timmillea

Efficiency is performance. Excessive heat output changes the form factor. Heat = large cooling systems. Power consumption = large batteries or PSUs. You cannot have a viable laptop or compact desktop with good performance without good efficiency. High efficiency SoCs make products such as the MBA possible - lighter than an iPad + keyboard, fanless and yet has more performance than the highest-end cheese grater Mac Pros that can still be used as the main form of domestic heating.

Not going to happen. The car-loving US culture blind-sides Apple in the pointlessness of this endeavour. 

Sir Clive Sinclair, who created the original personal electric car in 1985, then spent millions in research into finding the optimum cycling geometry only to find that the existing geometries were already optimum. Solution already there. 

There is no future for expensive driverless cars. The future is walking, cycling, tuk-tuks and shared minibuses. It will always be cheaper to employ a driver than to maintain a network of backup people to rush to a vehicle to sort out inevitable issues that arise. It will always be better for a society to walk or cycle. Something Sir Clive realised decades ago. 

Simply replacing gas-guzzling vehicles with their electric counterparts does not cut it. Driverless does not cut it. The problem has already been solved but many of the current generation do not wish to accept the solution.

jas99 said:

greginprague said:

4.7% revenue beat and an 11.6% earning beat and the stock is just up 2.5% (at the moment) in after hours.  This is while still being down more than 12% from all time highs less than a month ago.

I agree with the sentiments. 

Apple has no competition. Microsoft makes some of the world’s worst software and hardware. 

Honestly, Apple should be at $500 per share and Microsoft should be out of business.

We have come a long way from the dark days when the company producing the most beautiful and "insanely great" products looked like going bust and that awful, naff company that had never produced anything of quality looked like it was going to claim global domination. I am glad to have lived long enough to see some sort of 'business justice' done. I would still like to live longer to see MS bankrupted and found guilty of crimes to good taste and usability. It is hard to detest a company but having worked in IT, I make an exception for them. 

The Apple mantra on processors is “performance per Watt”. When Apple first opened talks with Intel about the Mac’s transition to Intel chips, this truly blindsided Intel as they thought the way forward was forever better heat dissipation. For Apple, with an ever-increasing proportion of its products in the mobile category, it was simply a matter of physics. More heat = more Watts = bigger batteries/shorter battery life/noisier fans/hotter surfaces etc. - all things an anathema to Apple.

The newly announced, but not released, Intel chips are still at least a generation away (easily 50%) in terms of performance per Watt than Apple M1s that have been shipping in actual products for over a year! I think that puts Apple a comfortable 2 to 3 chip generations, or around 4-6 years ahead of Intel. Anyone can obtain better performance by throwing more power at the problem. Just transform the M1 Max curve on Intel’s own chart by a factor 2 in the X and Y axes and suddenly Intel’s latest (pre-)announcement looks rather embarrassing. In fact, the M1 Max x 2 curve would literally be off the performance axis shown. 

Re. iPadOS: "It is expected that even external monitor support will see a significant upgrade soon."

I would like to hear more about this!