Arming Macs is a big gamble, and Apple is everything

Apple is poised to make one of the biggest platform changes in the company’s history. On Tuesday, it is expected to announce the first Macs that will work with Apple-designed processors and graphics cards instead of the Intel chips used since 2005.

It’s a strategy Apple has employed with success with its iPhone and iPad devices over the past decade, but the upcoming transition for its laptops and desktops will present a whole new challenge.

When Apple – unhappy with the roadmap for the PowerPC chips it was using in its product portfolio – switched to Intel in mid-August, Apple offered promises of better performance and energy efficiency, promising that it would deliver products like the MacBook Air. and Retina MacBook Pros.

But as important as it is to a change, the move to Intel was as predictable as a change of this magnitude could be. After all, Intel chips were a platform proven for years on the Windows side, with processors of all sizes, wattages, and performance levels that Apple might need for products as light as a size MacBook Air. ‘an envelope. powerful like a $ 50,000 Mac Pro.

The Intel transition was successful in meeting Apple’s performance and power goals, and Apple is making similar promises with the upcoming Arm transition. But with the upcoming move to Apple Silicon, the future of the Mac is suddenly heading into completely uncharted territory.

Apple’s A-series chips are not a new concept. Apple has been designing its own chips in-house for over a decade, when the A4 SoC launched alongside the original iPad. Since then, the company’s chip-making efforts have expanded to encompass nearly all of Apple’s hardware, with iPad Pros, HomePods, Apple TVs, Apple Watches, and high-powered AirPods all containing a song. silicon designed by Apple.

Even recent Macs have started to see chips from Apple seeping in, with T2 security chips and built-in touch bars that run on hardware similar to the Apple Watch. But they’ve never been put to the test in something as demanding as a laptop. In fact, it can be argued that no Arm-based chip has been put to the test for Apple to prepare for its next Apple Silicon transition.

When Apple switched to Intel, the hardware and software proved their worth. Customers pretty much knew what to expect from an Intel processor, and developers knew they would be able to write software to match.

Arm, however, is a whole new ball game. There are only a handful of Arm laptops that can even give a hint of how Apple’s own chips might behave. And even the best Arm laptop chips around, like Qualcomm’s 8cx or Microsoft-branded SQ2, are designed for ultralight laptops. No one has made an Arm-based laptop that can deliver performance comparable to computers like Apple’s MacBook Pros or Dell’s XPS line, let alone a desktop computer.

That’s not to say Apple is entering this area completely unprepared. It’s been designing processors for a decade now, and the latest crop of chips in devices like the latest iPad Pro delivers a lot of power. But outside of the few developers who have been able to try out Apple’s Arm SDK (which comes equipped with a two-year chip), it remains to be seen how that performance translates into more traditional tasks on laptops or if it will. will be. able to keep pace with the best chips from Intel and AMD.

Apple also tried to ease the transition on the software side. He’s spent the last few years pushing Catalyst apps designed to help develop Mac apps that share code with their iOS counterparts. And the fact that the newer Arm-based Macs natively run almost all iPhone and iOS apps will help, too.

But there is still a big gap between the iPad and Mac apps. Even though Apple can deliver on its promises for Arm versions of Adobe apps like Photoshop and Lightroom or Microsoft’s Office suite, it will take time for developers to adapt. Just take a look at the slow Windows Arm transition.

Apple’s event is almost guaranteed with big flashy demonstrations of the power of its new MacBook and big claims about how they stack up against older x86 models. But this announcement will only be the beginning for Apple, and the proof – or rebuttal – of that next big leap is still an open question that may take months of real-world use to answer.