This refresh replaces the entry-level MBP which had 8th-gen Intel processors, two TB/USB-C ports and RAM was limited to 16GB max. I am sure the replacement for high-end MBP (10th-gen Intel, 4 ports and 32GB RAM) with an Apple-Silicon chip will be released next year.
And They should have brought MAGSAFE here along with HDMI and the SD card slot. Oh well it only took them four years to fix their keyboards. Maybe they will return to a better design in 2024.
1) Apple is navigating a tricky transition. Retaining the current form factor and other specs in some areas ensures that current and recent customers don't feel like Apple has just abandoned them. There are valid reasons for some to have purchased Intel Macs even after the AS announcement. Apple has been the standout company that does right by its customers for years and years. They aren't changing that DNA now.
2) The M series are amazing already. Kind of blown away. Sure in some cases, they are performing 2x the speed of their predecessors, but in others, it's 4, 8, and 10x. the M series low power chips are already Far better for video editors than most desktop class chips from Intel. We recently built a video editing dream machine with the best i9 money can buy. It doesn't handle 4k amazingly well, but performs acceptably in Adobe Premiere. A Mac mini with Final Cut will destroy that.
3) Even better performance-centric M series chips are coming. The larger MacBook Pros, the iMac, the Mac Pro, and whatever else Apple wants to do have a different thermal envelope and will. require more power, which yields much better performance. 8 cores in the M1 isn't a lot. The M2 or M1X or whatever will likely. double up on that.
In conclusion, Apple just opened the door to a bright, new, game-changing era and signaled the death knell of the X86 era for all of computing.
p.s. Already, the M series outpaces its x86 contemporaries by a lot. And that margin will exponentially increase in the coming years. You will see every PC maker follow suit into new RISC CPU designs. Intel would be wise to invest heavily into either its own, custom RISC architecture, or get on the custom ARM bandwagon. Samsung has already tried and failed to gain the upper hand with its mobile CPUs. but they are a waste. of time in this race. The one company I feel somewhat bad for is AMD, who has recently made a resurgence and matching (in some cases exceeding) Intels performance dominance. They enjoy success for a few years and ... AS drops. It's rough. But for us in the. Apple community, it's amazing and encouraging to witness. Wow.
1. True 2. True 3. True p.s. is problematic.
The margin will not exponentially increase in the coming years. They are primarily due to A14 being on a 5nm process while Intel's performance chips are on a 14nm process and AMD's performance chips are on a 10nm process. What happens when AMD and especially Intel get to 5nm? AMD's 5nm chips are being manufactured by TSMC for a 2021 release as we speak. Intel has a 7nm design ready but their foundry cannot manufacture it. They are going to decide in 1Q 2021 whether to pay TSMC to manufacture their design or wait another year on their own foundry. They will probably decide to wait a year because their 10nm chips have just hit the market anyway. As for Apple's capacity to improve, they will hit 3nm in 2022. After that, will 2nm be a thing? 1nm? Not likely. After Apple hits 3nm, what will be left is overclocking while using less power.
As for every PC maker following suit into the new RISC CPU designs: why? First off, Intel and AMD are going to narrow, catch up and surpass the A14 when they reach 5nm and 3nm. Second, unless their RISC CPU designs A) surpass the existing Qualcomm and other ARM Holdings-based designs like the M1 chip does, why bother? You may want this to happen in order for Intel to be marginalized - funny how it is only the Apple fans that want every other tech company to go out of business but that isn't going to happen. Wintel is the dominant hardware computing platform in everything but mobile. There isn't going to be this mass abandonment just because ARM is faster, especially since the alternative is Apple machines running a proprietary OS that cost as much as twice as much as Intel and AMD machines with similar specs. And even if they wanted to abandon it, they couldn't. There is too much x86 and x86-64 code - personal, business, enterprise, server - that would need to be rewritten. There is no business or technical justification for such a massive, expensive, lengthy and risky undertaking beyond making Apple fans feel about themselves.
Samsung has already tried and failed to gain the upper hand with its mobile CPUs but they are a waste of time in this race.
Yeah ... more "wishful thinking about Apple's competitors" stuff. The reality is that Samsung worked with ARM Holdings to design the new X1 Cortex super core and has worked with Google to design Whitechapel, Google's new hardware platform for Pixel phones and tablets. The new Samsung Exynos CPUs that used the core that they designed with ARM Holdings will be commercially available in devices in February and it significantly outperforms the Qualcomm 865+. The Qualcomm 875 might outperform it but not by much. In any event, if you are going to make a mobile device or Chromebook, Samsung's chips are going to be as good as any.
So long story short: there will be no mass migration from Wintel to ARM-based Macs because said Macs still cost way more AND the software compatibility problems that already existed for Intel-based Macs that people addressed with Parallels and bootcamp are going to get even worse. You should know from the experience with the iPhone and iPad that faster does not equal market share. The iPhone, the iPad and the Apple TV are all significantly faster than their competitors yet none of them have greater than 35% market share. Apple sold fewer smartphones in the United States - the market where it has the largest share by far - than Samsung last quarter, and they also sold only 5 million fewer iPads than Samsung sold tablets. Give most people the choice between "faster but way more expensive" and "not as fast but still accomplishes everything I need it to do" and they are going to go with the latter. And given that ARM-based Macs are going to have even less software options to "accomplish everything I need it to do" beyond offer desktop versions of iPad apps that were designed to run on touchscreens than the current Wintel ones ... you get the picture. Apple had 8% market share last quarter - ChromeOS had 11% by comparison - in its best quarter for selling Macs ever. Don't think that switching to Apple Silicon is going to move that very much, and for that matter I don't think that Apple is counting on it moving that much either.
You appear very defensive about the M1 specifically, and Apple in general. Perhaps you should consider preaching to the x86 choir, because, you certainly don't seem to understand Apple users.
Oh, and for the record, marketshare isn't the only metric. In fact, customer satisfaction and profits seem to follow Apple everywhere. Must be the overall user experience is better with Apple.
I didn't want to reply to his simpleton "chip quoting" that isn't applicable, he'd just come back all defensive and quote prices.
The main thing he doesn't understand, with the A4-A14 arch, and now M1 and future, are the packages and mods.
Here is the quickest low down details I can use to describe the SITCH.
When Microsoft "tried" to do Windows on ARM, their problem was they tried to seriously, "just swap the chip out," and flush Windows down the throat of the poor ARM chip. This is the simple reason why they are failing, it just doesn't work!
Back in the day, Intel used to try and do similar things with specific code instruction sets like Apple Silicon, but people didn't program like that back in the day, I mean every once in a while some developer would write a plug-in for Photoshop that would take advantage of a sub-set of the PowerPC even, but those times died back then, back in 2005-2007. And then when Apple picked up Intel chips, Intel went straight for CORES CORES CORES, and more threads, which is where we blatantly ended up, which failed (or is failing).
Apple is not going to RAMP up the CPU speed and go all crazy with cores, I mean sure the M2-3-4 might go as high as 8+8 cores (HP+HE), but the actual "new" way of coding and hardware, is Apple making really good frameworks/APIs, that take advantage of the "packages" on the A-series and now M-series chips coming our way. It's not just throw the whole OS at the cores and run geekbench
So EXCITING, the fact that as a developer you don't have to do super low level code (in Swift even) to use things like Machine Learning for AI in a game, and just use the frameworks offered is OMG, to me...
Laughable that these are only able to be upgraded to 16GBs of memory though.
What's laughable is that you are applying Intel-logic for needing more than 16GB RAM to a completely different architecture. Have you been sleeping through class and missed the part about Apple Silicon with its heritage coming from the iPhone, has proven to do much more work with less then 1/2 the RAM compared to others?
Seriously... just stop. Your ignorance is showing.
Then they should not have included "Pro" in the name. I'm sure these machines are capable but lets see how the stand with editing, rendering and exporting 12K RAW footage in Davicini Resolve. If they can with absolute fluidity, then I will eat shoe.
My conclusion from keynote: Macs are leaving concept of universal tool to became more powerful tool for specific usage. This may not be necessary bad move, as there is demand for such tools. However Mac will no longer be a computer that can be used in any industry to to earn money. Sure, it will be better tool for artists, photographs, video creators ... all sort of creative oriented persons. However if you work in finance, IT, oil and gas, or any other industry, you may stick with good intel Macs (as you can run windows industry specialised programs) or you have to switch to notebooks like dell XPS, or Lenovo Carbon Extreme or some notebooks-workstations big toys and have all your apple word in iphone or ipad pro. I cannot imagine, that someone will transform core banking client apps or business intelligence and data-warehouse development tools to ARM macs.
"Pro" does not mean only higher performance, but also versatility... On Intel Mac you can run everything and have full connection to your Apple ecosystem in one beautiful and powerful machine.
Laughable that these are only able to be upgraded to 16GBs of memory though.
I've been running 16gb on my Windows machines for years, machines on which I play VR games, and run MS Visual Studio and IntelliJ. Surely a Mac with "only" 16 gb would be at least as sufficient for the tasks for which this machine is likely to be used as a 16 gb Windows box, no?
I feel like this is just the beginning, not the end, of the story. More will come.
Laughable that these are only able to be upgraded to 16GBs of memory though.
What's laughable is that you are applying Intel-logic for needing more than 16GB RAM to a completely different architecture. Have you been sleeping through class and missed the part about Apple Silicon with its heritage coming from the iPhone, has proven to do much more work with less then 1/2 the RAM compared to others?
Seriously... just stop. Your ignorance is showing.
Then they should not have included "Pro" in the name. I'm sure these machines are capable but lets see how the stand with editing, rendering and exporting 12K RAW footage in Davicini Resolve. If they can with absolute fluidity, then I will eat shoe.
Laughable that these are only able to be upgraded to 16GBs of memory though.
What's laughable is that you are applying Intel-logic for needing more than 16GB RAM to a completely different architecture. Have you been sleeping through class and missed the part about Apple Silicon with its heritage coming from the iPhone, has proven to do much more work with less then 1/2 the RAM compared to others?
Seriously... just stop. Your ignorance is showing.
Then they should not have included "Pro" in the name. I'm sure these machines are capable but lets see how the stand with editing, rendering and exporting 12K RAW footage in Davicini Resolve. If they can with absolute fluidity, then I will eat shoe.
I don't care what BlackMagic, RED, or whatever, but to say "A little MacBook Air (or Pro)," first GEN M1 chip, HAS to ingest 3 streams @ 30 mins of 12K footage and then juggle the 3 streams, when a Mac Pro can do 3 x 8K streams, and SAY the AIR or MBP, just is PATHETIC cause it can't!!! is OUTLANDISH!! and what is that btw? 3TB of data for 3 Streams of 12K @ 30 mins?? I am just saying for your "fluidity" argument. It was just hilarious, that THAT was your benchmark of success or not.
Comments
The main thing he doesn't understand, with the A4-A14 arch, and now M1 and future, are the packages and mods.
Here is the quickest low down details I can use to describe the SITCH.
When Microsoft "tried" to do Windows on ARM, their problem was they tried to seriously, "just swap the chip out," and flush Windows down the throat of the poor ARM chip. This is the simple reason why they are failing, it just doesn't work!
Back in the day, Intel used to try and do similar things with specific code instruction sets like Apple Silicon, but people didn't program like that back in the day, I mean every once in a while some developer would write a plug-in for Photoshop that would take advantage of a sub-set of the PowerPC even, but those times died back then, back in 2005-2007. And then when Apple picked up Intel chips, Intel went straight for CORES CORES CORES, and more threads, which is where we blatantly ended up, which failed (or is failing).
Apple is not going to RAMP up the CPU speed and go all crazy with cores, I mean sure the M2-3-4 might go as high as 8+8 cores (HP+HE), but the actual "new" way of coding and hardware, is Apple making really good frameworks/APIs, that take advantage of the "packages" on the A-series and now M-series chips coming our way. It's not just throw the whole OS at the cores and run geekbench
So EXCITING, the fact that as a developer you don't have to do super low level code (in Swift even) to use things like Machine Learning for AI in a game, and just use the frameworks offered is OMG, to me...
2¢
That's a good one!!
"Pro" does not mean only higher performance, but also versatility... On Intel Mac you can run everything and have full connection to your Apple ecosystem in one beautiful and powerful machine.
I feel like this is just the beginning, not the end, of the story. More will come.
It was just funny, but it's NOT APPLICABLE.