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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: 3, Insightful) by Username on Thursday December 30 2021, @09:51AM (4 children)
I think the true reason is to prevent the Hackentosh people from running mac os and Apple (tm) app on PC bypassing the Apple tax. I have no doubt the next version of their os will only run on this cpu, rendering all Intel Macs obsolete.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 30 2021, @10:18AM
2022 Mac Pro Rumored to Use Intel's Ice Lake Xeon W-3300 Chips [macrumors.com]
Macs With Intel Processors Still Coming Amid Transition to Apple Silicon [macrumors.com]
Probably, but not quite yet. First comment: "This is good news for those of us with Intel Macs, because then Apple will keep new releases of macOS Intel-compatible for much longer."
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30 2021, @10:31AM (1 child)
I'm sure the Hackintosh people will come up with a way to emulate the Apple hardware. You can already emulate a PC with QEMU.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by theluggage on Thursday December 30 2021, @01:26PM
Except all current Macs - including Intel - (since the 2020 Intel iMac, I think) have a proprietary Apple chip handling (amongst other things) key storage and encryption. So once the older Intel Macs pass out of support, MacOS will be free to use strong, hardware encryption to identify kosher Apple hardware and emulation won’t cut it. Even if Apple don’t care enough about Hackintosh (which I doubt) to do this deliberately it will probably be a natural side effect of “desirable” security features like disk encryption and kernel signing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Thursday December 30 2021, @01:12PM
While Apple won’t be crying into their West Coast IPA over the demise of Hackintosh, to suggest that as a major reason for dumping Intel is heading for crazy conspiracy theory territory. It’s just not that big a deal (for Apple).
The community have done a stand-up job of making it easy to do, but it’s still complex enough to put off the typical consumer and any “lost sales” are a drop in the ocean. For 15 years, Apple have made no effort to beef up DRM in MacOS to stamp it out - which would be a lot easier than moving to a whole new processor.
Anyway, the writing was on the wall for Hackintosh years ago when Apple started using the T1/T2 chips for most motherboard functions in Intel Macs (like SSD control & encryption) instead of generic PC chips. This is great for security but also means that, just as soon as the remaining non-T1 Macs have been off the market for the requisite number of years, pre-T1 support will vanish from MacOS and the door will close on Hackintosh.
Anyway, that sounds like I’m defending apple, but while typing this I noticed that iOS 15 is now auto-suggesting emojis as I type and threw up in my mouth a little. A pox on Apple! (Or “a podcast on Apple” which is what autocorrupt thought l wanted to type….)