There's already multiple billion dollar companies trying to compete and get to where Apple's at. Apple has the lead now but they wont forever. They never do. I don't see what the big deal is here.

Competition has brought us such great processors. We should be thankful for it.

In the consumer space there are only 2 paths for a viable competitor to emerge. 1) a coordinated ecosystem attack or 2) an individual company doubles down.

There are things that lead me to believe 1) can't happen. Google ultimately acquiring Fitbit instead of ecosystem compatibility and integration. It seems like the giants are needing to acquire the pieces to build their own Apple, rather than partner with them. Also Google and Microsoft have complementary businesses but they barely coordinate on this. The closest thing I have seen is Android helping Microsoft with Dual screen Android devices. In most other areas they are setup to compete (chromeos vs. windows, azure vs. gcp, stadia vs. xbox cloud, gsuite vs office, bing vs google search etc).

2) Samsung is the most equipped to lead this.

How far behind Apple are AMD at the moment? If ryzen chips were optimized for low power and manufactured on TSMC’s 5nm process like the M1, what sort of performance difference would we be seeing?

TSMC advertises 5nm as +15% performance OR -30% power consumption. Either one of these won’t be enough to bridge the gap in mobile. Even throwing in another massive 20% IPC improvement wouldn’t do the trick.

On the flip side, once you go bigger the game changes. If you increase the M1 power consumption to amount for interconnects, more memory lanes, more IO, etc the M1 seems to offer worse power to performance that shouldn’t be too unexpected. ARM just announced they are splitting into V1 (performance above all) and N2 (best power, size, performance combo)

Laptop Zen 3 is already equal in multicore perf to the M1 for the same wattage IIRC. While being on 7nm still. Don't underestimate AMD.

Apple ships a 30w charger with the M1 air. I can't find any zen 3 shipping with less than a 65w charger.

Mac mini uses like 25-27w at the wall. 15-25w TDP for the 5800u doesn't include RAM (it's LPDDR4 at 1.1v will use a lot more power than M1 LPDDR4x at 0.6v). 5800u also has a chipset that consumes a few watts.

5800u has some features that the M1 does not (these would likely increase M1 power usage), but still doesn't seem close in power consumption.

Does the charger wattage mean anything? Couldn't it be that they are including a larger supply in order to charge faster?

I don’t have any solid numbers on 5800u, so I didn’t want to make any claims.

4800u isn’t that different as far as power goes (mostly different in performance). A mini-PC with it uses almost 70 watts under load.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16236/asrock-4x4-box4800u-ren...

No. Ryzen Laptops do consume a lot more power than the 15w the m1 consumes under load.

There's also 3) which is another sea change in computing, something that would lead to current device categories becoming irrelevant, and a currently overlooked company positioned to capitalize on it. To me, that seems more likely than 1 and 2, and due to the acceleration of the rates of consumer adoption, it should happen relatively soon.

Yes, that is a good point. It's also hard to know what this is. But for me, the end game of computing is just computing everywhere, reading the world and writing to our screens and our touches programming everything around us. Ultimately this is going to be an ecosystem, not a company. Maybe some better standards emerge that can tie everything together. But as far as devices go it seems to processors, network, storage, sensors everywhere. It's going to be hard to build a new computing company on top of those things with the current investments in cloud and consumer devices, without just being acquired.

Good thoughts. That’s along the lines of my hopes. Imagine if no one ever thought about buying a computing device or computing again because it was cheap and everywhere. There wouldn’t be any more consumer preference regarding how computers feel, how fun they are, how long they last while mobile, etc. All the preferences would shift to a different class of products that happened to be connected to computing in some way.

I see glimpses of this with some of the cheap commodity hardware available, but transportation and design costs are still too high.

Ability to break in would, I suppose, depend on that cost of design and adoption. The ability of large companies to efficiently acquire, though—-not sure what would change that situation.

What do you mean by “doubling down”?

Invest in more Apple like things: vertical integration, cross-device compatibility, app quality, more device types, more accessories, more spinoff platforms (similar to MagSafe, AirTag, etc)

> they wont forever. They never do.

retina imacs and macbook pros beg to differ

8,9 years later still no good alternative

I can’t disagree. I mean the new iMac has some design issues IMO (I hate the white bezel), but damn, the combination of good display (I’d LOVE to buy a 4.5k standalone 24” monitor, 27-28” 4K just isn’t good enough imo), goodish design and an incredibly powerful processor for $1299 is super compelling.

In a space that requires, quite literally, a decade of good product development plus investing a trillion dollars to make a product that can compete with other companies that have already invested a trillion dollars, it's only natural that there be very few competitors in the market, and they're all competing on different things so they can still make a profit [apple only builds for their own products so they can go the console route and make money on the backend; intel/amd do general purpose computing and thus relatively low-margin but wide market-share; nvidia only does GPUs and server stuff because they can specialize in it very well).

Yah, people saying the possibility of an apple dominated silicon industry is a bad thing must have forgotten what the Faustian nightmare that was the last 5-6 years of intel dominance. Competition is good. Intel and AMD will either adapt or wither. It’s not like apple is cornering the market through Broadcom-esque machinations or shady tactics. They put out a remarkably compelling processor that is both efficient, powerful, and relatively easy to get (yah, macs are expensive, but the Mac mini at 700$ comes with the same m1 you get in these new iMacs). I also really love how apple is only offering two almost identical models of the m1. It’s powerful enough for the vast majority of computing tasks and I am so relieved I don’t have to spend time figuring out what the fuck intel is doing with their cpu skus. No doubt an m1x or m2 will come for the bigger iMac, but it’s super refreshing.

> the ecosystem of competitors has failed to execute

I see what you did there!

It's probably because the ecosystem is multi-threaded and there's lots of deadlocks and unprotected reads/writes...

We might get something on-par from a Samsung fab: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-exynos-with-amd-rd...

(ryzen APUs are due for a facelift in the graphics department)

It exists, but not everywhere... I think Kirin was close to being on par for a while, it might even have been dangerous? With regards to privacy ? Plus there must have been some serious PLA money involved... anyway now this ARM cpu cannot be fabbed by TMSC because of the sanctions.

If that even happens, chances are the current industry leaders already know about it and are building their own variants to prevent an extinction event. Maybe that technology is more wearables like AR glasses but even that is probably going to be eaten by Apple: https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/22/apple-glasses-sony-oled...