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Does anyone have any insight into the business logistics involved in a transition like this? I presume Apple has done maintenance on transitioning desktop OS X

by rz2k 6y ago

Does anyone have any insight into the business logistics involved in a transition like this? I presume Apple has done maintenance on transitioning desktop OS X to ARM as an option for a very long time. How many years ago would they have had to decide that was the direction they were going to make it reality? 2015? How many people would have been working on it? How many billions of dollars? How does the cost of developing the software compare to the cost of developing a new processor, or compared to tooling a production line for an entirely new platform? I'm really curious about the share of institutional resources and attention this likely involved. I wonder how important it is as context to Apple over the past few years. I also wonder if it heralds a new direction in personal computers. Every time I've considered that my Mac isn't that great, the alternatives aren't that great either. Would Apple ever decide to seriously compete for a dominant share of the personal computer market? And finally, I am also curious about the accounting and financial disclosures required in such decisions. How much are institutional investors informed of long range plans? There's naturally a lot more pressure to distribute cash to shareholders if you don't know about some five-year-plan, yet that pressure waxes and wanes from activist investors, and institutional investors like CalPERS always seemed to be on board with Apple's direction anyway. Do unofficial leaks prevent violations of insider trading rules?

ryanianian 6y ago
> How many billions of dollars? Rounding-error-sized marginal costs. Even if you don't plan on pivoting architectures, it's good practice to write as much code as possible without assembly/intrinsics. If you're writing standards-compliant C/C++/Objective-C/Swift/* it's not a huge burden to change architectures. They also have past-experience with such transitions, so hopefully they kept the "keep the code portable" mantra close over the past 10+ years. The choice to do this seems relatively obvious for Apple. They have spent years building up their silicon game with portables. Their frustration with Intel is also palpable, so it was probably "just" a waiting game (not "how" or "if") in deciding when to pull the trigger and start using those chips outside of iPhones/iPads.
- Someone 6y ago
  If you have to maintain any highly optimized assembly/intrinsics code, it’s a very good idea to also maintain an “as portable as feasible” C version for comparison testing.
- AgentOrange1234 6y ago
  Probably a big opportunity cost though. It surely takes a lot of time from senior engineers to port the software, figure out this whole translation system, etc...
  - scarface74 6y ago
    The story was that it took two engineers to keep OS X compatible with Intel when they were on PPC. It took only a small company - Connectix - to make a better 68K emulator that worked perfectly with PPC/Classic MacOS than Apple could.
djrogers 6y ago
> * I am also really curious about the accounting and financial disclosures required in such decisions. * There are none, beyond the dollar figures set aside for R&D. > How much are institutional investors informed of long range plans? In the case of Apple, very little to not at all. Other companies have different policies - most share roadmaps and long range plans rather freely compared to Apple.
CoolGuySteve 6y ago
Apple already supports ARM so they have the whole toolchain, most of their operating system, and many frameworks ported. Most of the heavy lifting was done in Project Purple (aka the first iPhone). Porting from PPC to x86 was arguably more difficult as a lot more of the framework code had endianness assumptions baked in.
- qalmakka 6y ago
  As Steve Jobs himself said in the famous Mac Intel keynote, Mac OS X ran on Intel from day one, "just in case". After all Darwin has always supported x86, and NEXTSTEP ran fine on x86 too, so probably it was not that difficult from a core system standpoint migrating to x86.
- gsnedders 6y ago
  > Porting from PPC to x86 was arguably more difficult as a lot more of the framework code had endianness assumptions baked in. Did it? The code they inherited from NeXT didn't assume endianness, and until Rhapsody Developer Release 2 they shipped x86 builds. Some applications like iTunes ran on Windows, with a partial port of the Cocoa libraries underlying them (this, too, was a descendent of old NeXT support for Windows). It's entirely plausible that Apple didn't have to do much; as they said at the time, they never stopped supporting x86 after Rhapsody Developer Release 2, and they had the OS running on x86 the entire time. I'd assume from the point of view of most developers working on OS X they simply had requirements to avoid endian assumptions, etc., and occasionally the team maintaining x86 support would send a nondescript patch to "fix the endianness assumption".
ksec 6y ago
While I have talked about the financial of an All in ARM Mac platform, that was from an angle of each individual component. But you could also look at it from a company R&D perspective. Example. Apple ship ~10M MacBook Air a year. Current spending on MacBook Intel chip is roughly $200 per unit. As long as Apple could make it below $200, they make more profits or lower the price. That is a per unit, per model angle. i.e Apple could easily have fitted an A12Z inside Macbook Air, and save them at least $150. Or you could look at it from a company total perspective. Apple currently spend $2B annual R&D ( a made up number )on its Chip design. How much more additional would we need if we need to design for Mac CPU as well. $500M / $1B? Great, and do it. ( If you follow Apple closely, Apple's Net Profits and R&D has been at a fixed percentage for a fairly Long time ) >And finally, I am also curious about the accounting and financial disclosures required in such decisions. There is nothing that needs to disclose until these decision make material effect on its stock performance. It is worth pointing out Apple receives $10B annually from Google for having it as default search engine on Safari alone. While it is expensive to design its own chip, comparatively speaking it is still peanuts for Apple. At the rate things are going, Apple could have spend more money on Apple TV+ Originals than R&D spend on Mac CPU alone.
scarface74 6y ago
Institutional investors can’t know more than retail outside investors. That would be illegal. Why would they need to make any public disclosures? They don’t publish margins per segment.

by rz2k 6y ago

ryanianian 6y ago

> How many billions of dollars? Rounding-error-sized marginal costs. Even if you don't plan on pivoting architectures, it's good practice to write as much code as possible without assembly/intrinsics. If you're writing standards-compliant C/C++/Objective-C/Swift/* it's not a huge burden to change architectures. They also have past-experience with such transitions, so hopefully they kept the "keep the code portable" mantra close over the past 10+ years. The choice to do this seems relatively obvious for Apple. They have spent years building up their silicon game with portables. Their frustration with Intel is also palpable, so it was probably "just" a waiting game (not "how" or "if") in deciding when to pull the trigger and start using those chips outside of iPhones/iPads.

Someone 6y ago
If you have to maintain any highly optimized assembly/intrinsics code, it’s a very good idea to also maintain an “as portable as feasible” C version for comparison testing.
AgentOrange1234 6y ago
Probably a big opportunity cost though. It surely takes a lot of time from senior engineers to port the software, figure out this whole translation system, etc...
- scarface74 6y ago
  The story was that it took two engineers to keep OS X compatible with Intel when they were on PPC. It took only a small company - Connectix - to make a better 68K emulator that worked perfectly with PPC/Classic MacOS than Apple could.

djrogers 6y ago

> * I am also really curious about the accounting and financial disclosures required in such decisions. * There are none, beyond the dollar figures set aside for R&D. > How much are institutional investors informed of long range plans? In the case of Apple, very little to not at all. Other companies have different policies - most share roadmaps and long range plans rather freely compared to Apple.

CoolGuySteve 6y ago

Apple already supports ARM so they have the whole toolchain, most of their operating system, and many frameworks ported. Most of the heavy lifting was done in Project Purple (aka the first iPhone). Porting from PPC to x86 was arguably more difficult as a lot more of the framework code had endianness assumptions baked in.

qalmakka 6y ago
As Steve Jobs himself said in the famous Mac Intel keynote, Mac OS X ran on Intel from day one, "just in case". After all Darwin has always supported x86, and NEXTSTEP ran fine on x86 too, so probably it was not that difficult from a core system standpoint migrating to x86.
gsnedders 6y ago
> Porting from PPC to x86 was arguably more difficult as a lot more of the framework code had endianness assumptions baked in. Did it? The code they inherited from NeXT didn't assume endianness, and until Rhapsody Developer Release 2 they shipped x86 builds. Some applications like iTunes ran on Windows, with a partial port of the Cocoa libraries underlying them (this, too, was a descendent of old NeXT support for Windows). It's entirely plausible that Apple didn't have to do much; as they said at the time, they never stopped supporting x86 after Rhapsody Developer Release 2, and they had the OS running on x86 the entire time. I'd assume from the point of view of most developers working on OS X they simply had requirements to avoid endian assumptions, etc., and occasionally the team maintaining x86 support would send a nondescript patch to "fix the endianness assumption".

ksec 6y ago

While I have talked about the financial of an All in ARM Mac platform, that was from an angle of each individual component. But you could also look at it from a company R&D perspective. Example. Apple ship ~10M MacBook Air a year. Current spending on MacBook Intel chip is roughly $200 per unit. As long as Apple could make it below $200, they make more profits or lower the price. That is a per unit, per model angle. i.e Apple could easily have fitted an A12Z inside Macbook Air, and save them at least $150. Or you could look at it from a company total perspective. Apple currently spend $2B annual R&D ( a made up number )on its Chip design. How much more additional would we need if we need to design for Mac CPU as well. $500M / $1B? Great, and do it. ( If you follow Apple closely, Apple's Net Profits and R&D has been at a fixed percentage for a fairly Long time ) >And finally, I am also curious about the accounting and financial disclosures required in such decisions. There is nothing that needs to disclose until these decision make material effect on its stock performance. It is worth pointing out Apple receives $10B annually from Google for having it as default search engine on Safari alone. While it is expensive to design its own chip, comparatively speaking it is still peanuts for Apple. At the rate things are going, Apple could have spend more money on Apple TV+ Originals than R&D spend on Mac CPU alone.

scarface74 6y ago

Institutional investors can’t know more than retail outside investors. That would be illegal. Why would they need to make any public disclosures? They don’t publish margins per segment.