Agree. The top end Pro machines should get new chips first then they trickle down the line across the next 12-15 months.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple release strategy is just plain flawed
- Thread starter Rychiar
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Nah. Laptops first makes a lot more sense since that’s what they sell most of.
Maybe over time they can synchronise the releases better. But limited production volumes make it impossible to release everything simultaneously right now. As to the release schedule, it makes perfect sense to release the most popular products first. You want to increase the install base to encourage software conversion after all.
I think that's the real problem? A person isn't really "on holiday" if they need to do "certain important work things".
If there isn't a delegate to take over important work when one is "on holiday", then that one person has essentially made themselves a single point of failure - bad for any business.
This is unrelated to your post itself, but I love your signature!
I don't have signatures enabled, so I forgot that was being shown with all my posts 🙈😅
The M3 is just a 3nm version of the M2. Thus more power efficient yet not more advanced. Same goes with the iPhone chip this year.
Go with a Apple refurbished M2 Max Mac Studio and do not worry.
The M series chips has really erased the line between laptop and desktop. To be fair, Apples desktop releases are erratic at best. Their MBP are usually frequently updated with state of the art tech. If a M3 Max laptop is sufficient for your needs and you can afford the laptop price over head, does it matter what you have?
If you criticize Apple you will be double criticized. How dare you take issue with any Apple product, strategy, or decision.
Apple strategy is greed and hype. There is no reason with the resources, cash, and competences at their disposal to not release all products at once. They just don’t want to do it. They could certainly design logic boards in a way that could take any processor module. They could also make older models upgradeable if they wanted. They choose not to. They know how to maximize profits better than most companies.
The high priests of Apple will disagree and use their armchair SoC design skills to tell me why I am wrong. It always has to be us that is wrong and not the greedy corporation making the highest margins in the business.
Apple strategy is greed and hype. There is no reason with the resources, cash, and competences at their disposal to not release all products at once. They just don’t want to do it. They could certainly design logic boards in a way that could take any processor module. They could also make older models upgradeable if they wanted. They choose not to. They know how to maximize profits better than most companies.
The high priests of Apple will disagree and use their armchair SoC design skills to tell me why I am wrong. It always has to be us that is wrong and not the greedy corporation making the highest margins in the business.
I mean this in the sense that the first macOS version that won’t support M3 anymore will affect all M3 Mac devices at the same time. The M3 devices that were released later thus will have had a shorter life time.
I’ve never owned a laptop in my life cus the prices seem crazy to me and I don’t like investing so much only into a device that’s battery based and as potentially accident prone as a laptop. I’m more of a heavy workstation and an ipad on the side kind of user. Plus i want a minimum of 4tb of storage and apples costs are insane for that. A Mac Studio i can just keep an SSD plugged in 24/7 and run off that but a laptop that would suck.
No it's not.
CPU: higher clock speeds, significantly more cores on the Max. M3 Max performance seems close to M2 Ultra
On the GPU side: Raytracing, mesh shading, dynamic caching.
However I disagree with OP that the release strategy is flawed. If the M3 Ultra is not ready yet, should they just release a M3 Max Mac Studio ? And keep a M2 Ultra version ? That would be more confusing I think.
Or should they delay the release of all the other chips until M3 Ultra is ready ? Especially with Christmas in between ? I don't think so either.
What? Are you serious? M3 is a big deal with RT and Mesh shading. The caching also looks promising. To say its just 3nm version of M2 is plain wrong!
No Apple Silicon Macs have been dropped so we can't confirm that Apple will drop them based on the chip. The Intel Macs were more commonly dropped due to their graphical limitations (32-bit Graphics, OpenGL, Metal Support, etc.).
In terms of Apple's chipset, you can look at iOS and see this is not the case. The iPad Air 2 (A8X) was dropped from iOS 16, while the iPhone 6 (A8) was dropped from iOS 13.
Sure, that's true in principle but it's often not workable in practice. For anyone that's self employed, that's not practical. For anyone that runs a business, it's often not practical. If you're making the decision to buy a Mac Studio for yourself then you're almost certainly purchasing for yourself or for a small business. Especially if you're also spending the time discussing stuff online. Corporate companies that can employ enough people to cover all bases if someone is away will likely be buying computers for you. Plus, with modern work patterns, it's likely not very smart to buy desktops for staff anyway.
My wife and I run a business. There are certain things that cannot be done by people other than us, for different areas of the business. I handle all the payroll, finance and technical side of the business and have to make sure invoices are sent out and payrolls are done on certain days of the month. There is no one else that can do those things. It doesn't take particularly long to do any of those things and I can do a lot of the work required before the days in question but the final generation of invoices/calculations of issuing of payslips and payments has to be done on certain days each month and it involves software that is only on my machine. I have regular backups so if something were to happen to my machine, I could restore and start again on another machine but I can't concurrently do this work with two computers. The only options for me are taking my physical computer with me or using a remote desktop connection. At some point, we'll likely hire someone that can handle this stuff in my absence, likely with a shared virtual machine, but we're not there yet.
To be fair, the A8x had twice the ram as A8. I think that also contributed to its longevity. As the iPhone 7’s were supported the same.
Completely and utterly disagree with this post on literally every level especially when considering that @Spanky Deluxe was using a separate laptop in addition to the desktop. Consolidation makes a lot of sense and is quite liberating. I made the same decision years ago.
Not quite sure if you're joking there or asking a serious questions so I'll assume you're being serious.
No, it cannot. Payroll requires specific software running on one machine (Sage Payroll). There are ways to access it from other networked computers but that's usually only done with local networked computers. There are some online 'cloud' versions of the software, and there are cloud versions of competitor software, but they are not feature complete with the desktop software we use and are not sufficient to our needs. Not even close, unfortunately. It's x86 Windows only software. I run it in a Parallells virtual machine running Windows for Arm. My computer is backed up regularly to my NAS so if my computer were to be lost or die, it wouldn't be too hard to get things going on another machine. The software itself also backs up to my NAS and to the cloud after every time I use it and I could rebuild my setup from there. But still, there's no way to reasonably use it from multiple machines at multiple locations apart from having it run on a singled dedicated machine that I (or other users) could remote into but as I said, remote connections are unreliable.
I have an iPad Pro too but find it to be useless for work. It's now just used as an occasional extra tablet for the kids and I won't be buying an iPad again for myself until it can also run full MacOS software and the MacOS desktop. I could make it work as a remote terminal in a way and have tried that in the past but it's just not good enough as a reasonable solution.
I think this is excellent advice. It’s also nice to see, as a validation of what I am now thinking myself. Thank you for sharing.
My position is somewhat similar. I had a 2008 Mac Pro, which was excellent, and a 2013 Mac Pro, which was a flawed design IMHO but did exactly what I needed it to. My intention, without having bothered to give it much thought, had been to buy an upper-tier M3 Ultra Mac Studio when available. But I am pretty unimpressed with how much Apple charge to upgrade from the binned to full-fat Ultra (£1,000 here in the UK).
That got me thinking. To cut a long story short, I have decided to forego the Ultra Studio and buy an M3 Max 16/40 core MacBook Pro instead, which will also replace my 2019 Intel MBP (which I’m less happy with because of the extent to which it heats up and spins up the fans). So I will then have one device instead of two, and I’m confident that the M3 Max’s performance will be more than adequate (over 4 times CPU and 5 times GPU vs. my current machine).
Ironically, if Apple did not charge so much for the higher tier Ultra, I would have probably not have bothered thinking about it and would have ended up buying an Ultra Studio and an M3 Pro MBP. But I’m quite pleased to have switched to a single box strategy.
Have you tried teradici? great software to work remotely and the requirements for internet are quite low. Can literally work from starbucks or hotel lobby's internet
I’ve read @Spanky Deluxe post and actually I think the solution detailed works pretty well for his situation.
I couldn’t see anything pointless, nor anything Silly, or even Silly silly.
Is the content you are making detrimental to the world? Seriously, if it doesn’t cure cancer or stop wars, you can wait on the M3 Max.
People don't want hear reality. The product didn't exist 2 weeks ago and everyone was doing great. Now, suddenly a lot of people can't live/work without it and damn Apple for not releasing it already.
This hypocrisy is really hilarious and pathetic at the same time.
I think you've nailed it quite well with your analogy.
This hypocrisy is really hilarious and pathetic at the same time.
I think you've nailed it quite well with your analogy.
That was part of what started getting me really thinking about this. A top tier 16" MacBook Pro with Max processor is basically the same cost as a Mac Studio with Ultra processor, all other specs the same (RAM and storage). Would I rather have the extra cores or the portability? Does my workload even realistically make *use* of those extra cores regularly? The reality is that no, it does not. Or at least, the value of amount of time saved with faster multicore processing is marginal compared to the value of having portability for that 5% of the time when I'd like to be able to work untethered to my desk.
I haven't tried Teradici but I've tried a number of other remote desktop clients. I'm not new to remote desktop connections and have used them now and then for about twenty years. The biggest problems to functionally doing work remotely with them are twofold:
1) I'm usually connecting in from a laptop so I'm connecting from a smaller resolution screen to a higher resolution desktop. This makes everything an awkward size and hard to use. It's doable but it's frustrating to use and any task takes longer to do and with more irritation along the way, which is something I'd want to minimise while having to do work while on holiday.
2) If you've got a connection that's even remotely poor - slow speed, high ping or dropped packets, then remote desktop connections are an utterly miserable experience. The data bandwidth you need is orders of magnitude higher than that needed by the software I use itself. Even on a poor connection, I can get the few 100kbs of data that payroll or invoicing needs sent done without issue. But it can't necessarily manage the many megabytes or even gigabytes that a remote connection would use over the duration of all the work I'd need to do. I've found that hotel internet is often shared among so many users that it's next to unusable or the unlimited data mobile broadband sim I have just doesn't have enough signal for a suitable connection. Yes, going to a Starbucks is likely going to be fine though as they tend to be better prepared but they don't always have that.