tht

designr said:

I'm thinking that the "chin" is a little bit of a part of Apple's legacy Macintosh "identity" and design language. I think it's a long shot to go away.

Yup. The chin is part of the Apple's AIO brand identity save for one model, the iMac G4. Every other model has a "chin". The chin in the late 2013 to 2020 iMac models were basically perfunctory as opposed to the iMac 24 chin, where they out the compute components. There was basically nothing in the 2013 form factor, and Apple put it there for the sole purpose of having a chin.

It doesn't mean that Apple won't do anything different. They have. Just look at the iMac G4. As an AIO form factor, they are going to have something in the industrial design to make it unique and familiar. That's the chin. The iMac G4 display section was awesome though. A clear, symmetric frame around the display. An iMac like that panel, with glass instead of plastic, and the computing guts behind it would certainly be unique.

TheObannonFile said:

tht said:

TheObannonFile said:

The numbers don’t check out here on CPU.

if they improved the single core, and then added 2 more CPU cores (high performance I assume), the multi core should be a good bit higher than that.

somebody help me out in the math here. 

It's 8+4 not 10+2. Just 8 performance cores. They added 2 more efficiency cores according to rumors.

Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh, ok, that makes a lot more sense on the math.

I’m curious, are the additional high efficiency cores there to help so as many tasks as possible on less power to extend overall battery life? I can’t think of another reason why to add additional efficiency cores. 

Yeah, you would think so. The curious decision was why they dropped down to 2 efficiency cores for the M1 Pro or M1 Max chips when the M1 has 4 efficiency cores. These cores are very small. Were they that hurt for die size that they could not include 4 eff cores in the M1 Pro/Max chips? There are a lot odd decisions in the M1 Pro and M1 Max decisions. I don't know if it truly saved them time and money to do it the way they did, but that is the only reason I can think of.

Marvin was right about the GPU performance in the M2 Pro/Max. If they can match the 30 to 40% performance uplift on GPU, it's a nice win. There's actually another 30% to 40% uplift they can do by having the performance scale better with more GPU cores. If they can solve their GPU core perf scaling issues as well as have more perf per core, an M2 Max could have 60% to 80% improvement in GPUs. I'd hazard a guess that the GPU tile memory is too small to support a lot GPU compute loads and it can't feed the cores. Whatever it is, they need to fix it.

I still think they should have added CPU cores from the M1 Pro to M1 Max versions. Go from 8+2 in the Pro to 14+4 in the Max, and repeat with successive generations. They should do this, or have the GPUs be capable of doing more CPU ops, so CPU type loads scale accordingly to prices. Still weird that the M1 Pro isn't in a Mac mini or iMac 24. There are too many "no" responses within their marketing group.

That's 20k wafers per month right?

Some envelope math: 300mm wafer diameters are 70,000 mm2 in area. Using 100 mm2 for chips, that's about 600 chips at 85% yield. 20,000 wafers is 12m chips per month. Apple's share is 4m chips per month, or 12m per quarter

iPhone 14 models will still be selling in 2024, along with other A16 device, as well as Mac chips if M2 Max based chips are fabbed on 4nm, though their chips will be 2x, 4x, 8x the size of a 100 mm2 chip. So, 20k wafers per month at this plant will be enough to fulfill, what, 20% of the product line? At best.

It's a start. With TSMC slowing down in the fab tech race, don't be surprised if Apple contracts Samsung or Intel. There needs to be another TSMC plant in North America and a couple in Europe to really diversify and protect against the craziness of humanity.

cornchip said:

Still hating the camera bump. 

Yup. Would like them to offer an optional camera module with worse cameras but is flush with the back. For both iPhones and iPads.

One place where they could a camera bump? Mac laptops 

blastdoor said:

The iPad Pro might be the best argument in favor of allowing “side loading”. I’d love to install R on this thing! 

There is an R programming app in the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/r-programming-compiler/id1158038782

Every once in a while, I do some Python scripts on my iPad and Pythonista has been fine. There actually are some Linux/Unix CLI environment iPad/iPhone apps where the app is running a Linux environment, and you are using terminals with most CLI tools and common programming environments. C, C++, Lua, Perl, Python, etc.

With extended display support in Stage Manager, it becomes a real option for me to use as a laptop replacement. Apple still needs to let these apps arbitrarily install packages that don't come with their apps though. Oh, and Keynote, Microsoft Office, etc, need to be the full featured versions. MS loves to do not implement the one feature you need on environments and OSes that are not important to them. Apple needs to get on the ball too. Everyone. iPadOS apps should have every feature that the macOS, Windows app does.