Apple: A New Era For The PC

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Apple: A New Era For The PC

seekingalpha2021-04-22

Summary The 2021 iMac is the fourth M1 Mac, but the first to be built around the chip. I think they’ve been working on it for 3-4 years. It ushers in a new era of PC design centered on the ARM ...

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EMforever
·2021-04-22
[Miser] [Wow] [Miser]
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1
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OJC
·2021-04-22
Buy
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2
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- OJC:
  ??
  2021-04-22
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Sagongjin
·2021-04-22
What?
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US_watchlist
·2021-04-22
This is great news ! ^_^
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- jimmylaw:
  yeah
  2021-04-23
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- AT2020:
  Indeed
  2021-04-22
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US_watchlist
·2021-04-22
Yes
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jhchin
·2021-04-22
Buy the dip!
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2
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Vincentkhoo1
·2021-04-22
Like
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2
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- Rahyenong:
  Wow
  2021-04-22
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BeHappy
·2021-04-22
Should we buy now?
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- Baubausaur:
  Yes
  2021-04-22
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YungKhai
·2021-04-22
Yes
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blaCkbOx
·2021-04-22
Go go go
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2
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blaCkbOx
·2021-04-22
Buy!
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athenaang
·2021-04-22
Why it keeps going down
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璇瑤
·2021-04-22
A better Era..
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- TohKokMeng79:
  yup
  2021-04-24
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- TohKokMeng79:
  a good one Era
  2021-04-22
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Silverlitz
·2021-04-22
Go Apple go!
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- Ailuros:
  Lets go
  2021-04-22
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I think they’ve been working on it for 3-4 years.\nIt ushers in a new era of PC design centered on the ARM ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4420499-apple-new-era-for-pc\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n","source":"seekingalpha","html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>Apple: A New Era For The PC</title>\n<style type=\"text/css\">\na,abbr,acronym,address,applet,article,aside,audio,b,big,blockquote,body,canvas,caption,center,cite,code,dd,del,details,dfn,div,dl,dt,\nem,embed,fieldset,figcaption,figure,footer,form,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,header,hgroup,html,i,iframe,img,ins,kbd,label,legend,li,mark,menu,nav,\nobject,ol,output,p,pre,q,ruby,s,samp,section,small,span,strike,strong,sub,summary,sup,table,tbody,td,tfoot,th,thead,time,tr,tt,u,ul,var,video{ font:inherit;margin:0;padding:0;vertical-align:baseline;border:0 }\nbody{ font-size:16px; line-height:1.5; color:#999; background:transparent; }\n.wrapper{ overflow:hidden;word-break:break-all;padding:10px; }\nh1,h2{ font-weight:normal; line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:.6em; }\nh3,h4,h5,h6{ line-height:1.35; margin-bottom:1em; }\nh1{ font-size:24px; }\nh2{ font-size:20px; }\nh3{ font-size:18px; }\nh4{ font-size:16px; }\nh5{ font-size:14px; }\nh6{ font-size:12px; }\np,ul,ol,blockquote,dl,table{ margin:1.2em 0; }\nul,ol{ margin-left:2em; }\nul{ list-style:disc; }\nol{ list-style:decimal; }\nli,li p{ margin:10px 0;}\nimg{ max-width:100%;display:block;margin:0 auto 1em; }\nblockquote{ color:#B5B2B1; border-left:3px solid #aaa; padding:1em; }\nstrong,b{font-weight:bold;}\nem,i{font-style:italic;}\ntable{ width:100%;border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:1px;margin:1em 0;font-size:.9em; }\nth,td{ padding:5px;text-align:left;border:1px solid #aaa; }\nth{ font-weight:bold;background:#5d5d5d; }\n.symbol-link{font-weight:bold;}\n/* header{ border-bottom:1px solid #494756; } */\n.title{ margin:0 0 8px;line-height:1.3;color:#ddd; }\n.meta {color:#5e5c6d;font-size:13px;margin:0 0 .5em; }\na{text-decoration:none; color:#2a4b87;}\n.meta .head { display: inline-block; overflow: hidden}\n.head .h-thumb { width: 30px; height: 30px; margin: 0; padding: 0; border-radius: 50%; float: left;}\n.head .h-content { margin: 0; padding: 0 0 0 9px; float: left;}\n.head .h-name {font-size: 13px; color: #eee; margin: 0;}\n.head .h-time {font-size: 11px; color: #7E829C; margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nApple: A New Era For The PC\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-04-22 21:54 GMT+8&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4420499-apple-new-era-for-pc><strong>seekingalpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nThe 2021 iMac is the fourth M1 Mac, but the first to be built around the chip. I think they’ve been working on it for 3-4 years.\nIt ushers in a new era of PC design centered on the ARM ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4420499-apple-new-era-for-pc\">Source Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","isBrief":false,"type":0,"news_type":1,"symbol":"AAPL","symbol_name":"苹果","start_time":0,"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4420499-apple-new-era-for-pc","article_id":"1103717271","we_media_id":null,"thumbnails":[],"rights":null,"url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1103717271","pubTimestamp":1619099691,"sourceInfo":{"source_id":"seekingalpha","name":"Seeking Alpha"},"weMediaInfo":null,"summary":"Summary\n\nThe 2021 iMac is the fourth M1 Mac, but the first to be built around the chip. I think they","collect":0,"end_time":0,"defaultTopTitle":"seekingalpha.com","property":[],"viewcount":null,"language":"en","relate_stocks":{"AAPL":"苹果"},"translate_title":"苹果：个人电脑的新纪元","themeId":null,"isJumpTheme":false,"ttsUrl":null,"symbols_score_info":{"AAPL":0.9},"content_text":"Summary\n\nThe 2021 iMac is the fourth M1 Mac, but the first to be built around the chip. I think they’ve been working on it for 3-4 years.\nIt ushers in a new era of PC design centered on the ARM instruction set, not Intel’s long-dominant x86.\nApple is no longer only the Mac company, so this trend will have less effect on them than others.\nBut it also highlights a key portion of my long-term Apple bull thesis.\n\nPhoto by Nikada/iStock Unreleased via Getty Images\nARM Opens Up PC Design\nThis is an article is mostly about two images, and why they represent a revolution in the PC business, and soon in the data center:\n\nApple video screenshots\nThe top image is Apple's (AAPL) exploded view of their 2019 21.5\" iMac's main logic board and fan assembly. The bottom photo is the same for the 2021 23.5\" iMac which is replacing it. It's a bit of an unfair comparison, and I'll explain why, but what you see is the benefits to Apple of designing their own ARM systems-on-a-chip (SoCs), instead of using Intel's (INTC) CPUs.\n\nMuch smaller logic board. There is an array of chips that used to be on the logic board that are now integrated into to Apple's M1 SoC.\nBecause ARM chips require less power and heat dissipation, the fan assembly also takes up much less space.\n\nThe result is that Apple can open up the design of the iMac. The first part is that they were able to put a bigger screen in there, 23.5\" versus the 21.5\" they have had at the bottom of the iMac line since 2009. That's about a 20% increase in screen area and pixels, something they were unable to do for 12 years with Intel hardware.\nSecond, the iMac profile went from this:\nApple video screenshot. My favorite will always be the second from the left, Luxo Jr.\nTo this:\nApple video screenshot\nThe bulge is finally gone. Steve Jobs' vision of a desktop computer that fades into the background when you're using it, and looks great when you're not gets much closer than last week.\nWhat Is M1?\nIn 2008, less than a year after the first iPhone was in the wild, Apple bought a small company working on low-power chips, P.A. Semiconductor. As is their pattern outside of Beats, Apple was buying the IP and talent, not any product. From that came Apple's chip design unit, now widely considered the best in the world.\nThe first chip that went into a product was the A4 in iPhone 4 in 2010, which replaced the Samsung ARM SoCs they had been using. Samsung was already a handset competitor, and being dependent on them for the iPhone SoC was unacceptable. At first it was fine that these were as good as Samsung's and Qualcomm's (QCOM), but they are now widely recognized as the best smartphone SoCs. It's also a reason they have been able to dominate the tablet market for so long.\nARM is a UK company, owned by SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY), that does not make chips. They make an instruction set architecture that competes primarily with Intel's x86, used exclusively in PCs and data center, and open source RISC-V, currently mostly used for IoT chips. An instruction set is the very basic way in which software talks to hardware.\nThey also design core and reference designs for both CPUs (the main brain) and GPUs (graphics). All this IP gets licensed by the likes of Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Intel, AMD (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA), just to name a few. Apple only licenses the instruction set and uses their own cores built around it. ARM is the subject a proposed $40 billion acquisition by Nvidia that I have believed since the beginning is unlikely to pass regulatory muster. We'll talk a bit more about that when we get to the data center.\nMacs have been built around Intel chips since 2005. What does Apple get by rolling their own ARM chips they can't get from Intel? The first things are what Intel's customers have been wanting for a while, and Intel has been unable to deliver: less power consumption, and more customization without impacting performance. Let's start with the last one first.\nWhen the first M1 Macs were released last year, even people who had high expectations like I did were surprised at how capable they were. As always, AnandTech does the best publicly available testing. A couple things to keep in mind as we look at this:\n\nM1 is a laptop-class chip for the low end of their Mac line. It is, in another way of thinking, the worst M-series SoC we will see.\nThis review was from November 2020 when the first M1 Macs hit the streets, and both Intel and AMD have updated their lines since then.\n\nHere, we look at single-core performance, as this is the vast majority of what customers who buy these Macs are doing with them:\nAnandTech. Top score is integer; bottom score is floating point. Gray = ARM; blue = Intel; red/orange = AMD.\nTwo of the top three places go to Apple chips, and one of those chips powers a cell phone. Intel's best is in fourth place. But it's actually worse than that, because AnandTech included Intel and AMD's top end desktop/gaming chips. Yes, in November, Apple had a cell phone chip that was faster than Intel's best Core i9 desktop/gaming chip in the most common tasks.\nSo that's the first part: M1 performance is not just better than other laptop CPUs, but bests Intel and AMD desktop/gaming CPUs. That brings us to the second part of this, which is power consumption and its child, heat dissipation. Everything you own can run faster at a higher power cost, but the silicon would melt without elaborate and expensive cooling systems. Many projects at Apple and every other hardware company have been killed over heat dissipation issues. It is one of the central challenges of hardware design. In laptop design, the chip's power consumption is a big determiner of battery life, so it's doubly important there.\nApple does not release this sort of data, but TDP is a measurement of CPU power consumption under full load. AnandTech estimates it at 20-24 Watts in the M1. The closest Intel and AMD could get to M1 in performance back in November were desktop/gaming chips that hit 125 Watts and 105 Watts TDP respectively. Their best laptop chips, which underperform the M1 by a lot, were 28 Watts for Intel, and 45 Watts for AMD.\nA good comparison is the 2020 Mac mini versus its Intel predecessor, the 2018 Mac mini. It is the only M1 desktop Mac in the wild right now, without the power constraints of a laptop. This is total power consumption of the whole box.\n\nThe M1 allowed Apple to reduce power consumption of the whole computer by about two-thirds both at idle and at full bore.\nCompared to M1, the x86 chips from Intel and AMD are power-hungry heat monsters that don't even perform as well. This is the Client Group at Intel, 51% of revenue in 2020, and 64% of operating income. x86 is doomed, and if Intel doesn't shift soon, they will be too. They have time, but it is dwindling.\nThere is a bit of irony here, because performance-per-Watt is exactly how Steve Jobs framed the decision to move to Intel from PowerPC in 2005.\nBut the comparison with x86 gets even more dramatic when we consider customization, the last thing Intel's customers have been asking for and not getting. In two years, they will finally have that with the opening of Intel's new foundries which will support custom packaging. The M1 is a great example of why this trend will continue to grow.\nThe days of the general-purpose CPU doing everything have been ending slowly for a long time now. A CPU can do almost everything a programmer wants it to, but for many things this comes at too high a cost of power consumption and processor time. For over a decade, the GPU has picked up a growing amount of this work, but that is also inefficient in its own ways.\nEnter the ARM system-on-a-chip. When you buy a laptop chip from Intel or AMD, it has a CPU, GPU, cache, and that's it. The SoC concept is loading more things on to the chip die. This offloads less efficient tasks from the CPU and GPU, reduces the number of chips on the main logic board, and decreases power consumption and heat.\nSo let's get back to those two images. The reason this iMac is so interesting is that though it is the fourth M1 Mac, it is the first one that is designed around the M1, not a reused design from the previous Intel-based generation. But the reason the comparison with the 2019 21.5\" iMac is a little unfair is because it now has become clear that this model has been targeted for a while by Apple as the first \"true\" M1 Mac. The 2019 model is already over 2 years old, and it was a meager upgrade to the 2017 model, except for the latest generation Intel chip. The iMac team spent that four years making the 2021 iMac.\nThe big difference is that in 2019, Apple was still putting hard drives in the base model iMac. Hard drives create a lot of heat and power consumption compared to their replacement, solid-state drives, so that's why the comparison is a little unfair. So let's look at those photos again with some annotation.\n\nSo now in the top one from 2019, you can see where the hard drive went, and why that added to heat dissipation challenges. But let's focus on the very big main logic board on the right of the top image. Flipping it over where the action is:\nAnnotated Apple video screenshot\nThe top left red box is the RAM which is now attached directly to the M1 die. Under it is the Intel Core i3 8100. The top right is Intel's Thunderbolt high-speed I/O, and below that is the AMD GPU. Thunderbolt and the GPU are now on the M1 die, and the RAM is attached directly to the die in a much smaller package. But they didn't stop there. Only about half the M1 die is CPU, GPU and cache. In addition to that, it now has:\n\nSecure Enclave and cryptography accelerators.\nApple's machine learning cores and accelerators, which had never gone in a Mac before, and are a big part of their future ambitions.\nSpecialized units to offload frequent video, audio and photo tasks from the CPU and GPU.\nAll I/O, including Intel's Thunderbolt, which Intel has never put on a SoC.\n\nThese are Apple's priorities. Qualcomm, as another example, puts 5G connectivity on their smartphone and PC ARM SoCs, which makes them a unique offering. With ARM, everyone gets the chip they want, for their priorities and customers. Details are still a little thin, but Intel will be offering this type of customization in their new foundries with custom packaging for x86, ARM or RISC-V cores. In my opinion, this was the most important part of the foundry announcement. We should expect the foundries to be operational in a couple of years.\nAnother area of customization is within the CPU cores themselves. In the ARM world, this is known as \"big.LITTLE,\" and that is not a typo. The idea is that most things people do on their PCs, tablets or smartphones, like typing this article, are not very demanding on resources. But there are times when we do need lots of performance. The LITTLE cores are optimized for power consumption, and do most of the work. But when there's heavy lifting to be done, the big cores pitch in on those tasks. The M1 has 4 of each.\nSo let's add it up so far. Switching from Intel to ARM allows Apple to reduce power consumption by two-thirds on desktops, less on laptops, with even better performance than they were getting from Intel. They also get to put a host of other things on the die that offload inefficient tasks from the CPU and GPU. The net effect of all that is this:\nAnnotated Apple video screenshot.\nThe entire computer now fits in the lower bezel. That sound you hear is my head exploding. That allows Apple to make iMac much thinner and lighter, and bump up to 23.5\" while barely making the footprint bigger. In the end, all this work on chip design is about that final product for Apple.\nThis is a long section, but I am not done. There are two other very important things Apple gets by switching to ARM:\n\nThey control their own roadmap, and are no longer dependent on Intel pushing their platform in a direction that Apple wants. Intel designs chips for a wide range of OEMs. Apple designs chips for Apple only.\nWe don't have hard figures on this, but Apple almost certainly saves money on M1 when you add it all up.\n\nThis is a home run from every single angle.\nWhat About Everyone Else?\nApple was still Intel's fourth biggest customer at 8% as estimated by Bloomberg in 2019 before the M1 announcement. The top three are the PC/server makers Dell (DELL), Lenovo (OTCPK:LNVGY), and HP(NYSE:HPQ)who together accounted for 39% of Intel revenue in 2020, 41% in 2019. You can bet that some of the first M1 Mac orders went to engineers at those companies so they could reverse engineer what Apple did.\nMicrosoft (MSFT) already has Windows 10 for ARM, but the PC makers are missing a huge piece of the puzzle - a great ARM hardware platform for Windows/Chromebook like what Apple did with the M1. Right now, a lot of Chromebooks and a few Windows PCs are built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 compute platform. Despite the unique feature of 5G onboard, it is widely disliked for being slow, as are many competing platforms. Microsoft is reportedly also working on their own ARM chip for their Surface line.\nBut Qualcomm just made a very big but under-appreciated acquisition that recently closed. Gerrard Williams led Apple's chip design unit in the period it went from nothing to the best in the world. In 2019, he left Apple to start his own company, Nuvia. Reportedly, Williams wanted to make a data center chip, Apple did not, and so he left to do it elsewhere. He had assembled a pretty impressive team of chip design all-stars. Apple is suing Williams, and vice-versa.\nWhat Nuvia was working on when Qualcomm snatched them up were ARM cores with an even better power-performance profile than Apple's, or so they claimed. These were intended for densely-packed data center chips, like Ampere Computing's 80-core ARM data center chip.\nI believe Qualcomm wants to get there is as well, but first they need to solve their current problems:\n\nTheir smartphone/tablet SoCs now trail Apple badly.\nTheir compute platform is underwhelming.\nTheir automotive SoCs are undifferentiated ARM chips.\n\nIntegrating Nuvia's cores solves all these problems at once. But for our discussion, the compute platform is the big issue. Once they are able to integrate Nuvia's cores into that, likely in 2023 at the earliest, there will be a really powerful Windows/Chromebook platform that competes head on with x86 PCs.\nGerrard Williams is now the SVP of Engineering at Qualcomm, and the Nuvia team is also there working under him.\nData Center\nThere are also big ARM moves in the data center happening right now. AnandTech recently tested Intel's new Ice Lake data center chips, and they included the Ampere 80-core ARM chip I mentioned a few paragraphs ago along with AMD chips. Here, we look at multicore performance, more important for big data center loads:\nAnandTech. Integer tests on left; floating-point on right. Gray = ARM; blue = Intel; red/orange = AMD.\nThe top numbers you see are all 2-socket logic board designs (\"2S\" in chart) with two CPUs on them, including the 160-core Ampere board. With Intel's stumbles, AMD leads the pack now, Ampere a close second, and Intel trailing. Keep in mind a few things about this comparison:\n\nAmpere is a small, private company whose R&D budget is a fraction of Intel's and AMD's.\nThis is Intel's newest chip, just released. Ampere will soon have a 256-core 2-socket board design that may wind up even topping AMD.\nAmpere's chip is about half the price of the Intel and AMD chips at the top there.\nIt also uses less power, though the difference is not as dramatic as the M1 comparisons we looked at. Power consumption is a key component of data center Opex.\n\nThis is what a tiny company with a tiny R&D budget can pull off. What about someone bigger? Nvidia has just announced its upcoming GRACE processors that combine their top GPUs with ARM CPUs linked together by their ultra-fast NVLink 4 bridge. Combined with the data-processing units (DPUs) they purchased with Mellanox, Nvidia is putting together a data center beast that will be entirely unique when it is released in 2023.\nFor the near-term, this is targeted at huge AI loads on supercomputers. But if the last 30 years have taught us anything about the data center, it's that today's supercomputer-scale tasks eventually become the common tasks of tomorrow. All these chips, the CPU-GPU-DPU combo, remain separate, as the requirements are too high to do what Apple did with M1. But Nvidia's eventual goal is to get them on one chip. Right now, no one is skating to where the puck is headed in the data center like Nvidia, and it relies on ARM CPU cores at the base of the stack.\nTo be clear, Nvidia can pull all this off as an ARM licensee. What they want is control over the roadmap to focus it more on ARM's Neoverse data center cores, where their interests lay.\nThis is why they are willing to make this bold $40 billion offer, though most of that is stock valued at $485 per share, well below today's price. Anyway, I have believed from the beginning that this deal will not go off. There is a lot of focus on the UK aspect of this with the inevitable news that UK regulators were going to frisk the deal. I'm not sure why anyone was surprised by that. This is the crown-jewel of UK tech.\nBut the issues are much bigger in the US and China. In the US, every ARM licensee has to be terrified by this. The bottom line is that ARM has never been part of a company that competes with its customers. It was independent when SoftBank bought it. If Nvidia bought it, they would have control over the roadmap, may take focus away from smartphone chips, and as a practical matter will have first crack at everything new. So far to my knowledge, only Qualcomm has filed a brief in opposition, but I expect more.\nBut I also don't think the Chinese government is going to allow such important IP fall into the hands of a US company given the political tensions, and what appears to be a bifurcation of technology that I don't think will reverse in the Biden administration. Chinese regulators have leverage through the ARM China joint venture. This is a long, complicated story, and since this is already a long, complicated article, I will skip it. I will happily provide details in the comments for the curious.\nJust the other day, Chinese company, Longsoon announced a new instruction set architecture. There are a lot of ways this can go, because politics are involved now. But regardless, Citi thinks there's a 10% chance the deal goes through. I think that's closer to zero. Again, Nvidia can pull off their plans as an ARM licensee, but it puts up obstacles. They will also lose the $1.25 billion breakup penalty.\nThe Supply Chain Bites Back\nApple website screenshot\nApple usually does spring product announcements in March, not April. The main products announced will not be available until the second half of May. Make what you like of that, but most of the rumors surrounding this have focused on display panel supply.\nAlso, the 4/20 date of the announcements gives a little more clarity as to why Tim Cook was not at Congressional hearings the next day. From Apple's letter to Senators Amy Klobuchar and Mike Lee from 4/11:\n\n We simply sought alternative dates in light of upcoming matters that have been scheduled for some time and that touch on similar issues.\"\n\nOther Announcements\nQuickly:\n\nThe iPad Pro is the first one really worthy of the \"Pro\" name. They are already widely used in film production, but this new one will be very popular on film sets, especially the larger one. This is a marginal market for Apple, but an important one to them.\nPaid subscriptions for podcasts just add a new line to services revenue. These need not be large, but they add up. I don't foresee this as any kind of business on the scale of the App Store, which is what it would need to be to move the needle.\nI'll be back regarding AirTags when we have more details on how they work in edge cases. Ultimately, if they sell well, it will increase the size of the Find My network, which has large implications across all Apple products.\n\nUpshot for Apple and the Rest\nThat Apple is making the best computers in their low range, and everyone else's midrange, is now beyond question. This is one of those things like iPod, iPhone, iPod, Watch and AirPods where Apple puts out something that everyone else immediately sets out to copy. They are hindered right now by a lack of a great Windows/Chromebook platform like M1, but I do not believe that will last.\nBut returning to Apple, 2020 was the biggest calendar year ever for Mac and iPad because of this:\n\nAs it relates to Apple:\n\nIn the first place, with the vaccination campaign going well, I don't think this sort of demand can continue. Also, as you see, Apple's business tends to be very seasonal, and it is about to drop off on that. Mac gets a little boost in Apple's Q4, the back-to-school quarter. Now they have low end ARM laptops and desktops that are the most popular with those customers.\nBut Apple is no longer the Mac company of course\n\nMac is only about 10% of their top line, so even big moves on that fat green line don't have a big effect on the consolidated Apple. Mac and iPad did save their fiscal 2020, however, as it was a bad year for iPhone, and the unusually high demand filled that hole.\nThe bigger effect will be on the brewing battle of ARM versus x86 in PCs and the data center. Apple just gave everyone on the ARM side the roadmap to winning:\n\nFocus on performance-per-Watt.\nCustomize the SoC with the things you want for your devices and customers.\nTie it all together with software.\n\nIt also highlights a key portion of my long-term Apple bull story. Apple now has a tech stack so high and complete, there is no one else to even compare them with in the products world. The base of that stack is the chip design unit. The new iMac highlights how their work translates into a final product when it is designed around the capabilities of the chip and vice versa. At this point, Apple is more a platform for rolling off new device types. 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