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Comment by openknot | Hacker News Reader

I would personally be very interested in such a blog, but so would Apple's competitors. I've read that being too open about methods can let competitors catch up to once-unique advantages quickly, especially as it lets them design a roadmap of future features to work on.

Suppose Apple had an engineering blog that released a roadmap about the M1 chips before their release. Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today, as laptop manufacturers may have invested more in ARM processors by seeing them as viable due to Apple's work.

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Oh please. There's no need for any engineering blog to publish a company's 2 year product roadmap slides moments after presenting them to leadership, or ever. There are surely a bazillion problems solved every year at much finer detail than would be useful as a decision tree for competitors. How about OS engineering? Apps? Physical manufacturing? Logistics engineering? CAD design? At the level of detail. None of these things if covered at a small enough scope would provide competitors an undue advantage, but each would definitely inspire a young or aspiring engineer to up their game. Maybe they can just hoard the best talent with money to keep them away from competitors, but how much future and potential talent are they leaving on the table by forcing their engineers to bottle up their innate human desire to share their wisdom? It's a short-sighted local minima, they can do better.

>Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today

That's giving Intel a heck of a lot of credit. Intel is a massive ship moving along at full speed. They aren't the most agile of companies to say the least. Intel's x86 giant hammer convinces themselves that everything is an x86 nail. How else do you explain the fact that they are so woefully behind in the times? Apple and Intel worked together in CPUs before. Intel knows what Apple wants/needs, and refuses to give it to them. I seriously can't imagine that Apple and Intel never met about how the Intel chip just wasn't advancing, yet Intel plodded on anyways.

Except...

Whilst I acknowledge that the M1 macs are pretty good, Intel power pcs on everyone else's desks that work just fine for the standard Microsoft Office workload. Intel are not miles behind, they are just not ahead. In the world of Enterprise Applications x86s compatibility with legacy code is going to be important to many large organisations.

Meanwhile Apple with probably pull support for Rosetta2 in a couple of years (like last time), but Photoshop and Logic will keep working and the most users won't care.

So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world.

> So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world.

Not necessarily! A lot of office needs boil down to the Office 365 suite, Adobe and the SAP GUI - all of which now have native M1 variants. The only thing that's needed is someone other than Apple and Qualcomm actually putting out a desktop-worthy ARM CPU so that Microsoft can provide Windows-on-ARM for everyone (there are rumors of a secret deal between MS/QC that is bound to expire soon-ish). Once the price point gets low enough for corporate beancounters to buy a ton of ARM Windows devices for paper pushers, they will do so - and by that point, Intel is doomed. AMD is eating their lunch in the server market, and Intel doesn't have anything that can compete with ARM on power-per-watt and price.

What if Apple ended up supplying older M1 designs, not cutting edge but efficient on batteries and forced down to a really low price… to Google, for making chromebooks with? Bottom end craptops not even being handled by Apple anymore but still running an older generation of M1 cpus, with the lesser but still substantial benefits and the battery life?

On the extreme low end it's not only about Windows. Chromebooks are a thing. Eventually M1 chromebooks and Apple leveraging the fact that now they're a CPU designer? After they do some more upgrades to their own tech for their own purposes?

Who would be manufacturing these older M1 chips after Apple is currently having the later generations? Apple's current needs would mean TSMC capacity will be focused on these newer chips. It's not like there's a new fab with each generation of chips.

Office 365 for mac is not the same as office for Windows though. If you are a power user that might matter to you.

Then there are the applications not available on mac...Project, Power BI...

I know because amongst my estate is an rdp server for mac users to use some niche excel features and to use PowerBI desktop.

And MS is also trying to get parity between Office for Windows for ARM.

> Intel power pcs

Had to do a double take there…

That’s a very Pyrrhic victory for Intel to be dominant in the personal computer space. Apple alone sells more ARM based devices than the total non server market and it only has a 15% market share in phones worldwide. Even in the server space, the cloud providers are moving toward ARM where it can.

A software engineering blog would make more sense; it's what WWDC essentially is, anyways.

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