Apple has gotten into Windows and PC territory with their naming for chips and models. Kind of funny to see the evolution of a compact product line and naming convention slowly turn into spreadsheet worthy comparison charts.
That all said, I only have an M1 and it's still impressive to me.
I think they're still keeping it somewhat together, agree it got ever more confusing with the introduction of more performance tiers but after 3 generations it's been easy to keep track of: Mx (base) -> Pro -> Max -> Ultra.
Think it's still quite far away from naming conventions of PC territory.
Now I got curious on what naming scheme could be clearer for Apple's performance tiers.
I agree it’s kind of weird. I do wonder if the ultra was part of their original M1 plan, or it came along somewhere in the middle of development and they just had to come up with a name to put it above the Max.
That said it’s far better than any PC scheme. It used to be easy enough when everything was megahertz. But I left the Wintel world around 2006 or so and stopped paying attention.
I’ve been watching performance reviews of some video game things recently and to my ears it’s just total gobbledygook now. The 13900KS, 14900K, 7900X, 7950X3D, all sorts of random letters and numbers. I know there’s a method to the madness but if you don’t know it it’s a mess. At least AMD puts a generation in their names. Ryzen 9 is newer than Ryzen 7.
Intel has been using i3, i5, i7, and i9 forever. But the problem is you can’t tell what generation they are just from that. Making them meaningless without knowing a bunch more.
At least as far as I know they didn’t remember everything. I remember when graphics cards were easy because a higher number meant better, until the numbers got too big so they released the best new ones with a lower number for a while.
At least I find Apple’s name tractable both between generations and within a generation.
yeah, as I was jokingly implying the names themselves aren't what I would have went with, but overall sticking to generation + t-shirt size + 2 bins is about as simple as it gets.
Until the next Max that goes beyond Ultra!