Eric_WVGG

Funny how people value different things… I've been waiting all year for the Mini, and this magnetic stuff (I've been a stick-on-wallet guy for a decade) was the icing on the cake. I know another guy who's been bitching about the round edges on the older models since the 6. And the advances in "Night Mode" since the XS had me kicking myself for not waiting one more year… IMO this is the biggest deal since the iPhone 4, absolutely can't wait.

I mean, LIDAR for crying out loud… what constitutes a major upgrade to you guys? Not a new design, not a faster CPU, not new visual capabilities, not a better camera, not an entirely new accessory system… it still has the notch, is that it?

I hope you're right, but I'm skeptical. The ARM transition is expected to take "about two years" as of June 2020, so we'll definitely be seeing Intel Macs throughout next year at least.

Two reasons I think 16" will be low priority:
- The GPU needs are far in excess of existing Apple A-series chips. A12X gets a 9000 metal compute score; Radeon Pro runs 38,000. Not impossible or even difficult (they can just throw more cores at it), but not nearly as straight-forward as a theoretical A14X either.
- Consumer demand is pretty low. Ten years ago most developers I knew were using 15" MBPs, but as the industry changed and legions of young graduates for "developer bootcamps" flooded the industry, there was a huge trend toward cheaper 13" machines. (source: pre-Covid, I spent a lot of time in co-working spaces and WeWorks, saw firsthand the shift from 15" to 13" computers. Still pretty popular among graphic designers and video editors but that's it.)

I'm betting on Fall 2021 for 16" ARM at the earliest.

I wish Apple Insider ran "fantasy football" style games regarding Apple releases… I've got a whole release schedule mapped out in my head, I wanna place bets

dewme said:

I hope this works out for the people of Wisconsin. 

hah. haha… hahahahahah no

There's an absolutely buck-wild podcast episode about this boondoggle, includes absolute jaw-dropping excerpts of town hall meetings in the Mount Pleasant where the project gets railroaded through. You truly need to listen to believe it. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd/132-negative-mount-pleasant

neilm said:

gmgravytrain said:

A 2,227 mAh battery will likely only last a few hours of normal use.  The mini is a nice size, but I could never deal with that small capacity battery.  I guess it could be good for some people, but with an A14 Bionic, they'd want to use it a lot and the battery will just poop out halfway through the day.  That's just crazy.  I would only be satisfied with the iPhone 12 Pro Max simply because that is the largest capacity battery available.

Smaller screen also equals lower power consumption, other things being equal.

ehhhh not really. The Max screens is only 5% larger than the regular Pro, the battery is 30% larger, and the battery life is 25% more. The larger screen might take a trivially larger amount of power (again, that screen is only 5% larger), but the battery is a LOT bigger and that gets turned into time, not screen. 

There's a lot of speculation that the Android world kicked off the phablet thing because they simply couldn't make a phone or OS that was as power-efficient as the iPhone 3gs, so instead they went big, which gave them equivalent battery time (thanks to much larger batteries) at the cost of only a little more power requirements (the screen doesn't make much of a difference.)

All of which is to say, I expect the battery life of the Mini to be really bad. Which is fine, I don't sit around glued to it all day.

I just don't believe this one. The technology sounds hair-brained and of limited usefulness. 

If this was feasible, they wouldn't have bothered with the TouchID-in-lock-button solution for the iPad Air. I mean, yeah they would've got that button working in the lab, but it wouldn't have made it to product.

We see this over and over. Apple has a new keyboard design; they don't release it in one laptop, and a different keyboard in another. They pick what they think is the best solution and put it in everything, and then use the economy of scale to make the cheddar. 

Also, even though I kind of hate FaceID, I find myself missing TouchID most when I'm in a checkout line and trying to use Apple Pay. But you know what works better than an iPhone for that? The Watch. I want TouchID back too but really it's not that big a deal.