That is concerning... I wholeheartedly agree. But Apple must know they would be shafting people who shelled out for the Pro Display XDR by not supporting full 6K resolution natively on their own chips. They pushed hard the ability of the 10th-gen Iris Plus iGPU to run native 6K on that monitor. It would be a bizarre step backward if they dropped it with A-series Mac chips.
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What about the ultrafine 5k display?
- Thread starter A_Flying_Panda
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I’m sure Apple is able to run them at 6K. They likely weren’t running the ordinary DTK for the demo. The DTK was just something they could mass produce for a few thousand developers.
There's no reason why Apple would go through any special effort to run the XDRs at 6K during the keynote. The keynote video itself was being shot in less than 6K, so no one would be able to tell what resolution they were running on.
I didn’t say Apple ran them at 6K during the keynote, just that I’m sure Apple can run them at full resolution on whatever they are using for internal development purposes.
Agreed. And quite possibly what they're using for internal development is: intel-based Macs!
Just like it has always been when developing for ARM-based iOS devices.
Agreed. And quite possibly what they're using for internal development is: intel-based Macs!
They have been running with early engineering samples of Apple Silicon for quite some time now if the timeline have to match up with release less than 6 months from now.
Yes. My guess is the chips for the first Macs with Apple Silicon are in mass production now. “By the end of the year” could mean a December 31 release, but more likely means a November release if they are trying to get holiday sales of a popular product like the MacBook Pro.
Long story short: Don't assume anything about the final "consumer" and "professional" devices based on the developer kit.
The developer kit is basically an iPad Pro guts crammed into a Mac mini chassis.
Thunderbolt is an open standard, it is not specific to Intel, even though Intel developed it. Apple is perfectly free to implement Thunderbolt 3 on ARM Macs. In fact, because they released the XDR display while the ARM Macs were obviously already well in development, they have to be planning on it.
When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel, the DTK only ran a super-power-hungry Pentium 4 single-core CPU, with crappy integrated graphics, when even the Mac mini and iBooks came with discrete graphics. When the Intel Macs actually launched, they had way better CPUs and GPUs. (Although Apple did move to Intel integrated graphics for the mini and MacBook (non-Pro,) although it was better than that in the DTK.
The developer kit is basically an iPad Pro guts crammed into a Mac mini chassis.
Thunderbolt is an open standard, it is not specific to Intel, even though Intel developed it. Apple is perfectly free to implement Thunderbolt 3 on ARM Macs. In fact, because they released the XDR display while the ARM Macs were obviously already well in development, they have to be planning on it.
When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel, the DTK only ran a super-power-hungry Pentium 4 single-core CPU, with crappy integrated graphics, when even the Mac mini and iBooks came with discrete graphics. When the Intel Macs actually launched, they had way better CPUs and GPUs. (Although Apple did move to Intel integrated graphics for the mini and MacBook (non-Pro,) although it was better than that in the DTK.
Optionally, yes.
As I understand it, it is up to the implementor whether they support the 20Gbps-per-channel speed - which is based on Thunderbolt - and - even if they do that - there are a couple of odd "legacy" bitrates needed for full Thunderbolt backwards compatibility.
If/when Apple implement USB4, it would be madness not to include Thunderbolt compatibility.
However, if there's one thing that we can rely on the USB Implementors Forum for, it is that they will stop at nothing to maximise confusion, e.g. by re-branding old-style USB 3.1 as USB4x1b^42mediocrespeed and specifying a type of cable that only works on Tuesdays. After all, we're talking about the people who managed to design a USB A cable that defied Euclidian geometry by needing to be rotated by 540º before it would fit in a socket
I was slightly bemused by how Apple were managing to run 6K XDR displays from (apparently) A12Z chips with no Thunderbolt (does the XDR support lower resolutions using DisplayPort-over-USB-C?) but then this was in Apple's labs so they probably made an interface from Unicorn horns and fairy dust.
XDR @6K only needs DSC via USB-C, not necessarily TB3.
In a number of cases this meant that that they ship a few units in December to meet their promise. The bulk shipments don't begin until January or February.