With Apple’s announcement to move to their own custom designed processors for Mac computers, the company is realizing a vision that has been coming for many years. With the Mac, iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and Apple TV all on the same platform, Apple has unprecedented control over the ecosystem of products it makes, and even with everything they have shown off, I’m sure we haven’t even fully seen the fruits of those labours.
Apple’s product stack is a very unique proposition. Their products are generally more expensive than what the competition provides, but the interesting thing about it is that the more Apple products a person purchases, the more value each individual product has. Their products integrate so seamlessly together that there is a real benefit to owning more than one. And with Mac laptops transitioning to Apple designed processors, that proposition only gets more interesting. Own an iPhone, and you get access to the app store, iMessage, good battery life, an efficient operating system, and all of the benefits (and limitations) that iOS brings. Add an Apple Watch, and you get iMessage, apps designed for the watch, notifications and a robust fitness tracking system on your wrist. Buy a pair of Airpods and you get what is the best experience with Bluetooth audio on any device, along with the ability to pair them to the watch and listen to music or take calls straight from there. Add an iPad to the equation, and you get access to the same app library, the ability to use iMessage from the larger iPad, easy transfer of files between devices using AirDrop, AirPods that work with both devices seamlessly, and even more. And add a Mac, and you get most of the same benefits of iMessage, Airpods, file sync, as well as the vast array of desktop style Mac apps. That is before you factor in the traditional form factor of mac computers, especially the laptops.
Everything integrates very well as is, but the move to Apple processors in Macs will take it to the next level. The Apple processors in the Macs will be variants of the same processors found in the iPhone and iPad. In some cases, Apple may choose to use the exact same processor in lower cost Macs, while a computer like the MacBook Pro may see a more powerful version than what is found in iPads. With the processors being the same architecture, Apple tells us that a Mac running and Apple processor will run most iPhone and iPad apps without any modification at all. This suddenly opens up hundreds of thousands of apps for the Mac, and especially in the case of iPad apps, apps that work very well on bigger displays. This has the potential to have a huge benefit to software developers, especially smaller ones. It allows a developer to write one app that will work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Previously, apps written for iPad and iPhone were different than apps written for Mac, leading to developers needing to maintain multiple apps. With a Mac with an Apple processor, that restriction can go away.
There are still many unanswered questions with this, however. Will an app for the iPad be required to be distributed through the Mac App Store, or can it be distributed in a more traditional sense? If it must be distributed through the App Store, some developers may choose to continue creating separate apps so that can happen. There are many questions about this. Another question is the product clarity. What will the difference between an iPad and a MacBook look like when a MacBook can run iPad apps. MacBooks are traditional laptops without a touchscreen, and an iPad is a tablet with a touchscreen. Will that be the differentiator? Will Apple force users to make that choice? If a MacBook can run iPad apps as well as dedicated Mac apps, as well as having a full keyboard and mouse built in, what use is there for an iPad? An iPad is lighter and has a touchscreen. Is that it? I am very curious to see how Apple will approach this in the future, as the lines between the product offerings begin to blur.
Even with those questions, the ecosystem that Apple has created has some very strong advantages. As Apple gains even more control over their stack of products, they become more integrated and work even better together. This means that anyone fully invested in that ecosystem gets a fully cohesive set of products. But with that comes a cost. The more Apple products a person buys, the more difficult it becomes to buy anything but an Apple device. If you own an iPhone, the smartwatch that makes the most sense is the Apple Watch. Other bluetooth headphones work, but the AirPods (or Beats headphones, a company owned by Apple) integrate best with the iPhone. Apple actively incentivizes people into buying multiple Apple products, and makes it hard to buy anything else. The only real exception to this has been the Mac. Owning a PC has not excluded someone from the rest of the Apple ecosystem. I would argue that the only thing someone was missing in buying a PC over a Mac when owning an iPhone was iMessage support. The Mac didn’t have any other inherent advantages over the PC in the ecosystem. The move to Apple designed processors in the Mac is an attempt to close this.
Whether or not Apple succeeds in making the Mac more of an integral part of their ecosystem could come to cost. Macs right now are *very* expensive. The cheapest Mac computer is a Mac Mini at $1000, the cheapest laptop is a $1200 MacBook Air, and I wouldn’t recommend those computers to anyone. To get a good experience on a Mac, I usually recommend products that start in the $1500 range. You can buy a very, very good windows laptop for $1500, which shows why the Mac has been limited. I’m not going to say that I think Apple will suddenly start making a $600 Mac laptop, but the company has seemed to realize that less expensive products do help move units in recent years. The entry level iPad brought the costs down on the iPad to a relatively inexpensive $430 for the base model. Apple also released a new version of the iPhone SE this year that starts a $600, making it the least expensive “new” iPhone in several years. There is precedent here in Apple lowering prices. Could Apple get the price of a MacBook laptop down to $900 or so? I’m not sure, but one can only hope. Apple has an opportunity with this transition to both make their products more attractive and lock in users. It will be interesting to see if they are able to seize it.