Equivalent to "the notebook with the fastest GPU we could find at half the power" is how I remember it...
I'm just not entirely certain what GPU performance does for me...? I don't work with video, there aren't any games, and I'm not playing them, anyway. Does iTerm2 scrolling get better?
I used to be quite happy with the GeForce 7xx(?) and tensorflow, and this seems like it would have quite a bit of power for ML. Unfortunately, the software just isn't there (yet?).
Well, no - they immediately followed the discrete laptop graphic comparison with a desktop graphic comparison, highlighting how much more power they draw for "the same" performance.
> Well, no - they immediately followed the discrete laptop graphic comparison with a desktop graphic comparison
pretty sure the comparison was with "the most powerful PC laptop we could find", which makes sense because they then talked about how much it was throttled when running only on battery while the new M1 is not.
That wasn't for desktop graphics, it was for a top-end laptop graphics SKU (I think RTX 3080 Mobile on a ~135W-150W TDP configuration?). Otherwise the graph would extend all the way to 360W for a RTX 3090.
The chart only shows a line up to about 105W, so it's not clear what they're trying to represent there. (Not that there's any question this seems to be way more efficient!)
And I think based on these numbers that a desktop 3090 would have well over double the performance of the M1 Max. It's apples to oranges, but lets not go crazy just yet.
Now, I am extremely excited to see what they will come up with for the Mac Pro with a desktop thermal budget. That might just blow everything else by any manufacturer completely out of the water.
GPU workloads are very parallel. By throwing more transistors at the problem while lowering clock rates you can get pretty good performance even in a constrained power budget.
M1 pro and max are very likely the fastest consumer CPUs in the world, despite being stuck in a 30-40w power envelope. Apple is embarrassing AMD and Intel engineers right now.
This, I currently run triple 24inch monitors in portrait off my work 2019 16" laptop rather smoothly. Unfortunately the M1 couldn't run it. The new 14 and 16 max can do triple 4k.
Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or
Up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max)
When they make those statements I'm always curious if they are expecting the user to use two external with the lid closed, or open (which would be 3 displays).
I've always found MacBooks don't play well when the lid is closed, but maybe that has changed?
Same. I am impressed with M1 Pro and M1 Max performance numbers. I ordered the new MBP to replace my 2020 M1 MBP, but I bought it with the base M1 Pro and I'm personally way more excited about 32gb, 1000 nits brightness, function row keys, etc.
They could have been optimizing for lower power consumption rather than more compute power. For example, the next iPhone chip will likely not be the most powerful when it comes to compute, even if it beats the other iPhone chips.
Maybe currently, but they are only on their second generation of laptop chips.
I guess going forward the current A-series chip will be lower power/performance than any reasonably recent M-series chip (given the power envelope difference).
Just so I don't misunderstand, does that mean I need XDR or will it work with any monitor? I was very surprised to see that the original M1 only supported one external monitor so just want to confirm before I press buy.
It will of course work with other monitors, but there aren't that many high res monitors out there. The Apple display is the only 6k monitor I know of. There are a few 5k monitors and lots of 4k monitors.
There's one 8k monitor from Dell, but I don't think it's supported by macOS yet.
It's their marketing term for their HDR tech. The XDR displays are their flagship media productivity monitors. The new screens in the 14/16 inch MacBooks have "XDR" tech as well.
Indeed. The M1 Max can drive 3 6K monitors and a 4K TV all at once. Why? Professional film editors and color graders. You can be working on the three 6K monitors and then Output your render to the 4K TV simultaneously
I’m assuming that running multiple 5-6k monitors will still require multiple cables/ports though. One thunderbolt port per monitor.
I’m still waiting for the day we can hook 2 5k monitors + peripherals up to a thunderbolt dock and then hook that up to a MacBook using a single cable.
MST is not supported and won't be supported, that's been Apple policy for some time now. Only Thunderbolt tunneling is supported for multiple screens on one output (which logically provides separate DP outputs, no MST)
- M1 Max SoC was highlighted (Connectivity: Display Support -> 33:50):
- Supports three XDR Pro Displays and a 4k television simultaneously
- "75 Million pixels of real estate."
- Highlighted still having free ports with this setup.
Since these won't ship in non-Apple products, I don't see really the point. They're only slightly ahead of AMD products when it comes to performance/watt, slightly behind performance/dollar (in an Apples to apples comparison on similarly configured laptops), and that's only because Apple is head of AMD at TSMC for new nodes, not because Apple has any inherent advantage.
I have huge respect for the PA Semi team, but they're basically wasting that talent if Apple only intends to silo their products into an increasingly smaller market. The government really needs to look into splitting Apple up to benefit shareholders and the general public.
OSX is less than 1/7th of the desktop OS market, and iOS is slightly over 1/4th of the phone market; the major cloud companies are the largest consumers of desktop and server scale CPUs, and buy mostly AMD with some Intel only when cluster compatibility requirements apply; when it is non-x86, it is a mix of things that do not include any Apple ARM offerings but do include larger scale higher performance ARM CPUs and some POWER as well.
The most used architectures of any kind (including embedded, industrial, and automotive) are MIPS, then ARM, then POWER/PowerPC, then x86. Apple is a tiny player in the overall ARM market, and by hyper-focusing on desktop and phone alone, they are giving up important opportunities to diversify their business.
At no point does "Apple will have plenty of customers" make sense in a context where Apple is a $2.45T company: either they have a large majority of possible customers in multiple industries at multiple levels, or reality is going to come crashing in and drive them back down to sub-$T levels. You cannot convince a company that only has a net income of $22B a year is worth that much, no matter how much "goodwill" and "brand recognition" and other nonsense intangibles they have. Steve Jobs died exactly ten years ago on Oct 5th, and the RDF died with him.
You are forgetting that GNU/Linux desktop will never happen, it is always going to be Windows or macOS for 98% of the world.
Even if we take ChromeOS and Android into account, ChromeOS is largely irrelevant outside North America school system, and Android will always be a phone OS.
In both cases, the Linux kernel is an implementation detail.
So that leaves Apple with its 10% market share for all creatives, which someone has to develop software for, and iOS devices, which also require developers to create said apps.
"They're only slightly ahead..." and "The government really needs to look into splitting Apple up to benefit shareholders and the general public." doesn't really seem to jive for me.
If they're only slightly ahead, what's the point of splitting them up when everyone else, in your analysis, is nearly on par or will soon be on par with them?
ARM going mainstream in powerful personal computers was exciting enough as it was, with the release of the Apple Silicon M1. With time hopefully these will be good to use with Linux.
> I have huge respect for the PA Semi team, but they're basically wasting that talent if Apple only intends to silo their products into an increasingly smaller market.
They design the SoCs in all iPhones and soon all Macs. They have the backing of a huge company with an unhealthy amount of money, and are free from a lot of constraints that come with having to sell a general-purpose CPUs to OEMs. They can work directly with the OS developers so that whatever fancy thing they put in their chips is used and has a real impact on release or shortly thereafter, and will be used by millions of users. Sounds much more exciting than working on the n-th Core generation at Intel. Look at how long it is taking for mainstream software to take advantage of vector extensions. I can’t see how that is wasting talent.
> The government really needs to look into splitting Apple up to benefit shareholders and the general public.
So that their chip guys become just another boring SoC designer?
Talk about killing the golden goose. Also, fuck the shareholders. The people who should matter are the users, and they seem quite happy with the products. Apple certainly has some unfair practices, but it’s difficult to argue that their CPUs are problematic.
This is a poorly considered take, no offense to you. I think you're failing to consider that Apple traditionally drives innovation in the computing market, and this will push a lot of other manufacturers to compete with them. AMD is already on the warpath, and Intel just got a massive kick in the pants.
There's other arguments against Apple being as big as it, but this isn't a good one. Tesla being huge and powerful has driven amazing EV innovation, for example, and Apple is in the same position in the computing market.
A lot of Apple fans keep saying Apple drives innovation, but I'd love to see where this has actually been true. Every example I've ever been given has a counter-example where someone else did it first and Apple did not do it in a way that conferred a market advantage; the only thing Apple has proven they're consistently better at is having a PR team that is also a cult.
Sure. Here's the basic pipeline: Somebody makes a cool piece of tech, but they don't have the UI/UX chops to make it work. Apple comes along and works some serious magic on the tech to make it attractive for everyday use. Other companies get their roadmap from Apple's release, and go from there.
Some examples:
Nice fonts on desktops
Smartphones
Tablets
Smartwatches (more debatable, but Apple did play a big part here)
In-house SOCs.
I suspect that their future AR offering is going to work the same way. The market is currently nascent, but Apple will make a market.
I think the 140w power adapter is to support fast charging, they mentioned charging to 50% capacity in 30 mins, I'd imagine power draw should be much less than 140w
Yeah, I don't know the peak power draw when everything's on 100% load, but I think (also thinking the efficiency of M1) 140W would keep charging even under highest load.
My guess is it will work like using a 65W adapter on a Mac that prefers 95W. It will charge if you're not doing much but it will drain the battery if you're going full tilt.
Just like USB-C cables can differ in capacity I’m finding a need to scrutinize my wall chargers more now. A bunch of white boxes but some can keep my MacBook Pro charged even when on all day calls and some can’t. With PD the size isn’t a great indicator anymore either.
Instead of having to replace the mag safe power brick for 85€ you can now just replace the cable for 55€.
However, it my personal experience, I've never had the cable fail, but I've had 2 mag safe power supplies fail (they started getting very hot while charging and at some point stopped working alltogether).
They share the core design, icestorm for efficiency cores and firestorm for performance cores, but these are recombined into entirely different systems on chip. To say the m1 max is the same as a14 is like saying a xeon is the same as an i3 because they both have skylake-derived cores.
The differences between the A14 and A15 are so small it doesn't matter. I suspect the CPU/GPU cores come from the A14 but the ProRes accelerator comes from the A15.
>The differences between the A14 and A15 are so small it doesn't matter.
The testing shows increases in performance and power efficiency.
>Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here – usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17% on the peak performance states versus the A14. If we had been able to measure both SoCs at the same performance level, this efficiency advantage of the A15 would grow even larger. In our initial coverage of Apple’s announcement, we theorised that the company might possibly invested into energy efficiency rather than performance increases this year, and I’m glad to see that seemingly this is exactly what has happened, explaining some of the more conservative (at least for Apple) performance improvements.
On an adjacent note, with a score of 7.28 in the integer suite, Apple’s A15 P-core is on equal footing with AMD’s Zen3-based Ryzen 5950X with a score of 7.29, and ahead of M1 with a score of 6.66.
Seems reasonable. They still sell the Intel Mac mini, despite having an M1 powered Mac mini already. The Intel one uses the old “black aluminum means pro” design language of the iMac Pro. Feels like they are keeping it as a placeholder in their line up and will end up with two Apple silicon powered Mac mini’s, One consumer and one pro
I doubt that we'll see a really powerful Mac Mini anytime soon. Why? Because it would cannibalize the MacBook Pro when combined with an iPad (sidecar).
Most professionals needing pro laptops use the portability to move between studio environments or sets (e.g home and work). The Mini is still portable enough to be carried in a backpack, and the iPad can do enough on it's own to be viable for lighter coffee shop based work.
Not many would do highend production work outside a studio or set without additional periphery, meaning that highend performance of the new MBP isn't needed for very mobile situations.
A powerful mini and an iPad would therefore be the much better logical choice vs. a highend MacBook Pro. There where you need the power there's most likely a power outlet and room for a Mini.
For myself, my iPad Pro actually covers all use cases that I would need a laptop for, so my current Macbook Pro is just in clamshell mode on my desk 100% of the time. That's why I would love to replace it with an M1 Max Mac Mini.
iPad + keyboard has a battery and can be enough for most tasks you'd do outside an office, set or studio environment when away from your other pro periphery. You wouldn't cut movies on the trackpad within a coffe shop if you're used to doing it with a mouse and other tools inside a studio. That's what I mean.
There were rumors that it was supposed to be today. Given that it wasn't, I now expect it to be quite a while before they do. I was really looking forward to it.
The benchmark to power consumption comparisons were very interesting. It seemed very un-Apple to be making such direct comparisons to competitors, especially when the Razer Blade Advanced had slightly better performance with far higher power consumption. I feel like typically Apple just says "Fastest we've ever made, it's so thin, so many nits, you'll love it" and leaves it at that.
I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart when people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for me to give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively to linux for the past couple years.
Apple almost single-handedly made computing devices non-repairable or upgradable; across their own product line and the industry in general due to their outsized influence.
>According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.”
The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro
Just today I got one 6s and one iPhone 7 screen repaired(6s got the glass replaced, the 7 got full assembly replaced) and battery of the 6s replaced at a shop that is not authorized by Apple. It cost me 110$ in total.
Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using an SSD and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon.
What’s that narrative that Apple devices are not upgradable or repairable?
It simply not true. If anything, Apple devices are the easiest to get serviced since there are not many models and pretty much all repair shops can deal with all devices that are still usable. Because of this, even broken Apple devices are sold and bought all the time.
>Just today I got one 6s and one iPhone 7 screen repaired
Nice, except doing a screen replacement on a modern iPhone like the 13 series will disable your FaceID making your iPhone pretty much worthless.
>Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using an SSD and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon
Nice, but on the modern Macbooks, the SSD is soldered and not replaceable. There is no way to upgrade them or replace them if they break, so you just have to throw away the whole laptop.
So yea, parent was right, Apple devices are the worst for reparability period since the ones you're talking about are not manufactured anymore therefore don't represent the current state of affairs and the ones that are manufactured today are built to not be repaired.
Hardware people are crafty, they find ways to transfer and combine working parts. The glass replacement(keeping the original LCD) I got for the 6S is not a procedure provided by Apple. Guess who doesn’t care? The repair shop that bought a machine from China for separating and re-assembly of the Glass and LCD.
Screen replacement is 50$, glass replacement is 30$.
iPhone 13 is very new, give it a few years and the hardware people will leverage the desire of not spending 1000$ on a new phone when the current one works fine except for that broken part.
By changing chips. There are already procedures for fun stuff like upgrading the RAM on the non-retina MacBook Airs to 16GB. Apple never offered 16GB version off that laptop but you can have it[0].
You clearly don't have a clue how modern Apple HW is built and why stuff that you're talking about on old Apple HW just won't work anymore on the machines build today.
I'm talking about 2020 devices where you can't just "change the chips" and hope it works like in the 2015 model from the video you posted.
I know Luis, he made a career of complaining that it's impossible to repair Apple devices when repairing Apple devices.
Instead of watching videos and getting angry about Apple devices being impossible to repair, I get my Apple devices repaired when something breaks. Significantly more productive approach, you should try it.
Louis makes "Apple impossible to repair" videos since ever. It's not an iPhone 13 thing, give it a few year and you can claim that iPhone 17 impossible to repair, unlike the prehistoric iPhone 13.
He recently moved to a new larger shop in attempt to grew his Apple repair operations. Then had to move back to a smaller shop because as it turns out, it wasn't Apple who is ruining his repair business.
> I would love to be enlightened about the new physics that Apple is using which is out of reach to the other engineers.
That’s known as private-public key crypto with keys burnt into efuses on-die on the SoC.
You can’t get around that (except for that one dude in Shenzhen who just drills into the SoC and solders wires by hand which happen to hit the right spots). But generally, no regular third party repair shop will find a way around this.
I know about it, it simply means that someone will build a device that automates the thing that the dude in Shenzhen does or they will mix and match devices that have different kind of damage. I.e. if a phone that has destroyed screen(irreparable) will donate its parts to phones that have the face id lens broken.
You know, these encryption authentications work between ICs and not between lenses and motors. Keep the coded IC, change the coil. Things also have different breaking modes, for example a screen might break down due to the glass failure(which cannot be coded) and the repair shop can replace the broken assembly part when keeping the IC that ensures the communication with the mainboard. Too complicated for a street shop? Someone will build a service that does it B2B, shops will ship it ti them, they will ship it back leaving only the installation to the street shop.
Possibilities are endless. Some easier some harder but we are talking about talent that makes all kind of replicas of all kind of devices. With billions of iPhones out there, it's actually very lucrative market to be able to salvage 1000USD device, their margins could be even better than the margins of Apple when they charge 100USD to change the glass of the LCD assembly.
You don't. It's a technological progress similar to one where we lost our ability to repair transistors with introduction of chips. If this doesn't work for you you should stick with the old tech, I think the Russians did something like that on their soviet era plane electronics. There are also audiophiles who don't even switch to transistor and use vacuum tubes. Also the Amish who stick to the horses and candles who choose to preserve their way of doing things and avoid the problems of electricity and powered machinery.
You will need to make a choice sometimes. Often you can't have small efficient and repairable all the time.
Only if Apple wants to let them as far as I have seen. The software won't even let you swap screens between iPhone 13s. Maybe people will find a work around, but it seems like Apple is trying its hardest to prevent it.
And yet they authorize shops to perform these repairs. They’re not trying to prevent repairs, they’re trying to ensure repairs use Apple-supplied parts. Which, sure, you may object to that… but it’s very different from saying they’re preventing repairs full stop. And there’s very little chance such an effort would do anything other than destroy good will.
> Nice, but on the modern Macbooks, the SSD is soldered and not replaceable. There is no way to upgrade them or replace them if they break, so you just have to throw away the whole laptop.
I mean, you can replace the logic board. Wasteful, sure, but there's no need to throw out the whole thing.
True, but you are talking about devices that are 4-6 years old. Storage is now soldered. Ram has been soldered for a while now, and with Apple Silicon its part of the SoC.
not that I've heard of anyone popping out a DIMM over time, but I'd rather pop it back in rather than having to ship it to a repair shop with BGA workstation to replace if a DRAM chip develops fault over time.
newer MacBooks have both the SSD and RAM soldered on board, it's no longer user upgradable, unless you have a BGA rework station and knows how to operate it.
In modern Apple laptops (2018 and later), the storage is soldered as the memory has been since 2015. Contrast this with a Dell XPS 15 you can buy today within which you can upgrade/replace both the memory and the storage. This is the case with most Windows laptops. The exception is usually the super thin ones that solder in RAM Apple-style, but there are some others that do as well.
There's also the fact that Apple does things like integrate the display connector into the panel part. So, if it fails - like when Apple made it too short with the 2016 and 2017 Macbook Pros causing the flexgate controversy - it requires replacing a $600 part instead of a $6 one.
Apparently, you didn't compare Apple devices with what the bulk of the market consists of.
Also, implying that repairability is required for environmental sustainability is questionable at best. People in their vast majority tend to get rid of 5 years old phones and laptops.
I'm still daily driving a 2015MBP. Got the battery replaced, free under warranty, a few years ago. Running lates MacOS without any issues
The phones in my family are an iPhone 6S, iPhone 8 and an iPhone XS. All running the latest iOS. The 6S got a battery swap for 50€, others still going strong.
Similar with tablets, we have three and the latest one is a 2017 iPad Pro. All running the latest iPadOS.
Stuff doesn't need to be repairable and upgradable if it can outlast the competition by a factor of two while still staying on the latest official OS update.
Can't do that with any Android device. A 6 year old PC laptop might still be relevant though.
FWIW, they are in general quite accurate with their ballpark performance figures. I expect the actual power/performance curves to be similar to that they showed. Which is interesting, because IIRC on the plots from Nuvia before they were bought their cores had a similar profile. It would be exciting if Qualcomm could have something good for a change.
> I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart when people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for me to give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively to linux for the past couple years.
I really enjoy linux as a development environment, but this is going to be VERY difficult to compete with..
I think that for the first time, Apple has a real performance differentiator in its laptops. They want to highlight that.
If Apple is buying Intel CPUs, there's no reason making direct performance comparisons to competitors. They're all building out of the same parts bin. They would want to talk about the form factor and the display - areas where they could often out-do competitors. Now there's actually something to talk about with the CPU/GPU/hardware-performance.
I think Apple is also making the comparison to push something else: performance + lifestyle. For me, the implication is that I can buy an Intel laptop that's nicely portable, but a lot slower; I could also buy an Intel laptop that's just as fast, but requires two power adapters to satisfy its massive power drain and really doesn't work as a laptop at all. Or I can buy a MacBook Pro which has the power of the heavy, non-portable Intel laptops while sipping less power than the nicely portable ones. I don't have to make a trade-off between performance and portability.
I think people picked apart the comparisons on the M1 and were pretty satisfied. 6-8 M1 performance cores will offer a nice performance boost over 4 M1 performance cores and we basically know how those cores benchmark already.
I'd also note that there are efforts to get Linux on Apple Silicon.
Apple used to do these performance comparisons a lot when they were on the PowerPC architecture. Essentially they tried to show that PowerPC-based Macs were faster (or as fast as) Intel-based PCs for the stuff that users wanted to do, like web browsing, Photoshop, movie editing, etc.
This kind of fell by the wayside after switching to Intel, for obvious reasons: the chips weren’t differentiators anymore.
As is typical for apple, the phrasing is somewhat intentionally misleading (like my favorite apple announcement - "introducing the best iphone yet" - as if other companies are going backwards?). The wording is of course carefully chosen to be technically true, but to the average consumer, this might imply that these are more powerful than any CPU apple has ever offered (which of course is not true).
...or just released the full documentation for them. Apple being Apple and wanting full control over its users, I don't see that happening. I really don't care how fast or efficient these are, if they're not publicly documented all I think is "oh no, more proprietary crap". Apple might even make more $$$ if it wanted to open up, but it doesn't.
I mean the documentation of the SoC itself. The thousands (or perhaps tens of thousands) of pages of information about every register and peripheral on it.
MacBook announcements are the opposite of slow news days. Consumer tech outlets are literally scrambling to cover every aspect of these things because there is so much interest.
Great update, I think Apple did the right thing by ignoring developers this time. 70% of their customers are either creatives who rely on proprietary apps, or people who just want a bigger iPhone. Those people will be really happy with this upgrade, but I have to wonder what the other 30% is thinking. It'll be interesting to see how Apple continues to slowly shut out portions of their prosumer market in the interest of making A Better Laptop.
I certainly don't feel ignored as a developer by this update. The memory capacity and speed bump, and the brighter, higher resolution screen are very significant for me. My M1 Air is already a killer portable development machine because of how cool and quietly (silent) it runs. The 14" looks like a perfect upgrade for me.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 395 ms ] threadI'm just not entirely certain what GPU performance does for me...? I don't work with video, there aren't any games, and I'm not playing them, anyway. Does iTerm2 scrolling get better?
I used to be quite happy with the GeForce 7xx(?) and tensorflow, and this seems like it would have quite a bit of power for ML. Unfortunately, the software just isn't there (yet?).
https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/
pretty sure the comparison was with "the most powerful PC laptop we could find", which makes sense because they then talked about how much it was throttled when running only on battery while the new M1 is not.
The chart only shows a line up to about 105W, so it's not clear what they're trying to represent there. (Not that there's any question this seems to be way more efficient!)
Now, I am extremely excited to see what they will come up with for the Mac Pro with a desktop thermal budget. That might just blow everything else by any manufacturer completely out of the water.
TDP, TDP, TDP!
With big enough heatsink, the performance can be proportionally high (perf = sqrt(TDP))
Kind of wild to consider given how long it has taken to get here with the graveyard of Apple laptops in my closet.
Feels like I’ll have to pay a lot for that 3rd monitor!
Up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Pro) or Up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors (M1 Max)
I've always found MacBooks don't play well when the lid is closed, but maybe that has changed?
I guess going forward the current A-series chip will be lower power/performance than any reasonably recent M-series chip (given the power envelope difference).
What does that mean?
There's one 8k monitor from Dell, but I don't think it's supported by macOS yet.
No mention of MST though.
I’m still waiting for the day we can hook 2 5k monitors + peripherals up to a thunderbolt dock and then hook that up to a MacBook using a single cable.
Also specific statements:
- M1 Pro SoC supports two XDR Pro Display
- M1 Max SoC was highlighted (Connectivity: Display Support -> 33:50):
I have huge respect for the PA Semi team, but they're basically wasting that talent if Apple only intends to silo their products into an increasingly smaller market. The government really needs to look into splitting Apple up to benefit shareholders and the general public.
Apple will have plenty of customers.
The most used architectures of any kind (including embedded, industrial, and automotive) are MIPS, then ARM, then POWER/PowerPC, then x86. Apple is a tiny player in the overall ARM market, and by hyper-focusing on desktop and phone alone, they are giving up important opportunities to diversify their business.
At no point does "Apple will have plenty of customers" make sense in a context where Apple is a $2.45T company: either they have a large majority of possible customers in multiple industries at multiple levels, or reality is going to come crashing in and drive them back down to sub-$T levels. You cannot convince a company that only has a net income of $22B a year is worth that much, no matter how much "goodwill" and "brand recognition" and other nonsense intangibles they have. Steve Jobs died exactly ten years ago on Oct 5th, and the RDF died with him.
Even if we take ChromeOS and Android into account, ChromeOS is largely irrelevant outside North America school system, and Android will always be a phone OS.
In both cases, the Linux kernel is an implementation detail.
So that leaves Apple with its 10% market share for all creatives, which someone has to develop software for, and iOS devices, which also require developers to create said apps.
Everyone else will stay on Windows as always.
If they're only slightly ahead, what's the point of splitting them up when everyone else, in your analysis, is nearly on par or will soon be on par with them?
They design the SoCs in all iPhones and soon all Macs. They have the backing of a huge company with an unhealthy amount of money, and are free from a lot of constraints that come with having to sell a general-purpose CPUs to OEMs. They can work directly with the OS developers so that whatever fancy thing they put in their chips is used and has a real impact on release or shortly thereafter, and will be used by millions of users. Sounds much more exciting than working on the n-th Core generation at Intel. Look at how long it is taking for mainstream software to take advantage of vector extensions. I can’t see how that is wasting talent.
> The government really needs to look into splitting Apple up to benefit shareholders and the general public.
So that their chip guys become just another boring SoC designer? Talk about killing the golden goose. Also, fuck the shareholders. The people who should matter are the users, and they seem quite happy with the products. Apple certainly has some unfair practices, but it’s difficult to argue that their CPUs are problematic.
There's other arguments against Apple being as big as it, but this isn't a good one. Tesla being huge and powerful has driven amazing EV innovation, for example, and Apple is in the same position in the computing market.
Some examples:
Nice fonts on desktops
Smartphones
Tablets
Smartwatches (more debatable, but Apple did play a big part here)
In-house SOCs.
I suspect that their future AR offering is going to work the same way. The market is currently nascent, but Apple will make a market.
Wait huh? My current 16" Intel Core i9 is only 95watts. Does this mean all my existing USB-C power infrastructure won't work?
However, it my personal experience, I've never had the cable fail, but I've had 2 mag safe power supplies fail (they started getting very hot while charging and at some point stopped working alltogether).
Does “M1” == “A14” or does it mean “M1” == “5nm TSMC node”?
The testing shows increases in performance and power efficiency.
>Apple A15 performance cores are extremely impressive here – usually increases in performance always come with some sort of deficit in efficiency, or at least flat efficiency. Apple here instead has managed to reduce power whilst increasing performance, meaning energy efficiency is improved by 17% on the peak performance states versus the A14. If we had been able to measure both SoCs at the same performance level, this efficiency advantage of the A15 would grow even larger. In our initial coverage of Apple’s announcement, we theorised that the company might possibly invested into energy efficiency rather than performance increases this year, and I’m glad to see that seemingly this is exactly what has happened, explaining some of the more conservative (at least for Apple) performance improvements.
On an adjacent note, with a score of 7.28 in the integer suite, Apple’s A15 P-core is on equal footing with AMD’s Zen3-based Ryzen 5950X with a score of 7.29, and ahead of M1 with a score of 6.66.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-perfo...
Having your phone chip be on par with single core Zen 3 performance is pretty impressive.
Most professionals needing pro laptops use the portability to move between studio environments or sets (e.g home and work). The Mini is still portable enough to be carried in a backpack, and the iPad can do enough on it's own to be viable for lighter coffee shop based work.
Not many would do highend production work outside a studio or set without additional periphery, meaning that highend performance of the new MBP isn't needed for very mobile situations.
A powerful mini and an iPad would therefore be the much better logical choice vs. a highend MacBook Pro. There where you need the power there's most likely a power outlet and room for a Mini.
I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart when people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for me to give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively to linux for the past couple years.
>According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.”
The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/251046-ifixit-labels-s...
Basically, they can only change a few components (keyboard, display (with assembly), motherboard, and probably the aluminium case), but that's it.
It's made to be thrown away, instead of repaired.
Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using an SSD and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon.
What’s that narrative that Apple devices are not upgradable or repairable?
It simply not true. If anything, Apple devices are the easiest to get serviced since there are not many models and pretty much all repair shops can deal with all devices that are still usable. Because of this, even broken Apple devices are sold and bought all the time.
Nice, except doing a screen replacement on a modern iPhone like the 13 series will disable your FaceID making your iPhone pretty much worthless.
>Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using an SSD and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon
Nice, but on the modern Macbooks, the SSD is soldered and not replaceable. There is no way to upgrade them or replace them if they break, so you just have to throw away the whole laptop.
So yea, parent was right, Apple devices are the worst for reparability period since the ones you're talking about are not manufactured anymore therefore don't represent the current state of affairs and the ones that are manufactured today are built to not be repaired.
Screen replacement is 50$, glass replacement is 30$.
iPhone 13 is very new, give it a few years and the hardware people will leverage the desire of not spending 1000$ on a new phone when the current one works fine except for that broken part.
if there’s a demand there would be a response.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgEfMzMxX5E
I'm talking about 2020 devices where you can't just "change the chips" and hope it works like in the 2015 model from the video you posted.
Modern Apple devices aren't repairable anymore.
/s
Anyway, people are crafty and engineering is not an Apple-exclusive trade. believe it or not, Apple can’t do anything about the laws of physics.
Watch Luis Rosmann on youtube.
Instead of watching videos and getting angry about Apple devices being impossible to repair, I get my Apple devices repaired when something breaks. Significantly more productive approach, you should try it.
Your old Apple devices, that are known to be vert easy to repair. You wouldn't be so confident with the latest gear.
But why spoil it for you? Let's talk in a few year when you find it out the hard way on your own skin.
Here is a video from 2013, him complaining that Apple doesn't let people repair their products: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdlZ1HgFvxI
He recently moved to a new larger shop in attempt to grew his Apple repair operations. Then had to move back to a smaller shop because as it turns out, it wasn't Apple who is ruining his repair business.
That’s known as private-public key crypto with keys burnt into efuses on-die on the SoC.
You can’t get around that (except for that one dude in Shenzhen who just drills into the SoC and solders wires by hand which happen to hit the right spots). But generally, no regular third party repair shop will find a way around this.
You know, these encryption authentications work between ICs and not between lenses and motors. Keep the coded IC, change the coil. Things also have different breaking modes, for example a screen might break down due to the glass failure(which cannot be coded) and the repair shop can replace the broken assembly part when keeping the IC that ensures the communication with the mainboard. Too complicated for a street shop? Someone will build a service that does it B2B, shops will ship it ti them, they will ship it back leaving only the installation to the street shop.
Possibilities are endless. Some easier some harder but we are talking about talent that makes all kind of replicas of all kind of devices. With billions of iPhones out there, it's actually very lucrative market to be able to salvage 1000USD device, their margins could be even better than the margins of Apple when they charge 100USD to change the glass of the LCD assembly.
You will need to make a choice sometimes. Often you can't have small efficient and repairable all the time.
I mean, you can replace the logic board. Wasteful, sure, but there's no need to throw out the whole thing.
Only if you go to someone who isn't an authorised Apple repairer.
As far as I understand, the less components and heat, the longer the electronics keep working.
There's also the fact that Apple does things like integrate the display connector into the panel part. So, if it fails - like when Apple made it too short with the 2016 and 2017 Macbook Pros causing the flexgate controversy - it requires replacing a $600 part instead of a $6 one.
Also, implying that repairability is required for environmental sustainability is questionable at best. People in their vast majority tend to get rid of 5 years old phones and laptops.
The phones in my family are an iPhone 6S, iPhone 8 and an iPhone XS. All running the latest iOS. The 6S got a battery swap for 50€, others still going strong.
Similar with tablets, we have three and the latest one is a 2017 iPad Pro. All running the latest iPadOS.
Stuff doesn't need to be repairable and upgradable if it can outlast the competition by a factor of two while still staying on the latest official OS update.
Can't do that with any Android device. A 6 year old PC laptop might still be relevant though.
I really enjoy linux as a development environment, but this is going to be VERY difficult to compete with..
https://asahilinux.org/
If Apple is buying Intel CPUs, there's no reason making direct performance comparisons to competitors. They're all building out of the same parts bin. They would want to talk about the form factor and the display - areas where they could often out-do competitors. Now there's actually something to talk about with the CPU/GPU/hardware-performance.
I think Apple is also making the comparison to push something else: performance + lifestyle. For me, the implication is that I can buy an Intel laptop that's nicely portable, but a lot slower; I could also buy an Intel laptop that's just as fast, but requires two power adapters to satisfy its massive power drain and really doesn't work as a laptop at all. Or I can buy a MacBook Pro which has the power of the heavy, non-portable Intel laptops while sipping less power than the nicely portable ones. I don't have to make a trade-off between performance and portability.
I think people picked apart the comparisons on the M1 and were pretty satisfied. 6-8 M1 performance cores will offer a nice performance boost over 4 M1 performance cores and we basically know how those cores benchmark already.
I'd also note that there are efforts to get Linux on Apple Silicon.
This kind of fell by the wayside after switching to Intel, for obvious reasons: the chips weren’t differentiators anymore.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XjkoYlpf3EA
Excuse my ignorance, what is?
I imagine there could me many, many innovative products built with these chips if Apple sold them and supported Linux (or even Windows).
If these were available for others to buy, I think we would be very surprised by the innovative new devices people would invent.
HN: 54 points
Slow news day.
On HN you probably don't have to though. Lots of fans of Apple things here.
What is missing for you as a developer?