Base is an apt word. How long has the base model been at 256mb VRAM? 3 years now?
And for many professionals, this is perfectly adequate. If you're a road warrior doing Powerpoint presentations and Word documents and Excel, you really don't need much in the way of GPU performance. Myself, I'm a coder. I run NetBeans, various databases, shell scripts, XML editors, etc. All "pro" apps that need lots of RAM, CPU, and HD space, but not much in the way of GPU power. (Driving big monitors is nice, but my IDE doesn't need 600 fps.) Pro != gamer level GPU.
Apple is falling apart! Their Buy Now link goes to the Store which is not yet back online! Yes I am trolling here but I am honestly upset. Same form factor. Great pipeline?!! Where are thou?
MD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory on 2.0GHz configuration; or AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on 2.2GHz configuration
MD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory on 2.0GHz configuration; or AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on 2.2GHz configuration
This is all over the f***** place.
Apple just gave the finger and said buy the top level 15" and 17" or MBA or screw off.
I don't care about macbooks, but they are an indicator of what we could see in the next mini. And I sure hope it has better than Radeon 6490 graphics. That's pretty weak.
It says turbo boost to 3.4 ghz thats pretty legit, so is 1gb of vram, and if you get that with the 512SSD then you've got yourself a laptop (assuming its cool enough to put on your lap).
was hoping for the ssd flash boot drive and longer battery life.......
think ill wait for the next update until i buy a new mbp
thunderbolt, facetimehd and sandybridge doesnt warrant me to upgrade yet.
Agreed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by archer75
I don't care about macbooks, but they are an indicator of what we could see in the next mini. And I sure hope it has better than Radeon 6490 graphics. That's pretty weak.
What? Radeon HD 6490M? That's a step backward from the GT 330M in the current ones. Apple doesn't do steps backward in the models with Dedi GPUs. Sideways, yes. Forward, yes. But going back to something about on par with the 9600M GT? Doesn't make any sense.
do you know how GPU's work???? on Apple's site, it says GDDR5 RAM thats much faster than the 330m's DDR2, DDR3 or GDDR3 RAM.... thats why its being used- its faster... plus it cna be upgraded to a 6750... WHICH crushs a 330m...
Graphics cards have barely moved in 5 years. CPU's were marginal for years.
Back when you went from 25 to 50mhz it actually halved the time. We are talking single or low double digit percent improvements these days.
Half the time you are shuffling windows and unless you are cranking some serious tasks the rest of the time is spent tapping some keys or something. A 10yr old computer was mostly waiting on us.
And if you are cranking some major tasks, like say processing 100,000 images, or editing a scifi feature film with 50 layers of effects or drafting a sky scraper or modeling gas movements etc etc and all you can afford is a laptop then it about time to accept your lot or get the right tools like oh a fully specced macpro preferably as the front end of some 500 CPU SGI box.
Oh sorry, don't have $20k - $500k to spend on getting high performance? Stuck spending $1.5k on a lappie for your knappie. Oh well, won't matter what the new models spec is you still going to be waiting overnight.
5400rpm -rolls eyes- and exactly how many laptops have 5 disk arrays of 15,000rpm drives to make a shred of difference.
Which is why Intel added Turbo Boost to their multi-core CPU's, as stated elsewhere. If the CPU thinks you are not running enough at the same time to warrant using all cores, it simply shuts them down and increases the frequency of the other ones, to get the best of both worlds: multi-core performance where possible, single-threaded performance otherwise. It's been in the i series for over a year.
Yeah, that's why I'll be curious to see what it will clock up to and what the real-world performance will be like (and just how hot the bottom of the laptop will get when it's rev'd up ).
Oh noo.. here i was thinking to finally upgrade my Aluminium macbook to a new macbook pro and now this.
I need CUDA for some of the software i use and that only runs on Nvidia cards. So both the intel graphics and faster radeon graphics wont be able to run it.
What a shame, would have been great to get some thunderbolt action!!
Graphics cards have barely moved in 5 years. CPU's were marginal for years.
Back when you went from 25 to 50mhz it actually halved the time. We are talking single or low double digit percent improvements these days.
Half the time you are shuffling windows and unless you are cranking some serious tasks the rest of the time is spent tapping some keys or something. A 10yr old computer was mostly waiting on us.
And if you are cranking some major tasks, like say processing 100,000 images, or editing a scifi feature film with 50 layers of effects or drafting a sky scraper or modeling gas movements etc etc and all you can afford is a laptop then it about time to accept your lot or get the right tools like oh a fully specced macpro preferably as the front end of some 500 CPU SGI box.
Oh sorry, don't have $20k - $500k to spend on getting high performance? Stuck spending $1.5k on a lappie for your knappie. Oh well, won't matter what the new models spec is you still going to be waiting overnight.
5400rpm -rolls eyes- and exactly how many laptops have 5 disk arrays of 15,000rpm drives to make a shred of difference.
Bunch of spec pansy noobs
Thank you very much. I couldnt agree more! If you want high performance, well then maybe a laptop isnt the right choice of tool.
Who cares that i can copy files and wait 5 seconds instead of 10 or that my CPU can convert a quicktime in 1 min instead of 2.
For most of the stuff you will always have some waiting time and its going to annoy people no matter how long it is.
In a laptop i am much more interested in ergonomics, reliability, etc..
Apple just gave the finger and said buy the top level 15" and 17" or MBA or screw off.
I was thinking that myself from the graphics point of view. Sure the CPUs are nice - getting a quad i7 in the entry 15" is pretty cool and still getting 7 hours of battery life but downgrading the GPUs in everything below the $2200 model is not cool at all.
If Apple had made it so that the 15" models could use technology similar to hybrid SLI then fair enough but it's pretty unlikely.
Also, the lower quad-core is lower than just the clock-speed as it cuts out the new AES instructions for hardware encryption, no VT-d support, no execute disable bit, no demand-based switching. The latter 3 are probably not that useful but hardware AES would have been useful.
Seems very much like if you want a good laptop, prepare to shell out $2200.
Bang goes the idea of using a Mini as a neat little gaming machine too as it'll drop to Sandy Bridge i5 IGP so a slight downgrade over last year. It was all going so well too, I wonder what made them decide to mess it all up. I suspect they collaborate too much with Intel now that their other partnerships are vulnerable.
Intel to Apple: pssst, if you drop NVidia from your lineup, we'll give you Light Peak before everyone else and good deals on i7 mobile chips.
Would it make any difference if I used 13 inch for coding in SDK for iphone apps?
NO, writing code for the iPhone is not that CPU intensive. I've seen people compile most of the "games" for iOS using a 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro.
Ultimately, it is disappointing that Apple dropped NVidia
Quote:
Typical response from the uneducated. Clock speed is no longer a clear indicator of performance and is only a small part of the package itself. The multi cores work together at the base 2.0Ghz speed but if you are running a non multi-threaded application it will 'power off' 3 cores and boost the clock speed of a single core, in this case probably to 2.8GHZ or 3.0Ghz
Normally you would be correct, however, only about 1% of applications are multi-threaded. Most are still single threaded, where a slower CPU would not perform as well as a faster one.
Also, disk I/O is still the slowest part of a computer, so having an HDD instead of a SSD also hurts performance.
So, Apple is actually jerking us around; unless you only buy/use multi-threaded applications; in which case, I guess you're fine.
As far as AMD vs NVidia: I have a pretty tight gaming rig (Windows of course) and it sucked until I got rid of the AMD 5770 and went with an NVidia GTX 470. So, I see these new MacBooks as woefully underpowered.
Is it faster than my new MacBook Air? That has yet to be seen, as I don't feel like buying a new MacBook Pro just to see how it compares video wise.
Quote:
Thunderbolt, facetimehd and sandybridge doesnt warrant me to upgrade yet.
Graphics cards have barely moved in 5 years. CPU's were marginal for years.
Back when you went from 25 to 50mhz it actually halved the time. We are talking single or low double digit percent improvements these days.
Half the time you are shuffling windows and unless you are cranking some serious tasks the rest of the time is spent tapping some keys or something. A 10yr old computer was mostly waiting on us.
And if you are cranking some major tasks, like say processing 100,000 images, or editing a scifi feature film with 50 layers of effects or drafting a sky scraper or modeling gas movements etc etc and all you can afford is a laptop then it about time to accept your lot or get the right tools like oh a fully specced macpro preferably as the front end of some 500 CPU SGI box.
Oh sorry, don't have $20k - $500k to spend on getting high performance? Stuck spending $1.5k on a lappie for your knappie. Oh well, won't matter what the new models spec is you still going to be waiting overnight.
5400rpm -rolls eyes- and exactly how many laptops have 5 disk arrays of 15,000rpm drives to make a shred of difference.
Bunch of spec pansy noobs
SSD > HDD (and it uses less power too)
I used to draft StarBucks and banks using a 1GHz UNIX machine with 512 MB RAM, so yes (I am agreeing with you), a computer from 2003 was ample enough for us
What is sad is SandyBridge is being used (it's bad, just read MaximumPC)
I think people want to use BootCamp to dual-boot Windows and have a nice gaming rig/productivity platform. I know I'm one of them. Mac by day, Windows gamer after 6
About GPUs: NVidia's latest offerings really wipe the floor with anything currently available right now. I have a GTX 470 and it's amazing. NVidia's new GPUs have really pushed the envelope forward on not only graphics but also parallel computing (CUDA). I think this is the next leap, and it only took what? 20 months?
I actually like the slower processor (means less heat on my lap) but a lot of people have a laptop as their only computer, so for them, processing is more important that for others. If they need more horsepower, then more power to them (literally). Especially if their using iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes simultaneously whilst powering an external monitor (catch my drift?)
Just because I can do everything I need with a MacBook Air doesn't mean it's the right computer for everyone. Just like I drive a truck because a car can't fit a piano, sofa, or a kitchen table in it, no matter how much the seats are folded down (or things are taken out).
Comments
Website just updated
Refreshing furiously here. Nothing. OK main website updated. Store not yet.
Base is an apt word. How long has the base model been at 256mb VRAM? 3 years now?
And for many professionals, this is perfectly adequate. If you're a road warrior doing Powerpoint presentations and Word documents and Excel, you really don't need much in the way of GPU performance. Myself, I'm a coder. I run NetBeans, various databases, shell scripts, XML editors, etc. All "pro" apps that need lots of RAM, CPU, and HD space, but not much in the way of GPU power. (Driving big monitors is nice, but my IDE doesn't need 600 fps.) Pro != gamer level GPU.
- Jasen.
Website just updated
13" battery life reduced to 7 hours.
15" graphics:
MD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory on 2.0GHz configuration; or AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on 2.2GHz configuration
13" battery life reduced to 7 hours.
15" graphics:
MD Radeon HD 6490M graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory on 2.0GHz configuration; or AMD Radeon HD 6750M graphics processor with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on 2.2GHz configuration
This is all over the f***** place.
Apple just gave the finger and said buy the top level 15" and 17" or MBA or screw off.
think ill wait for the next update until i buy a new mbp
thunderbolt, facetimehd and sandybridge doesnt warrant me to upgrade yet.
was hoping for the ssd flash boot drive and longer battery life.......
think ill wait for the next update until i buy a new mbp
thunderbolt, facetimehd and sandybridge doesnt warrant me to upgrade yet.
Agreed.
I don't care about macbooks, but they are an indicator of what we could see in the next mini. And I sure hope it has better than Radeon 6490 graphics. That's pretty weak.
Agreed.
What? Radeon HD 6490M? That's a step backward from the GT 330M in the current ones. Apple doesn't do steps backward in the models with Dedi GPUs. Sideways, yes. Forward, yes. But going back to something about on par with the 9600M GT? Doesn't make any sense.
do you know how GPU's work???? on Apple's site, it says GDDR5 RAM thats much faster than the 330m's DDR2, DDR3 or GDDR3 RAM.... thats why its being used- its faster... plus it cna be upgraded to a 6750... WHICH crushs a 330m...
Graphics cards have barely moved in 5 years. CPU's were marginal for years.
Back when you went from 25 to 50mhz it actually halved the time. We are talking single or low double digit percent improvements these days.
Half the time you are shuffling windows and unless you are cranking some serious tasks the rest of the time is spent tapping some keys or something. A 10yr old computer was mostly waiting on us.
And if you are cranking some major tasks, like say processing 100,000 images, or editing a scifi feature film with 50 layers of effects or drafting a sky scraper or modeling gas movements etc etc and all you can afford is a laptop then it about time to accept your lot or get the right tools like oh a fully specced macpro preferably as the front end of some 500 CPU SGI box.
Oh sorry, don't have $20k - $500k to spend on getting high performance? Stuck spending $1.5k on a lappie for your knappie. Oh well, won't matter what the new models spec is you still going to be waiting overnight.
5400rpm -rolls eyes- and exactly how many laptops have 5 disk arrays of 15,000rpm drives to make a shred of difference.
Bunch of spec pansy noobs
Which is why Intel added Turbo Boost to their multi-core CPU's, as stated elsewhere. If the CPU thinks you are not running enough at the same time to warrant using all cores, it simply shuts them down and increases the frequency of the other ones, to get the best of both worlds: multi-core performance where possible, single-threaded performance otherwise. It's been in the i series for over a year.
Yeah, that's why I'll be curious to see what it will clock up to and what the real-world performance will be like (and just how hot the bottom of the laptop will get when it's rev'd up
I need CUDA for some of the software i use and that only runs on Nvidia cards. So both the intel graphics and faster radeon graphics wont be able to run it.
What a shame, would have been great to get some thunderbolt action!!
What a bunch of bitching.
Graphics cards have barely moved in 5 years. CPU's were marginal for years.
Back when you went from 25 to 50mhz it actually halved the time. We are talking single or low double digit percent improvements these days.
Half the time you are shuffling windows and unless you are cranking some serious tasks the rest of the time is spent tapping some keys or something. A 10yr old computer was mostly waiting on us.
And if you are cranking some major tasks, like say processing 100,000 images, or editing a scifi feature film with 50 layers of effects or drafting a sky scraper or modeling gas movements etc etc and all you can afford is a laptop then it about time to accept your lot or get the right tools like oh a fully specced macpro preferably as the front end of some 500 CPU SGI box.
Oh sorry, don't have $20k - $500k to spend on getting high performance? Stuck spending $1.5k on a lappie for your knappie. Oh well, won't matter what the new models spec is you still going to be waiting overnight.
5400rpm -rolls eyes- and exactly how many laptops have 5 disk arrays of 15,000rpm drives to make a shred of difference.
Bunch of spec pansy noobs
Thank you very much. I couldnt agree more! If you want high performance, well then maybe a laptop isnt the right choice of tool.
Who cares that i can copy files and wait 5 seconds instead of 10 or that my CPU can convert a quicktime in 1 min instead of 2.
For most of the stuff you will always have some waiting time and its going to annoy people no matter how long it is.
In a laptop i am much more interested in ergonomics, reliability, etc..
Bunch of spec pansy noobs
Epic.
This is all over the f***** place.
Apple just gave the finger and said buy the top level 15" and 17" or MBA or screw off.
I was thinking that myself from the graphics point of view. Sure the CPUs are nice - getting a quad i7 in the entry 15" is pretty cool and still getting 7 hours of battery life but downgrading the GPUs in everything below the $2200 model is not cool at all.
If Apple had made it so that the 15" models could use technology similar to hybrid SLI then fair enough but it's pretty unlikely.
Also, the lower quad-core is lower than just the clock-speed as it cuts out the new AES instructions for hardware encryption, no VT-d support, no execute disable bit, no demand-based switching. The latter 3 are probably not that useful but hardware AES would have been useful.
Seems very much like if you want a good laptop, prepare to shell out $2200.
Bang goes the idea of using a Mini as a neat little gaming machine too as it'll drop to Sandy Bridge i5 IGP so a slight downgrade over last year. It was all going so well too, I wonder what made them decide to mess it all up. I suspect they collaborate too much with Intel now that their other partnerships are vulnerable.
Intel to Apple: pssst, if you drop NVidia from your lineup, we'll give you Light Peak before everyone else and good deals on i7 mobile chips.
Would it make any difference if I used 13 inch for coding in SDK for iphone apps?
NO, writing code for the iPhone is not that CPU intensive. I've seen people compile most of the "games" for iOS using a 2.0 GHz MacBook Pro.
Ultimately, it is disappointing that Apple dropped NVidia
Typical response from the uneducated. Clock speed is no longer a clear indicator of performance and is only a small part of the package itself. The multi cores work together at the base 2.0Ghz speed but if you are running a non multi-threaded application it will 'power off' 3 cores and boost the clock speed of a single core, in this case probably to 2.8GHZ or 3.0Ghz
Normally you would be correct, however, only about 1% of applications are multi-threaded. Most are still single threaded, where a slower CPU would not perform as well as a faster one.
Also, disk I/O is still the slowest part of a computer, so having an HDD instead of a SSD also hurts performance.
So, Apple is actually jerking us around; unless you only buy/use multi-threaded applications; in which case, I guess you're fine.
As far as AMD vs NVidia: I have a pretty tight gaming rig (Windows of course) and it sucked until I got rid of the AMD 5770 and went with an NVidia GTX 470. So, I see these new MacBooks as woefully underpowered.
Is it faster than my new MacBook Air? That has yet to be seen, as I don't feel like buying a new MacBook Pro just to see how it compares video wise.
Thunderbolt, facetimehd and sandybridge doesnt warrant me to upgrade yet.
sandybridge = stay away.
NewEgg pulled all the SandyBridge Mobo's ever since Intel announced that they have issues with their CPU (http://pcper.com/comments.php?nid=9695)
Nice how Apple didn't seem to get that memo
What a bunch of bitching.
Graphics cards have barely moved in 5 years. CPU's were marginal for years.
Back when you went from 25 to 50mhz it actually halved the time. We are talking single or low double digit percent improvements these days.
Half the time you are shuffling windows and unless you are cranking some serious tasks the rest of the time is spent tapping some keys or something. A 10yr old computer was mostly waiting on us.
And if you are cranking some major tasks, like say processing 100,000 images, or editing a scifi feature film with 50 layers of effects or drafting a sky scraper or modeling gas movements etc etc and all you can afford is a laptop then it about time to accept your lot or get the right tools like oh a fully specced macpro preferably as the front end of some 500 CPU SGI box.
Oh sorry, don't have $20k - $500k to spend on getting high performance? Stuck spending $1.5k on a lappie for your knappie. Oh well, won't matter what the new models spec is you still going to be waiting overnight.
5400rpm -rolls eyes- and exactly how many laptops have 5 disk arrays of 15,000rpm drives to make a shred of difference.
Bunch of spec pansy noobs
- SSD > HDD (and it uses less power too)
- I used to draft StarBucks and banks using a 1GHz UNIX machine with 512 MB RAM, so yes (I am agreeing with you), a computer from 2003 was ample enough for us
- What is sad is SandyBridge is being used (it's bad, just read MaximumPC)
- I think people want to use BootCamp to dual-boot Windows and have a nice gaming rig/productivity platform. I know I'm one of them. Mac by day, Windows gamer after 6
- About GPUs: NVidia's latest offerings really wipe the floor with anything currently available right now. I have a GTX 470 and it's amazing. NVidia's new GPUs have really pushed the envelope forward on not only graphics but also parallel computing (CUDA). I think this is the next leap, and it only took what? 20 months?
I actually like the slower processor (means less heat on my lap) but a lot of people have a laptop as their only computer, so for them, processing is more important that for others. If they need more horsepower, then more power to them (literally). Especially if their using iMovie, iPhoto, and iTunes simultaneously whilst powering an external monitor (catch my drift?)Just because I can do everything I need with a MacBook Air doesn't mean it's the right computer for everyone. Just like I drive a truck because a car can't fit a piano, sofa, or a kitchen table in it, no matter how much the seats are folded down (or things are taken out).