“This week, Intel announced that it was laying off 12,000 employees,” Dan Moren writes for Macworld. “If you’re not the type to keep a close eye on the industry, that might come as a surprise, but it’s been clear for a while that Intel missed the boat on the largest revolution to hit Silicon Valley in the past decade: the move to mobile.”
MacDailyNews Take: Intel didn’t just miss the boat, they missed the dock, the shore, the cab from the airport and the plane. By several years.
“This puts Apple in a peculiar position,” Moren writes. “”While the majority of devices that the company sells are now based on chips of Apple’s own design, it still has one long-running product line that relies on Intel: the Mac.”
“Given Apple’s history of switching Mac architectures roughly every 10 years — remember that for the decade before the PowerPC, the Mac ran exclusively on Motorola’s 68k processors — it seems a certainty that somewhere in Cupertino is a Mac prototype running on an ARM chip,” Moren writes. “Apple today is a much more powerful company than it was even a decade ago, so there’s no reason to believe it will be caught flat-footed should Intel no longer be capable or competitive.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Aligning, the stars are.
Think code convergence (more so than today) with UI modifications per device. A unified underlying codebase for Intel, Apple A-series, and, in Apple’s labs, likely other chips, too (just in case). This would allow for a single App Store for Mac, iPhone, and iPad users that features a mix of apps: Some that are touch-only, some that are Mac-only, and some that are universal (can run on both traditional notebooks and desktops as well as on multi-touch computers like iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and – pretty please, Apple – Apple TV). Don’t be surprised to see Apple A-series-powered Macs, either. — MacDailyNews Take, January 9, 2014
There is no reason why Apple could not offer both A-series-powered Macs and Intel-based Macs. The two are not mutually exclusive. — MacDailyNews, January 14, 2015
In order to build the best products, you have to own the primary technologies. Steve felt that if Apple could do that—make great products and great tools for people—they in turn would do great things. He felt strongly that this would be his contribution to the world at large. We still very much believe that. That’s still the core of this company. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, March 18, 2015
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Apple’s emphasis on security makes ARM-powered Macs ‘inevitable’ – April 21, 2016