101–110 of 198 posts
1.3 GB/s vs 2 GB/s read. I think it's perfectly reasonable given most users aren't going to be doing high I/O, and if they did, they'd just get a MBP.
Or better Dell/HP/System76 with upgradable 32GB RAM.
Hardware of latest MBP aren't super reliable anymore, so I don't see any reason to pay premium price.
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You'll be back for the trackpad alone.
I have to agree Apple makes a great trackpad. Most other manufacturers' hardware seems to consistently detect a movement as a drag action. Constantly detecting the wrong movement and drawing a box instead of moving the mouse pointer. It could be Windows OS that's bad or macOS that's good or a mix of OS and hardware. The Apple OS is nice but too restrictive for me. Windows I find is kludgy and bloated. Linux is nice i…
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The biggest bummer of these machines is apples lack of vp9 hardware decoding in macos, it makes 4k youtube unwatchable. For high motion content (mountain biking videos) 4k is the only way to watch even on a tiny laptop screen due to youtube’s horrific compression. Its an absurd limitation considering the hardware has full support for it! I know it sounds insane but I returned mine for a quad core 13” mbp just to brut…
Google could support H.264 or H.265. The only reason they don't is because they want to push their format.
But they don't, so Safari users have to suffer.
Are these new T2-based Macs usable with Linux yet? Honest question. Edit: For the downvoters, it’s a real concern: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2018/11/06/mac-t2chip-linux/
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I am guessing for high motion content you mean 60fps video?
No, they mean content where things are moving a lot. (Imagine how fast the picture is changing on a mountain biker’s GoPro...)
It's worth remembering that the storage architecture of T2-based Macs (like this MacBook Air) is very different from previous Macs and any PCs. The T2 chip is an Apple ARM SoC running Darwin/XNU (basically a cut-down iOS). It connects to the Intel system using a variety of buses. From a storage perspective, the T2 is the storage controller. It sits between raw NAND flash and the Intel system (connecting to the Intel…
NAND flash is almost always packaged with a stack of several dies in each BGA package. Individual dies are typically 256Gb (32GB) or larger, and most manufacturers will stack up to 8 or 16 dies per package. So an SSD with two packages can easily vary from 128GB (2 packages x 2 dies per package x 256Gb per die) to 2TB (2 packages x 16 dies per package x 512Gb per die).
It's also possible for a single BGA package to have the NAND organized on one or more channels. Drives using larger form factors (eg. enterprise SSDs using 2.5"/15mm dual-PCB) will typically have each package connecting to only one of the SSD controller's channels, and often have multiple packages per channel. Consumer SSDs that need to minimize PCB footprint take the opposite approach, using eg. two packages connecting to two channels each to fully populate a low-end 4-channel SSD controller.
I don't know Apple's recent history of NAND choices, but it's possible they've switched from MLC (two bit per cell) to TLC (three bit per cell) NAND flash, which sacrifices performance for density and cost. They have probably moved to 3D NAND with a higher layer count, which can be a mixed bag for performance especially when the controller is not also upgraded. If they've moved to a higher per-die capacity for drives with the same total capacity, then a significant performance drop for lower-capacity models is expected.
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Apple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts. These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their pric…
The $1K aluminum monitor stand is symbolic in that regard, even though it's not even hardware.
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Apple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts. These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their pric…
Apple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin app…
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The biggest bummer of these machines is apples lack of vp9 hardware decoding in macos, it makes 4k youtube unwatchable. For high motion content (mountain biking videos) 4k is the only way to watch even on a tiny laptop screen due to youtube’s horrific compression. Its an absurd limitation considering the hardware has full support for it! I know it sounds insane but I returned mine for a quad core 13” mbp just to brut…
Do hardware decoders for vp9 even exist?
On Android, it has been mandated by CTS for several years already.
[1] Except Radeon VII, which is technically Vega.
Would be curious of whether this is before or after the cache. My understanding is that, for instance, newer Samsung QLC SSDs are slower but they include a very fast SLC cache, and in practice you spend your time in the cache unless you are copying >15GB files.
> unless you are copying >15GB files. Or, presumably, using them in a miltitenant SAN or DBMS where the SSD’s pipeline is full of concurrent random IOPS to more than 15GB of hot data.