It's a tempest in a teapot. Ninety nine percent of the folks joining in the outcry could not accurately articulate what a tenth extra graphics core would do for their workflow.
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Apple Says iPad Air Performance Details Are Accurate Despite 9-Core GPU Mistake
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Spot-on. Some people just need to be perpetually unhappy in order to have something to complain about.
Even though: "the performance claims that it shared during the MacBook Air launch and in marketing materials are accurate."
Apple charges for more performance but you’re okay with Apple providing less performance than originally advertised and charging same price.
Be more coreful next time, Apple.
Get out of here with all your logical sense and reason.
It's not less performance, that's the point being made. Had it been an actual 10-core, the performance would have been greater.
Customers still got exactly what they paid for in terms of device performance.
binning is a pretty common thing for chips in general, otherwise the waste is astronomical, even on processes that have great yields
Could also be deliberately neutered if there's not enough faulty ones. Price will be lower I guess which is fine considering the 11" Air starts at $599 - the M2 iPad Pro used to be more expensive than that although that seems to have noticeably disappeared from third party retailers - look out for refurbished bargains on official Apple store - they'll have full thunderbolt port and pro-motion screens.
Vision Pro uses M2 - probably full fat version at the price offered.
Currently the Mac mini uses it but possibly not for much longer. The Studio will likely be moving to the M4 process later this year.
More interestingly, I notice third party retailers now starting to stock weird configs of long considered discontinued Macs - loads of M1 class products (noticeably iMacs and Mac Studios) still seem to be turning up at places like Costco (and I guess in the US Best Buy?) - I find it hard to believe that Apple could have manufactured that many of them that it takes them over a year to trickle them out of the channel.
Could be significant interest in a 9 core GPU M2 for an AppleTV Pro - if Apple intend to keep making M2 chips for specific products like the Vision Pro and Air I could see TSMC fulfilling orders for a couple more years at least. It would certainly explain why the H1 rumoured AppleTV might fall by the wayside.
Could M2 make it into a future basic iPad if they sufficiently binned enough stuff off it?
Don’t care. I wanna that tenth core, give me the tenth core, otherwise Apple is lying.
Remember old days where you unlock CPU cores from AMD’s CPU. I purposely brought AMD Phenom II x3 and BIOS unlocked the 4th core.
Alternatively, this is is more astroturf, tutti-fruitti, phoney-baloney, plastic banana, good time, rock-n-roll Apple PR: Apple is so bleeding edge that they were trying to get to a 10-core GPU but had to pull-back at the VERY last minute and it was SO last minute that the marketing materials were already made.
Now THAT is incredibly sloppy. So sloppy one must wonder if it was somehow deliberate. How does that even happen?
It's basically for marketing. Instead of GHz, Apple sells # of cores and thermal performance.
E.g. MacBook Air upgrade costs $100 for 2 extra CPU cores. Pay even more for better thermal performance on MBP.
The new iPad air, now with The Reality Distortion Field included.
You know why - so shills like Rene Richie and the rest have some clickbait to lord over the competition when the product is initially released that'll quietly get burried or pooh-poohed away down the line when actual results come in.
wow, one number gets through a proof check... and everyone's undies get twisted.
suddenly I feel better for all the newsletters we published at my last job that 4 people checked only for the residents to huff and puff the day after release about "the errors".
it gets a bit conspiracy-level here at times... if the device ONLY has 9 cores then the benchmarks would have used those 9 cores. it's not like Apple secretly release an over-cored device to benchmark.
suddenly I feel better for all the newsletters we published at my last job that 4 people checked only for the residents to huff and puff the day after release about "the errors".
it gets a bit conspiracy-level here at times... if the device ONLY has 9 cores then the benchmarks would have used those 9 cores. it's not like Apple secretly release an over-cored device to benchmark.
Well I was definitely going to buy it when I thought it had 10 cores, but 9 cores make this unusable!
(joking, in case that's not clear)
(joking, in case that's not clear)
To be honest, I think many of Apple's M-chips are the same and they disable cores and RAM and sell them as different configurations when in fact, they all start out the same. Sort of like the new car that actually has an alarm system factory installed, but disabled, and if you want it enabled, it's hundreds of dollars to turn on a feature that is already there!
Smells like an excellent opportunity to vote with your wallet and go elsewhere for tech.
Going forward, will you commit to never again supporting a tech company you believe is lying?
Ehhh tomato, tomatoe. Nobody is doing anything with those cores anyways.
Does 9 or 10 cores matter if the performance is as-promised? It's not like suddenly, these are slower than advertised.