10 ms·
I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again: - Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
by bayindirh 2mo ago
I know, this is a bit of a meaningless comment, but it's funny in a way. Feels like late 90s again:
- Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.
- Apple: *Meep Meep...*
- qwertytyyuu 2mo agoEchos of the ai race as well haha
- mr_toad 2mo agoApple levelled up in the middle of a fight.
- forinti 2mo agoCheap RAM in 500 yards. ->
- RankingMember 2mo ago[apparent tunnel to cheap RAM painted on rock face]
- bayindirh 2mo ago...and Apple zooms through it like it's a real tunnel.
- derwiki 2mo agoReading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped
- kccqzy 2mo agoThat just sounds like a standard introvert response when one doesn’t want to walk.
- mikestew 2mo agoMight want to edit, as this would make sense/be amusing if the exec in the last sentence was Apple. That, or I can’t read.
- derwiki 2mo agoYou got it, thank you!
- troupo 2mo agoZune was probably a better player. It was too late, and arrived when MS didn't much care. There are emails unearthed in various lawsuits where you can read Bill Gates screaming at his subordinates: "why the hell can't our partners like Sony and Creative create a similar device? Give them all, give them early access to everything, work with them". In the end MS felt compelled to make their own.
- bayindirh 2mo agoSony can't be bothered to compete with Apple in that era. They were trying to recover from their DRM dreams, and their devices were already sounding great with in-house software and hardware. Creative's Muvo^2 already was the poor man's iPod with surprisingly good audio quality as well.
- cptskippy 2mo agoI feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good. When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry. I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality. Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day. The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device. This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
- nxobject 2mo agoHell hath no fury like Apple Global Security scorned...
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoTo be fair, the Zune actually was a better media player than the ipod in almost every way. That wasn't a false statement. The issue was the abysmal marketing and "me too" attitude Microsoft had (and still has).
- wat10000 2mo agoIt was better in every way you can quantify in a tech specs listing, and not in any way that actually matters to the customer.
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- aatd86 2mo agome still thinking about the iRiver H320 I was lusting after...
- stillpointlab 2mo ago100% - the iPod wasn't just good enough, it was more than enough for almost everyone. The Zune was firmly in the diminishing returns category by the time it came out.
- compiler-guy 2mo agoYep. To overcome an incumbent that sells a very good product and has momentum, it is almost never enough to be somewhat better. You have to be "knock my socks off" better. The Zune may have been somewhat better (until the nano and iphone), but it wasn't enough better to overcome the ecosystem switching costs.
- georgel 2mo agoI had the OG white Zune. It was the same price as an iPod ~$250. The reason I chose Zune was the Zune Pass. A precursor to Spotify. Plus growing up in the Seattle area, I knew other people who had them and we would trade songs.
- bingo-bongo 2mo agoSimon Sinek - Apple vs Microsoft: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jEOftmUJ6a4 But it had nothing to do with the iPod/iPhone release in his story. (story starts ~1:15, but I highly recommend the entire talk)
- mark_l_watson 2mo agoI loved the book The Infinite Game. Really changed how I looked at work, personal research, and being an author. Recommended!
- shuwix 2mo agoActually, Microsoft came with "modern" smart phone much sooner. Actually too soon, technology wasn't there (price, computing power, size, weight, battery life). Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend.
- __alexs 2mo agoWindows CE (1996) was garbage compared to Palm OS (also 1996.)
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2mo ago>Apple never came first ... but often just at the right moment and had marketing skills to make it a new trend. Newton.
- simondotau 2mo agoFun fact: the Newton was the first mobile device to use an ARM CPU.
- skrebbel 2mo agoI'm the opposite of an Apple fanboy (typing this on a Windows box), but this is some grade A nonsense. Sure, MS launched PDAs and phone-ish devices long ago, running Windows CE and whatnot but they were awful. It's absolute bollocks that the iPhone was a splashing success because of Apple marketing. It was a splashing success because it worked spectacularly well. Random non-tech people would randomly pull out their newest purchase to show their friends. "And now it's a notepad!" "Look and now suddenly it's a calculator!" Sure, your awful HP Tablet had all that, and a call function, well before. But it sucked. It felt like using a computer while squinting, and not like a magic calculator that can turn into a notepad and then into a phone and then into an iPod. The iPhone was a success because it worked so well. And it worked so well because the technology was there - in part because they invented it and in part because they had the taste to not bring out a shit product but wait a bit instead.
- 2mo ago
- adventured 2mo agoThe anecdote is likely a false rip of the actual story: [2017] Speaking at an event Tuesday, Scott Forstall, who lead Apple's iOS software division under Jobs, recounted the surprising history behind the company's first touchscreen prototype, which ultimately lead to the first iPhone. It all began, Forstall said, because Jobs had an acquaintance at Microsoft who he really, really, didn't like. "It began because Steve hated this guy at Microsoft," Forstall said during the event. "Any time Steve had any interaction with the guy, he'd come back pissed off." The unnamed Microsoft exec, who was apparently the husband of a friend of Jobs' wife, apparently bragged so much it pushed Jobs over the edge. "He just shoved it in Steve's face -- the way they were going to rule the world with their new tablets with their pens. He came in on Monday with a set of expletives and then was like 'let's show them how it's really done.' " https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-microsoft-grudge https://mashable.com/article/scott-forstall-steve-jobs-micro...
- meowface 2mo agoSpite cam actually be one of the most powerful motivators for productivity, in my own experience. I can buy this story being accurate.
- astrange 2mo agoIn Steve's case "fueled by spite" would be more precisely "borderline personality disorder". If you read him in that lens it might help distinguish how to be successful like him without all of the bad parts.
- ziofill 2mo agoIMHO the iPod nano (the little puck with a touchscreen that you could clip on stuff) was the best player I ever had.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoIt's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.
- dbspin 2mo ago> even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops. When plugged in... This caveat is so enormous it should almost be legislated. If your computer use is at all portable, a computer that scales down to 20 - 40% of GPU power when unplugged is an enormously significant factor. So far as I'm aware (could be wrong about arm devices?) there's no non-apple laptop that operates at 100% speed on the road.
- bryanlarsen 2mo agoHave you tried Panther Lake or Wildcat Lake laptops?
- PUSH_AX 2mo agoApple is like the Billy Mitchell of computing. Just waited for them to beat it before announcing the gains they were sitting on.
- inigyou 2mo agoDoes this imply they faked all their benchmarks?
- aksss 2mo agoFunny, wasn't getting the reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell_(gamer) THE (Col.) Billy Mitchell was actually a badass. His time in Alaska alone, running telegraph lines in the wilderness, made him a legend even before his forward thinking during WWI and beyond.
- Zylokloto 2mo agoI do not find it funny tbh. I'm very very surprised that Xiaomi matches Apples speed even with the newest release, its not diminishing Xiaomis success.
- smith7018 2mo agoI think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.
- bayindirh 2mo agoI find it funny not because I support Apple. I find it funny because it feels like the leapfrogging happened in early superscalar CPU evolution. The era when the Moore's Law was working. I enjoy it because of progress, not because of Apple.
- giwook 2mo agoIt's interesting to see how defensive some of these pro-China posters get on HN and elsewhere. I'm genuinely curious why there seems to be an inferiority complex here with respect to America/American companies.
- cyanydeez 2mo agoI find pro apple comments funnier; but you know, everyones got their own rose colored glasses.
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo agoI wish I could understand how they created a cult like following despite having mid tier products. They somehow convinced people low power consumption on CPU mattered.
- officeplant 2mo ago
- handbanana_ 2mo agoHaha, late 90s wasn't really like that though
- ajross 2mo agoTo be fair, this kind of dominance is not unprecedented. Intel was even further ahead in the early 2000's. Every new competitor process was further behind the leading edge and not closer. TSMC started launching half nodes like 28nm just to have something in the market that would sell. But then you started to see the cracks. New competitors would launch new products with very slightly better metrics than Intel's older stuff, just to be, heh, meep-meeped at the next press conference. But the overlap was real, if small. And it grew over time until everyone looked up around the 5nm node and realized Intel had lost. That's where we are right now with Apple. "Funny in a way", sure. But history says this is more likely to be the beginning of the end. Everything goes in cycles.
- nasretdinov 2mo agoTBH Apple never should've been the one who makes the best CPUs -- that's not really their area of expertise historically speaking either. It just appears that everyone else did such a terrible job for so long that they caught up
- bayindirh 2mo ago> It just appears that everyone else did such a terrible job for so long that they caught up Or, Apple bought P.A. Semi and gave them the money and manpower they needed and they made a great job of designing CPUs and GPUs.
- pavlov 2mo agoIn the ‘90s it was the opposite. - Apple: We have matched Intel in CPU performance thanks to this new PowerPC! (Shows ad that uses carefully handpicked benchmarks to suggest that the PowerPC is actually faster when it really isn’t on average) - Intel: Oh, we just found a 30% clock rate increase in the pocket of our other fab pants. - AMD: Hold my beer, I have the DEC Alpha guys making an x86 CPU… How about 64-bit while at it.
- bayindirh 2mo agoI said late 90s though. The insanity which poured through early 2000s. 5.25GHz Pentium 4s, intentionally lower binned Athlons, the era your CPU got obsoleted the moment you booted it for the first time. I don't remember early 90s much. I was too young back then. I don't remember much stuff from that era. But late 90s, early 2000s. Oh, boy. P.S.: AMD64 was a great sucker punch though. One of the professors in our university rejected to believe and got mad when he learnt that Intel licensed AMD64 from AMD, heh.
- nxobject 2mo agoIronically enough, I knew a polar opposite prof… swore off Intel after the FDIV bug (he did cosmological simulations on Beowulf clusters)… although he was a stickler for time management, when Opteron came out he threw out his summer schedule to find grant money for a new cluster.
- 0x457 2mo agoI had a G4 MacBook when I switched to the first-gen Intel MacBooks, and subjectively, the G4 performed much, much better. Probably because the best pairing for any Intel CPU is thermal throttling.
- crest 2mo agoA lot of the important applications took a while to get ported. Also the last two generations of G4 hardware just overclocked basically unchanged chips. The 12" G4 laptop was infamous for slowly cooking your junk with their titanium shell.
- Gud 2mo agoExcept in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoReally? You could run OS X on any hardware you bought? Or OpenVMS?
- bayindirh 2mo agoThat's sadly true though. Also booting something was really simple. Now we boot an embedded microcontroller (or CPU) which boots the main CPU which boots another OS semi-persistently to boot the main OS (if it's allowed). Sometimes there are other processors needs to be up to allow processor to continue booting as well (these are mostly servers, but eh).
- thsv32r2 2mo agoYou can still have the 90s OS experience, even today, but these days we use the name bootloader, not operating system, for that amount of functionality.
- reaperducer 2mo agoExcept in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought. What OS could I have loaded onto my Macintosh SE/30 that wasn't from Apple?
- Gud 2mo agoNetBSD. Still supported, by the way. Does Apple support your Macintosh SE/30 still? I believe Linux was also supported. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/
- reaperducer 2mo agoNetBSD for the Mac didn't come out until after the SE/30 was already discontinued, and even then was little more than a crashy, unusable beta mess, not a real operating system. It was a tech demo, not something you could do work with.
- yard2010 2mo agoI just want to take a minute and be grateful for getting the chance to live through the 90s again. I always felt a bit sorry for myself being a child through the og 90s. Now I feel like in a decade or so into the future I will look back and be happy I got to live in the naïve days of windows 95 again, as an adult this time. I really appreciate it.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoSeems most computer companies are still boasting that they can beat the M1 and it's like...congrats on beating a 6 year old chipset?
- bob1029 2mo agoI still have zero urgency in upgrading from my M1 MBP.
- ant6n 2mo agoI don’t get that sentiment. I have an m4 16gb and it’s such a sluggish machine. and that’s not even doing development, just browsers, word, excel, PowerPoint. (And so many eternal bugs… I feel like I’m on windows)
- georgel 2mo agoI have an M2 Pro MBP 16GB, compared to the latest MBP issued by my employer a couple months ago, I see zero difference in real world performance. Can’t speak for Office on Mac, I have not used it in over a decade, but for typical full stack web dev I literally don’t need anything more.
- omnimus 2mo agoYou better check health of your machine then.
- ant6n 2mo agoI think software makes it sick. Perhaps it would be better without it.
- alistairSH 2mo agoSounds broken, somehow. The M1 iPad Pro I just traded in worked fine. Traded it for a Neo and the Neo does some stuff faster, but for day-to-day casual use, it's not notably different.
- 2mo ago
- chvid 2mo agoThe US “export controls” what Chinese companies can buy at TSMC.
- reaperducer 2mo agoXiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance. Apple: Meep Meep... This seems to happen repeatedly. Apple: Look at this cool new chip! Others: Look how we very slightly passed Apple (six months later, with worse thermals and power consumption) Apple: Look at this even cooler new chip!
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo agoYay a CPU in 2026! My YouTube will load 0.00001s faster!
- jonplackett 2mo agoI think it’s weird to say Apple is faster than Xiaomi when both are just using arm chips and using TSMC to build them, and this chip is only any faster because TSMC made a smaller node. I know Apple do some special hardware software integration magic too.
- alain94040 2mo agoApple is not "just using arm chips". They have been designing their own 100% custom cores for more than a decade.
- jonplackett 2mo agoYes as I said in the comment, I know they do design them - based on arm. But come on - if they had to use intel’s fab - their chips would be terrible. The reason the m6 is faster is largely because TSMC invented a smaller process node.
- NetMageSCW 2mo agoSo, so incredibly incorrect.
- jonplackett 2mo agoOk so why is m6 only a tiny increment faster. If they made it on the same node as last time it Would basically be the same speed. Apple are not wizards. They did the bulk of the work making m1 and the subsequent chips have just been on faster nodes
- saagarjha 2mo agoApple is in talks to fab their new chips with Intel. You are very wrong in how their microarchitecture is developed.
- 2mo ago
- Perepiska 2mo agoJoke from 201x: Apple: our CEO is gay. Samsung: our CEO is also gay and waterproof.
- oceansky 2mo agoI know Xiaomi is very far from small, but Apple is the multi-trillion dollar company, not the underdog in the race.
- bayindirh 2mo agoIt's not about the sides, it's about the progress. If the names were reversed or were different, I'd be submitting the same comment, again. I believe I said the same thing down below somewhere, but it's too buried to find now.