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Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

extremetech.com

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Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#201

Post by MobileVet »

thefz wrote: post #183
iSnow wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-powered machines is, tbh. I am a bit more extreme in that I am not buying any machine below 32GB given RAM is no longer upgradable, but even if my mom came and asked me about those iMacs, I'd tell her to not buy. It's a shame that Apple is so great at greenwashing and at the same time spits on every way they could help create truly sustainable products by just…

> I am not sure what the end-game for releasing those under-powered machines is, tbh The lowest and highest tier exist only to shift consumers towards the middle tier, where Apple profits the most and where lies less value for the consumer. It is a marketing strategy invented by Apple IIRC (it's been a long time since my marketing exam).

The strategy is called ‘anchoring’

I had no idea it was invented by Apple. That feels a little too recent...

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#202

Post by djxfade »

dataking wrote: post #155
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #101

> Apple’s gamble, with the M1, is that its custom CPU performance is now so high, at such low power consumption, that the choice of chip inside the system has become irrelevant within a given product generation. This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini. Apple makes a lot of money by offering a range of processor options. At the moment we are early in the transition but…

> This is clearly wrong as they are still selling Intel versions of the MacBook and MacMini I can think of other reasons some customers may prefer or need to buy the Intel version. AFAIK, you cannot run virtualized x86 code (docker, parallels, vmware) on the M1 macs (yet?) or maybe you need a driver for HW that is not yet available for M1/ARM. You can't conclude that they sell Intel versions for performance reasons.

Docker for Apple Silicon was just released. It uses emulation for x86 based images and works mostly seamless.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#203

Post by gambiting »

sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

So my sister does professional photography, and went from a 16GB MacBook Pro(2016) to an 8GB Air, and reports no decrease of productivity - quite the opposite, in her experience all Adobe programs run much faster, and the machine is quieter and lighter to boot. So yeah, I'm not sure - maybe the ram amount isn't as a big deal as people make it out to be. On the other hand I'm a C++ programer and my workstation has 128GB of ram and I wouldn't accept any less.....so obviously it varies.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#204

Post by the_duke »

emteycz wrote: post #192
the_duke wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the marketing effort is immense, and it's really surprising to me how many eagerly lap up the angle Apple is pushing without much reflection, even on HN. Like the good old Apple hype days. Now to be fair, the M1 is an impressive iteration on the A* chip line. But the Ryzen 5000 mobile chips really don't look bad at all in comparison, and a 5nm version of those would level the field.

But there isn't a 5nm version of those... And laptop battery life is vastly different between these two.

Can you link a good test result that proves this?

The 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile chips are not very power hungry either.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#205

Post by klelatti »

bluedino wrote: post #197
klelatti wrote: post #150

One thing which I don't think has been commented on is the marketing effort behind the M1. It's getting a lot of prominence and its use across lots of computers means that there can be a consistent message that "M1 is great - get a new Mac and get an M1". It also provides an opportunity to distinguish between M1 and the next generation M2 (presumably). I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 sta…

The i7 name was ruined by dual core mobile parts It meant at one time “quad core”

At one point I think hyperthreading was i7 only too?

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#206

Post by f6v »

franciscop wrote: post #151

While the M1 is great now, I'm very hopeful in what's to come. If Apple can maintain even a bit of their current improvements year over year, in 2-3 years it just won't make sense to use anything else; see this graph to know what I mean: https://miro.medium.com/max/1356/1*_aVjpbyBkMq-KIY8kbbP_w.pn... Even if Intel can catch up somehow, it'll take years to catch up to this, and by then it'd be too late. The only reaso…

> The only reason why Apple will not win is that they bundle software and hardware too strongly.

That is the major reason M1 is having such a momentum. I was pretty skeptical that niche x86 FORTRAN R extensions would work on M1. But here we are, Rosetta made it the smoothest ride possible. Now look at Microsoft and their Surface Pro X.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#207

Post by chiefalchemist »

"Part of the reason Apple can get away with doing this is that — and let’s be honest — it’s been selling badly underpowered systems at certain price points."

There is also market share. Being more affordable to more people means more sales. True, Apple has always positioned itself as premium. That will remain. Now it will be a higher value as well.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#208

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

sto_hristo wrote: post #153

Make it as fabulous as much as you want, $1700 for an 8 core, 8 gigs of ram machine is just one plain fabulous joke. This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

> This in the time when 16 gigs ram is the baseline if you plan to do anything more than facebook and instagram.

Facebook and Instagram is probably the upper bound on memory-hungry apps. (The average webpage consumes more memory nowadays than gcc -O3.)

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#209

Post by kamranjon »

speedplane wrote: post #76
nightowl_games wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On his recent Lex Fridman podcast appearance, Jim Keller speaks to exactly this mindset. He says that they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue.

> they've been heralding the death of Moore's law since he started and that the "one trick ponies" just keep coming. He says he doesn't doubt that they will continue. The situation is clearly far worse than what you suggest. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, apparent computer performance was doubling roughly every two years. Your shiny new desktop was obsolete in 24 months. Today, we're lucky to get a 15% gain in tw…

Is this a bad thing? This seems like a great outcome for consumers, and will reduce e-waste. I look forward to a future where people see less need to upgrade year after year.

Re: Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model

#210

Post by matkoniecz »

outside1234 wrote: post #13

x86 is dead - first in consumer, then in cloud. It is hard to see to me how this ends any other way. The creative class (us) will quickly have largely all ARM computers within 4 years. Its not hard to see from there how software will be even more optimized for ARM variants than x86 and that the scale of both mobile and consumer computing will push x86 out of the datacenter slowly as old software that relies on x86 is…

> as old software that relies on x86 is retired over the next decade.

seems very, very, very unlikely to me

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