No it's not. I like MacOS and use their laptops, but Apple proprietary approach does not work for me when it comes to desktop. Their development lifecycle must be very long if they missed advancements in the CPU space. Ryzen to the masses.
It boggles my mind that Apple hasn't switched to AMD Ryzen yet. Lower cost for them, more cores/higher overall performance for their customers. What's not to like?
But no, they'd rather try and sell people $20,000 Xeon Mac Pros with half the cores of an AMD Threadripper and like 4x the price.
This is a unique situation though. Intel is now years behind in their process nodes. Ryzen right now is already significantly better than any Intel CPU. M1 has been released which trounces all of those and PC manufacturers now have to compete with Apple in a way that they haven't really before. I don't remember Apple ever being this competitive in performance and they're going to take the lead once the Macbook Pros are released. The only way for manufacturers to keep up is a top-to-bottom switch to Ryzen.
So I do think we're going to see a big shift towards Ryzen, since I'm not sure how Intel could possibly entice manufacturers to stick with them when they haven't been able to deliver in years.
Great marketing. I wonder the sales difference if they were also selling Macs with current generation AMD Ryzen chips manufactured on a modern TSMC node.
Given that Apple is tightly coupled with Intel for now, I would assume that they did not expect AMD to deliver great new CPUs and did not create the Mac Pro to compete with them in mind IMO.
My only concern here is that the Mac line still only represents 10% of Apples revenue, and they might not give these desktop processors the attention that a supplier like intel or amd would to their own processors. I hope I'm wrong but I feel like Apple has been making serious missteps in the mac line for the past 10 years because its no longer their core product.
If you look at Intel's mediocre-at-best improvements over the last few years, it makes perfect sense that Apple want to move to their own silicon. They also could have moved to AMD, but they probably started thinking about this move before Ryzen happened, and given Apple already make great chips for iPads, it's no great stretch to put them in MacBooks too.
Sure, it gives them more control, but they already had the ability to exercise platform control on x86. They could have disabled Boot Camp etc on the T2 chip Macs if they wanted to, it's not about the CPU.
Apple is all about mobile now, even for computers. So they don’t care that AMD has great desktop CPUs, they need great mobile (laptop) CPUs too. The Ryzen 4750U is a great laptop chip, but I can pretty much guarantee that in perf/watt the new Apple Silicon CPUs will blow them out of the water.
I don’t really buy this. Apple, in general, seems to be shockingly bad at software. They have a design aesthetic, they’re pretty good at ideas, and they are able to execute. They accumulate plenty of technical debt, though, and they are bad at maintaining their software portfolio.
Intel throws a lot of money at software, much of it open source, and this has played out fairly well for them. AMD is far, far behind in this regard.
I fully expect a cutting edge implementation of macOS on ARM, and I fully expect it to languish post release.
I agree with you, but at this point it's leaving people wondering if they're almost abandoning the Mac itself. It feels like an after thought instead of a product line.
Not every release needs to be a groundbreaking product, but I'd be pretty happy seeing at least some newer CPUs/GPUs across the product line. Keep up with what Intel has.
Yes that is why I also wrote in another reply [1] it doesn't make much sense financially. And I dont quite see how it make any sense technically either. Even if Apple refuse to use AMD CPU for whatever reason Intel's investor roadmap ( Which tends to be more accurate then what they shared to consumers ) shows they are finally back on track. ( It will still take a year or two to catch up though )
Software is expensive, writing, testing , QA.
On the hand, they are spending billions on stupid Apple TV Dramas, I guess they might as well make their own CPU for high end Mac.
Does Apple actually invests into laptop/desktop development? They are usually couple of years behind competition (DDR3, Sky Lake chips). While their ARM chips are heavily developed.
I think they decided long time ago that ARM is good enough, and are waiting for train to stop to change the engine. It is not about Intel quality, but about saving money and independence. AMD is not even considered as an alternative...
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