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Introducing the next generation of Mac

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Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#131
post #108
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine they all are made with 16Gb on and the ones that are broken get sold as 8Gb. What worries me is my desktop has 64Gb of RAM which cost 1/3 of Apple’s usual upgrade mugging. I think I’ll walk away from this. Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb. 8GB of RAM for £200 is “get fucked” territory. I paid £240 for the 64Gb in my desktop.

The iPad Pro has a mere 4GB of RAM and is faster at almost every task AND multitasking than any of my other beefy machines. I wouldn’t discount this yet.

what kind of tasks are those? my eyes rolled into outer space

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#132
post #108
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine they all are made with 16Gb on and the ones that are broken get sold as 8Gb. What worries me is my desktop has 64Gb of RAM which cost 1/3 of Apple’s usual upgrade mugging. I think I’ll walk away from this. Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb. 8GB of RAM for £200 is “get fucked” territory. I paid £240 for the 64Gb in my desktop.

The iPad Pro has a mere 4GB of RAM and is faster at almost every task AND multitasking than any of my other beefy machines. I wouldn’t discount this yet.

I think it depends what they've done with Big Sur.

Take a look at your activity monitor and see how many background tasks you laptop is running right now (I currently have 481 and I only have 4 apps actually running).

Compare that to iPad which can run 2 apps max and apple controls all the background activity.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#133
post #108
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine they all are made with 16Gb on and the ones that are broken get sold as 8Gb. What worries me is my desktop has 64Gb of RAM which cost 1/3 of Apple’s usual upgrade mugging. I think I’ll walk away from this. Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb. 8GB of RAM for £200 is “get fucked” territory. I paid £240 for the 64Gb in my desktop.

The iPad Pro has a mere 4GB of RAM and is faster at almost every task AND multitasking than any of my other beefy machines. I wouldn’t discount this yet.

But you don’t have background services on the iPad and apps are hibernated to disk if they aren’t active and iOS needs more ram. It’s possible that Apple is doing the same thing on macOS, but we don’t know (it would break a ton of apps).

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#134
post #13

It's interesting that all the chips are branded as the M1 - I wonder if there are any clock, memory or cache differences between the devices?

I'm pretty sure they're all identical chips. No doubt there are clocking differences. But that may be automatic based on thermals and not actually represent a difference in the actual chip.

The base model m1 air has a 7 core gpu compared with 8 core in the others.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#135
post #59

Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air just due to the keyboard.

They kept the touch bar but it seems that they added (back) a physical Esc key, isn't that the most criticized missing key? Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?

The physical Esc key was already added in the previous generation

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#137
post #23

I'm interested to see the benchmarks vs. comparable AMD systems. Some of the claims, like 2x performance increase on the MBP are impressive, but intel laptops have been absolutely trounced by AMD 4000-series laptops of late. Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.

I don't think they included Intel's new Xe or AMD's APU in those 2x for iGPUs.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#138

The 16GB RAM limit is unfortunate. Five years later and I still can't buy a new 13" laptop from Apple with more RAM than my 2015 MBP. Edit: Apparently you can configure a (Early 2020) Intel-based 13" MBP with 32GB of RAM - I was not aware of that. Hope they bring that option to the ARM versions ASAP, especially if the performance gains are as good as Apple claims.

It's worse. The 13" intel MBP can go up to 32 Gb, but the intel Mac Mini can go up to 64!

16 is basically useless for dev purposes, unless you're only doing web stuff. And maybe not even then, containers/vms?

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#139
post #78

The 16GB RAM limit is unfortunate. Five years later and I still can't buy a new 13" laptop from Apple with more RAM than my 2015 MBP. Edit: Apparently you can configure a (Early 2020) Intel-based 13" MBP with 32GB of RAM - I was not aware of that. Hope they bring that option to the ARM versions ASAP, especially if the performance gains are as good as Apple claims.

Not all RAM is created equally. Better memory management means less RAM can be better than more RAM. Pair that with superfast flash storage for SWAP and you might not even be able to tell the difference between 16 and 32. Besides, this release cycle is 100% optimized for an impressive speed boost, tempered by a need for a more impressive battery life. The proof will be in the pudding.Time will tell.

I have the same reaction. I suspect a lot of RAM is wasted by os's and applications.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#140
Apple mentioned in the event that these Macs will have hardware verified secure boot. Since I’m not very knowledgeable in this area, can someone explain (or even try to guess) what this would/could mean for running Linux on these? I use Macs way beyond Apple’s support timeframe with OS X/macOS, and Linux is the one that runs on some of the older Macs and provides adequate security and security related software updates.
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