Mastodawn

Meanwhile, a thought about the Macbook Neo:

The Neo uses an A18 Pro SOC, the 2024 iPhone Pro cpu—the iPhone 17 Pro runs on the A19 Pro. (The Neo soaks up their stockpile of high-end phone rejects.)

Apple's about to ramp up for the 2026 iPhones, which will release in September on the A20Pro.

Phones outsell laptops by a huge margin so I think the current Neo will be quietly replaced by an A19 Pro model in September, to use up the reject stockpile once as iPhone 17 sales tapers off.

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Charlie Stross Mar 22

Implication: if you want a Macbook Neo this year, maybe wait until September—unless you expect the coming supply chain shock to hit Apple, too. Which is not impossible if TSMC can't meet their chip delivery dates.

If that happens, prices will shoot up and scarcity economics will take over, so buy now and be prepared to run it for the next decade.

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Graydon Mar 22

@cstross Taiwan is dependent on natural gas for electrical generation. Reports vary about their stockpile, but I haven't seen anything that suggests they might have more than 20 days. And like the rest of East Asia they're supplied from the Persian Gulf.

All by itself, that hit on Qatar's LNG facilities makes me think Apple will not escape the supply shock.

The other part of this is that no one who isn't Apple wants to see "it's a phone" laptops. Other parties may encourage the Neo to fail.

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Charlie Stross Mar 22

@graydon The Windows world already has a bunch of "it's a phone" laptops (or rather, convertibles)—Windows on Arm uses somewhat less powerful chipsets than Apple's M-series. (It turns out that the A-series have fewer cores, less RAM/SSD, and much lower power draw but are otherwise similar. Apple actually has an architecture that scales all the way up from earbud microcontrollers to very high end workstations—supercomputers in 2015 terms.)

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Graydon

@cstross Those exist, but that's not where MS wants to be competing; they want to keep competing in their incumbent space, where there's all that software and accumulated supply chain breadth and the possibility of making a performance argument.

The whole data center power supply problem gets a lot worse if they have to back up a couple-three fab generations to be able to keep making chips, too. Which is looking increasingly likely as an outcome.