But what Apple Arcade will do is give us meaningful alternatives to the flood of F2P games. Dozens of premium games with good production values and design, some destined for consoles and PC, and none of them designed to steadily become less fun until you pay up again, and again, and again. Those are few and far between today.
How far up the product line? Certainly not all the way to the new Mac Pro. Apple’s silicon work focuses on hundreds of millions of chips and battery-saving designs; the Pro’s sales volume is likely to be in the tens of thousands, not the iPhone’s hundreds of millions. For the Pro, Intel’s high-end designs will be economically more attractive, sharing the investment with other Intel clients.
If (or, more likely, when) the Mac switches to Axx chips, the change won’t be instantaneous. Some Macs will become powered by Apple’s home-grown CPU chips, others, like the Mac Pro, will remain on x86 processors. And thus we’ll have a fork of macOS. Two forks, actually: A sliding break as the transition progressively moves from low end machines up the product line, and then a permanent “fork ceiling” that separates the extreme-end Mac Pro from its lower-powered siblings.
Where’s the nearest camping site? Does it have free space? And where is the nearest WiFi? These are common questions camping enthusiasts face. Some go into the wild without knowing what awaits; others prefer to organise everything in advance. Whether you leave at the last minute or plan ahead, apps can make your trip go smoother.
I hope Apple is more ambitious with its programming languages. I hope, somewhere, Apple is orchestrating the replacement of Javascript and CSS with SwiftUI.
~
Thanks for reading.