With M1X Macs now mere weeks away, Intel’s cringey PR is at it again

[saltycaramel]

Summary

Intel recently published a supposed “social experiment” (judge by yourself if the reactions look genuine or scripted) in which Apple fans (allegedly) are confronted with the amazing world of customization, cheap memory upgrades after the fact and wild form factors that lies outside of the Apple bubble. 

 

Video

 

My thoughts

We are now just a few weeks away from the 10-core M1X Macs (2 Macbook Pros and possibly 1 Mac Mini), the timing of this ad may not be a coincidence. I see cringe, “nerdy” tone deafness, failing to acknowledge what the Apple “spell” is all about. And honestly faux social experiments belong to clickbaity youtubers, not to a company at the pinnacle of chip design. I get that PR is a separate team from engineering, but I thought the new leadership at Intel was supposed to stop it with this kind of self-deprecating smell-of-desperation PR stunts.  

 

Also, since already 90% of desktop/laptop users live outside of the Mac bubble, why is Intel acting so nervous and proactive to convert that 10% of Mac users? What are they afraid of? Are they connecting the dots about the M1, the M1X and the M2’s hard to beat perf-per-watt and perf-per-buck?

 

The more Intel and MS embarrass themselves with this kind of ad campaigns, the more I know Apple is onto something with these new custom silicon Macs.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Intels afraid because the macs are good.

Like really good.

And 10% of poeple who had macs with intel are people who apple is trying to get to upgrade to apple silicon.

 

[tikker]

13 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

why is Intel acting so nervous and proactive to convert that 10% of Mac users?

Even more market share.

13 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

What are they afraid of? Are they connecting the dots about the M1, the M1X and the M2’s hard to beat perf-per-watt and perf-per-buck?

Yep. Intel hasn't moved that much over the last years and for all intents and purposes had a monopoly. With the advent of Epyc, Ryzen and M1 they're now feeling the heat under their feet from these companies getting a little uncomfortably hot. Plus, with top of the line Intel and AMD CPUs costing about the same and both games and other workloads becoming more effective at leveraging multiple cores, why would I pay the same or more for an Intel CPU with less cores.

[Lightwreather]

5 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Also, since already 90% of desktop/laptop users live outside of the Mac bubble, why is Intel acting so nervous and proactive to convert that 10% of Mac users?

I feel like that number has changed/ might change soon. And not to sound like a fanboy, but I'd say Intel IS worried, the mobile space has been one that intel has historically dominated, and seeing increased competition at a time where they don't have a product that is truly competitive (sorry TGL) has them worried imo

 

[BobVonBob]

5 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

(judge by yourself if the reactions look genuine or scripted)

It's an ad, obviously it's fake.

 

As for why Intel is trying to make their products look better, it's because those ARM chips are looking really damn good. If high performance ARM chips and x86-64 emulation existed on Windows or Linux you can bet I'd be dropping Intel and AMD in a heartbeat. People without my negative opinions of Apple are already jumping ship, because Apple's new chips are just really good. I'd probably be doing it too if I didn't hate Apple more than I hate Intel and AMD.

[Senzelian]

Good ads wouldn't get you to complain about them on this forum.

[tankyx]

I understand Intel, they have been offering pretty poor cpus for a couple of years now.

 

Ryzen 5000 converted me to AMD on my gaming rig, and I use a MBP M1 now as a laptop. No more intel

[saltycaramel]

“REAL” capitalized, Intel says

 

But it’s an ad so we’re supposed to know it’s fake. 

 

Or maybe those actors are also real apple fans after work. 

 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Honestly are Mac users really buying Macs at the time because they have Intel processors? Though to be fair, that's American advertising for you. It's like how every single ad for an American car company is just cringy AF. Apparently every single car made in America earned some sort of JD Power award. And who can forget  Chevrolet's "real people" ads. 

[GoodBytes]

Listen, we all know Intel is the best.

Only with Intel they could deliver such an amazing gaming video playback experience.

 

And only with Intel you can enjoy quality message boxes from their "fully supported DirectX/OpenGL" graphics chip which popup and crash your games saying that some DirectX or OpenGL call is unsupported.

 

Only with Intel...

 

Do you have this with Apple M1? No! And there you go.
You don't have the Intel eXperience(TM) on those devices!

 

 

Next time you go shopping for your next computer, be sure to ask for Intel CPU (don't worry, thanks to them making secret anti-consumer and monopolistic deals with OEMs to get special pricing if they go exclusive Intel, you won't have to worry about getting anything else than Intel in the PC space).

 

[atxcyclist]

I might be off base here, but I honestly don't think typical consumers that buy Apple computers generally care about the hardware side, they're buying it for the ecosystem. This is both a great and a terrible thing if you buy Apple, you're getting curated hardware and software that's tested and designed to work well together, but you're limited to the OSX ecosystem.

 

My father has a 2014 Intel MacBook Pro, and I don't think he really cares what the processor is. He's also going to buy a new MacBook Pro eventually, and it having an Intel or an Apple chip in it won't really matter.

[Dracarris]

7 hours ago, r821e228 said:

if Apple stuff wasn't so freaking expensive I'd have switched long ago.

Then your time is now, the M1 based machines start at around 700$ and the M1 MBA has probably one of the best price to performance ratios in the history of laptops.

4 hours ago, atxcyclist said:

I might be off base here, but I honestly don't think typical consumers that buy Apple computers generally care about the hardware side, they're buying it for the ecosystem.

For a large share, probably yes. But do keep in mind that Apple has a significant share among very knowledgeable people like Anthony or anyone else for which the proximity of macOS to Linux is a huge plus. For those people the move away from Power PC was a bliss.

[Video Beagle]

15 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

For a large share, probably yes. But do keep in mind that Apple has a significant share among very knowledgeable people like Anthony or anyone else for which the proximity of macOS to Linux is a huge plus.

Yeah, but I say this as an Apple user longer than most people reading this have been alive and a masters degree that I like to pretend makes me knowalgble about stuff, if not spelling, that those people aren't gonna be swayed by intel..or apple...marketing.

 

17 hours ago, BobVonBob said:

 If high performance ARM chips and x86-64 emulation existed on Windows or Linux you can bet I'd be dropping Intel and AMD in a heartbeat.

Didn't I see that as one of the big "new features" of Windows 11? (and by "see" i mean, I thought I saw that as a bullet point in a list of marketing things).

 

 

---------

Something I've never gotten is the "more customizable" argument...though I guess as it's intell, its more "look at the neat shapes you can make a PC in" as opposed to the old "windows is more customizable" argument...As in the past 2 weeks I've had several challenges that are simple to solve on my mac with either open source but not user friendly to polished inexpensive commerical versions that are pretty much "can't be done on a PC to the level you want no matter how much you search" (I think I posted about both topics elsewhere so you can search my history if curious )

[Laborant]

The only problem I have is, that ARM-based Macs are completely unusable in many engineering B.Sc and M.Sc programmes. State of the art software for programming FPGA (Quartus or Vivado), for Schematics/Layout of PCBs (Altium), many widespread CAD software and other proprietary tools do not run on MacOS. With the old Intel Macs, dualbooting to Linux or Windows was possible and enabled these workflows also on a MacBook. 

As there are many hardware engineers working at Apple, I wonder how they deal with that problem. 

 

As many people realisticly could work inside a web browser - and therefore could perform everything on an iPad - the Mac Ecosystem is for most people a valid choice.

The Freedom™ many Windows and Linux users brag about is not needed by most people out there. 

[Dracarris]

5 minutes ago, Laborant said:

State of the art software for programming FPGA (Quartus or Vivado), for Schematics/Layout of PCBs (Altium), many widespread CAD software and other proprietary tools do not run on MacOS.

That indeed is a huge problem and the reason why I have to daily use Win10, macOS, Ubuntu and CentOS. Altium and CAD are a notoriously Windows-locked field but at least for Vivado there is widespread Linux support (well that is common for chip-design EDA tools) but still no Mac version.

 

[hishnash]

1 hour ago, Laborant said:

As there are many hardware engineers working at Apple, I wonder how they deal with that problem. 

 

I expect apple is a large enough client for these vendors that apple can request source code access and likely has multiple in house modifications in place on these tools going back years anyways.   

[Kilrah]

19 hours ago, saltycaramel said:

why is Intel acting so nervous and proactive to convert that 10% of Mac users?

They are not, they're proactive to try and avoid that number growing with a stupid but likely unfortunately working "you wouldn't want to be seen in that group of losers, would you?" approach... 

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

On 10/5/2021 at 8:02 PM, GoodBytes said:

Listen, we all know Intel is the best.

Only with Intel they could deliver such an amazing gaming video playback experience.

 

And only with Intel you can enjoy quality message boxes from their "fully supported DirectX/OpenGL" graphics chip which popup and crash your games saying that some DirectX or OpenGL call is unsupported.

 

Only with Intel...

 

Do you have this with Apple M1? No! And there you go.
You don't have the Intel eXperience(TM) on those devices!

 

 

Next time you go shopping for your next computer, be sure to ask for Intel CPU (don't worry, thanks to them making secret anti-consumer and monopolistic deals with OEMs to get special pricing if they go exclusive Intel, you won't have to worry about getting anything else than Intel in the PC space).

 

If it's so powerful that it can make Homer Simpson smart, I'm sold. 

[Bombastinator]

19 hours ago, Laborant said:

The only problem I have is, that ARM-based Macs are completely unusable in many engineering B.Sc and M.Sc programmes. State of the art software for programming FPGA (Quartus or Vivado), for Schematics/Layout of PCBs (Altium), many widespread CAD software and other proprietary tools do not run on MacOS. With the old Intel Macs, dualbooting to Linux or Windows was possible and enabled these workflows also on a MacBook. 

As there are many hardware engineers working at Apple, I wonder how they deal with that problem. 

 

As many people realisticly could work inside a web browser - and therefore could perform everything on an iPad - the Mac Ecosystem is for most people a valid choice.

The Freedom™ many Windows and Linux users brag about is not needed by most people out there. 

I thought I heard somewhere that a Linux was being done for apple silicon stuff but that it wasn’t out yet.  I don’t know if that would help you or not.  Might be a dual boot would be needed. IRRC It was at one time possible to do dual boots with something called multibeast which was not an apple designed app. Doesn’t mean building such a thing is still possible though.  That might be part of the hold up.  I don’t know much about it. 

[Lightwreather]

5 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

IRRC It was at one time possible to do dual boots with something called multibeast which was not an apple designed app.

That was for hackintosh

5 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I thought I heard somewhere that a Linux was being done for apple silicon stuff but that it wasn’t out yet.

It's already out, tho without an installer, and without hardware acceleration

[Bombastinator]

The weeks away thing is interesting.  I’ve been wondering more about the gpu stuff than the cpu stuff.  Apple silicon apparently can run a lot of x86 stuff, which implies at least some games. M1 is still an APU though even though it’s apparently good for an APU.  I want more power than any current APU can provide though.  Like 3d 1440p high in a game kind of power.  

[WolframaticAlpha]

On 10/5/2021 at 8:58 PM, saltycaramel said:

Summary

Intel recently published a supposed “social experiment” (judge by yourself if the reactions look genuine or scripted) in which Apple fans (allegedly) are confronted with the amazing world of customization, cheap memory upgrades after the fact and wild form factors that lies outside of the Apple bubble. 

 

Video

 

My thoughts

We are now just a few weeks away from the 10-core M1X Macs (2 Macbook Pros and possibly 1 Mac Mini), the timing of this ad may not be a coincidence. I see cringe, “nerdy” tone deafness, failing to acknowledge what the Apple “spell” is all about. And honestly faux social experiments belong to clickbaity youtubers, not to a company at the pinnacle of chip design. I get that PR is a separate team from engineering, but I thought the new leadership at Intel was supposed to stop it with this kind of self-deprecating smell-of-desperation PR stunts.  

 

Also, since already 90% of desktop/laptop users live outside of the Mac bubble, why is Intel acting so nervous and proactive to convert that 10% of Mac users? What are they afraid of? Are they connecting the dots about the M1, the M1X and the M2’s hard to beat perf-per-watt and perf-per-buck?

 

The more Intel and MS embarrass themselves with this kind of ad campaigns, the more I know Apple is onto something with these new custom silicon Macs.

Well, this ad has convinced me to switch to PC! They seem so much better! I guess I will order a CPU. 

*watches ltt/gn review*
Yes, a ryzen 5 5600X and AMD RX 6700 please. Ah, yes. I want to build a PC with AMD parts in it.

 

THANKS INTEL!!!!!! I LOVE MY AMD PC!!

[suicidalfranco]

Would have grabbed an Intel powered laptop anyway. Since it's the only way to get thunderbolt on the only pc format where it makes sense to have it. Apple dropped the ball with the removal of bootcamp, so a no go even if apple silicon becomes the fastest chip of the world. Plus apple anti repair philosophy don't help it either, thank god for the likes of framework, just need to start shipping to Italy.

[Spindel]

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The weeks away thing is interesting.  I’ve been wondering more about the gpu stuff than the cpu stuff.  Apple silicon apparently can run a lot of x86 stuff, which implies at least some games. M1 is still an APU though even though it’s apparently good for an APU.  I want more power than any current APU can provide though.  Like 3d 1440p high in a game kind of power.  

Of the software that I use that is x86 it runs everything with no problems (or at least with no more problems than that software had on my intel mac, I'm looking at you OneDrive you piece of shit software).

 

But to be honest for work I do the software that is not AS native it's mainly AutoCAD, MS Teams and OneDrive (and the odd session of some other software that is not native i e TeamViewer from time to time etc). The rest is office suite that is native, outlook etc.

The only game I do play on my computer is Civ 6 (and it is x86) through Steam and that runs good and round times are waaaaaaay faster than my old iMac and I can run on higher graphics settings (the iMac had a GTX780M so it was an old graphics card, but it was still very much faster than the intel integrated graphics on the newest intel macs).  

[saltycaramel]

2 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The weeks away thing is interesting.  I’ve been wondering more about the gpu stuff than the cpu stuff.  Apple silicon apparently can run a lot of x86 stuff, which implies at least some games. M1 is still an APU though even though it’s apparently good for an APU.  I want more power than any current APU can provide though.  Like 3d 1440p high in a game kind of power.  

 

The GPU in the M1X will come in 2 varieties

- twice as big as the GPU in the M1

- four times as big as the GPU in the M1

 

Plus it’ll have better cooling being on more Premium/Pro machines.

 

Plus if it’s based on the A15 design, it should also carry some nice “IPC” (let’s borrow this expression from the CPU world) upgrades over the A14-based M1 design.

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-performance-review-faster-more-efficient/3

 

So all things considered the top M1X GPU could very well be more than 4x faster than the M1 GPU.

 

As a side note, even the latest xbox and ps5 use a SoC/APU approach.