
Apple Just Killed the MacBook as We Know It: ‘Don’t Buy a Mac’ Is Good Advice - ralphc
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2020/06/27/apple-just-killed-the-macbook-as-we-know-it-dont-buy-a-mac-is-good-advice---macbook-pro-macbook-air-on-hold/#5cb0ff8446f3
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efficax
Even at a fancypants place like where I work, where they can definitely afford
to replace your machine early and often, we have 36 month lifespans for our
laptops. I'd expect "universal" amd64+aarch64 binaries to be available for
almost all relevant software for at least 5 years from now. This article is
not thinking clearly

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Spooky23
Exactly. Plus Apple is shipping new intel macs.

The thing to be critical of Apple for is the vague and mysterious guidance re
roadmap. That's ante for playing with Macs. After years of defective laptops,
it's ridiculous that we need to read tea leaves. As a commercial user, do I
wait for broken 2018/19 keyboards, or replace with a potentially obsolete
device? We wont know until Apple controls the CPU pipeline.

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qnxub
A few years from now, it is plausible that some developers won't bother with
Catalyst and will release ARM-only apps.

Also, Apple has announced that iOS/iPad apps will run on ARM-based Macs
without any developer intervention.

Buying an Intel-based Mac now means missing out on forwards compatibility.

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api
This is FUD. PPC universal binaries stayed around forever, and that was back
when storage was much more expensive.

The big reason PPC seemed to die so fast was that Intel rocketed so far ahead
of them in performance that everyone switched as soon as they could. A few
years after the switch the speed difference was like 3-4X or more. It's very
unlikely to be such a large speed difference today, though ARM Macs could see
longer battery life and less heat.

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dhagz
I'm betting there will be a huge perceived speed boost simply because Apple
will have full control over the device's stack. I'm sure they'll find ways to
better optimize the OS for the hardware.

What I /am/ curious to see is if the CPU options shrink per device - i.e. will
there be one A-series SoC for "pro-level" computers and one for "consumer",
will there be different clock speeds, etc. We'll have to wait until they
announce hardware - I'm assuming at their September/Fall event.

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api
Intel may maintain a performance lead on certain tasks that take advantage of
things like AVX, though Apple may be able to make up with more cores. AFAIK
ARM has no equivalent to the more advanced vector instruction sets of X64
chips.

I do expect ARM to have an instant heat and battery life advantage. It may be
sizable if you combine a more efficient chips with smaller process nodes. I
expect a bigger gap here than in raw speed.

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prirun
[https://developer.arm.com/docs/dui0801/latest/a64-simd-
vecto...](https://developer.arm.com/docs/dui0801/latest/a64-simd-vector-
instructions)

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tibbydudeza
Jeepers Forbes really has a thing for Apple.

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baggachipz
> Jeepers Forbes really has a thing for ~Apple~.

Clickbait *ftfy

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ralphc
I loved the switch to Intel, it made virtualization on par with Windows and
Linux, and lately it's easy, for example, to load games from Steam. I'm glad I
got a 2019 MacBook Pro, I hope to use it for many years, then I'll have some
decisions to make.

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dchest
Clickbait.

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beavisel
A large portion of Forbes reporting on Apple can be classified as such.

