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Comment by frostwarrior | Hacker News Reader

Also, it was until 2015 where Intel was on a great streak with their processors and didn't show signs of stagnation until around 2017/2018

I5/i7's were great at that time

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The 12” MacBook came out in 2015 and had terrible performance and a problem with overheating. Insider reports say that Intel had promised a lower power chip with better performance that Apple designed the MacBook for but then Intel killed that chip and Apple had to use another Intel mobile chip. Some people feel that was when the problem got real.

Apple would still have a lot of people who relived the same situation during the IBM days.

If you're getting hints that your chip vendor is not aligned then you better have a backup plan.

Not entirely true, people watching and in the field knew. Back in 2015 I made a massive bet on AMD because people on HN working in the field explained the arch shift. Similar with this move by Apple. There are people in those rooms, making the decisions, sharpening their ideas on HN — if we care to listen.

The problem is how do you separate the gold from the cruft? Seems impossible. Also, so much cruft makes you miss the gold as well. :/

From my understanding, it is way more costly to miss the gold than to get some cruft.

I actually wrote software to do that lol

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.

Stalking as a Service? How could that possibly go wrong?

I’m equal parts horrified and amazed. And curious what The Algorithm thinks about my ramblings.

>Back in 2015 I made a massive bet on AMD because people on HN working in the field explained the arch shift.

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.

There were a ton of Intel engineers at the time complaining about management in a different thread.

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

They had already plateaued in 2014/2015 with Haswell/Broadwell. They've basically been releasing that same CPU with minor tweaks to power consumption and codec support for 8 years now.

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!

I don't think my 2019 MBP has ever laster more than 3 hours on battery.

My M1 Max is amazing by comparison.

They were bad for thin and light laptops with good battery life (mostly atom shit and underpowered core cpu's like in the 12inch macbook).

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