I'm writing this on an intel MacBook Pro, so I expect that the Mac Neo probably has very usable performance, while running cooler and with longer battery life.
I hate how I can't buy an new apple silicon with upgradeable RAM or SSD. Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine? 4TB is the smallest SSD I ever want in a new machine, but buying one from Apple is stupidly expensive. Back in the intel days, I'd buy a macbook pro, for example, with less ram and a smaller SSD than the max available and then upgrade to much cheaper aftermarket parts a few years later when prices dropped.
I'm still not going to use windows or linux. Don't want to be an IT guy on the side just to keep linux machines working. This may not be obvious to some unless you try to use printers and scanners that are more than 5 years old and what them to be on the network. And, you don't install virtualization tools like vmware that require compiling and loading kernel drivers which ends up being incompatible with new OS releases...etc.
Windows is just too much of a painful acceptance of mediocrity and apathy in product design for me.
> Is there a legit reason why they couldn't make these things upgradeable at all even on a studio machine?
For the SSD, no. For the memory, yes. The memory lives on the same chip as the CPU and the GPU, it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on. The memory being there has legitimate technical benefits that make it much easier/cheaper for them to reach the extremely high memory bandwidths that they do.
This, although it's not merely "easier/cheaper", it's "impossible" (unless you sacrifice a ton of performance)
Same reason as a) GDDR on dGPUs (I think I read somewhere that GDDR is very much like regular DDR, just with much tighter paths and thus soldered in) and b) Framework Desktop (performance would reportedly halve if RAM were not soldered)
SSD reasons I seem to recall are architectural for security: some parts (controller?) that usually sit on a NVMe SSD are embedded in the SoC next to (or inside?) the secure enclave processor or whatever the equivalent of the T2 thing is in Mx chips, so what you'd swap would be a bank of raw storage chips which don't match the controller.
The memory does *not* live on the same chip as the CPU and GPU, you appear to be thinking of HBM. Apple is using regular LPDDR5 RAM on separate chips, but soldered near to the CPU/GPU.
The soldering does serve a purpose though, the shorter traces allow for better signal integrity at higher speeds. This isn't something special about what Apple is doing though, Intel and AMD are doing the exact same thing with the exact same LPDDR5 chips on their respective APUs.
HBM is still almost purely reserved for datacentre GPUs.
>it's even more tightly bound than just being soldered on
No. There is a reason for it but no, it's just soldered on the same carrier board as the APU, in order to be really close to it. Apple could have used a form factor like CAMM2 and it would have worked the same, be it at slightly higher cost. The reason is simply to kill upgrade options and cut manufacturing costs - same as for any other soldered ram.
I think it’s possible that Apple will support LPCAMM2 assuming it can done without risking the SOC but it is too cutting edge single vendor technology for them to be implementing it now.
To the original Ramones you say? Might be hard to deliver.
But how much of traditional broadcast radio license fees accrue to musicians? Zero, unless they happen to be the songwriters (but good news for Max Martin et al.) Record companies also got no royalties from radio airplay (in fact they got in trouble for paying radio stations to play their music.)
I mean I sort of believe that most Ramones t-shirt sales came along because of the listens, but then again I see lots of Misfits t-shirts on kids born this century and considering it's in Denmark it seems unlikely it's because their parents were big Misfits fans.
Of course Misfits had a much more impressive visual aesthetic, so that might explain their continuing design relevance.
This doesn't match up with what I've heard from people I know within Apple, but perhaps things have changed recently. Certainly the encrapification seems to have gotten worse - my suspicion is that the services businesses have too much power within the company and are damaging product design to boost their own numbers.
There's an excellent Ben Thompson piece where he points out one of the big missteps of Apple executives. He was talking about Tim Cook and the like in the context of App Store legal case. He says Apple started drinking their own kool-aid around privacy, and user benefit - which makes them want to seek rent a lot more. I suspect your friends at Apple might be falling onto that as well.
This will be like saying - there are good people working at Nestle. The packaged water business is the villian, but people are nice.
Agreed - once you have to do something for a living in order to survive (and probably under the orders of clueless management and company executives) it becomes "work" that is no longer fun.
Same way that being forced to read for school often kills the desire to read for fun.
> I'm somewhat genuinely worried about the human race becoming like the people from Wall-E. We already get food almost on-demand, entertainment to consume too. As of right now somebody alive has to produce that entertainment, but once we've figured out how to automate that (ComingSoonToATheatreNearYou) we'll just be amusing ourselves to death.
Congrats everyone, we seem to have arrived there sooner than expected!
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