Some Mac software has made it all the way from 68K to M1 - here's why
Mac developers are currently in the midst of a major hardware architecture transition. But for some app makers, this is the third time that they have done this.
Mac developers are currently in the midst of a major hardware architecture transition. But for some app makers, this is the third time that they have done this.
The past is another country, and the old Apple of a decade and a half ago has been long replaced by the behemoth it's become. Yet, the decisions Apple made over Intel in 2005 are being repeated now — and they give us a guide to what we'll get and when we'll see Apple Silicon Macs.
Apple can engineer Macs with ARM processors instead of Intel ones, but it can't make all developers move with it — and there are some complications that will cause some problems.
The history of the first four decades of PCs has largely been defined in terms of OS: Apple's early lead with the Mac was taken over by Microsoft's Windows, which then lost ground to Google's Android. But this narrative fails to account for an even more powerful force than the middleware software platform: low-level hardware, and specifically the largest historical driver of technical progress in the industry: the silicon microprocessor.
Apple CEO Tim Cook mentioned that Apple took about a five percent hit on Mac revenues because of constraints on Intel processors, and the company can't seem to break the 10nm process barrier. The last two times that a chip supplier couldn't keep its promises, Apple made a big move to another architecture — and this is just another sign on the road to an ARM Mac coming relatively soon.
The Mac shifting to ARM may come as soon as a full decade after Steve Jobs died. Yet, as well as championing and managing the Intel move in the 2000s, he also considered these major computer hardware architecture changes to be essential every decade or so.
Apple has always made you pay a lot for its newest and best Macs, and, believe it or not, the 2018 lineup isn't even close to the most expensive Apple has ever been. AppleInsider takes a look back at Apple's Mac pricing over the last three decades.
As IBM secretly mulls plans to sell off its increasing outdated processor chip fabs in New York and Vermont, a new wave of mobile chip developers—led by Apple, ARM and Qualcomm—are hiring away many of the top chip designers of the once leading firm.
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