Wow you're exhausting. Are you aware that you're talking to a vacuum and that Apple executives aren't actually reading this thread? If you really want to convince the people you NEED to convince, then perhaps start by sending an email to Tim Cook?
Macs are super tiny fraction of Apple's income. They don't give a damn about margins about a market they don't need. They've let MacBooks and Mac Pros stagnate for YEARS, because they really, really don't care about the macOS market. It's just kept around as a nice "halo effect" to keep Apple semi-relevant in the desktop market, but other than that they need the Mac market as little as a human needs 10 legs. All their energy goes into boosting iPhone sales.
Furthermore, your margins are wrong. Mac computers have
notoriously slim retailer margins. Apple pockets something like 90% of the final sales price.
http://images.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/q3fy16datasum.pdf
Apple's Income in Q2 2016 (before iPhones temporarily lost some popularity):
65% from iPhone.
11.9% from services like iCloud subscriptions, App Store sales commissions, etc.
10.1% from Mac computers. <---
8.7% from iPads.
4.3% from other products and services (like Apple Watch, Apple TV boxes).
But as I and others have pointed out, an ARM based (non-x86/x86_64) chip would kill the Mac as a relevant desktop. Let's look at the most relevant pros and cons.
+ Cost of the A10 is lower than an Intel chip.
+ Wattage of the A10 is lower than an Intel chip.
+ Floating point and fixed point math performance is comparable to Intel chips.
- ARM lacks the hundreds of hardware-based math functions that apps rely on for massive speed boosts; Intel's SSE, MMX, hardware-accelerated crypto, etc.
- Right now, Apple's ARM CPU cores can't talk to each other directly. So a multi-core machine would be slow.
- Apple's ARM chips have ZERO ability to communicate with Intel's desktop bus standards, which means NO PCI Express, NO Thunderbolt, NO SATA, NO DDR RAM. And forget about Intel granting Apple licenses to implement their intellectual property! Intel granted a manufacturing license to AMD decades ago, and they regret that now.
- All hardware peripheral manufacturers would need to design brand-new "ARM Mac"-specific graphics cards, soundcards, storage controllers, etc, that work with Apple's proprietary data bus.
- An ARM Mac would forever completely lack BootCamp support. No ability to use Windows would LOWER Mac sales. BootCamp is a bigger selling point than you seem to realize.
- There will be no more native CPU-accelerated OS virtualization (such as Intel's "VT-x" technology), which means that products like VMware and Parallels and VirtualBox would not work anymore.
- Trying to emulate an "Intel x86" CPU to run old Intel Mac applications would be insanely inefficient and would cause them to run at something like 5-10% of the speed you would get on an Intel CPU. Just look at how extremely slow all modern CPU emulators (like QEMU) are; and those are emulating x86 on x86! This won't ever change. Emulating a CPU in software is always going to translate 1 cycle on the native hardware to something like 20-50 cycles when emulated instead.
- If they want to emulate an advanced, modern x86 CPU, they would have to spend years writing an emulator to accurately emulate the hundreds of hardware-accelerated functions, registers and undocumented legacy bugs and hardware quirks of Intel CPUs.
- Apple has already made the mistake of going proprietary once; it was called "PowerPC" and it meant that they were stuck with a dead-end CPU that nearly killed Apple since they couldn't provide faster machines, and they were forced to make a painful switch to Intel, which killed off all Macs in existence. They did it for a great reason: Great performance gains and future safety. But going to ARM would mean less performance and less safety. So why do it!?
- They would throw away all existing applications, a lot of which will never be updated by their developers again. All developers would have to re-compile and TEST their applications (and watch out for compiler bugs) on the new ARM based Macs, which means that every developer in existence would need to buy at least one ARM Mac. How much do you want to bet they'd rather just say "**** off, Apple, you money pinching whores, throwing out perfect Intel x86 hardware for your own proprietary, locked-down ****? **** off, I am leaving!".
- They would fragment their existing market into Intel and ARM, and piss off all existing customers. Many of which would abandon Apple in disgust.
- Apple would isolate themselves from the rest of the planet. Meaning they would lose access to the wide array of Windows/Linux/BSD applications that have been written for Intel machines and are therefore super-trivial to port to current Macs.
We can thank Apple's transition to Intel for the fact that apps on Macs are thriving nowadays, and are developed alongside Windows versions, despite Macs being a smaller market. With the switch to Intel, Apple gave familiar hardware to a legion of pre-trained developers. Some of which simply installed Hackintosh versions of OS X on their regular PCs to be able to join the Mac platform and develop for it. The great Intel app availability took Macs out of obscurity and into the mainstream. That would
all be gone if Apple tries to stubbornly isolate themselves from the rest of the world.
- The huge barrier-to-entry for software developers would strangle the development of new/updated apps, and that would quickly lead to the death of the Mac. And in case you don't realize it:
Profit margins are irrelevant on dead products that nobody wants.
- They would
lose all the software and hardware compatibility, performance and clockwork Intel CPU upgrades year after year that made Intel Macs the best selling machines in Apple's history.
Well... Good luck with your board meeting with Apple. Looks like you're onto a winner!
Keep on fighting the good fight against all the unbelievers!
