Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 351 posts

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#221

Post by D13Fd »

moshmosh wrote: post #183
D13Fd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I agree about iPhone and non-pro iPads. They should 100% be on USB-C at this point.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#222

Post by Symmetry »

jeffbee wrote: post #166
Symmetry wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems a bit weird to me. Many programs are hard to multithread but I'd expect that if any given program can make effective use of 8 threads it can probably keep scaling to 16 and 32. The hard part is getting from 1 to 2 and 2 to 4. So I'd expect that in most cases having more than 8 high performance cores doesn't make that much sense.

> it can probably keep scaling to 16 and 32 Bad assumption. It's pretty difficult to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 32 cores. You have to carefully avoid all sources of process-wide contention. The only cases where it is easy to just keep adding cores are where the units of independent work are overwhelmingly large compared to everything else, like video compression.

No, it's certainly hard to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 32 cores. But it's also hard to write a multithreaded program that scales up to 8 cores. I'm saying that if we exclude the multithreaded programs that don't scale to 8 cores, most of them can be made to scale to 32 cores with reasonable effort.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#223

Post by snowwrestler »

playpause wrote: post #185
D13Fd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple’s goal is to have every portable computer work like an iPhone: you charge it overnight, then unplug it and use it unwired for a full day. This is why the charging port on the mouse is on the bottom, for instance.

They never quite got their Intel laptops there, though. (Especially running MS Teams, Slack, and Chrome!)

It’s kind of funny that, now that they can make a laptop that really does last all day on one charge (according to tests of M1), they’re switching back to MagSafe.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#224

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

oezi wrote: post #198
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

How about cleaning the connector?

There's nothing to clean. Everything is pristine. The problem has even persisted across replacement cables and a full top case replacement (the keyboard, of course) where Apple scrubs the whole thing down before they give it back. Maybe I should superstitiously blow on it like it's an NES cartridge. It won't help, but maybe I'll feel like I have some agency.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#225

Post by Marsymars »

mikece wrote: post #11
seanalltogether wrote: post #8

So they used to sell 15" and 17" laptops and got rid of the 17", now they're selling 14" and 16", I wonder why?

Isn't part of it that there's basically no bezel on the 14 and 16 models? I know Apple minimized that over the years it really is essentially zero now. I haven't checked but I wouldn't be surprised if the footprint of a 16" MBP is actually smaller than most 15.6" (or are they 15.4"?) non-Apple laptops.

Low-end non-Apple laptops, yes, but as far as high-end laptops go, Apple was very late to the party in minimizing bezels.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#226

Post by rsynnott »

paulpan wrote: post #209
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…

Is Apple even going to refresh any of its Mac products with Intel CPUs at this point? When they first announced the transition last year, it was implied that some products will still get refreshed during the 2-year transition period. But based on this article and common sense, there is minimal incentive to do an Intel refresh. Refreshing both discourages buying of Apple silicon-powered Macs and lessens the performanc…

I'd be a little surprised if Apple release _any_ new Intel machine. I'd be _amazed_ if they release an Intel laptop. It would be generally slower than the 13" M1 (Anandtech has Tiger Lake H _just_ beating the M1 in for multithreaded workloads in short synthetic tests, but given the throttling shown (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16680/tiger-lake-h-performanc...) even in a presumably friendly reference laptop it wouldn't be competitive in the real world) and have far worse battery life, and be replaced in under a year; what would be the point?

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#227

Post by MR4D »

bertmuthalaly wrote: post #152
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…

A nitpick but arguably an important one for your point - this article argues that the efficiency cores aren’t for “browsing the web / watching YouTube / checking emails” but for non-interactive tasks like Spotlight indexing (based on GCD scheduling priority). https://eclecticlight.co/2021/05/17/how-m1-macs-feel-faster-...

> tasks like Spotlight indexing

I'd swear that Spotlight indexing would prefer a freaking supercomputer when it runs.

My whole system just starts to feel sluggish, especially if I just moved a bunch (say 1-5GB) of files onto my system and not it wants to index them.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#228

Post by jamesfmilne »

mikece wrote: post #24
geerlingguy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :) I still deal with 1080p and get annoyed at my hardware's limitations. If I could justify a Mac Pro and Apple's accelerator card, I'd get them in a heartbeat. For certain applications, no matter how good the hardware you have is, there's always a desire for more, faster hardware.

"There are plenty of editors who would love to be able to edit 4 8K (or 12K!) streams in real time :)" Is that really a common scenario? I can see editors at the big studios using monsters like this (because the studios can afford it) but are we talking about a market of hundreds or thousands? Is this something a free-lance video person would use?

No, 8K is not really reality at the moment, but editing UltraHD is reality, and being able to easily edit or composite 2/3 streams of UltraHD with some complex effects in realtime is desirable.

It's a bit mind-bending for those of us who remember the SGI Octane and Onyx days to think that 100x as much computation is available at 100x less power-consumption. (That's 10,000 times more efficient, for those following along at home.)

Between that and the almost infinite instantaneous computation power available in the cloud at the press of a few buttons (and sufficient capacity on one's credit card), we ain't in Kansas any more.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#229

Post by vetinari »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #184
D13Fd wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 had similar problem with MagSafe; the culprit was the dust that both the charger and the laptop collected over the years. After some compressed air treatment, it was as good as new.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#230

Post by medium_burrito »

snowwrestler wrote: post #223
playpause wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Apple’s goal is to have every portable computer work like an iPhone: you charge it overnight, then unplug it and use it unwired for a full day. This is why the charging port on the mouse is on the bottom, for instance. They never quite got their Intel laptops there, though. (Especially running MS Teams, Slack, and Chrome!) It’s kind of funny that, now that they can make a laptop that really does last all day on one c…

Unfortunately that doesn't work for those of us that need to run compute intensive tasks, like browsing the web, or compiling stuff, or running docker.

There's this stupid dream that the computer needs to be light and fanless and thin and sexy. It doesn't need to do that. I'm happy if it doesn't melt while trying to run some software I need to do my job.

Post reply on HN