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The author clearly and obviously has no clue about M1. Calling its performance a "marginal improvement" is laughable. The entire article reads as a desperate attempt to distract people from the obvious advantages of the M1.

I'd be desperate too if I were trying to pretend Android is a serious competitor performance-wise when the CPUs are 18-24 months behind and the gap is still widening.

>I'd be desperate too if I were trying to pretend Android is a serious competitor performance-wise when the CPUs are 18-24 months behind and the gap is still widening.

I open WhatsApp on an iPhone XR. It launches instantly.

I open WhatsApp on a five year old Oneplus. It launches instantly.

Honestly who cares unless you have some niche use case or play mobile games. Having a class leading CPU isn't an advantage if it offers an indiscernible performance increase.

What I do care about though is having a respectable battery life and useful features like a headphone jack. A brand new phone (iPhone SE) should not have worse battery life than a phone from 2015 with its original battery that cost half its price.

If all you use is WhatsApp, then you really don’t need to care about Apple. There is a huge range of android phones that will meet your needs.

The key is that it increases the size of the performance and energy budget. When you have a large budget, you can start doing interesting things.

A friend of mine got some Samsung flagship(don't remember which one but something new and expensive) from this year, she's into Instagram filters whan she showed me some fun ones she likes I noticed that these filters have significantly slow FPS on live preview - something I am not used to see on an iPhone. I tried the same filters on the lowest end iPhone I have access to, which is iPhone 6s, and that device gave much much better FPS on the live filters of Instagram.

This got me thinking, maybe the Andoid ecosystem is degrading the iPhone experience too? Probably Facebook is holding back on filter capabilities in the name of having the same features on all the platforms? If this Samsung flagship is not better than iPhone 6 in Instagramming, god knows what's the experience on lower end devices.

BTW, TikTok filters have superior face tracking in my experience with excellent iPhone 6s performance. I don't know what's the Andorid situation on TikTok.

It might be a marginal improvement for some apps running on Rosetta 2.

Benchmarks from relatively trusted sites, such as Anandtech, suggests that strong native performance on most benchmarks, and at least competitive, if not slightly better, when emulating.

The article is a bad argument to a conclusion that we already know, something that they can already do without putting out their own chips.

Having worked as a mobile app developer primarily on iOS, I quickly learned that many Android fans has an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder. My Android developer co-worker has to use every opportunity given to rant about how superior Android was and how terrible iPhone was. Not to mention how downright evil Apple was.

I've noticed the same thing.

I admittedly do have an obsession with ranting about Android, but I find that there are fewer reasons to rant than five years ago. So I rant less.

As the Android platform has improved over the years, I find that the main reason I don't want people around me to use Android is the ridiculously short product lifecycle of many Android phones, and the risk of non-techies using unpatched devices.

I honestly think Apple's recent 5-6 years is unsustainable, but the three-year(?!) promise that seems to be a best case for Android is just obscene.

Someone at work said it's partially due to SoC manufacturers not providing drivers for new Android kernels for very long, but I might have misunderstood.

This to me is perhaps the primary reason I view Android as simply irresponsible as an ecosystem.

The average lifespan of their phones is kind of sad. Most people keep their iPhones for many, many years. But if you try to do that on the Android side you're putting up with a lot of hardware pains or putting yourself at risk using a device that's no longer getting security patches.

Totally understand that people have different cosmetic preferences in operating system, or even philosophically just prefer the Android approach. But it's this fundamental disposability of Android that seems so wrong in comparison to how Apple dutifully designs their phones for long haul support.

And last time Greenpeace did a checkup of this, it seemed like it was only Fairphone and Apple that even had attempted to work on their processes to limit the environmental impact of their products. It's really hilarious, especially considering the limited user serviceability of Apple products https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/greener-electronics-2...

iPhones have actual resell value, too.

I switched to iPhone in 2012 after I got super annoyed about the poor quality of and lack of software support my HTC Desire Z was receiving. Since then, every phone I've had, has served out its full 5 or 6 year lifecycle with family members.

I generally switch iPhones every two years, and as of late, the only reason I do it is to prevent family members from ending up with garbage Androids. From iPhone 6s forward, I feel that the 'useful lifespan' of these products for someone who wants something snappy, has only increased.

Here in Finland, one can buy phones from carriers unsubsidized, but with years of interest-free installment. After two years, the market price of my old phone is pretty close to the remainder of my installment.

> many Android fans has an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder

I've also found many Apple fans have an unhealthy obsession with Apple bordering on mental disorder, but my anecdote is about as pointless as yours here.

There are also plenty of people in both "camps" who just want a device to go about their business and, as is their choice, don't care much beyond "what costs less" (however they might define that), or what their friends/family use or recommend, or maybe just what fits a very specific use case of theirs.

I've used both types of devices, and there are some things Apple/iOS does better and some things Google/Android does better, and certainly some things neither does well. The specifics of that will always be a subject of disagreement depending on who you ask.

Apple fans tend to be fanboys, Android fans tend to be hateboys too.

I find the hate part to be very unhealthy. Seriously annoying people, they wouldn't just defend their camp, they would just be evangelists of Andoroid, they are also on a quest to bring down anything else. They even branch between themselves and have fractions of purists, Samsungers, xiaomiens ands so on and they will constantly try to bring down each another too.

This is patently false. Apple fanboys also go to great lengths to demean users of other platforms.

Case in point: Your labeling of users of other platforms.

As an android user, I hate that iPhone users put up with insane bs that Apple does. They normalize abusive behavior and that spreads to the Android ecosystem too. Which hurts me. Case in point: headphone jacks

its annoying and anti-consumer (imo) to remove things like headphone jacks (especially when there is plenty internal space left for one) but it seems what your really angry at isnt apple per-se but market behaviors and competition (where companies rush to imitate the market leader)

this happens (for better or worse) all over the place, with fast-food, cars, fashion, electronics etc

I'm an Android user but also have an iPhone for work purposes. There's nothing I find particularly delightful about either platform and I can't fathom what would motivate someone to be an Android or Apple fanboy.

The reason I've stuck with Android has got very little to do with the software.

> Architecturally it looks like they're sacrificing expandability and raw multiprocessing power (like massively parallel database server multiprocessing) for a single minded focus on laptop chips.

I don't see that there's any hard evidence they're doing that; there's no obvious reason that they can't just shove in more cores for an M1X or whatever (very much Intel's approach these days, say), and they're not (at least technologically) married to the on-package RAM thing.

Actually, they might not be able to.

Everything comes with a cost when you're working in silicon. You can add more cores, yes, but to do so, you either must make each core smaller, or increase the maximum distance between two cores.

This is important, because the longer the distance, the harder it is to maintain e.g. cache coherency between all cores. There's a physical limit to the speed electrons travel, and you have to account for that.

Intel's designs rely on pretty teeny cores with small L1{I,D} caches and small private L2 caches on a ring bus topology, with the iGPU on one polar end, and the system agent/memory controllers on the other ends. [0] [1]

Zen takes a slightly different approach, using individual ICs with four cores on a single IC complex, sharing a single, relatively slow L3 cache, with small private L2 caches per core. The "chip complexes" are contained on a carrier chip which takes care of PCIe and the memory controller, similar to Intel's system agent, but farther from every core. [2] [3]

Apple has instead opted for all the cores to, instead, share a single large L2 cache, with enormous L1 caches. Both the GPU and CPU appear to have point-to-point connections to the memory controller and to the other peripherals.

Because they use 1) large caches and 2) squash everything together, they've managed to achieve ridiculously high memory bandwidth with teeny L1 latency.

For example, while Intel's latest uarch requires 5 CPU cycles to read L1D cache, M1 can do so in 3 cycles. Zen requires either 4 or 5 cycles.

There's no free lunch here, and I doubt they could maintain this same architecture while adding many more cores. They're missing the interconnects and necessary silicon to do so, and adding it would add latency and/or shrink existing caches. The design seems to be predicated on being small with minimal distance between components.

Caveat emptor, I'm not an engineer, this is all idle speculation.

[0] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/thumb/c/cf/coffee_lake_over...

[1] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/5/53/coffee_lake_die_%28oct...

[2] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/a/a7/amd_zen_ccx_2_%28annot...

[3] https://en.wikichip.org/w/images/7/75/amd_zen_octa-core_die_...

> The author also makes the confusing suggestion that M1 is a ploy to get developers to publish to the App Store because ... Xcode produces fat mach-o's? Maybe I'm an idiot here, but all those third party apps are also made with xcode. Where is the correlation with the app store? Sure, apple has been pushing the app store, but how does "apple silicon" specifically push devs there?

App Store has smart deploy features so it only sends you what you need. So maybe that's it. But still.. it's a pretty weak argument.