Which Mac will be the first to house an Apple processor?

Nov 13, 2018

Really nice article from Dan Moren writing for Macworld. The points he makes are actually pretty solid : if the Mac is to switch to the A-series processors, which Mac will be the first to make that jump?

The arguments supporting the thesis that the MacBook will be the first one are pretty valid. The best is the one that would explain why the laptop lineup is so confusing right now - but maybe it’s especially valid just because it makes clarity in a confusing situation. The others are that it's fan-less like an iPad, it serves non-pro users who don't really care what's the architecture under the hood, it's thin and light and would gain much to have a longer battery life.

The ones supporting the thesis by which the Mac Pro will be the first are little less intriguing to me, even though there are some clues pointing in that direction. The first: the iPad Pro is opening the doors for pro apps on A processors, look at Adobe Photoshop coming to iOS and iPad Pro as recently demoed. The second: Anand Shimpi recently sat down to talk with Samuel Axon at Arstechnica; here's a brief excerpt:

The iPad Pro outperforms every MacBook Pro we tested except for the most recent, most powerful 15-inch MacBook Pro with an 8th generation Intel Core i9 CPU. Generally, these laptops cost three times as much as the iPad Pro.

"You typically only see this kind of performance in bigger machines—bigger machines with fans," Shimpi claimed. "You can deliver it in this 5.9 millimeter thin iPad Pro because we've built such a good, such a very efficient architecture."

Ok, nice work with the iPad Pro. What were you saying about bigger machines with fans? What if I gave you one?
Even if the prospect sounds fascinating, I can't see Apple beginning the transition with a product that serves a niche of customers that needs an extremely powerful machine with vast support for external expansion cards, plugins, software and more.

One last argument Dan makes in favor of the Mac Pro is: why sell a product with a fairly long lifecycle if you are to abandon its processors' architecture in a short while?
This reasoning almost got me, but then I went back and read this old article from April, 2017: in a rare move, Apple had opened up about the aging Mac Pro, saying the 2013 design was not good and that they were in the process of making something totally new, with a modular structure, "something that can be supported for a long time with customers with updates and upgrades throughout the years."
If this proves to be actual in a few months, Apple could begin releasing the Mac Pro with the most powerful set of processors Intel makes, and then upgrade it later once its processors have become widely supported and ready for such power requirements.

Many Apple technologies see first the light in one product and then transition to one other. Liquid Retina and the work done with anti-aliasing on round corners has come from the iPhone XR to the iPad Pro 2018 very quickly.
As Dan points out, the Mac is the only product in Apple's lineup not to have an inhouse designed processors. Moreover, Apple's supplier TSMC is the only that has succeeded in manufacturing 7nm processors, and in a quite large scale, something that would give it a competitive advantage on any other PC maker on its own.
Intel is also rumored to begin making 5G modems for Apple's iPhones, continuing a long partnership that extends beyond processors and that won't throw it out of the window once the processors transition is over.

Time will tell what is going to happen. By now, almost everybody is debating more on when and how than on if. I like the MacBook hypothesis more, but will be pleased to be wrong.

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