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drnick1today at 3:10 PM4 repliesview on HN

Why doesn't Apple make a tower PC with a standard ATX motherboard, power supply, extension cards, etc, like in the old days? That's immensely more upgradable, easier to cool, and I don't believe most people expect their desktops PCs to be tiny.


Replies

roughlytoday at 3:19 PM

The reason the mini & studio work as well as they do for the use cases that have made them popular again is because the architecture puts memory, cpu, and gpu/npu on the same die, and puts storage right next to it, which is why you get the storage & memory bandwidth you do. The separability of those components would break that, which is why the Mac Pro didn’t survive past one generation in the Apple Silicon era.

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chainwaxtoday at 3:15 PM

I'm actually coming around to realizing that I _do_ expect a desktop PC to be small. I'm finding myself only considering Mini ITX desktop cases when I think about upgrading my desktop. I only have one video card and don't have storage requirements that necessitate lots of 3.5" drives, a big nvme is all I need.

We no longer need CD/DVD/floppy drives, storage has shrunk/moved to the cloud. The only thing that's really grown inside a pc case is the video card, and most of these ITX cases are built specifically around fitting popular cards.

Even folks primarily focused on gaming are probably thinking that a full ATX case is a lot of wasted space.

Maybe it's just me, but I think ATX full and mid towers are going the way of the dinosaur.

WASDxtoday at 3:25 PM

The memory and GPU are integrated into the CPU so those can't be upgraded anyways. That's also how the memory can be so fast (shorter physical distance).

lvl155today at 3:13 PM

They sorta did right? It didn’t sell well at all.