Reading Infinite Games, they tell an anecdote about a Microsoft exec on a flight telling an Apple exec that the Zune was a way better portable music player than the iPod. The Apple exec was just “yup, you’re probably right” and then soon after the iPhone dropped

I just want to take a minute and be grateful for getting the chance to live through the 90s again. I always felt a bit sorry for myself being a child through the og 90s. Now I feel like in a decade or so into the future I will look back and be happy I got to live in the naïve days of windows 95 again, as an adult this time. I really appreciate it.

Cheap RAM in 500 yards. ->

In the ‘90s it was the opposite.

- Apple: We have matched Intel in CPU performance thanks to this new PowerPC! (Shows ad that uses carefully handpicked benchmarks to suggest that the PowerPC is actually faster when it really isn’t on average)

- Intel: Oh, we just found a 30% clock rate increase in the pocket of our other fab pants.

- AMD: Hold my beer, I have the DEC Alpha guys making an x86 CPU… How about 64-bit while at it.

It's been really weird reading laptop reviews over the last few months. I've seen a bunch of reviews where they have their usual bar graphs comparing a bunch of laptops, and the laptop that is at the bottom is an Apple. It's the really inexpensive Neo, of course, but even the M5 laptops are consistently beat on performance and battery life by Intel Windows laptops.

I assume the M6 will take the crown back and then a few months later Intel/AMD will release a new chip and take that crown back again. That's the state of the world we used to expect, but it's a state that has been missing ever since the release of the M1 in 2020 until Intel finally caught up again this year.

Echos of the ai race as well haha

Seems most computer companies are still boasting that they can beat the M1 and it's like...congrats on beating a 6 year old chipset?

Apple is like the Billy Mitchell of computing. Just waited for them to beat it before announcing the gains they were sitting on.

Xiaomi: We have matched Apple in CPU performance.

Apple: Meep Meep...

This seems to happen repeatedly.

Apple: Look at this cool new chip!

Others: Look how we very slightly passed Apple (six months later, with worse thermals and power consumption)

Apple: Look at this even cooler new chip!

I think it’s weird to say Apple is faster than Xiaomi when both are just using arm chips and using TSMC to build them, and this chip is only any faster because TSMC made a smaller node.

I know Apple do some special hardware software integration magic too.

To be fair, this kind of dominance is not unprecedented. Intel was even further ahead in the early 2000's. Every new competitor process was further behind the leading edge and not closer. TSMC started launching half nodes like 28nm just to have something in the market that would sell.

But then you started to see the cracks. New competitors would launch new products with very slightly better metrics than Intel's older stuff, just to be, heh, meep-meeped at the next press conference. But the overlap was real, if small. And it grew over time until everyone looked up around the 5nm node and realized Intel had lost.

That's where we are right now with Apple. "Funny in a way", sure. But history says this is more likely to be the beginning of the end. Everything goes in cycles.

The US “export controls” what Chinese companies can buy at TSMC.

Haha, late 90s wasn't really like that though

Except in the 90s, I could wield my OS of choice on the hardware I bought.

Apple levelled up in the middle of a fight.

I do not find it funny tbh.

I'm very very surprised that Xiaomi matches Apples speed even with the newest release, its not diminishing Xiaomis success.