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I always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important th

I always get a little bothered when I see negative reviews from a CPU update in Apple laptops. While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. I’ve been in this situation many times with Apple and it has been very frustrating. I’m glad they are back on a yearly refresh schedule. I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.

ebbi 1y ago
Agree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it looks the same. I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some people want more frequent design changes!
- wmf 1y ago
  Intel released new CPUs every year; they shouldn't be blamed when Apple refused to update.
  - al_borland 1y ago
    I remember reading about an aging Mac Pro not seeing an update because the Xeon chips it used hadn’t seen an update from Intel. I’m sure Intel had some releases each year, but did they have the right ones to make it possible for Apple to release an update?
  - stetrain 1y ago
    Intel had multiple years of promising that their new next-gen more efficient 10nm CPUs were coming very soon, and then those kept being delayed. The chips they did release in that time period were mostly minor revisions of the same architecture. Apple was pretty clearly building chassis designs for the CPUs that Intel was promising to release, and those struggled with thermal management of the chips that Intel actually had on the market. And Apple got tired of waiting for Intel and having their hardware designs out of sync with the available chips.
    - close04 1y ago
      > and those struggled with thermal management of the chips An ironic mirror of the PowerPC era when every version of the G5 was struggling with high power consumption and heat generation when operated at any competitive frequency/performance level. The top end models like the 2.5GHz quad-G5 needed water cooling, consumed 250W when idle, and needed a 1kW PSU. Intel's offering at the time was as revolutionary as the M-series chips.
      - stetrain 1y ago
        Yep, it was a very similar situation where Apple wanted to keep their hardware cadence but were beholden to a third party on the chip roadmap. These days they're still somewhat beholden to TSMC continuing to make progress on nodes etc, but I think they have a closer partnership and a lot more insight into that roadmap so they can keep their hardware plans in sync.
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    Indeed. There was a significant period where they, er, weren't really better than last year's, though. Remember Broadwell? Followed by Skylake, which took about two years to go from "theoretically available" to "actually usable". And then Skylake's successors, which were broadly the same as Skylake for about four years.
- tpmoney 1y ago
  Apple is the company where every new iPhone release is both simultaneously boring, not worth it and a sure sign of their impending collapse and also somehow a vicious treadmill which forces people to upgrade every year, throwing out their old phone and contributing to e-waste. They could announce a cure for cancer tomorrow and within a month people would be back to asking what have they innovated recently. People just like to complain.
  - nativeit 1y ago
    Maybe I'm a weird one, but I'm still quite happy on my iPhone 12.
    - vishnugupta 1y ago
      Add me to the group. I’m on iPhone 11 and I couldn’t be happier. I do follow their new launches and then look at what I have. It looks and works like new, have absolutely no complaints. 6+ years and going strong.
    - edu 1y ago
      iPhone 12 mini here, I replaced the battery last year, and still going strong. Actually, I fear the day I'm forced to upgrade due not having the mini size available anymore...
      - molszanski 1y ago
        Replaced 12 mini with 17 pro. Not worth it. Will go back. Too big too heavy
    - f1shy 1y ago
      I changed my iPhone 8 about 1 year ago. Now I have a 16, which I will probably be using in 2031
  - NaOH 1y ago
    People quickly become accustomed to common occurrences that are not threatening (like extreme weather events). Apollo 8 was the first time humans reached the moon, just orbiting it. Sixteen months later, in a time with much less media and information than we have now, US TV networks chose not to broadcast an en-route feed for Apollo 13 because this was no longer seen as interesting. We often seem spoiled, we often seem prone to complaining, and we often seem more enamored with something new. Yet there are so many remarkable things we take for granted.
- KolibriFly 1y ago
  I'd much rather Apple put their energy into performance, battery life, and long-term reliability than chasing novelty for novelty's sake
- tolien 1y ago
  > So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. If ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for" - whether it's the Touch Bar, deleting ports or the butterfly keyboard, a redesign isn't necessarily a positive.
  - strbean 1y ago
    I loved the touch bar once I realized all the first party applications actually had useful customizations for it. When you used the Terminal app, there was literally a "man" button that would open the relevant man page (for whatever command you currently had typed) in a new window. Actually an awesome feature if application authors got on board. Making the power button part of the bar instead of a physical button sucked though.
  - ebbi 1y ago
    You know, I would not be mad if the Touch Bar made a return sitting above the function row keys. If they had done that from the beginning, I think the reception to Touch Bar would have been a lot more positive.
makeitdouble 1y ago
Yes. The review ecosystem is really toxic in that regard, as makers will court to it. We had the silly unboxing videos fade, and it meant gorgeous packaging flying in the face of recyclability and cost reduction. I wonder if the glass backs and utterly shiny but heavy and PITA to repair design is also part from there. A reviewer doesn't care that much if it costs half the phone to repair the back panel.
- thenthenthen 1y ago
  Makers? Could you expand on this?
  - amarant 1y ago
    He means OEMs. Device manufacturers. Examples include Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, etc etc.
  - marcosdumay 1y ago
    You can replace it with "manufacturer", I do think it becomes clearer. Maker has a specific connotation, but technically still fits on the GP.
throw0101c 1y ago
> While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. Also: incremental updates add up. A (e.g.) 7% increase from one year to the next isn't a big deal, but +7%, +7%, +7%, …, adds up when you finally come up for a tech refresh after 3-5 years.
- ecshafer 1y ago
  Its 2025, the fact that Apple is delivering CPUs with actual, noticeable annual performance improvements is pretty astounding in itself. Sure its not 1990s levels, but its still pretty great.
  - NaomiLehman 1y ago
    M silicon/SoC is the best thing to happen to computing, for me. I have 64GBs of RAM in my Macbook Pro. I load a 48GB DuckDB to RAM and run real-time, split-second, complex, unique analysis using Polars and Superset. Nothing like this was possible before unless I had a supercomputer.
    - Citizen_Lame 1y ago
      Have you tried other PC with 64 GB of RAM?
      - NaomiLehman 1y ago
        yes. we have PCs. AFAIK, the cheapest PC that compares for my workflow is an EPYC/NUMA or another very expensive CPU/latency optimized server. We have a complex stack, with clients running unique queries that we can't predict and gigabytes loaded into RAM, L3 cache doesn't always save us. I haven't found another solution, I wish we could drop the Macs cause the OS is pretty awful. We're using Macs as servers. But it's a small operation.
        1y ago
staplers 1y ago
it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things One could argue our entire society is tainted by this effect (news, politics, etc)
appreciatorBus 1y ago
It's so tiresome. Every car company in the world realized that yearly product updates was the way to go, and no one whines that this year's model isn't good enough to justify upgrading from the previous year.
- nradov 1y ago
  The auto market doesn't really work that way any more. Each new model is now expected to last about 8 years (plus or minus depending on the manufacturer) with only one minor mid-cycle refresh.
NeoA3on 1y ago
I don’t think most people are upset about the update itself. They’re just reacting to the mismatch between the scale of the improvements and the scale of the marketing.
- haritha-j 1y ago
  To be fair apple didn't even market this launch, it was a very quiet release, but the reviewers needed to make content, so here we are. That's not to say that they generally aren't guilty of making massive fanfare about ridiculously incremental phone updates and swapping the location of the camera bump just to make it look different.
adastra22 1y ago
Yeah, I literally just bought an M4 device mere weeks before the M5 came out. The performance jump is nontrivial for my use case. Am I worried about it? Nah. In another year there will be another jump, and then the year after. I’m just on a different upgrade cadence, that’s all. Meanwhile back in the pre-M1 days I remember stalking Mac rumors for moths trying to make sure I wasn’t going to buy right before their once-in-blue-moon product refresh. You could buy a Mac and get most of its useful life before they upgrade the chip, if you timed it right, so an upgrade right after you bought was a real kick in the pants.
troupo 1y ago
My worry is that all their hardware teams are now on the same "must release yearly with insane marketing" cycle as software.
drcongo 1y ago
Nobody realy talks about the knock on effects of the attention economy. I opted out of it a long time ago, I despise YouTubers, TikTokers etc. because of the world they're shaping, and it's not just the injection of mindless rubbish into people's brains, it's real world effects like you outline in your second paragraph. It amazes me when I see seemingly smart people on HN talking about how they're addicted to YouTube "Shorts", it's like being addicted to labotomies.
benjiro 1y ago
> I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. The problem is that our hardware as we know it, has lost a lot of its stretch. Used to be that we got 100% performance gains on a generation to generation update. Then it became 50%, 30% ... Like in the GPU market, the last generation that actually got me exited was the 1000 series (1070 specific). Now its "boring" 10 a 15% upgrades for the same generation (if we do not count naming / pricing rearrangements). When was the last time any of use was "hey, i am exited to potentially buy this tech, really". Apple M1 comes to mind, and that is 5 years ago. Nvidia tried to push the whole ray tracing (a bit too early), but again, its just a incremental update to graphics (as we had a lot of tricks to simulate lighting effects that had good performance). So again, kind of a boring gain if we look back. Mobile gaming handhelds was trilling, steam deck... Then we got competitors but with high price tags = excitement became less. And now, nobody blinks with a new generation gets released because the CPU/iGPU gains are the same boring 15 a 20%... So who wants to put down 700, 900 Euro for a 15% gain. What has really gotten you exited? Where your just willing to throw money at something? AI? And we see the same issue with LLMs ... what used to be big step/gain, in barely a years has gone from massive gains, to incremental gains. 10% better on this benchmark, 5% better there, ... So it becomes boring (GPT5 launch and reaction, Sora 2 launch and reaction). > When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. If you think about it, there is a reason why tech channels have issues and are even more clickbait then ever. Those people live on views, so when the tech they follow/review is boring to the audience, they start pushing more and more clickbait. But that eventually burning the channels. Unfortunately, we have a entire industry that is designed around making parts smaller and smaller every generation, to make those gains. As we lost the ability to make large gains on making those smaller making parts ... Its ironic, as we knew this was coming and yet, it seems nobody made any breakthrough at all. Quantum computing was a field that everybody knew had no road to general computing at home (materials issues). So what is left is the same old, lets may the die a bit smaller, gain a bit, do some optimizing left and right, and call it a new product. But for customers, getting product 2.1, being named "this is our product 3.0!!!! Buy buy" ... when customers see its just 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 ... We are in a boring time because companies sat too darn long on their behinds, milking their exiting products but never really figured how to make new products. I think the only one that took a risk was Intel years ago, and it blew up in their face. So yes, unless some smart cookie makes a new invention, that can revolutionize how we make chips (and that can be mass produced), boring is the standard now. No matter how companies try to repackage it.
KolibriFly 1y ago
Agree... regular, even if "boring," updates are a feature, not a bug
ndiddy 1y ago
One thing that bothers me about the lack of a redesign is that it means there's been no progress on minimizing or getting rid of the notch. Apple is clearly able to do this, they made the notch smaller on iPhones a few years ago, but on Macs it's just as big and intrusive as it was when they introduced it 4 years ago. To me, this indicates that Apple either doesn't care about how intrusive having a big gap in the middle of the menu bar is, or worse, considers it a part of the Mac's "brand identity" now, something that indicates at a glance that someone's using a Mac.
- MattTheRealOne 1y ago
  I agree. Apple needs to either shrink the notch or add Face ID. I was surprised Face ID was not included initially with the notch, but figured there was a last minute problem or something. But here we are several revisions later, and still no change.

ebbi 1y ago

Agree. So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. I remember the time people were (rightfully) complaining that the update schedules were slow for Macs, mainly because of Intel's limitations. Now we get yearly refresh, they complain that it looks the same. I don't think they appreciate the cost of redesigning and retooling. Echo your thoughts and hope Apple doesn't listen to this feedback. Imagine more expensive laptops because some people want more frequent design changes!

wmf 1y ago
Intel released new CPUs every year; they shouldn't be blamed when Apple refused to update.
- al_borland 1y ago
  I remember reading about an aging Mac Pro not seeing an update because the Xeon chips it used hadn’t seen an update from Intel. I’m sure Intel had some releases each year, but did they have the right ones to make it possible for Apple to release an update?
- stetrain 1y ago
  Intel had multiple years of promising that their new next-gen more efficient 10nm CPUs were coming very soon, and then those kept being delayed. The chips they did release in that time period were mostly minor revisions of the same architecture. Apple was pretty clearly building chassis designs for the CPUs that Intel was promising to release, and those struggled with thermal management of the chips that Intel actually had on the market. And Apple got tired of waiting for Intel and having their hardware designs out of sync with the available chips.
  - close04 1y ago
    > and those struggled with thermal management of the chips An ironic mirror of the PowerPC era when every version of the G5 was struggling with high power consumption and heat generation when operated at any competitive frequency/performance level. The top end models like the 2.5GHz quad-G5 needed water cooling, consumed 250W when idle, and needed a 1kW PSU. Intel's offering at the time was as revolutionary as the M-series chips.
    - stetrain 1y ago
      Yep, it was a very similar situation where Apple wanted to keep their hardware cadence but were beholden to a third party on the chip roadmap. These days they're still somewhat beholden to TSMC continuing to make progress on nodes etc, but I think they have a closer partnership and a lot more insight into that roadmap so they can keep their hardware plans in sync.
- rsynnott 1y ago
  Indeed. There was a significant period where they, er, weren't really better than last year's, though. Remember Broadwell? Followed by Skylake, which took about two years to go from "theoretically available" to "actually usable". And then Skylake's successors, which were broadly the same as Skylake for about four years.
tpmoney 1y ago
Apple is the company where every new iPhone release is both simultaneously boring, not worth it and a sure sign of their impending collapse and also somehow a vicious treadmill which forces people to upgrade every year, throwing out their old phone and contributing to e-waste. They could announce a cure for cancer tomorrow and within a month people would be back to asking what have they innovated recently. People just like to complain.
- nativeit 1y ago
  Maybe I'm a weird one, but I'm still quite happy on my iPhone 12.
  - vishnugupta 1y ago
    Add me to the group. I’m on iPhone 11 and I couldn’t be happier. I do follow their new launches and then look at what I have. It looks and works like new, have absolutely no complaints. 6+ years and going strong.
  - edu 1y ago
    iPhone 12 mini here, I replaced the battery last year, and still going strong. Actually, I fear the day I'm forced to upgrade due not having the mini size available anymore...
    - molszanski 1y ago
      Replaced 12 mini with 17 pro. Not worth it. Will go back. Too big too heavy
  - f1shy 1y ago
    I changed my iPhone 8 about 1 year ago. Now I have a 16, which I will probably be using in 2031
- NaOH 1y ago
  People quickly become accustomed to common occurrences that are not threatening (like extreme weather events). Apollo 8 was the first time humans reached the moon, just orbiting it. Sixteen months later, in a time with much less media and information than we have now, US TV networks chose not to broadcast an en-route feed for Apollo 13 because this was no longer seen as interesting. We often seem spoiled, we often seem prone to complaining, and we often seem more enamored with something new. Yet there are so many remarkable things we take for granted.
KolibriFly 1y ago
I'd much rather Apple put their energy into performance, battery life, and long-term reliability than chasing novelty for novelty's sake
tolien 1y ago
> So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design. If ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for" - whether it's the Touch Bar, deleting ports or the butterfly keyboard, a redesign isn't necessarily a positive.
- strbean 1y ago
  I loved the touch bar once I realized all the first party applications actually had useful customizations for it. When you used the Terminal app, there was literally a "man" button that would open the relevant man page (for whatever command you currently had typed) in a new window. Actually an awesome feature if application authors got on board. Making the power button part of the bar instead of a physical button sucked though.
- ebbi 1y ago
  You know, I would not be mad if the Touch Bar made a return sitting above the function row keys. If they had done that from the beginning, I think the reception to Touch Bar would have been a lot more positive.

makeitdouble 1y ago

Yes. The review ecosystem is really toxic in that regard, as makers will court to it. We had the silly unboxing videos fade, and it meant gorgeous packaging flying in the face of recyclability and cost reduction. I wonder if the glass backs and utterly shiny but heavy and PITA to repair design is also part from there. A reviewer doesn't care that much if it costs half the phone to repair the back panel.

thenthenthen 1y ago
Makers? Could you expand on this?
- amarant 1y ago
  He means OEMs. Device manufacturers. Examples include Apple, Samsung, Lenovo, etc etc.
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  You can replace it with "manufacturer", I do think it becomes clearer. Maker has a specific connotation, but technically still fits on the GP.

throw0101c 1y ago

> While a new CPU alone isn’t a thrilling update, it’s important that they do these regularly so consumers looking to buy aren’t forced to buy a 3 year old product with no idea when a refresh will come. Also: incremental updates add up. A (e.g.) 7% increase from one year to the next isn't a big deal, but +7%, +7%, +7%, …, adds up when you finally come up for a tech refresh after 3-5 years.

ecshafer 1y ago
Its 2025, the fact that Apple is delivering CPUs with actual, noticeable annual performance improvements is pretty astounding in itself. Sure its not 1990s levels, but its still pretty great.
- NaomiLehman 1y ago
  M silicon/SoC is the best thing to happen to computing, for me. I have 64GBs of RAM in my Macbook Pro. I load a 48GB DuckDB to RAM and run real-time, split-second, complex, unique analysis using Polars and Superset. Nothing like this was possible before unless I had a supercomputer.
  - Citizen_Lame 1y ago
    Have you tried other PC with 64 GB of RAM?
    - NaomiLehman 1y ago
      yes. we have PCs. AFAIK, the cheapest PC that compares for my workflow is an EPYC/NUMA or another very expensive CPU/latency optimized server. We have a complex stack, with clients running unique queries that we can't predict and gigabytes loaded into RAM, L3 cache doesn't always save us. I haven't found another solution, I wish we could drop the Macs cause the OS is pretty awful. We're using Macs as servers. But it's a small operation.
      - 1y ago

staplers 1y ago

it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things One could argue our entire society is tainted by this effect (news, politics, etc)

appreciatorBus 1y ago

It's so tiresome. Every car company in the world realized that yearly product updates was the way to go, and no one whines that this year's model isn't good enough to justify upgrading from the previous year.

nradov 1y ago
The auto market doesn't really work that way any more. Each new model is now expected to last about 8 years (plus or minus depending on the manufacturer) with only one minor mid-cycle refresh.

NeoA3on 1y ago

I don’t think most people are upset about the update itself. They’re just reacting to the mismatch between the scale of the improvements and the scale of the marketing.

haritha-j 1y ago
To be fair apple didn't even market this launch, it was a very quiet release, but the reviewers needed to make content, so here we are. That's not to say that they generally aren't guilty of making massive fanfare about ridiculously incremental phone updates and swapping the location of the camera bump just to make it look different.

adastra22 1y ago

Yeah, I literally just bought an M4 device mere weeks before the M5 came out. The performance jump is nontrivial for my use case. Am I worried about it? Nah. In another year there will be another jump, and then the year after. I’m just on a different upgrade cadence, that’s all. Meanwhile back in the pre-M1 days I remember stalking Mac rumors for moths trying to make sure I wasn’t going to buy right before their once-in-blue-moon product refresh. You could buy a Mac and get most of its useful life before they upgrade the chip, if you timed it right, so an upgrade right after you bought was a real kick in the pants.

troupo 1y ago

My worry is that all their hardware teams are now on the same "must release yearly with insane marketing" cycle as software.

drcongo 1y ago

Nobody realy talks about the knock on effects of the attention economy. I opted out of it a long time ago, I despise YouTubers, TikTokers etc. because of the world they're shaping, and it's not just the injection of mindless rubbish into people's brains, it's real world effects like you outline in your second paragraph. It amazes me when I see seemingly smart people on HN talking about how they're addicted to YouTube "Shorts", it's like being addicted to labotomies.

benjiro 1y ago

> I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. The problem is that our hardware as we know it, has lost a lot of its stretch. Used to be that we got 100% performance gains on a generation to generation update. Then it became 50%, 30% ... Like in the GPU market, the last generation that actually got me exited was the 1000 series (1070 specific). Now its "boring" 10 a 15% upgrades for the same generation (if we do not count naming / pricing rearrangements). When was the last time any of use was "hey, i am exited to potentially buy this tech, really". Apple M1 comes to mind, and that is 5 years ago. Nvidia tried to push the whole ray tracing (a bit too early), but again, its just a incremental update to graphics (as we had a lot of tricks to simulate lighting effects that had good performance). So again, kind of a boring gain if we look back. Mobile gaming handhelds was trilling, steam deck... Then we got competitors but with high price tags = excitement became less. And now, nobody blinks with a new generation gets released because the CPU/iGPU gains are the same boring 15 a 20%... So who wants to put down 700, 900 Euro for a 15% gain. What has really gotten you exited? Where your just willing to throw money at something? AI? And we see the same issue with LLMs ... what used to be big step/gain, in barely a years has gone from massive gains, to incremental gains. 10% better on this benchmark, 5% better there, ... So it becomes boring (GPT5 launch and reaction, Sora 2 launch and reaction). > When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. If you think about it, there is a reason why tech channels have issues and are even more clickbait then ever. Those people live on views, so when the tech they follow/review is boring to the audience, they start pushing more and more clickbait. But that eventually burning the channels. Unfortunately, we have a entire industry that is designed around making parts smaller and smaller every generation, to make those gains. As we lost the ability to make large gains on making those smaller making parts ... Its ironic, as we knew this was coming and yet, it seems nobody made any breakthrough at all. Quantum computing was a field that everybody knew had no road to general computing at home (materials issues). So what is left is the same old, lets may the die a bit smaller, gain a bit, do some optimizing left and right, and call it a new product. But for customers, getting product 2.1, being named "this is our product 3.0!!!! Buy buy" ... when customers see its just 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 ... We are in a boring time because companies sat too darn long on their behinds, milking their exiting products but never really figured how to make new products. I think the only one that took a risk was Intel years ago, and it blew up in their face. So yes, unless some smart cookie makes a new invention, that can revolutionize how we make chips (and that can be mass produced), boring is the standard now. No matter how companies try to repackage it.

KolibriFly 1y ago

Agree... regular, even if "boring," updates are a feature, not a bug

ndiddy 1y ago

One thing that bothers me about the lack of a redesign is that it means there's been no progress on minimizing or getting rid of the notch. Apple is clearly able to do this, they made the notch smaller on iPhones a few years ago, but on Macs it's just as big and intrusive as it was when they introduced it 4 years ago. To me, this indicates that Apple either doesn't care about how intrusive having a big gap in the middle of the menu bar is, or worse, considers it a part of the Mac's "brand identity" now, something that indicates at a glance that someone's using a Mac.

MattTheRealOne 1y ago
I agree. Apple needs to either shrink the notch or add Face ID. I was surprised Face ID was not included initially with the notch, but figured there was a last minute problem or something. But here we are several revisions later, and still no change.