> far worse because of how monopolies inevitably stagnate

Unregulated monopolies do, but regulated ones can be forced to innovate, both according to a plan, or through a process that internalises competition at the places where impact would be maximised (instead of multiple groups arriving at the same solution in secrecy, multiple groups exploring different possibilities while communicating between them and coordinating their efforts to avoid duplication).

It might be a good time to move PyCon US to Canada again.

Ditch the Aluminium and go with a copper MacBook Pro. Or silver. If you get it with a terabyte of RAM, the silver shell will be a small part of the total costs.

Argentium 960 would most likely be the best alloy for the job, as it’s a good heat conductor and doesn’t tarnish like pure silver.

This tells me the Max CPU chiplet has two interfaces to GPU dies. If you can connect two CPU chiplets via the same interface, making an M5 Ultra is doable by joining two CPU chiplets, each with a GPU chiplet attached.

Given that generation gains are not sufficient to make a Max twice as fast as the previous-gen Ultra, a longer cycle is rational. The M3 Ultra is still the fastest M-series system.

“Rendered obsolete” is a doing a lot here. It might have been discontinued, but it is still faster than the rest of the line and the only self-contained computer that can handle models that large.

The most I would say is that it was discontinued, but, depending on how it goes, it might be just sold out for now pending on memory procurement.

I was betting on the 1TB Mac Studio, but half a terabyte was already an insane amount of memory.