#LIGHT MAC WORD PROCESSOR SOFTWARE#
#LIGHT MAC WORD PROCESSOR MAC#
#LIGHT MAC WORD PROCESSOR WINDOWS#

#LIGHT MAC WORD PROCESSOR MAC#

Will these systems fundamentally be Macs, but with Arm, or a different beast entirely, with a different flavor of Mac OS? When Apple moved to Intel it took the opportunity to overhaul its product line. Will it change the Mac in some fundamental way? Therefore it would be further out - like 2022 or later. What about a Mac Mini-esque system?Īs to whether it will make it as high as the MacBook Pro, much less the iMacs or Mac Pro, I think that might require a rejiggering of system architecture. It would make sense to debut it in an ultra-ultraportable - something lighter than a MacBook Air, for instance - though there's been speculation that it would more likely be a return of the 12-inch MacBook. It's almost a given that it will initially appear in MacBooks the big appeal of the hybrid-core, system-on-chip approach (aside from allowing Apple to split from Intel's roadmap) is battery savings and a cellular-modem friendly design. Right now, the rumor mill pegs product rollouts for mid-2021. When Tim Cook takes the virtual stage on June 22, if he does break the big news, here are the questions we hope we'll get answers to. But it still may not be fast enough to be worth the tradeoff of performance for a bit more battery life. Since Apple doesn't have to mix and match components with an operating system that weren't designed for it, I give it a better chance of success.

#LIGHT MAC WORD PROCESSOR WINDOWS#

Then there's the worry that Apple's move to this new processor may be as lackluster as the attempts we've seen to create Windows laptops running on the Qualcomm-equivalent platform. Plus, there's bound to be confusion among buyers, no matter how carefully Apple frames its message. Some of Apple's moves seem to start paving the way for a change to a new platform, such as finalizing the deprecation of 32-bit applications and the introduction of Catalyst in MacOS Catalina (for running iOS apps on MacOS), though a pending processor switch likely wasn't the driving force behind them.Įven though it might not take the same eight years to complete a changeover, we'll still be living in a more mixed environment for a while than we are now: Apple's three operating systems, iOS, iPadOS and MacOS, could conceivably turn into four, or at least three and a half. But it took about six years to complete that switch Apple didn't discontinue support for it until OS X 10.7 Lion and PowerPC systems weren't deemed 'obsolete' until 2013.

#LIGHT MAC WORD PROCESSOR SOFTWARE#

And the software tools for making the change should be much better now than they were then. So the idea isn't as much of a stretch as previous Apple moves, such as when Apple switched from the Motorola 68000 to the IBM PowerPC or when it began transitioning from that RISC platform to Intel x86 in 2005. Switching to new microarchitecture is a big step that can take years to develop and debug before it even reaches the desks of software developers, then another six months to a year - at least - to bring to market.Īpple provides its own Arm-based A-series Bionic chips for iPhones and iPads, and its T1 and T2 security chips are also based on Arm. The will it/won't it (again) speculation about such a move has been around for quite a while, but dropping the news on developers is the first public step to confirming it's a reality and making it happen. The big buzz right now, at least in the tech community, is that Apple may be ready to discuss shifting the brains of its Mac systems - away from CPU heavyweight Intel to under its own proprietary wing - with its developer community at WWDC on June 22.

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