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Apple consumers have been insulated from the semiconductor industry practice of binning for years by high margins and insane growth. Basically Apple could affo
by ajross 2y ago
Apple consumers have been insulated from the semiconductor industry practice of binning for years by high margins and insane growth. Basically Apple could afford to throw out the "only 9 cores work" chips (or whatever) instead of selling them as separate products or performance tiers (or whatever). But now the unit growth is levelling off, so they need to squeeze for "growth" by expanding profits instead.
And one way you do that is by selling the extra chips you'd previously been flagging as yield failures.
- dividedbyzero 2y agoWhen I got my M2 Macbook Air in 2022 I had a choice between 8 and 10 GPU cores. I always assumed the 8 core ones were binned 10-core units, too.
- wtallis 2y agoThe MacBook Air with M2 is already sold with either 8 or 10 GPU cores. Having an iPad Air with M2 use 9 GPU cores is completely unsurprising and unremarkable. The only thing noteworthy here is the mistakes in the spec sheet and press release. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#Variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M2#Variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M3#Variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M3#Variants All of the M-series processors so far have been sold in at least two bins.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y agoJust living with that sort of waste is not very Cookian. I am surprised that it took this long.