Intel Puts Apple's 'Mac Guy' Into New Ads Praising PCs (theverge.com) 243
Intel has hired Apple's former "I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long to create new ads praising PCs. From a report: Long starts each commercial with "Hello I'm a... Justin," with the typical white background you'd find on Apple's Mac vs. PC ads from the 2000s. Naturally, the ads focus on Mac vs. PC again, with Long mocking Apple's Touch Bar, lack of M1 multiple monitor support, and the "gray and grayer" color choices for a MacBook. One even goes all-in on Apple's lack of touchscreens in Macs or 2-in-1 support by mocking the fact you have to buy a tablet, keyboard, stylus, and even a dongle to match what's available on rival Intel-based laptops. Another ad also points out that "no one really games on a Mac." Intel has put out more ads where they point out that Mac doesn't have the gaming ecosystem that Windows laptops enjoy.
Intel is really freaking out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intel is really freaking out (Score:5, Interesting)
In a way, I'd also argue this demonstrates Intel's fundamental internal problems. They're running an ad campaign which plays off an Apple ad campaign that ended *over a decade ago*. Many people likely don't even remember that Justin Long was in those Mac ads - if they recall the ads at all.
It's like the old axiom: If you have to explain a joke, the joke has failed.
On a side note, it also stresses how SOL Intel will be if (or maybe I should say "when") Microsoft moves whole hog over to ARM processors.
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On a side note, it also stresses how SOL Intel will be if (or maybe I should say "when") Microsoft moves whole hog over to ARM processors.
Could only happen when the performance overhead of emulating x86 apps on ARM is acceptable, so not any time soon. Closed-source and multi-arch just don't mix. I'd also morn the replacement of UEFI/BIOS with binary BSP blobs.
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What makes you think that emulating x86 is a requirement for a move to ARM? Emulation is fine as is for anything but applications that hammer the CPU, mostly games. If Microsoft does move to ARM, game publishers will follow.
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There's more used in the office than CRUDware, CAD software and video editing software would be far too slow when emulated, photo and audio editing software could be slowed down badly as well. And that's not even getting into server-side software, Exchange is terrible enough on the type of hardware it was coded for...
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There's more used in the office than CRUDware, CAD software and video editing software would be far too slow when emulated
But because this is translation rather than emulation you don't suffer those speed problems. It's not going to be as fast as something that is optimized for the native instruction set but it's certainly fast enough as a stop gap while vendors move to arm natively:
Maya [youtube.com], ArchiCAD/AutoCAD [youtube.com].
Re:Intel is really freaking out (Score:5, Insightful)
Could only happen when the performance overhead of emulating x86 apps on ARM is acceptable, so not any time soon. Closed-source and multi-arch just don't mix. I'd also morn the replacement of UEFI/BIOS with binary BSP blobs.
On M1 it is well acceptable.
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Emulated code on M1 is often faster than on native intel chips.
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Interesting, starting to see why Intel's shitting their pants now. I'm starting to wonder about the FLOPS-per-watt of an M1 vs. a good x86 CPU for x86 tasks.
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Sorry but this is complete bollocks.
If you look at emulated x86 performance on M1 in benchmarks it's 30% below mid range mobile Ryzenn in single core, and a small fraction multi core.
Re: Intel is really freaking out (Score:2)
1. M1 is entry level
2. Ryzen isnâ(TM)t Intel
This puts Intel third?
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Could only happen when the performance overhead of emulating x86 apps on ARM is acceptable, so not any time soon.
Funny, Apple seems to have done a damn fine job of exactly that, first try.
Too bad MS doesn't have as talented of Developers as Apple.
And that's even though Apple and MS are reportedly using the same basic concept of "Pre-Execution Translation" (not "Emulation").
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Could only happen when the performance overhead of emulating x86 apps on ARM is acceptable, so not any time soon.
Apple's Rosetta 2 does a pretty decent job of it, I haven't tried Microsoft's solution but I have heard it's performance is lacking somewhat at the moment.
The performance of Rosetta 2 is good enough that people can switch to arm-based Macs and it buys time for software vendors to rebuild their applications for it natively.
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Yeah, this says far more about Intel's bitterness than it does about the difference between products. Literally every one of the observations made are observations where Apple was one of the first companies to introduce similar features: the colour explosion of Macs in the early 2000s, the Retina Display, and Face ID. Criticizing Apple for starting a trend that PC companies have tried, and generally failed, to emulate in the same quality, says "keeping up with the Joneses" is the only thing Intel thinks P
Re:Intel is really freaking out (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple stopped showing those Ads shortly after Windows 7 came out. and was shown to be a good OS. Also with the popularity of the iPhone across consumer and business sectors the "Look at me the scrappy underdog who is better than the big guy" type of ad's didn't fly much anymore.
The I am a Mac and I am a PC Ad campaign, was a sign of the times, where Apple (while growing again) was much smaller in terms of money and market share than Microsoft where MS Dominance of the PC seemed like a sure thing. That campaign was to assure people that switching to a Mac wouldn't be a big deal, and you are not going to be loosing out on much, but actually be gaining a lot.
That campaign doesn't seem to be a good idea.
1. Justin Long is older. Yes ageism and other stuff... But he was young and hip, now he is a bit older and out of date (What we currently think of Intel)
2. You are giving attention to Apple. Apple has a sleek new chip that a lot of people say is much faster than what Intel has to offer. Many people (including me) may have been off Macs for a while because we found that we could get more powerful Laptops from other vendors for less (because it has the specs we are interested, and can choose from a larger variety, not that Macs are actually that much more expensive to compatible PC's). Apple targeted generic PC's which everyone knew about, and hoped people would compare the two and find out that Apple may be a better fit for them. Intel probably doesn't want that.
3. You had just pissed off Vendor Loyal People. We had other companies try and fail to bad mouth Apple, where all it did was galvanize the Fan Boys to go against you.
This is a bit different than Sprint Using the "Can you hear me now" guy from the old Verizon commercials. As it is the smaller historical brand name mocking the larger one, as well the old one was about coverage, which is no longer such a big issue anymore doesn't play much in giving a bad message.
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I just watched the first ad and the gist of it is that Windows PCs come in a bunch of colors and Macs come in two shades of gray.
That's what you do when your CPU technology sucks and you want to divert attention to something irrelevant.
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Uh, Apple just revived the ad campaign a few months ago when they announced the M1 macs...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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It shows, however, that Apple believes people will still remember the original ads. I do agree that Intel's new commercials are kind of dumb, but I don't agree with the rest of the premise of the grandparent post.
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True, but it's also more likely to be true that many Apple fans will remember those ads since Apple fans tend to be loyal and so have stuck with Apple for a long time. But, again, since it wasn't a real ad campaign (and also pretty clearly tongue-in-cheek), Apple, unlike Intel, isn't hoping it will actually lead to increased sales. It was just to inject some fun into a presentation given during a pandemic when the world coul
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In a way, I'd also argue this demonstrates Intel's fundamental internal problems. They're running an ad campaign which plays off an Apple ad campaign that ended *over a decade ago*. Many people likely don't even remember that Justin Long was in those Mac ads - if they recall the ads at all.
Do they need to recall them to understand how bad Macs are?
If you recall them, it's icing on the cake. If you don't? No biggie.
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On a side note, it also stresses how SOL Intel will be if (or maybe I should say "when") Microsoft moves whole hog over to ARM processors.
That might be a while considering MS was using ARM with Windows RT in 2012. With their current SQ1 chips, Windows on ARM is still nothing to write home about. Maybe in the next decade, they will make some progress. :)
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[...] Many people likely don't even remember that Justin Long was in those Mac ads - if they recall the ads at all.
I do not know, the Verizon guy went to T-Mobil to somewhat good effect.
On a side note, it also stresses how SOL Intel will be if (or maybe I should say "when") Microsoft moves whole hog over to ARM processors.
For a long while, the will not even notice the lack of windows clients, bussy as they will be with the frequent trips laughing all the way to the bank to deposit the income from Servers, Clouds and 5G basestation and Core gear.
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Intel has made a lot of mistakes in the last decade and they are definitely eating humble pie because of it. But the M1 is only better for Apple. Such a chip, configured as it is couldn't really work in PC's. Apple gets some very good performance because they leverage a lot of specialized instructions and fixed function hardware that is specifically tailored to their stack and their prescribed use case. Like everything else they do it all works great together. A best case demonstration of vertical integrati
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Does anyone think an M1 can do everything a Ryzen can?
Why not?
Does a Ryzen CPU not spend its entire life emulating an x64 architecture?
Re:Intel is really freaking out (Score:4, Insightful)
When you say "specialized instructions" which ones are you talking about?
If I was privy to Apple's ISA extensions and compiler optimizations I would be under NDA and couldn't discuss them. Everyone who designs their own chips and development stack does it. I don't need to know the specifics to know they do it just like Intel and AMD do.
, it does have specialized co-processors just like in a PC, Nvidia's NVENC for example and AMD has something similar.
Yup, that's a good example of the kind of specialized fixed function hardware I'm talking about. Most GPUs include hardware decoders for popular video formats as well and its very apparent when your GPU is obsolete because Youtube etc starts eating cpu instead. Apple also supposedly does this for encoding as well to allow the iPhone and iPad (and presumably the M1 as well) encode video in their chosen format efficiently and effectively.
What tasks are you saying it wouldn't be suitable for and what fundamentally about it would make it unsuitable?
A likely use case for Macs that I think it will have trouble at is encoding video in a format that Apple didn't include dedicated logic for. Real estate on the silicon is finite and dedicated logic is space inefficient so they are going to limit that to what gets the best bang for buck. That works just fine when you are using iMovie with the stock settings but someone using Premier and exporting in a more special purpose or niche format will run into problems. In the Mac Pro and PC worlds this is solved by GPUs which not only include their own hardware encoders like NVENC but are also naturally better at video encoding by the nature of their architecture. Modern GPUs are at the extreme end of MIMD and video encoding lends itself well to that.
M1 only has its integrated GPU. Granted, it isn't a bad integrated GPU, in raw FLOPS its roughly on par with a mid range dedicated gaming gpu from a decade ago. That makes it better than the old Intel Iris IGP, but everything is better than that. Its comparable to AMD's Vega based IGPs in raw numbers but there's more to graphics performance than flops so we'll see how it stacks up in the real world. Vega is also on its way out, soon to be replaced by Navi based IGPs which should be much more capable.
Currently M1 based systems do not allow for eGPUs, internal DGPUs are right out because you cant physically fit them in a Macbook or Mac Mini. I don't consider either of those the kinds of machines that "pros" would be using anyways. So if or when Apple makes an M1 based Mac Pro it had better support internal DGPU or EGPU or its sunk.
I also don't like how they've done the memory for a few reasons. I am in principle against unified memory being shared between CPU and GPU. What makes good system memory and good graphics memory are different things which means you will always have a suboptimal compromise with a unified pool. It also means you have less memory than you think you do. Its a cost cutting measure used in gaming consoles that are built to a price point and not something serious compute devices should do.
The way they've done it also tells me that the memory is tightly tied to the SoC in such a way as to make scaling difficult. People complain that the ram is soldered as if Apple just did it to prevent upgrades. They did, they hate using hardware for more than three years. But they didn't just do it for sales. Its as much an engineering decision as it is a revenue driver. I don't think the M1 as it is right now could function with memory slots and arbitrary JEDEC compliant DDR4 modules.
What is it that you're suggesting a Ryzen can do that an M1 can't? I mean aside from natively running x86 instructions of course.
Well use dedicated GPUs, work with off the shelf commodity memory and support memory beyond 16GiB. And support highspeed I/O. Ryzen is the best option in the consumer space if you want PCIe lanes right now. Intel always segmented their market on PCIe and as far as I can tell M1 has next to none. How many use cases can you think of that require any of those things? I can think of a lot.
I don't think their CPU is better (Score:2)
That said, Intel's still good enough, and I still can't do a lot of gaming on a Mac. That's unlikely to change, especially as long on x86 owns 2 out of 3 consoles (with the last one being an afterthoug
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Right now even if you don't think Apple is eating Intel's lunch, AMD certainly is. Their desktop CPUs are faster than Intel and use half the power. Their laptop CPUs are maybe twice as fast with less power consumption. Their EPYC CPUs make the Xeons look like a bad joke.
I think Intel is attacking Apple because of what's coming, not because their first foray into a low-power CPU is a huge threat. We'll see though. Most people who pick a Mac laptop aren't trying to decide if they want Windows or not. Th
Intel plays hardball (Score:2)
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Intel has to go after Apple because they can't compete with AMD anymore. They are behind in they category: performance, power consumption/battery life and integrated graphics.
The only advantage they hadn't now is Thunderbolt. AMD need to get their act together on that. They are taking about next year.
Hire the runner (Score:2)
Re:Hire the runner (Score:5, Funny)
At this point she's probably using a walker.
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It's a $600 option.
Re: Hire the runner (Score:2)
It's been nearly 40 years scince that famous ad, so..yeah.
Of course, they can always use a CGI recreation which, depending on whether she is alive or not, may not dip too far into the "Uncanny Valley."
I think a modern "look alike" would be a better choice tho.
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And as she used to do sports, she is probably as beautiful as ever: just a bit older.
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Her name is Anya Major [imdb.com]. Definitely not using a walker (yet)...
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At this point she's probably using a walker.
Seems fitting, at this point so are the latest Intel chips. :)
(I prefer AMD.)
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At this point she's probably using a walker.
You made my day!
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That actually would be super cool!
Nice... (Score:2)
Intel has put out more ads where they point out that Mac doesn't have the gaming ecosystem that Windows laptops enjoy.
Gaming has a fiercely enthusiastic bunch of loyalists who think it is the be all and end all of computing. But Gaming is not what drives the vast majority of PC sales. Boring crap like word processing, e-mail, basic image processing and beyond all else Facebooking, Youtube and surfing (especially for porn) drives PC sales.
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Gaming is the only thing an average home user might have to lose from switching away from Windows though.
Re: Nice... (Score:2)
Companies want to go as cheap as they can when it comes to the average, mundane office, so this is why you find offices filled with Dells or HPs, even if they might not be the 'best' PCs out there.
Because they are regulated to "boring office tasks", they don't need fancy graphics cards, or super fast processors. As long as they can run M$ Word or access the company's database, a humdrum, no frills PC will do.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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This, and they don't even have that much to be insecure about. The M1 is a super-oddball CPU that's a long way from running anything but Apple's OS and its performance is good, sure, but there's nothing really amazing about it. People are hardly going to be cross-shopping M1 Macs and Intel PCs specifically. Intel's bigger threat is whatever AMD's making these days. The last two computers I bought for myself and the last one I built for a customer all had AMD CPUs, nothing I would've considered an M1 for.
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Intel can't argue on the merits of their CPUs and instead have to argue things that aren't really related to their CPUs and instead related to hardware and software that they have little to do with.
Heck, AMD could come along an equivalent advert, but target at Intel: "Intel may game better than Apple, but AMD games better than Intel".
Re: Reeks of insecurity (Score:2)
They did push the "Ultrabook" form factor. Which honestly was better than "Netbook" which were really crappy (mostly thanks to underpowered Intel Atom CPUs). Of course they only did so years after Apple released the Macbook Pro and Macbook Air (2008).
Mac with Windows is best (Score:4, Insightful)
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A 2013 Mac can run the 2021 Big Sur. It's not like they are deprecating quickly here.
https://support.apple.com/en-u... [apple.com]
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I'm running Mojave on a Mid-2010 MacBook Pro. Not officially supported, but it works. It still gets security updates, and can still run most of the latest software, the main exception is VMWare, which needs a more modern CPU for the latest versions.
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It's always amused me that the best way to revive an older Intel Mac with a modern OS is to throw Windows on it.
Though you don't have to go back very many years before the first Intel Mac to start getting into processors that Windows 10 won't run on. (It won't run on CPUs that lack NX, PAE or SSE2.)
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With the money you spent on a mac though, you can buy a *better* quality PC, and you won't have to deal with Apple's one-size-fits-all problem.
Intel points fingers ... (Score:2)
All this as tiny AMD's server chips consistently beat giant Intel's top offering. Ask serious gamers.
And these last few years, we have been hearing about several serious security flaws baked almost all of into Intel's chips. Some can be repaired at BIOS level, others can not. Permanent vulnerabilities, only recently disclosed.
Now Apple has their own RISC chip. Even less market share for Intel.
No wonder Intel are pointing fingers at Apple.
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I found it amusing that the PC gamer in their video was using a gamepad. It's clear that the ad was (at least partially) targeting people who aren't PC gamers.
Quote common actually signed, a pc gamer who uses xbox pc controllers
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I found it amusing that the PC gamer in their video was using a gamepad. It's clear that the ad was (at least partially) targeting people who aren't PC gamers.
Quite common actually. I'm a PC gamer, and always have a pair of xbox controllers around. My kids use them almost exclusively.
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I found it amusing that the PC gamer in their video was using a gamepad. It's clear that the ad was (at least partially) targeting people who aren't PC gamers.
Quite common actually. I'm a PC gamer, and always have a pair of xbox controllers around. My kids use them almost exclusively.
You're not a real PC gamer unless you have a gaming mouse, controller, HOTAS setup, VR setup, mechanical keyboard that can wake the dead, dual RTX 3090 and 240 Hz 4K monitor.
One funny thing about those old Mac ads (Score:5, Funny)
Back then, I thought it somewhat amusing when I found out that - in real life - John Hodgman was an avid Mac fan, while Justin Long preferred Windows. But both played their parts well.
So Intel ist beating on Apple from the 2000s? (Score:3)
Figures.
Nothing like a turncoat... (Score:2)
A shill's a shill. Gotta make that money.
Re:Nothing like a turncoat... (Score:4, Informative)
Dude's just an actor, he makes his living playing different roles.
I mean, John Hodgman was a Mac user in real life, even while he was saying "I'm a PC" in the ads. Was he a shill?
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It definitely falls in the category of “You keep using that word (shill)... I do not believe it means what you think it means.”
A shill is an “enthusiastic customer” — anybody in an advertisement can’t be a shill by definition.
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It definitely falls in the category of “You keep using that word (shill)... I do not believe it means what you think it means.”
A shill is an “enthusiastic customer” — anybody in an advertisement can’t be a shill by definition.
Not really. "shilling" is the act of (fraudulently) praising a product, usually while pretending to be an actual customer rather than a paid speaker. In common usage it is frequently applied to celebrity spokespersons.
shill /SHil/
informalNorth American
noun: shill; plural noun: shills
an accomplice of a hawker, gambler, or swindler who acts as an enthusiastic customer to entice or encourage others.
verb
verb: shill; 3rd person present: shills; past tense: shilled; past participle: s
Dude, kick a** (Score:2)
"Missing You" (Score:2)
"Every time I think of you
I always catch my breath
And I'm still standing here
And you're miles away
And I'm wondering why you left"
"I ain't missing you at all
Since you've been gone away
I ain't missing you
No matter what my friends say"
"I ain't missing you
I ain't missing you
I can lie to myself"
Remember when Intel said even if they lost Apple, it wouldn't matter much since Apple didn't contribute much to their revenue?
Re: "Missing You" (Score:2)
And their latest CPUs are 300 watts of latency inducing redesigns:
https://www.anandtech.com/show... [anandtech.com]
"Our results clearly show that Intelâ(TM)s performance, while substantial, still trails its main competitor, AMD. In a core-for-core comparison, Intel is slightly slower and a lot more inefficient. The smart money would be to get the AMD processor."
The M1 chip... (Score:2)
... is pretty amazing and it's only the initial version. Intel, you had the initiative and couldn't deliver.
I play on the markets and make money (Score:2)
The advertisement I want to see (Score:2)
Is where a gang of bearded weirdos breaks into Mac & PC guy's office and installs a different Linux distro on each machine.
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Is where a gang of bearded weirdos breaks into Mac & PC guy's office and installs a different Linux distro on each machine.
You know that’s not true. Those guys would be installing BSD. Linux is too mainstream.
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I'll have you know I was using Linux before it was mainstream. *adjusts hipster glasses*
Revenge for the Pentium II snail adverts (Score:2)
Intel isn't for business laptops? (Score:2)
In these ads, I see a focus on games and a focus on the colours of different laptops and...
What about those of us who need a good, solid, reliable laptop for business? For literally decades, I used laptops made by Lenovo, HP and Acer that were basically all charcoal grey and designed for road warriors but it seems I'm now out of step with Intel with looking for these attributes in a laptop.
For almost 10 years now, I've had a basic MacBook Air as my primary business laptop and have loved it. It's kinda
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Replace the battery, it is just $75 or so ....
Re: Intel isn't for business laptops? (Score:2)
Get a laptop with AMD CPU or APU if you need to do work. No battery life killing security flaw mitigations. Better performance and longer battery life.
Pick a viable alternative, not Microsoft. (Score:5, Insightful)
A shot in the foot (Score:3)
It would show the disparity even more if (Score:2)
Apple brought back an ad with John Hodgeman and it was entertaining.
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This. Hodgman's been saying for years that he's ready and willing to get paid to do more Apple ads.
Underwhelming... (Score:2)
This doesn't bode well for Intel.
Wait... no multi monitor support on M1? (Score:2)
Re:Apple can't repair, can't upgrade, over priced, (Score:5, Funny)
Apple can't repair, can't upgrade, over priced, and soon to remove all NON m1 software.
Apparently Apple is also shortening your lifespan by spiking your adrenaline levels, making you lose your shit and sending you into a fit of hysterical rage and hatred ever time you see one of their logos.
Re:Apple can't repair, can't upgrade, over priced, (Score:5, Insightful)
The hate for Apple here is unreal. If the company makes such bad products then why do they sell so many?
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I’d say designing their own cpu is pretty innovative.
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The hate for Apple here is unreal. If the company makes such bad products then why do they sell so many?
They're extremely well made, but even better locked down.
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They have Rosetta 2, why at all should they care to remove compatible software?
Just if to promote benefits of the native.
Re:Apple can't repair, can't upgrade, over priced, (Score:4, Insightful)
Apple can't repair, can't upgrade,
Have you tried to repair or upgrade an x86 laptop? They are origami puzzles that make all but seasoned repair professional despair.
over priced
True but they aren't the only ones guilty of this.
and soon to remove all NON m1 software.
This is unlikely since they have invested so much in making a compatibility layer. It's more likely that eventually they will not support the compatibility layer on new hardware and thus causing software to be ported lest it become inaccessible to a growing segment of Mac users.
I don't care for Apple but your argument is weak.
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Not really, they're not hard to open at all. I've opened almost all laptops me or my wife have owned, if only to upgrade the memory or add another SSD drive (many laptops have an empty drive bay if they came with an SSD because the SSD will be in an M.2 slot).
I'm just a software developer that is half decent with a screw driver.
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Not really, they're not hard to open at all. I've opened almost all laptops me or my wife have owned, if only to upgrade the memory or add another SSD drive (many laptops have an empty drive bay if they came with an SSD because the SSD will be in an M.2 slot).
I'm just a software developer that is half decent with a screw driver.
Oooh! How impressive! (NOT!)
You removed the bottom-plate and accessed the made-to-be-accessible parts. I have done that on many Apple laptops, back when such things were replaceable.
Now, use that same skillset to replace the WiFi module in your "PC" laptop. I'll wait...