Smartphones and tablets powered by ARM-based chips in recent years, increased performance a multiple of the pace, while the x86 market has long forgotten about such progress. As a result, today reached a psychological turning point. For single-core performance CPU new Apple Fusion A10 processor used in the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus and reached the level of Intel Core processors for laptops. According to Geekbench tests, this is the new iPhone not only beat the competitors from the camp Android, but also be faster than any of the newly released MacBook Air, many Mac computers and even workstation Mac Pro 2013.
Of course, compare smartphones with desktops weird, but the fact says a lot about the development trend of the industry in recent years and the explosive growth of mobile market. For many years Intel dominated the consumer processors, but today its position here cannot be called sustainable.
In the modern world, which is slowly but surely shifting to the sector of mobile computing devices, Intel’s future becomes more vague, sure browser 3D News. Advertisers begin to invest in the mobile sector more and more funds, reducing investments in the area of advertising for PC — this is much faster than in the past, the abandonment of the market print advertising. And people get smart phones five times more often than a new PC.
In 2015, according to IDC, the market has been sold 1.43 billion smartphones against 276 million PC. Only one Apple in the last quarter of 2015 sold more iPhones (74.8 million) than personal computers, the whole industry together (71.9 million)! Already today, judging by mere numbers, the Apple A processors are at least as important as a large part of the x86 Intel chips.
But now that the A10 Fusion can compete with mobile Intel in performance, just a matter of the operating system stops Apple from running on their own laptops processors: optimized for macOS x86. But cupertina the company has sufficient resources to begin turning iOS into a universal platform. Promotion iPad Pro, perhaps only the first step on this path. In this step table such heavyweights as Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, already appear on iOS with very wide functionality.
An important advantage of a PC are still graphically rich game high-end. But this is only true if we are talking about Windows systems: macOS, this factor is far less significant. Apple continues to develop macOS, but today the majority of innovations come from the latest iOS. Thus, in many ways, macOS is a platform that exists for the sake of compatibility with old software, and at any time Apple may call it outdated, concentrating all forces on the development of iOS.
For the generation that grew up in the Golden era of PC, it is difficult to understand and accept a new world in which there was already a new generation of people, very far from the desktop. PC today gradually transformed into the likeness of the mainframe: it’s impressive, powerful and overall system, the need for which arises only in the case where it is necessary to solve very complex problems.
The market for high-end systems will not disappear: in a PC you can install productive multi-core processors, multiple high-end graphics cards, a huge array of drives. But the market for such systems will continue to shrink along with the growth capacity of mobile chips and mobile capabilities.
Apple explicitly reduces attention to the desktop market (perhaps because of dissatisfaction with the new Intel chips): many computers for a long time did not receive updates (e.g., MacBook Pro and Air and have not got the Intel chips Skylake). Microsoft even criticized the copertina lack of attention to the PC market. Perhaps this is another sign of Apple’s plans to switch on their own chips in Macs.