• Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    1 year ago

    Nintendo is fighting the same forces of physics and they’re beating every other mobile platform so far. Switches still sell great depite their CPU and GPU be in the equivalent of a five year old Android tablet.

    Apple is making huge steps in chip design that has giants like AMD and Intel beat. AMD still has better chips half a year after the release of a new M series, but Intel has basically given up on being power efficient. Everyone else is just playing catchup to Apple. AMD and Nvidia are beating the shit out of Apple in GPU performance but for day to day use, Apple’s hardware accelerated media engine and TPU are great at hiding their lacking GPU.

    What Apple does lack is I/O. The base iPhone 15 still has USB 2.0 speeds and the M1 Macbooks couldn’t even drive two screens. That’s where the competition is still ahead in a wag Apple can’t mask with a proprietary accelerator.

    Luckily, Apple doesn’t care for silly things like games and enforces their own look onto the world, creating a great market for competitors to operate in. They sell their laptop replacement iPads with stupidly gimped software that prevents them from ever replacing laptops. They demand high app store premiums to scare away any serious games publisher. They gimp their browser and forbid proper terminal emulators just to piss off developers. They take the revolutionary HoloLens concept and turn it into an iPad you strap to your face.

    Apple could crush the Switch if they wanted to. Their hardware is powerful enough and their designers are smart enough not to create a Pippin 2.0. They just don’t care about power users, gaming, and every other market they don’t bother to compete in.