I actually used whatever was pre iPod - I think it was a phone I loaded your favorite 20 songs on? Either way, for all the talking down of the iPod when it came out - for folks who wanted to listen to music it was total magic. I bought the first iPhone too, and didn’t have a clue that it wasn’t a good email device. I still use only windows / Linux server side - but this new “gimmick” of the M1 does have me interested
There were more than a couple MP3 players before the iPod. I had a cool little device from Sandisk with, I think, a 512MB solid state drive? I bet it's still kicking. That thing was way cooler than an iPod, it ran off a AA battery (I think) and it seemed pretty tough. I dropped it in a slushy road puddle and it just kept trucking. The iPod had good capacity but the spinning drive in there was a huge failure point.
I remember (at about the same time CDMA cell phones began getting popular) a standalone device with 32MB of storage, enough for like 20 songs or so. I think this was the one:
I loved my Sony Ericsson phones. With a decent memory stick and headphones it felt like the future. In a way it was, but there were many limitations and I jumped to the iPhone one year after it became available without regrets.
There's a lesson for all of us to not leap to conclusion.
In the case of the Apple iPhone I didn't see it and only boarded the train by iPhone 4 (and honestly, I think it was about the right time). In the case of M1 I _did_ expect a revolution and frankly one I had been waiting for for decades (the true cost of x86 is finally exposed). I can't wait to see if Apple can keep up the momentum.
They've reinvented x86 at least twice: microcode and then x86_64. I wouldn't bury x86 yet.
Plus a good chunk of the M1 computing prowess is not even the CPU, it's the additional hardware such as the neural engine cores and such. This is something you could put next to a Sparc core, it's not ARM specific.
There is an fundamental complexity in the semantics of x86_64 instructions that makes them expensive to implement. I worked for Transmeta and am at another microprocessor company today so I do have 1st hand experience.
There are other things in M1 that helps make M1-based systems fast. I'm not talking about that. I'm exclusively referring to pure-core performance. It is true that the latency improvement and high-bandwidth of the nearby DRAM does help here, but it is far from the major factor.
FWIW, there's no evidence that TSMC's N5 node is the major factor, beyond letting Apple spend a lot of transistors.
Intel/AMD have so far been able to overcome the overhead with lots transistors and power, afforded by leading edge nodes. Apple is now at the same playing field and especially the power efficiency difference is obvious.
Nah, this is it for x86. The only relevant piece of x86 binary software is the Windows ecosystem ... and that runs on arm now. Everything else is either interpreted (Python, Ruby), JIT'ed (Java, C#) or can be compiled natively to arm anyway. All Apple have done is prove that it's possible.
However I'm doubtful that the PC market will move to a closed system similar to Apple's. So whoever comes in with ARM better be prepared for lots of competitions and low margins in a cutthroat environment. That's not a very attractive market proposition, especially since the x86 makers won't just take this lying down.
I think we'll be in a weird place soon.
Apple will be doing Apple things and increasing its market share but never taking over (maybe it will reach 20-25%? who knows).
Many server environments will switch to ARM, especially the big cloud providers that can make their own chips.
Qualcomm will push some more desktop class SOCs but I doubt they'll reach Apple's performance levels so they risk having their lunch eaten, especially by AMD.
So it's possible that the PC desktop/laptop market might be "stuck" with x86 for many more decades.
There is also a scenario where Intel or AMD come up with some brilliant designs and catch up completely or well enough to Apple in which case this will all have been a tempest in a teacup.
>and honestly, I think it was about the right time
Why so? I got the second model (3G), and if I could, I'd had gotten the first. It was already a giant leap from the smartphones of before (and I had the "flagship" models from other companies that were shit compared to it).
I didn't see it because I didn't really use my phone. It was used entirely to phone taxis, order pizza, and as a pager-of-sorts for the office to let me know when it was Overtime time.
It didn't "click" until I had to replace my ipod, and got the ipod touch. It didn't take very long for me to realise the one thing it was missing was connectivity.
Realistically I'm not even sure I was wrong. Calls & SMS are amongst the functions I use the least on my phone. It's still an ipod with connectivity.
Apple's New Thing, 2001: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/apples-new-thing-ipod.5...