mjtomlin

palegolas said:

Knowing the demand etc. is all very business oriented. And of course it's important in order to make a successful launch. However I think the much bigger elephant in the room question is whether there's actually a healthy future for AR/VR at all? Or is there only a dystopian future when a huge portion of people eventually much rather would like to stay in VR and live in the matrix than to take it off, and that's the world we'll be living in. Whether Apple wants it or not, I think they're going to make a compelling presentation, which unfortunately will lead to the latter.

There's probably as much interest in VR at Apple as there is in AAA gaming. We would've seen some hint of them moving in that direction. And short of the demonstration of the iMac Pro being able to produce/develop VR content, there hasn't been anything to lead us to believe that they believe its a technology currently worth investing in.

AR on the other hand they do have an obvious interest in and have been working on, we've all seen it and a lot of us have probably played with it on our iPads and iPhones and even AirPods. Not mention all the visual AI recognition technologies they've been working on; text, scene, object, face, eye tracking. And sensors LiDAR, infrared, gyroscope, compass, etc. And even display technologies such as micro LED. And extremely powerful mobile chips.

And to be at all successful, they'll need to offer different lens shapes and prescriptions.

9secondkox2 said:

VR has been a niche ever since the Virtual Boy. It's just not that big a deal.  AR is another thing and is just as well done on our phone, etc. The only better option would be glasses and people aren't really into being surveilled so easily. 

In this day and age people are constantly being surveilled by mobile phones, security cameras, doorbells, dash cams, go pros, drones, etc.

If anyone would/could create a pair of A/R glasses that actually respected privacy, it would be Apple. Hell, even their "mapping" cars blanked out peoples faces from the start.

Rogue01 said:

Don't know what version of Geekbench they are running, but Geekbench 5 for the iPhone 13 Pro is 1,745 for Single-Core and 4,796 for Multi-Core.  So if that is a newer version of Geekbench, they changed the scale to give it higher numbers, as they claim the 13 Pro is 2,260 and 5,427.

Downloaded Geekbench 6 and my iPhone 13 Pro is now 2,275 for single, and 5,536 for multi.  Wonder why they changed the scale to make the numbers higher, when version 4 to 5 actually adjusted the scale for lower numbers.

Scale reflects what the new base system (Intel Core i7-12700) is as compared to the previous base system. They may have made the new baseline score higher (2500) to keep older scores more consistent, so the previous base system which was a Core i3 had a baseline score of 1000... and probably stills scores in that area under this new scale.

programmer said:

Serqetry said:

That is what I've always thought.  If Apple doesn't design a new ARM chip series for the Mac Pro that exceeds the limitations of the SoC M-series, there's really no reason at all to even make a new Mac Pro.  The dumb rumors about an M2 Ultra Mac Pro make no sense.  I think that is more likely to be misinterpreted info related to an upcoming M2 Mac Studio refresh.

There might be a new Mac Pro coming too, but it has to do a lot better than M2 Ultra... and it probably isn't coming as soon as people believe.

Why?  The Mac Pro is about a tower chassis with expansion capabilities.  There’s no rule that says it has to have higher performance than every other model.  The Studio has good thermals and that’s the primary limitation when it comes to performance.  And while it’s nice to think Apple could crank out a SoC just for the Mac Pro, the (1) economics of doing that don’t make much sense:  they just don’t move enough volume to warrant it.  When using Intel they had the luxury of a buffet of workstation and server class chips, plus AMD and/or nVidia to provide a selection of GPUs.  This is no longer true with ASi, so they need to figure out how to scale high enough without over investing.  Tricky problem.  

The whole M1 series was an impressive exercise in scaling, and if they can improve on the M1 Ultra’s efficiency bottlenecks then the M2 Ultra will be even more impressive.  It isn’t going to satisfy the discrete GPU adherents though, so either Apple backtracks and uses an AMD GPU (which kind of undermines their strategy), or they use multiple M2s (some sort of grid compute software solution), or they just stick with the M2 Ultra (for now, until they can improve their scaling story further) and put it in a slotted chassis, or they put off the Mac Pro until M3 (which leaves a hole in their product line).  My guess is they’ll use an M2 Ultra, perhaps clock it a bit higher, and focus on expandability… but at least have a product.  M3 is spooling up this year though, so perhaps a bit more delay and launch the next architecture with the Mac Pro?

1. The Mac Pro is already expensive because of this reason. For Apple, the biggest chunk of cost for their custom silicon is in R&D. They can get away with producing SoCs for the Mac because those SoCs use the very same core designs as the A-series. So the cost is covered by A-series volumes. It just a matter of plugging the blocks together to make a different SoC, or even a different chip altogether. The proof is in the fact that Apple has a huge line of SoCs (A, M, T, W, H, U, S-SiP) that all interchangeably use the same core IP blocks. So, creating a custom "X-series" CPU and/or custom "G-series" GPU for a high-margin system that uses the same IP as all their other silicon designs is not that difficult to believe.

I do agree that the Mac Pro "SoC" does not necessarily need to be more performant than the "Ultra", but it does need to be more flexible. Otherwise, it is just a Mac Studio with slots, which is a system they could've already released. And if they truly didn't care about the Mac Pro and what it represents, they would've done just that. And it would be an abject failure as a vast majority of users interested in a system like the Mac Pro are mainly interested in expandability and flexibility.

Stabitha_Christie said:

mjtomlin said:

mfryd said:

I think the author of this article is reading too much into Bob Borchers' statement. While Apple may very well be working on an Apple Silicon based Mac Pro.  I don't think Bob Borchers' statement speaks to that issue.

"Taking the entire product line to Apple Silicon" might mean that any Mac model with an Intel processor will be discontinued.  This doesn't seem to be a statement that every Mac model will survive the transition.

Consider that taking the iMac to Apple Silicon involved dropping the 27" model.   

That system was replaced by the Mac Studio. Consider the following...

The Intel 27" iMac was dropped when the Mac Studio was released.
The Intel Mac mini was dropped when the M2 Pro mini was released.
The Intel Mac Pro has not been dropped, because they haven't released a replacement... The Mac Studio was not meant to replace it.

That's not to say we won't see another large iMac. I believe the M1 Pro/Max was not what they wanted to put in a larger iMac. Just as the M1 Pro never made it into the mini. I'd be willing to bet we will eventually see a larger iMac with Mx Pro, and possibly Mx Max.

We're supposedly getting a larger MacBook Air soon. Maybe they'll also finally release an M2 iMac and alongside it, a larger iMac with M2 Pro/Max?

They literally said the Mac Pro was coming in even where they Mac Studio was announced. 

Yes, you are correct. But when I said...

"That system was replaced by the Mac Studio. "

That system = 27" iMac.