No question, the sins of the past, limited ports, butterfly keyboard, touch bar were all expunged from existence
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If Apple had two product lines..
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I never would've switched to Mac if it wasn't for Apple Silicon, and I'm not alone on this. Just look at laptop sales every quarter for the past two years and who was at number 1 everytime by a landslide: Apple
The Apple Silicon Macbooks are the only laptops worth buying now. Their battery life, build quality, and price to performance ratio is too good to ignore, especially now that M1 Macbook Airs are being sold for $800 brand new now.
A bigger question is: When the hell are we gonna get a Macbook SE?
8% drop is relative:Really?
Apple sales in biggest fall since 2019
The decline came as people cut back in the face of higher living costs, said Apple's boss.www.bbc.com
....Sales of its popular iPhones were down more than 8%,
Smartphone Shipments Suffer the Largest-Ever Decline with 18.3% Drop in the Holiday Quarter and a 11.3% Decline in 2022, According to IDC Tracker
Really? Statista shows Mac sales have been flat over the last few years, with the normal seasonal swings.
Considering Apple's revenue results, I'd say they are doing OK, especially compared to the rest of the industry.
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I think give it some time and software support will increase for ARM. There is even the possibility that Intel and AMD start releasing more ARM stuff in the future…x86 may be coming to a close….
As for me, I would not want an x86 Intel in a laptop anymore. I would support Apple including an Intel chip option in a desktop like the Mac Pro, but for a laptop the advantages of Apple Silicon are just too strong.
How did you survive the PPC days if you need Windows? In my experience, application support is so much better on Apple Silicon than it was back in the days of my PowerBook. Almost nobody cared about releasing software for those PPC Macs.
As for me, I would not want an x86 Intel in a laptop anymore. I would support Apple including an Intel chip option in a desktop like the Mac Pro, but for a laptop the advantages of Apple Silicon are just too strong.
How did you survive the PPC days if you need Windows? In my experience, application support is so much better on Apple Silicon than it was back in the days of my PowerBook. Almost nobody cared about releasing software for those PPC Macs.
I'd say the software support is already fairly good. Practically all big apps that ship a Mac version offer a native ARM client.
The problem is legacy specialised software that doesn't get updated and only works because Windows puts so much importance on backwards compatibility. People who rely on those kind of tools will have to seek other options.
Yeah, and that heavy focus on backwards compatibility is what keeps technology stagnant to some degree. Microsoft enables their developers to be complacent while in Apple's ecosystem, it's "keep up or get left behind". I think there's a place for both mindsets to some degree, but sooner or later everyone must move on. x86 as a platform has hit a wall in many metrics and ARM is the future. Apple is just embracing it sooner and in the process, making it easier for others to do so.
A sentiment I frequently hear when these dis uses ions start is that backwards compatibility is required for business to operate cost-efficiently. I never much cared for that reason to be honest. General-purpose computing shouldn’t be held back because some businesses prefer to work with decade-old tooling. There certainly to be a better solution for these things.
I do, ThunderSkunk. Thanks for asking!
So, what you're actually complaining about here is the fact that this highly specific software you use only runs on Windows. That's a tale as old as time, my friend. I'm sure you can come up with thousands of applications that don't run on a Mac. It's been this way for decades. You want to run a freight train or program a car assembly line or run air traffic control, you're probably not using a Mac. Did you really only just now realize this?
Oh cool. Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to work on Illustrator on and M1 Mac designing the cute graphics for a major US sporting event. Not as important as your physical objects, but someone's got to do it!
Assuming you think what you do matters, reducing your productivity by using one less-efficient laptop would have a far greater effect on society overall anyways. Seems like a silly thing to even worry about.
That said, I'd have to think long and hard about it as I do enjoy gaming on my 2016 15" MBP. Losing the ability to run older windows games via PlayOnMac simultaneously with the option of an eGPU would probably be too much for me. Right now, my solution is to keep the old machine working as long as I can, then I'll see if Apple Silicon has gotten so good that it's worth losing Windows compatibility on my laptop. I have a desktop PC anyways, so it's not the biggest loss, but I do enjoy the flexibility of a portable computer that can do it all.
Ha! Speaking out against the hivemind always draws opposition. To many folks' credit, for all the blind Apple fanboys on this site, there's many that rightly call out Apple's crap when necessary and that is certainly appreciate.
I agree that, if the M3 does not show substantial gains, then some warning signs will begin to appear for Apple Silicon. I am just baffled at the raw performance of Intel 13th gen. I watched a video showing synthetic benchmark results from the 13980HX (laptop CPU) and it the Intel score was more than double the M2 Max score. The reviewer also said (though did not show the numbers), that, yes, while the Windows laptop loses performance when unplugged, it would STILL be faster than the M2 Max in spite of that handicap. Insert disclaimer here about synthetic benchmarks not being indicative of real-work tasks; I'm just looking at the trends at large.
My thinking goes like this: Intel's highest end chip is over double the performance of the M2 Max. The Intel chip uses a comical amount of power. However, you could scale down that Intel chip wayyy down to a lower-level SKU and still be at the performance of the M2 Max. At that point, you'd likely be at a more reasonable power level. At the rate Intel is moving, will their "low-power" chips eventually be matching Apple's highest-end chips?
This whole discussion is not even discussing AMD's upcoming 7000 laptop chips which, by AMD's claims, are in the ballpark of Apple Silicon along with killer battery life. I'm stoked for those. MacRumors did an article on them earlier this year.
It's going to be a wait-and-see approach. As mentioned, if M3 isn't a monumental leap forward, Apple may begin to sweat. AMD and Intel have been doing this for decades longer than Apple.
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I would buy an Intel laptop, assuming it was keeping up with the pace of innovation otherwise, because at least air drop worked. Air drop on both my M1 work machine and M2 personal machine just don't work. and not being able to send files from my iPhones or iPads to my mac without rebooting my mac really ticks me off, basically every other day.
Definitely. You may have seen my reply to @maflynn -- sure, Intel uses a comical amount of power, but that performance deficit between the M2 Max and the 13980HX is too big to scuff at.
With the performance of Intel's highest end chip being over double the M2 Max, then Intel can simply trim down that CPU to a lower end SKU. That would bring down the power as well. Will we see Intel's mid-tier offerings outperforming Apple's best offerings? Will we see Intel's lowest end offerings (the chips for low power thin and lights) outperforming Apple's best? That's what I think will be something to watch going forward, if not this generation, one or two from now.
As I said to maflynn, if the M3 generation isn't a monumental leap, then Apple has reason to start worrying for the medium to long term.
Current generation of Intel CPUs needs significantly more power to match Apple. For example, i9-13900HK (Intels fastest "normal" mobile CPU) is 5% slower in single core and 15% slower in multi-core than M2 Pro while consuming at least 3x more power. To get faster than Apple Intel had to release a new class of 55W "mobile" CPUs (this used to be desktop power bracket just a couple of years ago FWIW) — which are 20-30% faster in trivial multicore benchmarks than M2 Max, but at the expense of 4x-5x power consumption.
Of course, if Apple does absolutely nothing, Intel will eventually catch up. But that's the funny thing — in terms of CPU core, they still can't match Apple's 2020 tech. Their multi-core advantage comes from packing many more cores on chip and SMT.
I think there are two elements here. One is the basic CPU core technology, and I think we agree that Apple needs to show some IPC improvements here. The other one is scaling performance to desktop devices, which was only secondary focus for Apple until now.
Twice as large is probably an overstatement. From what I understand Intels process is slightly better than TSMC 7nm and has roughly 40% lower transistor density than TSMC 5nm.
The node definitely plays a role, but then again Zen3 was already more power efficient than Intel at comparable node size. I don’t believe that node alone can account for 2-3x power usage discrepancy at the same performance.
Apple designs are wider (more execution units) and optimized for power clock. Apple also has larger caches. I suppose these things do make a difference.
They are
But these are just names by now. The relation to actual transistor sizes are anecdotal, if at all.Here is a nice article on this: https://read.nxtbook.com/ieee/spectrum/spectrum_na_august_2020/the_node_is_nonsense.html
While Apple needs to continue to make gains in performance, I don't think monumental leaps are needed.
One of Apple's advantages is they control the chip and OS, so they can integrate the design to achieve desired performance levels.
Even if the raw power is less on benchmarks, the overall real world performance may be better. Since most users don't cae about benchmarks, that's what counts.
My personal experience:
Like most employers, mine utilizes windows machines. I am a Macintosh person.
For a while, I used their machine almost exclusively. And then one day about a year and half ago I decided to try some thing: I downloaded Office 365 (now Windows 365) from the Mac App Store (except for Teams; had to go to the MS Teams website to download that. No biggie). I logged on using all of my work credentials. It worked, amazingly enough. Via Microsoft OneDrive, I am able to access all of my Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files, as well as send and receive mail through Outlook. I can even access all of my files shared on SharePoint using my credentials. Rarely is there a case where I need to access my work machine.
Anywho...
If this helps, great! If not, best of luck in your future endeavors...
You could do what I've done since Windows VMs went away, which is leave that Lenovo laptop plugged in somewhere at work and just remote on to it when you need to do something you would have done previously on your Windows VM.
It's a workaround, but it's not so bad. And it actually exists, whereas Apple releasing a new product with an Intel CPU doesn't.
Honestly from what I've seen, and I don't only hang around in Apple places, the people who are fine with the way Intel is achieving performance by pushing frequencies and power consumption are in the minority.
Apple silicon doesn't exist in a vacuum either. They go into Apple's devices. You can't take an M1 Ultra and stuff it in a desktop and show it being trounced by the 13900k in that same desktop - it's only in the Mac Studio, which is small and light and cool and quiet for what it is. The fact that something like the Studio, or the MacBook Pros are being compared to big desktop Intel CPUs in the first place is a testament to Apple silicon's success.
Apple makes devices, not just CPUs. I'm sure Apple could let their M2 Max run at the same power consumption that Intel does, but I sure wouldn't want to own that laptop.
Once Apple releases the Mac Pro, and we see the entire range of Apple silicon devices, then it'll be easier to judge this situation.
I think this is a bit disingenuous in the current context. For many customers, Apple Silicon has been exactly what they want — unmatched on-demand mobile performance and superior ergonomy. There is a reason why Mac sales have skyrocketed since late 2020.
Is it really worth it to sabotage all this and dilute the brand just so that one can cater to the small group of users who need professional access to competitor software?
I'd add:
3. Apple would have to continue developing Intel versions of MacOS; which is likely to result in trade-offs to keep both 100% compatible with each other.
Steve Jobs was never about listening to customers.
As is always, from Apple ][ to Mac to Motorola to PowerPC to Intel to AS.
Not really. All customers do not have the same value, and the costs of keeping those 10% may outweigh any short term benefits.
The AS is not for you; and is for those who value battery life. For many, that is a key laptop feature.
As always, the key is to get a machine that does what you need.