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Comment by linuxhansl | Hacker News Reader

Do I need to worry now that a walled-garden company - with all its advantages - pulls ahead of open ecosystems?

I only use Linux at home. Will I be doomed to inferior H/W going forward?

This is not a rhetorical question or a flame... It's an honest question... Is Apple pulling ahead of everybody else and soon going to be our only option?

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Your situation won't be worse than what would exist had Apple not moved so far ahead of the others. In fact, Apple moving ahead only encourages others to up their game. So you're better off, due to Apple, even if you don't buy their machines.

That's an excellent point, I didn't consider that.

It does appear Intel has become rather complacent in recent years, more competition can only be a good thing.

I doubt it. When they talk about performance - they always said it in terms of compute/watt. In absolute numbers these CPUs and GPUs will still be less performant - just my guess.

On top of it for a foreseeable future I think a lot of professional software will stay on x86 architecture simply because most of it must be also available on Windows.

I'd agree, but Apple's position with the iPad likely will ensure enough professional developer mindshare? Most enterprise apps I use typically have a fairly built out version for the iPad (and most only support Windows otherwise). I agree that developers themselves will likely stick with x86 architecture to write code on for the most part given that's what servers will run.

Don't forget that AMD is still improving its cpus and moving ahead of intel .

I actually worried about this because of Windows on ARM only supporting ARM apps installed via the Microsoft Store which banned competing browsers like Firefox. You can run x86 apps with emulation without the Microsoft Store but why even bother with an ARM device then?

Turns out Windows on ARM is a farce and never had a chance in the first place. The available SoCs were crap, no hardware manufacturer actually launched ARM laptops in significant quantity, apps had to be ported to UWP, etc... It's basically Windows RT again and it was a total failure at that.

> Will I be doomed to inferior H/W going forward?

H/W is more than performance alone.

Personally I would consider a closed platform which can only run a single proprietary operating-system inferior, no matter what performance it has to show for.

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