kellie

There’s an obsession with core performance.  Multicore performance in particular is almost pointless for most people since there are relatively few apps that are designed to execute across multiple cores. For most people single core performance , RAM and memory bandwidth are the limiting factors that determine the speed experience people will observe.  Apple is famous for focusing their product announcements on CPU performance, yet configuring systems with slow SSD’s or only 8 GB of RAM or slow memory bandwidth.  All Macs should come with at least 16 GB of RAM and dual SSD’s.  The marginal costs aren’t that much, but the performance improvements are significant.  But Apple likes to gain lots of profit from low balling a base configuration that is performance constrained, requiring an owner to pay exorbitant upgrade charges to get more RAM or storage.  

Now I hat the M4 is out, in the “lowly” iPad, Apple will be forced to accelerate M4 upgrades in its entire product line.  Sales of Macs will dramatically slow down as people await the M4 deployment.  Unless one absolutely needs a Mac now, people will defer their purchase, awaiting the M4 upgrade.  And if the M4 has some specific features to enhance Apple’s AI strategy, that will be yet another compelling reason to delay a Mac purchase.  I predict a rapid M4 rollout across all Macs. 

The AI I want to see on a Mac or an iPhone is a configuration assistant that would analyze all of the configuration parameters and then ask me using plain English questions how I would like to use my system, my privacy preferences, my risk tolerance, etc. and then make suggestions for recommended changes.  Or being able to instruct Siri about configuration changes I’d like to make and it goes and makes the changes without me having to plod through all sorts of menus. 

All of this M4 speculation with the associated AI hype is going to kill sales of current Mac models.  Tying AI into this chip along with all of the high expectations regarding how AI is going to change the world is going to give people who don’t absolutely need a new Mac now motivation to wait.  This is an example of a time when it would be beneficial for Apple to talk a little bit about future products and tell people that currently shipping M3 models will be able to take advantage of future AI software from Apple.  I could see Apple building significantly more neural processors into the M4.  And perhaps enhancing memory and on chip communications. But the core of Mac OS will be fine with current M3 systems. I haven’t seen any recent rumors about some sort of iOS/MacOS integration.  That might be something an M4 would be needed for. 

Mike Wuerthele said:

Madbum said:

Joe Biden needs to go. I am sorry but I am not usually political but this guy is ridiculous 

This started two years into the Trump administration.

But it continued with Biden and the Biden administration ok’d the continuation and ultimately the initiation of legal action.