thadec

blastdoor said:

If true this is a huge win for Qualcomm, small loss for apple. 

Huh? Explain. Qualcomm's discrete modem sales to Apple is a fraction of their overall business. Wasn't Apple's agreement with Qualcomm $4.5 billion over 6 years? Less than $1 billion a year for a company that had $36 billion in revenue in 2021. This is even sillier than the people who claim that losing Apple's business will cripple Intel when A. Apple is only the #4 PC maker behind Lenovo, Dell and HP and in 2020 was actually #5 behind Acer and not much far ahead of ASUS and B. the clear majority of CPUs Intel sold to Apple were the cheap Core i3 ones for the entry level MacBook Air and Mac Mini.

Apple's position in the Qualcomm fight never made sense. They were:

1. It was the iPhone itself that gave Qualcomm's patents their value.

Except that ... cell phones existed - and were a pretty big and growing industry - long before the iPhone. 

2. Because Apple sold more phones than everybody else paying more than everyone else for the same IP was victimizing Apple for creating a superior product like the iPhone that sells so much. So Apple should only have to pay a fraction of what companies who sold far fewer phones do so they would pay no more than - say - Motorola for the same IP.

Yeah, except that Samsung, pre-sanctions Huawei, Xiaomi and the Chinese BBK conglomerate have at times all sold about as many phones as Apple does, if not more, because iPhones only have about 10% to 20% market share. Also, this is different from how licensing IP has always worked, including Apple's own attempts to get other companies to pay licensing fees. In addition, the idea of "variable licensing rates" is a horrible one because it allows the very sort of sweetheart collusion deals that FRAND is meant to prohibit in the first place. 

Their arguments were bonkers and they had no chance of succeeding on the merits. 

dtownwarrior said:

It’s funny how people still don’t know the difference between socialism and communism!!

It is funny how so many people on the left call everyone to the right of AOC a fascist.

Stabitha_Christie said:

This whole article is a good example of  how tech punditry  is an echo chamber that can't see past their very narrow needs and is just out of touch with consumers at large. 

Per Apple, this is the second best selling notebook model in the PC space. That may be a dubious claim but it does make this the second best selling Mac in Apple's line up. So clearly consumers see value in it and are buying them in fairly large number. That AI contributors and commentators don't get that says more about them being out of touch with consumer needs and buying habits than it does about the 13 inch MacBook Pro.

I don't know if you are being purposefully obtuse, but no one is questioning the value of the 13" MacBook Pro in general. What they are questioning is the 13" MacBook Pro being the 13" 2017 MacBook Pro with a new CPU. Keep in mind: that makes it worse than the 2018 13" MBP (which had 4 ports and supported 3 4K external displays), merely the 2020 M1 MBP with a (minor) CPU upgrade (the GPU upgrades are more significant, but with 1 external monitor for pros to use to take advantage) and for most people worse than the M2 MacBook Air, which has a bigger/better screen and better webcam for $100 less! Yes, the GPU on the $1200 is worse but - again - the pros who would benefit from the extra 2 GPU cores and improved ProRes performance are going to be offput by the 2 ports and single screen. 

Folks are merely stating that the set of people that wouldn't be better off getting the M2 MBA instead of the M2 MBP is a small one. It really is limited to people who want/need an entry level (or perhaps a secondary) graphics machine (photo/video editing, graphics design, animation etc). Previously a real case could have been made that an M1 Mac Mini would have been better for that cohort because at least that would have allowed for a pair of 32" 4K screens instead of a 13" screen and a single 4K screen. Which means that when the M2 Mac Mini finally makes its debut then there really will be no reason for the M2 MBP to exist.

Now of course, as I stated below, the reason why the 2017 13" MBP design is being used AGAIN is clearly the component shortage. But as I also stated below, the Windows and ChromeOS entry level notebook market that the 13" MBP competes in is shifting to tablets. The 12" Lenovo Thinkpad tablet kicked it off last year, followed up by the 13" Dell XPS detachable this year. There have also been several (HP and Lenovo) ARM Chromebooks with similar form factors. The component shortage - and the TSMC bottleneck - has limited both the number of detachable notebook models and the quantities available of those that exist for purchase, but expect to see a boom of both in 2023. What that is going to mean for the 13" MBP going forward has to be considered.

Sorry but macOS gaming isn't going to happen. People who are serious about gaming buy PCs and consoles. Even if your main machine is a Mac, you are going to buy a console ($250 for a Nintendo Switch or XBox S, $500 for a PlayStation or XBox) or a gaming PC (which start at $750) to play your games. If you don't have a console or a gaming PC, you aren't serious about video games. Meaning that even if a flood of video games were to arrive on macOS, you won't start playing them. Why? Because if you were actually interested in playing them before you would have bought a console or PC and played them before.

PC and console gaming is an expensive, time-consuming, and frustratingly difficult hobby. Because of this not very many people do it. Even a hit console only sells 50-100 million units, and the PC gaming market is about the same size. By contrast billions of people play mobile games because they are cheap - $5 or less as compared to a $60 PC or console game - far easier and available on hardware that you already own for other purposes. Mac users who have never shown an interest before aren't all of a sudden going to start investing the time, money and effort into Final Fantasy and Far Cry just because you now can on a Mac.

Another thing: don't overstate Apple Silicon's capabilities. Its two best attributes when compared to Intel and AMD - multicore performance and power per watt - are completely irrelevant to PC gamers. What is most important for PC gaming is single core performance and GPU performance. Apple Silicon is honestly mediocre in both. The single core performance is behind Zen 3 AMD Ryzen 7, 11th gen Intel Core i7 and later this year may even be comparable with Zen 4 AMD Ryzen 5 (which will be on TSMC's 5nm node) and 13th gen Intel Core i5 (will be made on Intel's 2nd gen 10nm node). And while Apple has the best integrated GPU by far, discrete GPUs that outpeform it don't cost a whole lot (or at least won't when the shortage is over). A $2000 MacBook Pro offering the same effective gaming capability as a $1200 Dell G15 is nowhere near the compelling proposition to people who actually play video games as it is to Apple fans who push the "ballpark with x86 performance plus much better power per watt" thing.