“When Apple announced its 64-bit A7 processor, I dismissed the speculation that this could lead to a switch away from Intel chips for the Macintosh line for a homegrown “desktop-class” chip. I might have been wrong,” Jean-Louis Gassée writes for Monday Note.
“A friend set me straight. In the first place, Apple’s drive to own ‘all layers of the stack’ continues unabated years after Steve’s passing. As a recent example, Apple created its own Swift programming language that complements its Xcode IDE and Clang/LLVM compiler infrastructure,” Gassée writes. “Secondly, the Mac line is suspended, literally, by the late delivery of Intel’s Broadwell x86 processors.”
“Furthermore, it looks like I misspoke when I said an An chip couldn’t power a high-end Mac,” Gassée writes. “True, the A7 is optimized for mobile devices: Battery-optimization, small memory footprint, smaller screen graphics than an iMac or a MacBook Pro with a Retina display. But having shown its muscle in designing a processor for the tight constraints of mobile devices, why would we think that the team that created the most advanced smartphone/tablet processor couldn’t now design a 3GHz A10 machine optimized for ‘desktop-class’ (a term used by Apple’s Phil Schiller when introducing the A7) applications?”
Gassée writes, “By moving to ARM, Apple could continue to increase its PC market share and scoop much of the profits – it currently rakes in about half of the money made by PC makers. And it could do this while catering to its customers in the Affordable Luxury segment who like owning both an iPad and a Mac. While this is entirely speculative, I wonder what Intel’s leadership thinks when contemplating a future where their most profitable PC maker goes native.”
Much more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Intel’s Broadwell chips further delayed; not shipping for most Macs until early-mid 2015 – July 9, 2014
Apple will inevitably drop Intel for their own A-series processors in the Mac – June 26, 2014
How long before Apple dumps Intel from MacBook Air? – June 26, 2013
