Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by horsawlarway | Hacker News Reader

While I'm not a fan of Apple in most regards, I think their approach to mobile hardware is much more coherent than NVidia and Intel right now.

Generally speaking - The CPU just isn't the performance bottleneck on most machines that people are intending to carry with them during the day.

The performance bottleneck is the battery and the temperature.

I think it's incredibly telling that from this chart (produced by intel, designed to promote intel products) my takeaway is intel has missed the mark entirely. The relative performance of their chips just doesn't matter when you realize that the M1 chips are SO MUCH BETTER at power usage. The ranges for power draw barely even overlap - the M1 is getting you ~100% of the performance, using half the power of the lowest power intel chip.

That's the win. Full stop.

It means the machine with that CPU is going to run cooler for longer. It means that cpu isn't going to be thermally throttled so you can actually use all of it (unlike that intel). It means you still have a running machine 15 hours later, instead of having a dead brick after just 5.

Ethically - I refuse to buy any general purpose machine Apple makes, but I'm sad Intel is so far off the mark here.

What are your ethical issues with Apple? Why mention them in the first place without further explication? Your other points rang true for me but this seems a little tangential.

For me it's the hostility towards developers and users. I can't even lower the dang contrast on my iOS or MacOS devices to make them a little less dopamine inducing. Sure you can switch to B&W but then I lose usability (Is that link clicked?). The massive cut they take from creators is another pain point. These are just off the top of my head, I'm sure others can chime in.

No doubt, Apple is more opinionated when it comes to UI/UX than others — for better or worse. It's a trade-off.

Fwiw, Apple does provide more control over the display tucked away under Settings/System Preferences => Accessibility (lots of goodies there, actually).

Not clear if you knew that and still found that too limiting, but perhaps others will have fun poking around in there.

At least on the Mac, I can almost always find a third-party tool that can accomplish anything Apple didn't expose.

I largely agree they need to reduce their App Store fees — it is damaging their goodwill for relatively limited benefit, but more-so it's attracting government scrutiny that will likely lead to worse outcomes for Apple and its users if they don't relent.

> I can't even lower the dang contrast on my iOS or MacOS devices

Does "Reduce White Point" on iOS/iPadOS help at all?

https://support.apple.com/en-by/guide/iphone/iph3e2e1fb0/ios

The dopamine inducing element is addictive apps like Facebook, not the color levels of the display.

You can simply delete the apps that have that effect.

Tell that to my apple mail icon.

You can delete that if you don’t like it.

> What are your ethical issues with Apple?

I don't believe you can genuinely purchase an Apple phone at the moment, and I think they're trying pretty hard to move their laptop/desktop machines in the same direction.

Namely - Much of their mobile ecosystem is utterly hostile towards non-Apple developers - including the owner of the device.

They lock hardware/software features behind entitlements that require Apple's permission (and of course an accompanying fee) to use. Good luck using multicast on your personal device on your personal network. Turns out you can't. The hardware can, of course, but only if Apple allows it.

In fact, turns out almost all of the software Apple provides to run their hardware treats you like a user, and not an owner. They riddle (and cripple) the product with digital locks, and do not provide the keys to the owner.

Instead they provide keys only to apps submitted for review to their store, signed with their certs. So again, it's hard to say I actually own the damn thing.

Is technological lock-in, or "hostility" toward a user as you put it, an ethical issue?

I would think the use of Chinese labor abuses to make iPhones is the ethical issue. Funny you didn't mention that.

Yes, but if one used that as their moral standard they wouldn't be able to purchase anything made by an international company. It's really easy to bash iPhone on things they do exclusively, but harder on industry practice.

Wrong.

You are making the "all or nothing" fallacy.

You absolutely can make the ethical choice when you have the choice. In some cases, you are simply forced to make the lesser evil choice.

Transparency is the first step. Yes, in some cases it is unavoidable, but to translate that into overall inaction, IMHO, is lazy.

That's reductive of my point. The overall being one's choices for a new smartphone are iPhone, Android, or abstain. When the parent comment elected Android for "ethical" reasons those reasons would not include the labor conditions of the phone's manufacture since that doesn't vary between most Apple and Android phones.

> That's reductive of my point.

> they wouldn't be able to purchase anything made by an international company

I suggest you don't make sweeping generalizations, then.

> The overall being one's choices for a new smartphone are iPhone, Android, or abstain.

That's why I took care to point out "In some cases, you are simply forced to make the lesser evil choice."

> When the parent comment elected Android for "ethical" reasons those reasons would not include the labor conditions of the phone's manufacture since that doesn't vary between most Apple and Android phones.

You're not allowing for someone to still consider the ethics of an issue: it's not like subtraction, if A has it and B has it than neither have it, so why consider it. IMO that's reductive. It can still be considered.

From my understanding, the factories that inflict these terrible conditions are shared between companies. The lesser of two evils isn't something that is easily findable. Apple's public controversy was specifically an investigation of Foxconn factories in China who have clients other than Apple. You've yet to convince me that the same workers in the same factories with the same terrible working conditions are somehow more justified if they're not putting an Apple logo on the products they manufacture.

Wouldn’t be able to go with pretty much any one then. Probably wouldn’t be able to wear much of your clothing either if labor abuse is an issue.

Gustin and Everlane.

These two clothing companies provide 100% transparency on their sourcing and labor practices.

You absolutely can choose to wear clothing that doesn't enslave people. Maybe not 100% (shoes are still difficult to source), but it doesn't mean throwing your hands up and walking away. Or being cynical toward someone who is trying.

Sorry if you do, do that. I’m almost every other case, people are not consistent with this sort of stuff. I was wrong with the way I wrote my comment and my attitude.

Apple has the strongest protections against unethical labor of any tech company. The main reason we know of any issues is because apple is literally the only company that audits and publishes the results of supplier audits.

If you think that somehow the people working on apple hardware construction are treated worse than the people working on the vastly higher number of android devices, etc you need to provide some evidence.

I recall a case where apple audits found a supplier using child labour, included that in their report, included the remediation (including cases where they outright dropped suppliers). The headlines weren’t “apple found child labour and stopped it”. The headlines were “apple uses child labour”.

The reason you don’t get that for other manufacturers is that they a) don’t audit, and b) don’t publish details even if they somehow become aware.

Apple acquired a large number of Intel chip designers and architects about 2 years prior to M1 launch. That might not have been enough time to impact the overall architecture of M1, but I think it is possible M1 carries a lot of Intel design influence. I'm thinking it is a little odd for Intel to attack the M1 when it was likely designed by Intel engineers.

Two years is not long enough to do a major redesign — Apple started hiring back towards the end of the PowerPC era and they were delivering very competitive designs years prior to the M1 announcement. When they announced M1 most people had been predicting it because the phone/iPad side was so strong.

No, a few engineers 2 years ago are not going to change basic architectural concepts that apple has clearly Cavour that run pretty contrary to intels design concepts.

Also designing a cpu takes time: a chip that is released in year X was likely functionally locked at least a year ago, and general architecture would necessarily predate that by a few years.

No CPU manufacturer is designing a cpu for year X, and then starting work on the following years chip. They will be simultaneously designing chips for sequential years, years in advance of release dates. That’s why Intel and AMD can produce their “next years chip” talks. The chip isn’t ready for final production, but there won’t be any significant changes by that point.

There’s also a 8-12 week latency on manufacture, so if they are targeting a release date, they have to have started manufacturing 3 months before then in order to have any chips to sell.

This. Basically ALL CPUs put out by Intel in the last decade all throttle when under load on ultra mobile platforms. Cool Intel you can keep up with Apple for 10 minutes before your CPU slows to a crawl, no thanks.

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