neilm

pichael said:

I still long for the day Apple makes a triumphant return to this space. Yet I won’t be holding my breath. These seem great but I need more affordable. Great Review.

Review? This was simply a product announcement based on Netgear’s press release (https://www.netgear.com/about/press-releases/2020/netgear-orbi-pro-wifi-6-tri-band-mesh-system.aspx)

AppleInsider said:

According to China Times, Apple's first machine will be a MacBook with a 12-inch Retina Display. Previous reports have said it that the first Apple Silicon Mac will be a MacBook Pro.

A new 12" Retina MacBook would certainly be an easy introductory Apple Silicon model from a performance standpoint, whereas the expectations for a MacBook Pro replacement would be much higher.

Think of it as a clamshell iPad with a keyboard and running MacOS instead of iPadOS. Current iPads already have much better performance than the previous 12" MacBook, so that part wouldn't be a challenge. Apple might even get away with not having Thunderbolt 3, although I'd hope for more than the old MacBook's miserable single USB-C port.

The MacBook "plain" is also a currently vacant slot in Apple's lineup, although it could be argued that a new MacBook might cannibalize iPad sales to some degree. To this day I've never seen the old 12" MacBook in the field, whereas Airs and Pros are everywhere.

Ofer said:

Obviously no one but Apple knows the answer to this. But I’m curious, what do you think the first Apple Silicone model will be? I’ve been wanting to purchase a MacBook Air but am holding off for now, since I would definitely prefer to go for an Apple Silicone one with a brand new design.

Unless these new products also feature, say, surgically enhanced breasts, it's silicon.

AI wrote:

An examination of the logic board further proved there wasn't any user-upgradability for storage with the model being examined, as there were no SATA connectors on the board at all.

Since we knew that hard drives were no longer offered in the 2020 27" iMac, it would have been very surprising to find an SATA connector on the new iMac's board.

And because we also knew that the new iMac uses Apple's T2 chip, it was unlikely that the SSD mass storage would be a standalone, much less a standard (e.g. NVMe), drive module of any kind, since Apple integrates the SSD controller function into the T2. That makes Apple's SSD incompatible with commercially available SSDs, which have their own onboard controllers.

It wasn't known whether the SSD's storage would be soldered on, as opposed to plug-in, but now we do. Note that even in the iMac Pro, which also uses the T2 but does have plug-in mass storage modules, those modules are proprietary and not available for sale as upgrades. (They are available as repair parts.)

We just took delivery of a 2020 27" iMac (3.8 GHz, 8C, 8GB, 512GB) last week. With 32GB of OWC RAM installed we got the following benchmark results:
Geekbench 5: 1248 (single core); 8554 (multicore).
Cinebench R20: 4871
The fan kicked in quickly on the R20 test, but not observably with GB 5.

@MW: That's one really poorly formatted and hard to read table.

The entries for each dock aren't centered under the column headings, making several of the entries appear to be split between columns. And the table itself is tall enough that the column headings scroll off-screen, making it even harder to parse once you get past halfway — and I'm using a generous 27" 5K monitor.

Worse, the table seems to be inaccurate. For instance the article shows a photo of a dock by Plugable that clearly has two identical video-out ports (DP in this case). That's not even reflected in the table.

I'll point out that this is a valuable feature that almost nobody offers. Most docks make you use the second TB3 port for one video out, and either an HDMI, DP or mini-DP port for the other. We have a whole bunch of MBP workstations with TB3 docks and double external monitors, and this means I have to keep an annoying variety of different cables on hand, since both the docks and the monitors vary in their video-in ports.