A little bit like what uber does vs how taxis work.
In Germany uber only exists were it is reasonable profitable. Taxies exist everywhere in Germany and do all the other things society needs: dialisis drives to hospital etc.
Apple doesn't bother with providing cheap and affordable hardware (the mw 1k Mac book air was a surprisingly good deal, still a few hundred bugs too expensive for a lot of humans).
I don't critisis apple for it. It's just that the margin they have and the general size of how many people want and need hardware is just that big.
But it makes this 'gamble' very predictable and controllable
.
Even developers just accept what apple requires from them.
I would be impressed by what apple does if it would actually help the normal people.
Tim Cook is nowhere near the product guy that Steve Jobs was but Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation. Apple has slowly adopted the Tim Cook doctrine the last 10 years and it has made Apple an 800 pound Gorilla that is also swift on it’s feet. Apple Silicon is the ticket to a 10T market cap and beyond. Their chips will instantly give them a huge advantage, from laptops to cars and AR/VR.
Do you have any idea what the T in TSMC stands for? None of the important fabs (or at least none getting the latest tech) are in China and you are not going to see another TSMC fab built in China. Ever.
Well... you are eliding the one, rather decisive way TSMC could indeed end up in Chinese hands.
We just have to hope that the Ukraine conflict has convinced China not to try to pull it off. We certainly would not be able to find economic sanctions that could possibly work if they did.
True, but that doesn't imply that TMSC will be taken over by China.
In Ukraine, the territory is what Russia wants (minerals, crops) but in Taiwan it's the "human capital" that's desirable, and the latter isn't so susceptible to invasion.
It's likely that Russia, with ten times the armed forces of Ukraine, will devastate Ukraine, unfortunately. But China is more likely to hold off devastating Taiwan.
a) Ukraine situation has shown that a clean, Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan is increasingly unlikely. Europe has irrevocably changed and is far more hawkish and willing to join the US in economic coercion which China will struggle to defend against. And AUKUS, Quad, AU-JP-UK-US etc are solidifying and unifying opposition in ways never even imagined a few years ago.
b) Intel spun up their Foundry Services division specifically to manufacture chips for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
A Hong Kong style takeover of Taiwan would never happen unless a supermajority of the Taiwanese wanted to give their country away to a totalitarian genocidal police state. Where is the upside?
It was of course the norm to an extreme (even more so than Apple today) with minicomputer, mainframe, and high performance computing companies through about the 1980s. We're just seeing a mild reversal of the horizontal integration that companies like Intel and Microsoft brought about.
Owning the chain when it can distinguish you is valuable; but if the parts you need are commodities AND you are not the majority of the market, it may not be as worthwhile. Apple making cloned x86 chips probably wouldn’t have been worth it, for example.
the way I heard it was - Steve Jobs famously had a cash flow problem once regarding hard disk drives, long ago. After that, accumulating cash became a centerpiece to Steve Jobs dictatorship. Controlling the supply chain, ruthlessly, as your competitors would do to you, developed over the years as cash enabled that. In the specialized, fast-paced and global electronic components markets, it was not possible to control all the inputs, but by M&A and relentless, years long campaigns, some parts were brought in. There is nothing new about controlling your industrial inputs, it is simply difficult to do it.
Yes, and the most important part is .. you need a sufficiently high-margin business that you can scale up, otherwise you'll never be big enough to "control your inputs".
I mean sure, you can always work on decreasing risk (from directly hedging financially ... forward contracts, swaps, basically counterparty insurance), to keeping a shitton of inventory, using standardized components, etc..
But of course the accumulation of capital allowed Apple to do this, which is simply [quantity] x [unit economics].
Again "obviously", it's not independent of Steve's (and Apple's as a whole) philosophy. Repositioning themselves into a high-end market immediately helped with the unit economics, even if they sold last year's technology with a simplified (but polished!) UI/UX.
no. I do not have industry details, but it was control through contract terms, using harsh negotiating, that prevailed. As oil-backed transportation dropped in price again and again, many industries moved away from holding inventory at all. btw- Dell was harsher than even Steve Jobs, which is hard to do. Tim Cook was literally picked due to his contract "skills" and that he was an obvious work-a-holic.
It’s not just that. It’s using volume and supply chain strength to be able to write blank checks to the engineers. “What could you design if we could monopolize TSMC’s leading edge process/build aluminum parts for half the price/could make our own sapphire coated glass?”
> We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
That "Tim Cook doctrine" is 100% Steve Jobs doctrine, from back when companies like Adobe and Microsoft were holding the platform hostage and represented an existential threat to Apple. You'll find that this neatly explains hundreds of notable Apple choices as disparate as QuickTime for Windows, custom silicon efforts going back to the mid-2000s and ultimately leading to the M series, the 1997 Microsoft investment, etc.
"Steve Jobs is no match for Tim Cool when it comes to being a CEO of a big corporation"
Other 'Big Corp CEO' features are antitrust and abuse of dominant market position, forbidding suppliers from selling spare parts to device owners, lobbying opposition to right to repair and spreading lies, disabling the device in case of 'unautorised repair', and running software on your device with the goal of sending their own customers to jail.
He is wholesomely taking part in taking away property rights from masses of people and bringin about a new age of digital serfdom. You will own nothing, and anything from your phone to your toaster can be used against you.
Android hardware is behind, but I don't mind it that much. M1 made Android development finally nice on a laptop though. Before this it was a massive slog if you couldn't use a desktop machine, but developing on M1 is joyous. And this comes from a person who has never bought a single piece of Apple hardware nor has any interest in the ecosystem.
I have a M1, got it because I wanted to try something new. Now I love my M1, but it’s a special time. They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architecture and going to smaller nanometers. While apple is strategically buying up time on a limited production capacity like no one else can. Innovative design integrating all kind of slow components. I think it was an opportunity that won’t last, intel and amd are waking up to this fact. I see AMD and Intel coming up with some RISC and hybrid type solutions. Where they might not be able to do better is the PC integration. Memory and processing have always been separated and it’s going to be hard to integrate those just because of the cooperative structures. I think Apple can stay ahead if they keep going. If there is a M2 this year that is better, I’m buying it again with more memory, because M1 has been workable it’s not optimal for all my workflows.
The personal computing market is a nothingburger in the grand scheme of things. Apple alone sells more ARM based mobile devices than the entire worldwide PC market not including servers.
Even with the server market, AWS is moving toward ARM where ever it can (disclaimer I work at AWS). Even if Intel regains momentum in the PC market, it’s a Pyrrhic victory if they can’t get into the mobile market.
Even if the PC market (including laptops) is quite a bit more than a nothingburger, the segment of the PC market that really cares about the top decile or two of performance for whatever reason (real or imagined) is tiny. A lot of people are fine with a 5 year old system that's still supported, or even a Chromebook at this point.
AMD does ARM stuff and has had plenty of time to get it right.
Intel has had, what, three, four bites of the RISC cherry? They've owned big chunks of the ecosystem Apple now exists in. Evidently one of their pitches involves RISC-V and specifically SiFive.
I think it's a mistake to see the future as Apple vs Intel or AMD; that is the battle of the first -- nearly over -- quarter of this century.
The future is Apple vs Samsung and some Chinese megacorps we don't necessarily recognise. Because the battle is now moving on from large-scale off-the-shelf products and chips for motherboards to SoCs and large-scale bespoke design.
It will be the speed and performance of native apps on Apple and Samsung ARM silicon vs the freedom of choice and universal portability of WASM on RISC-V and the-long-tail-of-every-other-architecture.
I think Intel is too late. They can play catch up with the ARM market, but it will take time because there are are enough other players that they're not relevant enough to be on top again. That is unless they can out-innovate the competition, which I doubt, but who knows.
Over the past few years I've read articles and watched videos on Intel making some kind of comeback, yet the journalists creating those pieces seem either oblivious to RISC or are ignoring it. I don't know which one. That tells me all I need to know, and so far it isn't looking like Intel is the future for consumer electronics.
Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet. Might take a decade for them to realise.
Intel as a business? Maybe as a design house they will struggle to catch up. As a foundry? If they do not catch up with the amount of government support they are going to be able to claim, then there is something very wrong.
Most chip designers have at least one way forward, which is to produce chips that run WASM well on Linux or a BSD. This is actually a good time for minority architectures, because a truly portable architecture is on the horizon, and everyone has an incentive to see it work; that incentive being not losing all their business to Apple, Samsung and a few Chinese firms whose names we don't recognise yet!
>Well. I think x86 is dead and Intel just doesn't know it yet.
Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
In fairness, are you not merely implying the opposite prediction? I'm sure there were people who thought pagers/beepers wouldn't instantaneously disappear from use, and there were plenty of developers who thought Java was going to be the language for the web. I'm not sure how pointing to the year of the Linux desktop is a good argument.
Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.
There was a small measure of satire/hyperbole in what I said. But you have separated that one sentence from the second sentence that provided context, so I don't think I particularly need to defend it on its own.
Perhaps I should have used a semicolon to defend against you.
The point was that in ten years time, I think people will look back and say: 2022 is the year x86 really ended as a forward-looking architecture. Ergo: dead, they just don't know it yet.
But to expand: one of the things that is very striking about tech stuff is how quickly the energy in any one system can deflate.
Looking at the Apple competition, do you think buyers will think:
1) Intel simply need to make x86 a bit better to compete, or
2) It is about time we started looking at architectures that can scale up to compete with Apple Silicon on all levels (absolute CPU power, power consumption, mobile to server)
Architecturally, x86 is in serious trouble and this isn't just something I -- a random non-chip-designer -- think. It's what Intel think, or their entire recent push would not be to become a fabricator for other chip designs, built on an unhealthy amount of anti-asian supply chain FUD.
Once again, no. For the price of a Mac Pro, you get x86 hardware that performs simply better. Despite HN having a hardon for "b-b-but it's only 85W", it doesn't matter to a very large portion of users. I don't give a single crap if my workstation uses up 600W to run a 5900X and an RTX3070 (or, well, if I could find one, but shhh). I merely care about raw power. My electricity bill is a non-factor. And that's just with something of "equivalent power" (not even taking into account the fact that people don't give a shit about OSX if it doesn't run their software/games/etc). I can get some x86 hardware that runs an M1 into the ground easily, and given that all the current gen is on old processes, upcoming x86 hardware will, once again, be more than just competitive, but better. Then Apple will come out with the M2, reap all the benefits that come out of being a non-upgradable SoC with soldered RAM and soldered CPU, maybe be on top of very select benchmarks for a while, etc. As with every time that Apple came out with "revolutionary new hardware", what it mostly meant is "we slapped TSMC with a load of cash and got their latest and greatest process".
So, to respond, buyers will:
1/ Not give a crap about whether it's x86 or Apple Flavored ARM (read: an ARM with undocumented extensions that is pretty much CISC), but merely look at price, in which case Apple buyers are an extreme minority. A $500 laptop with a mobile Ryzen is more than enough for the average user, and mostly, most people cannot afford a $1200+ macbook air.
2/ Not care about power consumption because it does not matter to a boatload of people. Get out of your bubble, noone outside of software developer nerds care if they have to plug in their laptop once every four hours. Most people have lunch breaks. Is it a great thing to have in a laptop ? Absolutely, and Apple has done great in that regard. Does it matter anywhere else ? Absolutely not. Once again, it's HN jerking itself off about pErFoRmaNcE pEr WaTt when Apple put out a CPU that can't even draw the 105W it's rated for, and has no proof that it can improve in single threaded performance with more power. But sure, toss out more cores, it's what x86 has been doing for years, but when Apple comes out with the M1 Ultra it's a stroke of genius to slap two of these bad boys together.
3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
ARM is not a forward looking architecture, and neither is x86. They both are architectures, with their advantages and flaws (and the Apple flaws are fucking massive, unupgradable-except-if-you-buy-next-year's-version is the very definition of non-forward thinking, especially for end users).
Not going to respond to the unnecessarily rude tone here generally, except to say that any argument you want to have taken seriously is better not couched in terms of "hardons" and "jerking itself off". If you are a teenager, consider trying not to sound like one. If you're not a teenager, consider trying not to sound like one. Either way, this kind of communication is why you're likely still not taken as seriously as you could be.
Also you're taking it all off on an angry tangent about the HN audience when I am talking about buyers (I meant including institutional buyers, not end users, and I didn't clarify that enough but I would have thought the focus on architecture would have made it clearer) but:
> I don't give a single crap if my workstation uses up 600W to run a 5900X and an RTX3070 (or, well, if I could find one, but shhh).
I would. Between this April and next April my energy bill will double, and it is unlikely to ever fall back to where it is now. Power consumption matters A LOT in Europe right now. Corporate buyers will have to care about that, for the long term.
> 3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
No, they really don't upgrade their hardware, in fact. Almost no computer buyer upgrades through anything other than replacement.
But I'm using a seven year old, secondhand MacBook Pro, so I'm not the target of your comment.
For what it's worth, I recently went and traded in a pile of old Macs because I was travelling with a newer Macbook Pro (16" with M1 Pro) and needed to be able to effectively replace not only my first early M1 laptop, but also the iMac Pro I'd got as a flagship machine before the M1s came out.
Between those and an intel Mac Mini and an older iMac, I got over $3000 in trade-in value. Made me feel quite foolish for not having tried that before. The oldest iMac still got me a couple hundred bucks, as would your seven year old MacBook Pro most likely. A two year old high-specced computer?
I get that the list price for any of these is still way higher than putting together a PC from parts… but again, I belatedly traded a bunch of stuff in, and got more than $3000 in gift card value from Apple doing it. That makes 'rebuying a macbook pro every two years' a whole other state of affairs. I'm kicking myself for not having tried that earlier: I'm sure I left over $1000 on the table simply by letting recent computers sit around unused rather than immediately trading them in for Apple credit.
At the cheap end, it's ARM too. Chromebooks if you need a keyboard, tablets if not. It's only enterprise corporate office drones that are tied to windows. I've got a gaming rig too, but we are also a minority. Most people don't need a $1200 Macbook air, but also most people don't need a $800 RTX3070. PC Gamers are already a niche. Mobile gaming is where the money is, then console, then PC games, and mobile is 10x the both of them.
So to the point at discussion: Apple uses their common tech across their entire Market. The M1 chips are the result of making the fastest mobile phones. The M1 is going into tablets. They are just printing money and pumping that money into chip design. If your DIY PC Building is what is going to keep Intel/x86 alive, then I agree with GP: Intel is the walking dead. And it really is just us gamers.
Who needs raw CPU/GPU at their desk? I had one of the first nehalems under my desk (NDA and everything). Then I heard about AWS and started running my shit on that. Back then, that was intel. Now it's Graviton ARM: more processing per $.
> They capitalized on Intel/AMD sleeping on RISC architecture and going to smaller nanometers.
Apple is singlehandedly using up almost all of TSMC's 5nm processes. There are no smaller processes available anywhere in the world, and Samsung's is disappointing. Processes that have largely been driven by demand from AMD and Apple (EPYCs and Ryzens from AMD, and Apple's mobile chips). They capitalized on nothing except having fat wads of cash to slap people around with.
Additionally, it's not "being a RISC architecture" that makes the M1 a beast. Slap a 5950X on a SoC with directly available memory and GPU, and you get similar (better, even, considering current gen CPUs do get better performance already) results. "Deep integration of an entire stack makes things more performant" is not a new thing, it's merely that Intel and AMD have been upholding the contract of x86/64 that is interoperability and replaceability (well, Intel has been doing some socket fuckery for upgrades, but upgrades are still entirely possible), and Apple can afford to throw it away.
EDIT: bUt ThIs oVeRlOoKs PoWeR CoNsUmPtIoN
I swear I'm going to come out with a souped up raspberry pi and tell HN "look, it uses 1W of power for 10GFlops" and you would buy it because tHe PoWeR pEr wATt iS BeTTeR !11!!
The Udoo Bolt v8 is about the tiniest x86 "SoC" that I know that runs a Ryzen V1605B, 16GB of RAM and a Vega 8 that costs $500 and scores about half of the M1 Max in Passmark. Not too shabby for something that still has to deal with DDR4-2400 and storage far away!
This is the upside of Apple's distressing tendency to burn backward compatibility. As a Mac dev who chooses to support really REALLY old machines, I've experienced the downside of this, needing to keep dedicated retro machines just for building retro software on, and developing everything repeatedly on different generations of computer instead of having it just work the first time.
This is the upside: if they want to make a quantum leap, they will absolutely do so if it benefits them, and everybody's expected to just re-buy, at Apple prices (mind you, trade-ins are a thing). Apple absolutely can afford to throw away anything that impedes them from doing what they want, and in the case of the M1 processors it's serving them really well. Turns out the fat wads of cash can be used to buy useful things, and when Apple wants to, they can CHANGE THE WORRRLLLD ;)
I'm sure the PC (not necessarily 'x86') world will find ways to more or less keep up: there are plenty of people who really, really want to keep up. It's just that complacency won't cut it: PC-land has to really seriously work to not fall way behind. Good. That's best for everybody. As a lifelong Mac guy since the 68040, I'm delighted the PC world has driven Apple to these extremes, because now I get to enjoy the results.
The 5nm process is only one part of what makes the M-series so fast and efficient. Yes, RISC is another but much of Intel’s chips are RISC at some levels.
A big part of what makes Apple’s chips so fast is that they optimize them for the needs of the OS. In interviews they have given examples of how to profiled the common operations in the OS and then made sure that those operations were as fast as possible on the chips. that integration is a big part of it. Other hardware and software vendors are not as tightly coupled and don’t do this kind of optimization.
You're rewriting history there. Intel has tried, tried, TRIED! to compete against ARM since it's been clear all the market growth was happening there around 2010.
Their most credible strategy was to produce modems to steal Qualcomm's insane margins on those chips and break the forced mariage of their modems with their not-so-good processors. It was such a resounding failure that Apple bought the whole division for scraps.
I don't see how Intel suddenly gets its shit together now that the ARM chips are in computers. The fact that the chips ended up in computers is a direct consequence of their decade of failure. I expect Apple to stay ahead of Intel and AMD in terms of power per watt for a decade at least.
It's kind of the same situation with Tesla vs. the big car companies. They were always going to catch up, and they made huge progress in the last few years. AMD and Intel have spent decades trading places, sometimes with unethical practices that would make 2000s Microsoft blush. I'm not sure Apple is prepared for what happens when AMD and Intel both come for them.
I think slumping Mac sales just had more to do with Apple putting out tired, flawed products and letting them languish especially on the desktop side. Why buy a laptop that will cook itself and have the keyboard self destruct in a year or two or a desktop that hasn't been refreshed for 3+ years? Their investment in the late Intel era was particularly bad. Were they expecting AS earlier but just couldn't get it where they wanted?
One reason for me not upgrading my 2009 MacBook until the M1 was I put a SSD in there, more ram, and it just purred along. Then somewhere around 2014 I installed Linux on it and I never looked back. I don’t have much to do but write documents on this thing, email and light web browsing. The thing was a tank, and it still goes after 10+ years. Fun fact the cd drive broke just after 1 year… I still think the screen is the most beautiful screen I own, and the keyboard/trackpad is solid what else do I need? M1 for me was just interesting to try something different.. and turns out it was a good gamble, and I have retired the 09 model as my daily driver, because it turns out having a battery that works is useful.
Computers in general have just matured. Unless you're an extreme power user like a gamer or video editor, you don't need to upgrade that often anymore.
I have a fairly loaded M1 Pro MacBook and it's very nice. But I also have a couple 6 year old Macs in the house and, to be honest, aside from video and phoro editing which is all on my M1 now, I use all 3 systems pretty interchangeably--usually in the browser--except for the iMac which has a full setup (lighting/audio/etc.) to conference and record video.
Not just that, but changing machines is a chore. I'd be happy to only upgrade when my machines starts to disintegrate. Sadly, corporations don't agree with that.
Yea I mean I m not a hardcore gamer or graphics guy and I am not able to find a reason to upgrade from my MacBook pro 2014 retina. It works like a charm even though I m concerned if Apple would let me change the battery which may need replacement
Jony Ive put a sprightly charm into the dull personal computer. But he should have stuck to the oldest design tenet - "Don't change something drastic enough to make it less usable".
There are always bunch of people on both sides of the fence, but the usability & familiarity generally is perceived to have taken a dip with the flat glassy design. Admitted, now we are used to it (the iOS look & feel). But the change between skeumorphic & flat was a hard change & tad unpleasant for its times. Form should have never take precedence over function. This is something that the Thinkpad team got overwhelmingly right.
Apple's genius is in selling Rolls-Royces to the masses (or at least to a sizable fraction of the masses) - bespoke chip design seems in keeping with this strategy.
I would argue that the masses don't need Rolls-Royces, thus this is resource mis-allocation on a global scale - but certainly Apple have pushed device and UI design forward strongly, so maybe we can live with that.
Personal devices are practically an extension of one’s brain in that it is a key part of most people’s thought processes. Speeding this up globally is a holy mission.
I have never thought of that but I agree. Personal combination of devices/OS/apps is a reflection of our own mind and everyone should choose what works for them best.
Who's saying they're great? All I'm saying is that they're better than starving on the street, which as you pointed out is what would be happening to these people without the shitty sweatshop jobs. I really struggle to see how offering an alternative to starving on the street is a bad thing. Would you prefer these companies pack up the sweatshops, return production to countries with expensive labor, and force some of their former workers back to starve on the street? Personally I would not. If those people want to work in those conditions I think it's immoral to stop them.
> but promoting that is far from a "holy mission".
I don't think anyone is saying this either. Obviously sweatshop operators are looking out for their own interests, but that's the great thing about trade. When all participants are willing they are necessarily better off due to the trade, otherwise it wouldn't happen.
Apple hardware isn't "Rolls Royce". It is not low-cost, but in many segments competetively priced. At worst you can call them BMW. Yes, they keep out of the low price market and for some parts (memory, ssd extensions), they ask for a hefty price. But they are pretty competitive to the upper range of the market. On the other side, the M1 MB Air is actually a cheap laptop considering its performance.
And on the big scale, we should be happy that finally the x86 monoculture is coming to an end. I can still remember the times when there were several competing cpu architectures which made for a lot of innovation.
I generally agree, but I think you might underestimate how many customers _globally_ are very price sensitive. I have relatives overseas and a price difference of ~$40 is pretty sizable over there. Apple devices are seen as quite a luxury there.
I am aware of that. I think it is amazing that a $70 unsubsidized cell phone exists and Android has done more to make “computers” ubiquitous than Microsoft/Intel did.
But a $100 cell phone is no substitute for a $429 iPhone SE. While there are some mid tier $250-$300 Android phones that are “good enough”. The only phones that currently exist that have the performance of even an iPhone SE are - other iPhones.
No it is a substitute. They are both phones, they both browse the web, check emails, etc. Obviously the iPhone SE is better but guess what? It costs over 4 times as much! A BMW 3 series is also better than Chevy Spark. Not everyone can afford to pay $400+ for a phone.
A big part of the price you pay for an Apple device is that you are also finding their future R&D so they can make the right (or wrong?) choices for their customers. It’s not just the cost of goods sold.
No wonder, I don't particularly like Apple, most of their stuff is way too overpriced imo, but the new M1 MacBooks are pretty great. Every single laptop I had before the M1, whether it's Apple, Dell or whatever is simply crap compared to it.
I'm not really sure what AMD or Intel were doing in these past 10 or so years, but they need to change ASAP. The M1 Mac is great, but a similar linux laptop would be incredible.
Not everything is supported yet. Depending on your workload/device it could be usable if you're okay with the limitations. See their feature support page:
Apple only sells Apple Silicon through proprietary, locked-down, non-upgradable hardware paired with Apple's choice of operating system.
Even if Intel/AMD processing power was not competitive with Apple Silicon (which it is), there is a laundry list of reasons for many people to continue buying PCs.
To be sure, Intel has struggled "these past 10 years or so", taking their sweet time pushing PC processing power forward, and then making a series of mistakes in engineering. AMD also struggled prior to 2017, but they've been riding a series of successful engineering ventures recently. In the meantime, Intel will likely succeed well enough in remaining competitive with their massive resources and investments in research and development.
While the impressive performance, and especially efficiency, of Apple Silicon brings Apple into the mainstream as eligible devices, there's still, as I said, plenty of reasons outside of performance (and efficiency) that make PC's worthwhile options. Of course, if you're a fan of macOS, there's already no reason for you to consider a PC, but if you really do like Linux, then I'm not sure what it is about the current state of AMD/Intel processing hardware that you dislike so much.
Laptops. Apple is the undisputed king of laptops, and no PC can achieve quiet power in such a light enclosure. I mean, the Macbook Air doesn't even have a fan!
I'm reading this on an M1 Air. Not only doesn't it have a fan, it doesn't even get hot. Disclaimer: I'm sure it can be made to get hot. If you want to play intensive games or compile gigabytes of code, get a Pro with a fan. If you want to read, watch movies, write, create documents, the M1 Air is about perfect.
Not OP, but I think that the consumer market for laptops is basically Chromebooks and iPads for anything < ~$700 and a MacBook for anything over. I would imagine that the number of high performance "gaming" laptops sold in the consumer space would be in the minority comparatively.
> Of course, if you're a fan of macOS, there's already no reason for you to consider a PC, but if you really do like Linux, then I'm not sure what it is about the current state of AMD/Intel processing hardware that you dislike so much.
On PC, Intel and AMD is great, the desktop M1 is not that great vs. those CPUs. The problem is the laptop form factor. All Intel and AMD laptops I owned so far were noisy, overheated, had worse trackpad, and didn't last long on battery. Those are not a problem with PCs.
You might want to hold off if it's not of immediate need. Should be a new product release in september, or possibly at WWDC this summer. Then you can decide whether to get the M1 for cheaper or M2 for same price.
I think that's a fair price. But it was overpriced before the M1 CPUs. You could just buy a non-Apple for way cheaper that was noisy, weak and overheated just like the MacBook Air.
The last time I bought a MacBook was in 2016. I swear, that thing was cursed. In the first 2 weeks, I cracked the bezel below the screen (I suspect a small shell of a peanut or something of a similar nature). Then, 2 weeks after that, my keys started to randomly fall out (this was very common for that particular model) and Apple refused to fix it for me. And then, a few months down the line, I managed to spill a can of beer on it while getting up from the bed in my hotel room. That was the end of that.
Didn't get another one and instead got an Asus with an RTX card, which is really nice for all kinds of things, and even gaming when I want.
But, the M1 looks really promising. And it seems they have finally gotten rid of the Touch Bar also. I think I need to start putting some money in the piggy bank.
It's been better written about elsewhere, but the fifth-gen 2021 M1 MBPs are a really good (if not timely) course correction from the fourth-gen (2016 - 2020) debacle. Solid keyboard, no useless touch bar, most all the ports back including MagSafe, top-notch display, and internal upgrades. I bought one to finally replace my 3rd gen (2013) MBP and it's just been fantastic.
I'm not sure how people have these structural issues with their Macbooks. Not saying you did anything wrong, but my experience with the screens is that they are relatively robust.
The only time I had a serious problem with Macs was back in the 2000's when they were shipping with cheap ass Hitachi hard drives that were extremely failure prone. I had an early iBook (yes the weird one with the translucent color) and one day the drive had an unrecoverable head collision and that was the end of that thing. Years later all my college friends had Macs and, no joke, half of them ended up with the same thing.
I got an M1 Macbook Air last year and I still feel like I'm living in the future. It's small, light, noiseless, and snappy to boot. The battery life is crazy good as well. I can take it on a plane and not even need to think about whether the plane has an outlet. As a web developer also doing SCAD for 3D printing, it's been a joy. It handles a bajillion browser tabs quite well. Maybe something else will fail after 7 years, but at least that will be 7 good years. lol
There's a lot to criticize about Apple as a company, but recently they've really been knocking it out of the park with their laptops in my opinion.
As an aside, if anyone reading this has an M1 or a Mac of any kind, at your own risk, look into disabling ReportCrash and see what happens. This improved performance even further for me, and it's easy to undo.
Macbooks are made of rigid aluminum and have incredibly tight tolerances especially in the 2016-2019 era. There is almost zilch room between the display and chassis when closed on butterfly models. Apple literally has a support article telling you not to use a webcam cover more than 0.1mm thick because you could break the display [0] and I've heard stories of similar problems with crumbs. They also had really poor cooling for the chips Apple stuffed in there especially for the i9s, to the point IIRC the 2018 i9 benchmarks slower than the i7 in longish workloads due to thermal throttling. And the butterfly keyboards are a known disaster prone to breaking.
While the M1 models have been an improvement, 2016-2019 were particularly not great.
That would be the best outcome for PC people. Apple never cared who made their chips; they want the best node at volume. If Intel can get their business, so be it.
However, I doubt it in the next decade. Have you seen how many chips they need for the iPhone?
Gotta say my M1 exceeds all expectations. Virtually no fan noise, I almost thought it was broken until I had a better look.
Performance wise it compiles my code much much faster than my 2019.
In terms of battery I can take it for a full day's work in town doing the same coding work, and there's no need to start looking for a charging point. Not even "just in case". I don't even have to think about maybe closing one of the apps, I just run it with 5 IDEs and 15 projects open, though that's probably down to having plenty of RAM rather than the CPU.
The new architecture also doesn't make much difference. Stuff just works, though homebrew needs to be told it's not on Intel anymore (terraform breaks weirdly if you don't do this). There seem to be plenty of M1 versions for your generic coder stuff.
The most mind-blowing thing about the M1 is that I've never seen the beachball cursor for the entire system ever since I got mine. Used to be a daily occurrence on my 2012 macbook pro and drove me nuts at times. This one is ridiculously responsive.
On and I've only managed to get the fans to audibly spin after several minutes of compiling an Android app with a huge native library on an x86 NDK for 4 architectures.
that’s the thing with computers, performance is always nuanced… Latest Intel’s are fast, latest AMDs are fast, latest Apple silicon are fast and we’ve never really had it better. I’m super happy to be back in desktop arena with user replaceable parts and capacity.. 32 core, 128gb ram, non soc systems for me at prices i could only dream of a few years ago.
If your are using vscode with the rust analyzer plugin, you are constantly "compiling". This is how the inline hints, errors, typehints are done. My 3 year old i5 laptop struggled with this, my new desktop 12th gen i7 has the power so it never slows down, but if you look at the syst monitor, you can see that it does do quite some work.
If you have this plus some of the other electron hogs (teams, slack, a browser with 30 tabs of stack overflow), your system does have a proper load.
Compiling can use an arbitrarily large amount of CPU, memory, and disk bandwidth. After all, if more of the critical resource were available, using it would allow compilation to complete faster, which would be a win.
The beach ball occurs when some UI process does not service its event loop. This can be an issue with the process, or it can be caused because that process is contending for resources with the compilation processes.
If the critical resource that's causing a beachball here is CPU, there's two very easy paths forward: either modify your compilation scripts to use fewer threads than the system has physical performance cores, or run the compilation at a higher nice level. In either case the UI process should be able to get CPU when it needs it and not beachball. The higher nice level is generally both the easier and more effective solution, since it will allow the compilation process to continue to use all cores when UI processes are not scheduled.
If the critical resource is memory the system will page, which will turn the critical resource into disk bandwidth. Fixes specific to memory usage here are to get more memory (not really actionable), or to reduce parallelism on the build process.
If the critical resource is disk bandwidth, this is the hardest problem to fix. To my knowledge MacOS doesn't provide good tools for managing disk priority. If the disk bandwidth being used is to access build-related files (source, object files, etc) rather than swap, one possibility is to use a thunderbolt-connected external SSD for the build artifacts, leaving the internal storage for swap and for the UI program. However, if your build process is using so many disk operations that it's starving a UI program, you're likely to see a performance hit going to a slower external SSD.
Your comment is one reason I still love this place. A brief snarky comment is taken seriously in the best way with a well-considered and comprehensive reply. It’s like watching a Zen koan play out.
Word of caution: many (most?) Linux distributions are vulnerable to various hard crashes with -j >= num_cores, and sometimes getting the physical machine or instance restarted is a pain! So you probably also want to fix these builds if you use any of this Rust or Haskell software on Linux.
But the real question is whether you ever saw the beach ball when doing these compiles on Intel processors?
It is not that the M-series chips can never trigger a beachball but that there are significantly fewer scenarios where that happens to the point that many users never find themselves in those scenarios. You see their enthusiasm as fanboyism and they could see you as being grumpy, but the you are just both seeing different parts of a distribution curve.
Oh you can definitely get the beach ball, but I pretty much only get it from things I would expect to get it from. If you're doing things that aren't graphically expensive, then yeah, the M1 means next to no weird hangups in my experience. I'd be surprised if you never got the beach ball.
I do get it but only when an app is blocking its UI thread. The rest of the system is still responsive. On my old macbook I'd get a beachball and the entire system would freeze for seconds at a time.
It might have serious problems on the Mac. On Windows it is generally quite nice, and I have never seen any unusual delay joining a meeting. Warm startup for the application is about three seconds on a relatively old machine.
>Teams is set to automatically open and run in the background as soon as you start your device. If you close the app, it keeps running in the background.
If it takes 15 seconds to get Teams on a Mac to do anything substantial like start up or start a meeting, it would hardly be a surprise if no one wanted to use it. Perhaps Microsoft should do something about it, or rewrite Teams using an efficient technology, I don't know.
... or that it's just a lot less likely that you'd notice a problem with CPU or memory usage unless you just happened to be looking at a process monitor, due to the abundance of system resources these days. I often wonder whether the art of profiling during software development is dead.
At some point I realized that most (all?) Electron apps have web versions that work just fine, and sometimes even better, in the one instance of Chromium I run anyway. I don't need Teams nor Slack (thankfully), but I do use Discord in a browser tab.
I’ve seen it running gtpj locally (which needs 48GB ram so this is the first apple laptop that can run it). I didn’t check how many threads were at full tilt but possibly my entire cpu was maxed out.
Citrix client regularly beachballs and hangs for me. Obviously it’s buggy software, but isn’t buggy software often the cause for seeing the beach ball in general?
Designing your own chip is a ballsy thing to do. I think it might be one of the most underrated innovations Apple has ever done. Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. But he's still delivering on innovation where it's typically stalled.
Apple has too many cash on their hands. God knows how many hyper well funded projects they have.
Not my definition of balsy project. Balsy would be risking the business level of funding. This is peanuts money level of risk. They didn’t told anyone about it either, so no reputation risk also (how many failed projects at this point on apple we don’t even hear about?).
So, in my humble opinion, not risky nor balsy. But a smart and rewarding move? FUCK YES!
Ballsy? They are the richest company on the planet, and the biggest risk to their business is stagnation. They have enough cash on hand to buy the international space station 3 times over. Investors are roasting them for being entirely dependant on iPhone sales for revenue.
Where else are they going to invest this money? Having your own components is the most obvious way to strengthen their moat.
If they took a step outside consumer electronics and invested into a new market, or invented something never seen before, which they can do 3 times over, then yeah, that would be ballsy.
> Ballsy? They are the richest company on the planet, and the biggest risk to their business is stagnation. They have enough cash on hand to buy the international space station 3 times over. Investors are roasting them for being entirely dependant on iPhone sales for revenue.
It’s absolutely ballsy when you look at what happened with PowerPC (where they made the opposite decision to great effect), and the failure of competing attempts to do this such as Windows on ARM.
They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success despite their largest competitor attempting and failing to make the migration.
> They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success
They didn't - they obviously had tested performance of these CPUs and knew it was excellent before deciding to switch to them. They were only risking whatever amount they invested.
PowerPC was unpopular and dying. ARM was the most popular instruction set on the planet before Apple developed M1.
Apple has tight control over software on their platform, they say jump, everyone asks 'how high. Apple dropped 32 bit support overnight and everyone has to deal with it. Microsoft still has support for 16 bit software in Windows 10. Open Process manager on Windows, Discord, Steam and much of other software is still 32 bit. No-one is compiling for Windows for ARM, Noone is using their Store. Some corportaes are still on windows 7, the world took 15 years to get off windows XP and I have seen some ATMs still running on it. Very different market.
We really need some X86 stuff to come out on that 5nm process already. Everyone keeps saying that the M1 chips are great, and they are right, but then they slip into implying it's because of the ARM design, which I don't think there's any evidence for. Yet. When AMD's Zen 4 stuff comes out we'll finally be able to compare architectures, and I can't wait.
There's plenty of evidence, and the 5nm architecture is far from the only part of the story. Would an x86 on 5nm suddenly be able to run without a fan?
Though it does use TurboBoost up to 55W apparently. I don't know about the M1. If anyone wants to try, you can lock TDP on some laptops to exactly 15W (or whatever the compared M1 runs at) and run Passmark or something.
ARM ISA has probably little to do with the efficiency, although:
* the memory model is slightly more relaxed
* instruction decoding is obviously simpler, and while the impact of x86 decoding was not that major at a point, I suspect it has increased with time
What matters is mostly the microarchitecture of Apple, and, yes, the 5nm.
IIRC at the beginning of the Zen projet, AMD wanted to do 2 versions: 1 with an x86 frontend, and one with an ARM one. They would probably have had very similar performance profiles, and I suspect at most a dozen percent of diff for energy consumption. Intel is currently very far from that to reach a core perf similar to the one of the M1.
if I recall correctly ARM instructions are fixed length. You can start deciding instructions on parallel at the same time (ie right after you fetch). X86 uses variable length instructions. Decoding the next instruction requires the previous one to be decoded (think decompression vs reading fixed records).
Hopefully I got that right. Now in theory Intel and AMD do employ tricks to optimize x86 decode. If I recall this correctly, they decide opportunistically several possible paths simultaneously and start speculatively executing the ones that turn out to be valid instructions. Likely this works pretty well (+ the variable length means better utilization of the code cache).
> In terms of battery I can take it for a full day's work in town doing the same coding work, and there's no need to start looking for a charging point. Not even "just in case".
I agree.
The M1 architecture is fabulous. But the fact they've managed to cram it into a laptop, without throttling performance and without killing battery life, infact quite the opposite on both fronts, i.e. amazing performance and amazing battery life. Its quite the tour de force.
Hats off to all those at Apple. That's some hardcore engineering there.
My Mac Studio Ultra is completely quiet, even when I am using all 20 cores (my art generation tools sometimes maxes out the CPU). Compiling in release mode, and running, is often faster than my brain can realize it's already done.
The last time I felt the machine was faster than I thought it to be was 1984 running Turbo Pascal on a PC/XT. No PC or Mac since then really felt insanely fast to develop on. Until this one.
I run World Of Tanks, which runs in WINE emulator, which runs on Rosetta, and it's as fast as it was on my iMac. I have no clue how this works.
> The new architecture also doesn't make much difference. Stuff just works, though homebrew needs to be told it's not on Intel anymore (terraform breaks weirdly if you don't do this). There seem to be plenty of M1 versions for your generic coder stuff.
I bought an MBP with M1 two months ago. The main reason was to run video conferencing software, which so far it has done well at. That it is a powerful machine yet small and lightweight was a plus for it as well - its easy portability.
I bought it for some secondary reasons, but those have not panned out yet. In mid-February I tried to compile a program with the release version of Android Studio, the project had NDK (C language) components. Even with Rosetta it was not working ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). Google said they had M1 support coming down in Android Studio canary version and other fixes coming out as well in the future. I'm not in a rush, but it compiles on my Ubuntu box and on Intel-based Macs, but not M1 out of the box yet (not without having to fiddle around to do it any how).
For my Android projects that were fully Java/Kotlin based, the M1 did compile fast though.
Also, Fidelity said they have an application called Active Trader Pro that works on Macs. It's not something I ever used, or that I would probably use regularly, but I decided to check it out. It would not work for me either, and support forums made mention of difficulties it has on M1.
One thing I haven't tried yet is loading Unity 3d and futzing around with it, hopefully when I have the time to do that it will be working.
Still happy with my purchase as it's working for my primary need, and more Android Studio support seems to be coming, and it is not a big rush to me. It's probably good that Apple is pulling software into a world where it supports ARM (kind of weird Android code primarily targets ARM devices, yet has trouble compiling on ARM devices). I had heard about how fast things compile on it, but it was even faster than I expected. So all in all I like it, and hopefully more software will be supported as time goes on.
Interestingly that devices on M1, per geekbench scores, all have basically identical performance. So in the end, M1 Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro differ only in the number of ports and the availability of a built-in display.
The point is only about processing power. Previously, mini/air/pro lines on Intel all had wildly varying performance. Now many of Apple devices share identical processors and do not differ in this regard.
(Of course there are now models with differen processors from the latest generation of products, but i wasn't talking about them)
No, I was not. I even did a table last time I shopped for new devices for our developers:
Model Processor Geekbench multi/single core score
MacMini (2020) M1, 8 cores 7782/1747
MacBook Air M1 M1, 8 cores 7618/1734
MacBook Pro (13-inch Late 2020) M1, 8 cores 7739/1753
iMac (24-inch Mid 2021) M1, 8 cores 7660/1742
2021 models do come with M1 Pro processors come with 8 and 10 cores, and have 9900 and 11700 multicore score respectively, but I was not talking about them.
It’s easy for people to make this assumption since all of the Apple Silicon chips are “M1” but some are “M1++”. It helps to avoid that misunderstanding by talking about baseline M1 or non-pro M1 chips.
Depending on the config, the M1 Pro has 8 or 10 cores - and unlike the M1, the M1 Pro's 8 core configuration uses 6 performance cores and 2 efficiency cores vs 4 / 4
I don't see why that would be the case on a hardware level. Unlocking power limit (and maybe voltage) controls would be nice if just to see how far it can be pushed.
Intel had unlocked TDP/TPL on many i7 chips and lower end models had exactly the same performance as higher end models (assuming equal core/thread/cache count) heh
Is there any option for getting this kind of integration for general purpose Windows or Linux systems? It still seems pretty far off. Even getting an ARM system at all is still fairly exotic or you are using niche hardware like the Raspberry Pi.
What would be key would be getting the chip designers to optimized their chips to support common operations in those OSs super efficiently. that is part of what makes the Apple Silicon chips so effective. With Window and Linux, there is no vertical integration and the chip makes are not focusing on this kind of optimization.
I still keep an old Intel MacBook around for compatibility reasons, but otherwise I am all-in on M1.
A couple of years ago I noticed that my old iPad Pro (not M1, but ARM) compiled Swift code in Playground projects twice as fast as compiling the same code on an Intel MacBook.
Off topic, but to me the most amazing Apple silicon enabled product is the Apple Watch. It is so fantastic being able to leave my iPhone at home and still get calls and messages from my wife, Dad, etc. It seems so much healthier to just be wearing the watch. Mobile phones are intentionally addictive.
Not really. A large percentage of the world's super computers right now are using ARM-based setups. We are probably a few years away from seeing ARM-based desktop chips from a variety of manufacturers that put x86 in the dust in terms of performance and power consumption
Apple's design is remarkable, but it is completely useless as we can't buy one and use it for something other than a Mac, so in effect, it doesn't exist.
Good for them. Maybe someday the rest of us will get access to this kind of hardware through a less walled-garden vendor that actually lets us use it for something other than running a Mac.
I haven't read the article due to the paywall, but was it actually risky? Apple had already proven they could make high-performant chips ever since the A4 in the iPhone 4. It was a long effort, sure, but given the tight integration between hardware and software Apple has, I wouldn't classify their effort as risky.
Was it really that risky? If anything this seemed like a pretty sure-fire bet by bringing in various operations in-house when partnerships would prove to go sour. I think Apple knew these limitations back with Jobs too. At least that's what I understood from reading various biographies on the many Apple characters & partnerships.
Now that Apple has paved the way, you'll likely see this with other big computer companies like Microsoft for their mainline products & development. I think Steve Jobs would regularly quote Alan Kay on this idea:
I think that given Intel has recently changed leadership (for the better ridding the culture of MBAs), we may even see unique partnerships as well that may act as this "in-house" hardware providers.
People overestimate the risk. If the M1 had not worked out they’d stick it in an iPhone and try again. They’re still selling Intel processors so it’s not like Intel would tell them to F off either, so the real risk is whatever costs they incurred making it.
Like the Intel transition before, they controlled risks well and were able to develop the iPhone processor until it could run a Mac.
Just because something is daring and amazing doesn’t mean it was a huge risk.
Even if you take that article at face value (I don’t). Let’s look at chip volumes
1. Apple uses the same processors (the Mx series) on Macs and high end and midrange iPads.
2. Looking more broadly, Apple uses slightly modified versions of the same ARM chip in Macs, iPads, iPhones, set top boxes and monitors (yes the newest Apple monitor has the same processor as an iPhone 11)
Just taking 1 and two into account, Apple probably sells between 250 - 300 million computing devices with high end ARM chips.
Now let’s add the processors that Apple sells in the Watch and AirPods that are also ARM variants.
I'm generally not an Apple fan, I only use it for work and have never bought an Apple product with my own money.
Saying that the M1 MBP is pure bliss, so much that I'm for the first time considering spending my own money on an Apple product. And that is even though I still had a few issues here and there with Docker but the 'no fan, no heat' and strong battery life make well up for it!
Yup, recently got one for work. I still do my open source work on Windows with a maxed out XPS i9 laptop, since I've used Windows almost exclusively for 20+ years, and VS is a bit nicer than VSCode for F# (or maybe I'm just used to it; VSCode on Mac is perfectly usable). Perf is about the same between the two (though TBH the Mac does usually run a couple of percent faster when I time it) , but that Mac just spoils you for battery life. I get frustrated now when the Dell starts asking for more juice after "only" two hours.
I have been using the first edition of the M1 from work for development and it’s magical compared to the old i7 Intel. It almost never spins the fan, even with IntelliJ IDEA cranking up with Docker full speed.
I recently purchased the M1 Pro for private use and the battery life on that thing is insane. 16 inch screen running VS Code, Docker, Elixir, Erlang and Chrome while lasting hours with no charge and able to use it in my lap without a sweat. It is incredible.
Yeah I got an M1 pro recently but most of my dev workflows are in docker and docker is still painfully slow compared with Linux.
I actually miss the plasma desktop and Linux more than I anticipated and might consider putting Linux on the m1 when there are more options unless I get more find of MacOS.
Docker on mac already runs on Linux, so how can Linux be slower than Linux? Are you talking about cross-filesystem access? You have an imaginary problem.
But putting an M1 into iPad 11 and 12.9 (and now Air!?) was a huge mistake. I get it - economies of scale. The new thing, why not take the power etc.
Problem is: ipads (for me at least) were all about battery power on the go. My 12.9er is useless and basically only used at home. My 11" Cellular model is still good but definitely a few hours less than my old A12X 11"er was. And the difference in speed is negligible on a non-multitasking device.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadA little bit like what uber does vs how taxis work.
In Germany uber only exists were it is reasonable profitable. Taxies exist everywhere in Germany and do all the other things society needs: dialisis drives to hospital etc.
Apple doesn't bother with providing cheap and affordable hardware (the mw 1k Mac book air was a surprisingly good deal, still a few hundred bugs too expensive for a lot of humans).
I don't critisis apple for it. It's just that the margin they have and the general size of how many people want and need hardware is just that big.
But it makes this 'gamble' very predictable and controllable .
Even developers just accept what apple requires from them.
I would be impressed by what apple does if it would actually help the normal people.
That's a funny typo, but it is a typo, right?
We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make
We just have to hope that the Ukraine conflict has convinced China not to try to pull it off. We certainly would not be able to find economic sanctions that could possibly work if they did.
The only thing that can end up in Chinese hands is the rubble of what used to be TSMC facilities.
Ukraine has shown that those can evaporate in mere days.
In Ukraine, the territory is what Russia wants (minerals, crops) but in Taiwan it's the "human capital" that's desirable, and the latter isn't so susceptible to invasion.
It's likely that Russia, with ten times the armed forces of Ukraine, will devastate Ukraine, unfortunately. But China is more likely to hold off devastating Taiwan.
b) Intel spun up their Foundry Services division specifically to manufacture chips for Apple, Amazon, Microsoft etc.
See IBM, Solaris and hp big iron. Even car makers would source various parts from other smaller companies
I mean sure, you can always work on decreasing risk (from directly hedging financially ... forward contracts, swaps, basically counterparty insurance), to keeping a shitton of inventory, using standardized components, etc..
But of course the accumulation of capital allowed Apple to do this, which is simply [quantity] x [unit economics].
Again "obviously", it's not independent of Steve's (and Apple's as a whole) philosophy. Repositioning themselves into a high-end market immediately helped with the unit economics, even if they sold last year's technology with a simplified (but polished!) UI/UX.
no. I do not have industry details, but it was control through contract terms, using harsh negotiating, that prevailed. As oil-backed transportation dropped in price again and again, many industries moved away from holding inventory at all. btw- Dell was harsher than even Steve Jobs, which is hard to do. Tim Cook was literally picked due to his contract "skills" and that he was an obvious work-a-holic.
That "Tim Cook doctrine" is 100% Steve Jobs doctrine, from back when companies like Adobe and Microsoft were holding the platform hostage and represented an existential threat to Apple. You'll find that this neatly explains hundreds of notable Apple choices as disparate as QuickTime for Windows, custom silicon efforts going back to the mid-2000s and ultimately leading to the M series, the 1997 Microsoft investment, etc.
inb4 'Tim Cool, formerly known as Tim Apple'
Other 'Big Corp CEO' features are antitrust and abuse of dominant market position, forbidding suppliers from selling spare parts to device owners, lobbying opposition to right to repair and spreading lies, disabling the device in case of 'unautorised repair', and running software on your device with the goal of sending their own customers to jail.
He is wholesomely taking part in taking away property rights from masses of people and bringin about a new age of digital serfdom. You will own nothing, and anything from your phone to your toaster can be used against you.
Even with the server market, AWS is moving toward ARM where ever it can (disclaimer I work at AWS). Even if Intel regains momentum in the PC market, it’s a Pyrrhic victory if they can’t get into the mobile market.
Intel has had, what, three, four bites of the RISC cherry? They've owned big chunks of the ecosystem Apple now exists in. Evidently one of their pitches involves RISC-V and specifically SiFive.
I think it's a mistake to see the future as Apple vs Intel or AMD; that is the battle of the first -- nearly over -- quarter of this century.
The future is Apple vs Samsung and some Chinese megacorps we don't necessarily recognise. Because the battle is now moving on from large-scale off-the-shelf products and chips for motherboards to SoCs and large-scale bespoke design.
It will be the speed and performance of native apps on Apple and Samsung ARM silicon vs the freedom of choice and universal portability of WASM on RISC-V and the-long-tail-of-every-other-architecture.
Over the past few years I've read articles and watched videos on Intel making some kind of comeback, yet the journalists creating those pieces seem either oblivious to RISC or are ignoring it. I don't know which one. That tells me all I need to know, and so far it isn't looking like Intel is the future for consumer electronics.
Intel as a business? Maybe as a design house they will struggle to catch up. As a foundry? If they do not catch up with the amount of government support they are going to be able to claim, then there is something very wrong.
Most chip designers have at least one way forward, which is to produce chips that run WASM well on Linux or a BSD. This is actually a good time for minority architectures, because a truly portable architecture is on the horizon, and everyone has an incentive to see it work; that incentive being not losing all their business to Apple, Samsung and a few Chinese firms whose names we don't recognise yet!
Let me toss that in my list of sentences that will poorly age, alongside "This is the year of gaming on the linux desktop" and "surely nothing wrong will happen if I plug in this SCADA on the Internet"
Though I think x86/x86_64 inevitably will outlive its usefulness for general purpose computing, but it's not literally "dead". There's too many Intel architecture devices out there still. To me, it seems clear that it's more of a dead architecture walking, because I really can't think of anything that x86 does better for most use cases. I'd love to be shown wrong, though.
Perhaps I should have used a semicolon to defend against you.
The point was that in ten years time, I think people will look back and say: 2022 is the year x86 really ended as a forward-looking architecture. Ergo: dead, they just don't know it yet.
But to expand: one of the things that is very striking about tech stuff is how quickly the energy in any one system can deflate.
Looking at the Apple competition, do you think buyers will think:
1) Intel simply need to make x86 a bit better to compete, or
2) It is about time we started looking at architectures that can scale up to compete with Apple Silicon on all levels (absolute CPU power, power consumption, mobile to server)
Architecturally, x86 is in serious trouble and this isn't just something I -- a random non-chip-designer -- think. It's what Intel think, or their entire recent push would not be to become a fabricator for other chip designs, built on an unhealthy amount of anti-asian supply chain FUD.
So, to respond, buyers will:
1/ Not give a crap about whether it's x86 or Apple Flavored ARM (read: an ARM with undocumented extensions that is pretty much CISC), but merely look at price, in which case Apple buyers are an extreme minority. A $500 laptop with a mobile Ryzen is more than enough for the average user, and mostly, most people cannot afford a $1200+ macbook air.
2/ Not care about power consumption because it does not matter to a boatload of people. Get out of your bubble, noone outside of software developer nerds care if they have to plug in their laptop once every four hours. Most people have lunch breaks. Is it a great thing to have in a laptop ? Absolutely, and Apple has done great in that regard. Does it matter anywhere else ? Absolutely not. Once again, it's HN jerking itself off about pErFoRmaNcE pEr WaTt when Apple put out a CPU that can't even draw the 105W it's rated for, and has no proof that it can improve in single threaded performance with more power. But sure, toss out more cores, it's what x86 has been doing for years, but when Apple comes out with the M1 Ultra it's a stroke of genius to slap two of these bad boys together.
3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
ARM is not a forward looking architecture, and neither is x86. They both are architectures, with their advantages and flaws (and the Apple flaws are fucking massive, unupgradable-except-if-you-buy-next-year's-version is the very definition of non-forward thinking, especially for end users).
Also you're taking it all off on an angry tangent about the HN audience when I am talking about buyers (I meant including institutional buyers, not end users, and I didn't clarify that enough but I would have thought the focus on architecture would have made it clearer) but:
> I don't give a single crap if my workstation uses up 600W to run a 5900X and an RTX3070 (or, well, if I could find one, but shhh).
I would. Between this April and next April my energy bill will double, and it is unlikely to ever fall back to where it is now. Power consumption matters A LOT in Europe right now. Corporate buyers will have to care about that, for the long term.
> 3/ People actually upgrade their hardware and don't rebuy a macbook pro every two years like half of this forum does.
No, they really don't upgrade their hardware, in fact. Almost no computer buyer upgrades through anything other than replacement.
But I'm using a seven year old, secondhand MacBook Pro, so I'm not the target of your comment.
Should have gone with nuclear years ago, our prices are stable.
Between those and an intel Mac Mini and an older iMac, I got over $3000 in trade-in value. Made me feel quite foolish for not having tried that before. The oldest iMac still got me a couple hundred bucks, as would your seven year old MacBook Pro most likely. A two year old high-specced computer?
I get that the list price for any of these is still way higher than putting together a PC from parts… but again, I belatedly traded a bunch of stuff in, and got more than $3000 in gift card value from Apple doing it. That makes 'rebuying a macbook pro every two years' a whole other state of affairs. I'm kicking myself for not having tried that earlier: I'm sure I left over $1000 on the table simply by letting recent computers sit around unused rather than immediately trading them in for Apple credit.
So to the point at discussion: Apple uses their common tech across their entire Market. The M1 chips are the result of making the fastest mobile phones. The M1 is going into tablets. They are just printing money and pumping that money into chip design. If your DIY PC Building is what is going to keep Intel/x86 alive, then I agree with GP: Intel is the walking dead. And it really is just us gamers.
Who needs raw CPU/GPU at their desk? I had one of the first nehalems under my desk (NDA and everything). Then I heard about AWS and started running my shit on that. Back then, that was intel. Now it's Graviton ARM: more processing per $.
Apple is singlehandedly using up almost all of TSMC's 5nm processes. There are no smaller processes available anywhere in the world, and Samsung's is disappointing. Processes that have largely been driven by demand from AMD and Apple (EPYCs and Ryzens from AMD, and Apple's mobile chips). They capitalized on nothing except having fat wads of cash to slap people around with.
Additionally, it's not "being a RISC architecture" that makes the M1 a beast. Slap a 5950X on a SoC with directly available memory and GPU, and you get similar (better, even, considering current gen CPUs do get better performance already) results. "Deep integration of an entire stack makes things more performant" is not a new thing, it's merely that Intel and AMD have been upholding the contract of x86/64 that is interoperability and replaceability (well, Intel has been doing some socket fuckery for upgrades, but upgrades are still entirely possible), and Apple can afford to throw it away.
EDIT: bUt ThIs oVeRlOoKs PoWeR CoNsUmPtIoN
I swear I'm going to come out with a souped up raspberry pi and tell HN "look, it uses 1W of power for 10GFlops" and you would buy it because tHe PoWeR pEr wATt iS BeTTeR !11!!
When opening a second chrome tab*
This is the upside: if they want to make a quantum leap, they will absolutely do so if it benefits them, and everybody's expected to just re-buy, at Apple prices (mind you, trade-ins are a thing). Apple absolutely can afford to throw away anything that impedes them from doing what they want, and in the case of the M1 processors it's serving them really well. Turns out the fat wads of cash can be used to buy useful things, and when Apple wants to, they can CHANGE THE WORRRLLLD ;)
I'm sure the PC (not necessarily 'x86') world will find ways to more or less keep up: there are plenty of people who really, really want to keep up. It's just that complacency won't cut it: PC-land has to really seriously work to not fall way behind. Good. That's best for everybody. As a lifelong Mac guy since the 68040, I'm delighted the PC world has driven Apple to these extremes, because now I get to enjoy the results.
A big part of what makes Apple’s chips so fast is that they optimize them for the needs of the OS. In interviews they have given examples of how to profiled the common operations in the OS and then made sure that those operations were as fast as possible on the chips. that integration is a big part of it. Other hardware and software vendors are not as tightly coupled and don’t do this kind of optimization.
Their most credible strategy was to produce modems to steal Qualcomm's insane margins on those chips and break the forced mariage of their modems with their not-so-good processors. It was such a resounding failure that Apple bought the whole division for scraps.
I don't see how Intel suddenly gets its shit together now that the ARM chips are in computers. The fact that the chips ended up in computers is a direct consequence of their decade of failure. I expect Apple to stay ahead of Intel and AMD in terms of power per watt for a decade at least.
IMO, the only everyday computing task that can't be done with acceptable performance on a Raspberry Pi4 is opening a web browser.
There are always bunch of people on both sides of the fence, but the usability & familiarity generally is perceived to have taken a dip with the flat glassy design. Admitted, now we are used to it (the iOS look & feel). But the change between skeumorphic & flat was a hard change & tad unpleasant for its times. Form should have never take precedence over function. This is something that the Thinkpad team got overwhelmingly right.
I would argue that the masses don't need Rolls-Royces, thus this is resource mis-allocation on a global scale - but certainly Apple have pushed device and UI design forward strongly, so maybe we can live with that.
These jobs aren't great. 16 hour work days and company provided boarding makes them into borderline slaves.
I'm not saying stopping the demand for electronics is going to fix that, but promoting that is far from a "holy mission".
Unless you care more about plastic gadgets than the people making them for you.
Who's saying they're great? All I'm saying is that they're better than starving on the street, which as you pointed out is what would be happening to these people without the shitty sweatshop jobs. I really struggle to see how offering an alternative to starving on the street is a bad thing. Would you prefer these companies pack up the sweatshops, return production to countries with expensive labor, and force some of their former workers back to starve on the street? Personally I would not. If those people want to work in those conditions I think it's immoral to stop them.
> but promoting that is far from a "holy mission".
I don't think anyone is saying this either. Obviously sweatshop operators are looking out for their own interests, but that's the great thing about trade. When all participants are willing they are necessarily better off due to the trade, otherwise it wouldn't happen.
And on the big scale, we should be happy that finally the x86 monoculture is coming to an end. I can still remember the times when there were several competing cpu architectures which made for a lot of innovation.
Those are hardly Rolls Royces prices.
Apple also releases security updates for phones two years older.
Not to mention that the $100 Android is slow and clunky with worse battery life and a horrible camera.
But a $100 cell phone is no substitute for a $429 iPhone SE. While there are some mid tier $250-$300 Android phones that are “good enough”. The only phones that currently exist that have the performance of even an iPhone SE are - other iPhones.
I'm not really sure what AMD or Intel were doing in these past 10 or so years, but they need to change ASAP. The M1 Mac is great, but a similar linux laptop would be incredible.
https://github.com/AsahiLinux/docs/wiki/Feature-Support
Even if Intel/AMD processing power was not competitive with Apple Silicon (which it is), there is a laundry list of reasons for many people to continue buying PCs.
To be sure, Intel has struggled "these past 10 years or so", taking their sweet time pushing PC processing power forward, and then making a series of mistakes in engineering. AMD also struggled prior to 2017, but they've been riding a series of successful engineering ventures recently. In the meantime, Intel will likely succeed well enough in remaining competitive with their massive resources and investments in research and development.
While the impressive performance, and especially efficiency, of Apple Silicon brings Apple into the mainstream as eligible devices, there's still, as I said, plenty of reasons outside of performance (and efficiency) that make PC's worthwhile options. Of course, if you're a fan of macOS, there's already no reason for you to consider a PC, but if you really do like Linux, then I'm not sure what it is about the current state of AMD/Intel processing hardware that you dislike so much.
On PC, Intel and AMD is great, the desktop M1 is not that great vs. those CPUs. The problem is the laptop form factor. All Intel and AMD laptops I owned so far were noisy, overheated, had worse trackpad, and didn't last long on battery. Those are not a problem with PCs.
Didn't get another one and instead got an Asus with an RTX card, which is really nice for all kinds of things, and even gaming when I want.
But, the M1 looks really promising. And it seems they have finally gotten rid of the Touch Bar also. I think I need to start putting some money in the piggy bank.
The only time I had a serious problem with Macs was back in the 2000's when they were shipping with cheap ass Hitachi hard drives that were extremely failure prone. I had an early iBook (yes the weird one with the translucent color) and one day the drive had an unrecoverable head collision and that was the end of that thing. Years later all my college friends had Macs and, no joke, half of them ended up with the same thing.
I got an M1 Macbook Air last year and I still feel like I'm living in the future. It's small, light, noiseless, and snappy to boot. The battery life is crazy good as well. I can take it on a plane and not even need to think about whether the plane has an outlet. As a web developer also doing SCAD for 3D printing, it's been a joy. It handles a bajillion browser tabs quite well. Maybe something else will fail after 7 years, but at least that will be 7 good years. lol
There's a lot to criticize about Apple as a company, but recently they've really been knocking it out of the park with their laptops in my opinion.
As an aside, if anyone reading this has an M1 or a Mac of any kind, at your own risk, look into disabling ReportCrash and see what happens. This improved performance even further for me, and it's easy to undo.
While the M1 models have been an improvement, 2016-2019 were particularly not great.
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT211148
However, I doubt it in the next decade. Have you seen how many chips they need for the iPhone?
Performance wise it compiles my code much much faster than my 2019.
In terms of battery I can take it for a full day's work in town doing the same coding work, and there's no need to start looking for a charging point. Not even "just in case". I don't even have to think about maybe closing one of the apps, I just run it with 5 IDEs and 15 projects open, though that's probably down to having plenty of RAM rather than the CPU.
The new architecture also doesn't make much difference. Stuff just works, though homebrew needs to be told it's not on Intel anymore (terraform breaks weirdly if you don't do this). There seem to be plenty of M1 versions for your generic coder stuff.
On and I've only managed to get the fans to audibly spin after several minutes of compiling an Android app with a huge native library on an x86 NDK for 4 architectures.
Chances are it has nothing to do with M1 and everything to do with your SSD being overwhelmed.
If you have this plus some of the other electron hogs (teams, slack, a browser with 30 tabs of stack overflow), your system does have a proper load.
The beach ball occurs when some UI process does not service its event loop. This can be an issue with the process, or it can be caused because that process is contending for resources with the compilation processes.
If the critical resource that's causing a beachball here is CPU, there's two very easy paths forward: either modify your compilation scripts to use fewer threads than the system has physical performance cores, or run the compilation at a higher nice level. In either case the UI process should be able to get CPU when it needs it and not beachball. The higher nice level is generally both the easier and more effective solution, since it will allow the compilation process to continue to use all cores when UI processes are not scheduled.
If the critical resource is memory the system will page, which will turn the critical resource into disk bandwidth. Fixes specific to memory usage here are to get more memory (not really actionable), or to reduce parallelism on the build process.
If the critical resource is disk bandwidth, this is the hardest problem to fix. To my knowledge MacOS doesn't provide good tools for managing disk priority. If the disk bandwidth being used is to access build-related files (source, object files, etc) rather than swap, one possibility is to use a thunderbolt-connected external SSD for the build artifacts, leaving the internal storage for swap and for the UI program. However, if your build process is using so many disk operations that it's starving a UI program, you're likely to see a performance hit going to a slower external SSD.
Also SpaceX doesn’t suck, you suck. :P
It is not that the M-series chips can never trigger a beachball but that there are significantly fewer scenarios where that happens to the point that many users never find themselves in those scenarios. You see their enthusiasm as fanboyism and they could see you as being grumpy, but the you are just both seeing different parts of a distribution curve.
It literally takes 15 seconds to join a meeting with one of the fastest user computers available.
Absolutely horrible garbage of an app.
Microsoft has zero incentive to fix it, because they have a captive audience i. Their enterprise customers.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-settings-i...
An apples to apples comparison would require you to change the settings to disable autostart on Windows.
Even WhatsApp, which seemed to be a pretty light app, run smoother on Firefox than chrome or electron.
Still no perceptible fan noise :)
There were a few 16" MBP models that could be equipped with 64gb of memory, before the Apple silicon transition.
Also worth noting, a lot of the older Intel chips also had memory capacities that went beyond 64 gigs. In theory Apple could have shipped a 128gb MBP.
Designing your own chip is a ballsy thing to do. I think it might be one of the most underrated innovations Apple has ever done. Tim Cook is not Steve Jobs. But he's still delivering on innovation where it's typically stalled.
Not my definition of balsy project. Balsy would be risking the business level of funding. This is peanuts money level of risk. They didn’t told anyone about it either, so no reputation risk also (how many failed projects at this point on apple we don’t even hear about?).
So, in my humble opinion, not risky nor balsy. But a smart and rewarding move? FUCK YES!
Where else are they going to invest this money? Having your own components is the most obvious way to strengthen their moat.
If they took a step outside consumer electronics and invested into a new market, or invented something never seen before, which they can do 3 times over, then yeah, that would be ballsy.
It’s absolutely ballsy when you look at what happened with PowerPC (where they made the opposite decision to great effect), and the failure of competing attempts to do this such as Windows on ARM.
They effectively bet a full generation of laptop sales on the premise it would be a success despite their largest competitor attempting and failing to make the migration.
They didn't - they obviously had tested performance of these CPUs and knew it was excellent before deciding to switch to them. They were only risking whatever amount they invested.
PowerPC was unpopular and dying. ARM was the most popular instruction set on the planet before Apple developed M1.
Apple has tight control over software on their platform, they say jump, everyone asks 'how high. Apple dropped 32 bit support overnight and everyone has to deal with it. Microsoft still has support for 16 bit software in Windows 10. Open Process manager on Windows, Discord, Steam and much of other software is still 32 bit. No-one is compiling for Windows for ARM, Noone is using their Store. Some corportaes are still on windows 7, the world took 15 years to get off windows XP and I have seen some ATMs still running on it. Very different market.
Don't forget what Apple has a virtually no variations in the hardware, compared to Windows.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1265U...
Though it does use TurboBoost up to 55W apparently. I don't know about the M1. If anyone wants to try, you can lock TDP on some laptops to exactly 15W (or whatever the compared M1 runs at) and run Passmark or something.
* the memory model is slightly more relaxed
* instruction decoding is obviously simpler, and while the impact of x86 decoding was not that major at a point, I suspect it has increased with time
What matters is mostly the microarchitecture of Apple, and, yes, the 5nm.
IIRC at the beginning of the Zen projet, AMD wanted to do 2 versions: 1 with an x86 frontend, and one with an ARM one. They would probably have had very similar performance profiles, and I suspect at most a dozen percent of diff for energy consumption. Intel is currently very far from that to reach a core perf similar to the one of the M1.
Can you elaborate why decode would become more problematic over time?
Hopefully I got that right. Now in theory Intel and AMD do employ tricks to optimize x86 decode. If I recall this correctly, they decide opportunistically several possible paths simultaneously and start speculatively executing the ones that turn out to be valid instructions. Likely this works pretty well (+ the variable length means better utilization of the code cache).
- No 32 bit support
- Fewer other legacy ISA features to support
- big.LITTLE style efficiency/ performance cores (until latest generation Intel)
On the first two fewer transistors wasted mean more to spend elsewhere (eg on caches).
I agree.
The M1 architecture is fabulous. But the fact they've managed to cram it into a laptop, without throttling performance and without killing battery life, infact quite the opposite on both fronts, i.e. amazing performance and amazing battery life. Its quite the tour de force.
Hats off to all those at Apple. That's some hardcore engineering there.
The last time I felt the machine was faster than I thought it to be was 1984 running Turbo Pascal on a PC/XT. No PC or Mac since then really felt insanely fast to develop on. Until this one.
I run World Of Tanks, which runs in WINE emulator, which runs on Rosetta, and it's as fast as it was on my iMac. I have no clue how this works.
I bought an MBP with M1 two months ago. The main reason was to run video conferencing software, which so far it has done well at. That it is a powerful machine yet small and lightweight was a plus for it as well - its easy portability.
I bought it for some secondary reasons, but those have not panned out yet. In mid-February I tried to compile a program with the release version of Android Studio, the project had NDK (C language) components. Even with Rosetta it was not working ( https://github.com/android/ndk/issues/1299 ). Google said they had M1 support coming down in Android Studio canary version and other fixes coming out as well in the future. I'm not in a rush, but it compiles on my Ubuntu box and on Intel-based Macs, but not M1 out of the box yet (not without having to fiddle around to do it any how).
For my Android projects that were fully Java/Kotlin based, the M1 did compile fast though.
Also, Fidelity said they have an application called Active Trader Pro that works on Macs. It's not something I ever used, or that I would probably use regularly, but I decided to check it out. It would not work for me either, and support forums made mention of difficulties it has on M1.
One thing I haven't tried yet is loading Unity 3d and futzing around with it, hopefully when I have the time to do that it will be working.
Still happy with my purchase as it's working for my primary need, and more Android Studio support seems to be coming, and it is not a big rush to me. It's probably good that Apple is pulling software into a world where it supports ARM (kind of weird Android code primarily targets ARM devices, yet has trouble compiling on ARM devices). I had heard about how fast things compile on it, but it was even faster than I expected. So all in all I like it, and hopefully more software will be supported as time goes on.
(Of course there are now models with differen processors from the latest generation of products, but i wasn't talking about them)
Yes you were.
Intel had unlocked TDP/TPL on many i7 chips and lower end models had exactly the same performance as higher end models (assuming equal core/thread/cache count) heh
A couple of years ago I noticed that my old iPad Pro (not M1, but ARM) compiled Swift code in Playground projects twice as fast as compiling the same code on an Intel MacBook.
Off topic, but to me the most amazing Apple silicon enabled product is the Apple Watch. It is so fantastic being able to leave my iPhone at home and still get calls and messages from my wife, Dad, etc. It seems so much healthier to just be wearing the watch. Mobile phones are intentionally addictive.
Apple's design is remarkable, but it is completely useless as we can't buy one and use it for something other than a Mac, so in effect, it doesn't exist.
Also who founded ARM?
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/writing-arm6...
These M1 Max machines are already very impressive at a reasonable price. M1Max + 64GB + 2TB is about $4K.
Now that Apple has paved the way, you'll likely see this with other big computer companies like Microsoft for their mainline products & development. I think Steve Jobs would regularly quote Alan Kay on this idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAfTXYa36f4
I think that given Intel has recently changed leadership (for the better ridding the culture of MBAs), we may even see unique partnerships as well that may act as this "in-house" hardware providers.
Like the Intel transition before, they controlled risks well and were able to develop the iPhone processor until it could run a Mac.
Just because something is daring and amazing doesn’t mean it was a huge risk.
https://towardsdatascience.com/microsofts-bright-future-8c75...
1. Apple uses the same processors (the Mx series) on Macs and high end and midrange iPads.
2. Looking more broadly, Apple uses slightly modified versions of the same ARM chip in Macs, iPads, iPhones, set top boxes and monitors (yes the newest Apple monitor has the same processor as an iPhone 11)
Just taking 1 and two into account, Apple probably sells between 250 - 300 million computing devices with high end ARM chips.
Now let’s add the processors that Apple sells in the Watch and AirPods that are also ARM variants.
Saying that the M1 MBP is pure bliss, so much that I'm for the first time considering spending my own money on an Apple product. And that is even though I still had a few issues here and there with Docker but the 'no fan, no heat' and strong battery life make well up for it!
I actually miss the plasma desktop and Linux more than I anticipated and might consider putting Linux on the m1 when there are more options unless I get more find of MacOS.
But the hardware is great
But putting an M1 into iPad 11 and 12.9 (and now Air!?) was a huge mistake. I get it - economies of scale. The new thing, why not take the power etc.
Problem is: ipads (for me at least) were all about battery power on the go. My 12.9er is useless and basically only used at home. My 11" Cellular model is still good but definitely a few hours less than my old A12X 11"er was. And the difference in speed is negligible on a non-multitasking device.