verne arase

charlesn said:

"Big" improvement over M2? Even Apple marketing isn't trying to make that claim, focusing instead on comparisons with Intel chips and M1. For the sake of argument, let's say the 20% bump in bench testing is accurate... what does that translate to in real world tasks? Is it even 10%? And considering that the vast majority of real world tasks are now handled instantly, how much does a 10% improvement on "instantly" matter? Possibly, professionals who work in processor-intensive tasks that do take time on a daily basis--video editing comes to mind--would benefit if everything was 10% faster. But those people are probably buying Macbook Pros or desktop machines. 

And look, I get it: what was Apple going to do, NOT upgrade the MBAs to M3? Obviously, this needed to happen, if for no reason other than marketing purposes. But this is Apple's conundrum across product lines, except at the pro level: the hardware is already beyond what the vast majority of people will ever demand of it. Apple now needs new and compelling capabilities that require new hardware to drive the rationale for upgrading Apple products. We all know that the M4, M5, M-etc. chips are coming in a year, two, three, whatever. Do you care? Tell me what those machines will be able to DO that my current machines can't and you'll have my attention. 

The biggest determinant of a computer's snappiness - especially for workloads in this machine's target demographic - is single core performance.

No one throughout the course of ownership has ever regretted having a faster machine, and if you get one of these puppies with 16 GB RAM and at least 512 GB storage you'll have eliminated most of the bottlenecks that the target audience for this machine will experience and will handle pretty much any workload leaving plenty of aspirational power for things like low-end video, photo, or audio editing.

The big improvement over M2 means an even bigger improvement over the M1 - and a mind boggling improvement over an Intel-based Mac - all with great battery life and no fan noise whatsoever. This is the machine that Microsoft and Qualcomm urgently want to build, and spoiled Mac users just show their distain when Apple releases it with just a press release.

Heck, this thing can probably handle low-end Blender work because it now features hardware level ray tracing, and will probably handle gaming much better as well.

teejay2012 said:

The EU does not generate enough profit for Apple to be happy about a $2B fine. That is going to hurt. Why for all this, when Apple was responding to DMA and making accommodations for their anti steering practices?... Because Margrethe Vestager is still very angry from losing the Irish tax case, which was over ruled on appeal as it did not provide proof of wrong doing. I think on appeal the same could happen here, as the EU commission is not the same as EU courts which adhere to the law and not vendetta driven. Apple could have allowed more information to music customers of course, but Spotify and Daniel Ek are nasty pieces in this. US tech companies have every right to become paranoid about future business in the EU, as clearly they are being targeted, to the advantage of EU companies. The corruption is obvious imo, but I suppose that is what businesses are all about. In the future, I doubt Apple will leave the EU, but certainly the products and services in the EU will differ, and likely will be more expensive.

I've long held that Apple should begin to manufacture devices for highly regulated markets like the EU which comply with EC regulations and are released some time after Apple releases their world market devices at a higher price to accommodate the additional engineering costs. They could also tack on regulatory fine costs and spread them over the EU devices uniformly.

This would mean that when the EC comes up with bonkers design decisions like all devices need replaceable batteries the whole world won't have to suffer with phones that aren't waterproof or lack inductive charging because a battery and cover being where the inductive charging coil currently sit today.

Of course, Europeans could still try and smuggle in grey market world phones, but that's a matter for the EU and their enforcement agencies to try to stop.

Everyone outside of these regulated countries could also buy the regulated phone but chances are they'd opt for the cheaper world phone (unless for some perverse reason you had the need to carry around a phone with a bunch of replaceable batteries).

IOW, just treat the Europeans and their demands as a cost of doing business, and have a side engineering department whose sole job is refitting a higher cost European iPhone to satisfy the more restrictive European market. Heck, the European phones could even be manufactured in the EU which would contribute to an even higher cost but would keep EU regulators happy.

beowulfschmidt said:

I know there's no way it would actually happen, but it would be nice if Apple and other tech companies would just close up shop in the U.K.  Fire everyone, and remove all their products from the stores.

Same with China.

Note that failure to do so is not entirely Apple's fault.  The laws for corporations in the U.S. can result in legal penalties for executives who piss off the shareholders.

Close Apple's British business presence and allow Brits to buy Apple products mail order drop shipped from China (or India).

If necessary, make 'em grey market purchases.

Regulators in the UK and EU think they're kings of the world - let 'em try to keep British purchasers from ordering internationally; the product nazis need to realize that their own citizens don't support their bullsh*t.

Looking forward to the lighter frame (titanium), a telephoto zoom camera, better modem (faster LTE), and Thunderbolt for (hopefully) faster Mac syncs. Going from 480 mb/sec to a nominal 40 gb/sec should make for much faster transfers - though changing out my alarm clock and cables will be a bit painful.

Unfortunately, wired docks may be a thing of the past due to USB-C's tighter tolerances eliminating blind docking solutions.

The A17 should be faster and more energy efficient and in conjunction with the bigger battery should solve some of the battery woes of the 14 Pro with its always on display.

Hopefully supply chain problems won't make this puppy too hard to get.

jdiamond said:

godofbiscuitssf said:

Apple is also part of the RISC V consortium. As soon as Apple announced Macs as having “Apple Silicon” and not “ARM-based CPUs” I knew it’d be a possibility that they’d always remain open to other ISAs.  If RISC V continues on its current trajectory— and continues to attract all the talent — it may happen by 2035–40. 

I completely agree.  Apple's not going to get caught again being tied to an ISA.  The agreement with ARM is likely just to guarantee terms on Apple using ARM for the next 20 years - Apple could drop at any time like they did with Imagine and GPUs.

Apple doesn't license processor IP from ARM - just the Instruction Set Architecture.

AFAIK, there is nothing in the ISA that limits Apple - in fact it's rumored that ARM designed ARMv8 at Apple's request so Apple could create Apple Silicon's deep pipeline out-of-order execution model (which ultimately resulted in the up to eight simultaneous execution unit of Apple's Firestorm processor).

There's nothing magical about an instruction set - provided it doesn't limit deep pipelining by doing old-gen stuff like ARMv7's inclusion of condition code execution in every other instruction.

The only advantage of something like RISC V is licensing - and Apple's already got all that covered.