Apple was always their own world, their "openess" came from almost closing doors around 1994 and with NeXTSTEP they played the same game as NeXT did, pretending to be open to get UNIX devs into the platform.

Now that they have the upper hand, they are free to go back to their old ways without much considerations about opennesses.

With the PC sales declining and most OEMs following back to the old ways of integrated computers, before of PC components revolution, I guess most regular users will use follow along.

If the macOS/iOS developers still can get their share of the cake, most things will hardly change, although they might loose those that only use macOS as a pretty UNIX.

The question is how relevant are those sales currently.

Except apple has demonstrated they can design cpu’s that outperform the (android) competition. Who is to say they can’t make ARM cpu’s that genuinely outperform intel? Intel hasn’t executed all that well lately anyway.

Being able to go toe to toe with low-power areas says little about being able to compete against full-power areas, and vice versa. Intel is a laughing stock when trying to compete in low power areas even though they dominate full power. ARM is the only choice in low power outside of a few Chinese chips and Samsung's Exynos, but yet ARM hasn't made a dent in full power applications. The two areas do not scale as easily as they sound.

Intel has been iterating their design decades longer and was in stiff competition for much of that time period. They will be hard to catch in the desktop/laptop space for anyone starting with a cell phone CPU.

ARM has not had real competition in their market, most chipmakers are licensing ARM tech, so they should be easier to catch up to, which Apple has done (with a healthy dose of borrowed ideas from ARM).

You do realize Exynos and the Apple A-series are both ARM processors. They didn’t “borrow” ideas from ARM, they licensed the IP and are fundamentally just better implementations of the base line IP with a few things added on.

Isn't Exynos also ARM?

You're right, for some reason I was thinking Exynos wasn't ARM based because it wasn't Qualcomm- not sure why. That takes the list of ARM competition down to just the Chinese offerings, unless I'm mistaken about that.

The trade offs for a SoC are different than for a desktop machine, and to a lesser extent a laptop. The desktop is where we'll feel the most pain. I wouldn't be surprised if they cancelled the Mac Pro entirely.

It would surprise me, because they made a big public show of recommitting to the Mac Pro last year.

If they had any doubts all they had to do was say nothing -- which is their strong preference -- and it would have remained clear that the Mac Pro was dead.

Making a strong "trust us, we're working on it" statement and then canceling would be a pretty bad unforced error. Not impossible, but with their top-down, forward-looking decison-making process it seems very unlikely to me.

Given the failure of ARM in the datacenter Apple would be pulling something off that no other semi manufacturer has. It's not impossible but just very unlikely.

It's much more reasonable that they'll do a "best effort" in the high end space but it won't be comparable to a Xeon. You can see the iMac Pro as a prelude to that. A beefy machine to be sure but not what you'd expect for top of the line.

It really depends on what exactly Apple is intending to do, which we just don't know yet.

But if they really are committed to the Mac Pro (and if this rumor is essentially true), then they must be planning something pretty extraordinary:

1. They actually have a solid plan on how they are going to make CPUs competitive with Intel Xeons over the next ~2-4 years.

2. They're planing on a bifurcated line, where some Macs have Apple CPUs and some have Intel CPUs... presumably with different architectures. I guess 2b. would be that the Apple CPUs will actually be x64 compatible.

It all seems pretty crazy, but Apple has done this kind of thing before, and done it rather smoothly. I guess time will tell.

The simplest explanation is that they aren't that committed to the high end. They don't make any money there and they've proven with their actions it is not a priority. A few quotes to the contrary don't change the fundamentals of what they've been doing.

Nah... back then single thread performance mattered a lot. Today most users can do most of their work on something with the performance of an iPad.

Apple will not suffer in 2020 from having lower performance than intel. It wont matter. Form factor, screen quality, memory speed, memory size, touch pad, battery life etc will matter so much more.

Multi threading is also so much more common on pro app which require performance. They can just match intel by using more cores. ARM is way cheaper than intel so I don't see how they can lose this game. PPC was an entirely different world.

Not everyone wants a mobile PC.

The mac mini is essentially 1700 days old since they downgraded the processors.

I only have macs because I build apps on them. I buy used and as inexpensively as possible. Using an old i5 for development currently.

I wanted to be an Apple fanboy, but having to rebuy critical software for even point releases because of stability killed that off for me long ago.

Best Apple I've ever owned (beyond my //e) was the Dual Processor Quicksilver. Case opened on the side, you had many upgrade options and it even looked nice (irrelevant to me but I'm sure that matters to some).

ARM will simply be the new PPC. You think things like supporting external graphics cards (yay they just got limited AMD support) and having high end rigs isn't what people want, especially in the gaming community?

I don't know where all this conjecture is coming from. Have you seen benchmarks of apple A11 chips? They have some of the best CPU technology in the world now. They are competitive with low end Intel chips already while using significantly less power.

Before they went to Intel, they were at the mercy of Motorola, which couldn't keep up with Intel.

The problem Apple had with Motorola was that Motorola couldn't get the chip yields they needed at high clock rates.

The problem Apple had with IBM was that IBM didn't care enough about power efficiency to make the chips viable in laptops. They also weren't that interested in fast iterations of incremental improvements.

When the G4 first game out, it was far, far ahead of x86. Apple offered it at 350, 400 and 450 MHz but shipped maybe a few hundred or a few thousand at 450 MHz and a few tens of thousands at 400 MHz. Those computers blew the Pentium out of the water. Intel eventually caught up and passed them purely on manufacturing ability.

Then the G5 came out, which was a beast of a processor. But it never came out for mobile, and IBM only upgraded the speed once or twice before Apple went for Intel.

Except PPC was Motorola and IBM, not Apple

Aww, young'uns.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC

PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM. PowerPC, as an evolving instruction set, has since 2006 been named Power ISA, while the old name lives on as a trademark for some implementations of Power Architecture-based processors.

Apple contributed heavily; they're the ones who basically invented Altivec.