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Comment by barelyauser | Hacker News Reader

Many? To the shareholders it is. But as a consumer I prefer innovation and not money hoarding. Shareholders think otherwise.

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The Apple Silicon chips are a massive innovation which have just massively changed the laptop landscape. People are buying new MacBooks left and right because they can do all their work on a tiny laptop now which doesn't run hot and has a battery like an iPad.

As much as I am impressed by Apple Silicon, I haven't seen the buying habits of people I know change.

Windows laptop owners still continue to buy windows laptops.

Maybe I am in a bubble, but in my family I was the only Apple user 5 years ago. Today we have got not a single Windows device left anymore. My wife has a MBA now, my mum has a MBA now, my sister has a MBA now.

Same goes for the .NET community. So many developers who some time ago would have only developed on a Windows machine all switched to Apple over the last few years and most people don't ever look back.

I appreciate that those personal anecdotes don't mean anything, but let's put it this way, I was not surprised to see a 30% drop in Windows sells in Microsoft's last financial statement.

Definitely a bubble. Comparable and accurate numbers are hard to get, but wikipedia reports [1] Apple having 9.8% of personal computer units shipped globally. It's certainly a different number if we could get a breakdown by country.

In my bubble view, I don't see a lot of switching. Apple people like their M1/M2 mostly, other people aren't as excited about cpus, but seem to be doing ok. I'm definitely not an Apple person, and am feeling pushed away from Windows as well, but I haven't landed on FreeBSD for desktop yet.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_com...

The trend is also reversing in some segments Apple owned which masked that there may be quite a trend occurring for home purchases, but the data doesn't show it because the extra purchases and hidden by losses.

For example University libraries in the UK - at least those in the higher ranked universities - used to typically buy Macs/MacBooks somewhat as a status symbol, over Microsoft PCs. Today, there are few and far computers with the set up of a computer lab now almost entirely dead to laptops. I don't think this had an insubstantial impact on Apple, but it was probably masked by the rise of mac-based startups and other trends in Mac.

>The Apple Silicon chips are a massive innovation

I have seen this repeated again and again. As if Apple Silicon was made for the Mac.

Apple Silicon came from iPhone and iOS. Using the same Ax SoC on MacBook just happened because they became fast enough.

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