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Apple to ditch Intel?
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[Craig Seeman] “How close might a 12.9″ iPad Pro with keyboard and pencil is to a full fledged laptop computer and Wacom tablet in one? That may happen by 2020 (but it’ll have to have more than the current lightning connector).”
Yep. I find it hard to believe that MacBook and iPad won’t somehow merge.
[Craig Seeman] “I don’t think this is the same or as “simple” as soothsayer allusions to a sudden shift to a new CPU/GPU.”
I totally agree. Hardly time yet for anyone to get their knickers in a wad ☺
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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And another opinion.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/03/apple-macbook-laptop-chips/
– Oliver
Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
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I thought this was an interesting perspective.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/03/apple-macbook-laptop-chips/
Geekbench tests of the iPhone X’s A11 chip found that it was almost a match for the 2017 MacBook Pro.
Things that make you go hmm.
I imagine that we won’t see these chips pop up in the Mac Pro any time soon, or even the higher-end MacBook Pros. After all, those machines are designed to appeal to professional users who won’t want to sacrifice their existing software setups. The MacBook, however, seems like an ideal candidate for Apple’s first custom CPU.
Generally I’d agree in concept but the question is form. Wouldn’t it be more useful to keep the iOS interface, making it a real artist’s tool (again I’m thinking of a Wacom tablet type computer) rather then the same “old” Macbook computer interaction with just an Apple designed chip?
I think we’d be looking at innovation (or at least hybridization) given Apple’s design proclivities rather than same old same old with a new CPU/GPU.
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Interesting how the chart shows computer sales stopped falling and then rose briefly with the change to Intel chips before the iPhone & iPad started the next slide.
I would believe that Apple might go totally their chip for all battery powered Macs. I suspect they will stay with Intel or AMD for whatever is their desktop. Maybe by 2020 they will only have one desktop. There might be one more MacPro but I would never base a business decision that needed powerful desktops on expecting Apple to provide for my needs. I can see an end for Apple in this market and they can quietly retire OSX and be totally a portable iOS company from 2024 onwards.
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[Michael Gissing] “Interesting how the chart shows computer sales stopped falling and then rose briefly with the change to Intel chips before the iPhone & iPad started the next slide.
“The chart isn’t showing the rising or falling of sales. It’s showing the percentage of Apple’s revenue. Apple still makes a lot of money on Macs. The iPhone has just eclipsed the Mac on where the majority of the revenue come from. The Mac is still essential to iOS app creation.
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Apple has changed the Macintosh processor architecture twice before. I’ve stopped worrying about that.
The ARM processor was first developed for a desktop system by Acorn. ARM once stood for Acorn RISC Machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_ArchimedesI don’t think anyone would be surprised that Apple has probably has been doing ports of Mac OS to the ARM architecture probably for years now. I have no knowledge, but there is a precedent for this; The Macintosh Star Trek project in the early 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Microsoft has done similar things. They’ve put the NT Kernel on about everything, ARM, Itanium, X86, PowerPC, etc.
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[Oliver Peters] “I find it hard to believe that MacBook and iPad won’t somehow merge.
“I find it hard to believe that they WILL. ???? After all, “What’s a computer?” In all of Apple’s organizational schemes, it seems like these are the two product lines where they’ve worked the hardest to draw lines between them.
Some of this is differentiation to protect iPad, I suspect. I’d think that there are a lot of people who are happy enough with their big phones that iPads start to feel superfluous.
Apple also has bizarrely little imagination here, or perhaps Jonny Ive has bizarrely short arms. Listening to them moan about the intense physical discomfort caused by just the IDEA of a touchscreen on a laptop, and you can see how they will never, ever, ever merge these experiences.
[greg janza] “To get a sense of where Apple may be headed in the future just look at how their revenue source has changed over time. “
AMAZING chart, but the quintessence of skating to where the puck has been, I think. ???? As others have noted, that line doesn’t represent Apple’s overall computer revenue, but Mac’s percentage of revenue relative to the rest of the company. That’s a massive distinction.
In fact, looking at Mac sales by UNIT, the chart is almost inverted! This is as current as it gets, too, running from 2006 through the end of December 2017 (which is the end of Q1 ’18 in Apple’s calendar). Down a skosh from the 2016 peak, yes, but let’s see what we see when Apple updates their Q2 ’18 numbers in just a little bit. And trust me when I say that the iMac Pro promo push has barely gotten started.
Keep in mind too that the bars going up and down along the way are references to individual quarters — some quarters of the year are bigger for computer sales as part of the annual cycle. But pick any quarter of the year and follow it through the chart — the 2016 peak notwithstanding, Apple’s Mac business unit is doing fine, thanks.
(Source here.)
This is actually quite a feat. Apple has the best-growing computer business in the industry, but it creates the optical illusion of shrinking, only because the rest of Apple is growing so much faster.
So the question for where the puck is going next is, what ELSE will Apple be doing, other than what’s currently on the table? What’s the thing we DON’T see right now that’s going to drive the curve so massively higher that Apple’s VERY NICELY GROWING computer business will LOOK like it’s shrinking?
Well, they’ve already told us some of it — Home Pod. This is potentially massive, not just for the devices themselves, but for what they drive. For example, Amazon says that sales of Echo drove a doubling of Amazon Prime Music revenue last year.
Believe me, Apple has noticed Spotify absolutely kicking Apple Music’s ass. But who do you think is going to be quicker to market with a speaker/mic music DJ request line thingy, though, a la Echo? Apple. Count on it. Apple Music doubling annual growth would allow it to at least keep pace with Spotify, and if they hit the ball as far as Amazon did with Echo, will of course additionally create a nice source of hardware revenue.
Apple has of course been hinting at TV sets or something like them for over a decade now. Meh. I don’t see it. The making and selling of TV sets is a terrible business to be in right now. Not nearly enough margin, even for what Apple could get away with charging for their version of the thing.
There’s also honestly not nearly enough revenue coming from Apple’s own corner of TV content. They’ll do more than they are, but they’re still years away from catching up to the most laughable channel on your Roku channel.
Contrast this again with Apple Music, with upside galore, easily accelerated with Home Pod.
Now then.
I know I’m the only gol’ darn person in the entire history of this forum to believe that Apple can make a killing with cars. An accidental pun, but I’ll take it. I don’t care what Tesla is up to, and neither does Apple. Apple wants to go after Prius, and their most recent patent filings this very week are ASTOUNDING. If you haven’t dug into these yet, you have absolutely no idea how seriously Apple is taking this.
The fact is that cars have been a massive part of Intel’s business of late, and I’m convinced that Apple doubling down on moving away from Intel has EVERYTHING to do with moving into the heart of Intel’s actual current businesses….and what’s the one besides cars that have been driving (hahahahaha!) Intel? Artificial intelligence and VR/AR. And where do you need AI and VR/AR-styled technology, especially for heads-up display? In a car?
No shit, fellas. I’m telling you. LOOK AT THIS. Chips out the wazoo. HUD out the wazoo. And, as Patently Apple calls it, The Patent of the Decade. I think they’re underselling it. If Apple pulls it off, it’s the patent of the century to date, by a mile.
Don’t just reject this out of hand. READ THE APPLICATION, or at least Patently Apple’s summary of it. THIS is what it means to go after Intel where Intel lives. It has everything to do with why Apple is poo-pooing VR and promoting AR: because the goal isn’t to get you out of your current reality into a different, not real reality. The goal is to provide overlays on the reality you’re in. While you’re driving.
This is of course old technology in some ways. Pilots have had this for many years. What’s new is doing it without a helmet, in a consumer environment, with a combination of information dense but quickly readable, in a manner that stays out of the way, that can be operated at almost a subconscious, reflex level…..not unlike iOS. That you control with your eyes, not your fingers. Using AR technology.
Running on an assload of chips. Trust THAT to Intel? No thanks. If you give most people a choice in chip provider for controlling my door locks and lighted drink holders, you think they’re gonna choose Apple or Intel? Hmmmm….. I wonder. NOT.
Note bene: this has NOTHING to do with whether Apple actually builds the cars. Who cars. Apple doesn’t need to get in the brakes and upholstery business to pull of AI/AR driving environments. (Although, wouldn’t it be nice? Anyone who flies Virgin knows EXACTLY how cool it would be if Apple DID get involved in building “transportation devices”, so to speak. Virgin is as close as we’ve gotten yet — it’s like flying inside a white iPod, in a good way.)
This is already where they’re headed with cars: get the manufacturers to open the hooks for an overlay, to let Apple control the car’s systems. If Apple was also licensing them the chips, well, this gets right interesting. Now you don’t have to compete with Toyota, Tesla, or anyone else. You let the market (eg, you maniacs) demand that your car vendor of choice license Apple’s stuff if they want your business.
After you dig into Patently Apple — here’s the link — take a listen to the normally pretty level heads at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center, who posted some nice coverage just this morning.
Look, you may keep saying I’m wrong about Apple and cars. Apple has certainly made no bones about deciding that they didn’t want to build the actual cars, which I was very hopeful they WOULD do. But it’s clearer than ever that Apple’s view of its own future is developing the INTERFACE for the future of driving. The interface for the car on the road and such — wheels, brakes, steering, all that? Apple doesn’t need that pain. But when it comes to the experience of how drivers relate to cars, to the world, and relevant data to manage that relationship — who ELSE would you rather have do that? NOBODY.
Of course I say this as somebody who still can’t imagine ever giving Apple another dime. ???? I just don’t like their stuff. I don’t think a single thing they do is best of category. I just don’t. But I WANT them to keep winning, so that companies I like better will win MORE. ????
I need a rimshot emoji to truly sell that last paragraph, but don’t think for a minute that I’m kidding the tiniest bit about believing that THIS is where the puck is going, that THIS is why Apple is parting ways with Intel. As big as Intel is thinking about cars, AI, VR, and AR, I think Apple thinks Intel isn’t thinking nearly big enough. I KNOW Apple thinks that YOU aren’t thinking big enough if you think Apple’s chip moves are mostly about computers.
While also underscoring that Apple doesn’t want you to take your eye off the ball, that the computer business is thriving, and entirely relevant.
Say, I’ve got the perfect music for the ad campaign for the Apple car overlay dingus, whatever they’re gonna call it. Beep beep, mm beep beep, yeah!
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[Scott Thomas] “The chart isn’t showing the rising or falling of sales. It’s showing the percentage of Apple’s revenue.”
Ah thanks for that qualification.
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[Tim Wilson] “Believe me, Apple has noticed Spotify absolutely kicking Apple Music’s ass. But who do you think is going to be quicker to market with a speaker/mic music DJ request line thingy, though, a la Echo? Apple. Count on it. Apple Music doubling annual growth would allow it to at least keep pace with Spotify”
https://www.asymco.com/2017/12/14/the-sound-of-music/
By this chart from the Asymco article, you can see that Spotify has double the number of subscriptions, but look at that timeline. It took Spotify around 7 years to amass that many subs. Will Apple continue that trend?
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[Scott Thomas] “It took Spotify around 7 years to amass that many subs. Will Apple continue that trend?”
I’ve seen that chart before, and it’s completely misleading. It took Spotify 7 years, because that’s how many years they’d been doing it when the chart was made. ???? The first few years were pushing uphill against the idea that renting music was a good idea at all, while Apple and Amazon were pushing as hard as they could to discredit that notion, and kept jamming on paid download ownership. Steve Jobs was banging on this point at pretty much every public presentation for the last years of his life. Renting music: bad. Owning music: good. Spotify had their fight cut out for them, and they did it.
Spotify was also fighting the labels who wanted to keep them out of the US. So they were locked out of not just the world’s #1 music market, but pretty much all of the top 5 markets in the beginning. Heck, it started as a Sweden-only enterprise, because that’s all they could secure the rights for. They did it one country at a time, over a period of years, self-funding the whole way.
Apple on the other hand did what they so often do, show up late when the concept has been proven, and the demand is high. They’re the richest company in the history of humankind, poured billions into a fast start on a global scale, and kind of achieved it, but honestly, really kind of didn’t.
More granular charts note that the gap between Spotify and Apple has been increasing over time, not decreasing. That’s both the number of subscribers, and the rate of acquiring new ones. Part of the reason for that is the many millions of Mac users who’d already invested in Spotify, where playlists rule. In fact, there are individual Spotify playlists that have more subscribers than the entirety of Apple Music! There’s really just not much of a race there right now on a feature level, or on user attachment. This has always been where Apple shone most brightly, but they whiffed this time.
Apple knew that they blew it, which is why they spent billions on Beats, a company created with just one strategy: prove themselves to Apple as quickly as possible and get bought out. It worked!
But it was still too late to truly close the distance beyond the core “if ain’t Apple, I ain’t buyin’ it” crowd. Millions of Apple customers around the world had already said, “This is stupid. Apple has said they’re not gonna do this, that buying music is the way to go, but I think they’re wrong. I got tired of waiting for Apple to do the right thing with streaming video, so I stopped using iTunes and went to Netflix. Time for me to do the same with Spotify and music. Spotify works great on Mac, works great with all my Apple devices, so I’m in.”
Apple hasn’t made a compelling offer to switch any meaningful number of those folks back. They tried to jumpstart this with music, it didn’t succeed all that well, so they’re trying to do it more organically with video, by spending Netflix-level dollars, to create a fraction of the content that Netflix is, taking much longer to to do it. Barriers are low to adding new services. If Apple does something worthwhile, some Netflix folks will add Apple to the mix, too, the same way that they also do Hulu and HBO or whatever….but Apple’s not going to CONVERT hardly ANY of those folks. Netflix is going to keep widening that lead. Same with Spotify.
That’s why the one thing that might change the game for Apple even a little is Home Pod.
Amazon is of course an also-ran in this race in some ways, but Prime is much more than a subscription music service, or a movie service, or a delivery service. It’s a platform that compresses the distance between impulse, expression of desire, and fulfillment to the shortest possible interval. Maybe it’s seconds, maybe it’s a couple of days, but THAT’s Amazon’s game. Impulse fulfillment in just a few words. Dim the lights. Ship me some olives. Play my Rainy Day playlist. Tell me the weather forecast.
Google’s got the search part of that nailed, but not the impulse fulfillment.
Which is how Echo has been the driver to Amazon doubling Prime year on year. It’s inconceivable to me that most people will see this in action and say, “Nah, I’ll wait for Apple to do it”, because Apple’s is still going to be limited. It won’t include nearly as much video for years, it won’t include ANY meaningful shopping, and has a long way to go just to catch up to the basics. (Siri is not the same, sorry.)
The most Apple can hope for is that Home Pod serves as a compelling-enough front end for Spotify and Prime to capture the hardware money from those folks, at which point Apple can try converting them back to Apple software…although lotsa luck with that. Apple hasn’t made much of a dent AT ALL in Spotify’s loyalty among Mac customers, any more than they will with Netflix folks when they make that move.
But it’s a shot that they don’t have just yet. They will, though, and I bet they’ll have it before Spotify does. It won’t be enough to change their standing with Spotify, though, not ultimately.
In the context of my previous post, this area of inquiry is only interesting to me because of Home Pod as a place that Apple needs to put a ton of extremely sophisticated chips, loaded with Apple-specific programming, and they need it yesterday. Intel will take too long, and the solution will be incomplete, so this is one of the things that Apple is going to do with the chips that will keep that that first graph that Greg posted growing in the same direction — yes, Macs growing, but the rest of Apple growing much faster. Places that the puck has not yet been.
I can honestly say that I spend as much time researching this angle of consumer behavior as I do almost anything in my life. You won’t meet many people more versed in this than I am…although I’m happy to point you to sources for all this, to folks who know even more than I do….
…but to me, it still pales next to what Apple is going to do with using AR and AI as the front end for transforming the human-machine-world interface with cars, and how abandoning Intel is at the absolute heart of that. As I mentioned in my previous post, when Patently Apple calls this the “patent of the decade”, I think they’re wildly underselling it. I think it’s the Patent of the Century.
No matter how big music, computers, and devices seems to you for Apple’s chip story, I’m tellin’ ya, this AI/AR automobile stuff is much, much bigger. Please read those articles I linked previously, and prepare to be dumbfounded.
https://www.etcentric.org/apple-submits-vr-patents-for-next-gen-autonomous-vehicles/
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