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Comment by voakbasda

8 hours ago

When they break stuff, developers should lift their middle finger in response. That they don’t I think reflects some kind of Stockholm syndrome.

13 comments

voakbasda

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benoau  7 hours ago

It's more an indictment of everyone else, buy a different computer and you're guaranteed to be buying an objectively weaker computer for the vast majority of work scenarios. And you're paying a comparable price for it too.

It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.

  • Aurornis  7 hours ago

    > It's so bad Apple can just abort M6 Pro and Max and reuse the M5 generation for an extra year because why not, the most powerful alternatives are still playing catch-up with the base M4.

    The rumor is that Apple decided to put the engineering effort into the M7 series to make a bigger leap.

    Engineering resources are finite. Expecting a company to release every version of every chip at every generation is not optimal. Some times it's better to put the development effort into a bigger goal that takes longer.

    I wouldn't call that bad. They're being smart about development strategies instead of forcing everything into arbitrary release goals to satsify marketing and shareholders.

    That's what I want from companies who development my products. This is a good thing.

    • bigyabai  7 hours ago

      Apple's work is cut out for them; M7 and M8 desperately need a better GPU. These SOCs put up fantastically efficient single-core performance, but have some of the worst GPU compute efficiency you can buy. It also needs a better interconnect than RDMA, since Thunderbolt is snail-speed when networking several iGPUs together.

      Apple Silicon is a mirror into the Mac's decision paralysis. Apple wants to unify the Mac power users and iPhone casuals onto one silicon backbone, but can't decide who gets the short end of the stick. Tim Cook especially couldn't figure out how to ship a Mac Pro while retaining "ecosystem" level control over academic and prosumer customers. Professionals and researchers had a stack they wanted to use, and Apple didn't support it.

      Ternus will probably try to pivot Apple Silicon towards professionals, but he'll need to make software concessions to enter the true ARM HPC market. Ironically, that may entail Apple's rapprochement with Khronos to get the industry onboard with a CUDA stack alternative. Even a basic "inference hardware" GPGPU standard would put Apple Silicon back on the map for professional applications it has otherwise sat-out.

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asdff  6 hours ago

And do what? They make money selling products to apple users. They probably already sell to PC if they are interested in it. Not so much stockholm syndrome, but some sort of modern sharecropper development system for sure.