tenthousandthings

patdiddy said:

Steve Jobs was a true genius. The only problem with the iMac’s early debut was that nobody had really dealt with Ethernet or WiFi at the time, in fact, the internet was just really starting to become a thing. 

Had it debuted with the iPod, Steve Jobs might have had the best way to get digital music, and saved apple completely.

This is a fun “what-if” thought, so thanks. A 1998 iPod (a portable hard drive designed for playing music), would have been larger and heavier than the 2001 edition, and the interface would have been more of a kludge. The 2001 iPod benefited from OS X development, and it fit in beautifully with the elegant 2001 iMac releases, both the G3 models and the G4 at the end of the year. 

Nothing in the source article (other than the headline and lede!) suggests any of this is unexpected, or that TSMC is "struggling" or "straining" any more than would be expected in such a transition. It even quotes an analyst saying that yields are at a "healthy level at this stage in N3 development." It also points out that Apple's deal with TSMC accounts for lower yields in the early N3 ramp-up stages.

Anandtech has a decent article exploring the TSMC 3nm roadmap, here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/18833/tsmc-details-3nm-evolution-n3e-on-schedule-n3p-n3x-deliver-five-percent-gains

It will be interesting to see what they do.

I think the M3 sooner is wishful thinking. It will be later, like next year. The first 3nm capacity will have been reserved for the A17.

tyler82 said:

re: sluggish Mac sales
Apple asking an additional grand to upgrade the memory to an acceptable amount and a 1TB hard drive  is what turns me off from buying a new Mac. Especially when market prices for these components are a fraction of that cost. 

This is disingenuous. Take HP ZBook Firefly, for example. Upgrade from 8GB to 16GB RAM is $140. Apple MacBook Air is $200, for unified memory upgrade, not just RAM upgrade. Upgrade from 256GB to 1TB storage is $365. Apple MacBook Air is $400.

So we’re talking $505 (HP) versus $600 (Apple) total, and it’s not a one-to-one comparison because with Apple you get a GPU memory boost, not just CPU.

I gather you also mean 16GB isn’t an “acceptable” amount of RAM or unified memory. The HP upgrade to 32GB from 8GB RAM is $410.  upgrade to 24GB from 8GB of unified memory is $400. 

One term used in The Independent article I hadn’t heard before is PMU—power management unit, described as “a microchip that ensures the other parts of the system are getting the energy they need”

I gather this is part of the power supply?