Also, it will be interesting how Apples market share develops, as th AS could make the Macs much more attractive. Both from the performance and price and of course, because of the iOS compatibility.
Apple's pricing strategy over the past few years has been to reduce the entry-level costs of their devices thus increasing their marketshare, ecosystem lock-in and services revenue. It's the strategy they've employed with the entry level iPad, iPhone SE and Apple Watch SE, and I fully expect them to bring to same strategy to the Mac, now that they no longer have to pay Intel's profit margins.
We'll very likely see a MacBook in the $700 price range in the upcoming months. That would put the price of Apple's entry-level MacBook right around the that of an average notebook computer in the United States, while providing far better performance than their competitors in that price range (see A14 benchmarks). This would naturally provide Apple with a big marketshare boost in the consumer notebook space.
Ultimately nobody but Apple knows exactly what their pricing strategy will be with Apple Silicon based notebooks. However, if I were competing with Apple in this space, I'd be tremendously concerned.
On the software side you have Gatekeeper and SIP. On the hardware side you have T2, soldered RAM, their weird custom SSDs, and their lawsuits against hackintosh manufacturers.
Yes, there are still ways around some of them, but it's pretty obvious where they want things to go.
It seems unlikely to me that PC OEMs will just stand by and take it. Windows on ARM already exists and this may be the spark that really ignites that fire.
With Apple Silicon, the game changes a bit. Not only is there the prospect of the AS being really fast, as Apple is going to make a complete transition, software companies have to support AS, if they want to continue to sell to Mac users. And suddenly, any Linux user also has a great ARM platform to work on, via a VM running on the Mac.
This might even have a direct impact on the Windows software offerings. So far, they could sell to Mac users running a x86-VM. This will be no longer possible. As much as Mac users contributed to Windows verndors revenue, they have to either give up the Mac market, make a native Mac application or hope that Windows on ARM becomes available in a VM on the Mac. But then, they at least need to fully support Windows on ARM.
With smartphones it's not such big a problem cause you don't do anything productive on smartphones anyway.
With PC/laptops it's a big disadvantage I don't see changing in a few years just because of small performance advantages, even if the prices weren't an issue.
Those enormous piles of cash could build out a world-class service that would be attractive both to developers servicing iOS applications, and just to developers, period, a lot of whom use Macs.
That would indirectly take a chunk out of Intel's server dominance, and might get the other players thinking about whether Intel is the best platform for them to stick with as well.
> It wouldn't matter at all to either AMD or Intel until Apple starts supplying these chips to other OEM's. Till then, it will just be used in the walled garden of Apple products, which is the very thing that makes it very unattractive for many users.
Well, there is another possible path: if Apple Silicon is seen as a PoC, someone else could decide to pursue the server market with an Apple Silicon inspired ARM-based offering. Perhaps aimed at FaaS deployments or something similar.
The only x86 servers were running a mix of NT 4.0 and Windows 2000.
Apparently it worked.
One just needs to properly configure mount points and remote sessions.
There was hardly any difference between my X sessions and local development.
Developers! DEvelopers! Developers!
ARM should be in consumer space, millions of laptops for developers first running Windows and Linux
The only issue would be libraries available only in binary form for AOT compiled languages.
It wouldn't matter at all to either AMD or Intel until Apple starts supplying these chips to other OEM's. Till then, it will just be used in the walled garden of Apple products, which is the very thing that makes it very unattractive for many users.