Maursault

> I think a Mini of any spec is a great value.

My second suggestion for 16-core was M2, also. $100 less with 1Gb, and with 10Gb it would be $100 more than you paid. i.e. two of the 8-core M2 Minis with 24GB RAM each would do about twice as much work as the high end Mini M2 Pro alone, sometimes less than twice the work, sometimes more. The same is true of two M1 Max Studios vs one M1 Extreme Studio for the same price. 2 less powerful machines spank one more powerful machine every single time, and one M1 Extreme Studio is definitely NOT worth two M1 Max Studios, same as one 12-core M2 Pro Mini is definitely NOT worth two 8-core M2 Minis.

Everyone is drawn to "the best," and that's where Apple fleeces and makes its money. Pretty consistently forever, the best buys from Apple are never the high end configurations. We may feel secure in what our choices were, doubling down on affirming them, but we definitely pay for it.

> legacy wins

20 years ago, probably. I don't understand why it is still the case today that legacy is important. Who is still running very old, 25yo software, and just how are they wagging the dog?

Itanium was supposed to be powerful, not efficient, and it originated at HP. Atom was x86. If Intel designed something new from the ground up with high efficiency specifications, I don't think it could be too terrible, and I think it would advance SotA to have real competition with ARM designs. The i860 may be Intel's last innovative chip design solely designed in house. Every advance in x86 is just another ugly monstrosity.

Why does Intel need Arm for collaboration, and what does Arm get out of optimizing "Arm’s IP for Intel’s upcoming 18A process technology?" Why doesn't Intel license Arm designs like anyone else, and optimize it themselves? I also don't quite get why Intel doesn't just design their own competing high efficiency architecture, after abandoning x86 and backwards compatibility, of course, something they should have done two decades ago at least.

Not awful, but for $2K you could have had 16-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 48GB unified memory, 512K SSD storage, Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two HDMI ports, four USB-A ports, two headphone jacks, two Gigabit Ethernet.

A lot can change in that amount of time and apparently has. Also, as you're very likely aware, KDE runs on macOS, though idky anyone would want to do that. It certainly wouldn't draw anyone back from FreeBSD. The best and worst parts of macOS are BSD — best because there is a BSD userland, and worst because it's inexplicably outdated.

It's just such a waste of time, resources and talent, when it would be vastly better, and presumably easier, to stop the extinction of vaquita, black rhinoceros and other subspecies, saola, tiger species, leopard species, elephants and sub-species, gorillas and subspecies, orangutang, and hundreds of species of fish, frogs and insects. We don't need fake mammoth. Save the vaquita. And save the Amazon Rainforest, and whatever is left of every other forest.

> KDE is so great.

Funny, back in 2006ish, KDE development was stalled, and it was a janky, inconsistent mess. Everyone hated it and used Gnome, which had a simpler design and was far more stable and smooth.

SP1

> Maybe. But graphics cards aren't the only thing people put into PCIe slots.

Right, so there will be PCIe slots for expansion, they just won't support PCIe GPU, just like Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis for Thunderbolt now. It isn't the PCIe slots that break compatibility, its the difference in architecture between x86 and Apple Silicon that makes them incompatible.

> I remember some PC vendors selling Alpha based workstations running NT in the mid- to late 1990s.

AGFA sold Alphas (DEC-branded) running NT4.1 in the mid-1990s along with their Apogee film imaging equipment to run their Apogee RIP software (which may have been G4-TIFF based at the time). I worked at a commercial printer as a prepress operator in 1996, and the Alpha/NT AGFA RIP just stayed on until 1998, at least that's when I moved on. The Mac workstations saw the RIP as an ordinary printer. There was never any reason to touch the RIP, it just did its thing and shot to the imagesetter. What I saw later was RAMpage equipment, an AGFA competitor, and which was 100% PDF, that separated the RIP from the shooter into two machines, both RAMpage-branded PCs.

> It could be that Apple does away with it entirely and the Mac Studio is the new Pro.

Or the Mac Pro will be released without PCIe GPU support, and Apple will be able to leverage increases in Apple Silicon GPU performance to eliminate any need or desire for PCIe GPU, drawing away high end GPU customers from nVidia and AMD and locking them into Apple Silicon and the Apple ecosystem.

Automatic transcoding is the last thing I'd want wasting processor cycles.