You make some excellent points. I didn't even think of the power requirements. On the other hand, what is possible, and what Apple thinks is most profitable, are often conflicting, unfortunately. For example, it would be entirely possible for Apple to release a 16" M1 MBA/MBP, but they haven't, and likely won't, as they don't see it raising their profits. Similarly, they might reserve the 2x/4x Max configurations for the full Mac Pro. I'll be waiting with curiosity to see if your conjectures come true though.
At
WWDC 2005 Steve Jobs
popularized to the mass market the metric of
performance per Watt.
This is important when it comes to battery life of the AirPods, Watch, iPhone, iPad and Macbooks. It is a factor for desktops & servers not for the purpose of usability but on the power bills and operating noise.
Typical PCMasterRace do not care or do not make the connection between that and the monthly utility bill they pay. All they care about is raw processing power to get triple digit fps for games. Never mind if their room sounds like the inside of an aircraft powering to take off. They have headphones to isolate themselves anyways.
But if you are business owner who takes his fiscal discipline from the workplace to the home you will appreciate that the iMac Pro's 500W.
It may be reduced to <300W of the iMac 27" when the iMac with M1 Max that has raw processing power exceeding the top-end Mac Pro.
I'd love to have a MBA 16" M1 to compete with the
LG gram 16" but Apple probably knows that the volume required for it isn't sufficient to introduce one at this time. When Apple is able to ship ~55 million units worldwide from the
~22.5 million they do so in 2020 then I would not be surprised they'll introduce a MBA 16" M3 or M6 that may share the same 57 billion transistor as the M1 Max by year 2032.
My speculation that the Mac mini & iMac Pro will get the M1 Pro, M1 Max and their higher-end chiplet SKUs has more to do with increasing the volume of these chips for the purpose of
economies of scale.
Look at the row labeled
form factor Apple creates an Apple silicon chip and uses that into as many applicable product line as possible.
Who would have ever thought of using a
laptop much less desktop chip in a tablet? I was really expecting an
A14X chip derived from the iPhone 12's A14 chip instead.
With the M1 Pro & Max it is only used with the MBP 16" & 14" so far. The lowest powered charger for an M1 Max is
96W so that's my origin point for my
educated guess.
The Mac mini's
enclosure is mostly empty with a
150W PSU when they reused it with the M1 then it has the physical space & power overhead to accommodate more powerful chips. One use case for the Mac mini is as a
server.
Apple has yet to replace the
$1,099 Mac Mini Core i5 & $1,299 Mac mini Core i7. So there is a current market for a more expensive Mac mini M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Max Duo &
M1 Max Quadro.
An estimated M1 Max Quadro die size of 8.502cm² with 40 cores can fit inside a
19.7cm² Mac mini easily but may cost ~$5,000 as
36-core server chips sell for $4,000-5,400 and
32-core desktop chips sell for $2,000-2,600.
This Mac mini will no doubt have a
10GbE port in the base model by default.
