Some key take away:
- A lot of people got it wrong with the bet on Intel.
- 2 people that said it will take 5 years were right.
- Suggestion to use Rosetta was right.
- Indicator for fan less Macbooks was right.
It's easy to doubt but it actually takes effort to form educated guesses about the future.
2015 is the year both the (Intel) 12” MacBook and the first iPad Pro were released.
These we also both entirely new form factors for Apple (and both roughly the same size).
On the Intel front, Apple saw how underperforming, short lasting battery and hot the 12” MacBook was.
Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was.
This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.
I sure hope they saw. They designed, built and sold the things.
Would be hard to miss those issues during their development and testing, wouldn't it?
It's not like Apple didn't know what they were selling.
Not to mention tons of people love them...
What did you expect would happen?
It would be like Apple putting the chip from the Mac Studio in the Air.
They could, but those were crap.
>What did you expect would happen?
That it would be a niche due to size, but otherwise much beloved model, whose 2022 absense is still lamented? (See comments below)
Yes it was slow but really, not terrible.
It ran windows with battery life better than macOS. It was a solid form factor. Never over heated. Great for traveling with.
I miss mine.
For sure, the weakeast point of it was the processor, which had to sacrifice too much performance to stay in the thermal budget. I guess the basic design decisions for the 12" MacbBook were made when Intel still seemed to be on track for their 10nm process. But it wasn't the only caveat with its design. It had of course the horrible butterfly keybord which would plague the Apple laptops for years and 12" is the absolute minimum screen size for doing work.
I think Apple has another laptop design < 13" coming, that could be 12". The ARM processors pretty much solve the power/performance problem. The keyboard could actually be the biggest hurdle, as it increases the body thickness. But the keyboard of the new M2 Air is just wonderful, well worth whatever it adds to the device thickness. I wouldn't even be surprised, if they don't make an ultra-thin 12" MacBook but rather a 12" MB Pro, which might be slightly thicker than the Air.
I kinda wanna get an M2 Pro but I personally dislike macOS. :(
Nowadays you could stick a (maybe throttled or fewer cores to get even more battery life) M1/M2 in there, add a second USB-C port, and it would be an excellent device without any of the downsides that the original version had.
That form factor with m1/2 would be awesome! Especially to use in bed cos the screen was so nice and it was so light.
[1] implies that the M1 development started around 2008 - although you could also read it that the M1 was 5 years in development but that sounds a bit quick and also doesn't fit with [3] in 2014 - "Apple Testing ARM Based Mac Prototypes".
But there doesn't seem to be any other direct corroboration of the 2008 date that I can find.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oDZyOf6CW4 via [2] [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31778257 [3] https://www.macrumors.com/2014/05/25/arm-mac-magic-trackpad/
Then they saw how performant, long battery lasting and cool their iPad (ARM chip) was.
This became an easy decision for Apple to ditch Intel when they saw how much better their own iPad Pro was relative to the 12” Intel MacBook.
For those who have being using Mac since the PowerPC days all have used this argument against X86 chips. As you all know, Apple actually had to switched from RISC chips to Intel X86 chips, before they switched back to ISAs chips now. Just saying performance is not the main reason to switch chip sets.
Apple abandoned PPC after it became obvious that laptops were going to become more popular than desktops, and the G5 cheese grater Mac Pro required liquid cooling for the dual CPU chip versions.
Apple moved from Intel to ARM for the exact same reason. Intel no longer cares about pursuing high performance with a low power draw. They have returned to the Pentium 4 strategy of performance via clock speed and power increases.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/338748-raptor-lake-to-...
If that isn't a return to the Pentium 4 strategy, I don't know what is.
Intel isn’t relying on an architecture thats about to run them into a wall like the Pentium 4’s architecture was about to, what keeping them is second is being behind on their process, and beyond that, execution.
You can argue that it's not what they "want" to be doing, but it's certainly what they are doing.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-raptor-lake-ma...
What you can't change is the reality of Intel's actions.
Around what time? 2015?
Maybe I could have been more clear in my original post but 2015 was the year the iPad Pro launched.
How could the “iPad Pro were getting close to Intel performance” happen in thr first version?
The very first iPad Pro was already more performant than the MacBook 12” (which also launched that same year).
Whenever Tim Cook was asked, why pretty much up until maybe a few months before the apple silicon announcement, he said there weren’t any plans to switch the mac to arm.
some people see value in this some people perhaps not
However I do think it's a bit harsh to call these things a scam - I mean take the art market itself - value is entirely subjective - doesn't mean it's a scam ( though scamming things happen in the normal art market to try and inflation prices ).
The question you have to ask yourself is:
Are you buying the NFT as an investment - because you think other people will value it, or are you spending the money because you are quite happy to own that thing forever and never sell - ie the value is to you.
I'd argue if you are doing the former you are more likely to be 'scammed' than the latter.
Also if I want to trade anonymously there is always cash ( as least for now ), which is a simple, well understood, near universally accepted mechanism.
There are niches where decentralized banking is useful - but they are niches - and many of them are associated with dubious activity.
On top of that the current tech plaforms simply don't scale - the cost of replacing simple trusted parties with technology is huge.
for most people in the US or the world? i think everywhere banks rank amongst the most disliked institutions
Which would imply that people love banks and want them to be even more powerful.
see fallon.eth
i think that's harsh. why would you even expect an aggregate sentiment of hn to indicate where to invest one's money. on the other hand it might be worth pointing out that y combinator supports plenty of blockchain projects
Being wrong once is one thing, but HN commentary seems consistently wrong on a whole litany of topics. The biggest source of bad hot takes seems to be something new/different. HN seems to be consistently conservative.
It’s a shame because I used to think that i would gain some insight on future trends from the fact that a lot of the people who comment here are in tech, but now I’m not so convinced.
I5/i7's were great at that time
Built this: https://insideropinion.com/
But use it for investments.
You can’t completely remove risk, but I invest in areas where insiders discuss publicly about their work. It provides insight often fundamentals lack; leaving massive potential upside.
I’m equal parts horrified and amazed. And curious what The Algorithm thinks about my ramblings.
I think you got really lucky. Zen1 didn't ship until 2017 and it lagged severely behind in single thread. You had no idea what AMD was going to have.
Even AMD would tell you that they were surprise that Intel fell so far behind. They've been quoted saying this a few times.
Intel's 10nm Node (equivalent to TSMC 7nm) was suppose to ship in 2016! It didn't ship anything on the desktop using 10nm until Alder Lake in 2021. Five year delay.
Intel would have been well ahead of Zen2 in node technology. Instead, it was around 1.5 node behind.
If you made your bet purely on what was said inside AMD in 2015, you just got lucky. No one knew that Intel would be stuck on 14nm for 7 years when they were planning for 2 years.
I’m sure luck was involved (so many things could go wrong). But i tend to make money on bets based on what I hear on the fringe. AMD, Bitcoin, etc
If you're getting hints that your chip vendor is not aligned then you better have a backup plan.
At the time, it was hard to notice, but reviews at the time absolutely noticed the minor CPU update (https://www.theverge.com/2015/4/9/8375735/apple-macbook-pro-..., search "Broadwell"). Another funny aspect of that review: it mentions out 10+ hour battery life for the MBP as a nice, but hardly astonishing spec. 9 hours 45 minutes with Chrome was the worst case. It's amazing to think how bad the 2016-2019 MBPs were in comparison, to the point where getting back to 10 hour battery is an amazing Apple Silicon feature!
My M1 Max is amazing by comparison.
Phew. I’m glad I didn’t comment on that thread.
I didn't see this particular article but I would have agreed with it. I certainly have written many comments on similar articles (search the comments for alwillis ARM Mac for starters) explaining why such a switch to ARM was completely doable, having lived through the switch from PowerPC to Intel while working at MIT.
Meta will have recovered from their current issues and will be their main competitor.
I think Apple could have a big advantage because their processors could allow more powerful things in a standalone VR headset compared to the current Generation where you need a external PC for most CPU and GPU intensive tasks.
I don’t see any practicality to VRs outside some tiny niches. They make a few games more fun, some niche workloads can be done more efficiently, but they are hard to equip and first and foremost block your interactions with the real world. Sure, some contact lens futuresque thingy could improve on this as well, but how would you control that? Voice control is slow and troublesome.
So I don’t predict a huge success to VR, it will be at most something akin to an xbox’s kinect, or some wii accessory.
As far as I can tell, we have a lot of progress to make with display resolution and GPU quality before VR becomes competitive for work environments with a modern hiDPI dual display setup. Maybe it's more appealing to folks with crappy home desk setups, or people who live in cities who don't want a full desk? Ergonomics still feels like an obstacle, though.
- Apple arcade and Apple TV will still be around but Apple has no plan/vision for gaming.
(E.g. this for the XXI century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isetta )