ARM devices have become associated with App Stores, touchscreens, locked-down and dumbed-down systems. And there's a very real risk that Apple will take this as the opportunity to completely lock out any software that's not been censored and taxed by their App Store.

I personally doubt they will do that. If anything I could see them making iPadOS more capable, moving more of the consumer market there, and making the Mac line even more suited to pro users with more compute power and more OS capability.

BTW the ARM move could fit into this. I wonder how a 32 or 64 core A series ARM64 chip in a laptop form factor would perform? Our company runs some infrastructure stuff on Cavium ThunderX chips with 96 ARM cores and the performance is comparable to high end Xeons for very parallelizable load. The Apple A series core is far superior. I'd take 64 of those in a laptop.

It would be so fast I'm sure it would have no issue running transpiled X64 code at perfectly adequate speeds. Could probably even run X64 VMs in emulation at speeds that were at least quite usable for testing and dev.

From the start, it was clear that a decent arm chip in a laptop is very usable. Paired with an SSD, and more ram, it would be killer.

MacOS would need some care to make it less heavy in terms of background consumption, but I don’t see that as being beyond Apple’s reach. Windows is a different matter, not sure what MS can bring to the table there.. The work being done right now in porting iOS applications to work on macOS clearly points to a strategy being developed.

Think it’s going to be an interesting couple of years.

Random example: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/01/2018-ipad-pro-benchmark...

I hook my 2018 MacBook Pro up to a 4K TV to present to a meeting and the battery goes down to about 35% after two hours.

iPad apps are expected to have massive buttons for big fat fingers. Pro software requires a mouse and a keyboard, a much more precise and flexible combination.

(Yes, you can get the Apple Pencil and an iPad keyboard. But it's a bit chicken-and-egg, people don't have the accessories because there's little software that uses them. And there's no software as few people have the accessories...)

I want my iPad Pro to be a good workstation, but the reality is that will probably never happen. However, if Apple uses the same hardware to run MacOS, then it could happen. Yes, they would need to tack on some more I/O (or at least release a first-party dock) and RAM, but they could still make a very thin and fast device that would blow Intel laptops out of the water. I would not buy one of these because I don't really care for MacOS. (I use the iPad as my "laptop" because it doesn't really require any customization or maintenance. I have my SSH key on there, that's about it. I use it as a dumb terminal and it's great for that, but with the right software, it would also be a very capable computer.)

I get Google started it to run their webapps.

But it doesn't seem technically infeasible to package and sell a set monthly subscription price, that gets you a lazy-allocated machine on GCP.

Spin up beefy software, your computer recognizes "this is more than I can do", checks current networking availability, and starts running the app remotely.

I know there are offerings like this, but it seems like a killer feature if it had full OS integration.

Just plop an overlay icon somewhere in the window to clearly note it's running remote. (Thereby letting users reason through why it occasionally behaves weirdly)

It seems an ironic perspective given that "Time is the only real currency we have" is on the HN front page!

I specifically mentioned it because Apple (1) has cloud resources, whether they see it as an offering or not, (2) has full stack integration with their products, & (3) has historically prized ease of use and packaging new technology in a slick way.

"Underpowered Mac / iPad / etc, now with iPower transparent cloud compute" seems a unique way to leverage their strengths and abilities in ways that Google, MS, and Amazon lack the capabilities to match.

Sounds like Silicon Valley thinking. If you're used to massive salaries (and massive housing costs), you probably won't care about relatively small subscription costs.

But for the majority of people elsewhere in the world, those costs really do add up. There's very little appeal in renting a PC or games console in the cloud, then getting a sub-standard PC or console experience for an ongoing fee.

Point being that expecting someone with that level of disposable income to having savings that allow for capital expenditures (instead of amortized subscriptions) isn't likely either.