[warcraftWidow]

Thought his was interesting.

How Intel lost the mobile chip business to Apple's Ax ARM Application Processors

[anon(4698833)]

I'm wondering if/when Apple is going to go the same route with their personal computers...

[warcraftWidow]

I'm wondering if/when Apple is going to go the same route with their personal computers...

Yep. I've definitely seen speculation about that. I'm guessing if they go that route it would be with the MacBook Air. I'm not sure the ARMs are powerful enough yet to replicate the experience of the quad core rMBP series.

[Flow39]

Yep. I've definitely seen speculation about that. I'm guessing if they go that route it would be with the MacBook Air. I'm not sure the ARMs are powerful enough yet to replicate the experience of the quad core rMBP series.

I would hope they don't replace the rMBP processors with ARM processors. I personally am counting on partitioning my drive and installing Windows to be able to run some Windows programs on the Mac. A switch to ARM-based chips wouldn't let me do that.

[mikeo007]

Instruction set is the kicker at this point for using the ARM processors in their current Intel lineup. All 3rd party applications would cease to work until they were recompiled for the different architecture. The relative lower power of ARM chips would make something like Rosetta from older OSX versions very unlikely.

Apple knows the importance of 3rd party apps and won't shoot themselves in the foot by disabling basically all of them. If they do eventually make the switch, it will likely be over a long period of time, with several "intermediate" devices to help bridge the gap.