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Comment by carlycue | Hacker News Reader

This thing is going to sell like hotcakes. The combination of single core CPU and graphics performance, device thinness, battery life in this laptop is unmatched.

It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years. Johnny I’ve doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does.

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My M1 Air is a nearly perfect machine, but I continuously find myself looking at the yellow “memory pressure” graph and swap disk writes.

I wish Apple never offered 8gb version, as I was surprised to find that MacOS wants to use more RAM than a Windows machine with the same amount of RAM.

If they gave us a way to actually disable the macOS features, 8GB would be very usable. But everything from regular wifi/bt scanning to photo tagging to adding all interactions to a giant Siri database so that the OS can suggest what it thinks you’re most likely to open at any given moment. These all need RAM and other resources even if you don’t have any open applications.

There aren't third-party ways to shut some of that stuff off? When I used OSX I remember a great app called OnyX [1] that could customize deeper, system-level stuff.

[1] https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/index.html

Have you checked to see how much they are using? In general it's not much.

I exchanged my 8gb air for 16gb and it's perfect. Really cannot get it bogged down. Definitely now that most things are Apple Silicon compiled; before that it was a bit more problematic.

Theres no need to watch memory/swap, just use it as it is intended. IME, 8gb is plenty.

> but the silicone chips team now does

You mean silicon. Silicone means something else.

https://www.livescience.com/37598-silicon-or-silicone-chips-...

He could be talking about boobie trapped chips

Do you think there is anyone here who didn't understand exactly what they meant?

Getting grammar and spelling right makes for text that's much easier to read. Helping people remember these things is positive.

There is a thin line between times when this is true, and times when people are just being obnoxiously pedantic.

Correcting someone's language is always ok as long as it's done respectfully, which it was. I'm sure people that speak English as a second language really appreciate it, otherwise if nobody tells 'em they're using something incorrectly then they're never get to learn!

Yup - I owe my above-average native fluency to my mother's incessant correcting, and my English proficiency to countless kind strangers on the internet.

Just "silicon*" as a reply should have been enough. There was no need for the additional sentence and certainly no need for the source/link.

Even that's not needed, it's just a shitty spelling-only reply when everyone in question knows what's going on - it added nothing to the discussion.

Well, words do matter. This is HN...

Peer pressure matters a little bit. Standardized usage is a good thing.

> Do you think there is anyone here who didn't understand exactly what they meant?

"Aoccrdrinig to rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be ttaol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

In my grad school AI class I turned in a paper that I ran through a script (that I wrote) that jumbled the letters like this. The topic was related to the power of the human brain. The professor didn’t catch the double meaning and made me resubmit it normally.

I'm with you. HN pedants are so god damn annoying.

As one of them, I agree. It's easy to jump to the first thing you notice (something superficially wrong to point out), I often do this. And it's hard to think beyond that and engage with the ideas instead.

But then again, that's why we try to write elegantly so readers don't stumble on the words and instead think about the meaning behind them.

> It’s funny how Apple came back from the worst the Mac has ever been to the best in a span of few years.

The terrible state of the Mac over the last nine years hardly compares to the dismal state that Apple was in during the 90s. The product line was a mess and they had multiple machines that had common failures (PowerBook 5300c[0] comes to mind as my first laptop). It was so bad that PowerComputing was making better Macs (clones) than Apple.

They've made two incredible comebacks.

[0] > Two early production PowerBook 5300s caught fire, one at an Apple employee's house and another at the factory; it turned out that the Sony-manufactured lithium ion batteries had overheated while recharging. Apple recalled the 5300s sold (around a hundred machines) and replaced the batteries on these and all subsequent 5300s with nickel metal hydride batteries that provided only about 70% the endurance. At the time, the media viewed the problems with the PowerBook 5300 series as yet another example of Apple's decline.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_5300#Batteries

Wonder how long these M chips were in R&D and meanwhile they were just watching everyone on the internet complain how crappy mac laptops were but they knew this was coming

Probably a decade or so. I imagine it was always a possibility, with steps being taken towards it over time, even if it wasn't a well defined goal yet. Requirement of uploading App Store apps as LLVM IR instead of machine code comes to mind.

>watching everyone on the internet complain

What's especially amusing in hindsight are the (then justified) complaints about thermal throttling in the last Intel Macbooks. They knew damn well those chassis would not be good enough for Intel CPUs, but they didn't care, it was designed from ground up for Apple silicon.

The M series is a continuation of the A series development that's been going since 2008 when they bought PA Semi, maybe earlier. The M1 could have been branded the A14X but for whatever reason they chose not to, probably to make better marketing buzz. I would guess they've been booting macOS on ARM in the lab since the A7 and after that just a long grind to get to a good enough user experience with sufficient app compatibility to switch. You can see stuff like TSO in the CPU showed up in earlier chips at least a couple years before the M1 launched.

AMD and Intel chips take ~5 years from starting work to being available to buy

The architecture is basically frozen 2 years before tapeout, which itself is a year before they go on sale.

Do you have a reference for that? 5 years is a pretty long time but I suppose it depends a lot on how one defines the start of a design.

Probably somewhere around two years before the M1 announcement is when development started.

It’s a lot of work to design one of these parts.

https://anysilicon.com/asic-design-flow-ultimate-guide/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2019/07/26/intel-...

Intel - 4 years.

When Linus Tech tips did a review and tear down of the last Intel MacBook Air the design had no heat pipe and was just passively cooled. The first MacBook Air with the M1 design was equivalent but with an updated motherboard that had an M1.

The A12Z in the DTK is derived from the A12 which came out in 2018 so it probably was earlier than that.

? My M1 MacBook Air is passively cooled, but has a heat pipe that feeds into a heat sink that's at least as large as the M1 system heat spreader.

- Detail image: https://valkyrie.cdn.ifixit.com/media/2020/11/19115445/MBA_M...

- iFixit Teardown feature article: https://www.ifixit.com/News/46884/m1-macbook-teardowns-somet...

It's just a big piece of copper with decent thermal mass, not heatpipe.

None of the Intel MacBook Airs were passively cooled. They all had fans.

There was a Macbook however that was passively cooled.

I loved that computer, and I hope they make another one of that size.

My M1 MacBook Air is insanely fast and the battery life is easily the best I've ever experienced. If the M2 is anything like the M1 or better, I agree, these things are going to make Apple a nice chunk of change.

I suspect the best reason for upgrading is access to 24GB of RAM and maybe the hardware video encoders if that's your thing. Otherwise, M2 is a very solid iteration, but probably not worth dropping that much money if you already own an M1 system.

For me the main reason to upgrade would be Magsafe. I'm constantly afraid of someone stumbling on the cable and destroying the USB-C port.

I couldn't find any info on this, is this the same Magsafe as the 2015 devices, i.e. can I use existing old chargers? If so then I might even consider upgrading just due to this (I also have a 12/24V Magsafe charger).

24 GB RAM would be nice compared to 16 GB currently, but it's not something I'd really need.

My 16in M1 Max with MagSafe is not compatible with the older MagSafe chargers

Damn. Then I have no reason to upgrade. Thanks!

For me it's hardware nested virtualization but I'll be waiting for the M2 Pro.

Could you please provide the link about "hardware nested virtualization"?

While not officially confirmed, it seems likely as the A15 appears too (https://nitter.net/dylan522p/status/1438313107231842304), and VMware seems pretty optimistic (https://nitter.net/denniscdietrich/status/153456512761738035...).

I have no idea why VMware is talking about EL3 access, these chips do not have EL3. They do have nested virtualization but it's not available in the system frameworks yet.

Honestly the keyboard prevented me from purchasing a MacBook from 2014 until 2020. I still despise the 2020 keyboard but I’ll reluctantly use it to type a password and then plug in a USB keyboard.

The 2022 is a dream come true for me.

It was 2016 when things went wrong for the keyboards. I have a 2015 MacBook Pro and the keyboard is fantastic.

Apple released a 12" MacBook in early 2015 which was the first to have the butterfly keyboards.

A guy I worked with bought one and complained about it relentlessly.

True. In my case I didn't need a laptop for 2015/2016, but I'm typically an "every 2 years" kind of person. When 2016 rolled out I knew I was going to be taking care of that 2013 laptop for a long while.

And mag safe made a comeback? And an HDMI port?! The M1 pro was a no-brainer to me when I was in the market for a new laptop.

How in the world do you invent (or at least properly commercialize on a mass scale) a feature like MagSafe and then remove it from your laptops?

Jonny Ive made a lot good decisions in the days when he worked for Jobs, but my theory is that Jobs kept him from being a complete idiot. Tim Cook lost control of him and it went downhill massively after that.

The lure of only having two ports, both of which are identical, and can be used for absolutely everything, is powerful. It’s pretty cool to take the laptop home and plug in one single cable to hook it up to my desk, though it’s really only a few seconds less than separate power, usb, and audio cables once you figure out how to keep them from getting lost under the desk.

Personally, I think the all-in USB-C was a brilliant one. A better-looking USB-C/A adapter would have made it bearable.

I wasn't missing HDMI at all.

Long AAPL, you say? Or what else are you saying?

I agree that Ive's influence will not be missed.

I would be long AAPL if they didn't have the majority of their production in China. That now poses a significant risk and Apple execs must be sweating bullets right now scrambling to onshore.

They’re slowly moving production to Vietnam and India. But I don’t think that’s far enough from China if a war between US and China breaks out.

Let alone China invading Taiwan.

What’s going on in Ukraine is alteady horrible, add this scenario to the equation and we’re looking at ultimate doom.

There. I said it.

I have a bunch of money ready to spend at a moments notice at my nearby computer shop as soon as I hear Taiwan has been invaded.

I figure whatever I can get at that time will serve me well for the next 10 years.

Aren't Macs basically a rounding error for the overall company?

Their Mac business is still a Fortune 500 company in terms of revenue by itself. Besides Halo effect, they still make a ton of money off Macs, and now that their chips cross pollinate with the iOS devices, it makes no sense to kill it off.

Not to mention, the Mac platform is effectively the SDK for the iOS/iPadOS platform. And it's a thing which pretty much every single person who works at Apple uses on a daily basis. The Mac is not — I assure you — going anywhere.

Especially not after they made this push into their own silicon where the majority of the benefits reaped so far have been in the Mac line.

Yup. If for some reason Apple didn't make computers, don't think I'd own an iPhone -- the whole ecosystem fitting together is a major part of the appeal for me.

I don't disagree at all. But the context of the comment I was responding to was specifically about whether this would be enough to justify a high conviction bet on AAPL stock.

Even if this model sells like hotcakes (which I'm sure it will), and even if that isn't priced in (which I'm less sure of), don't really see that having a large enough impact on overall earnings to move the needle on the stock. The reality is that small differences in the next Fed announcement probably will move AAPL to a much larger degree than this product.

As others have said, it's about 20% of phone revenue but you need a mac to build an iOS app. THey're also selling a whole ecosystem that needs to be cohesive and technically strong. For a while the mac part of the ecosystem wasn't living up to the quality of the phones, IMHO.

I've brought this up before, and someone responded that they'll move iOS app building and compilation into a web service, and they will no longer need to sell general-purpose computers, and the idea haunts me.

That feels like it cuts against the core of the f what Apple is, but it’s possible if Cook is succeeded by someone with no connection to old leadership.

They've built pieces of that already: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

I'm not personally very excited about living inside that sealed of a bubble.

It's outsourcing a key part of the Apple ecosystem to Google (Chrome), which is why Apple will never do it. Big-tech companies go to extremely great lengths to own every part of the pathway from consumer to developer to hardware. Google first developed a browser, then an OS, then a hardware division just so Microsoft couldn't sit between Search and a microchip. Similarly, Apple has worked extremely hard to develop an App Store, IDE (XCode), and developer machine (Mac) so that neither Google nor Microsoft can come between them and the developer.

Facebook is currently paying the price of not owning their distribution infrastructure - they've been hurt extremely badly by recent privacy changes that Apple and Google have put out, while Apple and Google themselves have been relatively isolated from them.

I don't think Google factors into this plan anywhere. The endpoint is iOS devices able to build iOS apps with full fidelity using Xcode for iPad, not a web based IDE. Total control for Apple.

Even if that's their plan, it will be at least another decade before that service is viable to be a hard requirement, completely replacing local builds.

Apple is virtually the only consumer computer company that has had positive YoY computer growth every year in the past 20 years. Apple is selling way more iPhones, but the Mac has been gradually and steadily gaining growth.

Around 20% of what iphone makes - not the most important category, but not a rounding error either.

And people don't need to replace iphones as much as they used to in the past...

Still a formidable company don't get me wrong.

Besides what other commenters mentioned, it is also the longest running revenue source for Apple.

In addition to all of that, MagSafe is back as well.

Keep it. I want one port to rule them all.

Is the returned MagSafe the only way to charge these new macs? Or can you choose to use either MagSafe or usbc?

Honestly curious.

Not sure about plugging in two chargers at once, but you can definitely use either MagSafe or USB-C to charge. I do it frequently with my MBP. The MagSafe charges faster, but that may be more down to the power brick than the interface, I don’t know.

The new 2021 MBPs (14 & 16) as well as the new M2 MBA/MBPs can charge with either Magsafe, OR USB-C.

I've personally charged my 14" off a 100W USB-C, and it does fast charge, faster than the stock 67W adapter.

mag safe is how to get the 67w, usb c will be slower but possible. This i researched too because wanted a USB-C Exclusive EDC and it looks like thats possible albeit slightly slower charging which is fine if you don't rely on 100% battery dumps then full fast charges to operate.

Wrong. It depends on the USB-C charger/cable; it can and will charge at >67W via USB-C if your wall adapter & cable can handle it.

> Johnny Ive doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does

That's not how Apple works. If they still work remotely like they did back under Jobs the hardware teams are not the guys calling the shots for future product cycles.

> If they still work remotely like they did back under Jobs the hardware teams are not the guys calling the shots for future product cycles.

There have been a lot of articles about how it doesn't work remotely like it did under Jobs[1]. Tim Cook has been CEO for 11+ years and isn't at all like Jobs.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/technology/jony-ive-apple...

> the worst the Mac has ever been

No. No no no. The worst was the Amelio era.

That era lasted from February 1996 to July 1997. I don’t think you can call it an era. Maybe a transition period.

Amelio did do three good things: * replaced Spindler * failed to buy BeOS * bought NeXT

Spindler's Apple is responsible for the Performa sub-brand (although Amelio didn't kill it).

> After releasing a total of sixty-four different models [in five years], Apple retired the Performa brand in early 1997, shortly after release of the Power Macintosh 5500, 6500, 8600 and 9600, as well as the return of Steve Jobs to the company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa

Yeah, for sure. I'm just grumbling about these kids that don't know how good they have it. Even with unreliable keyboards and Intel failing to deliver, the period leading up to the M1 wasn't even close to "the worst the Mac has ever been". I had to walk to school barefoot!

I wager that 90% of PC buyers don't really look at specs at all and just always buy the latest Mac regardless.

And that 90% of that 90% won't really benefit much from the advanced specs. I had an 11" Chromebook with a Celeron processor for 6 years. Cost less than $200 and weighed almost nothing. If I wasn't coding or gaming, it was the best PC I ever owned.

> but the silicone chips team now does.

Ah-ha! I knew they were implants!

> the worst the Mac has ever been

Which one was that?

The 2016 MacBook Pro was a turd. The butterfly keyboard would inevitably break. I went through several of these laptops. To add insult to the injury, this model's unique innovations were "Touch Bar" and "no ports"...

I've been buying Macs since 2000, and the 2016 MBP is definitely the worst Mac I ever had. It was enough to drive me to purchase a Surface Book as an alternative.

Sheesh, did you skip the MBP 2015? That's the best one they ever made, even to this day. I've been using MBP 2015 since then and just recently "upgraded" to M1. The MBP 2015 is still a better machine, better screen and keyboard.

I can type waayy faster on the 2015 with less errors and the screen is better on the eye strain. The whites on the M1 are BRIGHT. I don't need a flash light shining at my face. Turning down the "brightness" doesn't address the problem. That just makes the whole screen darker or but the whites are still as bright. I'm still learning the laptop, maybe there is a contrast setting.

Oh, and the trackpad on the 2015 doesn't feel like sandpaper. On the M1, the tip of my finger is numb most of the day.

Anyway, for such a fanboi and you skipped the best MBP. Bummer for you. I can't imagine going from 2015 to 2016 and being satisfied with that. I'd have returned it the same day.

I'm not really that picky about era of MBP, honestly I'd be happy with any of them save for the era with the bad keyboards. But the 2015 vintage was certainly a good one.

I have a late-2015 rMBP as my daily driver. I'm only now starting to run up against its limitations. USB-C, better 4K support, form factor, battery life, overall speed are things I'm looking forward to when I finally upgrade.

I was hitting memory limits and the disk was starting to fill up. I could have worked around the issues but the M1 marketing got me excited and they fixed the blatant faults introduced in the previous generation. If I were to do it again, I'd hold off another two generations, maybe get M3 or M4. The 2015 is that good.

I swapped the battery on my 2015 for like $150 at local computer repair shop. I was starting to hit memory limits but could have held off by using bare-metal dev box for heavy loads.

You'll definitely want to enable warmer colors

I use that. Been toying with night mode, color filters, and even flux. It's still too extreme, though it helps with the whites the other colors look atrocious.

I have just about identical settings on both models and comparing the two laptops side-by-side, the 2015 looks much better. I still have "vivid" colors but the whites are more grey.

Must be a screen thing, some new IPS technology. I don't know. It's terrible.

I feel like you might be noticing HDR. HDR supersedes your brightness settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlAsAuBtmps

I refuse to buy a touchbar mac although some have been issued to me by employers. I remember when they came out they raised the price of the MBP for this "feature" that just kinda sucked.

Ended up leaving my MBP closed 95% of the time and using a separate keyboard.

This is why I bought a M1 Air instead of a Pro when it first launched. I don't know how some people can stand the touchbar. "But it can do so much!" Isn't the point of touch typing to never look at the keyboard? It never made sense to me.

I'm grateful for the 'no ports' move. It really helped jump start moving everything on to USB-C. Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out. particularly how the mass manufacturers can cut cost while still the most wanted subset of supported features.

> Yes, the implementation details are still being worked out

We're about 7 years into USB-C and I still had to do a ton of searching to find a dongle that does HDMI at 60 Hz, USB-A and charging (how crazy to want all that, right?!). I also had to buy a shady (AFAIK it violates the spec) extension cable to build a dock setup ("real" docks are in the hundreds of Euros). It cost me about 40€ to get back features I used to get for free and has reliability issues.

USB-C is a blessing for charging, but I'm a bit disappointed by the ecosystem for the rest.

The 16" Macbook pro I bought in 2019 has been a source of constant irritation to me - unexpected fan thrashing, overheating, the usual stuff - and the performance and low cost of the new M1-based MacBooks has done nothing to improve my mood.

I don't blame you. That "pinnacle" of hardware design is an Apple poop-bomb.

I have one with 32GB that was provided by my employer. It is bad. I hate using it. The keyboard on it is bad, the performance is bad, and the glitchiness is deeply frustrating.

I loved my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" that it replaced and wondered why I thought it would be any better.

My M1 Macbook Pro 16 is a joy to me.

I put an order in for a 14" one last night to replace my 2019 MBP, this makes me feel better about the price.

I have one of these for work (employer-provided) and it is the worst machine I have ever used. The touchbar is useless. It's heavy and bulky as hell. Just watching a Youtube video or opening a page with some gifs causes the fan to spin up and sound like a jet engine. The dual fan situation was supposed to improve cooling, but it only made it LOUDER.

Incredibly embarrassing to be in a quiet meeting room and accidentally open a slide deck with a gif for 2 minutes and have the machine ramp up its fans to maximum speed. Why?? Meanwhile on my M1 Air I can have the same content open + some Twitch stream + 3D map view open with no fan, no sound at all, and it runs great.

Try customizing the fan curves to spin up at lower temps. Not much more noise over all if at all, but much more responsiveness.

> The 16" Macbook pro I bought in 2019 has been a source of constant irritation to me

This. Worst Mac I've ever had to use.

Same situation with mine. Even had to have the battery replaced after showing errors, after a whole ordeal to have it covered under warranty. I suspect this was related to the constant overheating.

I am not generally an Apple user, but I had a 2012 MacBook pro for work for a few years, and it seemed pretty nice. I can't remember any complaints. That's while I was working at Google, though, so all I used it for was a web browser and SSH terminal.

Oh my, the 2018 one I have is a terrible piece of junk, notably the USB subsystem (overheats on one side, prone to interference, regularly resets which kills and connects to some device, may it be mouse, keyboard, or external display) and although I liked the touch of the butterfly keyboard, the arrow keys still trip me up (and of course the reliability)

> "Touch Bar"

The default touch bar UI is terrible, except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs). I did see and try some hacks to customise it but they were quite brittle so I dropped off that train, but it kind of proved to me that there was something to it that could have been really great were it fully programmable for real, and that the actual execution was extremely subpar.

> "no ports"

If by "no ports" you mean USB-C only, I am really enjoying the 4x C port machines, and would rather not go back to mixed ports unless forced to. USB-A/B sockets just need to die.

> except for a few special cases (e.g Logic Pro / GarageBand sliders/knobs).

yeah that .. I enjoy it for quickly setting/sliding brightness and volume. And you can add a screenshot button to it which does not break focus so it allows me to screenshot things the keyboard cmd+shift+3/4 UI can't (ie context menus)

In addition they made the battery smaller despite the CPU not really getting any more efficient so it got less battery life unless literally all you were doing was watching iTunes movies.

Hmm I did exactly the same thing. Apple refreshed my whole laptop after a keyboard break, and I have the Surface to my wife. I think we are both going to get these M2 MBAs next.

The last Intel Air (early 2020) is the worst Mac I've ever owned by an absolute mile. The fan is permanently on - it's like working on a hairdryer.

Honestly - Pretty much every laptop Apple released from 2018 to 2021 was a complete turd.

I have the 16 inch 2019 model (issued by work, I don't buy apple products) and it's... just not a good machine.

It gets amazingly hot, the fans run ALL the time, the usb-c ports are flakey at best (frequently stop working after a suspend/resume cycle, or if you unplug while the machine is closed).

It's got a shitty touch bar instead of function keys (although at least it reverted to a real esc-key, the touchbar only esc was literally a joke).

It has frequent rendering glitches and artifacts.

The battery life is bad (basically a given for how much power this thing is dumping right into my lap as heat).

----

Before the M line, I was about to go have a real fight with our IT department to get me issued literally anything other than another Mac. The last couple of models they've put out in the intel line are just genuinely bad machines, across both the pro and air lines.

Ugh, I forgot about the battery. I'm lucky if I get a couple of hours out of it. Horrible thing.

90 minutes max for me. Awful machine.

I spent months complaining to them about this laptop. I had an Air for 5 years(!) before this and it was a wonderful machine. For 2k I'd expected a decent machine - but I hate everything about it. Obviously Apple didn't care in the slightest.

I had to resort to using third party software to disable Intel's Turbo boost just so that I can have decent battery life doing mundane tasks.

15”/13” MBPro with the Touch Bar and that horrendous keyboard.

Butterfly keyboard era. I have one as a work machine that sits around until I need VPN access. The keyboard is miserable, and the fans spin up when I open Slack. In contrast, my 14" M1 Pro is the best laptop I've ever used. Fans are inaudible, incredible performance, incredible keyboard/trackpad, battery is not a worry.

The one they launched with Touch Bar. By far the worst keyboard I have come across, almost useless Touch Bar, no ports.

For me the Touch Bar wasn't just useless, it was actively annoying.

Any of the 90s Performa models where processors were routinely crippled by having half-width memory buses on them.

Single core, huh? It's 8 core

I think they meant single core performance.

autocorrect spelling error : silicone -> silicon

I would say, is this Ive's fault or Intel's? What the silicon team is doing is more or less what Ive needed to fulfill his visions.

Honestly, there's a lot of PC nerd pushback against Ive, but I think the industry as a whole needs someone like his asking the (to the lay person) obvious questions - i.e. why can't I have this amount of computing power in a human-friendly form factor, vs. the giant, imposing, and ugly monolithic towers of yore?

> Johnny Ive doesn’t dictate things around Apple anymore but the silicone chips team now does.

Then how come we never read about those hardware devs, and get only story after story about Ive?

My guess: those hardware devs are just faceless pawns that get replaced as soon as they start having opinions about product design.

So... the last 3-4 Apple events have had minute long segments with Johny Srouji presenting the Apple Silicon chips. He is Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies.

There is an interview with him in the Wall Street Journal here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chips-that-rebooted-the-mac...

Ive doesn't even work at Apple anymore.

> This thing is going to sell like hotcakes. The combination of single core CPU and graphics performance, device thinness, battery life in this laptop is unmatched.

Well, except for the small problem that the M1 air exists and is still on sale. Same single core CPU performance and near enough multicore and GPU performance. And it's cheaper by a not insignificant amount.

Which is pretty much why Linus Tech Tips wasn't a fan. If you want an Air, get the M1 version and save a buck. If you want performance, kinda hard to argue with the huge upgrades you get from the not that much more expensive 14" Pro.

Linus offhandedly said the M1 had “disappointing performance” when it first came out. He’s got opinions but he’s not super credible.

The LTT review I was referring to was by Anthony, not Linus. I don't recall Linus ever saying the M1 was "disappointing performance" anyway, nor how they wouldn't be considered a credible review? Just because a reviewer doesn't give the review you want doesn't mean it's not credible.

I think you are confusing their review of MacBook Pro M2 with the MacBook Air m2.

the air m2 still is $200 more for a fairly small performance improvement

Better webcam, better screen?

M2 is not a single core CPU, albeit it does have stellar single threaded performance. As for having the worst Mac, it's quite probable they were nerfing their last x86 models on purpose to make the jump to Apple Silicon even more impressive. Remember the models that had inadequate thermals? Now magsafe is making a comeback?

I find it very hard to believe that Apple deliberately sabotaged a multi-billion dollar product line for ~5 years in order to (possibly?) boost sales when their incredibly risky and expensive investment into their own silicon came to market.

People have been shitting on MacBooks since they removed MagSafe and brought in the butterfly keyboard in 2016. The i9 Pros with massive thermal issues came out in 2018. That's a lot of money to lose due to everyone and their mother complaining about the decline in quality and poor value for money of your product.

I wouldn't ascribe to malice what can be more easily be ascribed to incompetence - Apple made questionable regarding the design of the MacBooks, and took the complaints to heart in time for release with their much improved chips.

The point isn't even lost revenue. That Apple can swallow. That's not going to sink them. But they had sufficiently many really _bad_ generations (like 4 or so) that people _had to_ start thinking about how to move out of the Mac-universe. And that requires significant amounts of investment that you cannot easily recover. And that means that once Apple comes up with a non-sucking Mac, it's by no means clear that they get _back_ that business.

If they did that intentionally, then they took a very risky bet that paid off. But I really don't think anyone would make that kind of bet.

It was one generation, the 'touchbar' machines, not four. The third generation Macbook Pro is widely considered one of the best computers Apple ever built.

I'm typing on one now. It's almost ten years old. Original battery, even (though it really should have gotten a new battery about 2-3 years ago.)

> I wouldn't ascribe to malice what can be more easily be ascribed to incompetence

While I usually agree with the sentiment, it's hard to believe that one of the most successful companies in the world can be subject to such levels of incompetence on one of their flagship products.

The rust belt is littered with the remains of what were at one time or another some of the most successful companies in the US or the world.

Corporations are ran by fallible people and are perfectly capable of running themselves into the ground. I'd argue it's nearly their natural trajectory to become bloated and inefficient over time. General Motors was largest and most successful auto manufacturer in the world right up until it crashed and burned in 2008 and had to be bailed out by the federal government.

I agree with your overall point, but GM was already widely seen as a has-been for years, maybe even decades, before 2008. They still had a lot of sales volume but apart from their trucks and a few SUVs, most of their products had been well behind those of their competitors in terms of both design and quality. So I don’t think they were really comparable to Apple at that point.

I take you don't know anyone working at Apple.

There is plenty of good and bad, like everywhere.

Apple took tons of questionable decisions and pissed off a lot of customers (me included) but they're redeeming themselves by bringing ARM to the laptop world (which was long overdue).

Personally I'll run my current Mac to the ground and then I'll just have a (non Mac, hopefully ARM) desktop PC.

I think the simpler explanation was that for that period of time, the mac wasn't their flagship. They were 100% on mobile devices.

Incompetence is the general state of affairs in the life of us all, unfortunately.

Given the turnaround that happened when Ives left, I can definitely ascribe a lot of the problems to his push of form over function. Steve Jobs could set him straight in a way that Tim Cook apparently could not.

Seems like in 2016 Apple was developing thermal designs for Intel’s future promises which ended up being significantly delayed.

And the Apple Silicon Macbook Air has no fan at all.

This is what Apple wanted out of their laptops, and was clearly struggling to achieve it with Intel’s offerings in 2015-2020.

Read that sentence as “single core cpu performance and graphics performance” Rather than “a single core cpu. And graphics performance”

I read GP's as "combination of (single core CPU *plus* graphics) performance"

Sure, that's why I mentioned it having stellar single threaded performance -- I figure out what they probably meant, but it's not what is written. And I've been seeing a lot of misinformation lately about many things (in general, and in tech in particular), and people buying that without questioning , which is why I jumped to "correct" this detail.

The point about nerfing their last x86 models stands on its own though.

When you multiply that out it becomes "combination of (single core CPU performance) and (graphics performance)", which seems clear enough and aligns well with your point. It's possible to read it as "combination of (single core CPU) and (graphics performance)", but since the first one isn't much of a benefit (other than possibly power), I think the other is the more natural reading.

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