Other manufacturers seem to be completely oblivious to it. They still equip their laptops either with full hd or 4k screens. The resulting ppi are all over the place. Sometimes way to low (bad quality) or way to high (4k in an 13" laptop, halves the runtime). Same with standalone screens, there is a good selection around 100ppi, but for "high res" the manufacturers just offer 4k in whatever size, so once again the ppi are all over the place again.

Apple realizes there's diminishing returns in upping the resolution beyond what your eyes can see. So they hit Retina, and then move on to focus on color accuracy, brightness, and contrast.

They do this throughout their product stack. Only as much RAM as their phones actually need, because RAM is both costly in terms of BOM and also consumes battery life.

Using fewer Megapixels than competing phones because it's about the quality, not quantity, when other manufacturers trip over themselves to have the most Megapixels.

When your customers are picking a product based off a spec sheet, that's the trap you easily fall into.

It's still not enough resolution for x2 upscaling that Apple argues optimal.

Apple's focus and commitment can be a pain to users who want something different, but overall it's a huge strategic advantage.

Software developers are building their apps for M1 because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Apple isn't going to keep Intel around any longer than they have to, whereas Microsoft had and will continue to have a hard time persuading anyone to adopt ARM Windows because the opposite is true.

But Wintel will own business desktops for probably a decade, unfortunately.

Do you see this as being different from what was going on pre-M1?

Aside from shared math libraries, seems like most stuff required cross compilation just to work - I’m not clear that M1 adds more work on top of that.

Apple, what are you thinking? People who can afford that display might want to connect their desktop mac and their laptop to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Inspiron_laptops

That's about 130+ish dpi and it was unmatched for years: I know I had one and was depressed to see dpi do down and down afterwards :)

Hopefully Apple restarted the dpi race.

By the time I was ready to purchase one of their keyboards to put in my iBook G3 Snow, they had shut down. Little did I know...

https://technical.ly/philly/2013/01/09/jeff-white-fingerwork...

Maybe compilers would be default spit out binaries that run on all of them, like Apple's Rosetta or whatever it's called.

Universal binaries. Apple calls those binaries “Universal binaries”. Rosetta is more like running different arch binaries through qemu. A brief look through Google says that there was a FatELF specification created years back, but never really went anywhere. Presumably because Linux users tend to know what arch they are using.

Fat binaries would make distribution easier, but would double (or triple) the size of a binary. I doubt it would be worth the size trade off.

Docker also supports multiarch images.

Given how easy it is to JIT or BT RISC ISAs, the future is good for binary portability.

That said, I don’t know what Apple does. For example, in the main download for Big Sur, is (for example) zsh a universal binary, or are there a specific x86/M1 downloads. I haven’t looked.

    /usr/bin$ du -schL .
    813M total

Also much of this tech only existed when it did due to their investment in technology development and tooling. Microsoft had dragged their feet on Hi-DPI for years before Apple jumped ahead with retina and 5K and forced them to pull their socks up. Android phones probably went to 64-bit two years earlier than they otherwise would have. With Surface devices Microsoft has come up with some genuinely innovative and forward looking designs and engineering, but would they have done that without the spur of competing with the iPad and Mac? Apple have been single handedly dragging the rest of the industry kicking and screaming into the future, to everyone's benefit. How is that outcome 'evil'?

And they do this so well because they're led by Tim Cook who approaches the big picture in part in terms of supply chain.

I don't argue that cornering the market isn't an accounted-for and desirable side-benefit of this arrangement. I just don't think it's usually the starting point for them.

There are pro's and con's to both models; choose the one that works best for you. Even if it's not Apple :)

It's usually a legitimate justification, too. Nobody else makes hardware this nice, almost as a general rule.

So when compared to other companies which do put out products with similar materials the difference is that Apple never reaches low. They won't sacrifice their premium material usage and expression to reach lower end markets.

Air Pods Max might be the situation backfiring on them. They were so wrapped up in having aluminum enclosures for the headphones they ended up with an overweight and overpriced to many product. It is going to be real curious what a lower cost version of these entail; the rumor is they will come but when and of what materials?