cloudguy

Appleish said:

Let Intel sink. Looking forward to leaving their failings and empty promises behind.

Apple had 6% of the market in 2019. They were 8% in their best quarter in history ... one in which more Intel-based Chromebooks sold than Intel-based Macs.

So as Apple will not have 50%, 25% or even 12% of the market - they have had as little as 3% and their peak position ever was 15%, a peak they only reached because the overall market contracted due to enterprises and many consumers refusing to buy Windows 8 devices ... as soon as Windows 10 released Apple went back to single digits in market share - and more importantly the Windows and ChromeOS devices that will continue to be 90+% of the market or more will continue to use primarily Intel CPUs, with AMD being second and ARM devices with Qualcomm, Samsung and MediaTek SOCs being a distant third as Dell, HP, Lenovo and the rest will not have the option of using Apple's SOCs for their Windows devices.

And please, none of this "others have the market share but we make all the profits!" nonsense. That only applies to makers and sellers of the end user devices. Intel charges Asus - who has razer thin profit margins on their cheap Windows and ChromeOS laptops - the same for their Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs as they do for Apple's $1000-$3000 Macs. As for the i9 and Xeon CPUs, Intel sells less than 1.5 million of those for Mac Pros and very top end iMacs and MacBook Pros a year. The vast majority of their i9 and Xeon chips wind up in server and data center devices. 

So while you get to leave Intel's failings and empty promises behind, the rest of the industry can't because they have no other alternatives. And the rest of the industry is like 90%-95% of the PC and desktop market and 100% of everything else. So just like Microsoft was fine despite the success of the iPhone - they are a $1.5 trillion company - Intel will be pretty much the same company they were after Apple splits as they were before Apple joined up with them in 2005 in the first place. After all, Apple's market share has only gone from 3% then to 6% now (or rather in 2019, the last full year stats that we have available). 

h4y3s said:

Don’t overlook the unified memory architecture that Apple can deploy, (as they own the whole stack) this will save 2x on a lot of common functions! 

Unified Memory Architecture is not a new idea. It was created by Nvidia years ago and several companies use it for their own products. It has its own set of advantages and tradeoffs. On some of the more technical blogs, folks are already debating the virtues of UMA versus segregated CPU/GPU memory as the thinking - and experience for those who have it - is that you can run into problems if the GPU exhausts memory resources that the CPU needs and vice versa. One of the reasons why Nvidia created UMA in the first place was that they are promoting the idea to data centers that you get more performance per dollar by shifting as many computations from the CPU to the GPU as possible for workloads that don't require a CPU's general purpose flexibility.

So UMA will work for Apple Silicon for workloads that are both CPU and GPU intensive (right now this is handled by giving, say, 16 GB of RAM to the CPU and 4 GB of RAM to the GPU as is done for the 16' MacBook Pro) only if enough RAM is provided. Of course, Apple knows this. And they know that users of, say, vector video editing or 3D animation - examples of heavy peak simultaneous CPU/GPU workloads - are going to be willing to pay a lot for that RAM.

9secondkox2 said:

Called the "M" series. That's so cool.

A Series wouldn't be right.

A few things to keep in mind:

1) Apple is navigating a tricky transition. Retaining the current form factor and other specs in some areas ensures that current and recent customers don't feel like Apple has just abandoned them. There are valid reasons for some to have purchased Intel Macs even after the AS announcement. Apple has been the standout company that does right by its customers for years and years. They aren't changing that DNA now.

2) The M series are amazing already. Kind of blown away.  Sure in some cases, they are performing 2x the speed of their predecessors, but in others, it's 4, 8, and 10x. the M series low power chips are already Far better for video editors than most desktop class chips from Intel. We recently built a video editing dream machine with the best i9 money can buy. It doesn't handle 4k amazingly well, but performs acceptably in Adobe Premiere. A Mac mini with Final Cut will destroy that. 

3) Even better performance-centric M series chips are coming. The larger MacBook Pros, the iMac, the Mac Pro, and whatever else Apple wants to do have a different thermal envelope and will. require more power, which yields much better performance. 8 cores in the M1 isn't a lot. The M2 or M1X or whatever will likely. double up on that.  

In conclusion, Apple just opened the door to a bright, new, game-changing era and signaled the death knell of the X86 era for all of computing. 

p.s. Already, the M series outpaces its x86 contemporaries by a lot. And that margin will exponentially increase in the coming years. You will see every PC maker follow suit into new RISC CPU designs. Intel would be wise to invest heavily into either its own, custom RISC architecture, or get on the custom ARM bandwagon. Samsung has already tried and failed to gain the upper hand with its mobile CPUs. but they are a waste. of time in this race. The one company I feel somewhat bad for is AMD, who has recently made a resurgence and matching (in some cases exceeding) Intels performance dominance. They enjoy success for a few years and ... AS drops. It's rough. But for us in the. Apple community, it's amazing and encouraging to witness. Wow.

1. True
2. True
3. True
p.s. is problematic.

The margin will not exponentially increase in the coming years. They are primarily due to A14 being on a 5nm process while Intel's performance chips are on a 14nm process and AMD's performance chips are on a 10nm process. What happens when AMD and especially Intel get to 5nm? AMD's 5nm chips are being manufactured by TSMC for a 2021 release as we speak. Intel has a 7nm design ready but their foundry cannot manufacture it. They are going to decide in 1Q 2021 whether to pay TSMC to manufacture their design or wait another year on their own foundry. They will probably decide to wait a year because their 10nm chips have just hit the market anyway. As for Apple's capacity to improve, they will hit 3nm in 2022. After that, will 2nm be a thing? 1nm? Not likely. After Apple hits 3nm, what will be left is overclocking while using less power. 

As for every PC maker following suit into the new RISC CPU designs: why? First off, Intel and AMD are going to narrow, catch up and surpass the A14 when they reach 5nm and 3nm. Second, unless their RISC CPU designs A) surpass the existing Qualcomm and other ARM Holdings-based designs like the M1 chip does, why bother? You may want this to happen in order for Intel to be marginalized - funny how it is only the Apple fans that want every other tech company to go out of business but that isn't going to happen. Wintel is the dominant hardware computing platform in everything but mobile. There isn't going to be this mass abandonment just because ARM is faster, especially since the alternative is Apple machines running a proprietary OS that cost as much as twice as much as Intel and AMD machines with similar specs. And even if they wanted to abandon it, they couldn't. There is too much x86 and x86-64 code - personal, business, enterprise, server - that would need to be rewritten. There is no business or technical justification for such a massive, expensive, lengthy and risky undertaking beyond making Apple fans feel about themselves.

Samsung has already tried and failed to gain the upper hand with its mobile CPUs but they are a waste of time in this race.

Yeah ... more "wishful thinking about Apple's competitors" stuff. The reality is that Samsung worked with ARM Holdings to design the new X1 Cortex super core and has worked with Google to design Whitechapel, Google's new hardware platform for Pixel phones and tablets. The new Samsung Exynos CPUs that used the core that they designed with ARM Holdings will be commercially available in devices in February and it significantly outperforms the Qualcomm 865+. The Qualcomm 875 might outperform it but not by much. In any event, if you are going to make a mobile device or Chromebook, Samsung's chips are going to be as good as any.

So long story short: there will be no mass migration from Wintel to ARM-based Macs because said Macs still cost way more AND the software compatibility problems that already existed for Intel-based Macs that people addressed with Parallels and bootcamp are going to get even worse. You should know from the experience with the iPhone and iPad that faster does not equal market share. The iPhone, the iPad and the Apple TV are all significantly faster than their competitors yet none of them have greater than 35% market share. Apple sold fewer smartphones in the United States - the market where it has the largest share by far - than Samsung last quarter, and they also sold only 5 million fewer iPads than Samsung sold tablets. Give most people the choice between "faster but way more expensive" and "not as fast but still accomplishes everything I need it to do" and they are going to go with the latter. And given that ARM-based Macs are going to have even less software options to "accomplish everything I need it to do" beyond offer desktop versions of iPad apps that were designed to run on touchscreens than the current Wintel ones ... you get the picture. Apple had 8% market share last quarter - ChromeOS had 11% by comparison - in its best quarter for selling Macs ever. Don't think that switching to Apple Silicon is going to move that very much, and for that matter I don't think that Apple is counting on it moving that much either.

Xed said:

k2kw said:

blastdoor said:

The title is about the future, the content about the past.

Here’s a thought about the future — I wonder if “desktop AI/ML” will define the Mac of the 2020s the way desktop publishing did in the 80s. 

Combine user friendly tools for training models with your data with uniquely powerful hardware. Train on Mac, deploy on iPhone 

Yeah, I read through all that to only get 5nm.   But one thing is guaranteed-this is about PROFITS.   I'm sure Desktop ARM chips will be cheaper to make and will have greater profit margin.    I'm hoping Apple tries to increase its volume but won't hold my breath on this.   With the move to an arm based architecture I am expecting macOS to become more iPhone/ipad like as they share a common software base.  SuperOS for the future.

DED is usually very good a reiterating the history of Apple's rise to dominance, but doesn't have the same track record with prognostication about the future.

No "SuperOS," as you put it. iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS will continue to be Darwin-based and use many of the same frameworks, but will be distinct OSes. Not only is Apple not going to use a single OS for all products, but they continue to diverge their OSes.

You didn't mention performance. I think we'll see an above average YoY performance boost but performance per watt is the bigger gain here. I think a reduction in price behooves Apple as it will allow them to sell more Macs, but they could keep the price points the same—just don't conflate that with Apple increasing their profit margins unless you can account for the cost changes of all other components and associated costs, or that increasing profits for a product category relates to increasing profit margins (price drops aren't altruistic moves by companies).

Good grief. The Intel Core i3 chips that Apple puts in the entry level MacBook Air costs less to buy from Intel than it will cost TSMC to make the A14 chip. And the chip cost is only a fraction of the cost of the device. For example, the Qualcomm charged Google only $50 for the Snapdragon 765G that is in the $700 Pixel 5. I know that there are rumors that Apple will sell the ARM laptops starting at $799, but only because they want to sell more of them. The tradeoff is that Apple will have lower margins in return for that increased market share. That will make ARM-based Macs the equivalent of the iPhone SE 2020, for example. 

First off, never forget that this is from the same guy that as late as 2015 was claiming that no profits were being made on Android and that Google, Samsung and the rest were going to abandon it. He never took responsibility for those false claims.

Second, please realize that right now Apple has 8% market share in PCs. ChromeOS - which already includes ARM devices like the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet, the #1 selling ChromeOS device this year - has 11%. Were it not for mass shortages of Chromebooks caused by COVID-19 induced supply chain disruptions, ChromeOS would have 13-14% market share.

Third, this fellow writing off the success that is Android is hilarious. It has 75% - 85% market share. And the only reason why Google Play has less revenue than the app store is because Google chooses not to operate in China. In other words, the gap between Google Play and iOS is much closer than the gap between macOS and Windows. Yet he wants us to believe that Android is somehow a failure? That Samsung and the rest would be better off by not manufacturing Android apps? Or that all these developers and software companies have not gained tons of revenue off Android apps? 

Fourth, Apple Silicon being so much faster than Intel-based PCs won't matter if:

A) Apple Silicon devices continue to cost far more than Intel and AMD-based PCs with equivalent RAM and storage configurations: they do.
if Apple Silicon devices don't run the software that large subsets of the population needs and wants: they don't.

Let me give you an example: PC gaming. The Acer Nitro 5 is a legit 1080p gaming machine with 8 GB of RAM (easily and cheaply expandable to 32 GB), 256 GB SSD (again easily to expand with USB-C port), Intel Core i5 and Nvidia GPU and 16' screen. Cost: $650. The cheapest MacBook with an Intel i5 and a discrete GPU? $1200! And for that $1200 ... you won't be able to play very many games. Though some Steam games are supported, even massive hits like Rocket League are available. So gaming with a Mac requires bootcamp. And that is today. Steam, Origin, EA and Epic are not going to run at all on ARM-based Macs, just as they don't on ARM-based Windows 10. Bootcamp and Parallels? They won't be either.

Also, believing that Intel is going to be at 10nm forever is nuts. They have a 7nm design already, just no way to manufacture it. They were on the verge of getting TSMC to manufacture their 7nm chips but had to back off because of internal opposition, but a final decision will be made in 2021 based on the progress that they have made with their own foundries. (By the way, it is very unseemly for Apple fans - who are totally reliant on other companies to manufacture components for them - to bash companies who make their own components like Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung.)  Because Intel uses way more transistors in their chips than anyone else, a 7nm Intel chip is equivalent to a 5nm AMD, Qualcomm or Apple A14 chip. Now Intel is actually capable of paying TSMC to make their 7nm chips at any time. They won't because of business reasons: they want at least 18 months to sell their current 10nm chips first or else they will lose money on that generation. But rest assured that by the time the 2 year transition from Intel to Ax is complete, Intel will have released their 7nm chips and be well on the way to 5nm,

Until then? Another problem is thinking that Microsoft, Windows and ChromeOS only rely on Intel when they absolutely do not. In case you haven't heard, the fastest desktop chip is no longer the Intel i9-10900K. Instead the fastest desktop chip is the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. The Ryzen 9 is on a 7nm process. 5nm process AMD chips are being manufactured right now in the same TSMC foundry that is currently making the 5nm Apple A14 chips. (This is why Qualcomm shifted their 5nm Snapdragon chips to Samsung for this year.) So if Dell, Lenovo, HP and the rest need to surpass what Intel is capable of, they can just use AMD. 

So long story short, don't believe anything this guy says. Just do an Internet search on his rants about how Android was NEVER going to catch iOS in market share and Google - who now has a $1 trillion and counting capitalization - was on the verge of going belly up. That will let you know how you shouldn't rely on this fellow for predictions.