AlexeyV

blastdoor said:

I’m really curious about the m4 pro specs. I guess the most likely is the same core counts as m3 pro, but 8 performance cores instead of 6 would be a welcome surprise 

davidmalcolm said:

For people saying, “oh these chips are made in the US then shipped somewhere else” you don’t seem to get it. Right now Apple is so incredibly dependent on operations in China. If war broke out between the US and China. (Realistically right now a China would be much smarter to look north and absorb large chunks of Russia. Winning a land war with Russia would seem to be much easier than picking a fight with its many heavily populated south Asian countries. Though China clearly would like to reabsorb Taiwan.)

Right now if America went to war with China or Taiwan that would mean no access to the best fabs in the world (also the fabs would be destroyed and the kinda behind them lost.)

by ensuring Apple and other companies can build advanced chips off the Island it gives China less leverage and motivation. One of the benefits for taking Taiwan would be disrupting the west. Because without Taiwan we as a society would be falling back on much older less efficient fabs in the US and Europe they can’t make power efficient chips that are perfect for mobile devices.

also Apple has manufacturing operations in China, India and Brazil. I suspect those plants in Brazil are in part there because Apple is hedging their bets not just because the labour is cheap. 

It’s also pretty obvious that as soon as it’s practical Apple will move device assembly to robots. Even if it costs more they’ll have at least some products being made in part by robots so that as climate change destabilizes the warmer/poorer parts of the world, they’re still able to pump out devices. (Also let’s be honest, COVID  put a huge wrench into things. So the sooner they can move to a system where they don’t have to rely on large groups of humans breathing the same air, the sooner they will.)