bishopdante wrote: Sat Dec 18, 2021 8:18 am
It's pretty funny how Apple have just gaslit the f*** out of everybody on specs, and then pulled a "bait-and-switch" tactic on the cheesegrater Mac Pro.
Hey people, check out this £3000 mobile phone...
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Only two years ago I was standing in an airport, marvelling at the insane price of the macbook air, £1699 excluding VAT... running some mystery "so shit we didn't brand it" CPU called the MR782-QRT or whatever, clocked at 1.4Ghz... for quite a bit more than I paid for my i7 2012 macbook air, which scores better on geekbench. Scary stuff...
Now there's some sort of ripoff drag race between Apple's new cheese grater, and the new mobile phone, which actually has a pedigree Acorn RISC Machine low-power consumer hardware design derived from the BBC / Acorn Archimedes.
Where Apple will be rubbing their hands together in glee is that the actual savings in production cost, increased efficiency and real-world performance gains are very real. By making everything smaller, you make it clock faster. By making everything on one die, there's less to go wrong, the whole thing is a sealed package, and it's both mechanically indestructable and cheap as anything. The whole computer as an IC. This makes it small, cheap, and great.
This means that Apple has begun its process of killing off the desktop computer, and replacing everything with App Store iLockedOut TPM / Apple Tax, and the rental / bricking can commence. Don't worry, the hackers are good, but the days of jailbroken iPhones are *long* gone, right.
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In the meantime, I'm looking at five year old servers with quad-socket motherboards on eBay for £250... fresh out of the datacenter... and thinking...
The current Mac Pro specs aren't really all that. You can get something with more industrial specifications for the server market, and those things are basically sent to recycling within a year or two in commercial use.
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All the older apple stuff is going to be *worthless* compared to the M1 mac mini. Hence, I'm looking forwards to using i7 mac minis as a general purpose appliance computer.
