“Imagine a 13-inch Macbook Air with a retina-class display that weighs a few ounces less than the current model,” Loyd Case writes for Macworld. “Or maybe it weighs the same, but you can use it all day without plugging into wall power.”
“That vision could become a reality—if Apple adopts the next generation Intel CPUs, code-named Haswell,” Case writes. “There have been rumors that Apple may be moving away from Intel for its Macbook and iMac lineup.”
Case writes, “But given the progress of Intel’s CPUs and the difficulty of making a switch, it’s unlikely Apple will abandon Intel in the near term.”
Much more in the full article here.
Related articles:
What Apple dumping Intel could mean – November 8, 2012
Apple exploring switch from Intel processors for Macintosh, say sources – November 5, 2012
iPad 4 graphics upgrade a serious horsepower increase; Apple’s A6X is one massive processing machine – November 2, 2012
Benchmarks: Apple iPad 4′s A6X beats all comers in GPU performance – November 2, 2012
Apple’s powerful A6 a unique CPU design that’s never been seen before – October 8, 2012
Analysis of Apple A6 core reveals exquisite, optimized custom layout done by hand – September 26, 2012
Apple A6 die reveals 3-core GPU – September 21, 2012
iPhone 5′s A6 SoC SunSpider performance fastest ever recorded on a smartphone – September 19, 2012
Apple’s custom A6 processor the result of years of effort, including a $500 million chip development program – September 18, 2012
A6 is Apple’s first with custom-designed CPU cores; iPhone 5 memory size and speed revealed – September 16, 2012
No Intel, meansno Windows boot, no Samsung components… that’s the right time. Kill ’em all.
I would prefer that Apple stayed with Intel in the Mac line.
+1
Intel will continue to be hard to beat in terms raw performance.
Agreed. No reason to switch. I don’t hear many people complaining about the battery life of their MacBook.
Another day another CPU rumor. This time they stay with intel…
I don’t think they should do it until market share improves. It helps them in the cubicle world.
Hell no, it won’t be soon. But think about iOS. Doesn’t need Windows, doesn’t need dual-boot. It won’t be long before OSX won’t need it either. It’ll sound old-fashioned to care. That’s when the switch happens. I’d say 5-8 years from now is when… Therefore they’re beginning to plan for that now.
As iOS is for hand-held devices, it’s no wonder you’ve no need to dual-boot. For many of us, the things I use my iPhone for are quite different from what I use my desktop for. I doubt I’ll ever need/want to dual-boot with an iPad, but the ability to do it on my desktop (strictly for games) is important to me.
Personally I don’t care what “makes it go”.
As long as it can paint a responsive interface on the screen, and has enough horsepower behind the scenes to crunch the bigger numbers, whatever works.
Having said that, it better work.
My 2 year old MacMini is getting flaky in the iPhoto & iTunes department (‘specially when Time Machine kicks in). And I can’t quite get through two full days between charges with my year-old iPhone 4S.
Love them to death, but not cool.
A two-year old MacMini is getting flaky with iPhoto and iTunes? Seriously, WTF? I was doing serious Photoshop work for blue-chip clients twelve years ago with a PowerPC Tower, running a 425MHz dual-processor, and 1Gb of RAM. If that could handle large files, with a lot of layers, and filters, then I’m pretty sure a Mac Mini can handle the sort of limited processing that iPhoto offers, and certainly iTunes. My Mac Mini, which is a year old, with 4Gb of RAM, certainly has no issues handling 144Gb of music in iTunes, and four or five thousand photos in iTunes.
Relax, my mac mini is super slow and weak. It is an early mac mini and it is using a G4 processor and super slow hard drive.
Hey, I was doing the same 17 years ago with 72 MB of ram on a 60 MHz PowerMac using a spare SyQuest cartridge as a scratch disc.
That doesn’t change the fact that my MacMini often gets bogged down for seemingly no reason. I know (better than most) that skimming through thousands and thousands of 10 megapixel JPEGs is nothing to sneeze at. Still, it would seriously piss off any normal person (like my wife) trying to use it to manage our vacation photos. W-wh-why-why-is-it-so-jerky?
Flipping through films using cover-flow in iTunes is a similarly start-stop proposition.
Could it be because our stuff is on a large USB drive, and the computer is sipping it all through an inadequate little straw? Sure, maybe. But where else are you supposed to store your stuff?
DiskWarrior?
+1
Good idea. But I thought we were past all that these days.
I’d have no problem buying/running DiskWarrior (could probably still dig up the box for my old System 7 version!), but frankly that’s too much to ask of normal consumers.
Holy! I just looked. DiskWarrior is $99.
I’ll probably buy it (in the old days it saved my butt a few times over), but I simply couldn’t ask my mother in law, or my sister to buy something like that.
I think intel will be ditched when Mac OS XI comes.
Cheers!
if i were apple in the position it is in. i would apply a little pressure onto intel to get access to the haswell chips now in order to customize such chips and also the ability to get them a month earlier than competitors
i also forgot to mention that i didnot see in the article that the haswell chips have the ability to run off of solar power without being plugged in. so these chips may spark the end of arm chips in ios devices if they are that efficient
check out this video
“but you can use it all day without plugging into wall power.” When you get to that sentence you know they’re not talking about Intel.
That’s the thing with Inel, about the time you are ready to write them off they seem to suddenly raise the bar.
They need to feel threatened before they act however and last time it took AMD kicking them around so maybe this time it’ll be arm
Increasing speed and power efficiency coupled with the ability to execute multiple commands simultaneously – fantastic.
they’ve got a great new mac mini but they don’t run ads for it.
Most PC people don’t know they can get a mac for 599 or that there is even such a thing as a ‘headless’ mac.
Windows 8 is bombing for many yet with Christmas Looming and many PC people thinking of switching Apple doesn’t run Macs and OSX “is better” ads. ( Mac PC guy ads died in 2009… )
No iMac ads either and the “Apple” salesguys at Best Buy does not even know a Mac Pro EXISTS…
(I’ve posted this before and people are probably bored stiff with my rants. but seriously I’m BAFFLED with Apple’s mac policy: Christmas, Windows 8 dud = opportunity $$$ and Apple is silent. Are the Apple SVPs now so rich they are not hungry anymore?” )
(for the flamers: I’m not saying stop iPad, iPhone push but asking they just spend a few bucks on Mac promotion. they could afford it years ago with dozens of Mac PC guy ads when they were smaller, they can afford it now… )
I think a few years down the road Apple will have iOS desktop and laptop computers along side OS X systems.
The iPad is opening minds to simpler computing. There is no reason, even now, Apple couldn’t offer a less expensive laptop and desktop based on iOS and ARM.
iOS, not OS X, will push Windows out of the consumer market. Windows, like we saw with RIM, will struggle to remain an enterprise only system.
short term memory here guys? many seem to have forgotten the pain that both Apple and its developers went through in the rough transition from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel chips. That transition was worth it in the end, but certainly is not something that Apple should consider doing again unless Intel starts to flounder — which of course it is not. Nobody makes a better, more featured, more capable PC chip than Intel. Intel brought Thunderbolt to market, and is integrating USB3 as well. There simply is no other desktop or laptop architecture that could replace them effectively.
Apple has wisely chosen the more energy efficient ARM chips for its i-devices, and that clearly has been a good move for that category of device. It doesn’t mean full-scale machines should limit their horsepower. Apple desperately needs to demonstrate superior hardware in order to maintain its current margins.
“forgotten the pain that both Apple and its developers went through”
The pain? Flipping a switch from PowerPC to Intel or Universal, was hardly a pain for developers.
It was a much bigger pain when they switched from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X and deprecated a lot of legacy API’s. But even then they kept “classic” mode around for a couple of years. Then the Carbon API’s were a few years after that, then Rosetta was around for a few years after the Intel switch.
Only the larger more lethargic software houses suffered, because they refused to modernize their code when Apple originally asked them to.
The recent abandonment of Rosetta was very troublesome for me as I have thousands of documents consisting of technical designs created in Freehand many years ago. As Freehand was orphaned by Adobe, I kept an old version of Freehand available to view those documents when I needed to refer to archived documentation for support and maintenance purposes.
I can understand the need to move developers on to the new standards, but Apple also needs to understand that long standing customers also need a way to continue accessing documents created in legacy applications which are no longer offered or supported by their manufacturers.
Obviously I now save all newly created documentation as PDF files, in the hope that PDF will be around for a long time, but the only way I am able to open our archived designs going back maybe twenty years is on an old Mac running an old OS which still supports Rosetta.
It’s not just lethargic software houses that suffered, Apple seems to regard software as something that’s current for a few years and then can be abandoned. I create custom electronics equipment that lasts for tens of years and use the best software available at the time to assist me. Even when that software is no longer available, I need to be able to read my documents created using that software.
I have faith that Apple will only do this if it’s an improvement over the existing processors they are using now.
PS: Other factors to consider are some very powerful advantages, if Apple plans on merging their computer side even more this might be the way to go down the road.
Perhaps Apple could think about steam. It worked for the railroads.
I’m looking forward to Mac powered by ARM!
Reading the comments on this blog, one is hard pressed to find any company that people don’t want to destroy. I hope there remains at least a few viable competitors to Apple, or we are all going to be paying $100 for iPhone cables.
What has really been going on:
1) Intel hoped that their Atom processors would be good enough to infiltrate and take over the smartphone and WhateverPad markets. It was not.
2) Apple has been a very long term investor in ARM RISC processor technology. The time and resources were right for Apple to design their own, superior CPUs and not bother with the inferior Atom processors.
3) TechTard journalists and ANALysts came up with the hair brained delusion that Apple was therefore going to dump all of Intel’s non-Atom CPUs. Oops. Major frack-up. Try again.