I miss that feeling. No part of me would agree that Apple is a more impressive company today than it was 13 years ago, despite its market cap.
- With some models you could open the battery with a simple handle.
- Some models had a small LED bar that you could check the battery status with, without opening the lid.
- Replaceable RAM and disk. In one Pro I replaced the hard drive with an SSD (almost nobody had an SSD yet) and it would fly. I could open all Creative Suite apps (which were still optimized for spinning rust) in three seconds.
After that started the dark ages. Soldered RAM, soldered SSD, no more MagSafe, only USB-C ports, keyboards that could be destroyed with specs of dust. And the overheating Intel CPUs.
In 2019-2021 there was a rebound. First the scissor keyboard returned, then Apple Silicon, and good amounts of ports again.
It was really hard to be a Mac user ~2016-2020.
On older Mac’s (2009-10?), the LEDs were built into the battery. Very handy to quickly check if your spare has more charge than the one you’re using.
In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either: fully integrated SoC’s inside laptops (with all the pros and cons of better battery life, lower heat, smaller size - but irrepairability) and almost entirely modular laptops.
I understand that most people want socketed CPU’s in machines, but speaking genuinely storage used to be upgraded more than ram, and ram more than a CPU; CPU’s limit how much ram we can have so having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.
I feel like a heathen saying it, because emotionally I don’t want it to be true, but it’s definitely the truth.
So, there's the rub, and it should be clear: repairability is coming with a trade-off.. Sleekness, performance, battery life.
We as consumers would rather have ultra portable, high performance laptops that feel rigid in our hands over bulky devices that could be useful for 1.5x as long (or survive more wear potentially).
Framework is banking on people who are aware of this tradeoff and want to buy a device going the opposite direction; which is GREAT!.
For example all smartphones are going larger and there's no choice for someone like me to get a small phone these days: I am forced. You're not! Someone is allowing you to make the tradeoff, and instead of understanding that these are actual trade-offs, you'd rather complain that they exist at all.
> In fact, now is the best time in the last 20 years for either
> having soldered RAM isn’t that big of a deal in reality to most people.
Precisely. This whole sub-thread is a response to sacralising Apple for their M chips, pretending there is no compelling alternative, and subsequently giving Apple a free pass for consumer-hostile/commercially-dubious practices.
At any point in time, Apple has the lead, there's no argument there, but if you can afford to wait 12/18 months, you get about the same performance in a repairable/extensible package. That makes Apple's performance less stellar, especially when the same people laud those devices' life expectancy (my daily-driver ThinkPad is specced from early 2017, in 2025 it wouldn't care having bought it "old" in 2018).
I get it, this is an affluent forum, people like the latest and greatest, and a lot of Apple's marketing strategy is about validation and status, that's not terribly rational and healthy, though.
> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC
I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple and make them out to be this big evil corporation, but you’re naming it sound as if they’ve been jerking off while sitting on TSMC’s capacity just to fuck with the competition and purely to make it impossible to compete, when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.
> making Apple look good on benchmarks for 12-18 months or so
What are you on about? They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1, especially if you take into consideration the power envelope and how performance is available with just passive cooling.
There isn’t really anything like it.
Even the salty argument of Apple hogging TMSC nodes just crumbles apart if you give more than a second of thought.
For starters, yes, sure Apple is great at managing their logistics and supply chain, which is why, when Cook was in charge of that, it impressed Jobs so much and it proved to be so essential to Apple’s success, that Jobs decided to hand pick Cook as his successor. I don’t see how that is a useful argument against Apple, moral or otherwise.
Nothing is stopping competitors from optimizing their process to the point where they can call TSMC and offer to buy their capacity for the next year or two. To say nothing of the efforts made outside of TSMC like Samsung GAAFET 3nm and MBCFET 2nm process and whatever Intel is dicking around with on their 2nm process.
More importantly though, it’s silly to make it seem as if that’s the only reason for the fruits of Apple’s labor.
Take AMD’s HX 370 for example, released last year, courtesy of TSMC’s N4P process. It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro, which wasn’t only 3 years older at the time, it was a product of TSMC’s older N5 process.
Clearly having access to newer TSMC nodes isn’t a guaranteed win.
> and couldn't care less about performance
You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.
If you’re inclined to read their every move through the big bad filter then you might say they never cared about raw performance because they’ve always been able to get more out of less and this way they could charge high spec prices without the high spec cost (and without, historically, advertising specs), and it clearly worked out for them.
Their stuff is being sold as if it’s given away for free, in doing so they’ve proven that the average user couldn’t give two fucks about bigger numbers as long as it works well, and their competitors have to pack their phones and other devices with higher specs and cooling solutions like vapor chambers (something Apple has managed to avoid so far) to keep up.
In a way they’ve always had to care more about performance than their competitors because they’ve mostly worked with hardware that’s “lesser” on paper to maximize their margins.
> to offer, a sense of novelty, excitement, taste
I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke with something that would’ve been considered a silly mobile processor 10 years ago is quite novel and exiting. If nothing else it lit a fire under Intel, even if they’ve seemed to have decided to let themselves be turned into a well done steak.
This was essentially what Intel had in mind with their Atom series for netbooks back in the day and Intel never managed to crack the code.
I remember being amazed when I received my developer transition kit, running macOS on an A12Z like it was nothing.
Even now, if I want to be more comfortable and do some coding or video editing work on the couch I can use my off-the-shelve base model M3 MacBook Air to do most of what I can on my M1 Max, that’s quite the leap in performance in such a short time.
There’s no accounting for taste or course and what I like might not be to your liking, and there is plenty about Apple that deserve legitimate criticism, so I don’t understand the need to make something out of nothing in this instance.
What a way to out yourself as some kind of irrational zealot.
>> goes into barring the competition from accessing the current nodes at TSMC
> I know it’s en vogue to hate on Apple […] when in reality they’ve continued to make exponential improvements on their silicon platform.
Have they? M3 to M4 is roughly 20% more perfs for 10% higher TDP.
> What are you on about? They’ve essentially been in a league of their own since the M1
Are they?
> Take AMD’s HX 370 for example,
Indeed, AMD is *very* close perfs-wise, while sitting on TSMC's 4nm, versus the new M4 Pro's 3mn Gen2.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6143vs6346/AMD-Ryzen-AI...
> It still struggled to provide a PPA similar to the M1 Pro
…and not far-off when talking energy efficiency, again, with a whole gen of difference
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...
so, within single digit precents.
I'm not taking away from Apple's push towards ARM, that was ballsy, and well executed (also, they had little choice but to ditch Intel, and with AMD not being an option it's pretty obvious in retrospect). That said, I'm tired of the rhetoric and attitude that somehow Apple's chips are made of angel dust or something, especially on this "tech"/"science" forum.
> You’ve got it mixed up. Apple has never cared about raw specs, but they always have and always will care about performance.
Apple a decade and a half ago was selling you "unique" products or clever features. Today's Apple announcements is Tim showing you benchmarks.
> I don’t know about you but single-handedly making x86_64 look like an ancient joke
No, they haven't. They did put intel to shame, but so did AMD, and that came as a surprise to nobody.
I also do not like that Apple has completely removed all USB type A ports on the newer MacBooks. USB type A plugs are still very common and I wish Apple left one or two on the newer MacBooks in addition to the USB-C ports. Yes, you can use USB-C to USB type A adapters but it is annoying.
I also do not like that Apple has removed the Ethernet and microphone jacks. Both jacks are still useful to have on modern computers. I'll make an exception for removing the Ethernet jack on the MacBook Air to accommodate a thinner chassis but wish the MacBook Pro chassis was kept thick enough to accommodate the Ethernet jack.
Ethernet is available over the ports via fairly cheap adapters if you need it. There's so much bandwidth on a thunderbolt port that it can do that and a display or two at the same time.
Build quality was also stunning. It’s still good, but the gap between brands is shrinking.
Arguably the worst part about modern MacBooks is software. I don’t know anyone who finds it more stable/convenient to use or pleasant to develop for :(
I simultaneously agree with you and also look at the other operating systems and realize Macs are still the best option (at least for a laptop). I want to like Linux more, but it feels like I start from scratch every time I do a major upgrade.
It looks like sometimes this approach has led to more details or an entirely different design, and sometimes less details. Almost like a normalization of sorts to better standardize around a level of details and amount of contrast and brightness.
And that is what I believe to be the crux of the problem. The trends have been regressions rather than improvements.
I have a few theories as to why this happens too but none of them are particularly complimentary towards Apple, et al.
And to be clear, Apple are far from the worst offenders here. Pretty much every company that releases new software or hardware feels the need to change things so it looks “fresh” and people keep buying their stuff. It doesn’t matter if it results in design regressions because by the time people realise they don’t like it, they’ve already bought that shiny new thing.
And "Photo Booth" looks like a mouth with a strange tongue sticking out.