<story><title>Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery</title><url>https://www.singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rini17</author><text>Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.</text></item><item><author>Heliosmaster</author><text>What if they simply decided that they didn&amp;#x27;t care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.</text></item><item><author>socialdemocrat</author><text>What Apple could have done is to continue supplying something like the G4 towers. Those where stunningly beautiful machines and practical.</text></item><item><author>chongli</author><text>Apple does not want to offer to the hackintosh&amp;#x2F;enthusiast market because they are the most price conscious segment. Targeting that segment means putting out extremely performant, low-margin commodity machines. Doing so then cannibalizes the market for their ultra-high-end stuff.&lt;p&gt;Not only that, though. Enthusiasts are also extremely fickle and quick to jump ship to a cheaper hardware offering. If you look at all of Apple’s other markets, you’ll see loads of brand loyalty. Fickle enthusiasts don’t fit the mould.</text></item><item><author>xoa</author><text>Not to speak for anyone else, but one thing I gently disagree with:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Given that Hackintoshers are a particular bunch who don’t take kindly to the Apple-tax[...]&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. I think a major generator of interest in hackintoshes has been that there are significant segments of computing that Apple has simply completely (or nearly completely) given up on, including essentially &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; non-AIO desktop system above the Mini. At one point they had quite competitive PowerMacs and then Mac Pros covering the range of $2k all the way up to $10k+, and while sure there was some premium there was feature coverage, and they got regular yearly updates. They were &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot;, but in the best way. There didn&amp;#x27;t need to be anything exciting about them. The prices did steadily inch upward, but far more critically sometime between 2010 and 2012 somebody at Apple decided the MP had to be exciting or something and created the Mac Cube 2, except this time to force it by eliminating the MP entirely. And it was complete shit, and to zero surprise never got a single update (since they totally fucked the power&amp;#x2F;thermal envelope, there was nowhere to go) and users completely lost the ability to make up for that. And then that was it, for 6 years. Then they did a kind of sort of ok update, but at a bad point given that Intel was collapsing, and forcing in some of their consumer design in ways that really hurt the value.&lt;p&gt;The hackintosh, particularly virtualized ones in my opinion (running macOS under ESXi deals with a ton of the regular problem spots), has helped fill that hole as frankenstein MP 2010s finally hit their limits. I&amp;#x27;m sure Apple Silicon will be great for a range of systems, but it won&amp;#x27;t help in areas that Apple just organizationally doesn&amp;#x27;t care about&amp;#x2F;doesn&amp;#x27;t have the bandwidth for because that&amp;#x27;s not a technology problem. So I&amp;#x27;m a bit pessimistic&amp;#x2F;whistful about that particular area, even though it&amp;#x27;ll be a long time before the axe completely falls on it. It&amp;#x27;ll be fantastic and it&amp;#x27;s exciting to see the return of more experimentation in silicon, but at the same time it was a nice dream for a decade or so to be able to freely take advantage of a range of hardware the PC market offered which filled holes Apple couldn&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mumblemumble</author><text>&amp;gt; offering no machine suitable for developers and power users&lt;p&gt;This perception strikes me as having warped in from a different decade. Nowadays, at least in my neck of the woods, developers almost universally use laptops, and Apple&amp;#x27;s still plenty competitive in the (high end) laptop department.&lt;p&gt;For the most part, the only developers I know who still use desktops are machine learning folks who don&amp;#x27;t like the cloud and instead keep a Linux tower full of GPUs in a closet somewhere. And then remote into it from a laptop. Half the time it&amp;#x27;s a MacBook, half the time it&amp;#x27;s a XPS 13. And they were never going to consider a Mac Pro for their training server, anyway, because CUDA.&lt;p&gt;I couldn&amp;#x27;t speak to power users, but my sense is that, while it meant something concrete in the &amp;#x27;90s, nowadays it&amp;#x27;s a term that only comes out when people want to complain about the latest update to Apple&amp;#x27;s line of computers.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery</title><url>https://www.singhkays.com/blog/apple-silicon-m1-black-magic/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rini17</author><text>Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.</text></item><item><author>Heliosmaster</author><text>What if they simply decided that they didn&amp;#x27;t care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.</text></item><item><author>socialdemocrat</author><text>What Apple could have done is to continue supplying something like the G4 towers. Those where stunningly beautiful machines and practical.</text></item><item><author>chongli</author><text>Apple does not want to offer to the hackintosh&amp;#x2F;enthusiast market because they are the most price conscious segment. Targeting that segment means putting out extremely performant, low-margin commodity machines. Doing so then cannibalizes the market for their ultra-high-end stuff.&lt;p&gt;Not only that, though. Enthusiasts are also extremely fickle and quick to jump ship to a cheaper hardware offering. If you look at all of Apple’s other markets, you’ll see loads of brand loyalty. Fickle enthusiasts don’t fit the mould.</text></item><item><author>xoa</author><text>Not to speak for anyone else, but one thing I gently disagree with:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;Given that Hackintoshers are a particular bunch who don’t take kindly to the Apple-tax[...]&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware. I think a major generator of interest in hackintoshes has been that there are significant segments of computing that Apple has simply completely (or nearly completely) given up on, including essentially &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; non-AIO desktop system above the Mini. At one point they had quite competitive PowerMacs and then Mac Pros covering the range of $2k all the way up to $10k+, and while sure there was some premium there was feature coverage, and they got regular yearly updates. They were &amp;quot;boring&amp;quot;, but in the best way. There didn&amp;#x27;t need to be anything exciting about them. The prices did steadily inch upward, but far more critically sometime between 2010 and 2012 somebody at Apple decided the MP had to be exciting or something and created the Mac Cube 2, except this time to force it by eliminating the MP entirely. And it was complete shit, and to zero surprise never got a single update (since they totally fucked the power&amp;#x2F;thermal envelope, there was nowhere to go) and users completely lost the ability to make up for that. And then that was it, for 6 years. Then they did a kind of sort of ok update, but at a bad point given that Intel was collapsing, and forcing in some of their consumer design in ways that really hurt the value.&lt;p&gt;The hackintosh, particularly virtualized ones in my opinion (running macOS under ESXi deals with a ton of the regular problem spots), has helped fill that hole as frankenstein MP 2010s finally hit their limits. I&amp;#x27;m sure Apple Silicon will be great for a range of systems, but it won&amp;#x27;t help in areas that Apple just organizationally doesn&amp;#x27;t care about&amp;#x2F;doesn&amp;#x27;t have the bandwidth for because that&amp;#x27;s not a technology problem. So I&amp;#x27;m a bit pessimistic&amp;#x2F;whistful about that particular area, even though it&amp;#x27;ll be a long time before the axe completely falls on it. It&amp;#x27;ll be fantastic and it&amp;#x27;s exciting to see the return of more experimentation in silicon, but at the same time it was a nice dream for a decade or so to be able to freely take advantage of a range of hardware the PC market offered which filled holes Apple couldn&amp;#x27;t.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matwood</author><text>&amp;gt; suitable for developers and power users&lt;p&gt;Important to note &amp;#x27;some&amp;#x27; here. I&amp;#x27;m a developer and power user, and haven&amp;#x27;t had a desktop computer in almost 10 years.</text></comment>