“There has been plenty of talk over the last several years of Apple potentially replacing Intel inside of some, if not all, of its future Macs,” Ashraf Eassa writes for The Motley Fool. “As the performance of Apple’s processors has improved, this development has seemingly become increasingly plausible.”
“I believe that with the A9X, Apple will have a processor that offers enough performance to credibly power something like the 12-inch MacBook and even the MacBook Air,” Eassa writes. “If Apple wanted to, I could see it investing in widening the dynamic range of its mobile processors to cover the performance requirements of something like a 13-inch MacBook Pro.”
“In terms of performance, if Apple isn’t already there with the A9X, then I have no doubt that it could get there by the time it rolls out the 10-nanometer A11X chip in late 2017,” Eassa writes. “The only reason I could see Apple going through the pain of a costly architecture transition is if the iDevice maker lost confidence in Intel’s long-term product roadmap and felt that it could genuinely deliver a better product without Intel inside than with Intel inside.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Wherever possible and practical, Apple prefers to own the key technologies that make up their products.