New HP ZBook gives us some hints about future of the MBP (and there's going to be disappointment)
HP has recently released the ZBook Studio, a high-end, but highly portable, 15" laptop workstation. It's 4.4 lbs and exactly the same thickness as a MacBook Pro Retina 15" It has Skylake processors, including the 6700, the 6820HQ and a couple of Xeons as options. The GPU is typical for a thin-and-light workstation - it's a Nvidia Quadro M1000M (actually similar in performance to the current MBP GPU). It has almost exactly the same financial (a modest configuration goes for around $2000, with configurations extending above $3000 - there's a 2 TB SSD option (using dual drives) that can reach $4000), size and weight budgets as a 15" MacBook Pro. Basically, if it ran MacOS, it would be the Skylake MBP (with a few differences reflecting HP's and Apple's design philosophies).
The bad news is that it Geekbenches a tiny bit slower than a 15" 2.8 gHz MacBook Pro (even with the 2.8 gHz Xeon processor). It's not different enough to say the machine is actually slower than the MBP - macOS vs. Windows could easily make that difference. What's news is that it's no faster. Anyone looking for a significant performance boost out of Skylake will be sorely disappointed - looking at the HP's results, the difference between Haswell Refresh and Skylake at the same point in the line will almost certainly be less than the difference between the 2.5 and 2.8 gHz Haswell models. It will be a great deal less than the difference from the 2.2 to the 2.8 gHz models. The only 2016 MacBook Pro that will even technically be faster than the current processor-bumped 2.8 gHz model will be the processor-bumped model, and that only by a few points. I've suspected this since I started looking into the refresh, but the benchmarks I found today confirm it. Moore's Law has failed, at least as far as CPUs are concerned, and the tiny improvements we've seen since Ivy Bridge or so are all we're getting. GPUs have some more room for improvement, but they'll probably hit the wall soon enough...
The other notable negative on the HP's spec sheet is that they didn't find a way to support a 2 TB SSD. They do offer a 2 TB option, but it uses 2 1TB blade SSDs. Apple's not going to include a second slot that is used only in a $4000 configuration, especially when they could cram another watt-hour or two of battery in there instead. If there was a single suitable PCIe blade, I could easily see Apple supporting it, but there's not. The upgrade from 1 TB to 2 TB costs $800 (with a whopping $1300 total upgrade from the default 256 GB configuration to 2 TB). HP also cheats on their SSDs - the slots support BOTH SATA and PCIe, and you don't get the fast one unless you pay extra for it.
HP sockets the RAM, and supports up to 32 GB (with a theoretical capacity of 64 GB using nonexistent 32 GB DIMMs). While HP charges a pretty penny for the upgrade, even high-quality 16 GB SODIMMs are relatively cheap ($200 or so for a pair of high-quality ones). This is good news, because Apple could easily offer 32 GB (soldered), and it might be something like a $200 upgrade from 16 to 32 GB, even accounting for the Apple tax.
HP does have a UHD (what we think of as 4K, although it's actually only almost 4K) screen option, and it's a beauty. It's one of their DreamColor wide-gamut panels, probably the best UHD panel on the market. Unfortunately, it's not as bright as the MBP screen, and it may also be somewhat less uniform. It's also an extra-cost option - just like the SSDs, HP goes for the cheap part (a standard 1920x1080 panel) and offers a high-end option. Apple might want to do a custom panel if they went for 4K - they prefer honest 4K (and 5K), and they'd want an exceptionally bright and uniform panel (no laptop presently has a true 4K panel, although various grades of UHD panels are not uncommon). Who knows if they'll go this way?
HP crams in every port under the sun - 3 USB 3.0, 2 USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, HDMI, headphone jack, SD reader and even Ethernet (they actually used a folding jack to get that one in a thin and light machine). Apple's not going to do that - we'll probably get a bunch of USB-C, but little or nothing else in the new machine, and the current one has most of what the HP has, but no Ethernet and an older Thunderbolt generation.
Looking at the HP's specs, I was able to figure out how they crammed in all those ports, plus socketed RAM and dual SSD slots, in a machine that is the exact same size and weight as a 15" Retina MBP. What they took out was a lot of the battery. HP uses a 64 watt-hour battery (of a reasonably standard shape, although non-removable except for service), and Apple uses 99.5 watt-hours of batteries crammed into every possible corner (difficult to remove even for service). They picked 99.5 watt-hours because it was the maximum legal battery capacity to get it on an airplane! Apple prides themselves on their extraordinary battery life, so the huge battery capacity isn't going anywhere, and that single decision drives a lot of the other specs of the MacBook Pro. They could add ports, but only by using a larger i/o board, which means less battery; they could socket the RAM or support a second SSD, but they'd lose a couple of watt-hours. The HP has half the battery life of a MacBook Pro - most of that is from the smaller battery, but the MacBook Pro is also extremely efficient - macOS has better power management than Windows, and Mail and Safari aren't as piggy as Outlook and IE (Edge is supposed to be a lot better).
The huge battery and thin-and-light design are Apple's calling cards. People can tell Apple "hey, I'd take a 5 lb machine if you give me my Ethernet back" or "a 5-6 hour battery is fine, if I can have upgradable RAM" all they want, but Apple wants elegant machines with exceptional battery life, and they won't sell you anything else. Apple's other notable design choice is that they don't offer cheap components as an option (except, occasionally, by keeping an old model around e.g. the MacBook Airs with pre-Retina displays or the 13" MacBook Pro with DVD). If you buy a mainstream model, you get the PCIe SSD and the Retina display, not junk with an option of the premium parts. If you're not careful, you can actually drop the WiFi out of an HP to save money, and it's confusing because it looks at first like you're dropping Bluetooth and then you look more closely and it dumps WiFi (I wonder if this is for certain government customers who shouldn't be accessing www.kgb.spy on their work machines - I've never seen a standard configuration missing WiFi, so it's not a usual cost savings)
Apple will probably take the opportunity to take another 1/4-1/2 lb off the redesign - that's a big part of the reason for the USB-C only and perhaps a move to a thinner keyboard. They're counting ounces to the point where an ounce for the card reader, another for the conventional USB and Thunderbolt ports and a third for MagSafe and HDMI makes a difference. Skylake's power savings will probably let them go to an 85-90 watt-hour battery without compromising battery life. I bet they're going for half a pound - get it under 4 lbs for the 15". They can do it if they take weight out of ports, screen, battery and keyboard (they may solder the SSD, too).
HP not only offers 5 mobile workstations , they actually offer 3 15" mobile workstations plus myriad 15" laptops of lesser performance( the three workstations are an older model that is even lighter but dual-core, this one, and a 6.5 lb model you can cram the kitchen sink into). Apple offers one, and they decide for you what the right combination of features is. For the most part, they make decent choices, but it's definitely a less flexible way to go.
In some way, what we'll see in the 2016 MBP is a similar performer to the 2014-2015 (Moore's Law HAS failed, after all - Skylake workstations aren't any faster), but with different choices of ports and a few other features. Maybe we'll see a 4K display or 32 GB of RAM, maybe it'll just be USB-C and Polaris?
The bad news is that it Geekbenches a tiny bit slower than a 15" 2.8 gHz MacBook Pro (even with the 2.8 gHz Xeon processor). It's not different enough to say the machine is actually slower than the MBP - macOS vs. Windows could easily make that difference. What's news is that it's no faster. Anyone looking for a significant performance boost out of Skylake will be sorely disappointed - looking at the HP's results, the difference between Haswell Refresh and Skylake at the same point in the line will almost certainly be less than the difference between the 2.5 and 2.8 gHz Haswell models. It will be a great deal less than the difference from the 2.2 to the 2.8 gHz models. The only 2016 MacBook Pro that will even technically be faster than the current processor-bumped 2.8 gHz model will be the processor-bumped model, and that only by a few points. I've suspected this since I started looking into the refresh, but the benchmarks I found today confirm it. Moore's Law has failed, at least as far as CPUs are concerned, and the tiny improvements we've seen since Ivy Bridge or so are all we're getting. GPUs have some more room for improvement, but they'll probably hit the wall soon enough...
The other notable negative on the HP's spec sheet is that they didn't find a way to support a 2 TB SSD. They do offer a 2 TB option, but it uses 2 1TB blade SSDs. Apple's not going to include a second slot that is used only in a $4000 configuration, especially when they could cram another watt-hour or two of battery in there instead. If there was a single suitable PCIe blade, I could easily see Apple supporting it, but there's not. The upgrade from 1 TB to 2 TB costs $800 (with a whopping $1300 total upgrade from the default 256 GB configuration to 2 TB). HP also cheats on their SSDs - the slots support BOTH SATA and PCIe, and you don't get the fast one unless you pay extra for it.
HP sockets the RAM, and supports up to 32 GB (with a theoretical capacity of 64 GB using nonexistent 32 GB DIMMs). While HP charges a pretty penny for the upgrade, even high-quality 16 GB SODIMMs are relatively cheap ($200 or so for a pair of high-quality ones). This is good news, because Apple could easily offer 32 GB (soldered), and it might be something like a $200 upgrade from 16 to 32 GB, even accounting for the Apple tax.
HP does have a UHD (what we think of as 4K, although it's actually only almost 4K) screen option, and it's a beauty. It's one of their DreamColor wide-gamut panels, probably the best UHD panel on the market. Unfortunately, it's not as bright as the MBP screen, and it may also be somewhat less uniform. It's also an extra-cost option - just like the SSDs, HP goes for the cheap part (a standard 1920x1080 panel) and offers a high-end option. Apple might want to do a custom panel if they went for 4K - they prefer honest 4K (and 5K), and they'd want an exceptionally bright and uniform panel (no laptop presently has a true 4K panel, although various grades of UHD panels are not uncommon). Who knows if they'll go this way?
HP crams in every port under the sun - 3 USB 3.0, 2 USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, HDMI, headphone jack, SD reader and even Ethernet (they actually used a folding jack to get that one in a thin and light machine). Apple's not going to do that - we'll probably get a bunch of USB-C, but little or nothing else in the new machine, and the current one has most of what the HP has, but no Ethernet and an older Thunderbolt generation.
Looking at the HP's specs, I was able to figure out how they crammed in all those ports, plus socketed RAM and dual SSD slots, in a machine that is the exact same size and weight as a 15" Retina MBP. What they took out was a lot of the battery. HP uses a 64 watt-hour battery (of a reasonably standard shape, although non-removable except for service), and Apple uses 99.5 watt-hours of batteries crammed into every possible corner (difficult to remove even for service). They picked 99.5 watt-hours because it was the maximum legal battery capacity to get it on an airplane! Apple prides themselves on their extraordinary battery life, so the huge battery capacity isn't going anywhere, and that single decision drives a lot of the other specs of the MacBook Pro. They could add ports, but only by using a larger i/o board, which means less battery; they could socket the RAM or support a second SSD, but they'd lose a couple of watt-hours. The HP has half the battery life of a MacBook Pro - most of that is from the smaller battery, but the MacBook Pro is also extremely efficient - macOS has better power management than Windows, and Mail and Safari aren't as piggy as Outlook and IE (Edge is supposed to be a lot better).
The huge battery and thin-and-light design are Apple's calling cards. People can tell Apple "hey, I'd take a 5 lb machine if you give me my Ethernet back" or "a 5-6 hour battery is fine, if I can have upgradable RAM" all they want, but Apple wants elegant machines with exceptional battery life, and they won't sell you anything else. Apple's other notable design choice is that they don't offer cheap components as an option (except, occasionally, by keeping an old model around e.g. the MacBook Airs with pre-Retina displays or the 13" MacBook Pro with DVD). If you buy a mainstream model, you get the PCIe SSD and the Retina display, not junk with an option of the premium parts. If you're not careful, you can actually drop the WiFi out of an HP to save money, and it's confusing because it looks at first like you're dropping Bluetooth and then you look more closely and it dumps WiFi (I wonder if this is for certain government customers who shouldn't be accessing www.kgb.spy on their work machines - I've never seen a standard configuration missing WiFi, so it's not a usual cost savings)
Apple will probably take the opportunity to take another 1/4-1/2 lb off the redesign - that's a big part of the reason for the USB-C only and perhaps a move to a thinner keyboard. They're counting ounces to the point where an ounce for the card reader, another for the conventional USB and Thunderbolt ports and a third for MagSafe and HDMI makes a difference. Skylake's power savings will probably let them go to an 85-90 watt-hour battery without compromising battery life. I bet they're going for half a pound - get it under 4 lbs for the 15". They can do it if they take weight out of ports, screen, battery and keyboard (they may solder the SSD, too).
HP not only offers 5 mobile workstations , they actually offer 3 15" mobile workstations plus myriad 15" laptops of lesser performance( the three workstations are an older model that is even lighter but dual-core, this one, and a 6.5 lb model you can cram the kitchen sink into). Apple offers one, and they decide for you what the right combination of features is. For the most part, they make decent choices, but it's definitely a less flexible way to go.
In some way, what we'll see in the 2016 MBP is a similar performer to the 2014-2015 (Moore's Law HAS failed, after all - Skylake workstations aren't any faster), but with different choices of ports and a few other features. Maybe we'll see a 4K display or 32 GB of RAM, maybe it'll just be USB-C and Polaris?
Comments
The other problem here isn't so much Moores law failing, we certainly are hitting a wall, but rather Intels focus on exploiting die area for better GPU performance. That isn't a bad thing if you want a better integrated GPU but it is pretty clear they did this at the expense of further CPU improvements.