Can confirm, my wife is a research scientist, she did her whole Ph.D. on a Mac (with remote supercomputer access for heavier stuff) and now leaves her work-issued Dell in a drawer for emergencies while doing everything on a MacBook Air.Also plenty of us unrecognised ones too
Actually my org is mostly windows but everyone technical has a mac at home or for academic work.
Yes! Think differently to make the Mini much more useful, portable, and robust. We should pay a bit more to have a built in UPS battery. Better than an external UPS because it’s still easy to pull the cord out of the back of Mini when moving it and crash it. Plus the cord is massive and internal power supply is too. Enclosure could be much smaller if it used a laptop power brick like MacBook, even with added battery.
Apple is supposedly good though. They aren’t trying to be cruel and torture people.
I am pretty sure that the chips in the Mac Studio(even the Ultra) aren't even close to reaching their thermal limit.
What you need to understand is that Apple is no longer in the hardware business, but the data-collection business. The latter wears the former as a skinsuit. It will happily sell $4,000 machines to graphics professionals, but what's really important is seeing that every student gets a free tablet to smash.
What in gods name are you on about?
Smartphone market is saturated. Apple will still keep raking money but if they are looking at growth, relying on phone hardware is not enough.
But ads are not the answer.
In my opinion, nope.
That's unfortunate. I wish they'd at least make upgrade pricing more reasonable, but they have complete control on it, as long as the base model is priced attractively.
I guess I would slightly rephrase it as "Right now we get excellent desktop performance at mobile-level power targets, but we can't scale it further to get super-duper desktop performance." 🙃Like I get what @theorist9 is saying that he wants the max possible SC performance in an M4 Ultra regardless of how fast the base M4 is already compared to its competitors but I feel like that approach is partially what got Intel into so much trouble and Apple creeping up on SC power is ... well it's fine for now, but I do worry a little bit about the trend. Maybe as you say it's for naught and it's just a natural part of how processors evolve if they want to continue "being #1 overall", but I fundamentally agree that if forced to choose Apple would probably rather remain "#1 mobile".Something I’ve been curious about since the first M1 is how the IC design affects peak clock and power consumption. People knowledgeable in this matter have provided a lot of input and ideas, the full picture is still somewhat missing.
There is at least some evidence that Apple CPU cores are meticulously designed to provide peak performance at carefully chosen power levels. For example, power consumption of M4 starts climbing very quickly past 4.05ghz — the system reports 7 watts at 4.04Ghz, 7.5 watts at 4.1Ghz and 8.7 watts at 4.2Ghz. It costs 1 watt to climb the 50Mhz from 4.15 to 4.2 Ghz! Andrei F. from Anandtech described a similar effect starting from at least A12.
The crux of the question is this - are higher clocks actually feasible with the current design or is what we see the practical ceiling? It is clearly not economically viable to design separate core families for mobile and desktop use. In x86 land, it is a tradition trade mobile performance for higher desktop performance potential. Would Apple need to follow a similar route? Right now we get excellent mobile performance at mobile-level power targets, but we can't scale it futher. Would Apple Silicon that can scale further mean reduction is deliverable mobile performance? If that is indeed the case, then I think their strategy is sound. Laptops are the core of the Mac business, and it probably makes sense to prioritize 5% higher laptop performance instead of 5% higher desktop performance.
Anyway, just ruminating aloud
No I understand, silicon is silicon is silicon* and I agree with you Apple seems to push the limits of what's possible with its scaling already with its base chips and would have to redesign them to scale "desktop" chips more - it's just that if as fast as SC desktop chips as possible damn the watts became the design priority, that would inexorably lead them down the same path Intel took. However, I'll admit that I've talked about boosting GPU clocks for the Ultra and hypothetical Extreme. Taken to the extreme, I guess it's not that much different philosophically, but I'll add that in the context of Apple's actual chips I'd bet raising GPU performance through clocks is more doable for more reasonable power increases than SC CPU performance is.
And it’s a good idea, right? I joined this forum to present this idea, hoping people would jump on board and push Apple to fix the problems with their product line and improve everyone’s productivity and convenience. But people want it to stay 2006. Mac Minis plug in and laptops are expensive and hot and that’s the way it shall always be.