sevenfeet

Strange that the new iMac can get the new micro-etched display and 8 TB of flash SSD while the iMac Pro can not.

This was hardly a surprise.  And I always thought that the introduction of Apple Silicon Macs and Thunderbolt 4 to coincide at the end of 2020 was not a coincidence. Apple has been the leading manufacturer and supporter of Thunderbolt so it made no sense to walk away from it, especially when every Mac has had it for years and the new Mac Pro is chocked full of it.  So it wouldn't be a surprise that Apple may have been driving the main delivery date of TB4.  I'll be curious to see if any Intel Macs will get TB4 in the transition.

As for TB4, I welcome 4 port docks and peripherals. Two ports isn't enough.

razorpit said:

eriamjh said:

Apple’s two year transition on hardware probably starts the day they ship the first Bionic Mac.  

If the last Intel Mac is replaced in late 2022 (probably the Mac Pro), then Hopefully it is another five years before Apple drops OS updates for the last Intel Macs just sold.  

My memory is a little spotty.  How long after the last PPC Mac was it before Snow Leopard came out? 

I think it was two years.  

This is just my take on it. I’m thinking support will be longer this time around simply because of the number of machines out there now compared to the PPC days. There are a lot more average people out there using Macs now that don’t understand all of this stuff, and are going to be really upset that their new iMac only lasted 2 years. Back then it was a different crowd. PPC was in a really bad place. Performance was hurting and and the switch to Intel made a noticeable difference. Actual performance now isn’t as bad as it was then. Heck how many of us are running 10 year old or older machines now?

ARM presents a better roadmap for the future if that makes sense. I think it’ll take 2 years or so before people realize how fast these new machines are and want to upgrade rather than being forced to. I just bought a 2018 Mac mini. I don’t think I’ll be getting a Gen 1 ARM machine, but I can definitely see myself with a Gen 2. I just hope pricing is more in line with those $500 dev kits! 

True.  The fact that new Intel Macs are still in the pipeline say to me that for the average user, Apple doesn’t believe that a transition will greatly affect a purchase since Apple plans to make the process so seamless that they won’t even notice.  It’s not that Intel machines are lacking in power...but Apple clearly thinks that they have a better 5-10 year roadmap than Intel does.

i do think that future versions of macOS 11 will have Intel support for longer than the PPC versions.  I wouldn’t be surprised that if support doesn’t end for 6 years and maybe 8 for the current Mac Pro.

lkrupp said:

I read the Apple Silicon Mac Mini for developers does not have a Thunderbolt 3 port so what does that say about Apple and Intel?

Thunderbolt and USB are converging with Thunderbolt 4 due at the end of the year...which is the same time frame as when the first A/S Mac will be delivered.  My guess is that Thunderbolt 4 isn’t ready enough for the developer machine so it’s probably kneecapped down to USB C for the time being.

My thoughts...

Yes, this was the worst kept secret in the industry, just like the PowerPC -> Intel transition.  But there are some interesting long term ramifications.

First, the fact that more Intel Macs are coming is testament that Apple thinks they can transition the Mac to AppleSilicon and the vast number of users not even notice.  It's just a compile and some QA.  Apple usually supports macOS for at least 6 years for most hardware and the Mac Pros usually get 8.  So there will be Intel versions of macOS long after the last Intel Mac is sold new.

Pundits have talked about the fact that the current iPad processor is quite competitive with Intel hardware and that's the reference hardware developers will be working from.  Do you think that is going to be the speed/performance of the first shipping Macs?  I think not.  The first machines will have to a make a statement that Apple can do this better than the platform they are leaving behind.  If it's indeed a "Pro" machine, then that will be a really big deal.

Apple has already slain the power consumption dragon by a decade of iPhone chips.  What will be interesting is Mac chips.  On the slide they showed, they indicated there will be high performance AND high efficiency cores.  How many of each for a typical Mac is anyone's guess.  But I'd wager that they way Apple configures a chip might be different than anything currently available.

The presentation also put a stake in the heart of AMD in that Apple may not need them for advanced graphics either, but that remains to be seen.  We've already seen the Mac Pros accelerator card which is probably a bunch of custom design GPUs.  That kind of architecture is probably just the beginning.  Someone earlier questioned if Apple will have advanced ray-tracing like Nvidia and AMD are doing now.  Hard to say, but i wouldn't bet against Apple.

I/O will be interesting to see play out.  Any new AS Mac will need things like Thunderbolt, HDMI (Mac Mini), and USB.  All of that will be in the reference developer machine.  Will AS Macs debut with Thunderbolt 4 which will unify Thunderbolt + USB?  The timetable of both toward the end of this year will be interesting.  The slide during the presentation spoke of a common memory architecture, which i read as common from CPU and GPU.  This is standard practice in phones and tablets and we saw it in mainline computers when Intel gave us GPUs in Core i3/i5/i7 processors.  But Intel took awhile to get GPU performance up to snuff.  I don't see Apple making that mistake so the common memory will be a key performance variable.  But Pro GPUs use more exotic memory in order to keep pipelines stuffed.  How will Apple solve this?

Some of said that Mac Pro users will be pissed?  Why?  Those machines were built for a job....to make money.  Every one in production right now is chewing up watts earning their keep, and will for years.  The real test will be a "server" version of the A-series processors that a Mac Pro or iMac Pro can use that will kick the crap out of Xeon or Ryzen.  Back in 2006, we got the first Intel Mac Pro whose hardware was based on the previous G5 PowerMac. I think the hardware basics will remain the same, but the CPU guts will look very different.  And graphics?  Too soon to tell.

From a marketing standpoint, will the shipping Mac chips be A-series chips or will they have their own designation?  Maybe the T3?  The T2 is already a specialized ARM-based chip....why not expand it to do everything and eliminate a chip from the board?