> Can I upgrade the GPU chip in the Blackmagic eGPU?
> No, the design has been optimized for quiet operation so it’s better suited for creative customers. This means the design is not a simple chassis with a PCIe card plugged in, but an integrated electronics, mechanical and cooling design that cannot have the GPU chip upgraded or changed.
$699 and no ability to upgrade makes it pretty clear that they're targeting business customers.
Sounds like a perfect fit for the Apple ecosystem.
That said, in this case, I don't see what is being gained by not making the GPU swappable or at least accessible (although it might very well still be). I'm assuming they could simply only offer official support for the one it contains but let people do whatever they want with it (which again might be the case in practice, they just aren't announcing it officially).
Some huge percentage of that is because many if not most laptops shipping today have wired everything down. You can't even update the Wifi chip in most laptops today, even though the whole reason we put Wifi on a daughtercard in the first place is because we knew the standards were going to have to move...
Meanwhile, I'm typing this from a five year old laptop that I would have happily upgraded by adding more RAM if possible, and I know a lot of people that would be more than happy to do the same, since CPU technology hasn't really been improving in leaps and bounds and neither has laptop design in the past five years.
Let's not be afraid to call it what it is: It's planned obsolescence. They want you to have to buy a new one in 18 months when they ship version 2.
Until last year, I physically removed the default cards in any of my laptops to put a "known good"" Dell ath9k in place. I bought them in bulk, and I may still have some spares
i am now investigsting "modern" alternatives
But, you know, once in 30 years of owning laptops.
My laptop is 4.5 years old now and I'm starting to think about replacing it. It was upgraded the week it was purchased, with a bigger hard disk and 16 gigs of memory (and a US keyboard, but that doesn't count) and that was the last upgrade it had. The next one will probably be never upgraded, as the manufacturer offers the configuration I want (at the time, Dell didn't). I expect it to last about 5 years just like this one.
Would I love to have a faster laptop? Of course I would. Can I justify the cost in terms of productivity gained? No way.
One of the elitebooks I saw recently doesn't even need a screwdriver to open the laptop.
I guess the business Dells are the same?
Yes, making things upgradeable generally adds weight and size to components. Sockets aren't "free", calling it planned obsolescence is absurd. They've been designed to have wired in components for a reason. You may not agree with that reason, say size constraints, but that is the constraints it was designed under. Weighting any decision is: how much will this cost our design? (note, cost here is not just money, its time, size, weight, manufacturing cost, complexity, etc...)
Upgradeability is a feature, if nobody is willing to pay for it, guess what will happen to the feature? Same thing as happened to our own species tails, they became obsolete.
And no ape had its tail cut in the name of evolution. It happened slowly, as older apes were replaced by newer models.
Maybe their next iteration might have replacable gpu cartridges or something? But I can totally see why they wouldn't prioritise this. Not everything companies do is done out of malice.
Because the CPU is not a problem and no noticeable difference in performance from generation to generation, makes no damn sense to replace their laptops.
You get easily get more than 5yr at less cost if you spec for upgrade ability up front (good CPU + motherboard specs) and then do a mid lifecycle ram, storage, etc upgrade. Rolling upgrades can save even more money if done properly because the hardware coming out of use becomes your service parts for the stuff that's getting up there in age.
Regardless, the best solution is whatever fits your specific needs best.
It was an old work machine that I got to take with me when I left that job so it was far overspecced for casual use.. though it feels so much better now.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Installing+MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+...
I may end up staying with High Sierra, but I'd really like to try out the dark mode
Apart from that, no problems at all.
http://dosdude1.com/highsierra/ and the related forum posts were excellent.
I've added RAM and replaced the HD with a SSD on a laptop I've owned since 2005,and would upgraded more chips if it was possible.
If you asked any macbook pro owner if they were willing to spend money to double its RAM or HDD capacity I'm sure you wouldn't get many negative answers.
The price of upgradabilty is a heavier, thicker machine with probably less battery life (because they now squeeze the cells into every nook and cranny).
The ability to upgrade a machine is not a no-cost argument.
If given a blanket question of - ‘would you like to be able to upgrade your laptop?’ I’m sure the answer would be 100% Yes!
But, if you said ‘would you like to be able to upgrade your laptop but it will be half an inch thicker and a pound heavier?’ You’d get quite a different answer.
Based on what I've seen from non-technical friends and family, the standard approach to laptops is to buy a $300 netbook, fill it with crappy browser extensions and malware over a few years, complain that the computer is "too old and slow", throw it out and buy a new one.
It's really not, and it's quite obvious that the baseless assertion that no one wants to upgrade hardware is rather mind-numbingly absurd.
There are businesses dedicated to repair, upgrade and refurbish computers, including laptops. There are businesses dedicated to sell used hardware which offer clients a choice of processors and other components, including different makes and models. It's utterly absurd that we're supposed that this basic need simply vanishes in a specific form factor.
but even that is obviously wrong because the 99.9% he claimed out of thin air.
And it's wasteful - once the GPU is out of date you have to dispose of a perfectly good TB3 enclosure.
Another anti-consumer decision made under the auspices of design and practicality that consumers want.
I cant imagine a single customer has ever asked for a non-upgradable eGPU.
Who cares that 50% of the components in both boxes are functionally identical? Certainly not all the not overly technical folks out there.
The lack of upgradability on the newer machines is a real turn off.
If you don't need macOS or an ultra-elegant thin computer with an incredible screen, you'll probably be happier with a PC from Dell or Lenovo with similar specs and an updated machine every 2 years. But they are neither elegant, nor thin. At least they run Linux very well.
My current personal laptop is 4.5 years old and I am now considering replacing it with a machine with specs similar to the PC I described - non-thin, non-elegant, decent-but-not-incredible screen, a non-bleeding-edge CPU, as much memory as possible, some flash storage and a hard disk and I don't expect to upgrade it in less than 5 years.
But hey, it's thin and light and aluminum, so all is forgiven, right? Don't get me wrong, the MBP is a pretty gorgeous device, but it's pretty hilarious to say that all is good and well just because it's thin and light and aluminum.
The problem is that not everyone has the budget to buy a fully-speced machine at the time of initial purchase. Also, many laptop vendors charge a significant premium to buy such configurations.
Apple partly solves this by simply not even selling the low-speced "base model" that other vendors would advertise. But still, buying low/mid-range now and upgrading later can be significantly more tolerable on the wallet than going-for-broke every major upgrade cycle.
Yes. In some markets Apple offers financing options right on their website. In case of businesses, they can deal directly with their banks.
People who want upgrade-ability aren't wrong for wanting to buck the throw away society we've become.
You can probably still buy one of those mobos and swap it out. Just look on ebay.
This design looks a lot smaller, and I'm sure it is a lot quieter as well. If you don't want those things and do want upgradability there are plenty of other options available already.
You're right, they don't. They ask someone else to do it. So, I'd bet your number is way off.
I've read statistics that most users, business or not, don't update anything, even when the hardware gives them the opportunity.
For businesses it doesn't even make much sense to update: they can just lease or buy new computers and have them as a tax writeoff.
As for most people, they just buy a new PC every 5-6 years (can be 10 years for the less interested in tech), and that's it.
It's a small niche of tinkerers and "power users" (actually power tinkerers -- there are users that do much more important stuff with the computers than them that still don't tinker at all) that ever does upgrade stuff.
Of course that's includes many people in our tech bubble, but you'd be surprised how many programmers don't care for upgrading and tinkering, and just buy a new laptop every so often.
As a programmer myself (CS degree and everything) I know I hate tinkering with hardware with a passion, but I know lots of others that do too. Of course I also know many dev friends and colleagues that do like building custom rigs.
the new mac has a 4TB SSD option for £2800. You can buy a 4TB top of the range samsung SSD for £800.
£2000 profit is a good motivation for sticking stuff down.
https://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-rSSD7101A-4TB-NVMe-Drive/dp...
The samsung SSDs have about 15% the read speed Apple is advertising.
HP EX920: http://www.legitreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/hp-ex...
Apple: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/Apple/MacB...
Same AS SSD benchmark.
Now you can argue that since SSD performance increases with size, maybe that's why. Then prove it.
I'm seriously interested if there's some sort of DIY out there wherein you could just buy a bunch of chips from eBay, put together some enclosure yourself and use your own graphics card. That'd be the dream. Any money not spent on enclosures is money well spent on a good GPU.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-1X-Expan...
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/60CM-PCI-Express-1X-To-16X-P... (Ingeniously, on this one, they've re-purposed USB 3.0 cables to carry the high-speed PCIe lanes).
We use Resolve in VM with hardware passthrough and can monitor its display output from within another VM this way.
Apple nails the prosumer, but I really don't see many using their hardware in industry.
One vendor (Sonnet) [1] has a 580 solution at 499. B&H has the no GPU unit at 299. So there are options.
[1]https://www.sonnetstore.com/collections/egpu-expansion-syste...
It costs $250 + GPU.
If you look up the parts themselves, the Pro 580 (in the eGPU box) is roughly 2-3 times faster than the RX 560X that you can get in the new 15" MBP.
this is important to me, glad to hear it!
I can be running Unity, visual studio, adobe premier, illustrator, photoshop, discord, trello, github + a million browser tabs and whatnot and it maketh not a peep.
So, unless ure AAA gaming an average of the shelf GPU these days is passively cooled already.
But I'm not talking about your custom-built gaming PC, we're talking about an eGPU case for a Macbook.
My experience with these type of peripherals (eg external hard drives) is they often say they have a 'quiet fan' but it's not really quiet. And I think it's something I read about being a problem with other eGPU cases.
I have this stuff in my living room. The Macbook is basically silent. I don't want a bunch of noisy fans to come on (they all add up...) every time I dock the laptop and try to do some work.
I won't be gaming. I might have headphones on to do some video editing, if my partner is trying to do her own work in the same room. But I don't want to be obliged to wear them just because of noisy hardware.
It's very nice that you wear headphones when you're playing a game. Me, and probably a lot of other people, don't.
You not being able to hear the GPU when using headphones does not mean it's quiet. It means you can't hear it. Incidentally, any other people in the room or maybe even in the adjacent rooms would be able to hear it very well.
... plug a new one into your new laptop.
I want to see rendering benchmarks (both 1080p/2160p) of this vs external Thunderbolt GTX/1060,1070,1080 enclosures (and AMDGPU equivalents). I mean if it works better and you do a lot of video, then yea, go for it. If it's only marginally better, buy something with a real PCIe slot that's upgradable.
Even business customers should not buy this if the benchmarks don't align. Seriously you're hurting everyone, even if you can afford it. Stop that. Planned obsolescent is terrible. Pay more and buy something you can upgrade, fix and repair.
Throwing out electronics after four years hurts the planet.
It’s a fun hobby. And if you have the cash to spend on always having the best GPU then you probably don’t care that for $1,000 you only get an extra 10 FPS or so.
These days I can’t even remember how old a machine is let alone what GPU it even has. “Why is this box so slow? It’s four years old? Holy shit, when did that happen?”
Even when I had a rig and was reading Tom’s and Anand daily I don’t think I actually ever upgraded a video card twice. Maybe it happened once? The cycles might have been longer back then, but by the time cards had advanced two generations we were moving from AGP 4x to 8X or to PCI-E or multi core whatever. I could easily just go back in time and buy whatever middle of the road Dell lunchbox was available and just replaced the whole thing every year or two and probably saved money for the same performance.
These days I’ll take a non upgradable whatever it is as long as it has a good warranty.
I don't think that's true in this case.
The upgradeable part would just be an PCIe enclosure. PCIe 2.0 is over ten years old and would still be sufficient for many GPU applications with little performance loss. PCIe 3.0 is eight years old and fast enough that we will likely not see 4.0 for many years in desktops (or mobiles) [also 4.0 needs more expensive materials for all involved planars, so... yeah... not doing that for +-0 %].
Clearly technology isn't advancing like it used to. I've been running a machine since 2011 when I built it. 15 years ago I maybe would've upgraded every 4 years. Now I'm almost 8 years strong.
Now everyone has different needs, and I think Apple and similar products haven't really been aligned with those needs perfectly, but how much, from now, can graphics REALLY improve, for most use-cases?
And you’re right—PCIe 3.0 cards out today have plenty of performance for today’s applications. That why you would get a PCIe 3.0 card today. But it doesn’t matter if it’s fixed because you aren’t going to upgrade it.
Actually that's not true. When PCIe 3.0 was introduced, it took quite some time before the (still marginal) performance improvements materialized. We're talking about a few percent at most in games and benchmarks (many are just neutral) between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0, simply because it's not a bottleneck. For not overly data-intensive GPGPU applications (e.g. video things) I reckon that's the case as well. Yes, sure, there are applications you can run on a GPU where PCIe is a bottleneck. PCIe bandwidth benchmarks, for example.
Don't expect PCIe 4.0 consumer-ish (i.e. what this is about) GPUs soon (2019 earliest). It's wholly unclear whether you'll see any performance improvements at all from that — just look at the bus utilization in games and benchmarks, you'll be hard pressed to see more than 10-20 % (which is precisely why running a GPU on a x8 interface (or 2.0) is not an issue).
I was saying that the Blackmagic eGPU in an upgradeable form factor would mean that you get a 200-300 $ (or something like that) GPU enclosure with some electronics in it (Thunderbolt hub, power supply etc.). Then you stick a current GPU into it. This would make sense because GPU replacement cycles are much shorter than the interconnect upgrade cycle. That's why I said that most applications are still fine today with the over ten year old PCIe 2.0.
So just to reiterate: PCIe bus speed is simply not a limiting factor for the overwhelming majority of GPU applications.
Turns out in practice technology changes enough over that time to only leave the case, and perhaps the PSU. The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster.
I don't know what gets saved by upgrading parts rather than the machine. The same amount of electronics are disposed of (or sold on the second hand market)
What is it used for?
If you buy Intel, you know beforehand you won't be able to upgrade the CPU, since the socket is changed (intentionally, of course) every generation. But the CPU isn't the issue for e.g. gaming, and upgrading every generation or every other generation largely doesn't make any sense at all with Intel parts for the last eight years or so.
Since you're saying obsolete, you probably bought into 1150/Haswell. It was known this was the last pure DDR3 platform, but you can still get DDR3 memory new, if you need more. So that's not a problem, really. (And it's actually cheaper than DDR4 memory)
Graphics cards can keep up for years nowadays. I've used a midrange-highend card for five years before upgrading; I could still play new games at mid-to-high settings. Graphics cards can always be upgraded in any computer (if the PSU has enough power, which is rarely an issue).
Is it really true that the socket changes every generation? My impression was that sockets changed every 2-3 generations, not every one. Not that that entirely defeats the point, but it expands the window.
Intel seems to change desktop sockets every 2 years now. That includes multiple generations, but 2 years of CPU improvements is not significant in almost all cases. A new motherboard with each new CPU is the likely situation. AMD has supported sockets for longer, and that seems to be continuing.
I can at least upgrade the SSD and GPU without throwing the whole damn thing out, but even then it's hard to justify.
I agree with the ssd, tho. The newer PCIe based ones in the m.2 formfactor areso much faster it feels a bit like a waste to buy a sata SSD.
Aren't the Vegas quicker, and the NVIDIA offering has been improving quite a bit over the last 2 years? I might not be paying enough attention, but I'm pretty sure the 1080 ti and 1070 ti's came out only recently.
If you upgrade the CPU, you usually have to upgrade the motherboard. That's about it.
How is that at all possible unless it was under powered in the first place? Maybe it can't play some of the latest titles at max settings but a 4 year old machine should be able to run just about everything decently.
What's stopping you from upgrading the graphics card? Looks like plenty of high end cards have PCIe3 support. RAM can always be upgraded, though few games will makes use of the 8GB that was pretty standard in gaming PC's nearly a decade ago. A new CPU won't gain you much gaming wise.
Most games target PS4 level specs anyway, which is now a 5 year old machine.
Unless you got a bulldozer CPU, I don't believe you. I bet that upgrading just the graphics card would give you 90% of the effect of upgrading everything.
You can upgrade your storage independently, you can upgrade you GPU out of step from other components, you can upgrade GPU more often than CPU without compromising too much. And so on. You can for example keep your soundcard since 10 years ago with some fiddling with drivers. One of my SSDs is 6 years old and while not ideal case it is still much faster than modern HDD and I use it constantly.
What you also mention - case and PSU - those alone cost ~100-200$ each, so worthy saving for upgrade. My seasonic PSU will work for a decade at least, or more.
It is not easy, yes. But possible.
Upgrade the RAM at the start of a new spec and you'll be fine. CPU/mobo go hand in hand, but you're rarely going to need to upgrade that anyway.
A pretty enclosure can be worth more than its contents, just accept it as a piece of furniture.
I'm sure you wouldn't scoff at PC gaming rigs with pretty flashing LED lights after all.
"and I absolutely need extra graphical horsepower to perform my job"
"but let's get the Razer core and fuck around for days getting it to work instead of buying the one advertised on the apple site because raisins".
https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-core-x
Now if you use a NVIDIA GPU, instead of an AMD one, then you need to do extra configuration.