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UnbreakableAlex

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 17, 2019
111
210
What do you think will apple include to attract more customers for the arm Macs?

Will apple transition to 21:9 displays? Face unlock? 120-144hz Displays? Bigger than 27” iMac displays with 6K?

The Big Sur UI is so big, it asks for touch an pencil usage. Maybe the displays will be crazy thin and the stand very flexible.

Somehow I expect more interesting features than just a spec bump.

Bonus question: where will iPhones and iPads go with their power? They will be faster and faster as the future comes. Do you think Apple will bring a DEX like feature to iOS?
 

casperes1996

macrumors 604
Jan 26, 2014
7,597
5,769
Horsens, Denmark
21:9; Absolutely not. MacBook Pros have for a long time stayed 16:10. A taller display is better for a lot of cases.
Face Unlock, at some point, yes.
High refresh rate displays; Possibly also at some point, but I suspect later than face unlock
Bigger displays at 6K, The Pro Display XDR. Maybe an iMac Pro. Nothing below that

Big Sur UI isn't actually that huge once you start using it. - It looked bigger at the keynote than it actually is. - It's not that much chunkier than prior releases - only in a few places have sizes increased a little. - I would be sad about a touch Mac, but I do fear you could be right though.
Regarding a DEX like thing; No I don't think so. But; An iPad Pro with macOS, possibly. And I want to clarify here that it would still be iPadOS in most aspects, but that it could have the whole macOS UI when connected to a display, while not entirely being macOS.
 

throAU

macrumors G3
Feb 13, 2012
9,198
7,344
Perth, Western Australia
What do you think will apple include to attract more customers for the arm Macs?

Sheer performance advantage.

I seriously think people are going to be blown away when they see what the a* processors can do when not constrained to 5-10 watts (like they are in an iPhone and iPad) and are unchained within a MacBook or iMac chassis with actual cooling. That's not just being an apple shill. Things have been a long time coming....

For all the whining about people losing windows and bootcamp, I think the flip side will be that no other OEM will be able to compete in terms of performance in any sort of notebook form factor for at least 5-10 years.

Apple's mobile chipsets are simply that far ahead and they're the only vendor who has control of both the hardware and the software which affords them some huge advantages in terms of making the best of their hardware.

If Microsoft or Google make a serious effort to try and emulate that starting today - well they're simply 5-10+ years behind when apple started it. Apple haven't been deprecating old APIs and replacing with new ones for the past decade for nothing. This is all a carefully planned strategy to modernise their software stack and then build their own hardware to run those modern APIs as fast as possible. i.e., hardware designed for the software, which has been re-engineered based on lessons learned over the past several decades.

Everyone else (and especially Microsoft) is is dealing with legacy garbage code from 10-30 years ago that they need to keep for compatibility reasons, and so even if the hardware for say, PCs advances massively, the software will take time to catch up. Never mind that intel is totally screwed right now and will take several years to get themselves out of the 10nm quagmire.

Additionally, Apple has overnight created the biggest gaming market in history - essentially the same game code with very minimal change will run across iPhone/iPad/Mac/appleTV. And with their own GPUs and Cpus the performance will be there to back it up.

Mark my words. When the new ARM Macs come out this will be apple's "mic drop" moment on the computing industry.

Sure, in the short term, you'll lose boot camp. Long term, it simply won't matter. The future for the Mac is looking bright IMHO.
 
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UnbreakableAlex

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 17, 2019
111
210
A speed boost compared to what?
I don’t think there will be such a huge speed difference.

Today you can buy a of with PCIe 4, faster SSD and better graphics card for way less money than every Mac. Do you think Apple can beat that? I don’t think so.

Apple Computer are just more sillent and have displays with higher resolution (not refresh rate) built in. But that’s about it.

don’t get me wrong, I also hope they will be blazing fast but I’m trying to be real here.

I already wasted tons of money on slower external hard drives because my 2013 iMac doesn’t give me easy access to the ssd.
 

leman

macrumors Core
Oct 14, 2008
19,516
19,664
A speed boost compared to what?
I don’t think there will be such a huge speed difference.

Today you can buy a of with PCIe 4, faster SSD and better graphics card for way less money than every Mac. Do you think Apple can beat that? I don’t think so.

We can only speculate at this point. But what I got from the WWDC videos — Apple engineers (and I am talking about proper hardware engineers, not managers) are VERY sure that their hardware can scale.

I doubt that Apple will be able to outperform, say, a big gaming laptop when it comes to gaming performance. But it is very possible that they will be able to offer a compact 13" MBP with ridiculous battery life that will come very close to the big gaming laptop. And I am quite certain that the performance of their CPUs will be better than anything that Intel or AMD have to offer.

But it goes beyond this. The point is the often mentioned "integration of hardware and software". Let's look at the GPU as an example. Apple uses deferred tiled rendering architecture, just like everybody else in the mobile space. But Apple is in a unique position to open all the details of their architecture to their devs, since they develop their programming interfaces themselves. This gives the devs an unprecedented level of control and allows an "integrated" GPU without dedicated RAM to perform as well — if not better — than a big hungry behemoth with fast external RAM — at a fraction of used power. All simply because some algorithms can be coded on Apple hardware in a much more efficient and more straightforward way.

Another example of this is integration of their hardware machine learning accelerators. They already showed a demo where you get what looked like a 10-20x speedup in video editing, simply because object tracking can be done by dedicated hardware. And once Photoshop and Final Cut Pro are running 2x faster on 13" MBP than on a large Windows workstation...

And that is just the beginning... we don't know what Apple will really do. They could make all crazy designs like on-die integrated stacked DRAM, AI-driven power management controller... all kind of stuff that anyone else can't do because they need to conform to certain standards.
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I already wasted tons of money on slower external hard drives because my 2013 iMac doesn’t give me easy access to the ssd.

Oh, I wouldn't expect much to change here. If anything, the stuff will become even more integrated. RAM might even go from being soldered on the mainboard to being soldered to the CPU itself ;)
 

throAU

macrumors G3
Feb 13, 2012
9,198
7,344
Perth, Western Australia
A speed boost compared to what?
I don’t think there will be such a huge speed difference.

Today you can buy a of with PCIe 4, faster SSD and better graphics card for way less money than every Mac. Do you think Apple can beat that? I don’t think so.


PCIe4 is a standard. Apple ships fast flash. The processors in terms of power per watt (what matters in mobile machines and all in ones as it drives your HEAT limit) will exceed intel.

Also - see LTT's back to back blind SSD test. The figures on paper for m.2 NVME are great but windows just doesn't work any better for the vast majority of things (outside of file copies) due to other issues. Blind testing most people picked the SATA SSD windows machine as more responsive during actual use :D

Where Apple may fall short is on GPU, but they have the ace up their sleeve of having a low level API they are building hardware specifically for.

Also, because they control the entire software stack they can quickly integrate AI/ML/other specialist hardware into the OS.

Raw gaming GPU performance is the only area where apple will maybe not totally dominate what you can get in a PC and that won't be for long IMHO and will only be at the very high end which is totally irrelevant in portable machines (which make up the bulk of the computing market).
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But it goes beyond this. The point is the often mentioned "integration of hardware and software". Let's look at the GPU as an example. Apple uses deferred tiled rendering architecture, just like everybody else in the mobile space. But Apple is in a unique position to open all the details of their architecture to their devs, since they develop their programming interfaces themselves. This gives the devs an unprecedented level of control and allows an "integrated" GPU without dedicated RAM to perform as well — if not better — than a big hungry behemoth with fast external RAM — at a fraction of used power. All simply because some algorithms can be coded on Apple hardware in a much more efficient and more straightforward way.

Another example of this is integration of their hardware machine learning accelerators. They already showed a demo where you get what looked like a 10-20x speedup in video editing, simply because object tracking can be done by dedicated hardware. And once Photoshop and Final Cut Pro are running 2x faster on 13" MBP than on a large Windows workstation...

This is also what I was talking about.

Forget game performance as being the one and only measure of processing power. I think Apple will compete there, but the true showing on just how far ahead they will be is like the above. They can do stuff like integrate AI/ML/DSP processors, etc. much, much more quickly than any vendor will be able to do on the PC/Windows side because they have FULL control of both the hardware and software stack.

All those APIs and components they've deprecated over the years (e.g., openGL, quickdraw, gcc->llvm/clang, etc.) - were very likely done in order to push new APIs they can optimise for hardware processing on chips they are now producing.

Apple now aren't in the situation where they are trying to write software to drive hardware that has been hacked and extended to do new things it was never originally intended to do. They've spent the last decade refining their graphics and processing software to be "hardware acceleration friendly". They can make hardware specifically to do things that their software does, in the specific ways their software operates.
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Oh, I wouldn't expect much to change here. If anything, the stuff will become even more integrated. RAM might even go from being soldered on the mainboard to being soldered to the CPU itself

Not sure if joking, but it would totally not surprise me to see apple dabbling with HBM for some of their hardware, which yes - involves RAM on the processor package itself (see: Radeon Vega, Fury, etc.).

If not as the entire system memory, but maybe as a 4th level cache between the CPU and bulk memory.
 
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