Chris TrottierMar 9
At a certain point, someone who’s not Apple needs to get serious about ARM CPUs in laptops because the gap between MacBooks and everything else is huge.

If Windows is the blocker, what stops OEMs from pushing Linux?
Show threadAlexMar 9

@atomicpoet There's also still a massive friction point with Linux and most software that isn't a web browser that people actually use. Word, Excel, etc.

Actual humans that aren't nerds are extremely friction-averse.

Show threadChris TrottierMar 9
@alesplin I understand the point about Linux being friction, but at a certain point, a performance gap becomes its own form of friction.

The old Windows ecosystem is clearly not able to address Apple’s performance advantages. We’re talking about the M5 being 50% better than Intel chips.

Someone is going to have to take on the risk of owning a platform, or at least maintaining one.

The only two companies fully equipped for this challenge right now are Google and Valve. Everyone else is caught with their pants down, and that includes Microsoft.
Show threadAlex

@atomicpoet I agree about the performance gap, but most of the folks using Windows-based notebooks haven't experienced the gap.

So the “good enough" experience they already have is their baseline. And they're unlikely to buy even Apple notebooks because of the whole friction thing, so they're not even terribly likely to experience the performance gap.

Mar 9 at 3:41pmWeb
Show threadChris TrottierMar 9
@alesplin I disagree that they haven’t felt the gaps. Microsoft forced us to upgrade to Windows 11 (I’m still sore about that). It runs like molasses on my daughter’s Intel NUC. And further updates wrecked the WiFi, and the taskbar no longer loads. Just loading up a web browser is painful as hell.

This is not a “good enough” experience.

Right now, I’m seriously considering getting my daughter a Mac Mini simply because performance is unacceptable.