Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I don’t know what happened with The Loyalist, but I actually got my mask from them pretty quickly.
Not gonna lie, I really didn’t find this episode compelling. Too much rehashing of Apple news, which while important for Apple supporters, is really not world changing despite the hype of @Leo and the crew. Maybe Microsoft will officially release Windows for this new hardware, but that still doesn’t mean that MacOS is going to take over the business world. Microsoft has a focus on corporate system deployment and management that is quite probably the antithesis of the Apple mentality, at least so far.
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I’m not sure you understand why gaming has stuck to the PC. Where Apple may fail with the gaming community, and where the consumer will likely experience the greatest harm from this transition, is Apple’s tendency to lock down platforms and then use exclusivity to restrict repair and upcharge for components.
Will various graphics card developers (NVIDIA, RADEON) and OEMs (MSI, EVGA, GIGABYTE, etc) be able to compete in the Apple space and fight to out-compete one another for performance and price? Or is Apple going to choose a chip developer, do the OEM themselves, and use their ubiquity to upsell a $500 graphics card for $1200, like they have with their other components in the past? 16GB DDR4 2666MHz from Apple is currently $400; from Corsair via Newegg is $68. 2 TB kit of two internal SSDs from Apple.com is $1,000. Two 1TB SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2 2280 1TB PCIe currently sums to $350. Maybe the Apple implementation of this hardware is better–but I doubt it’s that much better.
If Apple doesn’t change the way they do business, new developments will be unobtainable without buying a full new system which will cost a premium. This doesn’t mean they’re going to lose the “gamer”, but it certainly makes upgrades less obtainable, market competition between OEM reduced, and, if the rest of the market follows suit, will reduce the number of competitors in the space.
Edit: Maybe Apple will keep it open like it is now and my worries are for nothing. We’ll see.
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I found it really interesting, @Leo had a lot of new thoughts (at least, I hadn’t heard them before) on where Apple might go, new designs and so on that they have been holding off on.
That said, I’m about to buy a new Macbook Air! I really need a new laptop, I’ve been working on a Lenovo Yoga that I never really came to love, and it’s starting to misbehave, so I can’t wait.
And any time I wonder if I could just wait, I think about butterfly keyboards - Apple’s innovations aren’t always good! So a nice new MBA with a Magic keyboard will do me fine, and maybe my next purchase will be on Applie Silicon once they iron out the glitches.
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I agreed with Lory that there is a big question hanging over the PC gaming realm. I found that the others made just a cursory mention of PC gaming. The PC gaming industry is not purely about playing games. The auxiliary industries that spawn out the the gaming community have been growing and growing. Such as the display, cooling, memory, keyboard and mouse, headphones, mic, etc, are all big parts of the gaming industry. Then it is also greatly linked to the online streaming industry. There is a lot of facets to the PC gaming industry. I like Apple products, but being Apple, it is not going to allow the enthusiasts to customize their gears and make them unique. You stop having the option to compete among each others to build better PCs, and to show off to the world. The PC gaming has more than just games. Interesting to see where how it is going to be affected by Apple doing its own silicon.
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@Leo If your looking to do low level programming look at the Rust programming language. Rust is a modern replacement for C/C++ that doesn’t require garbage collection. It has been adopted by Microsoft and many others. Getting very popular.
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I think that Microsoft and Intel have a steady income for the foreseeable future. Too much of industry is too heavily invested in WinTel. I don’t mean office PCs, I mean industrial processes. A lot of them are monitored and controlled by Windows software and the manufacturers of those systems can’t even be bothered getting the software to work properly on Windows 7 or Windows 10 - heck we still have “new” systems that require IE and ActiveX to monitor them! An update to HTML5 or some other software doesn’t exist. Windows 7 just works and to hell with it.
The same for measuring equipment, we have stuff stuck on XP and Windows 7, because the newer software only works with newer hardware and why would you hand over 6-7 figures for a new piece of equipment, when the old one is still working perfectly well?
The kit just gets isolated or shifted onto secure networks with no external connectivity - no access to the back office, no access to the Internet.
If that is industries way of dealing with newer versions of Windows, there is a cat-in-hells chance of them converting the software to run on WoA, let alone Apple ARM silicon.
Heck, we even have an old label printer (metal and perspex) that needs MS-DOS (and won’t work on anything with UEFI or under Windows).
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I agree. At least Leo warned the listener at the beginning of the podcast episode that it was going to be an all Apple centric show. I made it through about 12.5 minutes and had to stop and eventually delete it from my library. When it’s about Apple, Leo can go into minute and very long discourse.
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I agree with @HouseWhiskey to quite an extent but from a slightly different angle: Apple may never decide that gaming’s hardest-core requirements are important enough to bother supporting. It’s not so much that they couldn’t best NVIDIA but that mediocrity is enough for enough people that their business model, in their view, won’t support anything better at a reasonable price-point, especially at their margins since it would “look bad” if a much more capable machine were offered at only a “slight” premium to a middling mass-market one which nevertheless earns so damned much thanks to its volumes, the syndrome having plagued the Mac for years up to now, by all appearances. As he says, though, I, too, yet harbor hope it is only due to appearances as they have burrowed away toward charting their own destiny. But every indication on Apple culture in these years, especially on the design side how weak-sauce mobile bullshit has kicked the average clueful user in the shins so hard it’s caused multiple compound fractures (unreliable external local storage in Files on iPadOS, anyone?! Craig’s WWDC2020 rationale why shitty iOS design trends should rule the day for “consistency” to reduce “mental mapping” without even addressing the map (“How will people know to touch an icon without a box around it to make it look like a button, on a touchscreen device while presented in specific, consistent contexts?!)), does NOT inspire confidence, but even more so, that stridently asserting user prerogatives angry at the insult to them Apple has allowed serving more basic users to entail may provoke a doubling down by Apple on such insults on the basis they feel forceful argument to have been one to themselves and/or facilitate badly intentioned ones.
One of the best shows of year! — Great work all.
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Agreed.
Once he said it was an all Apple show, I hit delete. I watched a 5 minute video from WSJ about the show and that is all I need to know. Apple is a religion and this is like church. They can draw out a paragraph from the bible and flesh it out for an hour.
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I am really happy that @Leo mentioned up front that it was an all Apple show. The ARM news is big, but that is all I want to know. I stopped the playback and deleted the episode, I expect next week will have more Apple talk, so may skip that one as well. 
Apple haters are a religion unto themselves!!! They crack me up 
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Yeah. Same here. I’ve watched or listened to every TWiT since day one. But seeing the comments about this one I decided to skip it. First time for me, but I can’t take anymore Apple hype.
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I have to agree here. The customisability and cost competitive market place is what really drives the PC gamer market.
You can choose the best “bang for buck” with different price options at the time and even take into account smaller future upgrades. Apple’s tendency to lock down all their platforms just goes against this ability to customise, along with their pricing. It’s a fallacy to think all PC gamers want (or at least can afford) to pay the highest price for a gaming rig, especially not one with the Apple price mark up.
I have one and I love it - I also have the 13" MBPro - both terrific - I have to admit though, these days my iPad Pro 11" with the Magic Keyboard is more and more becoming my daily driver
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