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One main advantage of going to their own silicon is, that Apple is no longer dependant on the decisions of Intel, what kind and number of ports the machine shou
by _ph_ 6y ago
One main advantage of going to their own silicon is, that Apple is no longer dependant on the decisions of Intel, what kind and number of ports the machine should have. Then designing USB-C/Thunderbolt support, they can add as many ports as they want to the chipset.
For the MacBook, 2 ports would be nice, as we have today on the MB Air. However I don't think the ports were the biggest reason that people didn't buy the 12" MB. The Intel CPUs were just too constrained when running in a machine without a fan, the Apple Silicon should improve upon this a lot. The butterfly keyboard didn't help things either.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoI don't think Intel is the reason for the few ports though... No other intel laptop has such few ports. It's Apple's own minimalism (and their extremely lucrative dongle business)
- _ph_ 6y agoYes and no. The problem is, the chipsets limit the number of thunderbolt ports you can offer without adding separate interface chips. That is why many other laptops come with one or two thunderbolt ports too. What Apple could have done, is offering plain USB ports etc., which the chipset would support. But as Apple wants all ports to have the same capabilities, they were quite limited by the maximum amount of thunderbolt ports supported. While I think it would have been very convenient to add at least one USB-A style port and perhaps a dedicated HDMI port to their machines, I quite agree how nice it is, that all USB-C style ports do have the same capabilities.