Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke about it “a historic day for the Mac” when he announced the program in the WWDC 2020 keynote silicone. It was a change in the hardware architecture of its entire line of Mac personal computers, which will replace Intel x86 processors within three years. in favor of their own designs under the ARM-licensed RISC architecture.

Two years later, and based on Mac sales data, analysts believe so Apple is meeting planned goals: avoid dependence on external technologies; maximum control for software and hardware integration as well as cost savings. The first ARM Macs with the M1 chip sold at a very good pace, and analyzes of the new equipment with the M2 SoC confirm that the Cupertino firm continues to develop very well, at least in terms of the performance of its SoCs compared to Intel processors.

It must be said that the idea of ​​bringing ARM to computers is not new, and the most interesting example is Microsoft, since it started trying it more than ten years ago with the Surface RT tablet. It was a fiasco that caused $900 million in losses and, according to Redmond gossip, a definitive fall from grace for then-CEO Steve Ballmer. microsoft eventually consolidated significantly the Surface line, but subsequent attempts at “Windows on ARM” ended in failure.

The reasons remain the same as they were a decade ago: serious performance issues (despite improvements in the Qualcomm chips used) and the inability to properly run common Win32 applications in Windows. And to make this type of hardware transitions that involve a change in architecture is not easy at all. Many are called and few are chosen, but why does Apple manage to bring ARM to the PC and not the rest of the manufacturers? We conduct a situational analysis.

1.- Experience with ARM

Apple has experience with ARM that no other semiconductor manufacturer or system vendor has. It should be remembered that those from Cupertino were involved in the development of this architecture shortly after Acorn Computer launched it in the early 1980s. In fact, the ARM6 was the engine behind the Apple Newton PDA. It was a sales failure and lost to other digital assistants of the time such as Palm, but its development was a prelude to what was to come with iOS.

And if Apple didn’t continue as a quasi-founder of ARM, it was because Acorn was worried that Apple’s presence would push other manufacturers to take advantage of their development. It was then that he decided to found a new company called Advanced RISC Machines (ARM), which is in charge of the product design of this architecture, today licensed to hundreds of manufacturers.

Among the big tech companies, Apple is the first to go with ARM and arguably the best performing. It licenses the design of its own chipsets and outsources manufacturing to a “neutral” company such as foundry TSMC. The result is hundreds of millions of iPhone mobile phones, iPad tablets or wearable devices sold to date. Access to the PC was only a matter of time.

2.- Very few configurations

Apple doesn’t suffer from the “fragmentation” problem like other platforms like Android or Windows because it doesn’t have too many hardware designs to support. This is a big advantage for optimizing the macOS operating system for use on any architecture. Apple knows exactly which model of Mac to build and how many different hardware designs it needs to support, making it much easier to design and customize performance and user experience.

in the face of Windows ecosystem is a monster which complicates its support by Microsoft. There are hundreds of models from dozens of different manufacturers and a huge number of peripherals, accessories and applications to support, many of which are legacy from previous generations that Microsoft has not moved on from.

This variety of hardware and software makes it much more difficult to ensure reliability, performance, application compatibility and timely updates for each computer. Something that Apple achieves, although it’s admittedly much easier.

3.- Emulation hardware

One of the big problems ARM PCs have had under Windows so far has been performance. Microsoft’s SQ2 SoC, built in collaboration with Qualcomm, is a powerful chip on paper, but it doesn’t handle emulation well even on notable devices like the Surface Pro X, which suffers from lag, stuttering, program crashes, other crashes, and significant generalization. instability.

This is not the only problem with SQ2. The ARM chips that manufacturers use to build Windows laptops are not optimized for emulating x86 applications. And this is where Apple makes a difference, as its M SoCs for PCs have a specific chip for emulation. In other words, they translate x86 code according to the hardware, resulting in better application compatibility, overall software stability, and much better performance than Windows on ARM offers.

The performance differences between the M1 and SQ2 are large in Apple’s favor across all benchmarks. The M2s are already hitting the market, and improving Apple’s own designs will be a constant going forward. We don’t see the same progress from Microsoft or the manufacturers that work with Windows.

4.- Full control of hardware and software

In Microsoft’s defense, it doesn’t have Apple’s big advantage: a closed ecosystem that it completely controls. Apple creates the operating system, designs the hardware to run it, installs its own apps, and even has the final say on what can or cannot be installed on your computer. This allows Apple to consistently control the experience, including the transition to ARM-based devices, on which it spends the most effort, successfully.

Microsoft cannot afford such a luxury. You can’t focus all your resources on developing Windows for ARM because you have other major platforms and a plethora of components, peripherals, and accessories at your disposal. If Apple does not license macOS to any other manufacturer, in Windows the user can build his own PC and install applications of any type regardless of the source. Windows today is a behemoth ecosystem of new and legacy hardware and software to support.

5.- Support for developers

Another big reason ARM Macs perform better than Windows PCs is software support. Never mind that the 30% commission and running the App Store is being challenged to be the most profitable digital app store on the planet and the most attractive to developers. And it’s because Apple supports creators like few manufacturers and he put all the meat on the grill when switching to ARM.

On the one hand, the company promised to convert existing mobile apps to Mac easily and in a very short time with Xcode 12, a solution that offers native compilers, editors and debuggers. In addition to making it easier to convert apps to run nativelydeveloped Rosetta 2 virtualization technology for developers to port existing iOS and iPadOS apps to new Macs without modification.

You can also potentially run Linux and Windows and use Universal 2 application binaries to create a single application that will run on both ARM-based Macs and existing Intel-based Macs, which number in the millions. And going forward, we can take for granted a single operating system capable of driving any Apple device or computer and a single application store once a common hardware architecture under ARM is achieved.

Microsoft doesn’t have that much developer appeal, nor has it been able to push new Universal Windows apps to cause a split with Win32. For Windows 11, the Windows Store has been developed to be more profitable for developers, more visually appealing, more functional overall and more useful for purchasing software.

Will anyone succeed in following in Apple’s footsteps? The future is not written and it is not known to what extent Microsoft will be able to advance and be able to one day challenge Apple through ARM in PC. We talk about Microsoft as Apple’s main rival, but this is extensive for the rest of the manufacturers, who generally still use x86 architectures from Intel or AMD. To date, no one has shown Apple’s capacity, but neither has the benefits of an ecosystem like Cupertino’s.