The talent behind M1 left Apple years ago, because they weren't giving enough stocks, bonuses. So, Apple is left with fixers. I don't expect Apple to bring another revolution in chips.
I know someone who worked on the original M1, he's now at Google. He said they just booted macOS on the iPad's processor and it seemed to mostly work aside from some bugs, so they refactored that into a more complete solution for macOS-specific things that were broken.
That is so typical apple, penny pinching on compensation and worker experience with things like mandatory office commutes and charging for food. I've heard they've changed their tune recently at least comp wise, is that true?
I don't really accept that. So what if it's $10K? Even if they doubled the price, so what? There are lots of firms that would outfit their studios with dozens of $20K Mac Pros. In 1996/7, the ANS/700, running a special version of AIX, was upwards of $25K. Not many were sold, and yet the ANS group was still profitable. Steve Jobs killed it along with A/UX in his return.
This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now, just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
The Mac Pro is already in the extreme niche. The current Intel-based Mac Pro starts at $6000.
That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of current customers though, I don't know.
Why though? M2 Extreme would be cheaper for Apple than the current Mac Pro chips it buys from Intel.
If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then Apple would kill the product.
... and it's not like the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro or Studio machines are low end. They're blazing fast. It's very much a niche market since anyone demanding even more power can easily just build a Linux box with 2X the power for 1/4 the price or use cloud.
But the Mac Pro was always for a highly niche market. Even the cheapest Intel-based Mac Pro is $6000. And that's with a pretty meager 8-core CPU that gets worse single-core and multi-core Geekbench scores than the M1 Max found in a $2000 Mac Studio.
> Mac Pro systems are often used for cinema and video production, and such workloads are getting more demanding as resolutions and color depths increase. And such systems not only need performance, but the also versatility and flexibility of a desktop PC, as they need to install a variety of add-in-cards, accelerators, advanced storage devices, and so on. To add these boards, a new Mac Pro would need advanced I/O, which is somewhat of a departure from Apple's SoC ideology that entails a very high level of integration.
I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
During the late PowerPC era (2000-2005), Apple was at risk of losing this industry entirely. Every new professional content creation application was being built primarily for the Windows NT platform which had already successfully killed off SGI workstations and their proprietary Unix software stack. Intel and AMD CPUs were consistently delivering both better performance and pricing, despite the brief glimmer of hope from IBM's PowerPC G5 CPU in 2003.
What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped for — latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)
I think as tech got more standardized, we're seeing industries move away from this (eg. new movies use AWS as a render-farm instead of just buying powerful desktops for the office).
Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac".
Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work).
Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro.
New movies don’t use aws. Don’t believe the marketing . None of the big vfx studios uses the cloud as their main render farm, mostly for bursts .. it’s crazy expensive
Its more that the whole operating system was better for creative tasks, from font management to color management, as you touch upon, then the software started building on that.
The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools.
I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).
> Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors?
Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.
There was only a very slim window of time that the PPC was faster than x86 in real life besides synthetic benchmarks and even then they were hobbled by slower busses, slower graphic cards (if they had any at all) and an operating system that wasn’t fully native.
> It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here)
The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.
For movies (not sound) most macs are/were used for video editing or matte painting.
Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good final cut studio) or photoshop.
But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish)
There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might still need a mac.
Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.
> But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry)
I'm pretty certain the industry standard has always been Avid Media Composer, even if today and for years nearly all of the market share is Final Cut Pro X with the minority remainder split between Premier Pro and Da Vinci. Most of the choices being made out there are, "do I want Media Composer or FCPX?" And FCPX is a lot less expensive, so that's how it goes.
> I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render farms...
Most of the high-end VFX/CG industry uses Linux for both workstations and render farm nodes. Some studios like Pixar allow a bit more flexibility to some artists in certain roles (generally those that don't work in the pipeline that much - i.e. concept artists) to use other software / OSs, but otherwise it's mostly Linux.
Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted some away from Mac.
I guess I don’t really know and was kind of going off of the article. I sort of thought the industries heavily used Macs, but it does make sense that some use much more industrial setups.
It depends which part of the industry and which departments you’re talking about.
Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows.
Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based.
There’s very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware though.
Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren’t great for extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you’re using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support the accurate display space most macs ship with.
Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux for things like the Adobe suite of products.
Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs, accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.
It's not based on the whims of a company, it's usually based on what runs the software they need to run well, and what the operators like working with and how well it integrates with the rest of the production line.
The higher up in the food chain you get with production the less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes and the more they just run one task (be it color grading, compositing, editing, sound editing & foley).
Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost is not a problem.
These industries typically give so few shits when it comes to money that replacing a fleet of 100 2020 Mac Pros with 100 2022 Threadripper based machines is seen as a minor inconvenience at best. Apple provides good hardware at the moment ? Use Apple hardware. Apple can't let us plug in our Quadro cards on our VFX guys machines ? Buy a new workstation somewhere else, who cares ?
My impression is that when they look to buy, they get whatever is the best fit for them at that moment.. (maybe biased by various "gifts" and such to the right people)
When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
Side question with the product and processor names; any one else finding Apple's product naming getting ... complicated? Can't we just have the product names based on size, and a moniker dictate its features + processor?
Maybe something like;
- Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch
And you can get them in:
- Mini, Max or just "normal size"
With your choice of:
- M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra
Running
- MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS
We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already.
Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.
On the other hand, compared to just about every other computer/tech company out there I find it by far the easiest and most sane. Is the 15" MSI GE67 better or worse than the 15" MSI Bravo 15? And where does the MSI GP67 fit into the whole picture?
The closest thing to a MacBook mini would actually be the 12-inch fanless MacBook that was always highly constrained by thermals on the Intel platform. It would be a lot more interesting on Apple Silicon, perhaps for the school education market that seems to mostly use Chromebooks these days.
it continues to baffle me that they haven't yet reintroduced this model. It was always an assumption of mine, perhaps incorrectly, that that model was a design/engineering experiment that was just the wrong side of the line on practicality but served as a market test for that form factor.
Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.
Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.
Even smaller; there was an 11" Macbook Air discontinued in 2016. It was too slow for me, but I really like the form factor. Would like to see that return with AS.
As other mentions “airpod Pro gen 2” is still much, much simpler than whatever it is Sony is calling their earbuds.
But on the other hand you need to be a bit of an expert to compare the different series of iPad.
And who can forget that the first iPad with Retina display was called “the new iPad” and the follow up was called “iPad with Retina display”. Talk about cluster fuck naming!
I wanna say Apple is doing better than the competition but worse than they used to, but they have a few fuckups from a decade ago that a bigger than anything they’ve got going on now, so maybe they’re not clearly doing worse.
So to answer your question: Is apples naming getting complicated? Inconclusive.
What I don't get, is that Apple lost their foothold in both the creative market & education markets, and don't seem to be trying to address it. Why is the Mac Pro still the same price, three years after its release? Why not work with aeronautics, engineering, CAD, architecture vendors to port their apps to the Mac? Why not sacrifice hardware margins, now that they're moving into services?
I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?
There is an unbelievable amount and diversity of software used in aerospace that is Windows only, from general mechanical engineering tools to highly specialized data acquisition and analysis packages, microcontroller interfaces, optics design, you name it. Getting all that to move over to a new platform would be an enormous undertaking for essentially no benefit on the part of the vendors. I suppose you could do it piecemeal if you really wanted to, but it's still an uphill battle in an industry where Windows is pretty solidly entrenched.
Gaming was super solidly entrenched on the Windows side. Valve put some muscle behind Wine and proton and that is no longer the case. I mean Apple even made Rosetta 2 for this silicon migration. If they really wanted it, it's totally within reach.
It's because those markets are tiny compared to the bigger markets that they focus the company on, which is why they slowly drifted away from their focus on it. The HDR [0] youtuber creator machine they created with the new macbook pro alone probably dwarfs them by several orders of magnitude for example.
[0] Yes I know HDR is not much of a thing currently on social media, but apple tends to invest tech wise to where they see the market going, and do it earlier. Removing the floppy drive early is an indicator of this, and they realize it's a bit of a chicken & egg thing.
True. I remember a video editing class in college and we had to use the cheese grater Mac Pro render our work. I don't remember all the details but I know I didn't want to try it at home on my white MacBook.
The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.
True, a lot of this moved to laptops for Innovator's Dilemma-reasons, but surely they have a plan to secure a more few niches, beyond FAANG software developers for the Mac, and students for the iPhone and Watch? The iPad was intended to dominate "what comes after PCs", but PCs never went away; and it just seems like Apple never course-corrected from that vision. That's what I'd like to see: a coherent vision for the future of computing. We haven't seen that since the failed post-PC thing in 2010.
On that front, it's funny to me that Google was so successful with Chromebooks, when Jobs called thin clients the future for decades yet failed to ever make one.
Apple cannot compete with $200 Chromebooks. Not without compromising the whole reason you'd choose Apple in the first place. It's a game of razor-thin margins and those aren't Apple's thing.
> Why not $thing?
Apple is focused on services, not hardware or software unless it boosts their services.
The only thing it makes sense for them to care about is their iPhone business. It's been that way for a long time. The iPhone business makes more money than wearables, services, Mac, and iPad combined.
I imagine that it has a lot to do with TSMC's 3nm being pushed back so far.
History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield, and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive.
>One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes
For those people who use a high workstation, what is the typical price? I feel like people spending more than 10k on a machine must not be bothered, they want the performance
$10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost. Yes, you've been able to configure Mac Pros or iMac Pros for similar prices in the past, but it's always been the ultra high-end with niche use cases, currently if you max out a Mac Studio you're up to around $10k.
That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else.
If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
10k is fairly normal for professional workstations when you factor in high memory Quadros and xeons.
I would really not recommend comparing to home built machines. Studios tend to lease from Dell/HP and those workstations will often be in the 10k+ range.
> $10k is easily double what a beast workstation has traditionally cost
I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
I regularly see people in the scientific and engineering fields spend more than 10k on a workstation without blinking. A company I work with that does antenna design for example dropped 12k (plus a bit more) on a workstation within the last year. No fancy video cards, just super beefy CPUs and tons and tons of RAM.
$employer procures workstations equipped with 64C Threadripper Pro + A6000 48GB GPUs for CG artists. They haven't said what they're actually paying but list prices of those machines are north of 15k. Devs get a similar setup except smaller GPUs.
The only thing pro about it is single threaded performance, and even there it's not close to the best available, as Zen 4 and Raptor Lake surpass it. In other areas it's lacking. A Threadripper will destroy it in multithreaded performance with 64 cores and terabytes of RAM. A 4090 will blow it away in GPU performance.
The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server market you have to add more IP, change the processor interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design another line of processors which needs additional design, verification, validation, software development, etc that you won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need to ask, is there really a market for this?
When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it, the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile market and it does not make business sense.
Readit News
https://archive.ph/pxQam
The gist:
The new high-end Mac Pro with Apple silicon is behind schedule, and you can blame changes to the company’s chip and manufacturing plans.
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> an M2 Extreme version of a Mac Pro would probably cost at least $10,000 — without any other upgrades
That would be a very niche market compared with the lower end devices.
When you're charging $1,000 for a monitor stand, all prices are arbitrary.
This "$10K is too expensive" line doesn't fly. Right now, just upgrading a Mac Pro processor can push the price over $13K. Again, so what? I'm certain there were more than a handful $50K configured 2019 Mac Pros sold. This kind of thing is expensive for the individual, but for a business it's merely a commodity. $50K is cheap because it couldn't even pay the salary of one developer for a year, and the Mac Pro is useful for at least a few years, so cost is more like $16K/yr. That's an absolutely nothing business expense.
That almost-doubling from the already insanely expensive machine could push it past a breaking point for a lot of current customers though, I don't know.
If Apple believed it has to sell it for 10k for the single reason of avoiding Mac Studio canibalization, and at the same time Apple believed 10k is too high for the customers, then Apple would kill the product.
I have always wondered: why do these industries effectively bet their industry’s computation on the whims of a company like Apple, who does what they (Apple) want when they (Apple) want and loves to shut out integrations?
What kept Apple alive in this market was 1) Pro Tools, 2) their own suite of applications like Final Cut Pro and Logic, 3) the 2006 Mac Pro that finally delivered everything users had hoped for — latest Intel CPUs, Windows compatibility, enough fast PCI slots for everyone. It was really the best of both worlds and became the x86 media desktop to beat. (In typical Apple fashion, the 2013 Mac Pro swung too far the other way towards Apple-specific integration and was an abysmal flop with massive heat problems and non-upgradeable GPUs stuck in the past.)
One cool thing in MacOS that Windows can't do is aggregates of audio devices/interfaces.
Interestingly, there is historic reasons that apple has disproportionately been successful with creatives and its not the marketing of MacBooks to hapless poets. Some of it is just "photoshop was first available on a Mac so other software was first made for a Mac".
Early Macs were historically faster and more capable due to using POWER chips, which made them desirable for performance oriented work. It led to a story that Macs were export-banned like weapons due to performance (reality is more fuzzy here) [1]. Other unique advantages Macs supposedly have: the first color monitor (def better for creative work).
Additionally, apple (Steve Jobs?) cared about graphics and color more than competitors, so any creative would want to use a system that cared about what they cared about. Even today, apple advertises their very expensive "reference grade" monitors. I'm not a creative, so I don't know how truly the apple monitor fills that purpose. The aesthetic and big $5k monitor (which works best with a Mac) was claimed to replace a $30k small and ugly reference monitor, which would leave lots of budget to splurge on a Mac Pro.
--- [1] https://www.techjunkie.com/apples-1999-power-mac-g4-really-c...
The Studio XDR display is not a replacement for a reference monitor and Apple ended up back pedalling on claiming it was. I don't know why you think what it looks like matters, or the size as they are a professional tools.
I used Photoshop on Irix running on an SGI, and the SGI back in the day was way more powerful than anything Apple produced for serious tasks (not sure it was a better Photoshop machine though).
Or edit? The cloud makes 0 sense for most of video production.
Did they really care about color? The original Mac didn't have color (it didn't get color until about System 7?) I think they chose higher-resolution over color. It's the same with the NeXT I believe, higher-resolution is more important than color.
https://vfxplatform.com/
The US government classified the G4 as a "supercomputer" and banned their export. Apple tried to make hay of this, but it hurt them, and within months Apple was lobbying to lift the ban.
They went through Motorola 65XX -> 68XX -> 68XXX -> Power PC -> Intel.
That portion before Power PC was a long time, 18 years.
Something that either needed final cut (and the rather good final cut studio) or photoshop.
But final cut has been somewhat overtaken by adobe (or was when I was leaving the industry) and blackmagic fucking with the entire software stack by making resolve and fusion free(ish)
There are some niche bits like cinesync that allows remote viewing of footage securely and colour accurately that might still need a mac.
Apart from laptops, apple have lost the VFX market pretty well.
I'm pretty certain the industry standard has always been Avid Media Composer, even if today and for years nearly all of the market share is Final Cut Pro X with the minority remainder split between Premier Pro and Da Vinci. Most of the choices being made out there are, "do I want Media Composer or FCPX?" And FCPX is a lot less expensive, so that's how it goes.
Do they? Last I heard, most of the industry uses Linux render farms...
Smaller studios use Windows/Mac a bit more (boutiques use Macs the most), but the removal of the Xserve and the lack of competitiveness in the MacPro for several years have shifted some away from Mac.
Animation and visual effects for large studios are all Linux based usually. Smaller studios vary between Mac and windows.
Edit houses tend to be primarily Mac based.
There’s very little that competes with macOS and Apple hardware though.
Take color accuracy and EDR. Linux and windows aren’t great for extended dynamic range while working, and especially if you’re using a laptop for mobile reviewing, very few laptops support the accurate display space most macs ship with.
Macs also provide a lot more software compatibility than Linux for things like the Adobe suite of products.
Combine that with out of the box support for many codecs, accelerated ProRes workflows and the ubiquity of airplay+airdrop, macs are very favoured for creative use cases.
The higher up in the food chain you get with production the less these machines are used as general purpose computing boxes and the more they just run one task (be it color grading, compositing, editing, sound editing & foley).
Yes, you can use Windows/Linux PCs, and they make more sense for a lot of 3D work and certain other tasks but at the end of the day Apple macOS and hardware just make sense and the cost is not a problem.
When it's time to upgrade the old stuff, the process happens again, and the previous gear more or less entirely retired..
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Maybe something like;
- Mac, MacBook, iPhone, iPad, Watch
And you can get them in:
- Mini, Max or just "normal size"
With your choice of:
- M?, M? Pro, M? Ultra
Running
- MacOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS
We've already got a "mini" iPhone (SE), MacBook (Air), Mac. Plus the normal sized ones; 14" for the laptops and studio for the Mac, and then max being 16" laptops, or a tower mac, and the 12.9" tablet etc. Same for the watch too, and the iMac has played around the 21/24/27 sizes already.
Perhaps I just don't understand the product differential requirements from branding / marketing perspectives.
On the other hand, compared to just about every other computer/tech company out there I find it by far the easiest and most sane. Is the 15" MSI GE67 better or worse than the 15" MSI Bravo 15? And where does the MSI GP67 fit into the whole picture?
Compared to Apple's/Steve Jobs' own standards, yes.
In some cases, it's complicated by being TOO SIMPLE: e.g. try figuring out iPad versions.
Anecdotally it seemed very popular, and loved by the people who bought one. Perhaps the numbers said otherwise, because otherwise I have no idea why they didn't reintroduce it as an M1/M2 machine.
Perhaps, and this is maybe just being hopeful, they're waiting for the even better efficiency of the M3 etc before reintroducing it because they want to do it, but absolutely nail it when they do without any battery life compromise. After all, they already ran the market demand test, so this would make sense if so. If that turns out to be the case I'll almost certainly buy one.
But on the other hand you need to be a bit of an expert to compare the different series of iPad.
And who can forget that the first iPad with Retina display was called “the new iPad” and the follow up was called “iPad with Retina display”. Talk about cluster fuck naming!
I wanna say Apple is doing better than the competition but worse than they used to, but they have a few fuckups from a decade ago that a bigger than anything they’ve got going on now, so maybe they’re not clearly doing worse.
So to answer your question: Is apples naming getting complicated? Inconclusive.
Then we can say things like "2022 was (not) a good MacBook-year".
I read an estimate from a French firm that Mac Pro volumes are orders of magnitude lower than Power Mac volumes were two decades ago; are they doing anything about it?
[0] Yes I know HDR is not much of a thing currently on social media, but apple tends to invest tech wise to where they see the market going, and do it earlier. Removing the floppy drive early is an indicator of this, and they realize it's a bit of a chicken & egg thing.
The gap between laptop and desktop with today's M1 MBPs is much more narrow for sure.
Macbooks (Airs, at least) and iPads are still huge in education.
Apple cannot compete with $200 Chromebooks. Not without compromising the whole reason you'd choose Apple in the first place. It's a game of razor-thin margins and those aren't Apple's thing.
> Why not $thing?
Apple is focused on services, not hardware or software unless it boosts their services.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/382136/quarterly-segment...
History shows that a very large chip made on a process node that has just come online isn't going to have a good initial yield, and 3nm wafers are said to be fairly expensive.
>One wafer processed on TSMC's leading edge N3 manufacturing technology will cost over $20,000 according to DigiTimes
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-will-charge-20000-per...
That's with 20x general compute cores, 32x neural engines, and 64x GPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 8TB of storage. I guess it's probably useful for 8K video workloads, but not much else.
If the article is right and they're targeting a $10k base price for the Extreme version of the chip, then they better get it VERY right for it to be worth the effort, and I wouldn't expect many customers to be lining up regardless.
I would really not recommend comparing to home built machines. Studios tend to lease from Dell/HP and those workstations will often be in the 10k+ range.
I was thinking similarly. Not Mac, but $4-5k will get you an extremely well specced Dell/HP workstation suitable for nearly anything. Staying under $5k can also make it easier to push it through finance where higher price premiums typically require more paperwork.
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Deleted Comment
I also wonder, does the SEC track trades placed by Mark Gurman and those who republish (collectively a bandwagon of such) pronouncements of analysts?
The M-series chip makes sense because you can share it between mobile and desktop machines. The A-series and the M-series are very closely related. Once you start to enter the high-end server market you have to add more IP, change the processor interconnect, topology, and increase the transistor count on the IP you already developed. This leads to the necessity to design another line of processors which needs additional design, verification, validation, software development, etc that you won't be able to share with your profitable chips. You then need to ask, is there really a market for this?
When Apple used 3rd party CPUs they outsourced the cost of that server development work, the 3rd party Intel already had a large market for their Xeon class chips so development costs were spread across customers. The business made sense. Let's face it, the Pro side of the business is tiny relative to the mobile market and it does not make business sense.
SOC with soldered memory, yet still expandable.
https://twitter.com/sroussey/status/1512934509540360195?s=20