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points by paxy 2 days ago | 0 comments

Minor rant – why come up with a consistent CPU naming scheme (Mx generation with Pro, Max etc. tiers) but then sell variants of each with different numbers of cores? It tosses the entire convention out of the window.

It is especially annoying during resale or benchmarking, because “M5 Pro” by itself doesn't mean much, and you have to count the number of CPU & GPU cores to figure out the actual SKU.

[–] 100percentjake 2 days ago

After getting my M1 MBP I mostly stopped paying attention to the new releases until the M4 came out and I decided to see how much "better" it was and was equally completely baffled by the insane number of SKUs and their seeming overlap. Insane product lineup decisions.

[–] tacon 2 days ago

Where is a Steve Jobs to return to Apple and simplify the product lineup again?

[–] drum55 2 days ago

They’re binned, not every piece of silicon will work perfectly so they’re selling the ones that did as higher SKUs and the ones with minor flaws become the lower core counts.

[–] paxy 2 days ago

Yes which is why every company that does this kind of binning advertises the actual SKU they are selling. This doesn’t fit the Apple marketing vibe, and so we end up having to guess.

[–] drum55 2 days ago

In the system info they’re referred to as M1 Pro 10 Core or whatever, much easier than Xeon 2950 E3 v3 in the scheme of things.

  Chip: Apple M5
  Total Number of Cores: 10 (4 Super and 6 Efficiency)

Same amount of information, just formatted differently ultimately.