1/ What specific design choices make the M1 so much better than the equivalent intel chips ? It looks like there are a bunch of changes -- 5nm silicon, single memory pool, a combination of high efficiency and high power cores. Can someone explain to me how each of these changes helps apple achieve the gains it did ? Are these breakthrough architectural changes in chip design or have these been discussed before?

2/ How did apple manage to create this when intel has been making chips for decades and that is the singular focus of the company ? Is it the fact that Mac OS could be better optimized for the M1 chips ? Given the design changes that doesn't seem like the only reason.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25381537

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25001438

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Large companies which have a diverse user base in the hundreds of millions make decisions based on how a particular change affects the entire user population. The larger their user population, the more diverse their user base is and the harder it gets to cater to the needs of each type of user. The folks commenting here are a vocal minority, an important one given many people here are probably early adopters and also have the skills needed to build a Reddit competitor, but it's hard to see the reactions of this minority on a dashboard. A problem worth solving IMO but non trivial.

Typically initiatives like this come from a team within the company who's objective is to improve a key metric, in this case let's say user engagement. Some individual in the team probably spotted the trend that users on the app are more engaged than users on mobile web browsers. They then launched an experiment to test getting users over to the mobile app. Many users who end up on reddit via SEO probably don't know that reddit has an app and on seeing this end up downloading the app which makes them more engaged with reddit. Overall on the dashboard this shows up as a win where user engagement in the enabled group is up compared to the control and given that they give users an option to continue using the web app there is not a significant user drop. At this point, a decision needs to be made on whether to ship this change or not to ship. Folks making this decision do understand that it might be annoying to some people but the data in this case overwhelmingly supports a ship decision. They talk about it, mention their reservations, but eventually make a decision given the data and don't think about it anymore. They also don't have to feel the pain as most employees have the reddit app installed and don't see this again and again.

The key thing to know here is that there are lots of incentives in the company to make this decision a ship decision vs a no-ship decision - the data, the success of the team, the success of the individual who pioneered this change but there is not enough evidence or visible push from users to not make this change. Let's say there are some customer reports for this but unless they reach a very high volume no one is going to notice it.

Posts and discussions like this are actually a great way to get your word known to companies. This will probably stir a conversation in the team that made this change and hopefully bring out some change in the experience. Don't expect it to go away but maybe they will remember your preference of not wanting to use the app.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19357455

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18668052

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15005069

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12628510

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11538261

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Even though many of the YC partners have mentioned the importance of this, I could feel the pain of reading through the first paragraph and not being able to picture anything about the company in my head. Might be a good strategy to stick in a summary of your startup in the apply hn corpus and ask close friends to see if they understand and get excited by the idea before applying to YC.

Another thing I noticed was how biased I was towards ideas which addressed problems I have had. So hopefully Apply HN will help YC look into companies which are catering to completely different industries and sets of problems which they haven't experienced.

This is a great experiment !