I think the MBP13" will become a "higher-end" MBA 13", ie. no more MBP 13". MBP 15" will probably drop the optical drive for good in 2012 and have MBA styling. MBP 17" Will have MBA styling but optical drive an the whole kit'n'kaboodle.
I'd rather they went for a better quality display than a high resolution one - other manufacturers do this:
I'm not sure how much more expensive this would make them but it severely detracts from the perception of quality when they use bad TN panels.
I would also like to see them go towards Air-like styling across the entire lineup putting emphasis on keeping the laptops cool without excessive fan noise. Ivy Bridge will help here more than any other chip upgrade in the past.
It'll be interesting to see which way they go with dedicated GPUs: AMD or NVidia. Both should have good options to choose from but NVidia looks to be focussing on compute power. Virtual memory space would be great to have in the MBP as it means less complaining about lower amounts of VRAM - a unified 64-bit address space shared by the CPU and GPU would be a massive improvement for computation and gaming and should have been done long ago. Double precision Kepler GPU would be a great addition for the MBP (and Mini).
SSDs are becoming very affordable now, even 256GB ones. When the sub-20nm chips hit in 2012, the combined manufacturing improvements and consumer adoption will hopefully drive it to $1/GB or less. This means the entry Mac laptop can come with 128GB, the 13" and above with 256GB as dropping the optical saves $100 or so. They can simply have another blade slot or two for additional cards when the prices drop again. Some people won't like losing options for 1-1.5TB internal space but they will have USB 3 so portable drives up to 2TB can be bought cheaply.
I'd expect them to drop FW800 and ethernet at the next revision and replace them with dual Thunderbolt and 4 x USB 3 ports on the 15", 1 x Thunderbolt on the 13".
This is no different than back in the PPC days when people blamed Apple for the lack of progress from Motorola and IBM. My point is if you must complain do it where it might do some good, in this case an Intel forum.
Not that it would accomplish much to complain to Intel. Let's face it everyone involved at Intel knows that the new Xeons have slipped. They know they need to fix whatever is wrong and get on with it, but they also know that rushing forward and stumbling on mistakes isn't helpful either.
Quote:
Originally Posted by hmm
I don't think any of the other oems have put out new stuff either. People have become grumpy because it's gone from an overpriced machine to an overpriced machine with aging hardware. It happens. Intel definitely hasn't helped.
I'm grumpy when I get up in the morning, however I have the maturity to not get worked up over things I can't change. This constant whine, from a very few about the Mac Pro, really has a negative impact on this forum. It would be one thing if Intel had been shipping new hardware for months to other manufactures but the haven't so the noise is baseless.
It would be a totally different thing if people wanted to talk about the rumored new chips. For one there seems to be a lot to talk about and two this is a rumor site.
Quote:
Usually they require volume to accomplish such a thing. I can't find a specific panel related to laptop ips displays, although I know a couple brands employ them on a limited number of models. My guess would be that producing them at comparable resolution to what is seen on the macbook pros today (especially the high res 15") would be cost prohibitive.
Any laptop called a Pro ought to have a Pro quality display. However there are many factors that go into choosing a display so we would need to understand the trade offs Apple has made. In the end I don't really think the displays are all that bad in the MBP relative to the rest of the market.
Quote:
If Apple did this and the other OEMs then employed the same thing, I'm sure you'd hear about copying.
? What do you mean here. If any manufacture can get their panel costs down laptop makers would flock to that panel. Apple doesn't develop the displays so other users can't be accused of copying.
Quote:
The real issue is that while I'm sure many of these manufacturers would really like to do this (new shiny feature to attract upgrade purchases), it requires a huge amount of volume to make it viable. IPS saw its major growth by professional adoption. There was enough demand for quality displays because of the number of people who wanted to replace aging crt hardware, and the price points were still high enough to drive the technology forward. Today we have $300 24" ips displays. Pretty much everyone but LG has dropped out there, and they haven't really done much to push the technology forward.
This is contradictory. Either the displays are expensive or they are not.
Quote:
If Apple does try to employ IPS there, it would probably be for the entire line. They don't really like significant design segmentation, so pricing from LG would become a factor. This means they may require support from other OEMs as well to really make this work close to current price points.
They could easily put higher quality displays in the MBP line and leave the AIRs as is. I say higher quality because I want to include everything that is possible not just IPS displays. IPS will quickly become a technology of the past just like many of the other LCD technologies. There is often this perception that XYZ laptop has to have this technology (IPS) to be called professional machine, I think that is often a mistake. Even slapping a retina display into a MBP doesn't automatically make the machine a Pro computer, there are many other display parameters to consider.
Yeah, but it's a sweet spot. Great CPU, finally decent GPU, 4K is good (though DX10 gaming... well, I don't care, since I have an Xbox360 now and have ditched PC gaming for good).
All of those features are important even if you have moved gaming off to a 360. GPU acceleration shows up in all sorts of places, even Web Broswers, people should strive for as much GPU performance as they can afford.
More importantly with Ivy Bridge the GPU is where most of the performance increases will come from.
Quote:
320GB SSD Retina-Display MBA 13"... BRING IT ON.
Well this is the really hard part because apparently the chips for the AIRs won't arrive until well after the other laptop chips. So we may have to wait until mid summer for AIR updates.
Quote:
I think the MBP13" will become a "higher-end" MBA 13", ie. no more MBP 13". MBP 15" will probably drop the optical drive for good in 2012 and have MBA styling. MBP 17" Will have MBA styling but optical drive an the whole kit'n'kaboodle.
I hope not. I really was hoping for a major refactoring of the 13"MBP. By that I mean a discrete GPU, SSD with a conventional drive bay and other goodies so that it continues to be a Pro machine. One of those others would be a better display.
The last thing we need from Apple is a line up of laptops limited in performance by AIRs thinnest.
This is no different than back in the PPC days when people blamed Apple for the lack of progress from Motorola and IBM. My point is if you must complain do it where it might do some good, in this case an Intel forum.
Not that it would accomplish much to complain to Intel. Let's face it everyone involved at Intel knows that the new Xeons have slipped. They know they need to fix whatever is wrong and get on with it, but they also know that rushing forward and stumbling on mistakes isn't helpful either.
I'm grumpy when I get up in the morning, however I have the maturity to not get worked up over things I can't change. This constant whine, from a very few about the Mac Pro, really has a negative impact on this forum. It would be one thing if Intel had been shipping new hardware for months to other manufactures but the haven't so the noise is baseless.
It would be a totally different thing if people wanted to talk about the rumored new chips. For one there seems to be a lot to talk about and two this is a rumor site.
My only point on the mac pro was that it's been priced quite aggressively at the single socket end for some time even with Intel's shift in cpu pricing to ride out the extended cycle, so it's easy for the line to look neglected. Looking at the other oems, their lines are in a similar place. The workstation market must be looking pretty ugly at this point in terms of volume. What is interesting is how few non Apple computers I've seen recently.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wizard69
? What do you mean here. If any manufacture can get their panel costs down laptop makers would flock to that panel. Apple doesn't develop the displays so other users can't be accused of copying.
This is contradictory. Either the displays are expensive or they are not.
I was saying desktop panels were the area where IPS saw its growth in the past. They never caught on in laptops. They started with desktops in leveraging out crt technology on the higher end where other lcd technologies weren't working. More recently they've been making really small displays for phones using ips. I don't actually know why they haven't developed more panels for the laptop segment given that they cover sizes above and below. Also years ago they were quite expensive. It has just come down immensely.
Regarding laptop makers flocking, I meant that if Apple cut a deal for a large quantity of these parts causing production to ramp up, other manufacturers would be more likely to jump on board. With a big enough push for ips it might bring down the cost per unit enough to make it feasible. Apple tends to ship in huge volume per product design, so they can order enough of something to actually impact the industry to a degree. On expensive vs cheap anyway, it depends on popularity in a given size.
I for one do hope that Apple keep an optical drive MacBook Pro option the line-up as I have shed loads of DVD's and still prefer to buy my music on CD (remember them! Far better quality than any download). It would be a shame if Apple abandoned FW800 just at the minute as there are still so many external HD's around that use the technology (I own 4 of the buggers) and it still beats a USB2 connected external hands down. USB3 and Thunderbolt would be great additions.
Maybe better quality displays instead of Retina and the current case design is still so appealing it would be hard to imagine what sort of a redesign Apple could come up with.
I for one do hope that Apple keep an optical drive MacBook Pro option the line-up as I have shed loads of DVD's and still prefer to buy my music on CD (remember them! Far better quality than any download). It would be a shame if Apple abandoned FW800 just at the minute as there are still so many external HD's around that use the technology (I own 4 of the buggers) and it still beats a USB2 connected external hands down. USB3 and Thunderbolt would be great additions.
USB optical drives (even Blu-Ray) are inexpensive now. It would be a hassle for some people to carry around but you can extract the discs onto the internal when needed.
FW800 has its uses but Thunderbolt is external PCI so you can actually get a docking solution that gives you ethernet, FW800, USB and an extra Thunderbolt port all plugging into one port:
This way you can hook up an external display and all your peripherals like USB optical drive and FW800 HDDs and connect them all to the laptop with a single plug.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MiMac
Maybe better quality displays instead of Retina and the current case design is still so appealing it would be hard to imagine what sort of a redesign Apple could come up with.
I still prefer the box design of the MBP over the wedge design of the Air and it gives more room for the battery. You can see here what removing the FW800 and ethernet ports allows them to do though:
Only having Thunderbolt, USB 3 ports, SD slot and magsafe allows them to make the machine a good deal thinner and to me it looks more modern.
I reckon a future design would be the iPad but where the display is OLED with two sides and you flip it up to use it like a laptop with a smart cover to protect the top screen but they need to get the batteries sorted out to make it light enough.
Really boy this crap is just a little to much, Apple can't ship a reasonable Mac Pro upgrade until Intel ships new chips to make the machine. That will happen when they get all the bugs out of the chip sets.
Can't?
More like 'won't.'
They could offer a line of Final Cut X class prosumer headless i7s (a dirt cheap chip now) with the lastest kick ass Ati card.
..but they'll keep it as a premium (if the line survives...) flag ship to eye gauge people.
It's not had an update in ages. It's mouldy. It's crusty. The gpu is ancient on it. The entry level quad core for £2000 is a bad joke. Plus Apple monitor to set you back £3000 almost for a desktop system?
it's everything that is wrong with apple's desktop line. You'd be made to buy one over a 27 inch iMac.
The Mac pro party?
So over.
I'll blow a party pheeeper if they make 'one more' upgrade before dropping it in favour of 6 core iMacs at some point.
Hopefully, they'll prove me wrong on price, gpu and cpu. But they haven't so far and it's been years.
And all my lamenting hasn't made me feel better or improved Apple's pro sales. Pricey and out of date. It's a joke.
Having used an iMac for the last two years. The pro seems like a relic of a bye gone era.
Apple's focus is firmly on the consumer. It's pods/phones/laptops/imacs. Consumer software and apps stores.
and yes, it's made them billiosn more than a few video producers who dump Final Cut X for Avid whenever a single upgrade 'upsets' them. (Apple may as well chase the fickle consumer market as opposed tot he fickle and rigid 'pro' market...it's bigger and worth billions, billions more.)
We'll still have our iMacs to do 3d, video, gaming, emailing, music etc. The top end one is more than enough.
There's PCs for those that decide it's not enough. Or ebay for the last of the Pro line when it ships.
Comments
320GB SSD Retina-Display MBA 13"... BRING IT ON.
I think the MBP13" will become a "higher-end" MBA 13", ie. no more MBP 13". MBP 15" will probably drop the optical drive for good in 2012 and have MBA styling. MBP 17" Will have MBA styling but optical drive an the whole kit'n'kaboodle.
I'd rather they went for a better quality display than a high resolution one - other manufacturers do this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hIe7OYfjiw
I'm not sure how much more expensive this would make them but it severely detracts from the perception of quality when they use bad TN panels.
I would also like to see them go towards Air-like styling across the entire lineup putting emphasis on keeping the laptops cool without excessive fan noise. Ivy Bridge will help here more than any other chip upgrade in the past.
It'll be interesting to see which way they go with dedicated GPUs: AMD or NVidia. Both should have good options to choose from but NVidia looks to be focussing on compute power. Virtual memory space would be great to have in the MBP as it means less complaining about lower amounts of VRAM - a unified 64-bit address space shared by the CPU and GPU would be a massive improvement for computation and gaming and should have been done long ago. Double precision Kepler GPU would be a great addition for the MBP (and Mini).
SSDs are becoming very affordable now, even 256GB ones. When the sub-20nm chips hit in 2012, the combined manufacturing improvements and consumer adoption will hopefully drive it to $1/GB or less. This means the entry Mac laptop can come with 128GB, the 13" and above with 256GB as dropping the optical saves $100 or so. They can simply have another blade slot or two for additional cards when the prices drop again. Some people won't like losing options for 1-1.5TB internal space but they will have USB 3 so portable drives up to 2TB can be bought cheaply.
I'd expect them to drop FW800 and ethernet at the next revision and replace them with dual Thunderbolt and 4 x USB 3 ports on the 15", 1 x Thunderbolt on the 13".
Not that it would accomplish much to complain to Intel. Let's face it everyone involved at Intel knows that the new Xeons have slipped. They know they need to fix whatever is wrong and get on with it, but they also know that rushing forward and stumbling on mistakes isn't helpful either.
I don't think any of the other oems have put out new stuff either. People have become grumpy because it's gone from an overpriced machine to an overpriced machine with aging hardware. It happens. Intel definitely hasn't helped.
I'm grumpy when I get up in the morning, however I have the maturity to not get worked up over things I can't change. This constant whine, from a very few about the Mac Pro, really has a negative impact on this forum. It would be one thing if Intel had been shipping new hardware for months to other manufactures but the haven't so the noise is baseless.
It would be a totally different thing if people wanted to talk about the rumored new chips. For one there seems to be a lot to talk about and two this is a rumor site.
Usually they require volume to accomplish such a thing. I can't find a specific panel related to laptop ips displays, although I know a couple brands employ them on a limited number of models. My guess would be that producing them at comparable resolution to what is seen on the macbook pros today (especially the high res 15") would be cost prohibitive.
Any laptop called a Pro ought to have a Pro quality display. However there are many factors that go into choosing a display so we would need to understand the trade offs Apple has made. In the end I don't really think the displays are all that bad in the MBP relative to the rest of the market.
If Apple did this and the other OEMs then employed the same thing, I'm sure you'd hear about copying.
? What do you mean here. If any manufacture can get their panel costs down laptop makers would flock to that panel. Apple doesn't develop the displays so other users can't be accused of copying.
The real issue is that while I'm sure many of these manufacturers would really like to do this (new shiny feature to attract upgrade purchases), it requires a huge amount of volume to make it viable. IPS saw its major growth by professional adoption. There was enough demand for quality displays because of the number of people who wanted to replace aging crt hardware, and the price points were still high enough to drive the technology forward. Today we have $300 24" ips displays. Pretty much everyone but LG has dropped out there, and they haven't really done much to push the technology forward.
This is contradictory. Either the displays are expensive or they are not.
If Apple does try to employ IPS there, it would probably be for the entire line. They don't really like significant design segmentation, so pricing from LG would become a factor. This means they may require support from other OEMs as well to really make this work close to current price points.
They could easily put higher quality displays in the MBP line and leave the AIRs as is. I say higher quality because I want to include everything that is possible not just IPS displays. IPS will quickly become a technology of the past just like many of the other LCD technologies. There is often this perception that XYZ laptop has to have this technology (IPS) to be called professional machine, I think that is often a mistake. Even slapping a retina display into a MBP doesn't automatically make the machine a Pro computer, there are many other display parameters to consider.
Yeah, but it's a sweet spot. Great CPU, finally decent GPU, 4K is good (though DX10 gaming... well, I don't care, since I have an Xbox360 now and have ditched PC gaming for good).
All of those features are important even if you have moved gaming off to a 360. GPU acceleration shows up in all sorts of places, even Web Broswers, people should strive for as much GPU performance as they can afford.
More importantly with Ivy Bridge the GPU is where most of the performance increases will come from.
320GB SSD Retina-Display MBA 13"... BRING IT ON.
Well this is the really hard part because apparently the chips for the AIRs won't arrive until well after the other laptop chips. So we may have to wait until mid summer for AIR updates.
I think the MBP13" will become a "higher-end" MBA 13", ie. no more MBP 13". MBP 15" will probably drop the optical drive for good in 2012 and have MBA styling. MBP 17" Will have MBA styling but optical drive an the whole kit'n'kaboodle.
I hope not. I really was hoping for a major refactoring of the 13"MBP. By that I mean a discrete GPU, SSD with a conventional drive bay and other goodies so that it continues to be a Pro machine. One of those others would be a better display.
The last thing we need from Apple is a line up of laptops limited in performance by AIRs thinnest.
This is no different than back in the PPC days when people blamed Apple for the lack of progress from Motorola and IBM. My point is if you must complain do it where it might do some good, in this case an Intel forum.
Not that it would accomplish much to complain to Intel. Let's face it everyone involved at Intel knows that the new Xeons have slipped. They know they need to fix whatever is wrong and get on with it, but they also know that rushing forward and stumbling on mistakes isn't helpful either.
I'm grumpy when I get up in the morning, however I have the maturity to not get worked up over things I can't change. This constant whine, from a very few about the Mac Pro, really has a negative impact on this forum. It would be one thing if Intel had been shipping new hardware for months to other manufactures but the haven't so the noise is baseless.
It would be a totally different thing if people wanted to talk about the rumored new chips. For one there seems to be a lot to talk about and two this is a rumor site.
My only point on the mac pro was that it's been priced quite aggressively at the single socket end for some time even with Intel's shift in cpu pricing to ride out the extended cycle, so it's easy for the line to look neglected. Looking at the other oems, their lines are in a similar place. The workstation market must be looking pretty ugly at this point in terms of volume. What is interesting is how few non Apple computers I've seen recently.
? What do you mean here. If any manufacture can get their panel costs down laptop makers would flock to that panel. Apple doesn't develop the displays so other users can't be accused of copying.
This is contradictory. Either the displays are expensive or they are not.
I was saying desktop panels were the area where IPS saw its growth in the past. They never caught on in laptops. They started with desktops in leveraging out crt technology on the higher end where other lcd technologies weren't working. More recently they've been making really small displays for phones using ips. I don't actually know why they haven't developed more panels for the laptop segment given that they cover sizes above and below. Also years ago they were quite expensive. It has just come down immensely.
Regarding laptop makers flocking, I meant that if Apple cut a deal for a large quantity of these parts causing production to ramp up, other manufacturers would be more likely to jump on board. With a big enough push for ips it might bring down the cost per unit enough to make it feasible. Apple tends to ship in huge volume per product design, so they can order enough of something to actually impact the industry to a degree. On expensive vs cheap anyway, it depends on popularity in a given size.
Maybe better quality displays instead of Retina and the current case design is still so appealing it would be hard to imagine what sort of a redesign Apple could come up with.
I for one do hope that Apple keep an optical drive MacBook Pro option the line-up as I have shed loads of DVD's and still prefer to buy my music on CD (remember them! Far better quality than any download). It would be a shame if Apple abandoned FW800 just at the minute as there are still so many external HD's around that use the technology (I own 4 of the buggers) and it still beats a USB2 connected external hands down. USB3 and Thunderbolt would be great additions.
USB optical drives (even Blu-Ray) are inexpensive now. It would be a hassle for some people to carry around but you can extract the discs onto the internal when needed.
FW800 has its uses but Thunderbolt is external PCI so you can actually get a docking solution that gives you ethernet, FW800, USB and an extra Thunderbolt port all plugging into one port:
http://www.gizmag.com/belkin-thunder...ss-dock/19834/
This way you can hook up an external display and all your peripherals like USB optical drive and FW800 HDDs and connect them all to the laptop with a single plug.
Maybe better quality displays instead of Retina and the current case design is still so appealing it would be hard to imagine what sort of a redesign Apple could come up with.
I still prefer the box design of the MBP over the wedge design of the Air and it gives more room for the battery. You can see here what removing the FW800 and ethernet ports allows them to do though:
Only having Thunderbolt, USB 3 ports, SD slot and magsafe allows them to make the machine a good deal thinner and to me it looks more modern.
I reckon a future design would be the iPad but where the display is OLED with two sides and you flip it up to use it like a laptop with a smart cover to protect the top screen but they need to get the batteries sorted out to make it light enough.
Really boy this crap is just a little to much, Apple can't ship a reasonable Mac Pro upgrade until Intel ships new chips to make the machine. That will happen when they get all the bugs out of the chip sets.
Can't?
More like 'won't.'
They could offer a line of Final Cut X class prosumer headless i7s (a dirt cheap chip now) with the lastest kick ass Ati card.
..but they'll keep it as a premium (if the line survives...) flag ship to eye gauge people.
It's not had an update in ages. It's mouldy. It's crusty. The gpu is ancient on it. The entry level quad core for £2000 is a bad joke. Plus Apple monitor to set you back £3000 almost for a desktop system?
it's everything that is wrong with apple's desktop line. You'd be made to buy one over a 27 inch iMac.
The Mac pro party?
So over.
I'll blow a party pheeeper if they make 'one more' upgrade before dropping it in favour of 6 core iMacs at some point.
Hopefully, they'll prove me wrong on price, gpu and cpu. But they haven't so far and it's been years.
And all my lamenting hasn't made me feel better or improved Apple's pro sales. Pricey and out of date. It's a joke.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Apple's focus is firmly on the consumer. It's pods/phones/laptops/imacs. Consumer software and apps stores.
and yes, it's made them billiosn more than a few video producers who dump Final Cut X for Avid whenever a single upgrade 'upsets' them. (Apple may as well chase the fickle consumer market as opposed tot he fickle and rigid 'pro' market...it's bigger and worth billions, billions more.)
We'll still have our iMacs to do 3d, video, gaming, emailing, music etc. The top end one is more than enough.
There's PCs for those that decide it's not enough. Or ebay for the last of the Pro line when it ships.
Lemon Bon Bon.