Looks like Apple is on a 2-year update cycle for AS Macs. If so, I think Intel will fly past them.

[Adarna]

Rumor is the M2 won’t be released until possibly late next year. With the M2 Pro/Max in 2023.

If this is the case, I absolutely see Intel flying right past Apple sooner rather than later.

Intel’s generational improvement will be less, but they will be updating chips twice as often.

This came to mind to me this week when M1 Max & M1 Pro came out 11 months after M1.

Apple is able to maintain a yearly iPhone SoC update as they ship more than 207 million iPhones yearly and >96% of more than 53 million iPads shipped have iPhone SoC.

So in terms of economies of scale they have the volume for annual updates

With M1 Mac SoC they had to use it on ~80% of more than 22.5 million all Macs shipped + <4% of all iPads shipped and these are

• late 2020 Mac mini
• late 2020 Macbook Air
• late 2020 Macbook Pro 13"
• early 2021 iMac 24"
• mid 2021 iPad Pro 11" & 12.9"

With M1 Pro I expect ~16% of all Macs shipped will have one & M1 Max I expect ~4% of all Macs shipped to have single SoC or multi SoC configurations

Single SoC M1 Pro/Max Macs are the following

• late 2021 Macbook Pro 14" & 16"
• early 2022 Mac mini
• early 2022 iMac 27" or larger screen

Multi SoC M1 Max Macs are the following

• late 2022 iMac Pro
• late 2022 Mac Pro

I'd be plenty happy with a base model iMac 27" replacement hopefully with 16GB memory & 512GB storage.

 

[alien3dx]

Intel is currently effectively one node behind TSMC. And yet they need dour times more power to get the same performance as Apple gets out of their cores. Do you think that Intel's next node is going to be some sort of magic pixie dust that offers 4x power efficiency boost?

maybe they will asking help again from amd .hehe x86_64 from amd .. i been those nightmare itanium..

 

[HQNYC]

Intel needs to beat AMD first.

Apple doesn't even sell enough to register as a competitor, but here we are.

 

[HQNYC]

This came to mind to me this week when M1 Max & M1 Pro came out 11 months after M1.

Apple is able to maintain a yearly iPhone SoC update as they ship more than 207 million iPhones yearly and >96% of more than 53 million iPads shipped have iPhone SoC.

So in terms of economies of scale they have the volume for annual updates

With M1 Mac SoC they had to use it on ~80% of more than 22.5 million all Macs shipped + <4% of all iPads shipped and these are

• late 2020 Mac mini
• late 2020 Macbook Air
• late 2020 Macbook Pro 13"
• early 2021 iMac 24"
• mid 2021 iPad Pro 11" & 12.9"

With M1 Pro I expect ~16% of all Macs shipped will have one & M1 Max I expect ~4% of all Macs shipped to have single SoC or multi SoC configurations

Single SoC M1 Pro/Max Macs are the following

• late 2021 Macbook Pro 14" & 16"
• early 2022 Mac mini
• early 2022 iMac 27" or larger screen

Multi SoC M1 Max Macs are the following

• late 2022 iMac Pro
• late 2022 Mac Pro

I'd be plenty happy with a base model iMac 27" replacement hopefully with 16GB memory & 512GB storage.

I think every 27 iMac will be utilizing a pro or max version of the M chip. 24 inch model is already a big screen and sufficient for most people.

 

[Adarna]

I think every 27 iMac will be utilizing a pro or max version of the M chip. 24 inch model is already a big screen and sufficient for most people.

Sufficient for the ~80% of all iMac users. I'm on a 27" and I am hoping a 27" or larger screen iMac will be out with a higher wattage Pro SoC but it is likely it will be using the exact M1 Pro & M1 Max SoC found in the MBP.

 

[HQNYC]

Sufficient for the ~80% of all iMac users. I'm on a 27" and I am hoping a 27" or larger screen iMac will be out with a higher wattage Pro SoC but it is likely it will be using the exact M1 Pro & M1 Max SoC found in the MBP.

Yeah agreed. We're going through a shortage right now, but even if we weren't, I suppose that Apple would like to have conformity among it's product lines.

Oh, I just noticed that I seemed to be missing a sentence. I wanted to say that going forward, I think the 27 iMacs will be called iMac Pros. The best equipped iMac Pro will probably utilize an unreleased M1 something chip.

I expect every change (aside from ports) to make it to the new iMac revision. The screen will be magnificent and it's resolution will most likely be higher than 5k. We should see the price change similarly to the new MBPs. Of course, these are just my own predictions.

 

[Adarna]

Yeah agreed. We're going through a shortage right now, but even if we weren't, I suppose that Apple would like to have conformity among it's product lines.

Oh, I just noticed that I seemed to be missing a sentence. I wanted to say that going forward, I think the 27 iMacs will be called iMac Pros. The best equipped iMac Pro will probably utilize an unreleased M1 something chip.

I expect every change (aside from ports) to make it to the new iMac revision. The screen will be magnificent and it's resolution will most likely be higher than 5k. We should see the price change similarly to the new MBPs. Of course, these are just my own predictions.

I think the price adjustment has more to do with the shortage and I think the transition would have finished within 7 months if COVID was not a factor

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Devils advocate. What’s the downside of intel doing well?

No downside to them doing well. However, there’s plenty of reason to believe that they won’t do much better than the “promise then deliver late” that they’ve been doing for years.

If they somehow manage to outperform internal silicon there isn’t much stopping apple from going back?

It’s not about intel or AS… Competition is a good thing, everyone wins.

Unless Intel decides to start including hardware acceleration for Apple proprietary codecs (ProRes) along with other M1 specific features that Intel doesn’t include, there’s nothing that Intel can ship that will significantly improve performance where it matters most for MBP users.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

This is good news; Having serious competitors pushing the boundaries will prevent Apple from stagnating or sand-bagging their progress. It can only benefit consumers.

Apple hasn’t had serious competition for their processors for years now. Qualcomm has been the closest and even they are a distant second. Apple’s only serious competition… is the processor they produced the prior year.

 

[JMacHack]

I can’t wait for the “INTEL IS BACK BAYBEE, APPLE BTFO” threads every year from now on.

The salt is delicious.

 

[hefeglass]

for those concerned about the NOTCH

this is what it looks like when menus are up there..apparently the OS spaces it out where the notch is.

 

[staypuftforums]

Every. Single. Time.

lol I said what I wanted to say. Didn’t know I was obligated to check in every few hours and reply to every post in the thread.

P.S. Have never cared and will never care if people agree or disagree with any of my opinions. So let’s not get that twisted.

 

[thenewperson]

lol I said what I wanted to say. Didn’t know I was obligated to check in every few hours and reply to every post in the thread.

P.S. Have never cared and will never care if people agree or disagree with any of my opinions. So let’s not get that twisted.

Dunno what you're talking about but you're still a troll

 

[uller6]

Your thought process is somewhat flawed. Apple is more than a chip design company...it is a vertically integrated hardware/software company. They design+manufacture chips to satisfy the needs of their products (e.g., smaller chip dies to satisfy smaller form factors). Yes, they have speed bumps generation to generation, but it doesn't seem to be their highest priority. Also, getting into a processor clock-speed war starts to become a bit silly especially if the other components on the system are the bottle neck (e.g., local or integrated memory bus)

Also, I don't understand these threads...I've never met anyone who upgraded their CPU at every refresh cycle just because it was "marginally" faster.

I’m very happy with my Sandy Bridge box from 2011 thank you very much…for all intents and purposes it’s nearly as fast as a modern intel CPU and while somehow doesn’t blast the computer fans into jet engine mode.

 

[darngooddesign]

for those concerned about the NOTCH

this is what it looks like when menus are up there..apparently the OS spaces it out where the notch is.
View attachment 1878570

Holy crap, C4D has a lot of menu items. I wonder what its like on the 14”.

 

[senttoschool]

There will still be yearly updates for the A-series, question is wether they will bother growing out each generation to a full set of M chips. Something they didn't do for iPadPro chips, so nothing really new here.

One could argue that the A#X chips that went into the iPad Pros were a bit niche so Apple didn't want to invest in one every single year.

However, now they should because the same M2/3/4/5 chips will go into iPad Pro, Macbook Air, Macbook SE (rumored), iMac. A lot more devices are counting on more powerful chips than several years ago.