Marvin

commentzilla said:

Sounds like a computer for K-12 education.

They'd be suitable for any general use cases but definitely popular with students. Even entry-level Apple Silicon is really fast. iPhone chips are essentially 1/2 the entry M-series chips of the same generation.

https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=iOS&api=metal&cpu-arch=ARM&hwtype=iGPU&hwname=Apple%20A18%20Pro%20GPU&did=123295110 (A18 Pro)
https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=OS%20X&api=metal&cpu-arch=ARM&hwtype=GPU&hwname=Apple%20M4&did=123984676 (M4)
https://gfxbench.com/device.jsp?benchmark=gfx50&os=OS%20X&api=metal&cpu-arch=ARM&hwtype=GPU&hwname=Apple%20M1&did=90754264&D=Apple%20M1 (M1)

A18 Pro is roughly 1/2 M4 and around the same as M1.

This would be like Apple selling an old M1 Air at $100-150 less than the entry Air that uses half the power. This would be $649-699 for education buyers.

Meson said:

9secondkox2 said:

Apple did nothing wrong. 

Epic created a gigantic case just to get the courts to settle for something smaller. Unfortunately it worked. 

And now apple is supposed to give free access to competitors. 

Apple has the right to charge whatever they want. If they want to charge a developer 99% for being listed on the store, they can do thst. 

But they’d lose partners. That’s how the free market works. 

27% is fair. And if they want to go to 20%, that’s fair too. 

But to try to force them to take nothing? That’s criminal. 

"Apple has a right to charge whatever they want." Really. You do understand that your the one who is paying at the end, correct. Don't you want competition on the iPhone? Or are you just happy with Apple just charging "whatever they want". 

This is just like tariffs. 😒

The amount per user is very low, it says here app store users spend around $5 per quarter or $20/year:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/289909/mobile-app-spend-on-per-user-mobile-apps-quarter/

Apple posted a report saying they facilitated $400b in transactions, which includes physical goods:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/05/app-store-in-the-us-facilitated-406-billion-usd-in-developer-billings-and-sales-in-2024/
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/2024-US-Apple-Ecosystem-Report.pdf

Digital goods were $53b so this would be $53b / 1.5b iOS users = $35/year per user, similar to above figure.

Apple charges 15-30% of this amount, which is around $5-10/year per user.

If this was something like a healthcare, agriculture or oil industry monopoly that causes families to pay thousands per year, that would be worth doing something about. Saying Apple's fee is high because someone pays $5-10/year extra is ridiculous. The billion-dollar companies and their shareholders are the ones complaining because they don't get this revenue instead.

Apple has a right to charge a commission for directing over 100 million players to an app. Even if 30% of all transactions is too high, it shouldn't be 0%.

15% is a fair amount to charge for every transaction. For a $4.99 purchase, the developer can charge $5.99, Apple gets $1, developer gets their $4.99. The fee can also be capped for higher amounts.

surgefilter said:

So big set of micro needles in the back of it constantly taking blood sample?  Will that not get a bit messy? Interesting and useful addition if they can pull it off.

It seems there's some non-invasive alternatives:

https://www.healthline.com/health/diabetes/blood-sugar-monitor-without-finger-pricks
https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/non-invasive-diabetes-technology

This kind would be usable in a smartwatch:
https://www.hagartech.com/

Their devices use radio frequencies and described as 1/3 the size of a smartphone. Either Apple would use a smaller integrated sensor or an accessory device, maybe a custom watch band.

This one uses a light beam to heat up the glucose in the skin and the temperature change shows the amount of glucose:
https://www.diamontech.de/en/solutions/d-pocket

The sites say they are 95% as accurate as the blood testing strips. This would be a big improvement from having pins stuck in either regularly via finger testing or with the CGMs installed all the time.

michelb76 said:

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.

M4 Max is a laptop chip, it's comparable to a laptop Nvidia 5070.

5070 laptop (~100W):
https://www.3dmark.com/sn/6066166 (Steel Nomad - 3166)
https://www.3dmark.com/sb/301082 (Solar Bay - 67588)
https://www.3dmark.com/wl/477536 (Wild Life Extreme - 25707)

Desktop GPUs like the 4090-5090 are 400-500W GPUs.

M3 Ultra is a bit higher (about the same as a 5080 laptop):
https://www.3dmark.com/snmac/876 (Steel Nomad - 5519)
https://www.3dmark.com/sbmac/624 (Solar Bay - 81084)
https://www.3dmark.com/wlmac/340 (Wild Life Extreme - 51896)

If there was an M4 Ultra, this would be about 25% faster.
If there was an M4 Extreme (quad Max GPU), this would be competitive with the fastest PC GPU, the 5090, but this would also use 400-500W. Only the Mac Pro chassis would be able to handle this and the sales volume at that price point would't justify it.

The main thing is they are competitive in the laptop space as that's the majority of users and they have the advantage with unified memory.

beowulfschmidt said:

It seems to me that Apple's commitment to gaming extends only as far as their own app store.  If you ain't buying from one of Apple's apps stores, they really don't care much about gaming.  They've demonstrated this time and time again.

It serves as a showcase for how powerful and efficient their GPUs are. They had people from CD Projekt Red at WWDC showing off the Cyberpunk port:

https://geekculture.co/cyberpunk-2077-on-macbook-pro-m4-max-shown-at-apple-wwdc/

It was running at 120FPS on Ultra quality on M4 Max on battery. They said Apple worked with them to make some things more optimal like using FP16 to reduce load on the CPU.

They don't say if it was with path-tracing or just Ultra raytracing, I would assume the latter. This would make it similar to an Nvidia 5070, which reaches around 140FPS at 4K DLSS performance (1080p upscaled to 4K), 4x frame-gen with Ultra ray-tracing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no63Pq-UOXo

This would mean M4 Pro will do 60FPS on the same quality and M4 will do 30FPS and the quality can be lowered a bit for higher FPS.

Path-tracing cuts the FPS to 1/3-1/4 of Ultra so Max might still be able to handle path-tracing.

Eventually these games can generate some revenue in the store but it's more important that the games are available on the platform in much the same way having native pro software helps attract users to the platform.

Some games run smoother on the Mac due to the amount of graphics memory and SSD speed. Even higher-end PCs get stuck with 8GB of VRAM so they have to keep streaming assets in/out of memory causing stuttering. A 32GB Mac can use 16GB or more for video memory.

Hopefully CD Projekt Red ports their upcoming Witcher games. These are built on Unreal Engine so should be easy enough to port over:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJtF3wzPSrY

Real-time rendering is reaching the end-game for quality. Path-tracing allows photoreal rendering in real-time and approximated lighting like Unreal Lumen looks close to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkuFNQIqcl4

This would be nice for interactive immersive environments on Apple Vision Pro.