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Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

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Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#181

Post by incrudible »

barkingcat wrote: post #50
redm wrote: post #45

As someone who just invested in a Mac Pro late last year, I'm a bit frustrated. I wanted years for a modular design that I could keep and upgrade over a longer time only to find out I'll be forcefully phased out within 2 years.

M1 mac pros were always going to come. Apple themselves announced that the next 2 years will be transition. I'd say if you purchased a Mac Pro, it's still the same. If you find yourself not having enough power, you bought the wrong machine to begin with (probably modern threadripper pro would be what you should have been looking for) If the computer satisfies all your performance needs, what use is it to "feel frustr…

> M1 mac pros were always going to come.

When the "new" Mac Pro was announced, the shift to ARM processors for MacOS was at most rumored and it also wasn't obvious that such a CPU would perform well.

If people knew this was "going to come", they would likely not have invested a significant amount of cash into a platform that was already on its way out.

> One constant of computer industry, there will always be the next chip, the next computer, and by then, the fancy M1 Mac Pro will become obsolete.

Unlike the incremental improvements you get with each new Intel CPU generation, this is quite a disruption. The PPC Macs soon were obsolete after the Intel Macs came about. All the efforts went into the new platform.

> Its day will come when everyone says "oh that M1? that was a slow POS that is now ewaste"

Things don't move that fast anymore. Take a 10-year-old Intel CPU, it's still quite capable. That certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago, or 20 years ago.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#182

Post by wmf »

vmception wrote: post #161

The new Macbook Pro sounds amazing. The 64gb RAM possibility suggests a lot of things, some of which confirmed by the artlce, such as a) a different processor design than the M1 b) different RAM modules that Samsung doesn't have in existence, so who and what? or, a different chassis design...

Maybe a 256-bit bus with four stacks of 16Gb dies. Apple could easily be the first customer for a new DRAM chip because they're willing to pay a premium to have the newest and best components and they are willing to guarantee large quantity orders.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#183

Post by moshmosh »

D13Fd wrote: post #33
EForEndeavour wrote: post #27

> Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes. They’ll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like. Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Tou…

I've had MacBooks since 2005, and I'm an amateur photographer. I really don't miss the ports or MagSafe at all. I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap. I've found that the cord being on other side is nearly as good as magsafe anyway, as it will be better positioned to pull out if it gets yanked. Ye…

USB-C would have been a great replacement... for DisplayPort/Thunderbolt ports.

It's finally, years later, getting merely not infuriating to be stuck with only USB-C ports.

Single port for display + charging is very nice, when it works.

That iPhones and most iPads still don't use it is annoying. Having two kinds of charging cable around, years after Apple went all-in on USB-C for laptops, sucks.

[EDIT] two kinds of charging cable and still needing to buy & carry two kinds of adapters/dongles for everything. Ugh.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#184

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

D13Fd wrote: post #33
EForEndeavour wrote: post #27

> Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes. They’ll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like. Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Tou…

I've had MacBooks since 2005, and I'm an amateur photographer. I really don't miss the ports or MagSafe at all. I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap. I've found that the cord being on other side is nearly as good as magsafe anyway, as it will be better positioned to pull out if it gets yanked. Ye…

> and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap

Man, my 2017 MacBook Pro's USB-C charging cable (the official one, not third party, and in pristine condition) constantly disconnects itself to the point where I'm basically traumatized from the annoyance of it now. It only provides power if it's ALL the way in, and the damned thing just pushes itself out half a millimeter and cuts power repeatedly.

I really want to like the generic nature of USB-C charging, but proper magsafe with a strong magnet is just miles better (third party magnet adapters for USB-C both break the spec and also tend to have very weak magnets which can cause damage from sparking at the port).

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#185

Post by playpause »

D13Fd wrote: post #33
EForEndeavour wrote: post #27

> Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes. They’ll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like. Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Tou…

I've had MacBooks since 2005, and I'm an amateur photographer. I really don't miss the ports or MagSafe at all. I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap. I've found that the cord being on other side is nearly as good as magsafe anyway, as it will be better positioned to pull out if it gets yanked. Ye…

> I actually like the USB charging better, as it allows you to connect the cord to either side, and it doesn't get accidentally knocked out if I use it on my lap.

I felt the same until my cat pulled my laptop off my desk by the cord. It landed on the corner with the USB plugged in, destroying the port on the laptop itself. Probably knocked a few hundred off the resale value. The little shit.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#186

Post by acqq »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #112
headmelted wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I would have expected - I suggested when the M1 was first mentioned that it might make more sense for the Mac Pro to just have a side wall of separate independent SOC stacks with independent on-thread memory that GCD could manage behind the scenes. This seems like a much more straight-forward way to throw more performance into the higher-end machines without making long-tail disruptions to the architectu…

> browsing the web, watching YouTube I know people say this all the time, but the reality is modern web browsers are incredibly expensive processors.

Yes, and it's also because a 2 KB text today comes inside of megabytes of code that has to be executed, and some code is additionally very expensive to execute, as it's doing shady stuff in trying to fulfill all the promises of all ad companies involved, sometimes really hundreds for a single page.

There was a moment in web history when the same happened due to the flash-based ads which easily spent huge amounts of CPU for... nothing meaningful to the reader. Now the flash is gone, but the pattern repeated.

And even not counting all the ads, today's "hot" web development conventions are often making the CPU even hotter.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#187

Post by kobe_bryant »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #27

> Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes. They’ll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like. Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Tou…

I'm pretty sure they're done with the touch bar

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#188

Post by miles »

EForEndeavour wrote: post #27

> Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes. They’ll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like. Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Tou…

> I'd immediately buy an M1 MBP with MagSafe and actual ports

Looks like you won't have too long to wait:

Apple ransomware leak corroborates 2021 MacBook Pro ports: HDMI, MagSafe, SD card slot https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/21/apple-ransomware-leak-new-mac...

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#189

Post by skrtskrt »

kobe_bryant wrote: post #187
EForEndeavour wrote: post #27

> Apple plans to launch the redesigned MacBook Pros in 14-inch and 16-inch screen sizes. They’ll have a redesigned chassis, magnetic MagSafe charger and more ports for connecting external drives and devices. Apple is also bringing back the HDMI port and SD card slot, which it nixed in previous versions, sparking criticism from photographers and the like. Even if they continue to force the anti-feature that is the Tou…

I'm pretty sure they're done with the touch bar

Are there any rumors about that?

That's the only change that my next laptop isn't a ThinkPad

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#190

Post by cogman10 »

matja wrote: post #176
cogman10 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, that's pretty easy if you do anything involving video. AV1 will eat all the cores.

Not quite that simple: Using AOM AV1, a 12-core Ryzen 5900X beats a 128-core dual EPYC 7763 (same Zen3 architecture) in every encoding benchmark, according to https://openbenchmarking.org/

You have to be smart about how you process the video.

Yes, if you just use AOM directly you'll have a hard time saturating the core with work.

However, if you split your video up into scenes and start an AOM instance per scene, it becomes trivial to outperform the 12 core ryzen with a 128 core machine. The main bottleneck becomes memory bandwidth.

This is what the av1an project is doing https://github.com/master-of-zen/Av1an

All that said, you need videos long enough for there to be a benefit here. The Ryzen will still win if you are talking about making 10 second av1 gifs.

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