[–] Grombobulous 1 day ago
[–] calf 1 day ago
[–] bigyabai 1 day ago
But, that lowest-common-denominator design philosophy gave us innovations like the Butterfly Keyboard, Touch Bar, Dynamic Island, and now a touchscreen. None of those features inspire much faith in Apple's ability to listen to what their users want from the Macbook. Most people I know want a more powerful iPad, not an iPad-like Mac.
[–] calf 23 hours ago
[–] Grombobulous 18 hours ago
Lenovo sells over 2x more personal computers than Apple.
[–] calf 13 hours ago
[–] bigyabai 14 hours ago
Outside of those niches, in places like game development, backend work, high-performance ARM datacenters, edge compute and personal computing, Macs are a second-class-citizen and rarely get recommended. macOS has a niche, those people love it, but it has not broken out into the larger market for decades now. Macs are a minority, still.
[–] calf 13 hours ago
They are great devices but they cost more. So you would not see them "recommend" in those industries you cite. Also it is reductive to accuse Apple of marketing.
What's much more plausible is that despite being a great product it also costs more. Not marketing nor the fact of being a minority.
It's also weird because your argument disingenuously ignores the wealth of HN commentary in the past about how great the M-chip MacBooks are. It's like ignoring actual reasons and doing this kind of armchair technical market analysis to prove one's point. It's a troll intellectual move to attribute success to marketing and failure to "because it is unpopular". Seeing your other replies in this thread suggests a common pattern of bias, not a one-off.
[–] bigyabai 12 hours ago
This is exactly what I said in the last comment. "People in the know" is a statement that narrows down your audience to a select few groups that Apple narrowcasts to. You arbitrarily ignored the rest of the market as being unqualified to shop for themselves. We have the usage statistics that prove macOS is not a popular alternative to Windows or even Chromebooks. The vast majority of PC shoppers do not buy Macs.
You might call it "disingenuous" to ignore your cherry-picked audience, but I did acknowledge the niches that Apple caters to. You are the one that is unable to reconcile Apple's halo of quality with their mediocre sales performance and rejection by the market at-large. Macs make Apple less revenue than novelty devices like the iPad, and the iPhone blows it out of the water in terms of install base. Apple Silicon isn't even the highest-demand high-performance ARM chipset right now, Nvidia's Grace SOC is. And Grace sucks, but it's modular and scalable enough to replace Apple's discontinued Mac Pro niche.
Cut it however you want; M-series Apple Silicon is chopped liver even in the middle of a compute shortage. The HN echo chamber said that unified memory and AArch64 would irreversibly change the direction of PC design forever, but both of those features have been ignored by other OEMs for the past 7 years. Instead, Apple Silicon is starting to copy design characteristics of competing hardware like Nvidia's CUDA GPUs. So, maybe you shouldn't trust "people in the know" to give you an honest accounting of how Apple Silicon competes with the computers that most people are buying. Their subjective statements cannot be extrapolated into an objective metric.
[–] neya 1 day ago
[–] cpursley 1 day ago
The only ones that work as a unified product, yes.
[–] neya 1 day ago
It's a fucking laptop. All laptops are "unified products". Stop throwing random jargon to cover up for the lack of merit to your argument.
[–] Danox 1 day ago
[–] neya 1 day ago
> Microsoft and Google dabble in hardware and both do nothing but lose money in the hardware area
How is losing money relevant here, you started off the argument by saying Apple is the only vertical computer company left. Which is clearly not true and as your own comment contradicts.
You should try using a Surface Pro once. It is what the MacBook Pro is becoming now, only it is 5 years ahead. Yes, Windows sucks. But, the form factor and its usability is unmatched. I wouldn't just write it off as "dabbling".
[–] bigyabai 14 hours ago
"Apple will bring memory in-house" (no further explanation, apparently)
"Vertical computers need a comeback" (ignoring why they originally died?)
"$GROUP needs to buy an ARM ISA license" (Arm has to make it worthwhile)
It's beyond my understanding how people can read the news and come up with this stuff. Perhaps it is beyond the commentor's understanding, as well.
I think some of those folks should face some facts:
- The notch on the MacBook Air and Pro lineups is unnecessarily huge and embarrassing. It’s obvious that Apple intended to implement FaceID and couldn’t get it into the notch by their deadline, then they just left the huge notch there with barely any software consideration for it, like how your menu bar icons and menus can just disappear if there isn’t enough room with no recourse.
- There is no design or cost reason for Apple to be this late on offering a touch screen on their laptops. There is no downside to a customer who buys one and doesn’t want a touch screen, they can just disable it.
- The 60Hz displays on the Air are not necessary for any kind of product quality or cost reason and are simply below-par for what you can get on similarly priced Windows laptops. 100% artificial product line anchoring.
- The idea that there was no such thing an OLED display that was “good enough for a MacBook Pro” before 2026 is absurd.