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

[cmaier]

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.

qualcomm has had a decade and shown us nothing. And even if they magically get good at CPU design despite having no heritage of doing anything other than asic-style design, they still will have the problem of designing of the lowest common denominator - their chips cannot be optimized separately for each of their customers. Nor does nvidia, samsung, or any other Arm CPU design team seem to have the ability to catch Apple, despite having years to try.

 

[jerryk]

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

For Apple it makes a lot of sense to move away from Intel. They have been millions of devices (phones, iPads, etc.) every year with their own designed processor. The computers were one of the few things they made running a non-Apple designed/speced processor. And worse, Intel was missing their promised deadlines and performance targets. By removing Intel from the equation they gained a lot more control over the computer performance and delivery timelines. Plus, as we have seen, they were able to offer consumers considerably more performance for the money.

 

[xraydoc]

I had a Microsoft SurfaceBook 2 with a quad-core i7 before buying my M1 MacBook Air. The SB2 always ran hot and got terrible battery life unless I put it in battery-saver mode. Doing so, however, cut the CPU speed down by like two-thirds. Running it docked and in full performance mode would result in a super-hot machine that constantly throttled as the SB2 is a fanless machine (not including the fan on the dGPU, which I dared not use unless plugged into the mains).

The M1 MacBook Air runs circles around the SB2 and gets 3x the battery life.

Edit: as this post as gotten a few likes, I do want to note that the SB2, in "recommended" mode, ran pretty well as long as it was plugged in (or when 4-5 hours maximum of battery life was acceptable), is built very solidly, was very stable and has a beautiful, Apple-quality display. I used it with relative satisfaction for over two years. I'd probably still be on a Windows laptop (though something with better battery life) if it weren't for the M1.

 

[jdb8167]

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.

I’m in that process right now with my 2013 Mac Pro. I feel I still need an Intel Mac as a safety net but I’m noticing that I rarely use it except as a file server. I don’t feel any urgency to retire it but the process of needing it less and less is exactly what you describe.

 

[Fomalhaut]

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.

The massive swapping has largely been eradicated in MacOS 11.4, so if it was by design, Apple has backtracked on that....

For similar apps & workloads:

Before:

After (11.4):

 

[ImaginaryNerve]

Back in 2011, I actually got a job (unknowingly, due to privacy/secrecy concerns) at Apple. Prior to that, I'd always discounted the OS and the hardware and never really thought much of the whole "Apple Experience". At Apple, though, we used iMacs for our workflow and I fell in love with the OS. I still couldn't quite justify the cost as I was still a college student at the time, but I'd desperately wanted one.

After graduating, I dove headfirst into the Apple ecosystem and swore I'd never look back but then my iMac's performance started lagging behind competitors, iOS (or the screen technology itself) developed a dynamic/auto-contrast that you couldn't turn off and was exceptionally noticeable (to me) on my iPad and the only workaround to "disable" it was to have the accessibility home button on the screen. An...inelegant fix. So, I jumped ship after we bought our house. Every refresh I'd check the products and hope they'd have something, but nothing had appealed to me. I wasn't keen on the Vega GPUs in the iMacs and I'd given my MBP to my partner years ago and never really considered getting another laptop.

Back in..2017? I'd built a gaming rig I liked and I bought a Surface Pro 7 (i5) since the contrast issue was still on the newer iPads (bought my mother an iPad Pro 10.5 for her birthday).

Six months later, I gave the SP7 to my partner because I couldn't...DO anything and Microsoft's support was basically, "Its working as intended. Have a nice day." I kept getting thermal throttled---hard. At one point, I couldn't even use their (Microsoft's) own Jigsaw or Solitaire apps. I'd drag a card or a puzzle piece and it would take 30 seconds of slow movement before it'd snap into place. The M1s had just been released so I went ahead and bought a MBP because, as much as I trusted Apple with thermals, my experience with the SP7 made me hesitant to use anything more involved than an iPhone without a fan.

I loved it so much I bought a Mac mini like four months later. I still needed access to Procreate and a tablet for work so I bit the bullet and bought the iPad Pro. Somewhere between the iPP 10.5" and the iPP 11", the auto-contrast issue seems to have lessened a bit and its not as distracting to me. Plus, having Procreate again has a made me ridiculously happy.

So, yeah. Apple's kind of sucked me back in away from other brands. I don't think I'd ever consider another Surface device, Windows 10 and I had a...bad breakup recently over my headset. I spent hours scouring forums, various settings windows (I mean, really, how many do you need, Microsoft?), trying to troubleshoot why my microphone suddenly stopped working. I gave up and went out and bought a new headset only to find that one had the same issue. Turns out, Microsoft at some point added a second security setting in an update that disabled non-Windows Store apps from accessing the microphone. Its a stupid thing to be annoyed/upset at, I'll wholeheartedly admit, especially since it IS a useful setting. But really, there's no need to enable blocking it by default WITHOUT giving some kind of warning or notice. I might still be a bit bitter about it. Tiny bit. A minuscule amount.

So yeah, Windows 10 only when needed now which is turning out to be rarer and rarer. It has been over a month since I turned on my gaming rig for anything other than playing a specific game, I like it like that and probably in a few months I might just give the rig to my partner as well.

...sorry for the wall. I got carried away.

 

[spiderman0616]

Back in 2011, I actually got a job (unknowingly, due to privacy/secrecy concerns) at Apple. Prior to that, I'd always discounted the OS and the hardware and never really thought much of the whole "Apple Experience". At Apple, though, we used iMacs for our workflow and I fell in love with the OS. I still couldn't quite justify the cost as I was still a college student at the time, but I'd desperately wanted one.

After graduating, I dove headfirst into the Apple ecosystem and swore I'd never look back but then my iMac's performance started lagging behind competitors, iOS (or the screen technology itself) developed a dynamic/auto-contrast that you couldn't turn off and was exceptionally noticeable (to me) on my iPad and the only workaround to "disable" it was to have the accessibility home button on the screen. An...inelegant fix. So, I jumped ship after we bought our house. Every refresh I'd check the products and hope they'd have something, but nothing had appealed to me. I wasn't keen on the Vega GPUs in the iMacs and I'd given my MBP to my partner years ago and never really considered getting another laptop.

Back in..2017? I'd built a gaming rig I liked and I bought a Surface Pro 7 (i5) since the contrast issue was still on the newer iPads (bought my mother an iPad Pro 10.5 for her birthday).

Six months later, I gave the SP7 to my partner because I couldn't...DO anything and Microsoft's support was basically, "Its working as intended. Have a nice day." I kept getting thermal throttled---hard. At one point, I couldn't even use their (Microsoft's) own Jigsaw or Solitaire apps. I'd drag a card or a puzzle piece and it would take 30 seconds of slow movement before it'd snap into place. The M1s had just been released so I went ahead and bought a MBP because, as much as I trusted Apple with thermals, my experience with the SP7 made me hesitant to use anything more involved than an iPhone without a fan.

I loved it so much I bought a Mac mini like four months later. I still needed access to Procreate and a tablet for work so I bit the bullet and bought the iPad Pro. Somewhere between the iPP 10.5" and the iPP 11", the auto-contrast issue seems to have lessened a bit and its not as distracting to me. Plus, having Procreate again has a made me ridiculously happy.

So, yeah. Apple's kind of sucked me back in away from other brands. I don't think I'd ever consider another Surface device, Windows 10 and I had a...bad breakup recently over my headset. I spent hours scouring forums, various settings windows (I mean, really, how many do you need, Microsoft?), trying to troubleshoot why my microphone suddenly stopped working. I gave up and went out and bought a new headset only to find that one had the same issue. Turns out, Microsoft at some point added a second security setting in an update that disabled non-Windows Store apps from accessing the microphone. Its a stupid thing to be annoyed/upset at, I'll wholeheartedly admit, especially since it IS a useful setting. But really, there's no need to enable blocking it by default WITHOUT giving some kind of warning or notice. I might still be a bit bitter about it. Tiny bit. A minuscule amount.

So yeah, Windows 10 only when needed now which is turning out to be rarer and rarer. It has been over a month since I turned on my gaming rig for anything other than playing a specific game, I like it like that and probably in a few months I might just give the rig to my partner as well.

...sorry for the wall. I got carried away.

I liked reading your "wall" because it was very similar to my own experience--always had Windows and Linux (for work) PCs set up in my house, gamed on an Xbox, etc. I owned ZERO Apple products, and the Apple product experience I had throughout life was limited to the computer labs in college, my dad's office computer when I was a kid, and my high school girlfriend's dad was an Apple fanatic so I used his PowerPC Macs sometimes to type papers. (My dad always refused to have a computer in the house until I was done with college--thanks dad.)

But it all kind of happened at once--Xbox red ringed for the second or third time, my awesome Windows 7 gaming rig became unusable over time because the rat's nest of Windows updates apparently couldn't run on a quad core CPU with maxed out (for the time) RAM and a top end GPU, etc.

My "aha" moment was the iPhone 4. I hadn't even owned so much as an iPod Shuffle before that. The next year I had added an iPad into the arsenal. The next year a Mac mini. You get the point. Now we have at LEAST one of everything Apple makes in our house.

 

[jamesjingyi]

Slightly related but I have recently seen that Photoshop has been updated for Windows 10 on Arm native support - something I don't think would have been accelerated unless the M1 had come out

 

[spiderman0616]

Slightly related but I have recently seen that Photoshop has been updated for Windows 10 on Arm native support - something I don't think would have been accelerated unless the M1 had come out

I sometimes feel like Windows users care more about things running well on ARM than Microsoft does. That's probably oversimplifying things quite a bit though. I'm sure Microsoft WANTS things to be going better for them with ARM right now and just can't get there.

This is what ultimately drove me away from PC. Too much focus on legacy hardware/software compatibility, not enough resources dumped into making sure that legacy stuff doesn't hinder the overall fluidity and ease of use for modern use cases. I still think it's shameful that there are like 5 old UIs from old versions of Windows STILL present in the settings if you click down far enough into the options. It's like they never really update the OS, they just build on top of it and hope for the best.

 

[ImaginaryNerve]

My "aha" moment was the iPhone 4. I hadn't even owned so much as an iPod Shuffle before that. The next year I had added an iPad into the arsenal. The next year a Mac mini. You get the point. Now we have at LEAST one of everything Apple makes in our house.

Oh man. You got me nostalgic for my iPhone 4S. I missed that phone so much, I kept it as long as I could. Its why I jumped on the iPhone 12 Pro Max, it was actually the first time I'd pre-ordered an Apple device.

 

[BigPotatoLobbyist]

Slightly related but I have recently seen that Photoshop has been updated for Windows 10 on Arm native support - something I don't think would have been accelerated unless the M1 had come out

Yeah, the ARM Windows ecosystem stands to gain the most from this. I previously thought the Chicken-and-egg issue would render WOA a failure since Microsoft is forced to hedge it's bets between architectures and won't commit to one or the other out of the gate. Now, I'm not so sure. Provided the big ones port because they see the marginal cost as as now worthwhile after porting their Mac OS binaries to ARM (which presumably will leave them with process knowledge on bugs for the transition if not share a portion of the codebase anyways - see Java extensions for Adobe ****) then suddenly the calculation changes. Throw in a hardware push from Samsung with AMD GPU's, or the dark horse - Nvidia - and well....

Basically I think right now we are just on the cusp of *good* WOA hardware, and naturally the naysayer's prognoses are structurally similar to the doubts on Apple Silicon as the hour approached or the delay (it admittedly happened a few years after i'd expected, which will the case here too.) A likely market entrance will be Samsung selling an Exynos laptop running 8 X2-based cores, and an AMD GPU, all on a 3/4NM GAAFET (if not some new feature) process with roughly TSMC *5NM* (so no, not as good as what TSMC will have by then) logic density and power draw would not be M1x/M2 tier, and probably only barely in shooting distance of an M1 on single-threaded performance or P/W.

But it would almost certainly prove superior in performance per watt to whatever AMD/Intel have by the end of 2022. And frankly they [Samsung, if not MS with Qcom & a Samsung node] can charge Intel i5 prices without issue, but in the long term reaping greater margins as the scale improves.

There's just no meaningful win scenario for Intel or AMD's X86 in the *medium to long term*, so ~ 4-15years. Not ecosystem: there are more total big $ interests with ARM, now Nvidia owning it. Not watt use relevant all the way up the stack even to servers! Not price, lol. Not ISA customization even with Pat's change. And unfortunately - probably not single-thread performance either on any practical read, given the decoder + reorder buffer situation. Apple won't do the 5GHZ meganutburtz ********, but Nvidia might, and by then it comes down to IPC, etc.

Interesting desktop/laptop times ahead. Certainly more than they've been in the last 5-10 years of stagnant BS (notable exceptions for WSL + Linux on ChromeOS and then of course Apple Silicon, those all piqued my interest.)

 

[Gudi]

You can’t be distracted, because you’ve already seen what the other side has to offer. Windows 10 on ARM was Microsoft’s half-arsed attempt at an transition to a new silicone, form factor and user interface all at once. Because the product wasn’t polished and they kept selling the Surface (Pro) with either ARM or Intel CPUs, nobody noticed the epic shift and it all came down to foldable laptops now have touchscreens too. I had no interest in PCs after Windows 7 and I’m still waiting for the 14" MacBook Pro.

 

[pshufd]

You can’t be distracted, because you’ve already seen what the other side has to offer. Windows 10 on ARM was Microsoft’s half-arsed attempt at an transition to a new silicone, form factor and user interface all at once. Because the product wasn’t polished and they kept selling the Surface (Pro) with either ARM or Intel CPUs, nobody noticed the epic shift and it all came down to foldable laptops now have touchscreens too. I had no interest in PCs after Windows 7 and I’m still waiting for the 14" MacBook Pro.

What I dislike about Apple is their inflexibility and the only way to get around that is with Windows or Linux. My 2020 build has 5 TB of SSD (3 NVMe) and I have another 64 GB of RAM arriving this afternoon so it will have 128 GB of RAM. This system cost about $2,500 so far so it's not cheap but it provides a lot of expansion capability.

Apple Silicon, though, changes that. If I wanted to build a system right now, the CPU and GPU would be problems. I just saw a video this morning on counterfeith CPUs. Someone buys from a reputable retailer and they get a brick. It was an older generation CPU that was in a new CPU package. The explanation was that someone at the retailer swapped an obsolete part for a real one and it looked close enough so that it wound up getting shipped. The end-user was really upset (vendor was Best Buy) and Best Buy wouldn't do anything for the guy so the video channel bought the part from him to do a video on it. That's how bad things are in the CPU market.

Apple with 32-core GPUs makes gaming doable. Sure, the software may not be out there yet, but the software companies are dumb if there's a potential new market out there. They also have to realize that ARM is the future and that they'll have to port there eventually. I'm not a gamer though I know people that are and the availability of good GPUs with low power consumption has to be attractive when the software gets there.

I plan to keep my Windows desktop as it will run the heavy stuff (stuff that requires a lot of RAM and storage) but I prefer macOS for daily use.

 

[UBS28]

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.

People don’t use their computers for running benchmarks, but software. That is the 1st priority.

X86 is the market standard at the end of the day and people will not drop x86 if the software isn’t there on ARM.