17 ms·

I think it's more interesting to see HN's past discussion from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244240

by esturk 4y ago

I think it's more interesting to see HN's past discussion from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9244240 Some key take away: - A lot of people got it wrong with the bet on Intel. - 2 people that said it will take 5 years were right. - Suggestion to use Rosetta was right. - Indicator for fan less Macbooks was right. It's easy to doubt but it actually takes effort to form educated guesses about the future.

frostwarrior 4y ago
Also, it was until 2015 where Intel was on a great streak with their processors and didn't show signs of stagnation until around 2017/2018 I5/i7's were great at that time
- lettergram 4y ago
  Not entirely true, people watching and in the field knew. Back in 2015 I made a massive bet on AMD because people on HN working in the field explained the arch shift. Similar with this move by Apple. There are people in those rooms, making the decisions, sharpening their ideas on HN — if we care to listen.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    The problem is how do you separate the gold from the cruft? Seems impossible. Also, so much cruft makes you miss the gold as well. :/
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      From my understanding, it is way more costly to miss the gold than to get some cruft.
    - lettergram 4y ago
      I actually wrote software to do that lol Built this: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ But use it for investments. You can’t completely remove risk, but I invest in areas where insiders discuss publicly about their work. It provides insight often fundamentals lack; leaving massive potential upside.
      - UncleEntity 4y ago
        Stalking as a Service? How could that possibly go wrong? I’m equal parts horrified and amazed. And curious what The Algorithm thinks about my ramblings.
  - senttoschool 4y ago
    >Back in 2015 I made a massive bet on AMD because people on HN working in the field explained the arch shift. I think you got really lucky. Zen1 didn't ship until 2017 and it lagged severely behind in single thread. You had no idea what AMD was going to have. Even AMD would tell you that they were surprise that Intel fell so far behind. They've been quoted saying this a few times. Intel's 10nm Node (equivalent to TSMC 7nm) was suppose to ship in 2016! It didn't ship anything on the desktop using 10nm until Alder Lake in 2021. Five year delay. Intel would have been well ahead of Zen2 in node technology. Instead, it was around 1.5 node behind. If you made your bet purely on what was said inside AMD in 2015, you just got lucky. No one knew that Intel would be stuck on 14nm for 7 years when they were planning for 2 years.
    - lettergram 4y ago
      There were a ton of Intel engineers at the time complaining about management in a different thread. I’m sure luck was involved (so many things could go wrong). But i tend to make money on bets based on what I hear on the fringe. AMD, Bitcoin, etc
- Tagbert 4y ago
  The 12” MacBook came out in 2015 and had terrible performance and a problem with overheating. Insider reports say that Intel had promised a lower power chip with better performance that Apple designed the MacBook for but then Intel killed that chip and Apple had to use another Intel mobile chip. Some people feel that was when the problem got real.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Apple would still have a lot of people who relived the same situation during the IBM days. If you're getting hints that your chip vendor is not aligned then you better have a backup plan.
- msh 4y ago
  They were bad for thin and light laptops with good battery life (mostly atom shit and underpowered core cpu's like in the 12inch macbook).
- dont__panic 4y ago
  They had already plateaued in 2014/2015 with Haswell/Broadwell. They've basically been releasing that same CPU with minor tweaks to power consumption and codec support for 8 years now. At the time, it was hard to notice, but reviews at the time absolutely noticed the minor CPU update (https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8375735/apple-macbook-pro-retina-review-2015 https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8375735/apple-macbook-pro-..., search "Broadwell"). Another funny aspect of that review: it mentions out 10+ hour battery life for the MBP as a nice, but hardly astonishing spec. 9 hours 45 minutes with Chrome was the worst case. It's amazing to think how bad the 2016-2019 MBPs were in comparison, to the point where getting back to 10 hour battery is an amazing Apple Silicon feature!
  - idontpost 4y ago
    I don't think my 2019 MBP has ever laster more than 3 hours on battery. My M1 Max is amazing by comparison.
tambourine_man 4y ago
Nice catch. Phew. I’m glad I didn’t comment on that thread.
alberth 4y ago
2015 was a pivotal year to indicate Apples future direction, here’s why … 2015 is the year both the (Intel) 12” MacBook and the first iPad Pro were released. These we also both entirely new form factors for Apple (and both roughly the same size). On the Intel front, Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was. Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was. This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.
- ulfw 4y ago
  and yet today the wonderful 12" Macbook is dead
  - klodolph 4y ago
    I personally like the 12" form factor, and I own one, but I saw approximately zero of them in the wild. It's significantly lighter, I can still get work done on it, it's great for travel... and yet I can't remember seeing other people using them.
    - andrekandre 4y ago
      you may not have seen them, but they are out there (raises hand)
    - antifa 4y ago
      I want a 12" netbook, but most options are garbage or overpriced. A 12" M1 OSX netbook would be a gamechanger.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was I sure hope they saw. They designed, built and sold the things. Would be hard to miss those issues during their development and testing, wouldn't it? It's not like Apple didn't know what they were selling.
pjot 4y ago
It’s funny to see how confident some OPs are in their claims, all while pointing out how the article is “speculating” the future.
alwillis 4y ago
It's easy to doubt but it actually takes effort to form educated guesses about the future. I didn't see this particular article but I would have agreed with it. I certainly have written many comments on similar articles (search the comments for alwillis ARM Mac for starters) explaining why such a switch to ARM was completely doable, having lived through the switch from PowerPC to Intel while working at MIT.
systemvoltage 4y ago
2030 predictions? Anyone?
- Wronnay 4y ago
  Apple will have an AR or VR headset, and we will start ditching traditional displays for VR. Meta will have recovered from their current issues and will be their main competitor. I think Apple could have a big advantage because their processors could allow more powerful things in a standalone VR headset compared to the current Generation where you need a external PC for most CPU and GPU intensive tasks.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I don’t know - mobile phones were a huge huge success because they are first and foremost, practical. They fit in your pocket, can take stellar images, have access to literally everything on the internet and are fully capable general purpose computers in your hands - a sci-fi product turned into reality. And on top of that, we control them with our hands, which are arguably our most capable part for this job. I don’t see any practicality to VRs outside some tiny niches. They make a few games more fun, some niche workloads can be done more efficiently, but they are hard to equip and first and foremost block your interactions with the real world. Sure, some contact lens futuresque thingy could improve on this as well, but how would you control that? Voice control is slow and troublesome. So I don’t predict a huge success to VR, it will be at most something akin to an xbox’s kinect, or some wii accessory.
    - dont__panic 4y ago
      I see a huge VR market in misguided companies with too much money to burn on "team building" projects who see VR as a good way to extend middle management BS to WFH employees. Likely subsidized by MetaFacebook desperately pushing their crappy VR projects to keep them on life support. As far as I can tell, we have a lot of progress to make with display resolution and GPU quality before VR becomes competitive for work environments with a modern hiDPI dual display setup. Maybe it's more appealing to folks with crappy home desk setups, or people who live in cities who don't want a full desk? Ergonomics still feels like an obstacle, though.
kranke155 4y ago
It's hilarious how HN is consistently wrong, even on tech-heavy subjects. No bright minds popping up here tbh. You can glean some interesting stuff from this. The hive mind was wrong on dropbox, seemingly wrong on this, and they are likely wrong on blockchain today.
- asutekku 4y ago
  It's been over 10 years and we still don't have a decent usecase for blockchain outside of crypto.
  - medo-bear 4y ago
    there has been a huge use-case the whole time: decentralized accounting / banking some people see value in this some people perhaps not
    - kranke155 4y ago
      Not to mention NFTs, but it seems impossible to convince the HN crowd that there is a real art market in them, with real buyers and real artists using it. Any attempt to demonstrate this is met with wild leaps of logic - it's wash trading, it's not big enough, it's all a scam. I point to Beeple, Wes Cockx, DeeWay sales and all they tell me is it must all be a fraud. I show them markets with vibrant activity - Versum, FXhash, Foundation - and all I get is repetitions of memes around how NFTs are dead.
      - DrScientist 4y ago
        Successful scams have customers - the presence of people putting in money isn't a defining trait. However I do think it's a bit harsh to call these things a scam - I mean take the art market itself - value is entirely subjective - doesn't mean it's a scam ( though scamming things happen in the normal art market to try and inflation prices ). The question you have to ask yourself is: Are you buying the NFT as an investment - because you think other people will value it, or are you spending the money because you are quite happy to own that thing forever and never sell - ie the value is to you. I'd argue if you are doing the former you are more likely to be 'scammed' than the latter.
0x0 4y ago
Funny to see an old comment of mine there. Looks like I wasn't wildly off base, fewf :)

by esturk 4y ago

frostwarrior 4y ago

Also, it was until 2015 where Intel was on a great streak with their processors and didn't show signs of stagnation until around 2017/2018 I5/i7's were great at that time

lettergram 4y ago
Not entirely true, people watching and in the field knew. Back in 2015 I made a massive bet on AMD because people on HN working in the field explained the arch shift. Similar with this move by Apple. There are people in those rooms, making the decisions, sharpening their ideas on HN — if we care to listen.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  The problem is how do you separate the gold from the cruft? Seems impossible. Also, so much cruft makes you miss the gold as well. :/
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    From my understanding, it is way more costly to miss the gold than to get some cruft.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    I actually wrote software to do that lol Built this: https://insideropinion.com/ https://insideropinion.com/ But use it for investments. You can’t completely remove risk, but I invest in areas where insiders discuss publicly about their work. It provides insight often fundamentals lack; leaving massive potential upside.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      Stalking as a Service? How could that possibly go wrong? I’m equal parts horrified and amazed. And curious what The Algorithm thinks about my ramblings.
- senttoschool 4y ago
  >Back in 2015 I made a massive bet on AMD because people on HN working in the field explained the arch shift. I think you got really lucky. Zen1 didn't ship until 2017 and it lagged severely behind in single thread. You had no idea what AMD was going to have. Even AMD would tell you that they were surprise that Intel fell so far behind. They've been quoted saying this a few times. Intel's 10nm Node (equivalent to TSMC 7nm) was suppose to ship in 2016! It didn't ship anything on the desktop using 10nm until Alder Lake in 2021. Five year delay. Intel would have been well ahead of Zen2 in node technology. Instead, it was around 1.5 node behind. If you made your bet purely on what was said inside AMD in 2015, you just got lucky. No one knew that Intel would be stuck on 14nm for 7 years when they were planning for 2 years.
  - lettergram 4y ago
    There were a ton of Intel engineers at the time complaining about management in a different thread. I’m sure luck was involved (so many things could go wrong). But i tend to make money on bets based on what I hear on the fringe. AMD, Bitcoin, etc
Tagbert 4y ago
The 12” MacBook came out in 2015 and had terrible performance and a problem with overheating. Insider reports say that Intel had promised a lower power chip with better performance that Apple designed the MacBook for but then Intel killed that chip and Apple had to use another Intel mobile chip. Some people feel that was when the problem got real.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Apple would still have a lot of people who relived the same situation during the IBM days. If you're getting hints that your chip vendor is not aligned then you better have a backup plan.
msh 4y ago
They were bad for thin and light laptops with good battery life (mostly atom shit and underpowered core cpu's like in the 12inch macbook).
dont__panic 4y ago
They had already plateaued in 2014/2015 with Haswell/Broadwell. They've basically been releasing that same CPU with minor tweaks to power consumption and codec support for 8 years now. At the time, it was hard to notice, but reviews at the time absolutely noticed the minor CPU update (https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8375735/apple-macbook-pro-retina-review-2015 https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8375735/apple-macbook-pro-..., search "Broadwell"). Another funny aspect of that review: it mentions out 10+ hour battery life for the MBP as a nice, but hardly astonishing spec. 9 hours 45 minutes with Chrome was the worst case. It's amazing to think how bad the 2016-2019 MBPs were in comparison, to the point where getting back to 10 hour battery is an amazing Apple Silicon feature!
- idontpost 4y ago
  I don't think my 2019 MBP has ever laster more than 3 hours on battery. My M1 Max is amazing by comparison.

tambourine_man 4y ago

Nice catch. Phew. I’m glad I didn’t comment on that thread.

alberth 4y ago

2015 was a pivotal year to indicate Apples future direction, here’s why … 2015 is the year both the (Intel) 12” MacBook and the first iPad Pro were released. These we also both entirely new form factors for Apple (and both roughly the same size). On the Intel front, Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was. Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was. This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.

ulfw 4y ago
and yet today the wonderful 12" Macbook is dead
- klodolph 4y ago
  I personally like the 12" form factor, and I own one, but I saw approximately zero of them in the wild. It's significantly lighter, I can still get work done on it, it's great for travel... and yet I can't remember seeing other people using them.
  - andrekandre 4y ago
    you may not have seen them, but they are out there (raises hand)
  - antifa 4y ago
    I want a 12" netbook, but most options are garbage or overpriced. A 12" M1 OSX netbook would be a gamechanger.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was I sure hope they saw. They designed, built and sold the things. Would be hard to miss those issues during their development and testing, wouldn't it? It's not like Apple didn't know what they were selling.

pjot 4y ago

It’s funny to see how confident some OPs are in their claims, all while pointing out how the article is “speculating” the future.

alwillis 4y ago

It's easy to doubt but it actually takes effort to form educated guesses about the future. I didn't see this particular article but I would have agreed with it. I certainly have written many comments on similar articles (search the comments for alwillis ARM Mac for starters) explaining why such a switch to ARM was completely doable, having lived through the switch from PowerPC to Intel while working at MIT.

systemvoltage 4y ago

2030 predictions? Anyone?

Wronnay 4y ago
Apple will have an AR or VR headset, and we will start ditching traditional displays for VR. Meta will have recovered from their current issues and will be their main competitor. I think Apple could have a big advantage because their processors could allow more powerful things in a standalone VR headset compared to the current Generation where you need a external PC for most CPU and GPU intensive tasks.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I don’t know - mobile phones were a huge huge success because they are first and foremost, practical. They fit in your pocket, can take stellar images, have access to literally everything on the internet and are fully capable general purpose computers in your hands - a sci-fi product turned into reality. And on top of that, we control them with our hands, which are arguably our most capable part for this job. I don’t see any practicality to VRs outside some tiny niches. They make a few games more fun, some niche workloads can be done more efficiently, but they are hard to equip and first and foremost block your interactions with the real world. Sure, some contact lens futuresque thingy could improve on this as well, but how would you control that? Voice control is slow and troublesome. So I don’t predict a huge success to VR, it will be at most something akin to an xbox’s kinect, or some wii accessory.
  - dont__panic 4y ago
    I see a huge VR market in misguided companies with too much money to burn on "team building" projects who see VR as a good way to extend middle management BS to WFH employees. Likely subsidized by MetaFacebook desperately pushing their crappy VR projects to keep them on life support. As far as I can tell, we have a lot of progress to make with display resolution and GPU quality before VR becomes competitive for work environments with a modern hiDPI dual display setup. Maybe it's more appealing to folks with crappy home desk setups, or people who live in cities who don't want a full desk? Ergonomics still feels like an obstacle, though.

kranke155 4y ago

It's hilarious how HN is consistently wrong, even on tech-heavy subjects. No bright minds popping up here tbh. You can glean some interesting stuff from this. The hive mind was wrong on dropbox, seemingly wrong on this, and they are likely wrong on blockchain today.

asutekku 4y ago
It's been over 10 years and we still don't have a decent usecase for blockchain outside of crypto.
- medo-bear 4y ago
  there has been a huge use-case the whole time: decentralized accounting / banking some people see value in this some people perhaps not
  - kranke155 4y ago
    Not to mention NFTs, but it seems impossible to convince the HN crowd that there is a real art market in them, with real buyers and real artists using it. Any attempt to demonstrate this is met with wild leaps of logic - it's wash trading, it's not big enough, it's all a scam. I point to Beeple, Wes Cockx, DeeWay sales and all they tell me is it must all be a fraud. I show them markets with vibrant activity - Versum, FXhash, Foundation - and all I get is repetitions of memes around how NFTs are dead.
    - DrScientist 4y ago
      Successful scams have customers - the presence of people putting in money isn't a defining trait. However I do think it's a bit harsh to call these things a scam - I mean take the art market itself - value is entirely subjective - doesn't mean it's a scam ( though scamming things happen in the normal art market to try and inflation prices ). The question you have to ask yourself is: Are you buying the NFT as an investment - because you think other people will value it, or are you spending the money because you are quite happy to own that thing forever and never sell - ie the value is to you. I'd argue if you are doing the former you are more likely to be 'scammed' than the latter.

0x0 4y ago

Funny to see an old comment of mine there. Looks like I wasn't wildly off base, fewf :)