The iMac had NVMe SSDs at least as early as 2015[1]. Apple has since moved away from NVMe modules and gone to raw flash chips hanging directly off the proprietary "T2" system controller chipset. I think it's fair to criticize the proprietary/non-upgradeable nature of this storage solution but benchmarks have shown it to be comparable in performance to standard PCIe 3.0 NVMe drives so calling it outdated is not really a valid criticism.
It will almost certainly be a low end macbook. In fact, there's a non-pro 'macbook'[0] that already exists which would be perfect, it was discontinued a year ago, but used ultra-low power CPUs. In fact when they were talking about them (prior to release) they thought they would have ARM CPU's back then.
They are fanless and have a 5W thermal envelope, which fits in with the current A12X too.
The major criticisms of the design at the time was: Butterfly keyboard, the Single USB-C port and the speed of the device (Intel CORE-M is truly, truly painful). But for a $600-$700 machine with an ARM CPU? that's insanely competitive, and is in-line with the "basic" macbook branding.
I have a later 2017 revision of that one, never really had an issue with CPU speed. Mine has RAM maxed to 16Gb though, perhaps that helps. It's a great machine: a real computer but with iPad pro dimensions.
The "best" CPU that comes in that lineup is the Intel Core i7-7Y75.
I have a GPD P2 Max[0] which also has 16GiB of ram and a Intel Core m3-8100Y...
Not to brag but my CPU does seem to bench higher[1][2], and for me it can be painfully slow at times.. Though perhaps the OS is doing me no favours (Sway+Arch/Chromium)
I've used some fanless Ideapad before this with Core M as well, let's just say there is no comparison. With that one a tiling WM was very much a necessity.
My office PC is a very generously specced desktop, but for user interaction tasks like coding, browsing etc there is no appreciable difference with MB12.
I think the 12" 2017 model with the i5 was the best one. The i7 got a little hot, and the m3 was pretty slow. The i5 (I'm still using it today and it works great) doesn't suffer from heat issues nearly as bad as the i7.
I’ve been force-feeding myself the new iPad Pro with magic keyboard as my primary laptop for the past few months (why? So I can experience what kids are largely experiencing these days, and empathize). It’s definitely a “real computer”, just optimized in a different way than I’m used to. Doesn’t feel like a budget computer either, it’s incredibly powerful for something that uses less than 18 watts and has no fan. IPadOS has some rough edges but they’ve been getting quickly smoothed out.
Well I very much need Emacs and Unix-like environment for work, so iPad doesn't quite cut it. That said I've got a 11" Pro: mostly as a portable second display via Sidecar for MB12 but also some pen-based apps like Sketchr3d. It's nice and if you have a workflow that suits it, no doubt it's usable.
It's no question that a "real" Unix system is more powerful, but a VPS has been surprisingly usable to me. Many commandline tasks are more enjoyable on the iPad than on my desktop. The rest, I just fall back to my desktop. Try it - you might be surprised how powerful it is.
Thanks for the tip, I might try it at some point, would need the keyboard folio first tho.
Am no stranger to bizarre setups. Have used remote shell on Palm PDA with foldout keyboard over IRDA via cellphone GSM modem; now this was cumbersome setup. Had Agenda VR3 Linux PDA and coded on it. It's really comfy with mb12 now tho and I like network independence.
I code on the planes all the time, somehow it's really easy to get in the flow. So I like how this setup works on the foldout tray and without network to count on. Doing tons of field work too. In late January had to code for 6 hours with my ass on a tunnel tarmac north of Trondheim. Though of course most of the time I work within network range.
Pretty sad to see people touting this as a workaround solution.
It's still a workaround - possibly the most basic one for any kind of thin client there is.
I want a consistent IDE as well and right now, you can't run vscode properly on an iPad.
I'm still hopeful that future apple silicon macs will be able to do local development with more grunt than current macs. I guess we'll see.
And yes, for doing development on the iPad basically everything is a workaround, but that doesn’t automatically make it worthless. Neither does the fact that it’s basic. I don’t get your criticism.
Then, contrary to what you said previously, VS Code never was an IDE in the first place because it's an Electron app, it's built on web tech.
That also means there's literally zero difference running VS Code in the browser vs. the electron app save for the browser toolbar (which Safari hides if you add a bookmark to the homescreen, which also nets you an app icon. At that point this "workaround" gives you exactly the same experience as a native app. Not sure what issues you're still seeing there.)
I'm talking about local vs remote development. Can you even spin up a webserver on an ipad to run codeserver? Or does it rely on an external webserver to run and build your application.
If you know what a thin client is, then you're effectively describing that for an iPad. Anything is a thin client - even your phone.
> Except you've made it a DIY thing and claiming that it's a the solution for doing development on an iPad which is clearly false.
Why not? You're basically claiming that solely because it's remote it's completely unfit for development purposes. That doesn't really make sense to me. Especially with VS Code being an Electron app the browser version is equivalent to the desktop app.
Just to be clear, I totally concede that there are certain tasks where you do run into limitations, e.g. handling files is rather a PITA, but other tasks like plain coding are perfectly fine. And if you can save the former type of work for your PC then an iPad plus code-server is actually not going to cause you any trouble with workarounds.
I am so tempted to go buy an iPad Pro, demoting my Mac to a development-only machine.
Everything on iPadOS just seems more refined, more fluid and more fun than on MacOS. Everything from 120 Hz display, to instant waking from sleep, to battery life that is actually consistent. The overall user experience just seems lightyears ahead of the Mac, assuming your workflows are compatible with the software limitations.
If you have the cash, I'd suggest you do it. I bought one kinda on a whim and I don't regret it at all. It's pretty much replaced my ThinkPad.
iPadOS is indeed more refined, but not all of it - there's a fair number of very specific things that are a total PITA on the iPad but a breeze on my desktop Mac. That makes doing serious work on the iPad a little challenging, though it's still possible, but for most serious work I still use the desktop. But for almost anything else, I prefer the iPad's mobility and UX. It's the best drawing tablet, ebook reader, web browsing and netflix machine I've ever had, all in one.
the 12" macbook is my favorite laptop of all time. Mine is the 2016 version and it's starting to feel dated and I'm hoping that they rerelease this on the new silicon first. I'll be smashing the buy button the day it's out.
Mine is a Macbook pro 2012 and it is still phenomenal.
2yrs ago, my screen used to flicker. I contacted everyone and they said 'change motherboard' and Mac support people were like buy a new laptop. so I kept the laptop in cupboard for a few months and I open it to check if it works, had decided to sell it and buy a new one and viola, it was working perfectly fine.
2012 mbp15r, maxxed out specs at the time (16GB DDR3, 500MB SSD), daily driver for eight(!) years, and has maybe 5 tiny dead pixels as the only sign it's the worse for wear. Current gig requires use of client-provided 2019 mbp16r with approximately the same size, weight and perf. I don't hate it, but it's hard to believe my ancient personal box is about as capable. They really don't make em like they used to.
>I don't hate it, but it's hard to believe my ancient personal box is about as capable
Exactly my point. The funny thing is, I bought the 2012 model at half the price of the new models and I have 0 complaints about it. No fancy keyboard issue, no fancy thermal issue. Nothing.
and to think that since then, they've made more problems than laptops!
They really don't make them like they used to. I just want a better battery backup that's it. I get 6-8hrs because I did a lot of research about how Li batteries drain (it is best if you do not let it drain below 50% because Li batteries' lifecycle depends on the high-low charge discharge cycles so if you keep discharging battery to 0% then you're scrwed in a few years)
I'll buy the 2012 model again, if this one dies out, but won't ever buy the latest models.
I have the non-retina version of the 2012 and it is still going strong. Battery is still fine, screen has nothing wrong with it, and I upgraded the RAM to 16GB as it only came with 8, then shoved in a 1TB SSD to replace the incredibly slow 750GB hard disk. Dual boots to Windows 10 and all is great! I honestly don't know what I'm going to do when it breaks because I don't like the work MBP I have (2016 too) and I don't like the direction macos is going.
I'll really miss this 2012.
I replaced my 2012 15" MBPr after 5 years with a 2017 only because it kept overheating and throttling, but in day-to-day use, the performance difference was really hard to notice. Biggest difference was probably in graphics performance when using an external display.
It just seems that they could juice up the power in the MacBook Airs a bit and then there wouldn't be enough of a gap between an Air and Pro to justify having the normal "MacBook" in between.
That said, the current Airs are still pretty weak on processing power and if they're not going to juice them up then a middle option would be welcome. Plus it would be a good proving ground to launch ARM with a model that's not currently available new.
I have a 2020 Air and it's pretty great but I recently saw it struggling when there's graphics-heavy stuff, namely driving a 5k external monitor while on video calls.
I also have a 2016 12" Macbook and love it. It's my full time personal machine, having replaced an older iPad and MBP. I love the form factor and weight, but I like it more than an iPad due to having an actual keyboard and ability to run real software.
As you say it's getting a bit long in the tooth and I've been lamenting that there's really no replacement for it. I've been holding out hope that apple silicon will change that.
I think my favorite computer was my late-2010 MacBook Air. It was such a departure from the big & clunky Windows laptops I'd owned up until that time. And of course I have fond memories of my first computer, an IBM PC Jr (although I really wanted the 2nd disk drive, and copying floppy disks with only one drive & 128kb of RAM was suboptimal).
The Air series we’re solid machines for a good while until they stopped updating them. It was such a good price/performance/portability balance that I didn’t miss having a Pro machine for a few years there, even doing relatively heavy tasks like photo editing and development.
I have a 2019 Macbook Pro now. The only reason I bought it was a friend really needed a computer any computer, and I gave her my 2014 Macbook Air. I bought the pro because it's a bit nicer for mobile development & running VMs.
I recently found a pic of my friend holding up my Air that I had just got delivered at the office. She has this look of awe on her at how thin the thing was.
I think Airs are the ideal machine for the majority of the population that just needs to reliably accomplish basic tasks. It's probably the cheapest if amortized over its lifetime.
At least until iPads can do everything laptops can.
I recently sold my 2016 Macbook (loved the device, the form factor, it was great — but the thing was becoming horribly slow and was starting to drive me nuts).
Got an iPad Pro (2020 + the keyboard) instead. Don’t know what I was thinking... :) Guess I wanted to try it out and see if it could work (and torture myself a bit).
The iPad pro is fun, great device for browsing on the sofa, and the keyboard is good for emailing and such. But multi tasking still sucks, apps in the background get killed or take forever to refresh content, etc. I’d go back to a Macbook but one that doesn’t take a second to swap between tabs in Firefox.
I agree, still running a 12" 2015, it's an incredible machine that just doesn't feel as though it has been replaced. Makes the Pro and Air feel like heavy weights.
Same (2016,m5,8gb,512gb). It's a really great little laptop, and has been my daily driver until catalina hit. The only people I ever see shitting on the 12" macbook are people who've never owned one.
Are their hubs yet that can turn one USB C port into several? Or do they still only turn one USB C port into several USB A ports?
A couple years ago what I read was that the hold up was that this required more complicated chipsets that would not be available for a few months and would be expensive. More recently, I've read that this won't happen until USB4.
It's a strange thing, you can get these super complicated docking stations with all sorts of different ports, but can't get a 4-port hub that's only usb-c connectors.
Oh wow, thanks for that link, I have never come across that!
Also, when I google with your phrase, there are no hits like that on the first page. I wonder if google is customizing my searches away from what I want...
This is the only way you can end up with >1 USB-C port, afaik. It's not currently possible to split USB-C like USB-A, so the only way you can get a second USB-C port is if you have a Mac and use a Thunderbolt dock.
The Mac mini is a vital part of the lineup, but it is so much of a utility computer. That's why they utilized it for the Developer Transition Kit. It's hard to market it since it's nearly invisible on a desk and there's no Apple monitor that is reasonable to pair with it. For 'Apple Silicon' for xmas, one would assume several notebooks and maybe something like an iMac with a built-in display.
> But for a $600-$700 machine with an ARM CPU? that's insanely competitive, and is in-line with the "basic" macbook branding.
I'm skeptical Apple's introduction of their high performance CPUs exclusively on a low end device. A super light/ high performance 12ish inch machine seems right up their ally, but they don't want the new CPU associated with being a low-end "Intel Pentium Gold" type device.
There might be a lower end ultra-thin laptop released, but they are going to go big and push out a high performance CPU right out the gate. They didn't launch their 64 bit A series CPU on a secondary device, they won't launch this on a secondary device either.
I've heard rumours of a low end 12" MacBook, along with a 13" MacBook pro targeting developers as launch devices. No idea if it's true, but it would certainly make a lot of sense.
With the Intel release they also released two devices at the same time (MBP and iMac, and other models quickly followed).
I’d assume them to do the same: a high end (MBP?) and low end device (MB? MBA?); that’s where ARM will shine first (mobile: battery life; maybe even integrating a modem with esims).
I don’t know if they would actually do it, but that would be an awesome way to launch: one category-defining device in terms of portibility and performance, and one super high end device to create a halo effect around the new processors
Yes, this would be a good strategy. The "low end" one would likely ship with the same CPU as the next-model iPad. The higher end one would be their new shiny high performance designed-for-MacBook CPU.
Maybe not exclusively, but it would make more sense as users of their more 'budget' machines likely won't be put off by its inability to run Windows and running existing Mac software more slowly due to emulation (unless it's been recompiled in the latter half of 2020).
Edit: Thanks to the replies letting me know that Rosetta is still a thing. I somehow forgot. Updated.
> inability to run existing Mac software (unless it's been recompiled in the latter half of 2020).
You will be able to run existing MacOS software on the new hardware under emulation. The Dev kits run emulation fairly well on a 2 year old iPad CPU so I would expect whatever new hardware they release will as well.
Most Mac software should be ready with an Apple Silicon recompiled version when or soon after they ship. Apple has been showing how easy it is for most software to retarget the new chips will very little work.
If you look at the history of the MacBook and MacBook Air together, it's pretty clear that Apple expected to eliminate the MBA as a product category years ago; to just have "MacBook" and "MacBook Pro" categories. This was probably due to them believing Intel's roadmap for chip releases, such that they thought they'd be able to hit MBA-like performance targets in the MacBook's form-factor. But Intel's roadmap didn't pan out, and so Apple had to turn around and build more MBA-form-factor devices to hit those performance targets. Eventually, the MacBook went so long between releases that they just eliminated it, and redesigned the MBA a bit to cater more to the people who liked the MacBook form-factor (without really making the MBA any lighter, just smaller-seeming.)
All the MBA computers since 2015 "should have been" devices with a MacBook form-factor and MBA-level performance. Right now, that'd mean an ultralight with a CPU matching or surpassing the performance of the https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1060N... (which is the highest-specced option for current MBAs.)
Such a computer, if released today, would be impressive, no? It would redefine the MacBook (Air) category to be Apple's primary Mac product line, satisfactory for almost all workloads (in the same way that the iMac has been redefined to be the primary desktop Mac, satisfactory for almost all workloads.) In that world, the MBP would be relegated to halo-product status, akin to the current positioning of the Mac Pro. In Apple Stores, you'd have three differently-sized MacBooks, and then an MBP off in a corner where looking at it for too long summons an Apple Business representative.
I don't see how that's not already "going big" or "making a statement." It'd demonstrate that their Apple Silicon chips can eat Apple's own lunch, with their new mid-range Apple Silicon devices beating their old high-end Intel offerings in price:performance, even before Apple Silicon high-end chips get designed to truly replace them. The Intel MBPs, even brand new, would be immediately branded as a "legacy" category, outmoded even before replacement, only to be purchased if necessary for a specific business use-case.
(Before you suggest: no, I don't think Apple would be Osborning their Intel products if they did this. Businesses and freelance professionals would, for the time being, still have plenty of such "specific use-cases" for an Intel-based MBP. Apple also has lots of enterprise customers locked into long-term upgrade contracts, so part of the demand for the tail end of their Intel-MBP pipeline would be fixed/inelastic demand.)
>I'm skeptical Apple's introduction of their high performance CPUs exclusively on a low end device
You can group the Notebook Shipment into a few Categories, $1000+, those are nearly all MacBook. With the remaining going into Gaming Machine ( Which is now being rebranded into Content Creation Machine )
You have the absolute low end, Netbook style that are $300, those are not what Apple targets and they are actually competing with an iPad.
You have vast majority of the Notebook in $300 to $600. Considering the lowest MacBook offering at $699, is just the same play as iPhone SE at $399.
It is just $100 more than the median of average Smartphone selling price, and it would attract enough number jumping to Mac platform all while sucking out the oxygen for the other PC vendors.
Optics dictate that Apple show the superiority of the new silicon, and it wouldn't want it immediately pigeonholed as something like Surface X, a compromised curiosity.
Apple's been consistent about ~10 hours of battery life for a while. They've hit their spec and think that most people don't need more in typical usage. So they'll be able to shave battery volume down to continue their trend of thinner without sacrificing other specs.
The recently discontinued MacBook was a vision statement that the hardware could not quite reach, much like the first MacBook Air. Here, I think that statement realized would be a MacBook Pro that is as thin as that MacBook, and is still notably faster than the current MacBook Pro.
I see no need for a standalone Macbook to negatively portray Apple Silcon.
"Macbook" is the heart of the entire PC portable line for Apple. "Macbook"is the grounding of the brand itself.
I think Apple will release the Macbook as the first Apple Silicon machine because of the optics of confidently putting the hardware at the symbolic heart of the entire portable line.
I do not think the 12" that was discontinued should be thought of also as where the machine will be picked up in terms of form factor. This is not how Apple behaves, when tech shifts or they don't like where they left off, they change direction. (i.e. the Mac Pro trashcan -> modern Mac Pro)
Apple Silicon will allow Apple to reintroduce the Macbook as a compelling machine addressing many customer types. This base machine would pave to eliminate the Macbook Air and redesign the Macbook Pro.
With a few models of Macbook and Macbook Pro the portable product line will be simplified and clean up the confusing price / feature / performance comparison problems that exist today.
To the skeptics, Apple Silicon is about thin laptops and fat margins. It makes no sense for Apple to reinforce this. Apple's silicon team is exceptional, and they should prove it.
And they will, delivering thin, light, long-lasting laptops, with high performance and the fattest of margins. The only people they need to prove themselves to are shareholders, and this is gonna do the trick.
Lightroom or Ableton are almost impossible to run on a CORE-M. It's painful specially after a 10/15 minute editing session when the fans kick in and not only you have to deal with a noisy laptop but also your CPU gets underclocked and switching between your full screen Lightroom or Ableton back to Chrome sometimes takes more than 30 seconds.
WoW and LoL are very lightweight compared to pro image or sound editing software, specially because they are doing a lot of the heavy stuff in your GPU.
Even the Mac Pro is also kinda bad with that software to be honest, specially if you spend more than half an hour using it, because of the thermal issues.
You can both be right. Machine defects, or just aging, can cause the battery to expand and internals to coat with dust - causing thermal throtting, excessive fan usage, and significantly worst performance, after even just a year or so.
Agreed, and I want to add one prediction (which is maybe just a hope):
It will have a SIM card slot, and get at least 12 hours of battery life while using LTE.
This would be a truly compelling product, filling a niche Apple has tried to inhabit a couple of times, with the distinct possibility of getting it right this time.
With tethering, I'm not sure I want a SIM card in my laptop! If nothing else, AT&T will charge me extra for that (I'm already paying extra per month for my Apple Watch to have LTE connectivity).
Whilst I don't take my phone running because I can use my Watch for music and can make calls on it while out, I don't think I'd ever be somewhere with my laptop and no phone.
The problem with that is that MacOS has no concept of “low data mode”. If it has a connection, apps are going to use it. You can deny apps from being able to use data over cellular on iOS. Also, well behaved apps will usually give you an option to either not use data or in the case of streaming apps, use less data.
It is also true of tethering, which is quite popular.
Now, I can tether my phone to my laptop. Indeed I did so fairly often, before global house arrest.
But this is true of my iPad as well, and I opted for the cellular model instead. I'm glad I did, it's a better experience, hands down, especially when I'm traveling and want to conserve my phone's charge rather than burn it at maximum.
But if you felt differently, Apple sells a WiFi only iPad, you could simply not pay the extra for the cellular model when checking out. This would almost certainly be true for this imaginary Macbook as well.
I wouldn't buy it at all, I'm a professional developer with mild presbyopia, and purchased the standard-fancy model of the 16". But if I were an incoming freshman again? Bet I'd be pleading with my parents to get the cellular model.
Unlike a touchscreen, an LTE modem doesn't demand any changes to a desktop operating system to provide a good user experience. Again, tethering. Cell bandwidth gets cheaper every year.
I primary drive the latest version and its my favorite mac to date (and I have the pro + imac + ipads + iphones). I have found that if you have a little bit of patience for loading, everything works just fine and the form factor beats everything for real work on the go.
If they are really creating an ARM macbook, this will be a great product and this chassis is definitely the right one to start with.
I loved my macbook (failed to survive a rainstorm, alas) and wrote a ton of code on that supposedly non-pro machine while traveling all over the world. I hope it does reappear as an apple silicon machine.
However I suspect that if they can they’ll start with a “pro” machine that beats Intel specs as their first out of the gate, to demonstrate that it’s not a compromise option.
The 12-inch Macbook is my favorite Mac, despite I have multiple MacBook Pros and a MacPro! Although people might find it strange. It's simple, beautiful, extreme on the design, and also extremely slim, light, and quiet. I'm pretty sad that they've discontinued this product, I hope they'll bring it back with an Arm processor.
It's almost as heavy and as thin as the iPad, but it is a full-sized computer with a full-sized keyboard. I can play with Emacs for 20 hours writing and scripting without charging.
Also another unpopular opinion - I also love the butterfly keyboard of the 12-inch Macbook, it's quite uncomfortable but once I get used to it, I feel I can type pretty fast and it feels good. It feels firmer than the old Macbook Pro because the latter feels a little bit shaky. It also feels more clicky than the later Macbook Pro with the butterfly keyboard. It seems to me they have received too much criticism on the butterfly keyboard so they were trying to make it less edgy, but that made it lost the characteristics as well, thus they withdraw butterfly keyboard eventually.
This is the laptop I have been using for 5 years now. As a web developer it is amazing that this 5year old mini laptop can drive a 4K screen through usb-c but driving too many stuff at once does slow it down a lot.
Thinking about switching to the new iMac right now.
I just wanted to point out, Butterfly Keyboard on MacBook wasn't much of a criticism at all. It was trade off that is possibly worth it in the name of the thinnest Notebook.
Butterfly Keyboard get most of its criticism when it moved to MacBook Pro, Because now you are putting up with a keyboard that ~50% of the people find it to have worse typing experience at the expense of a possible ( or not as we have seen other vendor capable of doing without it ) 1mm decrease in thickness.
Personally I still want the old 1.5mm Scissor Keyboard.
I'm guessing they will go right to the meat of things and upgrade one of their MacBook Pro models. That is right up the "Performance per watt" avenue which Apple claims their new silicon is best for. They are going to want to squash any rumors that these don't perform well right off the bat so I don't think they are going to be conservative here.
For similar reasons, I don't think the iMac was ever slated to be the first Apple Silicon machine. The desktop form-factor just doesn't highlight the benefits of the new architecture the way a laptop does. Since they sell a lot more laptops than desktops, it's likely they don't even have a desktop specific CPU ready at launch time. That'll come next year or maybe even 2022 towards the tail end of their 2 year launch window.
Yes, they need at least one Apple Silicon machine, which demonstrates that it is competitive for absolute CPU power and of course as a machine for all the developers. They do need not only a testing machine, but should be doing the development itself on an Apple Silicon machine. That is, why I would consider the rumor about a 13 or 14 inch MB Pro with Apple Silicon for highly plausible. The 16 inch would then follow later, with an even beefier CPU.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the 13/14 and the 16 inch both released this year.
That would mean 2 significantly different 16" MBPs in the same year. My thinking here is that it would be quite odd if they released a 14" MacBook Pro which is faster than the more expensive current 16" model.
The 16" was just refreshed and requires both a very beefy cpu and gpu. Not sure Apple will bring that with the first iteration. The 13" MB Pro has an integrated GPU, so that sounds more like a first step for Apple. Also, I think the Intel version of the 16" will stick around for quite a long time, might even be the last Intel machine sold in parallel to Apple Silicon, as developers and many others might require an Intel-based machine.
How can Apple say their new CPUs are the best/ fastest... but aren't good enough to ship in their flagship laptop?
This first launch is going to be the most scrutinized & criticized Mac Apple has launched in years. Apple knows this and they are going to put a beefy CPU in their new machine to silence the critics. If they can't beat Intel performance at launch, what are the chances they are going to be able to beat them a year down the line?
And since it would be quite weird to have the smaller MacBook be the better/ faster iOS development machine, it seems like the 16" is pretty likely. Maybe not launch day, but within the first few months at the latest.
They might keep the Intel based MacBook around and sell them at the same time, but I doubt it will be the only 16" MacBook they sell for long. It just doesn't make any sense.
That is the reason why I think at least one of the MB Pros will be available on Apple Silicon from the start, I am just not sure they will start with the 16", as they would have to replace a dedicated GPU for that machine.
Because one important feature of the large MB Pro is the availability of a dedicated GPU making it a decent graphics machine when connected to an external screen. I am certainly stressing the GPU of mine :)
My thinking is this is exactly the use-case Apple needs to prove they can compete with and arguably the case where they should shine. With ARM's much better thermal characteristics, Apple should be able to get much better graphics performance.
Worth noting that the very first Intel Macs released in January 2006 were the MacBook Pro and the iMac. At the time the MacBook Pro came in 15”/17” sizes, now after multiple generations they’re 13”/16” machines. The iMacs were 17”/20” machines as opposed to the 21.5”/27” machines they are now.
The rest of the PowerPC line was brought to Intel within the calendar year, and iMacs and MacBook Pros received an additional refresh replacing the Core Duos with Core 2 Duos later in the year.
At the time I remember thinking the release cadence for which models they transitioned over made perfect sense. You could make a strong argument for them to follow a similar roadmap this time around because while Macs have changed substantially since then, each Mac’s place within the lineup has not changed very much, although a MacBook Pro and a new ultra-thin MacBook around the same to show off the advantages of Apple’s chips on both sides ends of the performance per watt spectrum wouldn’t surprise me.
There should be at least one mid-range machine coming out early, so that the developers have really a machine they can work on. Also, Apple needs to demonstrate that they can make some powerful CPUs beyond what they do already for the iPhone and iPad. So the rumor of the smaller MB Pro sounds plausible, the 16" would be migrated in a second generation of Apple Silicon, likewise the large iMacs and the Mac Pro.
Consensus is that the first ARM devices will be 13.3-inch MacBook Pro and a new redesigned 24" iMac, based mostly on Ming Chi Kuo's report from just before WWDC2020.
The performance of their chips is good enough that it wouldn't make much sense not to update everything once silicon availability is assured. It would be ridiculous to keep their iMac slower than their Macbook Pro.
MacBooks and iMacs are not direct competitors - one is a laptop, the other is a desktop computer. You can have up to 128 GB of RAM, 8 TB of SSD, and a beefy GPU in an iMac, something I bet won't be available on ARM for some time.
I’m sure there are practical product development and supply chain reasons they would not be able to release an entire line of updated macs at the same time
Interesting how much emphasis they put on the camera, speakers, and mic
People realized how crappy the camera (an well mic) was on Macs compared to other computers now that we are all video conferencing. Its sad that every PC user with a Logitech looked much better.
The original Apple FireWire webcam was very good, with a large, motorized lens. Despite boasting higher resolution, I doubt many modern webcams are as good, especially integrated ones.
You can still judge the macbook cameras by looking at the images they deliver. They're bad, really bad. I suspect that apple's laptop guru / team moved to iPhone and never got backfilled, leaving the macbooks with budget flat cameras from 2007 or something.
How awesome would an updated iSight be today? You could fit an APC-C sized sensor (1.6x crop DSLR) with a 22mm f/2 pancake lens for some insane bokeh. Probably at around the $300 price point. Sure would be easier than hooking a "clean HDMI" DSLR or mirrorless into a HDMI input/USB adaptor...
Especially if the camera could compress the stream in-body so you don't have to blow up your CPU/GPU to get a good 60fps HD video signal like you do using a mirrorless/DSLR.
IMO YMMV etc but wide lens distortion can drag down what people would call “image quality”. 50 or 85 would work better for portraits if you can afford the distance.
Few if any laptops have decent cameras. This is partially because until recently most users didn't actually care that much, but also for practical reasons; modern laptops have very slim lids, so you can't really fit decent optics (a phone is a good bit deeper).
For comparison, the MacBook Air has about 2-3mm of usable space in the lid for optics + sensor. The iPhone has something like 7 or 8mm. For lens design and the ability to have a very slightly larger sensor, that's a huge difference.
Right, but having an integrated camera that is absolutely awful completely defeats the point of having that there in the first place. It really noticeable when you Facetime with someone on an iPhone and you compare the video quality of the two.
Which is riddiculous, because if they can fit good front camera in iPhone they should be able to do that in the much bigger device, like laptop, right?
An iPhone is much deeper than a laptop lid. Perhaps they'll have to redesign the lid not to taper at the edge to provide more space for a better camera.
I'm sure they can, but for some reason they didn't. It's fun to speculate, but apply Hanlon's Razor and Occam's Razor; it's unlikely there is some evil corporate scheme at play, and it's highly likely that the reason is very simple.
Perhaps they never got the levels of feedback that drove them to upgrade it. Perhaps it has to do with internal designs of using an USB 2.0 bus or something that now has to be changed to a CSI or MIPI style interface that first has to be processed by something like the T2 before it is a readable data stream for the standard Intel architecture.
They probably won't be able to fit the exact same iPhone module, the optics (Be it plastic or glass lenses) are too deep, but you could probably do with a better sensor for sure. Some manufacturers tried to 'fix' this by putting the camera below the screen which gives it a bit more space because you can then use the hinge area for the components; but now you end up looking at someone's chin all the time.
> having an integrated camera that is absolutely awful completely defeats the point of having that there in the first place
This is a ridiculous statement considering the camera we're talking about is 720p. The current camera is indeed better than "no integrated camera at all" and is perfectly fine for video calls with your family, or even for work, since you're probably sharing your screen and your coworkers don't need to see every pore on your face.
The camera on my iMac Pro is better then the Logitech C920 I was using with my older Trash can Mac Pro. I have a much better mic that I use so not sure about the built in Mic on the iMac Prov
Man, this will put a lot of us in a quandary. Buy this knowing the Apple Silicon is coming down the pipe or wait it out. I am disappointed no obvious changes to cooling have been made. Current i9 models can really spin up the fan as a number of owners have stated it one of the loudest Apple computers ever.
Nano Glass is around $500 up charge which does not seem bad but I seem to recall it has special cleaning requirements so be careful if you have family or friends who are touch prone.
SSD upgrade from 512 to 1TB is reasonable as well, around $200
Crucial P1 NVME 1TB is around 100 Euros in my neck of the woods so charging twice that for an 512GB upgrade is bonkers in my book but clearly I'm not the intended customer base.
I guess for companies flush with cash where every employees salary is in the six figure ballpark, the price of Mac configs don't raise any eyebrows in the list of expenses but at least in all companies I've worked so far if I'd have suggested we buy Macs, the bean counters would have had a fit.
> I am disappointed no obvious changes to cooling have been made
Same.
I own a 2017 5K model with an i5 and the terrible cooling is my only gripe with it.
It's totally fine for bursty workloads, but once you get into a light sustained workload (eg: music production) temps go to +70ºC and the fans become quite annoying.
As for the nano glass, I ordered an anti reflective screen protector from a local Dutch supplier. It works fantastic on my 16". I do programming though, no color-sensitive photo or video work.
I think this means iMac will be one of the first computers getting Apple Silicon, otherwise it's weird that they're updating the 27" without updating the smaller iMac.
There have been rumors about an updated smaller iMac which will shrink the bezels and basically look like an ipad pro on a stand, with a screen size increase to 24" and Apple Silicon, coming either later this year or early 2021.
I do wonder why separate the smaller and larger iMacs lifecycles, maybe because the desktop-level Apple Silicon chips aren't ready yet? That would make sense especially if they're aiming to replace the AMD GPUs even on the top of the line larger iMac and use integrated graphics there too.
I can imagine two priority devices for them to feature from the start:
- A super-lightweight 12" Macbook-like device that lets them demonstrate how Apple Silicon opens up new categories and form factors: small, powerful and amazing battery life
- A developer machine (MBP or similar) will be necessary. There are precious few DTKs out there, and they need more developers to be running Apple Silicon. I can't imagine them not shipping this in the first wave.
There is a lot of speculation that they might have a replacement MacBook 12” at launch. It would be a good fit. That one is not listed in any of the stronger rumors though.
The strongest rumors are for a MacBook Pro 13/14 and a 24” iMac. The 24” iMac suggests that they will switch to new designs with the new chips.
I don’t think that Apple will restrict their new chips to just a little MacBook. It would make it look like that is all they can do. They are going to want to come in strong and have a range of chips on different machines. Some with high efficiency and some with high performance. They seem confident and I suspect they will pull this off.
IIRC the iMac and the PowerBook were among the last computers to get an update after Apple announced that they were switching to Intel, and they were also the first computers to get Intel processors.
So this probably doesn't mean anything in that regard.
Honestly a fairly mediocre upgrade considering the pricing.
It's good that they've finally improved the webcam, but Apple clearly went out of their way to ensure people looking to get an Intel Mac because they need to dual boot weren't going to get anything too compelling.
Edit: Downvotes be damned, it is mediocre. Not bad, because it is a spec bump, but there are lots of things about the iMac's architecture that are beginning to show their age and are unchanged here, despite becoming bottlenecks. The cooling system is a big one, and the storage controller support another.
It included a 5K display at a much lower price point that hasn't been adequately justified by currency changes before too, so I'm not sure that means anything.
It includes a 5K display which may become useless in five years? (when Apple plans to stop updates for Intel based Macs). It seems that iMacs do not support using them as expernal displays right now. I would prefer 5K monitor to last a bit longer than five years.
I'm sitting here on a 2012 imac with a fusion drive. This drive never seemed to give much performance but it absolutely tanked once it converted to APFS. The computer became unusable to the point that I had to buy an external SSD and use that as my main disk. Now i'm very disappointed that it doesn't support Big Sur despite being only 8 years old. I will wait for the apple silicon because i don't anticipate that intel will be supported for too long. Apple will make "core features" of their OS depend on something that isn't shipping in intel silicon sooner than later.
How much RAM do you have? I recently upgraded my 2012 iMac from 8gb to 32gb and the performance is like night and day, I suspect because it has more memory to use for disk cache. It's a fully usable machine again.
APFS is as far as I know designed for flash and performs really badly on spinning disk. They still provide HFS+ and ExFAT as the options if you format an external spinning disk.
It depends on the macOS. Only Catalina and higher (macOS 10.15) require APFS. macOS 10.14 and Mac OS X 10.x may use HFS+. That is, though High Sierra and Mojave both "want" APFS, they may be coaxed (cloned) into booting on HFS+. [0]
I'm also on a 27" 2012 iMac. Have 32gb inside. I've had the internal drive fail a few times, once under warranty - another time due to age. I'm about to transition to an external SSD as my boot drive since the SSD part of the fusion drive is on its last legs, and keep the internal 6tb HDD for storage. When Apple silicon rolls around, I'm planning to update. Apart from the drives, the machine has been a total rock. No performance issues, apart from when the drives had their issues, but hard to complain this deep into its lifespan.
Does the imac pro get the better camera and other features listed?
I used laptops for years until and rsi issue made me have to avoid trackpads. I can say I’ve been extremely pleased with having a desktop imac. I use an ipad pro when I need something portable. I like just having a station I can get in front of that signifies work, and the imac pro fans basically never make noise.
I have an iMac Pro and can confirm the microphone is amazing. Miles better than the internal microphones on my colleagues PC laptops. (I don’t have a strong opinion on the camera, and don’t have an iMac to compare to.)
As I get older and wrinkled, I appreciate the lack of pixels and soft focus of a crappy camera. I'd be much happier with low noise in dark settings than more pixels. Kind of the same way I appreciated the Dell XPS "nostrilcam" that fools people about the hair on the top of my head in ways my Macbook doesn't.
I'm not so sure - ARM and Intel are bound to meet at some point in the power/performance space because both share the same limitations in terms of physics.
iMacs always had relatively better cameras than the laptops, and are not really limiting for most video chat usages (unless you're seeking 4k video or something). Their form factor allows real-sized cameras to be used, unlike a laptop lid that constantly compromises.
When we read "10th generation Intel Core" then we have to go and research whether than means real 10th generation (like i5/i7 MBA, some MBPs) or just another rebadged Skylake (6th gen) derivative.
All 10xxx parts are either Ice Lake (10nm) or Comet Lake (14nm), none are Skylake. I mean, if you want to get technical both are "Skylake derivatives", I guess.
The uarch and core differences between Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Comet Lake are neglible. The most significant changes were claims of hardware fixes for some Spectre and Meltdown variants in Coffee Lake, which is still a really minor change. The minor IPC differences arise from different cache sizes and interconnect.
Why do you care? They're the fastest cores you can buy and 10 of them in a box is pretty respectable on throughput terms, too. They're all just the umpteenth revision of the pentium pro, if you're trying to be reductive.
Depends which model. Some require taking the screen off, which unlike earlier models is taped on and some have soldered in RAM. Until someone has seen a hole in the back or has torn one down you just don’t know.
A friend of mine upgraded his 21 inch one out of the box because Apple RAM pricing and turn around is terrible. However he damaged the screen ribbon cable at the same time. Happens a lot.
The 27” models have user-accessible DIMM slots in a compartment on the back, so you’re ok to get that RAM from Newegg or Crucial. That’s what I will be doing.
It’s crazy. Even though my work laptop (https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/) was considered high end in 2010. My company ordered it for me because of some Windows CE development I was doing. It had 8 GB RAM.
They gave me the laptop when the company went out of business. It was my Plex server until last year.
> Massive upgrade for people working at companies whose IT refuses to buy anything but the cheapest model.
In my experience, the companies who always buy the cheapest model tend to avoid Macs entirely. The big place I see the base iMac popping up is at schools.
The rumor that they would redesign for Intel didn't make a ton of sense.
The MacBook Pro design had a major pain point so they needed to push an update for their "final" Intel MBP. The iMac design is a touch dated, but has no significant flaws (at least none which Apple intends to fix).
> iMac Pro now comes standard with a 10-core Intel Xeon processor. Designed for pro users who require workstation-class performance, iMac Pro features Xeon processors up to 18 cores, graphics performance up to 22 teraflops, up to 256GB quad-channel ECC memory, and a brilliant 27-inch Retina 5K display.
I think just a bump in the base CPU and maybe the graphics? There is a reason it's buried deep in the PR.
The iMac Pro is starting to seem pretty redundant even with this slight spec boost.
If you upgrade the new 27" iMac to the same specs, you can get a faster machine than the base model $4999 iMac pro for $900 less - it's a faster clock speed 10-core processor, better performing GPU with Radeon 5700 XT 16GB (as opposed to Vega 64 8GB), and same 32GB RAM and 10Gb ethernet and 1TB SSD for that price.
The iMac pro has even further upgrade options that the iMac doesn't, but still, I wouldn't expect a $5k non-upgradeable pro machine like that to be underspecced. It'll also be interesting to see some teardowns of the new iMac and compare actual benchmarks between these machines, the iMac Pro might still have better thermals that lets the cpu/gpu perform better in the real world.
Particularly when you consider they didn't even add the anti-glare display upgrade to the iMac Pro. It seems likely the iMac Pro will go its entire life with only this one small processor bump before it's retired.
5K iMac was introduced in 2014, several years before iMac Pro. I think the point of iMac Pro was to fill the gap while the new Mac Pro was in development.
I think I might the only one who likes and wants bezels on everything that has a display. Extra large bezels. Perhaps the only exception would be phones as they increase the size of the device.
Bezels are important to frame the screen content from functional perspective. Think of it like a frame for the art work. Black bezels occulude the distracting edges and background noise from the screen and you have always have a constant black border. They can be made to look nice as well like some of those Bang & Olufsen TVs[1] and Sony Trinitron Professional monitors [2].
Contrararily, there is no reason to the opposite besides "aesthetics". Can you think of any?
Alas - the momentum behind bezels is so massive, it is impossible to reverse this trend. Same with "borderless" trends in UI/UX.
I agree that bezels can look good, and small bezels are nice to frame the image as you mentioned, but the iMac bezels are neither small nor good looking.
I am arguing that they're invaluable even if they're not needed now that LCD technology has advanced in terms of being able to assemble it.
It actually doesn't matter if its a screen, artwork or a photo. IMO bordered (black or white) photos is vastly superior to borderless photos. There is a reason why every museum that displays fine art photography have borders, almost always.
I don't see any distinction with screens. Perhaps, even more so important to have distraction free edges on monitors than photos.
What on Earth is everybody's sudden aversion to bezels?
To be fair I'm biased because the shift to bezel-less (on phones) was accompanied by a shift to humongous screens that I can't use. Now I'm stuck with the new iPhone SE as my only viable upgrade.
It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon, in favor of ARM (excuse me for not using the cringey term Apple Silicon).
Why does it matter? There will be a period where the Intel Macs are still supported and probably more stable, and it could be ~2y before your upgrade is available if it's ARM based.
If you have a retina macbook pro from 2014~ it definitely makes sense to upgrade to a macbook pro 16" today. The thing will see you through another 5-6y easy.
Yeah I agree. Since this is an iMac thread.. I think notebooks will definitely be first to go ARM, and I wouldn't be surprised if the iMac user base would prefer that native x86 based processor for at least the next 5 years or so.
Fair point. It does make sense if you really need to upgrade a very dated machine.
However, I am assuming since the Macbooks are rumored to get ARM as early as late this year, it is likely iMac would follow next year too. The Developer Transition Kit has a Mac Mini with ARM already.
My fear isn’t around Apple and OS-level support. My fear is around smaller or indie developers who are already being asked to support macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android and now have to support another target. It’s not uncommon to see these devs not supporting Android or Windows because they can’t keep up. So how long before those devs drop support for Intel Macs (or don’t support ARM Macs for several years)?
For most apps it’ll be fine, emulation and cross compiling will be enough. There will be some apps where this isn’t enough though. When the App Store switched to 64-bit, how many apps just disappeared, never to be seen again?
I fully support the transition and I think it’s a logical step for Apple, but it’s going to be one more thing that indie or smaller devs have to worry about. Which means it’s one more thing everyone on this forum has to worry about.
It's trivially easy to build software for both ISAs from within Xcode, unless, of course, you are playing with Intel or ARM intrinsics or other pathologically non-portable thing, in which case it's anything but trivial.
It's not much harder than supporting Linux on x86 and ARM.
Some packages don't support ARM because there is little demand for that. People won't use RPis for heavy number crunching or any demanding application. Until recently, you could barely go beyond 2 GB of RAM on any ARM platform and still very few ARM boards will support more RAM than that. Another issue is that most ARM hardware is underpowered and it takes a long time to build and test software on it. Not everyone is willing to do that.
Apple is going to change the landscape with a mainstream ARM platform that can compete in specs with Intel desktops and laptops. Let's see what happens then.
The dynamics of proprietary software are somewhat different from open source - unless you make a steady revenue from an app you launched some time ago, there is little incentive to dedicate resources to port it to a new platform (even if it's from 32 to 64 bits) unless you expect it to drive new sales. There is no penalty apart from lost potential revenue and a huge incentive to focus on the next product.
> It’s trivially easy to compile your iOS app for 64-bit as well, but like I mentioned... that transition left a lot of dead apps in its wake.
Most of those "dead" apps were not under active development and had no income flow. Making a "trivial" change to an inactive project means rebuilding software which you have shelved for some time.
If you are actively developing software, adding Intel support to a build is pretty much just clicking the option to build a Universal binary. Adding a flag to an existing build a lot easier than dusting off an old app and making a bunch of tweaks and a new build with near zero chance of return on that time invested.
Apple only supported PPC for about 3 years after the Intel transition... what are you basing 5-6 years of support on? Apple hasn't made that promise.
And what user that is ok with a 6 year old computer is interested in spending several thousand on a new macbook that they're going to have to throw out in 3 years? The only user I can imagine that would be ok with the 16" macbook are the users that upgrade every 2-3 years... they can risk it and likely won't lose out on anything except maybe the resale value.
I’m guessing intel will be supported much longer than we think. They just (relatively speaking) launched the new Mac pros and I don’t see them switching that over to ARM quite as quickly.
I still run my 2014 MBP model because it still seems better to me than the newer models.
No touchbar instead classic function keys, HDMI output, 2 displayports + 2 usb3 ports, magsafe!, and most importantly a MicroSD drive i have put a Nifty 512GB card into, so i have 768GB of space of which 256 is from the SSD, - works perfectly.
Having a small SD drive is so incredibly useful when you can buy half a terabyte of extra space for $100, granted not that fast but still useful as storage.
The newer models are so incredibly expensive they make no sense to me when they remove features.
Apple stopped shipping updates to PPC systems after the 2 year transition was over last time. So if you buy today, you’ll need a new system in less than 3 years
This (and the 16" MacBook) are well timed upgrades. Apple is giving their more conservative/ cautious users a good upgrade choice right before they launch their new line. So if you want to stick with Intel, you can buy a system now and put off making the riskier move to ARM for a few years.
I'm sitting around waiting on the 2020 CPU revision of the 16" MBP. Will be getting that top GPU too. Just don't want to buy right now if we might get that CPU upgrade in the next 1-3 months.
I think this is every Apple Intel platform. My i7 6-core Mini can manage about 30 seconds at full clock if they're all lit. One problem seems to be that the fan hysteresis is too long, it spins up the fan too slowly and the CPU is already throttling down before it reaches full airflow.
>It just feels wrong to buy anything new from Apple with "Intel Inside" - when they're clearly going to dump it soon,
I'd be very surprised if Apple Silicon is going to be competitive against the Xeons in their highest end machines any time soon, so they'll be bound to supporting Intel at the OS level for the foreseeable future. They've basically said as much. I suspect you should be able to get about 5 years, at least, before they start phasing things out.
I don't think it'll be close to that long. Rumours are that they'll release an 8+4 core this year, which is enough for everything bar the top-end iMac Pro and Mac Pros, and I'm sure they can get out a 16+N core by 2021 or early 2022. That would be as fast as any Intel CPU on those models. And heck, the margins on those models are so large (they sell a $3000 Xeon W for $7000) that they could comfortably push past yield issues to throw out a larger die than that.
Good point. I still think 5 years is a realistic time-horizon for how long before they start phasing Intel stuff out, but that could just be like that Bill Gates quote about how people tend to way overestimate how much progress will be made a year from now and way underestimate how much things will change 10 years from now.
When buying a Mac one should factor in that they'll get a new one in 5-6 years (or earlier). In which case, buying an Intel now is fine -- there will be too many Intel Mac in 2-3-4-5-6 years for it not to be supported, and when it's near its last legs, it would be time to buy a new laptop anyway...
Yes – anyone saying otherwise is an early adopter (so most of this site), but for the average user, an ARM-based device won't be perfect at launch. Plenty of apps (and games in particular) will outright not work; buying an Intel device now will mean support for 3+ years and avoiding transition pain, even if you miss out on 'new shiny' for a while.
I guess people who buy Intel Macs now, they know what they're getting into. Plus, Intel Macs will still hold strong for at least another 3-4 years minimum, and it's definitely gonna live a lot longer
The chip also contains a bunch of coprocessors which have little or nothing to do with ARM, e. g. the GPU.
That’s one more reason to call the chips Apple chips, not ARM chips.
But your use of ARM is not encompassing of the entire change here. Apple Silicon is the whole SoC environment. All the custom cores, power management, specialized hardware decoding parts.. etc...
This is far more than an instruction set change.
Nah I think it's good news that apple is continuing to release Intel-based devices. It means all of us with existing Intel macs will get support for years and years to come.
Anyone in music should stick to Intel, maybe for as much as three years.
The whole industry of music software is kind of weird… their products tend to be somewhat “closer to the metal” than typical software, even a bit more than video, graphics, CAD and 3D… improvements and bug fixes are few and far between.
Also, like most artists (in my experience), musicians tend to learn one way of doing things very very well and getting them to try anything new is next to impossible.
erm, no. During the introduction of Apple SOC they stated that they will produce and support Intel based macs for some time together with the apple SOC versions.
IMHO they should build some hysteresis into their cost structure, so when something much better has just crashed in price, they can install that much better thing even though they may have contracted their parts inventory at a higher price. They can eat the cost difference in order to deliver a better machine to the customer. It will be made up in time. For example, over a year ago (maybe two?) I was able to buy a 1 TB SSD, top speed available at the time, and a top brand, for just over $100, retail. They probably plan out their costs ahead of time, so they may have considered the equivalent to be a $200 part. Ignoring the fact that they don't pay retail, they could eat the $100 difference on paper, because future inventory will cost them even less. Sure prices go up sometimes too, but the general trend is down for tech as we know. Not sure why they are so stingy with putting the best into their products when I have the dollar cost amounts in front of me and they are not that high. /rant
Just when you think they've forgotten the iMac. Can't wait for Barefeats to post the benchmarks, and compare the top level 27" to the Pro. The 27" is interesting now because you can get 10Gbe.
One gripe is the 27" iMac comes standard with only 8GB, while the 15" MacBook Pro has came with 16GB standard since 2014... I'm guessing most people are going to the aftermarket to throw 32-64GB in there anyway. Apple offers the 16GB upgrade (from 8GB) for $200, but you can buy 32GB of RAM for $150 and install it yourself.
Haven't the iMac and Mac Mini always offered (relatively) easy memory upgrades? I've upgraded probably 10-15 of them at work. They just use the samller laptop modules instead of a desktop module, and (usually?) only support 2 modules. Mac Pro offers it too, though that's a different style of computer entirely.
The post-lamp iMac has always offered user-replaceable SODIMM slots in a number sufficient to occupy all of the CPU's memory channels. The late 2009 model had 4 on the bottom, the 2015 has 2 one the back, these new ones have 2 and the Pro model has 4 (because the Pro CPU has 4 channels).
The current 2020/2018 (they are the same) Mac mini does use DIMMs, but it is not easy to entirely disassemble the computer to replace the RAM. Some (2014?) Mac minis didn't have replaceable memory at all. The 27" "regular" iMac is still using a design from late 2012 that has a simple door behind the stand hinge to very easily access the RAM. Even the iMac Pro has to be totally disassembled to change RAM!
RAM on iMac's has been user upgrade-able since at least 2014. I have a 2014 27" iMac and a 2017 27" iMac, and I upgraded the RAM on both of them. It's not a crazy "disassemble half the machine" type job either, it is really easily done via a panel in the back.
Only the 27" model has the access panel, the 21" model doesn't. I'm not actually sure if the RAM in the smaller one is soldered on or if it even has additional slots. But even if it does replacing it isn't something you can do easily.
iMacs have always had upgradeable RAM, just about the only user-serviceable part in them. There's a little door you can open on the back by the power connector. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191
I wonder what the ARM based iMacs will bring. There is a lot of talk about a fundamental redesign and Big Sur really looks like being designed for touch. If an iMac should support touch and pencil, it would need a foot similar to the one of the Surface Studio too.
I'm not really sure about that. It would probably be useful for artists and draftsmen, but I keep my iMac pretty far from my face while I would want to keep a drawing table pretty close. The Studio was really cool as a design concept, but I'm not sure how well it translated from showroom to daily use for anyone who isn't a professional artist.
And even for professional artists, I have to imaging the portability of an iPad Pro probably blows it out of the water for those use cases. Some people think it's more natural to move their canvas around the pen than vice-versa, so just being able to move the device/screen around is huge.
It's so the "starting at" price is low but they can mark up RAM and Storage upgrades when you actually go to order as if they were the expensive piece. They are making something like 80% margin when you max out the RAM, I assume similar for the "SSD storage" of ambiguous type.
Dell did the same thing with the RAM in a 7740 and 7750 I recently ordered (work and personal), ironically about the same markup.
I swear that the MBAs are ruining the world. This is the crap that mature industries pull to grow profit since they've saturated other growth channels. Instead of product growth, MBAs come up with product bundlings to maximize profit by obscuring the true cost to customers.
I have a first generation iMac 27" 5K (late 2014.) They were shipping with 8 gigs back then and I immediately upgraded to 24G. It's ridiculous that 8 gigs is still the default config! I recently ordered one of the new Raspberry Pi 4's with that much.
My wife has an 8 GB Macbook Pro and she's quite happy with that. For most uses (and she usually has a dozen Word documents open at any time) it's perfectly fine and the machine is quite snappy.
OTOH, I'd expect the average HN user to need a lot more. I'm currently finding 16 GB a bit constrained and would be delighted to have 32 in the same footprint. The server under my desk has 64 and the swap indicators tell me it should have more (or less stuff to do).
I had the same reaction. It pains me to use a machine that has a HDD... I had no idea that Apple were selling new, £1000+ machines that relied in spinning rust.
As someone who never purchased an iMac, but enjoys Apple's MacBook line of products - it blows my mind that people are praising them for this. Considering the price point, this should have been the case like 4 years ago.
I'm always interested in the differences between Apple's Intel OEM CPUs and the ones Intel lists in their catalog. There is no 10th-gen Core i9 CPU that exactly matches what Apple is selling here. In the iMac Pro they are installing a Xeon-W part that has almost twice as much cache as the standard part (43MB vs 25MB). They're not saying how much cache is in the new 27" iMac.
I'm picturing some binning shenanigans on Intel's part and Apple doing enough benchmarks to pick a minimum amount of cache. Or maybe Intel offered them something with odd specs that they have too many of?
Usually it comes down to either not being socketed or as with the cheese grater mac Pro's the CPUs lacked the integrated heat spreader. Sometimes it's cache or clock variations, but usually it's more along the lines of the chip packaging that differs.
Just did the fun "what kind of car could I buy instead" of maxing out the specs on an Apple computer. 10 cores, 128GB RAM, 16GB GPU, 8TB SSD, 10GB ethernet comes out to $8799. ~ A used Civic/Corolla I guess. Not as sticker shocking as the maxed MacPro. Would love to see how the machine performs though.
Nice spec-bump for those, who want to stay with Intel-based Macs a bit longer (e.g. depend on x86-virtualisation, running Windows). While I was about ready to upgrade my current iMac in 2020, I am going to try to hold out till the step to Apple Silicon. The one thing I would hope for would be a bigger screen. The 27" is a tiny bit too small, especially vertically. Considering that Apple once sold the 30" Cinema display, the step to 27" always felt like a step back. When going to a design with less bezels, they really should use some of the saved space for a bigger screen.
I wish I could use it as an external display. I would buy one as my personal machine and then use the display during the day with my MBP for work. Would be nice in this new world of remote work.
Having mentioned that, it'd be awesome if we could plug it into a MacBook Pro via USB-C and use it as a power supply, an eGPU, and an external monitor. And maybe also mount the disks.
Never used it, so I don’t know how well it works, but https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204592: “With target display mode, you can use your iMac as an external display for another Mac.”
From that same article: "This article has been archived and is no longer updated by Apple."
Because Target Display Mode is no longer supported:
"Make sure that your iMac is using macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 or earlier. You can't use target display mode with later versions of macOS, or with Boot Camp and Windows."
You can always boot from your mbp? Treat it like an external bootable storage system. Yes you won’t be able to use the display on the laptop, but you will be able to run your applications on the iMac. (Assuming that matters more? For me it does. I can’t stand how slow docker is on my mbp, pretty much puts my cpu to 100% and has the fans running at full speed)
I wanted this so much. Turns out that doesn't work with encrypted drives which is mandatory. Target disk mode only allows booting in non encrypted drives or perhaps non t2 MacBooks.
Always found it irritating that they never brought back target display mode. It was forgivable on the first retina iMac, as there was then no widespread connectivity for 5K screens (iirc that Mac internally used overclocked DP1.2 or something), but once Thunderbolt 3 was available there was really no excuse.
Though maybe I should be thanking them; I'd almost certainly have bought one if target display mode was available, so they've saved me money!
90% of people don't need more than what's in the iMac. For pros who would use it the iMac Pro or Mac Pro are the obvious choices. For gamers Apple has been ignoring the market and everyone knows you are better off building your own rig.
5700 XT is a very high end GPU, especially the 16GB option (can you even buy a 5700 XT with16GB for PC? I can't find any in the local price aggregator, all of them are 8GB). It isn't the fastest GPU you can buy, but it is still a high end one.
If anything, this is the first time i see an iMac which has a good GPU. Though considering iMac's form factor and my experience of having a PC with a 5700XT i wonder about thermals.
It's weird how restricted the choices are on SSDs too. The $1800 model is stuck at 256GB, the $2000 model lets you do 512/1TB/2TB, and the $2300 model adds options for 4TB/8TB.
Like, this has to be a totally artificial restriction. I'd much rather buy the cheap one with a bigger SSD, but instead I'm stuck paying hundreds of dollars extra for features I don't care about.
I definitely agree with the general consensus here that this is a solid spec bump, and most welcome at that!
And like others, it made me think of their transition to ARM. I know the first ARM Macs this fall will be their lowend MacBook and 13" MBP line, but at WWDC they said the Intel to ARM transition would be complete in under 2 years (like they said with the PPC to Intel transition). And since the PPC to Intel transition only took a little over a year, it could mean that ARM-based iMacs may be here next year to replace the current iMac lineup, and I'm dreadfully curious as to whether they'll be lower performing than this iMac update (which is quite impressive, performance-wise). Or perhaps they'll use multiple ARM CPUs to boost performance. Regardless, every time I see a spec bump now from Apple, I can't help but think of these things.
Just my speculation, but rather than “lowering the specs“, I think they’re positioning themselves to release a “budget” option in the $800 range with a 4k screen, which will probably match performance with the low end intel iMac.
Matching encoding speeds with Apple Silicon is probably an easier task, since they can create on-chip, hardware accelerated encoders, which exist on iPhones already.
The current bottom end is $1099 and that's the last model with a low-dpi screen. I'd be surprised to see the price drop much below that when it gets renewed.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadNot exactly a "major update". Looks like the magic on this iMac is already wearing off and the magicians want their reality distortion spells back.
[1] https://beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprietary-ssd-ultimate-gu...
I’d also speculate this means iMac won’t be the first computer getting Apple Silicon. I wonder if it will be the last?
What’s the consensus guess now? Perhaps a new MacBook Air with good performance but the real “breakthrough” is > 12 hours battery life?
They are fanless and have a 5W thermal envelope, which fits in with the current A12X too.
The major criticisms of the design at the time was: Butterfly keyboard, the Single USB-C port and the speed of the device (Intel CORE-M is truly, truly painful). But for a $600-$700 machine with an ARM CPU? that's insanely competitive, and is in-line with the "basic" macbook branding.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(2015%E2%80%932019)
I have a GPD P2 Max[0] which also has 16GiB of ram and a Intel Core m3-8100Y...
Not to brag but my CPU does seem to bench higher[1][2], and for me it can be painfully slow at times.. Though perhaps the OS is doing me no favours (Sway+Arch/Chromium)
[0]: http://gpd.hk/gpdp2max
[1]: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-7Y75-vs-Intel-...
[2]: https://askgeek.io/en/cpus/vs/Intel_Core-m3-8100Y-vs-Intel_C...
My office PC is a very generously specced desktop, but for user interaction tasks like coding, browsing etc there is no appreciable difference with MB12.
Am no stranger to bizarre setups. Have used remote shell on Palm PDA with foldout keyboard over IRDA via cellphone GSM modem; now this was cumbersome setup. Had Agenda VR3 Linux PDA and coded on it. It's really comfy with mb12 now tho and I like network independence.
I code on the planes all the time, somehow it's really easy to get in the flow. So I like how this setup works on the foldout tray and without network to count on. Doing tons of field work too. In late January had to code for 6 hours with my ass on a tunnel tarmac north of Trondheim. Though of course most of the time I work within network range.
It's still a workaround - possibly the most basic one for any kind of thin client there is. I want a consistent IDE as well and right now, you can't run vscode properly on an iPad.
I'm still hopeful that future apple silicon macs will be able to do local development with more grunt than current macs. I guess we'll see.
And yes, for doing development on the iPad basically everything is a workaround, but that doesn’t automatically make it worthless. Neither does the fact that it’s basic. I don’t get your criticism.
With your rational, I could do development on my phone as a thin client.
Yes. But it’s not getting in the way that much.
code-server is exactly what you were asking for, an IDE on iPad. You’re moving the goalposts here and not even specifying why and where to.
> With your rational, I could do development on my phone as a thin client.
No. You’re taking my argument ad absurdum. I’m saying the tradeoff isn’t that bad on iPad. That says nothing about phones.
That also means there's literally zero difference running VS Code in the browser vs. the electron app save for the browser toolbar (which Safari hides if you add a bookmark to the homescreen, which also nets you an app icon. At that point this "workaround" gives you exactly the same experience as a native app. Not sure what issues you're still seeing there.)
I'm talking about local vs remote development. Can you even spin up a webserver on an ipad to run codeserver? Or does it rely on an external webserver to run and build your application.
If you know what a thin client is, then you're effectively describing that for an iPad. Anything is a thin client - even your phone.
Until we live in a remote first world with everything built with that experience, you're just describing another type of platform like this: https://gitpod.io/#https://github.com/eclipse-theia/theia
Except you've made it a DIY thing and claiming that it's a the solution for doing development on an iPad which is clearly false.
Why not? You're basically claiming that solely because it's remote it's completely unfit for development purposes. That doesn't really make sense to me. Especially with VS Code being an Electron app the browser version is equivalent to the desktop app.
Just to be clear, I totally concede that there are certain tasks where you do run into limitations, e.g. handling files is rather a PITA, but other tasks like plain coding are perfectly fine. And if you can save the former type of work for your PC then an iPad plus code-server is actually not going to cause you any trouble with workarounds.
Everything on iPadOS just seems more refined, more fluid and more fun than on MacOS. Everything from 120 Hz display, to instant waking from sleep, to battery life that is actually consistent. The overall user experience just seems lightyears ahead of the Mac, assuming your workflows are compatible with the software limitations.
iPadOS is indeed more refined, but not all of it - there's a fair number of very specific things that are a total PITA on the iPad but a breeze on my desktop Mac. That makes doing serious work on the iPad a little challenging, though it's still possible, but for most serious work I still use the desktop. But for almost anything else, I prefer the iPad's mobility and UX. It's the best drawing tablet, ebook reader, web browsing and netflix machine I've ever had, all in one.
2yrs ago, my screen used to flicker. I contacted everyone and they said 'change motherboard' and Mac support people were like buy a new laptop. so I kept the laptop in cupboard for a few months and I open it to check if it works, had decided to sell it and buy a new one and viola, it was working perfectly fine.
~5yrs with no issues.
Exactly my point. The funny thing is, I bought the 2012 model at half the price of the new models and I have 0 complaints about it. No fancy keyboard issue, no fancy thermal issue. Nothing.
and to think that since then, they've made more problems than laptops!
They really don't make them like they used to. I just want a better battery backup that's it. I get 6-8hrs because I did a lot of research about how Li batteries drain (it is best if you do not let it drain below 50% because Li batteries' lifecycle depends on the high-low charge discharge cycles so if you keep discharging battery to 0% then you're scrwed in a few years)
I'll buy the 2012 model again, if this one dies out, but won't ever buy the latest models.
That said, the current Airs are still pretty weak on processing power and if they're not going to juice them up then a middle option would be welcome. Plus it would be a good proving ground to launch ARM with a model that's not currently available new.
I have a 2020 Air and it's pretty great but I recently saw it struggling when there's graphics-heavy stuff, namely driving a 5k external monitor while on video calls.
As you say it's getting a bit long in the tooth and I've been lamenting that there's really no replacement for it. I've been holding out hope that apple silicon will change that.
I still have that Air. Love that thing.
At least until iPads can do everything laptops can.
Though it never gets “too hot”, it does slow down perceptibly. Eg, a single YouTube or Netflix tab.
Butterfly keyboard still works flawlessly and even feels different from the butterfly on my work 2017 MB Pro which has worn out and misses keys.
But the 12” form factor gets too hot and CPU is weak even for browsing with just 20 tabs. But I’ve also been developing on it just fine.
And to me, it’s probably the most beautiful physical Apple product in past decade or so.
Are their hubs yet that can turn one USB C port into several? Or do they still only turn one USB C port into several USB A ports?
A couple years ago what I read was that the hold up was that this required more complicated chipsets that would not be available for a few months and would be expensive. More recently, I've read that this won't happen until USB4.
She uses it with a USB keyboard/mouse and PS4 controller and an external 1440p screen.. works without issue.
It's a strange thing, you can get these super complicated docking stations with all sorts of different ports, but can't get a 4-port hub that's only usb-c connectors.
At least neither tzs nor I have found such hubs.
You are right, I do not see them.. I wonder if that's for a particular reason. :\",
Also, when I google with your phrase, there are no hits like that on the first page. I wonder if google is customizing my searches away from what I want...
(To be clear, USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 ports have the same form factor and Thunderbolt 3 is downwards compatible with USB-C.)
[0] https://www.caldigit.com/ts3-plus/
https://superuser.com/q/1381139/122042
I'm skeptical Apple's introduction of their high performance CPUs exclusively on a low end device. A super light/ high performance 12ish inch machine seems right up their ally, but they don't want the new CPU associated with being a low-end "Intel Pentium Gold" type device.
There might be a lower end ultra-thin laptop released, but they are going to go big and push out a high performance CPU right out the gate. They didn't launch their 64 bit A series CPU on a secondary device, they won't launch this on a secondary device either.
I’d assume them to do the same: a high end (MBP?) and low end device (MB? MBA?); that’s where ARM will shine first (mobile: battery life; maybe even integrating a modem with esims).
Desktops will follow later.
Edit: Thanks to the replies letting me know that Rosetta is still a thing. I somehow forgot. Updated.
You will be able to run existing MacOS software on the new hardware under emulation. The Dev kits run emulation fairly well on a 2 year old iPad CPU so I would expect whatever new hardware they release will as well.
If you look at the history of the MacBook and MacBook Air together, it's pretty clear that Apple expected to eliminate the MBA as a product category years ago; to just have "MacBook" and "MacBook Pro" categories. This was probably due to them believing Intel's roadmap for chip releases, such that they thought they'd be able to hit MBA-like performance targets in the MacBook's form-factor. But Intel's roadmap didn't pan out, and so Apple had to turn around and build more MBA-form-factor devices to hit those performance targets. Eventually, the MacBook went so long between releases that they just eliminated it, and redesigned the MBA a bit to cater more to the people who liked the MacBook form-factor (without really making the MBA any lighter, just smaller-seeming.)
All the MBA computers since 2015 "should have been" devices with a MacBook form-factor and MBA-level performance. Right now, that'd mean an ultralight with a CPU matching or surpassing the performance of the https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-1060N... (which is the highest-specced option for current MBAs.)
Such a computer, if released today, would be impressive, no? It would redefine the MacBook (Air) category to be Apple's primary Mac product line, satisfactory for almost all workloads (in the same way that the iMac has been redefined to be the primary desktop Mac, satisfactory for almost all workloads.) In that world, the MBP would be relegated to halo-product status, akin to the current positioning of the Mac Pro. In Apple Stores, you'd have three differently-sized MacBooks, and then an MBP off in a corner where looking at it for too long summons an Apple Business representative.
I don't see how that's not already "going big" or "making a statement." It'd demonstrate that their Apple Silicon chips can eat Apple's own lunch, with their new mid-range Apple Silicon devices beating their old high-end Intel offerings in price:performance, even before Apple Silicon high-end chips get designed to truly replace them. The Intel MBPs, even brand new, would be immediately branded as a "legacy" category, outmoded even before replacement, only to be purchased if necessary for a specific business use-case.
(Before you suggest: no, I don't think Apple would be Osborning their Intel products if they did this. Businesses and freelance professionals would, for the time being, still have plenty of such "specific use-cases" for an Intel-based MBP. Apple also has lots of enterprise customers locked into long-term upgrade contracts, so part of the demand for the tail end of their Intel-MBP pipeline would be fixed/inelastic demand.)
You can group the Notebook Shipment into a few Categories, $1000+, those are nearly all MacBook. With the remaining going into Gaming Machine ( Which is now being rebranded into Content Creation Machine )
You have the absolute low end, Netbook style that are $300, those are not what Apple targets and they are actually competing with an iPad.
You have vast majority of the Notebook in $300 to $600. Considering the lowest MacBook offering at $699, is just the same play as iPhone SE at $399.
It is just $100 more than the median of average Smartphone selling price, and it would attract enough number jumping to Mac platform all while sucking out the oxygen for the other PC vendors.
Apple's been consistent about ~10 hours of battery life for a while. They've hit their spec and think that most people don't need more in typical usage. So they'll be able to shave battery volume down to continue their trend of thinner without sacrificing other specs.
The recently discontinued MacBook was a vision statement that the hardware could not quite reach, much like the first MacBook Air. Here, I think that statement realized would be a MacBook Pro that is as thin as that MacBook, and is still notably faster than the current MacBook Pro.
"Macbook" is the heart of the entire PC portable line for Apple. "Macbook"is the grounding of the brand itself.
I think Apple will release the Macbook as the first Apple Silicon machine because of the optics of confidently putting the hardware at the symbolic heart of the entire portable line.
I do not think the 12" that was discontinued should be thought of also as where the machine will be picked up in terms of form factor. This is not how Apple behaves, when tech shifts or they don't like where they left off, they change direction. (i.e. the Mac Pro trashcan -> modern Mac Pro)
Apple Silicon will allow Apple to reintroduce the Macbook as a compelling machine addressing many customer types. This base machine would pave to eliminate the Macbook Air and redesign the Macbook Pro.
With a few models of Macbook and Macbook Pro the portable product line will be simplified and clean up the confusing price / feature / performance comparison problems that exist today.
In many ways the same was true in 2006.
No, it wasn’t. I used to ru Xcode, iOS Simulator, World of Warcraft, League of Legends on the fanless MacBook with 8 GB of RAM just fine enough.
WoW and LoL are very lightweight compared to pro image or sound editing software, specially because they are doing a lot of the heavy stuff in your GPU.
Even the Mac Pro is also kinda bad with that software to be honest, specially if you spend more than half an hour using it, because of the thermal issues.
It will have a SIM card slot, and get at least 12 hours of battery life while using LTE.
This would be a truly compelling product, filling a niche Apple has tried to inhabit a couple of times, with the distinct possibility of getting it right this time.
Whilst I don't take my phone running because I can use my Watch for music and can make calls on it while out, I don't think I'd ever be somewhere with my laptop and no phone.
It is also true of tethering, which is quite popular.
Now, I can tether my phone to my laptop. Indeed I did so fairly often, before global house arrest.
But this is true of my iPad as well, and I opted for the cellular model instead. I'm glad I did, it's a better experience, hands down, especially when I'm traveling and want to conserve my phone's charge rather than burn it at maximum.
But if you felt differently, Apple sells a WiFi only iPad, you could simply not pay the extra for the cellular model when checking out. This would almost certainly be true for this imaginary Macbook as well.
I wouldn't buy it at all, I'm a professional developer with mild presbyopia, and purchased the standard-fancy model of the 16". But if I were an incoming freshman again? Bet I'd be pleading with my parents to get the cellular model.
Unlike a touchscreen, an LTE modem doesn't demand any changes to a desktop operating system to provide a good user experience. Again, tethering. Cell bandwidth gets cheaper every year.
If they are really creating an ARM macbook, this will be a great product and this chassis is definitely the right one to start with.
However I suspect that if they can they’ll start with a “pro” machine that beats Intel specs as their first out of the gate, to demonstrate that it’s not a compromise option.
It's almost as heavy and as thin as the iPad, but it is a full-sized computer with a full-sized keyboard. I can play with Emacs for 20 hours writing and scripting without charging.
Also another unpopular opinion - I also love the butterfly keyboard of the 12-inch Macbook, it's quite uncomfortable but once I get used to it, I feel I can type pretty fast and it feels good. It feels firmer than the old Macbook Pro because the latter feels a little bit shaky. It also feels more clicky than the later Macbook Pro with the butterfly keyboard. It seems to me they have received too much criticism on the butterfly keyboard so they were trying to make it less edgy, but that made it lost the characteristics as well, thus they withdraw butterfly keyboard eventually.
Butterfly Keyboard get most of its criticism when it moved to MacBook Pro, Because now you are putting up with a keyboard that ~50% of the people find it to have worse typing experience at the expense of a possible ( or not as we have seen other vendor capable of doing without it ) 1mm decrease in thickness.
Personally I still want the old 1.5mm Scissor Keyboard.
For similar reasons, I don't think the iMac was ever slated to be the first Apple Silicon machine. The desktop form-factor just doesn't highlight the benefits of the new architecture the way a laptop does. Since they sell a lot more laptops than desktops, it's likely they don't even have a desktop specific CPU ready at launch time. That'll come next year or maybe even 2022 towards the tail end of their 2 year launch window.
That would mean 2 significantly different 16" MBPs in the same year. My thinking here is that it would be quite odd if they released a 14" MacBook Pro which is faster than the more expensive current 16" model.
This first launch is going to be the most scrutinized & criticized Mac Apple has launched in years. Apple knows this and they are going to put a beefy CPU in their new machine to silence the critics. If they can't beat Intel performance at launch, what are the chances they are going to be able to beat them a year down the line?
And since it would be quite weird to have the smaller MacBook be the better/ faster iOS development machine, it seems like the 16" is pretty likely. Maybe not launch day, but within the first few months at the latest.
They might keep the Intel based MacBook around and sell them at the same time, but I doubt it will be the only 16" MacBook they sell for long. It just doesn't make any sense.
Why? The 2015 15" came with an integrated GPU option (and that was by far the most popular SKU, AFAIK).
It's certainly the tougher nut to crack.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/hgahzx/apple_gpu_...
The rest of the PowerPC line was brought to Intel within the calendar year, and iMacs and MacBook Pros received an additional refresh replacing the Core Duos with Core 2 Duos later in the year.
At the time I remember thinking the release cadence for which models they transitioned over made perfect sense. You could make a strong argument for them to follow a similar roadmap this time around because while Macs have changed substantially since then, each Mac’s place within the lineup has not changed very much, although a MacBook Pro and a new ultra-thin MacBook around the same to show off the advantages of Apple’s chips on both sides ends of the performance per watt spectrum wouldn’t surprise me.
https://9to5mac.com/guides/ming-chi-kuo/
People realized how crappy the camera (an well mic) was on Macs compared to other computers now that we are all video conferencing. Its sad that every PC user with a Logitech looked much better.
There is your answer - Physics is a harsh mistress!
Here's an article with screenshots: https://www.macworld.com/article/3018431/in-praise-of-the-gl...
What about the iMac?
Perhaps they never got the levels of feedback that drove them to upgrade it. Perhaps it has to do with internal designs of using an USB 2.0 bus or something that now has to be changed to a CSI or MIPI style interface that first has to be processed by something like the T2 before it is a readable data stream for the standard Intel architecture.
They probably won't be able to fit the exact same iPhone module, the optics (Be it plastic or glass lenses) are too deep, but you could probably do with a better sensor for sure. Some manufacturers tried to 'fix' this by putting the camera below the screen which gives it a bit more space because you can then use the hinge area for the components; but now you end up looking at someone's chin all the time.
We simply don't know.
This is a ridiculous statement considering the camera we're talking about is 720p. The current camera is indeed better than "no integrated camera at all" and is perfectly fine for video calls with your family, or even for work, since you're probably sharing your screen and your coworkers don't need to see every pore on your face.
Nano Glass is around $500 up charge which does not seem bad but I seem to recall it has special cleaning requirements so be careful if you have family or friends who are touch prone.
SSD upgrade from 512 to 1TB is reasonable as well, around $200
Reasonable for Apple maybe, but for $200 you already get a pretty decent 1TB retail SSD.
I guess for companies flush with cash where every employees salary is in the six figure ballpark, the price of Mac configs don't raise any eyebrows in the list of expenses but at least in all companies I've worked so far if I'd have suggested we buy Macs, the bean counters would have had a fit.
Same.
I own a 2017 5K model with an i5 and the terrible cooling is my only gripe with it.
It's totally fine for bursty workloads, but once you get into a light sustained workload (eg: music production) temps go to +70ºC and the fans become quite annoying.
There have been rumors about an updated smaller iMac which will shrink the bezels and basically look like an ipad pro on a stand, with a screen size increase to 24" and Apple Silicon, coming either later this year or early 2021.
I do wonder why separate the smaller and larger iMacs lifecycles, maybe because the desktop-level Apple Silicon chips aren't ready yet? That would make sense especially if they're aiming to replace the AMD GPUs even on the top of the line larger iMac and use integrated graphics there too.
- A super-lightweight 12" Macbook-like device that lets them demonstrate how Apple Silicon opens up new categories and form factors: small, powerful and amazing battery life
- A developer machine (MBP or similar) will be necessary. There are precious few DTKs out there, and they need more developers to be running Apple Silicon. I can't imagine them not shipping this in the first wave.
Their new iPad Pro took a big step in that direction with the keyboard, but it still doesn't have macos and mac apps.
Not sure whether they'd position it more as a "Macbook Touch" or "iPad Mac"...
The strongest rumors are for a MacBook Pro 13/14 and a 24” iMac. The 24” iMac suggests that they will switch to new designs with the new chips.
I don’t think that Apple will restrict their new chips to just a little MacBook. It would make it look like that is all they can do. They are going to want to come in strong and have a range of chips on different machines. Some with high efficiency and some with high performance. They seem confident and I suspect they will pull this off.
So this probably doesn't mean anything in that regard.
It's good that they've finally improved the webcam, but Apple clearly went out of their way to ensure people looking to get an Intel Mac because they need to dual boot weren't going to get anything too compelling.
Edit: Downvotes be damned, it is mediocre. Not bad, because it is a spec bump, but there are lots of things about the iMac's architecture that are beginning to show their age and are unchanged here, despite becoming bottlenecks. The cooling system is a big one, and the storage controller support another.
Don't forget it includes a 5K display...
It included a 5K display at a much lower price point that hasn't been adequately justified by currency changes before too, so I'm not sure that means anything.
It depends on the macOS. Only Catalina and higher (macOS 10.15) require APFS. macOS 10.14 and Mac OS X 10.x may use HFS+. That is, though High Sierra and Mojave both "want" APFS, they may be coaxed (cloned) into booting on HFS+. [0]
[0] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/327051/can-you-upd...
I had a tech come to the house and do it for under $100.
This can hardly come as a big surprise given that a maximum of 7-8 years of support for latest MacOS has been the norm for pretty much forever.
I used laptops for years until and rsi issue made me have to avoid trackpads. I can say I’ve been extremely pleased with having a desktop imac. I use an ipad pro when I need something portable. I like just having a station I can get in front of that signifies work, and the imac pro fans basically never make noise.
I'd like a quieter device without the constant fan noise.
I also do audio/video recording, and driving that + my external display really made the fans spin.
I miss the absolutely silent (albeit slow) computing it afforded me.
Your going to love Apple Silicon based Mac's!
Ice lake uses Sunny Cove cores, which are Intel's first significant core µarch redesign since Skylake.
There's also a very handy "New" indicator on the 27" model that's not yet present on the 21.5".
Personally I'd reserve my judgment.
Also notable, the rumored iPad-like style changes are conspicuously absent, these look pretty much identical to the older iMacs.
Otherwise this looks like a decent bump all around. Notably, the iMac Pro also got some love (though not too much it seems?)
A friend of mine upgraded his 21 inch one out of the box because Apple RAM pricing and turn around is terrible. However he damaged the screen ribbon cable at the same time. Happens a lot.
I get that it has to be soldered on or whatever, but I'm looking at faster RAM on Newegg right now, in brand names, single module DDR4, for ~115.
I really wanna buy Apple stuff, but stuff like this continually keeps me away when I finally get to the Buy page.
But that doesn't apply to the 27" Mac which has non-soldered slots.
They gave me the laptop when the company went out of business. It was my Plex server until last year.
In my experience, the companies who always buy the cheapest model tend to avoid Macs entirely. The big place I see the base iMac popping up is at schools.
If it where up to IT everyone would have beefy computers as the most frustrating calls are "My computer is slow."
The rumor that they would redesign for Intel didn't make a ton of sense.
The MacBook Pro design had a major pain point so they needed to push an update for their "final" Intel MBP. The iMac design is a touch dated, but has no significant flaws (at least none which Apple intends to fix).
> iMac Pro now comes standard with a 10-core Intel Xeon processor. Designed for pro users who require workstation-class performance, iMac Pro features Xeon processors up to 18 cores, graphics performance up to 22 teraflops, up to 256GB quad-channel ECC memory, and a brilliant 27-inch Retina 5K display.
I think just a bump in the base CPU and maybe the graphics? There is a reason it's buried deep in the PR.
If you upgrade the new 27" iMac to the same specs, you can get a faster machine than the base model $4999 iMac pro for $900 less - it's a faster clock speed 10-core processor, better performing GPU with Radeon 5700 XT 16GB (as opposed to Vega 64 8GB), and same 32GB RAM and 10Gb ethernet and 1TB SSD for that price.
The iMac pro has even further upgrade options that the iMac doesn't, but still, I wouldn't expect a $5k non-upgradeable pro machine like that to be underspecced. It'll also be interesting to see some teardowns of the new iMac and compare actual benchmarks between these machines, the iMac Pro might still have better thermals that lets the cpu/gpu perform better in the real world.
It made sense for a little while before the iMac screens were upgraded to 5k.
It’s offensive
Bezels are important to frame the screen content from functional perspective. Think of it like a frame for the art work. Black bezels occulude the distracting edges and background noise from the screen and you have always have a constant black border. They can be made to look nice as well like some of those Bang & Olufsen TVs[1] and Sony Trinitron Professional monitors [2].
Contrararily, there is no reason to the opposite besides "aesthetics". Can you think of any?
Alas - the momentum behind bezels is so massive, it is impossible to reverse this trend. Same with "borderless" trends in UI/UX.
[1] http://www.extravaganzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Bang-...
[2] https://www.proav.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/...
Also for the record, [2] looks extremely bad.
It actually doesn't matter if its a screen, artwork or a photo. IMO bordered (black or white) photos is vastly superior to borderless photos. There is a reason why every museum that displays fine art photography have borders, almost always.
I don't see any distinction with screens. Perhaps, even more so important to have distraction free edges on monitors than photos.
To be fair I'm biased because the shift to bezel-less (on phones) was accompanied by a shift to humongous screens that I can't use. Now I'm stuck with the new iPhone SE as my only viable upgrade.
If you have a retina macbook pro from 2014~ it definitely makes sense to upgrade to a macbook pro 16" today. The thing will see you through another 5-6y easy.
However, I am assuming since the Macbooks are rumored to get ARM as early as late this year, it is likely iMac would follow next year too. The Developer Transition Kit has a Mac Mini with ARM already.
For most apps it’ll be fine, emulation and cross compiling will be enough. There will be some apps where this isn’t enough though. When the App Store switched to 64-bit, how many apps just disappeared, never to be seen again?
I fully support the transition and I think it’s a logical step for Apple, but it’s going to be one more thing that indie or smaller devs have to worry about. Which means it’s one more thing everyone on this forum has to worry about.
It's not much harder than supporting Linux on x86 and ARM.
It’s trivially easy to compile your iOS app for 64-bit as well, but like I mentioned... that transition left a lot of dead apps in its wake.
Apple is going to change the landscape with a mainstream ARM platform that can compete in specs with Intel desktops and laptops. Let's see what happens then.
The dynamics of proprietary software are somewhat different from open source - unless you make a steady revenue from an app you launched some time ago, there is little incentive to dedicate resources to port it to a new platform (even if it's from 32 to 64 bits) unless you expect it to drive new sales. There is no penalty apart from lost potential revenue and a huge incentive to focus on the next product.
Most of those "dead" apps were not under active development and had no income flow. Making a "trivial" change to an inactive project means rebuilding software which you have shelved for some time.
If you are actively developing software, adding Intel support to a build is pretty much just clicking the option to build a Universal binary. Adding a flag to an existing build a lot easier than dusting off an old app and making a bunch of tweaks and a new build with near zero chance of return on that time invested.
And what user that is ok with a 6 year old computer is interested in spending several thousand on a new macbook that they're going to have to throw out in 3 years? The only user I can imagine that would be ok with the 16" macbook are the users that upgrade every 2-3 years... they can risk it and likely won't lose out on anything except maybe the resale value.
Not really. Pre-2015 Retina MBP are just as efficient and far more flexible than later models.
Wait for ARM.
No touchbar instead classic function keys, HDMI output, 2 displayports + 2 usb3 ports, magsafe!, and most importantly a MicroSD drive i have put a Nifty 512GB card into, so i have 768GB of space of which 256 is from the SSD, - works perfectly.
Having a small SD drive is so incredibly useful when you can buy half a terabyte of extra space for $100, granted not that fast but still useful as storage.
The newer models are so incredibly expensive they make no sense to me when they remove features.
... so waiting for the ARM version.
a question i ask myself
video rendering throttles to 30% at steady state
the top end CPU perf only lasts a minute or so before it throttles
/s
I'd be very surprised if Apple Silicon is going to be competitive against the Xeons in their highest end machines any time soon, so they'll be bound to supporting Intel at the OS level for the foreseeable future. They've basically said as much. I suspect you should be able to get about 5 years, at least, before they start phasing things out.
I'll take that action :) I think it's going to be pretty dramatic. Or they wouldn't have bothered.
That makes less sense, though. Apple isn't using Arm's cpu architecture, just the ISC.
Apple is switching from Intel chips with x86 to Apple chips with ARM. You should, when comparing, use one pair or the other.
From x86 to arm
Or
From Intel to Apple
The whole industry of music software is kind of weird… their products tend to be somewhat “closer to the metal” than typical software, even a bit more than video, graphics, CAD and 3D… improvements and bug fixes are few and far between.
Also, like most artists (in my experience), musicians tend to learn one way of doing things very very well and getting them to try anything new is next to impossible.
I wonder what took them so long.
One gripe is the 27" iMac comes standard with only 8GB, while the 15" MacBook Pro has came with 16GB standard since 2014... I'm guessing most people are going to the aftermarket to throw 32-64GB in there anyway. Apple offers the 16GB upgrade (from 8GB) for $200, but you can buy 32GB of RAM for $150 and install it yourself.
what? Since when did they offer a DIY upgrade path?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191
And even for professional artists, I have to imaging the portability of an iPad Pro probably blows it out of the water for those use cases. Some people think it's more natural to move their canvas around the pen than vice-versa, so just being able to move the device/screen around is huge.
Dell did the same thing with the RAM in a 7740 and 7750 I recently ordered (work and personal), ironically about the same markup.
OTOH, I'd expect the average HN user to need a lot more. I'm currently finding 16 GB a bit constrained and would be delighted to have 32 in the same footprint. The server under my desk has 64 and the swap indicators tell me it should have more (or less stuff to do).
Well. Wow.
> Apple today also announced that its 21.5-inch iMac will come standard with SSDs across the line for the first time.
Double wow
I'll be holding out for complete iMac redesign with ARM. I'm hoping something will be announced at their event?
I wonder how they justify charging US$ 500 for the coating on the iMac and US$ 1.000 on the Pro Display XDR. 32" vs 27" don't seem enough.
Having mentioned that, it'd be awesome if we could plug it into a MacBook Pro via USB-C and use it as a power supply, an eGPU, and an external monitor. And maybe also mount the disks.
That would be great.
Because Target Display Mode is no longer supported:
"Make sure that your iMac is using macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 or earlier. You can't use target display mode with later versions of macOS, or with Boot Camp and Windows."
There's also some screen extender software, but you absolutely want a wired connection or it'll be painful.
Though maybe I should be thanking them; I'd almost certainly have bought one if target display mode was available, so they've saved me money!
With Apple Silicon I suspect we will see the return of target display mode. I can't wait!
If anything, this is the first time i see an iMac which has a good GPU. Though considering iMac's form factor and my experience of having a PC with a 5700XT i wonder about thermals.
Like, this has to be a totally artificial restriction. I'd much rather buy the cheap one with a bigger SSD, but instead I'm stuck paying hundreds of dollars extra for features I don't care about.
And like others, it made me think of their transition to ARM. I know the first ARM Macs this fall will be their lowend MacBook and 13" MBP line, but at WWDC they said the Intel to ARM transition would be complete in under 2 years (like they said with the PPC to Intel transition). And since the PPC to Intel transition only took a little over a year, it could mean that ARM-based iMacs may be here next year to replace the current iMac lineup, and I'm dreadfully curious as to whether they'll be lower performing than this iMac update (which is quite impressive, performance-wise). Or perhaps they'll use multiple ARM CPUs to boost performance. Regardless, every time I see a spec bump now from Apple, I can't help but think of these things.
Matching encoding speeds with Apple Silicon is probably an easier task, since they can create on-chip, hardware accelerated encoders, which exist on iPhones already.