I think Microsoft have 5 or 6 different lines of business that bring in billions or more of revenue: windows, cloud, gaming, office/productivity and surface. They are the most diversified of the big players.
> Businesses above a certain size overwhelmingly use pcs unless they are in specific arty sectors. M1 won't change that, or at least not rapidly.
Besides the fact, which many HN users working for FAANGS or startups don't encounter, that big enterprises are both rigid and also quite locked into the Microsoft/Windows/Office mono culture, big companies tend to have very elaborate purchasing processes.
Things with just 1 vendor tend to be completely ignored, if they're meant to be used throughout the company. There is a certain irony with my previous paragraph, but Microsoft stuff is usually grandfathered in, the rules for new acquisitions don't apply to them. On top of that Microsoft has super solid backwards/forwards compatibility, migration paths and an amazing history of working with enterprises, as much as they are hated especially by the Open Source community for other things.
So you can expect ARM Macs to be adopted and used, but most likely frowned upon by IT departments and CIOs if too many people want them. With Intel they can have a bidding process or at least a product comparison between Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. With Apple it's... just Apple. Also Apple's B2B side is super underpowered and their history is very chequered due to their frequent breaking changes.
Funnily enough, both times I saw this happen (at a large bank and later at a utility company) the only thing we needed from IT was network access and a Windows VM license so that we could run the god awful company payroll app that required IE11 to work. Once a week dozens of very highly paid devs and SREs would boot up a Windows SOE VM, login to the domain, start the payroll app, enter in five rows of data and shutdown. What a waste of time and money.
If you want a Linux workstation, IT will provision you a Windows VM. It has email, Office, and our payroll app. With most stuff on Teams you can ignore it most of the time and get on with your work. IT's happy, we're happy.
Dell may actually be the PC provider closest to what Apple does, since I believe they source components for their own hardware in some cases (or use white label in others, but with their own firmware as I noted).
That said, I think the only thing that prevents Apple from competing in this space is desire and experience providing that service to enterprises at scale. It's not like they don't have the money or manufacturing pipeline, and lack of experience solves itself after a while.
I disagree. I work in such a company and they are always looking for one and only one vendor for their millions of PCs. It used to be Dell, now HP but they completely outsource procurement, maintenance, repairs and disposal of the computers to that one full-service provider.
Apple wouldn't be considered because they don't offer this full-spectrum service.
This ignores the operating system from the equation. Basically there is no effective replacement for Windows or macOS (or Linux). Whichever platform you pick you are stuck with due to legacy/having to retrain hundreds (if not thousands) of workers if you want to switch.
It’s true that large enterprise is slow and cumbersome. But they really don’t care too much if they’re buying you a MacBook, or a surface, or a Dell. Their main concern is whether they can properly manage all their devices, which isn’t too hard to do these days. Whether a large enterprise has MacBooks or not depends a lot more on whether or not they’ve figured out how to use JAMF than it does anything else.
Technical and design staff may make up a relatively small portion of the headcount for some of them, but the Windows-only enterprise is becoming increasingly less common. The primary reason being that the tools they need to support other operating systems are simply more capable and accessible than they have been in the past.
And as far as enterprise IT, there are a ton of Windows infrastructure folks, and again, there's little overlap between those and FAANG types. Plus infrastructure folks frequently hate Macs, for example (the stuff to manage fleets of Macs is vastly underpowered compared to stuff used to manage fleets of Windows PCs).
Plus even in those companies, the ERP & infra folks are maybe 1-5-10% of the workforce and they're generally in supporting roles (frequently they're temps or consultants), not in core business roles. Nobody listens to them :-))
And they generally want to get rid of them, they're seen as an expense.
I do agree that Windows-only places are becoming less common, but in big enterprises it's far from agreed that going outside the Microsoft ecosystem has a good ROI.
In any case, the reason enterprise adopts these technologies isn’t directly because of a technical ROI. It’s because giving people the tools that they want to use is generally seen as beneficial. Providing good UX to internal users is becoming just as trendy in enterprise as DevSecOps and Service Oriented Architecture is. There’s plenty of fairly obvious business reasons why enterprise would care about these things. One of the more important ones is that these organisations are competing FAANGs and startups to hire talent. If you walked around the bank office I was working in today I doubt you’d be able to tell it apart from a typical well-funded startup.
This to me is the interesting spectator sport for M1 (I have no intention of buying Apple hardware) - what are the competition going to do in response?
Based on all the reviews and benchmarks, the new generation of Apple laptops are going to outperform anything AMD/Intel, while having twice the battery life. These are not 'small difference' only of interest to geeks, these are large user visible differences that could make everything non-Apple look inferior.
I don't see x64 suddenly getting competitive on this front any time soon, so are the 'traditional' laptop vendors (e.g. Lenovo) going to have to pivot to ARM as well? Possibly segmenting so that 'gaming' or 'workstation' are different market sectors that stay on x86. Even if they do switch there's going to be lag for development, and there's no guarantee that the software landscape will be as set up for it as on Apple.
As someone whose purchases are 'second hand thinkpad, install Linux' I'm all for it. If you pick the right distro, Linux has supported ARM well for a while.
Second, the M1 successors have to cover a lot more use cases first. There are certainly use cases where M1 is winning single core performance, and some for parallelism, and nearly absolutely in efficiency and battery life. There are still plenty of cases where software either only works on Windows, or it's where many users are currently using it, and accustomed to using it. There are other cases where "M1 for x" doesn't exist yet - high-end workstations, for example. We have rumors and expectations for this to come out in over the next two years, and assuming the competition stands still, you might start to see cases where the time savings on heavy computation favors the Apple Silicon options heavily enough to overcome inertia.
But I would suggest people look at Intel and AMD in the Windows space for a precedent. AMD multi-core performance has been dominating Intel for about 3 years now... guess who owns the market share? It's still Intel. The momentum definitely takes years to overcome. AMD is at something like 20% of Windows notebook share after about one year of having dominate mobile chips. See this - https://www.pcworld.com/article/3588154/amds-notebook-pc-sha...
Sure, but they're not just going to sacrifice the consumer market entirely. The industry as a whole will need to respond.
> There are other cases where "M1 for x" doesn't exist yet - high-end workstations, for example.
For now. In a year, I wouldn't bet on it.
> AMD is at something like 20% of Windows notebook share after about one year of having dominate mobile chips.
AMD beat Intel by a little in efficiency over the last year (and for the mainstream laptop market, after a certain point, that's mostly what people care about). M1 is a _dramatic_ jump forward, there. "Here's an AMD and an Intel laptop for 1k each, the AMD one is a bit faster and has slightly better battery life" is a different proposition to "Here's the same AMD laptop from earlier, plus a $1k MacBook Air. The MacBook Air's a bit faster, and has twice the battery life".
The M1 is roughly competitive with the Ryzen 4000 chips (depending on variances in TDP, cooling, etc.) but arguably gets as much as double the battery life.
No argument that it's an advancement of CPU technology, but I think you might have some magical thinking if you think momentum doesn't matter.
It's not like suddenly 100% of buyers look at only benchmarks where the M1 leads, or only at battery life, or only at software that runs on the M1 rather than all the software they use.
If users were only looking at CPU benchmarks, AMD would have a lot higher market share, and the same will be said about the M1 after a year as well. Will Apple users replace Intel laptops in record numbers? Probably! But the conversion of Windows users will be slow regardless of hardware.
Folks here don't care, if their Business Software runs whatsoever or is whatsoever faster as long as it is cheap on a per unit basis. There is no such thing as ROI in Excel tables for controllers in my company. ;)
If Apple releases Silicon that begins to dominate in other areas by enough of a lead that it can't be ignored by purchasers, then Microsoft could start to sweat, assuming no one finds the hole in the market tempting enough.
So I would think the real question is how long will it take for competitors to step up their CPU efficiency.
Intel has ground to a halt, essentially, on the efficiency front. They continue to struggle with process improvements, and have had to do some tricky engineering to work within the constraints of an older process, while also having to settle for increasing power demands.
AMD has been fairly relentless in their forward march over the past 3-4 years, improving efficiency on their x86 chips. The next couple of years are going to be very telling how well that march of progress competes with Apple's march with their ARM-based CPUs.
There's still so much popularity in the Windows/x86 space that AMD likely doesn't feel overwhelmingly threatened, but one would imagine they do not have their collective heads in the sand, because they are still a market underdog. They cannot risk resting on their laurels while Intel catches up, and they are likely very well aware of Apple's thrust into the competitive CPU landscape. Whether they must switch to ARM to remain competitive is not yet clear, but will be in time.
The moat that Win32 provides has been eroding for a long time. That's why Microsoft has shifted their focus to the cloud. This technology might slow things a little but the writing is on the wall.
Most enterprises want to deliver software through a browser, the last thing they want to do is install software on the client. My customers have been telling me this for two decades now. They don't even like having Office run locally, they will drop it as soon as the browser version is viable.
Microsoft will be fine, they appear to be a long way along that journey already. I'm not so sure about Intel though. It's in Microsoft's interest for processors to become a commodity product. They would be over the moon if the competition sucked all the profits out of AMD/Intel.
The people who should be most worried though are the HP/Lenovo/Dells of this world. They have been happy to be carried along on the coat tails of WinTel for decades now. They will struggle to adapt to this new world.
Well, selling Windows for ARM to non-OEMs would be a good start. Apple could then allow for Bootcamp on their new ARM Macs.
I expect to see a whole raft of design wins for AMD from the major OEMs this year.
Windows has supported ARM for a while and they have a nice arm device right now.
New mobile Ryzen chips are extremely fast and efficient. X86 isn't going anywhere.
If Apple is successful putting algorithms into silicon for micro efficiencies Intel/AMD/Microsoft aren't going to sit idly by.
MS have been monetizing it as an additional ad platform for its other products & services like One Drive/Office 365/Edge, etc. which I frequently see popup.
In that light it makes sense for them to support ARM/M1 and as a goal have as many installations of Windows as possible as Google does with their OS's.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-ve...
Apple devices are out of budget for most countries, and they only own 10% of the worldwide market share in computing.
Outside desktop, Android owns the mobile market.
Really, it is just US analysts going crazy with M1.
I'm very far from SV salaries for example, and although I can afford an Iphone or Imac, It's just a dangerous slope for my pockets.
There are many countries poorer than mine.
As long as Apple is not selling cheap devices, no chance that this changes.
I think it is safe to assume they will only get cheaper from their launch-day prices.
I know because I've been in that place.
I am not trying to say that the entire impoverished world is going to go out and start buying Macbooks because of the M1. What I am saying is that practical ARM64 workstations are now a lot more plausible at every price point because of what the M1 demonstrated.
I agree that practical ARM64 Workstations will be more feasible now, but there's still a large gap.
There's a whole market of refurbished 1st world componentes. I talk a lot with people from LATAM and they're are used to buy 2nd hand Xeons with Chinese motherboards for their prosumer market.
They even sell packs of Xeons + motherboard + Memory (it was DDR3 recently, IDK how much that changed).
In many countries people hacked early 2000s games and there are communities maintaining such games because many people has not the means to play the last titles. Nor money to pay for subscriptions and such. They pirated the whole ecosystem.
This is pretty common in Russia and Turkey too. I guess in other countries it is too.
I do have websites in Spanish and try to make them lightweight and avoid JS because I know some of my visitors will have a hard time with it.
We are talking about the most valuable company in the world, and the M1 release was covered enthusiastically the world over. The notion that it's US-only is absolutely preposterous.
Apple is a significant player in mobile in the entirety of the West. Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands. And it's PC saturation is virtually the same in Canada and Europe as the US. Even in European media it is incredibly common to see Apple devices (phones and PCs) as the placeholders.
Apple even has 20% of the mobile marketshare in China. That's incredible. It has 60%+ in Japan.
The corporation buying a fleet of low-end PCs for seat warmers aren't going to buy Apple (nor are they buying Surface Pros. They're buying the junkiest HP or Dell they can get). But there are as many "artsy" people, or people who care about the experience, in other rich countries as well.
I guess Bangkok holds 28% of Thailand population then.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/thailand
Also the issue being discussed here are Apple computers with M1, even less than those 28%, in case you also want numbers.
Don't say
"the issue being discussed here are Apple computers with M1"
when your comment said
"Please list tier 2 and tier 3 countries where there is a significant market share of Apple hardware."
It's not.
It's more like 25% and dropping
In Italy iPhones used to be 50% of the market, because they were a status symbol and it was literally the only smartphone available, ten years after they have dropped below 24% globally, but new sells are much less, because
The number of people buying their first iPhone is declining. Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference this week will showcase how the technology giant is diversifying so that it no longer has to rely so heavily on its signature product.
-- 20th June 2020 - Bangkok Post
Regarding new phones Apple is now third with 10% of the market share in Thailand behind Samsung (22.3%) and Huawei (17.6%)
Consider that 25% is a minority, 75% is 3 times larger.
Apple is not gaining market shares anywhere, except in the US.
In China it dropped from 25% to 17%, in Europe from 17% to 14% in the last year.
The article was about ARM in computers, Apple computing devices are only 8% of the total in Thailand.
They were 9% at the beginning of this year.
Can you disprove the data without spewing all that bile?
I'm honestly worried about your health.
Here's a WSJ article about the topic
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-iphone-isnt-the-cash-cow-it...
Personal attacks are a sign of lack of proper arguments.
Is this the new normal on HN?
Further I don't think you understand what "significant" marketshare is. Even 10% marketshare is significant, where the actions of that market player is impactful. But Apple is pushing way above that almost everywhere.
I surely do, whatever Porsche and Ferrari do have very little repercussions on the automotive market, if you want a comparison.
Whatever you hope the position of Apple is doesn't correlate with reality.
Aside: Ferrari has between 0.01% - 0.1% marketshare in a given year in the richest countries, and that is your example why Apple -- at 20% or so in most of the world's economies -- is irrelevant. That is some perilously embarrassing nonsense. Hyundai, in contrast, has 7% marketshare in the US and is considered a pretty big player.
Apple has 17% (and dropping) of the mobile market share in Europe and around 9% in computing.
There aren't many other richer economies in the World.
Ferrari is worth now more than General Motors and Ford, so market share and net worth are not comparable.
Their market share is small because they make a luxury limited edition product.
They limit their production capacity to around 10 thousands cars/year (all sold in pre order), Apple is trying to sell as many devices they can.
There are no Ferrari Store where you can buy a Ferrari and drive it home half an hour later.
It's not a small difference.
Last but not least, there is a lot more competition between car manufacturers, even in the most expensive segments, Apple devices are only made by Apple.
Hyundai, for example, had a net income of over 3 trillion in 2019, Apple net income is measured in tens of billions.
Please don't create accounts to do that with.
Source? That means one in every five has an iPhone in China.
Microsoft devices are already out-fashioned by apple. The Windows UX is also subpar comparing to Apple. Now the hardware is also gonna completely fall behind.
If all the young people get mac's for their home computers, will the next generations use Windows at workplace?
Im talking about 10-20 years landscape for Windows and Office.
> Now the hardware is also gonna completely fall behind.
This may happen. For efficiency/battery life, it already has. But a handful of synthetic benchmarks where the M1 outperforms high-end AMD desktop chips in single core seems to have overshadowed the cases where those same desktop chips (and even some comparable 15W mobile APUs) outperform the M1 in other tasks.
Or the huge segment of PC gaming.
While they're more expensive to buy new than many Windows laptops, the general sentiment from those I've spoken to seems to be:
* It's worth the extra money for more reliable operation and fewer worries about malware.
* Buying used is much less of a lottery. They tend not to have hidden problems.
* Selling used means you actually get some return to put towards your next device.
I see people using Office and Chrome or Safari - and not much else.
I can't see the M1 making a lick of difference here. Home users aren't going to double their budgets to afford an Apple machine, especially one which can't even play most games.
If I were to switch to a Mac mini I would pay about $350 less than it cost me to build my main workstation/gaming machine. According to the benchmarks and real-world tests, I'd gain quite a bit in performance over my Ryzen build, with a fraction of the power consumption which is currently 120W idle, 310W maxed out as measured by my UPS. Per real world tests, the M1 mini never goes above ~35W and stays cool and quiet even when maxed out on stress tests. Given the fact I no longer play games much at all beyond WoW and a few indie titles, and my non-gaming workflow is 100% doable on macOS, I'm sorely tempted to switch even with my reservations about Apple as a company.
> ...especially one which can't even play most games.
No one buys a Mac for AAA games, that's a fact and probably won't change immediately. With that said, Blizzard has day one native Apple Silicon support for WoW, and the benchmarks indicate the performance (depending on the game engine) sits somewhere between the GeForce 1650 and 1660 for most of the games tested so far. That covers pretty much all non-AAA titles on the performance side, leaving portability as the only real issue. I've seen tests done with Steam games and most macOS native x86_64 games make the transition via Rosetta2 quite nicely.
Not to mention, M1 Macs can now run most iOS apps natively which opens up a horde of games to the platform immediately, including popular titles like Minecraft, Fortnite, and CoD.
On the flip side, the PC market is less and less relevant as phones have become the primary computing platform in the last 10 years.
Windows supports a lot of devices. It’s likely that every single driver would need to be ported. I don’t see that happening.
Granted, I have almost no idea what I’m talking about. Just my thoughts.
They are in a weird situation. They depend on AMD/Intel to deliver. This is a massive dependency for Microsoft. Are there other large corporations have this big of a dependency?
I understand that Microsoft's revenue is shifting towards cloud, services, etc. But I think Windows is still "the" key to a lot of those offerings. Take a massive chunk of market share from Windows and I'm pretty much sure all those services will have a hit too.
What are their options?