12 ms·

hard to feel sorry for Intel here they're still tied to Windows which is increasingly weaker and more rotted over time, losing market share every year for a de

hard to feel sorry for Intel here they're still tied to Windows which is increasingly weaker and more rotted over time, losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the performance the average person will need, with good battery life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right! Intel needs to seriously look at Linux...once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years (seems inevitable now and Microsoft seems to not care as long as Azure keeps winning), what else will they have? start now with serious price cuts....I don't need to replce my Linux laptops, but would for the right price

yawniek 3y ago
i also don't really understand why they don't offer a similar software/hardware package ontop of linux as apple does.
mschild 3y ago
The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. That's not within reach for a large majority of the worlds population. Not even within reach for a lot people in richer western countries. Most people need a Webbrowser that can do Email, Streaming, and some social media. What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease.
- blagie 3y ago
  > What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease. Of what? Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM. I think my observations are a little biased, but not a lot. According to statcounter: Android 41.56% Windows 28.29% iOS 17.29% OS X 7% Unknown 3.05% Chrome OS 1.32% Critically, it's no longer a monopoly; there's a lot less lock-in than there once was. Even Microsoft Office is gradually moving to the PWA model. Most servers and embedded systems I see run some variant of Linux as well. The market Microsoft has 75% share in seems to increasingly by a niche market within a much larger ecosystem. Microsoft seems to have pivoted, and as someone pointed out, no longer cares too much. However, the Wintel monopoly is dead. If Intel is tied to Windows, they'll increasingly be swallowed alive. TSMC manufactures most of those ARM chips. There's no way a smaller player can keep up in fabs and manufacturing technology.
  - itsoktocry 3y ago
    >Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM Comparing cell phone OS to a desktop OS is a bit silly. Nobody in the corporate world is doing work on Android.
    - blagie 3y ago
      Intel is in the CPU market, not in the "corporate desktop" market. If you'd like to see how well trying to focus on that niche works, have a look at DEC Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, Itanium, Sparc, PowerPC, etc. At the end of the day, it comes down to manufacturing volume. Volume leads to investment in next-generation technologies. More investment means, at some point, competitors can't keep up. Manufacturing doesn't care too much about who the ultimate end user is.
    - shortrounddev 3y ago
      Why not
    - josteink 3y ago
      His point was trying to measure OS market-share by checking desktop-only is no longer a valid approach. Even big players like Microsoft are forced to offer their software and services on non-Windows platforms (like mobile and tablets!) if they want to remain relevant. So counting desktop only paints a false picture, wrt where users are and where computing is happening. And that last bit is what is relevant from a Intel POV. An increasing amount of compute is now done outside the Intel-chip arena of desktops, like it used to be before.
  - whynotmaybe 3y ago
    The "niche" market is corporate and gouv. These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design) No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon from those. The android market share is mainly mobile devices and Microsoft gave that market up a few years ago, focusing on azure and office. Here again, focusing the corporate/gouv world. The corporate/gouv world has many windows only app and processes that would cost a fortune to replace. Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m1-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-space-gray/5721600.p?skuId=5721600 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m... I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up. Looking at the best selling laptops at Microcenter, they're $600, $700, $700, $1100, $800, $800, $750, $900... Having an M1 Air slotted in at $800 seems right in-line with the market.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    8GB is pretty sad though and it’s soldered on with no ability to upgrade
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years. Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't actually need the M1. BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200 EUR.
    - shinycode 3y ago
      But it’s more than RAM and it’s enough even for web dev so for most people it’s way enough
      - heavyset_go 3y ago
        I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you have things like browser windows open, you will have a bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of the question which made mobile app development difficult. If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  Macs are incredibly good value. The M1 Air actually starts at 800$ if you chase the deals and $900 if you buy from Apple with education discount. Nothing ever comes to the quality at that price, so even if you can buy much cheaper laptops those suffer in quality and performance. This means the value per dollar is not any better than MacBook Air, unless you are extremely short on dollars. Also the re-sell value of Apple products is good and combined with the durability of Apple laptops(this is where the repairability folks fail to convince most people because for most people Apple devices don't break down, they become obsolete after extensive use) the money spent on Macs turns to be an investment. The "Apple premium" you pay when you buy an iDevice is actually a recoverable when you sell it.
  - mschild 3y ago
    I agree they are but what if you can't afford to spend 800 or 900 on a laptop? There's also plenty of people who use their laptop until it's dead. Infact, I'd argue it's probably more economical to purchase a repairable laptop and replace parts as needed.
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      If you can't afford $900 you shouldn't be buying a laptop unless you absolutely need it in short term to get out of your current situation. You are probably in a precarious state, not really a chooser at this time and all you can do is to sort by price and buy the cheapest.
      - mschild 3y ago
        Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world doesn't run high paying western salaries. Most people earn significantly less. The average monthly indian salary, by now the largest country in the world population wise, is roundabout 450 USD. Your advice boils down to just get richer and don't be poor.
        mrtksn 3y ago
        My advice is, don't spend your money on low quality stuff unless you absolutely have to(i.e. maybe you will do some data entry stuff to buy food, then maybe you can spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop but if you are not in that kind of a situation save up buy something of good value later).
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  > What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share The biggest threat to Windows isn’t Apple and Linux, it’s mobile phones. People aren’t buying computers like they used to. Most day to day things can be done on a smartphone now. I see this first hand in my own family. My wife and mom both use their phones for pretty much everything. Email, web browsing, etc. If my wife needs a bigger screen for something like a yoga video, she usually uses a TV in the house which has a Roku, chrome cast, or similar attached.
- bhouston 3y ago
  > The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. Get the MacMini. The low end M2 Mac mini is $599.00 USD right now, although the one I run for my desktop is the more expensive one at $2,199 with 32GB, more cores, more gpu and more drive space.
  - mschild 3y ago
    That's not a laptop so you still need to buy a screen, keyboard, and mouse.
    - bhouston 3y ago
      Adding that will add another $150 if you buy it at Walmart. You are correct.
sokoloff 3y ago
Price cutting by enough to pull your demand forward is probably a losing strategy for Intel. If they cut their CPU price in half, would they sell twice as many? I doubt it. Their gross margin is between 40 and 50%. Call it 50% to be generous and make the math easy. If their selling price today is 6X and they sell U units, their gross profit is 3 * X * U. If they cut the selling price to 4X and sell 2U units, the resulting profit is around 2 * X * U. If they were somehow able to move 3 times as many units with a 33% price reduction, their gross profits would stay about the same as today. What would a 33% reduction in the price of the Intel components in your laptop mean at retail? A 10% reduction in the shelf price? 15% maximum?
allie1 3y ago
The x86 ecosystem is far superior to Apple Silicon, and that is not going away any time soon. Macs have one big advantage - efficiency, which translates to long battery life and more importantly for me personally - NOT OVERHEATING. However, porting software to apple silicon results in inefficiencies, and for developers it gets a bit trickier. I have a M1 Max with 65GB ram and I love it, but the moment Intel comes out with chip that doesn't overheat and is as performant, I'll be buying an Intel based laptop (granted, I will have to wait for longer). In a perfect world, Apple would get back to offering Intel as a CPU option when Intel comes back to the leading edge. You'd get the Mac OS, x86 and performance in a well built laptop - a dream!
- throwaway2990 3y ago
  What inefficiency are you talking about? Graviton instances in aws run general software better than x86.
  - allie1 3y ago
    I was referring to personal computer usage. Yes, usage specific chips can be a better option, but as far as general processing/usage is concerned, I'd take x86 over Apple Silicon any day of the week.
- Panzer04 3y ago
  Overheating is entirely down to the profiles the manufacturers use. Intel processors can be efficient, but usually they get clocked to the moon on desktop. Laptops are so all over the place it's impossible to judge them either :/
  - allie1 3y ago
    I haven't tried limiting clock speeds to keep the laptop cool, and it seems a bit crazy investment to buy a laptop to try that, but I do have an old MBP with Intel that I can test this with.
    - 3y ago
itsoktocry 3y ago
>losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. >offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good value"? >a better OS/ecosystem This is debatable. I don't find MacOS to be all that great, personally. >once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space.
- IceHegel 3y ago
  If they cared there wouldn’t be tabloid news in everything spare panel.
  - PretzelPirate 3y ago
    I commented on thus somewhere else, but it seems fitting here as well: my non-technical parents love the tabloid news that Windows shows, and they love that candy crush is pre-installed. I suspect most users are not the same as the HM crowd.
    - bdcravens 3y ago
      Most mobile phone users aren't in the HN crowd, yet the iPhone continues to sell well. Why is this true, when a $199 unlocked Android is more than sufficient?
- damagednoob 3y ago
  > Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good value"? I would argue in the same way that buying an expensive pair of boots that last longer than a cheap pair to be good value. > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space. What is the trend line and how much is that space growing by relative to other devices like mobile phones and tablets?
slashdev 3y ago
When it came time almost two years ago to get a new laptop, I had a choice between a MacBook Pro for over $4000 or an Alienware that I could modify with 64gb memory and an extra SSD for half the price. Bare metal gaming with better performance and even though it doesn’t support Linux, it supports it better than Mac. Cost half as much. No futzing around with packages that don’t work on the M1, just good old AMD x86 goodness. The battery life sucks, but that rarely bothers me. I’d love to buy an Apple, but it has never been priced competitively. My wife’s MacBook broke and it costs almost as much just to fix as to buy a new laptop.
- SamuelAdams 3y ago
  I’m curious what those prices would look like today. In 2021 I bought a MBP M1 Max with 32 Gb RAM and a 500 Gb ssd for about 3k. Looks like a max spec Alienware X14 R2 costs around 2,100 dollars. However the battery life seems to be the biggest drawback, most reviews say it lasts under 8 hours while my MBP lasts 12-16 depending on usage.
nullandvoid 3y ago
A similar priced mac > windows is ~2x the price, with no upgrade-ability options. I'm not so sure the price is right, it's expensive and they are making good money on it, but I agree does have some un-matchable features such as the battery life. I work with both windows (with WSL) and mac OS, and there's nothing massively that sells me either way on the base OS, however I really wish tools like raycast existed in windows.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> Intel needs to seriously look at Linux... Does Linux need Intel though? ARM Linux systems are surprisingly nice. Asahi Linux is probably going to be the best Linux laptop experience.
tbyehl 3y ago
> Intel needs to seriously look at Linux What should Intel be doing with Linux that they haven't already been doing for like 20 years?
- allie1 3y ago
  Better gaming drivers, better drivers all around. Their own linux distro for hosts that they keep optimizing for web, AI, compiling, testing.
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    Intel already have their own Linux distro: https://clearlinux.org/about https://clearlinux.org/about
surgical_fire 3y ago
> the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the performance the average person will need, with good battery life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right! Ehh... Is it? I use the M1 issued by my employer. It's an okay machine in terms of hardware, but I absolutely loathe MacOS. I certainly wouldn't pay for the M1 at the price they sell it, way over expensive toy. I vastly prefer my personal machine, which is a 4 year old Dell with Linux Mint installed. A joy to use, powerful enough for everything I do (development, gaming), and has a GPU I can use to play with StableDiffusion. The only thing where the M1 is the winner is in battery life... But 99% of the time I use my laptop on my desk anyway, power supply is no issue.
- bearjaws 3y ago
  > and has a GPU I can use to play with StableDiffusion. You can run stable diffusion faster on a M1 pro macbook pro than on a 1080ti 3900x desktop. DiffusionBee, I get .7s/iteration on a M1 using just 45w of power vs .98s/iteration on my 1080ti using over 5x that amount of power... I could upgrade to a 4080 and I am sure it would destroy it, but I doubt your laptop has a full power 4080 anyway. > But 99% of the time I use my laptop on my desk anyway, As someone who works remote and has to travel for work, battery life is incredibly important to me, and the M1 is just leaps above its competition. I can write code and build all day without even plugging in on the M1 16"...
  - surgical_fire 3y ago
    > You can run stable diffusion faster on a M1 pro macbook pro than on a 1080ti 3900x desktop. DiffusionBee, I get .7s/iteration on a M1 using just 45w of power vs .98s/iteration on my 1080ti using over 5x that amount of power... At what cost? > I could upgrade to a 4080 and I am sure it would destroy it, but I doubt your laptop has a full power 4080 anyway. Mine has a GeForce 2060 RTX. Not in any way overpowered, but runs games and StableDiffusion fast enough. That at a fraction of the cost of an M1 Pro too, and the added benefit of not having to use MacOS
    - the_overseer 3y ago
ezconnect 3y ago
Intel is not just selling CPUs.
mock-possum 3y ago
Which apple M1 exactly are you saying is an ‘incredible’ value? The current-gen Air?
foobarian 3y ago
> once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years I'm not sure, on the contrary I think in a few years Windows will be rewritten in Rust and entering a virtuous spiral. We'll see!
- compiler-guy 3y ago
  The percentage of end-users who care about which language their OS is written in rounds to zero. Rust may add additional stability to the OS, but modern OS's feel pretty stable to the mom and pop users and "additional stability" is pretty far down the list of demands.
Workaccount2 3y ago
Until linux devs can get through their head that common users never want to even see something that represents a CLI, linux isn't going anywhere. The biggest problem with linux is that it's made by people who like linux.
- 0zemp2c 3y ago
  obviously, for Linux to ever see mass adoption it would need a drastic reformulation like Android my point is, once Windows passes the event horizon, Intel needs SOMETHING or they are going to see 2/3 of their revenue stream go away...cloud vendors are busy pushing ARM in the datacenter now too...Intel is running out of markets btw AMD is also screwed by all the same logic...x86 is on the endangered species list
yyyk 3y ago
>they're [Intel] still tied to Windows Nonsense. Intel is one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel, the biggest depending on what measure you count by[0]. They even have their own distro. Moreover, much of their profit is from the server market, which tends to run Linux. >the Apple M1 laptop Is very expensive and is running MacOS. [0] https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/ https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/ https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/ https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/ https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/ https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/

yawniek 3y ago

i also don't really understand why they don't offer a similar software/hardware package ontop of linux as apple does.

mschild 3y ago

The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. That's not within reach for a large majority of the worlds population. Not even within reach for a lot people in richer western countries. Most people need a Webbrowser that can do Email, Streaming, and some social media. What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease.

blagie 3y ago
> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease. Of what? Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM. I think my observations are a little biased, but not a lot. According to statcounter: Android 41.56% Windows 28.29% iOS 17.29% OS X 7% Unknown 3.05% Chrome OS 1.32% Critically, it's no longer a monopoly; there's a lot less lock-in than there once was. Even Microsoft Office is gradually moving to the PWA model. Most servers and embedded systems I see run some variant of Linux as well. The market Microsoft has 75% share in seems to increasingly by a niche market within a much larger ecosystem. Microsoft seems to have pivoted, and as someone pointed out, no longer cares too much. However, the Wintel monopoly is dead. If Intel is tied to Windows, they'll increasingly be swallowed alive. TSMC manufactures most of those ARM chips. There's no way a smaller player can keep up in fabs and manufacturing technology.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM Comparing cell phone OS to a desktop OS is a bit silly. Nobody in the corporate world is doing work on Android.
  - blagie 3y ago
    Intel is in the CPU market, not in the "corporate desktop" market. If you'd like to see how well trying to focus on that niche works, have a look at DEC Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, Itanium, Sparc, PowerPC, etc. At the end of the day, it comes down to manufacturing volume. Volume leads to investment in next-generation technologies. More investment means, at some point, competitors can't keep up. Manufacturing doesn't care too much about who the ultimate end user is.
  - shortrounddev 3y ago
    Why not
  - josteink 3y ago
    His point was trying to measure OS market-share by checking desktop-only is no longer a valid approach. Even big players like Microsoft are forced to offer their software and services on non-Windows platforms (like mobile and tablets!) if they want to remain relevant. So counting desktop only paints a false picture, wrt where users are and where computing is happening. And that last bit is what is relevant from a Intel POV. An increasing amount of compute is now done outside the Intel-chip arena of desktops, like it used to be before.
- whynotmaybe 3y ago
  The "niche" market is corporate and gouv. These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design) No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon from those. The android market share is mainly mobile devices and Microsoft gave that market up a few years ago, focusing on azure and office. Here again, focusing the corporate/gouv world. The corporate/gouv world has many windows only app and processes that would cost a fortune to replace. Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.
sokoloff 3y ago
You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m1-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-space-gray/5721600.p?skuId=5721600 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m... I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up. Looking at the best selling laptops at Microcenter, they're $600, $700, $700, $1100, $800, $800, $750, $900... Having an M1 Air slotted in at $800 seems right in-line with the market.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  8GB is pretty sad though and it’s soldered on with no ability to upgrade
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years. Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't actually need the M1. BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200 EUR.
  - shinycode 3y ago
    But it’s more than RAM and it’s enough even for web dev so for most people it’s way enough
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you have things like browser windows open, you will have a bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of the question which made mobile app development difficult. If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.
mrtksn 3y ago
Macs are incredibly good value. The M1 Air actually starts at 800$ if you chase the deals and $900 if you buy from Apple with education discount. Nothing ever comes to the quality at that price, so even if you can buy much cheaper laptops those suffer in quality and performance. This means the value per dollar is not any better than MacBook Air, unless you are extremely short on dollars. Also the re-sell value of Apple products is good and combined with the durability of Apple laptops(this is where the repairability folks fail to convince most people because for most people Apple devices don't break down, they become obsolete after extensive use) the money spent on Macs turns to be an investment. The "Apple premium" you pay when you buy an iDevice is actually a recoverable when you sell it.
- mschild 3y ago
  I agree they are but what if you can't afford to spend 800 or 900 on a laptop? There's also plenty of people who use their laptop until it's dead. Infact, I'd argue it's probably more economical to purchase a repairable laptop and replace parts as needed.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    If you can't afford $900 you shouldn't be buying a laptop unless you absolutely need it in short term to get out of your current situation. You are probably in a precarious state, not really a chooser at this time and all you can do is to sort by price and buy the cheapest.
    - mschild 3y ago
      Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world doesn't run high paying western salaries. Most people earn significantly less. The average monthly indian salary, by now the largest country in the world population wise, is roundabout 450 USD. Your advice boils down to just get richer and don't be poor.
      - mrtksn 3y ago
        My advice is, don't spend your money on low quality stuff unless you absolutely have to(i.e. maybe you will do some data entry stuff to buy food, then maybe you can spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop but if you are not in that kind of a situation save up buy something of good value later).
SamuelAdams 3y ago
> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share The biggest threat to Windows isn’t Apple and Linux, it’s mobile phones. People aren’t buying computers like they used to. Most day to day things can be done on a smartphone now. I see this first hand in my own family. My wife and mom both use their phones for pretty much everything. Email, web browsing, etc. If my wife needs a bigger screen for something like a yoga video, she usually uses a TV in the house which has a Roku, chrome cast, or similar attached.
bhouston 3y ago
> The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. Get the MacMini. The low end M2 Mac mini is $599.00 USD right now, although the one I run for my desktop is the more expensive one at $2,199 with 32GB, more cores, more gpu and more drive space.
- mschild 3y ago
  That's not a laptop so you still need to buy a screen, keyboard, and mouse.
  - bhouston 3y ago
    Adding that will add another $150 if you buy it at Walmart. You are correct.

sokoloff 3y ago

Price cutting by enough to pull your demand forward is probably a losing strategy for Intel. If they cut their CPU price in half, would they sell twice as many? I doubt it. Their gross margin is between 40 and 50%. Call it 50% to be generous and make the math easy. If their selling price today is 6X and they sell U units, their gross profit is 3 * X * U. If they cut the selling price to 4X and sell 2U units, the resulting profit is around 2 * X * U. If they were somehow able to move 3 times as many units with a 33% price reduction, their gross profits would stay about the same as today. What would a 33% reduction in the price of the Intel components in your laptop mean at retail? A 10% reduction in the shelf price? 15% maximum?

allie1 3y ago

The x86 ecosystem is far superior to Apple Silicon, and that is not going away any time soon. Macs have one big advantage - efficiency, which translates to long battery life and more importantly for me personally - NOT OVERHEATING. However, porting software to apple silicon results in inefficiencies, and for developers it gets a bit trickier. I have a M1 Max with 65GB ram and I love it, but the moment Intel comes out with chip that doesn't overheat and is as performant, I'll be buying an Intel based laptop (granted, I will have to wait for longer). In a perfect world, Apple would get back to offering Intel as a CPU option when Intel comes back to the leading edge. You'd get the Mac OS, x86 and performance in a well built laptop - a dream!

throwaway2990 3y ago
What inefficiency are you talking about? Graviton instances in aws run general software better than x86.
- allie1 3y ago
  I was referring to personal computer usage. Yes, usage specific chips can be a better option, but as far as general processing/usage is concerned, I'd take x86 over Apple Silicon any day of the week.
Panzer04 3y ago
Overheating is entirely down to the profiles the manufacturers use. Intel processors can be efficient, but usually they get clocked to the moon on desktop. Laptops are so all over the place it's impossible to judge them either :/
- allie1 3y ago
  I haven't tried limiting clock speeds to keep the laptop cool, and it seems a bit crazy investment to buy a laptop to try that, but I do have an old MBP with Intel that I can test this with.
  - 3y ago

itsoktocry 3y ago

>losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. >offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good value"? >a better OS/ecosystem This is debatable. I don't find MacOS to be all that great, personally. >once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space.

IceHegel 3y ago
If they cared there wouldn’t be tabloid news in everything spare panel.
- PretzelPirate 3y ago
  I commented on thus somewhere else, but it seems fitting here as well: my non-technical parents love the tabloid news that Windows shows, and they love that candy crush is pre-installed. I suspect most users are not the same as the HM crowd.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Most mobile phone users aren't in the HN crowd, yet the iPhone continues to sell well. Why is this true, when a $199 unlocked Android is more than sufficient?
damagednoob 3y ago
> Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good value"? I would argue in the same way that buying an expensive pair of boots that last longer than a cheap pair to be good value. > You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space. What is the trend line and how much is that space growing by relative to other devices like mobile phones and tablets?

slashdev 3y ago

When it came time almost two years ago to get a new laptop, I had a choice between a MacBook Pro for over $4000 or an Alienware that I could modify with 64gb memory and an extra SSD for half the price. Bare metal gaming with better performance and even though it doesn’t support Linux, it supports it better than Mac. Cost half as much. No futzing around with packages that don’t work on the M1, just good old AMD x86 goodness. The battery life sucks, but that rarely bothers me. I’d love to buy an Apple, but it has never been priced competitively. My wife’s MacBook broke and it costs almost as much just to fix as to buy a new laptop.

SamuelAdams 3y ago
I’m curious what those prices would look like today. In 2021 I bought a MBP M1 Max with 32 Gb RAM and a 500 Gb ssd for about 3k. Looks like a max spec Alienware X14 R2 costs around 2,100 dollars. However the battery life seems to be the biggest drawback, most reviews say it lasts under 8 hours while my MBP lasts 12-16 depending on usage.

nullandvoid 3y ago

A similar priced mac > windows is ~2x the price, with no upgrade-ability options. I'm not so sure the price is right, it's expensive and they are making good money on it, but I agree does have some un-matchable features such as the battery life. I work with both windows (with WSL) and mac OS, and there's nothing massively that sells me either way on the base OS, however I really wish tools like raycast existed in windows.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

matheusmoreira 3y ago

> Intel needs to seriously look at Linux... Does Linux need Intel though? ARM Linux systems are surprisingly nice. Asahi Linux is probably going to be the best Linux laptop experience.

tbyehl 3y ago

> Intel needs to seriously look at Linux What should Intel be doing with Linux that they haven't already been doing for like 20 years?

allie1 3y ago
Better gaming drivers, better drivers all around. Their own linux distro for hosts that they keep optimizing for web, AI, compiling, testing.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  Intel already have their own Linux distro: https://clearlinux.org/about https://clearlinux.org/about

surgical_fire 3y ago

> the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the performance the average person will need, with good battery life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right! Ehh... Is it? I use the M1 issued by my employer. It's an okay machine in terms of hardware, but I absolutely loathe MacOS. I certainly wouldn't pay for the M1 at the price they sell it, way over expensive toy. I vastly prefer my personal machine, which is a 4 year old Dell with Linux Mint installed. A joy to use, powerful enough for everything I do (development, gaming), and has a GPU I can use to play with StableDiffusion. The only thing where the M1 is the winner is in battery life... But 99% of the time I use my laptop on my desk anyway, power supply is no issue.

bearjaws 3y ago
> and has a GPU I can use to play with StableDiffusion. You can run stable diffusion faster on a M1 pro macbook pro than on a 1080ti 3900x desktop. DiffusionBee, I get .7s/iteration on a M1 using just 45w of power vs .98s/iteration on my 1080ti using over 5x that amount of power... I could upgrade to a 4080 and I am sure it would destroy it, but I doubt your laptop has a full power 4080 anyway. > But 99% of the time I use my laptop on my desk anyway, As someone who works remote and has to travel for work, battery life is incredibly important to me, and the M1 is just leaps above its competition. I can write code and build all day without even plugging in on the M1 16"...
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  > You can run stable diffusion faster on a M1 pro macbook pro than on a 1080ti 3900x desktop. DiffusionBee, I get .7s/iteration on a M1 using just 45w of power vs .98s/iteration on my 1080ti using over 5x that amount of power... At what cost? > I could upgrade to a 4080 and I am sure it would destroy it, but I doubt your laptop has a full power 4080 anyway. Mine has a GeForce 2060 RTX. Not in any way overpowered, but runs games and StableDiffusion fast enough. That at a fraction of the cost of an M1 Pro too, and the added benefit of not having to use MacOS
  - the_overseer 3y ago

ezconnect 3y ago

Intel is not just selling CPUs.

mock-possum 3y ago

Which apple M1 exactly are you saying is an ‘incredible’ value? The current-gen Air?

foobarian 3y ago

> once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years I'm not sure, on the contrary I think in a few years Windows will be rewritten in Rust and entering a virtuous spiral. We'll see!

compiler-guy 3y ago
The percentage of end-users who care about which language their OS is written in rounds to zero. Rust may add additional stability to the OS, but modern OS's feel pretty stable to the mom and pop users and "additional stability" is pretty far down the list of demands.

Workaccount2 3y ago

Until linux devs can get through their head that common users never want to even see something that represents a CLI, linux isn't going anywhere. The biggest problem with linux is that it's made by people who like linux.

0zemp2c 3y ago
obviously, for Linux to ever see mass adoption it would need a drastic reformulation like Android my point is, once Windows passes the event horizon, Intel needs SOMETHING or they are going to see 2/3 of their revenue stream go away...cloud vendors are busy pushing ARM in the datacenter now too...Intel is running out of markets btw AMD is also screwed by all the same logic...x86 is on the endangered species list

yyyk 3y ago

>they're [Intel] still tied to Windows Nonsense. Intel is one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel, the biggest depending on what measure you count by[0]. They even have their own distro. Moreover, much of their profit is from the server market, which tends to run Linux. >the Apple M1 laptop Is very expensive and is running MacOS. [0] https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/ https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/ https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/ https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/ https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/ https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/