It's more an indictment of everyone else, buy a different computer and you're guaranteed to be buying an objectively weaker computer for the vast majority of work scenarios. And you're paying a comparable price for it too.

It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent [-]

> It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.

The rumor is that Apple decided to put the engineering effort into the M7 series to make a bigger leap.

Engineering resources are finite. Expecting a company to release every version of every chip at every generation is not optimal. Some times it's better to put the development effort into a bigger goal that takes longer.

I wouldn't call that bad. They're being smart about development strategies instead of forcing everything into arbitrary release goals to satsify marketing and shareholders.

That's what I want from companies who development my products. This is a good thing.

	▲	bigyabai an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Apple's work is cut out for them; M7 and M8 desperately need a better GPU. These SOCs put up fantastically efficient single-core performance, but have some of the worst GPU compute efficiency you can buy. It also needs a better interconnect than RDMA, since Thunderbolt is snail-speed when networking several iGPUs together. Apple Silicon is a mirror into the Mac's decision paralysis. Apple wants to unify the Mac power users and iPhone casuals onto one silicon backbone, but can't decide who gets the short end of the stick. Tim Cook especially couldn't figure out how to ship a Mac Pro while retaining "ecosystem" level control over academic and prosumer customers. Professionals and researchers had a stack they wanted to use, and Apple didn't support it. Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals, but he'll need to make software concessions to enter the true ARM HPC market. Ironically, that may entail Apple's rapprochement with Khronos to get the industry onboard with a CUDA stack alternative. Even a basic "inference hardware" GPGPU standard would put Apple Silicon back on the map for professional applications it has otherwise sat-out.
	▲	benoau 33 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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