@dewme : ever since Jony Ive left, Apple has introduced the modular Mac Pro, the 16" MacBook Pro with a better keyboard, and now this "Pro Mode" that prioritizes speed over comfort / noise. These are all things that people wanted, things that run counter to the mantra of 'thin, sleek and quiet' that was the hallmark of Jony ive's tenure.
Although Jony Ive left Apple in mid 2019, he stepped away from full-time design in mid 2015, and changed roles again in 2017. There would have been changes to the reporting structure at both times, and an opportunity to change direction within the company.
If any lower level employees were brewing ideas for product improvement that ran counter to his ideology, his departure must have opened the flood gates and we will see the manifestation of that release over the next 12-24 months.
As long as Apple continues to honor the product warranty I don’t have any issues with the nitro boost mode. I must say that this kind of open loop tinkering seems very uncharacteristic for Apple.
With any system that is performing a job the key performance indicator is overall throughput for the job being performed. Allowing users to tweak some of the individual performance settings without getting realtime feedback as to the impact on actual throughput for the job at hand is often a game of simply moving the bottleneck from one part of the system to another. The caveats indicated by Apple imply that the bottlenecks are mainly cooling and noise related. Hmmm.
However, like others have said, the actual user benefit may be the result of the placebo effect.
It will be significant performance increases, probably on order 10% to 20%. Intel’s processors, most CPU and GPU chips these days, have been on a slow IPC crawl, counting on a steady process node improvement. In this scenario, which Intel has been steady at for more than 3 decades, you can count on getting more performance for about the same amount power. That hasn’t been true for the past 3 years or so.
They’ve increased the core counts and utilized thermal capacitance way more than they ever they thought they would, but that will only get you so far without a process node improvement. Then, it looks like Intel 10 nm isn’t all that great versus 14 nm either. The only option left is to run the system with more power, and requisite cooling system.
So, if the laptops can run the chips at cTDP up levels, run a 28 W TDP processor at 35 W TDP for awhile, that will be a real 20% performance improvement. But you are left with a louder and hotter machine, which is against Apple’s ethos.
@dewme : ever since Jony Ive left, Apple has introduced the modular Mac Pro, the 16" MacBook Pro with a better keyboard, and now this "Pro Mode" that prioritizes speed over comfort / noise. These are all things that people wanted, things that run counter to the mantra of 'thin, sleek and quiet' that was the hallmark of Jony ive's tenure.
Although Jony Ive left Apple in mid 2019, he stepped away from full-time design in mid 2015, and changed roles again in 2017. There would have been changes to the reporting structure at both times, and an opportunity to change direction within the company.
If any lower level employees were brewing ideas for product improvement that ran counter to his ideology, his departure must have opened the flood gates and we will see the manifestation of that release over the next 12-24 months.
Since you lay the design elements you do not like at Ive’s feet as CDO, you must also lay the changes you do like there as well, as they were well within his tenure. There’s no way around this.
@dewme : ever since Jony Ive left, Apple has introduced the modular Mac Pro, the 16" MacBook Pro with a better keyboard, and now this "Pro Mode" that prioritizes speed over comfort / noise. These are all things that people wanted, things that run counter to the mantra of 'thin, sleek and quiet' that was the hallmark of Jony ive's tenure.
Although Jony Ive left Apple in mid 2019, he stepped away from full-time design in mid 2015, and changed roles again in 2017. There would have been changes to the reporting structure at both times, and an opportunity to change direction within the company.
If any lower level employees were brewing ideas for product improvement that ran counter to his ideology, his departure must have opened the flood gates and we will see the manifestation of that release over the next 12-24 months.
Since you lay the design elements you do not like at Ive’s feet as CDO, you must also lay the changes you do like there as well, as they were well within his tenure. There’s no way around this.
If you believe that he was actually an active part of Apple design during that time. If not... As noted, his role inside Apple had been reported as changing. It was probably some PR and some inside drama. There is probably much more behind the scenes that will not be known until years from now when people working at Apple today either leave or feel more free to talk.
@dewme : ever since Jony Ive left, Apple has introduced the modular Mac Pro, the 16" MacBook Pro with a better keyboard, and now this "Pro Mode" that prioritizes speed over comfort / noise. These are all things that people wanted, things that run counter to the mantra of 'thin, sleek and quiet' that was the hallmark of Jony ive's tenure.
Although Jony Ive left Apple in mid 2019, he stepped away from full-time design in mid 2015, and changed roles again in 2017. There would have been changes to the reporting structure at both times, and an opportunity to change direction within the company.
If any lower level employees were brewing ideas for product improvement that ran counter to his ideology, his departure must have opened the flood gates and we will see the manifestation of that release over the next 12-24 months.
Just like drugs which can help you too much of a good thing can also kill you!
The newer MacBook Pro's all have their T-CON boards held between the heat pipes and cooling fins. So you'll likely kill it as we've already seen grey black bars on the top and bottom of the screen of systems who's vents got blocked. This would require a new display assembly to fix $$$
I would strongly recommend only using this on the new Mac Pro which has the needed cooling system to support this.
As long as Apple continues to honor the product warranty I don’t have any issues with the nitro boost mode. I must say that this kind of open loop tinkering seems very uncharacteristic for Apple.
With any system that is performing a job the key performance indicator is overall throughput for the job being performed. Allowing users to tweak some of the individual performance settings without getting realtime feedback as to the impact on actual throughput for the job at hand is often a game of simply moving the bottleneck from one part of the system to another. The caveats indicated by Apple imply that the bottlenecks are mainly cooling and noise related. Hmmm.
However, like others have said, the actual user benefit may be the result of the placebo effect.
It will be significant performance increases, probably on order 10% to 20%. Intel’s processors, most CPU and GPU chips these days, have been on a slow IPC crawl, counting on a steady process node improvement. In this scenario, which Intel has been steady at for more than 3 decades, you can count on getting more performance for about the same amount power. That hasn’t been true for the past 3 years or so.
They’ve increased the core counts and utilized thermal capacitance way more than they ever they thought they would, but that will only get you so far without a process node improvement. Then, it looks like Intel 10 nm isn’t all that great versus 14 nm either. The only option left is to run the system with more power, and requisite cooling system.
So, if the laptops can run the chips at cTDP up levels, run a 28 W TDP processor at 35 W TDP for awhile, that will be a real 20% performance improvement. But you are left with a louder and hotter machine, which is against Apple’s ethos.
If the performance boosts are dynamically triggered based on application demand and/or background application profiling, having a little extra thermal headroom to increase performance by 10-20% makes sense. Again, as long as Apple signs-off on the deal by continuing to honor all warranty claims when these modes are activated - I'm cool with it. This type of dynamic boost is very unlike the old "turbo button" on ancient PCs. Those buttons, when they were actually connected, were totally dumb and agnostic to the dynamic demands of the machine.
Modern computers like the Mac are much more sophisticated and there are a lot of performance optimizations that are within the realm of the operating system and specifically the OS kernel. Since Apple owns the OS and has intimate knowledge of the underlying hardware I'd expect that a "Pro Mode" that has any degree of intelligence would coordinate optimization strategies between the hardware and operating system based on actual application demands and behaviors. Turning up the wick on everything, including processes and threads that don't need more processing bandwidth, may be squandering resources that could be better applied towards boosting applications that would benefit the most from running the machine harder and hotter. I'd bet that if we were talking about Apple designed processors the potential boost would be far greater exactly for the reasons I've mentioned. Apple's dependence on Intel for desktop processors means they can mash the pedal but only if they keep a very close eye on the temperature gauge.
@dewme : ever since Jony Ive left, Apple has introduced the modular Mac Pro, the 16" MacBook Pro with a better keyboard, and now this "Pro Mode" that prioritizes speed over comfort / noise. These are all things that people wanted, things that run counter to the mantra of 'thin, sleek and quiet' that was the hallmark of Jony ive's tenure.
Although Jony Ive left Apple in mid 2019, he stepped away from full-time design in mid 2015, and changed roles again in 2017. There would have been changes to the reporting structure at both times, and an opportunity to change direction within the company.
If any lower level employees were brewing ideas for product improvement that ran counter to his ideology, his departure must have opened the flood gates and we will see the manifestation of that release over the next 12-24 months.
Yeah let me guess, bald man bad isn't it?
Honestly, we can blame Ive for good stuff or bad stuff, but in the end I don’t care who was responsible for what; I just care about the finished product and how well it works and fits my needs.
Comments
Although Jony Ive left Apple in mid 2019, he stepped away from full-time design in mid 2015, and changed roles again in 2017. There would have been changes to the reporting structure at both times, and an opportunity to change direction within the company.
If any lower level employees were brewing ideas for product improvement that ran counter to his ideology, his departure must have opened the flood gates and we will see the manifestation of that release over the next 12-24 months.
They’ve increased the core counts and utilized thermal capacitance way more than they ever they thought they would, but that will only get you so far without a process node improvement. Then, it looks like Intel 10 nm isn’t all that great versus 14 nm either. The only option left is to run the system with more power, and requisite cooling system.
So, if the laptops can run the chips at cTDP up levels, run a 28 W TDP processor at 35 W TDP for awhile, that will be a real 20% performance improvement. But you are left with a louder and hotter machine, which is against Apple’s ethos.
The newer MacBook Pro's all have their T-CON boards held between the heat pipes and cooling fins. So you'll likely kill it as we've already seen grey black bars on the top and bottom of the screen of systems who's vents got blocked. This would require a new display assembly to fix $$$
I would strongly recommend only using this on the new Mac Pro which has the needed cooling system to support this.
Modern computers like the Mac are much more sophisticated and there are a lot of performance optimizations that are within the realm of the operating system and specifically the OS kernel. Since Apple owns the OS and has intimate knowledge of the underlying hardware I'd expect that a "Pro Mode" that has any degree of intelligence would coordinate optimization strategies between the hardware and operating system based on actual application demands and behaviors. Turning up the wick on everything, including processes and threads that don't need more processing bandwidth, may be squandering resources that could be better applied towards boosting applications that would benefit the most from running the machine harder and hotter. I'd bet that if we were talking about Apple designed processors the potential boost would be far greater exactly for the reasons I've mentioned. Apple's dependence on Intel for desktop processors means they can mash the pedal but only if they keep a very close eye on the temperature gauge.