snow66

samrod said:

I hope Apple doesn't transition Macs to ARM chips. The benefit of having a POSIX *n*x running on the same hardware as the rest of the world is hard to overstate. The thinking with the transition is that since ARM chips are so powerful sipping such little energy on iOS devices, imagine the workhorses they'd be on desktops? Sure? Maybe? But this would only be a short-lived advantage until the same physical obstacles affecting Intel come up. The reason to transition is that progression on the Intel architecture has decelerated. But this is universal and will affect the ARM architecture as well. The laws of physics won't give Apple's ARM engineers any advantages over Intel engineers. ARM may have a head start, but it WILL hit the same limits at 4nm process with yield problems, etc.

Apple isn't moving to ARM to avoid physical obstacles of CPU design.  Apple is doing this to manage processor costs and to control the processor development path.  Intel has a terrible record of delivering against their own processor roadmap for some time now.  This has been a significant problem for Apple, who doesn't just refresh their Mac lineups with the latest and greatest chips every x months the way some hardware manufactures do.  By taking processor control in house Apple will have the same type of advantage they have today with iPhones where they control the timeline and feature set so it is much easier to release on a schedule.  Using their own ARM chips will also increase Apples ability to differentiate their products from the competition.   

lkrupp said:

Somebody please explain to me why a STREAMING box needs 128GB. And don’t say for downloads. 128GB would get you a few 4K movies. Do people really have hundreds of apps on their TVs like they do their phones?

Local storage isn't just for the Apps themselves. Some Apps use significant amounts of local storage for temporary and persistent data. The Channels App buffers OTA television locally on the device when you pause live TV. Applications such as Infuse that manage and view collections of movies work best when the database of movie info and clipart are stored locally even when the movies themselves are stored on NAS or in the cloud. Use a couple of these and the current 32GB configs result in frequent rescans of your files. Even as a non-gamer I look forward to 64/128GB configurations.

I wonder if a majority of these Apple Silicon specific features such as blurred facetime backgrounds are implemented using the Apple Neural Engine.  If so adding those features to a M1 based Mac would be a minor lift and shift from the iOS code base, compared to a complete new development effort to implement these on Intel based Macs.

While Apples M1 Macs demonstrate their ability to run Intel code on Apple Silicon, I'm sure Apple can't wait to take advantage of the efficiency and tight integration that common silicon across their entire product range brings to the table.  These are the benifits of making such a significant shift in architecture.  If they weren't going to do this, they would have stayed with Intel.

My favorite weather app.  When I was shopping around for a weather app that was very accurate over the next hour or so, Dark Sky was the most reliable.  When Dark Sky says it is going to rain about 40 minutes from now or the current rain is going to stop in 20 minutes it is usually right on.  Very valuable when deciding when to talk a walk outside.  Hopefully Apple will improve it's integration within iOS.

In my house the Apple TV interface is more then worth the price of admission. With the Apple TV every television from the 19" in the kitchen to the 108" projector in the home theater has the same interface. No confusion about how to watch or search on the Samsung vs Sony vs LG vs Panasonic. They all have same Apple TV interface without the distraction of ads or attempts to get you to sign up for a new free trial of whatever. I have other family members who use the smart TV Aps and various flavors of streaming players and while they sometimes do a decent job of displaying the content, the noise it takes to get to the content is excessive. My mother has a post it note containing the steps it takes to watch her streaming service on the television in her bedroom. That IMO is a technology fail. I look forward to the next AppleTV hardware upgrade. Most of all, I hope they rethink the remote. I'd love to see a couple of additional dedicated keys to improve usability and a speaker that could be used to find the stupid things when they get lost in the furniture.

The economic fallout from the pandemic will allow Apple to pull ahead of the competition in areas that will allow it to offer features that others will not be able to match short term.  During the booming worldwide economy of the last several years Apples relentless investment and innovation in their A series processors has already created a technical advantage that is distancing themselves from everyone else in areas such as machine learning and efficiency.  There wasn't enough money in non-Apple premium devices for Qualcomm or other ARM CPU competitors to keep pace with Apple.  Now that the worldwide economy has stopped so will the money and pace of development of competing ARM CPUs. Apple has the money and resources to continue advancing it's A Series processors on schedule as they can afford a cycle or two of processors sales to not completely fund the R&D investment.

As Apple goes forward with hardware advancement such as SOCs and LiDAR it allows software development to take place that isn't available to others without access to supporting hardware.  On the other side of this pandemic I expect Apple will have a multi-year hardware and software advantage that allows AR and AI features that others can't replicate.  While the media focusses on Apples shortcomings with Siri, Apple is reaching far beyond cloud based voice assistants.  

It is going to be interesting to see how Apple takes advantage of their huge cash reserves over the remainder of the calendar year.  While some competition has been living on razer thin profit margins during a booming worldwide economy, Apple has used their 38% margin to create a rainy day fund large enough to continue full operation for years without selling a single iphone.  I would love to see Apple put the petal to the floor and speed up innovation at a time when much of the tech world are worried about how to survive until the world economy rebounds.

Going forward with 5nm is a start.