Be patient: this is a strange idea at first glance. But is it possible that Apple is making its Macs? at powerful?
Okay, okay, I know: How can having a computer that’s too powerful be a bad thing? But after announcing the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini this week, I wondered if the company has painted itself into a corner over its impressive hardware.
It’s, admittedly, a strange turn of events to wonder if Apple might have gotten too good at making computers so powerful they’re superfluous for most tasks, but you don’t have to look too far to find see another example of the same phenomenon.
This is a battle that Apple has long wrestled with on the iPad. Ask any user who pushes the limits of an iPad Pro and the consensus is likely to be that the hardware is awesome and incredibly powerful – if only the software could keep up.
Foundry
To be fair, the problem with the iPad is more what’s available on the platform. Yes, you can have all the power of an M2 processor, but how do you really use it? Most iPad users don’t do high-level video editing, encoding, or working with gigantic Photoshop images. (That said, Apple’s ads remind us that any of us could do all of those things… if only we bought an iPad Pro.)
I’m not suggesting that a lack of powerful software is the problem Mac back: In any case, Apple is clearly committed to letting users use as much horsepower as possible for professional applications. And it does this by offering a bunch of different machines powered by a slew of increasingly powerful chips. When Apple announced its first post-M1 processors in recent years, the rollout took on almost comical self-defining proportions as it first announced the M1 Pro and M1 Max, then in 2022 the M1 Ultra. It felt a bit like one of those old infomercials “But wait! There is more!”
The truth is that even the Pro series processors are far too powerful for the most common computing tasks. E-mail, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets: the M1 and M2 can handle it all with plenty of power. And yet, Apple continues to release faster chips, satisfying an increasingly narrow niche of the market (albeit at high margins). Between the M2 Pro and M2 Max MacBooks, the M2 Pro Mac mini, the Mac Studio, and the yet-to-be-revealed Mac Pro, it seems there are more machines aimed at the powerful professional desktop market than consumers. and yet, the higher you go, the thinner the air: there are fewer people in the market for machines this powerful.
The long-standing paradigm for the computer industry is that the more you spend, the more power you get. That used to be epitomized by one specification: the clock speed of a processor. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, customers were fixated on clock speed as the only measurement that mattered — an idea that Apple even tried to dispel with its idea of ”the megahertz myth”. And to some extent it worked: Search Apple’s specs pages or press releases for its new Macs, and you won’t even find the speed of any of its processors.
It’s all about the number of cores now and we’re past the clock speed.
Apple
Instead, it’s been replaced by an alternate metric: cores, both CPU and GPU. The more money you spend, the higher your number of parallel processing units. But even with that, we’ve fallen back into the trap of just gleefully increasing the numbers, emphasizing “bigger is better.” And as with the megahertz myth, the fixation on cores ignores the qualities that really make the difference between models for most users.
Because when all your devices are ridiculously powerful, the distinction comes down to other more tangible attributes: Screen size. Form factor. Number and type of ports. Heck, gate placement. All of which are more easily understood by (and arguably more relevant to) the market than abstract numbers like “20 percent faster.” Sure, for a visual artist pumping out renders that eat up their entire CPU, 20 percent faster could mean saving them a day’s work. But no one believes that a 20 percent faster CPU will allow them to answer emails so much more efficiently that they can start their weekend on Thursday. That’s just not the limiting factor.
With the first two generations of its own chips in its pocket, Apple has easily proven its ability to create unparalleled hardware. And I’m certainly not arguing for that Apple not try to produce the best chips it can. But no leap in the near future will be quite as big as that first one, from Intel to Apple silicon, and as the end of this transition period approaches, maybe Apple will consider other ways to advance the Mac – new form factors? touch screens? – instead of increasingly faster chips with more cores. In other words, to throw back some of the company’s most famous words: maybe it’s time to think differently again.
