Welcome to the AppleInsider Daily for Thursday, January 26, 2023

File this under unsurprising, but definitely disappointing. The forthcoming M2 Mac Pro is now not expected to support GPU PCI-E cards, so there will be no buying a better graphics processor down the line and fitting it yourself.

It's not surprising because Apple Silicon has lacked support for GPUs other than its own on-processor GPU cores.

Plus we have previously heard that the Mac Pro will also not have user-upgradeable RAM and that is also disappointing yet unsurprising, as one key factor in the performance of Apple Silicon is that its RAM is onboard the M1 or M2 processor.

It's the price of having Apple Silicon, but it's still disappointing because a key benefit of the Mac Pro has been its modularity. In its best incarnations, the Mac Pro could have graphics cards, RAM, and storage all customised at any point.

Now while you can presume we will be able to choose RAM, storage and some processor options at time of purchase, only storage is expected to be upgradeable later.

We'll know for sure when Apple stops fiddling and brings out the Mac Pro. In the meantime, it has today been reported that Apple has paused fiddling over making its own W-Fi processor.

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple has halted development because of shifts in priorities -- and because of forthcoming issues such as 3 nanometer processors, and the impending Wi-Fi standard transition.

It won't make a visible difference to iPhone users as Apple will presumably just continue using the same Broadcom modems it has, but Apple's move to make everything itself has taken a stumble.

So has Apple's stance on privacy, unfortunately. It appears that Apple may have been bowing to pressure from China's government and effectively extending Chinese censorship to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is of course a city in South China, but up until now it hasn't been exposed to the same degree of internet censorship as mainland China.

Hong Kong Apple users report that for about a week, Safari was automatically blocking access to the open source code site, GitLab. Safari blocks sites that are included on blacklists, and for America and most of the world, that list is maintained by Google.

For China, the list is instead run by Tencent, which claims to be a private company, but of course abides by the laws of its own country. For unknown reasons, GitLab was briefly included in Tencent's blacklist and while it was removed after Apple was notified by users, Apple is not saying how it got on the list or whether it had anything to do with removing it.

Charlie Smith, not his real name, of Chinese censorship advocacy group GreatFire said:

"Presumably people purchase Apple devices because they believe the company when they say that 'privacy is a fundamental human right.' What they fail to add is 'except if you are Chinese.'"

China does continue to be a huge market for iPhones, but new figures out today claim that the production delays caused by China's COVID lockdowns have contributed to Apple selling some 12 million fewer iPhones worldwide in the last calendar quarter of 2022, the December holiday season, compared to the same time last year.

That's a decline of about 15%.

Meanwhile IBM has announced that it is laying off approximately 1.4% of its global workforce, or around 3,900 jobs. They're to be cut from IBM's IT Services and Healthcare divisions, and the redundancies follow layoffs from other major technology firms such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Spotify.

IBM gave no reason for the layoffs, but each of those other firms have blamed both the economic downturn, and the post-pandemic return to normal demand. 

So IBM is the latest to cut jobs, Apple has cut development of its Wi-Fi chips and dented its reputation for privacy, and the Mac Pro seems increasingly less appealing, even before it is launched.

You can hear more news from AppleInsider on the weekly AppleInsider podcast every Friday. There's also our HomeKit Insider Podcast for smart home users, that's out every Monday. Links for both shows are in the notes for this one. 

Thanks for listening, I'm William Gallagher and this has been the AppleInsider Daily for January 26, 2023.