I’m curious to see if there’s any change to the replacement rate of Macs. It seems normal for people to use the same laptop for four or more years — a far sight longer than the two-year life expectancy of laptops twenty years ago, but about half of the replacement rate of smartphones.
There's one benefit of these DIY designs that seems under-reported: Apple can now develop stuff like the "neural engine". Chips that aren't just faster or more efficient than Intel offerings, but also do different things.
I think there's almost no chance that I'll be upgrading to an M2 Pro next year or the following, but there's every possibility that the M3 Pro won't just be a faster Apple Silicon chip. If future Macbooks are more than just "the same thing but faster," dorks like me will be retiring our computers a lot faster.
Yeah, and hold off for now. I'm the guy making sure that new onboards don't get blocked by M1 (as you can't but Intel anymore). Segfaults in docker/qemu (amd64 and arm64) are numerous: I can't build our otherwise boring (and recent) docker images locally - it has to go to a Linux ARM server. What truly bends my mind is that I am getting framerate/audio/input hitching on the desktop when one of the broken containers pegs 3 of the cores at 100% (and it's not just my machine).
It's a circus, wait for M2 or M3 unless your workload is influencing, blogging, and checking email.
I mostly do React/web dev and some dabbling with SwiftUI. I spent most of 2021 doing that on an M1 Air and it was a joy.
((The only kink I’ve run into was trying to deploy a serverless app; Docker did indeed make that a nonstarter. So I just accomplished it the old fashioned way (a dippy little VM running in a cloud server). Not a deal-breaker.))
Most of my friends are graphic designers who use Adobe apps (nearly all ported to ARM). The only reason most of them haven’t upgraded is because they want 27” iMacs.
What on earth do you think most people do with computers?
What they will do is be faster and more widely adopted. Docker (and everyone else) will do the heavy lifting to fix those, including any that are specifically Apple bugs.
Everything else has been an absolute breeze though (and so fast!).
Are people really still replacing their phones every two years? Mine always last for 4+
Not with their current demographic trends.
There are some scattered final assembly here and there, like screwing together the Mac Pro in Texas, and I think the iPhone production in India is non-trivial, but for all intents and purposes the vast, vast majority of Apple's production happens in China, performed by Chinese nationals, who are themselves subject to Chinese law, in facilities wholly inside of Chinese jurisdiction.
It doesn't matter much if Apple sells a single unit in China, from a "kowtowing to the Chinese government" perspective: China controls Apple fully as without China's consent and permission, Apple cannot produce anything for sale in significant quantity.
Keeps blowing my mind how consistently services keep growing. Highest margins too. Just printing money!
I have a windows desktop for gaming and Microsoft seems to constantly try to push their bullshit. Whether it’s opening edge at start/changing my default browser, making me use the Microsoft Store or Microsoft accounts (they do this for Minecraft now, and the install experience through downloading minecraft from the web is now hilariously broken), or even shilling something at the log in screen, Microsoft just does not give a fuck about making their UX seem cheap to push their bloat.
Woah I had no idea this was a thing! Since Google is forcing the old free workspace users into paid accounts this year, this will be a great replacement. Thanks, I'll have to look into this.
Edit - just to add that IBM dominated computing for a long time with this model. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Apple has become so big in what is a much bigger market.
How quickly we forget that Apple just had 2 generations of complete dogshit laptops.
I do, latest macs have terrible linux compatibility for now, with apple not doing much to help in providing support for it (M1)
They keep fixing and breaking their keyboards, the latest macs are better in this aspect but until even 2 yrs ago, they used to break quite frequently
Apple making it so hard to develop ios apps on a non apple device, definitely brings additional pain, I don’t want to use apple for my computer.
Saying it as someone who really enjoys using the iphone.
I get why people like macbooks so much, but saying “You never blame yourself for buying Apple” is untrue
For me, that would stand for thinkpads and even then primarily for the older ones.
marcan (lead dev of Asahi Linux) seems to disagree:
Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they *also* added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os.
And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.
Indeed. There is no evidence of them abusing streams of user information.
This means we will soon enough have a situation where a corporation controls the primary medium of communication of the citizens. At this point a smart society would consider how to regulate this situation to safely prevent domination abuse, but I doubt it will happen.
In the US.
And while I agree that anything nearing a de facto monopoly should be strictly regulated, I think any effort should be directed at any messaging app with a large user base, e.g. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger.
So long as there is a near substitute for Apple smartphones, I fail to see what that is sufficient grounds for anti-trust action.
The messaging apps are not a good example of monopoly violations. They are all market options which have many many solutions. WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Signal, iOS Messages, SMS, Discord, Slack, Google Hangouts, MS Teams, Zoom, Skype, and a thousand web forums have similar capabilities. The comms market is remarkably healthy. What most people complain about is the contract they agree to which has lots of restrictive clauses (some which are very vague). Those general contract terms in SaaS services is what I would aim to regulate, rather than the biggest incumbents in the disparate comms apps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Apple has not (in my recollection) sought to exert control over content of what is being said or shared among users. In fact, they seem to keep quite a distance from wanting to know or be responsible for that.
And you're claiming that iMessage is the "primary medium of communication of the citizens"? That is just a little overblown, don't you think?
I would argue, if you have that position, maybe you should spend your energy or concern on cable TV news and other media outlets, who do far worse, with far less share of their markets.
You may want to search for Telegram and Apple.
They also block apps that involve politically controversial content, or content that they disagree with (e.g. pornography).
How is that not a bigger monopoly?
Doesn't this imply that parents are the one purchasing it for them? Would be interesting to see how many stick with iPhone when they start earning for themselves.
And it's not Google.
Also please, that should probably be done by a company that is not Google.
Future concerns about what Apple might do in future are nothing by comparison.
But 90% of them will still be doing all of this on an Apple device. Yet you think Facebook is the company to worry about, not Apple?
They control what messaging apps you are allowed to install on your iPhone.
Wow. Crazy! This has literally never happened before.
But objectively: monopoly is a bad thing. We’re still recovering from Microsoft’s dominance of desktop computing.
Once you have a near monopoly it’s practically impregnable to disintegrate. As you have a wealthy company which is actively harming those efforts.
Remember all the “Apple is doomed, Tim is a bean counter” comments when Jobs handed over the reigns?
Yea. Ok.
And every cycle of quarterly results there’s surprise on HN.
This is what makes me nervous. They struck absolute gold with the iPhone, what happens if they don't catch the next wave?
Depending on your viewpoint these can be highly disruptive plays - smart phones were going no place for many demographics until the iPhone came out. Android was going to be a cheaper blackberry clone until they saw what iPhone was doing.
But another view of the iPad famously was the Slashdot single-line review, "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
Phones were a bit of a blind spot in the market. There should have been a lot more investment going on.
Phones are expensive devices that people update often (with "often" really being a function of the demographic), where the price was disguised in many markets via carrier subsidies and cellular contracts. The carriers were often trying to figure out how to get more customers and get them to pay for more services, so charging for data tiers on top of minutes and messaging was attractive.
Nokia had teams that understood this and obviously the company in general was capitalizing on how much money was going into phones, but they were highly dysfunctional in terms of massive amounts of duplicated work (e.g. little commonalities between hardware or OS on dozens of phones released every year). An example of Nokia trying to leverage cellphones to go into a new market would be the N-Gage.
In terms of markets they tend to go after, VR would be the one where I might worry they missed the wave. Some of that is not knowing if VR actually has broad demographic appeal though - there are technology leaps still needed for many people to tolerate longer headset usage, and most computer applications aren't really VR as much as they are 'large virtual monitor' - you don't see N-dimensional word processing as much as games and experiences. Their money is obviously on AR having much broader appeal.
There are certainly cases where market disruption attempts have failed, such as the HomeKit ecosystem. The more open (and cheaper) ecosystems that Google and Amazon have had managed to get significantly more adoption by manufacturers. For that reason they now seem to be aligning much more with and driving new industry standards instead, such as Matter.
All the rumors about them investing toward a full self-driving car product is really odd, because it goes against so much of their formula for incremental evolution of product lines - seems about as likely as them releasing a television or refrigerator.
What happens if they don’t catch the next wave? In that case, they will still be wildly successful. They’ve already had the iPad, which is the clear winner in the tablet market. They’ve already had the Apple Watch, which is the clear winner in the smartwatch market. They’ve already had the AirPods, which is the clear winner in the earphone market. None of these are the one-in-a-generation products that the iPhone is, yet they are all massive successes that bring in tonnes of money.
Apple will probably never have a hit as big as the iPhone ever again… but that’s perfectly fine and not at all incompatible with massive success and huge profits.
I just want a phone that works well, works with everything (virtually nobody builds serious apps just for Android and not iOS), and allows me to go about the rest of my day with ease.
But I’ve never had a Dell or HP laptop come without a bezel scratch or something like that. So in my books, Apple are still a league ahead on quality, even.
Many Apple products in particular OSX was pretty bad during Jobs era.