I never understood this project. Maybe I'm missing something, but the timescale is such that by the time they're done the product isn't even being sold anymore
At least with Panfrost it made more sense bc it still being used
M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point
I believe Walmart has a deal[1] with Apple to sell[2] M1 MacBook Airs. This has been the case for a year or so, so I don't think it's old stock. They have been in stock for since that date, and slowly getting cheaper.
They’ve always been available at Best Buy, BH Photo, and other authorized partners in the US.
The Walmart deal is a total mystery. It started, seemingly, as dumping new old stock without selling it on Apple.com, but they’ve even updated the machine I think so clearly it’s an ongoing concern.
Nothing like it I know of for Apple, ever. I’d love to know the story.
I would guess Apple’s goal is increasing the number of people buying recurring Apple services, such as icloud and tv+.
It has been a long time since people have needed cutting edge laptops, so an M1 bought today will still work for 90% of people for the next 5+ years. Even if Apple doesn’t earn a large profit margin on the sale of the laptop, they could earn a decent amount on monthly services revenue, plus increased odds of that person buying a watch/airpods/phone/etc.
For what purposes will the RAM and storage not hold up?
I see most people around me watching media, using a web browser to shop, maps, look at photos/videos (small storage is great for Apple, then more people buy icloud), fill out pdfs, and maybe some email or light excel.
Presumably, those are the people likely to buy a laptop at Walmart.
Storage can at least be expanded externally, if at a cost of speed, reliability, and convenience.
For the RAM, 8GB is not enough, but in fairness, when the system can page out at 200GB/s, paging out doesn't hurt nearly as bad. Its only when things have to thrash the page file that it becomes readily apparent on these (say, an application needs to have more than a few GB of stuff resident in memory all the time).
Why would the product have to be available new for the project to be worth it? There are still many M1 chips out there, and this helps prolong the usefulness of those chips.
> M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point
New M1 Macbook Airs are still available at Walmart (maybe elsewhere). But even if not, who cares? People are still writing code for computers that haven't been sold since the 1980s.
Yeah, I get if it's just a for-fun kind of thing. I didn't mean to knock it. I guess generally people want their work to end up being used. The time-line is such that that seems semi-impossible.
As the other replies show, you can still buy this machine, but it sounds like it likely won't be for too much longer
The developers involved must be acutely aware of it. Maybe they have some sense that the work will easily update to current M chips. Or maybe they don't really care about that. It was just an interesting exercise and they move on
At least with Panfrost it made more sense bc it still being used
M1 chip laptops can only be bought second hand at this point