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You're missing out on the fact that Apple didn't release a 12980hk or 5980hx competitor. These are 30 watt chips that trounce the competition's 65 watt (e.g. th

by lanza 5y ago

You're missing out on the fact that Apple didn't release a 12980hk or 5980hx competitor. These are 30 watt chips that trounce the competition's 65 watt (e.g. the 12980hk and 5980hx) and beyond chips. Hell, this Geekbench is faster than a desktop 125 watt 11900k. It's faster than a desktop 105 watt 5800x. Apple intentionally played to the competition here. They know AMD/Intel reach some performance level X and released CPUs that perform no greater than X * 1.2. They know they are in the lead since they are paying TSMC for first dibs on 5nm, but they didn't blow their load on their first generation products. Intel will release Alder Lake and catch up, AMD will reach Zen4 and catch up and Apple will just reach into their pocket and pull out a "oh here's a 45 watt 4nm CPU with two years of microarch upgrades" and the 2022 MBP 16 will have Geekbench scores of ~2200 and ~17000. There's a de facto industry leader in process technology today -- TSMC. Apple is the only one willing to pay the premium. They also have a much newer microarch design (circa 2006ish) vs AMD and Intel's early 90s designs. That's a 10-20% advantage (very rough ballpark estimate). The also are on arm which is another 10-20% advantage for the frontend. The big deal here is that this isn't going to change until Intel's process technology catches up. And, hell, I bet at that point Apple will be willing to pay enough to take first dibs there as well. AMD will never catch up since we know they don't care to compete against Apple laptops and thus won't pay the premium for TSMC's latest art. Intel might not even care enough and let Apple have mobile/laptop market first dibs on their latest node if Apple is willing not to touch the server market. Whether or not they'd agree on the workstation MacPro vs 2 slot Xeon workstation market would be interesting. It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop.

shaklee3 5y ago
You are vastly, vastly overestimating how many people like apple laptops. They're expensive, the OS is worse, and there's no speed difference outside of benchmarks. That combined with the fact that most apps are windows-based, and the games are poorly emulated or nonexistent, there's really no reason to buy an apple laptop short of bragging.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Is that why every tech company uses Macbooks? People who can't afford Apple laptops (and gamers and certain other use cases) buy cheaper laptops. The brand appeal draws all the wealthy people towards Apple devices.
  - shaklee3 5y ago
    I've worked at many tech companies and apple are by far the minority. And that's a biased sample size of really the largest market they have.
  - darksaints 5y ago
    I work at one of those tech companies, and have been issued a brand new $4000 MacBook pro. It sucks. Constantly crashing, requires multiple restarts to get networking to function properly if the battery dies while in sleep mode, and it has an extremely slow file system even with the best SSD they have available, and there are always 30 different things that break whenever I have to install OS updates. Tech companies buy Apple products because they try to cater to expensive tech workers, and there is a massive subset of tech workers that are brand-obsessed culty shitnoggins.
    - onion2k 5y ago
      That is not a typical experience with a Macbook Pro. Have you considered that maybe there's something wrong with yours?
    - vincnetas 5y ago
      could it be that your corporate laptop is loaded with pile of monitoring, management and antivirus crapware? i have one, and it annoys the hell out of me.
    - jamil7 5y ago
      It sounds like you need to get your laptop fixed?
  - nly 5y ago
Mindwipe 5y ago
> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. A laptop that can do some light gaming is not a niche requirement, and ultimately Apple decided to completely turn it's back on that market with the ARM transition.
- chaoskanzlerin 5y ago
  The architecture isn't to blame; it's the 32-bit stuff that breaks a fair amount of Steam games, and Vulkan/graphics engines lacking, both of which are...Apple being Apple
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    The architecture is ultimately to blame for "you can't log into Windows to fix Apple being Apple" however.
thefz 5y ago
> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. Some people need the ability to repair or upgrade, or the freedom to install any software they need. Not to mention that so far we have seen comparison of the M1 "professiona lline" to a gaming laptop; professionals deal with quadro cards since the RTXs are driver limited for workstation duties, and speaking of gaming on OSX makes no sense. For me it might be a long time since I can even consider buying another Apple product.
eertami 5y ago
>It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. Can't tell if sarcastic but until you can run Linux on the M1 I don't see any reason to buy an Apple laptop. It could be 10x faster than the competition but with OSX it would still feel like a net productivity loss, from having to deal with bugs and jank in the software.
adrianN 5y ago
> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. ...if you only care about the things that Apple laptops are good at. Almost nobody needs a top-of-the-line laptop to do their tasks. Most things that people want to do with computers can be done on a machine that is five to ten years old without any trouble at all. For example I use a ThinkPad T460p, and while the geekbench scores for its processor are maybe half of what Apple achieves here (even worse for multicore!), it does everything I need faster than I need it. Battery life, screen quality, and ergonomics are the only thing most consumers need to care about. And while Macs are certainly doing well in those categories, there are much cheaper options available that are also good enough.
- dijit 5y ago
  This is a really useless comparison. A 10 year old laptop will be extremely slow compared to any modern laptop and the battery will have degraded. The T460 has knock off battery replacements floating around but that’s not exactly reassuring. Granted: it works for you (and me, actually, I’m one of those people who likes to use an old thinkpad; x201s in my case though I mostly use a dell precision these days) but people will buy new laptops- that’s a thing. The ergonomics of a Mac are pretty decent and the support side of it is excellent. If you don’t need all that power: that’s what the MacBook Air is for, which is basically uncontested at its performance/battery life/weight. If you need the grunt, most of the m1 pro and max offer is GPU. You’re going to think it’s Apple shills downvoting you: it’s not likely to be that. The argument against good low wattage cpus is just an inane and boring one.
  - diffeomorphism 5y ago
    Define "extremely". You get maybe a factor 2 or so, not 10 or 100. Is that nicer? Yes, sure. Is it necessary? No, older stuff is perfectly sufficient for most people. Also, it is "if you need that power and need it with laptop formfactor". Again, impressive, but desktops/servers work just as well for most people.
    - dijit 5y ago
halotrope 5y ago
It seems Intel seems to have recognized that and hedged their bets by securing the remaining 3nm capacity [1] 1: https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-locks-down-all-remaining-tsmc-3nm-production-capacity-boxing-out-amd-and-apple https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-locks-down-all-remainin...
- nowherebeen 5y ago
  Not sure which one is true. https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/08/16/apple-secure-majority-tsmc-3nm-over-intel/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/08/16/apple-secure-majority-...
- klelatti 5y ago
  Frankly don't believe this. Who do you give majority of leading node capacity to? 1. Biggest long term partner. 2. Someone who competes with you as a manufacturer. Not a hard decision!
  - gsnedders 5y ago
    TSMC had long said they were happy to have Intel as a larger customer, including on leading edge nodes… if there was long-term commitment from Intel.
    - klelatti 5y ago
      Of course but that’s not the same as giving them the majority of the leading edge at the expense of Apple which is what the article implies.
aledthemathguy 5y ago
great post, thank you. curious though - you mention only fabrication advantages. what about the in-house design team? meaning - what about the talent?
cma 5y ago
They aren't the only one willing to pay the premium: they specifically bought exclusivity to the newest node and have for years.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
I have an amd laptop and wife has an M1. Mine has twice RAM, twice SSD, more ports, is 10% lighter and 20% cheaper.
- webmobdev 5y ago
  And your AMD laptop can run many OSes, while your wife will forever be stuck on macOS on the Apple M1 laptop whose hardware is designed to be hard to repair and upgrade ...
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    I tried to work with the apple laptop, it's very good in many aspects, but I needed a program and it can't be installed without Apple ID. I think there are many programs like that for the Mac, so I passed.
webmobdev 5y ago
That's a lot of if's and but's that ignores a very important fact - most of Apple's top engineers from their CPU division have already quit Apple ... Source: Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In - https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and-the-future-looks-dim-as-the-cpu-engineer-exodus-to-nuvia-and-rivos-impact-starts-to-bleed-in/ https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and... If they can't innovate, all they can do is keep increasing the core count ... don't think that'll help them compete with future AMD / Intel / ARM or RISC cpus in the long term.
nullvoxpopuli 5y ago
I'll take frame.work over apple any day.

by lanza 5y ago

shaklee3 5y ago

You are vastly, vastly overestimating how many people like apple laptops. They're expensive, the OS is worse, and there's no speed difference outside of benchmarks. That combined with the fact that most apps are windows-based, and the games are poorly emulated or nonexistent, there's really no reason to buy an apple laptop short of bragging.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
Is that why every tech company uses Macbooks? People who can't afford Apple laptops (and gamers and certain other use cases) buy cheaper laptops. The brand appeal draws all the wealthy people towards Apple devices.
- shaklee3 5y ago
  I've worked at many tech companies and apple are by far the minority. And that's a biased sample size of really the largest market they have.
- darksaints 5y ago
  I work at one of those tech companies, and have been issued a brand new $4000 MacBook pro. It sucks. Constantly crashing, requires multiple restarts to get networking to function properly if the battery dies while in sleep mode, and it has an extremely slow file system even with the best SSD they have available, and there are always 30 different things that break whenever I have to install OS updates. Tech companies buy Apple products because they try to cater to expensive tech workers, and there is a massive subset of tech workers that are brand-obsessed culty shitnoggins.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    That is not a typical experience with a Macbook Pro. Have you considered that maybe there's something wrong with yours?
  - vincnetas 5y ago
    could it be that your corporate laptop is loaded with pile of monitoring, management and antivirus crapware? i have one, and it annoys the hell out of me.
  - jamil7 5y ago
    It sounds like you need to get your laptop fixed?
- nly 5y ago

Mindwipe 5y ago

> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. A laptop that can do some light gaming is not a niche requirement, and ultimately Apple decided to completely turn it's back on that market with the ARM transition.

chaoskanzlerin 5y ago
The architecture isn't to blame; it's the 32-bit stuff that breaks a fair amount of Steam games, and Vulkan/graphics engines lacking, both of which are...Apple being Apple
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  The architecture is ultimately to blame for "you can't log into Windows to fix Apple being Apple" however.

thefz 5y ago

> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. Some people need the ability to repair or upgrade, or the freedom to install any software they need. Not to mention that so far we have seen comparison of the M1 "professiona lline" to a gaming laptop; professionals deal with quadro cards since the RTXs are driver limited for workstation duties, and speaking of gaming on OSX makes no sense. For me it might be a long time since I can even consider buying another Apple product.

eertami 5y ago

>It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. Can't tell if sarcastic but until you can run Linux on the M1 I don't see any reason to buy an Apple laptop. It could be 10x faster than the competition but with OSX it would still feel like a net productivity loss, from having to deal with bugs and jank in the software.

adrianN 5y ago

> It might be a long time before it makes sense to buy a non-Apple laptop. ...if you only care about the things that Apple laptops are good at. Almost nobody needs a top-of-the-line laptop to do their tasks. Most things that people want to do with computers can be done on a machine that is five to ten years old without any trouble at all. For example I use a ThinkPad T460p, and while the geekbench scores for its processor are maybe half of what Apple achieves here (even worse for multicore!), it does everything I need faster than I need it. Battery life, screen quality, and ergonomics are the only thing most consumers need to care about. And while Macs are certainly doing well in those categories, there are much cheaper options available that are also good enough.

dijit 5y ago
This is a really useless comparison. A 10 year old laptop will be extremely slow compared to any modern laptop and the battery will have degraded. The T460 has knock off battery replacements floating around but that’s not exactly reassuring. Granted: it works for you (and me, actually, I’m one of those people who likes to use an old thinkpad; x201s in my case though I mostly use a dell precision these days) but people will buy new laptops- that’s a thing. The ergonomics of a Mac are pretty decent and the support side of it is excellent. If you don’t need all that power: that’s what the MacBook Air is for, which is basically uncontested at its performance/battery life/weight. If you need the grunt, most of the m1 pro and max offer is GPU. You’re going to think it’s Apple shills downvoting you: it’s not likely to be that. The argument against good low wattage cpus is just an inane and boring one.
- diffeomorphism 5y ago
  Define "extremely". You get maybe a factor 2 or so, not 10 or 100. Is that nicer? Yes, sure. Is it necessary? No, older stuff is perfectly sufficient for most people. Also, it is "if you need that power and need it with laptop formfactor". Again, impressive, but desktops/servers work just as well for most people.
  - dijit 5y ago

halotrope 5y ago

It seems Intel seems to have recognized that and hedged their bets by securing the remaining 3nm capacity [1] 1: https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-locks-down-all-remaining-tsmc-3nm-production-capacity-boxing-out-amd-and-apple https://www.techradar.com/news/intel-locks-down-all-remainin...

nowherebeen 5y ago
Not sure which one is true. https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/08/16/apple-secure-majority-tsmc-3nm-over-intel/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2021/08/16/apple-secure-majority-...
klelatti 5y ago
Frankly don't believe this. Who do you give majority of leading node capacity to? 1. Biggest long term partner. 2. Someone who competes with you as a manufacturer. Not a hard decision!
- gsnedders 5y ago
  TSMC had long said they were happy to have Intel as a larger customer, including on leading edge nodes… if there was long-term commitment from Intel.
  - klelatti 5y ago
    Of course but that’s not the same as giving them the majority of the leading edge at the expense of Apple which is what the article implies.

aledthemathguy 5y ago

great post, thank you. curious though - you mention only fabrication advantages. what about the in-house design team? meaning - what about the talent?

cma 5y ago

They aren't the only one willing to pay the premium: they specifically bought exclusivity to the newest node and have for years.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

I have an amd laptop and wife has an M1. Mine has twice RAM, twice SSD, more ports, is 10% lighter and 20% cheaper.

webmobdev 5y ago
And your AMD laptop can run many OSes, while your wife will forever be stuck on macOS on the Apple M1 laptop whose hardware is designed to be hard to repair and upgrade ...
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  I tried to work with the apple laptop, it's very good in many aspects, but I needed a program and it can't be installed without Apple ID. I think there are many programs like that for the Mac, so I passed.

webmobdev 5y ago

That's a lot of if's and but's that ignores a very important fact - most of Apple's top engineers from their CPU division have already quit Apple ... Source: Apple CPU Gains Grind To A Halt And The Future Looks Dim As The Impact From The CPU Engineer Exodus To Nuvia And Rivos Starts To Bleed In - https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and-the-future-looks-dim-as-the-cpu-engineer-exodus-to-nuvia-and-rivos-impact-starts-to-bleed-in/ https://semianalysis.com/apple-cpu-gains-grind-to-a-halt-and... If they can't innovate, all they can do is keep increasing the core count ... don't think that'll help them compete with future AMD / Intel / ARM or RISC cpus in the long term.

nullvoxpopuli 5y ago

I'll take frame.work over apple any day.