About that A18 Pro MacBook rumor

24 points by tosh 4 days ago | 19 comments
  • kristianp 4 days ago
    Wouldn't they save on materials if they ditched the M1 Air design? The newer Airs are smaller, using less Aluminium.
    • steveBK123 4 days ago
      Interesting from a cost perspective but I hope it doesn’t introduce any oddities in software compatibility.

      There’s already things the M chip series iPads can do that the A chip series can’t.

      • xattt 4 days ago
        The new multitasking features (movable windows, pseudo-desktop environment) of iPadOS might be telegraphing an “iBook” line-up.

        Meanwhile, the MacBook stays with the M chips.

        • msgodel 4 days ago
          OSX could run just fine on the iPad today. There's no technical limitation, there's nothing to develop (nothing non-trivial anyway.)

          OSX does not run on the iPad because it would give iPad users an escape from profitable "value add."

          • ch_sm 4 days ago
            Also, it doesn‘t run on iPads because it would be very difficult to use all these mouse and keyboard centric UIs with only your finger.
            • 4 days ago
          • dagmx 4 days ago
            What differences in capabilities would there be? The cores are identical, it’s largely the topology that’s different.
            • geoffpado 4 days ago
              I/O seems to be the big one. The M1 has Thunderbolt support, the A18 Pro does not. This would majorly limit the resolution of external displays this MacBook could drive, for example. And the base-model M1 was already pretty limited in that capacity already.
              • abracadaniel 4 days ago
                Apple has a history of gating external displays behind higher price points. Seems reasonable they’d do it again.
                • dagmx 4 days ago
                  Sure but that doesn’t affect software compatibility which was what the person I responded to was talking about.

                  There’ll be hardware compromises of course, but software should run fairly uniformly.

                  • zaptrem 4 days ago
                    Don’t quote me on this but I think the A series also lacks support for virtualization.
              • attendant3446 4 days ago
                People want a macOS on an iPad. Apple is developing a MacBook with an iPhone CPU instead...
                • Svoka 4 days ago
                  what do you mean 'developing'. Prototype mac minis apple sent out for developers to adapt their apps to the new arm world (later named M1) was using iPhone A chips.