Did Apple bringing Silicon into lineup distract you from other computer brands?

[trevpimp]

Ive been searching on the internet for news and rumors of other brands switching to ARM chips but I have not read any so far

Its been a long time since I appreciated other computer brands and since apple brought silicon to the table it feels so distant to look elsewhere other than Apple in terms of performance

 

[cmaier]

Ive been searching on the internet for news and rumors of other brands switching to ARM chips but I have not read any so far

Its been a long time since I appreciated other computer brands and since apple brought silicon to the table it feels so distant to look elsewhere other than Apple in terms of performance

There aren’t yet any other sources of competitively-performing Arm chips for computers (servers aside). So don’t hold your breath.

 

[pshufd]

It's not just the CPU. I would like to do a 5900x or 5950x but I can't get get them at MSRP. And forget about GPUs. I could buy an Alienware but then I'd have to settle for Dell's configurations and I don't really care for them. They use small cases so you have to go with water cooling for the high-end AMD CPUs.

I do not know how long the CPU/GPU shortages will last but I like that Apple will be able to make very high-performance CPUs and GPUs. Performance-per-watt is a super-added bonus. I also prefer macOS. So yeah, not looking seriously at any other brands.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I went full Apple in 2015 after using a 2011 MBA for awhile (along side a primary Windows desktop). I never looked back. Yes, I built an AMD gaming machine last year but I didn't keep it for terribly long.

I initially laughed at the M1, thought it was ridiculous and silly - by over blown click baiting YouTubers. I had seen Surface tablets with Arm chips and thought, yeah, this thing is going to be slow as dirt and nothing will run on it.

Well.. Having had just entered the world of constant CPU fan noise on my i7 2020 MBP I found out that I could trade in my 2020 MBP and cover the cost of a M1 MBP. Because work had just provided me a 2019 MBP 15' I figured, why not?

Yeah. I was wrong. Wow, the M1 was everything I ever wanted in a laptop. Forever battery life, no audible CPU fan regardless what I was doing, instant OS actions in a MBP form. I could not use my i7 MBPs on my lap even browsing because I'd overheat even if it was 60F in the room. I can run W10 and compile X64 applications with no fan noise or heat. LOL. This thing is so fast that I'm in computer heaven. I can read on this for hours and hours and not even use 10% battery. Meanwhile, yesterday, during a hour Teams call (work - screen sharing), I burned through 40% of my i7 MBP's battery.

I am fairly engrained in the Apple ecosystem. Apple Watch, iPhone, and M1 MBP. I sold my iPad Pro earlier this year and I'm reading books on my M1 MBP - doing everything I used to do on an iPad with this thing.

The M1 MBP is significantly solidified my already fairly solid choice of staying Apple. So yeah, I guess it has distracted me - lol.

 

[thenewperson]

To your title: no, but it is a very nice side effect.

 

[spiderman0616]

Apple has been working on this for years and years. The reason it seems like they're just trying to distract you from competitors is because their competitors don't have an answer. They've been caught flat footed, and by the time they're manufacturing something that can compete, Apple will probably be on M3. The time to try to compete with M1 was 6 or 7 years ago, but instead they spent their time laughing off the notion of an ARM chip running a desktop operating system.

Same thing with Apple Watch. I'll be the first to admit that "Series 0" was not great, and probably launched about a year prematurely. But it was a solid start. So Apple just kept their heads down and concentrated on the task at hand while the competition laughed at them and pundits declared the product a flop. In terms of Apple Watch, the time to compete with that was probably 7 or 8 years ago, not by COPYING what they thought Apple Watch was going to be (ahem, SAMSUNG), but by coming up with their own tech and designs. Look at all of them now. Google is so desperate, they're hanging their hopes on Tizen for crying out loud.

 

[Apple_Robert]

No distraction just a quality product that nobody can compete against.

 

[bobcomer]

No distraction at all, M1 isn't a competitor in my job.

 

[pshufd]

HP and Dell reported blowout quarters this past week so they are selling well too. I imagine the shortages of AMD CPUs and GPUs in general had something to do with that with gamers and system builders having to buy from the box companies as they couldn't get product. The M1X, though, will be quite the game-changer as these companies won't be able to match it without really cranking up the juice.

 

[maswriter]

I switched from Windows to Mac in 2012 for a lot of reasons. I was looking to switch to Apple Silicon Macs when they came out, but I had to replace a failing 2015 MBP 13 before the M1s came out. I bought my last-of-the-Intels 2019 MBP 16 last fall, and I will be using it for a while. By the time I'm ready to replace it, I'm sure the Apple Silicon Macs will be even better and will have resolved the issues and limitations from this initial generation of products.

 

[spiderman0616]

I switched from Windows to Mac in 2012 for a lot of reasons. I was looking to switch to Apple Silicon Macs when they came out, but I had to replace a failing 2015 MBP 13 before the M1s came out. I bought my last-of-the-Intels 2019 MBP 16 last fall, and I will be using it for a while. By the time I'm ready to replace it, I'm sure the Apple Silicon Macs will be even better and will have resolved the issues and limitations from this initial generation of products.

16" Intel Mac is still an awesome machine. I wish I had waited a year to ask work to replace my work machine, and maybe I wouldn't have gotten the 2019 15" with that awful keyboard.

 

[Devin Breeding]

Not really a direct answer but pretty much everything they have done (plus the bad decisions from Google and Android) post Steve Jobs brought me on board to Apple everything. Still some lingering situations with Apple that has me saying “come on really?” but overall I’m floored with the brand and what they offter including the silicon Macs.

 

[ian87w]

Ive been searching on the internet for news and rumors of other brands switching to ARM chips but I have not read any so far

Its been a long time since I appreciated other computer brands and since apple brought silicon to the table it feels so distant to look elsewhere other than Apple in terms of performance

There's the Surface Pro X, and Snapdragon powered Samsung ultrabooks. They do get reported in the news, but Apple news brings more page views so most tech sites will spend more articles talking about Apple.

 

[Kung gu]

There's the Surface Pro X, and Snapdragon powered Samsung ultrabooks. They do get reported in the news, but Apple news brings more page views so most tech sites will spend more articles talking about Apple.

There's a reason as to why. The Surface Pro X is underpowered for the price and is not at all what a premium laptop should be. The SoC in the Surface Pro X is laughable.

As of now the M1 is only laptop ARM SoC worth talking about.

 

[cmaier]

There's the Surface Pro X, and Snapdragon powered Samsung ultrabooks. They do get reported in the news, but Apple news brings more page views so most tech sites will spend more articles talking about Apple.

It doesn’t help that that those Arm processors are years behind apple’s.

 

[BigPotatoLobbyist]

There aren’t yet any other sources of competitively-performing Arm chips for computers (servers aside). So don’t hold your breath.

what about an X2 chip on a 6NM TSMC node? Process node alone is superior to Samsung's 5NM, and the X2 is a meaningful upgrade over the X1. You keep saying this, and I certainly agree Apple is currently alone in performance, performance/watt and doing so with great multithreaded performance as well.

But as for the near future, the plausible near future no less - a cortex X2 is an ARM reference core, hardly a speculative Nuvia design. If an X2 in a laptop profile/implementation hits a 1500 GB5 with the same power budget, is that really completely out of Apple's league? Granted, AMD & Intel can do this today (or close), but not without the power budget of a nuclear aircraft carrier.

 

[BigPotatoLobbyist]

The more I ponder Windows on ARM, the more I wonder how much no matter how close the chips get, the legacy ********* will hinder something quite important:

paging. Just IMO, the 16K paging in tandem with SSD speeds are what really makes The M1 experience so absurd. The massive swapping is clearly intended; no way is the majority of it's use accidental as much as various Apple fora's members wish to believe. (I mean come on, lightning fast SSD and 8GB of RAM working fine, and you're shocked at the SWAP metrics? lol)

But it's (the shortened SSD life that may or may not be relevant within average use case timespans) totally worthwhile. Makes an entry level MacBook wipe the floor with most everything else in it's class. For my own specifications... well... I hardly even encounter stuttering/slowdowns during workflows. It's bizarre.

 

[cmaier]

The more I ponder Windows on ARM, the more I wonder how much no matter how close the chips get, the legacy ********* will hinder something quite important:

paging. Just IMO, the 16K paging in tandem with SSD speeds are what really makes The M1 experience so absurd. The massive swapping is clearly intended; no way is the majority of it's use accidental as much as various Apple fora's members wish to believe. (I mean come on, lightning fast SSD and 8GB of RAM working fine, and you're shocked at the SWAP metrics? lol)

But it's (the shortened SSD life that may or may not be relevant within average use case timespans) totally worthwhile. Makes an entry level MacBook wipe the floor with most everything else in it's class. For my own specifications... well... I hardly even encounter stuttering/slowdowns during workflows. It's bizarre.

Paging is a way to slow a device down, not speed it up. SSDs are slow, not fast. They are only “fast” if you are comparing them to spinning disks. The goal is always not to have to page.

 

[Spindel]

ARMs biggest problem in general PC space is people clinging to backwards compatibility.

Instead of switching to software that is supported people have this notion that they "need" this one piece of software from 15 years ago.

Instead of accepting that the future might be brighter if a general architectural switch is made and just emulating old non supported software they cling to x86.

In the 80's and large part of the 90's x86 wasn't the most powerful option (it was motorola 68000 and others), but it was what IBM used and subsequently was used in all IBM-PC compatible machines and gained market share because that was what corporations bought. End of 90's early 2000s until now is when x86 has been the most powerful CPU choice for desktop/laptops mainly because of lack of competing architectures.

As soon as people drop the notion of the "need" to run legacy software natively x86 will disappear, it probably will happen but not yet for a couple of years. Old software will still run great even emulated because all CPUs are so powerful today compared to 15 years ago.

 

[senttoschool]

ARMs biggest problem in general PC space is people clinging to backwards compatibility.

It's not just that. It's that ARM chips right now just aren't faster than x86 chips on laptops and desktops, with the exception of Apple Silicon.

Qualcomm is trying but their Snapdragon laptop/desktop performance isn't better than AMD/Intel.

I still think ARM will take over x86 though but it will be a slow and gradual change. Only Apple can force this change because Apple Silicon is so good and Apple controls the software.

 

[Spindel]

It's not just that. It's that ARM chips right now just aren't faster than x86 chips on laptops and desktops, with the exception of Apple Silicon.

Qualcomm is trying but their Snapdragon laptop/desktop performance isn't better than AMD/Intel.

I still think ARM will take over x86 though but it will be a slow and gradual change. Only Apple can force this change because Apple Silicon is so good and Apple controls the software.

Well Apple has shown that it can be done once you shed the luggage of x86, so my guess is that in time others will catch up.

 

[BigPotatoLobbyist]

Paging is a way to slow a device down, not speed it up. SSDs are slow, not fast. They are only “fast” if you are comparing them to spinning disks. The goal is always not to have to page.

Right, but it improves TLB hit rate to have a larger page file sizes.

 

[pshufd]

ARMs biggest problem in general PC space is people clinging to backwards compatibility.

Instead of switching to software that is supported people have this notion that they "need" this one piece of software from 15 years ago.

Instead of accepting that the future might be brighter if a general architectural switch is made and just emulating old non supported software they cling to x86.

In the 80's and large part of the 90's x86 wasn't the most powerful option (it was motorola 68000 and others), but it was what IBM used and subsequently was used in all IBM-PC compatible machines and gained market share because that was what corporations bought. End of 90's early 2000s until now is when x86 has been the most powerful CPU choice for desktop/laptops mainly because of lack of competing architectures.

As soon as people drop the notion of the "need" to run legacy software natively x86 will disappear, it probably will happen but not yet for a couple of years. Old software will still run great even emulated because all CPUs are so powerful today compared to 15 years ago.

There is a ready solution to the backwards compatibility issue though. That's to keep your current system and buy the new one and run your old software on the old system. I understand that people don't like to have multiple systems but it's the simplest thing to do if you have old programs to run. Then at some point you realize that you haven't turned on the old system for five years and you figure out that you really didn't need that old program. Kind of like people keeping their old VHS players for a couple of VHS videotapes they want and then deciding to convert them to modern digital formats.

I have three Intel Macs that I use regularly and I'm looking to move to M1. I also have a big Windows system that I am running multiple Virtual Machines on and I can put my legacy Intel 32-bit and 64-bit software on and then migrating to M1. So there are lots of options to moving to M1. Apple is making the hardware so attractive that it's hard not to upgrade. I think about the simple issue of not having to deal with excess heat from systems.

 

[bobcomer]

As soon as people drop the notion of the "need" to run legacy software natively x86 will disappear, it probably will happen but not yet for a couple of years.

A couple of decades, not years. In a lot of industries there just isn't the money to move to new software all the way around. You should see how much the software industries charge -- it makes the hardware you run it on look cheap. For instance our timeclock software, they wanted $30K+ just for a version upgrade, not even to run on a new platform. The last inventory/mill software we upgraded was $75,000, and that was a long time ago. And our corp had bids for ERP software, it would have been millions, but thank God the CEO asked the software committee why, and what does it gain us? Address the costs and you'll get more upgrades, but not until then.

Every time I see a message like yours I just can't stand it, you don't know what you're asking for.

 

[cmaier]

Right, but it improves TLB hit rate to have a larger page file sizes.

At the cost of longer latency to page. There are always trade-offs.