My sense is that years ago Cook realized that with Apple silicon on the horizon for use in Macs, there would be a time in the future where Mac revenue would decrease as customers would be holding onto Macs for longer periods of time, due to their excellent performance being good enough for most people.
Macs definitely retain their value much longer than PCs. My 2011 Mac mini held on for seven years, until the 2018 model was released, much longer than I had originally expected. As I have said elsewhere, my base model 2018 Mac mini was originally supposed to be a two-year "stopgap" until Apple Silicon was released, and I'm now on year five. As everyone and their pet muskrat knows, I've been rather troubled about needing a new computer, in the not too distant future. I'd typically be enjoying the rumormongering and resultant banter, but it's been more stressful than usual, whereas I would typically enjoy WWDC alongside everyone else here.
To compensate for that projected loss of revenue, Cook went full in on services, to the point where today it represents 22% of Apple revenue, and nicely fills in (and then some) for the Mac revenue downturn.
I suspect that, with considerable investment in new television and movie content, the margin on the Services division isn't as high as the more mature product categories. I see it as a long-term investment, which will be used to goose sales for Apple's other divisions, much as Amazon does with Prime. With Warner Bros. Discovery renaming HBO Max to simply "Max", I think that provides a gigantic opening for Apple to become the natural provider for premium content, compared to the shovelware that is found in Netflix, Hulu, and now apparently Max. The HBO brand had decades of quality associated with it, WBD is throwing that away, which gives Apple an excellent opportunity to fill that void. I don't currently subscribe to Apple TV+ (or any other streaming services), but would consider it, if Apple becomes the premiere content provider which I believe they wish to be.
As a side note, I'm going to address
@throAU's
post in this other thread, since it is related to this thread, and I didn't want parallel discussions going at the same time. This isn't to diminish what was written, for anyone who hasn't already, I suggest reading
@throAU's thoughtful and insightful post, and reply as seen fit. I appreciate hearing from folks who see things from a different angle.
Additionally, Apple had been burned and had to go through CPU transitions multiple times in the past. If some new cpu manufacturer comes out with a revolutionary product that's on the open market, you can guarantee Apple will be running their product stack on it internally until they can either replicate its performance or beat it - or buy it.
I appreciate the historical perspective and Apple's initial timeline for Apple Silicon. For those who have followed my Mac vs. PC saga, I believe I may have poorly communicated about my expectations from Apple. One thing that I failed to emphasize was how difficult this transition is, both because Apple is moving to an all-new architecture with Arm, but utilizing the latest nodes from TSMC. That's not an easy task, and I think that Johny Srouji and his team inside of Apple's skunkworks have done a remarkable job, considering the challenges they faced, both from global events, but also the gargantuan engineering task that they had to undertake. Also, massive credit to the folks working on Rosetta 2, which is so seamless in integrating x86 program support, that it's easy to forget how much work it took to accomplish nearly universal compatibility. That compares to Microsoft's efforts with Windows 11 and Windows-on-Arm, which hasn't been nearly as efficient. So, not only has Apple succeeded with the hardware aspects of the transition, but software, as well.
Going back to my personal perspective, I think that Apple has done an amazing job with CPU performance with the P-cores, E-cores, memory bandwidth, component integration and various accelerators which arrived much sooner than anything from the PC suppliers. As a result of Apple's vertical integration strategy, implementation was also swifter than what could be expected from Microsoft and its partners.
The one aspect where I have been personally skeptical has always been the GPU. I remember discussing this with
@leman over a year ago at the MacRumors forum, and our mutual concern that Apple would face difficulties in being competitive with midrange or higher graphics performance with standard PC desktops. I don't think anyone expects insane RTX 4090 levels of performance, but the recently released 4070 is highly efficient, and uses a tiny PCB. Ignoring Nvidia's obscene pricing, I think this is what Apple should be targeting for most of its desktop line. Teardown
courtesy of Gamers Nexus.
That's certainly the case for me with my M1 Studio and my modest needs. For me, it's good enough - and it will probably will be for the next few years.
While my bellyaching over this may seem excessive, it comes from a position of wanting Apple to succeed. Most of my concerns have centered around the delays of the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, but that product is symbolic of my plight in general. I will almost certainly not be purchasing the next Mac Pro, but will be looking at the mid-range desktop products that will follow it. The Mac Pro will inform us of Apple's plans for high-performance desktops going forward.
I am among the group that believes that Apple will not use AMD GPUs for graphics acceleration in the Mac Pro. I won't go into details on that again, but if nothing else, it goes against Apple's cultural norms. At the time that Apple Silicon was being planned, Nvidia had just screwed them over, and AMD had released the Vega series, which is hardly a standout generation. Those are just a couple of reasons why I believe Apple will stick with its own GPU architecture. When I asked
@Cmaier about it last year, he stated that he believed that Apple "likes their architecture", and that there is a good chance that Apple will produce a separate GPU die for a later M-series generation. (This was before he apparently received insider info from one or more old buddies inside of Apple, so this wasn't a leak.)
If Apple does implement third-party graphics cards with the Apple Silicon Mac Pro, that would likely mean that eGPU support would come for other models, as well. (This is not to be confused with GPGPU compute, but specifically regarding accelerated display graphics.) I'm using an eGPU right now, the Black Magic RX 580, which was certified and co-designed by Apple. An eGPU is and always will be a kludge, so it fits in my "never again" category, being a pain to deal with ever since I purchased it. I don't think Apple will go this route, and instead focus on improving its own GPUs. If Apple did go crawling back to AMD for GPU chips, then that would signal to me that Apple has no confidence in its own GPU offerings, and therefore PC would win my business by default. I would very much not like for that to happen, but this is one of the few areas that I don't see any wiggle room.
My two main concerns have been:
1. Can Apple provide enough GPU horsepower to take on upper mid-range PCs? Everything else about Apple Silicon is impressive, but they have been lacking in this metric, thus far. I do have to keep reminding myself that Apple Silicon is only 1.5 generations in, with the M2 series not even complete.
2. Can the Asahi Linux team successfully get Proton games running on Apple Silicon? I have always said that I don't need access to all Windows PC games, just enough to keep me satisfied. My favorite genre of games are turn-based isometric RPGs, and as a result of some bizarre happenstance, essentially all of them have a Mac version, with Baldur's Gate 3 being the most anticipated "AAA" gaming title in that sphere. I cannot think of a single isometric RPG that I want to play that doesn't support the Mac natively. For that, I am fortunate, and that covers about 80% of the games that I play. If that wasn't the case, then I'd have to go PC by default, but that is not an issue. It's the other 20%, such as games developed by Remedy studios, which are a stickler. I'm hoping that the Asahi Linux team continues to make progress in this regard; they've already succeeded far beyond what I had expected.
If those two things can come together, namely a potent homegrown Apple GPU, along with Asahi Linux Proton games support, then I think I will have my answer. I was quite pessimistic last month, but after talking through it with the posters here, I have become more patient about letting the final acts play out, with the help and advice from my friends here in this forum.
9to5mac.com
). Most of our customers at the beginning were defense/aerospace related.
TDP ratings on their chips trick people into believing their efficiency problem isn't as bad as it really is. Like "Wow, this 45W TDP chip is fast!" ignoring the 115W long-term boost state...
The one thing I’ll concede about the Mac lineup names though is that Pro/Max and Mac in various combinations can be a mouthful or repetitious … it’s not my favorite naming scheme but it works and could be so much worse, so whatever.