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Comment by trey-jones | Hacker News Reader

Purely marketing from front to back. It's a little bit similar to how AMD spent too much time on R&D for a "true quad-core" processor (which ended up being Phenom) back in the late aughts (2008 or so?). Intel kinda glued two dual-core CPUs together and beat them to market with a "quad-core" processor, securing dominance for about 15 years. I used the Phenom IIx4 for almost that entire 15 year period - it was really great! But they didn't sell that many.

Unfortunately it seems like fiscal success in 2023 mostly means jumping on the hype train of the day and beating the drum for all it's worth, and being ready to pivot to the next thing quickly. Rather than maximizing actual value in your product.

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>Unfortunately it seems like fiscal success in 2023 mostly means jumping on the hype train of the day and beating the drum for all it's worth, and being ready to pivot to the next thing quickly. Rather than maximizing actual value in your product.

We have nobody to blame but ourselves. Consumers are far too happy to just jump on the hypiest train and don't care enough to actually educate themselves about which product has maximum value. It's the entire reason Apple still exists as a company, for example.

> We have nobody to blame but ourselves. Consumers are far too happy to just jump on the hypiest train and don't care enough to actually educate themselves about which product has maximum value. It's the entire reason Apple still exists as a company, for example.

And water is all too happy to flow downhill. So we build dams to hold it back.

> It's the entire reason Apple still exists as a company, for example.

Apple's edge on competitors is all hype? Do you really believe that?

> Consumers are far too happy to just jump on the hypiest train and don't care enough to actually educate themselves about which product has maximum value. It's the entire reason Apple still exists as a company, for example.

Can you elaborate on this? It seems to me that observing Apple, it is a company that creates and captures significant value as a business. They are excelling in some key business areas, such as supply chain logistics, while also moving the needle in a meaningful way with the development of best-in-class hardware, specifically in sensor packages, baseband processors, and CPUs. Some of that has to do with their buy of TSMC yield on N3 and other nodes, however there is a direct business acumen in choosing to do this and understanding the logistical chain of provenance to dominate the market from a hardware perspective.

While I agree that this release from Intel is mostly marketing, it isn't clear to me that Apple is driving a hype train, rather than actually meaningfully moving the needle.

>Some of that has to do with their buy of TSMC yield on N3 and other nodes, however there is a direct business acumen in choosing to do this

That seems a little excessive. I'd say that, on the contrary, it would take a profound lack of business acumen to do otherwise in Apple's position. If you're trying to sell a premium product at that scale, what else would you do?

Good question. I'd honestly agree with you. There was an article linked here the other day quoting Charlie Munger saying that the secret to success in business was less about doing the right things and more about not doing the wrong things. Unfortunately if you look at the hardware business today, there's a lot of companies clearly doing the wrong things, Apple is also clearly not. Still goes to my point that Apple is far more than a hype train, there's actually something of substance there.

Why blame consumers? The market is designed by advertising to be opaque like this. You aren’t supposed to quickly gleam technical information and take relevant action. You are supposed to only find the hype when you go looking and buy into it. This is our modern marketplace. The consumers are blameless, they are a captive audience here, joe shmoe out of his garage down the street isn’t making computers for you.

One blames the consumers like this when it feels out of the question to blame anything else. Probably just libertarianism I would guess here.

> It's the entire reason Apple still exists as a company, for example.

Nope. Apple still exists because they were the first ones to sell digital media players that weren't a DRM clusterfuck (Zune), had actual storage capacity, battery life and sound quality. The iPod saved Apple - at a point, it contributed 40% of revenue and with the iPod Touch and iPhone's jailbreaks proving demand for apps, it paved the way to the endless cash cow that is the App Store.

[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/10469/apple-ipod-sales/

And they keep doing this again in multiple categories.

AirPods alone are worth $50B. They are just easier to use with devices than the bluetooth devices I owned previously.

I got the airpods 2 recently, it’s not just that they work real nice with my iPhone, the sound quality blew me away, and spatial audio with an iPhone is almost unnerving in it’s realism, albeit not much use.

This is ahistorical. iPods were locked to a specific iTunes library at a time when other players acted as mass storage devices, drag and drop.

DRM-free didn't happen until after the iphone [0]

iPod was a better product with better marketing, but it was not freer (libre) than its competition. (Personally I liked my creative Zen with Yahoo unlimited subscription [1]- DRM was a feature! Spotify wouldn't come along for another 5 or 6 years)

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jan/06/apple-dro...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Music_Unlimited

I was just getting into highschool. I had a few of the earlier competitors. The difference between that and an iPod is that iPod “just worked.”

To me, It’s the reason Apple made it. When family bought apple stuff it tended to function. When they bought windows or dells or sandisk media players stuff they tended to have it unplugged on its side and a screw driver in one hand and a phone in the other.

But iTunes wás the user experience with playlists and a proper desktop interface. Drag and drop to iTunes was much more convenient for 99% of the users, except you maybe.

>> It's the entire reason Apple still exists as a company, for example.

Apple makes great product with great user experience. And I say this as someone who switched from Windows PC to Linux PC on my desktop 20 years ago. My family all went Apple though, and I can completely see why. I do have an MBA, and I'm putting Linux on an old (un-upgradable) iMac of theirs because the hardware is very nice.

Does Apple charge a premium for their brand? Yes. Does that mean they're on a hype train? Nope, they really do put together a good UX - with the exception of eliminating standard ports in favor of expensive adapters.

I read “I do have an MBA” and thought if anything that undermines your technical opinions. Then it clicked: MacBook Air.

Same. I thought it was a comment about ease of installing Linux for the non-technical user.

Even after reading this comment, it took me at least half a minute to click. MacBook Air = MBA.

A bunch of people have already pointed out that Apple is a weird thing to use here, but no one has really pointed out that Apple actually takes the opposite approach with remarkable success.

Apple typically waits for competitors to jump on the hype train, usually with poor results, then learns from their lessons and steps in with a product that appeals to non-early-adopters.

Smartphone hype had basically died down by the time the iPhone was introduced. Apple Watch wasn’t out until 5 years after Fitbit (which was by no means the first smartwatch). Apple Vision came at a time where a number of AR/VR devices failed to gain any sort of traction and everyone had kind of accepted that AR/VR wasn’t going to be mass market for a long time, and really only benefits from hype from the Apple brand, not because anyone is particularly excited about non-Apple VR.

My guess is we see the same thing with ML

> It's the entire reason Apple still exists as a company, for example.

I genuinely can't believe you've said this with a straight face. If anything, Apple is a company that ruthlessly figures out what best delivers value to their customers and iterates like crazy on that principle.

Gotta say, some fault for consumers being tricked falls to the huge teams of experts paid to trick them

Nail on the head. These marketing people create demand.

>>We have nobody to blame but ourselves.

Sort of true, but the problem is that "ourselves" includes everyone from the top 2% of consumers with highly specialized education, training, and experience in the relevant technology as well as the randos who couldn't begin to explain the technology to keep a gun at their temple from being fired, adn jsut use "social proof" as their primary criteria for buying anything.

Category 2 and everything in between makes up the bulk of the customer base. so even if 100% of the Category 1 people, plus everyone they knew, bought only true technological advancements and never bought marketing-driven products, there are not enough to make a difference to the marketing & finance "leaders" at those companies.

> On stage, Gelsinger teased what he claimed would be the "world's largest AI supercomputer in Europe," and one of the "top 15 AI supercomputers in the world."

Disregarding what constitutes an "Ai supercomputer", surely "world's largest AI supercomputer in Europe" would just be Europe's largest Ai supercomputer?

I interpreted it as the world's largest ai supercomputer, which may not be the fastest, and will be located in Europe. Size and performance are two different metrics, especially if you're using lower density processing.

Phenom I was truly awful, sadly... especially once the bugs and instability turned up. It wasn't really competitive even before it had to be turned down.

marketing announcement leading to competition is a good thing.

It is only a positive thing to have robust competition in a market. This goes not only for the customers, but the employees in the companies that are competing. Sort of sucks to work in a company that won't (or can't) compete.

It's not purely marketing; they actually did integrate the Movidius VPU.

Well crypto was starting to tank Nvidia's numbers, gotta keep growing! New thing: LLMs everywhere!

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