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Comment by PraetorianGourd | Hacker News Reader

Please talk to anyone outside of the start-up/tech world and ask them about the technology they use. A majority don't give a toss about M1 or M2 or ARM vs. x86 or anything else that seems to get so many in the tech world so excited. They care about Excel, they care about backwards compatibility, they care about centralized management.

Apple _may_ take over the consumer space but this will be more due to the shift from desktop/laptop computing to phones and tablets than anything with the M* series of processors.

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Consumers do care about things like battery life. I imagine most consumers would prefer to stick with what they know (windows), but as the battery life/performance gap grows, people will be more likely to make the switch.

> Consumers do care about things like battery life.

For laptops, less than you'd think. A huge chunk of people buy laptops so they can work on the dinner table and then put their computer away easily when it's time for the family dinner.

Source: I spent about five years selling laptops to people. That was a while ago, but I don't think much changed here. If anything, things changed the other way (battery life is even less important for laptops than it was) since a lot of people also have a smartphone or tablet.

And as battery lives get longer, there are diminishing returns as well. The difference between 1 hour and 4 hours is huge. The difference between 4 and 8 hours pretty large. After that? Less so.

In my experience noise and heat (or rather, lack thereof) are more important, although also not hugely so for a lot of people, just more so than battery life.

Consumers buy €400 17” monstrosities with numpads and run them plugged in.

To be honest I'd kill for a revival of the MacBook Pro 17".

Heck I'd love portable 21" and even 24" models.

I agree about the CPU architecture, people don't give a shit.

However, I think MS/Intel will start losing also corporate space. With the staffing problems, companies are looking for ways to score cheap points, and I'm starting to see "free choice of a laptop, including MacBook" as one of the benefits even in some big corps.

Thankfully we don't need to trust in meaningless anecdotes about what those in the 'real world' do or don't know.

The facts on the ground are that Apple's Mac sales are rapidly growing and in the last quarter half of all Mac buyers were new. That clearly indicates that something new to the Mac platform is attracting users.

So whether they know specifically about M1 or not they do know that the Macs have better characteristics than in previous years which M1 is responsible for.

And given that in all Mac marketing the M1 has been heavily advertised logically at least some proportion of users do know about it and do see it as a key differentiator.

I’m working for a big bank. They now offer Mac workstations to be able to hire the best devs.

I would have never expected a Unix workstation in such a corporate setup when I started 15 years ago.

It's a gimmick. Best devs dont us MacOS, lol. There's probably some cohort of frontend that try to look "cool." But any dev doesn't fall for that fluff. FFS, Apple just announced memory swapping as a feature on their iPad, a feature that's literally been around since 1970s. That's laughable and sad, any dev worth their salt would know this.

I agree that the world basically runs on excel, but given that, the world cares about excel’s performance. Especially as spreadsheets are only getting bigger.

And then there’s this: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-office-for-ma...

Office for Mac is a non-starter for power users due to the lack of Alt-key accelerators. There are countless other missing features, but that alone is enough to never make the switch

Interesting that you state there are missing features.

I remember a speech given by one of the leaders of Mac development at Microsoft saying that new features are tested out on the Mac first, and if they work out, they're brought into the Windows version.

Is that no longer the case?

The problem is that Alt-key accelerators are encouraged by Windows across the entire OS and it has been the case since the very first version of Excel (it really predates Excel)

I love the approach of testing new features on the Mac first, but it isn't sufficient since the Mac version was never updated to be 100% parity with the Windows version, which means some of the preexisting features would forever be missing from the Mac

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