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Comment by historyloop | Hacker News Reader

"Eight months without perceptibly faster chip!"

Get a load of this guy. Can't even wait even a full year, he wants his CPU revolutions every 4 to 8 months.

Apple has frustratingly skipped entire Intel generations in the past, leaving their computers to languish for years without updates.

If the big Macbook Pro is only released this Fall or next Spring, it will be business as usual for Apple.

Same goes for an update to the M1 Macbook Air. I expect that machine to be updated next year at the earliest, with something akin to an M3.

I wonder if they can't ship the same M1 but with some external RAM and GPU. It won't speed up some apps, but it'll help with Pro apps.

If you look at all sorts of limitations on the M1 macs (less ports, only one external screen except on Mini where its one DP and one HDMI) it's plain that it's paying the price for using a phone SoC in a general purpose computer - no generic expansion buses, connectors optimised for phone use case, etc.

And they are banking hard on unified memory model in all sorts of marketing zbut it's unclear if it's the cause or effect of ring unable to use external GPU.

He doesn't want a whole new chip.

The M1 was hailed as an entry level chip, and merely the start of greater things to come. If that were true, logic would hold that they would have a higher end version of the existing M1 chip available by now.

It's not a different model architecture.

Apple announced a two year transition, the two years are not over yet so why should they be out by now?

A new MacBook Pro with M1X will come out this fall according to credible sources.

> The M1 was hailed as an entry level chip

Hailed by whom? I doubt you'll find a single instance of Apple calling M1 an "entry level chip".

It looks like this is the blogosphere getting too high on their own supply, huh?

Not sure about "hailed by", but that perception is probably driven largely by the market position of the Macs Apple put it into first. There is no Mac Mini or Macbook Air that isn't entry level.

I think this person has no idea how much work goes into bring a product up. It's an incredible amount of work and time that goes into it. And that's with code from Intel/AMD/Qualcomm + reference designs. Designing the silicon and the board and the firmware in under a few years is absolutely ridiculous. To do so in 8 months is ludicrous.

He's no slouch, and Apple has been working on this for a decade+. My guess is a resource shortage prevened moving faster.

I do believe there is something behind-the-scenes that is not going according to plan, but one thing I've found a little interesting is since Apple now controls all aspects of the system, it would have been an incredible bit of showmanship and a PR coup to just announce the refresh of the entire Mac lineup at November 2020 launch announcement with a Jobsian "One more thing..." kind of surprise.

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