elijahg

dewme said:

elijahg said:

Perhaps this is the long fabled xMac that has been desired for so long by many prosumers in the Mac world!

Would be interesting to say the least. Even something that is about as functional as an iMac but with a certain amount of end-user accessibility, end-user upgradability, and modularity would be awesome. No, it doesn't have to be equal in performance or expandability to the Mac Pro, it just has to be less sealed-up than the Mini and the iMac.

I really like my iMacs, but every one has required servicing and every service issue requires a trip to the Apple Store, the loss of the computer for several days, and they always come back with smudges and bubbles under the bezel where the poor technicians had to pry the darn thing apart. And as others have said, it always seems like a waste to have to recycle an iMac that still has a beautiful screen on it even if its computing internals are scrambled. 

It really would. I'd be happy with a couple of PCIe slots, a SATA bay or two, and a couple of NVME M.2 slots. A slotted GPU would make the most difference to me, as GPU speeds are advancing rapidly and even the top end ones quickly get surpassed. And if Apple get over their childish spat with Nvidia, I could use a much superior Nvidia GPU!  Oh and Apple's GPU options are damn expensive too.

Both of mine have had the same. CPU failed on my 2019 one, and power supply issue after a couple of months on the 2012 one, the Apple tech didn't even bother opening up the 2012 one, he said and I quote "its such a massive hassle to get into them it's just not worth it, we'll just swap it". A few years after that the hinge spring broke, so it was always facing down. I would have fixed it myself if it wasn't so hard to get into, but Apple fixed it in the end. Came back with a scratch on the screen though, and the 2019 one came back with a chunk out the stand. Had a Macbook Pro screen swapped (delamination) at an Apple Store too, and the tech forgot to do up almost every screw. But I digress.

Yeah it really is, nothing much environmentally friendly about iMacs and other un-upgradable AIOs that's for sure.

CheeseFreeze said:

elijahg said:

I'm hoping Apple will still offer a discreet GPU, the Metal score for the Apple GPUs is crap compared to AMD and Nvidia's GPUs. It might be fine for mobile games with graphics on par with the Xbox 360, but desktops have far exceeded that.

Agreed - it might work for a MacBook Air user but pros need much more. I wonder if they’ll stick with ATI for this.

I hope they stop being so childish and use Nvidia. Whilst AMD/ATI has improved with their new RDNA architecture Nvidia's GPUs are still ahead. AMD's previous GCN arch was geared toward GPU compute, which never really happened and made it sluggish and power hungry for graphics due to all the unused compute silicon. Also the drivers for AMD GPUs are written by Apple, and they're rarely updated and not great. I get a significantly better GPU score in Windows on the same machine than I do on macOS. Nvidia drivers were always much better, but Apple has blocked Nvidia's requests to sign their drivers (surely another antitrust suit waiting to happen there). My 2012 iMac used to get Nvidia driver updates right up to 2018, until Mojave when Apple required signed drivers. I used to get about the same GPU score in Windows as macOS on that iMac.

Considering Apple was the first to have a commercially available GUI, Macs being graphics oriented, the first to have a GPU accelerated UI, and their at one point reasonably tight integration with Pixar, you'd think they'd want to push graphics. But they just don't care about GPUs, it's really weird. I get the impression they're embarrassed that the App Store makes so much from games. 

cornchip said:

Quick question from a dummy.

as I understand it, the intel chips i3, i5, i7, i9 are essentially the same chip; with the “lower grade” chips “simply” being the ones which have tested with flaws or underperforming/cores not functioning. 

Is this true, and if so, it would stand to reason that the Apple chips face similar production yields. With Apple’s insane volumes, how does this play out in terms of what is shipped in iPhones and now Macs? 

You are correct. The better chips tend to come from the centre of the wafer, the cheaper ones out toward the edges. 

In the same family they're all the same chip, but they literally laser off bits of the CPU that aren't working - or sometimes disable it in microcode too, which is the firmware for the chip essentially. And then yes, they they sell it as a lower end ix chip. Sometimes the chip is fully functional at lower clocks, so they sell it as a lower end ix. or whatever. As the production process improves, they end up crippling perfectly functional high-end CPUs to sell as the higher volume i3 and i5.

My 2019 iMac's MMU (on the CPU die) failed, which was probably because it was a very early i9, produced before they perfected the lithography (printing) for the i9. 

I can't remember the specifics but the AppleTV was using an iPhone A series CPU with one or more of the cores disabled, which were probably just rejected iPhone CPUs. It's unlikely Apple will use iPhone CPUs in the mid to high end Macs, though I wouldn't be surprised if the A14x ends up in the iPad and MacBook Air or equivalent.

22july2013 said:

OctoMonkey said:

I, for one, am not happy about this.  Moving away from x86 to something (anything) else will break sooooo much.  All of a sudden the ability to run Windows (at CPU speed) goes away, all the programs which rely on Wine stop working (or at least working well).  I liked the 6502 (and variants).  I liked the 68K series.  I liked the PPC series.  I (eventually) liked the x86 series.  But this change...  I just don't feel good about it.  That said, perhaps the Apple CPUs will be fast enough to make emulation tolerable (unlike the x86 emulators for the PPC!)...  Perhaps.

Apple actually demonstrated its Rosetta 2 emulation for a Windows x86 3D game (Shadow of the Tomb Raider) in its July WWDC conference. Did you see it? Wasn't it fast enough for you? https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/hdzdo8/shadow_of_the_tomb_raider_running_on_rosetta_2/ <--

That was not the Windows version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, it was the x86 Mac version.

EEMind94 said:

This article makes absolutely no sense. I think there is a giant misunderstanding of what "5G" means and what "5GHz" is. 5GHz is not comparable to 5G. 5GHz is a WiFi frequency band that emits from the new iPhone 12. 5G is the 5th generation of cellular networking technology, it utilizes frequency bands above the 6GHz range. 5GHz WiFi capabilities are available with almost all in-home WiFi routers now, so the capability on the new iPhone is not that surprising. But as for being a "boon" this just simply isn't the case. When you use your phone as a WiFi hotspot, it basically acts as a link from a device you connect to it to the cellular network. No cellular network in the US has reached 5G mesh coverage yet, save for maybe one city. So when your phone says 5G, it's likely still experience 4G LTE speeds. This limits the capability of the 5GHz WiFi hotspot to be utilized to its full potential, but thats here nor there. This article is wildly misinformed and displays a severe lack of understanding for the technology it's covering. For a website called AppleInsider, you should be ashamed. ,

It's completely fine, you are the one misunderstanding. The article correctly states that iPhones 11 and below can only provide personal hotspot on 2.4Ghz, but the iPhone 12 can provide personal hotspot on 5Ghz. It also correctly state that iPhones 12 and below can connect to 5Ghz *wifi* networks. It also correctly states iPhone 12s in 5G areas will benefit from 5Ghz WiFi, because 5G speeds exceed the capabilities of 2.4Ghz wifi. So yes, 5Ghz personal hotspot is a boon. Oh and only having 4G LTE speeds only limits the top speed of the 5Ghz hotspot, but 5Ghz is less congested, less latency, and uses more modern 802.11ac, whereas 2.4Ghz is limited to 802.11n.  But do tell what's wrong with the article?