It comes from the idea that apple didn’t advance significantly in M2 and M3, which are equally untrue, but equally pervasive.
People were absolutely sure that apple made basically no real advancement but just were running up the TDPs and that’s where all their M2 and M3 gains came from. That was the narrative for the last 2 years. But then you look at geekerwan and apple is making 20, 30% steps every gen, and with perf/w climbing upwards every gen too. Mainstream sites just didn’t want to do the diligence, plus there’s a weird persistent bias against the idea of apple being good. It’s gotta just be the node… or the accelerators… or the OS…
Reminder that we sit here 3 years later and even giving AMD a node advantage (7940HS vs M2/M3 family) they’re still pulling >20W core-only single-thread power (even ignoring the x86 platform power problems!) to compete with a 5W M2 thread. And yes, you can limit it but then they lose on performance instead.
But yeah, anyway, that’s where it came from. People completely dismissed M2 and M3 as having any worthwhile advancement (even with laptops they could objectively analyze!) and were in the process of repeating this for M4 yet again. So why wouldn’t you think that three generations of stagnation indicates apple has a problem? The problem is that apple hasn’t actually stagnated - there is an epistemic closure issue and a lot of people won’t admit it or aren’t exposed to that information, because it’s being proxied through this lens of 25% of the tech community being devout apple anti-fanboys.
It's a problem with every single apple/android thread too. People will admit with the ML stuff that apple does a much better job handling PII (keeping it on-device, offering e2e encryption between devices, using anonymizing tokens when it needs to go to a service), and people intellectually understand they use the same approaches and techniques in other areas too, but suggest that maybe apple isn't quite as bad as the literal adtech company and you'll get the works. People don't want to think of themselves as fanboys but... there is a large contingent that does all the things fanboys would do and says all the things fanboys would say, and acts how fanboys would act, and nevertheless thinks they're the rock of neutrality standing between two equally-bad choices. False balance is very intellectually comforting.
People were absolutely sure that apple made basically no real advancement but just were running up the TDPs and that’s where all their M2 and M3 gains came from. That was the narrative for the last 2 years. But then you look at geekerwan and apple is making 20, 30% steps every gen, and with perf/w climbing upwards every gen too. Mainstream sites just didn’t want to do the diligence, plus there’s a weird persistent bias against the idea of apple being good. It’s gotta just be the node… or the accelerators… or the OS…
Reminder that we sit here 3 years later and even giving AMD a node advantage (7940HS vs M2/M3 family) they’re still pulling >20W core-only single-thread power (even ignoring the x86 platform power problems!) to compete with a 5W M2 thread. And yes, you can limit it but then they lose on performance instead.
https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=928
https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=1000
https://youtu.be/EbDPvcbilCs?t=708
But yeah, anyway, that’s where it came from. People completely dismissed M2 and M3 as having any worthwhile advancement (even with laptops they could objectively analyze!) and were in the process of repeating this for M4 yet again. So why wouldn’t you think that three generations of stagnation indicates apple has a problem? The problem is that apple hasn’t actually stagnated - there is an epistemic closure issue and a lot of people won’t admit it or aren’t exposed to that information, because it’s being proxied through this lens of 25% of the tech community being devout apple anti-fanboys.
It's a problem with every single apple/android thread too. People will admit with the ML stuff that apple does a much better job handling PII (keeping it on-device, offering e2e encryption between devices, using anonymizing tokens when it needs to go to a service), and people intellectually understand they use the same approaches and techniques in other areas too, but suggest that maybe apple isn't quite as bad as the literal adtech company and you'll get the works. People don't want to think of themselves as fanboys but... there is a large contingent that does all the things fanboys would do and says all the things fanboys would say, and acts how fanboys would act, and nevertheless thinks they're the rock of neutrality standing between two equally-bad choices. False balance is very intellectually comforting.
https://paulgraham.com/fh.html