charles1

Wow I remember going to Apple's training facility in Orange County several times circa 1985, once they gave us a tour that included their server room. They had a bunch of expensive hard drives stacked up on a high shelf, unanchored, no rack mounts or anything. I suggested that they fasten down some of that equipment or it would fall off in an earthquake. They were unreceptive to the idea.

I had a defective Airpods Pro, the left earbud had static all the time. This was a known manufacturing defect and Apple had an extended warranty program to replace them. I must have bought them like 3 years ago. I figured they'd just replace the left earbud. I phoned Apple Support and after a bit of fiddling (my Airpods wouldn't run their online diagnostic) they just said that my serial number was in the affected range, and they'd FedEx me a new set of Airpods. They arrived two days later. No yelling necessary, the Apple Support person was courteous and went beyond the call of duty to deliver a total solution to my problem.

I recall reading that Apple Silicon has some special on-chip extensions that are specifically targeted at running the Rosetta 2 code more efficiently. This is the sort of advanced implementation that you can only create when you own the entire hardware and software stack.
I'm going to have to dig into that, seems like it might be an important competitive advantage.

bradmacpro said:

Well that rather sucks if I may be so blunt. The Mac Studio with M2 Max is looking to be slower than a M4 based MacBook at this point.

Incorrect. The internal memory bandwidth of a Mac Studio M2 is several times that of any MacBook M4. The SSD speed is astonishing, nothing like it could ever be achieved on a laptop. A fast CPU/GPU means nothing if you don't have a system board that can handle that level of performance.

I invested heavily in a Mac Studio M2 Ultra with 4TB of SSD, correctly predicting that it would be a long time before it was dethroned as Speed King. I was correct. 

NOT holographic. It's a lenticular stereogram.

This is why you buy into the Apple ecosystem, new products retain their value over the long term. I was astonished at the prices on eBay when I sold my beat up, 3 year old iPhone 5s for $300. That was exactly what I paid for an original 2 year subsidized contract on my 5s, hey free iPhone for the last 2 years! This is the Apple advantage, lower Total Cost of Ownership. These previous-generation Apple products still outperform many new Android products. That's why the market for used iPhones is so hot. 

JP234 said:

Wondering what the terminal velocity of an iPhone is? Guessing that a fall from 20-25 feet might generate the same impact force as falling from 14,000 feet.

What do you mean? African or European iPhone?

There is a tech note from SoftRaid warning not to use APFS on HDD RAIDs. In fact, those warnings were upgraded recently during a software update to Carbon Copy Cloner, it now correctly notes that there are problems backing up image files on RAIDs, announcing that it now refused to back up my VM files. I wish I had known my backups were failing months ago when I set them up.

"..it has a nice read/write speed of around 1000 MB/s for 1GB, going down to around 850 MB/s for 5GB."

NICE read/write speeds?!? That speed is terrible. You installed an obsolete, low speed 2230 SSD, one of the slowest, cheapest SSDs on their compatibility list. So your "benchmark" only measures the max speed of the SSD, not the hardware driving it.

For comparison, I have an OWC 1M2 enclosure containing a 4Tb Samsung 990 EVO SSD. The enclosure is rated at 3151Mb/s and the SSD is rated over 7000Mb/s. I consistently get over 3000Mb/s read and write performance.

I am relieved at seeing the new chips, since I just purchased a Mac Studio M2 Ultra a couple of weeks ago. I wanted the high speed double-bandwidth memory and highest speed SSD only available in the M2 Ultra, wow it's fast. I figured there would be no M3 Ultra at first, maybe not for a full year, since the Mac Studio was only recently updated to the M2.
For once, I predicted correctly. I usually tell my friends, watch and see when I buy a computer, because that's always the wrong time to buy a new computer.