Xed

JamesCude said:

Is anyone really deciding their OS based on the chips, though? If you love Mac OS why on Earth would you settle for Windows just because the chips were closer performing? I'm sure it makes sense to the chipmakers but it's a non-starter for most actual end users. 

It does make a difference even if people don't realize it.

For example, I know people that switched to Windows during the later PowerPC Mac days because Macs were no longer within a reasonable lag that it was hurting production. Even if macOS (nee Mac OS and Mac OS X) can save you money by being more efficient and even if you've already purchased cross platform apps or even if you have to learn a different one there is a point at which it simply makes sense to not stick with a system whose HW performance isn't good enough.

petri said:

Makes a lot of sense and it’s always seemed weird to me that the watch wasn’t linked up to all these things before anyway.

I can control my phone music from my watch, that’s great, but why can’t I also control my iPad playback?  It has better speakers so I often use it as a portable music player, my watch can be used as a remote for Apple TV so why can’t it be a remote for my iPad?

Theres a fitness app on my iPad already, why don’t I see any of my fitness data there?  It’s all in the cloud anyway, why do I have to dig my phone out of my pocket when the iPad is right there in front of me?

Virtually everything else in the Apple ecosystem is synced across devices and just picks up right where you left off on whichever device… why was there ever this weird, artificial wall sealing in just the watch + iPhone? 

Have you actually explored the Watch app on your iPhone? Can you imagine setting up an enter Watch with that small tech screen? I can, and it sounds like a miserable experience which is why I don't think we'll be seeing the Watch completely untethered from the iPhone. At best I think we can hope for making other devices conduits for the Watch.

emoeller said:

There are a lot of folks that have a Mac or iPad and no iPhone (they prefer Android phones).   This is an untapped market for Apple's Watch, which is a gateway to Apple fitness, etc..   So this makes sense to me.

I doubt there would be separate apps for each device, rather this would be built into Settings.  

How many is "a lot of folks". While I'm sure there are Mac and iPad users who have no interest in an iPhone who want to use an Apple Watch, I do question how large that number is to make this a focus for Apple. This far into the iPhone's existence and it being the great toolbar getting WinPC users to switch to Mac, I don't see many Mac users who prefer an Android phone.

The only group that I can imagine this would touch are older individuals with home and dumb cellphones that have moved from WinPC (or no PC) to an iPad who may be interested in the Watch for health and safety reasons. For this reason I'm surprised that Apple hadn't already made the iOS Watch app available on iPadOS, which tells me that the market likely isn't large enough to warrant that move, so making it work via macOS would be much further down that adoption road.

9secondkox2 said:

mobird said:

Apple could reduce the MSRP on it's entire product line in a meaningful way with the funds that most likely has gone into this project...

Not sure how far the R&D money goes when applied to so many products sold, but you’re onto something. 

Apple was expected to actually LOWER prices with the advent of Apple Silicon. Instead, they have skyrocketed with exception of the SSD-handicapped Mac mini. 

If you expected that then that was foolish. No pricing structure of a complex product should be dictated by a change in a single component. While it can and does (and did) happen, there are simply too many considerations to think it's a 1:1 ratio on the overall price of the selling product.

muthuk_vanalingam said:

flydog said:

9secondkox2 said:

mobird said:

Apple could reduce the MSRP on it's entire product line in a meaningful way with the funds that most likely has gone into this project...

Not sure how far the R&D money goes when applied to so many products sold, but you’re onto something. 

Apple was expected to actually LOWER prices with the advent of Apple Silicon. Instead, they have skyrocketed with exception of the SSD-handicapped Mac mini. 

No one expected or was promised “lower prices.” Total BS. 

No one was promised - TRUE. Expected - May be, you were not paying attention to the forum posts. But there were few people who claimed "Apple would be able to avoid the Intel Tax" and pass on those savings to Apple's customers. Many were sceptical of this argument and were proven right.

If you're just looking at the entire product's price release-over-release then the MBA and Mac mini both dropped in price from Intel to Apple Silicon. If you're looking at performance how much would it cost to get that performance from Intel, TDP be damned?

But none of that matters because the cost of healthy selling product should not be dictated by the cost of a single component. Apple's entry-level HW dropped their starting price point but their "Pro"-level products mostly used the previous pricing scales while offering a great deal more in performance and capability. 

For instance, if you could drop $76 off a processor cost would you then drop the cost by exactly $76? Wold you drop the price by $100 and eat $26 in profit for a machine you already can't keep in stock very long? Would you use this knowledge of higher performance at a lower price to make your product even better by finally including new and improved HW in other areas knowing that you can still maintain the best price equilibrium?