That’s actually a nice side effect of all the *rumors pages. The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products. I keep on using my previous products while saving money and planet and being excited about what future holds.
On the contrary, I think that the reliable update cadence in modern electronics means that people should generally all but ignore future product roadmaps.
When you actually need to get a new device, just get whatever the up-to-date thing is.
OK, ok, I suppose that it's reasonable to check the rumor sites to see if you should delay by a month or two. But not any longer than that.
It's much harder with PCs, where you can get, for instance, new Thinkpad's with anything from 11th gen Core i all the way to new Core Ultras. And, now, ARMs as well...
I was inline to buy a 128GB M3 MAX, know that I know the M4 exists and already shipped in the iPad, it lets me know that the whole M4 pipeline has already started and what the perf numbers are, absolutely means I will be waiting. I survived yesterday without it, I can survive tomorrow. And now I can budget in the AMD Epyc bridge that covers that span.
I think Apple has been pretty good about hitting the right cadence with processor perf increases. They are making up for lost Intel time. The M6 is going to make us loose our minds. Apple is going to bring back "this is a munition" ads.
Both the M3 and the EPYC will be useful for far longer than the time it takes Apple to have the M4 on their next-gen laptops. Computers last a lot longer than they used to. I have a 10 year old Mac Mini that’s still comfortable to use, and, while an M3 Mac is a beast, it’s not that much faster than an M2 (or an i7) to create a qualitative change in my workflows. What is possible now was already possible last year. It’s just faster now. I get a higher return on investment with better keyboards and screens.
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
For myself, I like to think of it as applied procrastination. I could buy that new thing I want today.. but something better will come along in time, so I can afford to put it off a while longer yet..
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
Spot on!
Back in the nineties, Intel managed to push competing RISC architectures (UltraSparc, MIPS, DEC Alpha, PowerPC) out of the market using nothing but promises that Itanium was going to blow them all out of the water.
And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.
>And apparently Apple is okay with procrastinating and cannibalizing current sales of M1, 2, 3 if it helps prevent some Snapdragon (or Ampere) sales.
sales of what
i actually can't think of a single competing product. admittedly i don't keep up with laptop news but still, i haven't heard of anything yet that can meaningfully compete with the m1 from four years ago
Microsoft just announced some lackluster arm laptops that they claim can compete with M-series chips. The question is what windows programs are gonna run on them...
Some people have been running Windows 11 for Arm on a VM in Apple Silicon. It has an automatic transcoder that translates most x86 code at start. It seems to run many apps well. Microsoft claims these new machines have a better transcoder. This might work.
For me at least, the best possible outcome of this is that Windows handheld gaming devices become more power-efficient. That might be an advantage over Linux-based handhelds for a while, unless Valve decide that Proton needs to also be an architecture emulator. The chip efficiency wins must surely be tempting in this form factor.
> The rumors of future products keep me of buying the current products.
You may have heard of the 5-minute rule - "Will doing this take me less than 5 minutes? If the answer is yes, do it now." An adaption of that to reduce impulse purchases is - "Do I really need this product right now? If the answer is no, don't buy it."
And on the flip side I am generally hesitant to buy first-release Apple hardware. Over the 20 years I've been buying Apple kit I've generally found it to be exceptionally robust but newly released hardware has had enough bugs (either hardware or OS) that I just sit back and let other users find the issues first. But I do simultaneously have the same issue: if WWDC is coming up within a month or two I'm not going to be buying any hardware because there's a good chance that something new will be released or the hardware I was going to buy is going to get a refresh or a price drop.
