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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that very much. The iPhone was a true revelation: in user interface, in form factor, in the things it allowed you to do.

The M1 is amazing but it doesn’t compare. Performance (both raw and thermal) is a big boost but it’s not going to reinvent computing.

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Loads of people didn’t think much of the iPhone when it came out either.

No physical keyboard, other devices have large touch screens, no stylus, can’t copy and paste. Appreciating the iPhone is largely done in hindsight.

Best not to make predictions too far into the future.

> Appreciating the iPhone is largely done in hindsight.

I’m sorry but that’s definitely not true. Yes, there were a vocal minority of folks who said the iPhone was nothing special but the mass market response was huge and it was heralded as a huge deal by the vast majority.

And to go back to my original point: there’s a difference between “this new invention allows you to do new things, but those things aren’t important” and “this new invention does not allow you to do new things”. Reaction to the iPhone was the former. My reaction to the M1 is the latter. It allows you to do the things you already do faster and cooler and it’s a big technological shift. But it isn’t going to change the way people use computers in the way the iPhone did.

Did you forget when the CEO of Microsoft laughed it off and said it was crap? [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

I mean yeah, what else would the CEO of a competitor say?

To be fair, if you remember 2007, the first generation was lacking in many areas. You couldn't send MMS messages. Receiving MMS was awkward and was done through an AT&T web site. You couldn't install apps. You couldn't take videos, only photos. It was slow, etc.

My first iPhone was a 3G, but felt the iPhone really started taking off with the iPhone 4. It felt like a huge leap.

Like I said, there was a vocal minority. Did you forget that he was widely mocked for being so dismissive of an obviously very impressive product?

My reaction to the M1 is the latter. It allows you to do the things you already do faster and cooler and it’s a big technological shift. But it isn’t going to change the way people use computers in the way the iPhone did.

I think the point is that they have a single unified platform now (or soon). I think MS was right to have the Surface run windows and build in touch to Windows. But that never really took off.

Now, if I’m not mistaken, the M1 is giving you full performance for a work day running off a battery. And you can run iOS apps on Big Sur.

I think Apple will pull off what MS couldn’t. Single platform, multiple form factors, all capable of running the same software because the hardware is literally the same. Without just shoving everything into a web browser, because native apps are almost always better. And Apple has all the pieces of the puzzle: desktop, laptops, tablets, phones.

It won't reinvent UI, but it signaled the change to ARM and by extension, RISC.

To a normal consumer, that's not a big deal (although 17 hour battery life is already pretty huge). To future PC hardware and server/backend infrastructure, that's a huge deal.

Oh, for sure. It’s going to be a big deal to use techies and represents a huge shift in terms of who holds the power in processing. (that said, the vast majority of PCs won’t be able to use it!)

But entire industries (e.g. ride hailing) were created in the aftermath of the iPhone’s launch. I just don’t think we’ll see that kind of change reflected in most people’s lives.

The big boosts here are commodity ARM instances on the cloud. These instances already are more power efficient than their intel counterpart and cheaper - but developer machine used to be all intel. Now that has changed.

It’s not the same, but this is significantly accelerating the end of x86, and the end of Intel (at least the end of the current dominance of both). Such shifts don’t come along that often.

To put your comment in perspective:

Intel has 90+% market share in servers.

Apple has 15% market share in personal computers.

Sure, but I didn’t mean that the whole world will switch to Apple. The world will mostly switch to commodity ARM chips and Intel's margins will crumble. Might take 5-10 years.

This is Intel’s Nokia moment, when they lost a dominant position to Samsung/Android. Apple was the catalyst there as well, but Apple did not directly kill Nokia. The industry shift Apple sparked killed them.

I disagree... laptops and desktops have been “dead” forever. The release cycles are boring and the computers even more so. This chip is a big change - Apple came out of the gate offering it in 3 form factors. That’s meaningful.

For the task worker populations at my employer, we only committed serious cash to upgrades when Windows 10 started cutting off support. The funny thing is in some ways the newer devices are slower than the old Haswell stuff. Cheaper laptops are lighter but have awful thermals.

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