> Honestly to me the M1 era of Apple is the more exciting than things have been in years
The average person doesn't know or care about M1. If you are on HN, you are an enthusiast ("Pro" in Apple parlance). To everyone else, Apple just made their already pretty quiet and fast laptops, quieter and faster.
I think the article is right that the world is waiting to see if Apple's new bottom-up design org can deliver a new category-owning product. So far, they've proven that they can improve the legacy suite of products in meaningful ways and aren't afraid to roll back poor past decisions. I think the author is probably right that Apple's services org is getting much more attention than in the past.
When everything flows downwards, you get a singular vision, blind spots included. I think we saw that with Ive. This was true with Jobs' Macintosh too, before Ive joined. Today, we have fewer blind spots, but we haven't seen evidence that there are leaders willing to take big swings into new categories. Time will tell...
Which is actually incredible when you think about it. They might not know or care about what "M1" is (although I doubt that), but it's clearly a commercial success.
Great stat. I might be underselling the achievement... I bet some of that growth is driven by the insane battery life, which we know people care a lot about. To be clear, I own and love 2 M1-based machines :-)
I stand by my overall comment, though: They are better Macs. Not a new category or a new product for Apple.
They are powerful ARM laptops. I'm considering getting one purely because of that + Asahi Linux. My Pinebook Pro just doesn't cut it as a main machine, and I'm sick of x86.
I stick to free software whenever possible, so I wouldn't seriously consider using macOS. I even run Guix System (one of the FSF-approved distros) on my current main machine (ThinkPad T440p).
This figure is useless without context. What was this number for previous generations? I suspect it's always super high because a huge demographic for mac's is college students buying their first laptop, obviously it's gonna be their first Mac. Same with software devs. Tons of Macs are used by software devs getting their work computer.
As an tech professional and coder I can still say that barely 5% of my work is constrained by CPU. I'd trade all their hardware improvements for physical left and right click buttons instead of those awful trackpad gestures.
I've been using macs for dev for last 12 years at least. It's mandatory if you need to support iOS or safari users due to aforementioned vertical integration. Because building iOS apps requires an iOS device, and MacOS device and you still have to pay Apple a yearly fee. I had a one year hiatus where I had a Dell with physical mouse buttons and a touchscreen and it was marvelous.
yea I don't know what he's talking about. the haptic feedback is so good, I'd never guess there wasnt a physical switch. I had to power it down just to be sure. apple knows how to deliver a solid tactile experience.
The average person doesn't know or care about M1. If you are on HN, you are an enthusiast ("Pro" in Apple parlance). To everyone else, Apple just made their already pretty quiet and fast laptops, quieter and faster.
I think the article is right that the world is waiting to see if Apple's new bottom-up design org can deliver a new category-owning product. So far, they've proven that they can improve the legacy suite of products in meaningful ways and aren't afraid to roll back poor past decisions. I think the author is probably right that Apple's services org is getting much more attention than in the past.
When everything flows downwards, you get a singular vision, blind spots included. I think we saw that with Ive. This was true with Jobs' Macintosh too, before Ive joined. Today, we have fewer blind spots, but we haven't seen evidence that there are leaders willing to take big swings into new categories. Time will tell...
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