I don’t believe this for a second. That would have been a completely daft thing for them to do (not that corporations can’t be daft).
I think the stagnation perceived with the Mac was a combination of distraction (focussed on mobile), lack of general invasion on desktop in the market, Intels recent problems, and waiting. I believe they were waiting for their silicone to get the point that they could do a proper coordinated refresh.
Yeah Apple tried to kill the Mac… and then popped out with the biggest jump in laptop chips in a decade. That chip effort, along with everything that supports it in the new M1 machines was many years in the making.
As well as Ive having way too much influence and not grokking what the mac is actually used for, trying to turn it into an aspirational luxury product.
Developing in house silicon over around 10 years that craps all-over competitors is 'begrudgingly' updating?
The mac is the pinnacle of their product line up - it may not be their biggest priority or largest profit center... but its clear they consider it as a pro level device and treat it very differently from the iOS based products.
The M1 is quite clearly a derivative of designs developed for and deployed first in iOS devices. It's great, really. But other than die size and instance count, it's just a "phone chip". It's an iPhone with more cores/cache/etc...
The upthread point wasn't that the "M1" wasn't good as a laptop chip (it is!), it was that the "Macintosh" product line is clearly evolving in a direction where it's a derived product from the main revenue-producing lines.
You're applying the thought of 'they use it on iOS so it's the mac thats shifting' way too hard on Apple just choosing a new architecture that suits their products best...
If the performance hadn't been what it is then I'd agree. But I'd say the vast majority of hardcore mac users are hyped about the new devices. That's a sign that they're keeping the mac as the mac.
I can't wait to move from my intel to a M* in the next couple of years when software support is fully there for audio stuff.
> Developing in house silicon over around 10 years that craps all-over competitors is 'begrudgingly' updating?
...developing in-house silicon that has architecture parity with your iPad an iPhone. They've quite literally made the statement that "you people don't want computers anymore, so we're removing 32-bit support, we're taking away every mainstream GPU and graphics API, we're giving you a few more years before we disable x86 support altogether, and you'll be happy about it".
If that's not a begrudging update then I honestly don't know what is. You'd have to be pretty deep in their marketing campaign to tell yourself that removing those features is just business as usual.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it a ton lately, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
That’s a fair comment. That having been said, most of what I’m relying to is straight up dishonesty that HN has no way to police and also ‘destroys what it is for’.
> Desktop operating systems like MacOS and Windows belong in corporate, not consumers. They are archaic and still use the file system, which is no longer a thing that consumers need or want. Most people use a tablet and smartphone as their primary computer.
I don't believe most people use a tablet/phone as their primary computer (though maybe their primary web surfing device).
I also don't believe most people want their files on someone else's computer.
Do you have any studies to back up these assertions?
Some of that will be because smartphones last shorter than desktops, but It wouldn’t surprise me if half the smartphone users didn’t even have a desktop PC.
> I also don't believe most people want their files on someone else's computer.
They wouldn't want that if they knew how the cloud works, true. But it seems marketing did a great job at convincing people their new shiny tech product is trustworthy and pure magic.
A lot of people already use their phone/tablet as their "PC". I don't think it'll be the majority in the foreseeable future, but appstores cover a lot of use-cases and are supported by all mainstream services. And for some the smartphone/tablet is the first and maybe only contact with a computer. It runs Fortnite, so what more do you need? ;)
