If not for Intel's 10nm debacle, Apple probably wouldn't have left. All of Apple's early-2010s hardware designs were predicated on Intel's three-years-out promises of thermal+power efficiency for 10nm, that just never materialized.
I hard disagree. The chassis and cooler designs of the old intel based macs sandbagged the performance a great deal. They were already building a narrative to their investors and consumers that a jump to in house chip design was necessary. You can see this sandbagging in the old intel chassis Apple Silicon MBP where their performance is markedly worse than the ones in the newer chassis.
That doesn’t make sense: everyone else got hit by Intel’s failure to deliver, too. Even if you assume Apple had some 4-D chess plan where making their own products worse was needed to justify a huge gamble, it’s not like Dell or HP were in on it. Slapping a monster heat sink and fan on can help with performance but then you’re paying with weight, battery life, and purchase price.
I think a more parsimonious explanation is the accepted one: Intel was floundering for ages, Apple’s phone CPUs were booming, and a company which had suffered a lot due to supplier issues in the PowerPC era decided that they couldn’t afford to let another company have that much control over their product line. It wasn’t just things like the CPUs failing further behind but also the various chipset restrictions and inability to customize things. Apple puts a ton of hardware in to support things like security or various popular tasks (image & video processing, ML, etc.) and now that’s an internal conversation, and the net result is cheaper, cooler, and a unique selling point for them.
I was thinking of that as cheaper but there’s also a strategic aspect: Apple is comfortable making challenging long-term plans, and if one of those required them to run the Mac division at low profitability for a couple of years they’d do it far more readily than even a core supplier like Intel.
Apple doesnt manufacture their own chips or assemble their own devices. They are certainly paying the profit margins of TSMC, Foxconn, and many other suppliers.
That seems a bit pedantic, practically every HN reader will know that Apple doesn't literally mine every chunk of silicon and aluminum out of the ground themselves, so by default they, or the end customer, are paying the profit margins of thousands of intermediary companies.
I doubt it was intentional, but you're very right that the old laptops had terrible thermal design.
Under load, my M1 laptop can pull similar wattage to my old Intel MacBook Pro while staying virtually silent. Meanwhile the old Intel MacBook Pro sounds like a jet engine.
The m1/m2 chips are generally stupid effecient compared to Intel chips (or even amd/arm/etc)... Are you sure the power draw is comparable? Apple is quite well known for kneecapping hardware with terrible thermal solutions and I don't think there are any breakthroughs in the modern chassis.
I couldn't find good data on the older mbpros, but the m1 max mbpro used 1/3 the power vs an 11th gen Intel laptop to get almost identical scores in cinebench r23.
> Apple is quite well known for kneecapping hardware with terrible thermal solutions
But that was my entire point (root thread comment.)
It's not that Apple was taking existing Intel CPUs and designing bad thermal solutions around them. It's that Apple was designing hardware first, three years in advance of production; showing that hardware design and its thermal envelope to Intel; and then asking Intel to align their own mobile CPU roadmap, to produce mobile chips for Apple that would work well within said thermal envelope.
And then Intel was coming back 2.5 years later, at hardware integration time, with... basically their desktop chips but with more sleep states. No efficiency cores, no lower base-clocks, no power-draw-lowering IP cores (e.g. acceleration of video-codecs), no anything that we today would expect "a good mobile CPU" to be based around. Not even in the Atom.
Apple already knew exactly what they wanted in a mobile CPU — they built them themselves, for their phones. They likely tried to tell Intel at various points exactly what features of their iPhone SoCs they wanted Intel to "borrow" into the mobile chips they were making. But Intel just couldn't do it — at least, not at the time. (It took Intel until 2022 to put out a CPU with E-cores.)
the whole premise of this thread is that this reputation isnt fully justified, and thats one I agree with.
Intel for the last 10 years has been saying “if your CPU isn't 100c then theres performance on the table”.
They also drastically underplayed TDP compared to, say, AMD, by taking the average TDP with frequency scaling taken into consideration.
I can easily see Intel marketing to Apple that their CPUs would be fine with 10w of cooling with Intel knowing that that they wont perform as well, and Apple thinking that there will be a generational improvement on thermal efficiency.
>Under load, my M1 laptop can pull similar wattage to my old Intel MacBook Pro while staying virtually silent. Meanwhile the old Intel MacBook Pro sounds like a jet engine.
On a 15/16" Intel MBP, the CPU alone can draw up to 100w. No Apple Silicon except an M Ultra can draw that much power.
There is no chance your M1 laptop can draw even close to it. M1 maxes out at around 10w. M1 Max maxes out at around 40w.
Being generous and saying TDP is actually the consumption; most Intel Mac's actually shipping with "configurable power down" specced chips ranging from 23W (like the i5 5257U) to 47W (like the i7 4870HQ); (NOTE: newer chips like the i9 9980HK actually have a lower TDP at 45w)
of course TDP isn't actually a measure of power consumption, but M2 Max has a TDP of 79W which is considerably more than the "high end" Intel CPU's; at least in terms of what Intel markets.
Keep in mind that Intel might ship a 23w chip but laptop makers can choose to boost it to whatever it wants. For example, a 23w Intel chip is often boosted to 35w+ because laptop makers want to win benchmarks. In addition, Intel's TDP is quite useless because they added PL1 and PL2 boosts.
Apple always shipped their chips with "configurable power down" when it was available, which isn't available on higher specced chips like the i7/i9 - though they didn't disable boost clocks as far as I know.
The major pains for Apple was when the thermal situation was so bad that CPUs were performing below base clock. -- at that point i7's were outperforming i9's because they were underclocking themselves due to thermal exhaustion; which feels too weird to be true.
That's not Apple. That's Intel. Intel's 14nm chips were so hot and bad that they had to be underclocked. Every laptop maker had to underclock Intel laptop chips - even today. The chips can only maintain peak performance for seconds.
> You can see this sandbagging in the old intel chassis Apple Silicon MBP where their performance is markedly worse than the ones in the newer chassis.
And you can compare both of those and Intels newer chips to Apples ARM offerings.
I dunno, they could have gone to AMD who is on TSMC and have lots of design wins in other proprietary machines where the manufacturer has a lot of say in tweaking the chip (=game consoles).
I think Apple really wanted to unify the Mac and iOS platforms and it would have happened regardless.
If Intel didn't have those problems, Intel would still be ahead of TSMC, and the M1 might have well be behind the equivalent Intel product in terms of performance and efficiency. It is hard to justify a switch to your inhouse architecture under these conditions.
Apple had been doing their own mobile processors for a decade. It was matter of time before they vertically integrated the desktop. They definitely did not leave Intel over the process tech.
Apple has been investing directly in mobile processors since they bought a stake in ARM for the Newton. Then later they heavily invested in PortalPlayer, the designer of the iPod SoCs.
Their strategy for desktop and mobile processors has been different since the 90s and they only consolidated because it made sense to ditch their partners in the desktop space.
> Apple has been investing directly in mobile processors since they bought a stake in ARM for the Newton. Then later they heavily invested in PortalPlayer, the designer of the iPod SoCs.
Not this heavily. They bought an entire CPU design and implementation team (PA Semi).
I mean, they purchased 47% of ARM in the 90s. That's while defining the mobile space in the first place, and it being much more of a gamble than now. Heavy first line investment to create mobile niches has empirically been their strategy for decades.
Apple invested in them for a chip for Newton, not for the ARM architecture in particular. Apple was creating their own PowerPC architcture around this time, and they sold their share of ARM when they gave up on Newton.
The PA Semi purchase and redirection of their team from PowerPC to ARM was completely different and obviously signaled they were all in on ARM, like their earlier ARM/Newton stuff did not.
Let's not forget Intel had issues with atom soc chips dying like crazy due to power-on-hours in things like Cisco routers, Nas and other devices around this era too. I think that had a big ripple effect on them to play a cog in their machine around 2018 or so.
Yes 10nm+++++ was a big problem, too.
Apple was also busy going independent and I think their path is to merge iOS with MacOX someday here so it makes sense to dump x86 in favor of higher control and profit margins.
Right. It made no sense for Apple to have complete control over most of their devices, with custom innovations moving between them, and still remain dependent on Intel for one class of devices.
Intel downsides for Apple:
1. No reliable control of schedule, specs, CPU, GPU, DPU core counts, high/low power core ratios, energy envelopes.
2. No ability to embed special Apple designed blocks (Secure Enclave, Video processing, whatever, ...)
3. Intel still hasn't moved to on-chip RAM, shared across all core-types. (As far as I know?)
4. The need to negotiate Intel chip supplies, complicated by Intel's plans for other partner's needs.
5. An inability to differentiate Mac's basic computing capabilities from every other PC that continues to use Intel.
6. Intel requiring Apple to support a second instruction architecture, and a more complex stack of software development tools.
Apple solved 1000 problems when they ditched Intel.
Ah yes. The CPU and RAM are mounted tightly together in a system on a chip (SOC) package, so that all RAM is shared by CPU, GPU, DPU/Neural and processor cache.
I can't seem to find any Intel chips that are packaged with unified RAM like that.
Apple switching to ARM also cost some time. It took like 2 years before you could run Docker on M1. Lots of people delayed their purchases until their apps could run
