[ianai]

That sounds like a truthful explanation of their motives. On the one hand, I definitely welcome challengers to the chip industry. On the other, I remember the Power days. Having non Mac users “talk down” to me about using a different processor was beyond annoying. It adds a quill to the Mac haters. Here’s hoping Apple produces cpus that outperform their competitors like their 2 G/s ssds do.

Also makes me not really happy to buy any current hardware of theirs.

[flazzarino]

This is all hidden tech, you and OP have very valid points, but who is the intended audience of this message?

In the Jobs' days they'd promote the practical value of a product. For example they might say how the new iPod can have 50k songs, not how big the storage is, let alone the storage type. They'd mention a smaller form factor or improved battery life, not about HDD to SSD.

So when they talk about SoCs, cores, GPUs, intel or anything else hidden, are they signaling to customers? Maybe its signaling to investors that apple is innovating and that ought translate to profits; maybe the inner geek in all of us?

The dirty trick with hidden tech's performance figures is that they don't directly translate to customer value. As you mentioned, you're dissuaded from buying because the new stuff will be so much better. Maybe it will but the old apple would tell you that the new macs can process video in final cut 10x faster, or you don't have to buy a separate gaming rig, i.e. you can do more stuff better.

The good part about focusing on what the products can do is that you can't fake it. You can't fake it to [geeks] like me, [non-geeks like] my mom, my kids, investors, etc.

[mattlondon]

Got any data on the SSD? I believe that consumer NVMe SSDs are all 2-3,000MB/s or more these days (for sequential reads which I believe is the "standard" benchmark people use for speed (ignoring iops))?

E.g. this from 2015 (!): https://www.anandtech.com/show/9396/samsung-sm951-nvme-256gb... This from this year: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13438/the-corsair-force-mp510...

[djrogers]

The speed of SSDs is vastly overstated, as they are generally rated at the speed of the fastest component and the real world slows them down. For a comparison of SSDs in actual devices check this out:

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/2018-macbook-pro-benchmar...

[ianai]

My figure is per the 6th benchmark here https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/apple-macbook-air-...

[coder543]

That's a comparison between macOS and Windows, not the SSDs themselves. I would not have believed how terrible Windows is at small file I/O unless I had seen it myself dozens of times over the years. If they had put Linux on one of those laptops for comparison, I would consider a chart like that fair.

If you actually read technical deep dives like AnandTech posts on SSDs and MacBooks alike, you would see that they really do perform identically to what Apple ships... because Apple is shipping industry-standard SSDs. Apple chooses expensive SSD chips, sure, but it's the same NAND everyone else has. Only the most recent generation of MacBooks (since the T2) has actually integrated their own SSD controller, inside the T2, but it's still the same physical industry-standard NAND chips underneath.

[djrogers]

And that's exactly my point - the SSDs spec sheet numbers are based on the NAND chips, but the controllers slow them down in real world performance. I've still yet to see a benchmark that shows Macbook Air/Pro/iMac Pro level SSD permormance from any other SSD equipped computer.

[coder543]

No, I’m saying Apple has been using industry standard controllers until literally the MacBook Air refresh that just launched.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12670/the-samsung-970-evo-ssd...

You can buy this SSD today. There are others like it, and some, like Intel's Optane SSDs actually substantially outperform anything Apple has put in their computers in terms of IOPS, even though the Optane line hasn't focused on raw sequential throughput yet. Off the shelf SSDs get the much vaunted performance of "Apple's" SSDs (they're just normal SSDs...) being discussed in this thread.

In fact, the SSDs in those windows computers are as fast as the one I've linked to. The benchmark you were linking to was benchmarking NTFS vs APFS under a small file I/O workload, which NTFS sucks at. It was not benchmarking the SSDs in any effective manner. I am certain that I pointed this out in my comment above! If those laptops were copying a few large files, the performance would have been identical. If those laptops were running Linux, the performance would have been identical.

Look here! https://www.anandtech.com/show/12167/the-microsoft-surface-b...

Scroll to the bottom and tell me what you see! Yes, that SSD is performing as well as your vaunted MacBook!

Apple's iPad Pros are technological marvels. Their laptops' storage systems are not, and you're just deceiving yourself if you think otherwise.

[icanhackit]

> On the other, I remember the Power days. Having non Mac users “talk down” to me about using a different processor was beyond annoying.

Sample size of one and all that - but for me it was a selling point. The PowerPC G5 (PPC 970) was intriguing when it first came out. Having been with Intel, Cyrix and AMD systems since the 286 and used them since XT (Intel 8088) days, it was nice to muck around with something new and paired with OSX Tiger it was such a fun world to explore. The move to Intel felt like a bit of a letdown, but by that time I loved OSX and Snow Leopard cemented it as my OS of choice.

Apple desktops/laptops moving to custom silicon would excite the nerd in me. I want competition.

[philwelch]

Moving to Intel chips did two or three things for Apple:

1. It helped them jump from a failing CPU platform to a non-failing CPU platform. PPC was not keeping up with x86 anymore and Apple's two PPC vendors were going in opposite directions because there wasn't enough of a market for CPU's for Macs. (There were even rumors of future Power Macs migrating to a full POWER CPU rather than PPC.)

2. It meant you could run Windows, and hence Windows apps, on your Mac if you wanted to, without CPU emulation. This is still a fairly important use case.

3. It may have also simplified matters even for Mac application development, since you didn't have to switch ISA's in addition to switching operating systems. Making matters worse, PowerPC defaults to big-endian and x86 is little-endian.

How does this apply to a potential ARM switch?

1. You can't really say x86 is "failing" if it's still the industry standard, but Apple might believe (rightly so, given the market size of iOS) that they finally have the ability to sustainably outperform the performance of x86 on their A-series chips.

Most of the PowerPC bet was that a newer and more elegant architecture would outperform x86 and provide Apple a competitive advantage, and while that may have occasionally been true sometimes, it was never a huge deciding factor. Intel and ARM kept up because they were able to make investments in keeping x86 afloat. Ironically, Intel themselves also bet that a newer, more elegant architecture would make x86 obsolete, namely Itanium, only for AMD to invent x86-64. Not even Intel themselves could stop the x86 train.

With the rise of mobile devices, ARM now has the same market power as x86, if not more, simply because there are many more ARM-based devices manufactured and sold than PC's. Apple in particular has been able to invest heavily in their A-series chips and has full control of their CPU roadmap and destiny. Perhaps this time, x86 may finally be rendered obsolete. Don't count on it, though.

2. This is really mostly dependent on Apple's strategic priorities. With more and more application functionality moving to mobile and the web, being able to run Windows is less and less important. At the same time, being able to run Linux is more important; for many developers, running a Linux VM in Vagrant or Docker lets us develop in a similar environment to the servers our code will eventually run on. Sure, you can run Linux itself on ARM, and perhaps there will be more Linux distros that support ARM when and if Apple switches the Mac, but it won't actually be the same as the server unless ARM makes serious inroads in the server market.

Maybe they're betting they can surpass x86 enough that they could emulate x86 at respectable speeds. Since they would be migrating CPUs again, they will probably provide a CPU emulation layer again, like they did when migrating from 68k to PowerPC and then from PowerPC to x86. Keeping this emulation layer around would have more of a benefit because, after awhile, nobody needed to run 68k or PowerPC code anymore. This has never been true for x86 code, and it won't be for a long time, so look for Macs to continue to run x86 even if Apple switches.

3. I think A-series is also little-endian by default, and for x86, see above. Maybe Apple is banking on getting more value by running cross-platform iOS/Mac apps than cross-platform Windows/Mac apps. This will probably impact Mac gaming the most, but that's never been a priority for Apple.

[nicoburns]

Note: there's also an ARM version of windows. Although it lacks full backwards compatibility with the x86 version.

[mtgx]

Apple is already blocking Linux installations on new hardware via the T2 chip, so I'm getting the feeling Apple doesn't care much about Linux support on its laptops.

[philwelch]

The T2 stops you from booting Linux, unless you specifically disable that functionality, but if you read closely you’ll notice I was mostly talking about running Linux in a VM, which actually is a common use case.