Mac OS X and ARM
Back in 2010, a student by the name of Tristan Schaap wrote a thesis about porting Mac OS X 10.6 to run on the ARM architecture as a result of his internship at Apple for six months. The full details about this was brought to light a few days ago and I picked up on it from Apple Insider in their article about it. While the article it itself doesn’t say too much about the topic per say, it made me think about the whole OS X on ARM stuff again.
Some people believe that soon every Mac will have an ARM chip powering all the apps running on our Macs, be it a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro or iMac. They have accumulated a wealth of knowledge and very skilled personnel in the last couple of years and they make and design their own chips to some extent already. In some regards and aspects, the time could be approaching when Apple flips the big switch and moves everything over from Intel, just as it did with the big move from PPC to Intel a few years back.
The research and work Schaap did was in making Snow Leopard run on a Marvell ARM chip, which he succeeded in doing after some extensive work. Since this took place about two years ago, I have no doubt in my mind that Apple has a version of Mac OS X 10.7 humming away nicely on ARM and most likely have had it doing so for some time. Remember that the technical foundation of Mac OS X is a highly portable codebase that has been running on both x86 and PPC, probably a few more that I just don’t know about. If Apple is true to their form I believe they still work with the “just in case” mentality and have actively been porting Mac OS X to any architecture that could, at some point or another, in the future give the company a competitive advantage.
The real question in all this is if Apple deems the ARM architecture ready for prime-time in terms of mass deployment. While the current ARM chips do indeed slurp power at a very reasonable rate and perform nicely, they might not quite be on par with what Apple already offers in any Mac currently sold. As long as the trade isn’t a great step in the right direction in terms of power consumption and processing power, there won’t be a big switch. Not yet. Remember the reasons for moving away from PPC in 2005? Not just for the performance, but for the performance per Watt, essentially how much power you get out of the chip per Watt of power it consumes.
I see it as very realistic and quite possible for Apple to shift every Mac over to ARM in order to continue making them the best machines they can possibly be. Big moves like this has happened before and Apple is not one to shy away from difficult things. Products could be thinner and lighter, while still having good or even great battery life and not even need a fan to cool the internals down. Such a computer would definitely be one Apple would like to build.
Currently I see no other platform that could benefit Apple in the same way that the ARM architecture does, so perhaps the question is not so much about “if” Apple will build Macs with ARM, but rather “when” Apple will build Macs with ARM. Just don’t expect any such devices any time soon. Apple does what it pleases, when they deem the time right for it and that they can make some products that are really outstanding, not before.
