chips and boards running iPads and iPhones, so why not consolidate laptops too? For some evidence that this could be happening, look at ifixit's macbook teardown[0]. The logic board seems to be approaching the size of an iphone logic board [1]. Someone at Apple has to be asking a what-if question here when looking at this thing and thinking about how they could go all the way. [0] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown/62149 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Retina+MacBook+2016+Teardown... [1] http://www.cultofmac.com/315469/new-macbook-logic-board-is-only-twice-the-size-of-iphone-6s/ http://www.cultofmac.com/315469/new-macbook-logic-board-is-o...

hedgehog 10y ago
I've been following Apple and the rest of the industry since the mid 90's. Based on what I've seen I suspect that they already have built a handful of ARM Mac prototypes and maintain an ARM version of macOS, probably in a fairly serious way since the A7 shipped. macOS shares quite a bit of code with iOS and has been multi-architecture from the beginning. First bring-up was probably on actual iPhone or iPad dev hardware but they have the in-house fabrication capability to make machines that are visually the same as an existing model (probably 13" Air) with more or less the guts of an iPad. My guess is there are a small number of these floating around campus. With those assumptions I still would bet against us seeing ARM Macs in the next couple years. There are a lot of advantages to keeping Macs single-architecture. Recent Intel CPUs are efficient enough that saving power there won't make a huge difference in user-available battery life (screen, DRAM, network, etc all use some too). Intel can price their CPUs aggressively enough to make cost not a major issue. I do think it will eventually happen mainly because it will give them more control over their product line. Indicators of an upcoming shift will be if Intel screws up another generation of mobile CPU (it happened with Skylake, could happen again), Apple adds features like PCI-e for discrete GPU support (ok, they did in A9), and if Ax series performance starts to exceed corresponding Intel mobile parts by >50% (enough to compensate for the overhead of binary translation for legacy x86 apps).

flippyhead 10y ago

> Apple can ignore the PC market entirely Man, I hope they don't do that. I love my Mac!

santaclaus 10y ago
For real -- having most of the *nix niceties in a visually appealing, hassle free environment is so nice. We are on Red Hat at work, and the hoops one has to jump through to get reasonable fonts up and running and the huge inconsistencies between desktop apps makes me pine for the Mac.
- vetinari 10y ago
  Well, getting reasonable fonts from RHEL7 is quite easy (once you know, how). Getting OSX machine enrolled into IPA domain is still PITA. (The point is, that all systems have their nice and not-so-nice aspects.)
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  It's true for enterprise distributions, sure, but something like Arch Linux+GNOME 3.20 is REEALY nice. I use a Mac at work and my Arch with GNOME setup at home is easily matching the Mac and even outperforming it in terms of package management etc. Mac still handles high DPI a lot better, (but GNOME is getting there too) and if I was doing media content production, Linux probably wouldn't cut it for me, but I'm programmer and Linux is just the sweet spot of power + choice + usability for me.
  - Aeolos 10y ago
    Arch + Gnome 3.20 is what I use on my desktop too. The UX is excellent. Too bad that linux battery life and gpu-switching is still not up to scratch for laptops.
scoates 10y ago
Very short sighted of parent post. One of the main reasons I don't consider (very hard) switching away from iPhone is the integration with my Mac (which I do still think is worth using, at least unless they ruin this platform). If I had a Linux laptop………