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Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

arstechnica.com

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Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#11

Post by johansch »

headcanon wrote: post #7
Selfcommit wrote: post #4

The comment "15-inch Pros have enough thermal headroom to fit in quad-core Skylake processors..." is interesting. While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple? How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?

Apple's definitely playing the long game here. When the retinas came out, the absence of an ethernet port was a bit inconvenient for me, but now I don't miss it at all. It's possible that in a few years, when this model matures and goes down in price, the touch bar gets more wide support, and everything uses USB-C, then it will make a lot more sense to get one.

They have gone too far this time. This is far beyond the usual expensive inconvenience dongle cost etc that we're used to seeing from them. They just want to game us. It's basically financial domination at this time.

How hard could it really be to make a basic Linux desktop environment work sorta close enough to OS X to make enough people switch to finance further development? My quick and dirty estimate is that 50 good people could pull off a great first release in 18 months.

(I do have relevant consumer UX software design management experience and feel that I can do reasonable quick estimates based on that.)

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#12

Post by registered99 »

threeseed wrote: post #6
ssijak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it have quadcores currently. 32gig will come with kaby lake refresh. nvidia, maybe, maybe not, certainly welcome.

According to Macrumors, there is a compatibility issue which means Nvidia might be out of the picture for a while. Nvidia is only capable of driving dual 5K displays with the Polaris GPUs with DisplayPort 1.3 which is not supported with Thunderbolt 3. http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/14/late-2016-mbp-amd-gpus-s...

there's the possibility of GPUs in the display, though

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#13

Post by smitherfield »

ssijak wrote: post #5
Selfcommit wrote: post #4

The comment "15-inch Pros have enough thermal headroom to fit in quad-core Skylake processors..." is interesting. While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple? How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?

it have quadcores currently. 32gig will come with kaby lake refresh. nvidia, maybe, maybe not, certainly welcome.

He may have meant in the 13-inch model.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#14

Post by snowwrestler »

Selfcommit wrote: post #4

The comment "15-inch Pros have enough thermal headroom to fit in quad-core Skylake processors..." is interesting. While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple? How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?

It's a long play because engineering those cases (including thermal) is very difficult. So Apple typically uses the same case through several revisions of the internals, to defray the costs.

What this means is that the very first model released with a new case is usually underpowered, because the chips are not quite as powerful and power efficient as the (upcoming) chips the case was optimized for.

For this and other reasons I tend to not buy the first version of a new Apple product.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#15

Post by akvadrako »

registered99 wrote: post #12
threeseed wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Macrumors, there is a compatibility issue which means Nvidia might be out of the picture for a while. Nvidia is only capable of driving dual 5K displays with the Polaris GPUs with DisplayPort 1.3 which is not supported with Thunderbolt 3. http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/14/late-2016-mbp-amd-gpus-s...

there's the possibility of GPUs in the display, though

That makes a lot of sense, but I haven't seen any hints that it's coming soon. Keep in mind, you really need an upgradable GPU for that, since these $1000 5K displays have a long life cycle.

And it would probably require rewrites of high-performance apps and games to be something closer to client/server setups to manage communication between the CPU/memory and GPU.

There is really no difference for anything but the most demanding applications though.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#16

Post by ianai »

johansch wrote: post #11
headcanon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's definitely playing the long game here. When the retinas came out, the absence of an ethernet port was a bit inconvenient for me, but now I don't miss it at all. It's possible that in a few years, when this model matures and goes down in price, the touch bar gets more wide support, and everything uses USB-C, then it will make a lot more sense to get one.

They have gone too far this time. This is far beyond the usual expensive inconvenience dongle cost etc that we're used to seeing from them. They just want to game us. It's basically financial domination at this time. How hard could it really be to make a basic Linux desktop environment work sorta close enough to OS X to make enough people switch to finance further development? My quick and dirty estimate is that 50 g…

I think that could be good as well. If I were to spearhead it I'd have us hone in on one or two laptop models. Then spend the rest of the engineering time on making the install, upgrade, and user experience as smooth as possible.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#17

Post by jeromeparadis »

Selfcommit wrote: post #4

The comment "15-inch Pros have enough thermal headroom to fit in quad-core Skylake processors..." is interesting. While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple? How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?

I don't know what's the fuss about 32GB and OS X/MacOS but I upgraded my iMac to 32GB (from 8) and when booting, it still prefers to swap than to use the memory it has access to. For the next hour, it slowly starts using more memory and will use even more than 16GB. I suspect the OS isn't optimized to efficiently use more than 16GB.

Re: Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future

#18

Post by davidf18 »

Many of us just want the 15" display preferring longer battery life and smaller size/weight to using a discrete GPU. I am at a university and the 15" rMBPs are popular with students as well as researchers. I currently have the 2015 rMBP 15".

Thus, it is disappointing that there is not replacement for the version that uses only the integrated graphics. Also, the Intel 530 graphics of the 2016 rMBP 15" appears to be lower performing than the 2015 rMBP 15" integrated graphics. While there were benchmarks for the battery life of the iGPU, there were no performance benchmarks comparing the rMBP 15" 2016 iGPU vs. the 2015 iGPU.

I've looked online and it appears that the 530 is about 20% slower than the 2015 rMBP 15" iGPU.

EDIT: Source for Iris Pro 5200 vs. HD 530: 5200 about 20% faster than 530 for same resolution.

http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Iris-Pro-HD-5200-...

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