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Comment by anoncow | Hacker News Reader

This could mean the following things.

1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones.

2. Intel may be in for a tough time, especially with AMD winning big on the console and laptop fronts recently.

3. AMD and Intel may have to compete for survival and to save the non-Apple ecosystem in general. If AMD/Intel can consistently and significantly beat Apple here, it may mean that the non-Apple ecosystem survives and even thrives. It may even mean that Apple looks at Intel/AMD as an option for Pro MacBooks in the future. However, this does seem a little less likely.

4. This could also herald the entry of Qualcomm and the likes into laptop territory.

Looks like a very interesting and possibly industry changing move. This could potentially severely affect Intel/AMD and Microsoft. And all these players will have to play this new scenario very carefully.

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> 1. If done correctly, non-Apple laptops may become significantly less attractive. Just like Android phones.

What are you talking about? Android has about 72% of worldwide market share, so clearly Android phones are not significantly less attractive.

And I am not an Android fanboy, my first two phones were iPhone 1 and iPhone 3GS, and I still consider them very good phones.

Market share and attractiveness aren’t necessarily related. A Kia isn’t as attractive to its target customer as a Mercedes but outsells it because of price.

Speak for yourself. If I'm going to buy a boring car, I certainly would take a Kia over a Mercedes, even if both were free.

Mercedes are completely outdated. Nice leather, that's it.

Mercedes would like to have a word with you.[0]

[0] - Mercedes to debut Formula 1 MGU-H technology in AMG road cars - https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.mercedes-to-debut...

A hack on the turbo of an ICE car sounds pretty out dated to me.

What would they have to do to get you really excited? Fusion drive?

Warp drive.

ICE is dead. It's a welcome piece of fun at weekends, at the track, and when we drive our classic cars. But, I'm afraid, thats it.

Much more interesting would be the CVS gearbox which is THE Mercedes advantage, the TCU, the shifter or the ECU. 100x better but also 100x more expensive. Will not happen. Worked in F1.

> Market share and attractiveness aren’t necessarily related.

Well, they are. You're confusing niche market segments with overall preferences. Veblen goods don't have traction in general markets.

> Android has about 72% of worldwide market share, so clearly Android phones are not significantly less attractive.

More precisely, Android has the BOTTOM 72% of the market, mostly cheap smartphones with thin profit margins. Almost all actual profits go to Apple.

This is the case; it really shouldn't be downvoted.

> Apple dominates the global handset market by capturing 66% of industry profits and 32% of the overall handset revenue.

Samsung and Huawei are second and third with about 20% and 10%, respectively. The three companies combine for about 95% of the profits.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/apple-continues-lead-gl...

In the same quarter, Apple had 12% of the global market sales, against 21% by Samsung and 18% by Huawei. They combine for 51% of the sales.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

So, that quarter, companies representing half of the worldwide cellphone sales combined for 5% of the profit.

Apple sold 12% of the phones and captured 32% of the revenue but 66% of the profit.

Apple is clearly able to sell its phones at a unique premium; I am not sure of a better way to measure "attractive".

But isn't it just a matter of time til the novelty of smart phones wear of, they stop being tres chic and the cheap ones becoming 'good enough'? It might have taken decades, but eventually Ford bought Cadillac, Fiat bought Ferrari, VW bought Porsche (and Bugatti and a few more).

Big difference is Ford, VW, et al had local dealer networks that not only fixed the cars, but turned the lessons and data learned in the fixing back into engineering improvements upstream. The net result of this is over a span of years Ford and VW buyers would see the product get better each time they bought a new one.

Android will always be a low budget product as a market, because it's run by Google. Google doesn't care about its customers at all, but for the data they generate and its impact on ad sales.

Every time a user opens the Google app store, they can expect it to be worse than the time they opened it previously. Every time an Android user buys a new device, it's a crap shoot what sort of hardware issues it will have, even if it's Google or Samsung branded.

I do hope AMD does well here as Apple's chips with all their custom silicon, T3 etc, mean the death of booting anything but apple signed OS images on that, forget Linux.

And that's not the future I am willing to buy into.

The presentations today specifically mentioned booting other operating systems.

No it didn't. It mentioned running Linux in a VM, which isn't the same thing.

Do you complain if you’re running your OS on a CPU micro architetture VM abstraction?

I'm somewhat confused by this rhetorical question since the microcode of processor is vastly different than the userspace & kernel of Mac OS. Running an OS bare metal versus in a VM on top of Mac OS are different across a wide array of things. At a minimum performance is lower and less predictable on the VM; you now have two different OS's updates to worry about breakage with on top of their mutual interface (ask anyone who's done serious Linux dev work on a Mac); you have two different sets of security policies to worry about; the low level tools to debug performance in a VM don't have the level of access they do on bare metal; and if you're working with hardware for linux servers & devices in a VM you are going to have to go bare metall sooner or later.

The abstractions are leaky, the VM is not a pristine environment floating on top of some vaguely well-defined architecture. The software in one has two extra layers (VM software & OS) between it and the actual platform and all this is before you start hitting weird corner cases with cpu architecture differences in the layers.

Hmm, really? Since Windows 10 your desktop runs in a guest domain, while the kernel running the drivers is isolated.

Since about 5 years Apple provides this kit: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor Yeah, you got to use the hardware drivers from Apple unless it also supports PCI pass through, not sure but with the current user base I guess nobody would do that anyway.

I expect Apple to eventually run their ring-1 off the T chip, with everything else from a VM abstraction. It’s just the natural evolution of the UEFI approach, and Apple being themselves they’re doing it “their way” without waiting for the crossfire infested industry committees to play along.

Nope there was no mention of booting another OS. Craig talked about native virtualization that can be used to run Docker containers and other OS runtimes.

Yes there was in the State of the Union. Also mentioned was booting another OS from an external drive.

Watch the other keynote from wwdc they do mention it lol

Thank you for expressing this. As much as I like Apple and the wonderful approach they have to design, something felt amiss. This is what I wanted to express.