This a weird and borderline offensive definition of ‘work’. I write—in theory I could still be on my iMac G3 DVSE from 1999.
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No new M3 Mac Studio. No new adult size iMac…. for YEARS.
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This a weird and borderline offensive definition of ‘work’. I write—in theory I could still be on my iMac G3 DVSE from 1999.
Except they aren’t anymore. By the numbers and revenue it’s MBAs and iPads.
You have to be ready to strike when a seller lists on for a considerable amount less than the average.
Just see the PPC to Intel transition.
Mac Pro were updated in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013 and then first again in 2019 and again in 2023.
They used to be updated regularly.
Very true. With 128 GB RAM and Mx Max, that’s closer to a workstation in compact form. Apple silicon changed the game.
Adult size iMac? lol
Apple has said that they do not plan on introducing a new 27inch+ iMac and recommended a mac mini with M pro chip or mac studio with Studio Display or Pro Display XDR as a replacement for it.
Generally that's a good thing right? decoupling the computer from the display?
Apple has said that they do not plan on introducing a new 27inch+ iMac and recommended a mac mini with M pro chip or mac studio with Studio Display or Pro Display XDR as a replacement for it.
Generally that's a good thing right? decoupling the computer from the display?
What are you smoking? The Mac Studio was launched in march 2022, the second gen was launched one year and three months later in June 2023. last I checked there’s nothing that isn’t semi yearly about that.
They've never launched anything but phones and watches on a consistent basis. They launch them when they can do a meaningful update.
M3 is effectively EOL, so the iMac is waiting for M4 yields to be up high enough (the iPad Pro is a low volume product compared to the iMac or MacBook Air). Studio is waiting on M4 Pro/Max/Ultra, which honestly could be skipped and be the M5 Pro/Max/Ultra this fall.
This schedule is all being driven by TSMC process availability, and new limitations going forward on chip complexity. Apple (and the rest of the industry) are having to design chips to be far more modular and to evolve toward chiplets (or the technology's successor).
There are other significant changes happening as well, but this is the one which has the most obvious ramifications. When we come out the other side the chips may have far more variability within a generation because they'll be able to pick which modules or how far to scale up cores or cache to the limits of an architecture as an assembly step rather than as a core part of the chip design.
I don't think creating a M3 Ultra is possible on TSMC's N3B process; there's not enough space. I believe Apple negotiated that TSMC pays for poor yields as part of Apple's quoted pricing, so there may be negotiated size limits, as well as TSMC possibly negotiating time limits so they can kill the N3B process off for N3E/N3P.
Tim Cook.
Cook is not Steve Jobs, so Cook doesn't care about providing a beneficial computing experience for you. Cook only cares about maximizing profits.
Sadly, many Apple fans unthinkingly support Cook, even though he doesn't give a damn about them or their computing needs.
Even on the desktops the mini PCs are taking over for everything except extreme gaming.
At work I used a Dell ultra small form factor. It had no problem with an engineering workflow. Could it do a 4k video? No, but work wasn't about video, it was reports, big spreadsheets, and statistics and looking stuff up.
The Ryzen 7 7840H benchmarks at 28,000 at Passmark. That's in the high end mini PCs. One with 32 GB Ram and 1 TB SSD is $570.
My desktop has a Ryzen 4600G which is more than fast enough at 16,000, came out in 2020.
The original M1 is 14,000.
The base M3 is 19,000.
The low end Ryzen 5 5560U Benchmarks at 15,000. You can buy a mini PC with that CPU, 16 GB Ram and a 500 GB SSD for $250.
CPU power has exploded at the low end. The bean counters in Cupertino need to wake up.
I know! But that was over a decade ago now, and in the tech world that’s an eternity.
I think it is just a very different landscape now. A phone is “computer enough” for a lot of people.
Oh, I definitely agree, there isn't going to be an M3 Ultra, the M3 lineup is over IMO. I do think there's going to be an M4 Ultra, whatever form that takes. I do make the assumption that it will be 2 M4 Maxes joined with an interconnect, although it seems some people believe it will be monolithic, perhaps based on the M3 Max lacking an interconnect, which seems like weak evidence to me, since it's likely no M3 Ultra was ever planned, so putting an interconnect on it would have been ridiculous. But what do I know.
It makes sense, I think TSMC and Apple were well aware of the relatively short lifespan m3 would have, and there would be no point devoting resources to implement those things on silicon with a very finite lifespan.
Typical Apple apologists response. It’s not Apple’s fault, it’s the customers fault”. The OP wants a desktop, not a laptop. If they wanted a laptop, they’d get a laptop. The solution is not for the OP to compromise, the solution is for Apple to do better or stop making desktops. Apple is rubbish at making desktops. They have been since the first Intel Mac. They can’t blame Intel anymore, they just don’t care. They are going to sell outdated hardware at a premium for as long as possible.
You just can’t help but make absolutist, and therefore wrong, statements.
You just can’t help but make absolutist, and therefore wrong, statements.
*MOST* games work fine on a Mac, therefore the majority. The few that don’t are either modern AAA games squeezing every frame out of the latest GPUs, or they have some bug with Apple’s GPU drivers.
Sure, if you want a computer that’s more likely to play any future game under the sun, build a windows machine. Thats a fine statement to make and arguably good advice. But the statement “if you’re interested in gaming it’s the only way to go” is hogwash.
I’m trying to figure out why your argument couldn’t just as equally be used against Nintendo fans. After all, “most games” can’t be played on a Nintendo console. So, is the only way to be “into gaming” to not buy a Nintendo console?
Still waiting to upgrade my 2019 iMac. Not really interested in Mac Studio and external displays. By eliminating iMac updates Apple is trying to make more profit by selling Mac Studios and external displays instead. It's all about $$$ margin and sadly not about what customers want anymore.
Those are gone in 1-3 hours.
A couple of years ago, someone advertised 3 iMacs for sale and I sent them an email immediately for one of them. I went over, looked at it and gave them the cash. After putting it in my car, the seller said that they had a ton of people interested in the one that I bought but no interest in the other two models. The other two models were newer but they had i5s with large hard disks while the one I bought had an i7 and a 500 GB SSD. So the seller wasn't familiar with the market or technical specs and what they meant. I told her that they would never sell at their asking price and I saw them for sale several months later.
There are resellers, used computer stores, high-school and college kids that keep an eye out for Macs that are below market value. There are various reasons why they are below market value but some people get their new Studio and just want the old Mac out of their house without having to take it somewhere and they set a price that they are sure that it will sell very quickly.
There's a significant cost to supporting older hardware from the software side and you can see it in the amount of work that the OCLP people have to do every year.
There's still a lot of demand for the 2020 iMac 27 and a lot of Apple refurbished units getting sold.
For me: no Thunderbolt 5 (that’s all available Macs and no idea whether the M4 generation will support it), no mesh shading, no ray tracing, vastly inferior single core performance (although the CPU matters less to my uses than the GPU), and (less of an issue for myself) RAM (I’m cheap enough to want the base 48GB from the “full fat” M3Max, for example). And because I anticipate being a heavy user of Apple’s “AI” and my iPad wipes the floor with that Mac Studio…
To forestall the question on why I would possibly need Thunderbolt 5: monitors. My ideal monitors require the bandwidth of the next generation of Thunderbolt. And no, HDMI need not apply (shudders; nothing but problems with monitors attached to computers via HDMI… zero problems via DisplayPort). I would love to replace my dual 4K setup with something nicer but I won’t pay that amount of money for an insufficient quality improvement (obviously that applies to me and is not a generalization; I have plenty of friends on 27” and 32” 1440p displays that are happy kiddies… I am not). To answer that as yet unasked question: I dream of a 40” 8K monitor… preferably microLED although that will likely have to wait on the replacement(s) to whichever monitor(s) I buy next. But this is a chicken and egg thing: until computers support my desired displays generally, manufacturers won’t produce them… that includes Apple.
While I enjoy your sarcasm, M1 to M3 all use the “same architecture,” they’re speed bumps of the same cores. M4 is the first update to have a new core.
I do not know the limitations of the N3E process and where that draws a line through the lineup, but it could very well be that M4 Pro is not possible due to process constraints. They may need a M5, which puts interconnects in the middle of their current architecture so that they can divide things up into more chips.
My speculation is that Apple's chip design team is adapting to the limitations of TSMC's new processes by optimistically creating the chips they can as smaller, quicker iterations. The compromise is that will leave holes in the lineup until they get to their new target architecture - which will allow them to make modules on the latest processes, and combine them in multiple configurations depending on where the chip is going to land in the product lineup. Such an architecture also lets them combine in modules made on previous processes, such as in-package memory or I/O controllers - which may allow them to afford more cache or more I/O capabilities based on the lowered silicon cost.
The compromises are going to be different per iteration, so we're just going to see weird scheduling with weird lineup gaps (like iPhone Pro models being the only ones getting new chips, chips being sunset in iPhone models after a single iteration rather than trickling down, lower volume products getting upgraded first based on expected chip volume available, Mac chip releases without higher performance variants, etc.)
Actually, "By the numbers and revenue it’s..." not "...MBAs and iPads." That would be iPhones (if we were not talking about Macs). My claim about Studio Macs addressing Apple's bread-and-butter core users referred to historical core Mac usage, not to tablets or phones. This is a Mac thread after all.
Certainly Apple now sells lots of Macs that would not be considered part of that bread-and-butter core that I referenced. Probably a majority by volume; but that does not mean that a core cannot still exist. My argument stands that Apple needs to attentively service its core-for-decades Mac user subset that buys Studios and loaded Minis.
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