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RE[3]: Comment by Drumhellar
by mutantsushi on Thu 19th Sep 2013 21:30 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by Drumhellar"
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Excuse my comment if you were just meaning to disparage Apple and not intending your comment to actually be taken seriously...

ARM CPUs have nothing do with presence or lack or ports or other features.
Here is a review discussing a Samsung ARM-CPU netbook that has USB3, USB2, HDMI, and SD slot.

Re: the idea of fragmenting the CPU architecture for low-end/hi-end OSX products, I don't see the big deal.
Apple's compiler infrastructure allows dual-binary app's and you just need to select the desired target processors. The only apps which really will make heavy use of architecture specific products are high-end products, so that segment will remain unfragmented. (and increasingly they are making use of GPU resources not CPU, even though GPUs are fragmented between OEMs and intermediary interfaces are used e.g. OpenCL)

This is not a video game console, apps can be and are written to run on a wide variety of chips, normally that is the same instruction set, but the actual architecture details can often vary widely as seen in PowerPC processors. 99% of apps are simply not making any CPU-specific calls, they are using OSX APIs and that's it.

In this day and age isn't it just laughable when you see somebody with a $2000 Macbook Pro that they use for webbrowsing, writing, photo-editing and movie watching? Presumably they might have bought a cheaper product from Apple if it was offered, but Apple manages to milk this segment of customer for all it's worth by only offering larger screen sizes in "Pro" models. Ultimately, screen size is not correlative with required CPU power, most PC manufacturers already know this even if Apple pretends otherwise, and 15"-17"-23"+ screens can all be succesfully ran with an ARM CPU for 95% of users.

Edited 2013-09-19 21:35 UTC

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