Thai kind of opinion is pretty common and has been around since before the iPhone, when Apple's computers were considered overpriced luxury items to flex on the poor.
Heck, I had this opinion back in 2008 or so.
The problem is that it's a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned apple customers into the rich/dumb/cultist category you become blind to the actual reasons why Apple is successful.
My own take, after using Apple stuff for 15 years now, is it's the attention to detail. It still shocks me that macOS has better support for using EMacs style text shortcuts (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) in basically any applications text field than Linux does.
Similar to the Emacs bindings, in being something where Apple's products are far ahead in ways that are only leveragable for the upper fraction of a percent of technical users, is AppleScript (and to a lesser extent Shortcuts), where to this day, even with AppleScript on the decline, Apple GUI applications are far more scriptable than applications on other platforms. Note this is not the same as CLI script-ability (which the Apple ecosystem is also excellent at) because AppleScript understands data types, e.g., you can iterate through the todos in a list and act on only the ones from the last week, or save the media assets attached to each todo to a file.
Another note about the Emacs bindings, it's always applications that are highly regarded by the technical community where these stop working, like Blender. It always makes me wonder if on Linux and Windows do folks just live without movement by word, and delete backwards word in file dialogs? Or are there just other bindings for those that work across the OS on Linux and Windows?
FYI, the reason they don't work on Blender is because Blender, presumably for cross-platform consistency, manually draws its entire UI as well as handles its own events. The OS has no involvement in the UI, except to provide system resources. Most applications use standard dialogs for things like opening files, that are implemented in a central system DLL, so the behavior is consistent system-wide, and any improvement MS makes to those dialogs is automatically applied to all applications that use them.
Thanks for the reply! I'll have to try this in Blender, I'd love it if someone could chime in similarly for Linux, I'm super curious about the bindings support on other platforms.
I've got a 12 year old Mac book air that just refuses to die or grow obsolete. I've never been rich or wanted to flex - it was the only thing with the weight, size, and specs from the time and it remains my favourite laptop ever. I hate to think of what I'll have to get next time.
unfortunately I'll want to wait until asahi is sufficiently supported before considering it. I gave up on os x when they made me reboot to disable nanny mode.
"Gravity is caused by the bending of space-time" is a thought-terminating cliché. Once you've assigned gravity to the space-time-bend category you become blind to the actual reasons why things fall down.
There is such a thing as a satisfying explanation. Personally, I like Apple's hardware in general. The 2005 Mac Pros in particular are beautiful machines, possibly the nicest-looking desktop computers I've seen, inside and outside. I would still not pay what Apple asks for, when for the same money I could buy a more powerful non-Apple computer. That leads me to conclude that the people who buy Apple products have more money than me and care more about aesthetics and less about performance than me.
Apple M3 silicon has about 3-4x the perf/w in light workloads as the leading AMD chips on 5nm, despite a slight node disadvantage, let alone the comparisons against generic android phone SOCs.
This is a huge part of what gives them their battery life - it’s not the OS, it’s not the node, it’s not the accelerators, it’s that they pull 1/3 the power running a browser/electron app or a word processor as x86 does.
Again, you’ve volunteered to self-identify as someone who is doing precisely what GP said: you’ve made your little box and you’ve put people into it and you’ve closed your mind to any alternative possibilities.
Yes, x86 does ok in bulk vector computations, but performance really falls off in 1T or light-load scenarios. So they have to boost super high to keep up, which tanks performance. That’s the major difference right now.
Presumably this is because decoding x86 is quite difficult and x86 chips lean really heavily on SMT to keep the cores filled as a result. I’m excited to see how Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake end up working out and if efficiency is improved, but right now it’s not good, some would say objectively bad (60w peak for a literal single thread on AMD, 50w+ on intel, for scores that are +/- 5% from apple and Qualcomm).
If you feel like this is brought up a lot: consider that efficiency under light mixed workloads is pretty much the primary consideration for a large number of laptop buyers. I have a 9900k and epyc systems if I want something beyond what a laptop will deliver (and M1 Max isn’t exactly a lightweight to begin with) so this complements each other quite well.
It's also very helpful to have proper first-party driver support. Linux is a mess and not getting better. HDMI 2.1 still isn't upstreamed even 4 years after AMD started trying, for example. Windows is (ineptly) doing an ARM-to-Windows switchover and (ineptly) doing a big "AI PC" push too, in ways that are much more adversarial than apple. Hard to enunciate the difference, but it's really the same classic "you're the product, not the customer" whereas with apple that's never really in question. I do really enjoy never having to fight bluetooth drivers and whatnot. Linux is great for server PCs etc, but "year of linux on the desktop" is a meme for a reason... and "year of linux on the laptop" is even farther away.
And before you say framework... framework laptops actually do not have very good battery life at all, even among x86 laptops. That's sort of the problem in general: there isn't a turnkey "just buy this and linux works and it's just as good as a macbook" option for x86, at any price, even ignoring the 1T efficiency problems. For example even the latest AMD laptops still have broken HDMI support under linux. That's unacceptable on a big-ticket purchase.
Make a decent x86 laptop and I'll consider it, but right now the AMD and Intel offerings just aren't there. Far from your original claim, to me it's the exact opposite and people are constantly pushing you to buy x86 and overlook all the problems and defects and shortcomings. Offer me something comparable and I'll consider it, but for now I am not going back at least on my laptop.
> Make a decent x86 laptop and I'll consider it, but right now the AMD and Intel offerings just aren't there.
Sounds to me like you haven't even tried using the recent laptops. My 5800u Lenovo Thinkbook is one of the best laptops I've ever owned (better than my 2018 Macbook Pro) and I've yet to be in a situation where HDMI 2.0 needs an upgrade to HDMI 2.1. I'll let you know if anyone at the office brings it up.
It's fine if you want to settle on a more expensive solution, but I concur with the parent. You are overpaying for performance with every single product in Apple's lineup, laptop or desktop. The majority of users will get equivalent or better performance on a cheaper Windows machine. This was even true back at the M1's launch, when Ryzen 7 4800us could be had at half the price of a base-model M1 Air.
Yeah, it's great in terms of ops/J. It absolutely is, and if I was in the market for a laptop, I could see myself seriously considering a modern Apple laptop. But, I only use desktops, so I don't care about ops/J, I just care about ops/s. Apple desktop computers are and have always been atrocious in terms of ops/s/$.
So tell me, exactly what alternative possibility am I missing? I'm not even saying it's wrong to care about things that I don't care about, I'm just saying that the people who care about those things... care about those things? Honestly, I don't know what you're complaining about.
Nope, there's nothing wrong with that. IMO the mac stack really kinda ends at the macbook... or maybe the mac mini (which does make a compelling "NUC" for lightweight niches like HTPC etc). There isn't really anything compelling about the studio or the mac pro... unless you are willing to splash out for 128GB or 192GB of memory for LLMs or something. And you can get 128GB in a macbook if you want, which is by far the more popular option anyway. AMD still has a hard 32gb cap on how much memory can be allocated to the iGPU
(Apple TV is another one... the apple tv is an A15 and is probably unironically the fastest single-thread performance I own right now. For $129 for the ethernet model. Remember, the A15 (the little brother to M2) has been in the iphone SE 3rd gen for several years now too, and Android is basically just catching up to that.)
I have a 9900K+3090 system for gaming, I have epyc and supermicro 2011-3 systems and tinyminimicro pcs for homelab. Apple doesn't add value in that area. Horses for courses. And actually that stuff complements the laptop really well for self-hosting!
But phones and laptops? Yeah, Apple hardware is literally objectively better than the competition. Strix Halo is going to be the first real challenger to a loaded-out macbook and it literally won't even launch until next year. I'm definitely keeping an eye on it etc, I'd love a little mini-PC with a strix halo, but right now apple is running at least 3 years ahead of the x86 laptop/Android phone market.
And honestly the problem even as I'm writing this - is x86 is "fine, except for laptops where you care about battery life... unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town... and if you buy AMD the HDMI 2.1 also won't work, and the real Mx-Max performance competitor on x86 should be launching next year, 4 full years after the M-family hit macbooks... and the driver situation is shit on Linux, except for Framework, which has terrible battery life instead". Not exactly great, is it?
Make an x86 laptop that isn't a pile of compromises and defects and I'll consider it. But right now it feels much more like the x86 people are the ones blindly pushing for consideration of their sacred cow far above the actual merits of the product. I'm not going to give x86 a handicap as a product on something that I'm going to use every day for the next 5 years. I want a nice laptop.
>But phones and laptops? Yeah, Apple hardware is literally objectively better than the competition.
Objectively? I don't know about that. I think phone hardware is all basically the same. I'm sure there are minute differences that one of us cares about and the other doesn't, but I'd say it averages out to it all being "fine".
In terms of software... Doesn't iOS still not let you install apps except through the app store, and doesn't let apps do JIT? And don't I need OSX if I want to develop for iOS? I don't know, that seems to me like an objective disadvantage of the platform, as a user. It means I can't use my hardware however I please, at least not without some major inconvenience.
>unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town
Nah, it depends. 3090s are going for cheap nowadays, and 24 GB is enough to run some hefty models at acceptable performance, and you get a nice gaming card on top. It's not UMA, but hey, it also costs eight times less than a decked out Mac Pro. It's a shame Nvidia doesn't seem interested in bringing large VRAM sizes to the consumer or at least prosumer segment.
Heck, I had this opinion back in 2008 or so.
The problem is that it's a thought terminating cliche. Once you've assigned apple customers into the rich/dumb/cultist category you become blind to the actual reasons why Apple is successful.
My own take, after using Apple stuff for 15 years now, is it's the attention to detail. It still shocks me that macOS has better support for using EMacs style text shortcuts (^A, ^E, ^K, etc) in basically any applications text field than Linux does.