I was going to say, sounds like my college experience decades later. Still a very congested laser link, and I had a headless minitower instead of a rack (though I wasn't a CS student).
The lack of a black iPhone 17 Pro... has me dumbfounded. I might skip this year.
I'm really happy with the camera features, but there's less differentiation between base iPhone 17 and 17 Pro this go-round. Probably enough for me to still get the Pro, but the iPhone 17 is looking like a pretty cool option this year.
The full 40c Max GPU is back up to the full 400GB/s bandwidth, but you're right, the Pro has significantly lower memory bandwidth, and the 30c Max does too.
that, and the missing 27" iMac, seemed to very keenly indicate that if you want more power or more pixels, Apple will push you to buy a Mini + a Studio Display.
Going to be looking for outside validation of that Max GPU performance before making a buy decision, I think. Biggest hopes for this generation were dramatically better GPU performance--and Apple says they've got it--but we'll have to see how that actually pans out.
I was also hoping for a fourth USB4/TB4 port, which doesn't seem to be coming. Oh well.
Also from the P0 blog post:
Variant 1: bounds check bypass (CVE-2017-5753)
Variant 2: branch target injection (CVE-2017-5715)
Variant 3: rogue data cache load (CVE-2017-5754)
My checking doesn't show any of those three explicitly listed in Apple's security updates up through 10.13.2/2017-002 Sierra.