Surprise surprise, a random blogger with “supply chain sources” out of Japan does not know the status of Apple’s 5G modem.

Windows Hello is quite insecure: https://blackwinghq.com/blog/posts/a-touch-of-pwn-part-i/

No, Apple would not love it because it uses way more power. It’s extremely inefficient compared to a regular fan and the battery life would suffer.

M3 has 512GB SSD on the 14" MBP. Only the iMac has 255GB SSD.

Blender’s Cycles engine can make use of hardware accelerated ray tracing and this will hopefully help the M3 catch up with NVIDIA GPUs.

Interestingly the X Elite doesn’t even support hardware accelerated ray tracing which even the 8 Gen 2 supported.

Plus the upcoming Qualcomm’s chip may be comparable in power efficiency, they claimed 30% less power use at the same performance as the M2 Max. So M3 would need to be much better in that sense to still have bragging rights next year.

This was a bit misleading by Qualcomm. What they didn’t show was the power draw at peak multi-core compared to Apple Silicon. Why? It appears that the Snapdragon X Elite uses twice the amount of power as the M2 Max in for example Cinebench 2024 at approximately the same performance, making the power draw comparable to the M2 Ultra.

Yes, last year they had to roll back the GPU changes due to heat issues / 3nm being delayed. This year they were able to implement what they initially planned for the A16. I’m not sure how what you are saying contradicts my comment.

For Geekbench 6 the power consumption is basically the same at higher frequencies and worse at lower frequencies.

The reason the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 does better in Geekbench 5 is because it has more cores. In Geekbench 5 each core does a separate task, while in 6 they work together to solve a task. This change translates better to how smartphones use multiple cores in real life, but it also means multiple cores don’t scale perfectly in the benchmark.

(Sorry if this was mentioned in the video, didn’t get a chance to watch it with subtitles yet).

The issue is likely that 3nm node was delayed. The A16 and A17 have the same codename internally (H15 and H15 Coll), it’s rumored that the A17 is what the A16 should have been if 3nm wasn’t delayed. Now they are basically a generation behind schedule, let’s see what happens next year. At least on the GPU side they have to improve power efficiency.

Upscaling can be optionally enabled, it’s not on by default.