Discussion Apple Silicon SoC thread

[Eug]

M1
5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LP-DDR4
16 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 12 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache
(Apple claims the 4 high-effiency cores alone perform like a dual-core Intel MacBook Air)

8-core iGPU (but there is a 7-core variant, likely with one inactive core)
128 execution units
Up to 24576 concurrent threads
2.6 Teraflops
82 Gigatexels/s
41 gigapixels/s

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Products:
$999 ($899 edu) 13" MacBook Air (fanless) - 18 hour video playback battery life
$699 Mac mini (with fan)
$1299 ($1199 edu) 13" MacBook Pro (with fan) - 20 hour video playback battery life

Memory options 8 GB and 16 GB. No 32 GB option (unless you go Intel).

It should be noted that the M1 chip in these three Macs is the same (aside from GPU core number). Basically, Apple is taking the same approach which these chips as they do the iPhones and iPads. Just one SKU (excluding the X variants), which is the same across all iDevices (aside from maybe slight clock speed differences occasionally).

EDIT:



M1 Pro 8-core CPU (6+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 14-core GPU
M1 Pro 10-core CPU (8+2), 16-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 24-core GPU
M1 Max 10-core CPU (8+2), 32-core GPU

M1 Pro and M1 Max discussion here:

Page 78 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 78 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

forums.anandtech.com

M1 Ultra discussion here:

Page 109 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 109 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

forums.anandtech.com

M2 discussion here:

Page 127 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 127 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

forums.anandtech.com

Second Generation 5 nm
Unified memory architecture - LPDDR5, up to 24 GB and 100 GB/s
20 billion transistors

8-core CPU

4 high-performance cores
192 KB instruction cache
128 KB data cache
Shared 16 MB L2 cache

4 high-efficiency cores
128 KB instruction cache
64 KB data cache
Shared 4 MB L2 cache

10-core iGPU (but there is an 8-core variant)
3.6 Teraflops

16-core neural engine
Secure Enclave
USB 4

Hardware acceleration for 8K h.264, h.264, ProRes

M3 Family discussion here:

Page 215 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 215 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

forums.anandtech.com

M4 Family discussion here:

Page 263 - Discussion - Apple Silicon SoC thread

Page 263 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

forums.anandtech.com

 

[Eug]

You opted not to use their magic keyboard and magic mouse so I don't know how you have the gall to complain /s

The failing keyboards are the butterfly keyboards, like the one in my 2017 MacBook. My keyboard hasn't failed yet, but it's a relatively common occurrence in this era of Macs.

Fortunately, the iPad Pro M4 Magic Keyboard is a completely different key mechanism design. It also feels way nicer than the 2017 MacBook's keyboard. The trackpad in the latest Magic Keyboard is also excellent and better than the 2017 MacBook's trackpad.

Maybe you can install the latest service pack?

Thanks, but I have the latest updated version, Office 16.16.27 (which was from quite some time ago). I'm not really complaining though, since Office 2016 launched almost a decade ago, long before Apple Silicon debuted.

I do have the web version of Office 365 through my workplace, but that presents its own problems, like the fact I can't actually upload my ginormous presentation to the workplace. I've never given a presentation through Zoom from web-based Office either.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Thanks, but I have the latest updated version, Office 16.16.27 (which was from quite some time ago). I'm not really complaining though, since Office 2016 launched almost a decade ago, long before Apple Silicon debuted.

https://office-reset.com/ ?

 

[Doug S]

For that 2015 MacBook Pro I mentioned above, the two SSDs had these stats:

Apple OEM drive for this model that I bought used
256 GB - 97524322 MB writes in entire lifetime of 31540 hours.
That works out to 3092 MB writes per hour, or 23.2 GB per 7.5 hour day.
Assuming a 1900 hour work year, that's about 5.9 TB per year.
Wear levelling index 67%.

Apple OEM drive that came with the Mac
128 GB - 4179231 MB writes in its entire lifetime of (only) 877 hours.
That works out to 4765 MB writes per hour, or 35.7 GB per 7.5 hour day.
Assuming a 1900 hour work year, that's about 9 TB per year.
Wear levelling index 94%.

BTW, I'm not sure why this 2015 model had so few hours on it. However, I suspect it may have been a refurb unit, because the thing looked brand new when I got it in 2021, and when I opened it up to swap in the 256 GB drive, there was no dust in there at all. The battery only had a cycle count of 29 too.

Aren't those using standard SSDs, not Apple's controller since they aren't using Apple Silicon? Or did they include the controller on the "T2" chips they used in the last few years of x86 Macs?

 

[poke01]

great, AI craze hit Apple too...

 

[igor_kavinski]

View attachment 102718

Can't be from Apple. Looks like a lousy job.

 

[Eug]

Aren't those using standard SSDs, not Apple's controller since they aren't using Apple Silicon?

Sort of. They are PCIe drives, but they are not NVMe drives. They use a different connector, but they include the Samsung controller on the drive.

Anyhow , I was just talking about how much wear these drives may see, not Apple’s controller.

 

[poke01]

Samsung isn’t that good for SSDs. I always use the Kingston drives. KC3000 to be precise

 

[igor_kavinski]

Thanks, but I have the latest updated version, Office 16.16.27 (which was from quite some time ago). I'm not really complaining though, since Office 2016 launched almost a decade ago, long before Apple Silicon debuted.

Office 2016 for Mac 64-bit upgrade - Microsoft 365 Apps

Discusses the conversion of Office 2016 for Mac to 64-bit in the August 2016 release.

learn.microsoft.com

Did you install this?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Samsung isn’t that good for SSDs. I always use the Kingston drives. KC3000 to be precise

Haven't heard anything negative about the 990 Pro. Or the 990 EVO. But I understand why you are wary.

 

[poke01]

Haven't heard anything negative about the 990 Pro. Or the 990 EVO. But I understand why you are wary.

I just don't like samsung's firmware

 

[Nothingness]

Haven't heard anything negative about the 990 Pro. Or the 990 EVO. But I understand why you are wary.

Weren't there many issues with 990 pro? First models needed a firmware update.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Weren't there many issues with 990 pro?

Probably fixed by now.

My local Amazon ratings:


And 990 EVO ratings:


I think it's a decent drive if you want speed on a gaming or entertainment PC. But yeah, I wouldn't trust Samsung myself with critical data (had a Windows C partition wipe issue on 860 EVO. D partition was intact as far as I could tell).

 

[Eug]

Office 2016 for Mac 64-bit upgrade - Microsoft 365 Apps

Discusses the conversion of Office 2016 for Mac to 64-bit in the August 2016 release.

learn.microsoft.com

Did you install this?

View attachment 102723
View attachment 102724

Thx.

Isn't that an older version? That article references an update to Office 2016 15.25 (160817) 64-bit.

My Office 2016 is 16.27.27 (201012), which is 64-bit. As of macOS 10.15 Catalina (from 2019), applications must be 64-bit to run.

Also, I don't want to upgrade to Office 365 for fear of losing my licence.

EDIT:

It seems there will be Office 2024 for Mac with a perpetual licence available later this year. I'll consider getting a licence for that if the price is right. There is no way I'm paying for a subscription. But like I said, Word 2016 and Excel 2016 work fine for me on Apple Silicon, so the only issue for me is PowerPoint 2016 on Apple Silicon, and only during presentations and not the actual creation of the presentations. And I still have my Intel MacBook which works fine with PowerPoint 2016.

 

[igor_kavinski]

My Office 2016 is 16.27.27 (201012), which is 64-bit.

Never mind. Wrong version.

 

[Eug]

I had forgotten about this, but it looks like Office 2016 is the only Rosetta 2 application I have left that I still regularly use.



And even through Rosetta 2, it's still blistering fast compared to my 2017 Intel MacBook. Yes, my Intel MacBook is slow enough where even just PowerPoint is sluggish.

 

[Eug]

Samsung isn’t that good for SSDs. I always use the Kingston drives. KC3000 to be precise

Does Kingston even make controllers? Kingston doesn't make their own NAND chips and AFAIK they don't make their own controllers either.

Samsung makes its own NAND, and makes its own controllers. Apple buys high quality NAND, and makes its own controllers (which are actually now built into the SoC).

BTW, even Micron seems to like Samsung. Many moons ago I ordered some RAM from Crucial (which is Micron), and I received Samsung RAM from them.

 

[igor_kavinski]

BTW, even Micron seems to like Samsung. Many moons ago I ordered some RAM from Crucial (which is Micron), and I received Samsung RAM from them.

Samsung RAM chips on the SODIMM I can understand but if the sticker said SAMSUNG, that was bait and switch.

 

[igor_kavinski]

Does Kingston even make controllers? Kingston doesn't make their own NAND chips and AFAIK they don't make their own controllers either.

Kingston is pretty serious about their reputation. I don't recall a single bad incident with anything Kingston. They were in the news many eons ago for some bait and switch controller/chip controversy but haven't seen them in any negative news in years.

 

[poke01]

Does Kingston even make controllers? Kingston doesn't make their own NAND chips and AFAIK they don't make their own controllers either.

Kingston use Phison controllers which are pretty good.

 

[johnsonwax]

Because it was just Apple, they controlled all the pieces - and we still don't know how many years this was worked on from the first ARM frankenmacs built from iPhone SoCs began to appear in secret Apple labs. So sure X Elite stumbled out the door, but whose fault was it? Qualcomm designed the chip, Microsoft did the OS and X translator. Both had responsibility for the drivers.

Based on Charlie's article and what we've seen, they both share a lot of the blame. Maybe they would have benefited from pushing it back, but Qualcomm didn't want to keep stringing people along for a full year after the initial announcement before systems shipped. Microsoft didn't want to delay their big "AI PC" push. It was a game of chicken and neither was willing to blink for their own reasons.

If you set a bar for really high expectations, you have to be really sure you can deliver. You can't say "oh well we can't achieve the promised performance TODAY, but we're sure the next stepping will take care of it or the fixed drivers Microsoft promised will take care of it". They were still fixing serious performance regression issues in the drivers during initial shipments!

So, just back from vacation, catching up to a few.

Nobody is going to be as good at this as Apple, because nobody has paid the cost of being good at this as Apple - like, not even close. Apple has been through 4 architecture changes and a full OS rework. They've spun out (arguably) 4 more operating systems from that.

It's not a technical advantage, necessarily, it's a cultural one. One of the post 1997 lessons (I bought shares just after Jobs sold all of his shares and prior to the boardroom fight to oust Amelio, so I was following things closely even back then) was that Apple had lost control of most of their core technologies. This shows up in the full Cook doctrine:

We believe that we’re on the face of the Earth to make great products, and that’s not changing.

We’re constantly focusing on innovating.

We believe in the simple, not the complex.

We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.

We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.

We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.

And frankly, we don’t settle for anything less than excellence in every group in the company, and we have the self-honesty to admit when we’re wrong and the courage to change.

And I think, regardless of who is in what job, those values are so embedded in this company that Apple will do extremely well.

When Jobs returned, his critique was that they were too reliant on component suppliers, on 3rd party compliers like Metrowerks, on 3rd party retail channels like CompUSA, on the interests of Motorola and IBM, and so on. If they were a major brand, they would have the scale to make those relationships work, and they'd lost that, and they were being jerked around by pretty much everyone. What they needed to do is identify all of the points of failure of a platform (if your sole compiler vendor stops doing business, you're kind of fucked) and take control of all of those, and things that can be treated like commodities can continue to be hired out (like assembly). In simple terms, if it's IP encumbered and non-substitutable Apple wants to own that entirely. And because it would be a LONG time before Apple could control their own silicon, they made the investments to make sure that they could treat silicon as a commodity. That was a practicality that NeXT needed to have since they needed the flexibility to jump between silicon architectures that Apple adopted. They didn't need to deploy on multiple architectures, but in the event that PPC isn't cutting it, they need to have everything in place they can just drop them for Intel. And if Intel isn't cutting it, then the next thing, etc. That just became the culture of the company - fill in Intel's architectural moat so it can't be used as a weapon. So, Apple builds LLVM/Clang, they build Rosetta and improve upon that, they abstract even their own architectural advantages.

I'm not a big proponent of the individual talent theory of success in enterprise. There are examples of that, but very few. You can build a superteam of engineers and do completely fuck-all with them. As organizations get large, culture dominates everything, and Apple under Jobs and Cook established this culture of engineering for when the bridges get burned, because 1997 was when the bridges were being burned, and while Apple is on top now, they will be burned again. So while Microsoft is absolutely capable of matching Apple here, they haven't spent the last 25 practicing that, laying all of that foundation down and iterating on it over and over and over. They're clearly adopting some of the same attitudes as Apple. Microsoft is no longer willing to trust Intel with the keys to the kingdom. They gave up on trusting the OEMs when they introduced Surface. Bit by bit there adopting at least some of Apple's cultural elements, but they're going to be slower to incorporate compared to a company that was nearly out of business when those changes were introduced, and they're just less practiced.

All said, I think Microsoft is doing surprisingly well here around the Qualcomm move. It took Apple more tries to get to the same state.

 

[johnsonwax]

Apple being in possession of good stuff is just a waste for humanity. How much you wanna bet that there are engineers and other employees INSIDE Apple who want to use these efficient cores for something like 128-core, 256-core, 512-core and even 1024-core designs and completely blow away the cloud computing industry? But Apple executives won't have any of it. They would rather create their OWN data centers and provide this efficient computing power to paying customers with the magic of SaaS.

With Apple, it seems all new employees are taken through some top secret initiation ritual to wipe any semblance of humanity out of them so they work as humble and obedient servants for the purpose of achieving one and only one goal: Satisfying the unquenchable greed of Apple investors.

Generosity? It gets reported to HR and then you get a psych evaluation and if it becomes clear that you will never unlearn to be generous, they might decide to just let you go and be generous outside their campus.

Man, this is some wild fanfic.

I guess I'm surprised that in a forum like this with the quality of technical content that is being posted, that there is such a manifestly naive view of what actually drives these markets. Your statement here reads a little like why Mercedes wastes all of their engineering effort on their F1 cars when that same engine could make my riding lawnmower so much better. And like, sure, a 1000bhp lawnmower probably would be pretty fun, but they do that development where they do it, because that's where the money is to justify the development.

There's nothing stopping the cloud computing industry from doing what Apple is doing. Google does silicon design. Amazon does too. Apple is a California company so there are no non-competes. Just hire their people and build it. The reason they don't is that they can't afford to because their market is too small, their margin opportunity to fund that just doesn't exist.

Apple has taken the iPhones ability to throw off tremendous amounts of cash and used that to advance the state of the art in silicon by a pretty solid margin. And you're MAD about that. I think it's pretty safe to say that N4 and N3 would not have happened when they did without Apple's prepayment agreements there. And it's not like the cloud industry isn't benefitting from that - they're getting subsidized N4 and N3 development thanks to Apple being in the game.

And you think Apple employees are being denied some sort of agency here? Like, how? What would be the benefit of taking Apple's $20B or so prepayment agreement and using it to design a cloud processor that could never recover $20B? Apple would just immediately stop making that investment and would instead invest in screens or new anodizing approaches or whatever would turn some kind of revenue growth?

I think you seem to think that SaaS is a big revenue stream. AWSs annual revenue is about double that of, wait for it, Apple Watch. Where are there Apple-scale revenues in SaaS? Apple Services is a bigger business than Azure. Putting aside your complete failure to understand the relative scale of these businesses, Apple's entire business model is built around selling products for consumers - not for other corporations - and to capture the entirety of the value chain in that product, which is why Apple can outspend Intel on silicon. So yeah, Apple does make money on cloud compute - they have for a long time - that's the App Store. That's AppleTV+. That's iCloud. And they've always run on Azure and AWS because even Apple, using their own silicon, can't turn a greater profit by doing so.

 

[johnsonwax]

I can see plenty of good, usable products featuring AMD/Intel CPUs and GPUs available at affordable prices. Reason? Competition created by the different OEMs vying for our dollar.

Apple has no competition and whatever they produce, even crappy stuff,

Samsung doesn't exist? AMD doesn't exist? Qualcomm doesn't exist? WTF?

The structure of Apple's competitors are VERY different from Apple's structure, but that doesn't mean that they can't compete. The whole theory of business around Wintel was that disaggregating the technology stack would be impossible to compete against, and generally that theory wasn't wrong - that did indeed nearly run Apple out of business. But Apple has also shown very definitively, I think, that integrated development carries real value in the correct situations. Put another way, why the fuck is Apple leading on silicon development over Intel and AMD?

has prices wayyyy exaggerated compared to the value they provide.

No they don't. This is a huge failure to understand like, the most basic thing about market economics. There are 3 terms you need to understand:
1) Cost - how much money is needed to produce a good or service
2) Price - how much money will be charged the consumer for that good or service
3) Value - what the consumer feels the good or service is worth

With the exception of captive markets like healthcare can be, and none of Apple's markets are remotely captive, value is by definition higher than price. The consumer wouldn't fucking buy your product if they didn't think it was worth at least as much as you are charging, and with the exception of a very handful of markets, nobody knows and usually even cares what the cost is. Nobody is bitching that the $2 soda you buy at McDonalds actually has a cost of about $0.05. Nobody complaining about Apple's 30% commission on the App Store seems to even be aware that a 50% margin is average for retail.

You might disagree with the value proposition, which is absolutely your right to have, but that's your opinion, and your opinion is wrong by virtue of consumers looking at the $100 upcharge for $8 worth of RAM and saying 'yeah, that's fine'. You can think they're stupid. You can think they're being exploited. And, maybe. But you do the same goddamn thing in 1000 other transactions that you are too ignorant of and you don't see me shitting on you for buying a $5 loaf of bread you can make for about $0.50 (and save yourself some single-use plastic pollution). You have any idea how much money Americans absolutely light on fire in the name of car ownership? And destroy their own environment in the process? And you think charging people less money for RAM than the consumer thinks that RAM is worth is the problem? Because Apple's sales numbers suggest they could charge even more.

Because under this economic system that we have all agreed to (terrible as it may be) the only accurate way to determine worth is to do that transaction. And if $100 for 8GB of RAM is a workable transaction, then that's what it's worth. In fact, that's the only number that can be defended for what it's worth. Now, you can argue that Apple is terrible for going along with this system, but what else would they do? It's not Apple's fault that capitalism is exploitative. That's the system voters have demanded. We can demand something different. We never do, but we could. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

 

[igor_kavinski]

@johnsonwax , The game played by Apple isn't played by others. The others try but stumble in various ways and their products depreciate with time. Apple has mastered the art of marketing deception and that's how their products keep their value, despite inherently being of less value. That's all there is to it. Yes, they attracted some great talent and made some impressive hardware and technologies. But they are the worst example of how a successful company should be. Their nearest counterpart is Nvidia. Third was Intel until they were decimated by AMD. Nothing can go on forever. Apple and Nvidia will both have to pay for their sins. Everyone will see. It's just a matter of time.

 

[johnsonwax]

@johnsonwax , The game played by Apple isn't played by others. The others try but stumble in various ways and their products depreciate with time. Apple has mastered the art of marketing deception and that's how their products keep their value, despite inherently being of less value. That's all there is to it.

'inherently being of less value'. As defined by what? Is the inherent value of a BMW captured in the quality of the steel it uses? Or is it captured by how it signals to your neighbors that you are better than they are? What's the inherent value of filet mignon? You say these things as though they are objective measures, rather than your personal opinion. You don't like Apple. Ok. Good for you.

The benefit of the old Wintel model was you could mix and match your value choices. You could put more money here because you valued a case with internal LEDs and then put a shitty hard drive in it. And that's nice for the people who favor that. But that model was never successful with consumers. Almost nobody took advantage of the opportunities to distribute value. Instead, they generated some manner of brand loyalty, usually around a bit of anecdotal data around their last PC or service experience and then just let them do the packaging and threw all of the opportunity out the window. Rather than an Apple-like upsell system, most of them went with shovelware contracts to juice profits because in the end they were pretty much all just competing on price. They couldn't do what Apple was doing, so they sold you shit instead.

There's no marketing deception here. Apple makes it VERY clear what you are buying. There's nothing hidden - the 8GB of RAM is $100. It's very clear. It's not hard for anyone to work out that their costs are probably $6 for that. Nothing deceptive. But the shovelware is deceptive. The lack of warranty support depending on where you buy your PC is deceptive. I always think it's wild that one of the top rated brands in the world, with one of the highest customer loyalties is constantly derided as being some kind of fucking witchcraft, like they hypnotized 1/5 of the worlds population into buying their product. That argument can only be made by someone who simply doesn't understand what the value proposition in the product is, and doesn't care to understand - so they proclaim it to be witchcraft.

Yes, they attracted some great talent and made some impressive hardware and technologies. But they are the worst example of how a successful company should be. Their nearest counterpart is Nvidia. Third was Intel until they were decimated by AMD. Nothing can go on forever. Apple and Nvidia will both have to pay for their sins. Everyone will see. It's just a matter of time.

I honestly don't understand your metric here given that Apple and Nvidia are such wildly different companies in every respect. The only thing I can think of is they understand and play the capitalism game better than everyone else. And this is an accusation I see a lot - as though incompetent capitalism is the best kind. If you want profits to be retained by shareholders and reinvested, and in this case reinvested into technology, Apple is miles ahead of everyone in that game. If you don't like the fact that playing the game competently looks like this - I respect that. Demand that the game be changed. One of my big arguments for a long time is that many of the things that Apple is being criticized for taking a dominant position on are things that government should have retained authority for, because they were natural monopolies, but they walked away, Apple (or Microsoft, or Google) filled the void, and now government is pissed that Apple did their job for them. And rather than do this constant lawsuit followed by idiotic remedy business (which never works) by various governments they should instead just do their fucking job and look out for citizen interests from the outset.

But some of the things you seem upset about are just weird. Apple's the one that has broken the traditional semiconductor moat business. They're the ones who co-founded ARM after all, and gave us an architecture that any party can buy into, contribute to, and extend. And Apple could have gone proprietary with AppleSilicon but didn't. Apple also had a lot of responsibility to elevate foundries ahead of parties doing proprietary work. That's why if you want the best process you don't have to buy x86 to get it any longer, while also not excluding Intel from benefitting. These were both decisions that served Apple's long term interests, and they are good all around. And given the increasing costs to tip up new fabs, the number of parties who can afford to sustain this kind of investment is getting VERY small. Even Apple only has 1-2 more generations before they'll have to give up their first refusal advantage as they too will be priced out. So almost all of Apples silicon stack is there for almost everyone to use, and you're upset that they upsell their RAM by too much?

You think they're of less value? The fastest single core device you can buy right now by a pretty wide margin is a fucking iPad, not a $5K gaming PC or the SaaS server you think the market wants (and almost never actually deploys - who is putting fast single core in datacenters?) Apple's Mac sales are stalled out because all of us who jumped on Apple Silicon laptops at launch still have faster computers than pretty much anything in the x86 space. I just did a Factorio group event and can outbuild a 7950x3D - from a 3 ½ year old laptop. I expected to hold onto this laptop for 4 years when I bought it, and now I think it might be 6?

There are a lot of things to be critical of Apple of, but being good at keeping their customers happy sure seems like a weird one to focus on.

Of course Apple will fall with time. I made the money off of this stock because they did once before and I saw the opportunity and bought in when they were lowest. But I will say there's a lot that they have done with the culture of the company to insulate against that. You seem to think pretty much all of those efforts are bad.

 

[poke01]

@johnsonwax , The game played by Apple isn't played by others. The others try but stumble in various ways and their products depreciate with time. Apple has mastered the art of marketing deception and that's how their products keep their value, despite inherently being of less value. That's all there is to it. Yes, they attracted some great talent and made some impressive hardware and technologies. But they are the worst example of how a successful company should be. Their nearest counterpart is Nvidia. Third was Intel until they were decimated by AMD. Nothing can go on forever. Apple and Nvidia will both have to pay for their sins. Everyone will see. It's just a matter of time.

IMO, Intel is worse than Nvidia. At least Nvidia makes fast and efficient products with good technologies but it’s expensive. Same as with Apple. AMD isn’t as greedy yet because they don’t have mindshare nor the brand value like Nvidia or Apple do.

You should include MS in that list, almost all their products failed or underperform. As for Apple their products keep up value because they support their iPhones for a long time, the 2018 iPhone still gets feature and security updates, a 2018 Android no security updates. The value aspect doesn’t always exist for Apple, Intel Macs depreciated so quickly and lost their value for most Mac users, you can find a $3000RRP 2019 16” for $800 now on EBay.

Apples valued the way it because of the iPhone and everything else is secondary to Wall Street.