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Introducing the next generation of Mac

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Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#921

Post by wil421 »

lhl wrote: post #824
sudosysgen wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't doing it to save 20$ per machine, they are doing it to make the higher price of a 16GB machine seem more reasonable than if it was the base model.

It's worth noting that they are charging $200 for the 8GB memory upgrade. The spot price for 16GB of LPDDR4 looks like it's currently ~$8 per DRAMexchange: https://www.dramexchange.com/ They're also charging $200 for a 256GB storage upgrade - spot price of 3D TLC is $3/256Gb ($24 for 256GB) - you can currently buy a 256GB NVMe SSD (full stick with controller) at retail for <$30 as well.

That is like saying the materials the baker needs to bake bread cost 5¢. Why doesn’t the baker price his bread at 5¢?

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#922

Post by MperorM »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #482
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the Touch Bar. All those cmd-opt-shift bizarro keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped to custom buttons across lots of apps. A couple popup apps on globally-available buttons. Even a swiping gesture while on iTerm to fly through command history. It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.

incidentally, I place the “blame” for the poor uptake of the Touch Bar at Apple’s feet. They relied on uninterested developers to make it useful, and didn't but the necessary tools in the hands of users to make it useful themselves. In five years, they’ve done nothing to expand its capabilities since the debut. Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables…

I really have no clue what apple is thinking with regards to the touchbar.

Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one?

The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point.

As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful.

It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it?

macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#923

Post by mirthflat83 »

dartdartdart wrote: post #665
akmarinov wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's looking like they stuck the M1 in the same bodies of existing Macs with the intention of upgrading everything next year.

This is exactly right. They could have done everything in one go, but they had to change the keyboard and call that the 5th generation macbook pro. Like they didn't even include wifi 6 in the previous model nor did they hold an event for it. Kuo says a redesign is due in 2021, but apple can't keep getting away with doing the same thing since 2016. There are laptops with dual screens, 4k touch screens, vapeor chamber…

> dual screens

> touch screens

> vapeor chamber cooling

...Thank you apple for not listening to the HN crowd

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#924

Post by kllrnohj »

skohan wrote: post #861
kllrnohj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance. If they're "only" claiming 2x over anyone else' integrated, then it's not going to be all that interesting to compare integrated vs. discreet. By comparison here the 2060 Max Q is around 4x faster than the Vega 8 in the 4800U. Although that 2x faster than anyone else's integrated also has some really big question marks…

The claim was 2x CPU performance over the previous 13" MBP, and 5-6x GPU performance over the previous integrated graphics.

https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/

There's no claim of any 5-6x faster than previous there. It says "fastest integrated" (and in the fine print that integrated is specifically unified monolithic die, eliminating chiplet-style products), and then also "M1 delivers significantly higher graphics performance than the very latest PC laptop chip — for up to 2x the graphics speed."

So take the 4800U, which has among the fastest commercially available integrated graphics in a monolithic die, and double the GPU performance. If you needed a discreet GPU in your laptop previously this probably won't change that.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#925

Post by Shivetya »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #877
skrause wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even worse is that the RAM upgrade pricing hasn't changed in almost a decade. When I bought my 2012 MacBook Air more than eight years ago it cost me 100 euros to upgrade from 4 to 8 GB of RAM. Currently it costs 225 euros in the German Apple Store to upgrade form 8 to 16 GB, which is a higher per GB price than in 2012!

That's (slightly) unfair because obviously the RAM produced in 2012 isn't the same as the RAM produced in 2020. Better to compare Apple's price against the cost of top-of-the-line RAM available for other laptops. I checked around and it looks like you can get 8GB 3200MHz DDR4 from a highly respected brand for 56 USD, while Apple will sell you some mystery RAM for 200 USD. It's not an (ahem) apples-to-apples compariso…

Do we truly believe that on die memory has similar costs? I don't see how this is remotely possible but its going to take tear downs of both configurations to check what is going on; as in are the 8gb units using chips which never had the circuitry or perhaps disabled by hardware and its still there?

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#926

Post by pjmlp »

noisem4ker wrote: post #911
pjmlp wrote: post #871

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not everyone is on containers fashion running full blown clusters on their laptops and 8 GB are more than good enough for enterprise developers.

One doesn't even need to be a developer to fill up 8GB with just a browser, Teams and Slack in the background (or any other Electron apps of their employer's choice).

Another wise choice is not to use anything Electron based unless forced by the employer, or customer, and in that case, it is expected that they pay for the hardware.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#927

Post by wil421 »

_0w8t wrote: post #435
spijdar wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until 2019 Apple sold 13 inch MBPs without the touchbar, and these models did not have a T2 chip. They are still miserable computers to run Linux on, although I think the original 2016 touchbar-less MBP performs better than all the rest, albeit (IIRC) no working audio, very poor suspend/resume functionality, and until pretty recently no keyboard/trackpad functionality. Oh, and Apple's NVMe interface is non-compliant.…

Even in Bootcamp Apple did not bother to expose all hardware to Windows . The touchpad is reported as a mouse with a scroll wheel, no option to enable hardware encryption or to use Touch ID to unlock.

Why would you expect Touch ID to work on a windows machine?

As far as I know it’s only available on Apple OSes.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#928

Post by augusto-moura »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #857
voxgen wrote: post #846

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was an expected step of the evolution of the Memory Hierarchy. RAM is just bigger-but-slower CPU cache. Swapfile is just bigger-but-slower RAM. There's always a trade-off between size and speed. Incorporating RAM into the CPU package gives a big performance boost at the expense of maximum capacity. To compensate for the reduced performance in tasks that require more memory, you can either add another layer into…

Jisss to be honest the new PlayStation and Xbox hardware is amazing, specificially how the memory/cpu/mobo and streaming system will work. Wish we had something like that in PC land. Then again, their workflow is basically streaming data from disk, thus this round they optimized that hell out of that chunk of the pipeline. Hopefully AMD learn lessons from that sphere and can bring some of that to our sphere.

The problem I see with the PlayStation 5 at least is repairs, if the solded SSD kick the bucket you will probably need to: buy a new chip from Sony and resolder the fault one (or even worse, resolder the entire SSD chips because you can't rely in which cell is physically the data and swapping the cell will probably corrupt the entire disk), or buy a new PS5/Motherboard

You can't just swap the hard disk like before, I'm sure this you be a major headache with repairs

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#929

Post by mcjiggerlog »

BatteryMountain wrote: post #794

How are companies still releasing hardware with 8GB RAM? My MacBook Air from ~2016 has 8GB of RAM. My first PC which had 8GB of RAM was built in ~2010 if I remember correctly. My current machine has 32GB. In all honesty, 32GB is not even much, considering my motherboard can take 128GB (in the old days, if your motherboard could take max 8GB RAM, people would fill all the slots to capacity). Also, I have a Lenovo mach…

My base model macbook pro from 2014 had 8GB of RAM. So, yeah, they've been selling laptops with the same base amount of RAM for at least 6 or 7 years.

Re: Introducing the next generation of Mac

#930

Post by snazz »

encom wrote: post #856
mixmastamyk wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netscape?! That's for the kids, we used NCSA Mosaic and liked it. I suspect lynx is still around in some form.

Lynx is bloatware. Just use telnet.

Unless it’s HTTPS-only, which is most sites these days....

(I’m definitely not arguing that that’s a bad thing; it just makes Telnet more annoying)

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