tenthousandthings

blastdoor said:

I recently bought a refurbished m2pro Mac mini because I gave up on an m3 mini being released. I also would not be surprised if the studio skips m3 too. 

With regard to the Mini and the iMac refresh cadences, whatever. It’s fine. But if Apple skips the M3 Ultra, they need to explain what they are doing with the silicon. It raises a lot of questions, not all of which are (how shall I put it?) strategic.

It’s not enough to just say it’s all product-driven, and they only build the silicon their products need. Everyone understands why Apple doesn’t talk about unreleased products. But expectations need to be managed.

Marketing and management needs to wake up and realize the architects and engineers need to be allowed to explain more than what is currently being explained.

nubus said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

Apple has been doing ML integrations for years.  Marketing-speak changed “ML” to “AI” and you’re buying into it.  

As for this article, Apple’s been updating the Neural Engine every time in the silicon, sometimes obviously with the number of cores, sometimes by stating so, with giant performance increases, and other times by changing the architecture of the core.  

Apple has indeed been delivering a Neural Processing Unit for years. However, even M3 Max is only delivering the ML performance of iPhone 14 Pro (17-18 TOPS). Intel is doing 34 TOPS with their 2023 laptop CPUs (combined NPU+GPU) and Lunar Lake will launch this year with 100 TOPS performance for laptops. Standing still is why the stock is dropping.

Something will need to change. I would have killed M3 Ultra and asked the entire team to work on M4 or refocused M3 Ultra on ML at any cost to show at WWDC.

The presentation on this at WWDC will be interesting. I can't find it right now, but I read somewhere there is no difference between the NPU in the A17 Pro and the M3, and the 35 trillion versus 18 trillion numbers reflect two different standards for measuring it. So one number is for the mobile industry, the other for the computer industry. Apple didn't double the peak NPU ops/sec in the A17 Pro versus the A16 Bionic. Instead, the competition changed to a different standard that provided better-sounding numbers, and Apple was forced to adopt that for the A17 Pro and the iPhone 15 Pro without comment, but they kept the old standard for the M3, to avoid appearing to claim an astounding leap forward in the NPU relative to the M1 and M2, when in reality it is incremental.

I'll try to find it, it wasn't an anonymous internet commenter or anything, it described the change, but it was only like two sentences and now I can't find it.

I read the article, looking for something to support the headline’s claim that Young “tries excusing his return to Spotify by saying Apple Music is now as bad” — but nothing in the article supports that assertion. Young explained why he was returning, his “excuse” being that Rogan’s disinformation is now available everywhere, so his rationale of not wanting his music on the same platform is no longer valid.

I get that Apple isn’t the same as Spotify in terms of supporting Rogan’s disinformation, but Young didn’t say anything about that, at least according to this article.

I gather Young thinks Apple is “now as bad” as Spotify in terms of technical sound quality, his personal white whale, but that has nothing to do with why he left Spotify, or why he returned. The headline seems to conflate the two issues (disinformation and sound).

If the past is any indication, then, yes, M4 will be based on A18, and it (M4) will launch in June 2025. That's the A15/M2 release pattern. TSMC N3P will be the process node for this, with volume production in "2H 2024" and so it is obviously in risk production right now, with Apple leading the way.

It is too soon to say this, but I will anyway: the silicon production cadence is set now. The only real unknown (in my view) is whether or not every Mac will get every generation of Apple M silicon, every 18 months (not all at once, but spread out within that period). I think probably yes (the M2 iMac was a casualty of the global pandemic), but we'll see.

Here's my predictions (within the current Pro/Max/Ultra structure, that is, leaving out the possibility of some kind of "Extreme" Mac Pro configuration):

IIRC, this (anti-steering) was the one part of the Epic case that they lost in California. So it’s hard to see how Apple thought this would fly in the EU. I think they know they can’t avoid a fine, they’re making these points in their appeal to establish the framework for their ultimate response, which is going to be something similar to what they’re doing with the DMA rules.