Yeah, it's great in terms of ops/J. It absolutely is, and if I was in the market for a laptop, I could see myself seriously considering a modern Apple laptop. But, I only use desktops, so I don't care about ops/J, I just care about ops/s. Apple desktop computers are and have always been atrocious in terms of ops/s/$.
So tell me, exactly what alternative possibility am I missing? I'm not even saying it's wrong to care about things that I don't care about, I'm just saying that the people who care about those things... care about those things? Honestly, I don't know what you're complaining about.
Nope, there's nothing wrong with that. IMO the mac stack really kinda ends at the macbook... or maybe the mac mini (which does make a compelling "NUC" for lightweight niches like HTPC etc). There isn't really anything compelling about the studio or the mac pro... unless you are willing to splash out for 128GB or 192GB of memory for LLMs or something. And you can get 128GB in a macbook if you want, which is by far the more popular option anyway. AMD still has a hard 32gb cap on how much memory can be allocated to the iGPU
(Apple TV is another one... the apple tv is an A15 and is probably unironically the fastest single-thread performance I own right now. For $129 for the ethernet model. Remember, the A15 (the little brother to M2) has been in the iphone SE 3rd gen for several years now too, and Android is basically just catching up to that.)
I have a 9900K+3090 system for gaming, I have epyc and supermicro 2011-3 systems and tinyminimicro pcs for homelab. Apple doesn't add value in that area. Horses for courses. And actually that stuff complements the laptop really well for self-hosting!
But phones and laptops? Yeah, Apple hardware is literally objectively better than the competition. Strix Halo is going to be the first real challenger to a loaded-out macbook and it literally won't even launch until next year. I'm definitely keeping an eye on it etc, I'd love a little mini-PC with a strix halo, but right now apple is running at least 3 years ahead of the x86 laptop/Android phone market.
And honestly the problem even as I'm writing this - is x86 is "fine, except for laptops where you care about battery life... unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town... and if you buy AMD the HDMI 2.1 also won't work, and the real Mx-Max performance competitor on x86 should be launching next year, 4 full years after the M-family hit macbooks... and the driver situation is shit on Linux, except for Framework, which has terrible battery life instead". Not exactly great, is it?
Make an x86 laptop that isn't a pile of compromises and defects and I'll consider it. But right now it feels much more like the x86 people are the ones blindly pushing for consideration of their sacred cow far above the actual merits of the product. I'm not going to give x86 a handicap as a product on something that I'm going to use every day for the next 5 years. I want a nice laptop.
>But phones and laptops? Yeah, Apple hardware is literally objectively better than the competition.
Objectively? I don't know about that. I think phone hardware is all basically the same. I'm sure there are minute differences that one of us cares about and the other doesn't, but I'd say it averages out to it all being "fine".
In terms of software... Doesn't iOS still not let you install apps except through the app store, and doesn't let apps do JIT? And don't I need OSX if I want to develop for iOS? I don't know, that seems to me like an objective disadvantage of the platform, as a user. It means I can't use my hardware however I please, at least not without some major inconvenience.
>unless you want to do LLMs in which case Apple is still the only game in town
Nah, it depends. 3090s are going for cheap nowadays, and 24 GB is enough to run some hefty models at acceptable performance, and you get a nice gaming card on top. It's not UMA, but hey, it also costs eight times less than a decked out Mac Pro. It's a shame Nvidia doesn't seem interested in bringing large VRAM sizes to the consumer or at least prosumer segment.
Yeah, it's great in terms of ops/J. It absolutely is, and if I was in the market for a laptop, I could see myself seriously considering a modern Apple laptop. But, I only use desktops, so I don't care about ops/J, I just care about ops/s. Apple desktop computers are and have always been atrocious in terms of ops/s/$.
So tell me, exactly what alternative possibility am I missing? I'm not even saying it's wrong to care about things that I don't care about, I'm just saying that the people who care about those things... care about those things? Honestly, I don't know what you're complaining about.