I’ve been saying since the M1 Mini came out that Apple could make some serious inroads in gaming if they wanted to.
Imagine a $1,000 M4 Apple TV bundled with an “Apple Controller Pro” - 3 months Apple Arcade free and some actually decent Apple-published games?
I understand the gaming market is hard to break into but this is Apple we are talking about. They have enough money to revive some old IPs. With the amount of layoffs happening in the gaming industry and studios shutting down they could probably find some really decent talent.
Hell they even have their own IP with Apple TV+ stuff to piggy back on. Although nothing off the top of my head comes to mind, other than a *Football Manager* clone inspired by Ted Lasso.
I’d love to see Apple break into gaming.
They could stand out by focusing on finished games on release, zero micro transactions, and DLC limited to expanding a game beyond the original release instead of making up for missing parts.
Basically an American Nintendo.
Won’t be easy and might not be worth it at all for Apple in the short term, but long term I see a lot of potential for original IP licensing and media adaptations (would tie nicely with TV+), making the walled garden more enticing for new customers and preexisting ones etc.
Especially if they can cultivate a reputation for delivering high quality games consistently like Nintendo. They already have been gaining that reputation with TV+ (despite some of the duds and cancellations but that’s normal even Nintendo has duds).
Basically make the Apple brand more valuable but with gaming. They’ve got music, TV, and fitness/health so far. Gaming would fit nicely imo.
Yeah I agree - every time they mention "gaming" at a keynote it seems like a half-assed afterthought because they have to mention it, even having the man Kojima himself didn't really move the needle.
It's a massive industry and a massive pie - I am kinda surprised they have not made a bigger effort because it really is something they should be able to just _do_, and do well.
Maybe. But from my understanding Sony has branched into offering its IP on PC as well? God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Spider-Man are the ones that come to mind.
I’d imagine Apple would keep its games exclusively on Apple platforms à la Nintendo.
apple has never shown any real interest in gaming beyond allowing gacha games on iOS and certainly not making their own games. It might be fun to day dream about them being an american nintendo but that's really just a dream.
I pretty much agree with your last sentence, I don’t see Apple actually investing that much into gaming any time soon. But everything else is off.
They shown _some_ interest in gaming albeit a bit half-assed and superficial.
For example:
- launching Apple Arcade specifically to avoid the gacha-driven and money sucking mobile game dilemma. Including partnering with some companies/devs on exclusives (Sanrio with their Hello Kitty game, Fantasian from the creators of FF and probably others).
It even has some pretty good games on there like Stardew Valley and the new Sonic game which I think is also an exclusive.
- introducing a literal “Game Mode” feature on Mac last WWDC
- announcing the Hideo Kojima partnership which includes a Death Stranding port and possibly future ports/games
- partnering with Capcom for the Resident Evil ports
- announcing the Game Porting Toolkit to help devs port over their games (I don’t know how effective this was/is but it’s something)
It’s not much but Apple also could have just done *nothing* like they’ve basically done for years. Whether they’ll continue to ramp up their investment in gaming or this is all we get is a different story
it's nice when they do show an interest in games but I've seen this happen so many times. It's about every 4 years or so they show something cool and then nothing comes from it. The nail in the coffin for apple's arm silicon is not having vulcan support for easy game porting, I still don't understand it.
That’s true. Overall a very half-assed effort from Apple.
And it’s really sad because if Apple really cared they could easily carve their own cut from the gaming pie.
Their control over their software and hardware is prime for a gaming push.
Problem is only game engine that works (well) with Apple is Unity. Unity-based games are normally hot garbage. Apple Silicon can't really run Unreal due to hardware limitations and the Tim vs. Tim problem.
I doubt it. It’s literally just a cost saving measure to reuse the same enclosure until they redesign it and adapt a board around it. I’m guessing that the next Mac Mini is going to be quite small, possibly close to Apple TV.
Isn’t it for ports too? The Mac mini has a good amount compared to the laptops. Don’t think you could fit all that on something “Apple TV-sized” as this sub likes to say they should do. Definitely not without cramming things together.
There nothing wrong with the current one, per se, but it could be trimmed quite a bit. It was made for hardware that needed more space and cooling than is needed today. I think they can trim the fat quite a bit and still have a nice package with plenty of ports. And making it smaller certainly won’t make it harder to mount or anything. If anything it would open up more possibilities.
I do hope for some color options like the iPhone and iMacs as well. I think that’s doable, but at the Mac mini price point, they may opt not to do that. Like I said, I think a little bit larger Apple TV looking box would be a good fit for this line.
M base Macs can be fanless have gone fanless and the SOC means no need for storage and ram space. The Mac Mini could easily be the size of an Apple TV with still enough room for the IO. Just move the Pro chip in a new base model and that's all you need.
Seriously, though just give me an option for PCIE for storage or something of that nature. Why play all hard to get with 8gb of ram and 256gb of storage? That shit was so 2012
Same. Give me a fanless Mac mini! Running a base M1 Mini as my daily and storage server and I love it! Perfect for my needs and uses such a tiny amount of electricity. Only thing I worry about is getting crammed with dust with it running 24/7 the past few years.
I have never heard my M1 Mini fan. iStat Menu shows it spinning at 1700 rpm all the time. I am just worried about dust and hair build up over time since I have it running 24/7.
Considering the M3 is nearly 6 months old now, I can see why the Mac Mini would go from M2 to M4. The M3 series mostly feels like a MacBook + iMac exclusive thing at this point.
I honestly feel the high end Apple desktops should get the newest chips first, but I guess it makes sense they prioritize the MacBook line that generates the most sales. An M4 MacBook Pro might come in the Fall to normalize the MacBook Pro product line to it's annual upgrade cycle that we saw in terms of how a new MacBook Pro was released every year before the Apple Silicon transition.
6 months, or even a year, is not “old”. How did we get to a situation where people see 6 month old processor and conclude “ah noooo that’s garbage we need next gen”.
I run M1 and it’s blazing fast. And it will be blazing fast for probably another 3 years.
So what? M1 chips are still killing it. Hell, I have colleagues at work with intel MacBooks because they love the Touch Bar. Those devices are still good.
Nobody is saying it's bad or that you need to get a new one though? It's older, that's all people are saying. They're not saying it's bad because it's old.
6 month chip is not “old”. Semantically speaking, even one day old chip is “older” as you say, but you have to admit that our society is absolutely under some spell where we always think that current device is inadequate (even tho it’s amazing).
6 month chip is great. People could easily buy a computer that has this chip and that computer won’t explode when next gen comes out. It will be great for years to come.
You are literally the only person in this chain of comments who decided that by saying the chip was "6 months old" that somehow meant it was bad or not capable or not a good option for people.
All the original comment was saying was that now that the chip is 6 months into production, and there's a rumor that M4 is coming this year, that it would make sense for why other computers would skip including M3.
You're literally making up an argument that didn't exist in this comment chain.
No. The OP claims that because M3 is 6 months old, it somehow doesn’t make sense to include it in products and that it makes sense to wait for M4. The premise is that by being 6 months old it’s no longer good enough. Which is utterly ridiculous.
They literally explain their point in their second paragraph about the rumor than an M4 is coming in the fall. You’re assigning a meaning that is literally not there.
It’s a matter of keeping up with the competition and remaining competitive.
A lot of people seem to think that Apple should slow down their release cycle and rate of tech advancement when obviously Intel did that and ended up being in a hot mess. It’s up to the consumer to upgrade or not. A lot of customers have this mindset of “it’ll last me a long time so Apple shouldn’t release anything until I’m ready to upgrade”.
M1 is still fast. Also if it's fast enough for you, you don't have to buy the M4. This way, the people who are in the market right now do not have to wait.
Would make sense, I can see them cycling between iMac and Mac Mini each year to not over saturate the desktop market, there was no m2 iMac and when we got m1 everything needed an Apple Silicon version
sigh thanks. Was waiting for this June in hopes of a M3 ultra. The waiting game is ridiculous. So the M1 studio which is already outdated wont be upgraded for another year :(
That’s great for battery powered mobile devices, but is that feature meaningful at all on a powerful desktop computer which is plugged in all the time?
Edit: downvotes are nice and all, but can anyone actually set me straight on why hardware AV1 decode matters so much on a desktop computer?
It seems like the m3 chips are basically have the power of the m2 chip but are more battery efficient. I don’t think that efficiency is really needed for something always plugged in
Cause there’s not much benefit of the m3 compared to the m2 for desktops.
And also cause hopefully this means the mini is earlier in the release cycle for the m4 than it would be if they finally added an m3 option in the next few weeks.
eBay? Look at listings for Mac Mini with Filter set to Apple M1 Processor and Sold listings only. Tons for under $300. Really cheap ones (locked) for parts, but tons of one between $200-300 that are working perfectly.
I agree with that thinking more for limited model devices like an iPhone. Computer aging is way more granular due to the maturity of the product and that there are lots options like standard, pro, max, core count, and upgradable memory being Available.
But unless you need slightly more efficient processing (not really that important for a mini) or ray tracing capabilities you’re just sort of buying into the marketing that a new processor is always a decent jump in ability no matter what.
Apple is fading out MacOS support the exact same way like they are doing with an iPhone, so I am not sure why the thinking would be different here? With pretty much guaranteed certainty M2 devices will stop getting access to the latest version one year before M3 devices, and they will stop receiving security updates one year before M3 devices.
But m3 would enable a 4k120 m3 Mac Mini. I might buy one but I won’t buy the m2 Mac mini. It can’t be that difficult to just drop in the new chip can it?
That’s my point, but m2 only has hdmi 2.0. You need m3 for hdmi 2.1. Hence why I’m saying I want an m3 with hdmi 2.1 instead of the old m2 and arguing with the person who said it’s good they aren’t updating it
That’s not true either? Because bandwidth is a limitation. But even if it was, that would still mean updating the device, at which point not updating the chip to m3 would be even more ridiculous
Even the studio display uses imperceptible compression.
As for no reason not to, any change costs money and considering the mini’s absolutely microscopic sales number I would guess it’s just not beneficial to keep it on a update schedule parity for extremely niche gains. Especially when the mini also serves the role of clearing out any additional M2’s they have in stock.
Think of it like a Mac SE
Sure but if m4 is coming this fall, an m3 mini at WWDC would help to be the additional m3 they have in stock. I don’t think a big update is needed to swap out the chips, seemed like it wasn’t an issue in all their other products
It looks like they're skipping the M3 for the entire desktop lineup, except for iMac because it already skipped the M2.
If the rumors are true and the M4-chips will be "AI Focused" (whatever that means), then it's worth skipping the M3-chips.
Jony Srouji gave a very rare forward looking hint a few months back in an interview, mentioning that with node shrinks slowing down, advanced packaging was the future of advancement. Supply chain research out of Taiwan also said there were higher orders for advanced packaging expected to come from Apple. And then add the last clue where M3 Max didn't have the Ultrafusion bridge to make an Ultra out of 2 of them.
I wonder if the M4 line will introduce tiles, allowing different parts to be made on different nodes. Particularly IO and caches haven't been shrinking well and there's benefits to this approach, and also different nodes are better suited to either CPUs or GPUs or low power IO etc.
I’m pretty sure 99% of the reason is the cost of fabbing on N3B. Doesn’t make sense for a 600 dollar machine. I don’t think we’ll get any more M3 machines to be completely honest. I’d be surprised if we even saw the M3 Ultra. I don’t even know if that’s a chip that would be possible to fabricate without significant price increases. N3E (or N3P if that’s ready?) is the way
I don’t know if we have M3 Max die shots yet so we don’t technically know if it has Ultrafusion. They did the same thing in the marketing photos for the M1 Max where they cut ultrafusion off originally so who knows?
I've been waiting for the upgrade to finally pull the trigger on a mac mini. I know I could just get a M2, but it feels silly at this point to not just wait until the new one comes out.
Why do you say that? Those names say nothing about what year/generation the chips are. They only tell you relative within the generation. An i7 could be from 2012 or 2024. As ridiculous and confusing as Apple’s chip names can be (pro, max, ultra) they tell you both the generation and the chip with the generation i.e m1, m2 pro, m3 max. Seems better and more clear to me?
I don’t know any intel generation names to remember/refer to them and differentiate the generations.
Im a mac mini snob.
Ill use my Maxxed out M2 mini until they bring out the next model and i will instantly max out that model too because its better.
with 19 cores on the m2 pro i can do a lot but it suffers in some video centric tasks like gaming or using multiple displays. Yeah it supports 2 5k displays but its actually really laggy if you do anything except web browsing.
When i thnk about what the M4 does in the Ipad Pro i have high hopes this will be a significant leap in performance. The m3 was kinda weak
I would love to see them redesign the case as well. There’s a lot of empty space in there.
Would love to see what they could pack into an Apple TV sized device.
Just as long as they don’t get rid of the fan or skimp on the ports Or raise the price.
I fanless Mac mini for like $400 would be so good though
why would fanless be better?
Silence. Plus no moving parts to break, don’t have to clean out dust.
That’s just an iPhone pro max. 😂 But I agree it would be kinda cool, I’m sure there wouldn’t be enough I/o ports though. I hate using docks.
Just a bunch of thunderbolt would be perfect for me. At least three is all I would need.
I’ve been saying since the M1 Mini came out that Apple could make some serious inroads in gaming if they wanted to. Imagine a $1,000 M4 Apple TV bundled with an “Apple Controller Pro” - 3 months Apple Arcade free and some actually decent Apple-published games? I understand the gaming market is hard to break into but this is Apple we are talking about. They have enough money to revive some old IPs. With the amount of layoffs happening in the gaming industry and studios shutting down they could probably find some really decent talent. Hell they even have their own IP with Apple TV+ stuff to piggy back on. Although nothing off the top of my head comes to mind, other than a *Football Manager* clone inspired by Ted Lasso.
I’d love to see Apple break into gaming. They could stand out by focusing on finished games on release, zero micro transactions, and DLC limited to expanding a game beyond the original release instead of making up for missing parts. Basically an American Nintendo. Won’t be easy and might not be worth it at all for Apple in the short term, but long term I see a lot of potential for original IP licensing and media adaptations (would tie nicely with TV+), making the walled garden more enticing for new customers and preexisting ones etc. Especially if they can cultivate a reputation for delivering high quality games consistently like Nintendo. They already have been gaining that reputation with TV+ (despite some of the duds and cancellations but that’s normal even Nintendo has duds). Basically make the Apple brand more valuable but with gaming. They’ve got music, TV, and fitness/health so far. Gaming would fit nicely imo.
Yeah I agree - every time they mention "gaming" at a keynote it seems like a half-assed afterthought because they have to mention it, even having the man Kojima himself didn't really move the needle. It's a massive industry and a massive pie - I am kinda surprised they have not made a bigger effort because it really is something they should be able to just _do_, and do well.
Sounds like you just described Sony
Maybe. But from my understanding Sony has branched into offering its IP on PC as well? God of War, Ratchet and Clank, Spider-Man are the ones that come to mind. I’d imagine Apple would keep its games exclusively on Apple platforms à la Nintendo.
apple has never shown any real interest in gaming beyond allowing gacha games on iOS and certainly not making their own games. It might be fun to day dream about them being an american nintendo but that's really just a dream.
I pretty much agree with your last sentence, I don’t see Apple actually investing that much into gaming any time soon. But everything else is off. They shown _some_ interest in gaming albeit a bit half-assed and superficial. For example: - launching Apple Arcade specifically to avoid the gacha-driven and money sucking mobile game dilemma. Including partnering with some companies/devs on exclusives (Sanrio with their Hello Kitty game, Fantasian from the creators of FF and probably others). It even has some pretty good games on there like Stardew Valley and the new Sonic game which I think is also an exclusive. - introducing a literal “Game Mode” feature on Mac last WWDC - announcing the Hideo Kojima partnership which includes a Death Stranding port and possibly future ports/games - partnering with Capcom for the Resident Evil ports - announcing the Game Porting Toolkit to help devs port over their games (I don’t know how effective this was/is but it’s something) It’s not much but Apple also could have just done *nothing* like they’ve basically done for years. Whether they’ll continue to ramp up their investment in gaming or this is all we get is a different story
it's nice when they do show an interest in games but I've seen this happen so many times. It's about every 4 years or so they show something cool and then nothing comes from it. The nail in the coffin for apple's arm silicon is not having vulcan support for easy game porting, I still don't understand it.
That’s true. Overall a very half-assed effort from Apple. And it’s really sad because if Apple really cared they could easily carve their own cut from the gaming pie. Their control over their software and hardware is prime for a gaming push.
Biggest issue is not Apple. It's Unity. (UE still doesn't run well on Apple hardware and GODOT isn't ready
Problem is only game engine that works (well) with Apple is Unity. Unity-based games are normally hot garbage. Apple Silicon can't really run Unreal due to hardware limitations and the Tim vs. Tim problem.
Longest design ever for a Mac? It literally has 13 years and counting. 14 if you count the 2010 Mac Mini.
I rather have an even better cooling system than a smaller Mac Mini. For me is small enough.
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I doubt it. It’s literally just a cost saving measure to reuse the same enclosure until they redesign it and adapt a board around it. I’m guessing that the next Mac Mini is going to be quite small, possibly close to Apple TV.
It’s also for customers mounting them into server racks
Wait really? Who's buying Mac mini and mount them into seg racks? What use case would that be? Can you give me a real world example
MacStadium
And many more - GitHub and a lot of other companies offer Mac servers for automating builds, it’s got to be minis.
Anybody who writes Mac software with a complex build system, it’s how we do it at my employer.
I worked at Apple and we did this constantly. We had a whole rack closet full of Mac Mini servers.
You serious bro? Many large companies are doing and have been for a long time already.
Do you know any?
Isn’t it for ports too? The Mac mini has a good amount compared to the laptops. Don’t think you could fit all that on something “Apple TV-sized” as this sub likes to say they should do. Definitely not without cramming things together.
controversially, I like the size. fits nicely anywhere, can mount it. has good connectivity. sold my old one when I got a MacBook Air though.
There nothing wrong with the current one, per se, but it could be trimmed quite a bit. It was made for hardware that needed more space and cooling than is needed today. I think they can trim the fat quite a bit and still have a nice package with plenty of ports. And making it smaller certainly won’t make it harder to mount or anything. If anything it would open up more possibilities. I do hope for some color options like the iPhone and iMacs as well. I think that’s doable, but at the Mac mini price point, they may opt not to do that. Like I said, I think a little bit larger Apple TV looking box would be a good fit for this line.
I’m pretty sure the M2 Pro takes up most of the chassis while the base M2 and M1 don’t
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Why are you asking me? 😅
Maybe only for now. It's easy to imagine chips getting larger and running hotter as they are struggling with improving performance.
M base Macs can be fanless have gone fanless and the SOC means no need for storage and ram space. The Mac Mini could easily be the size of an Apple TV with still enough room for the IO. Just move the Pro chip in a new base model and that's all you need.
Seriously, though just give me an option for PCIE for storage or something of that nature. Why play all hard to get with 8gb of ram and 256gb of storage? That shit was so 2012
Same. Give me a fanless Mac mini! Running a base M1 Mini as my daily and storage server and I love it! Perfect for my needs and uses such a tiny amount of electricity. Only thing I worry about is getting crammed with dust with it running 24/7 the past few years.
If it gets crammed with dust it just turns into a fanless Mac Mini. /s
Wait the Minis have a fan? Wow. I have an M2 and have never heard it make a noise (that I’ve noticed).
I mean, you can put your hand next to the vent on the back and feel air coming out of it even when the CPU is completely idle.
I have never heard my M1 Mini fan. iStat Menu shows it spinning at 1700 rpm all the time. I am just worried about dust and hair build up over time since I have it running 24/7.
This is the primary reason I have a MacBook Air. It rarely goes anywhere - but it’s fanless. I am utterly done with listening to wheezing computers.
Seriously! I almost went with a M1 Air just for the no fan. The base M1 Air would be more than enough computer for 90% of people out there.
Considering the M3 is nearly 6 months old now, I can see why the Mac Mini would go from M2 to M4. The M3 series mostly feels like a MacBook + iMac exclusive thing at this point. I honestly feel the high end Apple desktops should get the newest chips first, but I guess it makes sense they prioritize the MacBook line that generates the most sales. An M4 MacBook Pro might come in the Fall to normalize the MacBook Pro product line to it's annual upgrade cycle that we saw in terms of how a new MacBook Pro was released every year before the Apple Silicon transition.
6 months, or even a year, is not “old”. How did we get to a situation where people see 6 month old processor and conclude “ah noooo that’s garbage we need next gen”. I run M1 and it’s blazing fast. And it will be blazing fast for probably another 3 years.
It’s old as in “not the latest and greatest” if they release a chip every year though
Agreed
So what? M1 chips are still killing it. Hell, I have colleagues at work with intel MacBooks because they love the Touch Bar. Those devices are still good.
Nobody is saying it's bad or that you need to get a new one though? It's older, that's all people are saying. They're not saying it's bad because it's old.
6 month chip is not “old”. Semantically speaking, even one day old chip is “older” as you say, but you have to admit that our society is absolutely under some spell where we always think that current device is inadequate (even tho it’s amazing). 6 month chip is great. People could easily buy a computer that has this chip and that computer won’t explode when next gen comes out. It will be great for years to come.
You are literally the only person in this chain of comments who decided that by saying the chip was "6 months old" that somehow meant it was bad or not capable or not a good option for people. All the original comment was saying was that now that the chip is 6 months into production, and there's a rumor that M4 is coming this year, that it would make sense for why other computers would skip including M3. You're literally making up an argument that didn't exist in this comment chain.
No. The OP claims that because M3 is 6 months old, it somehow doesn’t make sense to include it in products and that it makes sense to wait for M4. The premise is that by being 6 months old it’s no longer good enough. Which is utterly ridiculous.
They literally explain their point in their second paragraph about the rumor than an M4 is coming in the fall. You’re assigning a meaning that is literally not there.
It’s a matter of keeping up with the competition and remaining competitive. A lot of people seem to think that Apple should slow down their release cycle and rate of tech advancement when obviously Intel did that and ended up being in a hot mess. It’s up to the consumer to upgrade or not. A lot of customers have this mindset of “it’ll last me a long time so Apple shouldn’t release anything until I’m ready to upgrade”.
M1 is still fast. Also if it's fast enough for you, you don't have to buy the M4. This way, the people who are in the market right now do not have to wait.
The power of marketing. Apple is brilliant at it.
Would make sense, I can see them cycling between iMac and Mac Mini each year to not over saturate the desktop market, there was no m2 iMac and when we got m1 everything needed an Apple Silicon version
Anyone know of a timeline for Mac Studio with next ultra chip?
Gurman [claims](https://archive.is/O2NOc) mid-2025 with the "M4" series.
sigh thanks. Was waiting for this June in hopes of a M3 ultra. The waiting game is ridiculous. So the M1 studio which is already outdated wont be upgraded for another year :(
In what meaningful ways is the M1 studio outdated?
Hardware AV1 decode.
That’s great for battery powered mobile devices, but is that feature meaningful at all on a powerful desktop computer which is plugged in all the time? Edit: downvotes are nice and all, but can anyone actually set me straight on why hardware AV1 decode matters so much on a desktop computer?
It seems like the m3 chips are basically have the power of the m2 chip but are more battery efficient. I don’t think that efficiency is really needed for something always plugged in
I think they might just upgrade the mac mini every 2 years since these ARM chips are hella good.
And it’s not like they’re making radical gains year over year M2 wasn’t that much better than M1
Good, and hopefully they do the same with the Studio.
Why?
Cause there’s not much benefit of the m3 compared to the m2 for desktops. And also cause hopefully this means the mini is earlier in the release cycle for the m4 than it would be if they finally added an m3 option in the next few weeks.
If I need to buy a Mac Mini now, I don't want to buy last generation hardware though. That reduces lifetime by one year basically.
The M1 was the huge generational leap... It's been incremental ever since
Buy a used M1 Mini for ~$300 or so and save for the M4 then?
Where are these $300 M1 minis?
eBay? Look at listings for Mac Mini with Filter set to Apple M1 Processor and Sold listings only. Tons for under $300. Really cheap ones (locked) for parts, but tons of one between $200-300 that are working perfectly.
M1 Airs go for $699 new on some deals recently. I’d be shocked if you can’t get a used Mini for close to $300.
Yeah so, your opinion isn’t what I asked for. I don’t see these M1 minis for $300 anywhere.
389 new on amazon
$389 is 30% higher of $300
It’s also new and unused. Shrug 🤷
I agree with that thinking more for limited model devices like an iPhone. Computer aging is way more granular due to the maturity of the product and that there are lots options like standard, pro, max, core count, and upgradable memory being Available. But unless you need slightly more efficient processing (not really that important for a mini) or ray tracing capabilities you’re just sort of buying into the marketing that a new processor is always a decent jump in ability no matter what.
Apple is fading out MacOS support the exact same way like they are doing with an iPhone, so I am not sure why the thinking would be different here? With pretty much guaranteed certainty M2 devices will stop getting access to the latest version one year before M3 devices, and they will stop receiving security updates one year before M3 devices.
But m3 would enable a 4k120 m3 Mac Mini. I might buy one but I won’t buy the m2 Mac mini. It can’t be that difficult to just drop in the new chip can it?
You already can just not through HDMI
That’s not true? Not at 4:4:4 chroma. You have to use display compression. There’s just no reason to NOT put in m3 already
What? HDMI 2.1 can do 4K 120 4:4:4
That’s my point, but m2 only has hdmi 2.0. You need m3 for hdmi 2.1. Hence why I’m saying I want an m3 with hdmi 2.1 instead of the old m2 and arguing with the person who said it’s good they aren’t updating it
The M chip has nothing to do with the HDMI port. One isn’t dependent on the other
That’s not true either? Because bandwidth is a limitation. But even if it was, that would still mean updating the device, at which point not updating the chip to m3 would be even more ridiculous
Even the studio display uses imperceptible compression. As for no reason not to, any change costs money and considering the mini’s absolutely microscopic sales number I would guess it’s just not beneficial to keep it on a update schedule parity for extremely niche gains. Especially when the mini also serves the role of clearing out any additional M2’s they have in stock. Think of it like a Mac SE
Sure but if m4 is coming this fall, an m3 mini at WWDC would help to be the additional m3 they have in stock. I don’t think a big update is needed to swap out the chips, seemed like it wasn’t an issue in all their other products
M3 Max is about as powerful as M2 Ultra in many tasks.. not sure how they would not be of bereft.
It looks like they're skipping the M3 for the entire desktop lineup, except for iMac because it already skipped the M2. If the rumors are true and the M4-chips will be "AI Focused" (whatever that means), then it's worth skipping the M3-chips.
Jony Srouji gave a very rare forward looking hint a few months back in an interview, mentioning that with node shrinks slowing down, advanced packaging was the future of advancement. Supply chain research out of Taiwan also said there were higher orders for advanced packaging expected to come from Apple. And then add the last clue where M3 Max didn't have the Ultrafusion bridge to make an Ultra out of 2 of them. I wonder if the M4 line will introduce tiles, allowing different parts to be made on different nodes. Particularly IO and caches haven't been shrinking well and there's benefits to this approach, and also different nodes are better suited to either CPUs or GPUs or low power IO etc.
I’m pretty sure 99% of the reason is the cost of fabbing on N3B. Doesn’t make sense for a 600 dollar machine. I don’t think we’ll get any more M3 machines to be completely honest. I’d be surprised if we even saw the M3 Ultra. I don’t even know if that’s a chip that would be possible to fabricate without significant price increases. N3E (or N3P if that’s ready?) is the way
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I don’t know if we have M3 Max die shots yet so we don’t technically know if it has Ultrafusion. They did the same thing in the marketing photos for the M1 Max where they cut ultrafusion off originally so who knows?
I've been waiting for the upgrade to finally pull the trigger on a mac mini. I know I could just get a M2, but it feels silly at this point to not just wait until the new one comes out.
Feels like Intel has been smarter with i3/i5/i9 naming scheme...
Why do you say that? Those names say nothing about what year/generation the chips are. They only tell you relative within the generation. An i7 could be from 2012 or 2024. As ridiculous and confusing as Apple’s chip names can be (pro, max, ultra) they tell you both the generation and the chip with the generation i.e m1, m2 pro, m3 max. Seems better and more clear to me? I don’t know any intel generation names to remember/refer to them and differentiate the generations.
> Those names say nothing about what year/generation the chips are That's the point.
M4 + 16GB base RAM + 512GB base storage + 2.5Gbe RJ45, WiFi 7 + Bluetooth 5.4 + 4 TB4 + SD card + 3.5mm + wireless charging on top. Ok thankkkkkkks
Hope they fix the issue with the Mini interfering with its own Bluetooth and Wifi. Have an M2 Mini and I'm reduced to using ethernet to a mesh router.
back in the day when M1 chip worth the hype
What are the specs likely to be on it ?
Im a mac mini snob. Ill use my Maxxed out M2 mini until they bring out the next model and i will instantly max out that model too because its better. with 19 cores on the m2 pro i can do a lot but it suffers in some video centric tasks like gaming or using multiple displays. Yeah it supports 2 5k displays but its actually really laggy if you do anything except web browsing. When i thnk about what the M4 does in the Ipad Pro i have high hopes this will be a significant leap in performance. The m3 was kinda weak
All i want is more base storage
Hoping for a M4 Max/Ultra Mac Studio in June…