If there's one rumor that comes up every year like clockwork is that Apple is going to finally ditch the Intel chips and its Mac lineup and go with something else.
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Usually that means arm based chips that Apple would design itself kind of like what it does for the iPhones and the iPads, for those products Apple designed The hardware, they designed the operating system and they designed the chips that power them.
So it's taking that concept of just doing everything and bringing it to the max which currently has Apple design hardware and the apple operating system, but currently use Intel chips which they did not make, that means they're reliant on another company, which is something Apple does not like.
Do so of course that our members back this time the story is that Apple will announce this great transition at the virtual 2020 version of WWDC, the being annual Apple Developers Conference.
And that's happening online this year rather than in person because nobody's going anywhere in person.
And the story is that these new arm based Mac's will start rolling out Maybe in 2021, so not right away.
Now I'm old enough to remember the last time Apple did this back in 2006, when the company shifted from the old power PC chips to Intel chips and that actually kicked off, the device that we know as the MacBook and then the MacBook Pro and later the MacBook Air Those were some of the very first laptops I ever reviewed for c/net.
So why announce it now and wait until next year to ship it?
Well, that's because Ditch Intel's x86 platform for something different is actually really complicated.
And the people have to worry about that besides just Apple are number one, the people who make all the software after use.
And of course, all the.
People who use those software apps on their Mac's a lot of these software apps are very mission critical for your work.
And that's why you have to give developers at least six to 12 months of runway to develop new compatible versions of their programs.
If you're a gigantic company like Adobe, that's probably no problem.
You've you've maybe been working on this for years, but for a lot of other companies WWDC may be the first time you officially hear about this.
And then you have a clock ticking to get your software ready for the new hardware.
Otherwise, people will have new Macs and they won't be able to run your software or they'll have to wait for some sort of emulation, which Apple may also promise because emulated software is usually not as efficient, doesn't run as well as the as the real version.
So that's usually a pretty ugly workaround for people.
So software makers and people who rely on that software.
They're stuck waiting for one of two things or maybe both things, emulated the software that's complicated to do and can cause performance to take a nosedive and may not be a satisfactory experience for everyone.
Or new versions of [UNKNOWN] where, outside of a handful of really tight-handed companies, you may be struggling to get the resources together to put together in a timely fashion.
And heaven forbid you, as a consumer or a business owner, rely on some older software that's not supported anymore Good luck getting an arm version of that.
But the idea of Apple switching over to arm chips for its racks.
It's not totally unprecedented, in fact that the place we can look to, to see kind of what happens when you do that, and that is the occasional attempts over the last few years of PC makers to switch to arm chips.
We've seen that in the HP Envy x 2 the Asus Novago and a handful of other models.
What we've learned is that most of those PC makers never came back to do round two with those systems.
Why is that?
It turns out that in those windows cases, sticking a Qualcomm Snapdragon basically a phone processor and a laptop was not always a great idea.
In the models we tested over the past few years, we saw lower performance We saw lots of software and compatibility.
Microsoft tried to work around that a little bit with something called Windows 10 s which is a very limited version of that operating system that only some software could run on and we did not see that big bang.
Battery life gains that were promised by these arm based laptops, Windows laptops, some of them had slightly better battery life, but it wasn't knock it out of the park and the prices were not really that much lower.
So it was hard to see reason why people would want that.
Now Apple may be a different case entirely.
Industry watchers hope that those arm based Macs will actually be faster than the Intel ones they're replacing and may of course have better battery life.
If Apple can be in charge of the chip architecture and the operating system and the hardware well, then they can optimize everything to their heart's content.
In a way that no other computer making company can do, and you can certainly count on some sort of performance benefit from that, but here's one more crazy idea, people with computers For commercial use, whether you're buying a fleet of IMAX or your animation production studio or anything else, they like being able to get the same thing or very nearly the same thing, same set of components and slip it right into their existing infrastructure when they go to buy new machines.
Let's say they have a new employee, they're hiring, that employee needs to get the same thing as everybody else, so everybody can work together.
That is why there's a certainly not unreasonable chance that Apple could introduce and start selling these new arm based Mac systems, as early as next year, but at the same time continue to sell the old reliable Intel systems at the same time, and you could choose.
Do you want the arm version?
Or do you want the Intel version to go with the stuff you already have and how it works and all your software works with it.
But maybe you get a battery life if it's a laptop or a performance boost from the arm versions, at least in software that has been updated for it.
Maybe we'll find out what's going to happen at WWDC on June 22, and maybe we won't
