In a late-day news kerfuffle, Bloomberg reports that Apple is considering switching its chips in future MacBooks and iMacs from Intel to ARM. Rumor has it that the company is looking for ways to replace its Intel processors in its Macs with chips based on designs in its iOS devices.
Bloomberg says that the chips used in its iPhone and iPad will some day be powerful enough to run larger machines, like iMacs and MacBooks. And that makes some sense; with tablets and smartphones becoming more or less replacements for computers, Apple may want to unify its chip platform. In five years, according to Bloomberg, if Apple wants a “seamless experience” across all of its devices – including televisions! – it will want all of those disparate devices running the same chip architecture.
Take this information with a grain of salt, since Bloomberg’s source is “people familiar with the company’s research.” We’re a bit skeptical, too. But while we don’t think it will happen overnight, there is a possibility that this could happen within the next five years. We don’t expect Intel to go down without a fight, however. The chipmaker has been furiously trying to break into the smartphone and tablet market, which is now held by rival ARM processors, and has made great strides toward designing powerful chips that suck up less power and don’t require loud fans to stay cool. Apple sold 4.9 million laptops and desktops last quarter.
What do you think? Will Apple really leave Intel for a unified ARM structure across all its devices, or is this just Apple nerds creating rumors due to sheer boredom between new iPad mini releases and we’re still waiting for new on the iMac’s release?
Maybe the macbook air will use ARM… hate to switch to PCs in the future because the lack of powerful CPUs on mac computers.
I think this was already evident when Apple switched to non-Intel processors in iPhones and iPads, a clear indication their route will depart from Intel one good day. A second indication was Lion, then confirmed by ML, with the clear tendency to bring the two OSs closer and closer.
Next year we might see the first MacBookAir running OS X 10.9 with ARM inside.
This is something I anticipated some time ago in the Romanian fora macuser.ro and macforum.ro. It is clear that Apple wishes a return to dedicated processors as in PPC era. Why? Because they are different, and they wish to become different. The migration to intel was due to a deadend with PPC processors, mainly because G 5 could not have a better out put for energy/performance ratio. As soone as ARM is capable of better performance with Mac OS and iOS, it is beyond any doubt Apple will switch to ARM without much regret.
if it brings down the cost of production for apple and lowers the cost for the consumer then why not
Not sure Apple will actually lower prices because of this…might just result in a greater profit margin for Apple?
This may be true, Apple has kept prices as high as possible, a good attraction for snobs.