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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Apple has used exclusive access to advanced hardware as a differentiator several times. With screens it was Retina. They funded the development and actually owned the manufacturing equipment and leased it to the manufacturing subcontractors.

Also in 2008 they secured exclusive access to a then new laser cutting technology that they used to etch detail cuts in the unibody enclosures of their MacBooks, and then iPads. This enables them to mill and then precision cut the device bodies out of single blocks of Aluminium.

They’ve also frequently bought small companies to secure exclusive use of their specialist tech, like Anobit for their flash memory controllers, Primesense for the face mapping tech in FaceID, and there are many more. For Apple simply having the best isn’t enough, they want to be the only people with the best.

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Retina is a very interesting example for how Apple works. They have identified the necessary resolution (200+ ppi) for this technology and worked towards across their whole product range. The technology isn't exclusive to Apple, but they are the only company which pushes it, even if it sometimes means quite odd display resolutions.

Other manufacturers seem to be completely oblivious to it. They still equip their laptops either with full hd or 4k screens. The resulting ppi are all over the place. Sometimes way to low (bad quality) or way to high (4k in an 13" laptop, halves the runtime). Same with standalone screens, there is a good selection around 100ppi, but for "high res" the manufacturers just offer 4k in whatever size, so once again the ppi are all over the place again.

There are a few PC manufacturers offering 3K laptops at least (Lenovo, Huawei when I looked). For monitors it’s nuts, just Iiyama has a 5k screen with multiple inputs (the LG has only one input so useless for switching between pc and Mac)

Perhaps I'm lucky, but my LG 5K has aged really well. Fantastic upgrade in 2016 and still going strong. I'm surprised there aren't more 5K 27" monitors because they are great.

Personally, I hope Dell makes their own screen with the panel of the 6k Apple display. I would probably grab it in a heartbeat. I would consider the Apple display, but I don't need the reference video quality and especially I would like to have more than one input on a display that expensive.

Apple, what are you thinking? People who can afford that display might want to connect their desktop mac and their laptop to it.

8k TVs are imminent. The only real market for these with their detail only apparent up close is PC monitors and gaming.

I have a Chromebook with a 2400x1600 display. Not one of the standard resolutions, but it is 200-some ppi.

Retina is a great example of how Apple operates in general. They care about outcomes, not spec sheets. Sure, they'll take the time to spec dunk when the opportunity presents itself. It's just rarely the reason they do something, whereas Dell/HP/whatever want to say "4K SCREEN OMG" on the box regardless of whether that actually leads to a better experience.

Apple realizes there's diminishing returns in upping the resolution beyond what your eyes can see. So they hit Retina, and then move on to focus on color accuracy, brightness, and contrast.

They do this throughout their product stack. Only as much RAM as their phones actually need, because RAM is both costly in terms of BOM and also consumes battery life.

Using fewer Megapixels than competing phones because it's about the quality, not quantity, when other manufacturers trip over themselves to have the most Megapixels.

> Using fewer Megapixels than competing phones because it's about the quality, not quantity, when other manufacturers trip over themselves to have the most Megapixels.

When your customers are picking a product based off a spec sheet, that's the trap you easily fall into.

> Apple realizes there's diminishing returns in upping the resolution beyond what your eyes can see. So they hit Retina, and then move on to focus on color accuracy, brightness, and contrast.

It's still not enough resolution for x2 upscaling that Apple argues optimal.

> The technology isn't exclusive to Apple, but they are the only company which pushes it, even if it sometimes means quite odd display resolutions.

Apple's focus and commitment can be a pain to users who want something different, but overall it's a huge strategic advantage.

Software developers are building their apps for M1 because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Apple isn't going to keep Intel around any longer than they have to, whereas Microsoft had and will continue to have a hard time persuading anyone to adopt ARM Windows because the opposite is true.

That would imply split-brain development. Yes I agree that devs will support M1 out of necessity in supporting a minority market share OS that will expand from M1's apparent superiority....

But Wintel will own business desktops for probably a decade, unfortunately.

> But Wintel will own business desktops for probably a decade, unfortunately.

Do you see this as being different from what was going on pre-M1?

Aside from shared math libraries, seems like most stuff required cross compilation just to work - I’m not clear that M1 adds more work on top of that.

Dell Inspiron 8000 serie was released in 2000 with 15 inch 1600x1200 screen resolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron_laptops

That's about 130+ish dpi and it was unmatched for years: I know I had one and was depressed to see dpi do down and down afterwards :)

Hopefully Apple restarted the dpi race.

FingerWorks was one of the best of these acquisitions.

By the time I was ready to purchase one of their keyboards to put in my iBook G3 Snow, they had shut down. Little did I know...

https://technical.ly/philly/2013/01/09/jeff-white-fingerwork...

I believe this is the only consumer 5nm chip currently available as well. Ryzen gen 3 is still on 7nm. I'd be interested to see how well general purpose compute on the m1 vs ryzen gen 3 mobile will be.

The Huawei Mate 40 came out two months ago, and uses the Hisilicon Kirin 9000, which is also on TSMC's 5nm. It has about 30% more transistors and a higher clockspeed than the A14.

AMD has substantially more CPU/Microarch design experience.

Would you say that the comparison to the A13 from this article is fair? https://www.notebookcheck.net/HiSilicon-Kirin-9000-Processor...

"still on 7nm" :)

The thing is M1 performance isn't really the point in itself though. This is the lowest performance core architecture Apple will ever produce for MacOS, aimed at their lowest end cheapest hardware. It's only one data point towards what we can expect when they take the gloves off and go after the performance end of the market for real.

I hope so, I'd love to see a more heterogeneous chip market, with x64, ARM, M1+, RISC-V all competing with each other.

Maybe compilers would be default spit out binaries that run on all of them, like Apple's Rosetta or whatever it's called.

> binaries that run on all of them

Universal binaries. Apple calls those binaries “Universal binaries”. Rosetta is more like running different arch binaries through qemu. A brief look through Google says that there was a FatELF specification created years back, but never really went anywhere. Presumably because Linux users tend to know what arch they are using.

Fat binaries would make distribution easier, but would double (or triple) the size of a binary. I doubt it would be worth the size trade off.

Binary size is a small percentage of the overall asset bundle.

Docker also supports multiarch images.

Given how easy it is to JIT or BT RISC ISAs, the future is good for binary portability.

I’m thinking of all of the small utilities and small command line programs that make up a stock Linux distro. Those don’t have many resources other than the binaries. Sure, the size of each is not much in absolute scale, but combined, you have a pretty significant increase if they were all fat binaries.

That said, I don’t know what Apple does. For example, in the main download for Big Sur, is (for example) zsh a universal binary, or are there a specific x86/M1 downloads. I haven’t looked.

Looking at /usr/bin, /usr/lib/ etc. it's not quite as big as I expected. Going fat might be feasible, especially considering how large storage is at this point.

My /usr/bin is 800M

    /usr/bin$ du -schL .
    813M total

They bought Intrinsity as well, leaving us wonder about the fate of Fast14.

What could be the other motivation to be "The only one with the best" apart from greed? That's a pretty strong giveaway of being evil.

Greed sure, but it's also control. Apple has always been fanatical about controlling what the user, seller, repair shops, retail, etc can do with their products. Among other reasons, its one of the top reasons I'll never use Apple computers. I want complete control of my devices, and the ability to break my machines while pushing boundaries. Apple would rather have me locked in to their 30% fee App Store cash cow with apps that require their approval to exist.

I have heard that it might be possible to hack your Mac laptop (using a setting in System Preferences>Security&Privacy>General) to allow it to run code on that isn't from Apple's App Store.

Where is that setting on the iPhone and iPad?

There isn't one because the iPhone/iPad is a closed ecosystem, whereas macOS is not.

There are pro's and con's to both models; choose the one that works best for you. Even if it's not Apple :)

There is no lock preventing you installing non-Apple executable. Theres a warning and such but I install apps from third parties all the time. There are even several package managers, macports and homebrew, that will install userland unix binaries for you.

They're not 'the only ones' in that childish playground bragging kind of sense. If you want one you can buy one from them. It's just business.

Also much of this tech only existed when it did due to their investment in technology development and tooling. Microsoft had dragged their feet on Hi-DPI for years before Apple jumped ahead with retina and 5K and forced them to pull their socks up. Android phones probably went to 64-bit two years earlier than they otherwise would have. With Surface devices Microsoft has come up with some genuinely innovative and forward looking designs and engineering, but would they have done that without the spur of competing with the iPad and Mac? Apple have been single handedly dragging the rest of the industry kicking and screaming into the future, to everyone's benefit. How is that outcome 'evil'?

It is not greed, it is ego. Apple as a whole has an ego complex and it shows in so much of what they do. They always, to the point of harping, emphasize the Pro label and premium experience and premium materials. Even their head quarters is an expression of pure ego.

So when compared to other companies which do put out products with similar materials the difference is that Apple never reaches low. They won't sacrifice their premium material usage and expression to reach lower end markets.

Air Pods Max might be the situation backfiring on them. They were so wrapped up in having aluminum enclosures for the headphones they ended up with an overweight and overpriced to many product. It is going to be real curious what a lower cost version of these entail; the rumor is they will come but when and of what materials?

It’s business. This is all part of the reputation and image Apple wants. Any reasonably managed business will lean into its differentiations. This happens in every business sector at any measurable scale.

I think it starts, at least, with simple practicality. Apple products usually sell in massive volumes. When they introduce some new aspect, they have to be able to produce huge numbers of this thing, and since it's new, the industrial capacity to produce at those numbers reliably does not exist. They have no choice but to buy out and invest in all the available capacity, because they rarely release innovations in some small-scale experimental product. They swing for the fences for a mass market home run almost every time.

And they do this so well because they're led by Tim Cook who approaches the big picture in part in terms of supply chain.

I don't argue that cornering the market isn't an accounted-for and desirable side-benefit of this arrangement. I just don't think it's usually the starting point for them.

Brand marketing. It cements the Apple brand as being high quality and Apple products as being better than anything else available, justifying a premium price in the minds of their customers.

It's usually a legitimate justification, too. Nobody else makes hardware this nice, almost as a general rule.

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