docno42

zoetmb said:

\ I would also have been happier to have seen lower prices on storage upgrades, but it is what it is.  (I just bought a 2TB Sandisk external SSD for $300).   

Who wouldn't like to pay less for storage.  I know for one thing - your external SSD won't hold a candle to the performance of the internal SSD Apple is providing, so there is at least that.  

Still didn't make it any less painful clicking on the $400 upgrade from 1TB to 2TB  

netrox said:

Adaptor exists for that purpose. I carry USB-C hub which serves for many devices. No professionals carry laptops without a bag for power and adaptors.  

Wow - a dongletown apologist.  Amazing. 
And with the battery life of these machines no, I will not be carrying around a power cord; it's not neccessary. And since it has useable ports I no longer need to carry around a bevy of dongles either.  Imagine that!  Not having to have a bunch of accessories in order to support basic functionality.  How innovative!

welshdog said:

Wondering what their chip design will be for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro? Maybe another M series but with specific features that allow discrete (multiple) graphics cards and a lot more cores. And will that Mac Pro be this year or next year?

It still remains to be seen what they will do for the MacPro SOC - will they support socketed RAM and slots?  3rd party graphics cards?  It depends on how close they get with the 32 core GPU in this chip.   If they eat into all but the highest end nVidia or AMD cards with this chip like they did with cores to AMD/Intel then I don't know if I would count on them supporting third party GPUs for Apple Silicon.  

RAM is a real tough one - if they wanted to support socketed RAM they would take a huge bandwidth and latency hit; and after heavily using an M1 Macbook Air for two weeks I can attest that integrated RAM contributes significantly to the snappiness and responsiveness of the machine. 

Video card support is far easier - they just have to commit to porting AMD drivers to ARM.  Heck AMD may already be working on it so it wouldn't be something Apple has to go their own way with.  Again it will come down to the performance of the GPU in the M1 Max.   I will find it's performance very interesting, especially since these are likely the A14 GPUs cores, not A15.  It's going to be interesting indeed.

melgross said:
 The dates are actually between Nov 3rd and the 5th, not the 6th. That was a typo.

I'm in the same group.  So looking forward to its arrival!

auxio said:

Very nice!  I'm so tempted to pull the trigger on a similar machine...

Don't wait too long or you won't get it until next year.  I just refreshed and now shipping dates for that config are Dec 10 - Dec 23rd (!)