Yes, it’s impressive how they somehow cram that massive dual-fan heatsink into the MacBook Pro…
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Here Are All the M3 Macs Still Expected This Year
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Yes, it’s impressive how they somehow cram that massive dual-fan heatsink into the MacBook Pro…
?? What was terrible experience? M2 Max and M3 Max both rock.
Agreed. A Mini Mac Pro.
They charge that much as it's speacial order, if they all had it labor would be the same. No need to charge more than $100 for that. I think there would be blowback if they charged more
Fair enough - you’re right there are certain people / situations where it makes sense to have a separate laptop/desktop. Your point around private files not being on a portable device in case it gets stolen is a valid one too. As someone else mentioned, since Apple Silicon, the universe of cases I think for this has shrunk, as the performance of the laptop is essentially the same as the desktop (so those who had separate given ability for higher performance in desktop, may not need to do so anymore). Anyways just wanted to bring up the case of docking a laptop in case you hadn’t considered it. Sounds like you have and this works best for you.
Agreed. I’ve had a 4K 27” monitor for ~8 years now (bought it in 2016 when I got my prior 13” MBP), and run it at “Looks like 2560 x 1440” HiDPI mode like one would with a 27” 5K display. Even though it’s not perfect pixel-doubling, it still looks fantastic, and I honestly haven’t felt I was missing much. Every time I go in the Apple store, I check out the 27” 5K Apple Studio Display, and while I do feel like there’s something a little ”extra crispy” about it, it doesn’t feel like a big difference. I also don’t do anything graphics intense, so I don’t feel any slowdown from the extra GPU work done given the fractional scaling. If someone gave me the ASD for free, would I take it (and love it)? Of course! But I also have been happy to have bought my monitor for $400 8 years ago and still looks great!
Time for me to replace my old iMac 27" from 2017. It felt fast 7 years ago. It's a dog now.
Low end Mac Studio is my target.
I know the youtube "experts" say you're better off with a top end Mac Mini than an entry level Studio but if you sitting here next to me as I type this listening to my iMac's fan spinning up and down due to Xcode and Android Studio both running at the same time you'd go for the machine with the best (quietest) heat management.
32M of DRAM should be enough, I've got 40 in this old beast and I don't think I've ever really used that much.
Low end Mac Studio is my target.
I know the youtube "experts" say you're better off with a top end Mac Mini than an entry level Studio but if you sitting here next to me as I type this listening to my iMac's fan spinning up and down due to Xcode and Android Studio both running at the same time you'd go for the machine with the best (quietest) heat management.
32M of DRAM should be enough, I've got 40 in this old beast and I don't think I've ever really used that much.
The mac mini's pricing makes zero sense, the apple price ladder has really gone to the deep end. If I just want a somewhat more powerful mac mini with m2 pro and 32 gb ram, the price jumps to $1700....wtf would you do that when the mac studio with m2 max can be had at $2000 as a default option - which means it will be sold at all the retailers at a $100-200 discount, making the price almost same as the mac mini.
I love mac but really hate the way apple prices them, the m2 pro 32gb mac mini should be 1500, so you have at least a 500 gap between it and the mac studio... watch them increase the m3 mac studio by a few hundred $ instead to widen the gap between it and the mini
Given the m3 pro actually got downgraded on the number of cores, the m2 pro is actually a good value if the mac mini isn't priced so badly.
I love mac but really hate the way apple prices them, the m2 pro 32gb mac mini should be 1500, so you have at least a 500 gap between it and the mac studio... watch them increase the m3 mac studio by a few hundred $ instead to widen the gap between it and the mini
Given the m3 pro actually got downgraded on the number of cores, the m2 pro is actually a good value if the mac mini isn't priced so badly.
I think it depends a lot on your personal preferences, your eyesight and your workflow.
Have you tried many other displays besides your 5K? I know a lot of people talk online about optimal vs best PPI etc. with Mac OS. I have nothing but good things to say about my 4K display attached to my Mac. I never looked at my display and said "this looks weird." It looks great to me and I have no fuss and for sure no pressure to buy a studio display. Does your 4K monitor look weird on you Mac, and if so, why? Like, too small a font size?
Either M3 will adopt and utilize N3E as a mid life refresh, or it'll be the M4 which will use the N3E.
Either way, the Ultra version would most likely utilize the N3E.
Either way, the Ultra version would most likely utilize the N3E.
Apple's bread-and-butter are "all-in-one's" tech, it's been the definition of the Mac and Apple's most successful efforts since day-one. It's something that "got lost" at Apple after Steve's two departures. He made it his first priority to bring in back, and center stage, with his first return, sadly, there will be no second.This picture clearly points to a marketing deficiency that Apple currently has. Look at the following pie chart.
![most-popular-mac-in-us.png]()
source
This clearly points out that Apple made a big mistake, consumers and businesses actually prefer the iMac compared to the Mac mini and Mac Studio believe it or not. All Apple needs to do is to come out with a larger iMac using a better M3 processor and it would really jack up Mac sales a lot.
Also to be fair updated Mac mini and Studio Mac with M3 updates would sell more also.
I often pondered Apple's adventure with the Mini, and then Studio, it would seem that there is a camp within their campus that has long-loathed what Steve was doing with his "singular" ethos and that the Performa-line needed resurrection or, at least, a small chair at the post-Steve table. And that can work out just fine for a large corporation, keeping alive competitor ideas (read: PC component setups) for any potential customer base that might not "get" what AIO living has to offer.
And it has been with a keen eye towards that consideration that I've maintained that Apple had to (temporarily) snuff out the 27" iMac to give Studio its moment with "floaty cuffs" in the grownup's pool. But the days of swimming lessons do end and I expect soon 32" iMac shall arrive...and life will go on.
This picture clearly points to a marketing deficiency that Apple currently has. Look at the following pie chart.
![most-popular-mac-in-us.png]()
source
This clearly points out that Apple made a big mistake, consumers and businesses actually prefer the iMac compared to the Mac mini and Mac Studio believe it or not.
Leaving aside the validity of that chart (they sell more Pros than Airs? Really?), I don't see how any version of such a pie chart could possibly answer what consumers and businesses "prefer". It just answers what they end up buying.
All Apple needs to do is to come out with a larger iMac using a better M3 processor and it would really jack up Mac sales a lot.
I doubt it. Most people want laptops. Which, according to your logic, this chart already shows.
The Studio is just nine months old.
AIO machines - which in 2024 predominantly means laptops - align most closely with the Apple ethos. But back when Apple was Apple Computer, and the Mac was central to their business, there’s no way they could have competed with PCs with just laptops and the iMac. The platform would have lost all credibility. It wasn’t a case of ‘losing their way’, it was practical reality. And let’s not forget Jobs was proud to show off the G3/4/5 towers, demoing their ease of interior access and so on.
The large screen iMac is dead; Apple makes whatever form factors suit their business interests, not what their users would ideally buy. As the sole suppliers of Mac hardware, your choice boils down to take it or leave it.
The chart almost certainly shows revenue rather than unit sales. The Pros obviously sell in much lower qualities than MBAs, they’re just much more expensive (and the chart likely includes the last orders for Intel 2019 MPs, rather than the 2023 version).
And agree with the last comment - many large screen iMac users probably just wanted a good price / performance Mac desktop, not specifically an AIO. What were the other options? A £6K workstation? A mini with an iGPU?
I would add to that that this was an era where the newly-merged Apple/NeXT wasn't quite sure yet where the road was headed. See products like the Xserve. There's an alternate reality where "workstation" products like the higher-end Power Macs, Xserve, Xsan, Mac OS X Server, etc. were reasonably successful, in which case it makes sense to iterate on them. But that didn't pan out at all, at least relatively speaking, compared to consumer-y products.
That could be right. In which case it's still technically "market share" (a term that's become quite vague), but you can't really infer "people are this likely to buy this model" much less "people prefer this model" from it.
Well, it's December 2023, so that presumably no longer applies.
with the Xserve / Mac OS X Server.
Say that worked better and they added more AD like stuff to Mac OS X Server?
Do you think that at some point apple makes it so that you can run Mac OS X Server on an VM on any base hardware?
Say they don't keep up other server hardware but Mac OS X Server is doing good?
also with the intel workstations they where price competitive at lunch but apple lagged the full year on price / hardware updates.
My guess on the first question is it was about the surge in sales for the work-from-home revolution during and after the global pandemic. They sold way more than projected in the M1 iMac's first year (2021). If those production channels were running smoothy and not disrupted, then Apple would not have wanted to take the risk of introducing changes, no matter how small. They already had their hands full. So a decision was made to drop the M2 iMac and give it pride of place for M3.
But there's another explanation, the one where the iMac (M1) and now the Mini (M2, M2 Pro) are used to close out inventories of the previous-generation silicon. I would think the iPad (and other products, like displays) would be perfect for that, but what do I know?
I do know more than one person at Apple has said on the record that they would like all Macs to get every generation of Apple silicon. Anand Shimpi and others I don't recall exactly who. So I hang my hat on that, and revel in my hopium dream that a new Mini design is in the works and and we'll see it in 2024...
For me, myself, I don't care. I'll replace my M1 Mini with an M3 Max Studio the day it launches. But I think a slightly smaller form factor would be nice for the Mini, and I think there's room there for innovation.
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That was almost going to happen (early pre-releases of Mac OS X Server did run on x86, and before that, Yellow Box used to run even on top of Windows NT), and I imagine it was either Steve or Phil who ultimately decided that this was a bad idea. Apple's business, especially at the time, was selling hardware, not selling software licenses.
Instead, what we saw were dramatic cuts to software prices. For example, WebObjects went from $50,000 in the 1990s to $699 in 2000 to bundled with (the $499) Mac OS X Server in 2001 to ultimately bundled with (the $129) in 2005. You see a similar trajectory with macOS itself — it's now effectively free. Or, heck, with things like iLife and iWork, which used to cost money.
(Remember when there was a Windows Vista Ultimate Edition?)
I think Apple saw that this wasn't a trend they could slow. Similarly, the 1990s' idea of "workstations" also wasn't growing. SGI and Sun effectively went out of business, HP gave up on having their own architecture, etc.
So, license Mac OS X Server in a way that it runs on any hardware? They could've, and some ex-NeXT folks had at one point planned to, but the business opportunity wasn't there. Even less so today than back then.
(I also suspect this shift in thinking was one of the reasons Bertrand Serlet left. Things like Xgrid, I'm guessing, excited him; things like the iPod did not.)
Products like the XServe (and previous server hardware and software from Apple) made sense at the time, when there were a lot of proprietary file sharing and email solutions around for PC (Netware, Windows server etc.) with rather grudging support for Macs - the XServe properly things like AppleTalk and AFP, didn't require expensive per-user licenses and, at that time, the PowerPC platform offered something worthwhile for high-performance computing, and Mac OS X (i.e. Unix) was a solid base for a server OS.
Fast forward a few years - Linux has taken off as a free, solid base for server OSs, open internet-based standards are coming to prominence and the main "proprietary" local file sharing protocol - Microsoft SMB - has been cloned in open source form (Samba), and is now well-supported by Macs, which are now far better at integrating with PC centric networks. IBM and Motorola have lost enthusiasm for PowerPC, which isn't competing with Intel so well. Then Apple switch to Intel and while they did make an Intel-based XServe it had very, very little to offer over cheap commodity Intel server hardware running Linux. It was a product who's time came and went.
Just because something was the right product in 1999 doesn't mean it is the right product in 2024 (...and that's just the original iMac - the PC market has changed beyond recognition since the original Mac in 1984).
The point of an "all-in-one" is that it has the processor and screen combined into a single unit.
Know what else has a processor and screen combined in a single unit (with keyboard and battery to boot)? A laptop.
Apple (with help from Sony, and despite being Steve-less) pretty much invented the modern "notebook" laptop with the Powerbook 100/140/170 in 1991. It wasn't the first "laptop" but it was pretty distinctive at the time, with it's full clamshell design, large (for the time) display (with active matrix LCDs on the better models) set-back keyboard and pointing device in the middle of the wrist-rest. During the 90s, Powerbooks were still pretty popular and well-regarded. Certainly, almost every other laptop manufacturer since has been pretty obviously inspired by Apple's laptop designs (including the 'widescreen' format of the PowerBook Ti, the 'ultrabook' concept of the MacBook Air and the chiclet keyboards of the Unibody MacBooks).
The historical disadvantages of laptops were that they were underpowered vs. desktops, had short battery life and relatively small, inferior quality displays - things that have been improving significantly over time until, today, most MacBooks are using the exact same systems-on-a-chip as desktop Macs, have >>8 hours battery life and super-high-definition 14/15/16" displays (plus the GPU and CPU performance to drive a large external display when needed). There are still some reasons to prefer a desktop - but the market for all-in-ones of the late 90s has been decimated by laptops.
Also, people seem to airbrush the 2021/2023 iMac out of their reality. It exists, it costs about the same in figures as the original iMac did in 1998 (i.e. its much cheaper wrt. inflation) and is very clearly designed as a spiritual successor to the original iMac. The higher-end iMacs - with 27" screen and powerful CPU/GPU combos - were a much later arrival (~2009) and while they're great machines in themselves, the (post-Jobs) decision to use them to largely replace the low/mid-level Mac Pro (which was subsequently priced-out into "serious callers only" land) was problematic.