Apple is an existential threat to the PC

[MfA]

The documentation is just for an interface, it doesn't have to actually do anything with a motion vector input at the moment. Or it can just use the motion vectors for TAA, but not for the upscaling.

That's why precision is important, the distinguishing factor for DLSS 2.0 and XeSS is Motion Compensated Interpolation ... not it being temporal.

 

[Entropy]

Fer Crissakes, this confusion is totally redundant. Watch their developer video for easy to follow details. (In fact it’s the clearest video I’ve seen on the subject detailing not only how stuff works, but best practices for jitter, mip bias settings, and render pipeline optimization.)

 

[wco81]

Didn't see the WWDC keynote but Apple has announced big improvements to their graphics stacks over the years.

Is there any reason to think this time will be different?

They're not going to make consoles and the Mac is not going to attract all the AAA games the PC or consoles will.

They will make a lot of money from mobile games, some pushing the graphics on their devices but that's about it.

Hell do they even have much traction with Apple Arcade?

 

[MfA]

They're not going to make consoles

Why not? Apple TV sells decently and it would be a package deal.

The only good reason not to is to prevent more anti-trust attention.

 

[Pressure]

Finally someone doing thorough testing and perhaps a spiritual successor to AnandTech as it stands right now.

Battery life really shows how well the M2 fares with mixed workloads.

 

[MfA]

Youtube clickbait farmers good for anything, I kind of doubt it, but I will never know unless you volunteer to type out their testing methods.

 

[Pressure]

Youtube clickbait farmers good for anything, I kind of doubt it, but I will never know unless you volunteer to type out their testing methods.

Yeah, it would be helpful if they also had written reviews.

Anyway, their battery life test consists of periodically cycling through an array of applications in 1 hour controlled by a script giving each application 10 minutes focus time, while simultaneous streaming music in the background.

The applications used are web browsing, streaming video, Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint and Word), instant messaging and the aforementioned music streaming.

 

[MfA]

Something seems a bit screwy there, on pure browsing tests modern ultrabooks get way over 12 hours ... something is skyrocketing the power consumption.

Is Windows software decoding 4K VP9 while Apple is playing back a hardware accelerated format?

 

[Pressure]

Something seems a bit screwy there, on pure browsing tests modern ultrabooks get way over 12 hours ... something is skyrocketing the power consumption.

Is Windows software decoding 4K VP9 while Apple is playing back a hardware accelerated format?

They calibrated all the screens to 160 nits, no peripherals connected, using the same WiFi network. The process was automated through a Python script.

The site they stream video from is called BiliBili.

 

[Albuquerque]

I'll be honest, I believe the numbers as-presented and I'm absolutely NOT a Mac guy.

There's very much something to be said about owning the entire delivery pipeline from bare metal to software UX. Apple can tailor every single part of their stack to precisely match software to hardware in a way that Microsoft will never be able to achieve. I have an example anecdote from my own laptop experience that I'll share here...

About four years ago (ish?) I bought a Gigabyte Aero 15x v8 -- has the six core / twelve thread i7 8750H at 2.2GHz base / 4.something GHz boost, 16GB of DDR 2667 CL18 memory, a 512GB NVMe drive, switchable 1070MaxQ video powering a 1080p 144Hz screen, Intel BT and wireless modules, and some other stuff like a fully programmable RGB backlit keyboard and blah-de-blah. It showed up with Win10 Home and I bumped it to Win10 pro with an upgrade key I purchased for cheap.

When that laptop first arrived, the max battery time was about 3.5 hours on a ~95Whr battery! What the actual fuck? I thought for sure something was amiss, so I went on a tirade to upgrade all the drivers and firmware to most current, and it still didn't matter. I finally gave up, took a backup of the OE image, then fully wiped it and relaoded it with a clean image and loaded only the minimum drivers necessary to make it work correctly and only using drivers from the hardware manufacturer (eg I downloaded the Intel chipset and iGPU and BT and wireless drivers directly from Intel, the NVIDIA mobile driver directly from NVIDIA) and -- surprising to nobody who has ever done this before -- immediately found nine full hours of battery life. A little bit of tinkering with ThrottleStop later and I could reliably get >10 hours from that laptop websurfing while still getting excellent performance from the dGPU when I wanted it.

The root cause of the shit-tastic battery performance out-of-the-box was a horrible Windows power configuration profile and the "pretty" power management console app thing that Gigabyte loaded. With additional testing, I discovered I could load up basically the rest of the laptop with all the Gigabyte tools except for that shitty power management UI thing they provide and it would behave "normally." Interesting story though, it was still a 95Whr battery and it still "only" got about 10 hours of life in normal browsing. The Top Four power suckers were the backlight on the screen, followed by the fans that can literally never turn off, then the wireless card, finally the NVMe drive.

Apple can legit fix every single piece of this failure stack by tailoring their entire hardware, OS, driver, an application toolchain to maximize every part of the offload and acceleration stack from start to stop. Even in Microsoft's Surface devices it still seems like Microsoft isn't able to hit the necessary sweet spot because they're sourcing hardware from vendors who are pulling off-the-shelf parts rather than something uniquely tailor-made just for the Surface use case.

 

[MfA]

PC Shipments Are Still on the Decline - Unless You're Apple - Slashdot

Global PC shipments declined in calendar Q3 by 15 percent year-on-year thanks to reduced demand and lingering supply chain issues, according to number cruncher IDC. From a report: The Q3 slowdown is similar to that seen in Q2 2022, when shipments crashed by 15.3 percent year-on-year. The slowed...

hardware.slashdot.org

Intel Plans Thousands of Job Cuts In Face of PC Slowdown - Slashdot

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Intel is planning a major reduction in headcount, likely numbering in the thousands, to cut costs and cope with a sputtering personal-computer market, according to people with knowledge of the situation. The layoffs will be announced as early...

hardware.slashdot.org

I think the hardware manufacturers dependent on Microsoft not being incompetent and Google having a real future (other than as very large distraction from Apple's monopoly, kept on life support) are in for a bad awakening. Server and AI won't be their saving grace. Hyperscalers are increasingly in-housing hardware, even when they buy from AMD/Intel it will not be with the fat margins they were used to. I could see Intel splitting up into a foundry service to offer competition to TSMC and fabless processor designer doing mostly work for hire for the hyperscalers.

Time is running out, modern ecosystem are a stronger force tying people to Apple than Office ever was for Windows. Cloud storage ties people to ecosystem, cross device identity and payment services ties people to ecosystem, airtags ties people to ecosystem (small competitors just can't offer as comprehensive a wifi/bluetooth overlay network). The time to form a true ecosystem competitor to Apple is running out. Between them Samsung, Microsoft and Google still have the market share for some true competitors to form, but they are all held back by their legacy ties. Windows is tied to a bad hardware model and a disastrous foray into mobile making them gunshy, Samsung is tied to Google and Google is tied to advertising.

 

[PSman1700]

If MS/Windows is on its way dying out or not i have no idea, though the current decline in market sales could have to do with the pandemic as the article states that the sales volumes are still above the 2019 figures. Demand increased significantly during the pandemic, while cooling down 'after' the pandemic.

 

[MfA]

No reason to assume the market share shift isn't permanent and going to continue to move in the same direction. Partly because of ecosystem forces and partly because of the amazing PR Apple gets. People think Macbooks get double the battery life at this point. Even though as long as everything is going smoothly software/firmware wise modern ultrabooks can keep up just fine (the screwed up hardware model of Windows doesn't help keeping things running smoothly).

Microsoft doesn't depend on Windows nearly as much as all its partners by the way, they'll be fine. Windows is going to stick around corporate servers almost indefinitely and Office, Azure, etc will keep Microsoft alive well enough.

 

[PSman1700]

Microsoft will be fine i guess, though i think they dont want to lose the whole consumer (windows) market either, should be a large chunk of their worth still. But yea, macbooks offer both battery and performance while tying in well with ipads, iphones, apple watches etc. I usually recommend apple devices to elderly just because its so seamless and not having to explain anything basically. Samsung has made progress there but their long ways of being 'there'.

The death of Windows for the consumer if it occurs, it will be a while before that happens. And when it does i wouldnt mind it because if it dies off then theres good reason for it to happen. Games/software and even hardware would have to adapt then so gamers wont be missing anything i hope.

 

[wco81]

Yeah and MS is about to have a big launch event for Surface.

But they will be making billions or tens of billions every year from all those Office or Office360 or whatever their cloud productivity product is called nowadays.

Even if people all go WFH, people will still use Office to crank out reports, PowerPoints, etc. They will do it over Zoom or Teams or whatever.


Apple is doing okay for now since they're still closer to the start of the ARM transition. They still skim the cream of the market as far as disposable income, able to sell enough Macs at high ASPs.

But iPhones are the crown jewels and that will only be big as long as the super cycle of upgrades last. Their SOC performance jumps have slowed way down and soon fab process gains should hit a wall? Or people decide that cameras have become good enough and iPhone camera in 3-4 years from now aren't going to be that much better (unless they have some kind of accordion housing and telescoping lens assemblies or something).

This is speaking as an AAPL shareholder for decades.

 

[Pressure]

People think Macbooks get double the battery life at this point. Even though as long as everything is going smoothly software/firmware wise modern ultrabooks can keep up just fine (the screwed up hardware model of Windows doesn't help keeping things running smoothly).

Anyone doing mixed workloads will probably get twice the battery life (as shown again and again in reviews) and don't have to battle the operating system by manually having to change your performance levels between "Balanced", "Optimised" or "Performance" at whatever task you need to do that second. It's ridiculous frankly. Idle power levels are just far superior on Aarch64, no two ways about it.

But iPhones are the crown jewels and that will only be big as long as the super cycle of upgrades last. Their SOC performance jumps have slowed way down and soon fab process gains should hit a wall? Or people decide that cameras have become good enough and iPhone camera in 3-4 years from now aren't going to be that much better (unless they have some kind of accordion housing and telescoping lens assemblies or something).

In the semi-annual survey by Piper Sandler on teenagers called "Taking Stock With Teens"* their research shows that "87% of teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone; 31% of teens own an Apple Watch".

They will probably want to try out a Mac computer at some point if they aren't already in that ecosystem. It's clear why influencers and YouTubers get first unboxing and review units before anyone else by Apple.

*The survey only goes out to 14,500 U. S. teens.

 

[snc]

I just want to little brag that I got two new macbook pro with m1 pro chips (14 and 16) and xcode build time is way faster than in my older pro with i7, tough to be honest expected more from battery life

 

[MfA]

Anyone doing mixed workloads will probably get twice the battery life (as shown again and again in reviews)

There's video rundown tests, anecdotal reviews and one semi-structured rundown test with more than just video ... one is a bit hard to say again and again about. Wish WebXPRT 4 came out with a battery life test already, so we had something a little more trustworthy, but alas.

Most anecdotal reviews which compare them against something relatively modern like say Zenbook OLED or recent Lenovo Yoga have Apple winning but not by a huge margin (Rog Zephyrus G14 is also remarkably well designed for battery life). Especially running Zoom a bit seems to put them on even ground.

In the semi-annual survey by Piper Sandler on teenagers called "Taking Stock With Teens"* their research shows that "87% of teens own an iPhone; 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone; 31% of teens own an Apple Watch".

I just don't understand how anyone could read something like this and feel good about it. The usefulness of Apple products is one thing, the monopoly of Apple should scare anyone who is a tech enthusiast (and we're arguing with strangers on the internet about tech, so we all qualify).

The PC and even Android for all their messy development created so much hardware innovation which a vertically integrated monoculture never could. All the companies which Apple acquired for 3D cameras, processor development, AR lens designers etc. were started because there was still a healthy open hardware ecosystem out there. Once a hardware company has to start begging with Apple to please get some access to the one and only closed ecosystem providing all consumer electronics, why even bother? Apple will have them over a barrel and kill their profit potential, better to spend your time on a more competitive market than consumer hardware.

The Apple hardware ecosystem monopoly will be death for innovation.

 

[wco81]

Where does Apple have a monopoly?

I mean sustained over 50% of a geographic market.

 

[homerdog]

Where does Apple have a monopoly?

I mean sustained over 50% of a geographic market.

I think gen z only use iPhones, at least in the US. My understanding is that you get bullied if you send green text messages.

I don't know how this relates, but I've noticed that very young people (<18yo) seem to know less about computers the generation before them. Like if you ask them where a file is stored, they don't even understand the question. It's like they never developed digital object permanence.