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> I am very disappointed to see the design is identical to what we currently have

Yeah one possible explanation I can think of is that they're not 100% confident in how rollout will go, and they want to avoid the situation where people in the wild are showing off their "brand new macs" which are still going through teething issues. There's less chance of souring the brand impression of M1 if they blend into the product line better.

Alternatively, maybe they want to sell twice to early adopters: once for the new chip, and again in 12-18 months when they release a refreshed design.

I think it could also be that a lot of people will be 'calmed' by the design they're used to when you're trying to convince them of a new chip the average consumer might not understand

I don't know about that, I think the confident move would have been to release the new chips along with a big design update.

As you say, I think the average consumer doesn't understand the difference between an Intel chip and an Apple chip, and will probably not understand what if anything has changed with these new products.

I would say developers would be the group which would be most anxious about an architecture change (which is probably why this announcement was very technically-oriented), and developers on average are probably going to understand that design changes and architecture changes basically orthogonal, and thus won't be comforted that much by a familiar design.

On the other side, average consumers probably aren't all that anxious due to the arch change, and would be more convinced that something new and exciting was happening if it actually looked different.

> developers on average are probably going to understand that design changes and architecture changes basically orthogonal

If the reaction here to the touchbar is representative, perhaps they didn't want the M1 announcement to be overshadowed by the new feature related whining.

Probably a good mix of both. No need to send out a completely new design along with the new chips, plus the designs are really not that outdated. In any case these are squarely targeted at the "average consumer" market - lower budget, keeps computers for a very long time, places significant value on the higher battery life.

Less reliant on perfect compatibility of enterprise software, which I am sure is something they want a little more time to sort out before committing their higher end lineup.

> No 32GB options on any of the models announced today is a shame. Or not I guess as it means I won't be buying anything today

I think this was the fastest way to get something out quickly and cover as many SKUs as possible.

We'll need to wait for the next/larger SKU models to get out of the 16B / 2TB / 2-port limitations. Maybe they should call those devices the Macbook Pro Max.

I wonder how many more SKUs will be needed. Obviously they are going to minimize them, but will they be able to cover Macbook Pro 16", iMac, iMac Pro and Mac Pro with only one (unlikely) or two (likely) more SKUs?

When Apple does eventually produce larger than 16GB / 2TB / 2-port Macs I hope they don’t name them MacBook Pro Max. As long as they are called Macs this naming convention seems silly. I’d prefer that we don’t have any Max Macs.

> I am very disappointed to see the design is identical to what we currently have

Lot's of moving parts in a single generation is risky for scheduling and changing CPU architecture is huge enough for a generation change.

Maybe they really really don't want professionals to buy the 1st gen M1 Macs, because we have the toughest use cases and will shit on it the hardest if something goes wrong. Lack of 32GB seems like a pretty clear signal.

The Mac has turned into a very nice luxury-consumer business. It is a status signal even if its just used to check email and watch YouTube. It's a pretty smart idea to let these users be the gen 1 guinea pigs.

Also just two ports on a PRO model. C‘mon there is plenty of room on both sides. Maybe lets it look elegant but then the cable mess will be on the desk, thanks.

This MBP refresh replaces the lower-end MBP which also only had 2 ports.

This is a small detail that is easy to miss.

The "higher-end" MBPs with 4 ports are only availabe with the intel CPUs for now

Those 8 extra PCIe lanes eat a lot of power. It's worth noting that Intel's processor they used in the 2019 MBP 13 had 16 PCIe lanes (I think the chipset added more too), but this chip probably has 10-12 at the absolute most.

The "we integrated thunderbolt" bit is also implying an untruth that nobody else does that. Intel did that last year with Ice Lake. AMD will do that next year when they upgrade their IO die.

Are there any other ARM devices with Thunderbolt? I am not aware of any.

No, but that's not relevant. Their x86 to ME graphic shows all the things merging together.

The point is that it's mostly Apple's fault to begin with. They choose to use outdated processors without integrated thunderbolt. They chose to add their massive A10 die instead of a normal, optimized SSD controller (not to mention this screws over data recovery and SSD replacement). They are exaggerating at best about RAM as the chips merely sit beside the core. The only thing they should really claim is the IO die and even that's nothing too special.

> Also are we calling it the M1 CPU or the M1 SoC?

The M1 Chip: https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/

> Or not I guess as it means I won't be buying anything today

Honestly, people who don't use their computers as Facebook machines or have very specific things they want to do with the ML engine should probably stay away from Arm Macs for a couple years. There's bound to be plenty of software that doesn't work or doesn't work well, Docker will have ~limited usefulness until more and more people publish Arm images, etc. Plus I'm waiting for the typical Apple move of screwing early adopters by announcing that next year's model is 3x as fast, $200 cheaper, etc.

I didn't watch the event, but if you have an Intel MacBook, will everything keep working as it is now? Even when upgrading to Big Sur?

Yeah, there’s no change for Intel Mac owners really. Given Apple will still be selling Intel Macs through 2021 and likely 2022, I’d expect them to be fully supported through something like 2026/7 (though your exact model may vary depending on its current age).

Will Apple to transparent emulation (x86-on-ARM) or just not run x86 binaries?

Rosetta 2 is a x86_64 to ARM64 translation layer.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_silicon/abou...

Some things still won't run though. Among other issues, there's a page size difference (16 kb vs 4 kb) that bit Chrome (since fixed): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110219...

> Some things still won't run though. Among other issues, there's a page size difference (16 kb vs 4 kb) that bit Chrome (since fixed): https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=110219...

Rosetta 2 on shipping hardware uses 4kb pages; it was only the DTK that was 16kb-only.

Hmmm... What is the day 1 ability for, say, a systems programmer to run VSCode/golang development locally? It'd be neat to find out. The fact that they don't say doesn't tell me much, either it's "not a problem" or it's "such a problem we won't talk about it".

Both should work in Rosetta for now and I expect them to become native in the next few months.

The Visual Studio Code team tweeted that they are targeting a release for the Insiders channel by the end of November.

https://twitter.com/code/status/1326237772860981249?ref_src=...

> Plus I'm waiting for the typical Apple move of screwing early adopters by announcing that next year's model is 3x as fast, $200 cheaper, etc.

They aren’t screwed, the early adopters adopt the new model early by definition. They get the new model and the move on to the next new model.

I know several of these bold individuals.

Such a good point. I wonder how many folks don't actually realize there's a different ecosystem for Docker x86 and ARM images.

Especially since it’s unified memory between the CPU and GPU - no wonder they were showing off mobile games on a desktop device

13" has always had unified memory.