Apple Silicon is Overpriced and over valued in technology market

[trevpimp]

I had to read this several times. I read the whole thread and do not agree that hardware being leaps and bounds above software would cause software stagnation.

My first computer that I used as a kid was Windows 95 with a 200MB partition. Yes, I had no space to do anything but the computer was not mine. As the Pentium processors advanced, software took advantage of available hardware. Over the last decade, graphics cards have really taken off and software has advanced because of that (digital $, mass computing projects, crazy good graphics, etc).

While we have somewhat plateaued the needs of the CPU, we've found that just increasing the Ghz clock doesn't give us the gains we notice, especially today - instead, we increase the throughput for more parallel processes at once. IMO, the Operating System from Windows 95 to Now is not all that different. So running a Pentium 4 vs a modern chip today isn't going to see a lot of difference for most operations.

This is just my opinion but hardware drives software. Increasing hardware will result in software being written to take advantage of it. CPUs have not had much of a growth over the last decade imo. Apple's M CPU is amazing and the biggest jump I've ever seen in my lifetime in computing power.

On my M1 Max - I can do Parallels with a Windows 11 Arm compiling a Visual Studio project while running GB memory applications that deal with massive Oracle databases, seamlessly run 2-3 browsers opened with 20-30 tabs each, dozens of apps opened, streaming a Teams meeting sharing my screen, and according to Activity Monitor - I'm using 20% of my CPU. All this without an audible CPU fan. My i7 MacBook would scream max case fans just booting Windows 11 up not to mention doing anything in Visual Studio or the Chrome browsers.

Software can now be written to take advantage of this power.

In all my years of using computers - the power of the M1 continues to blow me away. Do I think this is stagnating software? No. Is it overpriced? No. (My opinion of course).

Right now Apple is most likely highly dependent on Silicon right now and they are probably focusing as much research as they can because right now it is a race for SoC, it is one of those times where Apple has to prove once again that they are a competing company with the likes of their opposite predecessors

Not only that because of Apple Silicon software has to be changed just as fast as it's hardware in a way they have to pull it off will be beyond measures

 

[falainber]

Current flagship desktop CPUs from AMD and Intel are faster than Apple's chips, but just barely and at the cost of massively increased thermal load and peak power consumption. I'd call that a leap, no matter how you slice it.

Also at the time of the M1's release, the top-of-the-line 27" Intel iMac with an Intel i7-10700K managed a solid 1250 single-core score in GeekBench. With the M1, the base model Air was offering ~1700 single-core in a fanless package that delivered all-day battery life. They were only released a few months apart, and that's still a bigger single-core gain than the top-range 2020 i7 iMac offers over my Late 2013 iMac, released over 7 years prior.

Single core performance is almost irrelevant in modern computing. Sure, one can use a small amount of big cores to inflate single core performance score but this won't help with most modern computing tasks that are highly parallelised.

 

[Boil]

Right now Apple is most likely highly dependent on Silicon right now...

So, Apple is dependent on the silicon they have designed for their products...? Uh, duh; this is like saying that ANY company is dependent on the components needed to make the products they sell... It is an empty statement, your lips are moving, but nothing of value is coming out...

...and they are probably focusing as much research as they can...

Yeah, why do that...? Why focus on the research to further the development of components needed for the products they sell...?

Another empty statement...

...because right now it is a race for SoC, it is one of those times where Apple has to prove once again that they are a competing company with the likes of their opposite predecessors

Apple needs to prove nothing in the "SoC Race", considering they are in the lead and have set the benchmark for all & any single-user SoCs to come...?

Not only that because of Apple Silicon software has to be changed just as fast as it's hardware in a way they have to pull it off will be beyond measures

Except they are "pulling it off", Apple is developing their software to take advantage of the hardware they are also continually developing; you make it sound like Apple has created hardware so powerful that no one will be able to develop software that will ever take full advantage of the hardware...

We get it, you are here to make ambiguous statements about how Apple is destroying the computer industry because they are actually innovating on both the hardware & software fronts and you don't like it...

Maybe loosen the strap on that red ball cap...? ;^p

 

[teh_hunterer]

Right now Apple is most likely highly dependent on Silicon right now and they are probably focusing as much research as they can because right now it is a race for SoC, it is one of those times where Apple has to prove once again that they are a competing company with the likes of their opposite predecessors

Not only that because of Apple Silicon software has to be changed just as fast as it's hardware in a way they have to pull it off will be beyond measures

Aren't you at least a little bit concerned that nobody can understand the argument you're making after 3 pages?

 

[GMShadow]

Single core performance is almost irrelevant in modern computing. Sure, one can use a small amount of big cores to inflate single core performance score but this won't help with most modern computing tasks that are highly parallelised.

Spoken like someone who has no idea what they’re talking about. Ever hear of JavaScript? It’s single threaded. It’s also used just about everywhere on the web and in many popular programs.

And it’s not just JS that’s still single threaded.

 

[ericwn]

What drives innovation could realistically be all sort of things. Believe it or not but Apple's foundation is way ahead of the current line up of products. They have plans and ideas beyond any depth we can think of that's what happens when you are high foundation. Go Apple

All we can be given are minor upgrades for years and years on end because Apple silicon is in demand at a much higher rate than we can ask for, excluding innovation we are lacking we can do much more when innovation is in demand but we so called can not because Silicon and especially Arm is way ahead of the game, market wise

What on the English speaking earth is a high foundation? Is that pointing to the hippie founders time?

 

[teh_hunterer]

I'm convinced that MacRumors is paying people to write inflammatory posts like this to get user interaction to keep this forum from dying.

Normally I would think this is conspiracy nonsense, but there certainly is a type I see here that I don't really see anywhere else. Posters who keep arguments going for as long as they can, ducking and weaving any attempts to nail down their point to specifics. Ignoring people's counter arguments, but responding with just enough vague nonsense to keep the other person hooked into replying and the controversy going.

In fact, these people all read like the same person. They have the same attitude, same level of language, same tactics. Bizarre.

 

[ahurst]

Single core performance is almost irrelevant in modern computing. Sure, one can use a small amount of big cores to inflate single core performance score but this won't help with most modern computing tasks that are highly parallelised.

That depends a lot on your workload! I work in the sciences, and in my general workflow there are a lot of libraries or custom scripts that aren't trivial to parallelize. In my field, strong single-core matters much more than it would for someone using optimized multithreaded creativity software.

As an added field-specific bonus, the M-series of chips also have absurd amounts of cache for consumer chips, which is a big benefit for heavy statistical models.

 

[theorist9]

Single core performance is almost irrelevant in modern computing. Sure, one can use a small amount of big cores to inflate single core performance score but this won't help with most modern computing tasks that are highly parallelised.

I don't know where you're getting this, but in fact the opposite is true for personal computers, which is what you were discussing. It's only a small minority of programs (typically those that do tasks that are relatively easy to parallelize, such as graphics processing: photo and video editing apps) that are configured to run on multiple cores.

In order to be able to write an app that runs on multiple cores, you need to be able to identify multiple concurrent operations that aren't continuously dependent on each other. And the kinds of tasks most apps are designed for aren't readily amenable to that.

Hence to the extent that CPU speed determines how responsive a personal computer is in normal use, what matters is ST speed much more than combined MT speed.

It's really too bad that this is the case, since most of the increase in PC processing power we've seen over the last couple of decades has come from more cores rather than faster cores*; i.e., it's been a type of performance improvement that most programs can't take advantage of. [*The transition to more cores rather than faster cores happened with the end of the "clock speed wars", when Intel realized it couldn't keep increasing clock speed without running into unacceptable heat and power issues.] [ST speed did continue to increase, but much more slowly, since it now relied mostly on improved architecture, including increased IPC, rather than being able leverage both that and increased clock speed.]

Apple understands this, which is why they designed the AS processors to offer very high ST performance, even in their thinnest and lightest machines.

*Indeed, it's to stay competitive with Apple's ST performance that Intel seems to be bringing back the clock speed wars:

The clock speed wars are back as Intel brags about hitting 6 GHz with 13th-gen CPUs

Raptor Lake boosts clocks, cache, and core counts on the same Intel 7 process.

arstechnica.com

 

[Boil]

Normally I would think this is conspiracy nonsense, but there certainly is a type I see here that I don't really see anywhere else. Posters who keep arguments going for as long as they can, ducking and weaving any attempts to nail down their point to specifics. Ignoring people's counter arguments, but responding with just enough vague nonsense to keep the other person hooked into replying and the controversy going.

In fact, these people all read like the same person. They have the same attitude, same level of language, same tactics. Bizarre.

Rogue AI...? The uploaded consciousness of Steve Jobs trolling us all...? Steve Ballmer...?

 

[falainber]

Spoken like someone who has no idea what they’re talking about. Ever hear of JavaScript? It’s single threaded. It’s also used just about everywhere on the web and in many popular programs.

And it’s not just JS that’s still single threaded.

Node.js now supports worker-threads. More importantly, JS is used a lot but almost exclusively for trivial tasks that do not require a lot of computing. Having adequate single thread performance is all that is needed.

 

[senttoschool]

Single core performance is almost irrelevant in modern computing. Sure, one can use a small amount of big cores to inflate single core performance score but this won't help with most modern computing tasks that are highly parallelised.

For normal consumers, single-core performance is more important than multi-core performance. You need a certain level of multi-core performance, then anything above is irrelevant for most consumer applications. Single-thread performance will always benefit consumer apps.

I can't think of a consumer-level application that is bottlenecked by MT.

 

[handheldgames]

Spoken like someone who has no idea what they’re talking about. Ever hear of JavaScript? It’s single threaded. It’s also used just about everywhere on the web and in many popular programs.

And it’s not just JS that’s still single threaded.

Talk about the kettle calling the pot black... Modern web based SPA's leverage service workers to handle multithreading. This is 2022 after all.

Did you know you can multithread in JavaScript? (Example)

A protip by thomaslindstr_m about performance, javascript, and multithread.

coderwall.com

 

[senttoschool]

Talk about the kettle calling the pot black... Modern web based SPA's leverage service workers to handle multithreading. This is 2022 after all.

Did you know you can multithread in JavaScript? (Example)

A protip by thomaslindstr_m about performance, javascript, and multithread.

coderwall.com

I guarantee you that 99% of SPAs do not use service workers in the browser.

 

[GMShadow]

Talk about the kettle calling the pot black... Modern web based SPA's leverage service workers to handle multithreading. This is 2022 after all.

Did you know you can multithread in JavaScript? (Example)

A protip by thomaslindstr_m about performance, javascript, and multithread.

coderwall.com

As we all know, all coding is done with the very latest methods and using best practices.

 

[orionquest]

With Apple deciding the value of SoC right now it is over priced and over valued, the other companies can't compete with the current market

It's an assurance of how everything has changed with technology this past decade

 

[throAU]

If you think about the availability of devices Apple is mainstreaming so many with such little upgrades, I will say that because Apple Silicon is overpriced and over valued it will take many years to see an upgrade which is slowing down technology progress

Positive speaking* Thats what happens when you change the game so quickly with ARM architecture with the needed Chips

You can edit multiple streams of 4k on a Mac mini for under a grand. 🤷‍♂️

 

[falainber]

For normal consumers, single-core performance is more important than multi-core performance. You need a certain level of multi-core performance, then anything above is irrelevant for most consumer applications. Single-thread performance will always benefit consumer apps.

I can't think of a consumer-level application that is bottlenecked by MT.

Depends on what you call a "consumer-level application". Many consumers do photo/image, video processing and those benefit from MT. Same goes for machine-learning (which is now part of many apps). Besides, every time the user runs more than one app simultaneously (say, web browser, music player and something else) MT is used. On the other hand, most consumer apps (calculator, notes, power-point, simple spreadsheets etc.) just don't need high performance. Yes, technically they all benefit from higher ST performance - as in, say, calc operation takes a few microseconds less which nobody will notice.

 

[falainber]

I guarantee you that 99% of SPAs do not use service workers in the browser.

That's because 98% of them don't really need them (because performance is not an issue anyways).

 

[orionquest]

Depends on what you call a "consumer-level application". Many consumers do photo/image, video processing and those benefit from MT. Same goes for machine-learning (which is now part of many apps). Besides, every time the user runs more than one app simultaneously (say, web browser, music player and something else) MT is used. On the other hand, most consumer apps (calculator, notes, power-point, simple spreadsheets etc.) just don't need high performance. Yes, technically they all benefit from higher ST performance - as in, say, calc operation takes a few microseconds less which nobody will notice.

And most of those tasks have been possible on hardware from at least the past 8 years. I'm sitting in front of a Haswell computer and can do all those things and more. 🤷‍♂️

 

[theorist9]

Depends on what you call a "consumer-level application". Many consumers do photo/image, video processing and those benefit from MT. Same goes for machine-learning (which is now part of many apps). Besides, every time the user runs more than one app simultaneously (say, web browser, music player and something else) MT is used. On the other hand, most consumer apps (calculator, notes, power-point, simple spreadsheets etc.) just don't need high performance. Yes, technically they all benefit from higher ST performance - as in, say, calc operation takes a few microseconds less which nobody will notice.

On my core i9 iMac, I often encounter situations where I'm getting spinning beachballs that last a few seconds while one of my ST applications is maxing out at 100% CPU in Activity Monitor; this happens with MS Office Applications and Adobe Acrobat Pro. This isn't microseconds, it's seconds. Most operations in Mathematica, another program I use frequently, are ST; and those can take several minutes. ST does matter on a personal computer.

Available MT is only limiting if you are running more operations than you have cores and, with the typical 8 or so cores, that's unusual for most people (unless you're running specific MT apps). Thus the limiting factor for computer speed for most users is ST, not MT.

 

[maflynn]

I will say that because Apple Silicon is overpriced and over valued

overpriced and over-valued can be viewed as the same word, where subjective opinion on the worth of a product is considered with that pedantic comment out of the way, I'm going to say that worth is a subject term and given the processing power, quality and design the current MBPs are not over priced or over valued.

Are they expensive? Sure, but so isn't other laptops of similar classification.

What is over priced? RTX4080 - 12gb model. This can be viewed as a moved justified by greed and hubris

Apple Macs do something that no other laptop can do, provide excellent battery live and top not performance while on battery. My razer's performance tanks to nearly unusable levels when running demanding software while on the battery. I can play games on my MBP and it makes no difference if its plugged in or on the battery. That alone is a killer feature that I absolutely love.

It gets really old lugging around a 230watt brick with my Razer just keep it going, where as my MBP sips so little power it will easily last all day and into the night if I need it too

That sort of engineering does not come cheap, and I find that the MBP is an incredible value

 

[theorist9]

You're also paying for for the quality of the support. In the US, all tech support is US-based, and I imagine it's the same in other countries (e.g., if you're in France, you get France-based tech support; if you're in Korea you get Korea-based tech support, etc.). Plus it's phone-based, there's generally little wait time, and if their level 1 tech support can't fix it they'll escalate to a senior advisor; and if they can't fix it they'll escalate it to the engineers.

Having locally-based and well-trained phone support, as opposed to hiring support from whatever foreign country has the cheapest possible labor costs* (and not paying extra to hire those with technical expertise or language fluency) costs money, and that's part of where your dollars are going.

*Yes, they do this with manufacturing, but they've been able to do that without compromising quality. If they could hire cheap foreign tech support that was just as good as locally-based support they would, but it's very hard to match the fluency of a native speaker (or one who has been living locally long enough to attain complete fluency).

 

[Freida]

Dude, what are you smoking? Everything you say makes literally ZERO sense!
We get faster computers than Intel and we pay the same and here you are complaining its overpriced?
Did you pay attention at elementary school?

It is overpriced in comparison to past and previous counterparts in todays market

What we are seeing is Apple taking over the market making prices with SoC's

Everything SoC is no where to be found we will now see minor improvements/designs/context with what little has changed now that SoC is in the market

ps I have been optimistic in previous posts I am speaking from a person point of view on Apple's game

 

[ArkSingularity]

Apple Silicon is actually underpriced, if you ask me. Take the cheapest Macs available, which are currently the M1 Mac Mini at $699 and the M1 Macbook Air for $999. Then compare the CPU performance and the GPU performance with x86 based laptops AND desktops in a similar price range. Apple slaughters the competition on performance AND price here.

What Apple lacks is a truly entry level SOC. Their lowest end SOC is a powerhouse (more like a firehose) compared to some of the entry level systems being made by their competitors. Can you find a $450 PC? Yea, you can, but it will probably have a dual core binned i5 and integrated graphics.