6 ms·

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can sti

by nisten 4y ago

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too. Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only that, but even providing a much better experience in terms of battery life because of power savings. Then yeah there was no point paying 20$-30$ a month for a remote browser instance. If you can afford that as a user you're either already set on CPU/GPU/RAM or better off just buying a used m1 air for <900$. It's quite sad of a lesson where you do everything right, work consistently hard, be quite innovative, have plenty of financial and talent resources, and still fail. Tech obsolescence is brutal.

Kwpolska 4y ago
> use your old laptop > M1 To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run you're cheaper off just buying a computer
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    Even for gaming and workstation use, this seems to be true. Last year, the value proposition of remote desktops looked great, but it turns out price/performance of all computing parts was at an all-time high.
  - jbjbjbjb 4y ago
    I looked into this and found, annoyingly, that even if used the Remote Desktop rarely and I could deallocate the machine to not get charged, it was actually the price for storage that made it too expensive.
  - funstuff007 4y ago
    You could say that same about running off-line batch jobs on EC2 instances. Unless your co-located data sources are forcing you to do so, I cannot fathom why you would.
- runako 4y ago
  For Mighty, this would mean their addressable market shrinks every year as more people replace with computers that are faster. That's not the characteristic of a market most startups want to be in.
yrgulation 4y ago
> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance. Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?
- paulgb 4y ago
  I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour. It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.
  - aniforprez 4y ago
    I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?
    - upbeat_general 4y ago
      Hence why M1 killed them. Some people do all their work in browsers.
      - disiplus 4y ago
        but you still need a somewhat ok laptop to use it. Screen battery and keyboard are still things that a 250$ laptop would be shit.
    - csande17 4y ago
      There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who, themselves, work at startups with dubious value propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.) There's another segment of people who can be sold snake oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency added by the streaming service, but they will believe claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of people who rewrite their app in React because they believe React makes apps faster.)
dinvlad 4y ago
Meh, desktop Intel/AMD chips still beat M1, and are more versatile for gaming etc.
- bitwize 4y ago
  When it comes to single core, M1 smokes EVERYTHING. And browser performance is gated by single core performance.
  - dinvlad 4y ago
    Is there some data to confirm that? Both AMD and Intel just came out with their new 5Ghz+ CPUs. I doubt that even M2 is faster.
  - svantana 4y ago
    Not generally true. On geekbench, both Intel and AMD have offerings that outscore both M1 and M2 on single core. https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Likely they meant "smoked on power per watt" which is useful on a laptop, not so much on a desktop or an always-plugged in laptop.
  - sod 4y ago
    It did when it came out. But it got already leapfrogged. Calculating fibonacci(45) with a recursive javascript function takes 13s on my m1pro and 7s on my ryzen 7600x. Profiling our angular app in chrome the initial render takes 200ms on m1pro and 130ms on my ryzen 7600x. Apple silicon is still the master of performance per watt. But raw performance: It really was just tsmc 5nm what gave apple the edge. Apple will shine again when they sit exclusivly on tsmc 3nm, but until then, not so much.
ohgodplsno 4y ago
There was no point paying $30 a month _period_. You could get a cheap, refurbished 2014 laptop and it would still be a better value proposition than Mighty. The only potential buyers of this service are SV tech bros, not anyone living in the real life.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
runako 4y ago
> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Agree with this take. It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs. Props to him for the skill it took to get funding in the door.
- swyx 4y ago
  didn't need funding skill, didnt need to look at apple roadmap, suhail's prior success as a founder was good enough for most pple
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    Certainly has the skill to layoff by the dozen, so given the current investment climate, that might come in handy too ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869419 In seriousness, going by what Suhail's been documenting through their tweets, they seem to fit the relentlessly resourceful bracket to a tee, which (according to pg, at least) means they have an above average chance at succeeding doing venture-scale startups: http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
    - hyuuu 4y ago
      what things did he do that make him relentlessly resourceful you think?
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  I remember people being very impressed with the performance of the arm macs at the time. Maybe they were impressed that it met expectations though and correctly predicting it would be good.
- foldr 4y ago
  >It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs It's easy to forget, but a lot of people were rubbishing the idea of ARM Macs as a viable replacement for Intel until it actually happened.
dmix 4y ago
> $30/m That price point was a serious barrier to entry. I loved how fast Mighty was (even on M1 it was noticeable) but there's no way I could justify that expense and I'm a big early consumer of B2B SaaS tools.
riwsky 4y ago
> where you do everything right everything except for, as Suhail points out, picking the wrong side of a technical trend to bet on. All the technical wizardry in the world can't save you from bad strategy.
ignoramous 4y ago
> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. Mighty is only dead because Suhail wanted to pursue what they clearly think is a bigger opportunity [0]. Mighty is already building its own GPU servers, might as well put them to use for AI as the perf and the size of AI models is roughly on an exponential trajectory [1]. It may not be long before AGI is within vicinity [2]. Though I agree a better strategy wouldn't be to accelerate the browser (akin to boiling an ocean?), but instead take one app at a time and make it browser-native (like, Photoshop -> Figma). A similar concept to (I don't remember who said it), take tools hackers use and build it for the Internet (grep -> Google, sendmail -> Hotmail, emacs -> Replit, sftp -> Dropbox etc). [0] AIs today can automate away humans on quite a few tasks, assist them on quite a few complex ones already. And still: models are getting only way more capable, not less. [1] https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501729837366452224 https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501729837366452224 [2] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1590816470845771777 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1590816470845771777
efficax 4y ago
did this product have any appeal? the price was insane for something i get for free, if you could afford it and needed it you could afford a decent computer that could

by nisten 4y ago

Kwpolska 4y ago

> use your old laptop > M1 To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run you're cheaper off just buying a computer
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Even for gaming and workstation use, this seems to be true. Last year, the value proposition of remote desktops looked great, but it turns out price/performance of all computing parts was at an all-time high.
- jbjbjbjb 4y ago
  I looked into this and found, annoyingly, that even if used the Remote Desktop rarely and I could deallocate the machine to not get charged, it was actually the price for storage that made it too expensive.
- funstuff007 4y ago
  You could say that same about running off-line batch jobs on EC2 instances. Unless your co-located data sources are forcing you to do so, I cannot fathom why you would.
runako 4y ago
For Mighty, this would mean their addressable market shrinks every year as more people replace with computers that are faster. That's not the characteristic of a market most startups want to be in.

yrgulation 4y ago

> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance. Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?

paulgb 4y ago
I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour. It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.
- aniforprez 4y ago
  I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?
  - upbeat_general 4y ago
    Hence why M1 killed them. Some people do all their work in browsers.
    - disiplus 4y ago
      but you still need a somewhat ok laptop to use it. Screen battery and keyboard are still things that a 250$ laptop would be shit.
  - csande17 4y ago
    There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who, themselves, work at startups with dubious value propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.) There's another segment of people who can be sold snake oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency added by the streaming service, but they will believe claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of people who rewrite their app in React because they believe React makes apps faster.)

dinvlad 4y ago

Meh, desktop Intel/AMD chips still beat M1, and are more versatile for gaming etc.

bitwize 4y ago
When it comes to single core, M1 smokes EVERYTHING. And browser performance is gated by single core performance.
- dinvlad 4y ago
  Is there some data to confirm that? Both AMD and Intel just came out with their new 5Ghz+ CPUs. I doubt that even M2 is faster.
- svantana 4y ago
  Not generally true. On geekbench, both Intel and AMD have offerings that outscore both M1 and M2 on single core. https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Likely they meant "smoked on power per watt" which is useful on a laptop, not so much on a desktop or an always-plugged in laptop.
- sod 4y ago
  It did when it came out. But it got already leapfrogged. Calculating fibonacci(45) with a recursive javascript function takes 13s on my m1pro and 7s on my ryzen 7600x. Profiling our angular app in chrome the initial render takes 200ms on m1pro and 130ms on my ryzen 7600x. Apple silicon is still the master of performance per watt. But raw performance: It really was just tsmc 5nm what gave apple the edge. Apple will shine again when they sit exclusivly on tsmc 3nm, but until then, not so much.

ohgodplsno 4y ago

There was no point paying $30 a month _period_. You could get a cheap, refurbished 2014 laptop and it would still be a better value proposition than Mighty. The only potential buyers of this service are SV tech bros, not anyone living in the real life.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

runako 4y ago

> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great. Agree with this take. It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs. Props to him for the skill it took to get funding in the door.

swyx 4y ago
didn't need funding skill, didnt need to look at apple roadmap, suhail's prior success as a founder was good enough for most pple
- ignoramous 4y ago
  Certainly has the skill to layoff by the dozen, so given the current investment climate, that might come in handy too ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869419 In seriousness, going by what Suhail's been documenting through their tweets, they seem to fit the relentlessly resourceful bracket to a tee, which (according to pg, at least) means they have an above average chance at succeeding doing venture-scale startups: http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html
  - hyuuu 4y ago
    what things did he do that make him relentlessly resourceful you think?
dan-robertson 4y ago
I remember people being very impressed with the performance of the arm macs at the time. Maybe they were impressed that it met expectations though and correctly predicting it would be good.
foldr 4y ago
>It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs It's easy to forget, but a lot of people were rubbishing the idea of ARM Macs as a viable replacement for Intel until it actually happened.

dmix 4y ago

> $30/m That price point was a serious barrier to entry. I loved how fast Mighty was (even on M1 it was noticeable) but there's no way I could justify that expense and I'm a big early consumer of B2B SaaS tools.

riwsky 4y ago

> where you do everything right everything except for, as Suhail points out, picking the wrong side of a technical trend to bet on. All the technical wizardry in the world can't save you from bad strategy.

ignoramous 4y ago

> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. Mighty is only dead because Suhail wanted to pursue what they clearly think is a bigger opportunity [0]. Mighty is already building its own GPU servers, might as well put them to use for AI as the perf and the size of AI models is roughly on an exponential trajectory [1]. It may not be long before AGI is within vicinity [2]. Though I agree a better strategy wouldn't be to accelerate the browser (akin to boiling an ocean?), but instead take one app at a time and make it browser-native (like, Photoshop -> Figma). A similar concept to (I don't remember who said it), take tools hackers use and build it for the Internet (grep -> Google, sendmail -> Hotmail, emacs -> Replit, sftp -> Dropbox etc). [0] AIs today can automate away humans on quite a few tasks, assist them on quite a few complex ones already. And still: models are getting only way more capable, not less. [1] https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501729837366452224 https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501729837366452224 [2] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1590816470845771777 https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1590816470845771777

efficax 4y ago

did this product have any appeal? the price was insane for something i get for free, if you could afford it and needed it you could afford a decent computer that could