A sly comment I saw elsewhere was this gives them a nice bump they can use when the M4 is released and they go back to 4x4
Edit: my personal feeling is this is just a cost savings they are doing like they did with the base SSDs
Edit: my personal feeling is this is just a cost savings they are doing like they did with the base SSDs
With the M3 series, the M3 Pro is more of a mainstream processor vs. being closer to the M3 Max.
[1]: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/upgrade/id918152703?i=...
This is a lot of extra complexity they are inflicting on themselves if accurate.
if this extra complexity is mitigated by hiring a larger, separate team (rather than strain existing engineers), then they might win overall because of the customer segmentation.
That may be true for the M3, but they undoubtedly are already working on the M4 and M5; they may have bigger differences planned for future releases that require the Pro and Max designs to be separate. Could be that they are just doing the initial work to split the design into two branches for M3 so they can make more changes from M4 onwards.
I have a hard time feeling I was the only one conspiratorial enough to suggest something like that.
I believe you.
Everyone else is wrong.
No, I don't see how that's more than a conspiracy theory.
I am using an M2 Air right now and it has 2-3x better performance than my older i7 Thinkpad while being completely silent and running 3x longer on battery. Apple didn't have the need to pull any tricks.
I am not saying the m1 wasn't amazing (I have one, I like it). I am saying that apple had subpar cooling solutions for several years before the m1. They had ample time to fix it, yet the last intel MacBook was probably the worst one.
If it was intentional I'd expect Apple to have a more expensive Pro Max Ultra tier with actually good cooling, and then a year later they can pretend they invented a new paradigm of CPU cooling that works even in the cheaper models. There's no upside for them if cooling just sucks in general, and their switch to a more energy efficient architecture is clearly motivated by this problem.
The only reason the thermal solutions were indefensibly bad was because Intel's roadmap had nowhere to go but to add more watts and heat. The 2016 MacBook Pro 15" had a perfectly adequate thermal solution for its hardware. Still, in a few short years, Intel's newer processors pushed the design to its thermal limits when they should have been delivering more performance within the same heat and power constraints. Apple had to relent and make the product thicker and add more wattage for the 16" MacBook Pro (Intel).
It's not like Apple massively upgraded the M1 thermal solution and took a victory lap on an artificially unfair playing field. Apple dropped their chips into the same or worse thermal designs and still outperformed Intel. On some benchmarks, the 2020 M1 MacBook Air with no fan beats the 96W 2019 Intel 16" MacBook Pro. [1] For Intel, it was downright embarrassing.
We can't blame Apple for designing an inadequate thermal solution for the 2016-2019 MacBook Pro 15" when it was Intel's own product line that couldn't deliver improved performance without consuming more watts.
Computers are supposed to get smaller and faster over time, not bigger and hotter.
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/11/macbook-air-with-m1-chip-beat...
The conspiracy theory is that that used a thermal solution that was enough for the m1 on the intel chips that throttled while browsing the web.
Here’s an article: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/05/26/tested-thermal-th...
> Apple's 2016 MacBook Pro chassis was designed at the latest, in early 2016. We got the first glimpse of it in a photograph in May of 2016. It looks like Apple is sticking with a four-year chassis design, so it's entirely possible that this is the last year of this enclosure.
> We aren't expecting a thicker machine.
> We've also said this before — we think Apple got hosed by Intel, when they were gearing up for the 2016 MacBook Pro enclosure in 2015. We know that in 2015, Intel was promising delivery of 10nm process Core chips well before now. With any luck, Intel will finally deliver on its promises for a die-shrink that was expected nearly three years ago which will help alleviate the situation further. Or, maybe the next will be ARM-based — we don't know.
Apple’s stop-gap 16” model would prove to be thicker, and the article correctly hinted at a future ARM system.
This quote is important context because Intel had been promising lithography advancements that were delayed.
In 2016 Apple designed a chassis that they wanted to keep around for the next several years, but Intel basically didn’t deliver on their stated roadmap. There was no way to update the system without pushing the thermal solution to its limits or partially redesigning the thing.
As far as thermal performance on 2015 systems (pre-USB-C), those designs are so old that I don’t think replacing Intel was on Apple’s near-term radar.
Since they were already on the road to switching to Apple Silicon, it may have not been worthwhile to redesign the cases for the Intel machines to compensate.
It was spectacularly bad by design. This would not have been sufficient even if intel had delivered.
The pro models were better but still awful. It wasn't a matter of fitting things in. It was by design.
I have apple products. I like them. But even being charitable I can't come to any other conclusion that they just didn't care to deliver a good product.
The largest expected number of potential buyers equals "the probability of upgrading when properly advertised to" * (multiplied by) "the total number of macOS users currently owning the hardware of the generation in question".
Where "the probability of upgrading when properly advertised to" depends on how big the jump is, not only in performance, but cumulatively with every other change made to the product. It also depends on how old it is as people are more likely to make another expensive purchase if the previous one was long time ago, just distributing financial burden over time.
And where "the total number of macOS users currently owning the hardware of the generation in question" is merely measured as Apple has direct access to those statistics at any time.
For instance, perhaps the probability that an M2 user will upgrade is only 10%, given how recently M2 released, and how small the difference between M2 based products (as a whole, not just performance of the SoC) and M3 based products is. And perhaps there is 10 million of M2 users. Expected number of potential buyers is 10M * 0.1 = 1M.
Then perhaps the probability that an M1 user will upgrade is 30%. And perhaps there is 20 million of M1 users. Expected number of potential buyers is 20M * 0.3 = 6M.
Then perhaps the probability that an Intel user will upgrade is 40%. And perhaps there is only 10M of Intel users. Expected number of potential buyers is 10M * 0.4 = 4M.
Therefore: most focus is given to comparing to M1. Second tier amount of focus (only mention in speech occasionally, and show on charts) is given to comparisons with Intel. And third tier amount of focus is given to comparisons with M2 (never mention in speech, but do show on charts). Give 0 focus to anything else to keep the total amount of information presented manageable and avoid getting negative results by confusing and overloading people.
There is nothing malicious here. Just practicality which in this case, dare I say, benefits not only Apple themselves, but their users as well: those who are most likely to feel the need to upgrade as is will receive the most direct and clear information on what they will get out of it.
We already had people in another HN discussion asking why on earth would owners of M2 MacBook Pros not mindlessly upgrade to M3 ones, as if not getting on that upgrade treadmill required any sort of justification.