They're still doing miles better than a typical laptop company. If you bought a HP or Dell or Apple and you wanted an upgrade, your only options are to sell it second hand or throw it away. Framework provides a third option of repurposing the mainboard, should you wish to so, plus it creates less e-waste because the screen, keyboard, battery, chassis etc. don't have to be replaced if they're working fine

It's not. TB3 enclosures have been known to offer significantly worse performance than plugging it in directly into a desktop, and the performance difference only increases as GPUs get more and more powerful (and demand greater bandwidth). Off the top of my head, a moderately powerful GPU like the RTX3080 could see anywhere from 20% to 50% performance drop when put into an eGPU enclosure.

Good thing we have choices, eh? It’s not as if the only choices we have are thin and light devices

There are already many games that run well on Windows 11 VM on M1/M2 (Parallels Desktop). For example the Witcher 3, and funnily enough, Skyrim (1080p medium runs at 60fps reportedly). So that's just not true. In any case, performance issues is not a result of the ARM architecture pre se, but rather the fact that PC games are designed with x86 in mind only. If Skyrim were to be converted to Unreal Engine or Unity, for example, it would run very well on ARM devices.

Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about it, but the Switch literally has Skyrim available. And the Switch is an ARM-based chip with a “mobile” CPU/GPU, with 2015-grade performance. Modern mobile processors like the Apple A16 or Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 easily offer 2~3x the CPU/GPU performance

The Apple M1 proved that ARM cores can outpace x86 in terms of performance. Not sure why you’d think ARM chips are inherently weaker or less capable of gaming than x86

Steve Jobs also said that the iPhone 4 was the perfect size and that nobody would buy a larger phone. Guess we all know how that played out

The touchbar was bad because it was replacing physical keys with something worse. Adding touchscreen doesn’t replace anything nor does it remove functionality, it simply adds a new feature.

And I’m sure there’ll still be traditional non-touch optimised UI as well, to cater to existing Macs without touchscreens (and the Mac Mini/Studio/Pro who will probably never have touchscreens) . It’s not like an Intel to Apple Silicon transition where Intel is getting totally abandoned and obsoleted

Think you’re describing Windows. Like I said, there’s nothing preventing Apple from designing it well and seamlessly blending touch interfaces with regular mouse & keyboard. In fact, Apple is probably the only manufacturer in the world that I would trust 100% to deliver technology in a meaningful and useful manner (butterfly keyboard & touchbar notwithstanding)

Psst… you can buy a touchscreen laptop and not use the touchscreen. Mind blowing, right?

(And before someone goes “why include a touchscreen then?”, it’s because consumers now have MORE options to interact with their laptop. You can choose to not use it, or you can use it if you think it helps.)

Edit: the sentiments in this thread reminds me of Steve “Who wants a touchscreen phone without a keyboard” Ballmer. Just because prior attempts were lacklustre doesn’t mean Apple can’t pull off a well-executed version, nor does it mean that touchscreen laptops are useless. The sales of iPad Pro + Magic Keyboard proves that touchscreen laptops are useful, as long as the software is designed for touch interaction

Exactly. So many people whining about how "GPU prices are going up, XXX card being too expensive, XX60-class card being sold for XX80 class money", and I'm just like, you can choose to not buy them? Nobody is forcing gamers to buy the latest GPUs

That's what they said about VR headsets. "It'll never work, look at the VirtualBoy, silly gimmick etc etc." But it turns out that previous products failed not because the concept is useless or silly, it's because technology wasn't advanced enough to create an enjoyable experience. And now VR headsets are a viable and growing market, posted to get better as display and processing tech advances.

Who says the same can't happen of 3D displays?