MacBook Pros, an “M1X” chip, and other stuff to expect at Apple’s October event | Hacker News Reader

MacBook Pros, an “M1X” chip, and other stuff to expect at Apple’s October event

arstechnica.com

26 pointsrbanffy49 comments

I can't be the only one who's mostly just excited at the prospect of being able to buy a high spec macbook that doesn't have a goddamn touch bar.

I’ve never really understood the disdain for the Touch Bar. I’ve been rocking my first MacBook, a 13” Pro, for the last few months and haven’t had any complaints about it so far.

Did you regularly use function keys beforehand?

F-keys hardly, unless you are running programs written for DOS like emulators or badly ported apps written with Windows or Linux in mind that don't adhere to macOS keyboard shortcuts.

But the brightness and media/volume keys (which is the default function of the keys) I use all the time.

XCode's default key commands for debugging use the function keys

Some of us touch-type. Since I have learned to use keyboard properly quarter of century ago I have never needed to look at my keyboard.

I tried to give it a chance. But it is breaking my flow by having to look at the keyboard which is a big productivity no no.

And lack of function keys is a problem. On Linux I am already running out of possible keyboard shortcuts. Touch bar effectively drastically reduces number of shortcuts that I can assign.

I used to change the display brightness with one keypress, now it takes three and I have to look closely. Company paid extra for this.

It is amazing how often this is mentioned. You can tap and hold the brightness control.

If I tap and hold, I get finer grained control of brightness with one or two motions then I ever did with a keyboard.

I'm still not a particularly big fan of the touchbar, because I'm an emacs user.

My wife, on the other hand, won't let us buy another Mac without one, she loves it. She's a pro photographer not a software developer, and that's the market for the touchbar.

With that said, once I disabled Siri, the touchbar has never gotten in my way.

So... I look closely, tap and hold, then move the finger around. What does that solve for? Unintuitive, slower, and not discoverable.

Finer-grained control is not a problem I had that tapping the key once or twice didn't accomplish in half the time and thought.

The older models are particularly bad because they lack a physical Esc and it extends too close to delete. I had to put an empty space where Siri is by default because I'd trigger it all the time by accident. I've also had a couple times where it didn't wake up from sleep so I had to restart to get Esc back. I don't really gain anything from it as my main apps don't really use it and I had to spend $10 on BetterTouchTool to get a weather widget for it which is the only semi useful thing about it for me. Otherwise it's just a shittier function row to me.

You’re definitely not the only one!

I am excited about these. Very curious if they’ll be able to drive my two LG 5K UltraFine displays.

Got those screens right away when the MBP2016 came out. It is a great setup, but unfortunately quite unstable. The MBP2016 had tons of crashes, after 4 logic board replacements it got swapped out for a 2018. More stable, but I still have to follow some ritualistic order plugging/unplugging them…

Just curious, are these issues not enough to make you look elsewhere? Especially since these kind of issues have been common with MacBooks over the past few years. Maybe you require MacOS for something specific? Or is there just nothing else you'd rather use?

Apart from this issue, these machines have been great for me. And the Apple ecosystem is hard to beat (when you get used to the seamless integration between devices…)

I have two LG 4K monitors with a 2016 model (which I really want to upgrade). It's mostly fine. Waking from sleep it does go thru an annoying sequence where it wakes up one monitor at a time. When I gave feedback to Apple, they suggested plugging in the dedicated power supply as well. Maybe that would help some of the issues you see.

The fact that the M1 macbooks can't drive two external displays(even with the internal display switched off) is criminal. I know at least two people who bought a brand new M1 MacBook and returned it the next day for this very reason.

The Mac Mini Can drive two external displays. One via USB-C and one via HDMI.

Up to 6 screens screens can be connected with the aid of DisplayLink on M1 machines

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/24/m1-macs-able-to-run-six...

I’ve had issues with various external displays over various MBP models forever, particularly waking from sleep. My current display had no problems at all with my previous 2014 15", but when that one died I replaced it with the first gen 16" and all those problems came back.

That said, I stumbled on a solution that’s been almost totally effective: I only ever wake from sleep with the TouchID button. I suspect (not very educated hunch) the problems with this newer model have something to do with timing of wake/power signals being sent before any other device data while waiting for the T2 to unblock.

Anyway, you might give it a try. I think I’ve had to re-plug all of 2-3 times in the last year (whereas failure rate waking from my external keyboard was close to daily before, and required a reboot at least a couple times a week).

I unfortunately (or fortunately) had to get an eGPU to drive the two monitors. Settled on the Razer Core X + Radeon RX GPU as there was no stable way to drive the two LG monitors.

What Mac are you using this eGPU with, out of interest?

I’m kind of fed up with external monitor issues with my MacBooks. It’s one of the main reasons I’ll probably get the M1X Mac Mini for desktop use and a cheap Air for a laptop rather than investing in a new high end M1X MBP to use in clamshell mode.

I think things got a lot worse when Apple ditched first party displays. I bought LGs because that’s what Apple sold and they just don’t work reliably enough (constant wake from sleep issues, across multiple laptops, macOS versions and cables/docks).

My 2015 MBP running Mojave is on its last legs. Everything Apple has released since then - both the increasingly unstable OS "upgrades" and all the horrible hardware changes including the broken keyboards in 2016, lack of ports, removal of escape and function keys, gimmicky touch bar, etc. - have discouraged me from upgrading to a new laptop, even at work where my employer would be paying for it.

I'm at the point where if they don't release a new Intel MBP that's a worthy successor to the 2015 15" model, then I'll probably just end up giving up on Apple for good and moving to a Dell with WSL. I imagine I'm not the only one who has patiently been waiting for years, but won't do so much longer.

I guess we’ll find out on Monday, but have you seen anything to suggest Apple is releasing new Intel models? Everything I’ve seen says that they’re transitioning completely to the M1/M1X.

I'm running on my 2015 still as well. The later Intel models never got me excited, with what seemed to be only marginal performance increases every year, and my 2015 being rock-solid reliable. The M1X definitely interests me.

I don't think you'll be seeing any new Intel-based laptops from Apple though.

2013 MBP.. same reasons, same hopes...(except i don't mind an m1.. i've heard only good things)

If you come from a 2013 MBP to an M1… you will think you're in a different galaxy.

check out the frame.work laptop. The future is repairability and you won't be compromising too much in terms of form factor. Also, you can replace the battery yourself. (its sad that in 2021, thats a FEATURE)

The framework laptop looks awesome and it’s a noble vision, but hardware isn’t why Windows/Linux/Android ecosystems are behind Mac OS. I’ve given up on Google trying to solve that but I’m hopeful for Microsoft. Tight/Seamless integration is the future, not being able to swap out an SD card expansion slot for a USB-C slot. My wife just moved from a Thinkpad to an iPad Pro and I’ve never seen her use a computer as much as she does now.

What do you run on it that needs to be intel? The Rosetta translation works really well for everything but doesn’t work for VMs. Notably docker for Mac runs in a VM but almost everything has arm images available now so it’s no longer an issue for me.

I guess I'd have no issue with Arm chips if the developer experience is pretty seamless, considering we deal with numerous languages and frameworks, Docker images, etc and deploy to X86 "cloud" servers. We're already struggling to deal with years of legacy problems while also implementing endless new features. I hate to say it, but I'm currently building ad-hoc production "patches" of images on my local machine and just pushing them straight to running prod servers without any sort of testing or CI/CD. It's a mess.

And the last thing I need is to worry about a bunch of build incompatibilities between architectures as I move from dev and prod environments. I remember the many crazy bugs we'd find just from developing on Windows and deploying to Linux (new lines, unicode incompatibilities, filesystem and path differences, etc).

There is no way they are releasing an Intel model. Why would they? The M1 chip has been an outstanding success exceeding the expectations of every reviewer I have seen. It has blown me away so much that I can't wait to rid x86 from my life. Burn the boats! This is a whole new world.

Right now the only reason to buy an Intel Mac is needing more than 16GB of RAM. I’m holding off replacing my Mac Mini because of that. The MacPro is another Mac you may need to stick to x86 for now if you benefit from having up to 1.5TB of RAM.

I expect to see M1-based Macs with 32 or 64GB of RAM, but I don’t expect to see one that can match the MacPro just now.

Don't hold your breath. If you can't stand the OS upgrades and want to stay on Intel chips, you might as well leave Apple now.

Given that these have custom GPUs, do older games still work on them? For example games from Blizzard? What about software for ML?

I have a friend who has an M1 and runs StarCraft I and II on it without a problem. I don’t know much more beyond that.

Many very old games worked flawlessly on my girlfriend's M1 MBP. Baldurs Gate, Diablo, etc.

Yooka-Laylee (a 2017 3D platformer) runs well at 1440p on the Mac Mini M1 with everything on. Seems like the GPU is at least competitive with cards from a few years ago. Not bad for a 15W? SOC.

The Anandtech benchmark puts it within fighting range of the GTX 1650.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...

I have big hopes that the M1X will be an excellent cpu/gpu for Dota2, the original M1 manage on average 50fps on 1080p with very high settings.

ML will depend on whether or not whatever ML platform you are using has a back end for the M1 GPU. I suspect that the M1 GPU's would have at least a OpenGL and a Metal driver so I presume most games that worked on macOS previously would work on the M1.

Given all the little issues MacBooks have had over the past few years, the departure of Jony Ive, the move to ARM, I'm expecting this one to be a seriously impressive iteration. I've seen the "leaked" images already and it looks about how you'd expect but I think performance numbers will blow people away.

The pressure is on. Didn't Apple give themselves a short time window when they introduced the M1 for a full-lineup changeover? Like 2 years, or something?

Surely they're not going to put a full-size hdmi port in them, as the article suggests. Apple is all about smaller, newer or less ports.

It does seem quite out of character for Apple but I believe a schematic leak in April showed a full size HDMI port among others.

This would be silly - I have one of my monitors connected to a USB-C to HDMI cable. I can’t imagine what I would gain from having an HDMI port.

No new rumors on the Apple Monitors? I want iMacs screens as a separate device, and the rumor mill from this summer was sounding pretty promising.

My Ubuntu crashed yesterday in the middle of upgrading to 21.10 when I moved the mouse and the XPS 15 hinge is literally falling apart. I can't wait for this to come out! I am mostly interested in the CPU performance and not having to run a VM to build iOS. That itself should save me hours waiting for code to build.

Linux is a better Unix than macOS, but I agree the MacBooks are better laptops than the XPS range.

And they aren’t that more expensive.

I agree. I prefer i3wm with Ubuntu to macOS, but its just not feasible when I am developing iOS. Macbook hardware is also rock solid.

My previous Macbook Air had 0 failures over 3 years, but something on my XPS breaks every year. The only things I haven't replaced at this point are the motherboard and screen.

I would seriously consider the frame.work laptop as well, but I need XCode. I might buy the frame.work laptop in a year or two.

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