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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

I think people are excited because it's been many years since any large manufacturer has shown they care about things professionals care about in laptops. IBM used to take care of us but after they sold ThinkPad to Lenovo it really wasn't ever the same. Apple used to take care of us but then the "March of Thin" happened. There are small companies like System76 but I think they mostly just use ODMs like Clevo et al. There are also some near-misses from Dell with their XPS line, they designed them for consumer and tried to adapt them.

This is really the first time in years a purpose-built professional laptop has came out with nice build quality, keyboard, display etc that clearly prioritizes pro users both in form (it's fatter for cooling again!) and function (beastly ARM SOC).

So while it's a low bar it's a loooong time since it's been cleared.

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A similar thing happened with the Mac Pro. The old 2012 era Mac Pro was much loved. Then the "trash can" came out which was form over function. Then Apple eventually admitted their mistake and went back to a tower design.

Apple just had an extremely fallow decade in the 2010s (in terms of design) because they were making so much $$$ with iPhone that they stopped caring about the Mac. Jony Ive also left the company during that period.

I wish they had went for a design that scaled down better with the Mac Pro. It's an amazing machine and it's great for professional video production which is it's reasons d'etre but it would have been nice if it scaled down well enough for software engineers. Sort of like how the old G5 did, it was an "pro" machine, rather than a "professional video editing rig".

I suspect the M1 Pro will eventually find its way into a Mac Mini since they certainly have the thermal headroom for it, and the new Mac Pro will get some kind of M1 Supermax.

If the predictions by Gurman hold true, they have chips in planning which are twice and four times the size of the current M1 Max...

I so hope there will be a Mini with the M1 Max, as this would finally be the desktop Mac, so many people have been waiting for (me including).

There's definitely a long-time rumor that a more powerful Apple Silicon Mac mini is in the works. It was expected to come out with the macbooks, but it didn't: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/08/22/gurman-high-end-mac-min...

I really wanted a cheaper Mac tower ten years ago but most of the reasons I wanted one aren’t really relevant anymore:

The future finally happened in terms of fast external peripherals (especially storage), and I don’t have a burning need for a Mac with upgradable internal storage anymore.

In 2010 I got a $100 graphics card that let my PC do things that the PS3 and Xbox could only dream of. Now for the cost of a “mid-range” GPU it’s possible to get a Switch with a game or two that look fine and run at fast FPS.

One thing: Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back

>Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back

I don't see that happen any time soon, not with their new focus on building the core as a SoC. Maybe with the MacPros, there will be on-SoC RAM and slower off-SoC, but I doubt it till I see it.

Low power, high performance, upgradable RAM: pick two.

RAM slots aren't free; all that extra interconnect length increases power requirements and becomes impractical with large buses. You'd need 8 SO-DIMM slots to match the bus width of the M1 Max models, at much higher power consumption and slower performance. LPDDR RAM doesn't even exist in removable form for these reasons.

For those wondering about the math: a SODIMM channel (e.g. DDR5) is 64 bits. An LPDDR channel is 16 bits. M1 has 8 of those (128 bits), M1 Pro has 16 (256 bits), and M1 Max has 32 (512 bits). That means the M1 is equivalent to dual channel RAM, the Pro to quad channel RAM, and the Max to octa channel RAM, in typical desktop/laptop RAM terms.

Modern embedded SoC integration is insane. Yes, the "two" memory chips you see on the M1 are really 8 discrete dies/chips (4 stacked together inside each of the two packages), and the "two" big fat things around the Pro are actually 2x8; double them up for the Max and that's how you get to 32 channels. Good luck putting that through a connector...

All macs should have 32GB without customization. It’s not so expensive without sockets, and Apple customers deserve the best. We shouldn’t even have to choose.

> One thing: Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back

never going go happen as Apples loathes users' freedom. they prefer selling a disposable brick.

More like a vocal minority of users want upgradable RAM. Most people don't even know what RAM is and think it's the thing that stores their files.

Maybe we will see a return of the amiga’s ‘fast ram’ expansion style, with high price, high performance modules designed for specific functions and improvement.

The “but muh upgradable RAM” folks need realize: computers are so fast now that just making RAM human-replaceable requires such long connectors that resulting speeds are unacceptably low (due to speed of light vs clock cycle time).

> There are small companies like System76 but I think they mostly just use ODMs like Clevo et al.

Yes. I remember seeing several Clevo models in their offerings. Like most laptops, they have really bad thermal management and atrocious manufacturer software.

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