The real problem Adobe had wasn't Apple changing processors, it was Apple not selling enough computers. At one point Apple fell to about 1.5% of global PC shipments. Adobe did what every other successful company did -- it concentrated on supporting the platform with actual paying customers: Windows.

That prompted Apple to get more serious about their own in-house professional media content creation software. And that didn't help the rift between Apple and Adobe at all. Then there was Jobs, going in full attack mode about Adobe Flash... not that he was wrong about proprietary Flash vs. standard HTML5. And Adobe didn't fundamentally care, because Flash was just a means to the end of their selling Flash development tools. But a smack-down is a smack-down.

Today, the Mac is 10% of less of Apple's business. They don't want to kill it, but it's also a ton of work compared to iOS per unit sold. RIght now they have to have several different laptops at different performance levels, they have to have iMacs, they still have Mac Pros though they only seem to sell in the first year or two of their 5-year-or-so lifespan. As that market continues to shrink, Apple's going to contiune to lose interest unless it becomes, essentially, part of the iOS product lineup.

Most embedded application processors have at least one PCIe link... no idea about Apple's, specifically, but that's a standard everyday module on the Chinese Menu of ARM components. I don't know if Apple is using AMBA/AHB for high speed internals on today's SOCs, or something else, but it's available right now up to 1024-bits wide. I doubt they'd have a performance bottleneck for laptop/desktop things.

And they're not building a Xeon or i7, either... Apple's been slowly killing off their high-end users through years of high-end neglect. They could pick up more sales, and lower development costs, by pushing the Macintosh into more of a desktop/laptop iPad Pro kind of thing... still mouse & keyboard but more like what iOS users expect. Not that I'd buy one, but I'd never buy a Mac PC either.

There was never anything called "Acorn RISC Machines".

There was the Acorn RISC Machine -- the V1.0 ARM Architecture and all that began at Acorn Computers Ltd. When the CPU company was split off from the main body of Acorn, it was launched as Advanced RISC Machines, and it was a three-way partnership between Acorn, Apple, and chip maker VLSI Technology.

Right. Apple currently sells around 15-20 million macOS machines a year. And they're nearly all relatively low-to-midrange PCs; the Mac Pro is chronically out-of-date. That's compared to 200 million iOS machines.

The macOS market may be relatively stable, but it's not growing. Apple spends far more effort per model on macOS systems than they do iOS systems, particularly given the large number of macOS models versus the numbers selling. If they evolved the today's Macintosh into less of a PC and more of a desktop iPad, they'd perhaps lose some or many of the remaining higher-end Mac users, but they might stand to gain a whole mess of iOS people, looking to extend their iOS experience more directly onto a more powerful laptop.

They probably could match lower-end Intel performance on their ARM chips. Apple is delivering faster cores today than anyone else in mobile. None of the other mobile ARM vendors really see value is jacking up their CPUs as much, and of course, Apple depends more on single-tasking performance in iOS than does Android. So freed of tight power constraints, they might hand you an i5-ish performance laptop or with 20 hours of battery life, or a cooler running iMac.

And sure, it might be a negotiating tactic. But they're certainly paying much, much less for their CPUs than the would from Intel's. A 20 million unit production isn't necessarily enough to really keep costs down, but they're sharing that with their 200 million unit mobile business, since both lines of CPUs will share technology. Apple doesn't have to differentiate in expensive ways; a few different packages with the same CPU but different speeds/cores/cache and they're probably filling out most of their current Mac sales.

And Apple's probably not paying much in royalties. Sure, ARM orginally meant Acorn RISC Machine, but the company was spun out as Advanced RISC Machines in a joint partnership between Acorn, Apple, and VLSI Technology. Not sure if Apple actually kept any ownership long-term, especially after the Softbank purchase. But that wouldn't have necessarily affected their long-ago negotiated Architecture License.

The Mac has no game community so no game developers to worry about.

I can't say that I know the whole community since there are games you can buy for the Mac outside of Steam, but the latest statistics on Steam report about 1.64% of their users are on Mac.

http://store.steampowered.com/...

allowAccess = false;

if (passwdMatched() == false)
. . niftyUiShakeAndDeny();
else
. . niftyUiApprovedAnimation();
. . allowAccess = true;

if (allowAccess == true)
. . setSessionCredentials();

...because it is such a waste of time to use braces and parenthesis to clearly state what your code is trying to do ;-)

(of course, could also be due to too much time in a language like Python where indentation specifies blocks of code)

"Pretty small market" ... which are you referring to? Perhaps in the personal consumer space it is a small market (I mean, if you bought the Mac to do email/browser/photos, why would you need Windows?), but in the professional workplace I would say easily 30-40% of the people I know with Macs have run a Windows VM at some point. I'm not claiming to be a defining voice here or perhaps even a strong representative sample, but there are people who wouldn't have bought a Mac if it weren't for the fact that they can run Windows when necessary.

In California, businesses (like restaurants) can refuse to accept money from anyone for any reason. They are not required to do business just because you have dollars or legal tender. If they don't like the fact that you are trying to pay in pennies, they don't have to accept it. Therefore, some business could legally refuse dollars but accept bitcoin if they wanted to.

This is amazing. Are there instructions anywhere for how you did this?? I've been holding onto my last-gen iPod Classic forever for the same reasons, (why should I be limited to only cloud-based music when I'm within cell service?). I even went out and found a used one a couple years ago when someone broke into my car and stole my original one.

I did something similar to my 1G iPod Mini (4GB). It is rather easy actually, since the iPods use standard compact IDE interfaces to their hard drives. Sure, you need to get an adapter that fits, but they're available. Look on MacSales for the Tarkan iFlash Dual.

For my iPod Mini, the process is simply getting a CF-to-SD adapter and then sticking in an appropriate sized SD card. Personally, I went with a 64GB SD card and it has worked really well. Total cost was around $25-30. The only thing I will point out is that I suspect that sometimes the Mini's firmware might struggle with so many songs on the device, but it hasn't been a real problem ... I suspect an iPod Classic would have less of an issue since its firmware is a few years newer.

The only other note I would make is that if you're going to go through the effort of opening the device up to do this, you might as well swap the battery out at the same time if you can. While I've opened my Mini 4 or 5 times, it does seem to me that I might start having some problems after another 5 ... they're not really made to be disassembled a dozen times :-)

It's not zero/one. The greatest electricity demand is on hot days, during the daytime. You can equate solar energy with air conditioners.