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Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

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Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#341

Post by salamandersauce »

cercatrova wrote: post #327
salamandersauce wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't take that as a clear sign. They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too. The touch bar is handled by the T1/T2/M1 chips in the laptops. It could be that just cramming a T2+OLED into a keyboard may have made it way too expensive for a keyboard. Plus does Bluetooth even have enough bandwidth to h…

> They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too. That's because changing the chassis is too expensive, but when they redesign it, you'll see it most likely without a touchbar.

They already had a touch bar free 13" MBP in that chassis. In fact they put in extra effort to add the touch bar to the 2 port 13" MBP.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#342

Post by tinus_hn »

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…

There’s SD cards for 99% of all hardware, and then there’s a ton of different standards for all these niches. Like CompactFlash, XQD is a dead format already. Apple isn’t going to add ports for that.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#343

Post by barkingcat »

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…

Large integrators like Apple usually have a tie line to inside Intel (in this case, probably at the CEO/VP levels) that would feed information to Apple regarding product lines.

Yes, Tiger Lake H-series was just announced, but it's likely Intel proposed selling this chip to Apple 2.5 years ago, and Apple didn't like the roadmap, and said No Thanks.

That's how much time supply chain changes like the move to apple silicon chip will need - I wouldn't be surprised if Apple already knew of all of Intel's roadmaps 5 years into the future, and decided, nope. No thanks. Not giving any more money to Intel.

From this point of view, you can tell, it's detrimental to Apple to go back to Intel now, if they wanted to use the Tiger Lake H they would have used the threat of M1 as a bargaining chip to lower the pricing on upcoming chips. It's obvious they didn't do that.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#344

Post by tinus_hn »

vmception wrote: post #247
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…

XQD has never caught on and there hasn't been a camera released that uses them since 2018 Whats up with photo/video people gatekeeping “serious” vs functional Your point might have some merit but SD will hold out for the next 5-8 years that purchasers of this machine will expect

For what it’s worth, XQD has been succeeded by CFExpress which is why you don’t see new devices using XQD.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#345

Post by Symmetry »

jeffbee wrote: post #312
Symmetry wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there CPU architectures where 8 cores share a L2 cache? I'm not aware of any though I can think of several where 4 cores share a L2 cache, though those tend to be pretty lightweight cores. More often you see issues with the L3 cache being shared between 8 cores or no as with Zen 2 versus Zen 3. And since only lightweight cores tend to share L2s this isn't really an issue in terms of replacing heavyweight cores wi…

Sure, POWER9 offers pairs of SMT8 cores sharing L2 caches, that's 16 thread contexts presented to software that are all sharing an L2 cache domain. Intel "Tremont" Atom has a shared L2 cache for a module of up to 4 cores. Maybe that is the one you allude to as lightweight.

Yes, there are clearly architectures where 8 threads share a L2$. L1$ too in both recent POWER SMT8 cores and SPARC Niagras. Yes, Intel Atoms were one of the examples I was thinking of regarding 4 cores sharing an L2$. One can quibble about what counts as a "core" when you're talking about POWER9 or Bulldozers but even being generous I don't think there's ever been a design where 8 cores all share the same L2$.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#346

Post by tjchear »

Jcowell wrote: post #162
mgkimsal wrote: post #160

I bet somehow, I'd still manage to get it to beachball on everyday common stuff like loading an IDE or Safari or something...

Used both in an M1 Mac. Haven’t seen the beach ball yet (VSCode and multiple windows of safari)

Do you ever see battery use differences between running VSCode and without on the M1?

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#347

Post by cercatrova »

salamandersauce wrote: post #341
cercatrova wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too. That's because changing the chassis is too expensive, but when they redesign it, you'll see it most likely without a touchbar.

They already had a touch bar free 13" MBP in that chassis. In fact they put in extra effort to add the touch bar to the 2 port 13" MBP.

Ah you're right, I forgot about the 13" without touch bar.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#348

Post by upbeat_general »

jason0597 wrote: post #295
upbeat_general wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about AIDA64, but Geekbench tests a variety of more real world or at least more varied scenarios compared to cinebench which just does CPU rendering. You can see the full description here ( https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf ) but there’s compression, encryption, compiling, and several other tests.

Taking for example encryption, isn't it an unfair workload? Encryption is hardware accelerated nowadays, which means you won't get an apples-to-apples (heh) comparison of processors and computers.

Yes. I’m not sure exactly how geekbench implements it but that’s certainly a big downside. Perhaps geekbench runs it without any hardware acceleration (to just test a different type of workload) but it might just use whatever hardware available.

As an end-user I’m okay with that, because at the end of the day if things run faster I don’t really care how, especially for tasks that are ubiquitous.

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#349

Post by matwood »

salamandersauce wrote: post #341
cercatrova wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They still made an M1 touch bar 13" MBP, they bothered to refresh it and keep it when swapping from butterfly back to scissor and the MBA only has touchID too. That's because changing the chassis is too expensive, but when they redesign it, you'll see it most likely without a touchbar.

They already had a touch bar free 13" MBP in that chassis. In fact they put in extra effort to add the touch bar to the 2 port 13" MBP.

You made 2 great points. There's also a rumor Apple had to do things to hide the M1 from Intel. Could the added TB been a part of that? Hard to know.

I'm not a TB hater (more indifference), and I still think it's going away :)

Re: Apple Readies MacBook Pro, MacBook Air Revamps

#350

Post by drewzero1 »

vmception wrote: post #291
drewzero1 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of the potential merits of alternative storage formats, it's a good point that people who have needed an SD card reader since their removal have probably gone out and bought external ones by now. I'd expect the standalone units to generally be higher-quality than the ones that would be built in. That said, I'm glad to see Apple has finally realized some of the ways they've been alienating their customer ba…

Apple has sold their dual GPU late 2015 powerhouse model on the website, allowing people to completely skip the USBC donglebook with butterfly keyboards and touch bar I’m looking forward to having that in the new processor and with touchbar They are acknowledging the folly of their ways as they have gotten rid of the butterfly keyboard, adding magsafe back, and adding sd cards back They are making the least contentio…

> They are making the least contentious and perfect machine

My "perfect machine" could also play DVDs, but that may be getting a bit contentious.

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