Now this is interesting. Sooner than I expected.

Apple is moving to arm. I wonder will they take all their software on an iOS based platform and make them larger for macbook? touchscreens in the works? hmmmm. Interesting.

https://mspoweruser.com/apple-arm-chips-for-mac/

 

There's not going to be a touchscreen MacBook because that would render moot Apple's entire premise for the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement.

 

Nah it wouldn't. Two different devices. Lightweight portable ipad pro, or larger notebook 2 in 1 Macbook. No different than surfsce pro and surfsce book

 

Two thoughts, first I can understand why they would do this as they are the leading designers in ARM (for now). The alleged 12 core ARM chip that is being developed based on the A12Z used in the Ipad Pro will be monstrous. Assuming no uplift in efficiency or IPC you're looking at roughly double the performance since they are moving from 4/4 to 8/4.

A12X gives a Geekbench5 score of 1110 / 4700 on 4H/4L
A14X should give Geekbench5 scores at minimum around: 1200 / 10000 8H/4L (rough math)
Ryzen 3900 gives a Geekbench5 score of: 1286 / 12037 12H/0L

Potentially we're looking at a chip that can go toe-to-toe with a 2nd Gen Ryzen and certainly Cometlake... which is pretty incredible in it's own right and ought to be pretty popular.

Second thought: Is this an indication that Microsoft intends to vastly improve their ARM emulation for Windows 10X? That's the only way I can see this taking off and not causing a massive backlash against Apple power users like myself who are moving back to windows (already had in anticipation of this).

 

Perhaps the Arm will have an x86 emulator mode (although CPU emulation in the past has been lack-luster).

If there is not an x86 emulation mode for the new chip, and Windows remain an x86 architecture, then what will happen to native Bootcamp? I also wonder for those that use apps like Oracle Virtual Box or VMWare Fusion vendors will have massive re-writes to emulate x86_64 CPUs?

 

Windows on x86 is going nowhere. It's here and huge. Windows on arm will improve in the next couple of years as long as they can get new arm chips developed.

 

AFAIK, I haven't seen a Windows ARM SKU as an install, ISO or otherwise download available from Microsoft. The only reason we know it exists is because Surface X (or whatever the edition) runs an ARM version of Windows. However, that doesn't mean that MS would even make it work on these new arch'ed Macs.

 

I'm sure they won't make it work on the Mac. But they are still working on arm based systems.

 

Which would probably put a big question mark for those that use Bootcamp now.

 

Who says boot camp will be part of macOS on arm? That's the other side of the coin too.