That may be true for drills, but that's not true for Apple products with "Pro" added on to their name.
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Waiting for the 2020 MBP
- Thread starter Dulcimer
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That may be true for drills, but that's not true for Apple products with "Pro" added on to their name.
Such a machine in computer terms would come with enterprise grade components (intel Xeon, ECC memory, SLC SSD etc) - designed and tested to destruction to run for ages with a very low failure rate. The MBP is not such a machine, it uses good but still consumer grade components.
This is even before dodgy keyboards are taken into consideration.
Along the lines of your argument, it was never there in the first place. The current MBP is the most "professional" MacBook Pro Apple has ever made — both in absolute and relative terms. But I agree that the moniker itself has little meaning.
Why not? MacBook Pro are faster, more flexible and generally more capable than their non-pro counterparts. I can see the see how the analogy applying here rather well.
We don't have any stats on workstation-class machine failure rates, so I don't know whether these kind of blanket statements hold. MacBook Pros are hybrid machines, taking clues from both the consumer space and the workstation space. Their power subsystem, surge protection and GPU switching is workstation class. And the reason why the MBP does not use Xeons is mainly because Intel doesn't make enough Xeons to satisfy Apple's needs. Sure, Intel could just rebrand all the CPUs they sell to Apple as Xeon (they are the same CPU anyway), but that would kind of dilute the meaning of the Xeon brand.
No, Pro is short form for Professional. A Professional drill is meant to be used in a professional capacity. However, there's obviously a world of difference between someone who is drilling heavy screws into hardwood 9 solid hours a day and someone who uses a drill for minor finishing work and drills 2 tiny screws into soft balsa wood once a week. Both are professional, both have materially different requirements.
I can absolutely understand that many users prefer a "weaker" (not meant dismissively) machine with a larger screen, but I also think that there is a certain danger of spec inflation here. This kind of user attitude allows chip manufacturers and OEMs to put premium prices on lower-powered hardware, making high-end hardware even more expensive and less accessible. This is already happening in the Windows world. The low-power 15W CPUs are now a standard sight in the premium laptop segment. Today, you pay much more to get the same relative level of performance than just couple of years ago. Intel now charges top $$$ for a CPU that is less capable for heavy-duty work. All this makes the higher-powered CPU configurations less accessible, which is a problem for many users that can benefit from that performance.
I'm not sure you're entirely right on that one. Xeons aren't just core i chips with different branding, they may be related at the level of the design of their cores, but they have more testing and a much stricter binning process. Absolute stability is the name of the game with Xeon. If one is found not to be stable at the requisite frequencies it's binned in the bin, not to core i7 or i5 level. The reason the MBP doesn't use them is principally cost - Apple want to make a high end computer suitable for those who may well be doing a bit of video editing on a commercial basis, making their living from it, but whose budget is not unlimited in the way a big studios would be. The way Apple values processors means a Xeon by itself would be worth the best part of a grand to the end consumer (as distinct from what Apple pays for the chip themselves).
The MBP 15" is a bit of a jack of all trades. A nicely designed, pretty powerful all rounder that can absolutely do a good bit of video editing, 3D work etc, but still wouldn't be your go to choice if you were doing a big movie edit or designing an aircraft carrier. And it has a terrible keyboard. The MBP 13" - both models are ultrabooks, there really is nothing setting them apart from this class of machine, slightly higher TDP on the 28W or no. This of course isn't to say they can't be effective tools for anything from writing work reports/ screenplays/ novels up to YouTube video editing, but they aren't really computationally intensive enterprise oriented machines (despite being priced accordingly for that market).
Of course "Pro" doesn't necessarily mean "for people that use computers for a living", or in their professional life. That would be asinine. Pretty much every professional uses a computer is some fashion and computer needs for those jobs are almost as diverse as the jobs themselves.
Despite what some of the recent discussion has evolved into in this thread, the added "Pro" on Apple devices has always been there to distinguish multiple options and signify the one with the higher performance and/or larger number of supported features. In computers, this has always been clear. MacBooks and MacBook Airs were lower power/performance devises. The MacBook Pro was a significant step up in computing power. This is true of the Mac, with the Mac Mini, iMac, Mac Pro and iMac Pro. Specifically, for Apple's desktop line, its meant Xeon class CPUs and ECC RAM. If Apple wants to make a top end, performance laptop, Xeon and ECC is now possible.
But hey, don't let me get in the way of you railing against the use of "Pro" term in a computer to somehow means professionals without high demand compute needs don't exist...
I definitely understand that. A MacBook Air 15" (or 14), would need to be placed carefully and I'd certainly only like to see it if it meant the Pro line price range was unaffected. But you are right, Apple would probably use it as an excuse to move the Pro line up a few hundred bucks.
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Apple seemingly does "everything" right now to move the Pro lines of all products up in price.
All cool man, and don't let my actual words get in the way of you understanding my post either.
..... how perfectly quaint.... Say what you mean, mean what you say. Don't try to blame others if you fail in that.
In this case, I think the point of your post was pretty clear....
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Not entirely. Look at the MBP 13". Features have moved down the price spectrum. I get that price creep is real and sometimes staggering, but Apple does ultimately maintain fairly price competitive products given the feature sets.
@wallysb01 Just so you don't wonder what happened, I'm ducking out of this. You and I could argue for days and pages and never agree and there's just no point in it. Cheers
I really think a 15" MBA would be a nice machine for those who maybe don't need a dGPU or want something thin. Essentially a Mac version of the 15" Surface Laptop 3 but with actually good performance.
Right, and it would work well in the $1600-$2000 price range. But Apple would worry about cannibalizing the low end MacBook Pro.
As far as I know, mobile Xeons are exact same chips as their consumer counterparts, just tested more extensively (as you say). Are you absolutely sure that "rejected" Xeons are discarded and not sold as i5 models instead?
As for the price... the official price for the Xeon E 2286M is just $40 over its spec-identical i9 counterpart. Apple's laptops are already priced on the higher end of the market, it wouldn't be a big cut into their margins, but the positive PR would be overwhelming. I really think that the yield is the major factor. After all, Apple mights not sell as many laptops as Dell or HP, but all MacBook Pros require expensive Intel CPUs. I would really like to see the statistics of where do all those i7s and i9s end up. I'd be surprised if Apple was not dominating that list in one way or another. The bottomline is that Apple's consumption of CPUs probably vastly outnumbers the amount of mobile Xeons Intel can push out.
I don't think that you understand how this works... Yes, the current mobile Xeons are on the same architecture as the consumer chips of the same generation, but they are not simply "the same chip, just rebranded".
If that would be the case people would already buy Core i7 processors and flash them to add error-correcting code memory, the vPro business management features and TSX-NI, but it's not the case.
Perhaps, the 4-core 1065G7 actually costs more than the 6-core 9750H, so a 15" MacBook Air could be as expensive or a dash more than the base 15-inch MacBook Pro. I guess (hope) the Radeon Pro 555X is pretty cheap since it's effectively a rehash of a 3 year old GPU.
In my opinion, they are the same identical chip, but the consumer chip has parts of the hardware disabled, either programmatically or physically (e.g. by destroying certain areas of the die). Besides, is CPU flashing even a thing nowadays, with all the encryption and cryptographic verification? I remember people used to do it a while ago, mostly with GPUs (I also remember using a pencil to connect some wires on my old Athlon CPU to turn it to a faster model ^^), but I haven't heard about these kind of mods in a while.
At any rate, I might just as well be wrong, and I completely admit that I don't have any kind of insider knowledge on the matter. My speculation is based on the following line of reasoning: a) its much cheaper to develop a very few physically different cores and then reconfigure them based on their individual performance and b) this is the technique that chip vendors have been using with great success for a while now, so it stands to reason that Intel would also use it for their Xeon E line, especially given the fact that spec-wise they are identical to their consumer counterparts, just with some extra features like ECC support etc.
The entry level 15" Air wouldn't have to have that i7-1065G7, could have the $100 less i5-1035G7. The smaller form factor, less battery, less TB3 ports, no touch bar and probably a worse screen would all help keep cost down a bit too.
Are there any solid rumors of a MBA 15"?
I'd definitely get it and hopefully we could build up to the 32GB ram.
Nowadays, Marco Arment is vocal about any flaw he can find, and he's very good at finding any flaw.
I was a big fan of the ATP podcast, but nowadays I take to the skip button quite quickly. There are lots of things for which there is no middle ground for Marco, and he uses only the most extreme of terms. "They disrespect us", "horrible, horrible keyboard", and then 15 minutes long.
And often, I kinda get where he's coming from, but boy, 15 minutes is a long time to listen to someone complain. Especially when there's no middle ground, and no solution coming.