JamesBrickley

Here is making the case for new ARM-based Mac CPU's.  

1. macOS is derived from NeXTStep / OpenStep and was designed to be cross-platform from the beginning.  How do you think they switched from PowerPC to Intel so fast?  Because they had an internal Intel build of OS X since day one of OS X.  It ran on IA-32, PA-RISC, and SPARC CPUs among others.  iOS is a derivative of OS X.  That funky .App/Contents/ bundle tech? Yeah, NeXT had it and you could compile for multiple processor architectures and it would include different binaries and share all the common Resources.  So it is not a big stretch to imagine Apple could one day transition away from Intel.  
2. Apple bought P.A. Semi founded by one of the lead designers of the DEC Alpha and StrongARM CPUs. They proved their designs could be extremely power efficient. Apple now designs its own silicon.  The T2 is based on the A10 CPU (ARMv8-A) for iOS devices.  While the T1 (ARMv7) was closer to Watch hardware.  The T2 can likely do a whole lot more than it does currently.  
3. Apple's current SoC (System on a Chip) designs are for mobile devices and as such are optimized for power efficiency across the board.  
4. The latest A11 CPU has 2 high-speed cores and 4 energy efficient multi-cores plus a few more cores dedicated to ML Machine Learning and handling the facial recognition of FaceID.  Not to mention the Secure Enclave, Apple custom GPU, etc.  It can compete with some Intel CPUs and in certain benchmarks, it is faster.  
5. There is absolutely no reason Apple cannot design a laptop CPU to compete with Intel. In 2015 they spent $8.1 Billion on R&D and much of that was for CPU design. It was ramped up to $10 Billion in 2017.  Note, other companies like Microsoft spend a lot more but they typically light the money on fire with pie in the sky ideas that will never see the light of day.  Apple doesn't do that, they are laser-focused on a target 5-10 years away and they never stop pushing toward that goal.
6. Only a handful of people at Apple know what's going on with their CPU designs.  The R&D and test labs are scattered throughout the valley and located in unmarked, nondescript buildings with extremely high-security measures.

I don't know when it's going to happen but Apple will one day produce their own laptop/desktop CPU SoC line of high-end 64bit ARM-based RISC processors that will be heavily customized for Apple's unique needs.  They will use a lot less power and will move to smaller nanoscales as that will mean even more efficiency leading to greater performance and more battery savings.  The size of the system boards will continue to shrink.

A glimpse of what is coming:
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What if you could have a MacBook Pro with 128 CPU cores, superfast Optane like nonvolatile RAM/SSD, and still have all day battery life considerably better than what is available today with the MacBook Air? How would you like 18-24 hours of battery life? Intel's breakthrough with Optane means it's fast enough to be main system RAM yet behave like Flash but without the limitations of Flash such as slow writes unless it's erased first and a limited number of writes. Yes, it's out there now with Intel SSD Optane technology and Intel is going to be releasing Optane RAM soon.  Suddenly, the need for super fast RAM and slow storage goes away.  You merge storage and RAM and redesign the OS to handle it.  Perhaps simply allocated a portion of the storage as RAM and the rest as storage. No need to hibernate nor sleep you just power off and back on with instant resume.  Who has the resources to integrate that technology at the hardware and OS level?  Apple, that's who.  Watch, it will happen in the coming years.  Supercomputers in your backpack will become a reality. Plenty of room for new and fascinating breakthroughs to come.  

Who knows what's going to happen but rest assured, Apple is playing a long game and is not aiming at today but shooting for stars in the distant future.  Today you can get CPU's with 32 cores intended for servers.  It's not a big leap to hit 5 nanoscale and super efficient SoC designs that can produce 128 cores and do it far better than Intel who is trapped in x86-64 CISC designs vs much more efficient ARM RISC designs.  Who is to say Apple has to stick with ARM designs, they can literally break the mold and do something new.  They optimized teh ARM designs stripping out everything but the kitchen sink to ditch legacy junk.

Disk performance is significant and battery performance is significant.  On graphics under the benchmark (not exactly real world) the Mac loses but can the Dell make use of an eGPU?  Because if you have to do significant GPU work that is what needs to be shown.  Results on eGPU with PC's shows some significant efficiency problems.  

Truth bomb, macOS = UNIX = text = processing tools galore = scripting = LaTeX = Markdown = git = GNU Screen / tmux = easy backups = easy sync = freedom = perfection.
Learn Terminal and command line and never look back.  

Don't be stupid.  Don't pirate software.  Block advertisements.  Don't use junk like coupon software and don't fill out surveys for that $1000 Amazon Gift card or free iPad, etc. Stay away from shady websites.  Don't be Jen. 

At first glance, the new Surface Books are somewhat kinda nice.  You can detach the screen and go tablet mode without the keyboard or you can flip it around a fold it back to go tablet bulk mode but have a larger battery (tablet & keyboard has battery).  It sounds nice but in reality it's not used that much.  But because the battery is in the tablet and keyboard it does have crazy battery life.  However, the trackpad sucks, the stylus is nowhere near as precise nor responsive as the Apple Pencil on iPad. The whole Win10 UX is bizarre and weird. Not to mention it's very expensive.

Ok, so reality check.  I used both the Surface Book and a MacBook Pro and iPad w/Pencil.  I might as well just buy a MacBook Pro and an iPad w/Pencil and be done with it. Switch between the two devices as needed. The whole experience is much nicer.  Holistically speaking, macOS / iOS is so much smoother and more refined and the hardware works so well with it that using Microsoft solutions just feel kludgy and slapped together.  Apple is not perfect but they are so far ahead it is going to take a long time for Microsoft to catch up.  You can see Microsoft in a panic as they do things like port SQL Server to Linux, build in the Linux Subsystem in Win10, add native SSHd / SSH, opened Azure to host Linux, tweaked Server to run headless, open sourced PowerShell and other things. Bought Xamarin so they can develop iOS / Android apps on Windows.  Bought GitHub, etc.  They know they are completely screwed if they don't embrace Cloud.  They are already losing developers to Macs because they play so much better with Unix / Linux.  The only thing that makes sense is all these steps that Microsoft are taking are because Cloud is a major threat to their survival and as such they must adapt and interact if they are to survive.  If Ballmer was still in charge, they would be hurting far more than they are now.  Office 365 Cloud is a big profit for Microsoft.  But they apparently need to play ball with the competitions Cloud solutions.