Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

512pixels.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 263 posts

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#101

Post by michaelt »

sylens wrote: post #76

Apple’s high end desktop strategy has been confusing to me for several years now. They made a big deal out of the iMac Pro, even though that seemed like an obvious quick fix for power users since the new Mac Pro wasn’t ready at the time. However, I never understood why Pros would want to pay more for an an all-in-one they couldn’t self service or upgrade when they probably already had monitors they preferred using. T…

> I don’t remember previous Mac Pros being targeted this exclusively; heck, somebody in my freshman dorm in 2006 had the cheese grater Pro at the time for music production.

Well, even before the rise of covid-induced work-from-home, Apple has been shepherding almost all of their users onto laptops.

That college student's 2006 Mac Pro might have had 1GB RAM [1] - but these days, Apple has a laptop for users wanting 64GB RAM. And it isn't a suitcase-sized mobile workstation either.

People wanting more power than that for things like ML and scientific computing will often be shifting their workload to the cloud or a cluster anyway - it's only people doing interactive tasks like CAD and high-end video editing who are buying the Mac Pro.

[1] https://youtu.be/l72MsGZQA8Q?t=418

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#102

Post by rahoulb »

teruakohatu wrote: post #7
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…

> clear case where using a powerful off-the-shelf Intel chip makes more business sense right now. It will simplify MacOS when they end Intel support.

I wouldn't be surprised if they keep internal Intel support anyway - as well as other architectures.

The difference would be supporting Intel publicly - with third-party developers. As the target for Mac Pros won't just be running a load of electron apps.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#103

Post by shapefrog »

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…

Dell will be shipping SOC ARM computers before that happens.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#104

Post by [deleted] »

jb1991 wrote: post #66
UltraViolence wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#105

Post by donbrae »

dmitriid wrote: post #91
akamaka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s aside from the point. They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line. The question is how they will pay for a high-end chip when they no longer can rely on Intel to spread out the development cost among many customers.

> They could accomplish that by simply killing off the Mac Pro line. In the time after the trashcan Mac Pro they lost a significant portion of the professional market. And while that market is relatively small, it's highly influencial. By the time Final Cut Pro X was unveiled Apple could boast that 60% of Hollywood movies are edited on a Mac. Now? Not so much. And this probably extends into other areas, too.

Indeed. Releasing FCP X as an MVP (a concept no-one outside of software dev understands), without the features in FCP 9 that professionals expect, was a bad idea. I know a couple of filmmakers that switched to PC, partly due to the cost of Macs but also because of FCP X.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#106

Post by formerly_proven »

akelly wrote: post #96
devwastaken wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple doesn't want you to know this but they do their mechanical and electrical design on Windows PCs (using Siemens NX and OrCAD respectively)

Hardly surprising because I don't think there's even one piece of high-end CAx software for Mac.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#107

Post by matwood »

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.

Every company in existence would love to have a $38B/year revenue (along with I'm sure great margins) vanity product like the Mac.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#108

Post by matwood »

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?

They are not starting from scratch. The Apple Silicon MX chips all share a common base, and are related to the AX chips. When every product Apple sells is using some version of the same family of chips, a lot of the design cost is spread across all Apple devices.

Then it's just the incremental design cost that must be recouped for things like (speculated) off die RAM.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#109

Post by lapcat »

iamtedd wrote: post #39
lapcat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. There's a cost to supporting Intel forever only for the Mac Pro and nothing else. Not only a cost to Apple, but also a cost to 3rd party Mac developers, who would be even less likely to have the resources to support the Mac Pro for its own sake. Apple dropped PowerPC support in Mac OS X (10.6) 3.5 years after the Intel transition started, and they dropped Rosetta support in Mac OS X (10.7) 2 years after…

You don't think it's possible that the cost to maintain MacOS support for Intel is already built into the price of a Mac Pro?

Certainly not for 3rd party developers, who get $0 from Mac Pro sales. Hard to sell a machine if there's no software support.

Anyway, no, not for Apple either, because Mac Pro unit sales are already low, and trying to make that one Mac model cover the cost of all macOS Intel support will make the already expensive and low volume Mac Pro even more expensive, and thus even lower volume, making it harder to cover the cost.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#110

Post by victorelu »

SpacePortKnight wrote: post #74

What I like about Apple is that they have such a clear product lineup that it allows for speculation like this article. On the other hand Microsoft's surface lineup makes no sense and is super confusing. That's true for Samsung as well. Even if these companies had the engineering capacity to make chips like M1; I doubt they would attract even a fraction of the media attention enjoyed by Apple.

Except the iPad lineup which is quite confusing and weirdly speced and priced.
Post reply on HN