We like our Macbooks in large part because Intel's done a pretty good job of increasing both horsepower and energy efficiency time and again over the last decade.
Power efficient CPUs are also a big deal for data centers so hopefully the Haswell server chips, whenever they come out, will offer similar energy savings.
How many loyal Mac customers have enough experience with other brands to make a reasonable comparison?
Customer satisfaction ratings are only that, subjective opinions based on what is most frequently a limited range of experience. See the hundreds of thousands of posts in the Apple Support forums for details....
That is true, but the fact remains that Apple customers are subjectively more satisfied than other companies customers.
And his point is as foolish as wanting the GPU to be user-replaceable in a notebook in case it goes bad so he doesn't have to be without his machine for 2 days whilst Apple repairs it.
Except I've had to replace batteries, but never a GPU. Your point is foolish.
This is indeed great news if it's true, I get about 4 hours of use with my Air 11" and would love to see that number jump up to at least 8 hours. I still would like a external battery slice that fixes itself to the bottom like my ThinkPad does but Apple has abandon the use of removable battery's, so that ain't happening.
Can't decide.. 13" MBA or iPad. Eager to see what both bring to the table this fall. I wonder if Apple plans on adding touchscreens to the MBA.
It is mind boggling how so many people get the idea that Apple will give the MBA a touch screen. That will not happen. It is a computer, not an Pad. That would definitely make it require a thicker display.
Still doesn't solve the problem of being without your laptop for a few days while its battery gets changed when it goes bad. Not to mention Apple's overpriced battery replacement fee.
Wait, what?
I have never --repeat, never-- replaced a laptop battery in my life, and I first started using the things back when bleeding-edge laptops came with an i386 stuffed inside of them. I never really understood the whole 'removable battery' thing in a laptop, save for one use case (it was a Dell Inspiron 8100 that had a second battery stuffed in the drive bay), and that was only because it was the only use case where you could swap batteries without shutting the whole thing down first.
Otherwise, when a battery craps out, you evaluate whether or not a new battery costs less than a new laptop. That said, Apple batteries have been naught but good to me - I held onto a 1994 PPC Powerbook that even in 2005 managed to eke out 30 minutes of battery, in spite of it being 11 years old (30 minutes was more than enough for what little I did on it by that point - usually to shake out an old file that I had stashed on it.)
As for the Apple battery performance? Let me clue you in a little:
I can crank along doing 3D/CG mesh-making, compositing and renders, and only burn off ~20% battery an hour on my 15" MBP using all available cores (wait, what do I mean by cores? Read on...)
My previous laptop, a Samsung RC-512, was touted to have a 5-hour battery life. I could drain the thing to nothing in only 90 minutes doing the same things on Windows 7 with the exact same applications - and that was after throttling processor affinity for the apps to just two cores in order to save power. Otherwise using all 8 cores would drain the whole thing in 60 minutes flat.
So far, I've exercised the battery on this MBP fairly heavily (I travel on business a lot), and it has been more than up to the challenge. If the battery goes south after the warranty dies on this thing, I'll just buy another battery and put it in myself**. Odds are perfect I won't be shelling out too much money to do it because of some stupid model-specific proprietary battery case shape either, like I would with most other OEM laptops.
** Why myself? I'm a sysadmin by trade, and have been monkeying with computer hardware internals -- from PDAs to 370-chassis mainframes -- since the late 1980s - to me, it's machts nichts as long as I can get parts and have the tools handy.
And his point is as foolish as wanting the GPU to be user-replaceable in a notebook in case it goes bad so he doesn't have to be without his machine for 2 days whilst Apple repairs it.
Lenovo actually gives a user-replaceable GPU option in their Y500 series. Comes standard with a GT 650M and via their ultabay you can add either a dvd, hd, or gpu in SLI mode. It's pretty cool and really the only laptop I know that has this option.
No doubt your own CPU designs are both more energy efficient and more powerful, and we look forward to using them. When will they be available?
In the meantime, Intel is not exactly the incompetent idiots you imagine. This thread is about Macs, not iPads, and Mac users choose their Macs because they're more powerful. Not that there's anything wrong with iPads, just a very different set of tasks it's aiming for, while the tasks people do on their Macs require more horsepower than any ARM chip ever made or even likely to be made in the next few years.
In fact, while you lament the notion that Intel only now understands that people are buying laptops, if you've bought a Mac at all in the last decade you have an Intel processor inside. We like our Macbooks in large part because Intel's done a pretty good job of increasing both horsepower and energy efficiency time and again over the last decade.
The reason Haswell is such big news is that it goes far beyond the sorts of improvements you've been enjoying all these years. What's important about Haswell is that it's the beginning of what may well be a sea change for the industry:
With a lithography process roadmap that ARM isn't scheduled to even match for years, by the end of 2014 we just might see x86 both outperforming ARM's best effort while also providing longer battery life.
Think about the implications. Haswell is today a modest boost, but underlying it is a process change that could well reshape the industry...
Yep. I agree with the roadmap/future. No one loved the PPC more than I, but I also knew that Intel wasn't sitting still. It's hard to imagine billions of dollars of R&D and an intense focus on making ever more powerful/cooler CPUs by the largest chip maker not eventually dominating the portable CPU biz.
Intel wants Apple's portable business and they will continue to throw their considerable cash and brain power at it until they achieve their goals. I imagine a partnership between Intel and Apple that will bear difficult-to-copy fruit regarding power and battery life.
lol. Manufacturers LOVE mind sets like yours, Sol. You're just the blank check that keeps cashing out. Meanwhile, ifixit and I continue plucking away and solving our own problems without ridiculously overpriced extended warranties and repair fees.
Speaking of battery replacement, this is funny: I can get an OEM replacement for my 2009 MBP 13" for 49 dollars online, and swap it out in about ten minutes. Apple, on the other hand, wants 130 bucks and a day to do the same thing. What? If I'm paying 50, they are probably paying 35 or less, which means they expect almost 100 dollars for ten minutes of labor. I don't care if you're Daddy Warbucks himself, that's ridiculous.
If I pay $1000 to $2000 on a laptop from Apple, I can afford to pay $130 for a new battery on the off chance that my battery needs to be replaced. I've not had any of my MBA battery packs ever go bad and I still occasionally use my Rev. A. version. .
If I pay $1000 to $2000 on a laptop from Apple, I can afford to pay $130 for a new battery on the off chance that my battery needs to be replaced. I've not any of my MBA battery packs go bad.
Computers often go through more than one owner. They're handed down to spouses or kids or sold. The annoying side effect here is that it basically renders older machines unserviceable. Apple sells a lot of refurbished units from prior years at times, but within 5 years of cutting off new sales, hardware service can be discontinued. It's part of their vintage policy. If a battery is relatively inaccessible, third party options are no longer viable. I've never personally run into such a problem, although I do keep an older notebook around just for travel purposes.
I'm not quite sure it will be a 50% improvement but it should be decent if that's what they focussed on this time around. Thank you Intel!
The processor doesn't account for all the load in a laptop so even if it is a 50% improvement you still need to get similar improvements out of the rest of the rest of the machine. LCD screens take considerable power for example as does secondary storage. Of course with SSD and new LCD tech floating around the potential is there
Haven't they said similar thinsg about SandyBridge chipset as well?
That is what they said and that is what we got. The problem is the savings in power is traded off for much higher performance. Apple just designs in a chip at the same power point that the platform supports. This leads to much higher performance each go around. This is a very good thing as performance is still an issue for many of us.
However Haswell does to a step or two further and does much better under light load than previous processors so if you don't stress the machine battery life will probably be much better.
Wasn't there supposed to be a sigificant battery improvement with well....EVERY new chipset relased? I don't that has come to fruitition.
I'm not sure you are looking at this with an historical eye. Today's laptops are power houses that do far more on battery power than any laptop from the past even thought about.
I hope it is true..... My rMBP battery lasts about 6-7 hours of normal use for me.
Think about it a bit that is pretty incredible. You are driving one of the highest performance displays out there and have one of the better performing laptops made. There was a time when laptops had 640 x 480 screens and half hour battery life times.
So the new Haswell rMBP would last 9- 10 hours? I hope this true....i might have to upgrade just for the battery alone....
No you can't say that from the info you have. The processor is only part of the equation. On top of that Intel laptop processors can run very hot under high loads and we have no info on how Haswell will perform in situations like that. In the end it is all about how you use the machine and how well the new power savings states and techniques work in conjunction with your usage.
Unfortunately, 50% less consumption by the CPU doesn't mean a doubled battery life. The screen is also consuming quite a bit of energy. Also, Intel's plans includes a lot of tweaking of other parts of the computer to save energy. If Apple takes the time to do that, we could see a dramatic improvement. If not, it'll be less impressive.
Personally, I'd like to see Apple add a reasonably priced EL edition to most of its laptop line. The EL (for extended battery life) would simply have a thicker base with a larger battery. That'd be enough to get me to set aside my aging MacBook for a new MacBook Air. As it, I seen no reason to spend $1200 to get a couple of more hours of battery life and to save a couple of pounds. There's a hundred better ways to spend that money.
This thinner is better mantra is silly. On a desk, thin matters not one bit. Transported about, my laptop is always in a padded case that's about two-inches thick for protection. It matters not if the laptop itself is a half-inch thicker. It matters a lot of that if that half-inch can give me several more hours of battery life.
Keep in mind that a battery life of over about twelve hours is essentially infinite. Few people can or need to work more than that in a day and recharging means it'll be ready to go again the next morning. Like a retina display and the human eye, never running down in normal use is like an infinite life.
In about two-and-a-half weeks at WWDC we should know what Apple's plans are.
lol. Manufacturers LOVE mind sets like yours, Sol. You're just the blank check that keeps cashing out. Meanwhile, ifixit and I continue plucking away and solving our own problems without ridiculously overpriced extended warranties and repair fees.
Speaking of battery replacement, this is funny: I can get an OEM replacement for my 2009 MBP 13" for 49 dollars online, and swap it out in about ten minutes. Apple, on the other hand, wants 130 bucks and a day to do the same thing. What? If I'm paying 50, they are probably paying 35 or less, which means they expect almost 100 dollars for ten minutes of labor. I don't care if you're Daddy Warbucks himself, that's ridiculous.
Have you gone to the auto repair shop lately? Flat rates aren't much better. The reality is it costs a lot of money to retain a staff of repair techs no matter what the industry. When it comes to computers though there is a lot of competition out there for this sort of staff.
By the way I'm not disagreeing with you about the savings. I tend to repair as much as I can around my house. That includes cars, computers, appliances, cell phones, furnace and whatever else I can. Why because I can for one, but more so I know that a good portion of the bill will go to support wages and business expenses, not the parts required for the repair. At times it can be rather foolish to pay for a plumber to make a house call to replace a few dollars worth of parts. Likewise it is foolish to pay Apple to replace a battery you can DIY.
It is mind boggling how so many people get the idea that Apple will give the MBA a touch screen. That will not happen. It is a computer, not an Pad. That would definitely make it require a thicker display.
It is a silly idea.
The display thickness would remain the same. Have you ever seen a Windows 8 Ultrabook, Asus has one with a thinner screen then a Macbook and that's touch. I to agree it's a silly idea, a Wacom board is a lot more useful.
Is it just me or do people need so little computing capability these days that they can get by with just a mobile device?
Actually today's mobile devices have a great deal of capability.
Hell, I can't even get by with just a rMBP 15, I am just such a long time user of large screen monitors and multi-cpu machines that I would feel crippled without my familiar desktops.
I tend to agree with the more cores is better mentality, however MBPs now come with quad core chips.
To me it would be like after owning a luxury automobile to have get by with only a bicycle. Sure I have a couple mobile devices, and I also own a bicycle but it is not my only mode of transportation.
The biggest problem with Apple today is the high entry price into a solid multi core desktop machine. A machine that is frankly very dated. Most of Apples machines these days are bicycles or in some cases motor cycles. They don't have a machine that is really designed for heavy lifting.
Is it just me or do people need so little computing capability these days that they can get by with just a mobile device? Hell, I can't even get by with just a rMBP 15, I am just such a long time user of large screen monitors and multi-cpu machines that I would feel crippled without my familiar desktops. To me it would be like after owning a luxury automobile to have get by with only a bicycle. Sure I have a couple mobile devices, and I also own a bicycle but it is not my only mode of transportation.
the 15 inch retina MBP has a 4 core i7, can be configured with 16 gigs of ram, can drive multiple large screen displays, and benchmarks within a hair of the 27 inch iMac. Certainly the 8 and 12 core Mac Pro is faster, but other than that, there's no real performance advantage in a desktop vs the retina MBP.
That is true, but the fact remains that Apple customers are subjectively more satisfied than other companies customers.
I is a mistake to believe that Apple users don't have experience with other machines. Many of us have plenty of experience with MS based systems in the workplace, even a few UNIX based mainframes. At home we may have a brace of Linux machines too.
The reality is Apple leads the pack in customer satisfaction because they have significantly better hardware and software. It isn't something that is subjective but rather an outgrowth of a wide array of experience. Satisfaction is due to the relative experience.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRulez
We like our Macbooks in large part because Intel's done a pretty good job of increasing both horsepower and energy efficiency time and again over the last decade.
Power efficient CPUs are also a big deal for data centers so hopefully the Haswell server chips, whenever they come out, will offer similar energy savings.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRulez
How many loyal Mac customers have enough experience with other brands to make a reasonable comparison?
Customer satisfaction ratings are only that, subjective opinions based on what is most frequently a limited range of experience. See the hundreds of thousands of posts in the Apple Support forums for details....
That is true, but the fact remains that Apple customers are subjectively more satisfied than other companies customers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
And his point is as foolish as wanting the GPU to be user-replaceable in a notebook in case it goes bad so he doesn't have to be without his machine for 2 days whilst Apple repairs it.
Except I've had to replace batteries, but never a GPU. Your point is foolish.
If this is true probably all MacBooks, and iPads will have simular battery life. (10 hours)
It is mind boggling how so many people get the idea that Apple will give the MBA a touch screen. That will not happen. It is a computer, not an Pad. That would definitely make it require a thicker display.
It is a silly idea.
deleted
Quote:
Originally Posted by TzTerri
Still doesn't solve the problem of being without your laptop for a few days while its battery gets changed when it goes bad. Not to mention Apple's overpriced battery replacement fee.
Wait, what?
I have never --repeat, never-- replaced a laptop battery in my life, and I first started using the things back when bleeding-edge laptops came with an i386 stuffed inside of them. I never really understood the whole 'removable battery' thing in a laptop, save for one use case (it was a Dell Inspiron 8100 that had a second battery stuffed in the drive bay), and that was only because it was the only use case where you could swap batteries without shutting the whole thing down first.
Otherwise, when a battery craps out, you evaluate whether or not a new battery costs less than a new laptop. That said, Apple batteries have been naught but good to me - I held onto a 1994 PPC Powerbook that even in 2005 managed to eke out 30 minutes of battery, in spite of it being 11 years old (30 minutes was more than enough for what little I did on it by that point - usually to shake out an old file that I had stashed on it.)
As for the Apple battery performance? Let me clue you in a little:
I can crank along doing 3D/CG mesh-making, compositing and renders, and only burn off ~20% battery an hour on my 15" MBP using all available cores (wait, what do I mean by cores? Read on...)
My previous laptop, a Samsung RC-512, was touted to have a 5-hour battery life. I could drain the thing to nothing in only 90 minutes doing the same things on Windows 7 with the exact same applications - and that was after throttling processor affinity for the apps to just two cores in order to save power. Otherwise using all 8 cores would drain the whole thing in 60 minutes flat.
So far, I've exercised the battery on this MBP fairly heavily (I travel on business a lot), and it has been more than up to the challenge. If the battery goes south after the warranty dies on this thing, I'll just buy another battery and put it in myself**. Odds are perfect I won't be shelling out too much money to do it because of some stupid model-specific proprietary battery case shape either, like I would with most other OEM laptops.
** Why myself? I'm a sysadmin by trade, and have been monkeying with computer hardware internals -- from PDAs to 370-chassis mainframes -- since the late 1980s - to me, it's machts nichts as long as I can get parts and have the tools handy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SolipsismX
And his point is as foolish as wanting the GPU to be user-replaceable in a notebook in case it goes bad so he doesn't have to be without his machine for 2 days whilst Apple repairs it.
Lenovo actually gives a user-replaceable GPU option in their Y500 series. Comes standard with a GT 650M and via their ultabay you can add either a dvd, hd, or gpu in SLI mode. It's pretty cool and really the only laptop I know that has this option.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacRulez
No doubt your own CPU designs are both more energy efficient and more powerful, and we look forward to using them. When will they be available?
In the meantime, Intel is not exactly the incompetent idiots you imagine. This thread is about Macs, not iPads, and Mac users choose their Macs because they're more powerful. Not that there's anything wrong with iPads, just a very different set of tasks it's aiming for, while the tasks people do on their Macs require more horsepower than any ARM chip ever made or even likely to be made in the next few years.
In fact, while you lament the notion that Intel only now understands that people are buying laptops, if you've bought a Mac at all in the last decade you have an Intel processor inside. We like our Macbooks in large part because Intel's done a pretty good job of increasing both horsepower and energy efficiency time and again over the last decade.
The reason Haswell is such big news is that it goes far beyond the sorts of improvements you've been enjoying all these years. What's important about Haswell is that it's the beginning of what may well be a sea change for the industry:
With a lithography process roadmap that ARM isn't scheduled to even match for years, by the end of 2014 we just might see x86 both outperforming ARM's best effort while also providing longer battery life.
Think about the implications. Haswell is today a modest boost, but underlying it is a process change that could well reshape the industry...
Yep. I agree with the roadmap/future. No one loved the PPC more than I, but I also knew that Intel wasn't sitting still. It's hard to imagine billions of dollars of R&D and an intense focus on making ever more powerful/cooler CPUs by the largest chip maker not eventually dominating the portable CPU biz.
Intel wants Apple's portable business and they will continue to throw their considerable cash and brain power at it until they achieve their goals. I imagine a partnership between Intel and Apple that will bear difficult-to-copy fruit regarding power and battery life.
If I pay $1000 to $2000 on a laptop from Apple, I can afford to pay $130 for a new battery on the off chance that my battery needs to be replaced. I've not had any of my MBA battery packs ever go bad and I still occasionally use my Rev. A. version. .
Quote:
Originally Posted by iRun262
If I pay $1000 to $2000 on a laptop from Apple, I can afford to pay $130 for a new battery on the off chance that my battery needs to be replaced. I've not any of my MBA battery packs go bad.
Computers often go through more than one owner. They're handed down to spouses or kids or sold. The annoying side effect here is that it basically renders older machines unserviceable. Apple sells a lot of refurbished units from prior years at times, but within 5 years of cutting off new sales, hardware service can be discontinued. It's part of their vintage policy. If a battery is relatively inaccessible, third party options are no longer viable. I've never personally run into such a problem, although I do keep an older notebook around just for travel purposes.
The processor doesn't account for all the load in a laptop so even if it is a 50% improvement you still need to get similar improvements out of the rest of the rest of the machine. LCD screens take considerable power for example as does secondary storage. Of course with SSD and new LCD tech floating around the potential is there
However Haswell does to a step or two further and does much better under light load than previous processors so if you don't stress the machine battery life will probably be much better. I'm not sure you are looking at this with an historical eye. Today's laptops are power houses that do far more on battery power than any laptop from the past even thought about. Think about it a bit that is pretty incredible. You are driving one of the highest performance displays out there and have one of the better performing laptops made. There was a time when laptops had 640 x 480 screens and half hour battery life times. No you can't say that from the info you have. The processor is only part of the equation. On top of that Intel laptop processors can run very hot under high loads and we have no info on how Haswell will perform in situations like that. In the end it is all about how you use the machine and how well the new power savings states and techniques work in conjunction with your usage.
Personally, I'd like to see Apple add a reasonably priced EL edition to most of its laptop line. The EL (for extended battery life) would simply have a thicker base with a larger battery. That'd be enough to get me to set aside my aging MacBook for a new MacBook Air. As it, I seen no reason to spend $1200 to get a couple of more hours of battery life and to save a couple of pounds. There's a hundred better ways to spend that money.
This thinner is better mantra is silly. On a desk, thin matters not one bit. Transported about, my laptop is always in a padded case that's about two-inches thick for protection. It matters not if the laptop itself is a half-inch thicker. It matters a lot of that if that half-inch can give me several more hours of battery life.
Keep in mind that a battery life of over about twelve hours is essentially infinite. Few people can or need to work more than that in a day and recharging means it'll be ready to go again the next morning. Like a retina display and the human eye, never running down in normal use is like an infinite life.
In about two-and-a-half weeks at WWDC we should know what Apple's plans are.
Have you gone to the auto repair shop lately? Flat rates aren't much better. The reality is it costs a lot of money to retain a staff of repair techs no matter what the industry. When it comes to computers though there is a lot of competition out there for this sort of staff.
By the way I'm not disagreeing with you about the savings. I tend to repair as much as I can around my house. That includes cars, computers, appliances, cell phones, furnace and whatever else I can. Why because I can for one, but more so I know that a good portion of the bill will go to support wages and business expenses, not the parts required for the repair. At times it can be rather foolish to pay for a plumber to make a house call to replace a few dollars worth of parts. Likewise it is foolish to pay Apple to replace a battery you can DIY.
The display thickness would remain the same. Have you ever seen a Windows 8 Ultrabook, Asus has one with a thinner screen then a Macbook and that's touch. I to agree it's a silly idea, a Wacom board is a lot more useful.
The biggest problem with Apple today is the high entry price into a solid multi core desktop machine. A machine that is frankly very dated. Most of Apples machines these days are bicycles or in some cases motor cycles. They don't have a machine that is really designed for heavy lifting.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
Is it just me or do people need so little computing capability these days that they can get by with just a mobile device? Hell, I can't even get by with just a rMBP 15, I am just such a long time user of large screen monitors and multi-cpu machines that I would feel crippled without my familiar desktops. To me it would be like after owning a luxury automobile to have get by with only a bicycle. Sure I have a couple mobile devices, and I also own a bicycle but it is not my only mode of transportation.
the 15 inch retina MBP has a 4 core i7, can be configured with 16 gigs of ram, can drive multiple large screen displays, and benchmarks within a hair of the 27 inch iMac. Certainly the 8 and 12 core Mac Pro is faster, but other than that, there's no real performance advantage in a desktop vs the retina MBP.
I is a mistake to believe that Apple users don't have experience with other machines. Many of us have plenty of experience with MS based systems in the workplace, even a few UNIX based mainframes. At home we may have a brace of Linux machines too.
The reality is Apple leads the pack in customer satisfaction because they have significantly better hardware and software. It isn't something that is subjective but rather an outgrowth of a wide array of experience. Satisfaction is due to the relative experience.