 Apple just announced what many of us have been anticipating for years now with equal measures dread and excitement. They're ditching Intel. Yep. The longest lived CPU partnership in Mac history is done, and Apple has confirmed not only the development of their own ARM-based chips in-house, but also their intention to complete this migration away from Intel systems over the next two years. Macs and potentially even PCs may never be the same. But me? You can always count on me. And my segues to sponsors like Elgato. Elgato's new Wave 1 and Wave 3 USB broadcast microphones are here. Use their Wave Link app to control your Wave mic, up to seven other audio sources, and create independent mixes. Check them out at the link below. Since the development of the A4 SoC began in 2008, Apple has been consistently designing their own silicon in-house, thanks to ARM's generous licensing model that allows third parties to implement their instruction set in standard ways, but without limitation in terms of core layouts. This flexibility gave Apple the ability to control the entire design of the iPhone, and since the iPhone 4S, they've consistently defended their fastest smartphone crown. Apple's chip design prowess has brought them to the point now where the current iPhone 11 Pro, a phone, can offer up single core performance that's competitive with their current MacBooks in synthetic benchmarks. And that's to say nothing of their other in-house silicon. Meanwhile, it's no secret that Intel hasn't been performing up to expectations. For years, Apple's efforts to build slimmer and lighter Macs with longer battery life have been frustrated by the enormous heat that they've had to deal with, or have outright refused to deal with. Now, Intel's upcoming 10 nanometer Tiger Lake microarchitecture with Z graphics has been making headlines for its promising performance improvements, but here's the thing, if Apple's promising to launch a laptop with their own silicon this calendar year, they clearly got sick of waiting anywhere from 12 to 36 months ago, and have been well past the point of no return for quite some time. Furthermore, Tiger Lake's thermal performance is yet to be seen. So, with 12 years of experience designing CPUs and having achieved a claimed 100x performance improvement since they started, why buy CPUs that might turn out to be flops from Intel or from AMD for that matter? If you want it done right, do it yourself. And I don't even blame Apple for seeing it that way. I mean, I love Android as much as anyone, but look at how much runtime Apple squeezes out of a comparatively small battery next to their Android competitors. And this is all while offering a snappy user experience with in many cases half the system memory. It's this control and consistent execution that makes Apple so darn profitable. Here's the thing, there's always a trade-off between your upfront R&D costs versus your ongoing costs. You can allow someone else like Google or Qualcomm to handle your operating system and your CPU design. That keeps your engineering staff requirements lower, but you might need to make up for some sloppiness with a big fat battery and some extra RAM. Or, if you're Apple, you spend upfront optimizing that hardware perfectly so that every unit you ship is as inexpensive as possible. This model works out great as long as you can sell enough that your units times cost savings is greater than that upfront R&D investment. We see the same thing in game consoles. Sony, for example, built a custom RadTools crack and hardware decompression chip for the PS5. That was a complicated undertaking, but without it, Sony would need a bigger, faster SSD or a much beefier CPU in every console unit they ship. So that initial investment could turn out to be absolutely game-changing. Pardon the pun. While using Apple Silicon in a laptop might not be painful, the transition could be. Going from PowerPC to Intel was a lot smoother than from Motorola to PowerPC, but it was still fraught with compatibility and performance implications early on. While Universal Binary eventually became standard until PowerPC died out, the Rosetta Translation Layer's first incarnation didn't run especially well, and Apple prevented their pro suites like Final Cut and Logic from running under it as a result. This time around, Apple says Rosetta can translate an application at install time rather than at runtime, potentially making things much faster overall. Only time can tell how that works out, though. As with the transition to Intel, eventually all applications will be ARM-only, and that has some both frightening and exciting implications for consumers. First, iPadOS apps can basically just work on a Mac. Apple Arcade and the new Maps and Messages apps are working examples, but the possibilities go much, much deeper. Because iOS and iPadOS are based on macOS, it's relatively easy for Apple to unify the entire ecosystem now around their custom ARM architecture, effectively erasing the distinction between what's a Mac and what's an iDevice for developers. The iPad is even getting relative mouse input for gaming and desktop-grade spotlight search now. However, this convergence isn't without danger. There's nothing official, but it seems that the App Store is being emphasized far more right now than alternative ways of installing applications, and that's a big problem for services with external monetization schemes. Now, to be clear, the App Store offers a valuable service, and Apple should make money from it. But the thing is, if I already have something in place, why should I, as a developer, be forced to use it? Least of all, on a desktop operating system where there isn't really much precedent for this. That's where things get frightening, because it's not clear who Apple is putting first right now. I mean, promising custom hardware solutions, tailor-made to what their customers need, might actually be worth some monopolistic behavior to some people. But there's one small problem. Does Apple even know what their customers want to do with their computers? The last few years have been spotty at best when it comes to listening to both customer and developer feedback. I mean, who asked for the touch bar? And then, how did it take an unacceptable three years for the company with the world's eighth highest R&D spending to get rid of a fundamentally broken keyboard design? To be fair, Apple has demonstrated a willingness to change lately. User-upgradable storage on the Mac Pro, for example. That's a great step forward. There's just a lot of questions still to be answered in how this whole thing is going to play out. Like, how did the iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard and MacBook differ now? What if Intel gets their shit together? Will PCs completely overtake them like what happened during late-game PowerPC? Or what if the opposite happens? The computer industry has a long and proud tradition of doing something kind of half-ass at first, waiting for Apple to do it properly, and then finding a hundred slightly worse ways to copy that. Will Windows for ARM become more widely available? What's going to happen to Boot Camp? Only time can answer these questions. In the meantime, I do have some predictions for how things are going to play out. One, Intel has tried to make low idle power consumption and always-on computing a thing for years with initiatives like Smart Connect, but it's never actually worked very well. Meanwhile, Apple has this absolutely on lockdown with iOS. You can leave your iPad untouched for literally weeks at a time, pick it up, and all your files, notifications, and settings are right there waiting for you, and you probably still have 20% battery to boot. This, along with the instant-on experience that we take for granted on phones, is coming to Mac, which means that Apple has a major selling point on their hands, even for people like me who do basically everything in a browser anyway. Next, this is going to completely fix the thermal throttling that we have criticized Apple for mercilessly over the last few years. Now, putting a TDP rating on Apple's SoC is a little bit challenging, but a non-text performance data indicates that the A12Z's Vortex cores in the iPad Pro can draw about 4 watts in a single-threaded workload. If we were to extrapolate that out to all 4 Vortex cores, which is unlikely to be possible on a tablet, but very possible on a laptop with better cooling and power delivery, that's about 16 watts, fully unchained, which curiously happens to be almost exactly the cooling capacity of the 2020 MacBook Air with its weird fanless heatsink, which is why my conspiracy theory might actually not be that far off. They could stick an ARM processor into that same cooling and chassis design, and it'll run faster, cooler, and probably with better battery life thanks to its ability to use low-power cores to handle background tasks. Now, I actually doubt that they will change much else on the first go, because the marketing practically writes itself, you know? Same Mac as before, more Apple than ever, magic. Probably a little catchier than that, but I think you guys catch my drift. Prediction number 3. If they want this to be a success on the desktop, either. Apple's ARM cores need to get competitive with x86 cores in single-threaded tasks, and I mean heavy desktop ones, or they need to augment them. Now, desktops are definitely coming, and based on these performance claims, I think Apple is taking the latter path here, giving themselves two years to finally push developers to both properly take advantage of many core CPU designs and to properly take advantage of heterogeneous compute, which is using a combination of CPU and GPU, or neural processor for that matter, to do conventional CPU work faster. When it comes to performance, though, there's more to consider. ARM, given that it's a RISC architecture, is able to do more work in fewer clock cycles and with less power than a CISC architecture like x86 can. That's an advantage that Apple used to enjoy with early PowerPC Macs outperforming their Intel counterparts at much lower clock speeds. But there are some drawbacks to this approach. While RISC is more streamlined, with no microcode, for example, it also lacks flexibility, meaning that if your application uses an x86 instruction for which there is no ARM equivalent, you as a developer are looking at either having to work around it manually or simulate it with many more cycles than you would otherwise need. That's part of why Microsoft's Windows RT didn't support x86 emulation when it launched. What makes this different is that compared to PowerPC or even Windows RT, many developers are by now well accustomed to working with ARM thanks to mobile devices, although there are still unknowns. Will Adobe, for example, be able to quickly implement every feature in the ARM version of Creative Cloud? I mean, given they can't even get every feature working in the regular one. Anyway, will Apple try to force them into the app? I mean, I can't imagine Adobe giving up 30% of their subscription fees. Come on. The bottom line, anyway, is that nothing quite like this has happened before. We're watching history being made today, and whether Apple succeeds or fails, one thing is clear, and that's that the computer industry will never be quite the same, unlike my segue to our sponsor, which is the same as it was in the beginning of this video even. Drop.com is bringing you the Massdrop and Sennheiser PC37X gaming headset. Its angled drivers and open back design result in very natural sound. They're super comfy. The drivers come from the same family as their HD598 and HD600 series headphones, meaning you got great stereo imaging and locational accuracy, and they come with a noise-canceling microphone. They've sold over 40,000 of these things, so if there was a problem with them, you'd know about it because people would be talking about it everywhere. They include a two-year manufacturer warranty, so go check them out at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video—actually, sorry, Anthony, I'm going to hijack this— I'm going to send them over to the Sub-Zero water cooling on the 2020 MacBook Air video, because that's where we found out that that laptop is designed around seemingly an A12Z processor.