Tim Cook has been horrible for software, but the hardware under his regime has been incredible.

joshstrange 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

May I introduce you to years he let Jony Ive control that. Which brought us things like the butterfly keyboard, thinness at all costs (battery life), and loss of ports (in part due to thinness) that had to be walked back.

	▲	JKCalhoun 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I have no love for Ive's anti-bauhaus philosophy of form-über-alles. Ports hiding on the back so you have to endure the sound of USB-tin scraping against anodized aluminum, the round mouse, etc.

▲

bigyabai 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Incredible is stretching things. Apple had to catch up with AMD in efficiency, and they did that. Outside the mobile market, Apple is basically a non-entity.

▲

Miraste 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Apple doesn't have huge sales volume for Macs because of macOS and their astronomical pricing schemes, but it's not because of the hardware. Macbooks are easily the best laptops you can buy for most purposes, and they have been since the M1 came out. That has never been true of Apple computers before.

▲

bigyabai 19 hours ago | parent [-]

It's because of the hardware. For mobile Apple is competitive, for desktop applications they don't even show up on most benchmarks next to AMD/Nvidia hardware.

For example, you have to scroll beneath last-gen laptop GPUs before you can find any Apple hardware on the OpenCL charts: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

▲

Miraste 19 hours ago | parent [-]

That's also because of software. Apple deprecated OpenCL in MacOS eight years ago. In productivity software with solid Metal implementations, like Blender, the M4 Max is on par with the top of Nvidia's (mobile) 5xxx line, except with much more VRAM.

▲

bigyabai 18 hours ago | parent [-]

No software fix exists, Apple's GPUs are architecturally limited to raster efficiency (and now, matmul ops). It's frankly bewildering that a raster-optimized SOC struggles to decisively outperform a tensor-optimized CUDA system in 2026.

	▲	Miraste 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I get the feeling you had a specific use case that didn't work well with Apple GPUs? I'd be curious what it was. The architecture does have some unusual limitations. By software problem, though, I meant referencing OpenCL benchmarks. No one in 2026 should be using OpenCL on macOS at all, and the benchmarks aren’t representative of the hardware.