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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

#61

Post by UltraViolence »

klelatti wrote: post #49

Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles: - A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users. - An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.…

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business.

The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#62

Post by mrtksn »

BooneJS wrote: post #8

Xeons have many, many PCIe lanes. Apple Silicon only needs enough HSIO for SSD and Thunderbolt ports, and they’ve released all of the non-internally-expandable machines already. They needed a chip that added 48+ PCIe lanes to the package so they could satisfy the relatively few Mac Pro customers. And without external DRAM, they’ll never be able to provide as much memory as a low-end Intel chip in the Mac mini at the…

Considering that Mac Pro is a special purpose machine, maybe it can be possible to have an architecture with multiple M2 Ultra chips and expansion options for special purpose hardware? Highly parallelizable workloads and use cases with special hardware requirements(like encoding media, ML computations etc.) can benefit from this stuff. Apple already sells cards like this for Mac Pro.

Surely that would require architectural changes and the software would need to be adapted but since these machines are niche, so is the software and Apple can sponsor the development of the few software people are using on that kind of machines. Apple is sponsoring Blender for example.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#63

Post by zozbot234 »

UltraViolence wrote: post #58

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 l…

There's an ARM64 build of Windows. And Linux on Apple Silicon is getting to the point where it's almost viable as a daily-driver OS. It's not there yet but quite close.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#64

Post by zozbot234 »

mrtksn wrote: post #62
BooneJS wrote: post #8

Xeons have many, many PCIe lanes. Apple Silicon only needs enough HSIO for SSD and Thunderbolt ports, and they’ve released all of the non-internally-expandable machines already. They needed a chip that added 48+ PCIe lanes to the package so they could satisfy the relatively few Mac Pro customers. And without external DRAM, they’ll never be able to provide as much memory as a low-end Intel chip in the Mac mini at the…

Considering that Mac Pro is a special purpose machine, maybe it can be possible to have an architecture with multiple M2 Ultra chips and expansion options for special purpose hardware? Highly parallelizable workloads and use cases with special hardware requirements(like encoding media, ML computations etc.) can benefit from this stuff. Apple already sells cards like this for Mac Pro. Surely that would require archite…

Well, the Ultra is already multiple silicon dies (chiplets) on an interposer. So this would have to be multiple packages, sitting in separate sockets on the same logic board. I agree that this seems like it could be a viable strategy to get around any packaging constraints that they might have.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#65

Post by bzzzt »

UltraViolence wrote: post #58

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 l…

While Bootcamp worked admirably I hardly ever see it used at work. I don't think 'professionals' would be buying Macs to run Windows native very often while Windows laptops exist and would be providing much more value for their money.

Meanwhile, Mac sales are up and the current crop of M1/M2 machines get top review marks.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#66

Post by jb1991 »

UltraViolence wrote: post #61
klelatti wrote: post #49

Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles: - A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users. - An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.…

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

Is the Mac actually unprofitable? I don’t think that’s true.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#67

Post by alkonaut »

UltraViolence wrote: post #58

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 l…

> Most users will switch to Linux on Intel laptops from various other vendors.

Who exactly will switch to Linux on an intel laptop outside of a fraction of software developers/IT professionals?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#68

Post by devwastaken »

UltraViolence wrote: post #61
klelatti wrote: post #49

Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles: - A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users. - An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.…

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

That will be really difficult to do considering apple needs macs to develop iPhone. Apple dogfoods it's own hardware, that's why it's the best.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#69

Post by muro »

esskay wrote: post #56
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.

Other displays have higher refresh rates, but the resolution is still special. Color accuracy is also great. The annoying bug with choppy repeating audio stays unfixed 8 months after introduction and fix with the hassle of disconnecting the monitor from power for an extended time is just ridiculous.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#70

Post by klelatti »

UltraViolence wrote: post #61
klelatti wrote: post #49

Just looking at the economics of the Mac Pro based on sales of the machine itself doesn't quite capture the full picture. An Apple Silicon Mac Pro could have many roles: - A flagship product that demonstrates just how powerful Apple Silicon can be. This in turn could enhance the Apple / Mac brand for a certain group of users. - An aspirational product for users who think that they might need more power in the future.…

This will hold as long as Apple makes tons of money from its iPhone business. The minute however that this starts to sag they'll start cost-cutting and they'll start with unprofitable vanity products like Mac's.

For the foreseeable future the development costs of the Mac Pro will be a rounding error on Apple's P&L.

More of an issue now and in the coming years is bandwidth to do work on low volume products. They may be happy to spend the money but diverting key staff who could be working on a volume product, say the next iPhone SoC, that's a tougher call.

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