Just watched the keynote stream, and I like what I saw! It looks like the Mac will be moving to impressive custom Apple silicon, with the first ARM-based Macs due to ship at the end of this year or early next year. I'd like to see the Mac Pro come back down to a reasonable price with some heavy-duty Apple silicon at the heart of it, otherwise I suppose I'd look at getting a new mini. Either way, they demonstrated some impressive performance already on a developer platform running an "A12Z" chip, I think what's in the iPad Pro at present, or something very close to it. They'll have a new Rosetta 2 to provide compatibility with Intel-only apps, and that looks like it will perform admirably. They demonstrated Maya with it, as well as Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and both ran very nicely. It's really impressive, and it looks like they'll at least match high-end Intel (and AMD?) offerings at lower power consumption. I suppose most people won't care. Most are fed up with Apple, and even I use Linux on AMD as my primary platform of choice today, but this looks to be an impressive move and one that is long overdue. I'm wondering if this might also spur the rest of the PC industry to embrace competing ARM-based or otherwise more power-efficient silicon down the line. I think it's kind of silly to have PCs loaded with massive cooling solutions, and I feel that the old x86 architecture is holding the PC back in some ways. I'd like to see a new generation CPU architecture come to PCs as well as Macs.
