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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

#421

Post by hajile »

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?

Process node is HUGE here. M2 is pretty close to just M1 with higher clocks and higher power consumption. This is largely because they didn't get to add transistors.

The N3 shrink doesn't help SRAM one bit, but it does give them more room to improve the CPU.

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

#422

Post by hajile »

dom96 wrote: post #291
joaogui1 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 issues in fact, one is TSMC being the only one capable of making these amazing chips and the second is Apple buying their entire supply. Now if any of that counts as a monopoly I don't think so

Why aren't there other companies outbidding Apple?

Because it's a bad deal. N3 isn't a good node and offers ZERO SRAM scaling. It's a stopgap for N2 GAA.

At the same time, chip shipments have dropped like a rock as everyone braces for recession. Nvidia allegedly even tried to cancel most of their N5 orders because they didn't think they could move the chips.

Apple is pretty much the only company willing to pay large amounts into a risky market. There may not have even been any serious bids aside from their own.

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

#423

Post by shepherdjerred »

grogenaut wrote: post #302
shepherdjerred wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now to build a Hello World full stack web app it can take 10+ minutes on a modern PC with 4GHz 16 core CPU and 64GB of RAM :) That's a bit of an exaggeration. What stack's hello world takes 10 minutes to build?

depending on your network, `npx create-react-app --template typescript` might take 10-15 minutes easily.

Well, yes, given an infinitely slow network any action depending on the network can take an infinite amount of time.

Since the discussion is around CPU hardware improvements, I don't think network speeds are too relevant.

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

#424

Post by ihateolives »

ticviking wrote: post #283
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then after most devs switched to using M3 Macs, app performance will regress back to the baseline, making everything slow on M1/M2 machines, and basically unusable on Intel Macs. This is one of those HN comments that has me feeling like I live in a different world than the commenter. What Electron apps are you using that are really that slow? I use several of the popular Electron and CEF apps on a daily basis and e…

When was the last time you used them on a $200 laptop like your cousin picked up cheap to take to college? Or tried to help students use an electron IDE on a computer with 8Gb and a 2 ghz 10 year old processor that their dad saved to buy secondhand to help his kid not need to work overtime at the factory to keep food on the table? Electon is only fast on developer and gamer tier hardware. Try running this stuff on th…

Having used second hand laptops almost exclusively for 20 years and having helped friends to do the same I'm pretty confident saying that 90% of the time the slowness is botched Windows installation and the lack of computer hygiene. Not always, but in overwhelmingly majority of cases.

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

#425

Post by ihateolives »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #338
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

none of the M1 laptops let you use multiple external monitors and all of the M1 products have much lower limits on storage than PCs.

Not true. Depending upon the processor choice, M1, M1 pro, or M1 max, you get 1, 2, or 4 external monitors. Up to 64 GB ram. Do you really need more than 64 GB? The number of users who actually need more are a very small part of the market.

The price of RAM is absolutely bonkers though. If i ever need more than 16GB of RAM and more than 512GB of storage, I'll strongly consider moving back to Thinkpads or something.

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

#426

Post by obert »

amoss wrote: post #66

This makes sense for Apple - they are aiming at the premium end of the market. Having a process advantage over the competition will translate into a performance / battery win. After all, this is what Intel did for decades while they could.

and when time comes and AI can run on a laptop, Apple will be 3-4 years ahead of everyone else…

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

#427

Post by chongli »

derefr wrote: post #416
chongli wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got my first Mac in 1995 (Performa 5200CD). Obvious from its name, it had a built in CD-ROM drive. I had the internet throughout the rest of the 90’s, dialing up via a series of external modems. 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and eventually a 56k modem. I downloaded MP3s and played them with SoundJam MP (which Apple bought and reskinned as iTunes). That computer was so slow (75MHz PowerPC 603) that it took nearly all of its res…

To be clear, my point was that consumer electronics — like the iPod — were and are typically targeted at "everyone", not "computer enthusiasts" (which would be far too few people to be worth the CapEx of hardware product development); and that, for every one computer enthusiast on Earth, there are 100 grandmas (and other similar demographics.) ( Professional electronics, on the other hand, could make all sorts of dem…

The original iPod was a Mac-only device. Anyone who bought it expecting it to work on their Windows computer, whether it was brand new or Pentium 120-vintage, would've quickly discovered the incompatibility and returned it to the store. Moreover, the initial price for a first gen iPod was $399 ($672 US in 2023 money). Not something I would expect to be affordable to a person struggling along with a 6-year-old computer (Pentium 120 came out in 1995).

For a device that only played music and only worked with FireWire-equipped Macs, the original iPod was not an "everyone" device, it was a luxury product for music enthusiasts.

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

#428

Post by kalleboo »

cronix wrote: post #235
edude03 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that we're talking about the 'iPod' & Apple and not the 'iRiver xyz' I think shows it made a big difference. Yes, I know, survivorship bias, but apple has a history of not releases products unless they think they're good enough (for their own definition of good) and if apple hadn't had found a way to make it store enough songs to be a differentiator we probably would never have heard of the iPod, nor would w…

Hah, no. It was their world class commercials. Not a single one of my twenty-something friends bought because of specs when they came out. It was these that everyone talked about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTs5pOn7XFU

At some point, great ads still need to be backed up by a good product, if the iPod was crap people wouldn't keep buying them no matter how good the ads.

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

#429

Post by vba616 »

derefr wrote: post #243
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forget the exact timeline, but I think part of it too was music pricing. Physical media (tapes, records) had gotten very expensive, and almost everyone was pirating MP3s from Napster etc. Apple's iTunes prices were low enough that it became simpler just to buy stuff legally than pirate it. I can't recall if iTunes was introduced at exact same time as iPod not not. Google search suggests it may have been 1 or 2 year…

> but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) iTunes the software was introduc…

>The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device

I don't remember ever using Firewire for anything.

Are you saying it was only Firewire?

Quite possible if I dug enough, I could find my iPod. It wasn't one of the very first ones, but it was monochrome and hard-drive based.

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

#430

Post by junofan »

vba616 wrote: post #429
derefr wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but if so then where were people originally getting music to put on iPods The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device. "You need a Mac with Firewire support to even use this thing" set a minimum platform spec that also made other things implicit — in this case, the availability of a CD-ROM drive. (Which wasn't a given in 2001, but was a given on any Mac that had Firewire support.) iTunes the software was introduc…

>The first iPod was a Mac-only Firewire device I don't remember ever using Firewire for anything. Are you saying it was only Firewire? Quite possible if I dug enough, I could find my iPod. It wasn't one of the very first ones, but it was monochrome and hard-drive based.

Yep IIRC it literally has a Firewire port on the top.
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