Apple just had an extremely fallow decade in the 2010s (in terms of design) because they were making so much $$$ with iPhone that they stopped caring about the Mac. Jony Ive also left the company during that period.
I so hope there will be a Mini with the M1 Max, as this would finally be the desktop Mac, so many people have been waiting for (me including).
The future finally happened in terms of fast external peripherals (especially storage), and I don’t have a burning need for a Mac with upgradable internal storage anymore.
In 2010 I got a $100 graphics card that let my PC do things that the PS3 and Xbox could only dream of. Now for the cost of a “mid-range” GPU it’s possible to get a Switch with a game or two that look fine and run at fast FPS.
One thing: Macs need to cut the Bs and give us upgradable RAM back
RAM slots aren't free; all that extra interconnect length increases power requirements and becomes impractical with large buses. You'd need 8 SO-DIMM slots to match the bus width of the M1 Max models, at much higher power consumption and slower performance. LPDDR RAM doesn't even exist in removable form for these reasons.
Modern embedded SoC integration is insane. Yes, the "two" memory chips you see on the M1 are really 8 discrete dies/chips (4 stacked together inside each of the two packages), and the "two" big fat things around the Pro are actually 2x8; double them up for the Max and that's how you get to 32 channels. Good luck putting that through a connector...
I don't see that happen any time soon, not with their new focus on building the core as a SoC. Maybe with the MacPros, there will be on-SoC RAM and slower off-SoC, but I doubt it till I see it.
never going go happen as Apples loathes users' freedom. they prefer selling a disposable brick.
Yes. I remember seeing several Clevo models in their offerings. Like most laptops, they have really bad thermal management and atrocious manufacturer software.
This is really the first time in years a purpose-built professional laptop has came out with nice build quality, keyboard, display etc that clearly prioritizes pro users both in form (it's fatter for cooling again!) and function (beastly ARM SOC).
So while it's a low bar it's a loooong time since it's been cleared.