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Last minute Apple silicon Mac thoughts
- Thread starter DHagan4755
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Assuming the Air and Pro both use a 4+4 chip, the difference may well be silent fanless operation vs squeezing extra sustained performance out with active cooling?
I don’t think that Apple has any plans on making iPads like that. Certainly not any that run macOS.
Really interested in tonight's event. I only bought my MBA in April but depending on how these ARM Macs are looking... I might be tempted.
Portable space heater that screams at me whenever I look at it for too long is kinda annoying now.
Portable space heater that screams at me whenever I look at it for too long is kinda annoying now.
I think we will just see an arm macbook 13", a macbook air 13" both with the same design and maybe a 1080p webcam and apple will call it a day and they might introduce a macbook 16" with a 10th or 11th gen intel cpu, I don't think apple will put an arm cpu on the 16" macbook just yet.
No new design , no 120 hz screen, still same big bezels ... that is what I'm expecting today, why does windows have to be so ugly? id love to just get a tiger lake xps 13 :/
No new design , no 120 hz screen, still same big bezels ... that is what I'm expecting today, why does windows have to be so ugly? id love to just get a tiger lake xps 13 :/
Is it though? I kind of like the recent improvements on the Windows side of things. However, there is not much going for the other side either, the XPS is pretty much priced 1:1 the same as the Apple series. Would love to switch, but honestly, it just doesn't pay off other than for the Nvidia GPUs. So todays event will pretty much decide whether I'll keep investing into the Apple eco system or I'll slowly fade out towards the XPS side of things. I'm preparing myself for a huge disappointment, but I'll give Apple a very small chance if their performance numbers blow everything out of the water, or if they have some extra surprises in store other than their Silicon update (which I so far see more of as a disadvantage).
Don't get me wrong, I love microsoft's new design direction, it's just it's SO damn inconsistent, the file explorer has a look, the start menu another look, their browser another look, you can access settings from so many different places and you run into things that look like windows vista, other things that look like windows p and other modern ones that feel well modern, is just chaos, they need to work HARD on making windows look consistent.
Yeah, the consistency is a mess on Windows. Apple had historically a way better influence on their devs, mostly through their much more tightly and coherently designed UI libraries. Most recently, with the rise of Electron based apps, this has changed much to the negative. Even Apple themselves have become incredibly incoherent in their paradigms. Sometimes you swipe, sometime you longpress, sometimes you right click, sometimes you press the option key to discover something new in the menu bar, then again sometimes it's only on the Touch Bar... it's a ****ing mess, there's no clear guidelines anymore when which paradigm is supposed to be applied, and I'm really disappointed that there's no real competitor who pays attention to those details as Apple did back in the days.
I'm interested as well, the fans on my 2015 Pro do seem to spin up quite a lot for little apparent reason recently. I don't think I could get on with a 13" computer though... maybe if the Air goes to 14" eventually?
I pretty much agree with everything you said, it just feels like apple is the "less worse" I am actually quite excited for microsoft's supposed improved new UI that is coming next year, but it should be here ALREADY. Oh that touch bar, I can't believe there is actual human beings who like it, you never know what is going to do! And it's so low res, it's just ugly to look at... Ugh
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The XDR's USB ports don't work, so technically it isn't support. It just "happens to work". Yes something appears on the screen but the overall device is a Thunderbolt device and without it elements of it don't work.
" ... We remain committed to the future of Thunderbolt and will support it in Macs with Apple silicon, ..."
And yet the Mac Developer Transition Kit doesn't have one. The DTK isn't viewed as officially being a "Mac" , but it is also demonstrative that Apple is willing to bend that "promise" in this transition just to get something out the door.
If Apple is doing high shared reuse between iPad Pro and low end Macs that is a zone where compromises may persist for a while the SoC that are exclusively just in Macs have a different set of package sizes ( larger with more I/O pins ) than the more package size constrained iPad Pro packages. ( Apple was "committed" to Thunderbolt when they released their "one port wonder" MacBook option. Apple is more committed to uber thinness than to Thunderbolt when those come into conflict. ).
Apple probably should use the Intel controllers. Baking it into the SoC only means they'd need a 're-driver' on the logic board to boost the signal. Much of the complications at the PHYS port location would mostly be there anyway. Apple probably was one of the main system developer drivers pushing Intl to put the TB controllers in the CPU package ( there are power saving upsides and Apple is always chasing power savings . ).
There is a slippery slope of Apple is trying to cover that too early.
At maximum Thunderbolt 3 speeds. TBv3 supported 20Gb/s on longer passive cables (than TBv2).
Cable Matters [Intel Certified] 20Gbps Thunderbolt 3 Cable 6.6 Feet (USB C Thunderbolt Cable) in Black Supporting 100W Charging
Thunderbolt 3 dating usb-c The Cable Matters 1m Thunderbolt 3 cable connects to any Thunderbolt 3 or USB-C port on a computer, dock, or monitor. This certified cable carries twice the bandwidth of a USB-C cable using the same reversible connector. Thunderbolt, USB and DisplayPort compatible. Comp...
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The "Universal" cable isn't as much about speed as it is about the cable being "no look, just plug and it works". Anything that is deeply hooked into USB standards is quite often about lower prices. Thunderbolt 4 is primarily just USB 4 without skipping over the optional stuff. The "required" baseline of USB 4 though is the 20Gb/s ( That theoretically was covered by USB 3.2 2x2 that didn't previously get mainstream traction. )
When USB 4 gets more traction the "Universal" , passive versions should get cheaper and , unfortunately, harder to spot the higher quality ones. ( as the race to bottom vendors pile in. )
Thunderbolt 4 ( and USB 4) is going to be bring more uniformity in the usage of the active cables. But more likely going to run into more "Universal" usage ones in the passive category.
Not really. The DTK is more a hack that Apple cobbled up internally and did a longer "production run" to ship out to external developers.
There are fewer than Mac Mini ports. The is more to being a Mac than submitting Geekbench numbers. The DTK is one reason why 3rd party external Thunderbolt (eGPU , etc) support in macOS 11 on ARM is no where near complete.
The SoC in the DTK doesn't natively support a system with 6-7 external ports. The initial Mac Laptops may not either ( since Mac laptops don't really match the desktops anymore. Lucky if have more than 2 ports. ). There is probably a SoC that is geared for Mac desktops coming, but that may not appear until much later.
The vast inconsistency of the Windows GUI drives me insane...!
At this point I am getting ready to dump Windows & switch over to Ubuntu Studio (this particular distro for that low latency audio), I will re-evaluate once there are actual Apple silicon Mac desktops to, well, evaluate...! ;^p
Things that would get me to buy: matching the 2015 MacBook Pro with Discrete Graphics (I don't think that's too hard), 20 hour battery life. Bonus - ability to run most macOS x64 software at no more than 50% penalty. This would be used mostly for media consumption away and writing and doing charts away from my desk.
I could see 5G being a feature of these. With their move to services, 5G would give them an excuse to lease more devices, in a way people are used to (since you can already lease them).
It’s good enough to use the monitor (not everyone uses the included hub) and it allows for use of the brightness / gamut settings. Good enough for the WWDC demo.
The DTK is also an iPad with extra RAM running macOS. I wouldn’t read too much into the DTK in terms of where they are at with a low end Mac SoC.
It’s not impossible that Apple might dump Thunderbolt on the Air, but it seems like an odd choice to do so on the 13” MBP.
One problem is that dumping features your customers use during a transition means folks don’t make that transition until you reach parity again. For what? Avoiding including an 8-lane PCIe controller on the SoC package that they could likely just license the blocks for in the worst case?
No real disagreement from me on this point.
I did clarify further in a later post.
But don’t mistake TDP for the sustained power draw either. That hasn’t been true lately unless you cap the power limit on these processors (or provide zero thermal headroom). Intel’s sustained power draw has been going up with each generation, despite posting the same TDPs.
With Intel, about all the TDP means is that if you can provide that level of heat dissipation, then you will be able to provide the rated base clock.
I think they should really just nail it home. Now introducing the Apple AppleAppleAppleBook Pro Apple Book Book
Sneak peek of the manual. Tim Cooking book. Sorry I’m going crazy waiting for the event!
Thunderbolt requires not only the x4 PCI-e input, but also x4 lane DisplayPort per stream , and x2 USB 2.0 data lines ( per port. So another x4 for a two port Mac laptop. or another x4 for a four port laptop if already have the two simple USB ports provision on the SoC ) .
For a four port laptop that is another (presuming have two USB ports on nonimal SoC) 28 pins out the bottom of the SoC. ( 8 + 16 + 4 ) . More pins/bumps usually leads to larger package sizes. For the Mac enclosures their is room.
The problem is if Apple is trying to "share" with the logic board constraints iPad Pro. If the MBA and MBP 13" are on same exact sam SoC then the package is probably larger than what is going into the iPad Pro. The issue is whether Apple's Scrooge McDuck tendancies doesn't have them looking at the iPad Pro ( or perhaps iPhone) SoC as a "go to" for the "smallest possible logic board" Mac when their tendancies to thinnest/lightest possible kick in.
The MacBook only needed to be incrementally bigger not to squeeze out the TB controller from the port location. Apple made that call. Doggedly sticking with the butterfly keyboard for 4 years pretty much shows where one of their base line motivations are ( Captain Ahab thinness).
Adding PCI-e lanes isn't a moon shot , "hard" problem. That isn't the core problem with some OCD elements of Apple's design tendencies.
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I am just looking forward to how all this is going to transpire, I had a MacBook Air 2017 model for work and it was great and but it tended to heat up a hell of a lot, I am hoping this will all solve that side of things and greatly improve battery life.