slurpy

mdriftmeyer said:

MisterKit said:

I am getting the feeling that Apple just pulled a few years ahead of the competition. These Macs are beasts and they will only get better. 2021 should be an interesting year.

I get the exact opposite feeling. You people think there's some sort of magic involved in all of this when it's a tightly coupled control of hardware and software they don't give access to third parties. Also, this 12 years in development product has gone through dozens of revisions in-house none of you seem to think took the time it took to reach this point.

Nothing Apple has done is ahead of the competition. 

The biggest surprise in this industry has always been Microsoft's refusal to develop their own CPUs along with their OS, Apps and Development Tools. They would rather be the software to everyone's hardware long after Bill has retired.

2021 will see a lot of augmentation in AMD first and later Intel. What I know personally from friends at Intel is they're in a huge shake up and the fact they sat on their ass for the better part of the past decade is the largest case of hubris since IBM's glory days.

Apple has a long road ahead for a fully scalable architecture to be at the level of a Mac Pro and they know it. They are years away from it. The problem is the rest of the industry is also making the transition to FPGAs and more integrated specialty cores. Apple isn't unique in this at all.

For instance, within a month of announcing the merger of Xilinx with AMD they have already released a beta of Xilinx's FPGA hardware accessible within post ROCm 4.0 released this past month and native kernel support in Linux for Xilinx FPGAs out of the box.

That tells me the merger and development has been in the works for the past 18-24 months. 

None of you seem to have a clue that Intel is not Apple's benchmark for the future. It's AMD and it's never going to match them. Apple has no plans of matching them either. They are focused on disposable/recyclable consumer products on a 12-18 months refresh.

The Macbook Air/Macbook Semi-Pro 13 neither are upgradable and are their first forays into disposable and future leased hardware. It's a disgusting future that they believe like the Subscription Model of Software the world will just fall in line. They'll expand their profit margins which is great for my stock portfolio but they are abandoning a lot of their potential in other markets that require much more power intensive computation requirements and thus professional level products.

On the plus side, I see the M series eventually becoming products integrated into EVs.

crowley said:

Beats said:

crowley said:

I don't know how anyone defends this behaviour from Apple as to the benefit of anyone but Apple.  And if that's the case then they're just like any other shitty big company.  I thought Apple aspired to be better than that.  The "best products" and all that.

I've been a subscriber to ProtonMail since before they had an app.  I like my Mac and my iPhone, but screw Apple and their rent seeking; if there's an option to pay outside of IAP then I'll be taking it at this point.  I was thinking about subscribing to Apple One, but to hell with that.

Apple is better than that. Go buy knockoff devices and be happy that way.

Not even attempting to address the issue.  You might be happy with suffering a susbstandard user experience for the sake of filling Apple's coffers, but I'm not.

crowley said:

genovelle said:

These selfish idiots will force Apple to change focus and it will effect the quality we get as product owners. 

Changing the focus away from services revenue and towards better user experiences sounds good to me.