timmillea

JamesCude said:

It's a relic from another era. Mac Studio covers 98% of the use-cases and sorry but the remaining folks who "need" these really don't- they just need to update how they handle I/O and seek more efficient processing. 

Agreed. The antiquated Pro is an inevitable victim of the switch to Apple silicon. The revolution of Apple silicon is all about bringing as much possible on-chip for speed gains and power savings. This is the antithesis of a 'tower' desktop.

I loved my 2008 Mac Pro. I could not fail to admire the beautiful engineering every time I had reason to switch a graphics card, add a hard drive, then latterly an SSD, or add more bullet-proof ECC RAM. It used so much power it kept my office warm and, when it was working hard, I couldn't hear the rain outside. Those days are gone. My modest M1 MacBook Air that I replaced it with is faster and silent. It drives a huge external display and any other functionality is provided care of Thunderbolt rather than huge, cumbersome PCI cards. 

The Mac Pro is a dead parrot. Deceased. It has outlived its evolutionary purpose. 

In the Mac Pro's favour I will say that I now require heating in my office and I find the sound of rain, and other things I couldn't previously hear, quite distracting. 

appleinsideruser said:

That’s all well and good, except I think cats have more lives!

I think they only have seven. I will stand corrected with evidence :-) 

Generally good article but I think the headline message is somewhat scattered and diluted. All rechargeable batteries have a longer life if charged slowly. For most chemistries the rule of thumb was no faster than at a rate of capacity in Ah/10h, i.e. at a rate that a flat battery would take 10 hours plus a little, another hour or two to allow for charging inefficiencies, to charge. However, consumers want 'fast charging' and herein lies the compromise. Modern Lithium battery chargers, start by charging fast then gradually slow down to avoid 'excess' ageing. Apple uses such an algorithm for all its devices. People want fast charging but they also want long-lived batteries. This is the compromise that battery chargers are programmed to deal with. 

However, if you wanted the absolute longest battery longevity, i.e. in terms of 'number of cycles', you would only ever use very slow charging and only ever take the device, whether phone, tablet, laptop, or car, away from power when necessary and leave their intelligent chargers to manage charging the rest of time. Of course all these things are designed to be used away from power which is why they have batteries!

So the intended use pattern is what really determines battery longevity. A cat has 7 lives. A lithium ion battery is around 20% dead after around 400 complete cycle equivalents. All rechargeable battery capacities follow an exponential decay curve, diminishing in capacity every more slowly until they can no longer supply the peak current asked of them. (The one exception to this is nickel cadmium which has an unusually long lifespan, easily 3000 cycles but has to be occasionally fully-discharged to restore capacity and has the most toxic chemistry of all). 

The less you need to use the battery and the more slowly it is charged, the longer and happier life the battery will have. 

Which is why I think the the wireless Qi charging is unduly criticised in the article. Keeping an iPhone on a Qi wireless stand by default is a very convenient way of supplying a slow charge whenever not on the move. Instead of being in a pocket or plopped on a table using up one of its lives, pop it on a (slow) Qi charger and your battery will love you for it. 

If selling or buying a used battery-powered device - phone, tablet, laptop or car - the first concern should be the battery health and then, crucially, how much it costs to replace the battery. Caveat emptor. 

I bought a used MessagePad 120 around a year after it was discontinued. I was severely underwhelmed by it and sold it on pretty quickly. To suggest it was the forerunner of the iPhone or even iPod is mistaken. It was not a phone nor a media device. The iPod and iPhone never had handwriting recognition as their primary input interface. They are different product categories. 

When Jobs returned to Apple he cancelled a whole load of projects, including some he should not have, because they were not his. The Newton platform was ahead of its time but not ready for commercial release. We also lost OpenDoc - a philosophical extension of ClarisWorks to the OS - and the World is much the poorer for it. Jobs wanted to use his Next OS based on Unix and that was that, we still do. A radical branch of progress was simply severed because it did not suit the vanity of one man. 

The MBA 13" is the perfect first candidate for the M3. The 3nM process will bring significant, 5nM/3nM = 67% approx improvement in performance to power ratio. How Apple decides to share performance to power out in the M3 we don't know. Given the fan-less heat-throttling design, I imagine it will be a large ramp up in speed, for a minute or so, then extended battery life. There would be the opportunity to make it thinner or even to introduce the much-missed 11" version but that is not the direction of travel of Apple since Jony Ive departed. 

I have the M1 MBA with BTO 2TB storage and exquisite (and expensive with all the tiered batteries) wedge shape. It's aesthetics are superior to the current M2 MBA. It supports an external 6k display - reaching the limit of human usefulness. An M3 'block' MBA won't sway me to upgrade. Apple will have to up its MBA design to make me upgrade. Perhaps ask Sir Jony for a hand?