Marvin

libertyandfree said:

The new Mac Pro seems to not be what was hinted at from 2 years ago since it’s barely more capable than the Mac Studio but at nearly 3x the cost.  It appears Apple failed to deliver on the M2 Extreme processor (2xM2 Ultras) and the M3 pro level chips are most likely nearly a year away from release so Apple was in a bind and had to release a Mac Pro this year and this is what we get.  I can’t imagine they will sell many of these machines maybe a few 10’s of thousands.  The next M3 iteration of this machine will be the one to buy. 

What people keep failing to grasp is that this is the size of the target audience no matter what Apple does. There's no opportunity in this space for some kind of miracle comeback tour at the $5k+ price point.

The biggest workstation manufacturer in the world sells $1-2b of workstations.

If Apple knocked it out the park and sold $1b of these at ASP $7k, they'd sell 140k units vs 20+ million other Macs.

If Apple made a Mac Pro that supported quad Nvidia 4090 GPUs (or equivalent), 2TB RAM, quad M-series CPUs, they'd sell... maybe a few tens of thousands of units, just the same as if they don't offer that option. Likewise with a souped up M3 Extreme.

The fact they dropped MPX modules shows that for all the bloviating about how the 2019 model was the right design for pros, nobody bothered buying them. Meanwhile Apple mentioned they've sold millions of Mac Studios with the exact same design constraints as the 'trashcan'. Phil Schiller's innovative ass will live on.

History has a way of repeating itself:

nicedaytoyall said:

One whole sentence. That's a very short article :-)

The article must have been cropped posting to the forum, the full article is here:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/06/08/diablo-iv-skips-mac-gamers-and-whoopi-goldberg-is-mad-about-it

maltz said:

it is out of character for Blizzard to skip the Mac, and maybe a first?

They never ported Overwatch. OpenGL was the key to older Mac ports. Since Apple switched to Metal, games with a custom engine needs months of work to port.

They are also being bought out by Microsoft so I doubt Mac support will be a priority after that.

lowededwookie said:

We don’t need AAA titles if this is their approach. We need games designed specifically for Macs that makes people want to game on Macs that leave Windows PCs and gaming consoles in the dust.

A lot of older games run really well through compatibility layers. Here is someone running Half-Life 2 in Parallels (9:20) on M1/M2 at 60FPS:



If it's between not having support at all and a low-effort compatibility layer version, the latter is the better option. The Steam Deck has over 8,000 games due to using compatibility layers.

Diablo IV runs around 90FPS on M2 Max with the porting kit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/14307be/diablo_iv_on_m2_max_using_macos_sonoma_and_game/

tht said:

I'm more curious about the capabilities of the headset operating system rather than its brand name.

There's got to be some kind of guarantee from the OS that it will generate the next frame at some minimum frame rate. If the frame rate slows down, it's going to be puke city. In a way, the requirements to deploy an app on Apple's headset may be more stringent than the Watch. Like the Watch and energy usage, the frame rate on the headset has to be absolutely protected. Wondering how they are going to achieve this.

One option they have for rendering is to do frame generation. Nvidia has this with DLSS 3 and AMD is rumored to have a similar feature in FSR 3:



https://wccftech.com/amd-fsr-3-might-generate-up-to-4-interpolated-frames-be-enabled-on-driver-side/

DLSS 3 adds a single AI-interpolated frame using motion vectors between real ones to double the FPS where it can. If there can be 3 interpolated frames between 2 real, this will be up to quadruple frame rate.

The CPU limits how quickly real frames can be generated so I think interpolated frames will be a must for AR/VR to keep FPS above 90. Apple can either use FSR 3 or make their own implementation in MetalFX.

Having custom R1 chips and a custom OS will also allow them to tune everything.

JP234 said:

If it's going to use microLED, expect it to come in closer to the projected $3,000 MSRP. That tech is currently expensive. Very expensive, no matter how small the screens are. Samsung sells two TVs with it, and they're both over $75K.

Micro OLED like these:

https://www.displaymodule.com/products/1-03-inch-micro-oled-display-2560x2560-with-mipi ($329)

https://www.kopin.com/kopin-oled-microdisplay-exhibits-breakthrough-7000-nits-brightness-with-good-color-fidelity/



They explain the high brightness (up to 10k nits) is so that it works well in AR when it competes with daylight and it avoids motion artifacts as the pixels are only illuminated for a fraction of the time on a fast refresh display. That brightness level also allows avoiding tone mapping for HDR:

https://www.avforums.com/articles/what-is-4k-hdr-tone-mapping.13883/

It's not likely they will run the whole display at that brightness, mainly very small parts like the brightest parts to give a realistic image.

gatorguy said:

AppleInsider said:

"With other shows, that could be any episode from any season. However, Apple's hit has only been included in the Nielsen research since the start of season three, so it's 795 million minutes in total, spanning every episode, over the seven episodes aired in 2023 up to that week."
Read on AppleInsider

According to the chart Marvin linked, the viewership stats were not just the seven episodes of this season, but 29 of 'em.

In the top-right of the chart, it says those are minutes viewed for one week, some people may be watching old episodes but most will be watching the latest episode.

This period of time was when two of the higher-rated episodes were available - Sunflowers and The Strings That Bind Us:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10986410/episodes?season=3