I'm pretty sure we'll see M1 copies/analogues soon enough (same design ideas, even if the processing cores are worse). That will spread around the world very fast. Kind of like AirPods.

What's true to the US and HN "bubble" right now, will be the norm for the rest of the world a few years from now. no?

It depends on the price. Apple products are rather expensive, and if you're poor you may not understand interoperability but you can see its effects.

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.

No. The rest of the world still is dominated by Android / Windows 10 years in.

As long as Apple is not selling cheap devices, no chance that this changes.

If Apple lowers their prices, maybe.

The cheapest M1 devices are already cheaper than equivalently spec'd devices from competitors, like the Surface Pro X.

I think it is safe to assume they will only get cheaper from their launch-day prices.

Being cheaper than similar specs is not enough, you have to have cheap devices and apple does not.

Cheap is relative. Right now their M1 devices are objectively the cheapest practical ARM64 workstation products on the market. I don't see why they shouldn't be able to maintain that lead for a while as costs come down for ARM64 workstations in general. And I think it is reasonable to expect that ARM64 platforms will eventually be cheaper than x86 ones.

Cheap is not that relative when you're poor. When your making an effort to buy an $400 laptop Apple is out of the equation.

I know because I've been in that place.

When you are making an effort to buy a $400 laptop than any flagship product from any vendor is out of the question. $400 products are not what define the future landscape of the market.

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.

One of the parents talked about the rest of the world. Hence my reply. You don't have to be in the 3rd world to consider an Apple product extremely expensive.

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.

HN's "bubble"? Absurd.

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.

Please list tier 2 and tier 3 countries where there is a significant market share of Apple hardware.

Go to a mall in Bangkok and you will lose count of the number of people walking around with iphones. I don't know what you consider a "tier 2 and tier 3" country, since I think you just made that up, but maybe you should travel more.

I do travel a lot, hence why I know how little iPhones are seen around the planet.

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.

That's not how statistics work. You said significant market share "of apple products" and there it is.

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."

> and still the iPhone is at 28%,

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.

Have you ever heard of anger management?

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...

Whatever, keep inside your happy bubble if it makes you happy.

Personal attacks are a sign of lack of proper arguments.

Those were not personal attacks, they were explaining that apple stuff is desired around the world and even in countries with lower incomes, people will save up to buy apple hardware, buy it used, etc.

> You clearly don't travel, or you're a liar, because your varied claims are uproariously disconnected reality.

Why is dang allowing this person to bully everyone?

Is this the new normal on HN?

If there were any such thing as "tier 2 and tier 3 countries" in any broad sense, I'd say that's quite a lazy and disingenuous transition from "only on HN" and only something the US cares about, to "outside of the vast bulk of the world's economy".

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 bet if we do a demographic IP check that is what most HN logins come from.

I surely do, whatever Porsche and Ferrari do have very little repercussions on the automotive market, if you want a comparison.

This circular logic is more disingenuous noise (the userbase of HN is utterly irrelevant given that you're trying to prove your own absurd claim that only HN cares, when clearly the entire developed world cares). How are you not moderated down to transparent by now? [I will tell you why - because the title draws in a certain crowd that is comforted by your nonsense, however fictional it is]

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 -- at 20% or so in most of the world's economies

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.

We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.

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We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and for using multiple accounts abusively.

Please don't create accounts to do that with.

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India would be tier 2 or 3. Apple share is less than 5%. Its very rare to see a iphone in the wild.

> Apple even has 20% of the mobile marketshare in China.

Source? That means one in every five has an iPhone in China.

M1 can accelerate the shift of home users to Macs.

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.

I find the macOS UX to be inferior compared to Windows. This is mostly a matter of habit, and what people are used to and how they expect things to behave.

All the young people I know (OK about a dozen nieces, nephews and neighbor kids) got PC laptops. Maybe I live in a bubble where kids playing video games is more common, but it seems like getting $300-500 laptops that can play thousands of PC games (and be used for homework) is still a pretty popular option. (Some of the older youth are getting $600-1000 PC gaming laptops instead.)

> 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.

I'd actually see a desktop Linux or desktop Android as more realistic unless Apple stops being so intentionally hostile to their users and treat them with some dawdling infantilism. This cult game they're playing is going to eventually crash and they'll have to start designing software that's not just theatrics and showmanship

I haven't noticed much acknowledgement of sole traders, as they're called in the UK. Very often when I see someone who's working for themselves they have a Macbook Air.

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.

UK is a tier 1 country, G7 member, many people can only dream of pound level salaries.

This same narrative has been touted for many decades now. I have heard it for 20+ years, yet the rate of windows usage in the quantifiable sense remains has varied only slightly.

> M1 can accelerate the shift of home users to Macs.

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.

> Home users aren't going to double their budgets to afford an Apple machine...

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.

I do think that's the disconnect. Apple has eschewed gaming whereas Microsoft has embraced it. It turns out that gaming is a huge moat, and until Apple decides to invade they will be relegated to second place in the PC market.

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.