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Comment by nisten | Hacker News Reader

I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great.

Before the value proposition was good. You can still use your old laptop and still have a very fast browser experience via remotely running it on a AMD server chip, this way you save on battery life and RAM too.

Then M1 speedometer scores started beating AMD Epyc on single core web browsing performance. Not only that, but even providing a much better experience in terms of battery life because of power savings.

Then yeah there was no point paying 20$-30$ a month for a remote browser instance. If you can afford that as a user you're either already set on CPU/GPU/RAM or better off just buying a used m1 air for <900$.

It's quite sad of a lesson where you do everything right, work consistently hard, be quite innovative, have plenty of financial and talent resources, and still fail.

Tech obsolescence is brutal.

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> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty.

Mighty is only dead because Suhail wanted to pursue what they clearly think is a bigger opportunity [0]. Mighty is already building its own GPU servers, might as well put them to use for AI as the perf and the size of AI models is roughly on an exponential trajectory [1]. It may not be long before AGI is within vicinity [2].

Though I agree a better strategy wouldn't be to accelerate the browser (akin to boiling an ocean?), but instead take one app at a time and make it browser-native (like, Photoshop -> Figma). A similar concept to (I don't remember who said it), take tools hackers use and build it for the Internet (grep -> Google, sendmail -> Hotmail, emacs -> Replit, sftp -> Dropbox etc).

[0] AIs today can automate away humans on quite a few tasks, assist them on quite a few complex ones already. And still: models are getting only way more capable, not less.

[1] https://twitter.com/stephsmithio/status/1501729837366452224

[2] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1590816470845771777

  > where you do everything right

everything except for, as Suhail points out, picking the wrong side of a technical trend to bet on. All the technical wizardry in the world can't save you from bad strategy.

> I think it really was the M1 Chip that killed Mighty. The product itself looked like it was working great.

Agree with this take. It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs. Props to him for the skill it took to get funding in the door.

didn't need funding skill, didnt need to look at apple roadmap, suhail's prior success as a founder was good enough for most pple

Certainly has the skill to layoff by the dozen, so given the current investment climate, that might come in handy too ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10869419

In seriousness, going by what Suhail's been documenting through their tweets, they seem to fit the relentlessly resourceful bracket to a tee, which (according to pg, at least) means they have an above average chance at succeeding doing venture-scale startups: http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html

what things did he do that make him relentlessly resourceful you think?

I remember people being very impressed with the performance of the arm macs at the time. Maybe they were impressed that it met expectations though and correctly predicting it would be good.

>It's amazing he was able to get this funded at a time it was fairly obvious from their product roadmap and language that Apple was going to release ARM Macs

It's easy to forget, but a lot of people were rubbishing the idea of ARM Macs as a viable replacement for Intel until it actually happened.

I did see that opinion expressed, but it was just silly given Ax performance in iPad/iPhone pre-M1. In no world does the flagship laptop use a more expensive, less efficient, and slower chip than the mid-range iPhone for more than a couple of product generations.

I don't think it was that silly to expect a transition from a stable, mature architecture, sold (albeit too expensive) by an established chip maker, to a new (to desktop) architecture designed in-house by a company known for its phones, especially when you consider that desktop workloads are very different from "here is an API for our walled garden" workloads.

Add to that the fact that a successful transition was entirely dependant on how well rosetta works (it turns out it works well, but that wasn't a given at all), evidenced by how people got burned in the powerpc-x86 transition

> when you consider that desktop workloads are very different from "here is an API for our walled garden" workloads.

This is a solid point, but iPad workloads were pretty clearly converging with laptop workflows. (And Apple was obviously moving in the direction of converging the SDKs even before the M1 was announced.) Plus, they already had the ability for devs to build apps to run on MacOS & iPad/iPhone. This was a strategic move that was visibly underway for years.

> a successful transition was entirely dependant on how well rosetta works (it turns out it works well, but that wasn't a given at all), evidenced by how people got burned in the powerpc-x86 transition

All the more reason to expect them to make a transition -- they had pulled it off successfully (if with some hiccups) before. I would not be surprised if they had some of the original Rosetta team around to revise for this time around.

> $30/m

That price point was a serious barrier to entry.

I loved how fast Mighty was (even on M1 it was noticeable) but there's no way I could justify that expense and I'm a big early consumer of B2B SaaS tools.

> use your old laptop

> M1

To have a M1 chip, you need a new laptop. A new Intel/AMD laptop would bring you plenty performance not to require remote desktop as a service.

I looked into remote desktop services but in the long run you're cheaper off just buying a computer

Even for gaming and workstation use, this seems to be true. Last year, the value proposition of remote desktops looked great, but it turns out price/performance of all computing parts was at an all-time high.

I looked into this and found, annoyingly, that even if used the Remote Desktop rarely and I could deallocate the machine to not get charged, it was actually the price for storage that made it too expensive.

You could say that same about running off-line batch jobs on EC2 instances. Unless your co-located data sources are forcing you to do so, I cannot fathom why you would.

For Mighty, this would mean their addressable market shrinks every year as more people replace with computers that are faster. That's not the characteristic of a market most startups want to be in.

did this product have any appeal? the price was insane for something i get for free, if you could afford it and needed it you could afford a decent computer that could

Meh, desktop Intel/AMD chips still beat M1, and are more versatile for gaming etc.

When it comes to single core, M1 smokes EVERYTHING. And browser performance is gated by single core performance.

Is there some data to confirm that? Both AMD and Intel just came out with their new 5Ghz+ CPUs. I doubt that even M2 is faster.

Not generally true. On geekbench, both Intel and AMD have offerings that outscore both M1 and M2 on single core.

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

Likely they meant "smoked on power per watt" which is useful on a laptop, not so much on a desktop or an always-plugged in laptop.

It did when it came out. But it got already leapfrogged. Calculating fibonacci(45) with a recursive javascript function takes 13s on my m1pro and 7s on my ryzen 7600x. Profiling our angular app in chrome the initial render takes 200ms on m1pro and 130ms on my ryzen 7600x.

Apple silicon is still the master of performance per watt. But raw performance: It really was just tsmc 5nm what gave apple the edge. Apple will shine again when they sit exclusivly on tsmc 3nm, but until then, not so much.

> Then yeah there was no point paying $20-$30 a month for a remote browser instance.

Sorry what? There are people that even considered this?

I’ve talked to a couple of very loyal Mighty users. If you think about the number of hours a knowledge worker spends in the browser every month, it works out to a pretty small price per hour.

It’s similar to people in jobs that require them to live out of their inbox paying (a comparable amount) for Superhuman.

I'm really REALLY not sure how it makes sense to pay that much for a remote browser unless there's something I'm missing which I have to think is the case. What was the actual hook here? Surely a remote browser cannot have been worth it for 240-360 dollars a year? Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface? How are people suffering from slow browsers that much?

Hence why M1 killed them.

Some people do all their work in browsers.

but you still need a somewhat ok laptop to use it. Screen battery and keyboard are still things that a 250$ laptop would be shit.

There's a reasonably sized market segment of people who, themselves, work at startups with dubious value propositions. They try to prop up the whole ecosystem by spending a lot of money on each other. (Source: worked at a late-stage startup, spent weeks integrating APIs that did nothing but were owned by a friend of the CEO.)

There's another segment of people who can be sold snake oil. They aren't actually very sensitive to UI responsiveness, so they won't notice the extra latency added by the streaming service, but they will believe claims that it is "faster" than what they're currently using in some nebulous way. (These are the same kind of people who rewrite their app in React because they believe React makes apps faster.)

> Wouldn't it have been more worth it to simply buy an M1 Mac or a Surface?

Yes, probably, but I would note that a cheap M1 Mac is 4x the annual cost you cited for the browser, and if the browser is 95% of what you use a laptop for, getting the same perf boost for 25% the cost sounds like a good value prop.

Granted, a laptop should last more than a year, but presumably it starts to show it's age in under four, whereas the remote browser can improve over time.

I had Macbooks that lasted 5 years (2010-2015) pretty well, my current MBA M1 is almost 2 years old and I don't see myself needing to swap it for another 2-3 at least. My girlfriend still uses her MBA from 2014.

I don't really see how I could justify paying 20-25% of the price of my laptop per year, that I use for much more than just browsing, to have a faster browsing experience. And I'm a power user (SWE, etc.) compared to the mainstream consumer, the market for this product seems to be extremely niche/small.

Then start to add all aspects: security, network delay, service downtime.

I think baas is bullshit for security reasons alone.

Ironically BAAS is sold for security reasons too. As in isolation. You'd do very sensitive stuff with the remote browser, or vice versa, for isolation from other activity.

There's a lot of people gaslit into thinking browsers are a janky slow mess because they've been using Chrome for so long.

This is an argument for a more broadly-accessible interface to e.g. Selenium, not for "the same browser, but somewhere else."

If people applied that logic of “my time is worth more” across everything in their lives - they would be beyond broke.

Not only that, but there are clowns that seriously called it the future of computing (suhail included).

Reselling Hetzner instances and locking access to Chromium, brought to you by the finest VC backed startups.

There was no point paying $30 a month _period_. You could get a cheap, refurbished 2014 laptop and it would still be a better value proposition than Mighty. The only potential buyers of this service are SV tech bros, not anyone living in the real life.

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