When Steve Jobs announced iPhone on stage in 2008 he said it was a “revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone,"
That was saying the quiet thing out loud and Apple is playing it much cooler on PR around competition these days.
But Apple Silicon combined with Apple software is very likely at least 5 years ahead of the competition, because there is not currently an assembly of organizations that can integrate to offer anything like what Apple is doing _now_.
What makes this article particularly interesting is it points at beating NVIDIA and AMD in graphics and reducing the size of the enclosure by half.
I find it interesting that Apple just redesigned the Mac Pro only to have to redesign it again for Apple Silicon.
Oddly, the failed trash can Mac Pro may have actually worked for Apple Silicon designs.
I suspect that Apple will provide web services to Apple developers that breaks pricing for Intel / NVIDIA based cloud compute and further burnishes the value of building for Apple platforms.
Apple can fab at max scale if it can consume its own chips in its own data centers that can flex between serving Apple or AWS or Azure customers.
It’s going to be a rough go for the PC market because not everyone is going to make it through this—-at least not as the companies they are today.
Zen3 looks pretty on par with the Apple stuff, maybe it's finally time for OEMs to adopt AMD in a serious way so they can invest into R&D even more.
Also at the end of the day performance oriented people aren't going to care so much about process node idiosyncrasies. Does it perform or not?
Not that I would be mad if AMD meets or heck even bests Apple. Competition is good for all of us :)
Why can't others just "get better" and make their own chips that actually compete?
That's not to say it would be impossible for another company to try to get themselves to where Apple is today—but it would be far from trivial.
It's not like they're an example or anything... I mean, it obviously doesn't work for every market, but I just see it as kind of strange that someone hasn't taken a page from Apple's playbook over the years when it would suit them.
When Steve Jobs came back as "iCEO" in the late '90s, Apple stock was roughly $8/share (pre-splits). They weren't a total nobody, but they certainly weren't interesting enough to any big fish that there was any push to put pressure on them to act like a more "traditional" company. And Jobs kept doing things his way for the next 15 years, until his medical retirement and untimely death, and those things increased Apple's stock price fairly steadily. Until the iPhone came out, of course, at which point it increased dramatically.
But by then, people were already used to the idea that Apple would do things Apple's way. (And some people were so used to the idea that Apple was Doomed that they still preach it every time there's any new Apple news.) And it's so utterly clear that Apple doing things Apple's way works—for Apple.
Any other company trying to do things Apple's way—or even its own unique way, rather than the way the markets want—would be fighting an incredibly strong current.
So many people, even those who should absolutely know better, seemed to get caught in the trap of believing that a company—any company—can only be "viable" if it can constantly outdo itself and all its competitors.
1985 - 1997
Anyway, thanks for the reminder that the period without Steve Jobs was less brief than I tend to think.
"We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term...
Because of our emphasis on the long term, we may make decisions and weigh tradeoffs differently than some companies...
We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions..."
Maybe there's something to this approach?
[1] Bezos letter to shareholders, 1997 - https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/amzn_shar...
But who's fault is it? I would tend to think that it's Windows Arm port that sucks since Qualcomm chips offer good perfs for Android phones.
It is extremely likely other companies will step up with new offerings. But it will take 2-3 years (where Apple will reap the benefit of being early).
I remember using laptops with LCD screens in 2010, and even before. They weren't even Apple laptops.
Dell had a 2560x1600 LCD in 2007. https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-ultrasharp-3007wfp/specs/ https://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/general/ultrasharp%20300...
Dell and Sony also had laptops going as high as 4K in 13" form factors around the same time. Yes they were high end. So too was the MBP.