If you really want silence, you're best off with the fanless MBA. Though Apple noted that in non-intense use the MBP should be silent, you can also see from their performance graphs[1] that the M1 is more efficient than the M1 Pro and M1 Max at low power levels. (<12 watts or so, from eyeballing the chart.)
Makes sense when you consider that the M1 has more efficiency cores than the M1 Pro/Max.
I'd actually like to build myself a home NAS/server with only Gracemont cores if we ever see Alder Lake-L available in a mini-ITX form factor. (Was going to try with Jasper Lake, but that seems to have been effectively cancelled with the chip shortage.)
To add to this, apple probably already tuned the chip so that any additional power wouldn't meaningfully improve performance. You're not trading 10% more power for 10% more performance, you're trading 50% more power for 5% more performance (numbers made up).
While the graphs are vague, apple’s performance v power graphs show this phenomenon.
The highest performing laptops in the market are more like portable workstations rather than mobile devices - while on battery their performance is significantly throttled to provide a useful battery life. This contrasts from apple’s designs for the reason you’ve stated: they are capable performers while on battery.
Not at all, actually. You're forgetting the heavy use of MacBook Pros by recording engineers and musicians. For them, having a machine that is fast without generating the incredibly annoying constant fan noise of the vast majority of PC laptops is a crucial feature.
So no. Definitely not. The user should be able to toggle this. As Apple has wisely chosen.
I like the option for both! Or even customizable. I had a laptop with a dedicated Nvidia card, and I could tell which programs to run on it, or whether i wanted to always on or always off. I loved it, was super easy to configure out the box as well!
to an extent, but the automatic part is a sticky widget for this particular case. as other in this thread have commented, not all users may want the baggage that comes with running at 100% even if they are plugged in to mains.
It isn’t standard with Apple laptops. They normally don’t slow down on battery. They do reduce screen brightness by default, though you can override that.
This will almost certainly be the case. Such a mode will likely sit within the "Energy Saver" section of System Preferences, which already has settings profiles for each power source.
Your comment is both condescending and wrong. Linux power management on mobile used to be garbage, but now you can get excellent battery life on Linux-friendly laptops, if you willing to invest time into tuning it. I'm typing this message from one such laptop (Lenovo X1C).
Glad you’re having a good experience.
But compared to MacOS, and to a lesser extent, windows, power management in mobile is still garbage for OEM laptops.
Not that my opinion of what is garbage may differ than yours. The M1 has spoiled me perhaps.
I’m glad you’re having a fantastic time, but the depth and quality of power management in MacOS far surpasses anything currently in Linux. See seamless instant wake from sleep.
Of course! The crazy thing is that you could do it while the computer was running and it was mostly fine: DOS and many DOS games would just happily keep working, just at slighly different speeds. But then it wasn't uncommon for the PC to just freeze and then it needed a reboot.
But the best feature, to me, was those PC with a turbo button that also had a seven-segment display showing the current speed. This was looking really cool.
I distinctly rememver taking one apart and being very disappointed: the segment display was completely fake and showed 2 predefined numbers, not correlated to the CPU frequency at all.
We added a variable frequency control to an IBM/AT and used it to adjust the CPU clock up to the point just below where the system would crash. Default was 6 MHz but we could push it up to around 10 MHz before it started crashing. That seemed amazingly fast at the time.
This is technically correct (the best kind…) however many people will have a different experience because it was sometimes inverted to be more intuitive.
It was mainly for games written for the older CPUs that used CPU timing for the main game event loop. Turning off "turbo" would reduce the clock frequency and slow the game down to a playable speed.
For just a second there I thought Intel provides the kernel some kind of backwards compatibility mode to clock down to 4.77MHz like the original turbo button.
There is a pin PROCHOT on all Intel processors that can be used to drop the CPU (and IGP, if equipped) into its lowest-power but still running state. It's designed to allow external voltage regulators on the board to assert that they are overloaded, but I don't see why you couldn't also wire in a turbo button there :=)
> Contrary to what it suggests, the "turbo" button was generally intended to let a computer run slower than the speed for which it had been designed when pressed.
Damn these trickster designers and their shitty design decisions. That's exactly the opposite of what I thought it did.
Like 10 years after my 486-DX2 went into the trash after a long long life, I was reminiscing about the turbo button with a coworker, and he mentioned that he always kept his turbo button activated and that there was never a single repercussion from it!
Well, slower was the repercussion, but my coworker thought turbo meant faster, and was thinking along the lines of "my CPU didn't catch fire from all the extra speed I was getting"
You misuderstood. When the turbo button is pressed, computer runs on nominal speed. When turbo button is un-pressed, computer would run on half of nominal speed.
So, unpressed button makes computer slower, not pressed one.
Source: actually used the button on my 386 SX 20/40 MHz
Yep. I always had the turbo button pressed, except for occasionally deciding to play Test Drive 3 at speeds lower than "light speed". It was the one game I had that didn't calibrate the delay loop properly and my 486 was waaay too fast for normal playing - something that I didn't know so I learnt to play a very twitchy version...
Sorry, but I think you're confused in the same manner my coworker was. Activating the turbo button decreases the speed of your computer.
Maybe yours operated differently, but everything I can find about turbo buttons on the internet indicates that they operated as I remember them - your computer gets slower when you turn the button on. I specifically remember playing certain DOS games where, if I didn't activate the turbo button, the entire game would speed through at what felt like double or triple speed.
From wikipedia on Turbo button:
> On IBM PC compatible computers, the turbo button selects one of two run states: *the default normal speed or a reduced "turbo" speed*. It was relatively common on computers using the Intel 80286,[1] Intel 80386 and Intel 80486 processors,[2] from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s. The name is inspired by turbocharger, a device which increases an engine's power and efficiency. *Contrary to what it suggests, the "turbo" button was generally intended to let a computer run slower than the speed for which it had been designed when pressed.*[3]
Look, you read about it in wikipedia, but I actually lived with this computer for my whole childhood. I know for sure how the turbo button worked, because I actually used it to cheat in F1 and Lotus racing games.
Best I can find in 10m I dedicated to this is this video showing switch between 22 and 40 MHz modes with a turbo button (around 8:50): https://youtu.be/TdenDH7S8LM
I've literally told you multiple times that I did too, and my computer behaved in the exact manner that all of the results googling the concept turns up.
You both may be right and wrong… further down in wikipedia page:
“ On most systems, turbo mode was with the button pushed in, but since the button could often be wired either way, on some systems it was the opposite.”
i dont know why the summary paragraph is so authoritative about what pressing the button means when a couple paragraphs down basically says “sometimes it’s wired backwards, so really it could be either faster or slower”
I don't know if you already knew why the Turbo button was there in the first place, but back at a time where there is no dedicated monotonic timer, applications (mostly games) rely on the fixed processor speed to determine sub-second time, which while worked on the original IBM PC... made it too fast for new generations of hardware.
Assuming you can detect what clock speed the device is running at, such an approach should still be able to work on different devices.
Although with newer systems able to process multiple instructions per clock, as well as having clock speeds change rapidly, it probably wouldn't work as well.
As far as I remember, the button itself was supposed to let the computers run at their normal, faster, speed. Meaning the computer was supposed to be in Turbo mode, all the time.
You turned the Turbo mode off when you needed to run it slower, say for playing games.
So, technically the button did what it said, run faster in Turbo mode.
There were also clock speed selectors that really did let the CPU run faster. They would let you switch to a CPU clock speed that was higher than the speed the CPU was originally rated for. The cost was a greater possibility of crashes. Depending on what you were doing and how stable the CPU was it was a noticeable improvement.
Some selectors would let you choose between 2 speeds, others had multiple speed selections. Often the higher ones would crash a lot more. There were also variable speed controls that acted like a rheostat with continuous speed changes. Those worked but were even more unstable.
I remember setting those 7-segment LEDs up on my first PC build.
On the motherboard there was a jumper which took the input from the turbo switch.
To provide feedback to the user, some cases ran a wire from the turbo switch to a bi-color LED on the front of the case as well as to the motherboard to control the turbo state.
On fancier cases they had multiple seven-segment LEDs which had a multi-state jumper for each segment, which decided to light that segment depending if the switch was on or off (example: http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/led_speed_display/LED%20disp...), so you could display either the two different clock frequencies, or a "HI"/"LO" message, or anything you wanted. And connecting that switch input to the motherboard wasn't necessary for the LED to change, so I guess that is how your father's was setup :)
I had two 2016 15” machines (personal and work), and upgraded the personal machine to a 2019 16” for the better keyboard. I actually just got my work machine upgraded to a 2019 16” as well. Not a single issue with any of them. 14” Pro on the way now… :)
I have hope that hardware will be improving now that Ive is no longer dictating. They removed the Touch Bar. They brought back ports and connectivity to the laptop. They've left the stupid keyboard behind. It looks like some sanity has been restored. I seems like someone at Apple finally got tired of everyone asking to make the bad man stop.
Ive was not unilaterally responsible for deciding what constitutes a MacBook Pro or frankly any of the products Apple created. And he never dictated anything to anyone other than the Design team he managed.
Major product decisions are always made across many parts of the company e.g. Product Marketing, Design, Hardware Engineering, Operations etc and are signed off by the Senior Leadership Team.
MacBook Pro is a critical product for the company and the idea that one person is simply making all the decisions is just laughable.
You don't want the arrows, don't be the one that leaves and suddenly things get better. Also, don't be the one in all of the marketing videos/on-stage demos/pointed out by the CEO as the one doing all of the designing. Not sure how us plebeian users are to know the difference. That's also part of the pros/cons of being SVP in charge. You're going to catch these arrows because you've signed off on all of these multi-group/people making decisions.
He was the one responsible for design. The designs improved after his departure. Maybe a myth, maybe a coincidence, maybe true.
You can’t say it’s a myth anymore than somebody else can say it isn’t.
I have worked at Apple so I know for a fact that Ive wasn't running around the company dictating to everyone what every detail of every product should be. That's not how the company works.
And you were talking about product features e.g. TouchBar and ports. Those definitely aren't the sole decisions of the Design team.
I thought it was odd the maxed out 14 and 16 have such a large gap in power requirements (99 watt charger vs 140 watt), but this makes the pricing a bit less palatable since 16 is only about $200 more.
Still got the 14 since the 16 seems too bulky and heavy for a daily carry.
The new 16" is ~.8 pounds heavier, and a bit larger, than the 2016 15" model, whose size and weight I was pretty happy with (though I was less happy over time with the butterfly keyboard, poorly placed touchbar, missing physical esc key, and poor trackpad palm rejection.)
It is still thinner than the 2012-2015 15" model (which had a perfectly functional keyboard and trackpad) but ~.3 pounds heavier.
Oh thanks for bringing to my attention that it’s thinner than 2012-15 MBP! That one was thin enough already. I suppose the 0.3lbs could be shaved off by not carrying around a power supply
The max is actually 4.8 lbs, not 4.7lbs. Not sure if that was factored in. But seeing as how I use my laptop to work in weird places portability and weight are actually important factors for me. I could manage the 16” size but the previous gen 16 inch was already pushing it for weight, especially if there are other things in the backpack. But seeing how this thing needs a big 140 watt supply means i can’t and even use the ultra compact 60 watt charger I have. So we’re looking at 5-6 extra lbs on my back!
That 140w charger is just for fast charge. You could get the 96w charger and be fine. You could also get a third-party charger like the GaN ones from Aukey and Anker that may be smaller and lighter.
70Wh vs 100Wh battery, so the bigger charger can hit Apple's fast charging targets.
> Still got the 14 since the 16 seems too bulky and heavy for a daily carry.
16" is still lighter than my old T430 and T440p, never had a problem stuffing those in bags. Tiny bezels and weird aspect ratios mean it's not much bigger either.
I’m pretty sure they all use whatever burst mode is available from their respective CPUs, within their respective thermal constraints. And were advertised as such.
It’s somewhat curious to see them take all previous criticisms on board and actually give people what they want. It’s a welcome change on the hardware side. Wonder if they’ll do the same with the software.
The funny thing is this happened before, all the way back in (IIRC) v4. They introduced top tabs, which lasted through most of the betas, and reverted to bottom tabs under pressure. Which is surprising now, with almost all other browsers using top tabs.
For several years I continued to use that beta version, patching it to use updated WebKit versions. I think it finally stopped working around v7 or v8.
I mostly meant the betrayal of trust that's gonna happen when they enable client-side scanning eventually, but the tabs are a positive example of it, at least.
111 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadMakes sense when you consider that the M1 has more efficiency cores than the M1 Pro/Max.
I'd actually like to build myself a home NAS/server with only Gracemont cores if we ever see Alder Lake-L available in a mini-ITX form factor. (Was going to try with Jasper Lake, but that seems to have been effectively cancelled with the chip shortage.)
[1]. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17019/apple-announced-m1-pro-...
So no. Definitely not. The user should be able to toggle this. As Apple has wisely chosen.
Nothing worse than trying to concentrate on something when "helicopter mode" suddenly kicks in :)
Yes, this goes a little farther than power management currently present in Linux and support by OEMs.
See Apples low power mode for an example.
If you’re actually comparing the two genuinely, I encourage you to read more on the topic.
Not that my opinion of what is garbage may differ than yours. The M1 has spoiled me perhaps.
It's definitely not as seamless or effortless as what you get on a Mac.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management#Userspace_...
There is nothing instant about the Linux variant.
I wonder if this is priced in to the public M1 Max benchmarks we've seen already? (Presumably it was in their own presentation benchmarks)
But the best feature, to me, was those PC with a turbo button that also had a seven-segment display showing the current speed. This was looking really cool.
At the time I had no idea what it was and...not sure I do now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button
`echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/intel_pstate/no_turbo`
Damn these trickster designers and their shitty design decisions. That's exactly the opposite of what I thought it did.
So, unpressed button makes computer slower, not pressed one.
Source: actually used the button on my 386 SX 20/40 MHz
Maybe yours operated differently, but everything I can find about turbo buttons on the internet indicates that they operated as I remember them - your computer gets slower when you turn the button on. I specifically remember playing certain DOS games where, if I didn't activate the turbo button, the entire game would speed through at what felt like double or triple speed.
From wikipedia on Turbo button:
> On IBM PC compatible computers, the turbo button selects one of two run states: *the default normal speed or a reduced "turbo" speed*. It was relatively common on computers using the Intel 80286,[1] Intel 80386 and Intel 80486 processors,[2] from the mid 1980s to mid 1990s. The name is inspired by turbocharger, a device which increases an engine's power and efficiency. *Contrary to what it suggests, the "turbo" button was generally intended to let a computer run slower than the speed for which it had been designed when pressed.*[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_button
Look, you read about it in wikipedia, but I actually lived with this computer for my whole childhood. I know for sure how the turbo button worked, because I actually used it to cheat in F1 and Lotus racing games.
Best I can find in 10m I dedicated to this is this video showing switch between 22 and 40 MHz modes with a turbo button (around 8:50): https://youtu.be/TdenDH7S8LM
“ On most systems, turbo mode was with the button pushed in, but since the button could often be wired either way, on some systems it was the opposite.”
You turned the Turbo mode off when you needed to run it slower, say for playing games.
So, technically the button did what it said, run faster in Turbo mode.
Some selectors would let you choose between 2 speeds, others had multiple speed selections. Often the higher ones would crash a lot more. There were also variable speed controls that acted like a rheostat with continuous speed changes. Those worked but were even more unstable.
It literally did nothing except change an LED readout on the case from saying "16" to saying "166".
On the motherboard there was a jumper which took the input from the turbo switch.
To provide feedback to the user, some cases ran a wire from the turbo switch to a bi-color LED on the front of the case as well as to the motherboard to control the turbo state.
On fancier cases they had multiple seven-segment LEDs which had a multi-state jumper for each segment, which decided to light that segment depending if the switch was on or off (example: http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/led_speed_display/LED%20disp...), so you could display either the two different clock frequencies, or a "HI"/"LO" message, or anything you wanted. And connecting that switch input to the motherboard wasn't necessary for the LED to change, so I guess that is how your father's was setup :)
Ive was not unilaterally responsible for deciding what constitutes a MacBook Pro or frankly any of the products Apple created. And he never dictated anything to anyone other than the Design team he managed.
Major product decisions are always made across many parts of the company e.g. Product Marketing, Design, Hardware Engineering, Operations etc and are signed off by the Senior Leadership Team.
MacBook Pro is a critical product for the company and the idea that one person is simply making all the decisions is just laughable.
You should look up what Product Marketing is because out of anyone they are far more responsible for what features go into a product.
And you were talking about product features e.g. TouchBar and ports. Those definitely aren't the sole decisions of the Design team.
Still got the 14 since the 16 seems too bulky and heavy for a daily carry.
It is still thinner than the 2012-2015 15" model (which had a perfectly functional keyboard and trackpad) but ~.3 pounds heavier.
I really don’t get all this talk about how heavy laptops are…
> Still got the 14 since the 16 seems too bulky and heavy for a daily carry. 16" is still lighter than my old T430 and T440p, never had a problem stuffing those in bags. Tiny bezels and weird aspect ratios mean it's not much bigger either.
For several years I continued to use that beta version, patching it to use updated WebKit versions. I think it finally stopped working around v7 or v8.