Apple Mac: Intel and Arm's PC ecosystem competition enters a white-hot stage

Intel said it will continue to support Macs during the transition period.

Intel publicly responded to its "breakup" with Apple.

Intel and Apple's architecture cooperation on Mac started in 2005, and it has been 15 years so far. At the recent WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), Apple officially announced that its Mac computers would abandon Intel chips and turn to self-developed chips based on Arm architecture, which inevitably led to many speculations from the outside world, including doubts about Intel's architecture capabilities.

In response, Intel said it would continue to support Mac during the transition period, while emphasizing that its processors are still the best in the industry.

How will Intel adjust after losing Apple?

Apple is an important customer for any partner. For example, Intel supplies chips to Apple for Mac products. Its shipment of several million units per quarter can undoubtedly greatly boost the sales of underlying chips.

After breaking off cooperation with Apple, Intel will undoubtedly have to make some adjustments.

In response, Intel pointed out in a statement that Apple is a customer across multiple business areas and Intel will continue to provide support in other technologies.

At the same time, it said, "Intel will remain focused on providing the most advanced PC experience and a wide range of technology choices to redefine computing. PCs equipped with Intel chips, such as the upcoming PCs designed based on the Tiger Lake mobile platform, can provide the best experience in the areas that matter most to customers around the world, and are also the most open platform for developers, both now and in the future."

What this means is that Intel will continue to delve deeper into the PC field, develop more customers, and at the same time, improve the open ecosystem of its own technology platform while continuously improving performance.

Why did Apple Mac abandon Intel and choose Arm?

In fact, in the PC field, Intel's architecture and chip capabilities are undoubtedly top-notch, but why would Apple give up Intel?

Judging from the information revealed, Apple’s move is mostly related to its strategic layout.

Statistics show that in the first quarter of 2020, Apple ranked fourth in shipments and was the largest decline among the top five, with shipments of only 3.219 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 21.0%. Apple's PC market share also shrank, from 7.0% in the first quarter of 2019 to 6.0% in the first quarter of 2020.

It has to be said that with the changes in the market, the competitive advantage of Apple Mac is gradually disappearing. Although it is not Apple's largest profit-making entity, as one of Apple's core businesses, Apple should also make adjustments.

Since its development, Apple Mac has only changed its architecture three times. The last time such an architecture switch was at WWDC in 2005, when Jobs announced that Mac would gradually abandon PowerPC processors and switch to Intel.

It was also in that year that Intel and Apple began their long-term collaboration.

In the years of cooperation with Intel, what Apple has been doing is to build its own upper-level application ecosystem based on chip architecture capabilities, from system, App to UI interface optimization. However, it is a fact that the sales gap between Apple Mac and PC with Windows system is getting bigger and bigger. The reasons are naturally closed ecosystem and the inability to significantly improve performance.

The biggest feature of the ARM architecture is that it has a relatively open ecosystem and has stronger performance on the mobile side, but its performance on the PC is not comparable to Intel's architecture. Considering this point, we can naturally guess why Apple chose to develop its own chips based on the ARM architecture. First of all, choosing to develop its own chips can make up for the slight performance deficiencies of the ARM architecture through design. At the same time, based on the ARM architecture design, it hopes to unify the ecosystem of its mobile devices and PCs, and may even move towards openness.

It can be said that this is the biggest update in recent years. From adopting ARM architecture, developing its own chips, introducing other content ecosystems to integrating software and hardware capabilities, Apple is clearly moving towards a more concise and open approach.

Intel and Arm's battle for the PC market

Apple's choice of Arm is a major success for Arm.

Since the first news came out in 2011, Arm has been competing openly and secretly for Intel's PC market share. First, it took over the tablet market between mobile phones and computers, and then gradually penetrated into the folding notebook market. There have been continuous news about the release of Arm architecture laptops. Arm has never given up.

Now, Arm has finally won this big customer. In the competition with Intel in the PC ecosystem, Arm is beginning to win.

In fact, there are many controversial views on Arm's entry into the PC market. Since the attempt began in 2008, the ARM architecture has not really entered this market for more than ten years. It was not until the past two years that Huawei, Amazon AWS, Marvell, Ampere, etc. began to launch new server chips designed based on the Arm architecture.

Objectively speaking, Intel has been able to dominate the PC market for a long time and no one can shake it. Intel's architectural strength is not something that ordinary competitors can surpass. The battle between Arm and Intel in the PC market is likely to continue for some time.

At present, judging from various news, the situation is not favorable for Intel. Arm, which has been deploying on the mobile side, may really have the possibility of taking over a large piece of the PC/server market in the future.