| ▲ | ajross 3 days ago |
| > They completely revolutionized laptop processors Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours. Apple absolutely ran ahead of the industry technically, by a shocking amount. But in a commoditized field that isn't sensitive to quality metrics, that doesn't generate sales. There's a reason why the iPhone remains the dominant product but macs are stuck at like 9% market share, and it's not the technlogy base that is basically the same between them. Laptops are done, basically. It's like arguing about brands of kitchen ranges: sure, there are differences, but they all cook just fine. |
|
| ▲ | acdha 3 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Tough love: no, they didn't. 99.9% of consumers simply can't detect a performance difference between an M4 Air and a junky Asus box (and what ones can will announce that games run much better on the windows shipwreck!), and while the Air has a huge power delta no one cares because the windows thing still lasts for 6+ hours. This wildly, comically untrue in my experience: all of the normal people I know loooooove how fast it is and charging a few times a week. It was only the people who self-identify as PC users who said otherwise, much like the Ford guys who used to say Toyotas were junk rather than admit their preferred brand was facing tough competition. |
| |
| ▲ | ajross 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users". You're measuring the 0.1%! (Which, fine, is probably more like 15% or whatever. Still not a representative sample.) You're likely also only sampling US consumers, or even Californians, and so missing an awful lot of the market. Again, real normal people can't tell the difference. They don't care. And that's why they aren't buying macs. The clear ground truth is that Macintosh is a lagging brand with poor ROI and no market share growth over more than a decade. The challenge is explaining why this is true despite winning all the technical comparisons and being based on the same hardware stack as the world-beating iOS devices. My answer is, again, "users don't care because the laptop market is commoditized so they'll pick the value product". You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Historically that analysis has tended to kill more companies than it saves. | | |
| ▲ | acdha 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Your "normal people" are mac owners, and your other group is "PC users” No. Remember that Apple sells devices other than Macs: they were all non-IT people who liked their iPhones and figured they’d try a Mac for their next laptop and liked it. One thing to remember is that Windows is a lot less dominant when you’re looking at what people buy themselves as opposed to what an enterprise IT department picked out. There are a ton of kids who start with ChromeOS or iPads, got a console for gaming, and don’t feel any special attraction to Windows since everything they care about works on both. > You apparently think it's because "users are just too dumb to buy the good stuff". Huh? Beyond being insulting, this is simply wrong. My position is that people actually do consider fast, silent, and multi-day battery life as desirable. That’s not the only factor in a buying decision, of course, but it seems really weird not to acknowledge it after the entire PC industry has spent years in a panic trying to catch up. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | 1stranger 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Best I can tell you're arguing that 9% market share by units sold is some kind of failure. Now go look at who has the highest market share by revenue. Hint: it's a fruit company. |
|
| ▲ | dangus 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This whole take might make sense if Apple didn’t double their laptop market share from like 10% to 20% when the M1 series came out, which actually happened. |
|
| ▲ | dangus 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Name one ASUS laptop with zero cooling fans. |
| |
| ▲ | Marsymars 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The ASUS BR1204? That's kind of a weird one because the PC market has notably regressed there over the past few years. Other than the Surface Pro 12 there've been no fanless PC laptops released since 2022-ish, when there used to be dozens. On a technical basis, fanless PC laptops released now would be better than the ones in 2022 just on the basis of 2022 lineup having a moribund lineup of CPUs (Snapdragon SQ1, Amber Lake, etc.) You could release a lineup now that would be broadly competitive with the M1 at least, but it doesn't seem to be a market segment that PC OEMs are interested in. | | |
| ▲ | dangus 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Right, so, a K-12 education-oriented PC with an Intel N-series chip, about 1/3 as fast as what you get with an M4 (or worse). When I asked my snarky question I'm really talking about "fanless laptops that someone would actually want to use and get some serious use out of." The regression of the PC market is because the PC market didn't see the ARM train coming from a million miles away and just sat there and did nothing. They saw smartphones performing many times more efficiently than PCs and shrugged their arms at it. Meanwhile, Apple's laptop marketshare has purportedly doubled from 10% to 20% or perhaps even higher since the M1 lineup was released. I say this as someone who actually moved away from Apple systems to a Linux laptop. Don't get me wrong, modern Intel and AMD systems are actually impressively efficient and can offer somewhat competitive experiences, but the MacBook Air as an every-person's experience is really tough to beat (consider also, you could get a MacBook Air M2 for $650 during the most recent Black Friday sales, and you'd have a really damn hard time finding any sort of PC hardware that's anywhere near as nice, never mind match it on performance/battery life). | | |
| ▲ | Marsymars 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, like we're in agreement about the current state of the market, I just don't think it has to be that way. The Surface Pro 12 is fanless, so presumably anyone else could make a fanless Snapdragon laptop if they wanted to. (My daily driver work laptop is Windows-on-ARM, and most everything works pretty well on it.) |
|
| |
| ▲ | ajross 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I believe the whole Vivobook Go line is fanless, actually. But again, the point isn't to get into a shouting match over whose proxied anatomy is largest. It's to try to explain why the market as a whole doesn't move the way you think it should. And it's clearly not about fans. | |
| ▲ | guywithahat 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I didn't even think about that, fans are the bane of my existence |
|
|
| ▲ | ebbi 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You're kidding, right?? |
