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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Kind of sad to think about this - Why does marketing dept not actually show these and instead put up a cartoonized version of Apple's chips [1]? That's in every keynote. This is a rhetorical question, the real mystery is why does an average consumer want to see unreal things to convince them its cooler/better? You'd think seeing actual die shots would be more convincing to average consumer, but they love marketing that's untruthful, fake and exaggerated. Not the fault of the marketing department. This is what consumers want and this is what sells. Sad to think how shiny things sell and the whole luxury industry in general.

[1] https://www.apple.com/v/mac/m1/a/images/overview/chip_cpu__d...

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Get real - which consumer ever really cares about die shots?

I'm a rather technical folk and even I don't care.

They do have a shot on https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/ (the first non-logo image) which looks like it matches up (you'll need to rotate one by 180°). So it's not like they're hiding it or actively avoiding it. It apparently just doesn't suit their needs.

The degree to which they hype UMA (a term of art within the PC industry for decades) on that page is amusing --- if Intel did the same sort of marketing for its integrated GPUs, they would almost certainly be laughed at.

This is consumer marketing; “people who have a solid grasp of fundamental SoC architecture” are not the target audience.

What do people with such a grasp have to say about it?

M1's performance is great, but there isn't much evidence to attribute it to the memory subsystem. Also, people wanting to fit 32GB worth of apps into 16GB is just wishful thinking that isn't supported by evidence either.

Quite a lot of testing in Final Cut and Logic etc showing very good performance and efficient swap. So for most consumer apps it works well. No magic if you need a big block of memory for ML or analytics.

Do we know what benefit they're getting by putting the memory on the chip to begin with? I had initially assumed there was some non-trivial performance advantage in it, but now people are saying not so much, so why did they do it?

It seems weird to artificially limit the max memory if there was no advantage in it.

The benefit is they can charge you $200 for memory they bought from Samsung for $15. There’s no performance advantage to the user.

I’d love to know where you’re picking up LPDDR4X-4266 RAM for $15?

Are you actually asking? The spot price for LPDDR4X 16G is only $9. I was actually being generous. No doubt the contract price is far lower.

Yeah a link would be good. I haven’t seen anything approaching those prices - all well over $100

I think it's a power advantage, not performance.

From what I've read it seems to be different from Intel's UMA. It's cache-friendly single pool of memory directly accessible from different cores of the SoC: CPU, GPU, NPU etc. Since there's no division of RAM between different parts of the SoC, copying operations aren't needed.

I also read somewhere that they made sure the data formats used by the various modules are identical. Without that, you have to copy data to do format conversions. I don’t know how much of a problem that is in general, though.

As a technical consumer I don’t know why I would want to see the actual die shots - it really doesn’t tell me anything at all.

The graphics they put on slides or marketing sites aren’t supposed to be technical reference material, usually it’s just about conveying the idea of a SoC or performance improvements, or relative sizes, or whatever.

Because it's more real, and more inspiring to look at real technical material.

> Because it's more real

Why is more real better for this purpose?

Isn't a big idea of diagrams that they aren't real so can be simpler and easier to understand? Otherwise we'd just use photos or actual schematics.

> more inspiring

Most people just need to get the info so they can get on with their job and day and get home to their kids. They aren't looking to be inspired right now. That's fine.

For some people yes, for others it’s a confusing jumble of fuzzy shapes that distract them from the pertinent information. I think Apple approach of providing simplified diagrams, and also illustrative die shots (yes, they did provide die shots, so the whole premise of this discussion is stupid) was perfectly fine.

The inquiry I am making is more general - infantilization of consumers and the idea of dumbing things down for consumers like they're blobs of meat with cash to spare.

You don't need to see the cartoonized version of it either. May be its easier as a schematic to explain? Not sure. A list of M1's features would work equally well. I think its just marketing pizzaz.

They are simplifying the presentation for educating a wider audience of non-ECEs.

This is not a new phenomenon in human communication.

But we’re all just blobs of meat, that’s true. Maybe one day Apple will better tailor their marketing to sentient Bitcoin algorithms.

Though there’s still the possibility that they could add it into the detailed specifications page, or perhaps even a link in the footnotes of the specifications page? Surely that would be a better match for the target audience that would care.

Your refusal to take a moment to think why Apple’s marketing team did this is very funny. Do you think they just throw a dart into a spinning board when making decisions like this? There’s a difference between “dumbing” things down and effectively conveying your messages. Suggesting that they include an actual die shot in their ads for general consumers is one of the most HN-esque comments I read this month.

> Do you think they just throw a dart into a spinning board when making decisions like this?

I think the opposite. Apple has perfected marketing in a lot of ways.

Apple isn't an education company so it shouldn't be surprising their marketing department doesn't worry about simplifying things for their real goals. At the end of the day the customers are blobs of meat with cash to spare and the advertisement is to change the latter part not teach the former.

There is a list of features here:

https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/

Or are you looking for more detail, like the width of the decode pipeline or depth of the reorder buffer?

I would think that a majority of software engineers don’t know what those are, fewer still would understand the significance compared other chips.

Does it make a difference? The ones from the marketing department convey the message better and are pretty to look at. These are not as cool to average consumer.

They've actually done this for some web pages, you likely can find them on Wayback.

The other discussion here recently about how Apple is very silo'd internally is relevant: the marketing department very likely doesn't have access to real die photos.

They do, die shots are literally on Apple's marketing page: https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/

A quick visual comparison shows this to be pretty accurate, just inverted and rotated.

I think if Apple wants to be a tech leader they should open up more. The secrecy is totally unnecessary.

Are you claiming that they are not a tech leader right now?

They're in a weird spot. They're obviously making a lot of money, but most companies in their position do a lot of work to court developers and accessory makers etc. Apple's position is essentially that they control the market so you need them more than they need you.

But that makes others resent them. Which is a vulnerability because it means you have all the rest of the industry ready to sell Apple down the river the first chance they get, whether it's in making antitrust claims or lobbying against them or just fervently supporting any half viable competitor in the hopes that it becomes fully viable.

This is how it seems to me too. I still have their hardware I got years ago and it works great, but it's been a couple of years since I've decided to refuse any software upgrades from them, and to avoid their hardware. Their attitude seems to be getting more and more "our way or the highway", and I'm not interested in playing those games.

Previously I already switched from Windows to Mac as my primary environment, so going to GNU/*ix was not a big stretch. I already know several non-hackers who have gone this route as well.

> fervently supporting any half viable competitor in the hopes that it becomes fully viable.

Great. I’m an Apple fan and I’d love it if there were more half-viable or better competitors. Seems like Apple is doing a good job.

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