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What if they simply decided that they didn't care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.
by Heliosmaster 6y ago
What if they simply decided that they didn't care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.
- rini17 6y agoOkay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.
- unicornfinder 6y agoQuite possibly - I was a huge Apple fan who's now using a PC because I was fed up with the lack of viable options for me.
- rbanffy 6y agoApple will certainly offer an ARM-based MacPro, but I'm assuming it'll be a very different beast - current one maxes out at 1.5TB of RAM and it doesn't seem likely anyone will integrate that much memory on a chip anytime soon ;-) Memory bandwidth is one key feature impacting M1's performance. When Apple builds an ARM-based MacPro, we can expect something with at the very least 5 DDR5 channels per socket. It's clear, from this, the M1 is a laptop/AIO/compact-desktop chip.
- sliken 6y agoThe M1 already has 8 LPDDR4x channels per socket, running at 4266MHz.
- rbanffy 6y agoMy bad. I was looking at the specs. It's 300GBps, which is roughly 5x DDR5 IIRC. So yes, at the very least 8 DDR4 channels, or one per core, but I'd expect more from a workstation-class board. Now, speaking of the board, all those memory channels will be funny.
- sliken 6y agoFunny? 8 channels is the standard AMD Epyc socket. Most threadrippers (AMD's workstation chip) are 4 channel, but there is a variant that's 8 channel.
- rbanffy 6y agoI would expect more, so that cores don't get memory starved. The M1 has 4 fast cores and 4 slow ones. If we imagine an M2 with 8 fast cores, I would expect it to need 16 channels to have the same performance. That's a lot.
- sliken 6y agoDunno, the M1 CPU package is tiny, thin, power efficient, etc. It's got 4 memory chips inside the package. I don't see any particular reason why a slightly larger package could have 4 memory chips on one side, and 4 chips on the other to double the memory bandwidth and memory size. However the M1 is already pretty large (16B transistors), upgrading to 8 fast cores is going to significantly increase that. Maybe they will just go to a dual CPU configuration which would double the cores, memory bandwidth, and total ram. Or move the GPU and ML accelerator offchip.
- davidf18 6y agoI'm guessing the next "M2" chip will be fabbed on the upcoming TSMC 5nm process, 2nd version. In 2022 there is projected to be the TSMC 4nm process. Thus, there will be room for more transistors. Expect also a density increase and capacity for DRAM chips (and SSD chips).
- matwood 6y ago> suitable for developers and power users Important to note 'some' here. I'm a developer and power user, and haven't had a desktop computer in almost 10 years.
- w0mbat 6y agoMe too. I last had a desktop, at work, about that long ago, and have not bought a desktop computer for myself in a lot longer. Laptops got very good and I can still plug it into a monitor and external controllers when I need to. I don’t need a server at home because of the cloud and broadband.
- coldtea 6y agoI think the developers and power users that still use desktop machines/towers are either very cpu-power-hungry niche exception, or the more backwards ones, and thus least likely to influence/be imitated by anyone...
- speleding 6y agoI care to differ (as a developer on a desktop). The reason for developing on a desktop is that my productivity is much higher with 3 screens, one of which is a 40 inch, a full 101 key keyboard and a mouse.
- pbronez 6y agoYeah I’m with you. Laptops are great, but they sacrifice a lot for the form factor. Remove the constraint of needing an integrated screen, keyboard, touch pad and battery, and you can do much more. Sure you can dock it, but docked accessories are always second class citizens relative to the integrated stuff.
- alistairSH 6y agoLaptop user, I also have 3 screens. I do use the MBP's keyboard, but never felt like that cost me productivity. I use a normal mouse as well. The only reason I can think of the need a desktop is the extra CPU/GPU capacity you can get.
- ericmay 6y ago> Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?
- ohgodplsno 6y ago>The same people who almost universally use a Mac? * in very specific places and conditions. Actual numbers from every single credible survey puts macs at a grand maximum of 25%.
- ericmay 6y agoWell, most corporations don't give developers a choice in what computer they use. I doubt that makes them unsuitable.
- freeone3000 6y agoMacs keep dropping off our domain, so there's no real way to maintain their provisioned state.
- Plasmoid2000ad 6y agoThere's a massive US centric bubble when it comes to Apple. iPhones and Macbooks are not in the majority, let alone universal, with software developers as whole, just in pockets
- ericmay 6y agoSure - so now they're unsuitable for developers?
- ampdepolymerase 6y agoThe five dollar latte crowd is willing to pay and consume. Walk into any café and good luck finding non-Apple machines. (Occasionally there will be a Surface or two, especially if you live in Seattle).
- alistairSH 6y agoI'm a developer and haven't had a desktop in 15 years or so. It's been a mix of Thinkpads (IBM then Lenovo) and MBPs. I'm guessing very few developers need the extra power a desktop offers over a high-end laptop.
- utxaa 6y agoeven a low end laptop. i work in clojure for finance. digital nomad. thinkpad x220.
- mumblemumble 6y ago> offering no machine suitable for developers and power users This perception strikes me as having warped in from a different decade. Nowadays, at least in my neck of the woods, developers almost universally use laptops, and Apple's still plenty competitive in the (high end) laptop department. For the most part, the only developers I know who still use desktops are machine learning folks who don't like the cloud and instead keep a Linux tower full of GPUs in a closet somewhere. And then remote into it from a laptop. Half the time it's a MacBook, half the time it's a XPS 13. And they were never going to consider a Mac Pro for their training server, anyway, because CUDA. I couldn't speak to power users, but my sense is that, while it meant something concrete in the '90s, nowadays it's a term that only comes out when people want to complain about the latest update to Apple's line of computers.
- iguy 6y agoYes, I think they view the basic mid-range tower box as a nearly-extinct form. Like corded telephones & CRTs. They choose to make the mac pro as some kind of halo product, I guess. But really the slice of people who need more power than an iMac, and less than this "Linux tower full of GPUs" or a render farm, they judge to be very small indeed. This wasn't true in the 90s, when laptops (and super-slim desktops) came with much bigger compromises.
- derefr 6y agoI don't think they think it's a small market; I think they think it's a commoditized market with very thin margins. That form-factor has a literal thousand+ integrators building for it, and also in many segments (e.g. gaming) people build their own to save even more money. Those aren't the sort of people who are easily swayed to pay an extra $200+ of pure margin in exchange for "integration" and Genius Bar "serviceability" (the latter of which they could mostly do themselves given the form-factor.)
- iguy 6y agoI guess people into hot-rodding, especially for games, have never been Apple's target. (Even if they are numerous, and I actually have no idea how large this segment is.) Besides price-sensitivity, wouldn't they be bored if there were only 3 choices? Maybe we will find out when the M2-xs or whatever arrives.
- mikepurvis 6y agoSure, but there's a legit gap in the datacenter— not having a sanely, legally rackable OS X machine is a pretty big problem for a lot of organizations. Not everyone wants to do their Jenkins builds or generate homebrew bottles on a Mac Mini under someone's desk.
- pjmlp 6y agoNone of those use cases seem relevant for iOS or macOS development.
- mikepurvis 6y agoSurely you'd want CI builds for your app? I suppose you can always go the sassy option and just offload this problem onto Travis or CircleCI, but then they're the ones stuck figuring out how to rack thousands of Mac Minis, dealing with thermals in a machine that isn't set up for hot/cold aisles, a computer that doesn't have a serial port or dedicated management interface, etc. If you're a big enough org or the app is for internal use, this might not be an option anyway. At that point I imagine most people just give up on it and figure out how to run macOS on a generic VM. But at that point you have to convince your IT department that it's worth it doing a thing that is definitely unsupported and in violation of the TOS. Or maybe some of these are big enough that they are able to approach Apple and get a special license for N concurrent instances of macOS running on virtualized hardware? Who knows.
- damnyou 6y agoNo company on the planet is big enough for Apple to make exceptions like that. All of them either use a cloud provider or a custom rack design just for Mac Minis.
- IntelMiner 6y agoCompanies like Google or Microsoft aren't big enough? Google's Chrome and Microsoft Office alone I would wager are more than big or popular enough to get special treatment Adobe is smaller by contrast but I'd speculate has a much deeper relationship with Apple as well