Super interesting how they kept the touchbar on the Macbook Pro keyboard but not on the Air. As a software developer, I'm going to be more likely to buy an Air just due to the keyboard.
Depends on how you use it, if you use a lot of actions (basically macros) via keyboard shortcuts then you probably hate the touchbar, because they can only be bound to f-keys.
My fondest wish is a high-end MBP 16" with no touch bar. The touch bar's sole role is to generate errors and missteps resulting from merely grazing over it.
Even setting the touch bar to vanilla F-keys, grazing triggers F-key actions which is so frustrating.
FWIW there are third-party software options for the Touch Bar such as MTMR (my touch bar, my rules), which at least allows you to activate the haptic feedback in the trackpad when touch bar buttons are pressed. I found that it helped dramatically with accidental touch bar presses.
MTMR also solves the other main problem with the Touch Bar which is that it hides brightness and volume controls behind a tap (so you can't, for example, instantly mash "volume down" when you find it is unexpectedly loud.) With MTMR (and others I believe) you can make multi-touch gestures on the bar to adjust volume and brightness swiftly.
All that said, I'm not convinced that the touch bar adds enough value to justify its cost. If your day-to-day computer use includes tasks it is good it, maybe. As a developer, probably not.
Just my $0.02 as a touchbar-skeptic-cum-macbook-owner.
I use it for exactly what I've always used function keys for- brightness and volume.
I also occasionally use the emoji picker or app specific stuff. For example- my markdown editor has Touchbar selections for code blocks and all that sort of stuff. I don't write enough markdown to remember everything- so the touchbar makes it nicely discoverable without having to click through menus.
Personally I tried using it for F keys which is quite frankly the only requirement I’d have and it was awful. At a fully extended hand, which you need to do if you’ve hit a meta key, it’s impossible to hit the right F keys every time. I don’t know how anyone writes code on those machines.
It went back to the Apple store within a week and I got an air. Which went to the Apple store in a week because the keybbboooaaarrdd wwaaass aawwwful.
Then I bought a thinkpad. Which is less of a shiny toy.
T495s running Ubuntu 20.04. Absolutely perfect machine as far as I am concerned. Everything works flawlessly that I've tried and the quality is excellent. Really like it.
VirtualDJ supports using it for a crossfader, but then, it would be a way better move to buy an Air, and a real audio interface and mixing board, or at least an external controller.
I dislike it immensely, mainly because it changes all the time and this makes ot hard to use worhout looking at it every single time. The best way is to use an external keyboard.
Like most oldsters, I have presbyopia, which is exacerbated in low light. When I need to turn up the brightness of my monitor, I can actually see the "button" on a touchbar. On all my non-touchbar laptops, I randomly press F keys and hope for the best or pull out my phone for a flashlight.
Yes, I miss the physical esc, but F-keys are usually SW configurable and I can configure splat-1-10. That said, I am not a frequent programmer...
I love the Touch Bar. All those cmd-opt-shift bizarro keyboard shortcuts, I have mapped to custom buttons across lots of apps. A couple popup apps on globally-available buttons. Even a swiping gesture while on iTerm to fly through command history.
It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.
incidentally, I place the “blame” for the poor uptake of the Touch Bar at Apple’s feet. They relied on uninterested developers to make it useful, and didn't but the necessary tools in the hands of users to make it useful themselves. In five years, they’ve done nothing to expand its capabilities since the debut.
Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables some cool stuff like three-finger-trackpad-swipes to cycle through window tabs! Worth the price of admission for that feature alone, give it a look. https://www.folivora.ai
I really have no clue what apple is thinking with regards to the touchbar.
Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one?
The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point.
As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful.
It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it?
macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?
I only use it for brightness and volume controls (and TIL about the Emoji picker thanks to a sibling comment). I LOVE the analog-feeling controls on brightness and volume. Even though I know it's the same under the hood as an incrementation button, the UX of it makes me feel substantially happier. I absolutely miss the volume and brightness sliders when I go to use my Chromebook or my wife's laptop.
I normally keep the touchbar configured to only show the ~4 most used buttons (night mode, brightness, volume, and mute), and find that I use the other buttons rarely enough that I forgot what else was on there -- mainly because I use touchpad gestures instead.
I rarely (never?) used F-keys in my IDE (Jetbrains) or other apps, so I don't miss them. I have a physical Esc key (which is nice), though I used it rarely enough on my previous generation touchbar mac that it wasn't very infuriating. Having the physical escape + power keys removed any complaints I previously had about it.
Interesting. Volume and brightness adjustment is my least favorite part of the touchbar. With physical keys I can adjust the volume/brightness without looking down.
If it were a physical slider, I'd totally agree with you.
(Not that there's any right or wrong or answer here.)
If Touch Bar were in addition to the function keys + Escape key, everyone would praise it as yet another brilliant Apple innovation, and rivals would be copying it the way every notebook nowadays looks like the late-2008 unibody Macbook Pro (and really, all the way back to the 2001 titanium PowerBook). But it's not, so they don't and they aren't.
Since the new MacBook Air doesn’t have a fan while the MacBook Pro does, I’m sure there are some differences that Apple isn’t admitting right now. The battery life claimed by Apple is also higher on the Air compared to the Pro. Maybe the Air is throttled or runs at lower clock speeds.
If you configured them the same (chose the more expensive Air), the Air and the 13" Pro have the exact same specs from what I can tell other than a slightly brighter screen (500 nits vs. 400 nits) and slightly bigger battery (58.2 whr vs. 49.9 whr) on the 13" Pro.
I've been using Airs as my primary machine since 2010. I don't use bulky software (XCode, Adobe suite, Office, etc), so if you use any of that I wouldn't recommend it, but for software dev it's been plenty fast and a real joy to use.
The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud.
In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider.
agree about old airs, but this new one has the same CPU as mac mini and macbook pro (although without a fan). If it's even 80% as fast as a mac mini, it'll be plenty fast for 90% of software development needs.
There's a noticeable latency using gmail.com on my iMac Pro, too.
I've always used powerful desktops (Mac Pro, iMac Pro) and MacBook Airs while traveling, and while the Airs aren't very good for video games like StarCraft II, I've never had a problem with performance while doing anything else (I work in VS Code on TypeScript). My unit tests run in ~20 seconds on the MacBook Air as well as the iMac Pro.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I frequently use the play/pause key and also the volume keys. I occasionally use the function keys in my text editor too.
Step Over/Into/Out shortcuts in Xcode (F6/F7/F8) are the really obvious ones which I hit many times per day. Play/pause/etc. with the Fn key are easier to hit without looking than the touchbar.
I prefer that they change labels in a context-sensitive way. For keys that I don't use that often the icon is a better trade-off than a tactile response. Sliders are useful as well.
This is such a bizarre unforced error. Why would they just arbitrarily remove a row of the keyboard? Taking it away and asking why I need it is like asking why I need right-click, pinch-to-zoom, or my left pinky finger. It makes no sense that we have to choose between fully featured input and active cooling.
Either way, based on this announcement I'll probably hold off on upgrading for another generation. That'll leave some time to see how the transition goes, and with any luck the next ones will include 32 GB RAM, Mini-LED, and 5G (along with a full keyboard).
Don't know why they didn't just add a screen to the blank function key width gap of bare aluminum between the keyboard and the hinge if they were looking to add some decoration to the keyboard. That would have been praised, instead it's been a pariah.
Having bought a Macbook Pro with an Esc key earlier this year, lack of an Esc key was 90% of my issue with the touch bar. My biggest issue now is when I accidentally activate it. I didn't have an issue accidentally hitting the function keys on my 2013, so why not bring those back? Or invent something new. Forward or back, I don't care, just admit the touch bar was a dud and get it off my keyboard.
EDIT: My mother also says she gets distracting autocomplete suggestions on the touch bar while she's typing. I vaguely remember doing something to turn that off on mine, but she is terrified of Covid so I haven't had a chance to get at her laptop and fix it for her. I don't know what human factors genius at Apple decided it would be helpful for people to see words hopping around at the edge of their vision while they're trying to type.
It's absurd that you had to resort to this.
I wonder if someone also released a standalone bluetooth escape key that attaches to the side of a keyboard (equally absurd).
> I vaguely remember doing something to turn that off on mine, but she is terrified of Covid so I haven't had a chance to get at her laptop and fix it for her.
You can use Messages to easily initiate screen-sharing (with you controlling her Mac) to do that. No 3rd party software, no action on her side needed.
I'm with you. My work computer has the TouchBar, and my personal computer has the physical keys.
While I prefer the physical keys, once you get the TouchBar configured properly (I use MTMR), it's really quite nice. Combined with a physical escape key, it would be ideal.
Considering how the people on HN boast so much about being L337 Haxxorz, I'm surprised they don't see the value in a secondary interactive screen that they can make do anything they want.
I don't look when I type, either, except for the function keys, because I don't use them that often. So since I'm already looking down at the function keys, looking at the TouchBar makes zero difference.
One minor annoyance, however, is that the TouchBar isn't visible in direct sunlight, which is to be expected of any screen. Function keys don't have that problem.
It is Cmd+Backspace for me because I remapped my MacBook's keyboard so it matches my ThinkPad's[1] - I really don't want to have to play Twister with my fingers.
[1] Yes, I've remapped/swapped the Ctrl+Fn keys on my ThinkPad too.
I am also not a fan of the keyboard or touch bar, but especially the touch bar. It's a cool idea and I can see useful functions, but not pushed up against a place where you're typing. I am constantly bringing up Siri or changing volume when hitting numbers, -= or delete from a finger swiping across the touch bar accidentally. There used to be a tactile force needed to activate F key functions, but now there's just a capacitive touch bar.
What's wrong with the new keyboard (touch bar aside)? I haven't tried one yet, but I thought it was supposed to be more or less the same as the 2013 - 2015 MBP's.
I can't fathom why Apple couldn't just include both. I'm using a company-provided touchbar'd Macbook Pro for work, and it's handy (I've got it setup with screenshot and screen lock buttons so I don't have to memorize the absolutely bonkers keyboard shortcuts for them); it just seems boneheaded to treat it as a replacement of the function keys instead of an addition.
They have Rosetta 2 (translates Intel apps to Arm) and said the integrated graphics are so much faster than Intel's you can expect faster performance in games than before.
I'm pretty sure they're all identical chips. No doubt there are clocking differences. But that may be automatic based on thermals and not actually represent a difference in the actual chip.
That does seem weird. Probably Apple doesn't care about developers or rather expects them to wait for the 16 inch version?
Personally I brought a windows workstation laptop and I have pretty much regretted that most of the time - if you are going for that kind of performance, running VMs, etc you are probably better of with a desktop. I expect that if you build a system with the new Ryzen 3 you can smoke almost any of the new mac models for 50%-75% of the cost.
Screws you pretty hard if you actually need the computer to be a mac for some reason.
This is a bugbear of mine. I've never met a real human being who uses that term. I don't even know if people would understand me if I started using it in normal conversation.
They are laptops outside of industry marketing material. Why can't they just admit they lost this rebranding battle?
I read somewhere about 15 years ago that the term was introduced when laptops would get so hot that the legal departments at laptop vendors started to worry about their liability if they kept calling them laptops and they got sued by someone whose lap got burned.
Now that Apple's laptops run much cooler, my guess is that they continue to say "notebook" because Apple owns an important trademark that ends in "Book".
For me, battery life has been the biggest disappointment with the 2018 MBP. It used to be that if one paid more for a MBP, one got more of everything. With the last couple gens of Intel MacBooks, one had to choose: speed? battery life? Now their lineup (and pricing) makes sense again.
I'm interested to see the benchmarks vs. comparable AMD systems. Some of the claims, like 2x performance increase on the MBP are impressive, but intel laptops have been absolutely trounced by AMD 4000-series laptops of late.
Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.
> Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.
If they're "only" claiming 2x over anyone else' integrated, then it's not going to be all that interesting to compare integrated vs. discreet. By comparison here the 2060 Max Q is around 4x faster than the Vega 8 in the 4800U.
Although that 2x faster than anyone else's integrated also has some really big question marks on the claim. The fine-print on that claim includes:
"Integrated GPU is defined as a GPU located on a monolithic silicon die along with a CPU and memory controller, behind a unified memory subsystem"
Which sounds a bit weasel-y like it's trying to specifically exclude what's commonly thought of as integrated graphics like the two-die approach in Tigerlake. Which how the product is packaged shouldn't really matter?
There's no claim of any 5-6x faster than previous there. It says "fastest integrated" (and in the fine print that integrated is specifically unified monolithic die, eliminating chiplet-style products), and then also "M1 delivers significantly higher graphics performance than the very latest PC laptop chip — for up to 2x the graphics speed."
So take the 4800U, which has among the fastest commercially available integrated graphics in a monolithic die, and double the GPU performance. If you needed a discreet GPU in your laptop previously this probably won't change that.
Actually I'm not sure that my number is correct, so I better won't spread misinformation. It's not clear what those Apple flops really mean and there are multiple characteristics for modern GPUs which are measured in flops with different values: half precision, single precision, double precision, tensor compute, sparse tensor compute.
This M1 chip is really interesting, but they seem to be hard limited in RAM to 16GB. That will surely limit the interest there is in the initial batch amongst the HN crowd. It makes sense maybe for the MacBook Air, but not that much for the Mac Mini or MacBook Pro 13".
What I can't find is how many external monitors can be supported on the M1 chip? I don't see any detailed specs. Al they say about the M1 specs are:
"The Apple M1 chip is the first system on a chip (SoC) for Mac. Packed with an astonishing 16 billion transistors, it integrates the CPU, GPU, I/O, and every other significant component and controller onto a single tiny chip. Designed by Apple, M1 brings incredible performance, custom technologies, and unparalleled power efficiency to the Mac.
With an 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU, M1 on MacBook Pro delivers up to 2.8x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 5x faster graphics² than the previous generation."
Strange, they list the resolution you can use if you use one external display. What about two monitors? I don't believe you could only have one display connected, that would be ridiculous, but I also don't understand why they only write about one display and not about many?
Exactly, a Thunderbolt 3 dock. If you're trying to use an (inexpensive) adaptor that takes advantage of USB-C DP alt modes you will run into this problem.
Ironically, if you boot into Windows you can use these cheap USB-C adaptors with no issues.
I was under the impression that Native display port would be able to drive 2 external monitors. I do not consider my self to be an authoritative source on this.
Perhaps not (I've never tried daisy chaining) but a MacBook Pro can drive two 4K@60Hz monitors over a single Thunderbolt 3 dock cable (I'm doing it right now).
I keep seeing comments about lack of MST support but they're ignoring that you can currently already like you say drive dual 4k60. I'm doing it right now.
You probably has monitors with native thunderbolt input? They are not that many such monitor exists. Without MST you are out of luck to do thing with Display Port (via DP, mDP or USB-C), and this is what majority of monitors on market has.
No, they're both DP. Thunderbolt 3 can do dual 4k60 over a single cable (including also providing power, ethernet, audio, etc) https://www.caldigit.com/ts3-plus/
At practically every desk in Silicon Valley for 4+ years, yes. Two 27" 4K Dell UltraSharps and a choice of 13" or 15" Macbook Pro are standard issue for an engineer.
Yeah I’m hoping it’s just a case of them not having the specs in right. Otherwise it would be a pretty poor downgrade for those that use two monitors. I don’t use the laptop screen either when docked so really no reason it shouldn’t be able to drive them.
Not likely, lack of arm build drivers and all. Though with the Mac Pro I'm curious how they'll handle hardware upgrades. I hope they don't revert back to trashcan mac like video situations.
They returned to the design elements introduced for the iPhone 4 in the iPhone 12. That general form would be pretty interesting for an ultra portable laptop.
How would you improve on the Air? It's such a beautiful, sleek little thing. I've currently got a 13" Pro and it just feels so damn clunky next to the succession of Airs it replaced.
From a marketing standpoint it doesn't make sense to update the design (this is typical Apple from what I've observed) - People will buy into the novelty of the new CPUs. For the refresh, you will probably see some design changes.
Five years later and I still can't buy a new 13" laptop from Apple with more RAM than my 2015 MBP.
Edit: Apparently you can configure a (Early 2020) Intel-based 13" MBP with 32GB of RAM - I was not aware of that. Hope they bring that option to the ARM versions ASAP, especially if the performance gains are as good as Apple claims.
fwiw, you can configure a 13" Macbook Pro with an Intel chip up to 32GB. But I agree, I wish they launched the new M1 based 13" Pros with up to 32GB RAM
The low end Air only has 7 GPU cores compared with 8 on the one with more storage. So they must be disabling a bad core and selling it the cheap model. Other than that all these machines use the exact same CPUs. Which means that an iMac or 16" MBP are probably going to use a M1X or something with more cores.
Yes. Chip fabrication is super sensitive to the condition of the silicon wafer used. Chip companies talk about yields, because some percentage of chips can't, for example, be run at the highest clock rate. Indeed, some can't run reliably at all. If there is a microscopic flaw on the wafer that ends up being where one of the cores is located, disabling that core altogether is an option to keep that silicon marketable.
Please do explain what your workflow is that requires to you have so much RAM in such a small form factor with a severely limiting CPU and almost non existent GPU?
GPU: don't need it except to drive 1 or 2 external monitors if I'm at my desk (thus small screen not an issue either)
CPU: 8 cores is fine for me
RAM: mainly for a local dev environment running in Docker
For reference I currently have a 2019 16" MBP, with 64GB of RAM and an 8 core i9. Right now I'm using ~45GB of it, usually its up around 50 or 55. The CPU is at ~10%. While I'm developing locally, the workloads are highly bursty but sometimes they will chew up almost all of the CPU for about 10 minutes.
I used to have a 2016 15" MBP with 16GB (4 core i7) and while I could still run everything, the RAM was always pegged. Before that I had a 2016 13" MBP with 16GB (2 core i7) (I actually swapped with a coworker because I thought his 15" had 32GB). With both of these the RAM was by far the limiting factor, and while the increased CPU cores have been nice, most of the time I haven't noticed. The RAM increase on the other hand is always noticeable. Thus, 16GB is a nonstarter for me.
Edit: To add, I prefer the 13" form factor when I'm not at my desk.
I'm guessing that since the RAM is now on the SOC instead of on separate chips creating models with more RAM becomes more difficult not only from a space constraint on the die but a cost to manufacture more variants?
The iPad Pro has a mere 4GB of RAM and is faster at almost every task AND multitasking than any of my other beefy machines. I wouldn’t discount this yet.
I think it depends what they've done with Big Sur.
Take a look at your activity monitor and see how many background tasks you laptop is running right now (I currently have 481 and I only have 4 apps actually running).
Compare that to iPad which can run 2 apps max and apple controls all the background activity.
Blows my mind, I do most of the same on a 2013 MacBook Air with only 8GB RAM. I’ve never had a perf hiccup unless I try video editing or gaming. But I just don’t really have a want to do those things, hence why I’m still getting by on this thing. I was going to upgrade once for the hell of it but all the keyboard issues kept me seated.
I expected you to say you did something with graphics/media. I guess the VMs could be the difference. I don’t use. But I have 100 chrome tabs open at most times lol.
All these things work with 8GB RAM. macOS uses all available RAM aggressively, so if you have 32GB RAM it will appear as what you are doing requires 32GB RAM, which is not the case.
On my machine, if it goes more than 5G into swap it starts to become less responsive.
It really depends on your usage patterns. VM abusers and people who need to keep an eye on more than one project at the same time (as in multiple IDEs) can't do with 16 Gb.
And please don't tell me to start closing software, I'm willing to pay for more ram to have everything handy. Except... I can't.
Right now I have 6GB for VMs (for ~12 docker containers) and 8GB for various IDEs and editors. Probably typical for those on my development team. Surprisingly Chrome isn't even the top ten for memory footprint on my laptop.
So far 16GB has been fine on this 2017 MacBook. Wouldn't turn down 32 though :-)
Could be true. But I get instant feedback from all apps, so what's the measure of "reduced performance" that would matter? I'm actually curious, if nothing lags, would I notice a difference by upgrading?
My view into your comment is that you think I'm used to the lag. That's not the case. It's not my only device just my only Apple laptop. My newest device, a iPhone 12 Pro, is an upgrade from my 6s that I surely noticed and knew I would. I had been frustrated by the 6s for a while but held out for 5G.
I did some benchmarking on that public taxi rides dump (~600m records) and could run through it all in under 15 seconds directly from SSD. No way in hell your CPU will keep up with anything close to memory bandwidth or beyond 3GB/s.
Yeah, I found running all my dev environments in Docker/VMs made everything too slow. So I've just installed everything natively and have my own little docker-compose style runner to simplifying running our in-house microservices. I would definitely appreciate decent Docker performance, but it was actually surprisingly painless to set this up.
Hitting a wall how? The machine stops working properly? Or you see all the RAM allocated in Activity Monitor? Because MacOS aggressively allocates RAM even under a normal workload.
Well when you start getting memory pressure you start losing cycles to compressing and decompressing pages which makes everything run like complete shit.
That’s not how MacOS works. It “keeps the pressure on” so to speak to try and have as much in-memory before you need it. Have you experienced actual issues with specific software?
The only thing could be some really aggressive swap disk situation offloading anything not needed that second. But that won't work for things where you need all the ram right now, video editing for example.
But you don’t have background services on the iPad and apps are hibernated to disk if they aren’t active and iOS needs more ram. It’s possible that Apple is doing the same thing on macOS, but we don’t know (it would break a ton of apps).
This is a good point and begs an interesting question: will they continue using the same ARM chip across the whole line when the 16" MBP and the other iMacs make the switch, and if so, will all Macs of the same generation always have the same amount of RAM? Or will they branch the chips (M2 and M2S, or something)? Is RAM becoming less relevant when you have smart integration of software and hardware components, to a point where stratification is no longer necessary in most cases?
> Is RAM becoming less relevant when you have smart integration of software and hardware components, to a point where stratification is no longer necessary in most cases?
If they intend these things to run software development, audio/video editing, CAD, or any other resource-intensive workloads, there will absolutely be demand for more.
I could see the M2 coming with 32GB across the board, at which point the only current outliers (setting aside the Mac Pro as a special case) would be the 64GB configuration for the 16" Macbook Pro and the 64GB and 128GB configurations for the iMac. I could imagine Apple's optimizations closing the performance gap with the current 64GB offerings, and then perhaps they just leave 128GB customers to go all the way for the Mac Pro. I would be surprised to hear that they sell very many 128GB iMacs right now anyway.
Not all RAM is created equally. Better memory management means less RAM can be better than more RAM. Pair that with superfast flash storage for SWAP and you might not even be able to tell the difference between 16 and 32.
Besides, this release cycle is 100% optimized for an impressive speed boost, tempered by a need for a more impressive battery life.
Yes that's true, for the "average consumer" that really only needs that RAM to power the 100+ browser tabs they have open. But if you're doing lots of virtualization or containerized work, super fast SWAP isn't going to cut it.
I no longer code so I'm probably close to the 'average consumer' now. I personally consider 32GB to be the minimum amout of RAM that anyone should consider in 2020,2021 (with obvious caveats on money). My multi-GB workloads are read-heavy and include loading multi-GB games, editing hundreds of RAW images, opening 50+ tabs, etc, all without leaving the cosy confines of my RAM - which I still sometimes do. I have a 100GB system commit limit on my W10 box, and with my current usage pattern, I hit about 50GB @ peak.
> Better memory management means less RAM can be better than more RAM
No, it can't. If more RAM means it's slower RAM then maybe it can be better to have less of it in some workloads. But otherwise it's never better to have less RAM than more RAM. Better memory management can make the impact of less RAM be less severe, but it's still unambiguously worse.
Especially if you have workloads that actually need the RAM like large ML models or editing 8K videos.
> better memory management absolutely can be better than just throwing more RAM at the problem.
Those are not competing in any way. Better memory management does not require nor benefit from less RAM.
Apple doesn't give you a different kernel when you choose the 8GB SKU instead of the 16GB one. It's the same software, just with less RAM. And having that less RAM is best case break-even in "day to day" experience, but never better.
It's true that if the OS could predict exactly which memory pages to keep and which to swap out, we could save memory wastage, but so far I haven't seen any memory management scheme that can reduce memory consumption by half.
For me personally, I won't even consider a machine with less than 32GB ram in 2020/2021. With 32GB, I never close out of applications that I use regularly, and so it allows me to switch state instantaneously for not that much more money. My workloads are typically read-heavy & multiple GBs - editing/screening/cataloging hundreds of RAW photos, loading of multi-GB games, having about 50 tabs open in FF, etc. After having switched careers I rarely code anymore, and I don't think these are uncommon requirements.
The Intel 13" MBP with 2 TB3 ports also topped out at 16GB. They're actually still selling the Intel 13" MBP with 4 TB3 ports, which is the model that can be configured to 32GB.
I was literally about to order a new mac mini, until I noticed it only has 16GB max memory. How can they do this?! The previous model could be upgraded to 64GB, had 4 USB-C connectors (instead of now 2) and the option for faster ethernet. It really sounds like this new mac mini is a downgrade from the previous model. I wonder if the new M1 chip/architecture really makes that much difference to make up for the downgrade of the rest.
Do most people with MacBook Airs have workloads that require more than 16GB or ram or do they generally value a lower price point?
Cost, performance, light weight - pick two right? Apple seems to have picked a combination of lower cost and light weight. Customers who need more ram probably move up to a MBP.
For the lowest end models right? It's the same tradeoff to bring down prices for people buying the lowest end machines. Presumably they understand that people who need the higher end spec'd machines will wait to buy a new laptop until more software has been migrated to run natively.
If you need a 13" MBP that supports more than 16gb of ram, they sell it. It seems unlikely they'll stick with a 16gb limit once they start replacing the higher end devices.
I honestly can't think of a situation where you need more than 16GB of ram on an ultrabook. If your job is heavy video editing - I don't think getting a laptop is a good idea.
I know I use a lot of RAM for compiling and tests, but we have cloud instances with up to 500GB of RAM for that.
Also with the new ARM instructions, I suspect more heavy task like these will be forced to move elsewhere. Businesses might not want to switch for a few years to wait for dev tools/ARM servers to be available.
More correct would be to term this limit "absurd" or "clownish".
Even if Apple views the use-cases of these machines as primarily consumption devices and the users of these machines not as creators but as consumers, the bloat of the modern web is expensive and getting more expensive every day.
The end user needs this memory even if they really are just using these as facebook machines.
EDIT: That's not just the notebooks - the mini appears to have this limitation as well (down from 64GB previously).
Crazy to imagine this, but restricting developers to 16GB machines might be the most effective way to fight against (cough... electron driven) software bloat :-)
I used a MBP with 4 GB of RAM up until 2018 for rather heavy duty data science workloads. Wasn't ideal, but one thing I learned was that you really can't infer the amount of swapping and performance degradation that occurs just by looking at how much RAM is in use vs. how much you have, because the OS will eat up whatever it gets. The little memory pressure graph you can see in Activity Monitor is quite good, and on my current machine with an "unfortunate" 16 GB of RAM, memory's always full but I have no complaints about speed whatsoever.
This is 16GB which is shared with their GPU so it will be interesting to see what limit Apple puts on the GPU for grabbing memory.
There are stories that Apple is working on a gGPU so that would free space up on a future Mx chip for additional processors or memory. However looking at the space occupied by DRAM and GPU it looks like a larger die is required for any on board memory expansion.
Apple has been getting trashed lately by developers for how hot and loud their macbooks get. You can tell how much focus they put on cooling in this presentation. The macbook air literally doesn't even have a fan!
No; I have one. (Perhaps you're thinking of the 12-inch Macbook, which was fanless, and which they stopped manufacturing a year ago.) And I go to extremes to keep the fan from spinning up: using Turbo Boost Switcher, and/or running a program that repeatedly does the equivalent of "kill -STOP" and "kill -CONT" to a process, hundreds of times per second, to force it to use less CPU.
Did I miss something, or are they, once again, not upgrading the camera? The low light performance of the current version is real bad. Since we're all using these cameras way more, I really thought there would a hardware bump. You can only squeeze so much detail out of an under-exposed, noisy image with software.
I'm curious, are higher-quality cameras even available that fit into the thin lid? (At a reasonable price?)
I was always under the impression that the built-in camera is so much worse than your phone's front-facing camera simply because the phone is thick and has room, while the MacBook lid is much thinner.
The reality is, for most people 720p is more than enough, since most videoconferencing is at a heavily compressed 480p anyways, and it's not like most people really want it super obvious that they missed a spot shaving or have a small zit anyways. And sure the quality arguably falls to below 480p in very low light conditions, but that's not an issue in any normal well-lit office, coffee shop, or kitchen or living room.
I would assume Apple is making the right call here that a higher-resolution camera isn't worth additional thickness.
Yea, I hate the way the background blur feature in google meets suddenly make my face way brighter and "pop" in the video. With winter coming, I'm getting a lot less natural light in my work area and my videos just look dreary.
Considering how good they are at iphone cameras there is absolutely no reason to have a poor camera nowaday in the laptop. They know how to make cameras that fit in tight places. They're just being lazy/cheap
Instead of having a camera as thin as the lid, they could have the camera stick out a little bit and fit into a recess on the other side of the clamshell when closed.
Surprising as it seems, 8GB seems to be enough for most "normal" users. My wife has an 8GB MacBook Pro and I'm always shocked by how many open tabs she keeps in Chrome and how many Office documents are open at any given time.
My 16GB MBP is constraining sometimes and the next one will, doubtlessly, come with at least 32GB. Until Apple can do that, I won't use an ARM-based Mac as my daily driver.
As for the 8-core, it's 4 beefy ones and 4 low-power ones. Load will shift from one kind to the other according to usage patterns. This is how they achieve that 20-hour battery life.
I brought a decent external camera, and while being able to position it is a must have, the quality means that if I don't shave or have a nick or something in the background, it is obvious.
Whereas the people I am on an online call with have about has many pixels dedicated to their hair as Laura in Tomb Raider 3.
I still care enough that I use it, and I am disappointed in Apple not including their iPhone camera, but it might not be something the average person wants.
If you look at the cooling solutions on the current macs I’d say the inverse: that these chassis were designed with the M1 in mind and they shoehorned Intel CPUs into them.
This is exactly right. They could have done everything in one go, but they had to change the keyboard and call that the 5th generation macbook pro. Like they didn't even include wifi 6 in the previous model nor did they hold an event for it. Kuo says a redesign is due in 2021, but apple can't keep getting away with doing the same thing since 2016. There are laptops with dual screens, 4k touch screens, vapeor chamber cooling, and apple just be changing out the keyboard for the next gen. This new chip is good for the chip industry, but it's not really a different laptop at all.
I agree that the cameras are subpar. I wonder if Apple figures that most Mac users already have an iPhone, and that if they want to use a better camera for videoconferencing, they can always just plug in their iPhone and use it as the camera.
Has anyone done this? I've considered using my iPad Pro's camera this way but have never cared enough to actually do it.
I'm pretty sure there was a part of the presentation talking about a camera upgrade. But it's not something on my wish list, so I didn't pay attention.
Double-check the recording on Apple's web site. The answer may be there.
On a tangential note, there were reports about the Intel based MacBook Pro from earlier this year having CPU usage spikes and heating issues when charging from the left side port. For users with this problem, it was effectively “charge using the right side port”.
I definitely get more heat and throttling powering on the left side than the right, on my 2019 16”. There are quite a lot of people who have reported the same, for all models which have USB-c ports on both sides. If you’re not seeing a difference, it’s pretty likely your workload or some background process is still pushing the thermal limits of your machine.
Hmm, I wouldn't say this is nonsense. I can consistently reproduce the issue by charging on the left side (making the computer completely unusable), and then switching to the right side and having it run perfectly fine. Since I started charging on the right side I've had zero issues with it.
You would also think they would keep the MagSafe connector, which was truly revolutionary (and has definitely saved me at least a dozen times), but yet here we are.
I've already tripped or stumbled on my usb-c cable dozens of times working from home. The damn thing is already pulling out at the ends. Why can't apple make good cables? They make their environmental statement making you buy the charger for your phone rather than shipping one in the box, just to sell you junk cables that don't last. I had old multipin cables and earbuds from the original ipod that still hold up. All of their textured grippy feeling cables have been crap.
You can’t charge from either side if there are only ports on one side, which, if I understand the design and Gp’s comment correctly, is the case for the ARM macs. Which would be those GP meant as “this generation”.
Not every 13" MacBook Pro has had four Thunderbolt ports; the base model always had just two. This computer clearly replaces that one, and Apple will launch another MacBook Pro in the future to replace the rest.
There was a model even with the touchbar that only had two ports and one fan. the four port model got you more cores and two fans, quite a different computer internally despite sharing the same shape and 13" macbook pro label. very confusing for consumers.
I backed a game a while ago on Kickstarter with native support for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Several weeks ago they sent us a message saying they were ditching the MacOS version due the architecture change.
I wonder how it'll affect the whole ecosystem. I think it'll end being like an iOS on steroids.
I think their hope is that the Mac's anemic game ecosystem will be filled in by iOS games which run natively. I hope they're right, and I say that as someone who has a gaming PC and still hasn't found many quality core games on iOS.
It's made by an indie studio which doesn't have the resources to port a game like this to a ARM. They also use a lot of third party software so it's not even up to them.
Depends on the engine the game uses. Games built on top of frameworks like Unity, Unreal Engine and the like get platform support basically "for free" as long as the framework in question supports the target platform.
Any in-house developed engine might either depend on 3rd party support (e.g. libraries like SFML[1]) or need to be recompiled for the new platform. Depending on architectural differences, optimisation and asset loading (in case endianness[2] differs) needs to be altered accordingly.
The main reason for a decision to cancel a release would be time and effort vs expected sales. The Mac market will be fragmented into Intel and Apple Silicon from now on and every "Mac version" would really be two separate ports (complete with separate QA and optimisation).
An independent studio might just not have the resources and experience to tackle this and a port that doesn't sell can effectively be worse than not releasing on a platform.
Considering most developers who have ported from x86 to MacOS have had few issues, it seems like the ecosystem will be just fine. Also, all the big pro software developers—Adobe, Microsoft, Apple—are onboard.
Hard to say what this will do to gaming on MacOS, but gaming has never been the big strength of MacOS.
Eehm. What is the actual difference between the MBA M1 and the MBP 13 M1? (except the latter is thicker?) Checked the compareison and didn‘t find anything substantial...
Yeah, that's what I was just looking at. Up to 2 more hours of battery life, TouchBar, and a [slightly?] better microphone is the only difference I can see. Not much price difference either.
The MBP gets all 8 GPU cores, the MBA gets 7 (but you can upgrade the MBA to get all 8 for effectively $50 with a $200 upgrade to the storage as well). Touchbar and bigger battery. I think those are the only differences
That would seem to imply whatever quality it has resembles a studio microphone. It doesn't say 'Quality Studio Microphone' after all.
It reminds me of my recent purchase of an electric shaver. The front of the box proudly proclaimed 'WAHL: The Brand Professionals Use.'
It wasn't until I got home and started opening it that I saw a little bit of fine print on the side of the box: "not to be used in a professional capacity."
1,004 comments
[ 767 ms ] story [ 1929 ms ] threadedit: No wait... here comes the pro!
Silly Apple.
Even setting the touch bar to vanilla F-keys, grazing triggers F-key actions which is so frustrating.
MTMR also solves the other main problem with the Touch Bar which is that it hides brightness and volume controls behind a tap (so you can't, for example, instantly mash "volume down" when you find it is unexpectedly loud.) With MTMR (and others I believe) you can make multi-touch gestures on the bar to adjust volume and brightness swiftly.
All that said, I'm not convinced that the touch bar adds enough value to justify its cost. If your day-to-day computer use includes tasks it is good it, maybe. As a developer, probably not.
Just my $0.02 as a touchbar-skeptic-cum-macbook-owner.
I also occasionally use the emoji picker or app specific stuff. For example- my markdown editor has Touchbar selections for code blocks and all that sort of stuff. I don't write enough markdown to remember everything- so the touchbar makes it nicely discoverable without having to click through menus.
It went back to the Apple store within a week and I got an air. Which went to the Apple store in a week because the keybbboooaaarrdd wwaaass aawwwful.
Then I bought a thinkpad. Which is less of a shiny toy.
I'm trying to figure out what my next laptop should be, but I have no prior experience with Thinkpads.
Yes, I miss the physical esc, but F-keys are usually SW configurable and I can configure splat-1-10. That said, I am not a frequent programmer...
It's great if you take the time to actually customize it.
Everything cool I can do with the Touch Bar is thanks to a third-party tool, BetterTouchTool. Also enables some cool stuff like three-finger-trackpad-swipes to cycle through window tabs! Worth the price of admission for that feature alone, give it a look. https://www.folivora.ai
Why should any developer spend time developing sorely lacking features for the touch bar, when they just released the most popular mac without one?
The only way I can make sense of the decision to release the air without a touch bar, is that it must be really expensive to manufacture and they were struggling to hit the $1000 price point.
As a result the touchbar lives in this weird limbo state. Apple themselves clearly are uncertain what they want from it, and it shows. Since its release the touch bar has been left mostly abandoned and it’s been up to third party developers to make it useful.
It can be useful, at least after heavy customization – something a screen lends itself well to. Why isn’t apple doing more to help users customize it?
macOS comes with an application called Automator. Automator is confusing for power and regular users alike and as a result, nobody uses it. Why not rethink Automator completely with the touchbar in mind? Bring the power of programming to regular users with an easily accessible ‘create your own button’ feature that lets users add custom commands accessible from their touchbar?
Add that, plus the ability to map any menu command to a Touch Bar button, and it would be vastly more useful.
I normally keep the touchbar configured to only show the ~4 most used buttons (night mode, brightness, volume, and mute), and find that I use the other buttons rarely enough that I forgot what else was on there -- mainly because I use touchpad gestures instead.
I rarely (never?) used F-keys in my IDE (Jetbrains) or other apps, so I don't miss them. I have a physical Esc key (which is nice), though I used it rarely enough on my previous generation touchbar mac that it wasn't very infuriating. Having the physical escape + power keys removed any complaints I previously had about it.
If it were a physical slider, I'd totally agree with you.
(Not that there's any right or wrong or answer here.)
The ability to use touch sliders, filmstrips, etc. is a huge boon.
It just gets a ton of hate here on HN because obviously there's very little overlap between the populations.
A lot of people forget that "Pro" has never referred to software professionals, it's always referred to multimedia professionals.
If the new graphics capabilities are that much better I would be very tempted to upgrade
the air is really sluggish for anything but the lightest of tasks. there was even extremely noticeable latency using gmail.com
The only time I'm speed constrained is deep learning, but generally I just run tiny test sets locally and then run full jobs on a cluster or the cloud.
In the mid 2010's I had a desktop with like 64GB of Ram and four million processors, and I found programming on the Air I was still more productive. Productivity wise I think it's a very high dimensional space to consider.
(P.S. Can't wait to get this new Air!!!)
I've always used powerful desktops (Mac Pro, iMac Pro) and MacBook Airs while traveling, and while the Airs aren't very good for video games like StarCraft II, I've never had a problem with performance while doing anything else (I work in VS Code on TypeScript). My unit tests run in ~20 seconds on the MacBook Air as well as the iMac Pro.
I've used the last 2 Air for developing including Photoshop and VMware fusion but I could work just fine.
Which other key do you miss now that Esc is back?
I'm happily tapping away with them on a 2020 MBA
In my particular case, I use them all the time. Edit some SQL, press F9. Select some files, press F5. And so on.
I can't work without the function keys.
Either way, based on this announcement I'll probably hold off on upgrading for another generation. That'll leave some time to see how the transition goes, and with any luck the next ones will include 32 GB RAM, Mini-LED, and 5G (along with a full keyboard).
EDIT: My mother also says she gets distracting autocomplete suggestions on the touch bar while she's typing. I vaguely remember doing something to turn that off on mine, but she is terrified of Covid so I haven't had a chance to get at her laptop and fix it for her. I don't know what human factors genius at Apple decided it would be helpful for people to see words hopping around at the edge of their vision while they're trying to type.
You can choose a few different options there - try "Expanded Control Strip".
You can use Messages to easily initiate screen-sharing (with you controlling her Mac) to do that. No 3rd party software, no action on her side needed.
While I prefer the physical keys, once you get the TouchBar configured properly (I use MTMR), it's really quite nice. Combined with a physical escape key, it would be ideal.
Considering how the people on HN boast so much about being L337 Haxxorz, I'm surprised they don't see the value in a secondary interactive screen that they can make do anything they want.
One minor annoyance, however, is that the TouchBar isn't visible in direct sunlight, which is to be expected of any screen. Function keys don't have that problem.
I really need a Forward-Delete key - pressing Cmd+Backspace just doesn't work for me.
[1] Yes, I've remapped/swapped the Ctrl+Fn keys on my ThinkPad too.
I am quite skeptical of this but let's see.
EDIT: the store does not let you configure anything but the RAM which is absurdly expensive.
A lot of CPU given any release is the same high end CPU with faulty cores disabled.
P.S. I’m a developer, like many here.
(Edit: specify the M1, not the existing Intel.)
It supports up to 64GB of 2666MHz DDR4 memory. (Source: Went through the "Buy" process to see the options.)
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/16-inch-space...
Personally I brought a windows workstation laptop and I have pretty much regretted that most of the time - if you are going for that kind of performance, running VMs, etc you are probably better of with a desktop. I expect that if you build a system with the new Ryzen 3 you can smoke almost any of the new mac models for 50%-75% of the cost.
Screws you pretty hard if you actually need the computer to be a mac for some reason.
They are laptops outside of industry marketing material. Why can't they just admit they lost this rebranding battle?
Now that Apple's laptops run much cooler, my guess is that they continue to say "notebook" because Apple owns an important trademark that ends in "Book".
Also will be interested to see the benchmarks of the integrated GPU vs. discreet GPU performance.
If they're "only" claiming 2x over anyone else' integrated, then it's not going to be all that interesting to compare integrated vs. discreet. By comparison here the 2060 Max Q is around 4x faster than the Vega 8 in the 4800U.
Although that 2x faster than anyone else's integrated also has some really big question marks on the claim. The fine-print on that claim includes:
"Integrated GPU is defined as a GPU located on a monolithic silicon die along with a CPU and memory controller, behind a unified memory subsystem"
Which sounds a bit weasel-y like it's trying to specifically exclude what's commonly thought of as integrated graphics like the two-die approach in Tigerlake. Which how the product is packaged shouldn't really matter?
There's no claim of any 5-6x faster than previous there. It says "fastest integrated" (and in the fine print that integrated is specifically unified monolithic die, eliminating chiplet-style products), and then also "M1 delivers significantly higher graphics performance than the very latest PC laptop chip — for up to 2x the graphics speed."
So take the 4800U, which has among the fastest commercially available integrated graphics in a monolithic die, and double the GPU performance. If you needed a discreet GPU in your laptop previously this probably won't change that.
"The Apple M1 chip is the first system on a chip (SoC) for Mac. Packed with an astonishing 16 billion transistors, it integrates the CPU, GPU, I/O, and every other significant component and controller onto a single tiny chip. Designed by Apple, M1 brings incredible performance, custom technologies, and unparalleled power efficiency to the Mac.
With an 8‑core CPU and 8‑core GPU, M1 on MacBook Pro delivers up to 2.8x faster CPU performance¹ and up to 5x faster graphics² than the previous generation."
Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and:
One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz Thunderbolt 3 digital video output
Native DisplayPort output over USB-C VGA, HDMI, DVI, and Thunderbolt 2 output supported using adapters (sold separately)
Ironically, if you boot into Windows you can use these cheap USB-C adaptors with no issues.
https://www.startech.com/en-us/faq/mst-hubs-mac-osx-support
However that requires MST support which afaik is missing from OSX entirely.
https://www.apple.com/mac-mini/
Up to .14x faster graphics performance for $250
Five years later and I still can't buy a new 13" laptop from Apple with more RAM than my 2015 MBP.
Edit: Apparently you can configure a (Early 2020) Intel-based 13" MBP with 32GB of RAM - I was not aware of that. Hope they bring that option to the ARM versions ASAP, especially if the performance gains are as good as Apple claims.
I really don't know much (anything) about the hardware manufacturing world. Is this a common practice?
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch-space...
If you need 32 GB with the new ARM chips, you’ll probably have to wait a generation or two.
For reference I currently have a 2019 16" MBP, with 64GB of RAM and an 8 core i9. Right now I'm using ~45GB of it, usually its up around 50 or 55. The CPU is at ~10%. While I'm developing locally, the workloads are highly bursty but sometimes they will chew up almost all of the CPU for about 10 minutes.
I used to have a 2016 15" MBP with 16GB (4 core i7) and while I could still run everything, the RAM was always pegged. Before that I had a 2016 13" MBP with 16GB (2 core i7) (I actually swapped with a coworker because I thought his 15" had 32GB). With both of these the RAM was by far the limiting factor, and while the increased CPU cores have been nice, most of the time I haven't noticed. The RAM increase on the other hand is always noticeable. Thus, 16GB is a nonstarter for me.
Edit: To add, I prefer the 13" form factor when I'm not at my desk.
What worries me is my desktop has 64Gb of RAM which cost 1/3 of Apple’s usual upgrade mugging.
I think I’ll walk away from this.
Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb.
8GB of RAM for £200 is “get fucked” territory. I paid £240 for the 64Gb in my desktop.
Take a look at your activity monitor and see how many background tasks you laptop is running right now (I currently have 481 and I only have 4 apps actually running).
Compare that to iPad which can run 2 apps max and apple controls all the background activity.
I expected you to say you did something with graphics/media. I guess the VMs could be the difference. I don’t use. But I have 100 chrome tabs open at most times lol.
It really depends on your usage patterns. VM abusers and people who need to keep an eye on more than one project at the same time (as in multiple IDEs) can't do with 16 Gb.
And please don't tell me to start closing software, I'm willing to pay for more ram to have everything handy. Except... I can't.
So far 16GB has been fine on this 2017 MacBook. Wouldn't turn down 32 though :-)
My view into your comment is that you think I'm used to the lag. That's not the case. It's not my only device just my only Apple laptop. My newest device, a iPhone 12 Pro, is an upgrade from my 6s that I surely noticed and knew I would. I had been frustrated by the 6s for a while but held out for 5G.
I'm somewhat impressed by some of these stories about RAM usage - what are people doing?
that gets done for GPUs and CPUs because they're a monolithic die, but AFAIK that's not done for memory chips.
Please don't.
Don't think so. The M1's RAM is integrated into the SoC package, but it's not actually on the same die.
There's some images showing the discrete RAM modules in Apple's marketing material.
> "Edit: just seen £200 to upgrade from a 8Gb unit to 16Gb."
It's always been this way with Apple. Just in the old days you could pop the modules out and upgrade the RAM yourself.
If they intend these things to run software development, audio/video editing, CAD, or any other resource-intensive workloads, there will absolutely be demand for more.
Besides, this release cycle is 100% optimized for an impressive speed boost, tempered by a need for a more impressive battery life.
The proof will be in the pudding.Time will tell.
No, it can't. If more RAM means it's slower RAM then maybe it can be better to have less of it in some workloads. But otherwise it's never better to have less RAM than more RAM. Better memory management can make the impact of less RAM be less severe, but it's still unambiguously worse.
Especially if you have workloads that actually need the RAM like large ML models or editing 8K videos.
If the purpose of owning a computer is "get shit done", better memory management absolutely can be better than just throwing more RAM at the problem.
Those are not competing in any way. Better memory management does not require nor benefit from less RAM.
Apple doesn't give you a different kernel when you choose the 8GB SKU instead of the 16GB one. It's the same software, just with less RAM. And having that less RAM is best case break-even in "day to day" experience, but never better.
For me personally, I won't even consider a machine with less than 32GB ram in 2020/2021. With 32GB, I never close out of applications that I use regularly, and so it allows me to switch state instantaneously for not that much more money. My workloads are typically read-heavy & multiple GBs - editing/screening/cataloging hundreds of RAW photos, loading of multi-GB games, having about 50 tabs open in FF, etc. After having switched careers I rarely code anymore, and I don't think these are uncommon requirements.
16 is basically useless for dev purposes, unless you're only doing web stuff. And maybe not even then, containers/vms?
Keep in mind the rollout of the new CPUs is a 2 year process.
Cost, performance, light weight - pick two right? Apple seems to have picked a combination of lower cost and light weight. Customers who need more ram probably move up to a MBP.
If you need a 13" MBP that supports more than 16gb of ram, they sell it. It seems unlikely they'll stick with a 16gb limit once they start replacing the higher end devices.
For the current M1 models. You can still get 32GB of RAM on the Intel models.
So they're "low end" only in the sense that you can't get more than 16GB of RAM on them.
I know I use a lot of RAM for compiling and tests, but we have cloud instances with up to 500GB of RAM for that.
Also with the new ARM instructions, I suspect more heavy task like these will be forced to move elsewhere. Businesses might not want to switch for a few years to wait for dev tools/ARM servers to be available.
This is a charitable characterization.
More correct would be to term this limit "absurd" or "clownish".
Even if Apple views the use-cases of these machines as primarily consumption devices and the users of these machines not as creators but as consumers, the bloat of the modern web is expensive and getting more expensive every day.
The end user needs this memory even if they really are just using these as facebook machines.
EDIT: That's not just the notebooks - the mini appears to have this limitation as well (down from 64GB previously).
I webdev (RoR) for a living on a Dell machine with Linux and 8 gigs of RAM. It works beautifully.
Sometimes I browse Facebook and it still works beautifully.
My GF uses my old 2013 MBP with 4 gigs of RAM for college and it works just fine for her. She, too, sometimes browses Facebook.
There are stories that Apple is working on a gGPU so that would free space up on a future Mx chip for additional processors or memory. However looking at the space occupied by DRAM and GPU it looks like a larger die is required for any on board memory expansion.
I was always under the impression that the built-in camera is so much worse than your phone's front-facing camera simply because the phone is thick and has room, while the MacBook lid is much thinner.
The rest of the screen display is thinner than the camera module already.
The reality is, for most people 720p is more than enough, since most videoconferencing is at a heavily compressed 480p anyways, and it's not like most people really want it super obvious that they missed a spot shaving or have a small zit anyways. And sure the quality arguably falls to below 480p in very low light conditions, but that's not an issue in any normal well-lit office, coffee shop, or kitchen or living room.
I would assume Apple is making the right call here that a higher-resolution camera isn't worth additional thickness.
And considering people LOVE Apple's huge and amazing trackpads... I would guess it wouldn't be a smart tradeoff.
My 16GB MBP is constraining sometimes and the next one will, doubtlessly, come with at least 32GB. Until Apple can do that, I won't use an ARM-based Mac as my daily driver.
As for the 8-core, it's 4 beefy ones and 4 low-power ones. Load will shift from one kind to the other according to usage patterns. This is how they achieve that 20-hour battery life.
I run heavyweight IDE, Photoshop, VMware and Chrome and I still could manage with 8GB fine. Who requires 16GB for daily use?
Whereas the people I am on an online call with have about has many pixels dedicated to their hair as Laura in Tomb Raider 3.
I still care enough that I use it, and I am disappointed in Apple not including their iPhone camera, but it might not be something the average person wants.
> touch screens
> vapeor chamber cooling
...Thank you apple for not listening to the HN crowd
Has anyone done this? I've considered using my iPad Pro's camera this way but have never cared enough to actually do it.
I want to do it too, but don’t want to choose between 3rd-party apps. I wish it were built-in to the OS, like AirPlay and Sidecar are...
I'm pretty sure there was a part of the presentation talking about a camera upgrade. But it's not something on my wish list, so I didn't pay attention.
Double-check the recording on Apple's web site. The answer may be there.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/10/macbook-pro-m1-720p-cam...
It throttles badly and overheats no matter which side you charge on.
Actually surprised it didn't get more attention. If you're downloading and charging at the same time then your computer is unusable.
The commenter is stating how the 2016-2019 MBP 13" had 4 thunderbolt ports, and this new one only has 2
Sure enough, it does exist: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP799
I wonder how it'll affect the whole ecosystem. I think it'll end being like an iOS on steroids.
It's made by an indie studio which doesn't have the resources to port a game like this to a ARM. They also use a lot of third party software so it's not even up to them.
Depends on the engine the game uses. Games built on top of frameworks like Unity, Unreal Engine and the like get platform support basically "for free" as long as the framework in question supports the target platform.
Any in-house developed engine might either depend on 3rd party support (e.g. libraries like SFML[1]) or need to be recompiled for the new platform. Depending on architectural differences, optimisation and asset loading (in case endianness[2] differs) needs to be altered accordingly.
The main reason for a decision to cancel a release would be time and effort vs expected sales. The Mac market will be fragmented into Intel and Apple Silicon from now on and every "Mac version" would really be two separate ports (complete with separate QA and optimisation).
An independent studio might just not have the resources and experience to tackle this and a port that doesn't sell can effectively be worse than not releasing on a platform.
edit: [1] https://www.sfml-dev.org [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness
Hard to say what this will do to gaming on MacOS, but gaming has never been the big strength of MacOS.
It reminds me of my recent purchase of an electric shaver. The front of the box proudly proclaimed 'WAHL: The Brand Professionals Use.'
It wasn't until I got home and started opening it that I saw a little bit of fine print on the side of the box: "not to be used in a professional capacity."