Jimmy writes...

Hello gentlemen!

Just wanted to share a thought on Chris' comment about Apple's edge with designing hardware and software together with the performance improvements making them a seemingly unstoppable force.

This reminded me of a recent episode of Sam Harris' podcast in which he had a guest that talked about ordered and loose cultures, and how they respond to threats, change, and myriad other topics.

The connection I'm making here is that Apple is effectively an ordered culture when it comes to their products, which seems geopolitically much like China. China's strength is that it can act with efficiency, building hospitals in weeks and really own the messaging and process. This is the benefit of their ordered culture, but it does come at a cost of certain liberties within society. Apple can own the entire process as well and set the rules of the game (which is why they'll win the Epic Games court case).

The x86/amd64/non-Apple-arm64 culture is very much fragmented into a loose confederacy (loose culture) that can't really operate at the efficiency of Apple, particularly with hardware-software integration, which reminds of the United States and how efficiency the country is at responding to anything really (see COVID response compare to China's). 

This confederacy allows great and terrible ideas to equally flourish (thus significantly less efficient), so it will always be behind in some regards to consumer hardware because of this.

Add to this, Apple's ordered structure lends itself to a strong brand because it doesn't have to share that with anyone else. What brand does the non-Apple world have with consumer hardware? Where is the leadership in this confederacy? It's fragmented and can't compete with Apple right now.