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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#151

Post by philistine »

sylens wrote: post #76

Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using. T…

In 2006, computing was less generous. A music producer probably needed a Mac Pro for their workflow to be efficient. Since then, Intel has massively reduced the delta between laptop and desktop chips. Coupled with the increase in computing ability of our processors while most tasks do not increase their needs (that music producer does not need more computing than in 2006) and desktops slowly faded to nothing but the most demanding tasks (ML, 8k video production, science, etc.) and Apple has gone upmarket with the Mac Pro to chase this market.

With that change, laptops have become the computer market. Look at Apple's iMac offering; they no longer have multiple models and the insides are now laptop parts. The Mac Studio is simply the desktop computer that gets the Macbook Pro chips. Since they don't want to engineer a cooling solution behind a monitor every time, we get a simple box with a ginormous fan.

The Mac Pro was supposed to be the computer with the truly desktop-only ARM chip. Even that seems cancelled now. I don't know what Apple is planning.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#152

Post by retskrad »

Apple literally had the Avengers of the chip industry working for them until the M1, which was a groundbreaking chip and still is for its unmatched performance per watt.

Just like sports, a team can’t stay at the top forever. Now that Apple has lost many of their Avenger members in their chip division, they need to be humble and go back to the drawing board. AMD and Qualcomm are getting closer to their performance per watt.

The M2 showed that the M1 architecture is done. They need to build something new up from the ground up but that’s going to challenge. Let’s see if they can pull it off.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#153

Post by trenchgun »

retskrad wrote: post #152

Apple literally had the Avengers of the chip industry working for them until the M1, which was a groundbreaking chip and still is for its unmatched performance per watt. Just like sports, a team can’t stay at the top forever. Now that Apple has lost many of their Avenger members in their chip division, they need to be humble and go back to the drawing board. AMD and Qualcomm are getting closer to their performance pe…

Why did they lose those key employees?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#154

Post by coldcode »

samwillis wrote: post #40

The Mac Studio was a new product category, sitting just beneath the Mac Pro. I suspect during development they were unsure of if it would actually be the Mac Pro, that would have probably been another 2013 Mac Pro debacle though. The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architectu…

The only thing I can see that the Studio can't do is access hardware directly. My M1 Ultra is beyond anything I could need performance wise (I mostly do complex generative art, but I only need all 20 cores only occasionally). I imagine a few people might need more than I have but it's probably not a large number.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#155

Post by yesenadam »

Damogran6 wrote: post #150
UltraViolence wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

"Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple. It's 'the same OS' fr…

> "Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds

For the phrase "Apple is Dooomed!", including similar results, I get only 4 pages of google search results.

For "Apple is Doomed!", including similar results, I get 31 pages.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#156

Post by dpflan »

trenchgun wrote: post #153
retskrad wrote: post #152

Apple literally had the Avengers of the chip industry working for them until the M1, which was a groundbreaking chip and still is for its unmatched performance per watt. Just like sports, a team can’t stay at the top forever. Now that Apple has lost many of their Avenger members in their chip division, they need to be humble and go back to the drawing board. AMD and Qualcomm are getting closer to their performance pe…

Why did they lose those key employees?

Add on: who are the key employees?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#157

Post by lelanthran »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #132
coldtea wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter. Those things can go in the span of a few years. Remember when Blackberry was king? Pepperidge Farm remembers!

Nokia, Blackberrys ... it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew. My surprise is that Android is the "other one" and not Windows Phone.

Why are you surprised, you said it yourself:

> it turned out that having a world class OS was more important than perhaps anyone at the time knew.

Microsoft never fully committed to a phone OS because workable tablets might have demolished the desktop market.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#158

Post by siddbudd »

yakubin wrote: post #115

I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in gen…

I am not experiencing any crashes on mine. Of the listed apps I use IINA, qBittorent, Sublime Text. I use around 30 apps frequently, none of them are crashing.

Have you tried reinstalling everything from scratch? If yes, then it is very likely a HW issue. If others suggest a better method for checking where the fault lies, other than reinstalling, then follow their advice.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#159

Post by icedchai »

yesenadam wrote: post #155
Damogran6 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple. It's 'the same OS' fr…

> "Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds For the phrase "Apple is Dooomed!", including similar results, I get only 4 pages of google search results. For "Apple is Doomed!", including similar results, I get 31 pages.

Perhaps it was sarcasm, and not meant to be taken literally.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#160

Post by Damogran6 »

yesenadam wrote: post #155
Damogran6 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds NOBODY has transitioned to an other architecture like Apple has, nor has the industry been kicked in the shorts as many times as by apple. (wholesale inclusion of GPU in the OS, migration from Motorola, to Power PC, to Intel, to Arm to X Efficienty + Y Performance Cores...and nobody wrings as much out of the ARM architecture as Apple. It's 'the same OS' fr…

> "Apple is Dooomed!" Google: 8,310,000 results in 0.38 seconds For the phrase "Apple is Dooomed!", including similar results, I get only 4 pages of google search results. For "Apple is Doomed!", including similar results, I get 31 pages.

You're missing the point. Apple's decisions and methods have been criticized for longer than many HN viewers have been alive. The OP is making a claim that Apple's decisions are unwise [i]despite the fact that it's the most profitable company evar[/i] cite: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/apple-3-trillion-market-cap-fir...

What chance can anyone else have if the Mac Pro is doomed if iPhone sales dip?

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