The news that Apple might ditch Intel processors and switch to ARM-based chips of its own design isn't a massive surprise to me. I can see it making a lot of sense for the future of the Mac. Why? Because it's been going that way for some time - the iPad Pro is a good demonstration of what's possible with low-power, efficient processors.
I've written before about my personal move to the iPad Pro as my main work device. I find that with the keyboard case I can achieve almost anything on an iPad that I can on a laptop. And the iPad is lighter, has better battery life and is a generally great device for me to get stuff done. But there's work to be done, and I'm sure Apple could make processors that offer a lot of enhancements that standard x64-based machines would struggle with.
So what are the issues? Well, right now many of us could give up on traditional laptops and move to these devices. Most people aren't pushing their hardware that hard and normal laptop CPUs are power-hungry and poorly suited to mobile computing. The problems tend to come with specialist software that doesn't currently run on ARM hardware, at least not natively.
I do photo editing and video a lot. These are tasks that can be performed on devices like the iPad or a high-end Android tablet but they aren't ideally suited to it. For Apple this is important because a lot of creative people are using its Intel-based laptops to use these beefy apps. Photos are less of a problem, but working with raw images from a DSLR are still a little frustrating. This isn't a problem with the power of the hardware though, it's more of an issue with optimising for the various file types needed by professionals. This extends to other industries too, perhaps for coders who need to run virtual machines which themselves need a lot of processing power.
Video editing is another interesting problem. It's possible on an iPad, I've done it. But when it comes to taking footage from the plethora of professional or semi-professional cameras and integrating it into a tablet-based workflow things get tricky. There are so many codecs - the methods modern video uses to compress video - and each requires its own form of acceleration to perform well.
Apple hasn't yet nailed this on the iPad. Even third-party solutions don’t have total support for every kind of video. This will be something that needs to be sorted before killing off Intel-powered machines. However I can see it being possible - this isn’t really a power issue, its one of compatibility and investment. If Adobe throws money at ARM processor development, these are all issues that are solvable.
The only other big problem for Apple will be running existing apps on an ARM platform. That’s something that will require extra work and that won’t be an efficient use of the processor. But look at Microsoft, which is offering Windows and apps on ARM devices
It’s no surprise that Intel stock dropped on the news. This is likely the future for a lot of computing. Intel has failed to make its low-power devices compete with those from the likes of Qualcomm and others. Now it’s Apple which will own the space. Presumably though Intel is working on this problem, and with its years of x86 and x64 platforms it should have some ideas about how to offer similar products for Windows devices.
The march away from standard processors began years ago, and it looks like it will be complete within another two...
