I wouldn't be surprised if they ditched third party GPUs and offered their own if they wanted expansion that way and made it all accessible via Metal. Supporting third party GPUs means writing and supporting drivers for them, or convincing those third parties to support MacOS on ARM. I just don't see it happening.
Like it has been for many years? Yes, it does seem they are moving in a different direction than that. We'll see if they can compete on the GPU front... I'd have been super skeptical before reading some of the newest comments in this thread.
... Apple is not a gamers company but it's trying to seem like one and failing. I don't understand why even bother, it's not like this is important for Apple.
I agree historically, but maybe it is now? I hope so, as that helps them in many other ways, too.
... You can't say you seriously imagined a scenario where Apple has two ongoing product lines, both running macOS, but using two different, incompatible CPU architectures? ...
Hmm, if I understand what you're saying, I kind of wonder if we won't see some overlap. Since it will probably be a while until many applications get on-board and ported (if they ever are) to Apple's new architecture, I could imagine Apple actually keeping an Intel option on the Pro machines for the people who need that compatibility.
Or, did you mean having both Intel and AMD?
I use UNIX, Windows and MacOS on my iMac. Indeed I'd say my iMac is the best Windows machine I have ever had. I need this capability for work, for a lot of scientific software is Windows-only. To me it seems like Apple is throwing away a lot of flexibility that many people rely on. ...
Yes, my concern as well. I guess time will tell if they are just moving on... and whoever hangs on does. We're not the biggest part of Apple's market anymore for sure. Or, if they have some plan for that.
Neither was PPC.
x86 matured to the point where it was competitive with and, in some aspects, faster than RISC based processors. Enough so that RISC vendors could not justify the continued cost of developing their own processors.
If we're to believe RISC, in and of itself, is superior to CISC ...
x86 won (for that time) because, Windows.
As I think I mentioned earlier, I saw the same happen in networking/servers. Novell was far superior, but NT ended up winning because decision makers recognized it, the marketing push, and license costs... and eventually application servers. It was absolute junk for years, but I did a heck of a lot of switching clients over.
Again, things don't necessarily win because they are superior. THAT is probably my biggest fear here. Apple could come out with a total home-run, and the industry could just ignore it and keep chugging along with Windows on x86.
The low power cores are very useful. Look at activity monitor on mac and how many processes are running at “0%” of cpu. By scheduling them on low performance cores you free up the big cores to run in longer bursts without having to share time with those other cores. And those cores generate less heat to do the same job as the big cores (because they are doing things more slowly and switching fewer transistors), so the overall die is a little cooler than it would otherwise be, which lets the big cores heat things up more. I think of the small cores mostly as improving overall system performance rather than really making much difference in power consumption on a mac.
And, then there are the special case ones like the T2. I can export H.265 video in a fraction of the time while my Mac doesn't even break a sweat. Previously, it meant full-speed fans for hours.
... something they have been doing as of late is backtrack from their mistakes. Something they were famously known for NOT doing it. ...
Agreed, that is a promising trend. Even Jobs was wrong at points and they didn't course-correct as well back then. They DO seem to be making more mistakes these days, but if they are willing to correct them, then that is long-term positive.
... I am in the market for a new iMac and I'm unhappy with the current options
...
They absolutely need to speed up the usability responsiveness - banish the spinning beachball. I have an iPad - and not even Pro, just the Air 3 I bought new in 2019 - and I want that responsiveness and speed from my iMac. Currently my iMac constantly has spinning ball issues - in my case also additionally due to having a ton of external hard drives which go to sleep and as a result, cause problems for Finder everywhere else on the system - unacceptable... if that's going to be an issue it should be confined only to the specific external hard drive and not spread to the rest of the system.
...
Yes, I absolutely don't know what they are doing with the iMac. Hopefully we just see a refresh one of these days. I have a hard time believing the iMac will transition this fall, but maybe? Otherwise it is WAY overdue for a refresh.
You're probably seeing so much beech-ball due to the spinning drives, and then, yes those externals. If you had a SSD main drive, that would probably take care of that. The external drive thing, though, is an actual bug (very long time!) in the OS.
If anyone knows... will that be addressed at some point? Is it related to something legacy that is going away?
My solution has been to go 100% SSD directly connected to my machine (2018 mini), and then put all the spinning discs on a server (an old MBP). I now almost never experience ANY sluggishness.
...
I am in Monterey for a conference, and I overhear some intel guys talking about Opteron. "There's no way they could have done that - they only had like 15 designers. We have 400 and can't do it - no way that chip runs at the speed they say it does."
I used to work at a near Fortune 50 and one of my managers (when we were commiserating on some seemingly dumb decision) used to say, 'big company = stupid'. But, like a huge ship or train, they are hard to stop. If some of the things that happened would have been at a small company, we'd have gone out of business. And, that stuff does eventually catch up, though... trains and ships can be stopped.
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This is one of few Microsoft has actually done well at (for Windows 10). My Mac is only sporting a mid-level performing SSD on SATA3 and the total boot time is probably about a minute and I haven't used a recent Mac with fast SSD, therefore, I don't know how close Apple is with "instant on" for the Mac. I would guess, my Mac mini requires about a minute or two to fully boot -- background app services and all.
Except for the Finder waiting on drive spin-ups that shouldn't happen often, if at all. Something is certainly amiss. And the drive spin-up pause should only occur when you select a drive, attempt to access a file or folder on a drive, or do a search.
I'll have to time my 2018 mini at some point, but I suppose a minute, if you include power-switch press all the way to logged in and all the background stuff going, yes.
But, I hardly ever do that unless I need to restart for some reason, like a system update, or back when I was going between Bootcamp and MacOS (I mostly use Parallels now).
If you're just coming out of sleep, or on a laptop, 'waking' it is near instant. Everything just kind of suspends.
I don't even sleep though, just have locking screen saver and let it run. Unless some app is doing something, it only takes like 30 watts or less.
As for the external spin-up, unfortunately it gets triggered by a lot of things including any file dialogs. It doesn't matter if you try to access anything on those drives. The OS just seems to need to check if they are still there and available or something, so lag, big-time.
It is so bad I used to un-mount or disconnect external drives when I didn't need them. I have no idea why Apple won't fix it. That said, I haven't checked since Mojave, as I went to all SSD. But, I've heard others (like John Siracusa) complain, rather recently, so I assume it is still there.
