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Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

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Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#251

Post by ghaff »

medium_burrito wrote: post #230
snowwrestler wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing Lenovo gets right is that they have fairly clear desktop replacement and travel laptop personas. I'm pretty clearly in the latter category although I'm hoping that the new rumored 14" will be able to replace both my 2015 MacBook Pro and iMac.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#252

Post by melq »

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…

As a musician with tons of peripherals, some of which are annoyingly sensitive and can't be used through hubs or anything but straight-through adapters (my turntable mixer's digital interface, for example), I welcome the return of the ports. Its not uncommon to have an audio interface, one or more midi controllers, the aforementioned mixer all connected for instance. And basically all of those things still use USB-B ports for whatever reason, and I never see USB-B to C cables ever.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#253

Post by Symmetry »

bombcar wrote: post #242
Symmetry wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused at this response. My thought is that instead of 32 high performance cores and 8 efficiency cores it might be better to have 8 high performance cores and ~100 efficiency ones which ought to be about the same area and power but provide a lot more throughput if software can utilize that level of parallelism. There's a lot of software that won't scale to 108 cores, of course, but again I expect the amount of…

The performance cores seem to take maybe twice as much space as the efficiency cores, so I'm not sure the tradeoff would be worth it - the efficiency cores would need to be more than half as fast taking into account the parallelism to make the tradeoff worth it. In a world where power and heat budgets don't matter at all you'd not have any efficiency cores, after all.

The general rule of thumb for reasonably sized cores, which both Apple's performance and efficiency cores are, is that performance tends to scale with the square of the transistor and energy budget due to N^2 structures like the bypass network, ROB, etc being the long poles. Now, for any given transistor budget there's going to be a non-linear tradeoff between performance and power governed by supply voltage versus process threshold voltage. And if you're testing a chip and using only one or the other of the two sorts of cores you're paying for the uncore and memory subsystem regardless of which cores you're testing which complicates things. But it would be really weird if power consumption wasn't super linear with performance, that's why "efficiency cores" have "efficiency" in their name.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#254

Post by mixmastamyk »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #218
skrtskrt wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any rumors about that? That's the only change that my next laptop isn't a ThinkPad

You hate the Touch Bar so much that if Apple's next round of laptops includes one you'll stop using macOS and start using Linux (or Windows) on your laptop instead?

Personally don't care for the touchbar, but it is fun sometimes as I have an external keyboard.

The fact the OS runs a dozen network services without being able to deactivate them is (the final straw) the pushed me back into the Linux camp.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#255

Post by jagger27 »

Applejinx wrote: post #149
slezyr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really funny because he is correct, that fan does nothing. There is no heat pipe connecting CPU and fan.

Only if the input and the output of the fan are piped together. Apple was designing stuff that considered the airflow THROUGH THE CASE back with the first Macintosh, the 128K. You could even get a silly looking chimney that used convection to pull even more air through the case with no other modifications. All Macs with air cooling, not just the laptops, are designed with internal airflow in mind and always have been…

> From first appearances he is an absolute bozo.

He's pretty much the main figurehead of the right to repair movement from the consumer electronics side of things. He has run his own independent repair shop doing board level repairs for years in NYC.

https://www.fighttorepair.org/ is him.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#256

Post by johncolanduoni »

SigmundA wrote: post #211
willis936 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a lot to scale a GPU up that far. Memory throughput requirements (the actually expensive part) increase linearly with number of cores. It will either cost a large fortune and use a Lot of power or be memory throughput starved (and cost a small fortune).

Tile based deferred renders help with memory bandwidth requirement (partly why UMA mobile GPUs and the M1 use it). The M1 has 16mb of cache coherent with CPU and GPU and then there is tile memory in each core.

That would be interesting for the Mac Pro since the kind of applications most people who would buy one would be running have probably never even been run on a tile based GPU, let alone optimized for it.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#257

Post by matwood »

etrautmann wrote: post #41
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…

The vast majority of cameras, even professional mirrorless or DSLRs, currently use SD cards now. Perhaps that's changing, but I would imagine there's sufficient utility to the SD card reader that many users would value that feature.

As someone else mentioned many of the higher end new cameras are moving XQD or something similar that is faster I presume to deal with video.

With that said, I have cameras that use SD cards and don't see the need for an SD port. I have usbc adapters that are not much bigger than the SD card that I can use on my MBA or iPad. With LR, I can basically load my days pics on either device and have them available everywhere.

I'm very skeptical they are adding back SD, so we'll see. I think MagSafe is going to be something like what came to the latest iPhone and not what people think of traditional MagSafe. Or maybe they'll add something to the usbc port that works like MagSafe if using an Apple cable.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#258

Post by wyre »

cuddlybacon wrote: post #231

I've been waiting for a 16-inch M1 MacBook Pro to come out. I've been delaying my work upgrade for it. I'm curious what the I/O situation will be. Will it be able to output to two 4k screens or not. The 13-inch cannot, so I'm not holding my breath.

Article says the chip will be able to support multiple thunderbolt ports, and they are adding HDMI. I would imagine it will support 2 4K monitors.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#260

Post by jagger27 »

1_player wrote: post #201
sardonico wrote: post #30

This chip is going to give us surprises in the next future. I can only imagine what is is store, but a rack of this kind of tech could really drive down power consumption of data centers

Apple aren't making nor selling datacenter chips. They have zero interest in doing that.

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/mac/

It might not be a 19" rackmount chassis like the Xserves of yore, but it's hard to deny Apple hardware will continue to find its way into real datacenters.

The high end Mac mini SKU mentioned in TFA sounds great for this application, especially now that they have 10Gig Ethernet.

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