Quote honestly, no, I don’t. It sure didn’t make an obvious, substantial difference for the user experience.
[Edit to add: for most people. Apparently the improved battery life was a game changer for some people.]
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I don’t think that’s true.
One of the huge problems with Mac laptops was that Intel wasn’t interested in making chips with the sort of power efficiency and performance Apple wanted in a form factor that would allow for the kind of extreme battery life we now see from Mac laptops. Windows machines were far more power hungry and even though the Mac laptops were the top sellers in each category, Mac’s as a whole were too small a market for intel to make a whole new chip segment for. So Apple did it themselves, and as a result Mac laptops now have a battery life and efficiency that windows laptops can only dream of.
Depending on you the user, that may or may not make a huge difference to you, but as someone who travels a ton and also takes his laptop into places without easy charging access that I need to use all day, it is a huge plus that I can now do that with a top tier, full-power laptop and not a low-power Chromebook or tablet.
YMMV of course but the M series chips ushered in a new era of mobile performance with an efficiency only dreamt about previously. And even if you don’t need that performance yourself, the subsequent mainstreaming of ARM desktops is a huge win for sustainable computing, too.
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Ok, opinions will differ of course, and apparently the change was a big deal for some people. To me all I have personally seen from Apple since the iPhone (other than the failed Vision Pro) is incremental improvements of their existing products, not any whole new ideas. And to me incremental improvements are rarely notable.
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Spearheading the transition to ARM has been absolutely humongous for sustainability. Forget the consumer, but x86 was (and is) incredibly power hungry, and if the legacy of Apple’s transition is just that we finally got free of it, as someone who lives and breathes datacenter efficiency, it’s a win.
Again, YMMV - people probably look at Walt’s animatronics vs the flying spider man now at the marvel campus and see that as a “incremental improvement “, too, but I guarantee you that imagineers would disagree 
What I’m far more pissed about is that Apple seemed poised to really take on the sustainability issue - even demoing their recycling robot, and then… nothing. A few marketing-only wins about carbon neutrality and that’s it. I was expecting them to lead the way on sustainability and carbon-neutrality by now as they’d promised and that’s really not happening. E-waste is a massive issue and no other manufacturer gives a shit about it, and now it appears Apple doesn’t either, so you’re left with a hunch of TERRIBLE options if you need to purchase new hardware. Apple’s stuff uses less power but still ends up in e-waste hell at the end.
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Ok, now you’re talking about something that I definitely know about. I work closely with those imagineers and have seen that animatronic up close and personal. It’s a different sort of animatronic that can do a unique trick, but even the folks who built it wouldn’t claim that it was revolutionary compared to the first generation of animatronics in the 1960s. Those things were truly groundbreaking.
Free-range interactive walking animatronics are another animal, maybe, but I’m still a little annoyed how all the press surrounding the BD-X droids keep talking about AI when they totally aren’t AI in any meaningful sense of the word.
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It’s been known for a couple decades that Intel chips were a dead end for efficiency purposes and ARM was where it’s at.
The thing is the vast majority of people don’t care about nerd stuff like 3nm fabrication processes, teraflops, efficiency cores, and power density. They just want devices to do the stuff they need them to do and have good battery life. They don’t care who makes the chips that power them. Apple bet their future on this when they started developing their own chips and it’s thus far worked out well for them.
That being said, with all the advances Apple has made in chip technology, but it’s by and large powering the same kind of devices that we’re accustomed to. The Visiom Pro was a big swing and a big miss. Apple never does well when they create a solution in search of a problem, which the Vision Pro most certainly is.
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I would like to point out the humble AirPods. They were derided when introduced in 2016, but now all Bluetooth earphones are basically AirPods — for better or worse.
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Definitely for better. I don’t miss cables one bit.
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But that’s what made those old iPod ads so distinctive!
Ok, fine. I guess removing the cables from earbuds can be Tim Cook’s lasting legacy.
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My ears actively push out earbuds. Anything without cables would get lost in no time. And buying one of those little string thingies (it’s a thing, look it up) just seems stupid.
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I have AirPods Pro for when I need something in a pinch. They stay in my ears ok but they aren’t great or anything, For serious music enjoyment, I use IEMs and a DAC so I’m covered in cables.
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I’m surprised they even have an Oversight Board, and that it doesn’t consist solely of Zuck and some yes-men.
I’m not surprised that the Oversight Board doesn’t care about trans people due to “public concern.”
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The Onkyo W800BT came out the year before?
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Ah. Well, I suppose nothing is ever really new.
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This is a good interview and sounds like a book I’d like to read:
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