You can get the extra graphics core with the Air as well. That's certainly what I did when I ordered yesterday.
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MacBook Air or PRO?
- Thread starter Sara Karlsson
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You can get the extra graphics core with the Air as well. That's certainly what I did when I ordered yesterday.
It kinda depends on what one means by "faster"... Snappiness or sustained computational throughput?
If we go with the latter, the limiting factor is typically heat dissipation. Modern CPU's throttle down (self-limit) their computational throughput to avoid overheating. The better you can dissipate the heat generated, the higher level of computation throughput you can sustain. Thus, generally the active-cooling systems will be "faster" than passively cooled systems when considering sustained computational throughput.
Now if we're talking about "snappiness" in terms of short/bursty cpu usage with the cpu mostly idle, which is pretty common for folks not playing games or choosing to watch software-decoded videos, then I don't know that we can necessarily say whether the Air or Pro would be different from one another.
For me it's likely to mostly depend on the actual screen quality and even more so manufacturing variation and evenness. I'll probably make a visit in a few stores once the machines are on display and the confinement over here in France.
Early retina screens were an absolute nightmare in regards to unevenness to the point of making any visual work difficult and any purchase a hassle with multiple returns needed before getting a screen that was worth calibrating. A recent visit in a few stores with latter intel MacBook Air and Pros on display suggested that I should remain quite cautious in that regard, particularly for the Air's display (The two dozen or so Airs I saw were mostly plain rubbish in terms of white balance evenness just by looking at Google's home page).
So a lot of it depends on exactly what changed to make the MBA's screen capable of P3 gamut and why the MBP's screen remains a 100 nits brighter (something I don't really care about in itself but may be related to components / manufacturing and may find a correlation with manufacturing variation).
Early retina screens were an absolute nightmare in regards to unevenness to the point of making any visual work difficult and any purchase a hassle with multiple returns needed before getting a screen that was worth calibrating. A recent visit in a few stores with latter intel MacBook Air and Pros on display suggested that I should remain quite cautious in that regard, particularly for the Air's display (The two dozen or so Airs I saw were mostly plain rubbish in terms of white balance evenness just by looking at Google's home page).
So a lot of it depends on exactly what changed to make the MBA's screen capable of P3 gamut and why the MBP's screen remains a 100 nits brighter (something I don't really care about in itself but may be related to components / manufacturing and may find a correlation with manufacturing variation).
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I would like to ask something different. I have an order already which has not arrived yet MBP 13' 8th gen i5 with 16Gb ram. Of course, nothing is sure before the benchmark tests but do you think the new MBA M1 chip without any upgrade of ram is better than my existing ordered Mac?
Better efficency?
Better performance?
more long lasting usege?
May I have your thoughts? I am seriously thinking to return MBP before the end of 14 days.
Better efficency?
Better performance?
more long lasting usege?
May I have your thoughts? I am seriously thinking to return MBP before the end of 14 days.
Great thing about Apple is their products retain value. You can always offload your device for a small depreciation and get the Apple Silicon device they release in the spring/summer.
If they claim their M1 Max are designed to operate within their thermal envelope that means that the CPU should not throttle under 100% load shouldn't it? If that is the case why the need for a fan in the MacBook pro? If fan is needed then the MacBook air is not designed to operate within its thermal envelope.
$320 for a 12-year-old Air?! Wow! My mid-2012 MacBook Pro with an upgraded SSD and newer battery might be able to fetch some $ toward a new laptop then. Lol.
Fan noise is not an issue - at all.
I almost never get the fan on my 16" i9 - I expect it to come on much less on a 13 with M1, which uses way less power - (how much, actually? What's the TDP?)
And then there's the fact that *if* the fan comes on on your Pro, the Air would then start throttling and use the energy efficient cores or turn down the display brightness - all not good trade-offs vs fan noise. Or it shuts down - also not good. We can see from iPhones that overheating can absolutely happen with these processors, and it's not pretty without a fan.
In my 15+ year experience of using Macs in the tropics, Macs are not designed for warm weather so unfortunately the Air won't work very well here. That's my prediction.
When are they gonna make Gold Pros? Come on, Apple.
PS: Touch bar is a toss up. I use mine now but it's not great.
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The M1 in the Air will be designed to run at a specific speed under load keeping heat within spec.
In reality this may mean an export of 20 photos from Lightroom would take say 15 seconds longer on the Air, but the Pro would be spinning up the fan. I'd rather have it take longer than a mechanical point of failure in my laptop.
I think we've all seen the same marketing presentation yesterday, so it'd doubtful anyone has any better info at hand than you do.
The key difference between the M1 MBA and MBP is the passive vs active cooling.
Whether that will make a difference in your usage depends on what you do with the system. Continuous CPU loading will favor the MBP. Whether the M1 MBA will supersede the 8th gen intel MBP is an unknown at this time.
My suggestion - if you can live with whatever system you have today for a while longer, cancel the MBP order and wait for folks to have the new M1 systems a few weeks. Then you'll be better able to make an assessment of whether to buy a new M1 MBA, a new M1 MBP, or an Apple refurbished intel MBP.
I don't think that's a valid interpretation. If it were true then that'd mean the systems were artificially limited in their ability to do any bursting.
Instead, I'd expect the sustained CPU performance limits itself to what the passive cooling can handle, and in periods when the system has not been at that level (i.e. it's cooler than the envelope max) there's ramp-up "room" for bursty usage.
Honestly I think the whole "throttling" concept has received bad press / is misunderstood.
End of the day - a passively cooled system will not be able to maintain the same level of continued CPU load that an actively cooled system can sustain, all else the same. If the CPU temperature begins reaching the thermal envelope, the system needs to slow it down to keep it from exceeding the envelope.
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Oh I completely agree with this statement what I don't agree with is the Apple statements about the thermal envelope design. Clearly MacBook air will throttle so no it's not designed properly.
Throttling isn't a thing with the M1, the chips will be designed to give the best performance they can within the TDP/cooling solution.
Throttling happens when you pair a chip that produces too much heat for the machine to handle. You think Apple are going to put an unrestricted 25w TDP M1 in the Air and let it just smash it's face into the thermal wall?
Philosophical question -- just exactly who gets to decide what's "proper" design in this aspect?
Real question - given that throttling is the reduction of clock speed to a level at which the CPU temperature does not exceed specification under sustained load, which specific systems on the market do not behave in this manner?
Is it not a waste to disallow brief periods of higher-than-sustainable load when the CPU is beginning at a lower temperature?
I owned a 13" MBP and 21" iMac simultaneously back in the day. I meticulously manage my photo and iTunes libraries, so trying to keep the two filesystems synced was a pain in the ass for me, and not worth the hassle. I won't lie and say I'm not tempted to own a new 13" Air and next year's redesigned 16", though.
For me 256GB is a bit tight since I do keep photos on my Mac. I wouldn’t go with the 512GB just to get the 8th GPU core.
I think folks have varying ideas of what "throttling" means.
Using the more general definition, all modern CPUs perform throttling as part of their basic design. If they did not, then they're leaving potential performance on the table by not being able to briefly burst - temporarily generating more heat than can be dissipated on a continued basis, then backing off as the CPU temperature rises towards the sustainable limit.
FWIW, using a private cloud via a NAS such as Synology or QNAP helps immensely in keeping key files/folder synced between two Macs. Effectively behaving as your own private dropbox. Just need to remember not to open stuff simultaneously.
I can take it or leave it. I’ve used it and sometimes it’s nice but I wouldn’t necessarily pay extra for it.
That's it being too hot and thermal throttling itself to protect the chip. Cooling on macs are trash, and they aren't too suited to play games.
A slow system could mean many things, badly optimised game, too much tasks opened in the background...
Is anyone else waiting until the laptops are released before buying? I feel like it's impossible to tell if we want a MBA vs MBP13 yet because despite having 'the same' CPU depending on under what conditions the MBA chip will be limited by heat limitations is currently unknown is it not?
