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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

The alternative is worse; continued stagnation of CPU performance. At least Apple is pushing the boundary higher. Now AMD/Intel/Microsoft will have to up their game. Competitive pressure is almost always a good thing in an industry, at least for customers.

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Intel have stagnated, but in their last 3 generations AMD has gone:

* from miles behind to ahead in multi-tasking workloads (ryzen 1000)

* drew "close enough" to Intel but Intel had a immediate counter (ix-8xxx vs ryzen 2000)

* Cut the feet from under Intel's HEDT CPUs and rendered them mostly pointless, and managed to keep a "close enough" position despite Intel releasing a new CPU generation soon after (Ryzen 3000 vs Intel 10xxx)

* Took a convincing lead which Intel has no answer for (Ryzen 5000 vs Intel 10xxx)

Intel have certainly stagnated but are promising any day now they'll be out of their slump and on a new process for mainstream CPUs. Maybe, maybe not, but their failures are no guarantee AMD are also going to hit a wall, especially since unlike when Intel planted themselves firmly on top, there are challengers in sight still for AMD.

I'm okay with 5% yearly increases in performance if it means I don't have to pay Apple $200 for an 8GB RAM upgrade. If I can choose which SSD to buy or which GPU or CPU. Nobody else is capable of doing what Apple has achieved here. That's not a good thing for customers, considering how authoritarian Apple behaves as a company over its customers.

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