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They are re-living their 2003-2004 period when the IBM PPC G5 CPU was way too hot and power hungry to put in the PowerBook and it needed water cooling in the Po

They are re-living their 2003-2004 period when the IBM PPC G5 CPU was way too hot and power hungry to put in the PowerBook and it needed water cooling in the PowerMac. Back then their solution was to switch to Intel CPUs. Now it's probably going to be to switch to in-house designed ARM CPUs.

rusk 8y ago
> in-house designed ARM CPUs. What could possibly go wrong!
- lostlogin 8y ago
  A lot. But imagine what could go right. The thing I most want is battery life, but I hope that isn’t squandered by translating it to thinness.
  - rusk 8y ago
    > imagine what could go right .
- edbaskerville 8y ago
  Many things could go wrong, but the Apple codebases and engineering processes should be pretty robust to architecture changes at this point. NeXT went from 68030 to Intel/SPARC/others, and then to PowerPC with Mac OS X. OS X went from PowerPC to Intel. And large chunks of it are shared with iOS on ARM already. (Fun fact: even classic Mac OS was running on Intel at one point before the 680x0-to-PowerPC transition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project) So there's good reason to think that they could pull this off.
  - rusk 8y ago
    That’s an awful lot of hope
  - charlesism 8y ago
    I have very little confidence it will be a smooth transition this time. Apple now is not the same people, and not the same culture as it was then. I don't see them sweating the details over Mac hardware.
- close04 8y ago
  With the CPU design or the transition to a new ISA? Lots of things can go wrong at any time even by doing nothing. But Apple does have a team of pretty good engineers that managed to design what's probably the fastest (best?) ARM cores on the market, and with good enough perf/Watt numbers. So I doubt their biggest hurdle will be to design a CPU. It will be to split the "MacOS" ecosystem in 2 and maintain two branches for x86 and ARM. And while they also have a team of pretty good software engineers with x86 and ARM experience they are already having major quality control problems lately. Having to maintain a dual ISA MacOS will be a challenge. Then they have to provide the legacy compatibility in order to convince people to buy into something with little to no support for most of what's out there today. But you know... we could use some diversity in this space. I wish them all the best.
  - 394549 8y ago
    > It will be to split the "MacOS" ecosystem in 2 and maintain two branches for x86 and ARM. And while they also have a team of pretty good software engineers with x86 and ARM experience they are already having major quality control problems lately. Having to maintain a dual ISA MacOS will be a challenge. Then they have to provide the legacy compatibility in order to convince people to buy into something with little to no support for most of what's out there today. They've done that twice before (68k -> PPC, PPC -> Intel), and IIRC, seem to be preparing to do it again (Bitcode). I think the biggest risk for Apple is that they may not be able to keep up with x86 on the desktop performance front. They have a much smaller market to amortize the R&D over than Intel does.
    - rusk 8y ago
      The biggest risk for Apple is they’ve become a shiny things company and don’t really have the engineering stones for doing this kind of thing any more
  - close04 8y ago
    @394549, I don't doubt that they can do it, as I was also saying a couple of comments above this one. But at what price? The difference is that now they have big QA issues before having to maintain the 2 branches. Their software (and possibly the software team) a decade and a half ago when they were moving to Intel was in a lot better shape. Unless I'm looking at this through nostalgia goggles. :)
charlesism 8y ago
It's a terrible argument, but I agree it's probably how Apple views things. If they're willing to sacrifice build-quality, ports, and a decent keyboard all in the name of thinness... I suppose adding a fraction of an inch of headroom in the bottom case is unthinkable to them.
- close04 8y ago
  Analysed in a vacuum yes, it's a terrible argument. But if you look at it through Apple magnifying glass it makes sense. They are locked on the objective of making their devices thin enough to be able to shave with one of them and whatever Intel is doing is no longer fitting this concept. One other thing Apple is aiming for is to go back to fully controlling the development and integration of their products. This means the HW and the SW. It worked just fine for them with the phones, admittedly a segment where no major architectural/compatibility changes were needed. We'll get to see if they can pull it off in a segment where the compatibility is a huge burden. Microsoft tried and failed perhaps for this very reason: no control over the HW. Also an even bigger burden of legacy (likely the biggest of any SW company). But Apple already managed to transition from 68000 to PPC to x86. They'd really set a hard to beat record if they manage to move to ARM even if just for the regular laptop lines (Air, MB) and not the Pros.

rusk 8y ago

> in-house designed ARM CPUs. What could possibly go wrong!

lostlogin 8y ago
A lot. But imagine what could go right. The thing I most want is battery life, but I hope that isn’t squandered by translating it to thinness.
- rusk 8y ago
  > imagine what could go right .
edbaskerville 8y ago
Many things could go wrong, but the Apple codebases and engineering processes should be pretty robust to architecture changes at this point. NeXT went from 68030 to Intel/SPARC/others, and then to PowerPC with Mac OS X. OS X went from PowerPC to Intel. And large chunks of it are shared with iOS on ARM already. (Fun fact: even classic Mac OS was running on Intel at one point before the 680x0-to-PowerPC transition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project) So there's good reason to think that they could pull this off.
- rusk 8y ago
  That’s an awful lot of hope
- charlesism 8y ago
  I have very little confidence it will be a smooth transition this time. Apple now is not the same people, and not the same culture as it was then. I don't see them sweating the details over Mac hardware.
close04 8y ago
With the CPU design or the transition to a new ISA? Lots of things can go wrong at any time even by doing nothing. But Apple does have a team of pretty good engineers that managed to design what's probably the fastest (best?) ARM cores on the market, and with good enough perf/Watt numbers. So I doubt their biggest hurdle will be to design a CPU. It will be to split the "MacOS" ecosystem in 2 and maintain two branches for x86 and ARM. And while they also have a team of pretty good software engineers with x86 and ARM experience they are already having major quality control problems lately. Having to maintain a dual ISA MacOS will be a challenge. Then they have to provide the legacy compatibility in order to convince people to buy into something with little to no support for most of what's out there today. But you know... we could use some diversity in this space. I wish them all the best.
- 394549 8y ago
  > It will be to split the "MacOS" ecosystem in 2 and maintain two branches for x86 and ARM. And while they also have a team of pretty good software engineers with x86 and ARM experience they are already having major quality control problems lately. Having to maintain a dual ISA MacOS will be a challenge. Then they have to provide the legacy compatibility in order to convince people to buy into something with little to no support for most of what's out there today. They've done that twice before (68k -> PPC, PPC -> Intel), and IIRC, seem to be preparing to do it again (Bitcode). I think the biggest risk for Apple is that they may not be able to keep up with x86 on the desktop performance front. They have a much smaller market to amortize the R&D over than Intel does.
  - rusk 8y ago
    The biggest risk for Apple is they’ve become a shiny things company and don’t really have the engineering stones for doing this kind of thing any more
- close04 8y ago
  @394549, I don't doubt that they can do it, as I was also saying a couple of comments above this one. But at what price? The difference is that now they have big QA issues before having to maintain the 2 branches. Their software (and possibly the software team) a decade and a half ago when they were moving to Intel was in a lot better shape. Unless I'm looking at this through nostalgia goggles. :)

charlesism 8y ago

It's a terrible argument, but I agree it's probably how Apple views things. If they're willing to sacrifice build-quality, ports, and a decent keyboard all in the name of thinness... I suppose adding a fraction of an inch of headroom in the bottom case is unthinkable to them.

close04 8y ago
Analysed in a vacuum yes, it's a terrible argument. But if you look at it through Apple magnifying glass it makes sense. They are locked on the objective of making their devices thin enough to be able to shave with one of them and whatever Intel is doing is no longer fitting this concept. One other thing Apple is aiming for is to go back to fully controlling the development and integration of their products. This means the HW and the SW. It worked just fine for them with the phones, admittedly a segment where no major architectural/compatibility changes were needed. We'll get to see if they can pull it off in a segment where the compatibility is a huge burden. Microsoft tried and failed perhaps for this very reason: no control over the HW. Also an even bigger burden of legacy (likely the biggest of any SW company). But Apple already managed to transition from 68000 to PPC to x86. They'd really set a hard to beat record if they manage to move to ARM even if just for the regular laptop lines (Air, MB) and not the Pros.