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.