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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

#111

Post by coldtea »

KyeRussell wrote: post #87
coldtea wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...

That’s…so long ago. The Apple with a two trillion dollar market cap and a spaceship campus is not the Apple of that era. The wider market and world aren’t what they were then, either. It doesn’t mean very much at all.

Doesn't matter. Those things can go in the span of a few years. Remember when Blackberry was king? Pepperidge Farm remembers!

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#112

Post by alkonaut »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #100
alkonaut wrote: post #77

What is the biggest hurdle for the M2 Mac Pro? Is it connectivity that isn't suppported by the chip? E.g. when they want external DRAM and GPU, the M2 SoCs simply don't have that capability so a whole new SoC would be required, with features that would only be used in the Pro, making it a questionable investment? Or is there a more technical hurdle, e.g. that supporting external Dram and third party GPU would require…

Could it be many still need CUDA and hence unless they can somehow fit in Nvidia they … But they do not want to. Hence not sure what is the point other than they can win the war against CUDA.

CUDA or not, I don't think many will buy a mac pro unless it delivers what the last one did in terms of Graphics. And that probably requires at least using separate graphics card in the several-hundred-watt class. They obviously aren't going to shove a 400W graphics card into the SoC and they aren't going to shrink the power requirements by an order of magnitude for GPUs. An they also aren't going to enter the business of making discrete pro graphics cards. nvidia and AMD can afford to do that research work because it trickles down to consumer/gamer cards. But Apple surely can't motivate that research expense.

So the only thing that makes sense is to either make no Mac pro tower workstation with discrete GPUs at all, or doing what they did last time, using third party cards.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#113

Post by matwood »

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…

When will this decline start? Last quarter was the best quarter ever revenue wise for the Mac.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#114

Post by matwood »

esskay wrote: post #54

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 ge…

> I know they lost a lot of key people in their silicon development team so perhaps thats the reason.

Maybe, but people are always coming and going on any team. This whole story felt like a tempest in a teapot type of thing.

IMO, given the typical lead time of hardware, we're finally seeing Apple have issues stemming from covid/supply chain breakdowns.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#115

Post by yakubin »

I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in general, or if those are still pains of migration to a new ISA.

(Often, when one application crashes, a couple others follow not long after.)

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#116

Post by matwood »

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?

Right now I have a 16" MBP connected to a TB4 dock. A 5k Studio Display is my primary monitor with a 27" 4k LG display as a secondary. The MBP screen is my tertiary screen.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#117

Post by xoac »

brailsafe wrote: post #97
esskay wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you really look into what's available, there's a fair bit of variation in the market for different customers, but there's incredibly few 5k+ displays at 27 or ~30 inches. Like zero if you discount the LG. Everything else is kind of ok, but not always a good replacement.

This is about to change with higher spec connectors being more widely available.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#118

Post by ErneX »

yakubin wrote: post #115

I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in gen…

No crashes on mine, maybe you got a lemon?

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#119

Post by manmal »

yakubin wrote: post #115

I don’t know if it’s the fault of Apple Silicon, but on my Mac applications regularly crash. That includes ACDSee, IINA, qBittorent, Edge, KeePassXC, Sublime Text, Sublime Merge… There is at least one crash every 3 days. Nothing like it happens on my Windows, Linux or FreeBSD systems. It’s my first Mac, so I can’t compare this experience to Intel Macs, and so I don’t know if it’s just that MacOS is so unstable in gen…

There was info a while back that memory management issues become more obvious on Apple Silicon, problems that x86 is more forgiving of. Can’t find the source unfortunately.

Re: What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition

#120

Post by nier »

coldtea wrote: post #83
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.

The Mac are what sustained Apple pre- and post-Jobs, when it WASN'T YET about "unprofitable vanity products". If the iPhone goes down, the Macs are exactly what Apple still has going for them...

In my understanding of history it would be more accurate to write: The Apple II is what sustained Apple post- and pre-Jobs.
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