Araxie
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also is nothing new, it's used from ivy bridge onward..
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Apple could use custom x86 SoC made by AMD
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also is nothing new, it's used from ivy bridge onward..
Are you just making a summary of what I said or something? I don't know what you're trying to do here.
That Apple quality totally explains the 2011 class action lawsuit about Macbook Pros with defective solder or iPhone 5S models with defective battery circuitry or iPhone 6s with defective cameras that take blurry pictures or the best yet, the 27" iMacs that have the entire screen fall off the unit because of defective glue or clips or whatever holds the screen on.
You run an Apple shop? That explains why you love Apple, you get to charge out the ass for both parts and labor to fix the things.
Apple hardware design is terrible, not only because of the defects but because they're designed to be thrown away. Nothing is upgradeable except the OS and if the RAM, SSD, GPU or CPU go bad, that's automatically a new motherboard or a new machine.
TheBlueChanell
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If they could get comparable or better battery life, performance within 10-15% of Intel on the CPU side and good integration for their "iGPU" and leverage the HSA tech within OSX and the rest of their software stack I would be all for this.
Apple would be a good candidate to actually push/adopt/produce good HSA enabled software and they could potentially integrate it vertically from the base/kernel level up to the applications. Don't know off-hand / wonder if they are apart of the HSA Foundation.
I don't care about the past but in the last 5-6 years Apple has been the pinnacle of quality notebook design nothing even came close to touching them in the quality department and ease of use of the trackpad on Mobile. Microsoft JUST started encroaching on that territory with the Surface Book and it's yet to be seen if it's actually the home run everyone hopes and thinks it is.
Intel's UltraBook initiative was a good step forward but it's been almost 4-5 years now and we still haven't seen any OEM release anything as nice / to complete with the MBP. Dell's latest XPS 13/15 come close and the Asus' ZenBook/UX300 come close but they still weren't there.
Apple would be a good candidate to actually push/adopt/produce good HSA enabled software and they could potentially integrate it vertically from the base/kernel level up to the applications. Don't know off-hand / wonder if they are apart of the HSA Foundation.
I don't care about the past but in the last 5-6 years Apple has been the pinnacle of quality notebook design nothing even came close to touching them in the quality department and ease of use of the trackpad on Mobile. Microsoft JUST started encroaching on that territory with the Surface Book and it's yet to be seen if it's actually the home run everyone hopes and thinks it is.
Intel's UltraBook initiative was a good step forward but it's been almost 4-5 years now and we still haven't seen any OEM release anything as nice / to complete with the MBP. Dell's latest XPS 13/15 come close and the Asus' ZenBook/UX300 come close but they still weren't there.
heatlesssun
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All of the early reviews I've read so far indicate that the Surface Book's build quality is as good as there is, including Apple. But being a hybrid, there are issues it has to deal with that conventional laptops don't. If Microsoft had simply made a conventional laptop the issues of the top heaviness and short run time of the tablet section standalone would have been two things that wouldn't come into play.
There are those that wish that Microsoft simply make a conventional laptop that comes in a bit cheaper with the same build quality. There are also those that think that Apple is a bit conservative these days and want Apple to make a real hybrid device that runs a fusion of OS X and iOS.
In the more general market though OEMs have caught up considerably. MacBooks were the gold standard for size, weight, battery, screen and track pads. OEM devices like Dell's XPS 13 and 15 easily match MacBooks on all these counts besides track pads where MacBooks are still considered the gold standard.
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Agreed apple is going to continue to push the envelope to keep getting my money. That said I loathe Windows so I'm hard pressed to move platforms.
So it seems bitsandchips AMD source may be accurate. Another rumor they posted in August suggested AMD was working on an "x86+FPGA+HBM2 combo" for an unknown customer. That rumor seems like it may be true as a AMD FPGA board just showed up on a shipping manifest.
heatlesssun
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I think there's a lot of doubt these days that Apple is pushing the envelope. They make tons of money with yearly incremental releases. They really don't have to push the envelop under these circumstances. They did push a little harder this year with the iPad Pro as iPad sales have been tanking.
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well there are probably a lot of customers like myself who love some of their products (magic keyboard 2, is fantastic, love my iPhone and macbook) but things like the new Surface Book give me pause. But myself, and others are vendor locked in, I've an iPad 4 mini, an iPad air 2, iPhone 6, macbook, apple tv, etc. Jumping ship would be so costly because of all the vertical integration between products. So for me, quality would have to take such a huge dive that, if I am honest, I don't think that's likely, and thus incremental upgrades will be fine.
Apple has a cult following of people who are zealots: they hate MS, hate windows, etc. Then there's those who, like me, have built their homes and family's computing infrastructure around the iPhone and Mac platforms because of "it just works" -- overall everything with Apple just works and the hardware and the like for a long time has been what the industry has looked to copying. And then there are those who just have iPhones and maybe an iPad and those where the transition costs are lower MS could scoop up with their new push into quality hardware.
Apple has a cult following of people who are zealots: they hate MS, hate windows, etc. Then there's those who, like me, have built their homes and family's computing infrastructure around the iPhone and Mac platforms because of "it just works" -- overall everything with Apple just works and the hardware and the like for a long time has been what the industry has looked to copying. And then there are those who just have iPhones and maybe an iPad and those where the transition costs are lower MS could scoop up with their new push into quality hardware.
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hmm...a tightly integrated laptop with 8GB of HBM2, decent graphics, and say 4 real cores could be rad.
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Don't run an apple shop, just never had an issue with any one of my apple products. My sister up until recently used a macbook pro 13 I got like 5 years ago. Only thing I did was add a SSD to it and an extra 4GB of ram. Worked great. She wanted something lighter so she sold it for 500 bucks and then got a macbook Air. Tell me what PC laptop you could sell for 500 after 150 bucks in upgrades after 5 years that you only paid 999 for new?
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Riding apples yang yang much lately? I think their products are top tier shit. Made by slaves, the officers of apple should all get tried for slavery.
Mr. Bluntman
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Fixed the percentage for accuracy, but otherwise QFMFT. This along with the smugness of their user base are the 2 major reasons I staunchly refuse to buy anything from them. There's a YouTube channel by user Louis Rossman that shows how Apple will charge you $750 to replace a $2 part. Utterly disgusting.
Just because you have never experienced an issue doesn't mean anything. You can find hundreds of pages of Google results for defective Apple products and Apple refusing to fix said problems.
You'd have to be a gullible idiot to buy a 5 year old Apple product for anything more than scrap value (ie. less than $10.)
Buying an old Apple product is like buying a used expensive German car like a BMW or Mercades-Benz. The second something breaks you have to write the whole thing off because parts are either non-existent or so expensive that an entirely new machine is cheaper.
If you think the 90% profit margin is a lie:
https://blog.bolt.io/how-it-s-made-...st-about-the-same-to-make-as-the-364cc6808d18
Apple sells these for $199, and I've seen them as high as $280. That's an 894-1300% profit margin. They make equally ridiculous profit margins on other "accessory" items. The margin only goes down when you start looking at actual hardware like phones, laptops, etc.
Irrelevant! Huge discounts only Intel can provide? Intel is not dying for Apple, and amd will most likely give Apple a deal that's how desperately they need market share.
Did you recently notice that all iMacs and all MacBook pros are on and Radeon chips now? So yea amd is in to gain market share. If they can get Apple to buy their graphics chips that will sure give them much need boost in market share that they have lost to nvidia. If Apple can put radeons over GeForce chips then yea they can use amd zen over Intel if performance is significant over excavator which amd said is over 40% ipc
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Gigabite I'm not sure why you're so hell bent on being anti-apple. If you think my purchases of apple of apple products is irrational then so be it. But they happen to meet my needs and I am much more productive on an apple computer than a Windows machine. To each their own dude.
Sure there are many horror stories. I'm sure there are just as many if not more happy customers. Apple fans are not so dumb that failing hardware will keep them using the product after all they have work to do as well. My MacBook is my work laptop that I bought and has served me well. Also should anyone run into legit hardware failures apple care more than pays for itself.
I just imagine you busting a vein trying to crusade against apple and find it funny.
Sure there are many horror stories. I'm sure there are just as many if not more happy customers. Apple fans are not so dumb that failing hardware will keep them using the product after all they have work to do as well. My MacBook is my work laptop that I bought and has served me well. Also should anyone run into legit hardware failures apple care more than pays for itself.
I just imagine you busting a vein trying to crusade against apple and find it funny.
In the 15 years I've run a computer repair business, I've only come across three "Apple fans" that were power users. The rest knew absolutely nothing about their machines and were willing to pay out the nose (and did) to get it working again. Parts are expensive for Apple machines out of warranty if you can even find them, and you're likely to end up where you started in the case of a defect because it will just break again.
I'd argue that "Apple fans" are less smart than average PC users since they're more than willing to pay more for less just because of the brand name. For the same money you spend, you can buy an Intel machine that's 2-3 times faster and have it run OS X on top of that.
At most you get up to 2-3 years for forking up to $350 over to them. From all of the horror stories I've seen of them blaming users for their problems and voiding warranties, I'd question whether it was just extortion or not.
I wouldn't call it a crusade, I'd call it giving good advice. There are lots of shit companies out there and Apple is one of them, so I don't see why I should say otherwise if someone asks me about them and I don't.
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Well I was wrong, you have evidence, you run a repair shop. The only thing I can come back to is my experience, which on the whole, looks to be far less in number than yours, still I can only speak to my experience.
In my experience with apple and apple care though, I've had nothing but good experiences. I just walk into the store, take a seat, tell the tech what the issue is, they come over and get it looked at and then boom, fixed.
As for hackintosh's that's not something I want to mess with. I like being able to easily upgrade to the latest versions of the OS.
"For the same money you spend, you can buy an Intel machine that's 2-3 times faster and have it run OS X on top of that."
Are you thinking about the desktops, then yes I would agree. But on the laptop front I have to disagree. The macbook line is well specc'd and fast for the money. Then again, the retina iMac makes some thermal considerations but the panel alone is worth the cost of the computer and you get a computer for the cash you put into it.
The last thing I don't understand is if you run a repair shop that services apple hardware and people "pay out of the nose" to get them repaired does that not help you and your bottom line? I understand the virtue in trying to help people make the best decisions with their money when it comes to buying hardware, that's what we do as PC enthusiasts, but this just does not make sense. It doesn't take a genius to come into your shop, see that you have mostly PCs lying around, that you rock a PC, to tell the apple user his hardware sucks, and for that user to take that in, but if he or she pays you for service how is that bad? do you feel guilty for it in some way?
In my experience with apple and apple care though, I've had nothing but good experiences. I just walk into the store, take a seat, tell the tech what the issue is, they come over and get it looked at and then boom, fixed.
As for hackintosh's that's not something I want to mess with. I like being able to easily upgrade to the latest versions of the OS.
"For the same money you spend, you can buy an Intel machine that's 2-3 times faster and have it run OS X on top of that."
Are you thinking about the desktops, then yes I would agree. But on the laptop front I have to disagree. The macbook line is well specc'd and fast for the money. Then again, the retina iMac makes some thermal considerations but the panel alone is worth the cost of the computer and you get a computer for the cash you put into it.
The last thing I don't understand is if you run a repair shop that services apple hardware and people "pay out of the nose" to get them repaired does that not help you and your bottom line? I understand the virtue in trying to help people make the best decisions with their money when it comes to buying hardware, that's what we do as PC enthusiasts, but this just does not make sense. It doesn't take a genius to come into your shop, see that you have mostly PCs lying around, that you rock a PC, to tell the apple user his hardware sucks, and for that user to take that in, but if he or she pays you for service how is that bad? do you feel guilty for it in some way?
Anecdotes from a repair shop owner are likely to suffer severely from all sorts of sampling biases. If you want accurate information on build quality and failure rates, then you pretty much have to look at that data directly, which may or may not be easy to obtain.
You can find a litany of complaints about basically any particular consumer electronic device online, so it's not going to be that informative.
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I was trying to de-escalate the conversation, but yes, I agree, sampling bias all over the place. It did help me understand where he was coming from though.
Unlike most repair shops, I don't markup parts. So when the customer is paying out the nose for parts, they're literally paying out the nose, I'm not adding any additional cost to them. I make all of my money on labor, which is why I get and retain most of my customers. I've had plenty of upside down repair bills where the parts cost far outweighed the labor, and I'm not that cheap either.
After seeing the same situation time after time where customer buys an Apple product because of either just the brand name or because someone pawned off a second or third hand Apple product on them for the price of a new PC/Laptop and it breaks, you tend to get angry. Not only is it anger towards Apple for making shitty proprietary, expensive and difficult to work on hardware; But also because many Apple users have that smug asshole attitude like they have a Bentley while everyone else is riffraff with their economy cars.
Of course PCs and Laptops break all the time, but they're serviceable and upgradeable, unlike Apple where it's one thing breaks and throw the whole thing out.
swatbat
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That was one of my first thoughts as well although I could see them going with AMD for some products depending on price/performance. Although I'd almost wonder if apple would just try to buy someone like AMD if they could build a nice processor for the phones/tablets.
I've seen a good amount of apple power users over the years. I will say back when photoshop ran better on the powerpc macs I saw a lot more of them. Still I've helped a fellow consultant that has clients that are still mac shops. In some ways I think apple has kinda given up the high end market though. They don't really have a server option anymore and a lot of people are not happy with the new mac pro.
I've also seen a bunch of IT users that are macbook fans. I know a consulting firm that has hundreds of employees and a lot of them use mac notebooks for work. Devices like the surface pro are pulling people back to windows though.
Ive been to the last two red hat summits.
Apple was the majority at both, with zero representation. Power users you say?
Just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you should do a thing
A custom chip for Apple by AMD could prevent using the OS on standard PC's. Plus AMD could produce a rather compact, all in one card for the most part that has everything. Zen, GCN 1.2+, HBM2 (more bandwidth to the cpu and gpu then anything today combined), HSA would work across the Apple PC platform plus AMD will be doing ARM meaning everything else.
How about an Arm APU/HBM configuration from AMD? Also Apple developed their low level graphics API Metal.
Needless to say who went from Apple to AMD and now at Samsung? Apple using AMD GPU's even though Nvidia Maxwell GPUs are more efficient? I find odd but maybe time will tell why (conjecture).
One thing is for certain, Apple likes to own/custom design everything to the smallest detail. Intel does not offer custom solutions at this time but AMD could.
How about an Arm APU/HBM configuration from AMD? Also Apple developed their low level graphics API Metal.
Needless to say who went from Apple to AMD and now at Samsung? Apple using AMD GPU's even though Nvidia Maxwell GPUs are more efficient? I find odd but maybe time will tell why (conjecture).
One thing is for certain, Apple likes to own/custom design everything to the smallest detail. Intel does not offer custom solutions at this time but AMD could.
Biggest thing preventing AMD takeover is that it will become almost worthless on the cpu side since x86 will not be able to be taken advantage of and would be lost. AMD separating the graphics division could allow that to be sold.
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Are you seeing this now? What ages and makes were the devices you repaired? I ask because I find it hard to believe, based on my own experience with Apple hardware, that they would fail so specactularly. Granted I only started buying Apple products 5 years ago so perhaps quality was not what it is now.
Ah, so Intel won't let em transfer the x86 license?
Probably why nobody has bought them then.
Ppl wrongly interpreted the message. Intel is offering customized processors but the issue is not about the custom CPU but about FPGA on the processor chip. Including FPGA makes possible 10x speedup for specialized operations while guaranteeing flexible reprogramming. Since the main push for Apple is artificial intelligence/machine learning, having processor with FPGA makes big sense.
Nope their x86 license is non-transferable to any buyer. Of course a new buyer could create a new license with Intel then again bypass buying AMD to begin with. I too think that is the reason why AMD has not been bought out because it would virtually be worthless once you did except for the graphics side. Intel has a scapegoat as well to prevent being a Monopoly which could force them to loose their exclusive control of x86 technology.
rumartinez89
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Why not just buy a 10-20% minority stake. They could infuse cash and have "control" over the chip supply and design and I would guess that would not affect the license agreement.
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I like that idea.
rumartinez89
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If I remember correctly they have a history of doing this, for example Sharp and Imagination technologies. The main issue is that this benefits AMD way more than Apple. They would get access to manufacturing process earlier, bigger research budget and free PR. All I see Apple getting is control and better graphics which might be worth it to them. I don't believe CPU performance matters to Apple(to an extent) judging by the fact that the Macbook is a regression in everyway to the Macbook Air, and the 2013 Macbook Air was a regression compared to 2012.
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I see many advantages:
1) even better pricing leverage on Intel
2) access to even more tech minds that could find their way to apple to work on apple's chips
3) radeon graphics synergies could see their way into future products, Apple could be the market that HSA needed to get off the ground, it's already baked into the OS and iOS (metal, grandcentral, etc)
4) leverage on Nvidia for pricing as well
5) say the next MacBook incorporates a proper low power APU (zen - not holding my breath, but hoping) with much better graphics at the super bargain pricing AMD would be willing to give - keeps Apple's margins high and allows AMD to stay afloat something that Intel needs
6) access to HBM - the next next ipad could feature a SOC based on this further shrinking the motherboard etc
You're right that performance of the MacBook with it's core-m cpu is a regression from the MacBook air, but both the air and the MacBook are not meant to be workstations, that's what the MacBook pro is for. I see the MacBook as the ipad with a proper keyboard and the MacBook air as a more focused for mobile version of the MacBook pro and as such compromises had to be made, but I am not an apple engineer and I have no idea.
1) even better pricing leverage on Intel
2) access to even more tech minds that could find their way to apple to work on apple's chips
3) radeon graphics synergies could see their way into future products, Apple could be the market that HSA needed to get off the ground, it's already baked into the OS and iOS (metal, grandcentral, etc)
4) leverage on Nvidia for pricing as well
5) say the next MacBook incorporates a proper low power APU (zen - not holding my breath, but hoping) with much better graphics at the super bargain pricing AMD would be willing to give - keeps Apple's margins high and allows AMD to stay afloat something that Intel needs
6) access to HBM - the next next ipad could feature a SOC based on this further shrinking the motherboard etc
You're right that performance of the MacBook with it's core-m cpu is a regression from the MacBook air, but both the air and the MacBook are not meant to be workstations, that's what the MacBook pro is for. I see the MacBook as the ipad with a proper keyboard and the MacBook air as a more focused for mobile version of the MacBook pro and as such compromises had to be made, but I am not an apple engineer and I have no idea.
rumartinez89
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I agree with you 100%.), that is why I would assume Apple would be ok with AMD in the MacBook /air. Leaving Intel to just the pro line. That would probably force them to drop prices. If Apple did get an AMD apu I wonder if they would push for more gaming on their OS.