3 ms·

Apple is always one step ahead of the game. All their competitors are constantly trying to get to where Apple's products are, but by the time they get there, A

by Adrock 15y ago

Apple is always one step ahead of the game. All their competitors are constantly trying to get to where Apple's products are, but by the time they get there, Apple has moved on to something even better. Intel is scared about Apple becoming the dominant PC maker, especially because Apple has been using non-Intel chips in their new premier products (iPad and iPhone). My guess is that Apple's next big move is to start selling something in the laptop space that uses either the A5 processor or the next generation of it, which I guess would be called the A6. This will be huge. Intel processors are major power hogs and there's no way they can make them significantly better. Apple is poised to release a laptop with the Air's form factor that runs iOS on an A5 or A6 that Apple manufactures. This could be an absolute coup if it happens. They will be selling something like the 11" Mac Air for between $600 and $700, possibly less. It would have sick battery life that nobody could touch. It will run all of the iPad apps, have Safari and all of Apple's Office replacement software. The best part is that nobody could compete with it, because the only way would be to also ditch Intel's x86 processor, but there's no other OS or developer ecosystem that could run on it. Maybe Android on an ARM processor. Microsoft has nothing lined up in this space. They are dead in the water. The best part is that you don't need Jobs to make this happen. What you need is the manufacturing knowledge and capacity that someone like Cook can deliver.

klausa 15y ago
>Microsoft has nothing lined up in this space. Uhm, Windows-on-ARM?
- marshray 15y ago
  Possibly. Like WP7 and "XP Tablet Edition" though, is it going to catch on?
  - wvenable 15y ago
    Windows 8 on ARM: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ces-microsoft-shows-off-windows-8-on-arm/8339 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ces-microsoft-shows-off-...
    - marshray 15y ago
      Microsoft will make and demonstrate all kinds of stuff. I'm sure it works and is well-tested on the hardware it supports. My job is at an ISV. We get lots of customer requests, but I've not once heard a customer request support for this thing. Nor have I heard of any other ISV building for it. But until then, it may as well not exist.
megablast 15y ago
Intel chips do not cost $300 to $400, so not sure how Apple are going to make the 11" Air that much cheaper. I guess they could skimp on the ram as well, since the iPad does not require gigabytes. But most other parts of the machine would not change.
nl 15y ago
Intel processors are major power hogs and there's no way they can make them significantly better. This simply isn't true - or at least it ignores half the issue. For their performance, Intel chips aren't powerhogs. A i5 uses a lot more power than a Tegra2/A5, but is a lot more powerful. An Atom use a bit more power than Tegra2/A5, but is a bit more powerful. Intel is pushing Atom down into ARM territory in terms of power usage, and ARM is moving up towards Atom - and, to the surprise of no one who knows what they are talking about - the power usage at the same level of performance is roughly the same. Arstechnica had an excellent article about this back when NVidia started talking about their desktop ARM push: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-riscification-of-x86.ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-t... A good quote: It's also the case that as ARM moves up the performance ladder, it will necessarily start to drop in terms of power efficiency. Again, there is no magic pixie dust here, and the impact of the ISA alone on power consumption in processors that draw many tens of watts is negligible. A multicore ARM chip and a multicore Xeon chip that give similar performance on compute-intensive workloads will have similar power profiles; to believe otherwise is to believe in magical little ARM performance elves. Intel isn't out of this game by a long shot. For example (Intel powered) Chromebooks perform roughly as well as an iPad in terms of battery life. There is little evidence that an ARM powered Airbook would do any better if it offered similar levels of performance (unless you believe in the magical ARM performance elves mentioned above).
- crander 15y ago
  The biggest concern Intel has is that moving down market, shrinking products and lowering margins almost never works in any industry when a disruptive competitor is moving upmarket into the same space (Innovator's Delimma). If Intel could move down market successfully don't you think we would have seen a reasonable IA facsimile of an iPhone or an iPad after all these years? Soon everyone on earth, except perhaps the bottom billion poorest, with have Internet access via ARM and Intel will peak at the top 2-3 billion. That's what scares the hell out of them. ARM,as a mobile optimized architecture, will never compete on performance grounds with IA. IA is the push rod V8 of computing and ARM is the hybrid.
  - 15y ago
bluekeybox 15y ago
> Apple is poised to release a laptop with the Air's form factor that runs iOS on an A5 or A6 that Apple manufactures. I wouldn't be surprised if this A6 Air offspring ran full-blown Mac OS X.
- zach 15y ago
  With the Mac App Store, it's a lot easier to get Mac developers to do things like sandboxing... or supporting the ARM. Just tell developers it's going to be required as of such-and-such a date if they want to be in the App Store. No need to tie it to OS releases anymore. Sure, there will still be foot-dragging by major players, but enforcing a timetable for these kinds of things just got way easier for Apple.

by Adrock 15y ago

klausa 15y ago

>Microsoft has nothing lined up in this space. Uhm, Windows-on-ARM?

marshray 15y ago
Possibly. Like WP7 and "XP Tablet Edition" though, is it going to catch on?
- wvenable 15y ago
  Windows 8 on ARM: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ces-microsoft-shows-off-windows-8-on-arm/8339 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/ces-microsoft-shows-off-...
  - marshray 15y ago
    Microsoft will make and demonstrate all kinds of stuff. I'm sure it works and is well-tested on the hardware it supports. My job is at an ISV. We get lots of customer requests, but I've not once heard a customer request support for this thing. Nor have I heard of any other ISV building for it. But until then, it may as well not exist.

megablast 15y ago

Intel chips do not cost $300 to $400, so not sure how Apple are going to make the 11" Air that much cheaper. I guess they could skimp on the ram as well, since the iPad does not require gigabytes. But most other parts of the machine would not change.

nl 15y ago

Intel processors are major power hogs and there's no way they can make them significantly better. This simply isn't true - or at least it ignores half the issue. For their performance, Intel chips aren't powerhogs. A i5 uses a lot more power than a Tegra2/A5, but is a lot more powerful. An Atom use a bit more power than Tegra2/A5, but is a bit more powerful. Intel is pushing Atom down into ARM territory in terms of power usage, and ARM is moving up towards Atom - and, to the surprise of no one who knows what they are talking about - the power usage at the same level of performance is roughly the same. Arstechnica had an excellent article about this back when NVidia started talking about their desktop ARM push: http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-the-riscification-of-x86.ars http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/02/nvidia-30-and-t... A good quote: It's also the case that as ARM moves up the performance ladder, it will necessarily start to drop in terms of power efficiency. Again, there is no magic pixie dust here, and the impact of the ISA alone on power consumption in processors that draw many tens of watts is negligible. A multicore ARM chip and a multicore Xeon chip that give similar performance on compute-intensive workloads will have similar power profiles; to believe otherwise is to believe in magical little ARM performance elves. Intel isn't out of this game by a long shot. For example (Intel powered) Chromebooks perform roughly as well as an iPad in terms of battery life. There is little evidence that an ARM powered Airbook would do any better if it offered similar levels of performance (unless you believe in the magical ARM performance elves mentioned above).

crander 15y ago
The biggest concern Intel has is that moving down market, shrinking products and lowering margins almost never works in any industry when a disruptive competitor is moving upmarket into the same space (Innovator's Delimma). If Intel could move down market successfully don't you think we would have seen a reasonable IA facsimile of an iPhone or an iPad after all these years? Soon everyone on earth, except perhaps the bottom billion poorest, with have Internet access via ARM and Intel will peak at the top 2-3 billion. That's what scares the hell out of them. ARM,as a mobile optimized architecture, will never compete on performance grounds with IA. IA is the push rod V8 of computing and ARM is the hybrid.
- 15y ago

bluekeybox 15y ago

> Apple is poised to release a laptop with the Air's form factor that runs iOS on an A5 or A6 that Apple manufactures. I wouldn't be surprised if this A6 Air offspring ran full-blown Mac OS X.

zach 15y ago
With the Mac App Store, it's a lot easier to get Mac developers to do things like sandboxing... or supporting the ARM. Just tell developers it's going to be required as of such-and-such a date if they want to be in the App Store. No need to tie it to OS releases anymore. Sure, there will still be foot-dragging by major players, but enforcing a timetable for these kinds of things just got way easier for Apple.