I hope Intel get their act together and start manufacturing ARM chips designed by Apple for Apple. Competition will push TSMC even harder to innovative faster to stay ahead.
Hmm, I wouldn't bet on it. Apple's chip designers are obviously great, but I bet a lot of their industry-leading performance/watt comes from being a node or two ahead of everyone else thanks to TSMC.
Bingo. Colocated RAM and the bespoke bridges are a massive part of this too, but buying out what is effectively the entire global capacity for a node is why Apple chips are where they are.
It's a main reason why ipod won so big too, they bought exclusive rights to the only existing small hard-drive tech for music player applications (you could still buy the drives for things like PDAs). Everyone else had to use laptop sized drives.
Similar to watching Intel scalp the entire industry, I don't think the US government cares who is in the lead, as long as that company is in their pocket. Apple's move to leapfrog the industry was smart, but also calls into question how actually efficient the chip is. If you compare the Apple A12z (their 7nm predecessor to the M1), to Intel's 7nm offerings, the performance starts weighing a lot closer in Intel's favor. In SIMD benchmarks, Intel can be 10-100x faster than ARM's NEON stopgap.
In other words, I'm really curious what the landscape will look like once Apple, Intel and AMD are all on the same node. I reckon x86 still has some life in it yet, a processor with AMD's IPC enhancements and Intel's process enhancements would cleanly smoke the ARM competition. It just remains to be seen if Intel or AMD will be the first to get there...
I don’t know if their position is quite so secure as Intel’s used to be.
Production can continue to scale up, and there’s massive spending to increase US capability due to the Taiwan situation. Apple obviously still have the money to throw around but I’m sure TSMC want to tread incredibly carefully here with regards to making their products available to more customers. Being an Apple-exclusive fab is lucrative in the short term but encourages your other customers to look for supply elsewhere, which is an existential risk to your dominance.
There are many factors that come together to make the M chips so efficient. The node is one. Another is full integration and optimization of all the systems together. Another is the inherent efficiency of ARM instruction decoding.
I still don't understand how Apple, a lifestyle company, managed to beat Intel at their own game. It must be humiliating for the employees and the execs. I wonder what the morale is inside the company.
Apple isn't a lifestyle company. They're just a tech company that happens to use lifestyle marketing as their selling point. But even before they owned a chip design firm their key strength wasn't the marketing; it was superior UX design.
Or to paraphrase Papa Steve: the only problem with other tech companies is that they have no taste.
Related note: Intel was in the bidding process for the original iPhone chip and lost to Samsung, partially because Intel's chip was too expensive for their liking. Apple really expects its vendors to be able to take a haircut on unit pricing and make it back up in volume, which isn't exactly Intel's thing. Had Intel met Apple's requirements they may have dissuaded Apple from getting into chip design in the first place.
It’s this type of thinking is why Intel is in the mess they’re in.
Calling Apple a lifestyle company kind of diminishes the relentless innovation they’ve demonstrated for decades.
It reminds me how Microsoft, Palm, Nokia, Blackberry dismissed the iPhone in 2007. That didn’t turn out so good for them.
I’m old enough to remember when Intel was an ARM licensee… I’m sure there are some Intel engineers lamenting how all of this could have been different.
Comparing a market for devices to all of computer hardware (including peripherals/components) is what's ridiculous. The more apt analogy is computers (PCs) to iPhones.
Throwaway4good was using the comparison of iPhones to PCs to allude that Apple has more money available to develop silicon, yet the pre-built PC market is a tiny subset of where money is made using semiconductors.
That's why it's a misleading claim.
I didn't expect I would have to elaborate this beyond what I said. My bad.
I am an Apple fan because I have been a fan for 20 years. However, Apple has been objectively a "boring" company the last 10 years. They are famous for design but they don't push design forward anymore because they don't have a crazy, arrogant person at the top to rally the troops in a unique direction.
The only area they're not conservative in is chip design, but that's not a cool and trendy thing. You don't hear regular people talk about the chips in their iPhones. How is Apple able to stay relevant among younger people and convince them to buy iPhones when Android phones are just as capable and look just as good?
Apple have been plenty innovative. In the past 10 years, Apple have:
- released Apple Watch
- all displays are Retina. (As far as I can tell by looking at all the monitors from other companies in an electronics store, they all still think that 96-dpi is acceptable)
- Apple displays have a much wider color gamut (I suspect the largest in the industry, but don't know)
- Apple Silicon (as you mentioned)
- AirPods, which people seem to really love
- continuously improved cameras on iPhones; no comparison between the current camera(s) and the iPhone 5 from 2012.
- Touch Bar (might or might not like it, but it is innovative)
- new, thin keyboard design (turned out not to be a good design, but it was innovative)
- integration between iOS/macOS: use your iPad as a monitor, handoff calls between phone and computer, shared copy/paste, etc.
- macOS can now run iOS apps
- Rosetta 2: invisible translation of x86 code that even runs faster than on their most recent native Intel laptops
- privacy as a feature (arguably innovative, but compared to what everyone else is doing it is...)
There's not so many new-category-defining innovations, but Apple have hardly been sitting on their hands.
> There's not so many new-category-defining innovations, but Apple have hardly been sitting on their hands.
Yep! With more to come too. Seeing Apple’s take on VR/AR in these next few years is going to be very interesting. Probably not as big of a paradigm shift as the iPhone, but still exciting nonetheless.
Apple Watch is only what it is because Apple shut off the ability for anyone else to have that level of integration. Hope the EU forces them to open it up.
This is just patently false. There might be a few things that Apple shuts off (though none are coming to mind, I had a Pebble for years and it worked perfectly), the truth is the competition isn't playing in the same league, mainly due to the chips/OS available. On top of that the Android Wear products I've seen don't hold a candle to the Apple Watch in terms of looks or capabilities.
Not only that but Apple commits to their products. Apple Watch v1 was pretty meh, but they kept at it, iterating year after year, until I finally pulled the trigger on one because it had the functionality that I was looking for.
All the other companies are constantly rebuilding their products from scratch, or dropping them entirely. Apple sets a vision and just continually works toward executing on that vision with small advances every year. That’s why users love them.
I felt the same way with the Samsung watch. v1/v2 was pretty meh, but they kept at it, iterating year after year, until I finally pulled the trigger on one because it had the functionality and design that I was looking for. I was specifically keeping away from squarish smartwatches because I didn't want a watch that screamed "smartwatch" and wanted a rounded design, which I find more aesthetically pleasing.
You nailed it. They are focused and relentless - something to admire in a world where companies are usually super reactive and don't have confidence in their vision.
Ben Horowitz’s peace time CEO vs war time CEO in ‘The Hard Thing About Hard Things’ comes to mind. Tim Cook is a great peace time CEO that can ‘focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths’. In war time (like when Jobs joined Apple and was weeks away from bankruptcy) ‘a company is fending off an imminent existential threat..has a single bullet in the chamber and must, at all costs, hit the target.’
There are probably ten thousand hackers on here that day dream about being at the helm of Apple with a world class team and war chest at their disposal. I know I’ve day dreamed about it and truthfully if money and technology were no object I’m not sure what opportunities remain for products that can fit inside a briefcase that Apple does not already pursue.
Curious to hear ideas that aren’t VR/AR or a SmartCar..?
(The best I can do is just a new take on existing products like a eInk iPod with 2 million songs and a month long battery.)
Apple is about to find its self in need of a wartime CEO. The threat will come when China is no longer a viable place to manufacture high-tech devices. Apple has deep pockets, but they've been doubling down on China with each new warning sign. At some point they'll have to scramble to start manufacturing on this side of the Pacific, and it'll be rough.
It's not that I think there's someone more skilled at operations. It's that Cook got Apple into this situation. He was the one that reimagined Apple's manufacturing strategy, closed their American factories and moved everything to China. He then spent 20 years expanding, refining and doubling down on that strategy. And it was brilliant. Jobs could not have saved Apple without Tim Cook. But the time for that strategy has passed.
To get out of China, Apple will need to again reimagine all its operations from first principals, and they need someone who is intellectually and emotionally free to do that—even able to repudiate Cook's past decisions in order push Apple in the right direction. Just as Ballmer couldn't lead a shift away from Windows and it took Nadella transform Microsoft, Tim Cook will not be able to remake Apple.
More integrated services for the home. HomeKit was supposed to be this big thing and it seems to have been silently forgotten. Same with improving the developer experience for building things on Apple platforms: the docs suck, the APIs are arcane (sign all your things, read this spec to figure out how!). IMO, aside from the swift fanboys, no one I've met enjoys developing for Apple.
> HomeKit was supposed to be this big thing and it seems to have been silently forgotten.
Actually this has just been rebooted as part of the "Thread" and "Matter" alliance. Might finally start working.
Apple's niche, as usual, is privacy, and part of their go it alone attempts (yes, plural) was because they wouldn't certify anything that nakedly leaked info. I don't know how all that will work now that Nest and Alexa devices (which share info with the cops without a warrant) will also be thread/matter devices.
> HomeKit was supposed to be this big thing and it seems to have been silently forgotten.
Hopefully the reason work has slowed on this is because Apple & Google (and others) are actually getting Matter[1] right, so home automation will actually, finally work without having to geek out over all the details all the time.
I'd like to see a carry around device (phone format or even nano) that can dock into other things like a desktop or laptop and convert into that thing.
So I'm on my MacBook, pull out the device (like a cartridge) and it's a phone. Plug it into something else and it's a desktop. Plug it into a car and it's a CarPlay. Everything I plug it into charges it too.
I think the current idea is that the universal computer is the clown, and your terminals (phone/notebook/laptop) have some local processing and different kinds of views into that computer's space.
I actually like that model and remember it well from the late 70s/early 80s. Unfortunately as unix workstations became more popular their somewhat stovepiped model overtook that (despite Sun's "the network is the computer" bull). I hoe we come back to that.
There is iteration, but nothing like the scale and customer base which Apple can bring to the table.
I think Apple would just need to aim for a market that barely exists. Single person transport vehicles would be my guess. It would need a big name brand which emphasizes safety and privacy over noise and power.
There are gyroscope based motorcycles with roof shells which would be great for the average consumer which would be in line with their environmental goals. Combine that with a complete augmented reality surround experience and some sort of ridiculous safety features like multi-limb airbag deployment or emergency jet obstacle avoidance they are in a unique position to completely change personal transport.
Add in some alternate transport options which are not available at all which would require major corporation negotiating power. Short flights added in as an option dropping some wings to bypass traffic. Perhaps some sort of rail connection to hook into those single car tunnels or existing railway tracks. Open the railways for traffic each direction when not otherwise occupied. Perhaps an optional jet ski and snowmobile accessory. Make it buoyant so it never sinks like trashed scooters in the river.
I would imagine they would focus on ergonomics, smoothness of the ride and energy efficiency over power. All digital so lots of haptics. Light enough to take into an elevator to park in your apartment. Just flip a switch and the gyro makes it stand on one wheel to fit in an elevator. Imagine being disabled and it opens your front door and drops you off in your living room.
I should imagine they would combine some high resolution camera technology to easily snap photos in any direction of whatever is interesting, 5G cellular for live-streaming in vehicle with easy swapping between internal and external cameras, automated pickup so you could send your bike to the store for curbside pickup without going with it and taking control from home if necessary. Disable local control so can send it out to pick up the kids from school. Or send it to park when you have reached your destination and it pays for parking and comes back when you need it.
Perhaps OLED exterior so you can change the look on the fly. 360 degree camera coverage so you have no blind spots. Auto collision avoidance from any direction.
There is a huge wishlist out there and it is easy to brainstorm all sorts of things that small companies just could not pull off in any sort of scale. Production wise they already custom design all the phone manufacturing hardware which runs 24/7 and there is always the possibility of just acquiring what they need.
Xiaomi, which started as a smartphone OEM, has released several e-bikes, which as a non-biker I wasn't interested in, but I though there was a sentiment that it's a pretty good e-bike, especially for its price range. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in.
How is Apple able to stay relevant among younger people and convince them to buy iPhones when Android phones are just as capable and look just as good?
If you truly can't figure it out, first thing I'd recommend is checking your assumptions.
> How is Apple able to stay relevant among younger people and convince them to buy iPhones when Android phones are just as capable and look just as good?
There is quite an element of peer pressure for young people to display status through having new and expensive technology (which I believe is one strong reason the design of smartphones are rev'd every year, so that people can tell at a glance whether you have the latest device), and add upon it Apple's cultural cachet to be the "cool/in" brand, it's often hard for young people to resist the pressure. This has led to issues such as "blue bubble versus green bubble" where young people on Apple devices exclude those on Android device based on not wanting to see an out-of-place color in their text message window.
The Watch, Mac and iPhone are doing great but the iPad lacks ambition and doesn't seem to have a direction. Who is in charge of the iPad division at Apple?
Apple isn't organized by product like other large tech companies, instead it's organized by function. E.g. no divisions like iPad, Mac, iPhone. It's divisions like hardware, software, RF, etc. Each division works on all products.
I use the iPad Mini for taking handwritten notes and it works beautifully for that use case.
I would use an iPad Pro as my "laptop" if Apple would let me run macOS. It's a Macbook Air but without a directly attached keyboard saddled with an inappropriate OS for the hardware.
You didn't ask me but I use Nebo; I found out about it when investigating the file format used by the Kobo Elipsa. I like it because of its realtime handwriting conversion, no recurring fees, cloud sync and backup, and easy export to pdf with text conversion preservation.
I remember headlines calling the iPad a big iPod touch when it came out.
…which is maybe kinda true? I have no idea if they want to make it a “Pro” device, despite the Pro moniker, because you still have such weird multitasking UI paradigms and so many limitations in terms of pro features. (Audio routing comes to mind. You can’t have Audio Hijack for iOS.)
And the value proposition of a fully loaded iPad with keyboard case is pretty dubious to me compared to just getting a MacBook Air. I know, I know, less apps, not a touch screen…but I can just do so much more with a Mac, and with the ARM transition, I also get the insane battery life of an iPad.
I think it's really just a limitation of the formfactor. It's first and foremost a touchscreen-centric device. Sure, you can clip a keyboard onto it to type easier and get a weird not-quite-cursor to interact with it, but at it's core, it will always be a touchscreen device, and as such can't expect users to keep peripherals on them at all times to make it more usable. So the OS will always be targeting the vast majority of its users, who are just poking at a touchscreen.
And touchscreen interfaces need to have all their points of interaction on them, or hidden behind non-obvious gestures which does not make for a very good power-user software interface. And iOS at its core (I know they call it iPadOS now, but let's be real, it's iOS with a half-hearted splitscreen/windowing system on top) is made to be a walled garden. A nice walled garden, sure. But not something for productivity, other than its own very specific scenarios, like digital art where you're only planning on drawing, and not going too far outside of the clean-cut path that it expects to be used in.
So for most people, it's just another screen to watch Netflix and YouTube. And it's pretty expensive for that.
I would argue that the typical reader at hacker news is not the target audience for iPad. Think young children and grandparents. My elderly mother loves her ipads. She has three of them. She can watch youtube on them, check email, chat apps, play music, control her TV. My preschool nieces and nephews love the iPad similarly for youtube and games. iPads are the easiest to use computers for people who are, for one reason or another, functionally computer-illiterate.
I like to consider myself computer literate but absolutely hate using a computer other than when somebody’s paying me to do it. At home it’s 100% iPad Pro or Kindle for my screen time.
Having an older iPad Pro has prevented me from buying a laptop. It’s just so easy to crack it open (with Brydge keyboard) and do whatever I need. Anything to prevent me from having to sit in front of my actual PC is good for me.
One has to assume that the ultimate direction is for some sort of convergence of iPad and MacBook. But no one at Apple has figured a good way to do that which isn't a fatal compromise. I use my iPad but it's a pretty optional device for me and I mostly use it when traveling. (I admittedly can't draw to save my life and I really want to get back on a computer pretty quickly when I'm doing things like searching.
Because, for example, I'd prefer to travel with a single device and the MacBook is better than the iPad at certain things and vice versa. It's not that big an imposition to take two devices to be sure--and I'm sure Apple doesn't mind the extra sales. And I can mostly sub my phone and maybe a Kindle if I'm trying to go light. But it feels as if there's the potential for a unified device someday there--if it can be without compromises.
Everyone knows two screens are better than one. So take both, and use the iPad as the second screen when using the laptop, and as a tablet when you’re not?
The trajectory is obvious, and includes iPhone. You don't need three different chips, just different interfaces. One unified computing and storage general purpose computer, available via mobile, audio (Airpods), visual (AR), large UI (Macbook / Mac), health (Watch), etc. They're already unifying under M1 / ARM.
It's far from obvious to me. Unifying back ends and unifying products are night and day propositions. Nothing Apple is doing points towards a thin-client strategy.
I mean, they are building their own processors now, and both the macbook and the iPad have the same processor. Why maintain two operating systems if one could work. I say that because obviously there are differences with iOS and MacOS, but apple controls both.
The problem with the iPad in my eyes isn't the mouse vs. touch issue. Yes, you want the UI to be designed for touch, on the other side the iPad now also supports a mouse.
The thing is a quite different point: the availability of software and the interactions. The iPad limits software to the App Store and its very restricted rules. Which makes the iPad nice for tasks which can be done completely inside one App, if that App exists in the first place. But it is really bad at any work flow which would involve multiple programs and a lot of programs aren't even allowed on the App Store.
On the Mac, one is free to run any software one wants, it is very easy to write your own. If it only is a quick shell script or python program. And it is trivial to combine multiple software in one project, just access the project directory from all involved programs.
There seems to be some capability of sharing file space between apps on the iPad, there is a great Git client called "Working Copy" which I can highly recomment which can interact with other apps, but that is quite an exception. In most cases, Apps on the iPad don't really support free data exchange with each other. My pet peeve: you cannot even add your own music to the music player on the iPad. It is sitting uselessly in Files and I can't access it.
It has the ambition, agree that they haven't figured it out yet. I think that it just might be a hard problem to figure out. I have an iPhone, an iPad, and a MacBook. I really understand when I want to use the phone or the notebook computer. The iPad is sort of in the middle.
I have made attempts at doing all my work stuff on it, but failed every time. Simple things like taking a screenshot over here and pasting it over there just feel harder on the iPad. I really want them to figure it out though!
I believe it is time for Apple to rethink iPad and MacBook. They both have the same chip now.
iPad should be a Macbook Air.
Apple already allows to run iPad applications on macOS. They should completely destroy iPadOS, and let macOS run on iPad. I would prefer to have powerful OS (macOS) with some glitches on iPad, than to have an iPad with limited OS (and still have glitches to be honest). I even ok to use similar to Windows 8 idea, you aren't plugged in to keyboard - it is going to look like an iPadOS (with different app launcher), and when you connect keyboard you can use macOS.
The only reason I am still own iPad (to be honest two of them), is because I cannot disconnect screen from my laptop, even that is not the biggest issue, but because there is no Netflix app, and I cannot download movies to watch in the plane.
It just seems that trying to use the Mac UI purely by touch would be godawful. I mean how do you Command-click, or right-click a UI element with your finger? These are solvable, but only with horrible compromises. The iPad has a completely different interaction model to very good reasons, and this would utterly butcher it. Microsoft tried this approach and it was disastrous.
Yes the iPad has its limitations, but also incredible strengths. The new multitasking gesture system is a vast improvement.
> It just seems that trying to use the Mac UI purely by touch would be godawful. I mean how do you Command-click, or right-click a UI element with your finger?
That's already in iPad OS/iOS. It's the long touch.
>Microsoft tried this approach and it was disastrous.
Surface Pro/Go is a pretty successful product for Microsoft.
I got a Surface 7+ recently and really like it. I can put full desktop applications (firefox + ublock origin, pycharm) and have it better mirror my dev environment with WSL.
Windows 11 on a tablet is really not that bad.
(I also run linux on a desktop and have an iPhone and Apple Watch, so not a hater by any stretch of the imagination)
The Surface has come a long way. I had (and still have) a Surface Pro 3 that had pretty much everything going for it: excellent build quality, great high-res screen, nice optional keyboard and decent PC-grade specs. There were two major flaws, though:
1. Linux support was pretty bad. You needed a custom kernel for an enjoyable experience, and even that was pretty unusable on anything other than x11 GNOME.
2. The overheating was a dealbreaker. I presume this was either a driver issue or hardware failure, but the device would regularly hit 55c in normal workloads, which was a no-go for that sort of product.
It was so close to being the Linux iPad of my dreams, but fell just short. I might give one of the later models a shot someday, but I'm not really in a rush. Maybe once Alder Lake makes it's way into a decent Windows convertible, it will finally be The Year of the Linux Tablet.
I have a m3 Surface Go 2. It's making a fairly decent Linux tablet with Arch using Gnome 42 (Wayland) and the mainline kernel. The camera doesn't work well, but everything else does including LTE.
It's actually a ton faster in Linux, but with a bit worse battery life.
The biggest flaw with using Linux on the earlier Surface line was the shit Marvell Wifi. That would drop out all the time. So glad they switched to Intel for the later ones.
Hm, I think I'll still wait for the Alder Lake update, but it really does sound like a good setup. If I didn't disagree with the direction GNOME was going in this choice would be a lot easier...
When combined with Apple Pencil it’s the best digital note taking device. I hardly need to use pen and paper any more. Note taking, reading books and watching videos, playing board games makes it’s a fun and work device. YMMV.
Same. I have both an iPhone and a MacBook as well, but with the Pencil, I just want to do everything on the iPad. It’s become my single notebook and sketchbook—-this is saying a lot coming from someone who has gone through countless fancy notebooks and fountain pens. I still use traditional media for anything I want to last, but for ideation and sketching practice, it’s all iPad all the time for me now.
Yeah, maybe I'm doing it wrong. Don't try to do everything on it, just use it for when you would want to sketch things out and don't look back. This comment inspired me to plug in my pencil and try it out for that.
> I really understand when I want to use the phone or the notebook computer. The iPad is sort of in the middle.
I'd never seen it put that way before, but I think it hits the nail right on the head for me. I do like my 2020 iPad Air when I use it, and the pencil is great; however, I basically end up using it as easy scratch paper or when copy-pastable handwriting is useful. Plus when I need an extra screen to go with my laptop.
It definitely has nice features, but doesn't feel like a compelling use-case overall, yet.
The most compelling use case I've seen yet for the iPad is for regular people who don't want a desktop or laptop computer, but don't want to do everything on their phone. The iPad is just a really big smartphone that with a folio keyboard can become an impromptu laptop if needed. In my extended family I have a few people who are using it for this exact use case and love it. Only one of them even has the keyboard, and all of them do everything on their iPad they'd otherwise use a 'real' computer for.
Another great use for the iPad is for sheet music. IME it is better than paper and much, much, much better than trying to use an iPhone or PC (which I've done sporadically).
Niche use case, but totally agreed. I was holding onto paper sheet music for the longest time, but no desire to even look back after switching to iPad for that purpose.
It helps that the app I use easily integrates with any cloud storage you would want to use, so I can easily just get sheet music using any personal device and just drop it into my cloud folder. And the next time I sit down at the piano, all those sheets are already there.
Way back when the iPad first came out, I didn't get it. But I read a lot, got one, and rather liked it. My conclusion was it (especially pre-pencil) was a somewhat luxury and rather optional device that did some things quite well. But was rather unnecessary compared to a MacBook or iPhone (or substitute some generic equivalent). And even non-Max smartphones are much bigger than they used to be.
A while ago I had an iPad, didn’t like it because of its limitations, and sold it. Now I have an iPad and love it despite its limitations. I think iPadOS still has a way to go, but it’s definitely progressing for me.
iPad has so much potential with M1 now. They can make it a hybrid with iOS and MacOS for example. In fact, I’d be shocked if that’s not what they end up doing with the M2 line of iPad Pros.
Yea, what if one could instantly switch between macos and ios?
Imagine having a super powerful ipad pro running mac os for your work stuff, and when you are lying on the couch you detach the keyboard and any external monitors and switch to the more touch friendly ios.
I think that would be a much better approach than to try to merge the 2 OSes into one hybrid OS that can do neither this nor that very well.
I suspect the big issue here is that macOS has far fewer restrictions on its use than iOS does. So Apple would need to either lock down macOS, or open up iOS. They can't lock down macOS because of professionals, and they really don't want to open up iOS.
I don't think iPads would need to run "Mac OS", just quite a few artificial restrictions on iPadOS would need to be lifted. I need to be able to install software myself on the device - be it only a small shell script or python program - and most importantly, I need to be able to share files between programs in the sense that several programs need access to the same file and can interact with it.
I don't think Apple would ever bring full MacOS to the iPad. I could imagine them allowing M1 native Mac Apps to run on the iPad tho.
Since the iPad and the Mac use essentially the same CPU now, why not allow Apps to be cross platform between the two? I know you can run some iPad Apps on the Mac, but why not the other way?
If you could run Mac apps on the iPad, would that hurt mac sales? Possibly. Although, I could imagine many non-mac users would buy an iPad if it could run VS Code.
Anecdotal but I am still fine with a 2013 iPad Air, just missing some features because of the non upgradable os.
Not sure that the fact that sales are decreasing means that the iPad is doing bad
Why is Apple's market cap so much higher than Microsoft and Alphabet?
-Google: Search and YouTube are essential in everyone's lives.
-Microsoft, the entire business world depend on their apps and services. The world wouldn't run without Azure, Windows and Office.
Their businesses are bulletproof. Apple on the other hand is completely dependant on China and you never know when a supplier drops the ball somewhere in the chain.
Apple has done astonishingly well in the last 20 years, but the entire professional world runs on Excel and it has done for decades. There is no way that changes any time soon.
Apple's services business is growing rapidly but they're all consumer-facing and easy to cut if times get tough.
Which is amazing to me. I always figure HW companies are at a disadvantage. If I write a piece of SW I pay for the NRE once and then more or less make free money on the continuing sales. If I sell HW I have to pay for NRE and then materials, production, logistics, etc for each unit sold. Pure software can scale really well if you don't need to customize it for each user.
Well Apple's trick is that their hardware is the only way to access their software, so they don't need to rely on a hardware advantage to keep their margins, because while some people are buying the hardware, most are buying access to the software.
For the Mac lineup, it’s hard to say that their software is the reason people buy their laptops (it’s not that Mac OS is bad, just that it’s a small difference in the overall experience in the grand scheme, in if anything, is more limited than windows in term of apps/games support)
Google docs gets you 99% of the way there so long as you are doing a simple task, like a simple data table or a simple letter. For simple tasks it’s very user friendly and efficient. But it lacks features to do anything more complicated than that.
It’s funny you should say that because I was joking with someone the other day about google workspaces “the only thing google docs needs is a decent editor (vim),” but in seriousness, if you are referring to vbscript or macros then you are missing the market that google is aiming at.
Aside from being a native app which is faster and more reliable, and works without an internet connection, and you can be confident that Office will always open a document you've been sent as intended with all features. Aide from that, the main missing features are in excel. Sheets is missing hundreds of functions and lots of customisation/features in its charts, pivot tables, and data analysis functionality. It also can't handle large data sets (30k+ rows) which you'll run into regularly with any kind of data logging.
It is possible you will never use these functions, but the entire professional world runs on excel sheets and registers (even though there is probably a tool somewhere that would work better for individual use cases). The universal compatibility is very valuable and the cost is negligible for businesses.
"People" don't buy office. Corporations buy office, and Google docs doesn't get you anywhere near 99% of the way towards what corporations need from Office. There are entire workflows built around janky plugins to explorer, reams of VBA macros, retention policies in exchange etc.
If it's your job, you want the best thing, even if it's only 10-20% better. Performance and offline capability of a native app alone is a strong selling point.
Well, in some large companies, legal documents are managed by contract management systems which generate the documents in MS Word format. So the embedding is deep. I'm sure I could open it in Google Docs... but then I'd have two problems.
>Microsoft, the entire business world depend on their apps and services. The world wouldn't run without Azure, Windows and Office.
Funnily, no one at the office (a dozen colleagues, in a European software editing company) and in my family uses any Microsoft service – except for LinkedIn, Github and npm.
Every fortune 500 company I've interacted with has a contract for microsoft's productivity suite. As they continue down the "github is the entire productivity suite for developers" that will only continue. The lock in they've got provides incredible value, and IMO is the main reason azure is even kind of successful.
One big reason is hardware. Apple's hardware business is multiple times that of Microsoft and Google combined. And hardware business may be little low profit, but it's more stable and long term profits are more or less guaranteed.
Apple is the undisputed king of performance per watt but they need to keep up in single core performance. Sure, Intel draws a ton of power but most tasks we do day to day are single core and the Intel i9-12900K is already 15-20% faster than the M1. The M2 will have a modest single core boost (10%) but the next i9-13900K will be 15-20% faster than the 12900K and increase Intel's lead even further.
I think that's pretty poor speculation. We know nothing about M2 and the i9-13900K yet. On top of that, responsible use of energy is exactly where we should be heading, not absolute single threaded performance.
Also if you ever owned a top end Intel MBP you'll know how much pain Intel can inflict on you.
> On top of that, responsible use of energy is exactly where we should be heading,
I never really got this arguement, especially when you're talking about a laptop that will happily draw 40w+ if you crank the display brightness. Arguing about the merits of a 7w CPU vs a 15w one sounds like people are missing the forest for the trees.
40W is way high. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-XPS-15-7590-OLED-Power-Co... shows 20w for max brightness on a laptop OLED monitor (or 6W at minimum brightness). For 13 inch laptops, it's around 25% lower (less area). Also, laptop CPUs can pretty easily use 30W (i7-1185G7 is an ultrabook class CPU and can be configured up to 28W).
Edit: was your 40W for total power consumption? If so, then going from 20W cpu to 10W cpu is still a 25% energy consumption reduction (as well as a cooler lap and better battery life).
Macs have long reserved ~50w of power for the display, whether or not all of it is used is a different question. Giving them the benefit of the doubt (and accounting for screens that can max out at 1500 nits), I think an upper bound of 40w is pretty close to the actual figure. OLED will always pull less power since it doesn't need a backlight, in contrast to the hundreds of backlights on newer Macs.
The macbook pro has a 70 watt hour battery, and has a 10 hour battery life (video playback). Also, if I'm reading correctly, the 1000 nits brightness is only achievable when plugged in, and apple automatically reduces brightness on battery to keep the power consumption lower.
The so-called breakdown of Dennard Scaling happened a little over 10 years ago. Since that time, CPUs have been forced to keep portions of the die powered off at any specific point in time - to prevent melting themselves. Each new generation requires a larger and larger area to be shut off.
Responsible use of energy directly leads to higher performance. You can also restate this: software is a performance bottleneck in a modern CPU.
We still didn't see Apple desktop m-series cpu
And you know, maybe 12900k is 15-20% faster in single core, but cmon - it's 250W tdp cpu vs something that doesn't even need active cooling
My i7 12700k idles ~21c, and much like the M1 series, struggles to peak 50c unless you're running a Cinebench loop. YMMV, but I think x86 has life in it yet if Intel can get these results with silicon that's less than half as dense.
>My i7 12700k idles ~21c, and much like the M1 series
Yea, but unlike the M1 series, you probably have a big hunk of copper on top of your CPU. It really isn't a fair comparison. Intel needs a miracle. Actually, we all need a miracle, because Apple just changed the whole industry and I really hope they get some competition.
Intel just needs to not be using their podunk 10nm lithography they've been touting for the past 5 years or so. They plan to beat Apple's density by 2024, which will raise some interesting questions about how much efficiency they can recoup at this point. I don't think it's fair to claim anyone as the victor yet, we'll simply have to wait and see if the reports of x86's death were grossly overstated or not.
... and the fact that cooling works well enough to keep your CPU at 21 C doesn't mean the heat isn't dumped into your room. Which brings up the A/C costs in warm times.
Apple is the biggest company on earth and out of the FAANG companies, they are the most prestigious place to work. Their market cap is on it's way to 10 Trillion. There's very little incentive for people to jeopardize this job and give up their stock in the company.
I don't know why you are downvoted. I agree. Personal experience says that Apple is not a great place to work at for PMs. I am curious to hear other folks chime in to round out the discussion.
"Apple is the biggest company on earth and out of the FAANG companies"
A pointless metric given that over the last 5+ years, Google/Apple/Amazon have had and lost that spot back and forth. It's a vanity metric and in terms of the actual business, is an abstraction.
"they are the most prestigious place to work."
By what criteria? If you are talking about by patents and research filed, it would be IBM (which is also the longest running firm at over a century), if its hardware one might be more impressed by SpaceX, if....etc. "Prestige" is another vanity abstraction, and isn't even prone to a metric.
"Their market cap is on it's way to 10 Trillion. There's very little incentive for people to jeopardize this job and give up their stock in the company."
If that were as true as you state, people wouldn't leave for startups at the rate that they do. Startups wouldn't be as common in general if these big 'prestige' firms were such a thing, but the valley only in the last dozen years or so has fallen to that as 'common wisdom' when the actual habits are a lot more mundane -- NDAs and it's a small valley so people who can't keep a secret don't get hired elsewhere. That was the case in the 90s when the big players were HP, IBM, MSFT, Sun, SGI,and folks bounced from firm to firm, it was the case a decade later when folks started moving into what became the dotcom wave........
