My experiences with Apple products, 2001-2021, were very bad

I've been using Apple stuff since before 9/11, and I've had the opinion that (1) the products are shit and (2) the community are shit.

This is cycnical, but... I think the "Apple stuff is not that good" bears out! The Zune was better than the iPod! The iPad was a bad value proposition on launch! Apple didn't even want an app store on the iPhone, they wanted browser apps!

That said, my opinion here is partially because I got into Linux really early on, and had the good luck of having no issues with it. I wasn't comparing MacOS to Windows Vista, I was comparing MacOS to Ubuntu.

Apple products always felt very anti-consumer, and specifically anti-me. EarPods? They stayed in everyones ears, but fell out of mine. AirPods? I'm happy everyone agrees they're ugly, I'd hate if these catch on- uh oh. iMessage? Come on, it's 2012, we are sixteen, I'm not even a communist yet and I can see the class implications of this.

I eventually tried my friends Airpod Pros, and they were actually very very good.

But the design of their operating systems? Everything is bouncing and sliding around. I can see through the matrix. I see the touch debounce and hysteresis and weighted smoothing. I see the differential equations used to implement it. I know there's a constant you can set, Apple, which will maintain the properties of your user interface while still speeding it up. I WANT TO SHAKE TIM APPLE BY THE LAPELS. MACOS DOES NOT NEED TO BOUNCE AND MOAN ON IT.

On this note: I got my first iPhone in 2020, which had such an abysmal of UX that it kept me firmly in the "degoogled Android" until later 2021, when I got a car, and needed Android Auto, which my degoogled phone didn't have. So, I used my iPhone increasingly often, and I saw it just Get Better over the years, as features were drip-fed onto the iPhone.

Seriously-- in the past five years, Apple has finally started to approach feature parity with Android, but that's in part because of how many nice features Androids have lost. NFC, SMB, DAV, the control center, adblocking built in to browsers, some apps with shells.

I "upgraded" to a 13 mini in 2022, because I kept seeing apps swap out of RAM on my 2020 SE, and I kept having the dangerous situation of CarPlay shutting down on me. The issue persisted, and then I "upgraded" to a 16 Pro this year. But my iPhone still constantly restarts.

Seriously- what's up with that? This phone has 8GB of RAM, and I can't take a photo while taking a phone call and using maps to navigate? This is something I was doing 11 years prior with no problems with an Android that had 512MB of RAM and was running JAVA.

I could not understand it. iPhones were something I used begrudgingly as I saw Androids get worse, and because Apple's privacy and legal practices really are better than Google. (I read ToS and Privacy Policies because I have brain problems! Apple really is better!)

I know I'm repeating the same two decades of smug redditory "Apple bad". But even with an open mind, I had to agree. Apple just not good, actually.

Apple does not deserve the hype they get. Apple products are not magic.

Apple would have you believe their M-series chips are magic

If you've taken computer science at a university, you might have taken courses that help you appreciate the question, "What is a computer?"

I'm sure you've heard of Nand Tetris, or seen Minecraft CPUs. You might understand the whole NAND -> logic gates -> flip flops and demuxes and ALUs -> simple processor -> pipelined multistage processor thing. Tomasulo's algorithm might be a familiar word. You might know operating system design, multiprocessing, indexing RAM by pages, processor scheduling algorithms, TLB, ram compression, all that. Four years of intense studying hard grant you the sparing, minimal necessary knowledge to peek behind the curtain of the state-of-the-art in computing... for the 1980s.

But, Intel? AMD? Nvidia? Qualcomm? Broadcom? They've been putting massive amounts of research time and energy into making their chips. There is not a person alive on earth that could tell you everything going on in any consumer processor. There is knowledge built into the bones of these institutions, there is knowledge contained only in the structure of people. A CPU core is the closest thing to a biblically accurate angel, and you might have dozens of them in your laptop.

So, when Apple started designing their own silicon for their iPhones, that was probably kind of funny. "Oh, epic. Failguy Apple is trying to make their own chips! LOL!"

I chalked up my bad experiences on iPhones to Apple's primitive processor design. I figured the CPU was something more likely for them to fuck up than an OS.

In 2020, Moore's law had been flattening for awhile, and efficiency gains YoY were pretty abysmal. Apple had been making their own chips for seven years at that point.

Then Apple, the king of misleading graphs, announced their M1 chip four years ago today. You'll see bullshit such as:

• Graphs lacking axes
• Vague claims like "2x faster CPU performance"
• Impossible claims like "25% of the power consumption" and "11 hour battery life"
• "Fast integrated graphics", LOL
• "Astonishing" battery life
• Moving to ARM with very few problems whatsoever

If even one of these claims were true, that would be magic. But Apple is surely stretching their claims for marketing, right? There's no way these are magic-

Every one of their claims were true; Apple M1 is indeed magic

I was in need of a laptop in 2022, and looking around, I was surprised to see the M1 Pro as the best value proposition.

Despite their recency to the scene, Apple really has pushed the CPU space forward by leaps and bounds.

These are fast and snappy. Rust programs compile much faster than they do on my expensive desktop (albeit that's also due to the faster default linker on MacOS). It's actually nice to use, despite the bad operating system.

The battery life is incredible, easily exceeding 10 hours. It gets hours more of actual computering from a 5000mAh brick I'd use for my phone. (Part of this is because the SoC design means they save so much space that they can pack their laptops full of battery.)

The (Pro) screens are like scifi magic computer screens I had imagined when I was in highschool. "What if screens had individual pixel brightness and more than three 8-bit color channels? Haha wow". And they're a bit taller than 16:9! That's so nice!

The speakers (on the Pro) are a lot better than I thought a laptop could have.

While Apple's "our 8GB is like their 16GB" is bullshit, I have it on good authority that they have some very good proprietary RAM sauce. It's not just swap and zram. With their base RAM at 16GB, these are very easy computers to recommend.

And they're small and light! In 2016, I was carrying around about 6lb of laptop + charging brick. The M1 Pro is about 3.5lbs and doesn't need a brick, and is much smaller. This turns out to be a huge convenience.

And ARM? It has never been a problem for me, as a "late" adopter grabbing one of these laptops on sale in 2021. Linux succeeded on ARM because so much was open source and could be recompiled, while MacOS succeeded on ARM because developers didn't have a choice. (I heard Rosetta 2 worked wonders, but never had to interact with it, I think.)

So, yeah: Apple's M1 was bonkers magic. It exceeds the hype. It's the only laptop I can imagine grabbing-- everyone else is playing catch up.

But, that's just one big leap in processor design, it's not like you can repeat it?

Apple M-series chips actually do keep getting better

Apple's M-series chips have a hierarchy that I actually understand. The M1, M2, M3, and M4 are sequential generation numbers. And they come in tiers: M1, M1 Pro, M1 Max, and the M1 Ultra.

I think "Max" should have been the highest tier, but to be fair, the Ultra" is actually two "Max" chips linked together.

According to Geekbench scores, Apple has had a steady rate of improvement between generations.

At this point, Apple has released the M4 Max as the fastest individual core on the market. Because single-core workloads are still probably the best measure of speed, and because it has fourteen of those cores, I think it's fair to say "Apple is still doing magic".

Oh, and all the RAM is VRAM, because it's shared with the GPU. I forgot to mention that Apple also has the cheapest VRAM you can get on market now, by GB.

I'm not going to read all that, what's your point? Why are you saying this now?

I've used computers a lot throughout my life, and Apple has had a firm place in my mind as "very bad at making computers". "Maybe this was undeserved," I thought, until I got an iPhone and regretted it. "Y'all live like this?" I thought. Then Apple released the M1 chip, and the Macbook Pro with the M1 Pro chip. these were magic computers from the future which blew everything else out of the water.

I can't stress enough: It is a shining achievement for someone relatively new to the CPU-design game to catch up and grab the crown to become the new leader.

Oh, and they're running Linux increasingly well, thanks to Asahi Linux. (Especially the M1/M2 laptops.)

With Trump's tariffs incoming, and myself due to upgrade my now-six-year-old desktop, I am considering just getting a maxed out Apple laptop instead. I use my desktop for renders and for Linux (<3<3<3), but I don't like how much space my mouse + keyboard + monitor + desktop takes. And an upgraded desktop seems superfluous when

With Trump's tariffs incoming, and myself due to sell or upgrade my desktop, I might just get a higher-end Apple laptop instead. According to Blender's benchmarks, the M4 Max is decently competitive with desktop GPUs, around the speed of a 3080Ti or 4070.

For $3700, you get the highest-end M4 Max and 48GB of RAM (which is also VRAM) and a 1TB SSD.

It would cost about $2400 for a roughly-equivalent desktop computer (except 64GB RAM + 12GBVRAM).

The $1300 difference can't just be chalked up to Apple's price margins, because you also pay for the nice screen, the portability, the battery, the nice VRAM, and the whole "not having to build it yourself" thing.

This is in line with Apple's past four years, since the announcement of the 2020 SE: Their price premium has slipped further and further. They're competitive to a point where, for almost every market they compete in, they have some of the best offerings.

It's like Apple put all their embarrassing design decisions into the HomePod. Now that's a bad product.

TLDR?

Longtime Apple hater forced to admit: The M-series chips are black-magic mind-boggling computers. Sometimes, you gotta hand it to them.