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What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

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Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#51

Post by stephen_g »

samwillis wrote: post #40

The Mac Studio was a new product category, sitting just beneath the Mac Pro. I suspect during development they were unsure of if it would actually be the Mac Pro, that would have probably been another 2013 Mac Pro debacle though. The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architectu…

I think it would be enough for the Pro to just be the same as the highest spec of the next generation Mac Studio, in a form factor that has PCIe and RAM slots. (I wonder if they could do some kind of memory hierarchy where you have, say, 32GB of the on-board unified memory soldered on to the processor like they have now, and then another eight slots or something of regular DDR5 sticks).

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#52

Post by girvo »

ksec wrote: post #15
akamaka wrote: post #5

How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Most of the M-series chips are shared across multiple products, but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. I don’t see Apple doing it simply as a vanity project, so there will have to be some inn…

>How will Apple recoup the cost of designing a powerful chip for a product like the Mac Pro, which is presumably their lowest-selling product? Which is the question I have been asking since 2015 . From a cost prospective it never made any sense. Presumably they will wait until Mac Studio becoming powerful enough to fill the gap. >but the Mac Pro seems to be a clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip…

Silly idea: could they put a M-series processor connected to a Xeon as a coprocessor to get the “benefits” of both wrt. adding their NPU stuff? Would that even make any sense?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#53

Post by firecall »

eastbound wrote: post #16
dwaite wrote: post #10

IMHO Mac mini isn't going to die any time soon; it is there in the lineup to be hostable/rackable operations glue for running old software and (old operating systems) headless. I doubt they will release a M2 Pro Mini. They will instead update the Mac Studio. Conversely, if they make a M2 Pro in the current Mini form factor, they'll likely use that as an excuse to redesign the regular M2 Mini to be smaller (Mac Micro)…

I buy Mac Mini because OSHA once demanded (and I find it’s not a bad idea) that I use screens instead of laptops to avoid employees spending 7hrs bending to neck. So they have 2 displays at work and 2 displays at home, and a Mac Mini, total 2300€, better than a 2800€ Macbook Pro + screens. What is the state of the art, do all of you simply buy a top-notch Macbook Pro and work on it all day?

MacBook Pro 16” with Screens.

Almost always with 2x 27” 4K Displays.

Nothing fancy, just the Dell range and whatever I can get a good price on.

I’d prefer 24” but you can’t get them at a sensible price. I’d use Apple displays but they are out of my budget range!

I tried 32” 4K displays, but they are too big for me!

Almost never gets used as a laptop. It just moves from desk to desk.

I get the 16” as when I do need to work directly on the MacBook, I want as much space as I can get!

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#54

Post by esskay »

I think its fairly obvious they've hit some problems. I know they lost a lot of key people in their silicon development team so perhaps thats the reason.

Whatever it is they're struggling to get the performance they need for a Mac Pro level machine.

I'd imagine part of it is going to be that they'll want to continue using Nvidia or AMD GPU's to allow for higher performance. That can't be an easy or simple thing to get working with their custom ARM based architecture.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#55

Post by esskay »

samwillis wrote: post #40

The Mac Studio was a new product category, sitting just beneath the Mac Pro. I suspect during development they were unsure of if it would actually be the Mac Pro, that would have probably been another 2013 Mac Pro debacle though. The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architectu…

XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers for their lower power consumption. The problem would be their insistance for them to run full blown macOS instead of a dedicated Linux based server OS.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#56

Post by esskay »

jamujamu wrote: post #4

Hopefully what’s also left is a 27-inch iMac with M2 or M2 Pro chip inside. The current 24-inch iMac just doesn’t cut it, and the Mac Studio + Apple Display combo is way to expensive compared to the price point of Intel iMacs.

I'd imagine most people going for the Mac Studio arent touching the balked Apple Display. It's been riddled with problems and at that price point you can get far better displays now. The panel they're using dates back to 2017 so it's not exactly like you're getting the latest and greatest in screen technology.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#57

Post by wartijn_ »

dwaite wrote: post #10

IMHO Mac mini isn't going to die any time soon; it is there in the lineup to be hostable/rackable operations glue for running old software and (old operating systems) headless. I doubt they will release a M2 Pro Mini. They will instead update the Mac Studio. Conversely, if they make a M2 Pro in the current Mini form factor, they'll likely use that as an excuse to redesign the regular M2 Mini to be smaller (Mac Micro)…

Mac Nano, if they follow the same naming convention as with the small iPods.

Or they’ll save the Nano name for a iPhone-sized Mac.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#58

Post by UltraViolence »

I have famously predicted that sales of Mac's will decline and could even lead to a rout. Many professionals need Intel CPU support in order for them to run Windows on their Macbooks natively. And no, emulation isn't an option.

I predict that Mac sales will sag and that this will lead Apple to slash more and more models, eventually undermining the legitimacy of the platform. Most users will switch to Linux on Intel laptops from various other vendors.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#59

Post by zozbot234 »

ksec wrote: post #13

It seems strange to include the Mini. As it is more of an Intel Mac for those who somehow still need Intel macOS for whatever reason. The memory capacity is limited in ARM Mac. So if you want high capacity memory you go to Mac Studio. And with Mac Studio, which brings us the next question. What are the Market Mac Studio couldn't compete with Mac Pro. If it is not powerful enough now, will possibly another doubling of…

> will possibly another doubling of LPDDR6, that is 512GB with 1.5TB/s of bandwidth

Will DRAM really scale to that extent at the device fabrication level, though? We're already seeing limits to scaling with SRAM.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#60

Post by solarkraft »

esskay wrote: post #55
samwillis wrote: post #40

The Mac Studio was a new product category, sitting just beneath the Mac Pro. I suspect during development they were unsure of if it would actually be the Mac Pro, that would have probably been another 2013 Mac Pro debacle though. The Mac Studio must be decimating Mac Pro sales, it must fit what 70-80% of Mac Pro users wanted. It's going to be incredible hard to Apple to justify development of an extended M architectu…

XServe would probably be pretty popular with the recent shift to ARM based servers for their lower power consumption. The problem would be their insistance for them to run full blown macOS instead of a dedicated Linux based server OS.

I think there's a chance they'd give you a thin iOS-based server OS (think watchOS or tvOS) with Hypervisor.Framework and let you choose what you run on it.
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