michelb76

dmitrek said:

There are no tradeoffs except for total computing speed — whole transition to Apple silicon started from Apple Dev Kit (or Dev Transition kit) where A12 Bionic was put into Mac Mini enclosure, and it was already faster than Intel macs back then.

michelb76 said:
Curious what tradeoffs will be made. Most of the 'cost' is in the profit on the base and upgrades like RAM. Does this need to compete with Chromebooks?

Well then how will they make it cheaper? The CPU will be binned as it doesn't make sense to scale this out. They can already offer the M2 Air for much less if they let go of the 30-35% margin, but why would they? So it's going to need cheaper parts, reduced ports, functionalities or else this will cannibalise the lowest offer. 8GB RAM is not going to be enough next year, so there's an expense already. the M2 is at a theoretical $999, a $799 model does not make sense. Competition(whatever that will be) is at $400-$600. I can't see Apple go below $600 and higher than $600 does not make much sense. And if they CAN make a cheaper model without too many compromises, the Air is too expensive.

Really hoping the design will be massively improved in the release. So many UI items are extremely hard to read or figure out.

Some results from my M1 Max, 10 CPU / 32 GPU, 64GB:
Steel Nomad - 1754
Solar Bay - 22008
Wild Life Extreme - 17910

Even with the M4 Max, Apple still has long way to go.

9secondkox2 said:

It boggles why this hasn’t been done already. 

There is no market for mac gaming. Performance still isn't great except for the top model macs, which are not begin bought by gamers. Also, there is very little to no profit in gaming for PC due to rampant piracy. Only console games make a bit of money because of the lock-in. The gaming market for PC is dying.

apple4thewin said:

Hopefully that means Apple works with Steam to make a temporary Game Porting Toolkit native mod until developers decide to update their applications.

There is no incentive for developers to do that (for the foreseeable future).