New 16-inch MBP with M1 Max to feature High Power Mode for intensive workloads

The funny thing is this happened before, all the way back in (IIRC) v4. They introduced top tabs, which lasted through most of the betas, and reverted to bottom tabs under pressure. Which is surprising now, with almost all other browsers using top tabs.

For several years I continued to use that beta version, patching it to use updated WebKit versions. I think it finally stopped working around v7 or v8.

I mostly meant the betrayal of trust that's gonna happen when they enable client-side scanning eventually, but the tabs are a positive example of it, at least.

Oh thanks for bringing to my attention that it’s thinner than 2012-15 MBP! That one was thin enough already. I suppose the 0.3lbs could be shaved off by not carrying around a power supply

The max is actually 4.8 lbs, not 4.7lbs. Not sure if that was factored in. But seeing as how I use my laptop to work in weird places portability and weight are actually important factors for me. I could manage the 16” size but the previous gen 16 inch was already pushing it for weight, especially if there are other things in the backpack. But seeing how this thing needs a big 140 watt supply means i can’t and even use the ultra compact 60 watt charger I have. So we’re looking at 5-6 extra lbs on my back!

I distinctly rememver taking one apart and being very disappointed: the segment display was completely fake and showed 2 predefined numbers, not correlated to the CPU frequency at all.

We added a variable frequency control to an IBM/AT and used it to adjust the CPU clock up to the point just below where the system would crash. Default was 6 MHz but we could push it up to around 10 MHz before it started crashing. That seemed amazingly fast at the time.

This is technically correct (the best kind…) however many people will have a different experience because it was sometimes inverted to be more intuitive.

It was mainly for games written for the older CPUs that used CPU timing for the main game event loop. Turning off "turbo" would reduce the clock frequency and slow the game down to a playable speed.

Great YouTube video on them! https://youtu.be/p2q02Bxtqds

If you really want silence, you're best off with the fanless MBA. Though Apple noted that in non-intense use the MBP should be silent, you can also see from their performance graphs[1] that the M1 is more efficient than the M1 Pro and M1 Max at low power levels. (<12 watts or so, from eyeballing the chart.)

Makes sense when you consider that the M1 has more efficiency cores than the M1 Pro/Max.

I'd actually like to build myself a home NAS/server with only Gracemont cores if we ever see Alder Lake-L available in a mini-ITX form factor. (Was going to try with Jasper Lake, but that seems to have been effectively cancelled with the chip shortage.)

[1]. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-...

To add to this, apple probably already tuned the chip so that any additional power wouldn't meaningfully improve performance. You're not trading 10% more power for 10% more performance, you're trading 50% more power for 5% more performance (numbers made up).

Indeed, having this as a opt-in feature is best

Nothing worse than trying to concentrate on something when "helicopter mode" suddenly kicks in :)

Yeah, I kept my old fanless G3 PowerBook long beyond it’s apparent sell-by date for live performance stuff, where a fan was a non-option.

For just a second there I thought Intel provides the kernel some kind of backwards compatibility mode to clock down to 4.77MHz like the original turbo button.

Like 10 years after my 486-DX2 went into the trash after a long long life, I was reminiscing about the turbo button with a coworker, and he mentioned that he always kept his turbo button activated and that there was never a single repercussion from it!

I don't know if you already knew why the Turbo button was there in the first place, but back at a time where there is no dedicated monotonic timer, applications (mostly games) rely on the fixed processor speed to determine sub-second time, which while worked on the original IBM PC... made it too fast for new generations of hardware.

Vide "macro photography"

As far as I remember, the button itself was supposed to let the computers run at their normal, faster, speed. Meaning the computer was supposed to be in Turbo mode, all the time.

You turned the Turbo mode off when you needed to run it slower, say for playing games.

So, technically the button did what it said, run faster in Turbo mode.

There were also clock speed selectors that really did let the CPU run faster. They would let you switch to a CPU clock speed that was higher than the speed the CPU was originally rated for. The cost was a greater possibility of crashes. Depending on what you were doing and how stable the CPU was it was a noticeable improvement.

Some selectors would let you choose between 2 speeds, others had multiple speed selections. Often the higher ones would crash a lot more. There were also variable speed controls that acted like a rheostat with continuous speed changes. Those worked but were even more unstable.

I remember setting those 7-segment LEDs up on my first PC build.

On the motherboard there was a jumper which took the input from the turbo switch.

To provide feedback to the user, some cases ran a wire from the turbo switch to a bi-color LED on the front of the case as well as to the motherboard to control the turbo state.

On fancier cases they had multiple seven-segment LEDs which had a multi-state jumper for each segment, which decided to light that segment depending if the switch was on or off (example: http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/led_speed_display/LED%20disp...), so you could display either the two different clock frequencies, or a "HI"/"LO" message, or anything you wanted. And connecting that switch input to the motherboard wasn't necessary for the LED to change, so I guess that is how your father's was setup :)

to an extent, but the automatic part is a sticky widget for this particular case. as other in this thread have commented, not all users may want the baggage that comes with running at 100% even if they are plugged in to mains.

It isn’t standard with Apple laptops. They normally don’t slow down on battery. They do reduce screen brightness by default, though you can override that.

Did you really just use “power management” and Linux in the same sentence?

Yes, this goes a little farther than power management currently present in Linux and support by OEMs.

See Apples low power mode for an example.

It is if only the max version of the machines has it.

If there weren't any issues, why did you have three of them?

I really wish this myth would stop.

Ive was not unilaterally responsible for deciding what constitutes a MacBook Pro or frankly any of the products Apple created. And he never dictated anything to anyone other than the Design team he managed.

Major product decisions are always made across many parts of the company e.g. Product Marketing, Design, Hardware Engineering, Operations etc and are signed off by the Senior Leadership Team.

MacBook Pro is a critical product for the company and the idea that one person is simply making all the decisions is just laughable.