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Apple ditched Intel, and it paid off
Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year.
The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring.
It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run.
[...] In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. [...] There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30 2021, @09:30AM (3 children)
Of course there was a short term improvement, because they are two full process nodes ahead of what they were getting from Intel. But AMD will launch Zen 4 on 5nm, the same process Apple is using, and it seems like Intel has righted the ship, though they still have some catching up to do.
The M1 isn't faster than what AMD and Intel are doing, it's just better performance per watt. This is a clear sign of process node superiority. But Apple doesn't have their own fab. Basically they just replaced one outsourced fab with another, and changed their CPU architecture as a side effect.
But Apple might still be happy even if AMD outdoes them with Zen 4. After all, they were using Intel, not AMD, and Intel is still going to be behind on process for a while. And Apple really likes to control as much of their technology as they can. It's probably worth it to them to design their own chips, even if they aren't better, just because they want to. And if Qualcomm gets ahead of them (they probably won't buy CPUs from Samsung because they are a competitor) they can always switch without having to do a whole architectural change, since they're still ARM.
Other stuff like the camera doesn't have much to do with the CPU. Apple was just using bad cameras.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday December 30 2021, @10:40AM
I hope that AMD takes the "APU" seriously as it moves to Zen 4/5. Apple showed up to the party with discrete-level graphics in the M1 Pro/Max, even if it's ultra-expensive and gaming performance is gimped on their OS. Intel will include 320 graphics execution units on a mobile processor within a couple of generations (Arrow Lake-P) instead of the 96 EU maximum it has now. Rembrandt is a good start as it should slightly more than double the graphics performance of Cezanne.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 30 2021, @12:50PM (1 child)
The reviews suggest that Apple is still using the same cameras. 720p cameras on $6000 machines? Kinda lame.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Thursday December 30 2021, @01:34PM
Yeah, they’re still using “bad cameras” but the M1 chip is loaded with hardware acceleration for neural computing that can make them look good in real time. If your idea of “good” happens to be the visual equivalent of auto-tune. But, hey, it’s only there for video conferencing.