MacQuadra840av

mr lizard said:

Just saw Tech Crunch’s review. What a disappointment. Not even a proper hinge, just two halves held together by cheap flimsy rubber. You can even see the laminated seal around the edge of the product. This has been made using the most inexpensive production methods. 

I was expecting something premium for the price. This is like a cheap knockoff. 

Apple blew all the money on the research and development of the failed AirPower, so this is all they could come up with.  Wireless chargers are better because the charger is not stuck to the phone when you pick it up.  And using MagSafe to dupe people into buying chargers is not what MagSafe was all about.  The purpose of MagSafe was to prevent damage to the MacBook if someone tripped or yanked on the power cord.  This is the complete opposite of MagSafe because the cable is now stuck to the phone, increasing the chances of damage - your watch flying off the charger when you pick up your phone and the other flappy part free to move anywhere causing the watch to fall off and hit the ground or table.  I bet Apple will have the same disclaimer that the MagSafe ring will damage the leather cases with an indented ring.

jdb8167 said:

Only worth the money if you travel a lot. It’s lightweight and can fast charge the iPhone 12. For every day use you can find 2 or 3 way charging pads for less than $30.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZH2LF2J/

A small USB 20w charger and a cable is much smaller than this overpriced device.  And you still need to buy a 20W charger for this to work.  So why would anyone buy it?

The article gets many things wrong.  The transition from 680x0 to PowerPC was a very good move.  The article implies that the switch to PowerPC was a bad move because no one else in the industry used PowerPC chips.  That had nothing to do with it.  The 680x0 architecture was going nowhere.  The 68060 to replace the 68040 was not much faster and required a lot of re-writes to take advantage of it.  The PowerPC, on the other hand, offered huge performance boosts that were much faster than Intel at the time.  Remember the famous snail ad?  That gave Apple a big boost, especially with the G3, G4, and G5.

The shift to Intel had nothing to do with compatibility.  The PowerPC reached its limit.  The G5 ran too hot for any type of portable use, and it would actually run slower than a G4, if they managed to shoehorn it into a PowerBook chassis.  IBM also could not produce any faster G5 chips for the desktop.  Intel, on the other hand, had the performance per watt and that is what Apple was looking for.  The Core Duo chips were far superior, and made the MacBook Pro run 5x faster than the G4.  Remember, Apple could not make the products they wanted to make with the PowerPC roadmap.  Also, when Apple acquired NeXT, OpenStep was already x86 native.  All versions of OS X were 100% x86 native behind closed doors.  Apple knew the PowerPC was reaching its limit and had been planning for Intel years before the switch took place.  Boot Camp and running Windows natively was just an added bonus.

The need to run Windows on Mac is still quite popular for running Windows as a VM on Mac, especially for developing software, so that might be a minor loss.  But Apple shifting to their own processors allows them to release new hardware on their schedule, and not be dependent on Intel.  Apple has done very well with the Intel Macs and it is amazing that the Intel Macs have outlasted both PowerPC and 680x0 Macs in longevity....at 14 years.

noraa1138 said:

Blah, just wrote a whole past the disappeared on me!

In short, I think Apple will be introducing a whole new line of chips vs. using the A series in a Mac. My reasoning is that the A series is heavily customized for mobile purposes - specifically in power usage (i.e. lower power usage) to keep heat generation down and increase battery life. Neither of these will be as much of a concern even on a MacBook that will have both active cooling and a bigger battery.

I'm not sure if the A series is flexible enough to be reconfigured with a higher TDP (thermal design power), or if maybe Apple is going to choose to go with efficiency vs. raw power at the outset.

Regardless, we will find out soon!

If you watched the keynote in June, they said they were working on 'desktop class' processors.

I don't buy it.  The A14 in the iPhone 12 runs at 2.99GHz and the A12X in the iPad Pro 2018 runs at 2.5GHz.  Why would they underclock an A14X in a much larger enclosure like a laptop? I would hope Apple would be going for something more than just 'slightly faster' than the current i9.