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Comment by 88913527 | Hacker News Reader

> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers.

I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few times.

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Imagine the counterfactual: an Apple engineering blog that routinely publishes in depth articles describing the awesome challenges that their engineering teams are overcoming in an org as vertically integrated as Apple. That would make me more hype about their products than anything.

I would personally be very interested in such a blog, but so would Apple's competitors. I've read that being too open about methods can let competitors catch up to once-unique advantages quickly, especially as it lets them design a roadmap of future features to work on.

Suppose Apple had an engineering blog that released a roadmap about the M1 chips before their release. Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today, as laptop manufacturers may have invested more in ARM processors by seeing them as viable due to Apple's work.

Oh please. There's no need for any engineering blog to publish a company's 2 year product roadmap slides moments after presenting them to leadership, or ever. There are surely a bazillion problems solved every year at much finer detail than would be useful as a decision tree for competitors. How about OS engineering? Apps? Physical manufacturing? Logistics engineering? CAD design? At the level of detail. None of these things if covered at a small enough scope would provide competitors an undue advantage, but each would definitely inspire a young or aspiring engineer to up their game. Maybe they can just hoard the best talent with money to keep them away from competitors, but how much future and potential talent are they leaving on the table by forcing their engineers to bottle up their innate human desire to share their wisdom? It's a short-sighted local minima, they can do better.

A software engineering blog would make more sense; it's what WWDC essentially is, anyways.

>Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today

That's giving Intel a heck of a lot of credit. Intel is a massive ship moving along at full speed. They aren't the most agile of companies to say the least. Intel's x86 giant hammer convinces themselves that everything is an x86 nail. How else do you explain the fact that they are so woefully behind in the times? Apple and Intel worked together in CPUs before. Intel knows what Apple wants/needs, and refuses to give it to them. I seriously can't imagine that Apple and Intel never met about how the Intel chip just wasn't advancing, yet Intel plodded on anyways.

Except...

Whilst I acknowledge that the M1 macs are pretty good, Intel power pcs on everyone else's desks that work just fine for the standard Microsoft Office workload. Intel are not miles behind, they are just not ahead. In the world of Enterprise Applications x86s compatibility with legacy code is going to be important to many large organisations.

Meanwhile Apple with probably pull support for Rosetta2 in a couple of years (like last time), but Photoshop and Logic will keep working and the most users won't care.

So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world.

> So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world.

Not necessarily! A lot of office needs boil down to the Office 365 suite, Adobe and the SAP GUI - all of which now have native M1 variants. The only thing that's needed is someone other than Apple and Qualcomm actually putting out a desktop-worthy ARM CPU so that Microsoft can provide Windows-on-ARM for everyone (there are rumors of a secret deal between MS/QC that is bound to expire soon-ish). Once the price point gets low enough for corporate beancounters to buy a ton of ARM Windows devices for paper pushers, they will do so - and by that point, Intel is doomed. AMD is eating their lunch in the server market, and Intel doesn't have anything that can compete with ARM on power-per-watt and price.

What if Apple ended up supplying older M1 designs, not cutting edge but efficient on batteries and forced down to a really low price… to Google, for making chromebooks with? Bottom end craptops not even being handled by Apple anymore but still running an older generation of M1 cpus, with the lesser but still substantial benefits and the battery life?

On the extreme low end it's not only about Windows. Chromebooks are a thing. Eventually M1 chromebooks and Apple leveraging the fact that now they're a CPU designer? After they do some more upgrades to their own tech for their own purposes?

Who would be manufacturing these older M1 chips after Apple is currently having the later generations? Apple's current needs would mean TSMC capacity will be focused on these newer chips. It's not like there's a new fab with each generation of chips.

Office 365 for mac is not the same as office for Windows though. If you are a power user that might matter to you.

Then there are the applications not available on mac...Project, Power BI...

I know because amongst my estate is an rdp server for mac users to use some niche excel features and to use PowerBI desktop.

And MS is also trying to get parity between Office for Windows for ARM.

> Intel power pcs

Had to do a double take there…

That’s a very Pyrrhic victory for Intel to be dominant in the personal computer space. Apple alone sells more ARM based devices than the total non server market and it only has a 15% market share in phones worldwide. Even in the server space, the cloud providers are moving toward ARM where it can.

Apple (at least their security org) has done this before with their talks at Blackhat [1] where they've detailed pieces of their boot chain and interesting challenges they solved while building Find My's offline location feature

[1]: https://youtu.be/3byNNUReyvE

They have something for ML: https://machinelearning.apple.com

This is how Purism works.

“Surprise and delight” is just the PR line, the point is having more control over the marketing and positioning of a product on launch. We could debate whether that’s worth the R&D inefficiency, but Apple hasn’t exactly failed by deferring to their marketing folks over the years.

> An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few times.

I agree, but the new MacBooks have had a fair bit of excitement around them. So maybe you just have to make several duds first?

People have been calling for/or expected Apple to switch to ARM/make their own chip for years and years before they actually switched. At that point people were just surprised to see Apple actually do something.

Maybe people in tech, but this doesn’t apply to (I’d like to say- Most of) their regular users

Most of their regular users don't even know what Arm or Intel is, let alone cares about it. A macbook is a macbook. The fact that it's faster is lost on most people as well, since their daily use consists of opening the browser or video conferencing or (if they have a PC) gaming.

Computers have plateaued for their current use case. The only innovation that will make a difference in the near future is AI.

I was a PC gamer but primarily use Macs for work. But I bought the MacBook Air and aside from one game (Elden Ring) every game I usually play works on the MacBook Air, some with Rosetta and some with native ARM support.

Heh. "Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the game selection?"

I'm an Apple guy, I just thought it was funny. And my Airpod Pro observation isn't on how great they were at creating it, rather 'can you please help me get mine to switch back out of mono mode, after I put them in my ears one at a time and inadvertently convinced 'em that life is mono now?' (mind you, I kind of know: they freak out if asked to play 96k content and you get a mono low-res version)

The m1 gains are more impactful than just speed, namely battery life and thermals. The fact that I can get a full workday or more depending on load, all without a loud fan screaming at me all day honestly makes this the first laptop I've owned that works as a genuinely fully portable workstation. It's basically eliminated charge anxiety. It's not a complete game changer or anything like the original iPhone, but it's a pretty massive upgrade over the machines of 2 years ago.

And "regular people" definitely care about battery life in a laptop - it's probably the most important parameter for someone who genuinely needs a laptop over a desktop.

Yeah battery life and fan noise have been so much better on the M1 16” than on the intel 16”, it’s unbelievable.

Maybe. But the fact that a computer gets 20 hours of battery life and doesn’t sound like an airplane under load is important to people.

I seem to recall that these specific ARM comments were made on the day the announcement was released that Apple was buying the company.

I stopped giving a shit about MacBooks when they started limiting RAM to 16G, and put in that stupid bar thing instead of function keys.

If anyone was excited about the new MacBook, I'm guessing it's because they're already deep into Apple as a brand.

Me, I just want a computer that works, has decent specs* and doesn't treat me like an imbecile, or refuse to ship Bash >3 because the legal team got antsy about GPLv3. (I just loooove when I'm writing shell scripts that might be used by coworkers running Macs and I need to make sure that I either limit myself to sh functionality, or Bash 3 functionality)

Which is why I've been running Linux laptops since then.

*And no, 16G is not enough, but I've had many fans try to explain to me why it was.

Time to lift your head out of the sand then. Macbook Pro now comes in 32GB RAM flavors, with fn keys instead of the touch bar, and zsh by default

Zsh isn't Bash. And Bash version compatibility is important when 75% of your team develop on Linux, but the other 25% on Mac.

I mean, I use Fish, but when I'm writing shell scripts for others, it's Bash, because it's a common default. But now I'm limited to Bash 3.

But I'm glad that they got rid of that stupid bar, and let you get a laptop with 32G of RAM now. So kind of Apple!

Why not just install a newer version of bash? It’s trivial to do so with homebrew. I’m sure your team has other dependencies that must be installed in order to run your software.

Because a shell script is supposed to be a lowest common denominator. Run this, and it'll ensure you have Maven, it'll ensure you have Java 11+, then it'll build the thing and run the thing.

And now I'm needing to sniff your OS, detect whether or not Homebrew is installed, install it if not, then install Bash >3, then run the actual meat of the script.

All because of Apple's lawyers being scared of GPLv3.

At this point, I may as well insist that you install pyenv and Poetry and deliver it as a Python package.

Bash is not a common denominator anywhere except Linux. Just write what you want as POSIX shell and it will work in a lot of places.

You already have to deal with platform-specific differences even (nay - especially!) across Linux with things like apt vs yum vs dnf vs pacman vs Nix. One more is really a non-issue.

Yeah, fair enough, I'm just bitter after my shiny new associative array failed and I had roll back to a worse option.

Bash really isn't a standard outside of most Linux distributions, you're going to find the same issue anywhere that isn't Linux.

OpenBSD uses pdksh, Busybox/NetBSD/Minix use ash, there are some linux distros that use zsh, OpenSolaris is ksh, etc.

Your bash scripts won't work on Windows, either. If we are here talking about bash being a "common default" maybe we shouldn't leave out the operating system that has about a 90% global marketshare.

If your development team doesn't have the time and resources to support a multi-platform development environment, they shouldn't do so.

Apple didn't change their business model, the GPL changed their license, and it's a license that's simply not compatible with any closed-source software business. Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?

> Your bash scripts won't work on Windows

Well neither would the code we're developing either so, not really a problem.

> Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?

Oh, most definitely. But then none of our products are closed-source, so we're an outlier, admittedly.

And I’m going to guess that your apps run on Linux systems in production.

So, I don’t think it makes sense to criticize macOS for being different than Linux. I can’t run my systemd units in macOS, either.

We might as well raise hell about Apple not pre-installing Firefox for us.

Indeed there’s actually a 64gb variant

64GB even too

Exactly

Most of the stuff is "officially leaked* to some places before the new releases anyway

When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw? I think it was on the iphone unveiling.

> When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw?

The performance per watt and rollout schedule of Apple Silicon?

Who besides industry geeks actually cared about that?

ipod was innovative for the common man.

iphone was innovative for the common man.

ipad was innovative for the common man.

The rest? Meh.

Nowadays it's just an upgrade treadmill, consisting of "To re-pair my old watch I first need to update to the latest watch software (even though it worked fine before I unpaired it). But to update the watch software I need to update my phone software to a higher version than it supports, so now I need a new phone, which now won't work with my computer unless I update that, but it doesn't support the latest OS so now I need to buy a new computer..." For want of a nail.

AirPods were the first Bluetooth headset that just worked and made you want to ditch the cord.

We had Bluetooth earpods in the early 2010s used by a lot of people. What's innovative in releasing the same product but for two ears something revolutionary. Capacitive touch is revolutionary, a Bluetooth earpiece is not

One that actually works properly and doesn’t sound like ass is revolutionary. That’s where apple win.

I feel it's a "good product" not a "revolutionary" one

That’s all I want

You list off 3 products that changed the world.

And then say “meh”

I just don’t understand some people.

Apple’s contributions to modern computing, from GUI work, to WebKit, to AirPods is game changing.

Yes I forgot airpods, mostly because I don't use headphones, sorry.

Webkit is nice but not groundbreaking. Their GUI work isn't much better than the competition, although I do hope SwiftUI goes somewhere...

So I listed 3 products (should have been 4 products) that changed the world, but the meh is not for those (they were quite good!). The meh is for a return to 1990s Apple. Most of the existing technologies have largely plateaued and are being pushed ever higher in diminishing return increments (battery life being the final frontier). Without a product visionary, this is where we'll be for awhile.

It is absolutely groundbreaking, so much so that every major browser that the entire population of the planet use, sans Firefox, is based on technology that was born in WebKit.

As for the “apple can’t innovate”, I don’t buy it. Apple of the 90s was full of poorly conceived ideas. I see little difference in the “world changing product development velocity” of Apple then and now.

I do miss the flavor of old apple though, grey has somehow replaced beige as the “boring color every computer uses”

WebKit which was forked from KHTML. Apple did work, of course, but they did not make that from scratch.

I love Apple, been a user since we had a MacPlus at home (then a Mac 2Vi, then a LC3, then PPC7600, then...) but let's not be overzealous.

Have you actually looked at the deltas between KHTML and WebKit? There is a reason WebKit was chosen.

Apple Watch, Apple Pencil, AirTag, AirPods...

They made a pencil?

Huh. And I guess stalkers quickly embraced the AirTag.

Apple Pencil = Apple Drawing Stylus, with Tilt, Pressure, and Interesting Choices About Friction And Power Management. I’m an artist and more and more of my fellow artists are using Procreate or Clip Studio on an iPad as their main tool for serious work now that there’s a decent stylus.

My wife doesn’t care about CPU architectures, but she was astonished that her new MacBook Pro didn’t get hot on her lap, and how she could work through the day on one charge. Then she was astonished by the sound quality of the speakers. It’s not a revolution but people care about the end result of those incremental innovations.

No one who was paying any attention to iPhone and iPad performance was surprised by that.

There is enough bullshit in the leaks to make it still a surprise on the day. Almost all of the truth gets leaked beforehand but it only makes up 40% of the leaks published.

The point is that Apple wants to stay in control of the messaging, which is still the case with these “leaks”.

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