Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, morphine
Xolore wrote:Intel ought to be getting back on their feet by the time Apple finishes their transition.
Captain Ned wrote:This is how Apple ends the "corruption" of Windows on Macs.
Redocbew wrote:Yeah that's true. I've heard video editing on the ipad actually works pretty well assuming you're using a codec that's supported in hardware. Obviously the hardware has to be good before choice of codec can make a difference. I'm not sure how much of a priority macOS really is for Apple in general, but I guess we'll just wait and see how it all shakes out for the desktop.
Redocbew wrote:Yeah that's true. I've heard video editing on the ipad actually works pretty well assuming you're using a codec that's supported in hardware. Obviously the hardware has to be good before choice of codec can make a difference. I'm not sure how much of a priority macOS really is for Apple in general, but I guess we'll just wait and see how it all shakes out for the desktop.
Redocbew wrote:I guess being a 1.5 trillion dollar company makes it slightly easier to make a consumer product that's really just for software development on their own platform.
I dunno though, the macbooks seem to fill that role pretty well already.
Redocbew wrote:Yeah I work with a guy who uses a macbook even though most of the work is in .net core. The OS does a decent job of staying out of your way while still providing you with the tools you need to get things done which is probably why a lot of devs use it even if they're not working on Apple stuff.
whm1974 wrote:I'm not sure how much Apple would benefit from switching over to ARM from x86. Considering that going over to x86 from PPC gave Macs a huge boost sales increasing marketshare of Apple.
tfp wrote:I think the big benefit is the cost structure for Apple, performance will be close enough to what x86 provides.
blastdoor wrote:Regarding cost.. the fixed cost of designing a new SOC on cutting edge processes is pretty steep. According to https://semiengineering.com/5nm-vs-3nm/, the cost of designing a 5nm SOC is up to $680 million (I presume Apple would be at the top of the range)
Apple sells about 20 million Macs a year. So if every Mac used the same SOC, that would be a design cost per Mac of $34 (in addition to the marginal cost). But Apple said they'll have a "family" of Mac SOCs, suggesting an even higher per-Mac design cost.
On the other hand.... if the Mac SOC uses the same CPU and GPU cores as the iPhone SOC and just differs in the number of cores, then perhaps that's not the right calculation.
Does anybody have a sense of that?