54 ms·

Apple's Shifting Differentiation

292 points by kaboro 6y ago

burlesona 6y ago
The point about robust collaborative editing as an API is interesting. The HN crowd generally prefers native apps and gets tired of the electron parade, but for major business software it’s increasingly table stakes that another person can see what you’re working on, live, by clicking a link. Apple does have relatively good live collaboration in its iWork apps. Perhaps there’s a future API there?
- rmorey 6y ago
  > Apple does have relatively good live collaboration in its iWork apps Does it? As much as i like the iWork apps, my experience (and impression of the general sentiment) has shown that Google Docs et al continues to blow the pants off iWork in that regard
  - yalogin 6y ago
    Can you give me some examples where Apple's collaboration SW falls short?
  - burlesona 6y ago
    I did say "relatively good" :) I would agree that collaboration is a little smoother in G Suite, however in my experience this is mostly about ease of sharing. Once you've gotten another Apple user to understand that they can "receive a shared document from you" and work on it, then usually collaboration itself is smooth.
  - chrisfinazzo 6y ago
    The collaborative editing (which I first recall seeing in Google Wave) was essentially carried into Google Docs. N.B, "SubEthaEdit had this for years!" - I know. As a whole, it could be argued that where Wave failed, Slack - and predecessors like Basecamp - succeeded. iWork has always seemed like it has a different user in mind with its collaborative features and never really had much traction in the market, which is already served by offerings whose entire reason for being is collaboration, not just as a general productivity suite.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      N.B, "SubEthaEdit had this for years!" - I know. FWIW, I first saw collaborative editing over a network done on an Amiga. So I guess this has been a thing for "decades."
      - chrisfinazzo 6y ago
        If I'm reading the specs correctly, there was 10 Mb Ethernet capability on the Amiga...in 1985. Mind blown. (I was born in '86, albeit late in the year, so I find this especially hilarious.)
- jinjin2 6y ago
  I would have wished that Apple had been the ones acquiring Realm. They really had the best API for building apps with live collaboration I have ever experienced. Instead they went to MongoDB, so who knows how that will end?
  - joshspankit 6y ago
    I always liked Realm but have not heard anything about them lately. Where did they go, and is the current work as powerful as the early stuff?
    - jamil7 6y ago
      I’m not really a fan of MongoDB but the handling of Realm so far seems well done. I migrated an app to their new sync service and everything worked fine. They also offer a fairly generous free plan and are open sourcing the sync engine.
    - dep_b 6y ago
      I tried to use it recently and it was an endless nightmare of suck. But perhaps I'm just allergic for any type of framework that tries to dictate my app structure and threading strategy.
  - alexashka 6y ago
    Realm was a dead end - it was based on a custom database, which was a mistake. Them going to Mongo is actually the best possible outcome - by replacing their dead end custom database with MongoDB, they make MongoDB into a more compelling product, making document-based databases more batteries-included than ever before, which is excellent news.
- onion2k 6y ago
  The HN crowd generally prefers native apps and gets tired of the electron parade... There's no significant preference for native; it's just that we won't tolerate bad apps. I'd guess that VSCode is the most popular editor among users here by a long way, and that Google Docs has far more users than MS Word. HN readers don't pick native apps when there's a good Electron or web-based alternative.
  - vulcan01 6y ago
    To add on, the reason why it might seem that > the HN crowd generally prefers native apps is because it is hard to write a good Electron / web app that is actually performant + easy to use. Which is why many people here are wary of new Electron apps.
  - alwillis 6y ago
    >I'd guess that VSCode is the most popular editor among users here by a long way I don't know about that. When ever there's an article about Vim, it gets lots and lots of useful, insightful comments. If you search for Vim on HN, you'll see the catalog of Vim posts and threads. I haven't seen the same thing regarding VS Code.
sarosh 6y ago
I thought this statement from the article had more than a hint of truth to it: "Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!"
- lalo2302 6y ago
  This will allow Sketch to kick Figma's ass as soon as they solve their online multi-user editing
  - pantulis 6y ago
    Ben’s blow at Sketch seemed a little excessive to me, but that is the painful path that Evernote has decided to follow to survive. Although the target market is designers and sketch is not multi platform, being full native is hard.
    - gammarator 6y ago
      Unfortunately Evernote has destroyed its performance by doing so. The Evernote support boards are full of angry paying users figuring out how to downgrade versions and discussing alternatives.
      - pantulis 6y ago
        Don’t tell me... I am a paying EN customer. Although I find that the biggest performance impact is not Electron but that now you don’t have a local database and a lot of requests are going through the network before the caching mechanisms kick in. In my opinion, it’s the correct move to make but incredibly hard. Now they have launched v10 they have at most and additionaa billing cycle (12 months) to start cranking out compelling features and polishing the product. My concern with EN is that they bleed so many paying users that they end being unsustainable. Time will tell.
  - save_ferris 6y ago
    Not if the design community fully embraces Figma and opts not to go back to sketch. I'm already seeing this transition at my company, and I have a hard time seeing management OKing a switch back to Sketch once they iron out their collab issues.
x87678r 6y ago
Its difficult to think different if you're the world's largest company and dominate the phone market. In laptops it looks like they are differentiating themselves very well.
- cpuguy83 6y ago
  Apple has a small piece of the smartphone pie. That said, their CPU's are consistently in a class of their own.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    And this year they are creeping back to 90s era: iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro are essentially the same phone. So no reason why both exist, except to muddy up the product line.
    - jsinai 6y ago
      The key differentiator is the camera on the Pro, which significantly increases the cost. Some people will pay a premium for the privilege of owning the top model and yet others will go for the Pro precisely because of the more advanced camera. By having separate lines, Apple can sell the 12 for cheaper than the 12 Pro, and those who are willing to pay for the 12 Pro camera can do so. Don’t see any muddying here.
      - anonymouse008 6y ago
        The problem is as a “normal user” you can’t go to your ‘tech friend’ and get a straight answer — there are too many considerations now to direct someone to one phone over another. It’s not ‘yeah, the new iPhone is great! You gotta have it.’ It’s “so what do you want to do mostly?” — no one knows. That is what I believe the 90s curse really means — your evangelists are no longer as effective because they give potential customers an overwhelming amount of information that slows down, and sometimes prevents, a sale. —- Your point is exactly right - Apple has decided to harvest the demand curve over making something undeniably great. Edit: let me clarify, watch and homepod mini are currently in the category of 'just get it' products. This is only a critique of the iPhone line.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 6y ago
Software is the key for me. I am by no means a power user but I really am loathe to give up even more of my software library to swap to Apple Silicon after Catalina cratered my gaming library in Steam and some older apps from companies long gone. I don't expect I am alone in this observation but the number of software companies they highlighted during the M1 debut was very slim and to be honest I have not heard of half of them until then and don't remember them now. So to me it matters not how much faster AS is, what matters is if I can run want I want to run. I am not going to own two separate machines to do what I want to do. If AS machines cannot do all I need I will keep my current Mac till support runs out and look again
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Rosetta 2 allows you to run your x86 mac apps on Apple silicon. It's like the PPC->Intel switch again; your software keeps working regardless of the hardware underneath.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    How is this going to work with games and GPUs?
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Nothing with Apple Silicon has a dedicated GPU, so, about the same. Existing calls to Vulkan and Metal don't need to be translated, the API and software stack are the same on the new hardware.
  - naravara 6y ago
    It’s not without some overhead though, so there will be performance issues. Fortunately those performance issues will probably only affect games released in a fairly narrow band of time, new enough that they’re still resource intensive but predating the transition. It would maybe be a 5 or 6 year span I guess depending on how performant the ARM system in question is?
klelatti 6y ago
> it is possible that Apple’s chip team is so far ahead of the competition, not just in 2020, but particularly as it develops even more powerful versions of Apple Silicon, that the commoditization of software inherent in web apps will work to Apple’s favor, just as the its move to Intel commoditized hardware, highlighting Apple’s then-software advantage in the 00s. I think Ben is missing something here: that the speed and specialist hardware (e.g. neural engine) on the new SoCs again give developers of native apps the ability to differentiate themselves (and the Mac) by offering apps that the competition (both web apps and PCs) can't. It's not just about running web apps more quickly.
- Hamcha 6y ago
  Apple is also working against itself in that department. As far as I know a webapp does not need to be approved by Apple to go live.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    I think you're confusing the Mac with iOS. Native Mac apps don't have to be approved by Apple unless they are on the Mac App Store.
    - izacus 6y ago
      Apple has made publishing apps without their approval significantly harder during last couple of years. With pretty much mandatory notarization there were several app developers who just stopped developing macOS software due to increasing amount of restrictions and process involved.
      - klelatti 6y ago
        Very fair comment. I guess that most developers don't see it as a huge issue though (I've not seen any issues with Apps that I use on Catalina). Direction of travel is towards more onerous Apple involvement.
darksaints 6y ago
I really wish Apple sold its hardware independently from its software. They make amazing hardware, and their latest silicon releases practically make me want to buy their computers again. Their software is shit though, and their walled garden, and insistence on using apple programming languages and IDEs for development, practically ensures that third party software will either not exist or be shit as well. There are only a handful of software shops that make decent software for apple, and they are all fully specialized on apple and therefore do not make software that plays nice with collaborators on other computers, nor used on a cloud server, etc. And if there actually exists better software from third parties that competes with apple software, you can forget about it ever being fully integrated. "Hey Siri, navigate to city hall using Google maps". Yeah right.
- amelius 6y ago
  Yes, they should break up Apple in a software and hardware company. Same for NVidia. It's the only way to actually own our hardware.
  - nsxwolf 6y ago
    But I want their integrated ecosystem much more than I want to "own my hardware". If you take that away, I lose instead of gain.
    - fabianhjr 6y ago
      Another option would be to vertically integrate most companies and since that is anticompetitive the resulting company could become a public state owned enterprise. I do prefer that alternative and if you take that away, I lose instead of gain.
    - username90 6y ago
      Why not buy a phone with software apples integrated ecosystem preinstalled? There are lots of solutions like that already, just that they all suck. If software apple existed then you would have more options for properly locked down phones without sucky software since now you could put it on hardware from other manufacturers than hardware apple.
pvsukale3 6y ago
I am hoping Chrome team uses the recent performance gains in M1 for tighter optimisations in Macs. A lot of Desktop apps are built with Electron these days and it would be a huge improvement in terms of performance and memory issues caused by Chrome.
snarkypixel 6y ago
>> The iPad has since recovered from its 2017 nadir in sales, but seems locked in at around 8% of Apple’s revenue, a far cry from the 20% share it had in its first year For me, the reasons are that I love my current Ipad pro, I don't have a good reason to upgrade it, and the pricing isn't advantageous. I change my Macbook often because of work-related reasons (I.e. when changing job I need to get a new one) I change my iphone often because the new ones have a big enough differentiator (for me at least), but more importantly, the way the pricing is structured with my cellphone provider, I almost get it for free. (I.e. I had to upgrade my plan to get more gig/months and a few other features so I only had to pay $200 for the new iphone 12). But for the iPad pro? I'd need to pay the full $1500 upfront and the new one doesn't offer a big enough value add compared to the previous ones.
- isthatsoup 6y ago
  You are aware that just because the true cost is obfuscated by the cell payment plan that doesn't mean you aren't paying for it in exactly the same way as the ipad pro, which you could also buy on a finance plan. There is no such thing as "free" or "almost free", you are paying for it.
  - coryfklein 6y ago
    This doesn't seem quite so obvious to me. 1. Do we know what the contracts between Verizon-Apple look like? Verizon may get discounts for buying in bulk or for being a strategic partner. 2. Cell providers (like Verizon) may be funding OP's iPhone 12 with the monthly-payments of other customers that don't exercise their ability to upgrade their phone exactly every 24-months. I think this group may actually be rather large. 3. Interest rates for financing your iPhone via your cell provider's 2-year contract plan are likely lower than financing an iPad on a credit card or other third-party financing. All of the above likely combine to make the iPhones proportionately cheaper than iPads, possibly significantly.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    2 years ago, I got a sim-only plan for unlimited minutes, unlimited sms and 10GB data for £15/month. 1 year ago, I renewed with the same provider, who offered me the same plan for £10/month. 1 month ago, same provider offered me 12GB data for £10/month. Shopping around indicated I could get 15-20GB for below £15/month if I jumped networks, and stuck on a sim-only plan. Instead, I got an iPhone SE 2020 128GB (RRP £449) and 40GB monthly data for £70 up front and £26/month. Total cost of ownership over the two years is £694. Cost of the iPhone if I purchased it from Apple is £449. That remains the remaining spend is £10.21/month for 40GB data. I definitely got something discounted.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
> Instead the future is web apps Time will tell...
areoform 6y ago
> Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate. Ben can write paeans to this new "cloud" business model. But at the end of the day, the question for us, the users is simple. Do we own what we buy? When I buy a Mac (and I've bought several), I am buying a computer. A general purpose computational device. And by selling it to me, the company is selling me a general purpose computational device. What right does the company have to stop me from installing/modifying my device in any way that I see fit? Sure, they may refuse support/warranty, that is their prerogative, but what gives them the right to stop me from having someone else repair it? Or, to boot into Linux? Or, to open my own computer? I have a MacBook Pro from 2016. Recently, I wanted to give it a thorough cleaning. So I took out my speciality screw driver and unscrewed the screws for the bottom plate. It wouldn't budge. It was then I realized that I needed suction cups and strength to move the plate downwards to unlatch something inside to make it "pop". This design serves no engineering purpose. It exists to make it harder for me, the device owner, to access the device I've purchased without sacrificing dollars at the altar of Apple. And this was their most "open" product. Prior to the M1 announcement, you couldn't boot into another OS - or significantly alter - your iOS device. And now we can't do so with our Macs. We seem to have collectively decided to blur the line of ownership. A device we buy isn't ours even after purchase. No, we must continuously give our money to the corporation for the benefit of their revenue projections. Which returns us to this, > Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate. With Sketch you own your data, and thanks to the open format, you can port that data to other mediums. With Sketch you own a copy of the tool that allows you to do your job. With these other, less powerful but "collaborative" software, you don't truly own your data or the tools to access it. You merely rent it. Should there be an event where Figma is acquired or goes out of business, then (in all likelihood) every user of this platform will lack the ability and the choice to preserve their work for future generations (and for their business). What are the odds of Figma staying as it is, in the control of founders, chugging along as a profitable business a year from now? 5 years from now? A decade? Two decades? I do not wish to single out Ben, but this post is an exemplar of the shift in thinking being pushed by the current crop of tech cognoscenti. They have made a growing argument that the future is one without ownership. Where it's one where you don't own your devices, you rent them. And they assure us that's the future, and because that's the future, it's going to be amazing. But that sounds like dystopia to me. It is one thing to have a tradeoff between accessing all the songs in the world and owning a few on vinyl to having the tools of your trade be abstracted away. Spotify and Netflix aren't essential services to me. My computer is. My vector design software is. My ability to write code is. My ability to make things is. They argue that there are benefits to "collaboration" with the "cloud", but that doesn't need to be so. The only reason why they're operating in the browser is because the tradition of web apps started within them. There is no reason why every other application can't collaborate natively, with combined local + server-based data storage with other apps across the world. Video games do it all the time! Games like counterstrike etc are in some ways far more collaborative than a Figma file. The state of what occurs in the world depends on every other person in the world, with the context being time sensitive, and the state being additive. And it works beautifully. If it can work for non-essential entertainment, why should we accept the reduced paradigm for our essential tools? Why should we buy into crippled software that is limited by the fact it runs in the browser? Why should we buy into the abusive business model of having to rent our ability to do work from another company? Why should we buy into the idea that we don't own the fruits of our labor? And that we don't get to have a copy of our work nor access it without paying the toll? Bohemian Coding, if you ever read this, don't go down with this ship. Add support for Windows. Or, Linux. It will save your company.
leoc 6y ago
> notably Apple avoided the trap of integrating hardware (the iPod) with hardware (the Mac), which would have handicapped the former to prop up the latter. Instead the company took advantage of the flexibility of software to port iTunes to Windows That's how things turned out, but not how they were originally meant to be. Jobs' reluctance to port iTunes to Windows was so obvious that even the Isaacson bio made it clear. And it wasn't simply an atavistic impulse, it was faithfulness to his "Digital Hub" strategy which saw smart-device integration as a way to sell Macintoshes. Jobs was a late and reluctant convert to the idea of a post-PC era. Repasting an earlier comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9470925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9470925 : >> If you look at Apple's trajectory over the last 15 years, you can see the vision was consistently outlined from the very beginning—the Digital Hub strategy ([link working in 2020: https://youtu.be/AnrM4n6S3CU?t=2585 https://youtu.be/AnrM4n6S3CU?t=2585 ]). > That's not really the case though. As Jobs outlined it in that video, the Digital Hub strategy was to sell Macintoshes by positioning them as something you could dock your consumer-electronics gadgets, mostly from third parties, into. It was a plan to sell hubs, not spokes. This strategy had limited viability for Apple, because a typical consumer wasn't likely to think "I've just bought this $500 camcorder, so now I need to spend twice that or more on a Mac in order to offload and edit the video". If they were going to use any computer as the digital hub for their camcorder, it was probably going to be their Windows PC. That's probably why iTunes for Windows was such a difficult and long-drawn-out decision for Jobs: because it was a decision to mostly abandon the Digital Hub approach in favour of selling more of the spokes. Then Apple's slow and initially reluctant embrace of the "post-PC era" with over-the-air iDevice updates and cloud storage to partly displace iTunes means that it's increasingly taking nearly the opposite of Jobs' 2001 stance: "We're clearly migrating away from the PC as the centrepiece" and "We don't think of it in terms of the PC business anymore" are things that Tim Cook could say today without really startling anyone. At his 2007 joint interview with Gates at D5 https://www.wsj.com/video/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-at-d5-full-session/60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB6-015AEBB1C052.html https://www.wsj.com/video/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-at-d5-fu... Jobs is coming round to the post-PC agenda, reluctantly.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Mobile and device proliferation more broadly snuck up on a lot of people. (Including me. I wrote a piece in 2003 about Apple morphing into an entertainment company and it was way too living room-centric. http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs/anappleent.pdf http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs...) The general view in the 1990s into the early 2000s was that you would have a centralized home computer/storage hub/etc. that everything else connected to.
jeswin 6y ago
People should stop cherry picking benchmarks (like SPECint2006) when comparing CPUs. And many seem to be misreading Anandtech's recent comparison as - Wow look M1 is almost as fast as a 5950X. Except that it's simply impossible. Wait for the actual benchmarks to come out. Especially real world workloads. I'll be very surprised if desktop Ryzens (or even the Intel CPUs) don't run circles around the M1 in a laptop.
- bufo 6y ago
  People have been saying that for years and keep getting it wrong. There is no evidence whatsoever that current x86-64 chips will do better. The polar opposite of SPECint2006 is stuff like Speedometer 2.0, where Apple chips still crush it https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1318644849437003780 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1318644849437003780. The only previous valid point was that previous iPhones/iPad couldn't sustain these high clock rates for long since they were fanless, fortunately adding a fan is not very hard. Sure the 5950X will probably win the multi-core benchmarks since it has 2x cores but it does not look promising for single core speed.
- pirocks 6y ago
  What do you mean by "simply impossible". Seems very possible to me, since it's on a better process node, has deeper out of order, more transistors etc.
AtlasBarfed 6y ago
One difference between the PPC-> Intel switch is that there was a healthy anticipation of massive performance gains to cover emulation shortfalls. That doesn't exist anymore. Emulation of an architecture for the Intel -> ARM switch can't rely on some big gains to cover for emulation. I'd have been more excited if they had provisions for some hardware acceleration of Intel instructions. I'm guessing they can't do direction instruction --> microops translation in the ARM silicon, there's probably a thousand patents blocking that.
- klelatti 6y ago
  The opposite is the case. > 2x faster CPU performance > M1 delivers significantly higher performance at every power level when compared with the very latest PC laptop chip. At just 10 watts (the thermal envelope of a MacBook Air), M1 delivers up to 2x the CPU performance of the PC chip. Which is precisely why they can make the move with Rosetta 2.
  - asdff 6y ago
    2x performance of a 10w pc chip? iirc the most recent intel air was using a custom 12w chip.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      It's a quote straight from the Apple website!
parsimo2010 6y ago
I accept that the performance of Apple's chips have increased rapidly in the last few years, but the benchmarks that they are using to compare to various x86 CPUs makes me suspicious that they are cherry-picking benchmarks and aren't telling the whole story (either in the Stratechery article or the Anandtech they got the figures from). Why am I suspicious? THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY THAT A 5W PART LIKE THE A14 IS FASTER THAN A 100W PART LIKE THE i9-10900k! I understand they are comparing single threaded speed. I'll accept that the A14 is more power efficient. I'll acknowledge that Intel has been struggling lately. But to imply that a low power mobile is straight up faster than a high power chip in any category makes me extremely suspicious that the benchmark isn't actually measuring speed (maybe it's normalizing by power draw), or that the ARM and x86 versions of the benchmark have different reference values (like a 1000 score for an ARM is not the same speed of calculation as a 1000 score on x86). It just can't be true that the tablet with a total price of $1k can hang with a $500 CPU that has practically unlimited size, weight and power compared to the tablet, and when the total price to make it comparable in features (motherboard, power supply, monitor, etc) makes the desktop system more expensive. Regardless of whether it's an intentional trick or an oversight, I don't think that the benchmark showing the mobile chip is better than a desktop chip in RAW PERFORMANCE is true. And that means that a lot of the conclusions that they draw from the benchmark aren't true. There is no way that the A14 (nor the M1) is going to be faster in any raw performance category than a latest generation and top-spec desktop system.
- zepto 6y ago
  Anandtech says you are wrong: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
  - parsimo2010 6y ago
    I read that article too and mentioned it in my first sentence. That's the article that Stratechery pulled their figures from. The validity of that article and those benchmarks is what I'm doubting. Will the new Macbooks with M1 chips compare favorably against Intel laptops with low power and fanless designs? Yeah. Is the existing A14 chip faster than than a 10900k (even in single threaded performance)? No way. There is something in the benchmark that is messed up to the point where you can't compare them.
nottorp 6y ago
> Android is more flexible and well-suited to power users, and much better integrated with Google’s superior web services ... if (forced) integration with Google's web services is a plus, that is. > (Apple) The company has the best chips in the world, and you have to buy the entire integrated widget to get them. Does it? Those claims of 3x faster seem carefully cherry picked.
martin_drapeau 6y ago
The overarching strategy is to bring iOS to the Mac in order to grab market share of the PC market. Apple's moat will increase more and more because of the vertical integration they have. A lot of people have iPads. They have replaced PCs for many tasks. Many I know only use their PCs for word processing or work. Other things we do on a computer are in the browser. In 2 years I'll be replacing 2 Windows computers in my family. Give me the choice of a Mac with familiar iOS interface, and access to the App Store, or a Windows PC, only good for word processing and browsing the web, I choose Mac/iOS. I am familiar with iOS but not so much with Mac (I've owned 2 but could never get used to the UI). I reckon millions will be faced with the same choices. I predict that in 5 years Dell, HP and Lenovo will be struggling. Time will tell... Oh, and of course the M1 today ain't compelling enough. But wait until it evolves. Apple has a track record of iterating year over year. Fascinating...
- Magodo 6y ago
  > I predict that in 5 years Dell, HP and Lenovo will be struggling. Time will tell... I mean most casual users don't use laptops already, either preferring their phones or tablets. Those that do, need it for work (or a nicher crowd - gaming). And there's no way in hell the primary buyers of Dell, HP and lenovo computers, companies, with no reason to pay the apple tax will pay for expensive 1000$+ MBPs for each employee
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    As phones are most users' primary computing device, I imagine desktop computers will become stateless machines with big displays and keyboards for users to dock their phone. The user will be able to access their phone's apps and data on the desktop computer, perhaps also offloading computation to faster desktop CPUs.
    - antipaul 6y ago
      Fascinating thought. Will Apple make a standalone screen/dock to plug in your iPhone/iPad...?
  - 6y ago
briandear 6y ago
> the M1 probably costs around $75 (an educated guess), which is less than the Intel chips it replaces, but Apple is mostly holding the line on prices (the new Mac Mini is $100 cheaper, but also has significantly less I/O). That suggests the company believes it can both take share and margin However, the creation of the M1 wasn't free. There's a significant R&D cost, both initial and ongoing that isn't calculated as part of the Cost of Goods Sold.
bmitc 6y ago
Apple can say whatever they want about the performance of their chips in their phones, but in my personal experience, their phones are slower than the competition.
- Daniel_sk 6y ago
  Based on numbers/specs or real word usage?
  - celsoazevedo 6y ago
    For me, the longer iOS animations makes iPhones feel slower than many Android phones. Not caching apps for long periods also affects the app loading speed.
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    If GP meant real word usage I can only agree. I really cannot see how iPhones feel faster. In my hands they clearly do not.
aborsy 6y ago
Focus on hardware as a differentiator that is not easy replicate would also allow Apple to sell privacy and security. The competitors such as Google are often focused on software and data, relying on data collection.
jbergens 6y ago
I think a strange thing in the article is that they make it sound like it is obvious that Apple will continue to increase performance faster than the competition. I don't think that is clear at all. Maybe they will maybe they won't. They can have reached a limit where it is hard to make the single threaded speed of the chip higher without increasing the power draw.
jpeg_hero 6y ago
I thought a lot about this comparing M1 to nVida Maxine AI video conferencing. setting up all these feature on a PC seems like such a kluge compared to apple's integrated hardware/software stack. https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine >Maxine includes APIs for the latest innovations from NVIDIA research such as face alignment, gaze correction, face re-lighting and real time translation in addition to capabilities such as super-resolution, noise removal, closed captioning and virtual assistants.
specialist 6y ago
This article feels like talking out loud. Read it twice and I'm not clear what the punch line is. Some comments here are rehashing the native vs web app debate. I don't see the connection. Stratechery's aggregation theory the most cogent, prescriptive analysis of one facet of our current business ecology. I don't recall if Ben has made a similar analysis of Apple's integration strategy. Here's my take... Apple bringing everything in house continues to surprise, startle, and delight me. It's so contrary to all the business trends, up to maybe the 2010s. The book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity is an economic model (applying NPV to modularity) describing the divide & conquer strategy of prior juggernauts. GM, "Wintel", etc. I took it as gospel. And then Apple rejected it. Cite cliche about there being only two ways to make big money: bundling or unbundling. Tesla has adopted Apple's strategy. Rejecting the automobile manufacturer's conventional wisdom. And I think it'll prove just as successful (if Musk can avoid giving himself an aneurysm. ahem.). This fully integrated strategy is different from the very successful conglomerate strategy (GE, Samsung, many others). I'm still trying to articulate how. Maybe mostly in focus. Yes, Apple's integration allows better fit and finish. That's not the part that impresses me. What most surprises me is that Apple doesn't have to share the benefits (profits, time to market) with any one else. For contrast, during the Wintel ascendency, advances were widely shared across the industry, as evidence by the economic success of clones and peripherals. My hunch is this explains how and why Apple is able to capture and protect their margins, in a way no one else is able to replicate, because the other strategies don't permit it. I still really can't phantom what's going on. Surely there are still interfaces, modules, common parts, right? So that Apple doesn't have to reinvent everything from scratch every product cycle. But those design choices are no longer publicly visible, extensible and substitutable by 3rd parties. Witness the whole right to repair debate. (I have another weird theory for Apple's unorthodox strategy around product group management, based just on guesses.) Tesla is doing the exact same thing for their product category. (Edit: Actually, Tesla eschewing model years, and doing continuous improvements is nearly what I think Apple is doing internally. What we see externally are just snapshots of those products in their continuous evolution and development.) One possible explanation for Apple's financial success is Wright's Law. It's like the Moore's Law of manufacturing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects h/t Sandy Munro's analysis of Battery Day. I now would love for somebodies to deconstruct a bunch of other apparent juggernauts to see if Wright's Law applies. Or not. AWS's data centers and solar panel manufacturing are two that pop into my mind. Any way. Back to Ben's article. If Apple has a customer facing differentiator, I think it's mostly their integration that allows them to capture and maintain fantastic margins, plowed back into product development, a virtuous cycle.
DrStartup 6y ago
On-device AI using a personal knowledge graph is the future of computing. The cloud cannot be trusted.

292 points by kaboro 6y ago

The point about robust collaborative editing as an API is interesting. The HN crowd generally prefers native apps and gets tired of the electron parade, but for major business software it’s increasingly table stakes that another person can see what you’re working on, live, by clicking a link. Apple does have relatively good live collaboration in its iWork apps. Perhaps there’s a future API there?

rmorey 6y ago
> Apple does have relatively good live collaboration in its iWork apps Does it? As much as i like the iWork apps, my experience (and impression of the general sentiment) has shown that Google Docs et al continues to blow the pants off iWork in that regard
- yalogin 6y ago
  Can you give me some examples where Apple's collaboration SW falls short?
- burlesona 6y ago
  I did say "relatively good" :) I would agree that collaboration is a little smoother in G Suite, however in my experience this is mostly about ease of sharing. Once you've gotten another Apple user to understand that they can "receive a shared document from you" and work on it, then usually collaboration itself is smooth.
- chrisfinazzo 6y ago
  The collaborative editing (which I first recall seeing in Google Wave) was essentially carried into Google Docs. N.B, "SubEthaEdit had this for years!" - I know. As a whole, it could be argued that where Wave failed, Slack - and predecessors like Basecamp - succeeded. iWork has always seemed like it has a different user in mind with its collaborative features and never really had much traction in the market, which is already served by offerings whose entire reason for being is collaboration, not just as a general productivity suite.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    N.B, "SubEthaEdit had this for years!" - I know. FWIW, I first saw collaborative editing over a network done on an Amiga. So I guess this has been a thing for "decades."
    - chrisfinazzo 6y ago
      If I'm reading the specs correctly, there was 10 Mb Ethernet capability on the Amiga...in 1985. Mind blown. (I was born in '86, albeit late in the year, so I find this especially hilarious.)
jinjin2 6y ago
I would have wished that Apple had been the ones acquiring Realm. They really had the best API for building apps with live collaboration I have ever experienced. Instead they went to MongoDB, so who knows how that will end?
- joshspankit 6y ago
  I always liked Realm but have not heard anything about them lately. Where did they go, and is the current work as powerful as the early stuff?
  - jamil7 6y ago
    I’m not really a fan of MongoDB but the handling of Realm so far seems well done. I migrated an app to their new sync service and everything worked fine. They also offer a fairly generous free plan and are open sourcing the sync engine.
  - dep_b 6y ago
    I tried to use it recently and it was an endless nightmare of suck. But perhaps I'm just allergic for any type of framework that tries to dictate my app structure and threading strategy.
- alexashka 6y ago
  Realm was a dead end - it was based on a custom database, which was a mistake. Them going to Mongo is actually the best possible outcome - by replacing their dead end custom database with MongoDB, they make MongoDB into a more compelling product, making document-based databases more batteries-included than ever before, which is excellent news.
onion2k 6y ago
The HN crowd generally prefers native apps and gets tired of the electron parade... There's no significant preference for native; it's just that we won't tolerate bad apps. I'd guess that VSCode is the most popular editor among users here by a long way, and that Google Docs has far more users than MS Word. HN readers don't pick native apps when there's a good Electron or web-based alternative.
- vulcan01 6y ago
  To add on, the reason why it might seem that > the HN crowd generally prefers native apps is because it is hard to write a good Electron / web app that is actually performant + easy to use. Which is why many people here are wary of new Electron apps.
- alwillis 6y ago
  >I'd guess that VSCode is the most popular editor among users here by a long way I don't know about that. When ever there's an article about Vim, it gets lots and lots of useful, insightful comments. If you search for Vim on HN, you'll see the catalog of Vim posts and threads. I haven't seen the same thing regarding VS Code.

sarosh 6y ago

I thought this statement from the article had more than a hint of truth to it: "Figma in Electron may destroy your battery, but that destruction will take twice as long, if not more, with an A-series chip inside!"

lalo2302 6y ago
This will allow Sketch to kick Figma's ass as soon as they solve their online multi-user editing
- pantulis 6y ago
  Ben’s blow at Sketch seemed a little excessive to me, but that is the painful path that Evernote has decided to follow to survive. Although the target market is designers and sketch is not multi platform, being full native is hard.
  - gammarator 6y ago
    Unfortunately Evernote has destroyed its performance by doing so. The Evernote support boards are full of angry paying users figuring out how to downgrade versions and discussing alternatives.
    - pantulis 6y ago
      Don’t tell me... I am a paying EN customer. Although I find that the biggest performance impact is not Electron but that now you don’t have a local database and a lot of requests are going through the network before the caching mechanisms kick in. In my opinion, it’s the correct move to make but incredibly hard. Now they have launched v10 they have at most and additionaa billing cycle (12 months) to start cranking out compelling features and polishing the product. My concern with EN is that they bleed so many paying users that they end being unsustainable. Time will tell.
- save_ferris 6y ago
  Not if the design community fully embraces Figma and opts not to go back to sketch. I'm already seeing this transition at my company, and I have a hard time seeing management OKing a switch back to Sketch once they iron out their collab issues.

x87678r 6y ago

Its difficult to think different if you're the world's largest company and dominate the phone market. In laptops it looks like they are differentiating themselves very well.

cpuguy83 6y ago
Apple has a small piece of the smartphone pie. That said, their CPU's are consistently in a class of their own.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  And this year they are creeping back to 90s era: iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro are essentially the same phone. So no reason why both exist, except to muddy up the product line.
  - jsinai 6y ago
    The key differentiator is the camera on the Pro, which significantly increases the cost. Some people will pay a premium for the privilege of owning the top model and yet others will go for the Pro precisely because of the more advanced camera. By having separate lines, Apple can sell the 12 for cheaper than the 12 Pro, and those who are willing to pay for the 12 Pro camera can do so. Don’t see any muddying here.
    - anonymouse008 6y ago
      The problem is as a “normal user” you can’t go to your ‘tech friend’ and get a straight answer — there are too many considerations now to direct someone to one phone over another. It’s not ‘yeah, the new iPhone is great! You gotta have it.’ It’s “so what do you want to do mostly?” — no one knows. That is what I believe the 90s curse really means — your evangelists are no longer as effective because they give potential customers an overwhelming amount of information that slows down, and sometimes prevents, a sale. —- Your point is exactly right - Apple has decided to harvest the demand curve over making something undeniably great. Edit: let me clarify, watch and homepod mini are currently in the category of 'just get it' products. This is only a critique of the iPhone line.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Shivetya 6y ago

Software is the key for me. I am by no means a power user but I really am loathe to give up even more of my software library to swap to Apple Silicon after Catalina cratered my gaming library in Steam and some older apps from companies long gone. I don't expect I am alone in this observation but the number of software companies they highlighted during the M1 debut was very slim and to be honest I have not heard of half of them until then and don't remember them now. So to me it matters not how much faster AS is, what matters is if I can run want I want to run. I am not going to own two separate machines to do what I want to do. If AS machines cannot do all I need I will keep my current Mac till support runs out and look again

freeone3000 6y ago
Rosetta 2 allows you to run your x86 mac apps on Apple silicon. It's like the PPC->Intel switch again; your software keeps working regardless of the hardware underneath.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  How is this going to work with games and GPUs?
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Nothing with Apple Silicon has a dedicated GPU, so, about the same. Existing calls to Vulkan and Metal don't need to be translated, the API and software stack are the same on the new hardware.
- naravara 6y ago
  It’s not without some overhead though, so there will be performance issues. Fortunately those performance issues will probably only affect games released in a fairly narrow band of time, new enough that they’re still resource intensive but predating the transition. It would maybe be a 5 or 6 year span I guess depending on how performant the ARM system in question is?

klelatti 6y ago

> it is possible that Apple’s chip team is so far ahead of the competition, not just in 2020, but particularly as it develops even more powerful versions of Apple Silicon, that the commoditization of software inherent in web apps will work to Apple’s favor, just as the its move to Intel commoditized hardware, highlighting Apple’s then-software advantage in the 00s. I think Ben is missing something here: that the speed and specialist hardware (e.g. neural engine) on the new SoCs again give developers of native apps the ability to differentiate themselves (and the Mac) by offering apps that the competition (both web apps and PCs) can't. It's not just about running web apps more quickly.

Hamcha 6y ago
Apple is also working against itself in that department. As far as I know a webapp does not need to be approved by Apple to go live.
- klelatti 6y ago
  I think you're confusing the Mac with iOS. Native Mac apps don't have to be approved by Apple unless they are on the Mac App Store.
  - izacus 6y ago
    Apple has made publishing apps without their approval significantly harder during last couple of years. With pretty much mandatory notarization there were several app developers who just stopped developing macOS software due to increasing amount of restrictions and process involved.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      Very fair comment. I guess that most developers don't see it as a huge issue though (I've not seen any issues with Apps that I use on Catalina). Direction of travel is towards more onerous Apple involvement.

darksaints 6y ago

I really wish Apple sold its hardware independently from its software. They make amazing hardware, and their latest silicon releases practically make me want to buy their computers again. Their software is shit though, and their walled garden, and insistence on using apple programming languages and IDEs for development, practically ensures that third party software will either not exist or be shit as well. There are only a handful of software shops that make decent software for apple, and they are all fully specialized on apple and therefore do not make software that plays nice with collaborators on other computers, nor used on a cloud server, etc. And if there actually exists better software from third parties that competes with apple software, you can forget about it ever being fully integrated. "Hey Siri, navigate to city hall using Google maps". Yeah right.

amelius 6y ago
Yes, they should break up Apple in a software and hardware company. Same for NVidia. It's the only way to actually own our hardware.
- nsxwolf 6y ago
  But I want their integrated ecosystem much more than I want to "own my hardware". If you take that away, I lose instead of gain.
  - fabianhjr 6y ago
    Another option would be to vertically integrate most companies and since that is anticompetitive the resulting company could become a public state owned enterprise. I do prefer that alternative and if you take that away, I lose instead of gain.
  - username90 6y ago
    Why not buy a phone with software apples integrated ecosystem preinstalled? There are lots of solutions like that already, just that they all suck. If software apple existed then you would have more options for properly locked down phones without sucky software since now you could put it on hardware from other manufacturers than hardware apple.

pvsukale3 6y ago

I am hoping Chrome team uses the recent performance gains in M1 for tighter optimisations in Macs. A lot of Desktop apps are built with Electron these days and it would be a huge improvement in terms of performance and memory issues caused by Chrome.

snarkypixel 6y ago

>> The iPad has since recovered from its 2017 nadir in sales, but seems locked in at around 8% of Apple’s revenue, a far cry from the 20% share it had in its first year For me, the reasons are that I love my current Ipad pro, I don't have a good reason to upgrade it, and the pricing isn't advantageous. I change my Macbook often because of work-related reasons (I.e. when changing job I need to get a new one) I change my iphone often because the new ones have a big enough differentiator (for me at least), but more importantly, the way the pricing is structured with my cellphone provider, I almost get it for free. (I.e. I had to upgrade my plan to get more gig/months and a few other features so I only had to pay $200 for the new iphone 12). But for the iPad pro? I'd need to pay the full $1500 upfront and the new one doesn't offer a big enough value add compared to the previous ones.

isthatsoup 6y ago
You are aware that just because the true cost is obfuscated by the cell payment plan that doesn't mean you aren't paying for it in exactly the same way as the ipad pro, which you could also buy on a finance plan. There is no such thing as "free" or "almost free", you are paying for it.
- coryfklein 6y ago
  This doesn't seem quite so obvious to me. 1. Do we know what the contracts between Verizon-Apple look like? Verizon may get discounts for buying in bulk or for being a strategic partner. 2. Cell providers (like Verizon) may be funding OP's iPhone 12 with the monthly-payments of other customers that don't exercise their ability to upgrade their phone exactly every 24-months. I think this group may actually be rather large. 3. Interest rates for financing your iPhone via your cell provider's 2-year contract plan are likely lower than financing an iPad on a credit card or other third-party financing. All of the above likely combine to make the iPhones proportionately cheaper than iPads, possibly significantly.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  2 years ago, I got a sim-only plan for unlimited minutes, unlimited sms and 10GB data for £15/month. 1 year ago, I renewed with the same provider, who offered me the same plan for £10/month. 1 month ago, same provider offered me 12GB data for £10/month. Shopping around indicated I could get 15-20GB for below £15/month if I jumped networks, and stuck on a sim-only plan. Instead, I got an iPhone SE 2020 128GB (RRP £449) and 40GB monthly data for £70 up front and £26/month. Total cost of ownership over the two years is £694. Cost of the iPhone if I purchased it from Apple is £449. That remains the remaining spend is £10.21/month for 40GB data. I definitely got something discounted.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

> Instead the future is web apps Time will tell...

areoform 6y ago

> Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate. Ben can write paeans to this new "cloud" business model. But at the end of the day, the question for us, the users is simple. Do we own what we buy? When I buy a Mac (and I've bought several), I am buying a computer. A general purpose computational device. And by selling it to me, the company is selling me a general purpose computational device. What right does the company have to stop me from installing/modifying my device in any way that I see fit? Sure, they may refuse support/warranty, that is their prerogative, but what gives them the right to stop me from having someone else repair it? Or, to boot into Linux? Or, to open my own computer? I have a MacBook Pro from 2016. Recently, I wanted to give it a thorough cleaning. So I took out my speciality screw driver and unscrewed the screws for the bottom plate. It wouldn't budge. It was then I realized that I needed suction cups and strength to move the plate downwards to unlatch something inside to make it "pop". This design serves no engineering purpose. It exists to make it harder for me, the device owner, to access the device I've purchased without sacrificing dollars at the altar of Apple. And this was their most "open" product. Prior to the M1 announcement, you couldn't boot into another OS - or significantly alter - your iOS device. And now we can't do so with our Macs. We seem to have collectively decided to blur the line of ownership. A device we buy isn't ours even after purchase. No, we must continuously give our money to the corporation for the benefit of their revenue projections. Which returns us to this, > Sketch, to be sure, bears the most responsibility for its struggles; frankly, that native app piece reads like a refusal to face its fate. With Sketch you own your data, and thanks to the open format, you can port that data to other mediums. With Sketch you own a copy of the tool that allows you to do your job. With these other, less powerful but "collaborative" software, you don't truly own your data or the tools to access it. You merely rent it. Should there be an event where Figma is acquired or goes out of business, then (in all likelihood) every user of this platform will lack the ability and the choice to preserve their work for future generations (and for their business). What are the odds of Figma staying as it is, in the control of founders, chugging along as a profitable business a year from now? 5 years from now? A decade? Two decades? I do not wish to single out Ben, but this post is an exemplar of the shift in thinking being pushed by the current crop of tech cognoscenti. They have made a growing argument that the future is one without ownership. Where it's one where you don't own your devices, you rent them. And they assure us that's the future, and because that's the future, it's going to be amazing. But that sounds like dystopia to me. It is one thing to have a tradeoff between accessing all the songs in the world and owning a few on vinyl to having the tools of your trade be abstracted away. Spotify and Netflix aren't essential services to me. My computer is. My vector design software is. My ability to write code is. My ability to make things is. They argue that there are benefits to "collaboration" with the "cloud", but that doesn't need to be so. The only reason why they're operating in the browser is because the tradition of web apps started within them. There is no reason why every other application can't collaborate natively, with combined local + server-based data storage with other apps across the world. Video games do it all the time! Games like counterstrike etc are in some ways far more collaborative than a Figma file. The state of what occurs in the world depends on every other person in the world, with the context being time sensitive, and the state being additive. And it works beautifully. If it can work for non-essential entertainment, why should we accept the reduced paradigm for our essential tools? Why should we buy into crippled software that is limited by the fact it runs in the browser? Why should we buy into the abusive business model of having to rent our ability to do work from another company? Why should we buy into the idea that we don't own the fruits of our labor? And that we don't get to have a copy of our work nor access it without paying the toll? Bohemian Coding, if you ever read this, don't go down with this ship. Add support for Windows. Or, Linux. It will save your company.

leoc 6y ago

> notably Apple avoided the trap of integrating hardware (the iPod) with hardware (the Mac), which would have handicapped the former to prop up the latter. Instead the company took advantage of the flexibility of software to port iTunes to Windows That's how things turned out, but not how they were originally meant to be. Jobs' reluctance to port iTunes to Windows was so obvious that even the Isaacson bio made it clear. And it wasn't simply an atavistic impulse, it was faithfulness to his "Digital Hub" strategy which saw smart-device integration as a way to sell Macintoshes. Jobs was a late and reluctant convert to the idea of a post-PC era. Repasting an earlier comment of mine https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9470925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9470925 : >> If you look at Apple's trajectory over the last 15 years, you can see the vision was consistently outlined from the very beginning—the Digital Hub strategy ([link working in 2020: https://youtu.be/AnrM4n6S3CU?t=2585 https://youtu.be/AnrM4n6S3CU?t=2585 ]). > That's not really the case though. As Jobs outlined it in that video, the Digital Hub strategy was to sell Macintoshes by positioning them as something you could dock your consumer-electronics gadgets, mostly from third parties, into. It was a plan to sell hubs, not spokes. This strategy had limited viability for Apple, because a typical consumer wasn't likely to think "I've just bought this $500 camcorder, so now I need to spend twice that or more on a Mac in order to offload and edit the video". If they were going to use any computer as the digital hub for their camcorder, it was probably going to be their Windows PC. That's probably why iTunes for Windows was such a difficult and long-drawn-out decision for Jobs: because it was a decision to mostly abandon the Digital Hub approach in favour of selling more of the spokes. Then Apple's slow and initially reluctant embrace of the "post-PC era" with over-the-air iDevice updates and cloud storage to partly displace iTunes means that it's increasingly taking nearly the opposite of Jobs' 2001 stance: "We're clearly migrating away from the PC as the centrepiece" and "We don't think of it in terms of the PC business anymore" are things that Tim Cook could say today without really startling anyone. At his 2007 joint interview with Gates at D5 https://www.wsj.com/video/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-at-d5-full-session/60C4F9FA-9AD5-4D04-8BB6-015AEBB1C052.html https://www.wsj.com/video/bill-gates-and-steve-jobs-at-d5-fu... Jobs is coming round to the post-PC agenda, reluctantly.

ghaff 6y ago
Mobile and device proliferation more broadly snuck up on a lot of people. (Including me. I wrote a piece in 2003 about Apple morphing into an entertainment company and it was way too living room-centric. http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs/anappleent.pdf http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs...) The general view in the 1990s into the early 2000s was that you would have a centralized home computer/storage hub/etc. that everything else connected to.

jeswin 6y ago

People should stop cherry picking benchmarks (like SPECint2006) when comparing CPUs. And many seem to be misreading Anandtech's recent comparison as - Wow look M1 is almost as fast as a 5950X. Except that it's simply impossible. Wait for the actual benchmarks to come out. Especially real world workloads. I'll be very surprised if desktop Ryzens (or even the Intel CPUs) don't run circles around the M1 in a laptop.

bufo 6y ago
People have been saying that for years and keep getting it wrong. There is no evidence whatsoever that current x86-64 chips will do better. The polar opposite of SPECint2006 is stuff like Speedometer 2.0, where Apple chips still crush it https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1318644849437003780 https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1318644849437003780. The only previous valid point was that previous iPhones/iPad couldn't sustain these high clock rates for long since they were fanless, fortunately adding a fan is not very hard. Sure the 5950X will probably win the multi-core benchmarks since it has 2x cores but it does not look promising for single core speed.
pirocks 6y ago
What do you mean by "simply impossible". Seems very possible to me, since it's on a better process node, has deeper out of order, more transistors etc.

AtlasBarfed 6y ago

One difference between the PPC-> Intel switch is that there was a healthy anticipation of massive performance gains to cover emulation shortfalls. That doesn't exist anymore. Emulation of an architecture for the Intel -> ARM switch can't rely on some big gains to cover for emulation. I'd have been more excited if they had provisions for some hardware acceleration of Intel instructions. I'm guessing they can't do direction instruction --> microops translation in the ARM silicon, there's probably a thousand patents blocking that.

klelatti 6y ago
The opposite is the case. > 2x faster CPU performance > M1 delivers significantly higher performance at every power level when compared with the very latest PC laptop chip. At just 10 watts (the thermal envelope of a MacBook Air), M1 delivers up to 2x the CPU performance of the PC chip. Which is precisely why they can make the move with Rosetta 2.
- asdff 6y ago
  2x performance of a 10w pc chip? iirc the most recent intel air was using a custom 12w chip.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    It's a quote straight from the Apple website!

parsimo2010 6y ago

I accept that the performance of Apple's chips have increased rapidly in the last few years, but the benchmarks that they are using to compare to various x86 CPUs makes me suspicious that they are cherry-picking benchmarks and aren't telling the whole story (either in the Stratechery article or the Anandtech they got the figures from). Why am I suspicious? THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO WAY THAT A 5W PART LIKE THE A14 IS FASTER THAN A 100W PART LIKE THE i9-10900k! I understand they are comparing single threaded speed. I'll accept that the A14 is more power efficient. I'll acknowledge that Intel has been struggling lately. But to imply that a low power mobile is straight up faster than a high power chip in any category makes me extremely suspicious that the benchmark isn't actually measuring speed (maybe it's normalizing by power draw), or that the ARM and x86 versions of the benchmark have different reference values (like a 1000 score for an ARM is not the same speed of calculation as a 1000 score on x86). It just can't be true that the tablet with a total price of $1k can hang with a $500 CPU that has practically unlimited size, weight and power compared to the tablet, and when the total price to make it comparable in features (motherboard, power supply, monitor, etc) makes the desktop system more expensive. Regardless of whether it's an intentional trick or an oversight, I don't think that the benchmark showing the mobile chip is better than a desktop chip in RAW PERFORMANCE is true. And that means that a lot of the conclusions that they draw from the benchmark aren't true. There is no way that the A14 (nor the M1) is going to be faster in any raw performance category than a latest generation and top-spec desktop system.

zepto 6y ago
Anandtech says you are wrong: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
- parsimo2010 6y ago
  I read that article too and mentioned it in my first sentence. That's the article that Stratechery pulled their figures from. The validity of that article and those benchmarks is what I'm doubting. Will the new Macbooks with M1 chips compare favorably against Intel laptops with low power and fanless designs? Yeah. Is the existing A14 chip faster than than a 10900k (even in single threaded performance)? No way. There is something in the benchmark that is messed up to the point where you can't compare them.

nottorp 6y ago

> Android is more flexible and well-suited to power users, and much better integrated with Google’s superior web services ... if (forced) integration with Google's web services is a plus, that is. > (Apple) The company has the best chips in the world, and you have to buy the entire integrated widget to get them. Does it? Those claims of 3x faster seem carefully cherry picked.

martin_drapeau 6y ago

The overarching strategy is to bring iOS to the Mac in order to grab market share of the PC market. Apple's moat will increase more and more because of the vertical integration they have. A lot of people have iPads. They have replaced PCs for many tasks. Many I know only use their PCs for word processing or work. Other things we do on a computer are in the browser. In 2 years I'll be replacing 2 Windows computers in my family. Give me the choice of a Mac with familiar iOS interface, and access to the App Store, or a Windows PC, only good for word processing and browsing the web, I choose Mac/iOS. I am familiar with iOS but not so much with Mac (I've owned 2 but could never get used to the UI). I reckon millions will be faced with the same choices. I predict that in 5 years Dell, HP and Lenovo will be struggling. Time will tell... Oh, and of course the M1 today ain't compelling enough. But wait until it evolves. Apple has a track record of iterating year over year. Fascinating...

Magodo 6y ago
> I predict that in 5 years Dell, HP and Lenovo will be struggling. Time will tell... I mean most casual users don't use laptops already, either preferring their phones or tablets. Those that do, need it for work (or a nicher crowd - gaming). And there's no way in hell the primary buyers of Dell, HP and lenovo computers, companies, with no reason to pay the apple tax will pay for expensive 1000$+ MBPs for each employee
- cpeterso 6y ago
  As phones are most users' primary computing device, I imagine desktop computers will become stateless machines with big displays and keyboards for users to dock their phone. The user will be able to access their phone's apps and data on the desktop computer, perhaps also offloading computation to faster desktop CPUs.
  - antipaul 6y ago
    Fascinating thought. Will Apple make a standalone screen/dock to plug in your iPhone/iPad...?
- 6y ago

briandear 6y ago

> the M1 probably costs around $75 (an educated guess), which is less than the Intel chips it replaces, but Apple is mostly holding the line on prices (the new Mac Mini is $100 cheaper, but also has significantly less I/O). That suggests the company believes it can both take share and margin However, the creation of the M1 wasn't free. There's a significant R&D cost, both initial and ongoing that isn't calculated as part of the Cost of Goods Sold.

bmitc 6y ago

Apple can say whatever they want about the performance of their chips in their phones, but in my personal experience, their phones are slower than the competition.

Daniel_sk 6y ago
Based on numbers/specs or real word usage?
- celsoazevedo 6y ago
  For me, the longer iOS animations makes iPhones feel slower than many Android phones. Not caching apps for long periods also affects the app loading speed.
- Dahoon 6y ago
  If GP meant real word usage I can only agree. I really cannot see how iPhones feel faster. In my hands they clearly do not.

aborsy 6y ago

Focus on hardware as a differentiator that is not easy replicate would also allow Apple to sell privacy and security. The competitors such as Google are often focused on software and data, relying on data collection.

jbergens 6y ago

I think a strange thing in the article is that they make it sound like it is obvious that Apple will continue to increase performance faster than the competition. I don't think that is clear at all. Maybe they will maybe they won't. They can have reached a limit where it is hard to make the single threaded speed of the chip higher without increasing the power draw.

jpeg_hero 6y ago

I thought a lot about this comparing M1 to nVida Maxine AI video conferencing. setting up all these feature on a PC seems like such a kluge compared to apple's integrated hardware/software stack. https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine https://developer.nvidia.com/maxine >Maxine includes APIs for the latest innovations from NVIDIA research such as face alignment, gaze correction, face re-lighting and real time translation in addition to capabilities such as super-resolution, noise removal, closed captioning and virtual assistants.

specialist 6y ago

This article feels like talking out loud. Read it twice and I'm not clear what the punch line is. Some comments here are rehashing the native vs web app debate. I don't see the connection. Stratechery's aggregation theory the most cogent, prescriptive analysis of one facet of our current business ecology. I don't recall if Ben has made a similar analysis of Apple's integration strategy. Here's my take... Apple bringing everything in house continues to surprise, startle, and delight me. It's so contrary to all the business trends, up to maybe the 2010s. The book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity is an economic model (applying NPV to modularity) describing the divide & conquer strategy of prior juggernauts. GM, "Wintel", etc. I took it as gospel. And then Apple rejected it. Cite cliche about there being only two ways to make big money: bundling or unbundling. Tesla has adopted Apple's strategy. Rejecting the automobile manufacturer's conventional wisdom. And I think it'll prove just as successful (if Musk can avoid giving himself an aneurysm. ahem.). This fully integrated strategy is different from the very successful conglomerate strategy (GE, Samsung, many others). I'm still trying to articulate how. Maybe mostly in focus. Yes, Apple's integration allows better fit and finish. That's not the part that impresses me. What most surprises me is that Apple doesn't have to share the benefits (profits, time to market) with any one else. For contrast, during the Wintel ascendency, advances were widely shared across the industry, as evidence by the economic success of clones and peripherals. My hunch is this explains how and why Apple is able to capture and protect their margins, in a way no one else is able to replicate, because the other strategies don't permit it. I still really can't phantom what's going on. Surely there are still interfaces, modules, common parts, right? So that Apple doesn't have to reinvent everything from scratch every product cycle. But those design choices are no longer publicly visible, extensible and substitutable by 3rd parties. Witness the whole right to repair debate. (I have another weird theory for Apple's unorthodox strategy around product group management, based just on guesses.) Tesla is doing the exact same thing for their product category. (Edit: Actually, Tesla eschewing model years, and doing continuous improvements is nearly what I think Apple is doing internally. What we see externally are just snapshots of those products in their continuous evolution and development.) One possible explanation for Apple's financial success is Wright's Law. It's like the Moore's Law of manufacturing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects h/t Sandy Munro's analysis of Battery Day. I now would love for somebodies to deconstruct a bunch of other apparent juggernauts to see if Wright's Law applies. Or not. AWS's data centers and solar panel manufacturing are two that pop into my mind. Any way. Back to Ben's article. If Apple has a customer facing differentiator, I think it's mostly their integration that allows them to capture and maintain fantastic margins, plowed back into product development, a virtuous cycle.

DrStartup 6y ago

On-device AI using a personal knowledge graph is the future of computing. The cloud cannot be trusted.