I seriously do not understand what would warrant a sad trombone in this instance. Please elaborate on why the new M3 Max chip being as fast as two M2 Max chips stitched together (M2 Ultra) would make a sad trombone play.
With respect to the "Pro" laptops: starting at 8GB in 2023 is terrible
With respect to the iMacs leapfrogging over M2 is weak
My base M2 Mini has TB4, while base M3 has TB3, hardware regression there. Although, 3 & 4 both support 40Gb/s ... if past Apple history proves anything they'll use version 3 versus 4 as an artificial cut off point for Mac OS upgrades in the future...
And then finally the 150/300/400/800 bandwidth of their unified memory is kind of ridiculous. Before it was 85-ish, 100, 200 or 400 throughput in versions one and two. They have the die shrink available to them, but they opted not to push the boundaries, and to me that seems lazy, as they own the whole stack now.
And finally, they rarely compared anything of real value to M2. It was all M1 or Intel stuff, so clearly they just are trying to lure you into an upgrade, all thepeople on old Intel hardware, and that's a money decision, not a technology, decision, and I thought we were told that, "we ain't seen nothing yet." They are just itching to drop support for Intel machines and it's gonna come sooner than later I think.
To me, it's clear that they artificially slowed things down since they were so far ahead of the competition, imo a sad trombone is warranted.
And really minor, they took away support for high impedance headphones... Really just give us a decent dac/amp which is already in my m2 base Mini.
I will have however, cut them slack for Wi-Fi seven, the lack of...
Finally, in the reading of multiple websites, nobody's running out to trade in their M2 machines handover fist, so it seems like initially it's going to be a slow roll until M4.
I absolutely could be wrong though...✌️