danwells

At first, I thought "this makes no sense" - two high end laptops that almost end up in the mobile workstation market and a consumer desktop that sells a fraction of what the consumer laptops do. The iMac is the next machine up for an update, but it pretty much shares its innards with the 13" MBP or the Mini (ignoring the M2 Pro Mini) - it just didn't get those innards updated the last time around (why?).

Then I realized that it makes sense in one specific situation... What if all three chips are ready, but supply is constrained by yield? The pro laptops have very, very high profit per machine (their percentage margin is typical of an Apple product, or even slightly low - but their high selling prices mean a lot of dollars per machine). Building an M3 Max and sticking it in a $3000-$6000 workstation is a lot more profit per chip than selling a base M3 in an iPad or a MacBook Air. The M3 Max is also larger, and I don't know how profit per wafer compares... 

The iMac is old, and it has been attracting attention in the Mac press for how old it is, so it's a good machine to update just for the PR. Why not update its innards-mates with it? If there are supply constraints, it shares its innards with the most popular Macs of them all...

 If Apple updated the Airs, it's possible that the limited chip supply would simply shoot availability dates into March right away. Update the slower-selling iMac and people might actually get one in a reasonable time frame. Update the 14" and 16" Pro and you've made some very visible creative users happy, and sold a bunch of high profit machines

That's very possible - I realized after my initial post that a "redesign" for the 13" Pro could be simply putting it in the 14" case (or a minor modification, like taking away a port or two).

Unless the image has been modified (or we're seeing a redesign on the 13", we know a little more than the article claims. That's either the 14" or the 16" MBP - the 13" doesn't have feet. Barring a weird upgrade (e.g. changing available RAM or SSD sizes, display backight or something else without messing with the processor), we have the M3 Pro and Max inbound

Or there was one weird rumor of Apple trying to put the M2 Ultra in a laptop (presumably 16" only)... I have no idea whether heat and power would allow that in an Apple-approved laptop chassis. It certainly WOULD work in a larger gaming or workstation chassis, but would it just drop in to the 16" MBP? 

Highest chance is M3 Pro/Max, then probably a weird upgrade, then a 13" redesign with feet, then the M2 Ultra??? I'd think a redesign would merit a bigger event?

The good news is that almost any USB-C cable should charge an iPhone. I don't know if pure data (no power at all) cables are even USB standard legal. Every cable I've ever seen will carry at least 15 watts. I think even a Thunderbolt cable in a non-Thunderbolt port does 15 watts.  Of course, there are probably some non-certified cables that won't carry power (but I've never seen one), and I think some USB-A to USB-C adapter cables might be 5 watts instead of 15.

The one obvious exception is so expensive that nobody is likely to try and use it as a phone charger. Thunderbolt supports optical cables with optical-to-electrical transceivers in  in the connector ends. You do see them as extra-long Thunderbolt cables, and that's obviously not going to carry power unless somebody's run a couple of copper wires alongside the optical fibers. I don't know if hybrid cables like that exist, but I do know that at least some optical Thunderbolt cables are pure optical and won't carry power by definition. The good news is that an optical Thunderbolt cable is at least $200, and most are more like $300-$500 so it's not the kind of thing that's going to be lying around in a drawer waiting to bite unwary people looking to charge their phone - it probably runs from your Mac Studio to a big noisy RAID in a closet...

The headline is misleading, looking at the graph... Since 2020, we've seen the same pattern each year. Samsung outsells Apple three quarters every year, then Apple takes a big lead in calendar Q4 each year - that's the iPhone intro quarter. and the holiday quarter in a significant part of the world. The real news here is that Apple dang near caught Samsung in Q1 2023. If you look at Q1 2020, 2021 or 2022, the gap between Samsung and Apple is much greater. Apple always has a huge sales bump in Q4, and Samsung's lowest sales percentage is always in Q4 (I'm guessing they move more units in Q4 than any other quarter, which this graph doesn't comment on) , but their PERCENTAGE is at its lowest - because they're competing against brand-new iPhones with 6 month old Galaxies. Q4 has huge overall sales because of the holiday quarter in North America, Europe and some other regions...

The other thing to remember about any Apple/Samsung unit sales comparison is that pretty much every iPhone competes with the TOP of Samsung's line. Everything except the SE is clearly competing with the S series Galaxies (and the less common Z Flip). Even the SE is competitive with the top of the Galaxy A line, which extends to price points significantly below the iPhone SE. Samsung makes even lower-end phones (well below the iPhone SE) in the Galaxy A0xx, F and M series that don't commonly appear in the US market, but are responsible for a lot of sales volume elsewhere in the world. This is slightly complicated by the VERY expensive Z Fold, but my best guess is that sales of that phone are minimal compared to the iPhone Pro Max (which competes with the S23 Ultra).