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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday December 02 2020, @02:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-the-chips dept.

A medium article

On Youtube I watched a Mac user who had bought an iMac last year. It was maxed out with 40 GB of RAM costing him about $4000. He watched in disbelief how his hyper expensive iMac was being demolished by his new M1 Mac Mini, which he had paid a measly $700 for.

In real world test after test, the M1 Macs are not merely inching past top of the line Intel Macs, they are destroying them. In disbelief people have started asking how on earth this is possible?

If you are one of those people, you have come to the right place. Here I plan to break it down into digestible pieces exactly what it is that Apple has done with the M1.

Related:
What Does RISC and CISC Mean in 2020?


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  • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:32PM (3 children)

    by theluggage (1797) on Saturday December 05 2020, @02:32PM (#1084346)

    10% of such a huge market is pretty significant. Now look at estimates of the profit share: Apple 66%, Samsung 17%, Others: 13%... [forbes.com]

    Apple has made a strategic decision to focus on the high margin, premium end of the market, whereas a lot of the Android sales numbers come from cheap free-with-mobile-plan handsets.

    Same with the mass of the PC market - a lot of those sales that Apple are losing are those $500 deals where the only real margin comes from hard-selling the customer finance, an extended warranty and a $70 Monster HDMI cable (...or sealing a supply contract with a corporate outfit by offering them a bargain on the basic PC and then screwing them for extras and a support contract).

    OK, as a consumer you may not care about Apple's profits - but if you think that Mac/MacOS is better than Wintel, you might want to stop and consider how much of that is down to Apple having a shedload of cash to put into MacOS and Mac Apps and the advantages of vertical integration - only having to worry about supporting a dozen or so Mac models rather than having to maintain compatibility with a hoard of lowest-common-denominator clones built from commodity hardware. Certainly, a lot of the benefits of the M1 seem to be coming from the tight integration of hardware and software - the GPU is designed from the ground up for Apple's Metal graphics framework, for example, and there are also claims that the CPU has features specifically to accelerate code produced by the Rosetta2 x86 translator.

    Plus, there's no way Microsoft or Intel could mandate a change of CPU architecture for the PC platform the way that Apple has done 3 times now (68k to PPC, PPC to Intel, now Intel to ARM/Apple Silicon). By contrast, we have Windows on Alpha/Sparc/PPC etc. (failed), Itanium (failed), Windows on ARM take 1 (failed) and Window on ARM take 2 (not taking the world by storm, and ironically could be turned around by the demand for Windows on the M1...). Then look at how long it took MS to replace kludgey DOS-based Windows (3/9x/ME etc.) with Windows NT (NT 3.1 released in 1993, didn't replace 9x/ME as the default PC OS until Windows XP in 2001 - and the compatibility layer still hanging around in 32 bit Windows 10) c.f. Apple replacing "classic" MacOS with the completely different OS X (approx 2001-2005, with "classic" stone dead after the 2006 switch to Intel).

    Its a fallacy to think that - in an alternate universe where Apple had gone down the licensing route - the result would bear any resemblance to Mac/MacOS today. Most likely, Apple would have gone down the pan in the 90s when Windows acquired a half-decent GUI and decent graphics. Microsoft gained an unassailable advantage by standing on the shoulders of IBM whereby they basically got a tithe of every single PC sale (...including PCs sold with alternative operating systems wherever they could get away with it) and maybe even kept Apple in business by producing Mac versions of Office and IE just to prove that they weren't a monopoly.

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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday December 07 2020, @02:39PM (2 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 07 2020, @02:39PM (#1084891) Journal

    No argument about the profitability of Apple.

    That comes at higher prices of their products. And arguably, better products with better experience. (I have not used any Apple products since about 2001 as my last PowerMac got used less and less, and Linux box got used more and more.)

    But if you want to control the world (ala Microsoft) you've got to own the market share.

    --
    When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
    • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday December 09 2020, @04:20PM (1 child)

      by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday December 09 2020, @04:20PM (#1085581)

      Maybe Apple are happy making a shedload of money and exerting a huge influence on the industry, but leaving the me-tools the hard work of selling the low-margin clones. Apple popularised (even if they left the actual inventing to others) the GUI, DTP, laser printers, local area networking, desktop video editing, the modern laptop layout, the personal “(not) mp3” player, the modern smartphone & “App Store”, the tablet, the “ultrabook” concept, better-than-full-HD displays... And now it is possible that that M1 could be the watershed moment in the move away from x86. That’s a pretty good score sheet without ever having a dominant market share, and I don’t see their shareholders complaining about the emoluments... If they had dominance, like MS, they’d probably never have taken those risks.

      Currently having fun working out how to rescue a bunch of old websites with Flash content (justified - The alternative at the time would have been RealPlayer or MS-centric Dynamic HTML). For the greater good, of course, but annoying. It may have taken Flash 10 years to die, it may belong dead, but the fatal wound was inflicted by the iPhone.

      • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday December 10 2020, @04:26PM

        by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 10 2020, @04:26PM (#1085947) Journal

        I had mixed feelings about Steve banning Flash on iPhone. I recognized the good long term effect. Something needed to kill Flash. And this was it. But in the short term it was going to cause a lot of problems.

        Hopefully, if your old websites are simply using Flash as a "media player" then you can find much better modern solutions.

        --
        When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.