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Apple ditched Intel, and it paid off
Apple's decision to ditch Intel paid off this year.
The pivot allowed Apple to completely rethink the Mac, which had started to grow stale with an aging design and iterative annual upgrades. Following the divorce from Intel, Apple has launched far more exciting computers which, paired with an ongoing pandemic that has forced people to work and learn from home, have sent Apple's Mac business soaring.
It wasn't always a given. When Apple announced its move away from Intel in 2020, it was fair to question just how well Apple could power laptops and desktop computers. Apple has used in-house chips for iPhones and iPads but had been selling Intel-powered computers for 15 years. It wasn't clear how well its macOS desktop software would work with apps designed to run on Intel chips, or whether its processors would offer any consumer benefits and keep up with intensive tasks that people turned to MacBooks to run.
[...] In April 2021, CEO Tim Cook said during the company's fiscal second-quarter earnings call that the M1 chip helped fuel the 70.1% growth in Apple's Mac revenue, which hit $9.1 billion during that quarter. The growth continued in fiscal Q3, when Mac revenue was up 16% year over year. [...] There was a slowdown in fiscal Q4, when Mac revenue grew just 1.6%, as Apple, like all manufacturers, saw a slowdown from the burst of sales driven by the start of the pandemic and dealt with supply chain woes. But fiscal Q4 sales didn't include revenue from its most exciting new computer of the year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30 2021, @01:01PM (5 children)
Uh, you know M1s can be had for less than $1000 brand new right?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 30 2021, @01:13PM
I was going to mention the Mac Mini. That's as low as $550 [slickdeals.net], you provide your own display.
I recall early reports that the 8 GiB base version was not enough memory and it would hurt the SSD's longevity due to excessive writes.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/02/23/questions-raised-about-m1-mac-ssd-longevity-based-on-incomplete-data [appleinsider.com]
It's only a theoretical risk, and may have been addressed by updates by now.
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(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday December 30 2021, @04:56PM (3 children)
Fair enough - I never even considered a Mac mini. https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space-gray-10-core-cpu-16-core-gpu-1tb# [apple.com]
$699 will get the base model, 8gig of memory, and 256 gig of storage. You get the M1 cpu with 8/8/16 cores. That CPU is probably adequate for most people. But, seriously, 256 gig of storage just isn't going to cut it, IMO. And, 8 gig of memory seems just "adequate" these days. As time goes by, everything wants more memory, and 8 gig will be inadequate before the last of these things are retired. A more reasonably specced Mac Mini has the same CPU, but 16 gig of memory, and 1 TB of SSD storage for $1299. Add a second TB of storage for $400, and you're at $1699.
To me, the Mac Mini seems to be inverted on the scale of things. Sure, it's a mini, but it seems to me that you want more computing power on a desktop, than you want on a laptop. They should be offering their monster CPU in the Mini, and more storage as well as memory.
To each his own, I guess. I see little value in the Mini, but people with different needs seem to be buying them.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday December 30 2021, @05:11PM (1 child)
8 GiB is theoretically fine, except for the longevity concern I mentioned. 256 GB storage is certainly doable if you aren't storing games (which this is considered a bad platform for) or video, which should probably be on an external drive.
You are paying extra to lob yourself into the Apple ecosystem equivalent of an office PC, but that's your choice.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 01 2022, @06:07PM
There are many places where 8GB is really, really not enough if you go and look at what used to be Apple's core audience; media production.
A classic example is music producers using large orchestral libraries for live rendition. Of course, in offline rendering it wouldn't matter, but when you have the really big fancy libraries with all sorts of articulations those eat up RAM like crazy, to say nothing of all the software and plugins surrounding them.
Of course, given their problems with audio glitching, it's not as if they're really pretending to care about audio production any more anyway ...
(Score: 2) by helel on Thursday December 30 2021, @07:03PM
For most users the computing power of the Mac mini / MacBook Air is more than enough, although that's been true of almost any new computer for a decade or more now. Assuming you want to pay the apple tax I think there are two advantages the mini has: First, you aren't paying for a screen and battery you don't plan to use and second, it fits in spaces a laptop might not. Why have a closed Air taking up desk space when you can have a mini mounted to the bottom of your desk?
Also allot of people get low speced minis as home servers. It's not the cost effective solution but a raspberry pi won't look as nice next to your router XD
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