841–850 of 1001 posts
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Traditionally Apple's marketing compared against the previous generation, not multiple generations old hardware. It seems tacky to me because the M2's competition isn't really 2019 Intel MBPs- it's laptops using modern Intel/AMD CPUs (the M2 may still be better than those, but if that's the case those are the benchmarks they should be giving us)
They did. 20% improvement in cpu and 30% ish in GPU.
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I'm not sure I'd attribute that much to the CPU design though. On a typical laptop, CPU power consumption is <20% of the picture.
Well in that case: whether it’s the CPU, or the way CPU/GPU/RAM are tightly coupled on the SoC, or the 4Kish MiniLED screen (which never seems to be dim), or some sort magic glue between the battery cells… Apple is doing something spectacular, and other manufacturers need to figure out how to do it too.
Frankly though, I don't want most manufacturers to make ARM machines. While Apple is allowed to monopolize the latest TSMC silicon, it's completely pointless trying to compete with them. May as well focus on delivering a great x86 experience with AMD and switching to something more open like RISC-V when the time comes.
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14 inch M1 Pro supports two external displays, 14 inch M1 Max Supports four, all four can be 5K. Sadly, Apple knows exactly how to get my money from me.
> all four can be 5K. Only 3, the HDMI out is limited to 4K.
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I got an MBP for the extra USB ports, magsafe power adapter, and HDMI port alone. On processing power, I have no doubt the Air would have sufficed. I was willing to take the weight/size penalty for the ports!
The M2 Air has MagSafe. (= Killing MagSafe has to be the singled DUMBEST product decision anyone ever made. I'm so glad they finally brought it back.
When I'm on the go I only want to bring one charger and cable for backup for every device, which is USB-C. (I don't own an iPhone)
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I thought killing MagSafe was pretty dumb, too, but every time I tripped over the USB-C power cable on my 2018 MBP it came right out, no problem. Plus it's really nice to be able to move the power cable to whichever side the outlet is close to. When I upgrade, I think I'd choose to continue using USB-C power if possible. I'll actually miss the Touch Bar. It's an interesting idea that seems useful, but isn't, except i…
The MacBook Air at least still supports USB-C power, which is useful for USB-C monitors that also supply power. But I still think you need to plug it in on the right side to avoid overheating the laptop (the MBA at least doesn't have a fan, so I can't tell if this is still true or not).
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Considering the complexity of a SoC like the M1, that there is zero documentation for it, and the Asahi team can only reverse-engineer it, what are the odds that they just don't know the magic bits to twiddle to get this functionality?
> Considering the complexity of a SoC like the M1, that there is zero documentation for it, and the Asahi team can only reverse-engineer it, what are the odds that they just don't know the magic bits to twiddle to get this functionality? I'd consider that very low because you've got a lot of eyeballs trying to get the most out of a COTS easily available hardware. The goal is to make it the best-in-class Linux support…
At a certain point, vendor cooperation becomes outright necessary. Asahi has come a long way, but getting to "best-in-class Linux support" takes more than community effort with commodity hardware. Stalled-out projects like Nouveau don't lend a lot of hope for the future.
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I thought killing MagSafe was pretty dumb, too, but every time I tripped over the USB-C power cable on my 2018 MBP it came right out, no problem. Plus it's really nice to be able to move the power cable to whichever side the outlet is close to. When I upgrade, I think I'd choose to continue using USB-C power if possible. I'll actually miss the Touch Bar. It's an interesting idea that seems useful, but isn't, except i…
The MacBook Air at least still supports USB-C power, which is useful for USB-C monitors that also supply power. But I still think you need to plug it in on the right side to avoid overheating the laptop (the MBA at least doesn't have a fan, so I can't tell if this is still true or not).
On the other hand, my M1 Pro MacBook Pro don't have any problem charging on either side, not like my previous Intel.
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I have used the 2020 M1 air with 8Gb since last summer without any issues as a documents/productivity suite and web application development tool. There are zero complaints here. I had a Core i9 with 16GB of ram MBP before it. This feels just as fast.
I have an really old macbook pro (mid 2014) with 8 gigs of ram. I am regularly running out of ram, I think it should be independent of processing power, right? Or is there some other way it feels snappier? Maybe the SSD got so fast it can better handle memory pressure...or you just don't need more than 8 gigs and it wasn't a limiting factor before
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> They were behind the state of the art (of laptop/desktop chip performance) with their A series chips starting with the A4 ...but A series chips were never intended for laptops or desktops? And by all accounts, the A series nearly always out-competed comparable QC Snapdragon chips.
They weren't... but evidence is that that's only because they didn't have competitive performance for those applications. Once the performance caught up they did choose to put them in laptops and desktops.
It's worrying that they are shying away from specifying generational improvements or at least comparing to it's competitors. The "fastest Intel MacBook" is not really the competitor for an M2 MacBook Pro, it's a predecessor. But I'd rather hear about generational improvements from M1, especially because both Intel and AMD seem to be making great strides in the low power space lately.
It's no secret that Apple's M2 series processors are a pretty minor improvement over the M1 series. Expect much bigger improvements in the M3 series which will likely be using TSMC's 3nm process (and then probably only minor improvements again for the M4 series). It seems that Apple's ridiculously impressive consistent year-on-year gains up the M1 were in large part possible because they were behind the state of the…
I was nodding along about M2 being a minor bump over M1, but I'm not even sure what you mean here. Apple previously used Intel processors - how is Intel not caught up with Intel?
Apple was key to many many computing technology adoption - USB, Thunderbolt, even early WiFi. Now that they're making their own desktop processors and entire SoC, I think they can move in ways that are not constrained by Intel or other players. It's possible we see the laptop market move more like the smartphone market.