In reply to a post by jchamier:

The next model in the line would be the Air, also passively cooled, but have more expensive cooling. The Pro models are required to get active (fan) cooling.

I thought they were going to bring a new one out with a A19 or something like that.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I think it was Seymour Cray who famously remarked that Cray Reseach was "primarily a refrigerator company" 😅

Reminded me of the old Atlas computer at Harwell (link), it was rumoured to be the only building on the site where the senior engineers made the tea, because they were the only ones with the keys to the refrigeration area where the milk was kept

Maybe in 2027 I would guess either every year, or every other year for something the price of the Neo.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Even iPhones do cooling (of a sort) now…

So far the Pros, not the standards or e... but it will come down the range.

When you’ve got on the region of 30 billion odd transistors all doing their thing several gigahertz, even the most power-efficient chip designs will get toasty.

In the Apple ecosystem, the cooling design of the Mac Studio is the other end of the spectrum for what can be / needs to done to maintain un-throttled peak performance.

The modern day Mac Pro effectively.

I think it was Seymour Cray who famously remarked that Cray Reseach was "primarily a refrigerator company" 😅

Doesn't surprise me, Cray and IBM had to invent a lot of the fundamentals.

Another famous quote:

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I think it was Seymour Cray who famously remarked that Cray Reseach was "primarily a refrigerator company" 😅

Reminded me of the old Atlas computer at Harwell (link), it was rumoured to be the only building on the site where the senior engineers made the tea, because they were the only ones with the keys to the refrigeration area where the milk was kept

Nice!

"From 1967 until 1985, several of the earliest computed generated image (CGI) or computer animated films were produced at the laboratory,[4] particularly for the Open University.[5] Most famously, the laboratory's facilities were used to produce the raster wireframe model rendering shown on the navigation monitors in the landing sequence of the 1979 Ridley Scott film Alien which won the 1979 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects."

Crazy to think of the advances in compute power over the decades. Ordinary desktop machines today are about 8 or 9 *orders* of magnitude faster than those machine, Atlas 1 and ICL 1906A

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Doesn't surprise me, Cray and IBM had to invent a lot of the fundamentals.

I had to think hard for a moment...do IBM actually still make stuff?!

Seem like they've comes full circle on the company that they were 70 years ago and just make mainframes (well one model anyway) 😂

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

I had to think hard for a moment...do IBM actually still make stuff?!

Yes, but nothing in consumer space. The zSeries mainframes are a big cash generator, and the POWER servers, that can run Red Hat for POWER or AIX or i/OS (formerly AS/400) seem to be popular for those with their own corporate data centres.. (See IBM's annual report, or The Register's hilarious summary). The company is massive in Consulting and in Software too.

Just no laptops, desktops, or monitors, so the consumer and SMB markets don't see.

In reply to a post by billford:

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I presume the security thing is the firmware update that a newer OS would update the Mac to

Yes, that was my concern. I'll agree that "bricking" was probably a bit OTT, but it could leave you in a difficult position for recovery.

Time Machine would be no help, it doesn't back up firmware. If the incumbent OS can't handle the changes then there's probably no point in trying to re-install it. I wouldn't even know where to start in trying to revert to an earlier firmware version, so about the only option is to properly install the OS you'd just been investigating... which you might not want to do.

I've always been somewhat risk-averse so maybe I'm overthinking it, but I think I'll just let the idea stew around in the old subconcious for a while

I thought I was also risk averse until a few weeks ago, when I was hit by an unforeseen disaster: my 2020 iMac crashed irretrievably - out of the blue, the screen suddenly went black, and the iMac could not be rebooted; in three hours over two sessions on the same day with Apple advisers on the phone, they concluded the likelihood was that a RAM component had failed. With this year of this model of Intel Mac it is a questionable costly repair to replace Ram components.

I had long thought there was a potential issue with the lack of spare storage capacity, on this 2020 iMac, which I guessed was due to my early mistake, in migrating from my previous iMac via a Time Capsule (then in use as a both router and backup), rather than using the migration assistant, due to the wifi malfunctioning on the earlier iMac. I had thought it is possible some convoluted data duplication had occurred with this migration.

Then it turns out that the La Cie one-terabyte back-up disk, which was connected to the 2020 iMac at the time when it crashed and through all the attempts to restart this iMac, could not be read either - as it will now not recognise its own password.

So perforce moving on to a new computer with none of my previous configuration nor data (thankfully all photos are backed up in icloud), luckily I found that having chosen a while ago to configure the Firefox browser on my old iMac, to synchronise with my iPad, once installed Firefox promptly synchronised over all my browser bookmarks, extensions, settings etc. to the new Macbook. This really is helpful, as such an extensive browser configuration is hard to recall or reconfigure.

Though a lot is now lost, in valued records and files, which I have no clue now, how to recover. The monetary cost of this iMac crash, has been similar to the cost of the two storms which followed fast one on the other, here, a few years ago, but this has been more stressful, by a long chalk.

The sudden transition from Sequoia on the iMac to Tahoe on the Macbook involved a visit back to the shop to ask why the colours were all wrong - if you make a mistake with an obscure setting in the accessability Settings which should definitely *not* be adjusted from "normal", all your photos go wildly wrong - my mistake. But sperately to this I have only found one option among 8 in the "Colour Profile" list which I think is natural, and correct, for photos - and without it I'd honestly be stumped to live with Tahoe. Lluckily it exists and I found it.

That’s rotten luck. 😭

Had a quick search and looks like the hard drive on your machine is probably soldered on to the main logic board / motherboard and encrypted via the T2 security chip. So it’s not like it could easily be taken out and put in a donor machine for recovery.

Saying that there could still be a way of getting the data off the SSD (and/or external drive), but you may need to get data recovery specialists involved as it will likely be hardware encrypted.

Did you not have files backed up to iCloud as with photos?

I wondered why you didn't seem to have been around much recently, you clearly had other things on your mind

Like Pheasant, I also did a bit of googling around but couldn't find anything useful. But there was an item of interest which I didn't know about (here)- if TM backs up to a network drive, it will periodically and automatically do a verification run, or you can start one manually. If it's directly connected (eg USB) then it doesn't and you can't. Mine uses an 8TB USB drive, so might rethink my backup strategy...