Sure. Running an OS that is carrying a lot of legacy OS X with introduced bugs and cruft. I love *nix and hope to keep using it for a long time more. But if you plunked 2002 me into modern day, apple’s offerings would be pretty cool but not what I’d expect after 2 decades.

You could buy a desktop with 4 gigs of ram in 2010.

Most of your comments in this thread read like you are completely unaware of the tech and manufacturing leaps we've already passed and are currently trying to pass. You are allowed to complain if you want to, but your complaints are unsubstantiated. Signalling we haven't made significant and or substantial advances since 2002 is a joke - especially if your barometer is buying RAM.

There's always research ongoing to improve tech and a lot of it is on the market already, but just because researchers figured something out doesn't mean it's feasible on a large manufacturing scale or that thermodynamics will even allow it to work well. Comparing devices in 2002 to 2023 and not noticing the drastic improvements just shows a lack of understanding and or signs of living in complete denial to just complain.

They could get me to shut up for probably 4 years if they cemented a deal to produce the next Nintendo console with Nintendo in a way Nintendo would be fully onboard with delivering. Think steam deck or mac mini level of hardware/cost.

I bought my windows laptop with 8g of ram in 2009. It was nicer but certainly not top of the line. If I recall, I think the minimum you’d find at that time would be 4g, and some configurations offered 16g.

What was the leap though? Pay huge sums for the best TSMC node and put as much as possible on package? Own the whole stack?

I don't know what the leap was, just the effect: a combination of perf and battery life that puts everything else to shame.

Marketing. It was a huge marketing leap for Apple to take credit for TSMC's node upgrades and claim it as some sort of great technological leap.

Given that the next generation Snapdragon offers comparable performance to Apple's M line, it appears that node advances were responsible for a very large percentage of any performance gains.

Yeah, probably had nothing to do with Qualcomm acquiring Nuvia, etc.

M1 was not that big of a leap for trillion dollar company. If you looked in A12 bionic or other processor from Apple before M1, M1 wasn't that different in IPC/core or any metric. Also Apple was 2 generation in semiconductor process ahead due to TSMC contracts.

If you look closely, yes apple is bit better in manufacturing, bit better in materials etc. and I have many apple products, but its products isn't that different from many small companies. Unlike say Google, whose software engineering and scale they can handle for complex services is almost impossible to match for small companies.

This discussion is a bit like the dropbox/rsync comment, M1 was a huge leap for the users, I am yet to see anyone upgrading to M1 and not amazed around me. It was a technological huge leap or not is not the important part here in my opinion.

Dropbox/rsync thread is so hyped here and most people haven't read it[1]. Firstly most comments were positive. Also the top comment poster who was negative first became positive later after explaination. Top commenter said "You are correct that this presents a very good, easy-to-install piece of functionality for Windows users". Second commenter said "This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it".

Also you missed the point of thread. I said I like Apple products. It's just that the stage they are in, they aren't trying to solve really tough problems which very likely will just loose money like say google does with quantum computing or AI.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

It's entirely subjective and I'm going to disagree. I ran an A12Z Developer Transition Kit and then immediately upgraded to an M1 Mini and the raw performance was staggeringly faster.

My followup question: if it's so easy and unimpressive, why aren't other companies doing it -- especially at similar performance-per-watt? The market is obviously there and they release "answers" to Apple Silicon that aren't really answers (again, perf-per-watt isn't there).

There was a time in the late 90s and early aughts when by the time you've unboxed your new computer it's already out of date.

I'm sure it was even more so in the 80's into the 90's, but that's a little before my time.

We have not really had a quantum leap in the last 20 years. Even longer. Apple's M-series chips are the closest we've gotten in recent times I think.

My new computer's got the clocks, it rocks

But it was obsolete before I opened the box

You say you've had your desktop for over a week?

Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique

Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great

If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight

https://youtu.be/qpMvS1Q1sos?si=kbkY4H6nepvB7I0o

I don't even need to click the link. Weird Al' is speaking the truth here!