4 ms·

I hard disagree. The chassis and cooler designs of the old intel based macs sandbagged the performance a great deal. They were already building a narrative to t

I hard disagree. The chassis and cooler designs of the old intel based macs sandbagged the performance a great deal. They were already building a narrative to their investors and consumers that a jump to in house chip design was necessary. You can see this sandbagging in the old intel chassis Apple Silicon MBP where their performance is markedly worse than the ones in the newer chassis.

acdha 3y ago
That doesn’t make sense: everyone else got hit by Intel’s failure to deliver, too. Even if you assume Apple had some 4-D chess plan where making their own products worse was needed to justify a huge gamble, it’s not like Dell or HP were in on it. Slapping a monster heat sink and fan on can help with performance but then you’re paying with weight, battery life, and purchase price. I think a more parsimonious explanation is the accepted one: Intel was floundering for ages, Apple’s phone CPUs were booming, and a company which had suffered a lot due to supplier issues in the PowerPC era decided that they couldn’t afford to let another company have that much control over their product line. It wasn’t just things like the CPUs failing further behind but also the various chipset restrictions and inability to customize things. Apple puts a ton of hardware in to support things like security or various popular tasks (image & video processing, ML, etc.) and now that’s an internal conversation, and the net result is cheaper, cooler, and a unique selling point for them.
- mattlondon 3y ago
  > net result is cheaper, cooler, and a unique selling point for them That and they are not paying for Intel's profit margins either. Apple is the quintessential vertical integration - they own their entire stack.
  - acdha 3y ago
    I was thinking of that as cheaper but there’s also a strategic aspect: Apple is comfortable making challenging long-term plans, and if one of those required them to run the Mac division at low profitability for a couple of years they’d do it far more readily than even a core supplier like Intel.
  - ac29 3y ago
    Apple doesnt manufacture their own chips or assemble their own devices. They are certainly paying the profit margins of TSMC, Foxconn, and many other suppliers.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      That seems a bit pedantic, practically every HN reader will know that Apple doesn't literally mine every chunk of silicon and aluminum out of the ground themselves, so by default they, or the end customer, are paying the profit margins of thousands of intermediary companies.
Aurornis 3y ago
I doubt it was intentional, but you're very right that the old laptops had terrible thermal design. Under load, my M1 laptop can pull similar wattage to my old Intel MacBook Pro while staying virtually silent. Meanwhile the old Intel MacBook Pro sounds like a jet engine.
- eyegor 3y ago
  The m1/m2 chips are generally stupid effecient compared to Intel chips (or even amd/arm/etc)... Are you sure the power draw is comparable? Apple is quite well known for kneecapping hardware with terrible thermal solutions and I don't think there are any breakthroughs in the modern chassis. I couldn't find good data on the older mbpros, but the m1 max mbpro used 1/3 the power vs an 11th gen Intel laptop to get almost identical scores in cinebench r23. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dijit 3y ago
    the whole premise of this thread is that this reputation isnt fully justified, and thats one I agree with. Intel for the last 10 years has been saying “if your CPU isn't 100c then theres performance on the table”. They also drastically underplayed TDP compared to, say, AMD, by taking the average TDP with frequency scaling taken into consideration. I can easily see Intel marketing to Apple that their CPUs would be fine with 10w of cooling with Intel knowing that that they wont perform as well, and Apple thinking that there will be a generational improvement on thermal efficiency.
  - derefr 3y ago
    > Apple is quite well known for kneecapping hardware with terrible thermal solutions But that was my entire point (root thread comment.) It's not that Apple was taking existing Intel CPUs and designing bad thermal solutions around them. It's that Apple was designing hardware first, three years in advance of production; showing that hardware design and its thermal envelope to Intel; and then asking Intel to align their own mobile CPU roadmap, to produce mobile chips for Apple that would work well within said thermal envelope. And then Intel was coming back 2.5 years later, at hardware integration time, with... basically their desktop chips but with more sleep states. No efficiency cores, no lower base-clocks, no power-draw-lowering IP cores (e.g. acceleration of video-codecs), no anything that we today would expect "a good mobile CPU" to be based around. Not even in the Atom. Apple already knew exactly what they wanted in a mobile CPU — they built them themselves, for their phones. They likely tried to tell Intel at various points exactly what features of their iPhone SoCs they wanted Intel to "borrow" into the mobile chips they were making. But Intel just couldn't do it — at least, not at the time. (It took Intel until 2022 to put out a CPU with E-cores.)
lostlogin 3y ago
> You can see this sandbagging in the old intel chassis Apple Silicon MBP where their performance is markedly worse than the ones in the newer chassis. And you can compare both of those and Intels newer chips to Apples ARM offerings.
offices 3y ago
If I was a laptop manufacturer who wanted to make money selling laptops I would not intentionally make my laptops worse.

acdha 3y ago

That doesn’t make sense: everyone else got hit by Intel’s failure to deliver, too. Even if you assume Apple had some 4-D chess plan where making their own products worse was needed to justify a huge gamble, it’s not like Dell or HP were in on it. Slapping a monster heat sink and fan on can help with performance but then you’re paying with weight, battery life, and purchase price. I think a more parsimonious explanation is the accepted one: Intel was floundering for ages, Apple’s phone CPUs were booming, and a company which had suffered a lot due to supplier issues in the PowerPC era decided that they couldn’t afford to let another company have that much control over their product line. It wasn’t just things like the CPUs failing further behind but also the various chipset restrictions and inability to customize things. Apple puts a ton of hardware in to support things like security or various popular tasks (image & video processing, ML, etc.) and now that’s an internal conversation, and the net result is cheaper, cooler, and a unique selling point for them.

mattlondon 3y ago
> net result is cheaper, cooler, and a unique selling point for them That and they are not paying for Intel's profit margins either. Apple is the quintessential vertical integration - they own their entire stack.
- acdha 3y ago
  I was thinking of that as cheaper but there’s also a strategic aspect: Apple is comfortable making challenging long-term plans, and if one of those required them to run the Mac division at low profitability for a couple of years they’d do it far more readily than even a core supplier like Intel.
- ac29 3y ago
  Apple doesnt manufacture their own chips or assemble their own devices. They are certainly paying the profit margins of TSMC, Foxconn, and many other suppliers.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    That seems a bit pedantic, practically every HN reader will know that Apple doesn't literally mine every chunk of silicon and aluminum out of the ground themselves, so by default they, or the end customer, are paying the profit margins of thousands of intermediary companies.

Aurornis 3y ago

I doubt it was intentional, but you're very right that the old laptops had terrible thermal design. Under load, my M1 laptop can pull similar wattage to my old Intel MacBook Pro while staying virtually silent. Meanwhile the old Intel MacBook Pro sounds like a jet engine.

eyegor 3y ago
The m1/m2 chips are generally stupid effecient compared to Intel chips (or even amd/arm/etc)... Are you sure the power draw is comparable? Apple is quite well known for kneecapping hardware with terrible thermal solutions and I don't think there are any breakthroughs in the modern chassis. I couldn't find good data on the older mbpros, but the m1 max mbpro used 1/3 the power vs an 11th gen Intel laptop to get almost identical scores in cinebench r23. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performance-review/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dijit 3y ago
  the whole premise of this thread is that this reputation isnt fully justified, and thats one I agree with. Intel for the last 10 years has been saying “if your CPU isn't 100c then theres performance on the table”. They also drastically underplayed TDP compared to, say, AMD, by taking the average TDP with frequency scaling taken into consideration. I can easily see Intel marketing to Apple that their CPUs would be fine with 10w of cooling with Intel knowing that that they wont perform as well, and Apple thinking that there will be a generational improvement on thermal efficiency.
- derefr 3y ago
  > Apple is quite well known for kneecapping hardware with terrible thermal solutions But that was my entire point (root thread comment.) It's not that Apple was taking existing Intel CPUs and designing bad thermal solutions around them. It's that Apple was designing hardware first, three years in advance of production; showing that hardware design and its thermal envelope to Intel; and then asking Intel to align their own mobile CPU roadmap, to produce mobile chips for Apple that would work well within said thermal envelope. And then Intel was coming back 2.5 years later, at hardware integration time, with... basically their desktop chips but with more sleep states. No efficiency cores, no lower base-clocks, no power-draw-lowering IP cores (e.g. acceleration of video-codecs), no anything that we today would expect "a good mobile CPU" to be based around. Not even in the Atom. Apple already knew exactly what they wanted in a mobile CPU — they built them themselves, for their phones. They likely tried to tell Intel at various points exactly what features of their iPhone SoCs they wanted Intel to "borrow" into the mobile chips they were making. But Intel just couldn't do it — at least, not at the time. (It took Intel until 2022 to put out a CPU with E-cores.)

lostlogin 3y ago

> You can see this sandbagging in the old intel chassis Apple Silicon MBP where their performance is markedly worse than the ones in the newer chassis. And you can compare both of those and Intels newer chips to Apples ARM offerings.

offices 3y ago

If I was a laptop manufacturer who wanted to make money selling laptops I would not intentionally make my laptops worse.