anonconformist

Perhaps the maxed out price of the new AS Mac Pro is 1/4 the price of the old Intel Mac Pro, but it also maxed out at a relatively paltry 192 GB RAM, but the old Mac Pro could have 1.5 TB RAM.

In the cases where you have large enough data sets, the new AS Mac Pro has selected itself out of the running. The SSD isn't nearly as fast as actually having RAM even in the best-case scenario. If all your data is streamed and processed linearly, the amount of RAM required tends to be lower, assuming you don't need to keep too many things streamed with a large enough context.

It's likely that with the kinds of data sets where it is larger than will fit in a new AS Mac Pro, it's not too feasible trying to partition the processing over multiple machines, so buying 4 of them isn't a bargain in that use-case.

Apple clearly is content with limiting their potential market for their halo Mac. This is a logical result.

JP234 said:

This seems on the face of it to be nothing more than a slightly more intrusive form of autocorrect.

If this provides full access to Bing Chat, that’s an absurdly grossly overly-simplistic extreme understatement of what can be done.

I’ve created a working console version (in Swift) of my personal invention of a form of Solitaire by describing the rules and requirements for how it behaves. That took several sequential prompts for the first attempt. It included as close to an “Attract Mode” of it playing itself as feasible in a console application with Swift not having a standard way to check if a key has been pressed without waiting for input. I prompted for the Attract Mode, but it alerted me to the limitations with explanation. I asked it to specially print the possible valid moves during the turns.

I didn’t write a single line of code to do this, I did this all in English. This is a solitaire game that has run on only my own iOS and MacOS devices in the past, implemented in Objective-C, but not released to the world because I hadn’t spent the time to make it nice and shiny.

So, to a limited extent, calling it autocorrect on steroids is partially true, but in any case, it has generative capabilities that far exceed anything you’ve used for autocorrect before. Hell, I’ve had it create song parodies in the style of various characters, human and otherwise, I’ve prompted it to create 4-person love songs for a fictional race with 4 genders, and it did it. Yesterday I had it create a parody of “Thriller” incorporating “The Hokey Pokey” without it using the original “Thriller” lyrics explicitly. And no, it’s not limited to 4 characters/voices in a song, I’ve had it do more.

Within certain intentional constraints for not offending people somehow (guardrails) and other legalities, while it has an upper limit for the number of tokens (roughly equal to words, not always) in the context, if it has been trained via data how to do something, you can have it do that. That includes teaching it via prompts what to do: for example, I didn’t like the code formatting style it generated, so I asked it first to reformat the Swift code according to the WebKit C++ standard that it looked up online, and it told me Swift has certain requirements for syntax that’d be affected, so after I prompted a bit different, and it neatly fulfilled that code formatting style while (not what I had in mind!) translating the Swift code into C++ code, which I had to clarify wasn’t what I wanted, so it retranslated back into Swift. There were still some formatting style rule changes I wanted implemented, as that wasn’t completely the style I wanted: it did it.

no autocorrect is that capable: it was following directions as specified in English to generate code and reformat it in a way I’d hope a human would be able to do, but it was faster, no typos, and filled in details I didn’t painstakingly explain as well as the ones I did.

The old (current) MacPro has expansion capability far exceeding what every other Apple system has, including RAM up to 1.5 TB.

Unless they cede the MacPro market that defines, it makes no sense to make the Mac Studio a one-and-done, because it isn’t remotely that expandable and can’t be made to be without making the squarish peg in the round hole mistake they made with the trashcan MacPro and stupidly over-constraining their most powerful system sold.

How big is the market for something more powerful than what is reasonably seen with the M2 Ultra for RAM? I submit Apple knows more of that than everyone else. Either they have run into problems trying to make a new Apple Silicon MacPro, or they’ve determined the market size for the MacPro isn’t large enough to justify the overhead, are both more reasonable expectations than Apple making the loved (my assessment, what are the numbers? Again, Apple knows) Mac Studio a one-and-done design, as it addresses a clear market point for price and functionality that wasn’t ever really served well by the MacPro.

I regret upgrading to iPadOS/iOS 15.5 because it has resulted in Safari failing so many tabs in so many sites, where the page is rendering, or you thought it was stable, and something changes, and POOF! It disappears, and anything you were doing on it is gone, and it doesn't reload it: it usually results in going back to the most recent tab you used before that.

I always keep in context this is an Apple rumor site, at least until they have actual hardware and software to test that the rest of us can buy.

What can be said that Apple Insider knows is they need to keep fresh content to pay the bills 😏