I think the issue stems from too many people making their living off reviews that require something exciting to get views. When updates are more evolution than revolution, it makes for a more boring article/video. I always worry that these types of responses will lead Apple to do silly things, like leaving old chips out there too long, or adding pointless features just so there is something new to talk about.

With Tahoe it's different: its ugliness is uncanny. I've just given up on it.

That's probably a 4x markup, and the $200 to go from 256 to 512 is even worse.

Every time a user considers jumping from Windows but balks at the storage costs, that's leaving many thousands of potential revenue on the table. I just can't believe it really makes economic sense for them, except in short-term cashflow terms.

It's funny that my ipad has a more current CPU than my two laptops.

My M4 iPad Pro is amazing but feels totally overpowered for what it's capable of.

I guess what I'm saying is.......I don't need faster CPUs. I want longer battery life, 5G connectivity, WiFI 7, lighter weight, a better screen, a better keyboard, etc..

I guess it's odd that Apple spends so much time making faster computers when that is practically an already solved problem.

Yes and no. Sometimes Intel did not move as fast as Apple wanted, and sometimes Apple didnt feel like it. Especially the MacPro (trash can and old cheese-grate) and the MacMini (2012-2018) were neglected.

Today, the MacPro ships with M2 Ultra, the MacStudio ships with M3 Ultra, and its not certain that the MacMini and the iMac will get the M5 or will continue shipping with the M4 for the foreseeable future.

More performance (especially for local AI models) is always great, but I'm trying to imagine what I'd want out of a design change!

I think slightly thinner would be nice, but not if it runs hotter or throttles.

Smaller bezels on the screen maybe?

I'm one of those who liked the touchbar (because I think that applications which labelled its shortcuts in the touchbar are awesome) so I think some innovation around things like that would be nice. But not if it compromises the perfect keyboard.

I do think MacOS would be improved with touchscreen support.

I'm uncertain as to whether any M series mac will be performant enough and the M1/M2 mac mini's specifically, or whether there are features in the M3/M4/M5 architecture that make it worth my while to buy new.

Are these incremental updates actually massive in the model performance and latency space, or are they just as small or smaller?

  - Some developer buys a new laptop
  - Developer writes software (a browser)
  - When the software works "fast enough" on their new laptop, they ship it
  - The software was designed to work on the dev's new laptop, not my old laptop
  - Soon the software is too bloated to work on my old laptop
  - So I have to buy a new laptop to run the software

If our computers never got faster, we would still be able to do everything the same that we can do today. But we wouldn't have to put down a grand every couple years to replace a perfectly good machine.

That's gonna be wild starting 2026, with the first implementations of RVA23, such as Tenstorrent Ascalon devboards TBA Q2.

That being said, I do kind of head-tilt at the folks screaming that this sort of “boring” cycle of hardware isn’t sustainable, that somehow, someone must create the next major improvement to justify all new spend or otherwise this is a worthless exercise. In reality, it’s always been the opposite: Moore’s Law wasn’t infinitely scalable, and anyone who suffered through the Pentium 4 era was painfully aware of its limitations. Sure, we can find other areas to scale (like going from clock speed to core counts, and core counts to core types), but Moore’s Law is not infallible or infinite; eventually, a plateau will be reached that cannot be overcome without serious R&D or a fundamental sea-change in the marketplace (like moving from x86 to ARM), often a combination of both.

Apple, at least, has the unenviable position of being among the first in addressing this challenge: how do you sell more products when power or efficiency gains are increasingly thin, year over year? Their approach has been to leverage services for recurring revenue and gradually slowing down product refreshes over time, while tempering expectations of massive gains for those product lines seeing yearly refreshes. I suspect that will be the norm for a lot of companies going forward, hence the drive to close walled gardens everywhere and lock-in customers (see also the Android sideloading discourse).

The hardware cycle at present is fairly boring, and I quite like it. My M1 iPad Pro and M1 Pro Macbook Pro dutifully serve me well, and I have no need to replace either until they break.

If you think this is a boring architecture, more power to you. It's not boring enough for me.

But did customers want it?

I'll leave it here, as the point is made.

M5 has performance/watt below Panther Lake.

Is that really what you want?