New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: What will Arm Macs mean?

Ask HN: What will Arm Macs mean?
5 by saltcod | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I'm trying to get a sense of how significant the transition to Arm will be. The spectrum of possibilities seems extremely wide. Some say it will be a massive performance gain, others say just an incremental jump. The benchmarks of the DTK Mac Minis that leaked this week reveal relatively unimpressive numbers, but of course don't reveal any of the true story — it's a limited machine, it's not the machine that will actually ship in a year's time, it's not even the chip that will ship with that machine etc etc etc. It tells us something, but not much it seems. I'm just trying to get a sense of what the Arm Mac future might look like. When I watch Youtube videos on my current Mini and the fan spins up almost immediately vs on my 3-4 year old iPad where there isn't even a fan, I feel like the performance gain has to be massive, not just incremental. Most people think the transition will mean faster, cooler Macs. But are we thinking like 10% faster? 25%? 50%? Think actual battery life in laptops will jump from ~4hrs to 8? 10? I keep hearing that this is a big deal. But just how big?

Comments