danox
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Apple says not every Apple Silicon generation will get an Ultra
eriamjh said:The Ultra chips likely have a significant yield problem. Considering they go into products that sell the least by volume and mix, those costs are even more significant.
Apple has multi-year plans, I’m sure, but plans are fluid and change with presidents and tariffs (nowadays).The Mac Studio was talked about being cancelled a recently. It probably sells circles around the Mac Pro and will continue to do so.They’re very small circles, though. Even the iMac is rumored to only be 3% of Mac sales.When Apple introduced the M4 iPad Pro the introduction increased sales by $1.5 billion in one quarter and those sales have been up since if you multiply by four that is $6 billion per year and a new big screen iMac being sold over the course of one year probably would do about the same yes that number isn’t up there with iPhones or the laptop sales, but it is a significant amount of very profitable dollars being left on the table (the markets are not the same many people have no interest in the laptop computer), note the sales of iPads we’re down from previous highs in the quarters leading up to the introduction of better M4 iPads.
The same scenario applies to towers and servers money billions is being left on the table by Apple up until this point, it’s good to see Apple offer/upgrade, the Mac Studio and going into the future Apple needs to offer more if they don’t want to lose that awakening AI mind-share for truck computers to continue go to AMD, Intel, and Nvidia and make no mistake they are the competition long-term to Apple hardware. Apple Silicon with its inherent advantages is at now at the crossroads where they can and should make life really difficult/miserable for the big three, Nvidia in particular has a huge unsustainable wattage problem.
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Game Porting Toolkit is a start, but Apple needs to do more for Mac gaming success
CheeseFreeze said:Apple needs to treat this as seriously as their TV business.
Why is there no Apple Original for games? This will require acquiring a family of mid-sized gaming companies (the future is not in $250M+ games but very high quality indie games).
Apple would also need to throw in money to subsidize quality ports of existing games.
And if Apple has enough ‘originals’, they could ditch that stupid Apple TV box that is only used for the TV app that we find in most smart TV’s anyway, and replace it with an ‘Apple media center’ like product, equipped with an M4 Max or Pro, sold at cost price (making money of a subscription and SKU sales).
It should come with an amazing controller and perhaps focus on simplicity, to separate its positioning from XBOX or PS5.Apple does not need to buy any of those large scale content game companies where all the talent is freelance on a per game basis, what are you buying when you buy one of those companies zippo, Microsoft buying Blizzard games for $72.5 billion dollars was a utter waste of money (and will in time be right up there with Skype), the only thing in the gaming world that’s worth buying is the Unreal Gaming Engine but I don’t think Sweeney would ever sell it to anyone let alone Apple.
I will agree that Apple needs to do more in gaming, but there are no shortcuts just like there are no shortcuts to developing Apple Silicon and there no shortcuts to designing a Apple modem, this is one of those long-term internal Apple projects if it ever happens, another example is the long slow process of increasing the GPU power within Apple Silicon in comparison to Nvidia there are no shortcuts just a lot of iteration and hard work over time.
Apples largest acquisition is still only $3 billion dollars after 25 years. I don’t think they will be buying any large scale tech gaming company unless it’s the Unreal Gaming Engine.
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Apple's extortionate upgrade prices can't stop the MacBook Air being a bargain
jdw said:
I think we all know that; and while it's worth repeating to emphasize "Apple quality," I have little doubt that most of us would be more than happy with REASONABLE prices for upgrades. In other words, a happy medium between the status quo of "extortionate" and "cheap." And I say this as a AAPL shareholder of 26 years who desperately wants Apple to keep on winning. You can still win and put numerous dents in the universe without "extortionate" upgrade pricing.AppleInsider said:Apple will never sell a cheap upgrade to anything...
It does cost more to buy Apple products many keep forgetting, but to offer continual research and development and iteration on their products does cost more money. They’re not a PC OEM nor are they LG or Samsung, who can’t sell 4.5K, 5K, or 6K monitors into the general PC market at least not at an acceptable margin it takes money lots of it.Apple once again is spear-heading new technology in Thunderbolt 5 across their product lines the other PC OEM’s don’t have the margins to be first or second for that matter, which is one of the reasons why most in the PC market is stuck on 4K 120 Hz monitors, and the same applies to tandem OLED displays they don’t have the margins Apple does in fact, Samsung had the original contract for tandem OLED screens for the new iPads but they dragged their feet and said they couldn’t do it so Apple went to LG.
LG got 3/4 of the orders for the new M4 iPads, Samsung probably initially didn’t want to do it because they were not going to be able to sell double tandem OLED for a profit (small margins) on their own products into the PC/Android world. -
Apple's extortionate upgrade prices can't stop the MacBook Air being a bargain
Dibiase said:Apple's storage upgrades are the worst example of price gouging. You can purchase a top spec 1 TB M2 SSD for under $100 but apple charges $400 just to upgrade. This is the reason I have refused to buy a new Apple laptop for over 10 years now. I've managed to do everything I need to do with an iPad and my iPhone. I'd like a new Macbook Air but until they start including more storage standard or bring their upgrade prices to realistic levels, I refuse to support these practices.If you are so unhappy just get a Windows computer and a Android phone. It does cost money lots of money to make what Apple makes and have it work across the board (a vertical computer company). You wanna live a life in hell join the ranks of the Wintel/Android crowd. The grass is not greener but it is cheaper for a reason on the other side, these days when Apple introduces anything a vocal quarter of the people cry about the cost, quality cost money. On going iteration research and development cost money.
Almost every piece of hardware that I bought from Apple over the years last 6 to 9 years and has resale value try and find anything in the PC market that holds up that long software or hardware wise quality cost money, there are two cheaper avenues you can pursue…..
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Apple says not every Apple Silicon generation will get an Ultra
dewme said:
Thank you x 10 for injecting some sanity into the conversation. First of all, none of the so-called Apple soothsayers who claim to know what Apple’s plans really are are privy to what Apple is actually planning that’s not been externally announced.programmer said:
The thing people don’t seem to understand when whining about not getting this or that is that these products take a huge development effort to create. And then when they have been designed, there is a complicated balancing act about fab capacities and yields. This isn’t some blokes with a drill press pumping out aluminum parts from their garage. This is light years beyond that in terms of complexity. Apple (and the rest of the industry) are pulling off miracles, and forum trolls pour hate on them because doing that takes no brain cells and you don’t even have to get off the couch.keithw said:While it's nice that the M3 Ultra is now finally out, why did it take them over a year to release it? (The M3 line came out on October 30, 2023!) Why didn't they release the M4 Max Studio at the same time as the M4 Max MBP? If they had, I may have saved a few thousand $$$ since I got tired of waiting and bought the MBP. And is the single core performance of the M3 Ultra the same as the M4 Max? Enquiring minds want to know... But I guess with the 512MB memory capacity and the 80 graphics cores on top of the 32 CPU cores, the M3 Ultra should be killer LLM machine.
If I were to speculate wildly, I would suppose that the process node (N3B) used for the M3 series had some issues, and pretty much only Apple used it. So to address the issues, Apple moved faster on the M4 using the newer process (N3E), and eschewed the ultra connector to get that line out faster. This may have freed up M3-capable capacity, which they can now use for the M3 Ultra… and IIRC (and this is even more speculative) the first process did have some advantages over the later one (they removed features from N3E to make it work better), which may play better to what high end chips like the ultra need. So rather than spending the time to make the ultra connector work using N3E, they are probably focused on N3P, which is apparently what comes next.Second, even if they were somehow able to get a snapshot in time of a committed roadmap, anyone who’s worked in any development organization knows that plans change based on priorities, actual progress, current conditions, constraints, and often, funding. The only thing that is constant in business is that things will always change. If you can’t adapt to change you go extinct.Third point, these chips are incredibly complex. I remember when the Intel 80386 came out and it was seen as a massive step up in the world of personal computing. It had slightly under one million transistors, which was astonishing at the time.The M3 Ultra has more than 180 billion transistors.Building these things is a lot harder than making a PB&J sandwich. When the 80386 arrived they needed a massive amount of computing resources simply to verify the design and test the fabrication while using the best fab and test machinery available. I can only imagine what it must take to verify the design and build and detect flaws in an M3 Ultra. All of the machinery need to fabricate the chips has to be built and verified as well.The M3 Ultra is one of the most complex consumer SoCs ever developed. It’s a fantastic achievement regardless of what name is attached to it.Apple Silicon across the board along with all the variants of Apple OS are great achievements, and so far Apple hasn’t been resting on their laurels, their iterations over the last 25 years has been second to none in comparison to their competition, however, the current fate of Intel, IBM, Xerox, Kodak, and the death of Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois means the job is never done.
If Apple has a advantage that you can use/press and not go too far out of bounds you have to pursue it that includes getting those Apple Silicon computing trucks out the door in a timely manner the time is now while most of the competition is struggling, Apple has/is getting the attention of a new generation of very smart people who want to get into AI programming and they are looking for solutions now Apple Silicon appears to be in the right place at the right time once again in comparison to the present competition,.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1j43us5/apple_releases_new_mac_studio_with_m4_max_and_m3/ Refer to the comment section the enthusiasm that is expressed in that section by most of the participants means there is a market, the computing trucks have to be made, Apple has to be a part of the mind share in this area of computing, they can’t let it go like they have in the 3-D CAD construction, and CAD/CAM world, particularly since they have Apple Silicon and a viable ecosystem today to put up a fight.
