cloudguy

Xed said:

That’s right, you claimed that the processors would cost Apple more. They don’t, as we see either lower or the same price point with other improved features with much improved performers and power efficiency (as I predicted).

Core i3 with 8 GiB RAM. LOL I can’t believe that’s still your line in the sand on where could hit on performance despite plenty of proof showing you the superiority of the M-series SoC.

A huge story for every Apple customer, Apple shareholders, for Intel, and the WinPC market as a whole. You’re inability to understand why a $999 MacBook Air with no fan outperforming a loaded 16” MBP is a good thing for customers or how the ability to run iOS and IPadOS apps on the M1 Macs will attract switchers is neither something I understand or willing to fix. Instead I’ll let you wallow in your misery as you ramp up your trolling.

They don't cost more? Are you sure? Because it seems to me that Apple had the same price for the $999 MacBook Air Mac Mini despite taking a bunch of other components out and integrating them into M1. 

A huge story for Apple customers and shareholders? Obviously. For everyone else? Not so much ...

You’re inability to understand why a $999 MacBook Air with no fan outperforming a loaded 16” MBP is a good thing for customers  ...

No. It is great for Mac fans! But for the 92-95% of people in any given quarter who do not buy Macs not so much. 

"or how the ability to run iOS and IPadOS apps on the M1 Macs will attract switchers"

Yeah, if you think that there is going to be this stampede from Windows laptop owners to pay $999 for MacBooks for the privilege of running iPad apps - on a non touchscreen UX/UI no less! - instead of better, more powerful x86 applications that are actually built for personal computers and not mobile devices then you really don't know people who actually own and use Windows laptops very well? I suppose rather than maybe changing your social and professional circles then that is something that you might want to understand or be willing to fix. 

Look, I have seen this site's archives. I have also been on other Apple-centric sites. It is always the same thing: declarations that with each new Apple advance, the competition (whether Android or Windows) is going to dry up and blow away. Why? The presumption is that everyone else loves Apple products as much as you do and all they need is something, some push or incentive or anything to liberate them from the misery that they are wallowing in and join the happy existence of Apple users.

What folks like this never realize is that Windows (and Android) users are happy already. They like their products. They like using them. They have the same anticipation towards buying new ones that you do. They even have the benefit of something that you don't, which is OEMs with great R&D departments that compete against each other for their attention and dollar. And Apple fans fundamentally misunderstand them.

For example: you folks love to say "Windows and Android devices are cheaper than Apple devices upfront ... but you are not considering the total cost of ownership ... Apple devices are more reliable because they last 5-7 years or more."

Makes perfect sense, right? TO YOU. But they are not you.

Windows fan: who wants to wait 7 years to replace my laptop? I like replacing my laptop every 3 years so I can get the latest Threadripper from AMD and really be able to play the latest Steam games!

Android fan: hold onto a smartphone for 5 years? LG/Samsung/Pixel/Huawei/Motorola etc. etc. etc. come out with cool new features every year! And you only need to spend $200 on the latest decent Android phone to get them!

Sorry, but Apple was only able to dominate the MP3 player, smartphone, tablet and smartwatch markets because there were no established products by large well known companies in them prior. You had Blackberry, Android Wear and a bunch of other stuff even more obscure. But Apple has never been able to achieve the sort of mass migration from one established product or platform to another that you are talking about. The closest that we have seen to that is the AirPod. The reason: you need to give people a compelling incentive or reason to switch. Meaning that you need to give people a reason to give up a successful product that they already fundamentally like for a product that they like better.

Android - for example - accomplished that by offering the combination of much bigger screens and substantially lower prices. 
What doesn't accomplish that is to have people pay more money for machines to run software that they don't use and/or have no interest in faster.

"Hey Billy, put down that $750 gaming PC and buy this $1000 MacBook Air instead."

"Can I play Rocket League on it"?

"No but Apple design the CPU!"

"Can I play The Division on it"?

"No, but you won't get viruses and it doesn't have a fan!" 

"Can I at least get my copy of Windows going in VirtualBox on it so I can use the programs that I need for work on it?"

"No but it runs a ton of iPhone and iPad apps that your job absolutely doesn't use! And you can use Continuity to hand off from your iPad and iPhone to your Mac!"

"All right fine but can I dual boot, upgrade the RAM or add an eGPU?"

"No but you will be able to use it for 5 years and still sell it for $500!"

See above. You have failed to explain how switching from Windows to macOS makes his life better. Instead, you are making the case why he should completely change his computing use case - the reasons why he buys his computers in the first place, which is to game and to use software that his job requires - around becoming a consumer of Apple hardware. Please realize that nearly no one is going to do that no matter how fast Macs are.

Now note that I did say nearly. You do have some people who want and need the most powerful machine they can get their hands on without having to deal with the difficulty or expense of an actual workstation or server and don't need much in the way of consumer facing or workspace specific software. For those people - developers are a great example of this, although not right now as a lot of the software and tools that they need aren't on the M1 Macs, can't be translated with Rosetta 2 (or don't want them to be for performance reasons) and won't be for awhile yet - the M1 Macs as well as Macs with the even better chips that Apple will release starting next year will be great. The problem is that there aren't very many such people. I will say it again: the number of people who actually need a chip faster than an Intel Core i5 or i7 and who won't be convenienced by giving up their Windows software isn't very big.

Just do the whole Venn diagram thing ... most people who want a faster chip than the i7 also want/need to hold onto their Windows software. Most people who have no real ties to Windows software don't want/need fast performance in the first place. And - this will really get you - most people who need the fastest performance they can get and don't need Windows software are so because they are in the creative industries and as a result have Macs already!

So yeah, I am trolling you I guess. But this "troll" has actual experience working with macOS (and its predecessors), iOS, Windows (and its predecessors MS-DOS and IBM PC-DOS), Linux, various mainframes, Android and ChromeOS. And being around a bunch of coworkers, students etc. who have the same. My guess is ... you don't? So, my trolling comes from the perspective of the 95% (give or take depending upon the product) of people who don't exclusively use Apple products and actually likes the non-Apple products that we do use and likes them a lot. And that is a perspective that you do not have. I repeat: if you think that there is this whole sea of people out there who hate Wintel or love Apple as much as you do and are just itching and dying to switch, you need to first ask yourself why they haven't jumped ship already. If they hated Windows that badly, they could have switched to macOS at any time. Since they didn't ... shouldn't you presume that they don't hate Windows at all then? 

Xed said:

I expect M-series Macs will make this j7mp considerably higher. 📈

Why? Despite months of claiming otherwise - and my warning against it - the cost of entry for a MacBook remains $999, twice as much as a Windows or ChromeOS notebook with (the former MBA entry level specs) an Intel Core i3 processor and 8 GB RAM.

Also - despite what Apple fans have spent the last 20 years being determined to believe - interest in iPods, iPhones, iPads, AirPods and the Apple Watch have not increased the demand for macOS as a PC platform. Similarly, people who would rather spend $1200 on a Dell XPS right now aren't going to be any more likely to switch to a MacBook Air or Pro just because Apple designed the chip. You have to be an Apple fan to even care that Apple is making the chip instead of Intel (or AMD or whoever) and people like that own Macs already anyway.

The Mac being faster will increase the market share some but realize that most people don't buy computers based on raw horsepower any more than - say - most people buy smartphones for it. (Remember when the iPhone SE 2020 was supposed to turn the smartphone world on its head and lure all those platform switchers by providing an A13 chip for $399? Didn't happen.)

I have stated it more than a few times: Apple using their own CPUs in their computers is a huge story for diehard Apple fans - which includes most of the media - but not much of one for the market at large. 

bageljoey said:

I know people like to make fun of folding mobile devices, I think the problem is that it hasn’t been done well yet. I assume a well thought out and a well done folding device that is durable could be awesome. 

I would be glad Apple is working on it—I want to see what they come up with when the technology is there to make it to Apple’s standards.

"People" don't make fun of folding mobile devices. Apple fans do. They make fun of every idea and feature that Android OEMs develop first ... right up until Apple copies it. Another point where you are wrong: while the generation 1 Galaxy Fold had issues, the generation 1 Galaxy Flip - Samsung's second foldable - was good. The generation 2 Galaxy Fold and Galaxy Flip devices are by all accounts outstanding with the former far exceeding Samsung's sales goals. Now that Samsung has mastered the design and assembly process they are including a substantially cheaper Galaxy Fold (the best seller of the two devices despite costing $500 more) among third generation devices in 2021. By the time Apple releases their version in 2022, Samsung will be on generation 4 of these devices and generation 2 of the cheaper Fan Edition ones. 

Look, the idea that "it takes Apple to come along and get things right" is just something that Apple fans come up with to justify getting features years late. Samsung actually has a better mobile payments solution than Apple does because it includes both MST and NFC, making it work at every credit card terminal that stores don't software-block. Despite all the bombastic "air power" claims, wireless charging works the same for Apple devices as it does for Android ones. Apple gave their Apple TV set top box an app store years after Android (Google and Amazon) ones did the same, and it does nothing that they don't do. Apple's OLED screens: ditto, no different from Samsung's. Apple adopted larger screened phones years after Samsung and the rest did, but Samsung still has far more multitasking features to take advantage of the larger screens. And so on.

This will be the same. Apple will adopt this technology after Samsung will have spent 4 years using feedback from customers and app developers refining it (and buying the materials from Samsung that Apple needs to make it). Apple's own solution will only be "better" in the eyes of people who never used the Samsung version in the first place, including all those people who derive some satisfaction out of claiming to have been "a longtime loyal Android buyer who got frustrated, switched to Apple and found their devices much better" but then you ask them basic questions about the very same devices that you actually do or did own and they "respond" by calling you a deluded fanboy and Apple hater and then go quiet. 

Also, this is the result of long-range planning from Samsung. Samsung years ago saw that while their Note line was generating good sales, profit margins were low due to R&D costs and the devices having too many features. So they put a 3 prong plan in place.
1. Make the Galaxy Note essentially the Galaxy S with a bigger screen and stylus.
2. Enable stylus support on all their premium phones. 
3. End the Galaxy Note line and make foldables their new premium phone.
It took them 6 years but they have finally done it. In 2020 all of their phones that will feature the Qualcomm Snapdragon 875/Exynos 2001 will have S Pen support and the Note line - which forced Apple to respond beginning with the iPhone 6 Plus - is no more. It will have been a great 10 year run for the second most influential smartphone in history behind the original iPhone. So much so that the current iPhone Mini actually has a bigger screen than the original Galaxy Note did!

So yeah, you can tell yourself that "Apple does other people's ideas better" but smartphone sales and Apple's own copying actions say otherwise.

Japhey said:

jimh2 said:

Considering 5G is really unnecessary what is the point of working on 6G. if the primary goal is to improve range so that it will provide broadband access to rural areas and an alternate solution for those of us in single provider areas. I have two to pick from: Charter Cable -> 200/5 faster speed, but major reliability and outage issues*, CenturyLink: 40/3 and ultra-reliable (rarely goes out)

6g is will be important for holographic television and teleportation (think Star Trek). Oh, and 1 second movie downloads 

Excuse me ... this is a global standard, not an American one. 5G adoption has been much better in (developed) Asia and western Europe than in North America. Also, these standards take years to create the technology and protocols for. So yes, they were in fact working on 5G before the iPhone supported 4G. Indeed, the first large company to put a position paper out on 6G was Samsung about 6 months ago when they estimated that it should be ready by 2028.

joguide said:

kpom said:

 DuhSesame said:

I wonder how much difference we’ll see for the Air vs. the Pro.

I assume it’s just the long-term performance.

I agree, but this is still very impressive. Something like Cinebench will be better for judging the difference in sustained CPU tasks. 

This is an industry changing moment.  Base MBA with no fan, just crushed the laptop world as we knew it. 

Huh? Samsung released a $999 fanless Chromebook with an Intel i5 CPU (in Linux mode a great development and otherwise productivity device, and oh yeah is quite good for Linux apps and PWAs too), 2-in-1 design, AMOLED 13' 4K touchscreen with built-in stylus way back in April. The Google Pixelbook is a fanless device with configurations that include an Intel i7 CPU,13' 4K screen and a 16 GB of RAM that was released way back in 2018. (The Pixelbook 2 was delayed to 2021 so that it will have Whitechapel - the SOC jointly designed by Google and Samsung and manufactured by Samsung for smartphones and Chromebooks - instead of a 10th gen Intel CPU in it.) Who cares about ChromeOS? You should as it surpassed macOS in market share this year - and it surpassed MacBooks in market share years ago - and as these devices are going to start featuring much better AMD, Intel and ARM CPUs starting in 2021 due to Google and its various OEMs promoting them as development and productivity devices, it is going to increase. Google in particular is already positioning Chromebooks to replace MacBooks that will no longer be able to virtualize Windows among enterprise companies and has already attracted their first (small) batch of buyers.

But as for right now, there are already plenty of fanless Windows 10 - and I mean real Windows, not Windows on ARM that tries and fails to emulate x86! - laptops out there. Consider the Acer Switch 7: 16 GB of RAM and Intel i7 processor. There are also a couple of Dell XPS fanless laptops and a couple of Asus ones in addition to more Acer ones.

Get this: folks are kicking around the idea that the new Intel Tiger Lake CPUs with integrated Iris XE graphics will allow fanless gaming laptops to become a thing (because Tiger Lake is Intel's low heat/low power design and Iris XE GPU - which is integrated in all Tiger Lake Core i5 and higher chips - is supposed to provide gaming performance on the caliber of the Nvidia MX350).

So seriously, you guys need to pay attention to the wider tech world more. If you are thinking that Apple Silicon is going to result in these magical devices that the rest of the tech world can't comprehend let alone compete with that is going to result in Apple quadrupling or more its market share and influence, prepare to be sadly mistaken. The tech media might not know this - as Apple devices are all that they use and as a result truly cover - but actual consumers do.