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Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

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Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#181

Post by zitterbewegung »

notjustanymike wrote: post #89
bookofjoe wrote: post #51

>Apple’s iPod, by comparison, was made far more pocketable thanks to the inclusion of a 1.8-inch Toshiba hard drive. The story behind how Apple came to acquire these hard drives for the original iPod is interesting. >Jobs had expressed interest in building a portable music player in late 2000 and had tasked Jon Rubinstein with making it happen. The problem, however, was that Jobs wanted a player that was small and sl…

Interesting article, thanks for that. One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen, paired with material and interface design that companies hadn't considered a priority.

Yea another example is the NVIDIA Tegra. NVIDIA tried to use it to make their own portable gaming device but then Nintendo figured out how to use it to make the switch.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#182

Post by tambourine_man »

Loveaway wrote: post #133
brailsafe wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'll help make the lightest and smallest devices even more capable than any other competing laptop. After using my work issued 16" M2 Pro, my 2019 intel mbp is crawlin slow, particularly with Docker. Build times can always be faster, battery life always better, cooling efficiency better. The real life luxury of just being able to toss a 14" macbook pro that weighs almost nothing into your bag and have a savage devel…

Similar for me, caved in and bought a M2. It's great and all, gotta say though, not entirely happy with how unbearable the 2019 intel mbp has become. Yeah, it struggles with YouTube videos and fans are spinning in vacuum cleaner mode. But it didn't in 2019. I feel OS and software updates ruined it. Not what I expect after only about 3 years of use. (obviously it wasn't cheap either) Oh well, still gave Apple my money…

What browser are you running? My 2017 Mac runs 4k YouTube videos without a glitch in Safari.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#183

Post by xadhominemx »

cubefox wrote: post #140
xadhominemx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for a brief period when HiSilicon was still making leading edge SOCs, Apple has been the first customer on TSMC’s new process technology, and always with a custom process flavor. This is completely normal.

That's not true? For example, I think the first TSMC 4nm chip was by Mediatek, not Apple.

4nm is a 5nm derivative node

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#184

Post by guiambros »

coder543 wrote: post #142
notjustanymike wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting article, thanks for that. One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen, paired with material and interface design that companies hadn't considered a priority.

> One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen I disagree entirely, for reasons that should be obvious once we examine the actual state of the market at the time. Storage was not the thing that made iPod successful. The microdrive had existed for several years by then[0][1], developed originally for digital cameras. Like most st…

From Wikipedia:

"A second generation of Microdrive was announced by IBM in June 2000 with increased capacities at 512MB and 1GB, with the 512 MB model costing $399 and the 1 GB model costing $499."

Yes, storage technology existed at the time, but it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what Apple needed to put in a consumer product.

It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of technology, and paved the road for everything that we saw in the following decade with smartphones.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#185

Post by modeless »

helf wrote: post #59
xiphias2 wrote: post #34

M2 was a skip generation for me, looking forward to M3. Maybe the same with iPhone. I generally care about process node as the main feature of a computer.

You care about the process node as a main feature? Really? I mean, it's nice and all, but the MAIN FEATURE?

Yes. TSMC 5nm was incredible. Everything fabbed on TSMC 5nm/4nm has seen a huge generational leap in performance and energy efficiency after years of relative stagnation. It directly improves single-threaded performance and battery life which are two of the absolute most important metrics for user perceived performance.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#186

Post by frereubu »

avisser wrote: post #113
newaccount74 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The M2 Pro chips finally allow 8k displays! That's a pretty significant new feature (at least on Macs, Windows has supported 8k displays for some time already).

I'm over 40. I can't see all the pixels on a 4k display, let alone 8k. I'm still happy with my 2013 MBP w/ Retina.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but alongside 3nm processes there’s a cutting edge technology called “glasses”…

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#187

Post by morcheeba »

coder543 wrote: post #164
tarsinge wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know about the Microdrive but Wikipedia says model larger than 1GB up to 4GB were first available in 2004, nearly 3 years after the iPod. At that time for $499 it costed you could already get a 40GB iPod.

I had added this paragraph before you posted but probably after you saw my comment: >> Maybe Apple would have slightly higher storage capacities, but... we're talking about a relatively marginal difference compared to the gulf in storage capacity between these microdrive MP3 players and the flash based MP3 players of the time. An advantage, but not a revolution. Regardless, it turns out that it wasn't even a capacity…

Ah, you must not have seen the pre-ipod players. The Personal Jukebox was 2.5 larger than an ipod. It didn't fit in a pocket and the grey plastic felt cheap compared to the ipod's shiny metal back. It really felt experimental, and nothing like the polished Walkmen Sony was making.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#188

Post by tambourine_man »

xiphias2 wrote: post #141
helf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You care about the process node as a main feature? Really? I mean, it's nice and all, but the MAIN FEATURE?

Yes, as computers don't really get faster anymore, and I travel all the time (right now writing this from a hotel restaurant), the biggest change I notice is in battery time, which depends on energy efficiency improvements that usually come with process node change. I'm not being sarcastic.

The M-series is way faster than previous generations even in single treaded general purpose code. “Computers don’t get faster anymore” was Intel’s inability to innovate for many years, not an inevitability of physics. We will reach the end of Moore's law someday, but it’s not there yet.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#189

Post by flatiron »

nekoashide wrote: post #131
cubefox wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how big a difference this made. If I remember correctly there were iPod alternatives with similar drives pretty quickly.

That's just it, being first to the market is sometimes more important than worrying about competitors. They killed it so hard with the ipod that even if the zune was a better device at the time people wanted the ipod.

people forget that the first ipod was firewire only and firewire was a very apple thing at the time. it wasn't until they gave in and changed it to usb (and released iTunes for windows) that it really set the world on fire.

Re: Apple orders entire supply of TSMC's 3nm chips for iPhone 15 Pro and M3 Macs

#190

Post by coder543 »

guiambros wrote: post #184
coder543 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of my key takeaways is the iPod represented not one but multiple simultaneous tech revolutions. Consumer storage until then unseen I disagree entirely, for reasons that should be obvious once we examine the actual state of the market at the time. Storage was not the thing that made iPod successful. The microdrive had existed for several years by then[0][1], developed originally for digital cameras. Like most st…

From Wikipedia: " A second generation of Microdrive was announced by IBM in June 2000 with increased capacities at 512MB and 1GB, with the 512 MB model costing $399 and the 1 GB model costing $499. " Yes, storage technology existed at the time, but it was an order of magnitude more expensive than what Apple needed to put in a consumer product. It's unquestionable that iPod unleashed the explosive miniaturization of t…

Those prices were still from over a year before Apple announced the iPod, in a market where technology was rapidly advancing and getting cheaper, and those were the MSRP for single unit quantities, not the bulk order prices that would have been available at launch, let alone the bulk order prices that would have been available when Apple was planning to launch their iPod.

As others have pointed out here, there were other competitors offering larger-than-1-inch hard drives like the ones Apple used.

As I have pointed out elsewhere, a portable MP3 player with about 5GB of storage was actually introduced about 2 years before the iPod.

Based on the available evidence, storage was not the defining feature that made iPod successful, which is the claim that anecdote was trying to make. The iPod was successful for other reasons, regardless of how emotionally compelling that anecdote tries to be.

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