this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2023
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306
Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Intel doesn’t think that Arm CPUs will make a dent in the laptop market::"They've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business."

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Apple's laptop segments have been decreasing massively since their switch to custom chips, actually. Could just be timing, or could be that people don't want the hassle.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/10/18/kuo-macbook-sales-down-amid-no-new-products/

[–] nave 41 points 1 year ago

Probably becuase people bought new Mac’s in 2020 and don’t feel like upgrading.

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/10/30/apple-says-strong-mac-sales-led-by-macbook-pro/

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

They swapped to M series chips, what, two years ago? This says sales this year are down due to no new Macs.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hassle?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not everything runs on MacOS with Arm. Some people may not upgrade to M* class chips, and others who may have switched don't want the hassle. I know plenty of developers who went to ThinkPads on Linux instead upgrading to M* architecture and having build issues.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Plenty of developers? Ok, sure. It was rocky for less than a year after they released the M1’s. I barely had any issues on my M1 Max that I got at release and I was just thinking the other day about how in haven’t thought about “will this run” or “oh there’s that thing that doesn’t run” in forever.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Yeah, it really hasn’t been a hassle. At my workplace (software research, lots of which is actually x86-specific) many people have switched to Apple silicon Macs and nobody is looking back. The only issue I’ve noticed that is disruptive in any way is that Apple isn’t really supporting TAP based network adapters which causes trouble once in a while, mostly with certain vpn configurations. Standard development tools like IDEs, compilers, etc have worked since nearly day 1. Basically the only common targets that I wouldn’t develop for is Windows, but even then you can do it in a VM and it’s the fastest way to run windows on ARM still.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

There's a lot of brew packages that messed up when the chips came out. It's still a bit of an issue two years later.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The M1 series was super good and Apple just hasn’t released anything since then worth upgrading to if you have an M1. They’re gaining market share though slowly, which indicates that their sales slump is lower than the market average.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Their selling points for the previous generation are now moot though, so that's why people aren't buying or re-upoing generations:

  • Gaming is null
  • Lots of issues for creators, including codec and transcoding issues (slight fixed if run through Rosetta)
  • Anything GPU-related is under lock and key by Apple drivers, no local AI or inference development.
  • Tons of FOSS projects just won't build and work
  • All of the M* media extensions are only available through XCode

There's just tons of stuff that makes it unattractive to developers. My particular job requires building multi-arch containers and binaries, and it's just a nightmare to dev and test locally. The argument to this point might be "just use cloud", or "use a remote CI build system", bit the point is you shouldn't have to. I can have a machine that does everything I need it to do with another vendor, with way less hassle, and for way cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • Gaming is indeed a big weak point for M series chips. Some games run, but it’s a pretty bad experience overall. Personally I’m insulated from this because I have a gaming PC I can use.
  • I’ve not heard this at all recently. This sounds like it was probably true in late 2020 but afaik creative workflows are quite flushed out at this point.
  • No idea what you’re talking about here. Tools like PyTorch fully support metal for training and inference. llama.cpp fully supports Apple silicon. Apple’s shared memory model gives their GPUs access to huge pools of memory compared to even high end discreet GPUs, and this allows working with models otherwise not possible in a laptop form factor. No other laptop GPU is getting shipped with up to 96GB of memory.
  • Really? This seems like a generally easy thing to fix, what projects (that ran on x86 macOS) are known to be bothersome?
  • This is a barrier to the Asahi Linux folks, and I hope someday the situation improves for them. Otherwise, it’s irrelevant since nearly everything for macOS is gonna be built through Xcode. It’s the system toolchain.

I don’t know exactly what software you use for work, but for simple cases docker desktop uses binfmt-misc to enable Rosetta and qemu-user for containers. This actually makes it really easy to build and test for a bunch of different architectures, x86 but also ppc64le, mips, etc. With x86-64 specifically you get Rosetta for very high performance. I know tools like gdb don’t work right in this environment, but thats not usually part of a typical ci/cd system anyways.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

Quick responses, sorry.

  • gaming is a problem for people who DO want this type of machine, and not a second or console. It's only become an issue with M*
  • Apple has literally thrown an entire engineering group behind their ability to import, export, and transcode media. So much so they even have their own fork of ffmpeg. It's atrocious.
  • PyTorch is CPU with GPU acceleration where applicable, and most devs want direct GPU access. Not possible on Apple hardware. LLMs are kinda dumb, and most people work on imaging inference. Direct access to the hardware for local development is a must.
  • Not sure what you mean, but Rosetta is essentially QEMU emulation, which is insanely slow. I can run a 2m build for something on a native x64 machine, or a 1 hour build through Rosetta. No thanks.
  • This is a power play by Apple thinking people will still buy their stuff and just deal with the inconveniences, but turns out the sales numbers show that is not the case.

In general, the "use containers for everything" is not a good workflow. It's also very subjective to performance on the platform you run it on. Containers all the time is exhausting and problematic for a number of different reasons.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol! No.

Gaming: has just jumped up in a huge way in the last couple of months. The software that's come out recently is amazing. Just run full windows games on your macbook pro? Sure.

Creators: huh? Never heard of this before. Everything seems to run amazingly well.

GPU: except for the local ai stuff that is being done all the time? What? Diffusion Bee doesn't exist now?

Cheaper: well, yeah. Heh. You get that one, for sure. But if money is no object, then... 🤷

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bruh...there is NOTHING about MacOS which invites the ability to run "full windows on your MacBook". I'm not sure form of Bath Salts you're smoking, but you should share that with the rest of the fanboys so they can experience the same delusions as you. Also "gaming has jumped up...in the last couple of months"...jFC those drugs you're on are amazing.

All your other points make zero sense, and it's obvious you are not experienced in software development, so you can go away from me now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I said "full windows games", but yeah, you can also run Windows on it, but that's old news.

Crossover and GTPK. Look it up. Didn't exist like it does now at the start of the year.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Be careful in trying to interpret year over year statistics. Last year was huge for Apple as if you look at Q3 2022 then Apple increased sales 10% while the rest of the PC market dropped a massive 18%.

You're saying "since switching from x86 to ARM apples sales are down! see it was a bad idea!" but actually they have been way way up and are just finally getting inline with the sales decline the rest of the PC industry has had after the covid work from home rush ended.