For now the rumor of ARM serves the same purpose as when Intel's team saw AMD people leaving Apple HQ when negotiating the x86 migration.

Apple's gradual fusion of iOS and MacOS experience/ecosystems (big things like AppStore & iCloud and small things like switching the Y-axis of laptop/trackpad to match iPhone/iPad's touch interface) will make the eventual transition a non-issue because of things like universal binaries and/or platform specific downloads.

Jacob

Exophase (exophase.delete@this.gmail.com) on August 3, 2014 10:06 pm wrote:
> Yuhong Bao (yuhongbao_386.delete@this.hotmail.com) on August 3, 2014 2:24 pm wrote:
> > http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/08/03/macintel-the-end-is-nigh
>
> Feel like I've seen this one several times now, and he repeats a lot of the usual fallacies.
>
> Like oh, Apple is paying $300+ for CPUs because that's what Intel Ark says - no, probably not,
> just look at Acer chromebooks that cost barely more than what Ark says their CPU costs. I'm
> sure Intel gives Apple a much lower price, and will continue to negotiate as necessary to keep
> their business. And this is something Intel will be able to afford to do more and more as they
> grow their manufacturing cost advantage over Apple fabbing with Samsung or TSMC.
>
> And Apple has a killer desktop CPU because they can just take Cyclone and clock it at 3+GHz.
> Not considering at all that the signs that point to the uarch being designed around much lower
> frequencies instead of merely being scaled down, hence why it has such high perf/MHz.
>
> And throw in the old x86-tax for good measure, despite being barely present in a chip of Haswell-level
> complexity. But then don't even so much as gloss over the tax for emulating x86 on ARM, which
> is an inevitability for a lot of software for a while, and really a pretty big deal.
>
> There's more of a point in demonstrating Apple's eagerness to control as much of the stack as possible,
> albeit most of this effort hasn't really hit the Macs yet. And that Apple can better align their own
> SoCs with their products and development schedules. But when push comes to shove, there is no way Apple
> is going to release a Mac product that is inferior to the older ones in either perf or perf/W in pretty
> much any significant number of use cases, and I'm pretty confident that that's what they'll get right
> now. The most I could see happening is introducing a new class of Mac that fits in between the iPads
> and Airs, but still runs MacOS or at least something closer to it in interface than iOS. At least to
> start with. I can't see replacing Airs outright being a near term item, much less Pros.