Why Apple silicon won’t be Microsoft’s $1 billion ARM chip dumpster fire.
Apple is probably the only company in the world who can pull it off for one very important reason.
A couple of months ago Apple announced their first line up of MacBooks with Apple designed ARM chips. This isn’t the first time a major tech company tried the move to ARM, but what eventually turned out to be one of Microsoft’s biggest failures, will most probably be one of Apple’s biggest wins.
Microsoft first dipped it’s toes into ARM chips back in 2011 with Windows RT on Surface RT. They did it not because they wanted to innovate, but because they wanted a piece of the iPad pie. They eventually ended up creating a confusing product without a clear use case, terrible performance and poor developer support that lost Microsoft close to a billion dollars. Apple on the other hand is determined not to repeat Microsoft’s mistakes.
First of all Microsoft’s product was slow, a lot slower than the products they were meant to be replacing. If you haven’t heard already from the hundreds of Youtube reviewers, these new Macs are fast. Not just Intel 9th gen to 10th gen incrementally faster, but FAST! Two to three times faster! A statement that many found difficult to believe during Apple’s announcement, but then realised was very true when they actually got their hands on one.
Is that speed at the cost of battery life?No! They run cooler, use less energy, and don’t even seem to break a sweat on tasks that users were told were impossible for thin and light devices. Nobody thought multiple stream 4K footage editing was going to be a thing on MacBook Air but here we are. They beat out most of Intel chips by a lot on a number of everyday tasks, from photoshop to programming, and these are just the first iteration of the entry level laptops. It really makes you think how much further we would be right now if Intel didn’t basically have a monopoly over the last 10 years.
So what’s the catch? You might think there has to be a catch. Well you are right, sort-off!
It’s very difficult to get Developers to believe in your product, and Microsoft learned that the hard way. Just like the Surface RT these Macs run on ARM architecture, instead of your normal run of the mill x86 architecture and programs have to run on different code. This essentially means that we would have to wait until developers actually get around to writing the code needed for these programs. Something that essentially never happened on Windows with Microsoft being the only developer who actually supported Windows RT. This made the Surface RT an alternative to the normal Windows OS that didn’t run 99% of the apps. To top it of Microsoft made it clear that it was going to continue to support normal Windows OS, which most users were already very happy with. This basically gave no incentive for the developers to switch over.
Things are different this time around.
First of all this is Apple! Whether you like them or not, over the years they have proven again and again that they are the best at getting everybody to follow along their vision. That trust and devoted customer base allows developers to allocate resources and time to a product that hasn’t had wide spread adoption with minimal risk.
Secondly, and this is the big one, it turns out these chips are so incredibly fast that actually running the old Intel programs through a translator is faster than it was on the Intel chips. Even games! There are now communities online devoted to finding games that these Macs can run that we wouldn’t even have dreamed of installing on the previous generation, even on translation. That’s just unheard of! The translator is called Rosetta 2 and it was developed specifically for this transition. This means that for any early adopters, buying these laptops isn’t a compromise, and the more users buy them the more support they will get from developers and faster.
Finally MacOS still runs exactly the same, with all the previous apps supporterd through Rosetta until they are native. Cupertino has also made it very clear from the beginning that after the 2 year transition period is over their end goal is to eventually kill off their Intel Mac lineup.
Microsoft is trying again with the Microsoft surface Pro X but it seems that they are repeating the same mistakes from almost a decade ago. Maybe Apple silicon is what they need to finally start taking their ARM products more seriously, but still I don’t think they can ever compete with Apple silicon head on.
The reality is that Apple is probably the only company in the world that can pull this kind of performance off and it’s not because they have better engineers or technology. It’s because of their insistence on total product manufacturing control allowing them to squeeze out as much performance as possible from their highly integrated chips. They are the only company in the world with this much control of what goes into their laptops and its to their great advantage.
What this means for the future of computing remains to be seen, but for the time being it doesn't seem to be anyone else that can even get close.
