Intel mocks Apple in new campaign highlighting things users can’t do on a M1 Mac
9to5mac.com
9to5mac.com
Rule of thumb, any time you hear a competitors product mentioned in ads you know it's unbeatable. Like, which smoothbrain at Intel thought it was a good idea to spend millions of dollars telling people about Apple's M1?
Intel has so little to say about its own products that it's redirecting ad money to the streisand effect
In this case, Intel has been the dominant player since the 90s, possibly the late 1980s in the consumer market. Running an ad saying they’re afraid of a newcomer’s first product (in this segment, of course) seems different because they’ve been a safe default option for decades - especially because this option was created to replace their products. It seems just as likely to make consumers wonder why they’re so worried about.
If the Apple ad said "Mac is so much better than the Dell XPS", that would be different.
At the time of "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC," Apple transitioned to Intel. Now that it's transitioning away from Intel, you're seeing the same argument but inverted.
You are exactly correct: Apple silicon. Intel is calling out a singular competitor. Apple called out all PCs.
> They want Apple to use Intel chips for refreshes on the bigger devices (MBP16 still ships with 9th-gen Intel, iMac with 7th-gen).
If there are generation-bump Intel refreshes for those machines coming, they have either been planned all along or will be a result of unexpected problems getting the M1X (or whatever would be in the those machines) ready or available. Intel isn't going to convince Apple to delay their architecture transition, especially now that they have released ads attacking their products.
> Anything they can do to delay Apple Silicon market takeup will dampen the attractiveness of post-M1 models running Apple Silicon, because nobody wants a machine with sparse software availability and that's a problem that won't get resolved until the user base is much bigger.
Oh, I agree this is their intent. But trying "Anything they can do" means they aren't coming from a position of strength.
> the streisand effect
Pretty sure everyone's heard of Apple. Come on.
They are not suggesting the ad is making people aware of Apple. They are suggesting that the ad is making people aware that Intel sees the M1 as a legitimate competitor, therefore suggesting to buyers that it is a worthy alternative to Intel's products. An unintended consequence of attacking a specific competitor or product is that you can raise awareness of the value of your competitor's product.
I also feel safer with Intel hardware than Apple's, because Apple is a system integrator who makes their own hardware and software. And thus they don't care beyond that - and so you have soldered hardwares (with no documentation), limited to no software comptability (for other OSes), face varying levels of difficulty to make anything work outside their ecosystem etc. ... it's fine for certain people. But limits our computing freedom.
If it were not for Intel or AMD, we would have a lot of silo-ed and incompatible systems, just like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have divided up the internet. Perhaps this is already happening with our personal computing devices slowly, and we haven't fully grasped it yet ...
I think Intel has bigger threats elsewhere. This is just a waste of money and will eventually backfire.
*Actual Apple ad from the 90s
https://i1.wp.com/lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/pentium-s...
I don't enjoy this kind of marketing, but for some reason the snail ad feels a lot more tongue-in-cheek than the serious corporate-hate-infused materials that Intel is releasing now.
Was it true at that time that Apple's offering was faster than the Intel-snail? Because if it wasn't, I'd certainly look at it differently.
There was a time when they didn't
> the snail ad feels a lot more tongue-in-cheek than the serious corporate-hate-infused materials that Intel is releasing now
Pentium II is the fastest processor in the World
... Not quite!
The chip inside every new Power Macintosh G3 is up to twice as fast
(it wasn't true... or, it was true that Altivec was "up to" twice as fast than MMX on some selected workloads, but the chip itself wasn't)
https://lowendmac.com/2006/twice-as-fast-did-apple-lie-or-ju...
Things you can do on an Intel that you can't do an M1...
Oh, look, there it is.
Threadripper Pro is really Workstation Epyc as that comes with the full 8 memory channels per socket and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes support as well as fully certified by the Motherboard suppliers ECC memory support for all ECC memory types and that includes ECC RDIMM support and 2TB memory capacity as well compared to the non Pro Threadripper consumer variants that only support 256GB or ECC UDIMM memory on motherboards that are not necessarily certified for ECC Memory support even if the consumer Threadripper has ECC memory support enabled.
We may have entered a phase similar to automobiles where brand stickiness is correlated to first purchase. I wonder if the ads will continue after the pandemic subsides and whether the exodus is significant.
I think Intel has a long way to fall before they are forced to finally face the music and innovate a bit. Until that time, expect to see a lot more of these awkward and cringe ad campaigns.
There's a small cost to maintaining the x86 architecture, which impacts on processor performance. But the idea that somehow processor designers switching to ARM will somehow make them fast an innovative is obviously wrong – I mean we've got AMD right there getting performance which is substantially closer to the M1, there have been countless ARM chips out there forever, and the M1 is itself absolutely an incremental approach to processor development!
They were not cheap plastic phones, they were expensive miniaturized phones representing the state of the art of portable phone devices.
I blame Apple if nowadays we keep bricks in our pockets.
Bricks that can't work on a battery more than 12 hours.
> PCs that last 12 to 24 months at best
I'm a proud owner of functioning PCs of the 90s, 2000s and 2010s.
The HW inside many PCs is of the same quality than the HW on a Mac, if not better, because people could chose what to put inside them.
Also, its interesting that you say "lasting 12-24 months at best" when recent Apple laptops have had plenty of issues necessitating recalls and redesigns.
It might be useful to read this
The words innovation and invention overlap semantically but are really quite distinct.
Invention can refer to a type of musical composition, a falsehood, a discovery, or any product of the imagination. The sense of invention most likely to be confused with innovation is “a device, contrivance, or process originated after study and experiment,” usually something which has not previously been in existence.
Innovation, for its part, can refer to something new or to a change made to an existing product, idea, or field. One might say that the first telephone was an invention, the first cellular telephone either an invention or an innovation, and the first smartphone an innovation.
> There’s no way they could possibly innovate at this point with all the baggage of x86.
Let's talk about it again in a few years.
"The M1 is really wide (8 wide decode) and has a lot of execution units. It has a huge 630 deep reorder buffer to keep them all filled, multiple large caches and a lot of memory bandwidth."