Thoughts on WWDC and AMD’s Ryzen 3000 Series

Many positive developments occurred during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The iPadOS fork brings about many overdue features such as Bluetooth mouse support and more. The Mac Pro being released in the fall has certainly set the Internet afire with chatter. There is a level of engineering present in the full stack of what has been revealed that demonstrates what a product can be when a company actually listens to its customers. The primary misfire during WWDC involved the pricing for the optional stand which supports its new 6K resolution monitor. It appears that initial feedback from the crowd was worthy of censorship. While we don’t deal with truly high-end professional monitors here, every monitor that has been purchased over the past 15 years included the stand. The warranted ridicule for making a potentially integral part of the display use experience could have easily been avoided by adjusting the base MSRP of the monitor to include the stand by default. Less waste due to shared packaging and complete usability fresh out of the box should have been obvious from a marketing and product development perspective. At $999 MSRP, we can only hope that the stands are made out of recycled vibranium shavings obtained from conflict-free Wakanda minerals.

AMD’s Computex announcements and subsequent clarifications instill a fair degree in confidence related to the soon-to-be-available Ryzen 3000-series processors. The spread of core counts and performance profiles per processor sound ideal. Pricing is in line with prior iterations from a value proposition perspective. The first-mover advantage to utilize the PCI Express 4.0 standard has resulted in the reintroduction of chipset cooling fans for the majority of consumer focused X570 chipset-based motherboards. The proactive approach by the supporting vendors to mitigate the risk of heavy I/O-induced thermals possibly compromising system stability is a good first step in providing a reliable and flexible platform. AMD’s decision to limit support for PCI Express 4.0 to its newest chipsets is also a wise decision. The potential problems that may have manifested across budget boards are effectively mitigated with this decision. Ryzen 3000-series processors will still be a higher performance drop-in replacement (with applicable BIOS update) for many of the systems out there today. We’re looking forward to benchmarks next month.