Jony Ive was right

[rgwebb]

Max Tech and a bunch of others did tests wherein the M2 throttled under load sooner than the M1. It's a hotter running chip. It's going to get hotter sooner than a cooler running chip. Not sure where this is a crazy notion here.

Okay but did those tests show that the M2 did worse than the M1 or just that it throttled? All the tests that I have seen indicate that the M2 will consistently outperform the M1. A chip may throttle itself but still outperform its competition. I understand that to be the case with the M2 v. the M1 within a fanless laptop chassis.

I feel like you're moving the goalposts because my reply was to this assertion from you.

I don't think anyone is breezing by this. I think the opposite is happening. Everyone is leaning into it as though the M2 Macs exist in a vacuum and that they're not supposed to be compared to their immediate M1-based predecessors which are faster in some cases.

You claim that the M1 is faster in some cases. I asked in what cases because the only cases I've heard about where that is true are disk I/O bound tasks on the base model M2 Air because Apple gimped the SSD R/W speeds.

 

[MBHockey]

I have noticed the following:
- 13” M2 MBP, will be delivered next day
- 13” M2 MBA will be delivered in 2 weeks.

And both devices cost the same when configured with the same specs.

So the Apple customer prefers a thermal throttling, slightly thinner machine with worse battery life over a machine that weighs only 160 grams more while having none of those issues and superior battery life.

That is exactly what the MBP has been with Jony his obession with thinnes rather than designing a proper chassis that could handle the Intel chips.

Bring back Jony!!!

The metric by which you are measuring demand for these machines is flawed. Shipping times is not solely a function of demand.

 

[sdwaltz]

I have noticed the following:
- 13” M2 MBP, will be delivered next day
- 13” M2 MBA will be delivered in 2 weeks.

And both devices cost the same when configured with the same specs.

So the Apple customer prefers a thermal throttling, slightly thinner machine with worse battery life over a machine that weighs only 160 grams more while having none of those issues and superior battery life.

That is exactly what the MBP has been with Jony his obession with thinnes rather than designing a proper chassis that could handle the Intel chips.

Bring back Jony!!!

It's not the thinness...

New/better design, better screen, smaller bezels, magsafe, no touch bar...THAT is why people are buying the Air.

 

[Queen6]

Jony was very far off the mark, never seen so many drop the Mac. The 2016 MBP re-design was an utter joke with the worst keyboard in the world, totally inadequate cooling and many more issues. Apple was slow and lazy to address the issue and that no doubt cost sales.

I'm happy Apple has woke up and listens to it's customers, powerful fast computers that actually serve the user, not the designers ego. Trick is if your product is garbage people won't buy it, a very simple concept....

Q-6

 

[gpat]

Is Johny who created the BUTTerfly keyboard and the touch-bar while having a short display cable and made the device so thin despite having an oven heat level chip for MBP from 2016-2018? If so, I am so glad he left. Seeing the M1-series MBP 14 and 16 are thicker despite having more efficient chips, I am glad I still use a mac.

Jony was a powerful man inside Apple, but it's not like Apple was a one man organization.
Surely he was responsible for the obsession with thinness and aspects like excessive thermal throttling, but there was a team approving those decisions as well.

It's not like he woke up one day and said "make the display cable short so it'll be a time bomb" while letting out an evil laugh.
Apple even released the 2018 rMBA, another joke product, with the butterfly keyboard when it has been a failing design for 3 years straight, and put a fan inside the MBA in a useless position, causing the thing to get toasty, when the old one dissipated heat just fine.
No way that is the fault of just one man. They just got lazy / careless, that's all.

The new MBPs are massive improvements over the old ones, but still it's puzzling that they made them thicker now of all times, as they have CPUs that would stay cool in the thinner chassis, that actually looked amazing besides all the issues that would have been solved with the newer tech.

 

[spiderman0616]

Jony was very far off the mark, never seen so many drop the Mac. The 2016 MBP re-design was an utter joke with the worst keyboard in the world, totally inadequate cooling and many more issues. Apple was slow and lazy to address the issue and that no doubt cost sales.

I'm happy Apple has woke up and listens to it's customers, powerful fast computers that actually serve the user, not the designers ego. Trick is if your product is garbage people won't buy it, a very simple concept....

Q-6

I don't think I agree with the "lazy" part, but I agree with the rest. Apple The Company is a large machine with a lot of moving parts, and unfortunately that DOES mean they are slow to make changes. When you're building things as intricate as MacBooks and make a bunch of bad calls on design like Apple did, those mistakes just take years to work out of the user base and the product pipeline. I don't think it's always as easy as just shredding up your plans and redesigning.

But yes, definitely slow. I know many casual observers, myself included, underestimated the pool of users waiting for Apple to right the ship and make a MacBook they wanted to buy again. A portion of those ditched the Mac for Windows or an iPad in the meantime, which is unfortunate. I think these newer machines can win a lot of them back though.

 

[crsh1976]

The 13-inch MBP is an old design (its sole unique feature is the disastrous touch bar), the M2 MBA also got a cool new colour that makes it more attractive.

MBP or MBA, ventilation/throttling isn't a real concern - nobody in their right mind buys either of these models for gaming or demanding workloads (the 13-inch MBP is capable, but there's not much 'pro' about it, and the fan inside isn't a feature).

They're the same price when specced the same way? To me it just means the 13-inch MBP has no purpose, but somehow Apple keeps it around (to compensate for the long wait times on other models perhaps).

Also I wouldn't compare wait times, supplies for different SKUs are not directly comparable.

 

[Queen6]

Jony was a powerful man inside Apple, but it's not like Apple was a one man organization.
Surely he was responsible for the obsession with thinness and aspects like excessive thermal throttling, but there was a team approving those decisions as well.

It's not like he woke up one day and said "make the display cable short so it'll be a time bomb" while letting out an evil laugh.
Apple even released the 2018 rMBA, another joke product, with the butterfly keyboard when it has been a failing design for 3 years straight, and put a fan inside the MBA in a useless position, causing the thing to get toasty, when the old one dissipated heat just fine.
No way that is the fault of just one man. They just got lazy / careless, that's all.

The new MBPs are massive improvements over the old ones, but still it's puzzling that they made them thicker now of all times, when they have CPUs that would stay cool in the thinner chassis, that actually looked amazing besides all the issues that would have been solved with the newer tech.

Simple performance over form and that makes sense, as M2, M3 will have higher cooling demands in the same chassis or we can go just back to throttling and be the butt of all jokes.

I think Apple gets it. The professional community has had enough of the toy's we need competent and performant tools that deliver. I cant speak for all, however I can speak of those I know. We as a group were predominately Mac focused, the MBP was systematically dropped due to aging hardware and the hapless 2016 MBP re-design. Inside 12 months we were all on Windows...

Slowly we're coming back, as ever time will tell and Apple needs to deliver on multiple fronts. Apple wants the market, they need to deliver...

Q-6

 

[Queen6]

The 13-inch MBP is an old design (its sole unique feature is the disastrous touch bar), the M2 MBA also got a cool new colour that makes it more attractive.

MBP or MBA, ventilation/throttling isn't a real concern - nobody in their right mind buys either of these models for gaming or demanding workloads (the 13-inch MBP is capable, but there's not much 'pro' about it, and the fan inside isn't a feature).

They're the same price when specced the same way? To me it just means the 13-inch MBP has no purpose, but somehow Apple keeps it around (to compensate for the long wait times on other models perhaps).

Also I wouldn't compare wait times, supplies for different SKUs are not directly comparable.

I'm OK with the 13" MBP it's a powerful system. I don't care for the TouchBar, but it's as fast this Asus workstation. Gets the job done and battery runtime is phenomenal and that is what is most important in a portable off the main supply...

Q-6

 

[jdb8167]

The Air doesn't have a heatsink in it so performance on it is limited compared to the other Macbooks so it doesn't burn up. For normal tasks you won't see an issue. For more demanding workloads you will.

Have you seen the teardown of the M2 MacBook Air? Did you see the part where there was thermal paste on the M2 SoC? The reason for the thermal paste is to improve heat conduction to the heat-spreader (which is a type of heatsink.) Both the M1 and M2 MacBook Airs have heatsinks. Don't listen to the YouTube nonsense.

 

[htnt7919]

Give me all the new upgrade on m2 MBA ( screen, speaker, magsafe) , i will get MBP 13 in a heartbeat.

 

[Freida]

Incredible! You buy Air for WoW? Someone didn't get the right machine for the task.

Air is for completely different audience than what you are suggesting. Those that buy Air will probably never throttle because they use it mostly for light stuff. Those that require power will choose different product accordingly to their needs.
Your analogy is very bad.

Play WoW and you will see it thermal throttle. It is pretty easy to thermal throttle these machines.

 

[Calaveras]

I have noticed the following:
- 13” M2 MBP, will be delivered next day
- 13” M2 MBA will be delivered in 2 weeks.

And both devices cost the same when configured with the same specs.

So the Apple customer prefers a thermal throttling, slightly thinner machine with worse battery life over a machine that weighs only 160 grams more while having none of those issues and superior battery life.

That is exactly what the MBP has been with Jony his obession with thinnes rather than designing a proper chassis that could handle the Intel chips.

Bring back Jony!!!

"the Apple customer" is several different people.

There are professional content creators who need as much power as they can fit into a portable machine. Think Photographers, musicians, videographers/editors etc.
Then there are college students who need a reliable machine to watch content on and write papers/do coursework.
This is going to be a minimum spec machine in terms of CPU/GPU, but will likely need to be robust enough to last 4-6 years.
Then you have your advertising and ad sales types. People who want to be adept with Adobe creative suite, but are more likely to be using Excel than Photoshop. Again this is going to be middle of the pack performance wise, but due to corporate amortization schemes they can count on a new laptop every 3 years.
Content creators have long been one of the most vocal segments of Apple users, but honestly we are a minority compared to college students and corporate users.

This is why there are different models of Macintosh to make different users happy.
I went with an Air for about a year. I was never happy except when just browsing the web. In ever other use it felt sluggish.
My 14" MBP is a happy sweet spot. It's powerful enough to do some heavy lifting, but it's not too heavy to lift!
Battery life is such a non-issue.
The only times I ever push the limits of my battery is when I am traveling by air.
Most of the rest of the time it is not hard to stay plugged in.
It's one of those dumb metrics Apple likes to crow about, and features nerds like to obsess over.

As far as Jony Ive. I am happy with the 14" MBP that could never exist under his stewardship.
It has useful ports like HDMI and an SD card reader. It also has 3 USB C/TB4 ports.
It gets the job done without a ton of dongles, and if I need a more sophisticated set up in my home office there are docks for that.

 

[rgwebb]

Play WoW and you will see it thermal throttle. It is pretty easy to thermal throttle these machines.

Does it adversely affect performance or is it just throttling after a period of time at load without significant performance hits?

 

[jdb8167]

Battery life is such a non-issue.
The only times I ever push the limits of my battery is when I am traveling by air.
Most of the rest of the time it is not hard to stay plugged in.
It's one of those dumb metrics Apple likes to crow about, and features nerds like to obsess over.

I've been working without a power adapter for 5 months now. First on an M1 MacBook Air and now on an M2. It changes how you use the computer. It becomes more like an iPad where you just pick it up and use it without worrying about what your battery charge is.

Working while plugged in is fine. I did it for years. I kept power adapters in multiple places so I didn't have to carry one around with me. Working without a power adapter is just better.

 

[iPadified]

As far as Jony Ive. I am happy with the 14" MBP that could never exist under his stewardship.
It has useful ports like HDMI and an SD card reader. It also has 3 USB C/TB4 ports.
It gets the job done without a ton of dongles, and if I need a more sophisticated set up in my home office there are docks for that.

The real pro port that is missing is ethernet.

 

[973358]

Jony was a powerful man inside Apple, but it's not like Apple was a one man organization.
Surely he was responsible for the obsession with thinness and aspects like excessive thermal throttling, but there was a team approving those decisions as well.

It's not like he woke up one day and said "make the display cable short so it'll be a time bomb" while letting out an evil laugh.
Apple even released the 2018 rMBA, another joke product, with the butterfly keyboard when it has been a failing design for 3 years straight, and put a fan inside the MBA in a useless position, causing the thing to get toasty, when the old one dissipated heat just fine.
No way that is the fault of just one man. They just got lazy / careless, that's all.

The new MBPs are massive improvements over the old ones, but still it's puzzling that they made them thicker now of all times, as they have CPUs that would stay cool in the thinner chassis, that actually looked amazing besides all the issues that would have been solved with the newer tech.

The way I see it when Jony was still there, Apple products focuses on Design no matter how poor the performance they have to sacrifice for it. This was why the MBPs from 2016-2018 have those flawed designs.

After he left, they now focus on Performance and customer feeds back (not that much but it is better compared to when Jony was still around) which is why they let the machine run hotter by having thicker chassis and stronger fans. Also, the ports that people like photo/videographers make a big deal about.

 

[rgwebb]

In fairness to Ive, the "Intel Mac Era" hinged on differentiating themselves from comparable Wintel OEMs despite have the same essential hardware. This meant better displays, higher quality chassis, better human input hardware (trackpad, keyboard, etc), and - yes - thinner and lighter.

The problem towards the end of the Intel Mac Era was that some of those differentiations became untenable with the nature of the Intel CPUs. Intel lost their interest in performance at low wattage and Apple's products suffered in the late stages of that business relationship. Furthermore, Apple made some self-owns with the butterfly keyboard too.

Thankfully, they've quickly reversed course and their laptop line up is fantastic from the bottom to the very top now.

Edit: Though it is telling that when Apple had an essential hardware differentiation with their own silicon, they selected an industrial design that was significantly thicker (with more thermal capacity) than they did with Intel CPUs.

 

[spiderman0616]

In fairness to Ive, the "Intel Mac Era" hinged on differentiating themselves from comparable Wintel OEMs despite have the same essential hardware. This meant better displays, higher quality chassis, better human input hardware (trackpad, keyboard, etc), and - yes - thinner and lighter.

The problem towards the end of the Intel Mac Era was that some of those differentiations became untenable with the nature of the Intel CPUs. Intel lost their interest in performance at low wattage and Apple's products suffered in the late stages of that business relationship. Furthermore, Apple made some self-owns with the butterfly keyboard too.

Thankfully, they've quickly reversed course and their laptop line up is fantastic from the bottom to the very top now.

If there was ever an "apology letter" from Apple to Mac users, it was Apple Silicon Macs. The M1 Air and Mini were a good start, the M1 Pro and Max MBP models were mind blowing, the iMac is stunning, and the Mac Studio felt like them just doing a victory lap and dancing on Intel's grave. I can't wait to see what kind of performance the M2 variations bring.

As they go down this product roadmap further, Macs are just going to get better and better and better. I actually never thought I'd see the day where they'd get free of Intel and start doing their own thing. It's paid off in spades so far.

 

[darngooddesign]

The real pro port that is missing is ethernet.

If you want an Ethernet port, you're going to need 2008 era MBP thickness.

 

[chrono1081]

Play WoW and you will see it thermal throttle. It is pretty easy to thermal throttle these machines.

Thermal throttling isn't this bad thing people think it is. All chips do it because back when they didn't you'd literally have the processor melt. The performance difference in a well designed machine is negligible.

I play tons of FF14 on mine, what to know what else I do? I run Houdini simulations (far more taxing than any game or pretty much any other software out there), I work in Final Cut with 4k video, I work in Logic, I work in Blender and ZBrush. This machine handled it all and barely got warm to the touch and significantly outperformed my 2019 16 inch Intel i9 MacBook Pro except for rendering in Blender (which isn't optimized for M series chips yet).

These are fantastic machines, go out and actually try one instead of listening to garbage tech YouTubers who don't understand that benchmarks don't ever translate to real world usage.

 

[rgwebb]

Thermal throttling isn't this bad thing people think it is. All chips do it because back when they didn't you'd literally have the processor melt. The performance difference in a well designed machine is negligible.

I play tons of FF14 on mine, what to know what else I do? I run Houdini simulations (far more taxing than any game or pretty much any other software out there), I work in Final Cut with 4k video, I work in Logic, I work in Blender and ZBrush. This machine handled it all and barely got warm to the touch and significantly outperformed my 2019 16 inch Intel i9 MacBook Pro except for rendering in Blender (which isn't optimized for M series chips yet).

These are fantastic machines, go out and actually try one instead of listening to garbage tech YouTubers who don't understand that benchmarks don't ever translate to real world usage.

Most who complain about this stuff:

 

[gpat]

The way I see it when Jony was still there, Apple products focuses on Design no matter how poor the performance they have to sacrifice for it. This was why the MBPs from 2016-2018 have those flawed designs.

After he left, they now focus on Performance and customer feeds back (not that much but it is better compared to when Jony was still around) which is why they let the machine run hotter by having thicker chassis and stronger fans. Also, the ports that people like photo/videographers make a big deal about.

I think people are giving way too much importance to this, remember that Jony was in Apple since 1997, before Steve came back as CEO.
This means that Jony supervised every Apple design for more than 20 years, and at the time Apple was at the verge of bankruptcy.
If he was that bad at his job, Apple would have been dead for decades.
If Apple lost its direction in the 2015-2020 era, at least in the Mac department, the problem was much bigger than Jony itself.
If Jony started churning out bad designs, that was on commission of the other executives, it's not like he could ship Apple product he conceived under the Apple brand.
People like Angela Ahrendts, Burberry CEO until 2014, came to Apple to supervise sales from 2014 to 2019 (coincidence?), and she was one of the executives responsible for the idea of turning Apple into a fashion-first brand, an idea that fortunately appears to be buried today.
Without doubt she wasn't the only one responsible for this. It's easy to pin all the guilt on one individual but large companies don't work like that.
I think Apple's board of directors pursued a wrong direction and now adjusted its course, it's something that can happen, nothing to be ashamed of.
And guess who supervised the board? Yeah, that's right, Tim Cook.

 

[haralds]

Just a couple of points that have been made before obliquely:
1. All CPUs and GPUs and many other components have do "thermal management." Apart from a system component like a fan it is changing the speed (throttling.) A small change can have a big impact on heat dissipation without a huge impact on performance. Apple Silicon is MUCH better at it than Intel or AMD. This is not a case where Apple added something to take away power and save money.
2. The chassis/case on Macs is part of the heat dissipation system (sink.) They pull heat away from the components and radiate it. Thinner here is NOT better; thicker is.
3. An odd part of the M2 Air design is that some enterprising YouTubers have added heat conductive pads between the CPU board assembly and the back of the MacBook and improved dissipation allowing for higher speed. I am not sure why Apple did not do that unless they wanted to avoid people complaining about burning laps.

 

[jdb8167]

3. An odd part of the M2 Air design is that some enterprising YouTubers have added heat conductive pads between the CPU board assembly and the back of the MacBook and improved dissipation allowing for higher speed. I am not sure why Apple did not do that unless they wanted to avoid people complaining about burning laps.

That is exactly the problem. There are rules for how hot the chassis can get. When the M2 is fully heat soaked the chassis is a couple of degrees C hotter than the M1 version. That is the practical limit. If you want a fanless design, throttling while the heat dissipates through the aluminum skin is a necessary trade off. You can’t get around it. Making the aluminum skin directly connect to the heat sink works and allows the M2 more performance but is simply too hot. Probably not good for the battery either.