Apple getting ready to ditch the Mac?

I am more "tech savvy" than most people, but I admit, I don't know a lot about Macs. (Switching to PowerPC shocked me; less so with the switch to Intel).

What I do know is that being "hitched" to Intel means that Apple will always have to pay extra for good graphics. This is probably really hitting home now that Apple has been able to continue to improve the graphics on the A-series of chips used in phones and tablets for "only" the cost of the employees. (Not that this cost is insignificant, it is just a "one time cost" as opposed to money going out the door for every unit sold.)

Are there any ARM cores out there today (or maybe unannounced) that have similar performance to a single i7 core ? I don't know. But, adding Apple designed graphics to a quad/octal core high performance ARM could greatly reduce the price of their notebooks.

Apple has a large and very enthusiastic customer base. It is pretty much the "go to" hardware for video and photo editing. But that has been slowly changing.

I do know this after 30+ years "in the business", it is getting more and more difficult to improve the performance of the existing chips. Performance improvements has always been based on finding a bottle neck and making it less of a bottle neck. Main memory access is today's biggest bottle neck (even with DDR4). Server chips are going to 4 way interleaving ($$$$) but that is not practical for most system. The quickest solution is adding more cache, preferable level 1 cache.

I always learn a lot from you great folks. I recently read that major corporations are running their whole system on Ipads, so it gave me pause to consider.

I believe that over the longer term, OSX and iOS will slowly merge into a single operating system. I would expect that to happen over a significant number of years, however. Once we see APPLE release a MAC with touch screen capabilities, the pace of change might start picking up.

LOT OF FAKE NEWS IN THE RECENT YEARS! As long as they are earning a good profit I don't believe they giving up!

2017 Fourth quarter results from Mac sales:

5.386 million units sold (10% year over year growth)
$7.17 billion revenue (24% year over year growth)

More importantly. What would an iPhone or iPad be without software? What devices are used for software development?

Tom

He is very much wrong on several points, such as iOS being "built from scratch". I've jail broken my iOS devices before, and they are very much UNIX based- I use the same commands I use on my Linux boxes.
If he had said that OS X was going to merge with iOS, he might have had a point, but Apple still makes a profit of the Mac line.

I suppose, but Apple is introducing a new iMac this month. Plus, consider the source -- John C Dvorak, whose other "predictions" include . . .

1984 (Macintosh introduced) -- "There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I don't want one of these new-fangled devices." (Computer Mouse)

2006 -- "Apple will switch to AMD in two years mark my words" (Apple switched to Intel)

2007 (iPhone Announcement) -- "Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone"

2010 (iPad Announcement) -- "the iPad is far from revolutionary. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! "