Felix 𝄢 @thegcat@kif.rocks

@moritzheiber *hugs of wanted*

@moritzheiber Ist aber wenn ich's richtig sehe nur "neue/andere Tasten" und nicht "Andere Tasten-Switch-Technologie", oder?

@moritzheiber oh, I had heard of that but it's not one of the more egregious things I tend to remember 😄

Regarding the keyboards, they backed away from the butterflies and went back to scissors some months/years(?) ago, those seem to work as expected and to not have any problems, and I'm guessing it's still the scissor ones in the new Laptops.

@moritzheiber tbh I have a 3,5y old MacBookPro, and I don't really need more CPU, GPU power or even RAM. Faster storage? Why not. Less heating? Why not, but it spends a lot of time on a laptop stand, so not that important either.

More reliability would be nice. Not needing to get the keyboard serviced for example :-D A part of my Touch Bar is also acting up (just the display and not the touchy part). I'd go for a 16" MBP even with the current stuff, no fan, one port on each side 😂

@moritzheiber (they're already offering M1 with 7 GPU cores or 8 GPU cores as an upgrade, probably to achieve higher yields/to be able to still sell chips that are not to full spec, so they seem to be price-sensitive here. Throwing 2 more unused TB ports/controllers on a chip where they're not used in what seems to be a highly modular architecture would strike me as odd in contrast)

@moritzheiber (the other option being that the M1 is already capable of driving 4 TB Ports but that they only use 2 because of the products they launched and because only needing 2 out of the 4 probably causes less non-functional chips. That would mean they'd eat the cost for this though, which, Apple being Apple, is not impossible, but would surprise me at that scale)

@moritzheiber Two ports is doable, and from what I see that was a way to bring the MacBook Pro, along with an older gen CPU, down a few price notches. From what I can gather there always has been a MBP13 with 2 TB ports.

I'd go so far that I could live with 2 ports if they were left and right and not on one side only 😄

What was really infuriating were the MacBook Airs with 1 port for charging and connectivity (one generation even had only USB rather than TB on that one port)…

@moritzheiber Keeping the M1 "simple" (good CPU, good but not best GPU, 2 TB ports but not 4, up to 16 GB RAM but not more) is probably a way for Apple to get their or their partner's fabrication techniques up to speed for the more complex chips that are probably coming while still keeping good yields and getting their software ready. (This is major tea-leaves-reading though, soooo :-D *passes a rock of salt*)

@moritzheiber For example the new crop of M1 Macs doesn't seem to support eGPUs. My hope is that this is a software thing (drivers not ready?) and also the reason Macs where you'd expect a discrete GPU are not out yet, because it's still being worked on. More RAM is probably a fab thing, more TB ports is probably a fab thing.

@moritzheiber My guess is those are the easiest to replace as in "few complicated ports", "no complicated peripherals" and probably currently the "easiest" gains (more power, lower consumption compared to chips more than 1y old).

In the bigger Macs, portable or not, more TB ports will be expected, more RAM will be expected, the option of a dedicated GPU will probably be expected. That's all complexity they don't have to tackle now.

@moritzheiber Yes, that is the current gen. In the previous gen, there were 8th gen Core quad-core 13" MacBook Pros with 2 Thunderbolt, See the Mid 2020 ones (MacBookPro16,3) here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Technical_specifications_5 or the 15,4, 14,1, 13,1 and so on before.

From what I can see the M1 replaces the "low end" of Macs, those with older gen Core Intels, with max 2 Thunderbolt ports, with 8GB or 16GB of "slow" RAM.

@moritzheiber don‘t they replace only the „small“ 13“ Pros that only Hand 2 TB ports before too? The previously escape pros?

@TheConstructor sieht nice aus