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Comment by samcheng | Hacker News Reader

I suspect there are a lot of us in that boat, with 5-to-8-year-old Macbook Pros. Apple really missed the mark with the intervening generation, by removing useful features and replacing them with features unattractive to developers.

Maybe this big leap in processor / thermal / battery life (and a revision back to proper keyboards) will be enough to get us to switch! I think 64GB (or at least 32GB) would be a nice sweetener.

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I'm still running a late 2013 Macbook, now on Big Sur. The battery life is now about 3-4 hours even if I'm doing dev work, but otherwise it's still pretty good otherwise, for a 7 year old laptop. I had a Sony Vaio back in the early 00s, and it started with running XP 'ok', and then... Vista, which made it dog slow. My point being that I'm surprised that a 7 year old laptop is still "good".

A new laptop isn't critical to my work at the moment, so I'm happy to wait for an M2, if that's what it will be called. Looking at Apple timelines a new chip tends to be 1-2 years apart, and I'm fine with that.

I'm also reluctant to give up Magsafe, or at least have to buy a magnetic USB C connector.

With Apple moving forward rapidly on this architecture change, I expect them to upgrade the processors at a faster pace than normal. They are 6 months into a 2 year plan to migrate all of their systems. I would expect the next version of M chips in 6 to 12 months with higher RAM limits and faster GPU. That would be targeted at their other laptops and the iMac. It will likely take longer for them to get to something that can be used in the Mac Pro and maybe an iMac Pro where RAM and GPU needs are even greater.

I wonder if they will simply provide a motherboard with more cpu slots for M1 v2 for higher end machines like iMac/iMac Pro/Mac Pro.

The ages old AMD philosophy, shovel more cores at it? With such low TDP it might work

It seems unlikely. There's a lot of extra complexity with multi-socket and there's no actual reason for them to do this. I'm not a CPU designer but they might do the equivalent of what you said with a chiplet design like AMD (Intel also has announced plans to eventually get to chiplets).

If it’s any consolation the battery life on my 6 month old 16” MBP is also 3-4 hours when I’m doing work. The CPU is an absolute dog, and the fans kick in under the faintest of loads.

Same battery life here. :( Love the actual machine but the battery life is a disappointment.

Just got a 16MB 500GB M1 Air and so far everything is at least as snappy as the 16" Pro, and battery looks like a full 8 hour day + so far... it's a keeper I think. I also find the keyboard a bit nicer to type on personally than on the 16", so accuracy is up.

Moving from a 2015 Air to a 2018 Pro felt like a downgrade since the battery life was much, much worse. I have to keep the power plug around if I want to work on the couch for any amount of time.

Isn't the Pro line optimized for power, while the Air line is optimized for mobile utility (incl. battery life)?

I love Magsafe as well. However, if the new laptop battery truly lasts all day, then it won't be nearly as important. I'll just charge the laptop overnight, and treat it like my phone.

Maybe they will integrate wireless charging into the laptops soon?

I would agree, with the exception that I’ve noticed really CPU heavy things like builds that take > 1 min still complete a lot faster when plugged in, even on a full battery. I assume they still need to throttle somewhat when only running on battery.

Air? Or do you have a fan?

It's not throttling, per se; the M1 prioritizes its efficiency cores when off mains power, and the performance cores when on mains power.

When unplugged, it engages the performance cores as little as possible. You should be able to run `powermetrics` on an interval while running a high-intensity task to confirm; the performance cores pin first when on mains, then ramp up the efficiency cores, and the opposite happens on battery.

It's a big difference because the efficiency cores max out at about 2W draw, and the performance cores max out at around 18W. There's a big incentive in battery life to rely on that behavior.

I'm not sure yet if it's tunable, macOS doesn't make that a transparent behavior where you can just tweak it at will.

The Air will throttle if under full load long enough, but it's still mostly just ramping down the performance cores to stay cool.

Magsafe seems less an issue now.

With a true 'all day' battery, you'll probably only plug it in at a desk where tripping or knocking things over isn't an issue. While travelling, you just charge it at night or when you aren't using it. Much more like smartphone usage.

How many people are aching for a magsafe phone charger?

Thats crazy; Are you using it as your daily primarly work horse?

I can't imagine how you got used to the performance you have right now. Either you are not doing anything with your device or you would hugely benefit of upgrading at least every 3 years or so.

Yeah, maybe. It's still hard for me to envision giving up a 2014 and 2015 MBP. They both work flawlessly and don't compromise on any of the useful features, like having USB A ports, SD card slot, MagSafe, no touchbar, reasonably sized touchpad and so forth.

My plan is to get a min spec M1 air as a personal laptop and then get the real 14"/16" M2 version with touch, more cores and more RAM later on. As one apple employee told me, you never really want to get a v1 with apple anything if you can.

With the 'touchification' of big sur, it seems pretty likely apple is going to release some sort of convertible macbook or maybe something iPad style. Or maybe iPads can start running macos?

Work laptop will get upgraded to an M1 one way or another anyway.

I keep seeing this, but the performance gains and real-world, Docker and all, battery life are significant in the 16 inch MacBook Pro‘s more so than even my 2017 15”.

I don't even want to imagine how expensive the 64 GB version is going to be.

I upgraded to a high spec MacBook Pro 16 after the M1 model was announced. I need solid virtualization support for Windows and Linux now, plus Big Sur seems kind of a mess from the design and privacy side of things. I'll probably wait 3-5 generations until everything with Apple Silicon is worked out to upgrade again, maybe get an Air as a device for travel if things look stable sooner.

That's pretty much how I feel too.

Nothing enticing because my computer is lightning fast and this means having to use the Apple ecosystem.

It's almost like Apple has a culture of forcing people to do things the hard way, just so it feels rewarding when it's done. Gamifying the experience?

The reason it has been stuck to 16GB is precisely because Intel mobile chips did not support any more than that up until a year ago. So rather than blaming Apple, it should rather be placed on intel.

I don't think expecting more than 16GB of ram for entry level Apple laptops should be expected.

The low amount of ram, energy inefficiency and plateauing performance are the exact reason why Apple is moving away from Intel and onto a platform where they can control their own destiny.

what do you mean entry level laptops? they don’t offer more than 16 and their base ram is only 8...

and how are the macbook pro or mac mini entry level laptops?

The mini is their cheapest computer. The Air has been their entry level laptop for the last several generations. The 13” Pro has had 2 versions since 2016 - a low-end 2 port model, and a higher end 4 port model.

Every device with an M1 available today is Apple’s lowest-end (and least expensive) offering.

The actual reason the M1 Macs cap out at 16GB is that they use LPDDR4, and that on a 128-bit bus caps out at 16GB. Assuming that they move to LPDRR5 as it becomes available (hasn't Apple generally been pretty quick on the uptake on new RAM standards?), that limit goes up to 64GB.

It's a conservative spec for sure given the rest of the M1. Samsung has shipped their own LPDDR5 in the Galaxy S20 since February. Maybe production capacity is still too limited.

I believe that Samsung co-designed the memory with their interface block, and then it was effectively codified as the standard. Most other companies had to wait for the standard to be formed before they could start work on their IP. This gave Samsung a huge head start.

Intel's fault? Uhm, they've had some misses recently, but your statement about RAM support is incorrect.

The 7200u supports 32GB or RAM. That chip is over 4 years old and nothing special. Not sure how long that's been supported, I didn't feel like looking further back.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/95443/i...

It does not support LPDDR4... which is something Apple has been targeting because it uses less power.

Huh, so they did. TIL.

The just released 16" macbook pro has DDR4. They clearly aren't married to LPDDR.

Probably because they couldn't keep waiting. It also means the 16" MacBook Pro goes through battery life at high speed from experience.

Apple switched to DDR4 when the 2018 Macbook Pros were released which allowed them to support 32 GB of RAM.

The rated battery life of the Macbook Pro didn't change between 2017 and 2018.

The rated battery life may not have, but the actual, real world experience battery life certainly has. Speaking as the user of a. 2019 MacBook Pro with the DDR4 that I use for work.

I find myself scrambling for a power supply way more often than I ever did with my 2017 15" MacBook Pro.

Even with the older battery in the 2017, with more cycles, I get a longer battery life out of it than the 2019.

And I have the complete opposite experience. Pinning this on the switch from LPDDR3 to DDR4 seems like a very weak conclusion. Especially when it is known that processors and displays are the largest consumers of energy and the 2019 MacBook Pro boosts way higher with more cores than the 2017.

> The reason it has been stuck to 16GB is precisely because Intel mobile chips did not support any more than that up until a year ago. So rather than blaming Apple, it should rather be placed on intel.

That is not true, example CPU I had in my old laptop: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/pl/pl/ark/products/78939/i...

Supports 32GB RAM, released in 2014.

The reason some older laptops didn't have more RAM was twofold: 1. Either the BIOS wasn't written with such support 2. There were no RAM sticks big enough (no 16GB in a single SO-DIMM) so you could have 2x16 - but there are currently since a year or two, SO-DIMMs with 32GB RAM, so you could easily reach 64MB in a laptop.

GP means LPDDR3 support which capped out at 16gb on intel, which was because their 10nm lines with LPDDR4 were delayed years. It was always possible to use regular DDR but for laptops the low power variant is important.

... and yet they use DDR4 (not LP) on at least one of their laptop lines.

Seemingly out of necessity?

Yes they do on the 16”, after years of complaints from users who didn’t understand the constraint, and which they added the maximum allowable battery size to (~100wH), and it still only lasts 3-4h in moderate use.

They switched it on the 2018 15-inch and it didn't change the battery life at all.

GP didn't write about LPDDR3, just a vague statement that intel cpus didn't support > 16GB RAM, which I proved was wrong.

Apple sells the 16" macbook with 64gb of DDR4. It's their decision whether to use LPDDR or DDR. They choose LPDDR for some and DDR for others.

Pretty incredible to blame another company for a decision that was made inside Apple. Especially for a chip that was designed from scratch in apple, and therefore has no Intel constraints.

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