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I see a myriad of comments that boil down to “duh”, but I think these comments are missing the point. Consider an alternate possibility: “sales of Apple’s new

I see a myriad of comments that boil down to “duh”, but I think these comments are missing the point. Consider an alternate possibility: “sales of Apple’s new ARM macs outpaced by older models”. Had Apple not knocked M1 out of the park, this was a real possibility. Is it surprising that a well executed architecture change is now selling well? Not really. But the more interesting point is that the rest of the market agrees with us early adopters and tech nerds. This would be a very different headline if devs were struggling to port their software, or if Rosetta 2 didn’t live up to its promise.

harperlee 6y ago
See Surface Pro X as an example of that alternate possibility.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Perhaps a bit ironically the M1 Macs arguably offer the best Windows on ARM experience.
- jaegerpicker 6y ago
  I hated my Surface Pro when I had, granted this was 3 years ago. It had terrible battery life, windows was horrible with the touchscreen, very few apps responded to touch events at all let alone correctly. All together one of the worst laptops/tablets I've ever used. I have an M1 macbook air and it's the best laptop I've ever used, same with my iPad Pro. Apple has really nailed the Arm device/os combo IMO.
whizzter 6y ago
Even w/o the perf of the M1 I think sales had been overwhelming, part because yes it's the "entry level" models but mainly because nobody wants to be left with a machine that won't get supported by the OS (even if I think low-mem M1 machines will be phased out of OS updates at some point)
- coder543 6y ago
  I think you vastly overestimate how much the average consumer thinks about or cares about OS updates. What you say is something that could affect the decision making process for highly technical people, but even then... we have no firm commitments from Apple on which platforms will get the longest support, so it's a gut-feeling decision, which isn't very technical. As you hint, the M1 could be treated as a pathfinder platform and deprecated much sooner than subsequent platforms, kind of like the original iPad. The M1 is not ARMv9 and lacks SVE2... ARMv9 is coming soon, and that may become the long-term supported standard for Apple's Mac-on-ARM platform.
  - sjwright 6y ago
    The original iPad was, in terms of compute specifications, a minimum viable product. The M1 Macs are not—they are the combination of a mature platform with a mature silicon chip. Given the sheer volume of M1 sales there’s no chance they’re going to be so prematurely deprecated as the original iPad was. At the very least I’d put money on the M1 not being deprecated before all Intel-powered Macs (present and future) are deprecated.
    - solarkraft 6y ago
      I think the M1 will easily last for a few years - but we don't know what they have left in stock. Was the original iPad regarded as MVP when it came out?
      - sjwright 6y ago
        The original iPad was a first generation product; its status as a minimum viable product was only clear after subsequent product cycles.
oblio 6y ago
The thing is, even if M1 would have been middling, Apple would have still migrated everyone forcefully :-)
- pdpi 6y ago
  Eventually, at some point, begrudgingly. People held on to their 2015 15" MBPs for as long as they could because they didn't like the upgrade paths. The 16" was well received and helped fix that. The M1 laptops were incredibly well received and people are excitedly jumping on them instead of feeling forced.
  - sportsball 6y ago
    Lots of marketing to Apple users worked? Is anyone surprised? When market share changes/Apple becomes more consumer and developer friendly, wake me up.
  - dkarp 6y ago
    *are holding onto My 2015 MBP is still going strong and Apple support were even pretty great at helping when I did have one issue, even though they classify it as Vintage. But you're totally right, I'm really impressed by the M1 and am just holding out for the M1X to upgrade.
    - MarkyC4 6y ago
      Another 2015MBP stalwart here. I wasn't planning on upgrading to an ARM Mac. I use BootCamp (daily lately, since we're in lockdown and it's snowing) for gaming on Windows with an eGPU. Neither of which are supported on the M1. I'm considering selling my eGPU and just building a gaming PC (the M3 will likely be out by the time I pull trig though :/), but it was nice to have 1 machine do it all (work + play), especially since I didn't need the eGPU to play some couch co-op games (Cuphead, Castle Crashers, very cottage-friendly!)
      - dkarp 6y ago
        I looked into the eGPU for the same reason, to have a single machine to do it all. In the end I got a separate machine as it was cheaper to do so (!!) and saw people having lots of issues with eGPU support. I couldn't believe the price on those eGPU enclosures. How was your experience? I bet it was nice just plugging in and getting all that extra power.
ghaff 6y ago
It's also worth observing that a lot of IT departments aren't necessarily rushing into the M1, especially to the degree that there isn't a full range of laptops with the new architecture yet.
- ianai 6y ago
  I think such departments were never a target for this iteration of hardware. That’ll be whenever a Mac Pro model comes out or similar.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    IT departments do often offer a small/light and a non-travel-optimized model but I imagine many companies are waiting until they can have a common architecture on new systems and any software teething pains are worked out (which seems to be happening but probably not quite there yet).
- Someone 6y ago
  Do IT department ever rush? I think their ambition is to be slow, but steady. If you don’t want to change course often, you can’t react immediately to every thing that happens.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    When they have to. Like when everyone went remote a year ago. But, to put it mildly, providing people with access to the newest Apple laptop does not constitute an emergency.
johnklos 6y ago
Good point, but really it's more about usability than anything else. Imagine that the M1 wasn't actually faster than just about everything out there. But also imagine that the new design decisions, the improved memory allocation methods, the significantly better power usage, and the materially lower price meant that it was faster, took less memory and less power for lots of things, or even for most things. Would it be compelling for people who already have Intel to move? No. But would it be preferable to choosing Intel for a new machine? Certainly, at least for low-end models and applications. And look at what Apple has done - the M1 is in the mini, the Air, the smaller (usually lower end) MacBook Pro, and now the 24" iMac (which is the lower end iMac). So, even though the M1 kicks Intel's ass, Apple is still playing it safe. There'd be plenty of reason to choose ARM over Intel even if performance wasn't clearly better :)
fallingknife 6y ago
I can't speak to the quality of the M1 since I haven't used one yet, but I don't think the sales numbers mean that much. Basically just new shiny model outsells old standard model. Just look at the website. What would you rather buy, a standard model, or the one "supercharged by the Apple M1 chip?"
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  The low end new shiny model of just 2 variants are out selling all of the older and more expensive models combined. That’s big.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    OTOH, people who might have otherwise upgraded to one of those older and more expensive models are holding off on purchasing until new higher-end models are available.
  - e-clinton 6y ago
    I assume Apple sells vastly more Airs and 13” Pros than they do any other machine they make. The lower price is a huge contributor. If the M1 were only on the top end machines, this thread wouldn’t exist.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      That’s a lot of assumptions to make. Based on what?
dividedbyzero 6y ago
I wonder how many of those who got an M1 mac recently are aware of what exactly that means, besides that it's new and fast. I could imagine a large part of those sales to fall into the "I need a new computer, I'll get another Macbook Air" category. Those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway; I guess you'd have to do pretty specialized work to really notice a big difference besides "cool" and "fast".
- smilekzs 6y ago
  I would imagine opinion from early adopters (and tech media in general) have non-trivial influence over even said buyers' decisions.
  - btown 6y ago
    Right, even if it's distilled down to "I've heard great things about these new Macs" that's still reflective of an incredible technical and marketing accomplishment.
  - krrrh 6y ago
    My parents got an M1 mba a few days ago. When they asked my advice about getting a new laptop they got an earful, and then the favour was returned when I listened to my flabbergasted dad explain to me how his bank website now renders instantly compared to 15 seconds on his old mba. It’s hard to quantify what portion of the so called tech-illiterate have a tech literate person in their lives who they go to for purchasing advice, but anecdotally I must provide decisive “wait until September” or “nows a good time to buy and here’s why!” advice to at least a dozen or relatives and friends. It’s also why the butterfly keyboards or the mdns debacle can end up being a drag on sales. I’m very bullish on Mac market share in the next couple of years due to pent up demand from family members being advised to hold on to older machines.
- zippergz 6y ago
  It's a testament to how well it was done that these people can buy the computers and not have to know anything except that it's new and fast.
yardie 6y ago
6502 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1) Apple has a long, long history of pulling off well executed architecture changes. If you are a Apple computer shopper then you would know by now that by the time they release a new architecture, internally, that platform has long been retired for their internal users. It would have been an even bigger headline if Apple released the M1 and it didn't live up to expectations. I'm actually more surprised about the iPad Pro going from the A-series to the M-series. And now, the new iMac looks very iPad-like.
- addaon 6y ago
  6502 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1) The original Intel Mac's ran the 32-bit Core Duo, although a mid-season refresh took them to the (64-bit) Core 2 Duo. That generation of purely-32-bit hardware being out in the wild had some real impact on moving the OS forward, later down the road.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Beat me to it!
    - addaon 6y ago
      Also probably worth dividing PPC into the 32-bit architectures (601, 603, G3, G4) and 64-bit architectures (G5), although the PowerPC architecture did that transition in such a civilized manner that it wasn't really traumatic. In some ways the jump from the 601 (Power-ish) to 603 (true PowerPC) was bigger than the jump from the G4 to the G5.
      - klelatti 6y ago
        Good points. Worth noting that PPC -> x86 was a 64 bit to 32 bit transition. I assume we will soon see ARMv8 -> ARMv9, but that will hardly be noticeable. I owned the first MacBook Pro but it died before the architecture became an issue :( Overall Apple should be good at architecture transitions by now as they've done enough of them!
gigatexal 6y ago
“Duh” comments come from all the wins they’ve had in the mobile space. They have been and likely will continue to be 2 or more generations ahead in performance per watt on mobile. So when they were talking about doing a desktop and laptop chip it wouldn’t be a stretch to think they’d “knock it out of the park”.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>But the more interesting point is that the rest of the market agrees with us early adopters and tech nerds. No one outside of early adopters and tech nerds cares one wink about the components of their laptop. The days of normal people caring about specs are long gone.
minikites 6y ago
>Consider an alternate possibility: “sales of Apple’s new ARM macs outpaced by older models”. This story would be "man bites dog", the linked story is "dog bites man", that's why people are reacting this way.
dariusj18 6y ago
Seems to me that the statistic is designed to hide other possible stories. Consider that those unhappy with the M1 move wouldn't buy older Macbooks, they would leave the Apple ecosystem all together.
yepthatsreality 6y ago
BS, there is no reality where the M1 failed with a company like Apple. They have too much loyalty for people to even consider other options. So much in fact that no one can be convinced of its flaws it’s all “Apple knocked it out of the park, most things work!” We all know “most things” is subjective to how you use your PC. Tell me a world where that wouldn’t ever happen and I’ll consider your Intel leading model scenario.
f6v 6y ago
> This would be a very different headline if devs were struggling to port their software, or if Rosetta 2 didn’t live up to its promise. Yeah, imagine if Surface Pro X outsold Intel-based ones.

harperlee 6y ago

See Surface Pro X as an example of that alternate possibility.

solarkraft 6y ago
Perhaps a bit ironically the M1 Macs arguably offer the best Windows on ARM experience.
jaegerpicker 6y ago
I hated my Surface Pro when I had, granted this was 3 years ago. It had terrible battery life, windows was horrible with the touchscreen, very few apps responded to touch events at all let alone correctly. All together one of the worst laptops/tablets I've ever used. I have an M1 macbook air and it's the best laptop I've ever used, same with my iPad Pro. Apple has really nailed the Arm device/os combo IMO.

whizzter 6y ago

Even w/o the perf of the M1 I think sales had been overwhelming, part because yes it's the "entry level" models but mainly because nobody wants to be left with a machine that won't get supported by the OS (even if I think low-mem M1 machines will be phased out of OS updates at some point)

coder543 6y ago
I think you vastly overestimate how much the average consumer thinks about or cares about OS updates. What you say is something that could affect the decision making process for highly technical people, but even then... we have no firm commitments from Apple on which platforms will get the longest support, so it's a gut-feeling decision, which isn't very technical. As you hint, the M1 could be treated as a pathfinder platform and deprecated much sooner than subsequent platforms, kind of like the original iPad. The M1 is not ARMv9 and lacks SVE2... ARMv9 is coming soon, and that may become the long-term supported standard for Apple's Mac-on-ARM platform.
- sjwright 6y ago
  The original iPad was, in terms of compute specifications, a minimum viable product. The M1 Macs are not—they are the combination of a mature platform with a mature silicon chip. Given the sheer volume of M1 sales there’s no chance they’re going to be so prematurely deprecated as the original iPad was. At the very least I’d put money on the M1 not being deprecated before all Intel-powered Macs (present and future) are deprecated.
  - solarkraft 6y ago
    I think the M1 will easily last for a few years - but we don't know what they have left in stock. Was the original iPad regarded as MVP when it came out?
    - sjwright 6y ago
      The original iPad was a first generation product; its status as a minimum viable product was only clear after subsequent product cycles.

oblio 6y ago

The thing is, even if M1 would have been middling, Apple would have still migrated everyone forcefully :-)

pdpi 6y ago
Eventually, at some point, begrudgingly. People held on to their 2015 15" MBPs for as long as they could because they didn't like the upgrade paths. The 16" was well received and helped fix that. The M1 laptops were incredibly well received and people are excitedly jumping on them instead of feeling forced.
- sportsball 6y ago
  Lots of marketing to Apple users worked? Is anyone surprised? When market share changes/Apple becomes more consumer and developer friendly, wake me up.
- dkarp 6y ago
  *are holding onto My 2015 MBP is still going strong and Apple support were even pretty great at helping when I did have one issue, even though they classify it as Vintage. But you're totally right, I'm really impressed by the M1 and am just holding out for the M1X to upgrade.
  - MarkyC4 6y ago
    Another 2015MBP stalwart here. I wasn't planning on upgrading to an ARM Mac. I use BootCamp (daily lately, since we're in lockdown and it's snowing) for gaming on Windows with an eGPU. Neither of which are supported on the M1. I'm considering selling my eGPU and just building a gaming PC (the M3 will likely be out by the time I pull trig though :/), but it was nice to have 1 machine do it all (work + play), especially since I didn't need the eGPU to play some couch co-op games (Cuphead, Castle Crashers, very cottage-friendly!)
    - dkarp 6y ago
      I looked into the eGPU for the same reason, to have a single machine to do it all. In the end I got a separate machine as it was cheaper to do so (!!) and saw people having lots of issues with eGPU support. I couldn't believe the price on those eGPU enclosures. How was your experience? I bet it was nice just plugging in and getting all that extra power.

ghaff 6y ago

It's also worth observing that a lot of IT departments aren't necessarily rushing into the M1, especially to the degree that there isn't a full range of laptops with the new architecture yet.

ianai 6y ago
I think such departments were never a target for this iteration of hardware. That’ll be whenever a Mac Pro model comes out or similar.
- ghaff 6y ago
  IT departments do often offer a small/light and a non-travel-optimized model but I imagine many companies are waiting until they can have a common architecture on new systems and any software teething pains are worked out (which seems to be happening but probably not quite there yet).
Someone 6y ago
Do IT department ever rush? I think their ambition is to be slow, but steady. If you don’t want to change course often, you can’t react immediately to every thing that happens.
- ghaff 6y ago
  When they have to. Like when everyone went remote a year ago. But, to put it mildly, providing people with access to the newest Apple laptop does not constitute an emergency.

johnklos 6y ago

Good point, but really it's more about usability than anything else. Imagine that the M1 wasn't actually faster than just about everything out there. But also imagine that the new design decisions, the improved memory allocation methods, the significantly better power usage, and the materially lower price meant that it was faster, took less memory and less power for lots of things, or even for most things. Would it be compelling for people who already have Intel to move? No. But would it be preferable to choosing Intel for a new machine? Certainly, at least for low-end models and applications. And look at what Apple has done - the M1 is in the mini, the Air, the smaller (usually lower end) MacBook Pro, and now the 24" iMac (which is the lower end iMac). So, even though the M1 kicks Intel's ass, Apple is still playing it safe. There'd be plenty of reason to choose ARM over Intel even if performance wasn't clearly better :)

fallingknife 6y ago

I can't speak to the quality of the M1 since I haven't used one yet, but I don't think the sales numbers mean that much. Basically just new shiny model outsells old standard model. Just look at the website. What would you rather buy, a standard model, or the one "supercharged by the Apple M1 chip?"

imwillofficial 6y ago
The low end new shiny model of just 2 variants are out selling all of the older and more expensive models combined. That’s big.
- ghaff 6y ago
  OTOH, people who might have otherwise upgraded to one of those older and more expensive models are holding off on purchasing until new higher-end models are available.
- e-clinton 6y ago
  I assume Apple sells vastly more Airs and 13” Pros than they do any other machine they make. The lower price is a huge contributor. If the M1 were only on the top end machines, this thread wouldn’t exist.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    That’s a lot of assumptions to make. Based on what?

dividedbyzero 6y ago

I wonder how many of those who got an M1 mac recently are aware of what exactly that means, besides that it's new and fast. I could imagine a large part of those sales to fall into the "I need a new computer, I'll get another Macbook Air" category. Those buyers wouldn't have much reason to care anyway; I guess you'd have to do pretty specialized work to really notice a big difference besides "cool" and "fast".

smilekzs 6y ago
I would imagine opinion from early adopters (and tech media in general) have non-trivial influence over even said buyers' decisions.
- btown 6y ago
  Right, even if it's distilled down to "I've heard great things about these new Macs" that's still reflective of an incredible technical and marketing accomplishment.
- krrrh 6y ago
  My parents got an M1 mba a few days ago. When they asked my advice about getting a new laptop they got an earful, and then the favour was returned when I listened to my flabbergasted dad explain to me how his bank website now renders instantly compared to 15 seconds on his old mba. It’s hard to quantify what portion of the so called tech-illiterate have a tech literate person in their lives who they go to for purchasing advice, but anecdotally I must provide decisive “wait until September” or “nows a good time to buy and here’s why!” advice to at least a dozen or relatives and friends. It’s also why the butterfly keyboards or the mdns debacle can end up being a drag on sales. I’m very bullish on Mac market share in the next couple of years due to pent up demand from family members being advised to hold on to older machines.
zippergz 6y ago
It's a testament to how well it was done that these people can buy the computers and not have to know anything except that it's new and fast.

yardie 6y ago

6502 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1) Apple has a long, long history of pulling off well executed architecture changes. If you are a Apple computer shopper then you would know by now that by the time they release a new architecture, internally, that platform has long been retired for their internal users. It would have been an even bigger headline if Apple released the M1 and it didn't live up to expectations. I'm actually more surprised about the iPad Pro going from the A-series to the M-series. And now, the new iMac looks very iPad-like.

addaon 6y ago
6502 -> 680x0 -> PPC601 -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARMv8.5 (Apple M1) The original Intel Mac's ran the 32-bit Core Duo, although a mid-season refresh took them to the (64-bit) Core 2 Duo. That generation of purely-32-bit hardware being out in the wild had some real impact on moving the OS forward, later down the road.
- klelatti 6y ago
  Beat me to it!
  - addaon 6y ago
    Also probably worth dividing PPC into the 32-bit architectures (601, 603, G3, G4) and 64-bit architectures (G5), although the PowerPC architecture did that transition in such a civilized manner that it wasn't really traumatic. In some ways the jump from the 601 (Power-ish) to 603 (true PowerPC) was bigger than the jump from the G4 to the G5.
    - klelatti 6y ago
      Good points. Worth noting that PPC -> x86 was a 64 bit to 32 bit transition. I assume we will soon see ARMv8 -> ARMv9, but that will hardly be noticeable. I owned the first MacBook Pro but it died before the architecture became an issue :( Overall Apple should be good at architecture transitions by now as they've done enough of them!

gigatexal 6y ago

“Duh” comments come from all the wins they’ve had in the mobile space. They have been and likely will continue to be 2 or more generations ahead in performance per watt on mobile. So when they were talking about doing a desktop and laptop chip it wouldn’t be a stretch to think they’d “knock it out of the park”.

itsoktocry 6y ago

>But the more interesting point is that the rest of the market agrees with us early adopters and tech nerds. No one outside of early adopters and tech nerds cares one wink about the components of their laptop. The days of normal people caring about specs are long gone.

minikites 6y ago

>Consider an alternate possibility: “sales of Apple’s new ARM macs outpaced by older models”. This story would be "man bites dog", the linked story is "dog bites man", that's why people are reacting this way.

dariusj18 6y ago

Seems to me that the statistic is designed to hide other possible stories. Consider that those unhappy with the M1 move wouldn't buy older Macbooks, they would leave the Apple ecosystem all together.

yepthatsreality 6y ago

BS, there is no reality where the M1 failed with a company like Apple. They have too much loyalty for people to even consider other options. So much in fact that no one can be convinced of its flaws it’s all “Apple knocked it out of the park, most things work!” We all know “most things” is subjective to how you use your PC. Tell me a world where that wouldn’t ever happen and I’ll consider your Intel leading model scenario.

f6v 6y ago

> This would be a very different headline if devs were struggling to port their software, or if Rosetta 2 didn’t live up to its promise. Yeah, imagine if Surface Pro X outsold Intel-based ones.