Former Apple executive director Jean-Louis Gassée, who previously held the position of Macintosh development manager, said it would be perfectly viable for the entire Mac lineup to be powered by ARM chips – even the Mac Pro. . This reverses a view he had last year when he called the idea “fancy.”
He said that while one of the two issues he discussed last year remains a huge challenge for Apple, food is no longer a problem …
Last year, Jean-Louis Gassée said that after examining both sides of the argument, he concluded that Intel’s switch to ARM-based chips was simply not practical.
After last week’s brainstorming experience on the future of the Mac, I realized that leaving the x86 family of processors made little practical sense. A pleasant fantasy, perhaps, but too complicated in practice.
One reason is that he didn’t think an ARM-based processor could be powerful enough for the Mac Pro.
The Pro is a monstrously powered machine that costs tens of thousands of dollars and is designed for a (relatively) small audience of content creators and other high-end technical users performing fluid dilutions and demanding calculations involved in applications machine learning. Will these users be satisfied with a lesser processor in the name of the cohesion of the Mac line?
Yesterday, however, in a blog post, he said he was wrong.
Ampere designs and sells high-power ARM chips that compete with Xeon processors used in cloud servers […] Ampere shows us that the ARM architecture can provide the class of chips that a Mac Pro would need. And, in this case, the chips are made by TSMC, the same company that makes Apple’s Axx processors.
Another problem, however, remains: what he describes as the “ fork ” of Mac: until the transition is complete, you would have a set of Macs running on Intel chips and another running on chips based on ARM, requiring two different versions of macOS.
If (or, more likely, when) the Mac switches to Axx chips, the change will not be instant. Some Macs will be powered by Apple’s CPU chips, others, like the Mac Pro, will remain on x86 processors. And so we will have a fork of macOS.
And as soon as the first Macs with ARM are announced, anyone considering an Intel-based Mac will know that they are essentially buying technology that will not work with the latest version of macOS – because the most modern version would be the one running on ARM chips . Is this upheaval worth it, he asks, at a time when the Mac range represents only 8% of Apple’s revenues?
Jean-Louis Gassée says he has “no idea” of Apple’s decision.
Personally, I think he is right about the “Mac fork” problem, but as I said before, history shows that Apple is ready to bite the bullet here.
Apple has done this not only once, but twice. First in the 1994 transition from the Motorola 68000 architecture from the original Macintosh range to PowerPC, and again in the 2006 transition from PPC to Intel. It facilitated transitions with a 68000 emulator and Rosetta.
This is not to say that such transitions are not painful; they are. Horribly so for a while. Those of us who have experienced both movements can still remember some frustrations to this day.
But in both cases, we overcame it and the end result was worth it. The same will be true again.
Ming-Chi Kuo suggested that Apple will release its first ARM-equipped Mac at some point next year.
Photo: Alison van Diggelen / Fresh Dialogues
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