Introducing the next generation of Mac
apple.com
apple.com
My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo machine that I paid $200 for that has 8GB RAM.
WHY any power user would buy a MacBook is beyond me. They've become devices that only my mother would use, not to get work done.
Apple should've made the baseline 32GB with 128GB as max spec. It would've forced the whole industry to give us more RAM. So for the next two years RAM will still be stagnant, all other manufacturers that copies Apple will indeed keep shipping 8GB without blinking.
It wouldn't force the industry to offer more. It would just mean purchasers such as your mother wouldn't buy a Mac.
You can't upgrade it on new Mac laptops. The ram is basically fully integrated in the system now.
You can do 16gb for silly high price, but that's also not massive these days.
If you ignore that and the high-end display, touchpad, and keyboard, then I suppose it’s not too far off from a Pi in a fancy case, but then you could say the same for any laptop.
The new one is apparently half empty: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22027513/m...
But in general MacBook Airs are not developer or video editing machines and they're not speced for that.
About half of all my dev friends have given up on laptops (specifically apple gear, incl iPhone) and ALL of them built ryzen-based machines and work from home. My previous workplace refused to buy us laptops and built typical workstation PC's for everyone (quadcore i5 + 16GB RAM + 256GB ssd + 1TB hdd, this was around 2017). The guys that do have iPad's tend to hang on to them but swapped their iPhones with Android phones when they ditched their MacBooks. Main complaint? Ports & (Performance vs Price vs (ryzen pc with same price)).
RAM eats battery. Apple has made a strategic decision to pretend RAM doesn't exist, ship underpowered hardware, then brag about the battery life.
This is also the reason RAM is not listed on iPhone specs.
If I remember correctly the iPhone Pro 12 Max has twice as much RAM as the other 12 models and it's nowhere in the marketing materials. This is not accidental, it's a fundamental part of Apple's strategy.
EDIT: The max has 6GB and the rest of the line has 4GB. That is not twice as much. I did not remember correctly.
Personally, i'd look at how common cross-platform apps are and how many of the frameworks (like Ionic and React Native) don't always use the native system UI in an efficient manner.
It seems a bit like running Electron apps on GNU/Linux and being puzzled about where all of the RAM goes.
While one could argue that there aren't that many visually driven experiences like that out in the wild, the benchmarks still prove that most abstractions have drawbacks.
Of course, there are good reasons for using them, which is also why many choose even the previously mentioned Electron platform for development, instead of something like Qt/GTK on desktop.
But for the discussion at hand, it simply serves as a suggestion that there's more at play here than just "Java uses a lot of memory and can be slow".
The relative openness of Android means your are not always getting the most optimized ROM , a lot of vendors add custom crapware into their phone OOTB.
I am very happy that with all their faults, Apple still ridicules the Webdev crowd
I am a die hard Apple products aficionado, I don‘t use any other computing device, but why are many HN commentors stubbornly defending every Apple decision that limits its users is way beyond me.
Edit: Re taking away freedom: Let‘s not forget the many app store dramas on iOS. This is Apple‘s vision for macOS as well: Install only approved apps, show a warning for all other apps (and finally disallow them?)
When I bought my 2012 MacBook Air more than eight years ago it cost me 100 euros to upgrade from 4 to 8 GB of RAM.
Currently it costs 225 euros in the German Apple Store to upgrade form 8 to 16 GB, which is a higher per GB price than in 2012!
Right? Or did I miss something?
https://www.amazon.com/HyperX-HX424S14IB2-2400MHz-Unbuffered...
Incorporating RAM into the CPU package gives a big performance boost at the expense of maximum capacity. To compensate for the reduced performance in tasks that require more memory, you can either add another layer into the Memory Hierarchy (i.e. CPU Cache -> Fast RAM -> Slow RAM -> Swapfile), or you can improve Swapfile speed. It appears Apple have done the latter - they claim their SSD is up to 2x faster.
Video game consoles have done something similar with the latest generation. Only a 2x increase in RAM from the last generation (compared to an 8x/16x increase from the generation before), but a focus on storage performance.
Hopefully AMD learn lessons from that sphere and can bring some of that to our sphere.
You can't just swap the hard disk like before, I'm sure this you be a major headache with repairs
8GB is a huge amount of RAM. I cannot imagine writing a serious program that needs more than 2% of that. The real problem is programmers using "frameworks" and shit that requires inordinate amounts of unused memory.
The rest of us are using Linux, Windows and MacOS, where many processes run side by side, each with memory requirements.
(Naturally this means it is now permanently plugged into mains power and an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse).
Yet the RAM is still sufficient for my use of macOS, dozens of Chrome and Safari tabs, Xcode, TextWrangler, iTunes, etc.
That one aspect never even seems problematic or limiting, and it’s not like I’m oblivious to all the other things wrong with such an old piece of hardware.
While you don't have to join in on that as a developer, you still have to be aware that 95% of users will have no idea that their instant messaging application uses 800mb of RAM to idle, or whether that's a bad thing.
The fact that so many laptops have gone to soldered-in RAM is an entirely different problem, those are all ripoffs no matter what.
Go look at a non-techie webbrowsing habits alone: they have 50 tabs open in chrome, some of which are months old. And they install all sorts of other crappy software, anti-virus, browser extensions. Some of them use Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer at the same time. And/Or if they use Slack/Steam/Spotify/VS Code/etc they are running another 300MB RAM per app.
If you are a programmer, try all that, with Visual Studio or Eclipse running, sometimes at the same time as Android Studio with an emulator running, maybe with a local postgres or sql server etc... it easily eats up that 16Gb. Oh lets sprinkle some docker/vagrant ontop..
Good luck if you are into video/image editing, 3d modeling, illustrating, CAD etc... then MacBook Pro's are basically the wrong tool for the job today, where it became very famous for being the right tool for the job in ~2010.
Same problem with Intel CPU's...they've been riding the wave of success of their initial chip redesign for 10 years and now AMD seems to be wrecking them every 6 months.
My problem with the RAM situation is that we've been paying ~$100 for 16GB for 5 years now.. instead of getting scale up to ~$100 to 64GB and down to ~$25 for a 16GB dim. The RAM companies riding the wave too at the moment. Luckily SSD's forced HDD manufacturers to up their game else we would've still paid ~$200 for 500GB hdd with 8mb cache, so now we at least have 10TB+ drives avail for consumers.
Yes, it's perfectly fine to sell machines like these with specs from 2012 but their efficiency should be reflected in the price. Honestly, what Apple is doing now seems like pushing power users buing new hardware towards non-macOS systems.
The Air ($1249) vs 13" Pro ($1299), you get:
- same CPU
- same GPU
- same Neural chip
- same RAM (8gb)
- More storage for the Air (512gb vs 256gb with 13" Pro)
- You get Touch Bar with 13" Pro
So if you don't care about the Touch Bar, you actually get with the Air:
- better specs
- smaller device footprint
- and $50 cheaper.
Am I missing something?
(I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing; it just makes Telnet more annoying)
Slack and discord, on the other hand, are real drags.
are we really talking about the same whatsapp ? it takes a good 4 seconds to load here. I don't remember ever waiting for MSN Messenger to load, on potato-powered computers.
When people complain about Electron apps, the response is always "modern computers have so much memory anyway, it's fine!"
But then when a manufacturer introduces a computer with slightly less memory (but still a perfectly reasonable amount) the big question is whether it can run all those Electron apps!
Is there a way to break the cycle? This isn't good!
My "typical Mac user" in this case, is my wife. Her 8GB MBP is holding up very well.
The green/yellow/red graph in the Memory tab of Activity Manager is the best way of seeing if you need more RAM at a glance. In my experience, macOS won't do any swapping in the green. In the yellow, the system is still pretty usable but there's some swapping going on. When it turns red, your SSD will be getting thrashed pretty hard.
2. Their entire presentation focuses on editing large image files, editing 4k video, machine learning, and graphics-intensive games (games were mentioned more than anything else)
So, given how these are marketed, they are extremely low on RAM and storage.
That will do it.
I know it's a deceptive metric but Task Manager shows 12.5GB "In Use". 16.2 Committed.
Each Firefox tab has between 250mb and 1g "Memory (Active Working Area)".
HUUUUUGeeeee long tail of 100MB trailing down to 20MB services and things. Adobe has half a dozen at all times, etc etc etc.
I'm game to use any other "more realistic" specification or monitor as I know that with memory paging and virtualization things are wonky.
I don't think this indicates I MUST have 12 or 16 or 32GB - I have a 4GB media PC that works just fine. But I do believe it's an indicator average user can use 16GB, if it's available. Or in other words, if I buy a $1000USD laptop, I don't think 16GB is going to waste away unused with zero benefit ever :-\
Again, perfectly willing to be educated :).
You're lucky any of those other applications opened at all!
But in context of expectations in the $1k laptop market, my point was that perfectly normal usage can grow to benefit from over 8GB of RAM these days, whatever the background reasons may be.
If I were going for a desktop it'd be at least 64GB.
Why wouldn't it be? The iPad Pros max out at 6gb and yet they overperform the vast majority of laptops out there.
What Apple appears to have done is transpose the hardware from iPad to Mac without thinking about the different requirements of each. There is a reason that RAM is not part of the package on laptop CPUs. This might work for casual users but people spending $$$ on a "pro" computer will wise up pretty fast.
I have a 2019 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM and it runs OS X fine for dev work. RAM compression and fast SSD storage make a big difference. The newer Macbooks will have even faster SSDs.
I think the main reason Apple don't want to add lots of RAM to the base Macbook models is that it's the wrong compromise between battery life and performance for most users. They are probably betting on continuing gains in SSD performance obviating the need for additional RAM.
The iPad Pro has strong raw CPU performance in any case. It certainly outperforms plenty of entry-level Windows laptops.
The vast majority of people need a social media, word editor, reminder list, chat machine.
Today I wouldn’t buy less than 32GB.
Performance is always better and the machine will last much longer
At the moment, that's debatable, since the only 32GB Macs you can buy are Intel ones...
It’s worked for them for iPad and iPhone. Samsung et all would boast more ram but oddly enough iPhones were and remain faster
Even with 16, 32gb of ram, Android phones still don’t have buttery smooth 60 FPS while iOS has never been smoother
Android's lack of smoothness is due to thread contention, whereas the iOS kernel uses a dedicated UI thread running at high priority. RAM size has no impact on UI performance, beyond a sufficient amount for the kernel.
I use a Pixel 3 and iPhone 8 on a daily basis.
Now that apple has the remaining 95%, it is letting their power users down. But that is only natural, establishing a beachhead with the powerusers was "just" a genious marketing move that worked pretty well.
And they still are. Just not in their base configuration, like they have never been. I've been using their stuff since the Motorola era.
Was there any time Apple gave "ample" RAM/DISK in their base configuration? No.
If anything, now it's better than ever...
A laptop can run many things simultaneously. Web browser, Office suite, Musik, EMail client, Cloud sync... Even my mother struggled with 8GB RAM on here work machine and she is by far no PC expert. She writes emails and letters, opens spreadsheets and websites. Sometimes she gets a call and has to open another document or website. End of RAM.
I would NOT recommend the 8GB Macbook Pro for professional work.
The goal shouldn’t be to increase ageing technology but to replace it with something better.
To be honest, I find even 16GB to be limiting. The lack of offering of a 32GB configuration killed the immediate sale for me, absolutely no exaggeration.
Because you can't upgrade it post-market, I'd consider these to be some of the least future-proofed releases from Apple in a while.
100GB sounds like paltry for 10 years of technological advancement. In 2010 DDR4 didn't exist yet and DDR3 only supported up to 16GB per ram stick (8 on Intel at the time). Now we have ram sticks with capacities up to 256GB. The 2010 MacBook Pro only came with 4GB! But really "640K ought to be enough for anybody", am I right?
You can buy a Thinkpad P15 with 128GB of RAM today, so I'd expect more like multi-TB RAM by 2030.
I've had 16 gigs for the last 8 years. I thought about getting 32, but I haven't noticed needing more memory and it does use (battery) energy so I decided against it.
Even if you somehow could argue that 8 is all you need now, what about in few years? No one should ever buy this device.
This reminds me of how movie theatres offer a small, medium and large but the large popcorn only costs slightly more than the medium, thus enticing you to go for the large.
Only recently Lenovo started to solder their parts so base models lost their power :(
The spot price for 16GB of LPDDR4 looks like it's currently ~$8 per DRAMexchange: https://www.dramexchange.com/
They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.
Many laptops now have soldered RAM, but other vendors have not chosen to do what Apple has done. In HP's premium laptop (Spectre x360 13t), adding 8GB of RAM is a +$70 option. For reference, an 8GB DDR4 SODIMM at retail pricing is about $30.
Also, AFAIK, no other major laptop or mini-desktop manufacturer uses soldered storage like Apple does, so in this case, the retail cost for storage is even more relevant.
These are commodity parts, so there's not any R&D to recoup - this is just profiteering on Apple's part. Especially for the Mac Mini, where there's not the same space constraints, the lack of storage upgradability is also a rather egregious form of forced obsolescence. Fine from a business perspective, but hypocritical for a company that claims to care about the environment.
You can call me bitter but this sort of manipulation is making me extremely salty to the point where I'll be having seething hate for the company for the rest of my life.
What about it? It's not like someone who mostly browses the web, checks email, works with office documents, and so on, will change what he does in a few years...
I would like to see Photos on those benchmarks, that is one program that would benefit from lots of ram, and would be used by many of the Air’s customers.
The fatal flaw in this argument is the failure to realize that web pages are bloating, video is becoming more prevalent, higher resolution images, etc.
So “browses the web” has ever increasing hardware requirements if you want to maintain the experience.
8GB is definitely underpowered
But I think a more important factor is future sales. They will likely sell more laptops as these 8GB owners upgrade earlier (in 2-3 years) as the OS and apps continue to bloat.
So on one side they save $20 per laptop and they likely sell more laptops.
So charge $50 more per laptop and make $30 more profit while not producing 8 GB junk that'll be e-waste in a few years because that's barely enough RAM to run an average browser session anymore.
The RAM is embedded into the SoC. Maybe the 8GB are salvaged chips where half of the memory is unusable?
And yet most PC laptops, with same or higher prices, have the same base spec, so there's that...
You still don't get the same feel as physical keys, but no Siri, no sliders to adjust volume or brightness, no stuff shifting around as you switch apps.
Also, what's the difference between the left and the right versions? just the storage? can't you configure the storage? why do they make it look like there are 2 different options.
Just the storage. They're suggested configurations, presented to make it easy for the masses, not the HN tinkerers.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air/space-gray-ap...
So lower clock speeds on the CPU/GPU and more use of the low-power cores.
The Air is going a more iPad route; totally silent and more than enough performance for typical tasks, but under sustained load it's going to throttle hard.
I'm very curious to see benchmarks on these things. Also wondering if processors are performance binned from one SKU to another, or if it's really just the amount of RAM and storage.
Apple's been known to have secret hardware differences like that, the 2018 iPad Pro had 4GB of RAM unless you specced it up to 1TB storage, which included a secret upgrade to 6GB RAM. You wouldn't know from the specs, since Apple doesn't talk about how much RAM their iPads have.
Now here we are with the M1 and Apple doesn't talk about the clock speed. All MacBook Pros have an M1, but do they all have the same clock speed? Maybe.
[1] - https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/10/21559228/apple-new-macbo...
It has 7W CPU in slightly smaller body than new Air, so I expect Air's performance review to be 'the story about throttling'.
I can't remember the brand of the cooler pad, but it had two 10 cm fans.
At 1500$ for 16GB version 13" Pro seems like a really good value deal for on the go workstation - if M1 benchmarks come out decent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=3m56s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlOPPuNv4Ec&t=5m30s
That's just a headscratcher.
Apple ramps their chip performance dramatically and frequently in iOS devices; that’s how they hit such high benchmarks but also deliver long battery life and stay cool. Those chips spend most of their time not performing.
In such a system, having “the same chip” in two different devices will not tell you much about their relative performance under real world loads.
So.. depending what you want to do on these older machines, my point is that this may be the least of your worries.
^(though I think it's fine, because it's the reverse that would be a problem? Bad news for 'hackintosh' if all supported versions of macOS can expect secure boot hardware, I think)
I bought a 2017 MBP hoping the situation would eventually improve but it never did, so I never got around to installing Linux. I'm expecting it'll be even worse for these M1 systems.
It is a shame, it's not something I ever really did (or not for long, for a period I do recall having Arch on my 2013 Air) but I like the idea - I like Apple's hardware, just not the software.
Which is unfortunate, because the 2015 models make great Linux machines.
The introduction of the T2 chip made proper Linux support much harder to achieve.
Oh, and Apple's NVMe interface is non-compliant. This is widely reported as Apple locking Linux out with the T2 chip, but that's not really true. The T2 chip will by default prevent unsigned kernels from reading/writing to the SSD, but this can be disabled.
Even if it's disabled, the controller is not standards compliant, and Linux won't see the underlying block device. I saw some diffs floating around on github a few years ago that fixed it, but I don't think it was ever mainlined.
Basically, post-2016, Apple seems to have incorporated even more custom (and undocumented) hardware that running alternative OSes on them is basically impossible. Windows works because of the Apple-provided HAL + drivers for WinNT.
As far as I know it’s only available on Apple OSes.
Your claims about "dismal then and only got worse" are unfounded. The repository you refer to is still active. https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux If anything, activity has slowed down in these threads because it was figured out how to make it work.
Even among people who run Linux on these MacBooks, the general recommendation is to keep a macOS partition around for stability. Some of the value you get from any Apple computer is in the software. If you intend on instantly installing Linux or Windows as your only OS, this probably isn't the computer for you. But if you want to or have to use Linux sometimes, these T2-chip Macs can do it.
As I'm said repo owner, let me chime in here quickly to shed some light on that.
I used a 13" MacBook Pro 2016 for 3 years with Debian as my sole machine for work. When ordering it back in 2016 I wasn't sure how difficult it'd be to get Linux properly working on it, as at that point it was only known that it's possible to boot Linux, but nobody had figured out even such basics like support for the integrated input devices or the NVMe SSD yet. However as I was using Linux on Macs since 2006 I figured it'd be somehow possible to get it to work for me.
Fortunately I wasn't the only one serious about running Linux these 2016+ MacBooks, as I have very limited knowledge of the required lowlevel programming skills. What I did was to provide and moderate a Github repository (https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux) as a central place to document and discuss of the status of hardware support for these MacBook Pros, some little patches and lots of feedback and bug reports. A big shoutout to all contributors who did an incredible job at reverse engineering, implementing and upstreaming drivers for various components! That's quite an achievement for such a complex device with no public hardware documentation at all!
After a while it turned out that support for certain components would be rather difficult to get working flawlessly. As an example, even at the end of the 3 years I used the MacBook Pro, I had to use an external adapter to be able to use WiFi. With that in mind I started to reconsider why I bought Apple products: I bought them because of their superior hardware quality. But if I'm not able to use the hardware as intended, what's the point of paying a premium for Apple products? And let's just not talk about the butterfly keyboard or the horrible thermal management. So when it came to replacing my MacBook Pro, I decided to go with a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon instead. It's not perfect, but I'm way happier now than I ever was with the MacBook Pro 2016, as the hardware just works.
As I don't own any 2016+ Apple device anymore, the help for further Linux support I can provide is limited, but I didn't stop bothering at all! I'm still actively managing said Github repository, but activity in general has significantly dropped there over time. Either the devices work well enough for other people now or they also replaced them with non-Apple hardware.
I’m totally fine with a chromebook-style unsigned boot warning.
Update: here a podcast with Craig Federighi on that matter https://youtu.be/Hg9F1Qjv3iU
"we're not direct booting an alternate operating system, it's purely virtualization"
Who else is making 8 core, 18 hour battery life laptops that have >200ppi displays and weigh <=1290g?
The choice is now performance xor privacy.
I suspect very little will work at all if someone can get Linux to boot on one, and it will be a very lengthy endeavor to get things up to being usable.
None of this, of course, is to pretend it's easy.
Void my warranty, boot with a scary splash screen, whatever, but don’t lock me out of the thing I ostensibly own. Or, maybe change the “buy” button to a “license to use” button in your store.
See this WWDC session: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686
and this manpage: https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/RwcT8stYMY/
The margins on general-purpose computers are simply too thin to sustain a $1T company.
People are frustrated with technology lately. Even non-tech people. Apple has everything it would need to change that, but it decides to contribute to technology becoming ever more frustrating time and time again instead.
Not true. Yahoo made 2 separate offers to acquire Google, and an established social-media company offered to acquire Facebook (for a billion dollars IIRC).
kmutil lets you do it apparently: https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/mN3Z2kfJWy/ and bputil lets you disable the signature checking of the kernel https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/RwcT8stYMY/
I'm talking about ARM macs, not Intel ones.
For me that quote means that they're not allowing booting any alternate operating system and they expect developers to use virtualization if other operating system is needed. I would be happy to be wrong about that.
Repeat for every new model.
¹ They will have to give you a full refund: it's your right as a consumer. Note that this may not work for companies.
"Vote with your wallet!"
<votes with wallet by doing as OP suggests above. Mind you, NOT buying is noise - buying and returning is signal>
"Not like that!!"
The only reason I could bare some of their hw is becase I knew I can put Linux when I get enough of it, and now what?
I am not buying, sophisticated people are not buying and it doesn't help so in my perspective IF something is ever going to change their policy is returning products to SEND A MESSAGE. Other option is to wait untill some dumbo get it when it'll be too late, like it was when S.Jobs has to return to save them..
Or you sugest even more strong action then returning?
Companies DO care when people return something, because that is pure signal. "I got it because I thought I would like it and I don't" is a much different signal than "I have no idea what you think because I never interacted with you". That is likely one of the most effective ways to make a company sit up and take notice, the return rate of a product is a key indicator of its success.
I really don't see that there's anything to disagree with there. Loving Apple, as you may, doesn't make the above point wrong.
This has nothing to do with a love of Apple or anything, and everything to do with “you’re abusing a program that they are going to either ban you from, or remove because you abused it too much”.
PS: Well, this one is downvoted too. Looks like some lost even a sense of what PERSONAL computer means.
OK. Keep downvoting! it's a good strategy to silence someone when there are no valid arguments.
Also, people who complain about downvotes usually attract more. I’d suggest not doing that. Claims that there are “no valid arguments” against your position rather than nobody wanting to deal with you are, well, absurd.
Recently I see more and more perfectly valid comments to be downvoted and I do not like it. If this forum will become mob controlled with bullying then I see no reason why bright people would stay here. If one doesn't want ot deal with comment, usually one moves on, like I do. But if argument is perfectly valid and instead of answer I see one simply downvotes it is bullying as it appears.
You probably turn around and then criticize people for contributing to the e-waste problem, and polluting the planet with carbon emissions.
Can't be satisfied just not to buy someone's offering, you actively need to go sabotage them.
Actually sounds quite right-wing in philosophy.
After two years of using an otherwise beautiful iPad Pro (along with my MBP) I came to realize that a crippled machine that is very limited in how I use a computer is not the future of computing I like. The device collects dust for quite some time as I prefer a computing environment where I use the terminal a lot, where I use my bash and Python scripts a lot to automate, where I use Emacs a lot to write tech docs, do my project planning, writing, automating workflows, and many more things that are not doable on a crippled (iPad)OS.
You keep going toward your vision of a computing platform where your customers are just consumers, not hackers and doers, and us hackers need to look for alternative platforms, most propably Linux.
You can get XPS Developer Edition, System76, Purism, or many other laptop brands (eg. any of these https://elementary.io/store/ with elementaryOS, whose DE should feel fairly familiar to a macOS user) with GNU preinstalled these days.
I do wish someone would dare ship something high-end non-amd64 (e.g.: ARM). Kinda like what we're seeing from Apple.
It doesn't need to be our only computing device to be appreciated, and not every computing device needs to be powerful.
But the iPad is an excellent companion, since I use that to scrible around, consume media, photo editing, keep my music sheets, and all that stuff that would suck on Linux.
I obviously count myself among the people who needs and wants creator capabilities, but for my technologically challenged family and friends there's no reason to learn and manage all the complexities of a classic computer environment if they just want a point of access to youtube, netflix, spotify and social networks.
I still shiver remembering the times of browsers riddled with search bars, trojans and antivirus software slowing computers to a crawl and people who's "good with tech" being dragged to friends' houses to see what's wrong with the computer.
I think it's a bit narrow to call label them content-consuming devices. Of course, they have limitations for activities like programming.
Because they can. Most other laptop manufacturers are producing garbage. Vaunted brands like Thinkpad and Dell are even failing to keep pace.
My wife's 2019 Dell XPS 13 is awful to use. The touchpad is horrendous, and I'm not buying Lenovo after the Superfish thing.
I had a Dell XPS 13 1645 that had a great display, but everything else about it was awful.
Well, in reality, you can't be a purist or you'll end up with nothing. The Lenovo T480 is solid and has two batteries.
While I can appreciate that some see other-OSs as something of a curiosity, for many of us it's a big deal-breaker, and it's a shame Apple is not willing to provide their hardware to so many potential clients who simply don't want their software.
It really depends on whether their secure boot architecture can be disabled (unlikely knowing apple), or allow adding ones own keys (unlikely). Bootcamp probably won't happen since windows does not support the architecture: they'll be pushing people to use VMs.
They might also provide some untrusted path to boot without it being able to access certain secure features. I wish they did this, but also won't keep my breath!
That said, the kernel itself needs to have support for the hardware architecture, and then drivers for all the new hardware they're pushing out. I don't expect this to be soon, though I'd definitely be willing to sponsor anyone willing to work on this.
Windows supports ARM and has for a while. But still probably Bootcamp's days are over, yeah.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/jn7wbf/heres_the...
I heard yesterday that Apple does not offer a battery replacement for 2014s and you have to go third party. This is an unfortunate development and I'm wondering if I should inquire about getting mine replaced.
How long will OS updates be distributed for it?
Now with the new model being even faster and without a fan things look even better for the future.
PS also don't waste your time trying to find ways to repurpose the old Mac SSD, an equivalent SSD or flash drive is cheaper than the enclosures
It’s nice to only have to plug in one cable when I dock it at my desk but I would have greatly preferred not having to replace the battery twice in the three years I owned it due to this. Especially since only one replacement was covered under the warranty thanks to the ‘rona shutting down all the authorized service centers in my city.
> And it features two Thunderbolt ports with USB 4 support to connect to more peripherals than ever,
Never occurred to me they would go backwards on this, I bet this is one of those overlooked details that will get a lot of notice once people actually start receiving these new laptops.
Presumably, when they fill the higher tier with the new chip it will also have more RAM and more USB ports.
- Charger
- USB C (4k display)
- HDMI (4k Display)
- Ethernet
I'm going to install Linux on it.
https://support.apple.com/en-qa/guide/mac-help/mchl5a63b060/...
Often freezes with not much open other than a few Chrome tabs, O365 and Sublime (not actually DOING much with any of them at the time).
The keyboard is poor, the touchbar is useless but doesn't get in the way that much, the touch pad is too large and disturbs me sometimes while typing source code. The lack of ports means without a hub the whole machine is pretty useless (and that means all users will have to buy an USB-C hub for another $100 - annoying but the real annoyance is to have that hanging of your laptop all the time, and you mustn't forget to pack it, or you're screwed).
I also dislike the 16" form factor compared to 13", as it breaks all my leather bags when I try to carry it (not so relevant anymore in the days of the home office..).
2.4 GHz vs 5.0 GHz on the i9-9980HK and
2.3 GHz vs 4.8 GHz on the i9-9980H
The original retina macbooks are still the best. :(
I was a longtime happy owner of a 2015 15" MBP until earlier this year when I decided it was time to upgrade to a refurbished 2019 16" MBP. I was a bit nervous at first but I have to say that I have no major complaints, other than the fact that I wish I had F keys instead of the touchbar. Contrary to everyone else, I really like the keyboard.
As for solving the touchpad issue, I use Pock [1] which I read about on HN. It removes the need for using a slider every time I want to adjust the volume or brightness and lets me control Spotify and see what song is currently playing.
I also have a 2018 15" MBP for work. If you believed the comments here you'd think that I am unable to type or use the damn thing. Honestly, after 1 week of use I'm already used to the keyboard. Not having an escape key kind of sucked, but I have rebound caps lock to escape on all of my Macbooks and enjoy that even more than having an escape key.
My other complaint is that the trackpad is a bit too large - I find myself accidentally hitting it sometimes and it just seems excessive. Finally, it's a shame that you can't mess with the battery/RAM/SSD yourself but unfortunately that's more of a trend for the industry than just Apple.
Overall I'm a totally happy user on both the 2018 and 2019 Macbook Pros. I was quite nervous about the possibility of having to use a Windows PC for work when I started my new job. And don't even get me started on having to use a Pixelbook at Google.
Lot of people like it, they just don't post about it.
Mine has a bunch of keys that print 2 or 3 times when I press the key once (the issue that everybody eventually get with the model I have) but I still prefer that flat keyboard to the old one. Takes a few days to get used to but then it's great.
I'm using https://github.com/aahung/Unshaky which fix the issue with the broken keys.
I hate to admit it since I've drunk the mechanical keyboard koolaid, but I like the mbp flat keyboard. I easily prefer it to the 2015 keyboard, which imo is really nothing special (at least it doesn't gunk up). I hear people say great things about the thinkpad keyboard, but from my little experience with it, I'd still rank the mbp flat keyboard higher.
Looks useful! Thanks.
Unless there is a separate late 2019 one.
But you can also do a quick swipe left/right on the button to a quick increase/decrease just like a tap.
I actually love the slider though. I hated it at first.
It's an objectively awful laptop.
It's a shame that the web has become this borderline unusable mess. I shouldn't need a quad-core machine with multiple gigabytes of RAM to just read the news online.
Wait. What? I can honestly say that I've never thought to myself that a laptop was too thin or too light.
I was always under the impression that the built-in camera is so much worse than your phone's front-facing camera simply because the phone is thick and has room, while the MacBook lid is much thinner.
The rest of the screen display is thinner than the camera module already.
The reality is, for most people 720p is more than enough, since most videoconferencing is at a heavily compressed 480p anyways, and it's not like most people really want it super obvious that they missed a spot shaving or have a small zit anyways. And sure the quality arguably falls to below 480p in very low light conditions, but that's not an issue in any normal well-lit office, coffee shop, or kitchen or living room.
I would assume Apple is making the right call here that a higher-resolution camera isn't worth additional thickness.
And considering people LOVE Apple's huge and amazing trackpads... I would guess it wouldn't be a smart tradeoff.
My 16GB MBP is constraining sometimes and the next one will, doubtlessly, come with at least 32GB. Until Apple can do that, I won't use an ARM-based Mac as my daily driver.
As for the 8-core, it's 4 beefy ones and 4 low-power ones. Load will shift from one kind to the other according to usage patterns. This is how they achieve that 20-hour battery life.
I run heavyweight IDE, Photoshop, VMware and Chrome and I still could manage with 8GB fine. Who requires 16GB for daily use?
Whereas the people I am on an online call with have about has many pixels dedicated to their hair as Laura in Tomb Raider 3.
I still care enough that I use it, and I am disappointed in Apple not including their iPhone camera, but it might not be something the average person wants.
> touch screens
> vapeor chamber cooling
...Thank you apple for not listening to the HN crowd
Has anyone done this? I've considered using my iPad Pro's camera this way but have never cared enough to actually do it.
I want to do it too, but don’t want to choose between 3rd-party apps. I wish it were built-in to the OS, like AirPlay and Sidecar are...
I'm pretty sure there was a part of the presentation talking about a camera upgrade. But it's not something on my wish list, so I didn't pay attention.
Double-check the recording on Apple's web site. The answer may be there.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/10/macbook-pro-m1-720p-cam...
Even setting the touch bar to vanilla F-keys, grazing triggers F-key actions which is so frustrating.
MTMR also solves the other main problem with the Touch Bar which is that it hides brightness and volume controls behind a tap (so you can't, for example, instantly mash "volume down" when you find it is unexpectedly loud.) With MTMR (and others I believe) you can make multi-touch gestures on the bar to adjust volume and brightness swiftly.
All that said, I'm not convinced that the touch bar adds enough value to justify its cost. If your day-to-day computer use includes tasks it is good it, maybe. As a developer, probably not.
Just my $0.02 as a touchbar-skeptic-cum-macbook-owner.
I also occasionally use the emoji picker or app specific stuff. For example- my markdown editor has Touchbar selections for code blocks and all that sort of stuff. I don't write enough markdown to remember everything- so the touchbar makes it nicely discoverable without having to click through menus.
It went back to the Apple store within a week and I got an air. Which went to the Apple store in a week because the keybbboooaaarrdd wwaaass aawwwful.
Then I bought a thinkpad. Which is less of a shiny toy.
I'm trying to figure out what my next laptop should be, but I have no prior experience with Thinkpads.
Yes, I miss the physical esc, but F-keys are usually SW configurable and I can configure splat-1-10. That said, I am not a frequent programmer...
It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.
Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables some cool stuff like three-finger-trackpad-swipes to cycle through window tabs! Worth the price of admission for that feature alone, give it a look. https://www.folivora.ai
Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one?
The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point.
As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful.
It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it?
macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?
Add that, plus the ability to map any menu command to a Touch Bar button, and it would be vastly more useful.
I normally keep the touchbar configured to only show the ~4 most used buttons (night mode, brightness, volume, and mute), and find that I use the other buttons rarely enough that I forgot what else was on there -- mainly because I use touchpad gestures instead.
I rarely (never?) used F-keys in my IDE (Jetbrains) or other apps, so I don't miss them. I have a physical Esc key (which is nice), though I used it rarely enough on my previous generation touchbar mac that it wasn't very infuriating. Having the physical escape + power keys removed any complaints I previously had about it.
If it were a physical slider, I'd totally agree with you.
(Not that there's any right or wrong or answer here.)
The ability to use touch sliders, filmstrips, etc. is a huge boon.
It just gets a ton of hate here on HN because obviously there's very little overlap between the populations.
A lot of people forget that "Pro" has never referred to software professionals, it's always referred to multimedia professionals.
If the new graphics capabilities are that much better I would be very tempted to upgrade
the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com
The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud.
In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider.
(P.S. Can't wait to get this new Air!!!)
I've always used powerful desktops (Mac Pro, iMac Pro) and MacBook Airs while traveling, and while the Airs aren't very good for video games like StarCraft II, I've never had a problem with performance while doing anything else (I work in VS Code on TypeScript). My unit tests run in ~20 seconds on the MacBook Air as well as the iMac Pro.
I've used the last 2 Air for developing including Photoshop and VMware fusion but I could work just fine.
Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?
I'm happily tapping away with them on a 2020 MBA
In my particular case, I use them all the time. Edit some SQL, press F9. Select some files, press F5. And so on.
I can't work without the function keys.
Either way, based on this announcement I'll probably hold off on upgrading for another generation. That'll leave some time to see how the transition goes, and with any luck the next ones will include 32 GB RAM, Mini-LED, and 5G (along with a full keyboard).
EDIT: My mother also says she gets distracting autocomplete suggestions on the touch bar while she's typing. I vaguely remember doing something to turn that off on mine, but she is terrified of Covid so I haven't had a chance to get at her laptop and fix it for her. I don't know what human factors genius at Apple decided it would be helpful for people to see words hopping around at the edge of their vision while they're trying to type.
You can choose a few different options there - try "Expanded Control Strip".
You can use Messages to easily initiate screen-sharing (with you controlling her Mac) to do that. No 3rd party software, no action on her side needed.
While I prefer the physical keys, once you get the TouchBar configured properly (I use MTMR), it's really quite nice. Combined with a physical escape key, it would be ideal.
Considering how the people on HN boast so much about being L337 Haxxorz, I'm surprised they don't see the value in a secondary interactive screen that they can make do anything they want.
One minor annoyance, however, is that the TouchBar isn't visible in direct sunlight, which is to be expected of any screen. Function keys don't have that problem.
I really need a Forward-Delete key - pressing Cmd+Backspace just doesn't work for me.
[1] Yes, I've remapped/swapped the Ctrl+Fn keys on my ThinkPad too.
It throttles badly and overheats no matter which side you charge on.
Actually surprised it didn't get more attention. If you're downloading and charging at the same time then your computer is unusable.
Five years later and I still can't buy a new 13" laptop from Apple with more RAM than my 2015 MBP.
Edit: Apparently you can configure a (Early 2020) Intel-based 13" MBP with 32GB of RAM - I was not aware of that. Hope they bring that option to the ARM versions ASAP, especially if the performance gains are as good as Apple claims.
I really don't know much (anything) about the hardware manufacturing world. Is this a common practice?
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...
If you need 32 GB with the new ARM chips, you’ll probably have to wait a generation or two.
For reference I currently have a 2019 16" MBP, with 64GB of RAM and an 8 core i9. Right now I'm using ~45GB of it, usually its up around 50 or 55. The CPU is at ~10%. While I'm developing locally, the workloads are highly bursty but sometimes they will chew up almost all of the CPU for about 10 minutes.
I used to have a 2016 15" MBP with 16GB (4 core i7) and while I could still run everything, the RAM was always pegged. Before that I had a 2016 13" MBP with 16GB (2 core i7) (I actually swapped with a coworker because I thought his 15" had 32GB). With both of these the RAM was by far the limiting factor, and while the increased CPU cores have been nice, most of the time I haven't noticed. The RAM increase on the other hand is always noticeable. Thus, 16GB is a nonstarter for me.
Edit: To add, I prefer the 13" form factor when I'm not at my desk.
What worries me is my desktop has 64Gb of RAM which cost 1/3 of Apple’s usual upgrade mugging.
I think I’ll walk away from this.
Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb.
8GB of RAM for £200 is “get fucked” territory. I paid £240 for the 64Gb in my desktop.
Take a look at your activity monitor and see how many background tasks you laptop is running right now (I currently have 481 and I only have 4 apps actually running).
Compare that to iPad which can run 2 apps max and apple controls all the background activity.
I expected you to say you did something with graphics/media. I guess the VMs could be the difference. I don’t use. But I have 100 chrome tabs open at most times lol.
It really depends on your usage patterns. VM abusers and people who need to keep an eye on more than one project at the same time (as in multiple IDEs) can't do with 16 Gb.
And please don't tell me to start closing software, I'm willing to pay for more ram to have everything handy. Except... I can't.
So far 16GB has been fine on this 2017 MacBook. Wouldn't turn down 32 though :-)
My view into your comment is that you think I'm used to the lag. That's not the case. It's not my only device just my only Apple laptop. My newest device, a iPhone 12 Pro, is an upgrade from my 6s that I surely noticed and knew I would. I had been frustrated by the 6s for a while but held out for 5G.
I'm somewhat impressed by some of these stories about RAM usage - what are people doing?
that gets done for GPUs and CPUs because they're a monolithic die, but AFAIK that's not done for memory chips.
Please don't.
Don't think so. The M1's RAM is integrated into the SoC package, but it's not actually on the same die.
There's some images showing the discrete RAM modules in Apple's marketing material.
> "Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb."
It's always been this way with Apple. Just in the old days you could pop the modules out and upgrade the RAM yourself.
If they intend these things to run software development, audio/video editing, CAD, or any other resource-intensive workloads, there will absolutely be demand for more.
Besides, this release cycle is 100% optimized for an impressive speed boost, tempered by a need for a more impressive battery life.
The proof will be in the pudding.Time will tell.
No, it can't. If more RAM means it's slower RAM then maybe it can be better to have less of it in some workloads. But otherwise it's never better to have less RAM than more RAM. Better memory management can make the impact of less RAM be less severe, but it's still unambiguously worse.
Especially if you have workloads that actually need the RAM like large ML models or editing 8K videos.
If the purpose of owning a computer is "get shit done", better memory management absolutely can be better than just throwing more RAM at the problem.
Those are not competing in any way. Better memory management does not require nor benefit from less RAM.
Apple doesn't give you a different kernel when you choose the 8GB SKU instead of the 16GB one. It's the same software, just with less RAM. And having that less RAM is best case break-even in "day to day" experience, but never better.
For me personally, I won't even consider a machine with less than 32GB ram in 2020/2021. With 32GB, I never close out of applications that I use regularly, and so it allows me to switch state instantaneously for not that much more money. My workloads are typically read-heavy & multiple GBs - editing/screening/cataloging hundreds of RAW photos, loading of multi-GB games, having about 50 tabs open in FF, etc. After having switched careers I rarely code anymore, and I don't think these are uncommon requirements.
16 is basically useless for dev purposes, unless you're only doing web stuff. And maybe not even then, containers/vms?
Keep in mind the rollout of the new CPUs is a 2 year process.
Cost, performance, light weight - pick two right? Apple seems to have picked a combination of lower cost and light weight. Customers who need more ram probably move up to a MBP.
If you need a 13" MBP that supports more than 16gb of ram, they sell it. It seems unlikely they'll stick with a 16gb limit once they start replacing the higher end devices.
For the current M1 models. You can still get 32GB of RAM on the Intel models.
So they're "low end" only in the sense that you can't get more than 16GB of RAM on them.
I know I use a lot of RAM for compiling and tests, but we have cloud instances with up to 500GB of RAM for that.
Also with the new ARM instructions, I suspect more heavy task like these will be forced to move elsewhere. Businesses might not want to switch for a few years to wait for dev tools/ARM servers to be available.
This is a charitable characterization.
More correct would be to term this limit "absurd" or "clownish".
Even if Apple views the use-cases of these machines as primarily consumption devices and the users of these machines not as creators but as consumers, the bloat of the modern web is expensive and getting more expensive every day.
The end user needs this memory even if they really are just using these as facebook machines.
EDIT: That's not just the notebooks - the mini appears to have this limitation as well (down from 64GB previously).
I webdev (RoR) for a living on a Dell machine with Linux and 8 gigs of RAM. It works beautifully.
Sometimes I browse Facebook and it still works beautifully.
My GF uses my old 2013 MBP with 4 gigs of RAM for college and it works just fine for her. She, too, sometimes browses Facebook.
There are stories that Apple is working on a gGPU so that would free space up on a future Mx chip for additional processors or memory. However looking at the space occupied by DRAM and GPU it looks like a larger die is required for any on board memory expansion.
That they are still selling new computers for $1000+ in 2020 with 8GB RAM as the default and 16GB of RAM max is a bad joke.
I am sure there will be consumer (crap) computers like HP pavilion, Dell inspiron etc where one can get 1000+ computer with 16GB or so RAM.
Apart from the RAM the main reason I went for it was the resolution (I liked the extra height in a 13" form factor). Also, it works with linux - though haven't tried it yet.
* As to how that deal worked, I'm guessing that large retailers that agree to buy a lot of laptops get a large discount.
Note they say "latest", not "best". That means that a Celeron 5205U, dual core processor with 1.9GHz, no turbo, no hyper threading, 2MB L1, would be a valid baseline.
Then the top model still ships with a Radeon mobile chip. So... your super duper M1 graphics, not so super duper.
It's a great baseline for comparing same-generation computers, though. Without benchmarks, none of us has any idea which is faster, the Air or the Pro, or the 15".
"The Apple M1 chip is the first system on a chip (SoC) for Mac. Packed with an astonishing 16 billion transistors, it integrates the CPU, GPU, I/O, and every other significant component and controller onto a single tiny chip. Designed by Apple, M1 brings incredible performance, custom technologies, and unparalleled power efficiency to the Mac.
With an 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU, M1 on MacBook Pro delivers up to 2.8x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 5x faster graphics² than the previous generation."
Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and:
One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz Thunderbolt 3 digital video output
Native DisplayPort output over USB-C VGA, HDMI, DVI, and Thunderbolt 2 output supported using adapters (sold separately)
Ironically, if you boot into Windows you can use these cheap USB-C adaptors with no issues.
However that requires MST support which afaik is missing from OSX entirely.
One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
One display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz connected via Thunderbolt and one display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz connected via HDMI 2.0I wonder how it'll affect the whole ecosystem. I think it'll end being like an iOS on steroids.
It's made by an indie studio which doesn't have the resources to port a game like this to a ARM. They also use a lot of third party software so it's not even up to them.
Depends on the engine the game uses. Games built on top of frameworks like Unity, Unreal Engine and the like get platform support basically "for free" as long as the framework in question supports the target platform.
Any in-house developed engine might either depend on 3rd party support (e.g. libraries like SFML[1]) or need to be recompiled for the new platform. Depending on architectural differences, optimisation and asset loading (in case endianness[2] differs) needs to be altered accordingly.
The main reason for a decision to cancel a release would be time and effort vs expected sales. The Mac market will be fragmented into Intel and Apple Silicon from now on and every "Mac version" would really be two separate ports (complete with separate QA and optimisation).
An independent studio might just not have the resources and experience to tackle this and a port that doesn't sell can effectively be worse than not releasing on a platform.
edit: [1] https://www.sfml-dev.org [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness
Hard to say what this will do to gaming on MacOS, but gaming has never been the big strength of MacOS.
I'm going to get two Mac minis to look at, and then wait to replace my current machine when 32 or 64 GB ARM machines are available.
My gut says there’s going to be a year or two of cross-compilation nightmares. I do a lot of Docker-based development. Wondering what everyone else thinks?
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch
scroll down to second row...
They did. They're right there in the store below the M1 models. Just scroll a little bit.
My machine (MacBook Pro 13-inch, 2018, 2.7 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3) often runs screaming hot (with screaming fans too), when I only have a browser, zoom, docker and IntelliJ running, and I wonder what went wrong.
All the more disappointing that Jetbrains won't support a language server beyond Intellij.
It does wonders for my 2019 16 MBP, ensuring the fans very rarely kick in and CPU temps stay reasonable doing similar workloads to what you describe.
I wouldn't use Docker on a Mac. The fan goes like crazy the whole time, and the battery life is like an hour or less. Whereas with vagrant and virtualbox the fan stays off and the battery lasts all day.
Why not just wait a few weeks post release to get a reviewers take on using the new device as a development machine?
~173 pages of complaints on Macrumors here: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/16-is-hot-noisy-with-an...
IMO, it depends on how long you're going to keep your computer.
If you're the sort of person who keeps using the same computer for eight or nine years, you don't want to end up on the old chips when all the software has migrated years earlier.
Imagine still running a PowerMac in 2010.
I was ready to buy an M1 model, but the deal breaker for me is the screen. I use a 2011 Air. An 11" screen was fine a decade ago, but my eyes aren't what they used to be, and I don't think 13" is going to cut it. When a 15" or 16" option becomes available, I'm there.
Bummer. I just paid $3200 for a lower end Lenovo P620 (only 12 cores), and similarly spec'd Apple machines were running almost $8k, and benchmarks say the Macs are technically slower. These were desktop workstations, though.
I know it doesn't help your decision, but I'm still excited about the new computer
At work we use a big ass linux vm to connect to (running docker, etc.). Saves a lot of battery power, and no macos-docker shenanigans.
Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.
If they're "only" claiming 2x over anyone else' integrated, then it's not going to be all that interesting to compare integrated vs. discreet. By comparison here the 2060 Max Q is around 4x faster than the Vega 8 in the 4800U.
Although that 2x faster than anyone else's integrated also has some really big question marks on the claim. The fine-print on that claim includes:
"Integrated GPU is defined as a GPU located on a monolithic silicon die along with a CPU and memory controller, behind a unified memory subsystem"
Which sounds a bit weasel-y like it's trying to specifically exclude what's commonly thought of as integrated graphics like the two-die approach in Tigerlake. Which how the product is packaged shouldn't really matter?
There's no claim of any 5-6x faster than previous there. It says "fastest integrated" (and in the fine print that integrated is specifically unified monolithic die, eliminating chiplet-style products), and then also "M1 delivers significantly higher graphics performance than the very latest PC laptop chip — for up to 2x the graphics speed."
So take the 4800U, which has among the fastest commercially available integrated graphics in a monolithic die, and double the GPU performance. If you needed a discreet GPU in your laptop previously this probably won't change that.
P.S. I’m a developer, like many here.
(Edit: specify the M1, not the existing Intel.)
It supports up to 64GB of 2666MHz DDR4 memory. (Source: Went through the "Buy" process to see the options.)
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space...
Personally I brought a windows workstation laptop and I have pretty much regretted that most of the time - if you are going for that kind of performance, running VMs, etc you are probably better of with a desktop. I expect that if you build a system with the new Ryzen 3 you can smoke almost any of the new mac models for 50%-75% of the cost.
Screws you pretty hard if you actually need the computer to be a mac for some reason.
Intel did that for the 486SX processor 30 years ago. The 486 was the first x86 CPU with an integrated FPU. Chips that failed the FPU test were sold as cheaper 486SX with the FPU disabled.
The die is the same, but there’s no evidence Intel rebranded rejected DX chips. Here’s an extremely pedantic discussion (when it comes to obsolete hardware, the best kind of discussion) on the topic:
This is kind of bad news for the Pro machine.
This might be tied to some I/O limitation.
The commenter is stating how the 2016-2019 MBP 13" had 4 thunderbolt ports, and this new one only has 2
Sure enough, it does exist: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP799
Finally with the last update of Macbook Pro they ditched the ridiculous 256gb SSD and went 512/1tb in the 2 pre-built models.
Now we're back to 256/512. The impressively low starting price is hiding behind this and the halving of default RAM too.
On the plus side I only see the larger battery for the Pro. On the minus side it's more heavy and a bit more bulky. And it's got the TouchBar (I'd count that as a negative...).
Honestly, why spend the $300 extra? I'd take the Air any day.
I am quite skeptical of this but let's see.
I've seen lots said about the lack of Bootcamp support but I've actually never even used Bootcamp, Linux VMS are much more relevant for me and I imagine many other developers.
Rumor has it that they'll eventually support virtualized Windows, but it's currently impossible for an end-user to buy a copy of ARM Windows.
Rosetta 2 translates Mac apps and can deal with JIT, but I do not believe it will work through virtualization.
It should be relatively light lifting to make Docker for Mac run an ARM linux installation and ARM-built containers.
From there, you likely would want to strategically add multi-arch container support to the docker runtime. This might be implemented based on existing qemu containers [2]
But ultimately I don't really care, I just want to `docker run postgres:latest` to develop web and mobile applications against against, and build a Dockerfile to be able to run a server-side ruby, python, java, go, etc. app locally for development.
EDIT: the store does not let you configure anything but the RAM which is absurdly expensive.
A lot of CPU given any release is the same high end CPU with faulty cores disabled.
It's been clear for a while that ARM processors have hit near desktop performance and it took the megacompany of Apple to push it over the edge.
I'm a dedicated non-Mac user at home, but at work I always chose the MBP option over the craptastic Dell PoS that'll start turning into broken plastic pieces within a year or the latest Microsoft offering which seems to suffer from endless software and driver struggles.
The software story will take a while to work out, but Apple has made this transition TWO times before, which is astonishing. Nobody else has done this successfully. Part of the reason is there is simply less of a need among Mac users to maintain backwards compatibility and simply far less software to carry forward. Even then, it appears that Apple has done some kind of magic to allow older software to work on the new architecture without too much fuss -- I'm awaiting some benchmarks!
(This will hopefully push more of the industry to look at desktop ARM systems)
Both SolidWorks and Altium are such RAM hogs that I’ve had to upgrade to 64GB.
It would be lovely to work on laptops, since it’s the default assumption for most managers, so I either stick out as a weirdo for asking for a desktop every time I switch jobs, or shut up and spend most of my day dealing with slow laptops and random crashes, and having to make design choices around my computer (unnecessary) limitations.
Running out of RAM is not my main problem, continuously swapping is as has a performance hit across the whole system for some reason.
As with many things, it's not a NEED, it's more that having to care about what I have open at any given moment gets annoying.
Those ravenous apps are the problem here. Seriously, fuck Electron.
Actually this should consume a dozen GB of RAM more or less, the rest is in caches, which I think you're undervaluing a lot. Having everything you use in hot caches means any applications starts in a couple hundred of milliseconds, and everything is as fast as your RAM and CPU are, especially if you're running an OS that has a good implementation of file caching (e.g. Linux).
Having more leeway means I never have to close anything if I forget to. I might have my dev environment chugging along in a desktop workspace, while I'm in another with a few dozen browser tabs, talking on Discord with a full screen game running on the other monitor.
That's what a £150 module of 32 GB of RAM gives me. But actually I'm running 64 GB :-)
If you are writing C++ in Vim for an embedded platform, you are limited by CPU power because C is so heavy to compile, but you are most likely also not likely to be the typical HNer.
It reminds me of my recent purchase of an electric shaver. The front of the box proudly proclaimed 'WAHL: The Brand Professionals Use.'
It wasn't until I got home and started opening it that I saw a little bit of fine print on the side of the box: "not to be used in a professional capacity."
Hopefully we'll see the 13" and 16" MBPs with M1+ and more RAM next Spring.
If they can release ARM machines that are such degree better, how terrible is Apple software on Intel? Is this due to Apple software engineers? Is there any reason to use Intel for anything?
These are serious questions. I find the multipliers very surprising.
I'm not sure I understand why the current Mac Mini's needed to be a unibody design, since it just sits on your desk.
While I am excited for the M1 chip and the future of ARM, I'm absolutely disgusted by the price gouging in the name of memory and HDD space.
- Will they ship a more advanced spec for the upper line? Something like a M1x, thus replacing the need for a third-party discrete GPU?
- Will they market these devices like they do with the iPhone: same Soc for every generation but with different sizes/extras (Macbook Air, Pro, Mac Mini just like you choose between an iPhone Mini, Pro, Max)?
- How long Intel-based machines will still be around? What they will do with the Mac Pro?
- How smooth will be the transition with OS/software (I expect it will take more than the two year planned) and how much it will change with this new ARM ecosystem?
As with any new first generation device from Apple, plus this vast, unknown land, I'd stay away from these machines and wait for at the least the next iteration (maybe two).
matches https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MLA22LC/A/magic-keyboard-...
Up to .14x faster graphics performance for $250
Otherwise I'm disappointed that there wasn't a physical design iteration. I was really hoping for something. MicroLED screen, faster refresh rate, different colours of unibody, smaller bezels, more durable anti-reflective coating, more dent resistance, but nothing AFAICT.
Yeah, I know they'd never do it. It's not their style. But they're in the best position to do that well out of any of the major phone manufacturers.
In the meantime I'll be waiting for some of these Linux phones to mature a little...
It's taken then less than 6 months to refresh the entire line? What an absolute kick in the teeth - especially on the back of a machine I really dislike. Super shitty move from Apple.
Now, off in another career field, I'm really wondering why I would choose a MPB over an iPad Air or Pro. By the time you add a keyboard to the iPad, it kinda feels like the only real difference is whether you want to run Xcode. Other than that, is there really anything you can do on a MBP that you can't do on an iPad?
If the App Store gatekeepers get their way then "run a shell".
(I've recently got my first iPad - my first iOS device in a very long time - and it's actually less locked down than I was expecting. I had no idea they had relaxed the rules on scripting on the device. But it's still way, way more locked down than a real computer)
I was imagining upgrading to the Pro to get more USB ports, but if that's not an option... I can't see why I'd ever pay for a Pro.
I like having more than one USB port so I can copy things from one external HD to another. I guess I'd need a dock for that.
Guess I will have to keep my $5000 camera plugged into my Ryzen-based PC, it has 6x USB-3.1 ports. Oh and my studio microphone is also "old" usb. And my keyboard/mouse. And my phone cable. And my expensive Corsair flashdrive. And my Seagate external hdd. And my memory card reader (I have 7 memory cards for different cameras). I can go on.
I'm not going to daisy-chain stuff. I'm not going to buy a dock (just another thing on my desk and take up another power socket, and more LED's burning nonstop). I'm not going to buy dongles to convert from one spec to another.
And no, I'm not going to convert everything to wireless. I have 1gbps fibre where I live, with a Asus router/modem sitting ontop of my PC, hooked up with 1gbps Ethernet cable. The 5GHz wifi is unstable if you don't sit in clear line of sight. I have a USB-3 to Ethernet dongle for my laptops but the fastest one achieves 800mbps and chows about 10% cpu when downloading something. ~2016 MacBook air gets 600mpbs with the same dongle.
Apple could've fix their port/dongle/dock mess this time around but chose not to.
in the end I went with a desktop computer (if you have the space and you don't mind losing portability - I also have a Dell XPS in a pretty good shape for when I need it). It does waaay better when it comes to multitasking, never gets sluggish, much easier to upgrade, no throttiling/overheating problems, cheaper.
So please buy after checking how much it can be repaired :/
I had been hoping for a web page dedicated to showing all companies on board with products coming or expected in the next year
I'm positively impressed here.
I've said this in another thread and thought they might use FaceID as a "Pro" only feature like they do on the iPads but nope, they also released an updated 13" MacBook Pro without FaceID.
I see FaceID as the compromise of increasing screen size to fill all the real estate on the iPhone. The Macbooks have tons of room for extra sensors on the keyboard part but not a lot can be put on the screen.
I'm more concerned about how long it will take for most apps to have full support for both macOS Catalina and Apple Silicon. When the 2012 retina MacBooks came out, quite a few apps were awkwardly pixelated for a long, long time.
Apple can charge more because they always have and people will buy it because they believe it's better.
I love my late `09 Mac Mini. Best Mac I've owned yet, but for the same amount we'll pay for a new one we could probably build our own Linux box with much better specs.
Apple’s always been in the experience game. And they’ve charged a premium for the experience, even though underneath the pieces were the same. Some people hate it and some people love it.
This is another change to the experience. I think though that we’re finally beyond (excuse the expression) “Apples to Apples” comparison though. This hardware is literally not the same stuff - unless you’re down to you talking about NAND gates.
(Happened to me with a brand new Sony Vaio and a Dell, for example.)
The late `09 Mac Mini I'm still using has been a real workhorse though. I upgraded the Ram and Hard Drive about 5 years ago and it's still very capable for what I do. To be fair, the DVD drive died after just a couple years on it though and I didn't really use it much.
But I don't use Photoshop or almost any Apple software anymore (outside of the OS). I write code and I don't need much horsepower for that.
It basically means your M1 won't get close to a radeon mobile chip...
I would have thought they would have allowed people to buy both ARM and Intel models for a period of time.
I guess not.
- 1TB SSD
- 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7
- 2 Thunderbolt
- 2 USB B
- Headphone jack
- MagSafe power
- HDMI
- SD Card Reader
- Physical function keys row
MacBook design peaked in 2015.
- retina display
- actually good keyboard
- the ability to upgrade storage
They are laptops outside of industry marketing material. Why can't they just admit they lost this rebranding battle?
Now that Apple's laptops run much cooler, my guess is that they continue to say "notebook" because Apple owns an important trademark that ends in "Book".
edit: No wait... here comes the pro!
Is this even possible?
Will they have a locked loader?
Silly Apple.