People have been calling for/or expected Apple to switch to ARM/make their own chip for years and years before they actually switched. At that point people were just surprised to see Apple actually do something.

Maybe people in tech, but this doesn’t apply to (I’d like to say- Most of) their regular users

Most of their regular users don't even know what Arm or Intel is, let alone cares about it. A macbook is a macbook. The fact that it's faster is lost on most people as well, since their daily use consists of opening the browser or video conferencing or (if they have a PC) gaming.

Computers have plateaued for their current use case. The only innovation that will make a difference in the near future is AI.

The m1 gains are more impactful than just speed, namely battery life and thermals. The fact that I can get a full workday or more depending on load, all without a loud fan screaming at me all day honestly makes this the first laptop I've owned that works as a genuinely fully portable workstation. It's basically eliminated charge anxiety. It's not a complete game changer or anything like the original iPhone, but it's a pretty massive upgrade over the machines of 2 years ago.

And "regular people" definitely care about battery life in a laptop - it's probably the most important parameter for someone who genuinely needs a laptop over a desktop.

Yeah battery life and fan noise have been so much better on the M1 16” than on the intel 16”, it’s unbelievable.

I was a PC gamer but primarily use Macs for work. But I bought the MacBook Air and aside from one game (Elden Ring) every game I usually play works on the MacBook Air, some with Rosetta and some with native ARM support.

Heh. "Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the game selection?"

I'm an Apple guy, I just thought it was funny. And my Airpod Pro observation isn't on how great they were at creating it, rather 'can you please help me get mine to switch back out of mono mode, after I put them in my ears one at a time and inadvertently convinced 'em that life is mono now?' (mind you, I kind of know: they freak out if asked to play 96k content and you get a mono low-res version)

Maybe. But the fact that a computer gets 20 hours of battery life and doesn’t sound like an airplane under load is important to people.

I seem to recall that these specific ARM comments were made on the day the announcement was released that Apple was buying the company.

I stopped giving a shit about MacBooks when they started limiting RAM to 16G, and put in that stupid bar thing instead of function keys.

If anyone was excited about the new MacBook, I'm guessing it's because they're already deep into Apple as a brand.

Me, I just want a computer that works, has decent specs* and doesn't treat me like an imbecile, or refuse to ship Bash >3 because the legal team got antsy about GPLv3. (I just loooove when I'm writing shell scripts that might be used by coworkers running Macs and I need to make sure that I either limit myself to sh functionality, or Bash 3 functionality)

Which is why I've been running Linux laptops since then.

*And no, 16G is not enough, but I've had many fans try to explain to me why it was.

Time to lift your head out of the sand then. Macbook Pro now comes in 32GB RAM flavors, with fn keys instead of the touch bar, and zsh by default

Zsh isn't Bash. And Bash version compatibility is important when 75% of your team develop on Linux, but the other 25% on Mac.

I mean, I use Fish, but when I'm writing shell scripts for others, it's Bash, because it's a common default. But now I'm limited to Bash 3.

But I'm glad that they got rid of that stupid bar, and let you get a laptop with 32G of RAM now. So kind of Apple!

Why not just install a newer version of bash? It’s trivial to do so with homebrew. I’m sure your team has other dependencies that must be installed in order to run your software.

Because a shell script is supposed to be a lowest common denominator. Run this, and it'll ensure you have Maven, it'll ensure you have Java 11+, then it'll build the thing and run the thing.

And now I'm needing to sniff your OS, detect whether or not Homebrew is installed, install it if not, then install Bash >3, then run the actual meat of the script.

All because of Apple's lawyers being scared of GPLv3.

At this point, I may as well insist that you install pyenv and Poetry and deliver it as a Python package.

Bash really isn't a standard outside of most Linux distributions, you're going to find the same issue anywhere that isn't Linux.

OpenBSD uses pdksh, Busybox/NetBSD/Minix use ash, there are some linux distros that use zsh, OpenSolaris is ksh, etc.

Bash is not a common denominator anywhere except Linux. Just write what you want as POSIX shell and it will work in a lot of places.

You already have to deal with platform-specific differences even (nay - especially!) across Linux with things like apt vs yum vs dnf vs pacman vs Nix. One more is really a non-issue.

Yeah, fair enough, I'm just bitter after my shiny new associative array failed and I had roll back to a worse option.

Your bash scripts won't work on Windows, either. If we are here talking about bash being a "common default" maybe we shouldn't leave out the operating system that has about a 90% global marketshare.

If your development team doesn't have the time and resources to support a multi-platform development environment, they shouldn't do so.

Apple didn't change their business model, the GPL changed their license, and it's a license that's simply not compatible with any closed-source software business. Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?

> Your bash scripts won't work on Windows

Well neither would the code we're developing either so, not really a problem.

> Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?

Oh, most definitely. But then none of our products are closed-source, so we're an outlier, admittedly.

And I’m going to guess that your apps run on Linux systems in production.

So, I don’t think it makes sense to criticize macOS for being different than Linux. I can’t run my systemd units in macOS, either.

We might as well raise hell about Apple not pre-installing Firefox for us.

Indeed there’s actually a 64gb variant

64GB even too