Apple Reports Second Quarter Results

Here's my speculation: After the stellar early growth years for the iPad (here are some graphs from 2015 https://qz.com/376041/the-ipads-first-five-years-in-five-cha...), there was an impression at the Apple that the future of the Mac is iOS. Then that growth leveled off, and now iPad looks more like a comparable category to Macs (see the more recent Six Colors graphs https://sixcolors.com/post/2021/04/apples-record-second-quar...).

So Apple appears to have been asleep at the wheel with the Mac (which is perhaps why Ive's had so much leeway with clearly unpopular decisions like the keyboard, missing escape key, etc...) resulting in its worst years ever. The laptop keyboard is one example, but the iOS-ification of the Mac is another (i.e., moving towards the iOS security model), as is the stagnate Mac Pro.

Now things are back to normal, see the M1, the new Mac Pro, the new iMac, etc...

The M1 transition going to smoothly and with such an emphasis on backwards compatibility (they ported OpenCL! they helped with Blender!) is my favorite example of this, contrasted with the complete &$@^*% you! treatment that developers got with things like notarization, new security features, and pretty much everything going all the way back to Mac App Store Sandboxing, which I'd personally consider the start of the dark years (and I'd also consider the single worst decision in all of this, worse than the keyboard, that's the one that fundamentally broke the Mac ecosystem, maybe forever).

Covid had a lot more to do with it. Mac is at an all time high yes but the last iteration of Intel MBPs was only slightly different from what we had while Ive was still around, and Mac is still a relative small % of overall revenue which has increased a lot.

I don’t really get the Jony Ive hate. The only particularly bad thing I can think of him being involved in was the butterfly keyboard, and the fact that the Apple Watch is the only real success among smart watches more than makes up for that.

> "The designs seem to make a bit more sense now, I was always perplexed at Ive's 'thinness at the expense of everything else' mindset"

And yet now we have the new iMac, the "thinnest iMac ever" at just 11.5mm. So it seems like Ive wasn't the only one at Apple obsessed with being thin.

Speculation on why Jony Ive pursued "thinness above everything":

- for the first x years of apple, everything was legitimately thick

- so each generation Ive wanted to make things thinner

- it entered the culture (of the design division perhaps) that you had to make each generation thinner than the last to please Ive

- Then when things got to a comfortable thickness for users, people kept making each generation thinner to please Ive

- Ive never told them to stop making things thinner so they didn't stop.

- snowball effect and we got those horrible products

- he had to leave to stop the cycle

I’ve been considering dropping Spotify for the “Apple One” plan, looks like I’m not the only one from that huge jump in services.

The macs are unfortunately still a sideshow compared to iOS devices (written on an iPad now).

Sorry, I doubt AMD would be where they are now had they not been a second source for Intel’s x86 chips, that’s what really bootstrapped them.

M1 is meaningless. To 99% of their market it is just a new vague number to justify an upgrade (like ram sizes, 3/4/5G, etc).

What is masterful is how they redirected the desirable-number-du-jour to be something that is both 1) proprietary and 2) not cutting into their service revenue (e.g. larger storage = less people shelling out for cloud storage)

It's on par with all of their propaganda. Their WWDC and product release events are all written like that.

I bet what 2/3 non-Intel? That means an extra (complete stab in the dark) 1/2 a billion ish $ in extra profit every quarter, maybe more!

I'm interested in the same question but from the opposite point of view: with the M1 a resounding success, is there a need for M2 through 5 to be a huge improvement? Asides from marketing.

My daily driver is a 2015 Macbook Pro. My iPhone is a 2016(?) 6S. My iPad is the original Air. I'd be happy to upgrade but for someone who lives in Books, Safari and Excel all day, they all work fine. I just can't justify it.

The M1 equivalents are leaps and bounds faster and there are plenty of people who need that power and more but... will 99.995% of Apple users notice further upgrades? Where do we go from here? What's the future of personal computing?

(Fingers crossed for lightweight fully immersive no wires VR in five years)

I was looking to buy a m1 Mac mini but went with Intel only because I need 32gb ram and apple for some reason only offers up to 16gb on Mac mini. I bought the Intel one with 8gb and manually upgraded it to 32gb. The m1 can’t be upgraded manually which is a bummer (but makes sense as that’s what makes it even faster).

I wish running multiple iOS and Android simulators didn’t need so much memory.

M1 is a very impressive chip, but it can't compete with the Threadripper/Xeon club. It really has trouble with the high-end laptop club too.

You can say "16gb is enough if you swap efficiently", but I run models that need 100+GB on the regular. I'd love to see what a super high-end Apple core can do to that workload!