Hacker News Reader

Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft’s efforts are more likely to result in a server chip than one for its Surface devices

In my opinion, the majority of people have too much faith in their ability to predict the future.

I was terrible at predicting the real world performance of the Apple Silicon M1. It is, in fact, much better than I expected. On the other hand, Microsoft has thus far only had slightly modified AMD chips in their Surface Laptop, and poor performing ARM-designed Qualcomm chips in their Surface Pro X. Maybe I'll be bad at predicting the future, but I do not expect excellent performance out of Microsoft's Surface chips in the next 365 days. Probably longer.

In the meantime, more Windows computers will be sold than MacOS, and they will have mostly Intel chips, but an increasingly large number of AMD chips.

AMD has survived with less diverse revenue streams and much worse product portfolios. I'm optimistic for how they'll do over the next several years.

View on HN

> I was terrible at predicting the real world performance of the Apple Silicon M1. It is, in fact, much better than I expected.

I expected what came out in the end. Apple would never put up the amount of money and the promise to ditch Intel if they were not absolutely certain that they could actually beat Intel performance-wise and have a working Rosetta to keep "old" software running.

The writing was on the wall for a long time, iPhone and iPad processor power has been taking decent shots at moderately powerful PC hardware for years now - the key thing why Apple didn't do it two years ago was software support and developer tooling, they wanted to avoid cloning the Windows RT fiasco which fizzled out because no one had working software and there was no translation layer.

Not sure why you're getting voted down - this is an excellent point.

It's also the case that now Apple has shown what can be done more firms will be seeing how they can try to reproduce that which will spur more investment in the Arm ecosystem.

Anybody remember the Zune? How different is Microsoft nowadays to make this actually work?

Most of their hardware products (not all... but most) end up being good, but not earth-shatteringly so, and either keep kind of moving on without taking any crowns (like Xbox), or slowly wither and die (Zune, Windows Phone).

Surface seems to be a good Halo product (not the game, ha!) so far, but I see very few Surfaces in the wild compared to any other laptop/tablet/desktops (mostly HP, some Dell, etc.).

Be careful with anecdotes! Even your own experiences! The world is a very big place. The few different jobs I've worked over the past, say... 5 years... I've seen lots of places that were Dell from door to door, a mix of Macbooks and Surface, all Macbooks but a few had Surface as personal/toys, etc. At some places, they are popular and I think when you see them all the time you're more likely to buy one yourself. When no one you know has one you're less likely to get one. So it's helpful to dig up sales statistics if you can find them...

Perhaps the closest thing to a Zune that Microsoft makes today is the Surface Duo. It's very expensive with nice hardware, but the initial launch got some bad press from mediocre software. The software has likely gotten a lot better over time, so it will be interesting to see a version 2 here. But no one will be buying a $1400 Zune :)

Microsoft is terrible at marketing anything to the common consumer and they always have been. That Windows dominates the consumer desktop dominant is a side effect.

Microsoft must always 2nd tier any consumer effort to their business of business.

Zune was instrumental in many of the design systems we have today.

I really liked the Zune. Also, it had a streaming service before Spotify was a thing, and you got to keep 10 songs per month permanently even if you canceled your subscription. I think it was much better than it got credit for.

I'm pretty inclined to think any custom CPUs will be for Azure specifically. They already have some custom hardware (e.g. FPGAs, ASICs) for different parts of the stack like storage and networking.

After M1, I am definitely holding out for Mac Pro rather than going the AMD route. I am sure there will be a ton of professionals thinking the same. While I’ve always cheered for AMD as a company, I think Apple will gain substantial market share in the next decade. And AMD just doesn’t have the resources to fight that wave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com