Tag Archive for ‘x86’

Apple released their first Intel Macs in January 2006 — the MacBook Pro and iMac. The final Mac to transition from PowerPC to Intel was released in August of that same year. In just seven months, Apple was able to transition their entire lineup to x86 processors. Granted this isn’t a direct comparison, but Apple announced their first product with a Retina display in June 2010 — the iPhone 4 — and here we are nearly six-and-a-half years later and Apple is still selling products with low pixel density displays.

Based on the price differential between Retina and non-Retina Macs, it’s clear that the cost of including these high-density displays is the limiting factor. But why is that still the case? Why hasn’t Apple found other ways to shave manufacturing costs on their computers or come to terms with temporarily decreased margins?

At this point, I wouldn’t buy a new Mac without a Retina display and Apple should draw a similar line in the sand. Non-Retina displays are drastically inferior products and Apple should feel like fools for continuing to sell them.

Gian Maria Forni, writing for Bits and Chips:

According to our sources, Apple is pondering about using custom x86 CPUs in its next iMacs and MacBooks, during 2017-2018. Nowadays it’s hard to avoid the use of x86 ISA in high end and professional personal computers, but at the same time Intel CPUs are too expensive if we compare these with ARM SoCs.

So, Apple’s target is to realize a complete x86 custom SoC family, like Sony and Microsoft did with their consoles. AMD is the perfect partner to do this.

This rumor was published back in October of last year, but John Gruber linked to it a couple of days ago.

There’s a lot of interesting things happening in the world of CPUs. Intel licensing ARM technology and attempting to take over the manufacturing of Apple’s A-series processors, the massive gap between Mac hardware iterations which was at least partly due to delays in Intel’s latest generation of CPUs, and the aforelinked rumor that Apple might be working with AMD on custom x86 SoCs. To name a few.

This is exactly the kind of rumors I enjoy, though. It hearkens back to the early days of my technology enthusiasm, when AMD was first to market with 64-bit and dual-core processors. And, perhaps this is just wishful thinking, but I have a strange feeling that we’ll be learning more about all this within the next six months.