cloudguy

jcc said:

I don't know why people are not concerned about the red Chinese hiring away TSMC blue Chinese engineers. No one here seems to be concerned that China is about to become technologically superior to us in advanced semiconductor production. They already beat us in infrastructure building. Just how many industries will we continue to lose before we wake the f&^k up? Later, they can just cut us off from their supply and there won't be a damn thing we can do about it since we're too dumb to produce any here in the U.S.

Because such sentiments are considered fascist by the Democratic Party, the mainstream media and even moderate and neoconservative Republicans. Intel did raise the issue of semiconductor manufacturing being nearly dead in the United States and suggested the government take action to preserve the industry a few years ago, but not very loudly or very long. Remember: the Trump campaign was called fascist by the mainstream of both parties for even suggesting that we should try to get some of our manufacturing jobs back. And not a day passes without seeing half a dozen articles gleefully declaring the end of Intel in favor of Apple and TSMC (and maybe AMD and Samsung). Look, when IBM shut their foundries down and sold their PC division to (Chinese) Lenovo, no one from that crowd shed a tear. They were too busy celebrating - prematurely - the PC being killed off by iPhones, iPads and Macs. 

These folks consider protecting American manufacturing (and energy and agriculture) jobs to be the road to fascism and are cheering the death of our 70s/80s/90s tech sector, starting with Wintel. So if by 2025 Intel has gone belly up and everyone who isn't using a Mac is using a Windows or ChromeOS laptop with a Chinese-made ARM SOC in it, these folks will regard it as a victory over Trumpism with Apple leading the way.

"The average selling price of the PC market came in at $764"

Considering that Apple had 8% market share in 3Q 2020 - if Gartner, IDC and Canalys are to be believed - will people now please stop claiming that Apple has 80% of the $1000 computer market? That stat is like 20 years old and was dubious even then. 

canukstorm said:

22july2013 said:

I would expect average people to be turned off by a non-Intel CPU, in the short term.

The average person buying tech doesn't anything about the processor in the laptop.  And they shouldn't have to.  But they do understand a laptop that runs cool, runs silent, that has long battery life, and performs well when running apps.

Cool, silent and long battery life hasn't driven laptop sales in the past. People who want those things generally buy iPads and other tablets. People who buy PCs have more of a "can it run my software" mentality. After that it diverges into two groups:

1) Can it run my software as fast as possible
2) Can it run my software as cheaply as possible

Virtually no one is spending 6 hours on the couch with a laptop in their ... lap. A smartphone or tablet? Definitely. A Chromebook (or Windows 2-in-1) that folds into a tent or thick tablet? Maybe. A MacBook Pro? Nah, that is going to be plugged in at a desk 80% of the time, especially when you are actually using it for work (which requires sitting down and concentrating your attention in the same spot for several hours). 

InspiredCode said:

I’m not sure what is left, but I don’t recall any of their patents something a reasonable person would consider IP. If this is how the patent system is going to work, we would be better off without it.

Apple's stance would be more sympathetic - and consistent - were they not so self serving with this. Apple tries to use a very broad interpretation of patent and trademark law when it comes to their own intellectual property but tries their level best to get away with a very narrow interpretation of the same when it comes to their having to pay to use others' IP. Apple's stance is the following:

Our IP is valuable because it is related to our brand so everyone else has to pay the maximum amount for it
Everyone else's IP is only valuable because it is used along with our own IP in our products so we should pay you very little for it and at times nothing.
We should not have to pay the same licensing terms as smaller companies who sell 1/100th as many products. That is punishing us for our success. Punishing us for making great products that people want to buy that incidentally contain your IP. So we should only have to pay you whatever [insert small electronics company that only sells a few million units a year] pays for the same IP because [small electronics company] shows its real value. If your IP was that valuable, [small electronics company] would sell 300 million units a year like we do. So this proves that your IP's only value is being fortunate enough to be in our product.

Yeah, stuff like that. It never ends. And that doesn't even get into Apple's willingness to break agreements at any time - or use strongarm tactics to force "renegotiations" - but will file a lawsuit at the drop of the hat against anyone who tries the same with them. In other words, Apple needs to abide by the patent system - and contracts system - that we already have before whining about the need for reform.

speakingmywords said:

Most corporate linux instances are on Intel gear. So really, unless you're using this for your personal website, internal network, etc... this is a toy release. My company is a software developer and our product are on Intel Linux systems. M1 is great, but if I can't get our software images to run on M1 virtualization software, nothing will convince them to buy M1 laptops for us.

Oh for crying out loud. Look, ARM versions of CentOS/RHEL have been out since 2010. Ubuntu released theirs in 2011. Major companies like Ampere, HP, Xilinx and Texas Instruments make ARM servers, with Nvidia soon to join them. Also lots of other companies - like Google and Amazon - are now building their own. 

Amazon in particular has a heavy investment in ARM servers. (Google isn't doing much in this space, but Microsoft has Windows Server for ARM in Azure.) Cloud companies are moving to ARM in a big way in order to get similar performance to x86 while saving power. So if your company doesn't have software engineers or architects who have an AWS or other cloud background ... let's just say I doubt it and move on. 

These are "toys" only because they are entry level machines that max out at 16 GB of RAM. But you even have companies buying Raspberry Pi ARM CPUs and programming them for IoT applications. Raspberry Pi can now run all the major Linux distros commonly used in IoT: Android Things, Debian, Ubuntu Core, Raspbian etc. Gee, it would be great to have an ARM-based laptop to use to run my Linux IoT OS in VMWare. Oh gee, where can I get a good ARM-based laptop that can actually run VMWare. (Which excludes Chromebooks - while the latest x86 based ones now can ARM ones can't yet - and Windows ARM.)

Sorry, I am not even as gung ho about M1 Macs as everyone else is and I can tell you that you are off base. If I:

A) didn't have specific needs that ARM-based Macs can't meet right now
hadn't JUST BOUGHT a fresh round of Windows (although several just to put Linux on) and ChromeOS computers to meet those needs I would absolutely have an M1 Mac Mini right now.