18 ms·

> Honestly to me the M1 era of Apple is the more exciting than things have been in years. Yes, I feel like this is somehow still massively underappreciated. Th

by bschne 4y ago

> Honestly to me the M1 era of Apple is the more exciting than things have been in years. Yes, I feel like this is somehow still massively underappreciated. They pulled off a major hardware transition without big hiccups (I'm sure someone's going to point some I have missed in the comments /s) and launched a bunch of devices that are an incredible leap forward. I mean the baseline M1 air starts at $1k and is an incredible piece of hardware for most usage.

Maursault 4y ago
> Yes, I feel like this is somehow still massively underappreciated. No, it is overhyped (not by Apple), and it worries me. Apple's platform jumps are impressive (and this last seamless platform switch is more about macOS, good decisions NeXT made a very long time ago, developer empowerment decisions), but let's not confuse that with how bonkers every user of M1 and family are going. We have a bit of anecdotal data coming in, no one can believe, and I quote 5000 new M1 owners, "how snappy" the M1 is. But look at the benchmarks. Each M1 model is a typical and negligible increase in performance over whatever most recent previous Intel model. We are talking about 1.05x performance increases! For example, take the 2018 6-core Intel Mini with the 3.2GHz processors and compare performance to the 2020 M1 mini, and it is immediately apparent, the 2020 M1 mini is really only a little bit more performant. And this is not bad news, it just means everyone is out of their minds, but it is typical of new Apple releases. The new models are always just a little more performant than the last revision (except 2010-2012, when models doubled in performance 3 years in a row and did not double again until 2018). So the hype on M1 is overwhelming, and the M1 and family are not at all under appreciated. People seem to think M1 is miraculous, and I admit I think it is pretty neat... even after comparing benchmarks with previous models and realizing this is not a quadrupling or even doubling of performance; the increase in performance with Apple switching from Intel to ARM is... merely incremental. This was a lateral move, and not a giant leap forward, not yet. Go look for yourself. But don't be sad about it, again, this is entirely typical of Apple new releases... the new models are always just a little better than the last revision. Of course, performance is not the only metric. So the hype says M1 walks on water, but misses the truth, that M1 does what x86 does with less power. Again, M1 isn't what a lot of people are saying... it doesn't blow Intel out of the water, it merely keeps pace with Intel, and that is impressive enough... but add the efficiency gains, and what we have are chips as good as Intel's (more or less), but use less power. Anything evangelized beyond this is crazy hype.
sremani 4y ago
The M1 iPad Air is $499, couple that with Apple Pencil, the writing experience is near frictionless. The M1 era is going to redefine the industry in subtle and not so subtle ways.
- rusk 4y ago
  Intel’s failing will redefine the industry in many ways. ARM and AMD and other players are taking chunks out of them at the cutting edge. They seem to be redefining themselves as a “couture” fabricator rather than taking leadership on the design end of things … playing off their scale rather than their velocity. It’s a big change and probably has as much to do with why apple ditched them. Remember Apple did this before when they switched to to intel from IBM/Motorola, when they too had stagnated.
  - DubiousPusher 4y ago
    Stagnated? Weren't PowerPC chips pretty advanced compared to Intel whose chips were carrying a lot of baggage at the time? Given that PowerPC chips were based on RISC, I'd guess they're a lot closer to the M1 than modern Intel chips are. My understanding is that IBM/Motorola's struggle with achieving volume is what doomed them not a lack of innovation. This is all way outta my area of understanding though.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      In general, IBM was just going in a different direction with Power than Apple needed them to be going in. IBM was and is focused on the highest end, high priced end of the server market.
    - b3morales 4y ago
      If I recall, the scuttlebutt was that Motorola had promised Apple (meaning Steve Jobs) that faster clock speeds were just around the corner for a while, and when that repeatedly failed to materialize Apple (meaning Steve Jobs) got pissed and activated the Intel backup plan.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GekkePrutser 4y ago
They've pulled off major hardware transitions twice before without hiccups. But this time they make the whole platform which is quite impressive imo.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The 68K to PPC transition was pretty good. But the operating system was running emulated 68K code for five years.
  - astrange 4y ago
    That was more or less intentional. The 68K interpreter was quite fast and 68K asm is smaller in memory than PPC asm, so converting all the cold code over would've made the system slower. I'd like to see the same idea used today. One I can think of is C++ exception unwinding which uses a DWARF interpreter instead of generating tons of code to do it.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You’re looking through rose colored glasses. My PowerMac 6100/60 ran 68K apps slower than my LCII with a 68030-40Mhz accelerator. The original 1st gen 68K emulator was really bad. Connectix became famous for shipping SpeedDoubler, a much better emulator. But my 6100/60 could still barely keep up with the 68030-40Mhz. The emulator performed even worse on the PPC 603.
      - astrange 4y ago
        That could be, I think it was explained to me by an former engineer on Mac OS 8 or so. But there was still 68K asm in there up until Carbon.
- adolph 4y ago
  Gosh I had to think back a moment to remember 68k to PPC. I wonder if that transition could be considered “botched” in that it happened at instead of going directly to x86. Outside hindsight I recall it was considered a questionable choice at the time.
bmitc 4y ago
It’s always interesting to me how Apple gets so much praise for taking things away, almost always needlessly with some made up excuse meant to sell more of something, only to later bring them back as if they’re some oracle of utility. Big surprise Apple, non-arbitrarily thin computers, usable keyboards, and ports are useful. The M1 chips are nice. But Apple also continually throws developers under the bus forcing them along their deprecation strategies.
- xmprt 4y ago
  I used to feel like you do but nowadays I applaud that (while still not really using Apple products much due to the walled garden ecosystem) because it's really hard to take something away when you know it's good but could be better. For all the things that they've "taken away" over the last 10 years, it feels like the newer laptops are significantly better than they could have been if they just kept on adding and making incremental improvements like most other manufacturers.
osigurdson 4y ago
No kidding. I bought a reasonably high end Thinkpad for myself and the entry level M1 MacBook Air for my son to do his schoolwork on. The performance, battery life and screen are much better on the M1 despite being significantly less expensive.
tootie 4y ago
Hard disagree. At least from a business perspective. The transition to Apple silicon was likely more about long-term cost savings and their ruthless vertical integration. Apple appeals to customers (most customers, HN users are outliers) as a luxury brand and their market dominance is based on their brand more than their products. The products need to look distinct with high quality finish. Like Louis Vuitton bags or Polo shirts. Otherwise they'd be back to occupying the niche of the laptop for graphic designers.
theptip 4y ago
One thing that is particularly under-appreciated is that Apple have pulled off a textbook disruption play against Intel; its supposed to be a small scrappy new company that disrupts the slow behemoth incumbent but in this case one of the biggest companies in the world has just executed it perfectly. In this case of course having multiple products to graduate their own silicon through, and enough cash to design and build a chip, require you to be a huge company. But it shows strategic excellence and a long-term planning horizon to pull this off. (Note I’m using the original strict definition of Disruption from Christensen, not the hand-wavey TechCrunch slogan.)
- chii 4y ago
  was intel really "disrupted"? The M1 designs aren't available as general CPUs for alternative uses other than on a mac.
  - theptip 4y ago
    Definitely not the case that the full lifecycle of disruption is complete since that entails the full replacement of the incumbent. But with M1 Apple silicon surpassed Intel in performance after many years of inferior performance improving at a greater rate, which I think is one of the key milestones in a disruption story. I’m not sure if there are any case studies of one behemoth fully disrupting another? So who knows what the end state will look like. One confounder for predicting the endgame is that due to their vertical integration with their OS, Apple won’t replace Intel where Windows is a hard requirement, and so they probably won’t completely decimate Intel. I suppose in this aspect it’s not a full disruption. I’m not really clear how much inertia there is behind Windows these days, now that MS is committed to Office on Mac. Definitely substantial, but if the price-per-performance was 2x or better for macs in a couple generations, what % of corporate buyers would switch over?
  - chiph 4y ago
    They've taken a hit to their revenue by losing those sales. There's also the reputation damage of losing a prestige customer like Apple.
  - 4y ago
User23 4y ago
Apple has pulled off several big hardware transitions: 68k -> PPC -> x86/x64 -> ARM. One reason those transitions are considered successful is that they did a masterful job of managing expectations. Apple showed that the consumer hardware market really doesn't care enough about backward compatibility to affect the bottom line. And thanks to Moore's law, supposing you can legally acquire a ROM, your M1 Mac will happily run 68k and PPC code in addition to the officially supported x86/x64 emulation.
EamonnMR 4y ago
The lack of hiccups is mostly by training the user base to assume that things will just stop working eventually. It's part of the deal with apple; if you're a legacy software enthusiast Apple probably alienated you long before the M1.
assttoasstmgr 4y ago
> They pulled off a major hardware transition without big hiccups This is easy to do when you eschew any and all commitment to backwards compatibility. Every major OS update has introduced breaking changes and I gotta be honest, everyone except the most diehard of Mac fans is getting pretty sick and tired of routinely re-purchasing software, not to mention Apple breaking their own applications. Example: obsoleting iTunes by force and coding hooks so it refuses to run without patching the app. (For those wondering, Apple coded a version check into the Mac version of iTunes so that it refuses to launch if the OS is "too new.") Ignore the fact that Apple Music is a shitty replacement that didn't replace all the features of iTunes (like removing the XML library sync, which a ton of third-party apps relied on, breaking them all in one move), but dont't let that stand in the way of progress. Show me one person that has never been affected by Apple breaking apps, and I'll show you ten people with Avid or Pro Tools rigs who "never update the OS" as a general policy. It's 2022 and I'm still waiting for official EOL/support dates published by Apple. Everyone from Microsoft to FreeBSD does this. Saying "well they traditionally support N-2" or whatever doesn't cut it. People need hard dates so they can plan adequately. Apple's commitment in this area is like depending on your stoner friend to follow through on a promise.
- cjmb 4y ago
  I rarely see this sentiment since the entire Tech class has moved to Spotify subscription streaming as their music platform of choice (slight hyperbole, only slight). But as one of the 12 remaining iTunes app users out there, I am shocked at how terrible the software has become. The 2005 version of iTunes that ran on my PowerPC macbook was strictly better than the app that I have installed today on my Windows 10 gaming PC. The 2008 iPhone iTunes app was better than the "Music" app on my iPhone today -- when I open my phone in airplane mode on a flight to listen to music, it bricks itself for 10 seconds trying to get wifi connection and prompt me to pay them for their crappy music streaming service. There is no way to disable that self-bricking advertisement. I suspect that the average Apple employee uses Spotify to listen to music and doesn't have a large personal collection of songs not available for streaming on common platforms. The lack of dogfooding shows through.
  - 4y ago

by bschne 4y ago

Maursault 4y ago

> Yes, I feel like this is somehow still massively underappreciated. No, it is overhyped (not by Apple), and it worries me. Apple's platform jumps are impressive (and this last seamless platform switch is more about macOS, good decisions NeXT made a very long time ago, developer empowerment decisions), but let's not confuse that with how bonkers every user of M1 and family are going. We have a bit of anecdotal data coming in, no one can believe, and I quote 5000 new M1 owners, "how snappy" the M1 is. But look at the benchmarks. Each M1 model is a typical and negligible increase in performance over whatever most recent previous Intel model. We are talking about 1.05x performance increases! For example, take the 2018 6-core Intel Mini with the 3.2GHz processors and compare performance to the 2020 M1 mini, and it is immediately apparent, the 2020 M1 mini is really only a little bit more performant. And this is not bad news, it just means everyone is out of their minds, but it is typical of new Apple releases. The new models are always just a little more performant than the last revision (except 2010-2012, when models doubled in performance 3 years in a row and did not double again until 2018). So the hype on M1 is overwhelming, and the M1 and family are not at all under appreciated. People seem to think M1 is miraculous, and I admit I think it is pretty neat... even after comparing benchmarks with previous models and realizing this is not a quadrupling or even doubling of performance; the increase in performance with Apple switching from Intel to ARM is... merely incremental. This was a lateral move, and not a giant leap forward, not yet. Go look for yourself. But don't be sad about it, again, this is entirely typical of Apple new releases... the new models are always just a little better than the last revision. Of course, performance is not the only metric. So the hype says M1 walks on water, but misses the truth, that M1 does what x86 does with less power. Again, M1 isn't what a lot of people are saying... it doesn't blow Intel out of the water, it merely keeps pace with Intel, and that is impressive enough... but add the efficiency gains, and what we have are chips as good as Intel's (more or less), but use less power. Anything evangelized beyond this is crazy hype.

sremani 4y ago

The M1 iPad Air is $499, couple that with Apple Pencil, the writing experience is near frictionless. The M1 era is going to redefine the industry in subtle and not so subtle ways.

rusk 4y ago
Intel’s failing will redefine the industry in many ways. ARM and AMD and other players are taking chunks out of them at the cutting edge. They seem to be redefining themselves as a “couture” fabricator rather than taking leadership on the design end of things … playing off their scale rather than their velocity. It’s a big change and probably has as much to do with why apple ditched them. Remember Apple did this before when they switched to to intel from IBM/Motorola, when they too had stagnated.
- DubiousPusher 4y ago
  Stagnated? Weren't PowerPC chips pretty advanced compared to Intel whose chips were carrying a lot of baggage at the time? Given that PowerPC chips were based on RISC, I'd guess they're a lot closer to the M1 than modern Intel chips are. My understanding is that IBM/Motorola's struggle with achieving volume is what doomed them not a lack of innovation. This is all way outta my area of understanding though.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    In general, IBM was just going in a different direction with Power than Apple needed them to be going in. IBM was and is focused on the highest end, high priced end of the server market.
  - b3morales 4y ago
    If I recall, the scuttlebutt was that Motorola had promised Apple (meaning Steve Jobs) that faster clock speeds were just around the corner for a while, and when that repeatedly failed to materialize Apple (meaning Steve Jobs) got pissed and activated the Intel backup plan.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

GekkePrutser 4y ago

They've pulled off major hardware transitions twice before without hiccups. But this time they make the whole platform which is quite impressive imo.

scarface74 4y ago
The 68K to PPC transition was pretty good. But the operating system was running emulated 68K code for five years.
- astrange 4y ago
  That was more or less intentional. The 68K interpreter was quite fast and 68K asm is smaller in memory than PPC asm, so converting all the cold code over would've made the system slower. I'd like to see the same idea used today. One I can think of is C++ exception unwinding which uses a DWARF interpreter instead of generating tons of code to do it.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You’re looking through rose colored glasses. My PowerMac 6100/60 ran 68K apps slower than my LCII with a 68030-40Mhz accelerator. The original 1st gen 68K emulator was really bad. Connectix became famous for shipping SpeedDoubler, a much better emulator. But my 6100/60 could still barely keep up with the 68030-40Mhz. The emulator performed even worse on the PPC 603.
    - astrange 4y ago
      That could be, I think it was explained to me by an former engineer on Mac OS 8 or so. But there was still 68K asm in there up until Carbon.
adolph 4y ago
Gosh I had to think back a moment to remember 68k to PPC. I wonder if that transition could be considered “botched” in that it happened at instead of going directly to x86. Outside hindsight I recall it was considered a questionable choice at the time.

bmitc 4y ago

It’s always interesting to me how Apple gets so much praise for taking things away, almost always needlessly with some made up excuse meant to sell more of something, only to later bring them back as if they’re some oracle of utility. Big surprise Apple, non-arbitrarily thin computers, usable keyboards, and ports are useful. The M1 chips are nice. But Apple also continually throws developers under the bus forcing them along their deprecation strategies.

xmprt 4y ago
I used to feel like you do but nowadays I applaud that (while still not really using Apple products much due to the walled garden ecosystem) because it's really hard to take something away when you know it's good but could be better. For all the things that they've "taken away" over the last 10 years, it feels like the newer laptops are significantly better than they could have been if they just kept on adding and making incremental improvements like most other manufacturers.

osigurdson 4y ago

No kidding. I bought a reasonably high end Thinkpad for myself and the entry level M1 MacBook Air for my son to do his schoolwork on. The performance, battery life and screen are much better on the M1 despite being significantly less expensive.

tootie 4y ago

Hard disagree. At least from a business perspective. The transition to Apple silicon was likely more about long-term cost savings and their ruthless vertical integration. Apple appeals to customers (most customers, HN users are outliers) as a luxury brand and their market dominance is based on their brand more than their products. The products need to look distinct with high quality finish. Like Louis Vuitton bags or Polo shirts. Otherwise they'd be back to occupying the niche of the laptop for graphic designers.

theptip 4y ago

One thing that is particularly under-appreciated is that Apple have pulled off a textbook disruption play against Intel; its supposed to be a small scrappy new company that disrupts the slow behemoth incumbent but in this case one of the biggest companies in the world has just executed it perfectly. In this case of course having multiple products to graduate their own silicon through, and enough cash to design and build a chip, require you to be a huge company. But it shows strategic excellence and a long-term planning horizon to pull this off. (Note I’m using the original strict definition of Disruption from Christensen, not the hand-wavey TechCrunch slogan.)

chii 4y ago
was intel really "disrupted"? The M1 designs aren't available as general CPUs for alternative uses other than on a mac.
- theptip 4y ago
  Definitely not the case that the full lifecycle of disruption is complete since that entails the full replacement of the incumbent. But with M1 Apple silicon surpassed Intel in performance after many years of inferior performance improving at a greater rate, which I think is one of the key milestones in a disruption story. I’m not sure if there are any case studies of one behemoth fully disrupting another? So who knows what the end state will look like. One confounder for predicting the endgame is that due to their vertical integration with their OS, Apple won’t replace Intel where Windows is a hard requirement, and so they probably won’t completely decimate Intel. I suppose in this aspect it’s not a full disruption. I’m not really clear how much inertia there is behind Windows these days, now that MS is committed to Office on Mac. Definitely substantial, but if the price-per-performance was 2x or better for macs in a couple generations, what % of corporate buyers would switch over?
- chiph 4y ago
  They've taken a hit to their revenue by losing those sales. There's also the reputation damage of losing a prestige customer like Apple.
- 4y ago

User23 4y ago

Apple has pulled off several big hardware transitions: 68k -> PPC -> x86/x64 -> ARM. One reason those transitions are considered successful is that they did a masterful job of managing expectations. Apple showed that the consumer hardware market really doesn't care enough about backward compatibility to affect the bottom line. And thanks to Moore's law, supposing you can legally acquire a ROM, your M1 Mac will happily run 68k and PPC code in addition to the officially supported x86/x64 emulation.

EamonnMR 4y ago

The lack of hiccups is mostly by training the user base to assume that things will just stop working eventually. It's part of the deal with apple; if you're a legacy software enthusiast Apple probably alienated you long before the M1.

assttoasstmgr 4y ago

> They pulled off a major hardware transition without big hiccups This is easy to do when you eschew any and all commitment to backwards compatibility. Every major OS update has introduced breaking changes and I gotta be honest, everyone except the most diehard of Mac fans is getting pretty sick and tired of routinely re-purchasing software, not to mention Apple breaking their own applications. Example: obsoleting iTunes by force and coding hooks so it refuses to run without patching the app. (For those wondering, Apple coded a version check into the Mac version of iTunes so that it refuses to launch if the OS is "too new.") Ignore the fact that Apple Music is a shitty replacement that didn't replace all the features of iTunes (like removing the XML library sync, which a ton of third-party apps relied on, breaking them all in one move), but dont't let that stand in the way of progress. Show me one person that has never been affected by Apple breaking apps, and I'll show you ten people with Avid or Pro Tools rigs who "never update the OS" as a general policy. It's 2022 and I'm still waiting for official EOL/support dates published by Apple. Everyone from Microsoft to FreeBSD does this. Saying "well they traditionally support N-2" or whatever doesn't cut it. People need hard dates so they can plan adequately. Apple's commitment in this area is like depending on your stoner friend to follow through on a promise.

cjmb 4y ago
I rarely see this sentiment since the entire Tech class has moved to Spotify subscription streaming as their music platform of choice (slight hyperbole, only slight). But as one of the 12 remaining iTunes app users out there, I am shocked at how terrible the software has become. The 2005 version of iTunes that ran on my PowerPC macbook was strictly better than the app that I have installed today on my Windows 10 gaming PC. The 2008 iPhone iTunes app was better than the "Music" app on my iPhone today -- when I open my phone in airplane mode on a flight to listen to music, it bricks itself for 10 seconds trying to get wifi connection and prompt me to pay them for their crappy music streaming service. There is no way to disable that self-bricking advertisement. I suspect that the average Apple employee uses Spotify to listen to music and doesn't have a large personal collection of songs not available for streaming on common platforms. The lack of dogfooding shows through.
- 4y ago