Yeah, I’m kind of stoked / apprehensive to find out what is going to happen with this.
I’ve been cycling back and forth between WoW on a PC gaming rig and iMac for years (been on my gaming rig the last five years), and the itch is returning for a beautiful elegant iMac as my primary home machine, once again.
So, on one hand I’m stoked about the rumors of an iMac refresh with possible AMD Navi chips on the top end (hopefully with somewhere remotely in the ballpark of RTX 2080 performance on 4-5K).
On the other hand, this impending ARM conversion has me nervous. I was all onboard with the PowerPC-to-Intel switch because it brought Macs in-line with the industry standards and really helped to take Mac acceptance among developers to the next level (certainly saving Mac as a platform).
However, this is different. This will be pushing away from standard x86-64 architecture into a mobile-driven world. This is a hugely risky move for the Mac (not necessarily for Apple as a whole, being as Macs are now just a fraction of their business). It could pay off in the long term and force the entire industry to look at wider ARM use (Microsoft tried and failed to push this). On the other hand, it could backfire and the Mac platform could lose most of its developers and power users.
I mean, let’s ask the brutal question here (one which of course even Blizzard can’t answer right now), but would Blizzard be willing to rebuild their current Mac lineup for ARM architecture? Remember that there is a limit to how much they are willing to do. Consider Overwatch.
Could we be looking at a future where Blizzard and other major developers start having to disclaim, “Support for Intel Macs only,” as we watch the Intel Mac lineup shrink over time?
Does ARM Mac become an exclusive App Store-only club?
So yeah, this concerns me greatly. Even if we get all we could possibly want in this year’s Mac lineup (that is to say machines able to run well at 5K), does the platform have a future with ARM?
These aren’t rhetorical questions, either. I think the entire industry is waiting to find out. If Apple is successful and a large market share eats-up ARM Macs, then we may actually see a shift in the Windows world towards ARM, as well. (Unlikely, in the short term, but possible down the road, as laptop vendors have tended to follow Apple’s design lead in most other ways.)