The notch is a function of whether you want the spaces to the left and right of the camera module to be either more bezel or more screen. The rectangular viewing area below the notch is still 16:10, so everything else above that is extra screen real estate to me.
I suspect the larger charging bricks help support the fast charging aspect of the laptops.
These machines are certainly somewhat of an overkill for a graphic designer like myself, but then again I'm a giant tech nerd and I want to see just how well this thing can run Baldur's Gate 3. I'm hoping Apple wants to make a pitch for AAA gaming, but I haven't seen any serious moves on that front as of yet.
The naming scheme does clash, but other than them sticking to letters or another buzzword like "Quantum", I don't see another way around it. Better to stick to the buzzwords they've already established.
All of my nits pale in comparison to the SoC, though. You're looking at something that competes with high-end desktop CPUs AND GPUs at a fraction of the wattage AND you're getting astronomical battery life AND the performance doesn't diminish if you're on battery AND the screen tech is 120hz variable HDR MiniLED. It is literally unheard of!
So, uh, these new 14" and 16" M1 MacBook Pros are a game changer.
They certainly have damn near every feature I'd have put on an MBP wishlist before the event. My only (very mild) disappointments are that the HDMI port is 2.0 and not 2.1 and there's no Face ID. I mean... they're going to dirty up the design with a notch, why not put the face lasers in it, too?
Hopefully, some real performance-oriented reviews make it out this week. My two big questions are.
-What sort of CPU performance impact does the 2x main memory bus on the M1 Max have? You can buy both the Pro and Max in 32GB configurations, but the Max has 2x the main memory bandwidth.
-How good is the GPU, really? If the M1 Max GPU really is 3080-class, that's genuinely going to rock the world.
Not going to buy one just yet. I haven't use my big iron MBP as a laptop since before COVID hit, and I don't anticipate needing to anytime soon. So, I'm going to wait to see what an Apple Silicon iMac Pro and/or Mac Pro might look like.
My thing with the notch is that there are plenty of windows OEM's that have made webcams that are good enough fit into very tiny spaces above the screen. I'd have less issue with the notch if it added any kind of functionality like, you know, FaceID. If it had FaceID, sure, why not.
But to just have this giant black space for just a 1080p webcam is unnecessary, and I think it's mostly so Apple can give a "Visual identity" where the screens on a mac look like the screens on the iPhone.
Again, it's a nit, and not the end of the world. These computers look great, and no computer is perfect.
So, uh, these new 14" and 16" M1 MacBook Pros are a game changer.
-How good is the GPU, really? If the M1 Max GPU really is 3080-class, that's genuinely going to rock the world.
The GPU will be hard to compare because RTX 3000 series mobile GPUs have variable wattage even between laptops that advertise the same model, so a Razer and an MSI could both have 3080s yet run them at differing wattages, which impacts performance.
Ballpark I would say the 32-core variant will shake out somewhere between peak 3070 and 3080 mobile models. The desktop models run way hotter and more power hungry, so I think by that point performance/watt might become a more useful metric.
My thing with the notch is that there are plenty of windows OEM's that have made webcams that are good enough fit into very tiny spaces above the screen. I'd have less issue with the notch if it added any kind of functionality like, you know, FaceID. If it had FaceID, sure, why not.
But to just have this giant black space for just a 1080p webcam is unnecessary, and I think it's mostly so Apple can give a "Visual identity" where the screens on a mac look like the screens on the iPhone.
Testing will bare out the webcam's quality, but I will agree that Apple did take visual identity into consideration. The white bezels for the M1 iMacs are another example. They're all design choices.
My thing with the notch is that there are plenty of windows OEM's that have made webcams that are good enough fit into very tiny spaces above the screen. I'd have less issue with the notch if it added any kind of functionality like, you know, FaceID. If it had FaceID, sure, why not.
But to just have this giant black space for just a 1080p webcam is unnecessary, and I think it's mostly so Apple can give a "Visual identity" where the screens on a mac look like the screens on the iPhone.
Again, it's a nit, and not the end of the world. These computers look great, and no computer is perfect.
I think the notch exists because the new screens are larger and they wanted to keep the dimensions roughly the same as the previous generation MBPs. Since the notch will be occupying unused space in the menu bar 99% of the time, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
To get out ahead of this, I don't consider this to be a bad thing overall. I really don't. I just find this amusing.
The 2021 16" MacBook Pro is actually thicker and heavier than the 2019 Intel model it replaces. Thickness is close, 0.66" compared to 0.64", but this year's model is 4.7 pounds compared to 4.3. that actually pretty significant, but not world ending.
Again, that's not a bad thing. I'd trade that weight difference for the performance. But I am amused by the fact that Apple really talked about how much more powerful the M1 Pro/Max is than the 2 generation old Intel processor that it is replacing, and how efficient the chip is. It is so efficient that they had to make the laptop thicker, heavier, and include a larger power brick.
I'm not saying any of this is bad. If I'm a developer or video editor in the Mac ecosystem, I've already pre-ordered this computer because it looks great. And at work I'm going to talk to our lead developer about getting one in to test with so we can make sure our tools all work fine, or at least adapt how to work on it since these are now the only options for laptops.
I got a good giggle out of them making it sound like they invented the concept of physical keys instead of the touch bar.
5 years ago when they introduced the touch bar Phil Schiller said on stage (paraphrasing) that it was silly that we were using a 45 year old input method on our computers, and that it was time to make something better. (which got us a touch bar instead of a touch screen on the laptop)
The 2021 16" MacBook Pro is actually thicker and heavier than the 2019 Intel model it replaces. Thickness is close, 0.66" compared to 0.64", but this year's model is 4.7 pounds compared to 4.3. that actually pretty significant, but not world ending.
I suspect that this has a lot to do with the departure of Jony Ives. Customer feedback for Apple products has always been for more battery life even if it comes at the expense of extra weight. And Ives… just ignored that. A few years after he’s gone and the last of his designs are finally being replaced and surprise! We’re getting slightly thicker iPhones and MBPs, both with much larger batteries.
I got a good giggle out of them making it sound like they invented the concept of physical keys instead of the touch bar.
5 years ago when they introduced the touch bar Phil Schiller said on stage (paraphrasing) that it was silly that we were using a 45 year old input method on our computers, and that it was time to make something better. (which got us a touch bar instead of a touch screen on the laptop)
That didn't age very well.
The TouchBar was a noble experiment but it really needed to be on all their machines, including their external keyboards. I’ve always loved its volume and brightness controls.
The 2021 16" MacBook Pro is actually thicker and heavier than the 2019 Intel model it replaces. Thickness is close, 0.66" compared to 0.64", but this year's model is 4.7 pounds compared to 4.3. that actually pretty significant, but not world ending.
I suspect that this has a lot to do with the departure of Jony Ives. Customer feedback for Apple products has always been for more battery life even if it comes at the expense of extra weight. And Ives… just ignored that. A few years after he’s gone and the last of his designs are finally being replaced and surprise! We’re getting slightly thicker iPhones and MBPs, both with much larger batteries.
I agree with everything you said, but I'll just point out that the new 16" macbook pro has the same battery that the previous version had, 100Wh, because that's the maximum allowed on an airplane. So for the 16" MacBook Pro specifically, the extra weight is coming from elsewhere.
We'll probably find out once we get teardowns but I'd put money on a more robust cooling solution. More metal in the cooling solution = more weight. Apple's graphs are garbage but it really does look like the M1 Max has roughly the same thermal envelope as the Intel core i7/i9 at somwhere in the 45W range. Add in the 140W charger instead of 96W and the system probably needs at least as much, if not more thermal management.
The 14" Macbook Pro does have a larger battery than the 13" one does (70Wh vs 58Wh) but actually has quoted less battery life than that 13" Macbook Pro, so the M1 Pro and M1 Max are definitley more power hungry than the vanilla M1.
The 2021 16" MacBook Pro is actually thicker and heavier than the 2019 Intel model it replaces. Thickness is close, 0.66" compared to 0.64", but this year's model is 4.7 pounds compared to 4.3. that actually pretty significant, but not world ending.
I suspect that this has a lot to do with the departure of Jony Ives. Customer feedback for Apple products has always been for more battery life even if it comes at the expense of extra weight. And Ives… just ignored that. A few years after he’s gone and the last of his designs are finally being replaced and surprise! We’re getting slightly thicker iPhones and MBPs, both with much larger batteries.
I agree with everything you said, but I'll just point out that the new 16" macbook pro has the same battery that the previous version had, 100Wh, because that's the maximum allowed on an airplane. So for the 16" MacBook Pro specifically, the extra weight is coming from elsewhere.
We'll probably find out once we get teardowns but I'd put money on a more robust cooling solution. More metal in the cooling solution = more weight. Apple's graphs are garbage but it really does look like the M1 Max has roughly the same thermal envelope as the Intel core i7/i9 at somwhere in the 45W range. Add in the 140W charger instead of 96W and the system probably needs at least as much, if not more thermal management.
The 14" Macbook Pro does have a larger battery than the 13" one does (70Wh vs 58Wh) but actually has quoted less battery life than that 13" Macbook Pro, so the M1 Pro and M1 Max are definitley more power hungry than the vanilla M1.
More cooling may lead to better efficiency which may lead to longer battery life with the same size battery. So both can be true.
Still waiting for a 27" iMac with the new chips... since they've not released one yet I guess I can hope for it to end up with the new M1max in it when it does?
Still waiting for a 27" iMac with the new chips... since they've not released one yet I guess I can hope for it to end up with the new M1max in it when it does?
Now I’m wondering if a new Mac Pro is on the horizon. Just stuff, like, four M1 Max chips in there and run a videowall made of Pro displays…
Rumor mill says yes, but probably not until late 2022.
I would even go as far as to say maybe 2023. We should still expect the larger iMac, the iMac Pro and Mac mini pro before a newer Mac Pro arrives giving enough time to push as much out of the M1 chipsets.
I would imagine that the Mac Pro is the last thing to be updated in the transition, so around this time next year, or maybe even early 2023 since the supply chain is so fubar'ed.
But 4x the M1 Max chips? Would that be more compute power than the RTX 3090?
Mr_Rose83 Blue Ridge Protects the HolyRegistered Userregular
Either that or the Pro desktop gets the first M2 chips. Because there’s no way those aren’t in someone’s pipeline somewhere.
“For the M2 Pro though, we decided to go in a different direction; instead of more raw horsepower we were able to improve the neural engine beyond even our expectations: meet the new, fully sentient Siri — all run on-device with no Internet lookups.”
It took about a year for Apple to come out with 3 M1 Macs in old chassis (Air, Pro, and mini) and 2 redesigned (iMac and Pro) ones, so I would assume that the redesigned mini, Air, and Mac Pro would also take about a year. They're also set to update the 27" iMac. Thus, I wouldn't be surprised if the M2 chip doesn't make it out until 2023; I think these chips are fast enough to endure a 2-year upgrade cycle.
Apple has publicly said they will finish their transition away from intel within.2 years of starting it. That means that fall of 2022.
If I had to put money on it, I bet we see the 27" iMac running M1 Pro/Max in the Spring, and probably a Mac Mini as well. the Mac Pro with M2 ProMaxUltimateJesus will be shown off at WWDC and then released in the fall.
And then when apple shows off the M2 that's also when we see the redesigned MacBook Air.
Apple has publicly said they will finish their transition away from intel within.2 years of starting it. That means that fall of 2022.
If I had to put money on it, I bet we see the 27" iMac running M1 Pro/Max in the Spring, and probably a Mac Mini as well. the Mac Pro with M2 ProMaxUltimateJesus will be shown off at WWDC and then released in the fall.
And then when apple shows off the M2 that's also when we see the redesigned MacBook Air.
Either Apple will end up cutting down its Mac product line streamlining it significantly or we will see a minimum of 4 significantly different Mac launches in 2022 covering over a possible of 2 event windows. It's an exciting time to see what can will come out.
One thing to consider as well now that apple does have control of the ecosystem entirely is we could see iPhone style product cycles where older models with older processors stay on the market.
So the redesigned M2 MacBook Air might come in at the price the current M1 MacBook Air is at, then they keep the older M1 MacBook Air on the market and cut $100-$200 off the price.
Long term that could be how Apple offers more affordable computers, just like how their affordable phone right now is the 2 year old iPhone 11.
One thing to consider as well now that apple does have control of the ecosystem entirely is we could see iPhone style product cycles where older models with older processors stay on the market.
So the redesigned M2 MacBook Air might come in at the price the current M1 MacBook Air is at, then they keep the older M1 MacBook Air on the market and cut $100-$200 off the price.
Long term that could be how Apple offers more affordable computers, just like how their affordable phone right now is the 2 year old iPhone 11.
At the very least, I think the M1 is going to be on the market for a long time. It’s used in four Mac form factors and iPads Pro, too. Its production is fully ramped and a year later, there’s nothing from AMD, Intel, or QualComm that has anything like its combination of performance, low TDP, and value. And if you’ve got TSMC cranking out a part for you, you don’t dare tell them to stop to retool for a new part, if you don’t absolutely have to.
One thing to consider as well now that apple does have control of the ecosystem entirely is we could see iPhone style product cycles where older models with older processors stay on the market.
So the redesigned M2 MacBook Air might come in at the price the current M1 MacBook Air is at, then they keep the older M1 MacBook Air on the market and cut $100-$200 off the price.
Long term that could be how Apple offers more affordable computers, just like how their affordable phone right now is the 2 year old iPhone 11.
At the very least, I think the M1 is going to be on the market for a long time. It’s used in four Mac form factors and iPads Pro, too. Its production is fully ramped and a year later, there’s nothing from AMD, Intel, or QualComm that has anything like its combination of performance, low TDP, and value. And if you’ve got TSMC cranking out a part for you, you don’t dare tell them to stop to retool for a new part, if you don’t absolutely have to.
Yeah, I believe that Apple has a 3-5 year lead on the competition. The media and PC heads will salivate over the first ARM processor for PC, but both performance and adoption will be sub-par for a bit. Though, it is easier now that Apple has shown the way, as per usual. It's obvious once you know how it's done.
Single thread CPU performance is about the same as M1, which means it's trading blows with the 5950x. It's the multi-threading performance that's bonkers. In in the multi-core version of ye olde SPEC floating point suite, it smokes the 5950x by about 25% (and the 5950x beats it at integer by over 50%). Given the M1 has 8 fewer real cores, it shouldn't even be in the same multi-core performance conversation as the 5950x:
In the SPECfp suite, the M1 Max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market. It completely demolishes any laptop contender, showcasing 2.2x performance of the second-best laptop chip. The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X – a chip whose package power is at 142W, with rest of system even quite above that. It’s an absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven’t seen the likes of.
GPU performance is more of mixed bag: slightly less than mobile 3080 performance for benchmarks and productivity apps, but not really close to that for games. Most Mac ports of AAA games are written using a DX shim library, so gaming performance could hypothetically be much better, but... most game studios aren't ever going to hassle with fully native Metal implementations.
The M1 Pro and Max chips will be a great test of the phrase: "if you build it, they will come." The hardware is extremely capable for software written to take advantage of it, but will AAA game developers bite? It's also a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The market can't decide if there are no games to buy. Apple could bring their incredible wealth to arms to help combat dev shyness, but do they care enough about attracting the PC gamer crowd to drop a billion dollars for millions in return?
Personally, I would love to play the latest games on this hardware, but I suspect that PC gamers are a finicky bunch, and as much as they like the FPS numbers to go up, their identity is still tied in with building their own hot inefficient machines, taking it apart, and putting it back together again. The inertia there is fairly sizable.
Also, to be fair, there ARE still games to be played on the Mac, it's just that the goal post for the number of games available being enough to switch over will always be moved.
The M1 Pro and Max chips will be a great test of the phrase: "if you build it, they will come." The hardware is extremely capable for software written to take advantage of it, but will AAA game developers bite? It's also a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The market can't decide if there are no games to buy. Apple could bring their incredible wealth to arms to help combat dev shyness, but do they care enough about attracting the PC gamer crowd to drop a billion dollars for millions in return?
Personally, I would love to play the latest games on this hardware, but I suspect that PC gamers are a finicky bunch, and as much as they like the FPS numbers to go up, their identity is still tied in with building their own hot inefficient machines, taking it apart, and putting it back together again. The inertia there is fairly sizable.
Also, to be fair, there ARE still games to be played on the Mac, it's just that the goal post for the number of games available being enough to switch over will always be moved.
That being said, I still think Apple should try!
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I wouldn't hold out much hope. The least expensive M1 Max MBP is $3.3K, and gaming laptops (and even gaming on laptops) are kind of niche even on the PC side.
That being said, Metal is much more conceptually similar to DX12 and Vulkan than OpenGL was, so the gaming situation should get better over time (slowly). I think a lot of the AAA games that exist now on Mac were ported using either Wine or DX shims. Given that no work gets done on ports without the original publisher paying for it, there's probably not even a lot of M1-native Mac games yet, never mind games with something approaching a native Metal implementation.
The M1 Pro and Max chips will be a great test of the phrase: "if you build it, they will come." The hardware is extremely capable for software written to take advantage of it, but will AAA game developers bite? It's also a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. The market can't decide if there are no games to buy. Apple could bring their incredible wealth to arms to help combat dev shyness, but do they care enough about attracting the PC gamer crowd to drop a billion dollars for millions in return?
Personally, I would love to play the latest games on this hardware, but I suspect that PC gamers are a finicky bunch, and as much as they like the FPS numbers to go up, their identity is still tied in with building their own hot inefficient machines, taking it apart, and putting it back together again. The inertia there is fairly sizable.
Also, to be fair, there ARE still games to be played on the Mac, it's just that the goal post for the number of games available being enough to switch over will always be moved.
That being said, I still think Apple should try!
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I wouldn't hold out much hope. The least expensive M1 Max MBP is $3.3K, and gaming laptops (and even gaming on laptops) are kind of niche even on the PC side.
That being said, Metal is much more conceptually similar to DX12 and Vulkan than OpenGL was, so the gaming situation should get better over time (slowly). I think a lot of the AAA games that exist now on Mac were ported using either Wine or DX shims. Given that no work gets done on ports without the original publisher paying for it, there's probably not even a lot of M1-native Mac games yet, never mind games with something approaching a native Metal implementation.
I think the biggest one on the horizon is Baldur's Gate 3, and before that it would have been Blizzard games. But lately it seems like they drifted away from their support of both operating systems. Larian, the developers of Baldur's Gate 3 (and the Divinity: Original Sin games; excellent games, would recommend), have seemingly taken that mantle.
The strongest push, I believe, will be from the push of mainstream games into mobile gaming. The latter is a much larger market than the former, and I think the Mac can benefit from the halo effect of any iOS games being playable on Macs. So from that viewpoint then Apple's push into Arcade seems like a good strategic move.
But yeah, in the veins of traditional PC games crossing over in a meaningful way? Probably not. It'll take a shift in the market that does it, if ever.
Just installed Monterey, and I’m very pleased so far. After a half day of use on my M1 Air, this is what I’ve noticed:
1. The support for running iOS apps is much more performant. On Big Sur, a few minutes of using Apollo to doom-scroll through reddit would eventually result in SPODs every few seconds, making Apollo unusable. That’s entirely fixed in Monterey.
2. Rosetta also seems more performant. I run a few daemon process for file syncing that are still Intel, and they no longer have any discernible performance impact.
3. Safari 15 is zippy AF.
4. The new Control Center has made at least other three menu bar widgets redundant, so I’m winning the fight against menu bar clutter for the first time in years.
I haven’t installed in on my Intel MBP yet because Parallels still has some issues with it, but… soon, hopefully.
So, uh, the M1 Max is a beast. Running a 14" with 32GB of RAM—Baldur's Gate 3 runs like a dream. It's a high-fidelity game in early access, and it's already pulling a solid 60fps in 4K and 100+fps in 1080p at the highest settings.
If AAA game devs jump on the Metal train, then the future for Mac gaming is bright indeed.
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
edited October 2021
Sorry, lurker here, but I keep up with all the tech stuff.
The biggest reason Apple won't ever get AAA titles like you see elsewhere isn't their hardware (The new M1 Max is rocking around a 3050/3060 level and looks nice!), it's their licensing.
Especially after the Epic/Apple suit, it's just a minefield.
Edit: Nevermind, all of the above is wrong.
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
There’s no requirement to go through Apple’s channels (and their licensing) in order to port a game to the Mac. Steam exists on the Mac and nothing on there goes through any of Apple’s licensing or approval process. It’s really more about devs not wanting to bother fucking with making their shit work on Metal for a historically poor return on investment.
The fact that Apple does not actively court anything gaming (up to and including their hostility w/r/t Epic) probably doesn’t help matters, though.
Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust
Sorry, lurker here, but I keep up with all the tech stuff.
The biggest reason Apple won't ever get AAA titles like you see elsewhere isn't their hardware (The new M1 Max is rocking around a 3050/3060 level and looks nice!), it's their licensing.
Especially after the Epic/Apple suit, it's just a minefield.
The Epic/Apple suit is about the Apple Tax required to sell software on the iOS App Store. While there is a Mac App Store, publishers aren't required to sell software through it. There are macOS versions of Steam, GoG, and even the Epic Games Store, none of which collect any sort of Apple Tax.
There aren't AAA titles on macOS because it's a small market, and the median macOS machine is probably something like a 2017 13" MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, which are running de-tuned dual- or four-core mobile Intel CPUs with integrated graphics.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
There’s no requirement to go through Apple’s channels (and their licensing) in order to port a game to the Mac. Steam exists on the Mac and nothing on there goes through any of Apple’s licensing or approval process. It’s really more about devs not wanting to bother fucking with making their shit work on Metal for a historically poor return on investment.
The fact that Apple does not actively court anything gaming (up to and including their hostility w/r/t Epic) probably doesn’t help matters, though.
That’s odd. We have a nightmare process to continue making our software work on Macs and none of it has to do with coding.
Edit: Just got confirmation from my friend at work who does the Mac stuff, that was the App Store portion of the software that hooked into the MacOS version that was causing problems. Nevermind, post redacted!
There’s no requirement to go through Apple’s channels (and their licensing) in order to port a game to the Mac. Steam exists on the Mac and nothing on there goes through any of Apple’s licensing or approval process. It’s really more about devs not wanting to bother fucking with making their shit work on Metal for a historically poor return on investment.
The fact that Apple does not actively court anything gaming (up to and including their hostility w/r/t Epic) probably doesn’t help matters, though.
Apple definitely courts gaming... on iOS. Mobile gaming is a bigger market than PC and console gaming, combined. And M1 Macs can run iOS games natively. Unity and Unreal Engine also both have Mac versions, and a lot of smaller publishers who use them also put out a macOS version.
Thus, from Apple's PoV, macOS gaming might not have a problem. Mac users can play iOS games and a pretty nice selection of AA and indie titles from Steam. They just can't play the latest AAA hotness available on consoles and PCs.
Connecting that to the Mac laptop I have two results:
- Both monitors (VGA + HDMI) plugged in: both extra monitors display the exact same thing, the laptop itself doesn't. Only one monitor's preferences window opens up (in addition to the laptop's screen) when looking at Display Preferences.
- Only one monitor plugged in, either VGA or HDMI: that monitor displays, that monitor's preferences window opens in System Preferences.
I'm probably going to wind up just buying another danged adapter for this weird USB-only brick but is there something clever I can do here? I have to imagine other people have had this problem.
On the plus side the laptop's screen looks really nice!
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I suspect the larger charging bricks help support the fast charging aspect of the laptops.
These machines are certainly somewhat of an overkill for a graphic designer like myself, but then again I'm a giant tech nerd and I want to see just how well this thing can run Baldur's Gate 3. I'm hoping Apple wants to make a pitch for AAA gaming, but I haven't seen any serious moves on that front as of yet.
The naming scheme does clash, but other than them sticking to letters or another buzzword like "Quantum", I don't see another way around it. Better to stick to the buzzwords they've already established.
All of my nits pale in comparison to the SoC, though. You're looking at something that competes with high-end desktop CPUs AND GPUs at a fraction of the wattage AND you're getting astronomical battery life AND the performance doesn't diminish if you're on battery AND the screen tech is 120hz variable HDR MiniLED. It is literally unheard of!
They certainly have damn near every feature I'd have put on an MBP wishlist before the event. My only (very mild) disappointments are that the HDMI port is 2.0 and not 2.1 and there's no Face ID. I mean... they're going to dirty up the design with a notch, why not put the face lasers in it, too?
Hopefully, some real performance-oriented reviews make it out this week. My two big questions are.
-What sort of CPU performance impact does the 2x main memory bus on the M1 Max have? You can buy both the Pro and Max in 32GB configurations, but the Max has 2x the main memory bandwidth.
-How good is the GPU, really? If the M1 Max GPU really is 3080-class, that's genuinely going to rock the world.
Not going to buy one just yet. I haven't use my big iron MBP as a laptop since before COVID hit, and I don't anticipate needing to anytime soon. So, I'm going to wait to see what an Apple Silicon iMac Pro and/or Mac Pro might look like.
But to just have this giant black space for just a 1080p webcam is unnecessary, and I think it's mostly so Apple can give a "Visual identity" where the screens on a mac look like the screens on the iPhone.
Again, it's a nit, and not the end of the world. These computers look great, and no computer is perfect.
The GPU will be hard to compare because RTX 3000 series mobile GPUs have variable wattage even between laptops that advertise the same model, so a Razer and an MSI could both have 3080s yet run them at differing wattages, which impacts performance.
Ballpark I would say the 32-core variant will shake out somewhere between peak 3070 and 3080 mobile models. The desktop models run way hotter and more power hungry, so I think by that point performance/watt might become a more useful metric.
Testing will bare out the webcam's quality, but I will agree that Apple did take visual identity into consideration. The white bezels for the M1 iMacs are another example. They're all design choices.
I think the notch exists because the new screens are larger and they wanted to keep the dimensions roughly the same as the previous generation MBPs. Since the notch will be occupying unused space in the menu bar 99% of the time, it doesn't seem like a big deal to me.
The 2021 16" MacBook Pro is actually thicker and heavier than the 2019 Intel model it replaces. Thickness is close, 0.66" compared to 0.64", but this year's model is 4.7 pounds compared to 4.3. that actually pretty significant, but not world ending.
Again, that's not a bad thing. I'd trade that weight difference for the performance. But I am amused by the fact that Apple really talked about how much more powerful the M1 Pro/Max is than the 2 generation old Intel processor that it is replacing, and how efficient the chip is. It is so efficient that they had to make the laptop thicker, heavier, and include a larger power brick.
I'm not saying any of this is bad. If I'm a developer or video editor in the Mac ecosystem, I've already pre-ordered this computer because it looks great. And at work I'm going to talk to our lead developer about getting one in to test with so we can make sure our tools all work fine, or at least adapt how to work on it since these are now the only options for laptops.
But I'm just amused at Apple sometimes.
I got a good giggle out of them making it sound like they invented the concept of physical keys instead of the touch bar.
5 years ago when they introduced the touch bar Phil Schiller said on stage (paraphrasing) that it was silly that we were using a 45 year old input method on our computers, and that it was time to make something better. (which got us a touch bar instead of a touch screen on the laptop)
That didn't age very well.
I suspect that this has a lot to do with the departure of Jony Ives. Customer feedback for Apple products has always been for more battery life even if it comes at the expense of extra weight. And Ives… just ignored that. A few years after he’s gone and the last of his designs are finally being replaced and surprise! We’re getting slightly thicker iPhones and MBPs, both with much larger batteries.
The TouchBar was a noble experiment but it really needed to be on all their machines, including their external keyboards. I’ve always loved its volume and brightness controls.
I agree with everything you said, but I'll just point out that the new 16" macbook pro has the same battery that the previous version had, 100Wh, because that's the maximum allowed on an airplane. So for the 16" MacBook Pro specifically, the extra weight is coming from elsewhere.
We'll probably find out once we get teardowns but I'd put money on a more robust cooling solution. More metal in the cooling solution = more weight. Apple's graphs are garbage but it really does look like the M1 Max has roughly the same thermal envelope as the Intel core i7/i9 at somwhere in the 45W range. Add in the 140W charger instead of 96W and the system probably needs at least as much, if not more thermal management.
The 14" Macbook Pro does have a larger battery than the 13" one does (70Wh vs 58Wh) but actually has quoted less battery life than that 13" Macbook Pro, so the M1 Pro and M1 Max are definitley more power hungry than the vanilla M1.
More cooling may lead to better efficiency which may lead to longer battery life with the same size battery. So both can be true.
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Most likely!
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Rumor mill says yes, but probably not until late 2022.
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I would even go as far as to say maybe 2023. We should still expect the larger iMac, the iMac Pro and Mac mini pro before a newer Mac Pro arrives giving enough time to push as much out of the M1 chipsets.
But 4x the M1 Max chips? Would that be more compute power than the RTX 3090?
“For the M2 Pro though, we decided to go in a different direction; instead of more raw horsepower we were able to improve the neural engine beyond even our expectations: meet the new, fully sentient Siri — all run on-device with no Internet lookups.”
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If I had to put money on it, I bet we see the 27" iMac running M1 Pro/Max in the Spring, and probably a Mac Mini as well. the Mac Pro with M2 ProMaxUltimateJesus will be shown off at WWDC and then released in the fall.
And then when apple shows off the M2 that's also when we see the redesigned MacBook Air.
Either Apple will end up cutting down its Mac product line streamlining it significantly or we will see a minimum of 4 significantly different Mac launches in 2022 covering over a possible of 2 event windows. It's an exciting time to see what can will come out.
So the redesigned M2 MacBook Air might come in at the price the current M1 MacBook Air is at, then they keep the older M1 MacBook Air on the market and cut $100-$200 off the price.
Long term that could be how Apple offers more affordable computers, just like how their affordable phone right now is the 2 year old iPhone 11.
At the very least, I think the M1 is going to be on the market for a long time. It’s used in four Mac form factors and iPads Pro, too. Its production is fully ramped and a year later, there’s nothing from AMD, Intel, or QualComm that has anything like its combination of performance, low TDP, and value. And if you’ve got TSMC cranking out a part for you, you don’t dare tell them to stop to retool for a new part, if you don’t absolutely have to.
Yeah, I believe that Apple has a 3-5 year lead on the competition. The media and PC heads will salivate over the first ARM processor for PC, but both performance and adoption will be sub-par for a bit. Though, it is easier now that Apple has shown the way, as per usual. It's obvious once you know how it's done.
Single thread CPU performance is about the same as M1, which means it's trading blows with the 5950x. It's the multi-threading performance that's bonkers. In in the multi-core version of ye olde SPEC floating point suite, it smokes the 5950x by about 25% (and the 5950x beats it at integer by over 50%). Given the M1 has 8 fewer real cores, it shouldn't even be in the same multi-core performance conversation as the 5950x:
GPU performance is more of mixed bag: slightly less than mobile 3080 performance for benchmarks and productivity apps, but not really close to that for games. Most Mac ports of AAA games are written using a DX shim library, so gaming performance could hypothetically be much better, but... most game studios aren't ever going to hassle with fully native Metal implementations.
Anyway, the whole article is worth reading.
Personally, I would love to play the latest games on this hardware, but I suspect that PC gamers are a finicky bunch, and as much as they like the FPS numbers to go up, their identity is still tied in with building their own hot inefficient machines, taking it apart, and putting it back together again. The inertia there is fairly sizable.
Also, to be fair, there ARE still games to be played on the Mac, it's just that the goal post for the number of games available being enough to switch over will always be moved.
That being said, I still think Apple should try!
I don't disagree with your sentiment, but I wouldn't hold out much hope. The least expensive M1 Max MBP is $3.3K, and gaming laptops (and even gaming on laptops) are kind of niche even on the PC side.
That being said, Metal is much more conceptually similar to DX12 and Vulkan than OpenGL was, so the gaming situation should get better over time (slowly). I think a lot of the AAA games that exist now on Mac were ported using either Wine or DX shims. Given that no work gets done on ports without the original publisher paying for it, there's probably not even a lot of M1-native Mac games yet, never mind games with something approaching a native Metal implementation.
I think the biggest one on the horizon is Baldur's Gate 3, and before that it would have been Blizzard games. But lately it seems like they drifted away from their support of both operating systems. Larian, the developers of Baldur's Gate 3 (and the Divinity: Original Sin games; excellent games, would recommend), have seemingly taken that mantle.
The strongest push, I believe, will be from the push of mainstream games into mobile gaming. The latter is a much larger market than the former, and I think the Mac can benefit from the halo effect of any iOS games being playable on Macs. So from that viewpoint then Apple's push into Arcade seems like a good strategic move.
But yeah, in the veins of traditional PC games crossing over in a meaningful way? Probably not. It'll take a shift in the market that does it, if ever.
1. The support for running iOS apps is much more performant. On Big Sur, a few minutes of using Apollo to doom-scroll through reddit would eventually result in SPODs every few seconds, making Apollo unusable. That’s entirely fixed in Monterey.
2. Rosetta also seems more performant. I run a few daemon process for file syncing that are still Intel, and they no longer have any discernible performance impact.
3. Safari 15 is zippy AF.
4. The new Control Center has made at least other three menu bar widgets redundant, so I’m winning the fight against menu bar clutter for the first time in years.
I haven’t installed in on my Intel MBP yet because Parallels still has some issues with it, but… soon, hopefully.
If AAA game devs jump on the Metal train, then the future for Mac gaming is bright indeed.
But that's a giant 60-point sized IF.
The biggest reason Apple won't ever get AAA titles like you see elsewhere isn't their hardware (The new M1 Max is rocking around a 3050/3060 level and looks nice!), it's their licensing.
Especially after the Epic/Apple suit, it's just a minefield.
Edit: Nevermind, all of the above is wrong.
The fact that Apple does not actively court anything gaming (up to and including their hostility w/r/t Epic) probably doesn’t help matters, though.
The Epic/Apple suit is about the Apple Tax required to sell software on the iOS App Store. While there is a Mac App Store, publishers aren't required to sell software through it. There are macOS versions of Steam, GoG, and even the Epic Games Store, none of which collect any sort of Apple Tax.
There aren't AAA titles on macOS because it's a small market, and the median macOS machine is probably something like a 2017 13" MacBook Pro or MacBook Air, which are running de-tuned dual- or four-core mobile Intel CPUs with integrated graphics.
That’s odd. We have a nightmare process to continue making our software work on Macs and none of it has to do with coding.
Edit: Just got confirmation from my friend at work who does the Mac stuff, that was the App Store portion of the software that hooked into the MacOS version that was causing problems. Nevermind, post redacted!
Apple definitely courts gaming... on iOS. Mobile gaming is a bigger market than PC and console gaming, combined. And M1 Macs can run iOS games natively. Unity and Unreal Engine also both have Mac versions, and a lot of smaller publishers who use them also put out a macOS version.
Thus, from Apple's PoV, macOS gaming might not have a problem. Mac users can play iOS games and a pretty nice selection of AA and indie titles from Steam. They just can't play the latest AAA hotness available on consoles and PCs.
I've got a question: I have a little USB adapter for my extra monitor setup, it worked fine with my old company's Thinkpad. Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-MacBook-Reader-Power-Pass-Through/dp/B07MP9P6B7/ref=pd_lpo_3?pd_rd_i=B07MP9P6B7&psc=1 with the VGA for my very old third monitor.
Connecting that to the Mac laptop I have two results:
- Both monitors (VGA + HDMI) plugged in: both extra monitors display the exact same thing, the laptop itself doesn't. Only one monitor's preferences window opens up (in addition to the laptop's screen) when looking at Display Preferences.
- Only one monitor plugged in, either VGA or HDMI: that monitor displays, that monitor's preferences window opens in System Preferences.
I'm probably going to wind up just buying another danged adapter for this weird USB-only brick but is there something clever I can do here? I have to imagine other people have had this problem.
On the plus side the laptop's screen looks really nice!