Do any deep learning frameworks even have metal support? I could see inference working well on these laptops but they lack so much of the specialized hardware I'd be surprised if training was even possible for most useable models.
"Recently Apple released the new M1 "system on a chip," which not only contains a built-in GPU, but also includes a 16-core "Neural Engine" which supports 11 trillion operations per second. Apple claims the Neural Engine will support up to 15x improvement in ML computation."
The neural engine seems to be only about inference. For training it seems most systems rely on Metal like the Apple Tensorflow plugin [1]. But I have never tried to do ML on macs so I am maybe wrong.
Do people really train locally? I'd have thought the field moved to aws or some other hpc by now. Seems like a waste buying such a nice laptop to just melt and abuse it when you can abuse amazon's hardware instead. The battery won't be happy being discharged every day since it seems like in my experience macbooks don't bypass the battery when on ac power unless you start the computer up with the batty unplugged (not so easy on newer computers)
So basically apple just went back to the things they tried to fix that weren't broken and then messed up the aesthetics by making it a design from 2010 and added a notch. Why do they do this. Does the design team not understand how to design macbook pros ?
If it disturbs you, there will sure be a software that moves the menu bar below and makes the top black. This is a Mac and not an iOS device after all.
I’ll take the extra pixels.
No i meant they were right to just put back what wasnt broken. I guess I have worded it wrong. I am just complaining about the design team putting the notch.
> So basically apple just went back to the things they tried to fix that weren't broken and then messed up the aesthetics by making it a design from 2010 and added a notch.
"Apple corrected nearly everything about their laptop design that people complain about, used a design this is considered by some to be the best MBP design ever [1], and put a small intrusion on the screen in the least-used-possible spot in order to provide more overall screen real estate. Why does Apple hate us?"
Everything they’ve said about the new MacBook Pros is extremely promising, but they had to add a notch to the screen. Just why? All for the sake of reducing the top screen border by a couple of millimeters.
Top-Center is among the most useless screen real estate. It takes just about the same amount of space as the keyboard language selector a bit to the right, or any one of the menu items to the left. And those two interface never fill up to the point where they need that center spot (or I'd be cleaning out those mostly annoying gadgets top-left).
The vertical screen space they might have freed by adding a notch was immediately taken by increasing the top bar height. I don’t see a purpose for such a trade off.
My Thinpak P1 has a moveable mechanical shutter I can move to physically block the camera lense. I don't see how you could do that reasonably with a notch design.
Before that on previous laptop models I used a post-it note or a piece of paper held in place with a clothes pin.
With the notch design you can't do that either without blocking parts of the UI!
> With the notch design you can't do that either without blocking parts of the UI!
I thought I was following until this part. Why couldn't you just put a post-it or whatever over the camera itself? There are no pixels where the camera is (although I would be surprised if this is not something under active research).
Oh, looking more closely the notch is actually quite wide - yeah, that might be doable to fit a post it over it. Still a lot less maneuvering space for that than on a normal laptop.
I'm sure someone will leap in to correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think the LED "camera on" indicator is purely hardware on modern MacBook Pros -- you can't override it in software -- and I doubt that's changed with this one. So I'm not sure how big a deal this would actually be in practice.
(I would probably go for a bit of black electrical tape if I were really worried about that, though.)
Top centre is where Gnome Shell on my Fedora install shows time, notification indicator and application notification icons (hexchat, Steam, etc.). Hardly an useless part of the screen!
MBPs are designed for macOS, if other OSes do other things with the hardware, that's on them. Why should Apple care when probably 99% of their users (if not more) are exclusively using macOS on the hardware with other OSes in VMs?
Can you make Gnome Shell do something else, then? Or if you don't want the extra pixels, I'm sure you could arrange it so that your OS does not use them.
Try this: Instead of thinking "Boo, they took away part of the screen with a notch" think "Yay! They extended the screen a few mm on either side of the camera"
If you want to join us in the cult of Mac, learning little contortions like that will make you a lot happier.
I remember naively asking on the Mac forums once, whether there was any way to have the laptop lid closed in Mac OS without putting the laptop to sleep.
Of course not, I was told. Apple's laptops use a superior thermal design, which could damage the laptop if the lid is closed while it's left running. Who would want to do that anyway? Better to have good cooling.
I didn't even bother to reply and mention the fact that my Windows install on the same laptop allowed it without complaint.
This was in around 2012, maybe attitudes have changed. This isn't my thread, but shows what responses to the question were like at the time: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2805582
You only have to go a few responses into that thread to get an explanation that the action of closing the lid will trigger sleep, but an external keyboard and mouse will wake it back up, allowing for the machine to be used while closed. You may not have originally intended to make the distinction between having the lid closed vs. the process of closing the lid, but it's clearly the former you were worried about, and that use case has always been supported.
For whatever it's worth, I've run my MacBook Pros in "clamshell" mode (e.g., lid closed, connected to an external monitor and keyboard) all the time -- I did it with every work Mac laptop I've had and with my personal one back when I was using it as a desktop. I know there's lots of "never do this with a MacBook it will overheat!" advice out there, but it was just never an issue for me, and this was across enough different devices and generations that I don't think I was just consistently lucky. Are you describing something else, e.g., closing the laptop lid without connecting an external display and preventing it from going to sleep?
I never had an issue with that when I was using Windows work laptops, either, except that I recall both ThinkBooks that I had seemed to have about a 50% chance of a full kernel panic style crash when I unplugged the external display. This was back when ThinkBook was an IBM brand, though, and IIRC I was running Windows XP on both.
This was back around 2012, and it looks like not sleeping when the lid is closed is officially an option in the power settings now, so it sounds like things have changed. Although I don't think overheating was ever a real problem in the first place. With my 2012 MacBook Pro when the screen is closed, the air from the vents can still escape out behind the screen.
I remember clamshell mode working in 2006. Didn’t use it much though, was afraid it would fry my Macbook Pro. You could boil an egg on the first Intel Macbook Pros.
But it takes the menu bar space, which is already scarce even without the notch. Some people may have many app icons and "widgets" (e.g. iStat Menus) on the menu bar.
I hated the idea when it came around for the iPhone - but actually using one showed me that it just isn't an issue. There's a status bar at the top anyhow, and the center of it is unused.
On a laptop, I see it as just extra pixels dedicated to the OS's status bar.
If I were to hazard a guess, it's more of a brand recognition thing - now you don't even have to see the apple on the back to know someone's using a macbook.
> If I were to hazard a guess, it's more of a brand recognition thing - now you don't even have to see the apple on the back to know someone's using a macbook.
The intuition driving your hazarded "guess" is unerring.
A recent leaker called out the notch which brought renewed attention to a different leaker, ty98, who mentions notch (and other details) as early as August. [0]
Coupled with confirmation of ty98's leak that there is "No "MacBook Pro" logo on the bottom bezel", the MacBook Pro notch may very well be a branding element.
Instant visual recognition without using words. The notch is branding that transcends language.
I agree. I finally upgraded from a Iphone SE to a 12 Mini. The notch is horrible and I’m not sure why people wave it away with “I got used to it”. I’ve had it for months. No idea what lunatic at Apple thought it would be nice for a laptop.
Can’t they come up with something a little more original than removing screen real estate to stand out?
I will be switching back to an SE just based on how overall unwieldy the new phone is. The notch is just one of the nails in the coffin.
The notch to me says, “now I know which products not to buy”.
It's a macbook though. You can just write a program that moves your screen down a millimeter or however much and live your life notch free with peace of mind.
Not holding my breath, it's been almost 5 years without a working CUDA shim. Hopefully this will push that work over the edge though. If I had the relevant skills I'd contribute...
So, now we know that LPDDR5 will be coming with at least 16GB per die stack. A doubling from LPDDR4. One package = 128 bit, a double of regular DIMM I/O width.
I see, it's not too much behind even HBM2, of which we may never see a mobile variant.
I was long pointing to people making laptops that LPDDR4 is much cheaper than DIMMs in overall, despite nominal per-GB cost being higher.
The elimination of manual assembly, termination, extra through hole parts, along with LPDDR actually taking less PCB area, less layers, and being less demanding of the PCB material easily compensates for higher chip cost.
I was laughing when every single one of these changes was presented as "revolutionary" in the keynote. No, you just had to revert everything because your previous revolution was universally hated by users.
"Provably wrong"? On the contrary, if it wasn't a small minority, Apple wouldn't have continued to break sales records with each iteration they release.
I posit that "hate" is too strong a word. I would describe the changes as merely unpopular.
I think he meant "hate" is too strong of a word. My impression is it just didn't serve much of a purpose for most people. I almost never use the function keys for anything but volume control anyway, and probably wouldn't have used the touch bar for anything but that either. It was just a waste. I probably wouldn't have hated it if I got one, maybe even found some nice uses for it, but I still think it was the right choice to get rid of it.
It was even worse. Those macbook owners would cause the others in the meeting to be annoyed when they couldn’t plug in and had to send their slides to someone else with a hdmi port and keep repeating the words “next slide”. It was viral annoyance.
My employer issues a dongle with a type A, type C, and HDMI port on it with every MacBook. That only helps if you actually have the dongle with you. One popular option was to just keep the dongle attached at all times. Personally, I found an adhesive pouch and attached that to the back of the monitor, and carried the dongle around that way.
I wonder when I'll be able to get one of these new Macs at work ...
At my office they just gave up and replaced the HDMI connectors with USB-C connectors in every meeting room. Now it's the people with the older windows laptops who need a dongle.
Power users forget that function keys and even command shortcuts are pretty much useless for normal users.
>About 90 per cent of computer users don't use CTRL-F to search for a word - as they don't know such a keyboard shortcut exists, a Google survey found.
The results stunned Google's Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness, Dan Russell.
I think we just all assume that we all know it, but no one actually does."
I personally think if it was just a vocal minority, Apple would not have relented. They play the long game, so they probably saw a decrease in their user base somewhere, or at least a trend there.
Ignoring that none of the changes was presented as "revolutionary" (the touchbar wasn't mentioned, magsafe was referred to as "Brought back", and the ports were simply noted for convenience), for some small but very loud subset of HN users, an Apple event is all a giant lie if it apparently isn't hosted by some sneering Apple detractor.
It's an Apple product launch. Like every product launch ever in the history of ever, they point out the features of the thing they launch.
> They'd be dumb to pause and say "oh yeah we were stupid, here's your old toys back."
Maybe I'm weird, but my respect for a company that did that would go way up, not down.
Obviously they wouldn't say "we were stupid", but I'd absolutely appreciate an admission along the lines of, "during our design journey over the past X years, we've realized our customers prefer having a full function key row on their keyboard / more ports / MagSafe / etc., so we've listened and are bringing them back!" To me, that signals a group of folks who know they are fallible, listen to customers, and do their best to meet customer needs.
But of course admitting those sorts of things wouldn't be consistent with Apple's brand. Apple is all about "we know better than you know what you want and can do no wrong". Which is fine, and seems to have created a lot of success for them, but it's always turned me off.
> Maybe I'm weird, but my respect for a company that did that would go way up, not down.
I think technically-minded people would take that well, but the business/management types don't like doing stuff like this, likely because it has a chance of making the stock fall (or even just not rise as much as they wanted it to).
I had the feeling they owned it. Like, the woman said something about "no need for adapters" and you could have maybe seen a little smirk on her face while saying that - but I don't know...
they listened to customers and reverted a lot of bad decisions from the past. What else do you want? That they admit they made bad decisions in what is essentially a sales event/pitch? This is more than anyone could have hoped for imo.
I know I'm in the minority regarding the keyboard, but on my 2019 model it's been flawless and I really have come to like it quite a bit, more than the one on my 2014 even (except for the vertical arrow keys that is. Seems like nobody at Apple actually tested their usability)
No, it's the 13" with butterfly switches. The only thing I worried about was dependability but they added the extra rubber membranes that year (I think) and anyway, the keyboard has caused me zero issues, and made every other keyboard feel clunky to me, including my previous favorite keyboard on my 2013 15" MBP.
I have owned macbooks only since 2017 and found the older (2011 era) aesthetic design to be bulky and not too appealing. I own a 2020 model, which looks sharp and professional. I don't like them going back to this rounded edges on the bottom. I love everything else, except this simple gripe over aesthetics.
All the time. The Macbook pro is meant to be for pros, pros care about other things like having physical function keys over it having a "light blue color that matches my shirt :)".
I haven't bought a Macbook since 2016 bc of all the trash they've been doing. A laptop without magsafe would last ~2 weeks in my household, so just that thing makes it for me.
Also, best battery, best screen, best trackpad, ports. Assuming nothing weird comes out later (screen or thermal issues) this will be the best laptop on the market for the next 10 years.
I miss the 2012 model every time I use the 2018 model I own now. One was peak Apple design everything worked, was robust, and just genuinely pleasant to use. The other rock bottom form over function with a disastrous keyboard that I never got used to with it's crap layout, lack of essential keys, shitty cheap feel, etc. And that was before it started having the well publicized issues.
I like that they are going back to basics with the new models. Not crazy about the notch but otherwise it is all good. Decent screen, memory and ssd are super expensive but at least there's plenty of it now.
I'll wait a few months to see if their quality levels are back where they should be. Because I'm beyond taking their word for it after my last experience. I'm particularly curious to see if it delivers on the performance hype and thermal behavior when actually using it for doing work. If that's even close to what they are promising, it's going to be a bad year for Intel.
Does anyone know if those neural processors do anything useful or is that only for people that use specialist stuff like video editing tools? I run docker, intellij, vs code, etc.
Oh I totally get that, I like functionality and the 2017-2020 MBP barely qualified as Pro laptops. I have a huge windows desktop for my actual pro work, MBP was just a mobile device and for some freelance work. A sharp design would be nicer is all I'm saying
The 2015 15" Macbook Pro was 1.8 cm thick. The 2019 16" Macbook Pro was 1.6 cm thick. The mew 2021 16" Macbook Pro is 1.68 cm thick. So the 16" got slightly thicker than the old one but not as thick as the old 15".
The 2020 13" Macbook Pro was 1.5 cm thick. The new 2021 14" Macbook pro is 1.55 cm thick. So that is only 0.5 mm difference.
Well, perceptions change. In 2012, the aesthetic and design was state of the art. Felt I looked good every time I pull it out.
But I still use a 2012 MBP. Doesn't look sharp anymore, and its always been pretty heavy, but they keys work sooooo well, the touchpad is a miracle of engineering, 9 years of daily use and everything still works beautifully. And frankly, I mostly don't notice any lag still (though I might if I was doing video editing). And the port selection meant that I could hook up to just about anything with no hassle ... including ethernet. Wifi is still inferior to an ethernet port.
I understand the perceptions in fashion and design will keep changing. But it is only recently Apple adopted boxy design in all their iPads and iPhones except the basic iPad and iPhone SE II. Why not follow that, the trend is set across the board. This top of the line macbooks have a design similar to the basic $329 iPad, I can't wrap my head around such a decision.
I know it's a very minor and a picky thing, but Apple takes such a great pride in the uniformity and design, it's strange they resort to this.
I've owned Macbooks since 2003. Typing this on a 2020 Macbook Pro 13". It's just been a long evolution of getting thinner. IMO, and as others have stated, going all-in on thinness drove a series of design mistakes that seem to be reversed here. Rounding out the thinner leading edge gives a bit more space, and would guess makes it feel more solid. I don't like the thinner front end being a little suspended above the surface of the table, it makes me worry about it bending.
The 2003 12-inch Macbook with the aluminum keys was like a textbook made out of solid metal. That keyboard felt great.
This looks like a great machine to me and I am a little sad I bought in Feb!
> I have owned macbooks only since 2017 and found the older (2011 era) aesthetic design to be bulky and not too appealing. I own a 2020 model, which looks sharp and professional.
There used to be a time when what people considered “professional hardware” was versatility and durability over pure aesthetics. I’m not saying we can’t have both form and function with professional grade hardware but with the later iterations of the MBP Apple have put form ahead of function and then trained an entire generation of developers to look at hardware superficially. I honestly weep for the industry if this is the path we are destined to continue down.
I see this is the time any company can do both ground breaking performance and a solid design let alone Apple. I don't want them to go back to the intel with discrete gpus and remove extra ports. I want a sharper design is all. It's not much to ask both, Apple after all cares a lot about design, I don't know how they came up with such a design while their all their iPads lineup (bar basic iPad) and iPhone lineup has a boxy design but this MBP is rounded.
“Rounded” is a common design element throughout the history of Apple — including iPhones and iPads. It also has zero baring on the function of the device so who cares if it’s a little more boxy or rounded? It’s supposed to be a “Pro” device not some piece of art.
I suppose I'm the only one who cares and at the same time I never claimed it affects the functioning of the device. Like I mentioned it in another comment, it is a very minor and a picky thing, but Apple takes such a great pride in the uniformity and design. With all of their current generation iPhones and iPads having a boxy design, it is strange they resorted to such a design choice that too in their top of the line macbook pros
You’re conflating form and function with your example (“reeking” is not an adjective for form, and a pig sty is not even a functional office space to begin with).
I have no issue with people wanting their work environment to be pretty but aesthetics shouldn’t hamper the person’s ability to get their work done. (at least not unless you work in an industry where aesthetics is your job).
I recently got a new M1/MBP and really love the utility of a customized TouchBar (using BetterTouchTool). I'm sad it'll be gone! It's actually great - but certain functions are missed (like a dedicated volume buttons).
Can't believe they did so many positive changes with the MBP only to add the notch from the phone in too. Almost the perfect update. Does this mean every app in full screen has to be updated to account for it?
Look at the old Macbook pros. The bezel at the top was thick. All they did was cut into the bezel so, in letterboxed mode, the display is the same size as the now previous gen of Macbooks.
My thought as well. That's a software features as long as the requisite hardware is there. There is a track record of hardware sitting dormant on some Apple hardware, too.
Can't believe they did so many positive changes with the MBP only to add the notch from the phone in too. Almost the perfect update. Does this mean every app in full screen has to be updated to account for it?
I wonder. Maybe full screen will behave differently and the menu bar will never be hidden?
Otherwise I am looking at my web browser in full screen and how do you design around that? You have to push the tabs down anyway, might as well just make the menu bar static.
No, remember that the notch extends the display upward, and does not expand downward into the display. Apple's reasoning is now you get a 16:10 display without having the top menu bar enroaching within it.
Which I'm perfectly fine with. Useless black area made useful.
I don't see much issue with having a notch on a laptop since it now lives in the middle of the menu bar now. That's typically negative space in most apps anyways.
I was going to answer "presumably this is why Safari has always put tabs below the address bar", but the most recent version finally changed that by default. :\",
Not sure I understand your distinction, the screen is taller now, if my browser wants to render to the top of the screen it has to contend with the notch.
If your browser changes nothing, the top bar will be blacked out and your tabs will display exactly as before. This only changes if your browser explicitly updates to handle the notched display.
It sounds like they're saying the OS will automatically add a black bar to the top in fullscreen mode, which will look seamless thanks to the contrast rate of mini LED.
If that is the case, it sounds like a pretty elegant solution and significantly reduces my concern about the notch. It also addresses my confusion about some of the images on Apple's website.
I can’t believe they didn’t color the menu-bar black to hide the notch.
I suppose the notch is only in the way if you are watching 4:3 video in full screen. For every other use case, the notch is hidden in either the menu bar or black, horizontal bars.
I’m also wondering if the led backlighting is arranged so that backlight is completely turned off in the black horizontal bars shown when viewing 16:9 video in full screen.
>I’m also wondering if the led backlighting is arranged so that backlight is completely turned off in the black horizontal bars shown when viewing 16:9 video in full screen.
That would likely help a lot, very interested to see it in action.
The Apple Event showed that full-screen apps and videos have a black bar extending the whole notch height; which still leaves you with an Apple standard 16:10 screen area. Since it's mini-LED, it'll be just as black as the previous bezels, and since the non-notch area is still 16:10, you're not missing anything at all; and the menu bar in a sense "doesn't take any usable space" anymore.
Nit: mini-LED is not the same thing as micro-LED, so it remains to be seen whether the LEDs are small enough/aligned in such a way that the black bar at the top doesn't have any backlight bleed.
Maybe I've drunk the Apple Kool-Aid, but there's another way to look at this: it's a perfectly rectangular 16:10 display, plus they've added an extra (albeit imperfect) strip along the top, 74 pixels high, allowing them to push the macOS menu bar into the bezel, leaving you with a clean and unencumbered 16:10 desktop area for your content.
That makes me happier, but it's a deep gash into an otherwise perfect rectangle. It's a little like the buying a brand new table (or car) and the first thing you do is accidentally put deep gouge in it. Perfectly serviceable? Yes. But still needlessly marred for the life of the product.
I wonder how it will work with a mouse. What happens when you’re hovering the menu bar and go inside the dead area? Does the cursor disappear and return on the other side? Making the dead area unvisitable (so the cursor keeps following the border) seems the most logical solution probably, but it makes it very awkward to go from one menu item to the next if the notch is between them.
That portion of my screen on my Mac has been a solid grey square with no meaningful information for 99.9% of the time that the laptop has been powered on. The aspect ratio is 16:10 so it’s not going to get in the way of any 16:9 content. I feel like this is a pretty bad take. Would you prefer a solid black bezel?
These look positively insane. 120Hz HDR displays. Can be specced with up to 64 GB of RAM and a GPU that (apparently) matches a 3070. All the ports you could ever want and magsafe. I can't wait to get my hands on one.
The notch doesn't bother me because it's literally more room on the screen. Laptops with the camera below the screen tend to have an uncomfortable angle that look sup your nose, and the design suggests that they may be adding Face ID in a future iteration.
Probably - some of the marketing shots they showed in the event showed it being hidden with a black bar, but I couldn't find any that showed the toolbar itself being below the notch. At any rate, if it doesn't exist at launch, someone will make an app for it.
I believe the 3070 uses a different die from the mobile 3070. The mobile and discrete parts have completely diverged so comparisons are meaningless. Laptop GPU performance is entirely a question of power and cooling.
In their charts, they showed it's about even (in performance, with much lower power consumption) with a laptop using a RTX 3080 (Mobile), which performs about as well as an RTX 3060-Ti / 3070 (Desktop). So that's pretty wild. More and more games getting playable on macOS too through native ports or emulation, so in theory you wouldn't need a gaming PC anymore. These numbers are for the M1 MAX though, which is a bit more expensive.
Not sure where you’re getting that from? This [1] appears to be the machine they compared with (assuming the part number actually refers to a unique spec), which only has a 3050 Ti?
Fascinating. I have pulled the trigger on an M1 Max to replace my i9 MBP, and wasn’t hopeful for the GPU.
But now I am VERY curious how well it will do at gaming using CrossOver Mac. I’d been eyeing a getting a 3080 laptop as a secondary for being able to do mobile gaming, but an M1 Max + CrossOver Mac setup might scratch that itch with only a single laptop. A fun experiment for next Tuesday.
It really isn't. Nvidia should be using clearly differentiated model numbers to represent two completely different lines. They did this to intentionally confuse customers.
I don't want to know the thermals on the laptop then.
There is a reason for the 3070 being available with a minimum of 2 large fans and liquid cooling existing at all. How do you want to cool the same performance in a thin laptop? With passive airflow?
For reference, this is what a laptop with the mobile (!) version of a 3070 looks like:
Where did you see the "matches the 3070" thing? When I was (admittedly) skimming the two articles, the performance metrics were all about "performance per watt" which ... doesn't mean anything for actual performance in a "how long will this scene take to render?" sort of meaning.
They made a direct comparison to "the fastest laptop we could find". I think there was fine print that had the exact laptop they compared it to, but I noticed it too late to read.
But presumably this means at least 3070 performance.
Hardware-wise maybe, but it's still bogged down by Facebook. Supporting them by buying their products, when the window of opportunity for user-respecting alternatives is still wide open, is frankly unethical.
Yeah, but the things that aren't clear from the comparisons are how under-clocked those gpus may be, and at what power usage did apple set them to before they ran their tests.
In the picture titled "GPU performance vs. power", that is "relative performance" with lower power consumption, so it doesn't say anything about literal performance.
Then there's this:
> In addition, the GPU delivers performance comparable to a high-end GPU in a compact pro PC laptop while consuming up to 40 percent less power, and performance similar to that of the highest-end GPU in the largest PC laptops while using up to 100 watts less power.[2]
Where that 2 points to:
> ... Discrete PC laptop graphics performance data from testing Lenovo Legion 5 (82JW0012US). High-end discrete PC laptop graphics performance data from testing MSI GE76 Raider (11UH-053). PC compact pro laptop performance data from testing Razer Blade 15 Advanced (RZ09-0409CE53-R3U1). Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
82JW0012US on Amazon has a 3050Ti in it
11UH-053 has a 3080 in it
RZ09-0409CE53-R3U1 has a 3080 in it
So there's some data. I've still got some real questions about why they're talking "relative performance" in their graphs, though.
It was written very small in grey text on the bottom right of the slide. I didn't notice it during the presentation but people posted screenshots on Twitter. The "Compact pro PC laptop" is Razer Blade 15 Advanced (rz09-0409ce53) and "High-end PC laptop" is MSI GE76 Raider (11UH-053). You can see if you pause at 22:46[0]. Both of these have RTX 3080s and in Apple's chart their chips are slightly slower but at much lower power. What we don't know if what benchmark they used for this comparison since 375 "relative performance" isn't a defined metric.
Probably covering their butts in case whatever benchmark they used works differently on ARM vs x86, or if there are weird macOS differences. If there were a bunch of performance patches made to the Mac version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider that made it faster on macOS, that's not because of a faster chip (just an example, I don't know how they benchmark).
I don’t think we know. The Apple website shows GPU benchmarks for pro apps for the new MBPs, where there is a big performance leap relative to the top GPU from the last model. But I haven’t seen comparisons on gaming against nvidia GPUs, which I think is what would be needed to make such a claim.
Part of the reason that nvidia GPU drivers are so large, and they've been so unwilling to open source them is a good amount of nvidia's secret sauce for gaming is in the software. They'll work with devs on optimisation before launch with might disproportionately benefit their hardware, sometimes the drivers will fix games for devs, e.g. swapping out shaders for visually equivalent but better performing ones, or the z-index issues cyberpunk had if you didn't update to the "game ready" drivers. e.g. look at the lows for Tomb Raider or anything for Red Dead 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIwIeobQSnQ
It's why when Intel moved from the GMA to Intel HD (i.e. "can just about render a desktop" to "can play indie games"), it took years before games even reliably worked on Intel GPUs, never mind performed. Of course once they did it pretty much killed off the budget GPU market.
Even at the high end consumer market, it's why you often find AMD GPUs outperforming cost equivalent nVidia cards for compute use but then falling flat in games.
Apple has the advantage that the big game engines like Unity/Unreal etc. have been targeting their hardware for the mobile support for the last while, so they have arguably a bit of a head start relative to Intel's entry, but I have to imagine they have a catch up to do before they run high end PC games comparably. Probably will run the entire iOS catalogue in 120hz though.
Yes, it looks _really_ nice. Specced with the crazy graphics, and 64G ram and 2TB storage, it costs 4000$. Ouch! Is the Max CPU still fanless?
(I really wish there was a matte screen option at the price point, my old macbook pro was a very expensive mirror and it puts a lot of strain on the eyes to try to concentrate on whats on screen, rather than behind it)
Can confirm. Currently using a P52 with 64 go ram and an Xeon processor, and a 4K screen. Probably cost my company 5-7k after all the enterprise support fees and such. Would much rather have a Mac, the thing is just way smaller and lighter.
Oh c'mon... I'm not going to argue that battery/build quality is better on the apple, but that is some serious FUD.
Literally just picked up an asus zephyrs g15 15.6" with 2560 x 1440QHD 165 hz refresh rate, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, 16GB Memory, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and 1 Tb ssd for $1850 at Best Buy, then picked up 2x16gb DDR4 3200 MHz for $150 off Amazon to upgrade to 32gb.
As someone who owns an Asus and a work-provided Dell XPS, and has extensively used a 2016 MBP... Yeah, no. Build quality differences are minimal, and at least on the Asus and to an extent the Dell not everything is glued/soldered on so it's maintainable. And it wasn't Dell or Asus who shipped faulty keyboards they refused to replace.
I own both a MBP (2019) and an Asus Zephyrus G14 (2020). While the latter is good value for the money (I use it for gaming), chassis, screen, sound, touchpad, fingerprint sensor, and reliability are much inferior. If you want to compare the new MBP to PC laptops, at least compare apples to apples (ROG Strix, Legion 7, etc.). Otherwise you're just arguing that a high-end laptop isn't worth the money to you, which is fine but has nothing to do with Mac vs. PC.
The device doesn't even have the same specs, the $4000 is for a MacBook with 2 TB SSD and 64 GB of RAM yours has a 1 TB SSD and 32 GB of RAM that's half.
Other than that yes MacBooks are expensive. But so are HP EliteBooks or Lenovo ThinkPads.
There is a Lenovo storefront called "perkopolis" to which you can find an entry key fairly easily that has deeply discounted thinkpads. So for example a 5800HS + GTX3060 + 16GB RAM + 512GB SSD laptop is going to run you around 1200$ there vs 2000$ without a discount.
What's your point. Of course you can get a laptop with lesser specs from a cheaper manufacturer for less, especially if you upgrade it yourself after the fact.
But if you price a Thinkpad P series of HP ZBook with 64GB RAM, 2TB storage, and similar GPU/CPU performance, you are looking at $4000. I know because I have one.
Have you been to Lenovo's or HP's homepage and seen what they charge for their high end ZBooks and P series laptops with those specs? No one is saying that you cannot get a Windows laptop with similar specs for cheaper if you buy from a cheaper brand and upgrade it yourself. But if you want a top of the line high end Windows laptop from someone like Lenovo or HP with matching specs then those companies charge basically the same as Apple.
Yeah I have. Lenovo has a really high list price but it has a secret store and a lot of sales.
Anyways that's the beauty of PCs, you don't have to pay the exorbitant prices or the OEM if you don't want to, a Lenovo P15 will allow you to swap the RAM and SSD however you want and it takes 5 minutes and like 9 screws.
FWIW, similarly spec'd 16" MBP (32GB, 1TB) is about $3100 though it will likely outperform the Asus in various measures that may or may not matter to a particular owner.
Tip, search online for "custom screen protector". Some companies will cut a screen protector to custom size. Just measure length and width of the screen. For my 2019 16" MBP, I ordered a matte one and it's glorious ever since.
The Pro is faster than a laptop 3050Ti [1]. The Max is slightly slower than a laptop 3080 (looks like 8%). [2] Relative performance is somewhat meaningless, and of course also depends on what features where being used. However, my M1 Air compared extremely favorably against similarly priced PC offerings, and I expect my 16" M1 Max will compare favorably with a 3070.
We don’t know what those tests are really measuring. Is it a game? Or some video production workflow? And what about features like ray tracing? Does the M1 Max support all the same technologies? Apple’s benchmarks seem purposely obfuscated.
Well yeah putting the camera below the screen seems borderline insane, but the notch definitely takes away beauty from Apple laptops known for their incredible sense of design.
Personally I think the 2020 design looks bad because the top black bezel is thicker than the sides. While things like the ipad have it uniform around the whole display.
For me that’s not an option, because I use my MacBook with an external display all the time, but I also use it as a laptop from time to time. Mac mini is not a solution for me.
I agree with everything else you said and I think overall these machines will be awesome.
I would disagree with you on the ports though, I think this is kind of a miss for Apple. They caved into some of the loudest complaints from several years ago which were already coming from a loud minority and that minority is now smaller than ever.
And if they were set on changing the ports these certainly aren't all that you could ever want. A few USB-A ports as well as keeping at least the 4 USB-C ports from last year (instead of reducing to 3) would have been more useful for more people than the HDMI and especially the SD ports are.
(HDMI used to be useful for plugging into a projector for presentations, that use-case is now nearly non-existent now that all meetings tend to happen over zoom, webex, teams, hangouts, etc. even when in-person. HDMI used to be useful for monitors but increasingly displayport over usb-c is supported by everything except the lowest end monitors. SD used to be important for stills and video footage, but increasingly cameras use CFExpress, CFast, output over hdmi to an atmos-style recorder, or even micro-SD for small GoPro style cameras, all of which will still need dongles. Devices like Raspberry Pis require micro SD not standard SD).
They also could have added the nifty ethernet-over-magsafe via the powerbrick that the iMac has and they didn't do that.
Edit: One additional thought - I'm seeing from the comments some reasonable situations where HDMI still comes in handy - cheap monitors, plugging into a tv to watch something, and I guess there are still lots of people physically plugging in at work for presentations. Fair enough, but in that case it's weird that this is a "Pro" feature. These are all very non-pro usecases and you'll still need dongles around for anybody with a non-pro machine (like a macbook air).
For all the times Apple seems to be willing to "stick to its guns" and ignore consumer complaining, this seems like a weird time to give in.
They basically made a line-in-the-sand on USB-C adoption, and it pretty much worked. I'd argue that an HDMI and SD card readers are less useful, and certainly far less versatile than additional USB-C ports.
For all the dongle jokes of a few years ago, I don't really see a reason to go back to less versatile ports in laptops.
Every monitor and TV manufactured within the last decade without exception has an HDMI input and monitors that support thunderbolt are nearly double the cost. Even if money is no object that HDMI port will prove to be useful.
It's weird to sell the machine with a super high resolution 120hz mini LED screen though and then optimize the ports for the cheap $400 monitor market.
You're right though the HDMI port might come in handy in random situations, better to include it than not. The SD port is the one I really don't get. And I still maintain that the continued lack of USB-A ports is a much bigger dongle problem than the lack of HDMI port was.
Because the cheap HDMI monitors might be the only ones available to you as your company calls people into the office but now with the added beauty of hoteling.
SD is absolutely massive in Asia, on a level that I think cannot be gauged properly from the West. I reckon these ports have been added with an eye to the Asian market rather than California.
Cheap android phones with decent cameras and expandable storage (microSD).
Edit: I'm obviously oversimplifying, but most of the world doesn't have always-on data connections (e.g. rural areas) and manufacturers outside of silicon valley do optimise for people that may want to download media so the can view/listen when they're not connected. Nothing beats a cheap phone replaceable battery and storage.
That's interesting. Are you talking about microSD in smartphones, or standard SD?
MicroSD support would have actually made more sense to me than standard SD. But from what it looks like micro cards will still require a dongle of sorts.
It's actually coming free with most off-the-shelf microSDs. And exactly that - SD as a physical format is more flexible, nowadays it can be used even for non-storage cards.
Yeah, that's a bit weird actually. I looked at my country's most popular comparison site, and listed the top-10 best viewed memory cards. Of those 10: 9 microSD, 1 standard SD.
SD and microSD nominally inhabit the same space, but microSD is effectively limited to storage whereas SD can be used for other things; it's just more flexible to provide an SD slot, if you can spare the lateral space. Among other things, microSDs are so tiny that it is often more practical to put them in an SD adapter whenever you need to handle them. That's why SD adapters are so widespread, and you'll likely find one in the package whenever you buy a consumer microSD.
They didn't optimize the ports for the cheap monitor market, at all. These machines support Apple's extremely expensive display and all the various 4K and 5K displays out there, admirably.
And they ALSO have the single most needed and bitched about port if it's absent, by far, for nearly all business users, which is HDMI. Far and away the best thing they could have added.
I personally will not use it often, but when I do, it will be invaluable, and for the users I support, it will be a tremendous increase in convenience and ease-of-use.
If you need a lot of USB-A ports, get a CalDigit dock and be done with it. If you need just 1, there are extraordinarily tiny adapters.
Which reminds me: I want more USB-C ports; Caldigits latest Thunderbolt 4 dock finally added the ability (as I believe the chipsets available maxed out at 2 ports previously). One of those, plus a 14" MacBook Pro with the M1X Max and I think I'll be set for computers + connectivity for a very long while.
If I had one of these machines, I would not be using that port at my desk.
However, I would be using it in every conference room I use, multiple times daily. It’s the difference between plugging in the cable vs. finding the right dongle that’s security-cabled to the presenter cable, and connecting it in the middle.
The HDMI is for plugging into displays that are available to you when you are out of your office. Since they all have HDMI inputs this is a very sensible port.
My company had to dongle up EVERY meeting room once developers switched to MacBook pros with USB-C. But we still have non Mac users who use HDMI. To this day, every meeting has the potential to be sixty seconds late while we navigate through dongle hell…
SD cards are essential for anyone who does video or photography seriously - and that’s a big part of the market this laptop sells to. I’m glad it’s back
Nope. I do them seriously. My Mavic 2 Pro has a microSD slot, my Canon EOS 5D Mark IV has a CF slot (it also does have a SD slot too, which is slower and I've never used it).
SD card reader is a nice addition for a handful of pros, sure, but definitely not essential for everyone who does photo/video seriously.
Anecdote, but... I rarely, but sometimes, need to read SD cards, for e.g. embedded systems, RPi, Nintendo Switch, etc. Not enough to go out and buy a brand new USB-C dongle which I would then lose somewhere in my house, but enough that it's annoying to not be able to use my primary laptop with it.
Don't get me wrong, I would still buy a MacBook with no SD card slot, but I would occasionally run into cases where I wish I had that dongle that I lost somewhere.
Take one of the "pro" markets—photographers. They sure have to deal with SD cards, and they often shoot tethered, which almost always means HDMI connection.
Tethering isn't done over HDMI. Invariably it's propietary, Micro USB-B or Micro-USB 3.1 to the camera and a plain old USB-A to the machine. Wireless tether is a thing to.
There's a single use case for which can't easily be replaced by a USB-C dongle: using it as makeshift additional "internal" storage.
SD cards work pretty well for that, for most read-heavy use cases. On older Macbooks, with undersized internal storage, I'd keep an SD card in the slot. I'd keep downloaded media there, installers, even infrequently used applications. Assuming one's using a high quality SD card, performance was "plenty good enough."
I wouldn't keep anything crucial on an SD card, but everything on my local storage is backed up to the cloud anyway, so not really an issue.
i was also hoping that they would somehow be able to shoehorn an ethernet port inside of the power adapter, like on the M1 iMac
on my M1 MacBook Pro (which, throughout the pandemic, has rested on my desk in clamshell mode all day, like a desktop), I use a
ethernet <=> ethernet to thunderbolt 2 <=> thunderbolt 2 to thunderbolt 3/usb-c
adapter chain, which takes up an entire usb-c port since it doesn't work at all when I plug it into the usb-c pass-through on my other usb-c hub
unfortunately, there seems to be some kind of hardware bug in the thunderbolt 2 ethernet adapter, so even when the machine is asleep or off, it runs hot
it also seems weird that Apple doesn't manufacture a first party ethernet <=> usb-c adapter — if i'm not mistaken, the only one on their website is made by Belkin and costs $30; moreover, I don't think anyone even manufactures a 10gbps ethernet adapter for the M1
There are Thunderbolt 3 10gbit adapters that work on M1. I use a QNAP QNA-T310G1S on an M1 Mini with no issues. It's SFP+, which I prefer--both due to existing hardware I already have, and for lighter power consumption compared to 10gbit over RJ45.
QNA-T310G1T is the RJ45 model, but there are other makes available too.
(I bought the Mini at launch, and they've since released a SKU with built-in 10gbit Ethernet)
> HDMI used to be useful for plugging into a projector for presentations, that use-case is now nearly non-existent now that all meetings tend to happen over zoom, webex, teams, hangouts, etc. even when in-person.
I'm not sure you have the information to make the claim that the use case for HDMI is nearly non-existent. We use HDMI all the time. Availability bias is a thing. I find that people drastically underestimate how much they don't know about a subject or use-case of a product.
Yep, I'm in Australia in a state that has been largely in office for most of the year and I used the HDMI port on my Dell XPS. Although because of the macbook users, every HDMI cable in the office has a usb-c dongle stuck on it so I wouldn't be too inconvenienced by the lack of the port either.
> Why have static ports when you can have dynamic ports?
Because dynamic ports (basically internal dongles) reduces the amount of internal volume they have to work with. This would cause compromises in other areas like a thicker laptop, less battery life, noisier fan, etc.
> Why have static ports when you can have dynamic ports?
The numerous USB-C dongles are basically dynamic ports..albeit with a lot more inconvenience. But internal swappable ports removes a lot of internal space.
I strongly disagree. They didn't cave in to a minority, they gave Ive the boot and are finally putting back so many ports they know they should never have removed.
Why they shouldn't have been removed?
Because USB-C is awesome and _almost_ everywhere, but you need ONE important occasion where you need to connect a screen, plug in an SD card or even an external (pen|hard) drive, maybe in front of customers, and you get really infuriatingly frustrated, and regret buying this stupid trap which has half the ports of the one from 10 years ago, but costs 3x as much and just lost you a customer.
The old one would have worked. Who's the idiot which came up with this contraption?
Dongles are NOT the solution. They get lost or forgotten, they're messy.
Reducing to 3 USB-C ports is perfectly fine as we regain the dedicated magsafe.
> which has half the ports of the one from 10 years ago, but costs 3x as much
I'm with you right up 'til that '3X as much' part - MacBook Pros have remained static or gone down in real prices over the last decade - not 3x higher.
Yeah you have a lot of good points! They timed the reintroduction of (especially) the SD card reader with its probable decline. In a year or two it might be as unappreciated as the touch bar - and of course also kept for 5 years?
> (HDMI used to be useful for plugging into a projector for presentations, that use-case is now nearly non-existent now that all meetings tend to happen over zoom, webex, teams, hangouts, etc. even when in-person. HDMI used to be useful for monitors but increasingly displayport over usb-c is supported by everything except the lowest end monitors.
If the HDMI port supports 100% of whatever resolution/framerate possible for modern top end monitors then I'd be happy to see the end of fighting with DisplayPort. Getting Macbook Pro to work with modern monitors is a buggy mess, loads of hassles []
I'd be happy to know that they made this choice deliberately to fix whatever issues where I guess plaguing the USB-C display connections.
- When you go "fullscreen", does the fullscreen window stop at the bottom of the notch, or like can you see the notch in maximized Netflix videos? In the keynote I thought I saw a maximized video whose height stopped just under the notch.
- So is the extra notch space used only for the menubar? What happens when you auto-hide the menubar (which I do)? Is that functionality disabled on this hardware?
The "fullscreen" screen area is the 16:10 that results from subtracting the notch height. The area left and right of the notch is strictly for the menu bar and will be blanked out on video or full-screen apps.
I guess that if you auto-hide the menu bar, a black strip will mask the area.
> Laptops with the camera below the screen tend to have an uncomfortable angle that look sup your nose, and the design suggests that they may be adding Face ID in a future iteration.
I agree it's probably designed with a future FaceID implementation in mind but if this isn't the case, Dell have managed to move their camera back up above the screen on the latest XPS's. In my opinion, this is the best looking option currently:
notch bothers me a lot. i was ready to buy, and i hope all you guys enjoy, but i’ll be sitting the notch out. it was one thing on a phone. this is just dumb.
It's just an addition, it doesn't remove any real estate from existing screen. Have a dark/black background/strip around on top and it should solve the issue. Sure not ideal, but solvable.
The max memory isn't an indication of that, the M1's max of 64gb is limited by LPDDR5 module capacities.
What would block a new Mac Pro would instead be DDR4 or DDR5 support instead of LPDDR5, and also PCI-E lanes. Both of which would likely require yet another change in silicon design.
It looks like it, previously Apple have indicated Apple Silicon Mac Pros will come in 2022. That will be interesting to see. I'm wondering how the economics of a super high-end processor exclusively for the Mac Pro could work out. It seems unlikely a single chip aimed just at the mac Pro market could be economically viable. I wouldn't rule out a multi-CPU architecture with dual high end M2 processors.
TBH I'd love to have Touch Bar but improved with haptic feedback, making it much more useful.
It helped me a lot while debugging and loved the customization it offered for the "static" keys on the right, but having no haptic feedback always caused me to miss the button unless I stared at it, killing the purpose greatly.
I liked the concept when I first saw it but honestly it's more trouble than it's worth. On my old work laptop, it would sometimes bug out and stop registering touch. That's a problem when you are in the middle of a call and you need to adjust volume because one of the speakers is too loud or too quiet.
I also don't like how it's harder to operate than physical buttons. Too many times I hit the wrong spot on the bar and for example ended up putting my laptop to sleep instead of adjusting brightness. I've also tried to configure Ableton Live to do something useful with it (maybe mute/unmute tracks or control their volumes); but with little success.
Yeah, some of the configs are already estimating December ship dates, and that's like 20 minutes after the store opened. They are not going to be able make enough Pro chips
Real keys and not touchbar, advertised as a feature in the presentation. What a leap of innovation. Though Apple makes the best hardware, they are arrogant as ever.
I didn't even notice that they were full height. There was something off aesthetically when I saw the pictures of the new keyboard and I figured it was just the missing touch bar.
As a touch bar hater from the beginning, I'm super excited to be able to hit keys to play/pause/skip music, mute, and adjust brightness without having to look at the touch bar to do it.
Sure, but did anyone had a serious use for them? Surely there are people, but I have the _feeling_ that the Touch Bar was a failure from the beginning. Also they brought back a magnetic snap cable for charging (the same my Air mid 2012 has that I'm typing on rn) and they added a HDMI and a SD card slot. It's all coming back ^^
So many of the 'features' are merely the return of a few features kept hostage for too long.
Ports, a half decent webcam, scissor switches & mag-safe are exactly the 'features' that took zero effort from Apple's side to implement.
I like that this seems like the first real 'pro' device Apple has produced since the 2015 Mac, but the reason it took as long has entirely to do with Hubris rather than technical constraints.
The M1 series of processors are IMO the only new standout innovation in these current-gen devices. That being said, it is seriously impressive innovation and the other laptop manufacturers appear to be even more complacent. (Looking at Dell and Lenovo making the same device for 10 years with only the smallest of changes each time)
I like what Microsoft is trying to do with their devices, but they don't seem to be too keen on competing against their 3rd party customers directly. So you get laptops with weird form factors or ones that try to go for value-for-money instead of top class performance.
"We listened to you and brought back the functions keys–and made them full size!"
That's just my half-assed stab at it. Presumably someone whose job is to write these things for a living can improve it meaningfully while maintaining the essence.
They said pretty much this minus the "we listened to you" part. I don't know why you need a pat on the back. Are you going to send them a thank you card for every thing they do right?
It's a company dude, Apple is not your buddy. They're not listening to you, they're listening to market research and usage analytics.
Yes, but instead of acting like bringing back the regular keyboard is an amazing achievement, they could instead just admit that the touch bar wasn't a good idea. But admitting errors is not the Apple Way.
Still have not solved the tinytiny inverted Tee arrow keys arrangement. Need to improve on the former IBM's 6-key cluster below the right shift key, or arrange full keysized arrows in a cross pattern breaking out of the rectangle at the lower right corner.
How are they supposed to frame it? “Sorry we messed up the keyboard. We’re putting a regular one back in.” Doesn’t seem like great phrasing for launching a new product.
The Air doesn't have a touch bar and costs less money. It's also a perfectly good -- no, sorry: an excellent laptop for most applications, including development.
I suspect the 13" M1 Pro was probably just something to cater for those who were skeptical about a fanless laptop since no one really knew back then how well these machines would perform. Now that the M1s have been out for a while and no one seems to be complaining about the Air, they can drop the M1 Pro.
But that notch is kind of a really ugly blight on the face of an otherwise good looking update. Especially since it's lacking faceid or something equivalent to windows hello
it is useful because it will be on the middle of the status bar. After 2 hours my guess nobody would notice anything weird. Like with the iphones, but this one actually makes sense.
It conflicts with existing Apple design decisions, such as Safari in full-screen with the compact tabs, or Apple Calendar in full screen mode. I wonder how that will work.
Except for purposes of immersion in games and movies, I might just always have the top menu bar visible if the treatment for many full screen apps is just to have an opaque black bar with no content.
They are as big as pre notch. It's just now the toolbar has moved in to a space which was once black bezel. Full screen is still useful for hiding the toolbar for a distraction free view.
People will get used to it... but they could have just shifted the screen down, using that chin. For example there are plenty Windows laptops with 3:2 aspect rations, where they use up all the vertical space.
They could have just moved everything down for IMO a slightly better design.
Looking at the product photos it looks like they black-bar the entire top of the display when anything is full-screen? So that seems to make the notch even more intrusive as you lose out on all the screen real-estate next to it when something is fullscreen.
Or rather, the menu bar is now a permanent bezel that nothing else can occupy?
As someone who always hides the menu bar, though, having a notch is going to kill being able to switch tabs in Chrome, search in Outlook, or broadly, use any controls at the top of a window in maximized mode. I’m guessing the hidden menu bar is going away on this machine because it would break usability of all other apps.
The bezel wouldn't have been as big. The resulting "fake bezel" is larger than necessary to house the camera, as it needs to shift where the camera is relative to the physical dimensions of the display and the border that it needs.
Just see literally any other laptop that has both a fairly small bezel and fits a webcam in it, like the Dell XPS 13. The camera in the macbook may be better and require a larger lens assembly as a result, but it's surely not as big as the bezel + notch itself requires.
The split is in the global menu bar which is owned by Apple design wise. It will be interesting but I imagine it will work fine, also don't forget early OSX builds had a centered Apple Logo with logic to handle this.
Go back to when the iPhone introduced the notch. There were so many comments just like yours but when was the last time you heard anyone say anything about it? It gets a lot of attention because it's quite visible — literally right in front of your eyes — but it's also in an area which is dead space most of the time and the most common scenario where it isn't is full screen video conferencing, when you'll be glad for the better quality.
There are literally still so many comments just like that and plenty of people who simply won't buy a phone that has a notch. The comments never stopped.
The screenshots showing application menus almost hitting the notch are ugly af. I'm sure that there are applications that have even more menus than Photoshop or Premiere.
> There are literally still so many comments just like that and plenty of people who simply won't buy a phone that has a notch. The comments never stopped.
… and yet, sales have continued to be extremely high, which suggests that is a self-selected group of extremely vocal opponents rather than a real market trend.
I hate the notch, but I'll still buy iPhones all day long if my only other choice is to buy products with questionable privacy from an advertising company versus dealing with Apple's shitty designs.
That's their point, it's literally self selection: people who do not care about the notch are not going to write comments about it, and people who care are never going to shut up about it, giving an extremely poor window for understanding how much it actually matters or how it impacts real use. That complaints like this are self-selective is both well known and the OP's entire point; it's amazing how much effort all the replies seem to be going through to not understand this.
I think the notch works ok on the iPhone as iOS is specifically designed with it in mind. The small spots abreast of the notch are fine for battery meter, clock, and reception bars.
The Mac notch is right in the middle of the toolbar. I have lots of applications that use that space for menus and will be curious how cumbersome it will be now that we need to literally navigate around it.
Will we need to move the mouse down to get around the notch, or will the cursor be allowed to go under the notch?
In the screenshots shown, most of the apps do not have menubars which extend to that space at that display resolution — this could definitely be more of an issue for people who increase the size for accessibility reasons.
From the full-screen screenshots, it appears that it's simply black across the top of the screen unless the application has been designed to support it. That looked like the regular Safari developer tools with an unbroken bar slightly lower down in the video.
My thought is that it’s a pro laptop. Does it really need a built-in webcam? How many people never use them or even tape over them? I could live without it, and if it’s actively providing a detriment, that’s all the more reason to get rid of it.
You mean like (I'm guessing but I think it's a safe guess) the vast majority of "pro" users who videoconference? The opinion that a laptop maker should take out a webcam in 2021 is... interesting.
> but when was the last time you heard anyone say anything about it?
Literally during the latest iPhone announcement where Apple was even timid about showing off the front of the display or talking about the smaller notch, as everyone mocked how dated the notch looked.
Was it really “everyone”, or just a few very online people in your social media? The sold out pre-orders suggest this was not as universal as you're portraying it — for example, looking at I see a note that it was smaller and you have to go 4 pages in before there's a single comment complaining about it, and that's in a community which loves to critique Apple designs!
Again, not saying this is nothing or that I love it, only that the buying public does not seem to feel anywhere near as strongly about it and I've never heard anyone complaining about it on a regular basis. Most people get used to it, if they're curious they probably understand that it's for the camera, and get on with life. I'd be quite surprised if this did not follow a very similar trajectory — especially since the display is larger so you could black out the entire top of the screen in software and still have more screen real estate than the previous model.
No, but it definitely means that it's not the big deal which overheated rhetoric in forums often implies. Experienced users are often extremely reactionary and wildly overstate the impact of highly visible changes but in most cases if you actually survey their usage later they've almost always gotten used to it.
In this case, the 16" screen gained ~0.2" diagonally and 314px extra resolution. Those extra pixels mean that even with the notch you're going to see more on the screen than you could before and in my experience that's far more likely to be the part which shapes people's impression of a new device.
Why are you moving the goal posts? At first you asked whether "anyone" talked about it, the parent gave you a reasonable answer, and now you're talking about "everyone." Accept that some people do talk about the notch, however small the minority opinion is.
What I should have said is anyone talking about it unprompted — there’s always someone talking about any design decision but you see the average priorities based on when people talk about them unprompted. People complain about the Touch Bar or the old keyboards a lot, or the sided charging / performance issues, but the notch seems much rarer to hear unprompted complaints about.
That doesn’t mean it’s zero but it suggests that the compromise was actually quite reasonable, even if there are a small number of people who vocally disagree.
have you noticed how screenshots and background images for iphones marketing material is chosen so that the notch is almost/totally invisible? it borders on false advertising. it's a design company, they know the most how ugly it is.
Do you have some examples? Looking at https://www.apple.com/iphone/ the notch is emphasized on the icons at the top of the page and the only images where it’s not clearly visible are the ones showing the camera on the back of the phone.
Agreed. In fact, I think I'll mind it less. On my iPhone the only time it looks funny is in landscape, otherwise it just sits in the top-bar. On a laptop that isn't an issue.
I think for me it'll fade away, especially with a dark-mode UI.
The notch is an explicit design choice, it's visible and iconic. It differentiates the new models and you can make a reasonable argument that space is always used by the status bar in macos currently, so this is a net improvement without question.
I agree that the notch is a bit large to just be a 1080p webcam. I don’t hate it though, aesthetically. If the next iteration doesn’t have Face ID, I’ll be a bit annoyed. Seriously considering trading in my M1 MacBook Air for the 14”. Tim Cook really knows how to drain my accounts!
I far prefer just plugging in one USB hub than plugging in like five different cables. I have a Thinkpad with loads of ports, but I just use two (one for a wireless mouse that's always plugged in).
Issue with my rMBP is if i have too much on said single port; the laptop overheats and crashes. I end up with all 4 ports plugged in anyway to get decent performance.
I've got a reasonably cheap screen with USBC input. The screen is the hub.
It's great, as I only need to plug in one cable and my laptop is powered, connected to both my external monitors (displayport mst) and USB peripherals.
It's also a reason I asked not to have a Mac when I changed jobs. The Intel Macs and the older m1s don't support MST.
MST would work correctly _in Windows_ on my last-gen MBP, so I think it may be a limitation of macOS. Apple has only ever officially supported MST over Thunderbolt, never over USB or DisplayPort.
I think the usefulness of a bunch of different ports/port types is for when you're on the go. A hub/dock is of course way more convenient when you're at your main workspace. But if you're traveling or even just on your couch, having extra ports makes things much more convenient.
It's good to have multiple options. I lug my laptop around and (rarely) need to connect multiple devices to it and sometimes I run out of ports. At home, I use a dock and the ports are useless, but that doesn't mean that I don't like the option to have more ports on the machine.
That doesn't mean that people are copying them. Thunderbolt 3 adopted the USB-C format. Until USB-C, USB wasn't capable of delivering the power required for charging. It made logical sense to switch charging to USB-C. If anything, Apple copied USB-C.
Sadly no. My new Thinkpad has only one USB-C port and it's used for power. So I cannot use the USB-C port while charging. And it has three USB-As and a freaking HDMI.
It would be nice if they could have squeezed one in again so you don't need to pull out a dongle/hub every time you want to connect a "legacy" USB device when traveling. But not really a realistic wish and wouldn't have wished they took anything out to accommodate it.
I'm not the one you asked, but heres a few things that I might need to use a USB-A port for when traveling:
* My yubikey to perform 2-factor auth
* The checkra1n jailbreak for my work iPhone (I do some iOS dev and occasionally need a jailbroken device. For whatever reason, it doesn't work with a USB-C-to-lightning cable, it has to use a USB-A-to-lightning cable + a dongle.)
* A USB flash drive for transferring a presentation or whatever. (I know these come in USB-C variants, but I don't have one.)
* Charging all the random things that charge from USB-A ports.
Gotcha. Well except for the weird checkra1n thing, everything else is easily migrated to USB-C. To help with that migration, I highly recommend this[1] cable (or one similar to it) as a technological Swiss Army Knife.
I made the transition at the beginning of the year to "USB-C everything I can" and it's very liberating. Ironically the only devices I have left that are not USB-C are my iPhone and AirPods (and my Kindle, but they just released a USB-C model which I will soon use to replace my current one).
You joke but the new Ferrari has capacitive buttons everywhere. Even the rear view mirror adjustment buttons are capacitive. Whether this is Ive's doing, I don't know.
As far as I understand, he was absent from about 2015 on. There was an article, which I can't find right now, that discussed the mess this left the design team in. He basically retired to his home, and he would require the design team to come present to him at some local place (he wouldn't go to Apple). Then he'd give zero feedback. (This is from my recollection of the article.)
Pretty telling since that was sort of the heyday of Apple's devices having all sorts of conflicting designs.
Furthermore, it's hard to imagine Ive and Ferrari gelling. Ive's style is about as diametrically opposed from Italian design as I can think of. I characterize his design as character-less, something Italian designers don't go for.
i'm guessing it has to do with the new M1 chips and their great power efficiency. back with the intel chips, an SD card slot or HDMI port consumed valuable internal real estate that could have been filled with battery instead, and filling it with battery was a better trade-off for most people.
with the new chips, they can comfortably sacrifice some battery size.
Pretty sure the batteries are bigger in the new ones vs the Intel ones, at least in capacity (6000mAh vs 5000mAh). I imagine they are the same physical size; if not bigger.
Disagree. 2016 15" MBP was 4.0 pounds. 2019 16" MBP was 4.3 pounds. New 16" MBP is 4.5 pounds. Apple simply decided in 2016 to shrink the size and weight by removing ports and other things, and then to increase the size and weight by bringing them back.
Personally I'm surprised they didn't decide to keep the same weight by shrinking the battery. Not that many people absolutely need a 21 hour battery life, though it is nice.
As someone that didn't like originally giving up my ports and thought Jony Ive was a bit too overzealous with thinness, I actually don't think he was wrong.
USB-C is pretty great, and the sooner we shift things over the better. When I bough a MBP with only USB-C ports I just bought a little dongle thing that slots in to my two ports on the side and gives me USB-A, HDMI, SD and MicroSD. I've used the thing around 20 times and its never been a burden because I carry it with me in my laptops case.
At this point I actually see adding the other ports back as a step backwards. HDMI is old and aggressively large in 2021. My 3 devices that use an SD card actually use a microSD card so I need to carry around an adapter anyway.
It almost has, it's just playing the long long game. People don't replace their monitors, tvs and projectors constantly but eventually they will all be bundled in with usb-c cables. Last time I was in an office, every cable had a usb-c dongle stuck to it permanently.
Well at least they admitted it. If they doubled down with the butterfly keyboard and touchbar crap they would rapidly die to a better designed linux capable book. or just become one of the many commercial vendors.
I guess M1 Air is targeted towards execs, business crowd, marketers and such who's primary day job is not into creating, not something that'd require Pro level capabilities anyway.
The M1 Air is the best laptop for the average casual laptop user (school, emails, photos, etc). The battery life alone makes it a huge upgrade over any Windows machine. I also love that it doesn't have any fans, side that's usually the first thing to go on any laptop. I expect to get years and years of good use out of the Air.
I already have an M1 Air, and I'm looking to buy the 14 MBP just for the display (working outdoors yay), battery life, and RAM (16GB + higher bandwith). There's enough horsepower on the M1 for me, not even noticeable compared to the i7 MBP 16.
That's.. interesting. Seems like the "wireless web" stat is really helped by the additional 2 efficiency cores on the Air, while the video stat is helped by the dedicated media silicon on the new Pro. Not to mention on what brightness (40% brightness on Pro is 100% brightness on air). Good to keep in mind.
> But also those who run multiple VMs at the same time.
I tried this route a few years ago but gave up out of sheer frustration. I wonder if it's improved now. At this point I'm more inclined to setup my local stack in AWS and be done with it. Like no local laptop testing at all.
The new models are a lot more expensive though. And the entry level model of the 14 inch has an 8 core variant of the m1 pro, which probably will not perform that much higher than the 8 core m1 in the 13 inch.
Conceptually I'd love one of these machine, but realistically if I can't develop locally in an Ubuntu VM then I might as well just wait a year or two to buy one until that's possible. I'm not going to use Docker, and realistically I have zero interest in spending multiple weeks rewriting all of my provisioning scripts.
Vagrant has a QEMU driver, which is what UTM uses anyway. I can't say it will do what you need the way you want but I suspect it's possible to get there.
Docker doesn’t really work on Mac. Like it technically runs, but just barely. Because it uses containerization inside virtualization, it pegs the CPU just to run a hello world app and completely drains the battery in 30 min. Oh and the fans sound like an airplane taking off.
Not my experience at all, you must have something weird in your setup. For a full dev environment I'm running containers with postgres, cockroachdb, several ruby apps, kafka, some JVM based stuff, and clickhouse and it does hit battery life a bit but certainly not pegging the CPU, actually it's using less than Slack...
Not my experience either on a fanless M1 Air. I can run lots of containers without it perceptibly heating up or slowing down. Battery life does suffer but I can still usually get at least 4-5h of solid programming like this.
I don’t know anyone at work who would agree with this. Docker is fine on macOS, honestly always has been. Sure, it will show up in Activity Monitor, but so will any other software that is actually doing something. I have never seen my CPU peg because of Docker, and I regularly run large stacks, use Earthly for all my builds, etc. The overhead of the VM + containerd is truly not that large.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I have about 7 containers running the full work app and I can't hear any fan noise and the laptop is running cold.
This thing is running Rails, mysql, elastic search, redis, mongodb, and workers inside docker. As well as nodejs, vscode, a handful of electron apps all at the same time and the laptop is cold.
Docker is terrible on Macs, but I used to run Docker+vscode+Firefox+Brave+Slack+misc. I'd run into issues on my 2015 MBP from time to time, but on the 2019 models it was fine.
gulp.watch would often eat an entire core, and stuff in Docker ran slower than on Linux, but my laptop could keep up. vscode didn't lag and Firefox ran just fine—all with 5+ Docker containers running.
I’m so impressed by the screen but it’s too un-ergonomic for me that I’m sad instead. Would have been so nice if they had released 27” desktop screens to connect with these finally wonderful laptops.
It’s not like a huge majority of office workers have been staying at home or working from the office for the last year and half or something. The coffee shop surfing, working in the plane / train must have taken a dive.
To reduce eye strain, reducing glare is important so using non-reflective screen by sacrificing quality is better (or ideally eInk). XDR displays (and previous displays from Apple) are great for quality, but not fully optimized for reducing eye strain.
I would argue dynamic backlit screens are terrible for development actually. High contrast is intense on the eye.
I bought a QLED TV 3 years ago, and tried to use it as an external display for my laptop. It's painful to look at. You switch from a white window to a black one and the TV adjusts backlight dynamically and blasts your eyes. I would react by putting my hand in front on my eyes like if i had looked outside from inside a cave after getting used to the cave.
Something like e-ink would be best for office work indeed. Lighting is external so controlled by the user and in line with the rest of the room
Sorry, I meant to say brightness contrast: high-end dynamic displays will turn off backlighting in black areas, and turn them all the way up in white areas.
Let's say your movie shows a full moon in the night. Looking at that moon on the screen is now like looking at a torchlight in the night in real life. The moon section of the screen is blasting high brightness right at your eyes.
This is what I meant. I tried doing office work on such a monitor, and quickly realize it's good for immersion, but terrible for office work, for which you want stable brightness.
From what I can tell, the charging brick is the same either way. The new MagSafe is just a different USB-C cable that has the MagSafe connector on the end.
Ah, awesome, that was actually something I was hoping they would do (and probably suggested once or twice in some HN threads). If I can just plug the MagSafe cable into any old USB brick, that's way more convenient.
Finally this dongle hell is over. It was so cringe worthy to see all Apple users carrying around a bag of dongles. Reminded me of the old LAN party cable fun…
Who was carrying around a bag of dongles? Any sane person would just get a tiny hub that fits in your pocket and has USB-A, HDMI, DP, SD, and whatever else you need.
Which is honestly a much better solution than adding SD and HDMI back to the Macbook. I know it's a controversial opinion around these parts, but I never understood the dongle-gate fiasco. A $30 portable hub will add those parts back to anyone that needs them. I sure as hell don't.
It starts like that, then you have some ports fail on that $30 hub then you are buying more junk you wouldn't have needed in the first place if apple had more sense.
I don't know. I have my MacBook Pro since 2016 along with it's HDMI/USB-A Dongle and while the macbook screen failed on me (twice!) I still have the same dongle.
But to be honest I don't need it suuuper often. Just for my USB-A microphone and the occasional projector somewhere. I live in the USB-C future Apple is turning away from haha
Controversial opinion, but I think adding Magsafe back (along with the other ports) was a step backward for the industry.
Apple pushed the whole industry to standardize on one connector for everything. If anyone really needed those other ports, a small $30 portable hub would add them all back.
Magsafe 3 is just another connector that will add more e-waste and proprietary cables to the mix. It's nice that they kept the USB-C charging, but now non-2021+ Macbook users can't reuse the charging cables.
Agreed. I'm a fan of function over form, but Apple standardizing on a single port pushed a lot of accessories and other manufacturers towards USB-C. I use my (USB-C) mac charger for my phone all the time, simply because it's there and the cable is longer.
I didn't really find Magsafe that useful anyway, as I'm pretty much always hooked up to a monitor via USB-C (which charges as well).
I guess it's nice for those that miss it, but we were starting to finally get to a world with a one-size-fits-all cable. Remember back in the day when old-style cell phones/laptops all had proprietary chargers?
But it seems the momentum for USB-C is there, so hopefully consolidation continues. Anyway, the EU and maybe others seem to be moving towards legislation to consolidate I/O types anyway.
I'm guessing the HDMI is partially due to bandwidth limitations of USB-C, though I forget the specifics.
I would need to look it up and and of course it depends on the version, but afaik HDMI usually lags behind DisplayPort in terms of bandwidth and features.
The SD-Card slot I can understand; for Magsafe I feels the same as you that I didn't really care for it, but HDMI... they might as well could have put a VGA port on there haha
> I didn't really find Magsafe that useful anyway, as I'm pretty much always hooked up to a monitor via USB-C (which charges as well).
I’m the complete opposite. I have to buy USB-C cables solely for MacBook Pro since nothing else I have uses it. I have plenty of HDMI and DP cables but literally only use USB-C on my laptop because I was forced to. Reverting back is a welcome change. USB-C only works as the only standard if you’re only buying relatively new tech products otherwise its the XKCD meme about an 11th standard.
My tv doesn’t have usbc, my monitors don’t have usbc, my headphones and microphone still use a jack, my phone is no usbc, etc…
Yeah, but mac standardization was pushing all of those devices towards USB-C. I'm sure we'll get there eventually anyway, but it's a nice push towards standardization.
It does create more friction in the short term though.
I don't see any reason we shouldn't move towards a single standard for all I/O, whether it's USB-C or otherwise. Maybe there are technical limitations to supporting so many things in one spec, I'm not that deep into the weeds.
Otherwise it's just incredibly wasteful to have all these different connectors, and it's anti-consumer. I mean I used to have a bag with 100 different cord types I'd have to rummage through every once in awhile to find what I needed. That shouldn't have to be a thing.
Fortunately we're down to like 4-5 standards now...
It is function over form though. The number of times I thought I plugged in the charger and didn't do it properly and the number of times I tripped on the cable when working on the couch alone makes it worth it. The simple indicator light on the magsafe makes it so much easier to see and confirm that it's charging or it's fully charged.
It almost never gets commented on but you can sneeze on the usb-C ports on the MacBook Pro and they will unseat enough to stop charging. It’s a shame the standard didn’t get notches like lightning cable which can easily hold the weight of a dangling iPhone pro max.
I'm pretty much done with buying any new Apple product, but the magsafe was brilliant years ago, and now.
Plus--Apple senior citizens loved it, and probally saved many laptops from hitting the floor.
(I will buy Apple used computers because their isn't much competition. There's a big part of me that would love a truly Hackers/Tinkerers computer. Jobs knew what the masses would buy. Wos knew what the tinkerers/inventors wanted. Wos wanted more ports, and so do I. Could anyone imagine a computer you could plug into your car, and it would delightful tell you what's wrong? (propriety issues aside) Or, a dvom. Or, having having a $50 accessory that would turn your computer into a oscilloscope. And yes--I know the market would be small now, but who knows what the future would bring. Or, adding a ham radio. Or, wifi chip that security professionals could use. And yes--I know their are third parties that make some I just mentioned, but we all know they usually come with hassels on Apple. This mythical computer would be only for the few true tinkerers out there. That is at first. It would be big bulky, but meant for repairability, and function would be it's only purpose, along with a reasonable price. I would happily pay $3000 for such a devise. Let Wos go crazy on a computer he really wanted, or wanted when he was in his 20's.)
>Apple pushed the whole industry to standardize on one connector for everything.
Because people actually want one cable for everything.
USB-C only guarantee 60W charging. Instead of telling user to use USB-C PD 2.1 Cable with Thunderbolt 4 support and this logo with x. Apple now tells its user if you want it to work at maximum speed and charging please use Magsafe.
The original PD 1.0 spec went up to 100W (20V/5A). Newest PD spec (3.1) can do up to 240W. And I think apple's magsafe cable terminates in a male usb type C, so it still uses PD internally at least.
More than 3A on PD requires tagged cables, I'm not even sure I have any 5A capable cables here. I do have tagged cables as tagging is required for USB3 over USBC which is negotiated with the aid of PD. Magsafe does make it rather somewhat simpler for the end user and I never really liked that the main cable for a portable could be so easily damaged, I liked magsafe and the magnetic connector on the Surface laptops quite a bit.
Precisely. Not all USB-C Cable are PD cable. Telling the story again.
I was trying to help a lawyer out and trying to explain why the $5.00 USB-C cable he'd bought from Amazon wasn't delivering 4K video to his expensive monitor AND powering his laptop too.
Me: OK: so its a USB-C cable, but its not a high data rate USB-C cable.
Him: But, its a USB-C Cable.
Me: but, no, not all USB-C cables are high speed cables. And some of them can't do high speed and power delivery
Him: but... its a USB-C cable: it plugs into the port.
Me: Um... just because it plugs in, doesn't mean its going to work. You can have USB-C cables that are actually slower than the old USB ports.
Him: but.... shouldn't it just work?
And so on. For... 15? more minutes? maybe 30? I finally got him to buy a "proper" belkin USB-C cable . Which was bought from a company that should be anonymous, but lets just say that a "refurbished" cable was shipped, which, surprise, surprise ,didn't work, for ANYTHING.
This basically sums up everything that is wrong with Tech thinking vs User Thinking.
It's tricky because the good part of that port is you can plug anything into it, thunderbolt, usb, etc. But the bad part of that port is that you can plug anything into it and its hard to tell why it might not be working as expected.
This was my biggest concern too, that my £300 dock would be rendered instantly obsolete. It’s nice that I could still plug these new pros into a dock with a single usb-c cable and have charging, multiple displays and usb connectivity all with one cable.
So my options are either a constant network connection or always keeping an external drive plugged in assuming I want to maintain 0 loss. Great! That's totally easier than just being able to remove the SSD.
What do you do if your laptop gets wet or lost? Or if someone runs it over? There’s not a ton of instances where the system won’t boot but somehow the SSD has survived.
Besides, the recent storage Apple has used is all encrypted with the keys stored in the Secure Enclave. Data cannot be recovered if you don’t have the board (even on the Mac Pro, IIRC).
Of the 2 laptop failures I've experienced both of them wouldn't boot but the data was recoverable because the drive didn't fail. Only in a vanishingly small percent of cases is the computer so destroyed that the SSD is also destroyed. The secure enclave is just another failing on Apple's part. If I'm encrypting my data it should be with keys I control. Apple should have a backup plan for users. Not doing so is negligent.
Well, there is an SD slot so if you're really concerned about being able to back up your work at all times if you're not network connected, you can periodically copy to that. If your laptop dies, there's no guarantee your SSD drive won't be the cause of the failure and/or can fail based on the same external event--e.g. spilling something.
For me personally, they hit it out of the park -- except for the notch, which seems like a complete showstopper to me at first sight. Maybe it's not so bad in practice if games and full-screen videos keep that whole strip solid black? But almost all the screenshots are of fullscreen apps, so it seems Apple thinks it looks a bit ungainly too.
I wonder how this will work with Apple Calendar or Safari in full screen (with the new iOS 15 compact tabs). I wonder if they are moving to a concept of full screen where the top bar is always visible.
From the marketing images on the website, it looks like fullscreen apps will just have a black bar across the top. Kind of frustrating! The inaccessibility of the top menu bar is the main reason I never use the native full-screen mode on macOS. Since the menu bar is now within the extra added space on top, I hope we eventually get the option to leave it visible.
If for many apps the top part of the screen is just going to be opaque black with no content, then that might push me towards a kind of full screen where the top menu bar is always available.
The new version of macOS allows to show the menu bar at all times, even if the app is in full-screen:
> Full-screen menu bar. You have the option to display the menu bar at all times in full screen so you can easily view the app menu and other glanceable information anytime.
I can live with the notch, but honestly I would pay more for an option to remove it along with the camera.
For me, it really depends on how this camera compares with a standard Logitech C920. If it's as good or better then I'm fine with it, but if it's just a minor upgrade over the terrible pre-existing camera then I'm not sure why they would mar an otherwise fantastic product.
Apparently the camera in last year's M1 macbook was already a huge upgrade compared to previous ones, and the new macbook pros have a higher quality 1080p sensor, and both leverage some of the special IP blocks on the chip to make the image even better, so it should almost certainly do better than the C920 (especially around audio capture as well, if you use that)
Interesting. I can't speak to the Pro, but my M1 MBA camera didn't* seem any different from the one in my 2013 MBP. If this camera is actually better than the C920, that's pretty cool.
Does anyone know how an iPad Pro camera compares? I'm guessing that'll be a decent indicator of what the new MacBook hardware is like.
*: I use the past tense because the camera lasted about a month before it randomly died. Now the camera light is always on (or at least it was before I taped over it) and the OS no longer recognizes it. (None of which I really mind, since I was planning to tape over it either way.)
The M1 cameras are not a huge upgrade, they are the same as the ones macbooks have had for years now; they just now make use of the M1's image processing hardware, and even then the improvement is nothing to write home about.
I love my M1 Air but this is one area where it doesn't really shine.
If the 1080p camera is anywhere near the one in the new iMac, it should be better than anything you need.
I suppose it does boil down to how much they improved the webcam. If it's still crap like the old one, why bother with the notch? Just slap a 720p webcam on there in the bezel and ditch the notch.
Sidenote: I think Apple could make a killing selling a $200 4k webcam. The market doesn't have many good options now, and I'm sure many Mac users would buy one.
I bought an XPS for my fiancée a few weeks ago. I’d heard the XPS camera wasn’t great, but it turned out far worse than I could have feared. They couldn’t have made a worse camera if they tried. She needs a decent webcam for doing teletherapy, so we had to send it back.
Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find a laptop that has a good webcam. We’ll probably just get her a MacBook Air, which is at least serviceable in that regard. (I’d get her a 14 inch MBP but she won’t let me spend that much on a laptop.)
Having used many Dell XPS with the webcam in different locations they're all terrible. If a notch is the compromise needed for thinner bezel while retaining good webcam quality that is fine with me. You don't lose any screen space after all. It just means the menubar (which is a real waste of screen space) gets moved up and your "desktop area" is the true rectangular size of the display.
Sure it looks odd but I can see it working very well due to macOS's menubar UI design. On Windows it wouldn't work nearly as well. Interestingly it would work very well on GNOME (with the clock moved to the right hand side) as well!
2,111 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 509 ms ] threadhttps://www.infoq.com/news/2020/11/apple-tensorflow-accelera...
"Recently Apple released the new M1 "system on a chip," which not only contains a built-in GPU, but also includes a 16-core "Neural Engine" which supports 11 trillion operations per second. Apple claims the Neural Engine will support up to 15x improvement in ML computation."
[1] https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/
"Apple corrected nearly everything about their laptop design that people complain about, used a design this is considered by some to be the best MBP design ever [1], and put a small intrusion on the screen in the least-used-possible spot in order to provide more overall screen real estate. Why does Apple hate us?"
[1] https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever
Especially on MacOS. 100% like this design - good camera, smaller bezels, useless space being cut out.
Before that on previous laptop models I used a post-it note or a piece of paper held in place with a clothes pin.
With the notch design you can't do that either without blocking parts of the UI!
I thought I was following until this part. Why couldn't you just put a post-it or whatever over the camera itself? There are no pixels where the camera is (although I would be surprised if this is not something under active research).
(I would probably go for a bit of black electrical tape if I were really worried about that, though.)
If you want to join us in the cult of Mac, learning little contortions like that will make you a lot happier.
Of course not, I was told. Apple's laptops use a superior thermal design, which could damage the laptop if the lid is closed while it's left running. Who would want to do that anyway? Better to have good cooling.
I didn't even bother to reply and mention the fact that my Windows install on the same laptop allowed it without complaint.
I never had an issue with that when I was using Windows work laptops, either, except that I recall both ThinkBooks that I had seemed to have about a 50% chance of a full kernel panic style crash when I unplugged the external display. This was back when ThinkBook was an IBM brand, though, and IIRC I was running Windows XP on both.
I hated the idea when it came around for the iPhone - but actually using one showed me that it just isn't an issue. There's a status bar at the top anyhow, and the center of it is unused.
On a laptop, I see it as just extra pixels dedicated to the OS's status bar.
https://i.imgur.com/hHEl3cN.png
https://imgur.com/a/Qlxr7t2
And apps that don't have a traditional Mac menu just have a black bar hiding the notch:
https://imgur.com/a/McNBTHY
I actually don't know what Mac OS does today when it runs out of room for menu items.
The intuition driving your hazarded "guess" is unerring.
A recent leaker called out the notch which brought renewed attention to a different leaker, ty98, who mentions notch (and other details) as early as August. [0]
Coupled with confirmation of ty98's leak that there is "No "MacBook Pro" logo on the bottom bezel", the MacBook Pro notch may very well be a branding element.
Instant visual recognition without using words. The notch is branding that transcends language.
[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/17/apple-notch-design-obsc...
Can’t they come up with something a little more original than removing screen real estate to stand out?
I will be switching back to an SE just based on how overall unwieldy the new phone is. The notch is just one of the nails in the coffin.
The notch to me says, “now I know which products not to buy”.
>macOS Hides the Notch on New MacBook Pro in Full-Screen Mode
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/18/macos-hides-notch-on-ne...
I take back what I said about the notch. It is not as bad, as it initially seemed to be
Better than dual socket servers...
I wonder if the mac pro will be dual proc...
I see, it's not too much behind even HBM2, of which we may never see a mobile variant.
I was long pointing to people making laptops that LPDDR4 is much cheaper than DIMMs in overall, despite nominal per-GB cost being higher.
The elimination of manual assembly, termination, extra through hole parts, along with LPDDR actually taking less PCB area, less layers, and being less demanding of the PCB material easily compensates for higher chip cost.
Feels like an apology for prior design decisions. My 2011 MBP is new again!
Nah. It was hated by a small but vocal minority of users, of which HN has a lot of.
I posit that "hate" is too strong a word. I would describe the changes as merely unpopular.
Do you have a source for that? Because if that was the case, it would seem silly for them to undo.
I have not met a pro user that wasn't annoyed by not being able to plug in HDMI at some point without a dongle...
I wonder when I'll be able to get one of these new Macs at work ...
>About 90 per cent of computer users don't use CTRL-F to search for a word - as they don't know such a keyboard shortcut exists, a Google survey found.
The results stunned Google's Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness, Dan Russell.
I think we just all assume that we all know it, but no one actually does."
https://www.smh.com.au/technology/only-one-in-10-know-what-c...
It's an Apple product launch. Like every product launch ever in the history of ever, they point out the features of the thing they launch.
But yes, I don't care how they market it. They'd be dumb to pause and say "oh yeah we were stupid, here's your old toys back."
Maybe I'm weird, but my respect for a company that did that would go way up, not down.
Obviously they wouldn't say "we were stupid", but I'd absolutely appreciate an admission along the lines of, "during our design journey over the past X years, we've realized our customers prefer having a full function key row on their keyboard / more ports / MagSafe / etc., so we've listened and are bringing them back!" To me, that signals a group of folks who know they are fallible, listen to customers, and do their best to meet customer needs.
But of course admitting those sorts of things wouldn't be consistent with Apple's brand. Apple is all about "we know better than you know what you want and can do no wrong". Which is fine, and seems to have created a lot of success for them, but it's always turned me off.
I think technically-minded people would take that well, but the business/management types don't like doing stuff like this, likely because it has a chance of making the stock fall (or even just not rise as much as they wanted it to).
"We heard your feedback and we listened."
https://twitter.com/apple/status/791704819811573760
Exactly none of these changes were presented as "revolutionary", that's just in your head.
I would much rather have more usb-c ports that can do anything and add dongles, than have ports that are functionally limited.
If so, that's not the keyboard everyone hates. They were already backtracking the butterfly switches by that point
Function over form.
All the time. The Macbook pro is meant to be for pros, pros care about other things like having physical function keys over it having a "light blue color that matches my shirt :)".
I haven't bought a Macbook since 2016 bc of all the trash they've been doing. A laptop without magsafe would last ~2 weeks in my household, so just that thing makes it for me.
Also, best battery, best screen, best trackpad, ports. Assuming nothing weird comes out later (screen or thermal issues) this will be the best laptop on the market for the next 10 years.
Great decision to have fired Jony Ive back then.
I like that they are going back to basics with the new models. Not crazy about the notch but otherwise it is all good. Decent screen, memory and ssd are super expensive but at least there's plenty of it now.
I'll wait a few months to see if their quality levels are back where they should be. Because I'm beyond taking their word for it after my last experience. I'm particularly curious to see if it delivers on the performance hype and thermal behavior when actually using it for doing work. If that's even close to what they are promising, it's going to be a bad year for Intel.
Does anyone know if those neural processors do anything useful or is that only for people that use specialist stuff like video editing tools? I run docker, intellij, vs code, etc.
The 2020 13" Macbook Pro was 1.5 cm thick. The new 2021 14" Macbook pro is 1.55 cm thick. So that is only 0.5 mm difference.
But I still use a 2012 MBP. Doesn't look sharp anymore, and its always been pretty heavy, but they keys work sooooo well, the touchpad is a miracle of engineering, 9 years of daily use and everything still works beautifully. And frankly, I mostly don't notice any lag still (though I might if I was doing video editing). And the port selection meant that I could hook up to just about anything with no hassle ... including ethernet. Wifi is still inferior to an ethernet port.
I know it's a very minor and a picky thing, but Apple takes such a great pride in the uniformity and design, it's strange they resort to this.
The 2003 12-inch Macbook with the aluminum keys was like a textbook made out of solid metal. That keyboard felt great.
This looks like a great machine to me and I am a little sad I bought in Feb!
There used to be a time when what people considered “professional hardware” was versatility and durability over pure aesthetics. I’m not saying we can’t have both form and function with professional grade hardware but with the later iterations of the MBP Apple have put form ahead of function and then trained an entire generation of developers to look at hardware superficially. I honestly weep for the industry if this is the path we are destined to continue down.
But I will say, the aluminium body is genius in terms of form and function. That's not an aesthetic compromise, it's the right thing.
Computers are our workplace, we spend most of our lives in them.
Would you be just as productive if we put your desk in a reeking pig sty?
I have no issue with people wanting their work environment to be pretty but aesthetics shouldn’t hamper the person’s ability to get their work done. (at least not unless you work in an industry where aesthetics is your job).
Sounds odd but I'll see what it's like in practice
I'm wondering what the behavior will be to run the mouse across the top of the screen?
It was never in the Macbooks.
> posted in wrong thread so copying here
A simple black bar in full screen apps would be sufficient I guess.
Otherwise I am looking at my web browser in full screen and how do you design around that? You have to push the tabs down anyway, might as well just make the menu bar static.
Which I'm perfectly fine with. Useless black area made useful.
If they have done that, it's fine.
But even then I can think of a bunch of people who buy MacBooks to run Linux.. it's going to be a showstopper for them.
If that is the case, it sounds like a pretty elegant solution and significantly reduces my concern about the notch. It also addresses my confusion about some of the images on Apple's website.
I suppose the notch is only in the way if you are watching 4:3 video in full screen. For every other use case, the notch is hidden in either the menu bar or black, horizontal bars.
I’m also wondering if the led backlighting is arranged so that backlight is completely turned off in the black horizontal bars shown when viewing 16:9 video in full screen.
That would likely help a lot, very interested to see it in action.
And I’m sure we’ll see everyone else start to copy this “feature”.
(Maybe this was mentioned in the presentation...)
Ha!
Thanks for the correction
They did announce a very high contrast ratio so hopefully it won't be too bad.
It is not a loss, it is a pure gain.
The notch doesn't bother me because it's literally more room on the screen. Laptops with the camera below the screen tend to have an uncomfortable angle that look sup your nose, and the design suggests that they may be adding Face ID in a future iteration.
[1] https://psrefstuff.lenovo.com/Detail/Legion/Lenovo_Legion_5_...
EDIT: Nevermind, they mention other laptops in the other slides, some of which do have a 3080.
@23:15 the high end laptop being a MSI GE76 Raider 11UH-053
But now I am VERY curious how well it will do at gaming using CrossOver Mac. I’d been eyeing a getting a 3080 laptop as a secondary for being able to do mobile gaming, but an M1 Max + CrossOver Mac setup might scratch that itch with only a single laptop. A fun experiment for next Tuesday.
It really isn't. Nvidia should be using clearly differentiated model numbers to represent two completely different lines. They did this to intentionally confuse customers.
But their partners probably weren't happy that the highest end laptop sku was a xx60, so here we are again.
Same for intel, there is a huge number of people who were asking me why their laptop with a dual-core I7 is slower than a desktop with an I3
I don't want to know the thermals on the laptop then.
There is a reason for the 3070 being available with a minimum of 2 large fans and liquid cooling existing at all. How do you want to cool the same performance in a thin laptop? With passive airflow?
For reference, this is what a laptop with the mobile (!) version of a 3070 looks like:
https://gzhls.at/i/89/84/2618984-n1.jpg
It's also 1199 euros, just saying.
It's not clear to me that's a cooling win, though? Unless there are actually some kind of vents on the bottom?
nvidia/amd just don't design with thermals in mind and that's exactly why you need to attach multiple helicopters to every piece of their hardware.
But we don't know what Apple is comparing.
In the picture titled "GPU performance vs. power", that is "relative performance" with lower power consumption, so it doesn't say anything about literal performance.
Then there's this:
> In addition, the GPU delivers performance comparable to a high-end GPU in a compact pro PC laptop while consuming up to 40 percent less power, and performance similar to that of the highest-end GPU in the largest PC laptops while using up to 100 watts less power.[2]
Where that 2 points to:
> ... Discrete PC laptop graphics performance data from testing Lenovo Legion 5 (82JW0012US). High-end discrete PC laptop graphics performance data from testing MSI GE76 Raider (11UH-053). PC compact pro laptop performance data from testing Razer Blade 15 Advanced (RZ09-0409CE53-R3U1). Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of MacBook Pro.
So there's some data. I've still got some real questions about why they're talking "relative performance" in their graphs, though.(edit: formatting)
[0] https://youtu.be/exM1uajp--A?t=1366
Certainly there are tasks they can do to skew that one way or another.
It's why when Intel moved from the GMA to Intel HD (i.e. "can just about render a desktop" to "can play indie games"), it took years before games even reliably worked on Intel GPUs, never mind performed. Of course once they did it pretty much killed off the budget GPU market.
Even at the high end consumer market, it's why you often find AMD GPUs outperforming cost equivalent nVidia cards for compute use but then falling flat in games.
Apple has the advantage that the big game engines like Unity/Unreal etc. have been targeting their hardware for the mobile support for the last while, so they have arguably a bit of a head start relative to Intel's entry, but I have to imagine they have a catch up to do before they run high end PC games comparably. Probably will run the entire iOS catalogue in 120hz though.
Mobile 3080 specs https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3080-max-q...
fewer teraflops but higher gigatexels, gigapixels
That seems closer to the power consumption they had on their comparison chart.
(I really wish there was a matte screen option at the price point, my old macbook pro was a very expensive mirror and it puts a lot of strain on the eyes to try to concentrate on whats on screen, rather than behind it)
A Windows laptop from HP or Lenovo with similar specs/performance won't be cheaper.
Literally just picked up an asus zephyrs g15 15.6" with 2560 x 1440QHD 165 hz refresh rate, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, 16GB Memory, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and 1 Tb ssd for $1850 at Best Buy, then picked up 2x16gb DDR4 3200 MHz for $150 off Amazon to upgrade to 32gb.
Weight is a little over 4 lbs. (4.1lbs)
Total cost: $2000
Other than that yes MacBooks are expensive. But so are HP EliteBooks or Lenovo ThinkPads.
What's your point. Of course you can get a laptop with lesser specs from a cheaper manufacturer for less, especially if you upgrade it yourself after the fact.
But if you price a Thinkpad P series of HP ZBook with 64GB RAM, 2TB storage, and similar GPU/CPU performance, you are looking at $4000. I know because I have one.
Anyways that's the beauty of PCs, you don't have to pay the exorbitant prices or the OEM if you don't want to, a Lenovo P15 will allow you to swap the RAM and SSD however you want and it takes 5 minutes and like 9 screws.
For Dutch people: https://www.smartfolie.com/
Since I replace my machine frequently enough for work, 32gb and 1TB is plenty for me for the work I do.
[1] https://live.arstechnica.com/apple-october-18-unleashed-even...
[2] https://live.arstechnica.com/apple-october-18-unleashed-even...
The 64G of ram is huge though. It only took them half a decade to figure it out.
That other 0.01% of the time is the killer.
I agree with everything else you said and I think overall these machines will be awesome.
I would disagree with you on the ports though, I think this is kind of a miss for Apple. They caved into some of the loudest complaints from several years ago which were already coming from a loud minority and that minority is now smaller than ever.
And if they were set on changing the ports these certainly aren't all that you could ever want. A few USB-A ports as well as keeping at least the 4 USB-C ports from last year (instead of reducing to 3) would have been more useful for more people than the HDMI and especially the SD ports are.
(HDMI used to be useful for plugging into a projector for presentations, that use-case is now nearly non-existent now that all meetings tend to happen over zoom, webex, teams, hangouts, etc. even when in-person. HDMI used to be useful for monitors but increasingly displayport over usb-c is supported by everything except the lowest end monitors. SD used to be important for stills and video footage, but increasingly cameras use CFExpress, CFast, output over hdmi to an atmos-style recorder, or even micro-SD for small GoPro style cameras, all of which will still need dongles. Devices like Raspberry Pis require micro SD not standard SD).
They also could have added the nifty ethernet-over-magsafe via the powerbrick that the iMac has and they didn't do that.
Edit: One additional thought - I'm seeing from the comments some reasonable situations where HDMI still comes in handy - cheap monitors, plugging into a tv to watch something, and I guess there are still lots of people physically plugging in at work for presentations. Fair enough, but in that case it's weird that this is a "Pro" feature. These are all very non-pro usecases and you'll still need dongles around for anybody with a non-pro machine (like a macbook air).
They basically made a line-in-the-sand on USB-C adoption, and it pretty much worked. I'd argue that an HDMI and SD card readers are less useful, and certainly far less versatile than additional USB-C ports.
For all the dongle jokes of a few years ago, I don't really see a reason to go back to less versatile ports in laptops.
You're right though the HDMI port might come in handy in random situations, better to include it than not. The SD port is the one I really don't get. And I still maintain that the continued lack of USB-A ports is a much bigger dongle problem than the lack of HDMI port was.
/snark
Why is that?
Edit: I'm obviously oversimplifying, but most of the world doesn't have always-on data connections (e.g. rural areas) and manufacturers outside of silicon valley do optimise for people that may want to download media so the can view/listen when they're not connected. Nothing beats a cheap phone replaceable battery and storage.
MicroSD support would have actually made more sense to me than standard SD. But from what it looks like micro cards will still require a dongle of sorts.
https://tweakers.net/geheugenkaarten/vergelijken/#filter:q1Y...
And they ALSO have the single most needed and bitched about port if it's absent, by far, for nearly all business users, which is HDMI. Far and away the best thing they could have added.
I personally will not use it often, but when I do, it will be invaluable, and for the users I support, it will be a tremendous increase in convenience and ease-of-use.
If you need a lot of USB-A ports, get a CalDigit dock and be done with it. If you need just 1, there are extraordinarily tiny adapters.
It's time to get over USB-A.
However, I would be using it in every conference room I use, multiple times daily. It’s the difference between plugging in the cable vs. finding the right dongle that’s security-cabled to the presenter cable, and connecting it in the middle.
SD card reader is a nice addition for a handful of pros, sure, but definitely not essential for everyone who does photo/video seriously.
MicroSD->SD is easy with a dummy adapter
Don't get me wrong, I would still buy a MacBook with no SD card slot, but I would occasionally run into cases where I wish I had that dongle that I lost somewhere.
There's a single use case for which can't easily be replaced by a USB-C dongle: using it as makeshift additional "internal" storage.
SD cards work pretty well for that, for most read-heavy use cases. On older Macbooks, with undersized internal storage, I'd keep an SD card in the slot. I'd keep downloaded media there, installers, even infrequently used applications. Assuming one's using a high quality SD card, performance was "plenty good enough."
I wouldn't keep anything crucial on an SD card, but everything on my local storage is backed up to the cloud anyway, so not really an issue.
on my M1 MacBook Pro (which, throughout the pandemic, has rested on my desk in clamshell mode all day, like a desktop), I use a
adapter chain, which takes up an entire usb-c port since it doesn't work at all when I plug it into the usb-c pass-through on my other usb-c hubunfortunately, there seems to be some kind of hardware bug in the thunderbolt 2 ethernet adapter, so even when the machine is asleep or off, it runs hot
it also seems weird that Apple doesn't manufacture a first party ethernet <=> usb-c adapter — if i'm not mistaken, the only one on their website is made by Belkin and costs $30; moreover, I don't think anyone even manufactures a 10gbps ethernet adapter for the M1
QNA-T310G1T is the RJ45 model, but there are other makes available too.
(I bought the Mini at launch, and they've since released a SKU with built-in 10gbit Ethernet)
I'm not sure you have the information to make the claim that the use case for HDMI is nearly non-existent. We use HDMI all the time. Availability bias is a thing. I find that people drastically underestimate how much they don't know about a subject or use-case of a product.
For a static port set, I think the burden of proof lies on whoever wants to remove the HDMI port.
However, I think Apple ought to have considered a Framework-style approach to ports. Why have static ports when you can have dynamic ports?
Because dynamic ports (basically internal dongles) reduces the amount of internal volume they have to work with. This would cause compromises in other areas like a thicker laptop, less battery life, noisier fan, etc.
The numerous USB-C dongles are basically dynamic ports..albeit with a lot more inconvenience. But internal swappable ports removes a lot of internal space.
Why they shouldn't have been removed?
Because USB-C is awesome and _almost_ everywhere, but you need ONE important occasion where you need to connect a screen, plug in an SD card or even an external (pen|hard) drive, maybe in front of customers, and you get really infuriatingly frustrated, and regret buying this stupid trap which has half the ports of the one from 10 years ago, but costs 3x as much and just lost you a customer.
The old one would have worked. Who's the idiot which came up with this contraption?
Dongles are NOT the solution. They get lost or forgotten, they're messy.
Reducing to 3 USB-C ports is perfectly fine as we regain the dedicated magsafe.
I'm with you right up 'til that '3X as much' part - MacBook Pros have remained static or gone down in real prices over the last decade - not 3x higher.
Doing presentations at work is a non-pro use case?
> the cheap $400 monitor market.
I found your employer is great and you're rich.
I'd be happy to know that they made this choice deliberately to fix whatever issues where I guess plaguing the USB-C display connections.
[] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/some-users-having-exter...
- When you go "fullscreen", does the fullscreen window stop at the bottom of the notch, or like can you see the notch in maximized Netflix videos? In the keynote I thought I saw a maximized video whose height stopped just under the notch.
- So is the extra notch space used only for the menubar? What happens when you auto-hide the menubar (which I do)? Is that functionality disabled on this hardware?
I guess that if you auto-hide the menu bar, a black strip will mask the area.
I agree it's probably designed with a future FaceID implementation in mind but if this isn't the case, Dell have managed to move their camera back up above the screen on the latest XPS's. In my opinion, this is the best looking option currently:
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81FV+91am5L._AC_SL1500_....
Add 4xUSB-A and Ethernet please.
I can see someone having an aesthetic issue with it, as a distraction perhaps.
But having a fat bezel at the top, as all other bezels shrink toward zero, is also aesthetically non-optimal.
The person that can’t get any work done because of the notch staring back at them has probably other bigger issues on the go.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/01/apple-silicon-roadmap-gurman-...
What would block a new Mac Pro would instead be DDR4 or DDR5 support instead of LPDDR5, and also PCI-E lanes. Both of which would likely require yet another change in silicon design.
It helped me a lot while debugging and loved the customization it offered for the "static" keys on the right, but having no haptic feedback always caused me to miss the button unless I stared at it, killing the purpose greatly.
I also don't like how it's harder to operate than physical buttons. Too many times I hit the wrong spot on the bar and for example ended up putting my laptop to sleep instead of adjusting brightness. I've also tried to configure Ableton Live to do something useful with it (maybe mute/unmute tracks or control their volumes); but with little success.
Long story short: I'm happy to see it's gone.
Hmm
So 3 models, with 2 of them being 'Pro'.
As a touch bar hater from the beginning, I'm super excited to be able to hit keys to play/pause/skip music, mute, and adjust brightness without having to look at the touch bar to do it.
Ports, a half decent webcam, scissor switches & mag-safe are exactly the 'features' that took zero effort from Apple's side to implement.
I like that this seems like the first real 'pro' device Apple has produced since the 2015 Mac, but the reason it took as long has entirely to do with Hubris rather than technical constraints.
The M1 series of processors are IMO the only new standout innovation in these current-gen devices. That being said, it is seriously impressive innovation and the other laptop manufacturers appear to be even more complacent. (Looking at Dell and Lenovo making the same device for 10 years with only the smallest of changes each time)
I like what Microsoft is trying to do with their devices, but they don't seem to be too keen on competing against their 3rd party customers directly. So you get laptops with weird form factors or ones that try to go for value-for-money instead of top class performance.
That's just my half-assed stab at it. Presumably someone whose job is to write these things for a living can improve it meaningfully while maintaining the essence.
It's a company dude, Apple is not your buddy. They're not listening to you, they're listening to market research and usage analytics.
I suspect the 13" M1 Pro was probably just something to cater for those who were skeptical about a fanless laptop since no one really knew back then how well these machines would perform. Now that the M1s have been out for a while and no one seems to be complaining about the Air, they can drop the M1 Pro.
Some people run applications full screen most of the time. For example the browser, text editor, chat, etc.
I wonder if it automatically inserts a black bar in those situations.
They could have just moved everything down for IMO a slightly better design.
Looking at the product photos it looks like they black-bar the entire top of the display when anything is full-screen? So that seems to make the notch even more intrusive as you lose out on all the screen real-estate next to it when something is fullscreen.
Or rather, the menu bar is now a permanent bezel that nothing else can occupy?
That would have been bezel in a notchless design.
Just see literally any other laptop that has both a fairly small bezel and fits a webcam in it, like the Dell XPS 13. The camera in the macbook may be better and require a larger lens assembly as a result, but it's surely not as big as the bezel + notch itself requires.
The screenshots showing application menus almost hitting the notch are ugly af. I'm sure that there are applications that have even more menus than Photoshop or Premiere.
… and yet, sales have continued to be extremely high, which suggests that is a self-selected group of extremely vocal opponents rather than a real market trend.
I hate the notch, but I'll still buy iPhones all day long if my only other choice is to buy products with questionable privacy from an advertising company versus dealing with Apple's shitty designs.
The Mac notch is right in the middle of the toolbar. I have lots of applications that use that space for menus and will be curious how cumbersome it will be now that we need to literally navigate around it.
Will we need to move the mouse down to get around the notch, or will the cursor be allowed to go under the notch?
From the full-screen screenshots, it appears that it's simply black across the top of the screen unless the application has been designed to support it. That looked like the regular Safari developer tools with an unbroken bar slightly lower down in the video.
Literally during the latest iPhone announcement where Apple was even timid about showing off the front of the display or talking about the smaller notch, as everyone mocked how dated the notch looked.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/apple-makes-the-ipho...
Again, not saying this is nothing or that I love it, only that the buying public does not seem to feel anywhere near as strongly about it and I've never heard anyone complaining about it on a regular basis. Most people get used to it, if they're curious they probably understand that it's for the camera, and get on with life. I'd be quite surprised if this did not follow a very similar trajectory — especially since the display is larger so you could black out the entire top of the screen in software and still have more screen real estate than the previous model.
In this case, the 16" screen gained ~0.2" diagonally and 314px extra resolution. Those extra pixels mean that even with the notch you're going to see more on the screen than you could before and in my experience that's far more likely to be the part which shapes people's impression of a new device.
10 people complaining online doesn’t mean that all the millions of purchasers dislike it too.
That doesn’t mean it’s zero but it suggests that the compromise was actually quite reasonable, even if there are a small number of people who vocally disagree.
I think for me it'll fade away, especially with a dark-mode UI.
Laptops are effectively always in landscape.
And yes, sarcasm.
It's great, as I only need to plug in one cable and my laptop is powered, connected to both my external monitors (displayport mst) and USB peripherals.
It's also a reason I asked not to have a Mac when I changed jobs. The Intel Macs and the older m1s don't support MST.
I wonder if the new m1s finally support it?
As more folks returned to the office, we get lots of issues with shitty network and other drivers on docks.
Also, HDMI ports are approximately the same height as USB Type-A ports, so presumably it would fit in this design.
It did
Traveling is when I'm least likely to do that. And regardless, I travel with this[1] anyway, so no problemo.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Purgo-Adapter-2018-2016-Delivery-Thun...
* My yubikey to perform 2-factor auth
* The checkra1n jailbreak for my work iPhone (I do some iOS dev and occasionally need a jailbroken device. For whatever reason, it doesn't work with a USB-C-to-lightning cable, it has to use a USB-A-to-lightning cable + a dongle.)
* A USB flash drive for transferring a presentation or whatever. (I know these come in USB-C variants, but I don't have one.)
* Charging all the random things that charge from USB-A ports.
I made the transition at the beginning of the year to "USB-C everything I can" and it's very liberating. Ironically the only devices I have left that are not USB-C are my iPhone and AirPods (and my Kindle, but they just released a USB-C model which I will soon use to replace my current one).
[1] https://www.amazon.com/SDBAUX-USB-Compatible-Electronic-Tabl...
Looks like a handy cable.
In practice I’ll probably mostly just deal with for a while by carrying a hub with me.
Of course I have a ton of other things I’ll home but that’s easier dealt with using various usb hubs.
He is now designing at Ferrari: https://www.wsj.com/articles/ferrari-hires-former-apple-desi...
- Removal of the brake pedal since you should only need one input to control things
- The gas inlet port relocated to a more aesthetically pleasing location in the very center of the undercarriage
- Total width of the car down to a svelte and sexy 3.5 feet because the thinner it looks the better it is
There is 3D Touch where a long press on the steering screen lets you set cruise control
You have to attach them via dongle, but the only input port is in the trunk.
Why is this a problem? You shouldn't be trying to drive it while it's fueling anyway
It also requires the car to be on the front wheels, with the back awkwardly suspended by the fuel hose.
https://dealerimages.dealereprocess.com/image/upload/v157591...
Pretty telling since that was sort of the heyday of Apple's devices having all sorts of conflicting designs.
Edit: I think this is the article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jony-ive-is-departing-apple-but...
With a summary at: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/01/jony-ives-departu...
Furthermore, it's hard to imagine Ive and Ferrari gelling. Ive's style is about as diametrically opposed from Italian design as I can think of. I characterize his design as character-less, something Italian designers don't go for.
with the new chips, they can comfortably sacrifice some battery size.
Personally I'm surprised they didn't decide to keep the same weight by shrinking the battery. Not that many people absolutely need a 21 hour battery life, though it is nice.
USB-C is pretty great, and the sooner we shift things over the better. When I bough a MBP with only USB-C ports I just bought a little dongle thing that slots in to my two ports on the side and gives me USB-A, HDMI, SD and MicroSD. I've used the thing around 20 times and its never been a burden because I carry it with me in my laptops case.
At this point I actually see adding the other ports back as a step backwards. HDMI is old and aggressively large in 2021. My 3 devices that use an SD card actually use a microSD card so I need to carry around an adapter anyway.
Even twenty years ago I wanted just the best features in a laptop.
Give me a quality machine, at a reasonable price; and I would drag around a boat anchor.
I also wanted repairability, and room for future upgrades inside the laptop, but gave up on that one.
I think you're giving them too much credit. This is Apple's way of admitting they were wrong.
If our stuff makes M1 runs slow ... It's probably poorly optimized code.
Of course game dev is exempt from this.
But also those who run multiple VMs at the same time.
I tried this route a few years ago but gave up out of sheer frustration. I wonder if it's improved now. At this point I'm more inclined to setup my local stack in AWS and be done with it. Like no local laptop testing at all.
The original M1 pro had a touchbar, that alone make it suck. But the M1 is still thinner by a mile and has no fan!
Many people overlook this but no fan means no dirt will get into the chasis. That is HUGE.
No reason they had to do that - just pure icing on the cake.
Mini-LED backlighting. It’s still an IPS panel. MicroLED is something else entirely. Had me excited for a second.
If it doesn't run VirtualBox then I can't use it to write code, so why does it even matter if it's faster?
Conceptually I'd love one of these machine, but realistically if I can't develop locally in an Ubuntu VM then I might as well just wait a year or two to buy one until that's possible. I'm not going to use Docker, and realistically I have zero interest in spending multiple weeks rewriting all of my provisioning scripts.
QEMU can virtualise arm and emulate x86.
You could use that now or wait for virtual box to catch up (I assume).
This thing is running Rails, mysql, elastic search, redis, mongodb, and workers inside docker. As well as nodejs, vscode, a handful of electron apps all at the same time and the laptop is cold.
gulp.watch would often eat an entire core, and stuff in Docker ran slower than on Linux, but my laptop could keep up. vscode didn't lag and Firefox ran just fine—all with 5+ Docker containers running.
Have you considered that plenty of people don’t need VirtualBox to write code?
It’s not like a huge majority of office workers have been staying at home or working from the office for the last year and half or something. The coffee shop surfing, working in the plane / train must have taken a dive.
https://www.eizo.com/library/basics/10_ways_to_address_eye_f...
I bought a QLED TV 3 years ago, and tried to use it as an external display for my laptop. It's painful to look at. You switch from a white window to a black one and the TV adjusts backlight dynamically and blasts your eyes. I would react by putting my hand in front on my eyes like if i had looked outside from inside a cave after getting used to the cave.
Something like e-ink would be best for office work indeed. Lighting is external so controlled by the user and in line with the rest of the room
Is it really the contrast though? No contrast is sharper than blank and white, and reading a book is fine.
Let's say your movie shows a full moon in the night. Looking at that moon on the screen is now like looking at a torchlight in the night in real life. The moon section of the screen is blasting high brightness right at your eyes.
This is what I meant. I tried doing office work on such a monitor, and quickly realize it's good for immersion, but terrible for office work, for which you want stable brightness.
Everyone likes to have mobile workstation.
14"
1.8-Core CPU, 14-Core GPU, 16GB Unified Memory, 512GB SSD Storage - £1,899.00
2. 10-Core CPU, 16-Core GPU, 16GB Unified Memory, 1TB SSD Storage - £2,399.00
Which is honestly a much better solution than adding SD and HDMI back to the Macbook. I know it's a controversial opinion around these parts, but I never understood the dongle-gate fiasco. A $30 portable hub will add those parts back to anyone that needs them. I sure as hell don't.
But to be honest I don't need it suuuper often. Just for my USB-A microphone and the occasional projector somewhere. I live in the USB-C future Apple is turning away from haha
Apple pushed the whole industry to standardize on one connector for everything. If anyone really needed those other ports, a small $30 portable hub would add them all back.
Magsafe 3 is just another connector that will add more e-waste and proprietary cables to the mix. It's nice that they kept the USB-C charging, but now non-2021+ Macbook users can't reuse the charging cables.
I didn't really find Magsafe that useful anyway, as I'm pretty much always hooked up to a monitor via USB-C (which charges as well).
I guess it's nice for those that miss it, but we were starting to finally get to a world with a one-size-fits-all cable. Remember back in the day when old-style cell phones/laptops all had proprietary chargers?
But it seems the momentum for USB-C is there, so hopefully consolidation continues. Anyway, the EU and maybe others seem to be moving towards legislation to consolidate I/O types anyway.
I'm guessing the HDMI is partially due to bandwidth limitations of USB-C, though I forget the specifics.
The SD-Card slot I can understand; for Magsafe I feels the same as you that I didn't really care for it, but HDMI... they might as well could have put a VGA port on there haha
So, SD for pro photo/video (and they are very right about full-size SDs here), HDMI for pro office, USB3 for everything else, seems legit.
I’m the complete opposite. I have to buy USB-C cables solely for MacBook Pro since nothing else I have uses it. I have plenty of HDMI and DP cables but literally only use USB-C on my laptop because I was forced to. Reverting back is a welcome change. USB-C only works as the only standard if you’re only buying relatively new tech products otherwise its the XKCD meme about an 11th standard.
My tv doesn’t have usbc, my monitors don’t have usbc, my headphones and microphone still use a jack, my phone is no usbc, etc…
It does create more friction in the short term though.
I don't see any reason we shouldn't move towards a single standard for all I/O, whether it's USB-C or otherwise. Maybe there are technical limitations to supporting so many things in one spec, I'm not that deep into the weeds.
Otherwise it's just incredibly wasteful to have all these different connectors, and it's anti-consumer. I mean I used to have a bag with 100 different cord types I'd have to rummage through every once in awhile to find what I needed. That shouldn't have to be a thing.
Fortunately we're down to like 4-5 standards now...
Plus--Apple senior citizens loved it, and probally saved many laptops from hitting the floor.
(I will buy Apple used computers because their isn't much competition. There's a big part of me that would love a truly Hackers/Tinkerers computer. Jobs knew what the masses would buy. Wos knew what the tinkerers/inventors wanted. Wos wanted more ports, and so do I. Could anyone imagine a computer you could plug into your car, and it would delightful tell you what's wrong? (propriety issues aside) Or, a dvom. Or, having having a $50 accessory that would turn your computer into a oscilloscope. And yes--I know the market would be small now, but who knows what the future would bring. Or, adding a ham radio. Or, wifi chip that security professionals could use. And yes--I know their are third parties that make some I just mentioned, but we all know they usually come with hassels on Apple. This mythical computer would be only for the few true tinkerers out there. That is at first. It would be big bulky, but meant for repairability, and function would be it's only purpose, along with a reasonable price. I would happily pay $3000 for such a devise. Let Wos go crazy on a computer he really wanted, or wanted when he was in his 20's.)
Its like insurance, you dont need to for most part but then when luck is not on your side that is when you need it the most.
Because people actually want one cable for everything.
USB-C only guarantee 60W charging. Instead of telling user to use USB-C PD 2.1 Cable with Thunderbolt 4 support and this logo with x. Apple now tells its user if you want it to work at maximum speed and charging please use Magsafe.
The problem is that the "industry" gave us one port for everything while giving us a confusing mess of mixed capability cables that use that port.
The original PD 1.0 spec went up to 100W (20V/5A). Newest PD spec (3.1) can do up to 240W. And I think apple's magsafe cable terminates in a male usb type C, so it still uses PD internally at least.
I was trying to help a lawyer out and trying to explain why the $5.00 USB-C cable he'd bought from Amazon wasn't delivering 4K video to his expensive monitor AND powering his laptop too.
Me: OK: so its a USB-C cable, but its not a high data rate USB-C cable.
Him: But, its a USB-C Cable.
Me: but, no, not all USB-C cables are high speed cables. And some of them can't do high speed and power delivery
Him: but... its a USB-C cable: it plugs into the port.
Me: Um... just because it plugs in, doesn't mean its going to work. You can have USB-C cables that are actually slower than the old USB ports.
Him: but.... shouldn't it just work?
And so on. For... 15? more minutes? maybe 30? I finally got him to buy a "proper" belkin USB-C cable . Which was bought from a company that should be anonymous, but lets just say that a "refurbished" cable was shipped, which, surprise, surprise ,didn't work, for ANYTHING. This basically sums up everything that is wrong with Tech thinking vs User Thinking.
It's too useful not to add back. Every laptop should have something like this; it prevents accidents and damage.
Besides, the recent storage Apple has used is all encrypted with the keys stored in the Secure Enclave. Data cannot be recovered if you don’t have the board (even on the Mac Pro, IIRC).
More seriously, I had not considered the secure enclave angle, which is worrisome.
Games have never showed awesome support for Apple's weird decisions, so I guess I would expect some issues there, unfortunately.
> Full-screen menu bar. You have the option to display the menu bar at all times in full screen so you can easily view the app menu and other glanceable information anytime.
Source: last feature in https://www.apple.com/macos/monterey/features/
For me, it really depends on how this camera compares with a standard Logitech C920. If it's as good or better then I'm fine with it, but if it's just a minor upgrade over the terrible pre-existing camera then I'm not sure why they would mar an otherwise fantastic product.
Does anyone know how an iPad Pro camera compares? I'm guessing that'll be a decent indicator of what the new MacBook hardware is like.
*: I use the past tense because the camera lasted about a month before it randomly died. Now the camera light is always on (or at least it was before I taped over it) and the OS no longer recognizes it. (None of which I really mind, since I was planning to tape over it either way.)
I love my M1 Air but this is one area where it doesn't really shine.
If the 1080p camera is anywhere near the one in the new iMac, it should be better than anything you need.
Not really, no. The Dell XPS for instance has just as small bezels but without a notch.
Sidenote: I think Apple could make a killing selling a $200 4k webcam. The market doesn't have many good options now, and I'm sure many Mac users would buy one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISight
I bought an XPS for my fiancée a few weeks ago. I’d heard the XPS camera wasn’t great, but it turned out far worse than I could have feared. They couldn’t have made a worse camera if they tried. She needs a decent webcam for doing teletherapy, so we had to send it back.
Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find a laptop that has a good webcam. We’ll probably just get her a MacBook Air, which is at least serviceable in that regard. (I’d get her a 14 inch MBP but she won’t let me spend that much on a laptop.)
Sure it looks odd but I can see it working very well due to macOS's menubar UI design. On Windows it wouldn't work nearly as well. Interestingly it would work very well on GNOME (with the clock moved to the right hand side) as well!
In my experience, it kinda disappears within minutes. I barely notice it’s there.