An ARM-based MacBook SE could destroy Chromebooks and mid-priced Windows laptops
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a) They'd have to release it at the same price point or less than those products (that's not The Apple Way)
b) Chromebooks have a huge market share in the educational space, and Windows low-end laptops have a massive market share everywhere else (and in general, the first person to a market usually maintains their lead for a long time, even given other factors - just like Apple with the iPhone)
c) This would require users to switch from one app ecosystem to another on a different platform that attracts developers that want to monetize directly compared to the app ecosystem on most Chromebooks and low-end Windows laptops (which are still x86_64-based and have a plethora of free/FOSS productivity apps)
If they do an update with an Apple chip, I would almost certainly get one.
Who's going to buy the $1k macbook when a $300 one works just as well? This isn't going to happen. Apple is a company built on high margin products, they aren't going to change that.
a) What people don't understand about the SE strategy, besides economies of scale and a smaller, more powerful phone, is that the device was made to offer extreme value targeting a demographic using a specific strategy called "Price skimming": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_skimming
The iPhone SE was designed to lower consumer's (Android users) barrier to entry (price) into the brand, to quickly gain market share, then sell them services or premium devices in the future. This is possible because of Apple's established reputation as a premium brand (as opposed to penetration pricing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penetration_pricing
b) The "1st mover advantage" is a myth. Consider Facebook or Google, they gained near monopoly market share because they were first in their technology/approach, not market.
The 'Apple way' is to wait for competitors to test new markets and get consumer validation, lowering risks by learning from early competitor errors, then grab market share with a product that delivers a better UX due to its superior combination of technologies. Look at Fitbit's demise with the Apple Watch - Google is now trying to replicate its Android success by acquiring Fitbit- "2nd mover advantage" works if done right.
c) If a and b work, this will make no difference to users, considering that Apple's strategy will not be focused on apps (this is a strength in phones, not laptops), but rather to sell a value performance device for the general public.
The Macbook failed not because it targeted the wrong demographic (business users) vs Air (students and commoners) and Pro (other professionals), but because it failed to provide value as an 'entry level' device: low specs, highly priced - they (partly) wrongly assumed business users' willingness to pay a premium for portability (inelastic demand) without regard for the value.
Nevertheless, the Macbook offer (a 1st gen. test product) did serve its purpose by anchoring users to see the next better offer at hand- the Air. This strategy called "bundling" in 3 options: good (price), better (quality), best (both) often serves to guide users to avoid extremes by choosing the middle option (usually most profitable), also called the "center stage effect": https://kenthendricks.com/center-stage-effect/
I recommend reading Stanford consultants' "Monetizing Innovation" to understand these strategies: https://www.amazon.com/Monetizing-Innovation-Companies-Desig...
In short, if they can offer a value laptop (priced below ~$700, best deal ultrabooks at this range) in an old body design (12 inch) and best tech specs (A14 or ARM), then this could be Apple's 'Macbook SE' offer. Heck, even test a 1st generation with cheaper AMD's chipset.
>a) They'd have to release it at the same price point or less than those products (that's not The Apple Way)
When I covered IT hardware companies on Wall Street, I heard Apple's CFO say that his company could release a $799 computer "but we don't want to".
Around the same time, at an investor dinner with the Dell CFO, an attendee asked how sales were of a $299 computer on Dell's print catalog cover. The CFO replied, "the problem with advertising a $299 computer is that people want to buy it".
The unfortunate reality with all of these stripped-down computers, though, is that nobody is writing software for them. While the CPUs are powerful enough to run pretty much anything, nobody is porting their AAA games or CAD software or video editors. Maybe Apple's ability to dynamically recompile Mac Store apps to ARM will help, but I still think MacOS is seriously lacking compared to Windows. So the best Apple can hope for is a "budget Mac" which power users won't buy (and power users write all the software), and they'll just be an expensive Chromebook. (ChromeOS doesn't have a lot of native software either, but at least you can run a normal Linux environment in a container and write software on the device. And, I don't think any person goes out to buy a Chromebook... they just get them for "free" from their school or company. It is an interesting segment of the market that can be profitable, but I really want to see these chips in something I can sink my teeth into. Set up a development environment, write software, and run the same software in production on those chips too.)
My takeaway is that it's a shame that this amazing CPU-design division exists inside a company that is all about dumbed-down user experiences. They could probably kill Intel overnight if you could just buy the chips on their own, but instead they insist on putting these chips in devices that are hamstrung by arbitrary policy. Obviously they are playing a long game, but as someone who just wants the best possible equipment... I can't afford to wait. (And I don't think the end result of the game -- Apple makes the CPU, laptop, OS, and software -- is very good for anyone.)
Random example: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/11/01/2018-ipad-pro-benchmark...
I hook my 2018 MacBook Pro up to a 4K TV to present to a meeting and the battery goes down to about 35% after two hours.
From the start, it was clear that a decent arm chip in a laptop is very usable. Paired with an SSD, and more ram, it would be killer.
MacOS would need some care to make it less heavy in terms of background consumption, but I don’t see that as being beyond Apple’s reach. Windows is a different matter, not sure what MS can bring to the table there.. The work being done right now in porting iOS applications to work on macOS clearly points to a strategy being developed.
Think it’s going to be an interesting couple of years.
I get Google started it to run their webapps.
But it doesn't seem technically infeasible to package and sell a set monthly subscription price, that gets you a lazy-allocated machine on GCP.
Spin up beefy software, your computer recognizes "this is more than I can do", checks current networking availability, and starts running the app remotely.
I know there are offerings like this, but it seems like a killer feature if it had full OS integration.
Just plop an overlay icon somewhere in the window to clearly note it's running remote. (Thereby letting users reason through why it occasionally behaves weirdly)
It seems an ironic perspective given that "Time is the only real currency we have" is on the HN front page!
I specifically mentioned it because Apple (1) has cloud resources, whether they see it as an offering or not, (2) has full stack integration with their products, & (3) has historically prized ease of use and packaging new technology in a slick way.
"Underpowered Mac / iPad / etc, now with iPower transparent cloud compute" seems a unique way to leverage their strengths and abilities in ways that Google, MS, and Amazon lack the capabilities to match.
Sounds like Silicon Valley thinking. If you're used to massive salaries (and massive housing costs), you probably won't care about relatively small subscription costs.
But for the majority of people elsewhere in the world, those costs really do add up. There's very little appeal in renting a PC or games console in the cloud, then getting a sub-standard PC or console experience for an ongoing fee.
Point being that expecting someone with that level of disposable income to having savings that allow for capital expenditures (instead of amortized subscriptions) isn't likely either.
iPad apps are expected to have massive buttons for big fat fingers. Pro software requires a mouse and a keyboard, a much more precise and flexible combination.
(Yes, you can get the Apple Pencil and an iPad keyboard. But it's a bit chicken-and-egg, people don't have the accessories because there's little software that uses them. And there's no software as few people have the accessories...)
I want my iPad Pro to be a good workstation, but the reality is that will probably never happen. However, if Apple uses the same hardware to run MacOS, then it could happen. Yes, they would need to tack on some more I/O (or at least release a first-party dock) and RAM, but they could still make a very thin and fast device that would blow Intel laptops out of the water. I would not buy one of these because I don't really care for MacOS. (I use the iPad as my "laptop" because it doesn't really require any customization or maintenance. I have my SSH key on there, that's about it. I use it as a dumb terminal and it's great for that, but with the right software, it would also be a very capable computer.)
ARM devices have become associated with App Stores, touchscreens, locked-down and dumbed-down systems. And there's a very real risk that Apple will take this as the opportunity to completely lock out any software that's not been censored and taxed by their App Store.
I personally doubt they will do that. If anything I could see them making iPadOS more capable, moving more of the consumer market there, and making the Mac line even more suited to pro users with more compute power and more OS capability.
BTW the ARM move could fit into this. I wonder how a 32 or 64 core A series ARM64 chip in a laptop form factor would perform? Our company runs some infrastructure stuff on Cavium ThunderX chips with 96 ARM cores and the performance is comparable to high end Xeons for very parallelizable load. The Apple A series core is far superior. I'd take 64 of those in a laptop.
It would be so fast I'm sure it would have no issue running transpiled X64 code at perfectly adequate speeds. Could probably even run X64 VMs in emulation at speeds that were at least quite usable for testing and dev.
The battery is on it's way out now and the keyboard is getting worn out but I'm pretty sure I'll get it repaired rather than picking up anything else. I'm not one to buy apple products usually but I've been so happy with this purchase, I'm not sure another laptop will ever top how great this one has been for me.
Apple's not shooting for marketshare. They never have been, they (probably) never will. And, conversely, it's very unlikely that most people with Chromebooks and Windows laptops today would be interested in switching to a Mac—the software's either not there, or very different.
And I say all this as a devoted lifelong Mac user.
In essence, they already have almost everything they need, but in a new form factor. And while an iPad on a stand is less nimble than a very thin screen, detachability and a better camera are very strong features for casual buyers.
https://www.cnet.com/news/macos-catalinas-ipad-apps-for-the-...
At some point they will merge iOS and Mac OS, given that iOS makes them all the money, and is now capable enough (with a different UI toolkit) to provide both phone and desktop programs.
And just outright kill a bunch of applications?
They'll support older apps for a long time though, it just won't be the preferred sdk and will gradually be phased out.
The situation they have right now is madness - two parallel slightly different UI toolkits and SDKs, one of which makes vastly more money.
And one which has a longer history. Should every Cocoa application be written in UIKit to continue working?
I'm not saying this is great for developers, I'm saying it makes economic sense for Apple and the signs are they are moving in this direction.
iOS (with a different UI toolkit) is macOS.
At the moment the base OS is the same but the huge SDK used to create apps has two parallel tracks without a huge amount of overlap (though they are increasing the overlap, and encouraging things like porting from ios to Mac OS). Each SDK takes a lot of resources to maintain and support.
They'll make cross-platform development between iOS and macOS easier, they're already doing that -- but getting rid of macOS (which is essentially what you're saying) isn't smart for them.
Not for users who need to run native apps for which there will be years of lead time to port.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
That being said, like many urban legends, there is quite a bit of doubt as to whether the company's demise was caused by the pre-announcement, rather than by the fact that Osborne was trying to leverage its lead into bigger margins, without offering more computer for the dollar.
Apple is picky about what it puts in its machines and what it makes them out of; can they make one of their signature milled aluminum cases cheaply enough to be a part of a BOM that lets them make a decent profit at $300? I can’t find much data on estimated BOMs for the Air (I feel that’s the closest thing in their line to this category) beyond a 2010 estimate of about $750 for machines sold starting at $1000. That price to users has remained consistent so I feel I can assume the cost to Apple hasn’t changed much. Some quick and sloppy searching shows that Intel’s prices on the CPUs in the current Airs are somewhere in the $150-300 range, if I make the best-case assumption that the cheapest Air’s CPU costs Apple $300 and that the cost of a desktop-level Apple CPU is zero, that’s still a BOM of ~350 for the rest of something built with the same specs as the cheapest Air. I guess you could bring in a mid-range Prestige Chromebook at that cost? Maybe? I have no idea what the Chromebook market is shaped like.
A plastic enclosure would probably lower the cost, but would they do that? I think the last time we saw plastic MacBooks was the “toilet seat” iBook back in the days of the gumdrop plastic iMac.
For example, the Google Play store app is only accessible by a single account, and apps aren't available across users. So if another user wants to install an app, you have to log out all users and they need to log in as the primary user. It's super annoying.
It feels a bit like comparing DSLRs to smartphones. Sure, there's some overlap in function but they're not directly comparable.
A quick glance at the front page of Steam shows at least half the games support Mac and Linux: https://store.steampowered.com/
It's never been easier to write a cross platform game with toolkits like Unity.
Though it's also true that, for a lot of casual gamers, laptop gaming generally may not matter all that much.
But they did still have a growing selection of less-GPU-intensive games. And then Apple removed 32-bit support, wiping out a huge chunk of the Mac Steam library. Oh, and they deprecated OpenGL, too...
Google had to build their own fleet management system for Macs for crying put loud!
The thought of Macs replacing most Windows machines is going to make me just laugh and laugh and laugh at random times today.
A lot of businesses have relatively little desktop software that runs natively these days. And many of the key desktop apps like Office (though even that's less important these days), Adobe Creative Cloud, etc. do run on Macs.
Yes, Windows is and will remain the standard at the majority of companies. But increasingly the laptop OS/chip doesn't matter as much. I have a couple Macs but I often just use my Chromebook.
If you aim at the entry level market, you either make something that will soon be obsolete, or cut corners on manufacturing - both options lead to the landfill rather soon.
The definition can vary. What one person defines as "normal wear and tear" is not necessarily what someone else would define it as. A small crack on the corner? A dead pixel? A loose hinge? Scratches?
In addition, buying used is fine if you can support it; but, what if someone can't? A warranty can be a good thing, as can tech support.
I've bought a number of used Thinkpads and it takes work.
It's working well already with cars - in places where labor is cheap things like older BMWs get extended life, as the same repairs wouldn't be affordable in other places, and as a consumer you get the benefit of driving a decent car for a reasonable price.
I see quite a bit of refurbishers in my area selling ex-leased laptops for a low price with a warranty, so it looks like the market finds a way.
My point is, there are upsides to buying new, but I think the environmental downside is much much greater.
To be honest, I'll buy an ARM Macbook right now if I can use Microsoft Office, Safari and VS Code.
Tries to argue the Windows transition failed because of the lack of a walled garden app store. But Windows on ARM did have a (to all intents and purposes) mandatory app store. Indeed, as the Mac App Store has broadly failed it had more of one.
Apple is going to have the same issues with third party software transitions. The reality is that consumers don't seem to really like the idea of a "proper" computer that can't run everything.
> With iPadOS now offering macOS-like features, as well as keyboard and trackpad support, it’s arguably not too much of a challenge for Apple to rework macOS to run on RISC and ARM.
This gives them two things:
1. Leverage on pricing with Intel;
2. The ability to ship ARM macs whenever they are ready.
So the next thing is, "what's the definition of 'ready'?" Opinions about that vary. I side wth tthe popular speculation that the 'problem' with macOS on ARM is not macOS, but all the legacy apps that need to be recompiled or run in some kind of emulation or need some other magic solution to "just work."
It's easy to ask every developer to recompile, but people have lots of shareware apps, unsupported old apps, enterprise apps, and apps from developers who aren't making enough money to justify putting a lot of work into supporting a new chip.
So for now, we have this weird situation where phones and tablets have enormous amounts of computing power but require less power and thus provide longer battery life for a given mass... Mostly to support computational photography.
p.s. Completely spitballing here, but I wonder if their hesitation to ship with an emulator—as they did when they made the PowerPC -> Intel switch—is because on a mobile device, emulation might be a heat source and power hog. With desktops, they didn't have the same concern about power draw or heat.
I think this will be the real deal breaker with these arm pcs... personally, I have enough of these arm phones/tablets/pi devices to skip paying $2k+ for a laptop with these processors inside that would have problems running anything but basic browser on them.
Only when you call it a computer. The other reality (I’m saying this for style, not to disagree with your core point) is that if you call it an iPad, it becomes one of the biggest hits in computer product history, a product that can only be judged as “meh” if you’re comparing it to iPhone.
The walled garden push may destroy MacOS too, if they go 'total lockdown' on their ARM release, and only allow store apps (so no Steam, no Bittorrent, no VLC, no cryptocurrency software, even more developer pain). Although I guess they did the 'killing Steam' thing already with the removal of 32-bit support wiping out ~50% of the Mac Steam library.
There's still as significant audience that wants a serious OS and serious software, not dumbed-down touch-centric 'Appified' rubbish.
I'm very interested to see how functional (or completely-dumbed-down) the rumoured iPad version of XCode will be. It could prove that 'serious work' may be possible on iOS in the future, or just another data point to confirm that we still need a clear separation of 'mobile OS' (primarily for communication and content consumption) and 'serious OS' (for everything else, serious work, creativity, development, gaming)
Unless they align themselves with market price (within a premium range, maybe up to 50% more than median), I don't see how they can "destroy the market" (they could still be a commercial success though).
The prime selling point of cheap laptops/chromebooks is their price.
I get (but I don't agree) that Apple wants to lock developers into their platform.
[0] https://calacanis.com/2019/01/02/chrome-os-is-the-ultimate-p...
Given the choice of a deluxe Apple computer (never mind an SE one) I would still take the regular PC or the Chromebook. Sounds mad but I like ChromeOS, Chrome and the normal PC keyboard. I don't actually want MacOS and I would pay to not have it. I am not alone in thinking this way.
edit: why downvotes? machines like that are also replacement for a tablet.
Touchscreen devices with touch-centric operating systems/UI systems will never replace 'proper computers' for 'serious software' as everything has to be so completely dumbed-down for touch, simply because you can't build a complex and feature-rich UI for such a limited input device.
My 7 years old dell can replace desktop workstation and tablet. Its replacement better have the same features.