Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Touch Bar onto users, I'd immediately buy an M1 MBP with MagSafe and actual ports.
Yes, I did use the SD card reader from time to time, but most serious cameras use other cards (my older camera uses compact flash, and the newer one uses XQD). It makes no sense for Apple to integrate readers for those, and my XQD/CF readers also read SD cards, so the card reader is useless.
All of my mobile peripherals at this point are USB-C, so I don't care about USB-A ports either. And when I'm at home, I use a dock, which has all of the ports I need.
Honestly I'd much rather that they keep the laptops thin instead of adding ports I'm not going to use.
The vast majority of people these days just use their phones for cameras, and don't use point-and-shoots or other things with full-size SD cards.
So really SD cards cater to just the mid-range camera market, where people use mirrorless/DSLRs but not high-end versions that often use faster cards.
I don't think it's a good idea for Apple to make everyone's laptops bulkier so a small minority of people can avoid using a $17 adapter like this:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07NW8RPYN/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
With that said, I have cameras that use SD cards and don't see the need for an SD port. I have usbc adapters that are not much bigger than the SD card that I can use on my MBA or iPad. With LR, I can basically load my days pics on either device and have them available everywhere.
I'm very skeptical they are adding back SD, so we'll see. I think MagSafe is going to be something like what came to the latest iPhone and not what people think of traditional MagSafe. Or maybe they'll add something to the usbc port that works like MagSafe if using an Apple cable.
It's finally, years later, getting merely not infuriating to be stuck with only USB-C ports.
Single port for display + charging is very nice, when it works.
That iPhones and most iPads still don't use it is annoying. Having two kinds of charging cable around, years after Apple went all-in on USB-C for laptops, sucks.
[EDIT] two kinds of charging cable and still needing to buy & carry two kinds of adapters/dongles for everything. Ugh.
The most recent non-pro iPad does have USB-C and I expect whenever they get around to redesigning the lowest cost iPads they’ll also move to USB-C.
Man, my 2017 MacBook Pro's USB-C charging cable (the official one, not third party, and in pristine condition) constantly disconnects itself to the point where I'm basically traumatized from the annoyance of it now. It only provides power if it's ALL the way in, and the damned thing just pushes itself out half a millimeter and cuts power repeatedly.
I really want to like the generic nature of USB-C charging, but proper magsafe with a strong magnet is just miles better (third party magnet adapters for USB-C both break the spec and also tend to have very weak magnets which can cause damage from sparking at the port).
Yeah, well, it's not.
> Yes, but how about the _inside_ of the USB-C port?
It's pristine, like I said elsewhere already.
Yesterday I moved it around. And noticed what you described. The plug will come back out by a millimeter. And then it won't charge.
Maybe just a bad design of the usb-c port then.
I don't have anything helpful to offer but I feel your pain. Reading your comment almost brings on PTSD from remembering what it was like.
I actually restored my 2015 Macbook Pro and have been so happy and content using that in the past two years or so. Not sure about the other sizes, but my 13" from 2015 does everything better than the one from 2017. Performance, keyboard, connectors. None of the overheating bullshit where the fan is constantly going and performance is throttled.
I felt the same until my cat pulled my laptop off my desk by the cord. It landed on the corner with the USB plugged in, destroying the port on the laptop itself. Probably knocked a few hundred off the resale value. The little shit.
They never quite got their Intel laptops there, though. (Especially running MS Teams, Slack, and Chrome!)
It’s kind of funny that, now that they can make a laptop that really does last all day on one charge (according to tests of M1), they’re switching back to MagSafe.
There's this stupid dream that the computer needs to be light and fanless and thin and sexy. It doesn't need to do that. I'm happy if it doesn't melt while trying to run some software I need to do my job.
Modern computing is a sad place :(
lol, it's not only browsing though but web-infested Electron apps as well. Used draw.io (which is otherwise a fine diagramming app) the other day, with fans spinning up all the time. It's sad to see that draw.io was (and internally largely remains) originally a Java (Swing) app, seemingly only ported to a fscking browser frontend as a fashion statement when the exact same things it does I could do almost 20 years ago on a PowerBook using OmniGraffle.
Man is that an understatement. My work MBP - a 16" i9 - may as well be a desktop.
Whats up with photo/video people gatekeeping “serious” vs functional
Your point might have some merit but SD will hold out for the next 5-8 years that purchasers of this machine will expect
That said, I'm glad to see Apple has finally realized some of the ways they've been alienating their customer base, and they appear to be walking back some of their most unpopular changes.
I’m looking forward to having that in the new processor and with touchbar
They are acknowledging the folly of their ways as they have gotten rid of the butterfly keyboard, adding magsafe back, and adding sd cards back
They are making the least contentious and perfect machine
My "perfect machine" could also play DVDs, but that may be getting a bit contentious.
Regardless, the point remains that high-end cameras often use high-end memory cards that are not SD cards.
Have you heard of these obscure websites called Amazon or eBay.
They have tens of thousands of cables in every configuration you need.
Last time I needed a cable on short notice before a gig I had to settle for an adapter, and was really lucky that it worked. I've had other seemingly simple pin-to-pin adapters not work on me before.
Next time I'm in a jam I'll run down to my local ebay though, thank you for this super helpful reply.
From these reports, the next revision to the Air is going to get a bit of a redesign, colors, faster CPU, etc., but "Air" is still almost certainly going to mean the line that prioritizes being thin and light. You will still have a Mac laptop that gives you what you want. But people who do want more ports will, for the first time since Mac laptops went USB-C, also get what they want. (Or at least get closer to it.)
That's the only change that my next laptop isn't a ThinkPad
https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/21/apple-ransomware-leak-new-mac...
looks like it has physical keys.
I think that's the right side of the laptop, so from the bottom up, it is shift, return, \, delete, and the connectors for the fingerprint sensor.
hallelujah
The fact the OS runs a dozen network services without being able to deactivate them is (the final straw) the pushed me back into the Linux camp.
I want to both beef up the memory/processing power of my laptop and switch to Linux (which comes with built-in performance bonus of native Docker). So I am headed to ThinkPad anyway, but there's a chance Apple could keep me locked in if they make a nicely-powered proper dev machine with no damn touch bar.
Migrating to Big Sur has been a pain in the ass even though I am still on an Intel model. Tons of Python language versions and packages are a total PITA to get built on Big Sur.
To be fair this seems to be a pretty Python-specific issue, but the inability to do much about it really has dug the feeling into me that I don't own/control my machine, Apple does.
The touch bar is handled by the T1/T2/M1 chips in the laptops. It could be that just cramming a T2+OLED into a keyboard may have made it way too expensive for a keyboard. Plus does Bluetooth even have enough bandwidth to handle sending screen data that size reliably?
It is a niche item and it does suck but for some reason they keep tacking it on...
That's because changing the chassis is too expensive, but when they redesign it, you'll see it most likely without a touchbar.
I'm not a TB hater (more indifference), and I still think it's going away :)
Looks like you won't have too long to wait:
Apple ransomware leak corroborates 2021 MacBook Pro ports: HDMI, MagSafe, SD card slot https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/21/apple-ransomware-leak-new-mac...
Not exactly sure if I'll end up buying a MBP later though. I basically only use my Mac for recording audio, and once you get your mic set up , your not too portable anyway
When they first announced the transition last year, it was implied that some products will still get refreshed during the 2-year transition period. But based on this article and common sense, there is minimal incentive to do an Intel refresh. Refreshing both discourages buying of Apple silicon-powered Macs and lessens the performance jump that Apple is so eager to publicize.
For example, Tiger Lake H-series was just announced/released and it'd logically target the Macbook Pro 16.
Yes, Tiger Lake H-series was just announced, but it's likely Intel proposed selling this chip to Apple 2.5 years ago, and Apple didn't like the roadmap, and said No Thanks.
That's how much time supply chain changes like the move to apple silicon chip will need - I wouldn't be surprised if Apple already knew of all of Intel's roadmaps 5 years into the future, and decided, nope. No thanks. Not giving any more money to Intel.
From this point of view, you can tell, it's detrimental to Apple to go back to Intel now, if they wanted to use the Tiger Lake H they would have used the threat of M1 as a bargaining chip to lower the pricing on upcoming chips. It's obvious they didn't do that.
For what it's worth, once I got the physical escape key back, I've come to really like the Touch Bar.
- 20 total, 16 high performance, 4 efficiency
- 40 total, 32 high performance, 8 efficiency
Which is kind of interesting given that the 8 core M1 is split half/half at 4 high performance, 4 efficiency.
Sounds like perhaps MacOS doesn't typically have more than 4 cores worth of low-priority work, regardless of the system size/workload?
How many is optimum is an interesting question, I would assume the apple peeps have a good idea and are on the money with this design.
At some point it's more efficient to have a single performance core going than a number of efficiency ones.
They do up to 8 on the big CPU according to rumor, so there's obviously some room there.
There's also plenty of time where the system has low intensity use or is idle. The efficiency cores let things like receiving notifications or checking e-mail happen for very little power draw. Fans only need to run during intense use and the system can be quiet the rest of the time.
Who knows, maybe the UI thread only needs access to the graphics card, and the background thread only access to network. It would save a lot of interrupt loops.
This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Fans running means that dust is accumulating in the machine at an accelerated rate, even if you have filters in place. The less the fans have to run, the less dust accumulates, and the longer cooling functions near-peak. A tower that sees sporadic heavy usage especially stand to benefit from fan minimization.
See, for example, this article from yesterday: https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...
Long story short, segregating background work from foreground work means that Spotlight indexing won't cause the UI to become sluggish. I'm guessing it also tends to be more cache-friendly.
At the end of the day you will still need HE Core, they just aren't as important comparing to a Battery devices.
Not to mention Marketing, Die Size cost consideration.
The design challenge of high-performance CPUs today is heat. Too much heat induces throttling. Putting low-priority stuff onto efficiency cores reserves the power budget of the SoC for high-priority tasks.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/apples-m1-is-a-fast-...
The efficiency cores are essentially for when the system is idling or for the 95% case (browsing the web, watching YouTube and checking e-mails). If a task is performance-bottlenecked then it makes sense to go straight to maximum performance rather than any in-between combination as you're essentially either waiting for the computer or not (i.e. it probably doesn't make much sense to try to strike an efficiency balance for tasks that are stressing a minimal set of low-power cores when they need to be completed either way - and in a machine where there's no battery life to worry about).
I know people say this all the time, but the reality is modern web browsers are incredibly expensive processors.
There was a moment in web history when the same happened due to the flash-based ads which easily spent huge amounts of CPU for... nothing meaningful to the reader. Now the flash is gone, but the pattern repeated.
And even not counting all the ads, today's "hot" web development conventions are often making the CPU even hotter.
It's like there's this assumption that the web's simple serving of HTML was a compromise of the time rather than it's killer feature.
I don't want to sift through hundreds of images and outbound links from the ads you're trying to trick me into clicking, I just want the information I came for or I'm gone forever.
The E-core magic trick is that they are always running and also exist to prevent thread stoppers, tasks that force you to pause high-priority work such as network requests, push notifications, or memory management. This enables a machine where the performance cores can pound away at tasks uninterrupted and your cache can stay dedicated to the task at hand, preventing situations where you may have to dump branches mid-process, increasing performance consistency. Mathematically, it works out to where the P cores are ~5.2W each and then the E-cores are less than that combined, allowing the system to idle on just e-Cores and spin up and dedicate P-Cores to the UI and UX intensive tasks, keeping the thermals low and performance high. In a situation like the Mac Pro, I would expect much, much hotter P-Cores too as the thermals will allow.
https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...
<personal rant>
I'd swear that Spotlight indexing would prefer a freaking supercomputer when it runs.
My whole system just starts to feel sluggish, especially if I just moved a bunch (say 1-5GB) of files onto my system and not it wants to index them.
</rant>
<math>S_\text{latency}(s) = \frac 1 {(1 - p) + \frac p s}</math>
Someone who doesn't need more performance cores is unlikely to invest in a Mac Pro.
There's a lot of software that won't scale to 108 cores, of course, but again I expect the amount of software that could usefully scale to 40 parallel threads but can't scale to 108 to be fairly small.
In a world where power and heat budgets don't matter at all you'd not have any efficiency cores, after all.
Bad assumption. It's pretty difficult to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 32 cores. You have to carefully avoid all sources of process-wide contention. The only cases where it is easy to just keep adding cores are where the units of independent work are overwhelmingly large compared to everything else, like video compression.
I'm curious what the I/O situation will be. Will it be able to output to two 4k screens or not. The 13-inch cannot, so I'm not holding my breath.
https://www.amazon.com/SAMSUNG-65-inch-Class-Q800T-Built/dp/...
The port standards to support 8k exist already. As do the cables.
And the super-high DPI is basically only useful to people sitting close to them... which is what someone doing MBP work will be doing.
2x4k would be a cop-out. I'd say 1x8k + 2x4k should be what an MBP should support.
You know, if it does mean "professional".
https://www.apple.com/ca/macbook-pro-13/specs/
> Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colours and:
>One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz
We already know from insider rumors and leaked schematics.
Magsafe for power (the original, wired, concept) and two USB-C on the left side, and headphones, SD card, HDMI, and an additional USB-C on the right.
>Compared to it’s N5 node, N3 promises to improve performance by 10-15% at the same power levels, or reduce power by 25-30% at the same transistor speeds.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16024/tsmc-details-3nm-proces...
It would certainly help pack that many cores into a small space without throttling.
AMD's high-end cores have a quarter-gig of cache. That uses a lot of power no matter how you slice it. AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect uses 30-50% of total chip power. Apple will have similar communications overhead too. Adding more memory lanes increases power consumption as does adding more PCIe lanes and other IO.
It definitely remains to be seen if their chips are significantly faster when scaled up. In any case, they wouldn't have to beat AMD or Intel to count it as a success. Simply not being terrible would be enough.
It would use less if it was on the same process node as the rest of stuff though. They were fulfilling some obligation to Global Foundries by having them separately manufacture it.
Apple needs very high performance core designs that also work in the thermal envelope of a handheld phone or a fanless laptop.
As noted when the A14 launched, taking the power/heat cut at the 7nm node change resulted in better sustained performance for those chips
>The one explanation and theory I have is that Apple might have finally pulled back on their excessive peak power draw at the maximum performance states of the CPUs and GPUs, and thus peak performance wouldn’t have seen such a large jump this generation, but favour more sustainable thermal figures.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16088/apple-announces-5nm-a14...
A 32+8 core M1 for a less insane price sounds like an easy upgrade choice. The lingering question is memory. 16GB won't be enough.
What does the time have to do with it? It's not like a car with moving parts.
The top end Mac Pro with 32 Firestorm on one chip is probably will have a GeekBench Multicore score approaching 60,000, triple the fastest Xeon based Mac Pro.
And it probably uses half the 300 watts of the existing Mac Pro, with correspondingly less heat. Hopefully Apple doesn’t use this as sn opportunity to go back to the whacky packaging of the Trash Can Mac Pro.
You can see the full description here (https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf) but there’s compression, encryption, compiling, and several other tests.
As an end-user I’m okay with that, because at the end of the day if things run faster I don’t really care how, especially for tasks that are ubiquitous.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/gpu_features...
Would Apple then make discrete GPU solutions using PCIe5? Makes sense for the Mac Pro given the edge cases for requiring multi-GPU solutions.
32 HP Core with 8 HE Core, 128 GPU Core give you ~650mm inclusive of L2 and SLC. Adding in I/O, NPU, ISP, VPU etc this chip should still be within the reticle limit of ~850mm2.
Block diagram over a die shot: https://3s81si1s5ygj3mzby34dq6qf-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
> Codenamed Jade 2C-Die and Jade 4C-Die, a redesigned Mac Pro is planned to come in 20 or 40 computing core variations, made up of 16 high-performance or 32 high-performance cores and four or eight high-efficiency cores. The chips would also include either 64 core or 128 core options for graphics.
> For the new MacBook Pros, Apple is planning two different chips, codenamed Jade C-Chop and Jade C-Die: both include eight high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores for a total of 10, but will be offered in either 16 or 32 graphics core variations.
The MBP M1x will have 8 Firestorm cores, 2 Icestorm cores and 16 or 32 GPU cores, support more ports, and up to 64Gb RAM.
These are going to fly, probably close to double multicore performance over M1, and up to 4X graphics performance.
I haven't tried yet, but AFAIK M1 Macbooks have a lot lower thermal issues, so that isn't a problem right now.
It will be interesting to see how close the rumors are to fact when real hardware announcements happen. Given how fast the M1 in the MacBook Air is performing for tasks like video editing I wonder if they will really need to push to such extremes as putting 40 cores in a Mac Pro -- unless they plan to edit four 8K streams at once?
Or you could run up to 5 Electron apps simultaneously!
To give some perspective: the current version can go up to 28 Xeon W cores, 1.5TB or RAM, Radeon Pro Vega II Duo with 2 x 32 GB, ...
(~$54,000 USD with wheels)
"Titan S375 - Dual AMD EPYC Rome 7002 Series - Scientific Research Server PC up to 128 cores"
https://www.titancomputers.com/Titan-S375-Dual-AMD-EPYC-Rome...
The 40 core model is probably the replacement of the 28 core Xeon which is a $7,000 option.
I still deal with 1080p and get annoyed at my hardware's limitations. If I could justify a Mac Pro and Apple's accelerator card, I'd get them in a heartbeat.
For certain applications, no matter how good the hardware you have is, there's always a desire for more, faster hardware.
Is that really a common scenario? I can see editors at the big studios using monsters like this (because the studios can afford it) but are we talking about a market of hundreds or thousands? Is this something a free-lance video person would use?
M1 is fast at editing, but not particularly fast when you factor in processing.
It's a bit mind-bending for those of us who remember the SGI Octane and Onyx days to think that 100x as much computation is available at 100x less power-consumption. (That's 10,000 times more efficient, for those following along at home.)
Between that and the almost infinite instantaneous computation power available in the cloud at the press of a few buttons (and sufficient capacity on one's credit card), we ain't in Kansas any more.
My theory is Apple will release the new Mac Pro with an updated Apple Silicon Afterburner card focused on pro video.
They will debut a new AI / ML compute "accelerator" focused on the data science space also under the Afterburner moniker.
Seriously, WTF? Where is it?
1: https://i0.wp.com/lemmymorgan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01...
The heat pipe is the part just above and to the left of the fan.
(Video mentions 2019 model, which is a minor revision based on this)
The downside is it's harder to get decent airflow over the fins. The casing is probably designed to direct the airflow, but I'd have to see all parts together to figure out how this works.
EDIT: the lower case appears to have some ducting on it, see this example: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/324259489798
Provides for heat dissipation over broader surfaces. This is normal.
And maybe it is a mistake. That happened before and they iterated over it and turned the design into an advantage most of the times.
Judging and say "does nothing" is very naive in my opinion and I am pretty confident that everything in that designed is planned pretty accurately.
Apple is also known for not admitting its design failures.
1: https://www.zdnet.com/a/hub/i/2020/11/20/ab77bd9b-edc0-419f-...
The idea that a cooling fan needs to “blow on” the thing that it’s cooling is just dumb. As long as the path from the fan to the CPU is sealed, it makes no difference at all how far away the fan is. (Think of a wing being tested in a wind tunnel. The fan that’s making the ‘wind’ doesn’t need to be placed right up against the wing for this to work!)
A heat pipe gives you more layout flexibility because it lets you place the fan somewhere where it can’t generate airflow directly over the CPU. Given that a heat pipe can’t be 100% efficient at transferring heat, a design with a heat pipe is actually less efficient, all else being equal.
> I am pretty confident that everything in that designed is planned pretty accurately.
Apple was designing stuff that considered the airflow THROUGH THE CASE back with the first Macintosh, the 128K. You could even get a silly looking chimney that used convection to pull even more air through the case with no other modifications.
All Macs with air cooling, not just the laptops, are designed with internal airflow in mind and always have been. You do not have a little fan blowing directly on the CPU (from where? to where?) and expect it to do anything.
I don't know who this fellow is, but next he can take the top off his cylinder head and then be upset the engine doesn't work. From first appearances he is an absolute bozo.
He's pretty much the main figurehead of the right to repair movement from the consumer electronics side of things. He has run his own independent repair shop doing board level repairs for years in NYC.
https://www.fighttorepair.org/ is him.
The person who bought it.
There’s no particular reason the fan should be physically next to the CPU or heat sink. Its job is to draw air into the computer, across the heat sink, and then back out.
You generally don’t want the air intake and outflow to be too close to each other since that would typically cause heated air to be drawn back in, making the cooling a lot less effective. And you mostly want the air flowing in a channel (rather than blown all around inside), so you can expel most of the heated air.
So, e.g., you have intake on one side of the computer, a channel for the air to flow inside the computer, and a fan at the other side of the channel, pulling air through.
This will be effective if the heat sink on the CPU is anywhere along the channel. There’s no reason it needs to be next to the fan.
A piece of copper, BTW, is a way to move heat from some place that doesn’t have good exposure to the air channel to a place where it does. You only need to do that if the heat sink doesn’t already have good exposure.
To do this properly, I think you’d want to analyze the design and then run some tests to see under what circumstances heat builds up.
Lost a little respect for that guy. He’s a smart guy, so I know he understands this stuff. You’ve got to wonder why he’s bullshitting his audience like this. Seems clear to me this video is about promoting himself rather than discovering or explaining flaws in the cooling system of Apple laptops. (Or maybe I’m giving him too much credit, and he really doesn’t understand this stuff. Either way, it’s not a good look for him.)
a) a different processor design than the M1
b) different RAM modules that Samsung doesn't have in existence, so who and what? or, a different chassis design...
It might not be a 19" rackmount chassis like the Xserves of yore, but it's hard to deny Apple hardware will continue to find its way into real datacenters.
The high end Mac mini SKU mentioned in TFA sounds great for this application, especially now that they have 10Gig Ethernet.
ARM might replace Intel, but it won't be branded Apple, that's for sure.
However I still wish they'd be able to get the bezel down to the size of an XPS 13
Right now I'm looking at a 2019 16" and 2018 15" models, they're pretty much the same size, the 16" model is just a couple mm wider. Probably the same applies for 13"->14".
That was 5 years ago and I'm over it. Still makes me sad though.
As I was thinking to buy M1 mac
Seems from this article that 1) New Macbook Pro 16 and 14 likely announced at WWDC in June with a "M1X" SOC 2) New Macbook Air and Mini refresh in the fall with an "M2" SOC
M1X > M2 > M1 in terms of pure performance. So if you need high performance, then at least wait for WWDC. If not, then can probably get the M1 now or wait until the expected sales post WWDC.
The first batch of M1 macs were announced on Nov 10th, 2020, and the 16" MacBook Pro hasn't been refreshed with an M* chip yet, so that will probably happen soon. The article claims it will happen "early summer", but within the next 6 months is a pretty safe bet.
Here's a good guide on how long each specific Mac has gone without updating, with guesses on when it's a bad idea to buy now: https://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#MacBook_Pro_16
Unfortunately the global chip shortage makes it a long wait.
This new design will likely replace that one in Apple's lineup, but it never went away.
Like I said before, I skipped the M1 and its seems to be paying off.
I would totally love that they port the new iMac white&color design to the laptops. I miss colors on laptops. I miss the white MacBook. The last decade of aluminum is so boring.
Mac Pros will have either 16 performance/4 efficiency, or 32 performance/8 efficiency.
I don't dispute that some applications are hard to parallelize. However, in my day to day work, I've found that parallel operations are often not that complicated to introduce.
The bigger issue is that CPUs are now so fast I find myself blocked by IO far more often than I'm blocked by actual processing.
> From production rendering to playing hundreds of virtual instruments to simulating an iOS app on multiple devices at once, it’s exceedingly capable.
> Increased speed for Logic Pro X, MATLAB, Adobe Photoshop 2020, Autodesk Maya, Wolfram Mathematica Build Time, Final Cut Pro X
> Tasks like animating 3D film assets, compositing 8K scenes and building lifelike gaming environments.
This is the target market - and pretty much everything listed here tends to be multi-threaded. Making multi threaded applications aren't easy, but for high performance tasks all these use-cases have to be multi-threaded where possible or they are just too slow.
I think that people grossly underestimate the amount of processing that can be done on video. Reasonably sized filters, something like deinterlacing, high quality transforms. Swamping a modern CPU in terms of memory access or processing isn't too hard.
Yes, if you just use AOM directly you'll have a hard time saturating the core with work.
However, if you split your video up into scenes and start an AOM instance per scene, it becomes trivial to outperform the 12 core ryzen with a 128 core machine. The main bottleneck becomes memory bandwidth.
This is what the av1an project is doing https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an
All that said, you need videos long enough for there to be a benefit here. The Ryzen will still win if you are talking about making 10 second av1 gifs.
For Windows support, I thought Apple said something along the lines of: "If Windows wants to add support, we are fine with it" - but I could be mistaken.
Say what now?
The problematic part of that quote is where it claims that iPhones and iPads used to have Intel processors.
Interestingly though, Intel did at once point make very nice mobile CPUs (notably the XScale PXA270, which clocked in at a little over 500 MHz and had a halfway decent PowerVR graphics accelerator).
I'd be a bit concerned to write something with parallel processing, only to have an overheating issue denied by Apple for years. Butterfly keyboard flashbacks...
They are selling the M1 MacBooks and Mini at a similar price as previous models with comparable number of ports, amount of ram, ssd. Only the CPU performance gain was for free ;)
I did see a guy with an m1 in our coworking space who hit a beach ball last week while showing me something, so I know it's not just me or my various hardware. but perhaps its more rare?
How would they do that if there are no ports on the new devices? Seriously though, I do not buy devices without HDMI and UTP port. Dell is pretty generous with the ports and 5300 is pretty amazing. I wish Apple had some sanity in the team that decides what ports go on devices.
https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/dell-laptops-and-notebo...
Jobs specifically hated that, and it was indeed the Mac II where Gassee and others pressured him into producing a Mac with more expandability.
I'd say if you purchased a Mac Pro, it's still the same. If you find yourself not having enough power, you bought the wrong machine to begin with (probably modern threadripper pro would be what you should have been looking for)
If the computer satisfies all your performance needs, what use is it to "feel frustruated" over something that was expected to come?
Don't feel Fear of Missing Out. The Mac Pro didn't change. Your feelings about it changed because of marketing and advertising (ie apple trying to persuade you that you need the M1, when in fact your computing needs are being taken care of already)
Wait for the next generation after that current M1/M1x mac pros and go for the next generations when apple comes out with 128 Cores and 256G of ram.
One constant of computer industry, there will always be the next chip, the next computer, and by then, the fancy M1 Mac Pro will become obsolete. Exactly like how nobody wants a 486 computer anymore but when it was released it was the hottest thing on the planet. Its day will come when everyone says "oh that M1? that was a slow POS that is now ewaste"
1) The details were all speculation. 2) There was no other option if you needed more horsepower. 3)_I'm happy with the current Mac Pro, but its going to be phased out of software support before its time, just like the Motorolla.
So it's more about the software support being phased out than new hardware coming out.
If you want the software support, wait until the support dies/runs out, and then buy the newest computer at that time, when you need it.
You'll find that apple will drop support for the M1 too in the future. Its day will come when Apple decides the neural engine is too outdated or the architecture is too old and will stop support it as well. That's a fact, not speculation.
This is precisely why I as a consumer do not buy Apple products. Apple has a long history of dropping product support with no upgradeable path forward, only buying new hardware.
This is also, in my speculation, the reason Apple is one of the most valuable companies on the planet, even though they are primarily a consumer products company. There's a constant internal urge for the newest shiniest product (which consumers of all products feel), but also the very real external requirement to buy new if you want to work with anything new.
My best anecdotal experience for this was when my uncle contacted me because his wife bought him an iPod Touch, but his Mac was telling him he needed a newer version of iTunes (I believe he bought the Mac 4 years prior). It turned out however that the new version of iTunes couldn't be installed on his "outdated" Mac because it was bundled with an OS update that his machine was too old to receive. I meanwhile was able to load iTunes under Windows on a machine twice the age of his Mac and connect the Touch without issue. He didn't want a new Mac, didn't need a new Mac, but chose to buy a new one to work with the rest of his ecosystem.
It's not speculation to know that whatever computer is bought this year will be bested by what comes next year.
Comments like this are always just so empty to me. This person was looking for a more powerful Mac, so suggesting they should have been looking for a CPU that's never going to be available for use in a Mac is just grandstanding. This person had been waiting for years for a product from Apple to replace the worthless trashcan systems. How your suggesting of something never to be available is helpful eludes me.
My suggestion was if there wasn't enough power, and the person needed a computer (which is the only reason one would buy a mac exactly during this changeover point), then a threadripper pro running linux would be the way to go for many workloads.
The alternative is to just wait a few months and see what comes.
Except for all of the software that doesn't run on Linux.
>The alternative is to just wait a few months and see what comes.
If one did this with Apple, one would never buy a product.
This is the reality really, if you actually wanted power then the Mac Pro just wasn't what you should have bought. Threadripper + Nvidia cards would take you way further for far less and with a clear sustainable upgrade path.
Also really after the past 10 years of Apple's pro moves with their last 2 "workstation" machines being discontinued it seems very risking investing so much money in their pro line.
Everyone then bought the current Mac Pro, but were disappointed that nothing else really fits into the slots aside from the things that Apple offered themselves (Nvidia cards won't work in the current Gen Intel Mac Pros.)
What makes anyone think the next Apple Silicon based Mac Pro will be any different?
Wanting a more modular mac pro is more like wishful thinking or wanting something to be different when reality is clearly saying something.
It's a little upsetting to see even the 12-core version get smoked by the M1 Mini, but it's from 2013 so what do I really expect.
Still nice and quiet and compiles iOS apps just fine.
So far the answer seems to be, there is no getting around these CPU issues through tailoring the compiler flags etc. and the best people can get is amelioration of the problem, not getting it back on par with normally inferior Intel chips. Again, the issue is that the Threadripper stuff is eating unreasonable CPU and the Intel stuff, normally not as good, is not doing that.
I suspect what you're looking at there is a CPU architecture that's getting optimized for specific conditions, which my plugins don't meet. There seems no fix other than 'you should be playing Mass Effect on this computer instead'.
I'm sure that it would destroy the Intel computer if you're doing that, but generalizing that to all conditions seems not justified.
Buy a mac, sell it after 1 year (many stores offer a buy back program for this exact purpose), get another new mac.
Easy. Done.
When the "new" Mac Pro was announced, the shift to ARM processors for MacOS was at most rumored and it also wasn't obvious that such a CPU would perform well.
If people knew this was "going to come", they would likely not have invested a significant amount of cash into a platform that was already on its way out.
> One constant of computer industry, there will always be the next chip, the next computer, and by then, the fancy M1 Mac Pro will become obsolete.
Unlike the incremental improvements you get with each new Intel CPU generation, this is quite a disruption. The PPC Macs soon were obsolete after the Intel Macs came about. All the efforts went into the new platform.
> Its day will come when everyone says "oh that M1? that was a slow POS that is now ewaste"
Things don't move that fast anymore. Take a 10-year-old Intel CPU, it's still quite capable. That certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago, or 20 years ago.
I kid, obviously. I've never seen anybody refer to the PowerPC as Motorola machines even though Motorola was part of the PowerPC alliance.
And third-parties will supply upgrades as the upgradable parts are roughly standard, so the Mac Pro is likely to be a completely usable machine for nearly a decade to come.
After that you’ll still get years on older MacOS, Linux, or Windows. Intel Macs can run both of the latter.
Feels like wanting to be both on the cutting edge of performance, and running/developing for a Mac, is damn pricey. However, I'd rather have it this way, than sit with my current machine being the best you could get. In some ways I am gratified that Apple is busy making last year's news feel really inadequate.
You can be damn sure I'm devoting a lot of effort to promptly supporting the new architecture. I've already got literally hundreds of M1 builds for my Audio Unit plugins out. I chose to produce native versions of EVERY product, no matter how old it was: rather than make a new product and only release that for M1, I treated it as the same as the 32/64 bit transition, and re-did every product in the whole library.
If we're going to get absurdly capable Mac computers, I mean to be categorically included in that equation.
For now, I'll enjoy my very costly iMac Pro that's still very capable… AND the M1 Macbook Pro at a fifth of the price that outperforms the iMac Pro at a few things already.