> They are what makes the mac popular with developers

Developers believe that they're Apple's priority when it comes to hardware, especially the Mac, in large part due to the perfect intersect that was the MBP for many years. That tide already turned in 2016 with the new keyboard, followed by the touch bar. Like the joke that the 'S' in IoT stands for security (the joke being there is no S, and there is no security), there is no 'D' for developer in MBP. Apple have been consistently clear that 'professional developers' are not the primary target of their 'Pro' lineup across the board.

Someone else made a comment on this forum that got my attention recently, that we're all so used to being courted as customers by (mostly free) services that we've forgotten that we're not always the target customer. Similarly, developers are only welcome in Apple's ecosystem if they play by Apple's rules. Like we've seen with the App Store, Apple will frequently alter the terms of the deal. All you can do is pray they do not alter them any further.

None of this should diminish the extraordinary results that can be delivered by the M1. That is amazing.

As someone who uses an MBP for development for 8-10 hours a day for work and another one for 4-6 hours a day for school, I'm pretty happy with them for development purposes

So does any company that paid attention in marketing & sales 101. An established hardware company has to sell what it has, and shouldn’t try to sell what it doesn’t have (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect is the classical example of why not to sell what you don’t have (yet))

(if you don’t have anything to sell yet, selling what you don’t have is fine. See Kickstarter and early Tesla)

I think the reason people think Apple is special at this is that Steve Jobs was very good at selling what he had and downplaying what he didn’t have.

Similar story with Apple Sign In (though no judge order there).

1. I'm paraphrasing

zfs

java (and also ruby, python) as 'first class' Cocoa languages

GC'ed ObjC runtime

[Ancient history but kinda huge!] just about the entire post-System 7 technology stack and roadmap was tossed.

Of course Apple did a 180 soon after and introduced the iOS SDK.

Not so sure if that was flipping the script when they were ready or that Apple had hoped to not have to open the OS but bent to the developer outcry (or saw that there might be some merit for growing the platform in opening it up).

How is that so? The initial promise with "web apps only" was that they would add the necessary APIs for people to develop web-apps that could do almost anything.

Nowadays Apple (intentionally or not) is crippling the entire web-app ecosystem by not supporting the APIs that everyone else does (no notifications, non-standard manifest, etc.).

Other examples of Apple reversing course would be "No stylus on iDevices", no use of intel chips, no switch back to scissor-type keyboards.

Word of mouth is the best form of advertising. If you're most vocal work of mouth folks turn than this would be bad for sales.

I'm just genuinely confused as to why people seem to think that [a] Apple is planning to switch to a locked down ecosystem on their notebooks and [b] Apple has been somehow limited in doing this until they had their own "silicon".

Is there somewhere I can find some evidence that it isn't a marginal improvement?

Apple timed the release perfectly to create the impression that it was more, because its obvious competition will be Zen 3 laptops, which are right around the corner but not actually out yet. So then you get benchmarks comparing it to 14nm Intel processors based on 5-year-old technology, and 10nm Intel processors with half as many cores as the M1 because Intel's 10nm yields are so bad they can't make high core count processors, and Zen 2 laptops when the Zen 3 ones it will actually be competing with in a couple months are expected to be 20% faster. And Zen 3 desktops, which the M1 loses to badly on multi-threaded tests, but is competitive with on single threaded tests -- as expected, since modern mobile processors actually have single-thread performance which is competitive with desktops in general, but manages to amaze anyone who doesn't know that.

Which isn't to say they've done a bad job. Making something which is even competitive with modern x86-64 processors is no small feat. But the fanboys are making it out to be some kind of coup when it does, in practice, appear to be a marginal improvement. And we still don't even have many real-world benchmarks because most of the real-world applications haven't actually been ported yet.

While your story about raw computing performance holds, there are two reasons why apple's M1 release is significant (i.e.: not marginal):

1. This is the first time in decades that we see a serious non-x86 competitor for general purpose consumer-level computing. This is significant in and of itself.

2. Power consumption. These things seem to consume 2/3rds as many watts to offer the same performance levels than their x86 counterparts. This is big in the laptop space.

I feel like this would be a lot more significant if you could buy the chip on its own. When you can only buy it as part of a Mac, you're really not buying the chip, you're buying a Mac with all that entails. Then who makes the chip in your Mac doesn't really change much because you buy it from Apple either way.

> Power consumption. These things seem to consume 2/3rds as many watts to offer the same performance levels than their x86 counterparts. This is big in the laptop space.

But that's much the same issue where you're comparing it to Zen 2 when Zen 3 is expected to be 20% faster at the same power, and close a lot of that gap.

It's also hard to compare this in general, for two reasons. The first is that the M1 is 5nm, so then the question is how much of the efficiency is due to that (and will accrue to AMD next year) and how much, if any, is the design?

And the second is that the M1 is big.LITTLE. The small cores are more power efficient, so when you average them in, the overall result should be more power efficient than entirely big cores. But x86-64 processors with a similar configuration are sparse, so what do you compare to? It will be interesting to see the result when there are some (both Intel and AMD have some planned).

Oh, totally. I'm not buying into apple (again) anytime soon, so the only bad thing about M1's for me is that I just won't have them, no matter how good they are.

> But that's much the same issue where you're comparing it to Zen 2 when Zen 3 is expected to be 20% faster at the same power, and close a lot of that gap.

I expect next-gen AMD laptop processors to close the gap either in performance or in power consumption, but not both. Also, power consumption of a laptop is very much a whole-package deal, and Apple really shines here.

To be clear, I dislike apple for who they are and where are they leading the personal computing industry, so I won't buy from them. Nonetheless, I have to acknowledge that they make some damn fine machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxSI45eeAts

Not to mention the ergonomic factor of being cooler and quieter.

This review appears to be comparing a dual core Intel i3 to the 4+4 core M1, which are only the same price because Apple doesn't sell any laptops for less than $999 even when they're a dual core Intel i3.