Rumor: Apple to ship Haswell-powered Retina MacBook Pros in October
New Retina MacBook Pros with Intel's new Haswell processors could arrive even later than expected, in October, if the latest rumor is to be believed.
The details were published this week by China Times, and highlighted by Macotakara on Friday. According to the report, new MacBook Pros equipped with Retina displays won't ship until October, well after the June debut of Haswell-powered MacBook Airs.
That rumored date is later than well-connected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities expects the new MacBook Pros to be introduced. He said in a note provided to AppleInsider this week that he expects MacBook Pros with Haswell to debut in mid-September.
Apple is said to have experienced continued yield problems with the high-resolution Retina display in its notebooks. That's led to apparent internal delays, despite the fact that benchmarks for both the 13-inch and 15-inch models have appeared online.
Prices for high-resolution LCD panels, as well as solid-state drives, have dropped in recent months. But the price of DRAM is also rising, which is why sources believe the new MacBook Pros will be sold at the same price point as the current models.
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro, in particular, is said to be even thinner than the current Retina display model. Kuo also expects the portable Macs to include 1080p "full HD" FaceTime cameras.
The details were published this week by China Times, and highlighted by Macotakara on Friday. According to the report, new MacBook Pros equipped with Retina displays won't ship until October, well after the June debut of Haswell-powered MacBook Airs.
That rumored date is later than well-connected analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities expects the new MacBook Pros to be introduced. He said in a note provided to AppleInsider this week that he expects MacBook Pros with Haswell to debut in mid-September.
Apple is said to have experienced continued yield problems with the high-resolution Retina display in its notebooks. That's led to apparent internal delays, despite the fact that benchmarks for both the 13-inch and 15-inch models have appeared online.
Prices for high-resolution LCD panels, as well as solid-state drives, have dropped in recent months. But the price of DRAM is also rising, which is why sources believe the new MacBook Pros will be sold at the same price point as the current models.
The new 13-inch MacBook Pro, in particular, is said to be even thinner than the current Retina display model. Kuo also expects the portable Macs to include 1080p "full HD" FaceTime cameras.
Comments
Hope they come with 32GB of Ram (though this is unlikely to happen if the price of RAM is rising); at the rate the average OS X first-party app eats memory (especially Safari), even that won't last long. For reference: the Notes app eats up 100 times more RAM in 2013 than the entire Microsoft Office suite did in 1994, despite doing much less...
I'm looking forward to replacing my late-2011 15" high-end MacBook Pro with a high-end version of whatever 15" model comes next; too bad that they won't put a Retina display on the classic models, since those are the only laptops worth the Pro monicker.
So the "expected" date was "mid-September" and the new rumored date is October and that's considered "even later than expected?" Half a month seems well within any reasonable margin for error on an expected product refresh.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Epsico
Hope they come with 32GB of Ram (though this is unlikely to happen if the price of RAM is rising); at the rate the average OS X first-party app eats memory (especially Safari), even that won't last long. For reference: the Notes app eats up 100 times more RAM in 2013 than the entire Microsoft Office suite did in 1994, despite doing much less...
I suspect you don't understand what you see in Activity Monitor. My Mac has been on for a few weeks, and I run Safari all the time with lots of tabs. Currently I have four tabs open and Safari is using 292MB of RAM. I just launched Notes and it's using 35MB.
how does your comment enlighten those of us who "don't understand what you see in Activity Monitor"? my version eats up 17.5MB on launch. then i create a bunch more and it eats up 40.5MB. BFD. both your comment and mine add zero to the conversation. I suspect even you don't understand what you see in Activity Monitor.
Uggggggh!
Apple. You're killing me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chabig
I suspect you don't understand what you see in Activity Monitor. My Mac has been on for a few weeks, and I run Safari all the time with lots of tabs. Currently I have four tabs open and Safari is using 292MB of RAM. I just launched Notes and it's using 35MB.
The original poster knows perfectly how to read Activity Monitor. My PC from 1996 has 32MB of RAM in it, which ran Office 95 comfortably. I’m looking at my Word 2011 process on my Activity Monitor, and it shows 40MB. 40MB for a full blown word processor compared to 35MB for a plain text editor is pretty worrying.
Please don't dismiss people who have different experience than you. The fact that you don't see increasing memory usage doesn't mean they're wrong.
I've seen Safari gobbling up extra memory over time for years. As you use it, it continues to grow in usage until the machine starts to slow down. Quitting Safari and relaunching solves the problem (and the fact that it reopens the tabs you were working on is a big help).
I don't understand it - it's been constant at least since I got my current MBP (late 2006 model). Since not everyone experiences it, it may be model-specific. Or maybe it's because of the relatively low RAM in my machine (which is maxed out at 3 GB).
Quote:
Originally Posted by chabig
I suspect you don't understand what you see in Activity Monitor. My Mac has been on for a few weeks, and I run Safari all the time with lots of tabs. Currently I have four tabs open and Safari is using 292MB of RAM. I just launched Notes and it's using 35MB.
When you launch them, they don't take a lot of RAM, yes. Safari is eating 1093MB of RAM with two processes here (613MB for Safari and 480MB for WebProcess); it hasn't been running for long. Notes is eating 231MB.
The field you're reading is RSIZE, which only accounts for the resident footprint, meaning backing store (swap) and deferred allocations are not account for; if you want to have a real perspective of memory usage, you have to look at the amount of virtual memory privately allocated by each process (private allocation exclude memory from shared libraries, which are always present in the Darwin runtime environment regardless of application requirements), which is given by VPRVT.
PS: I don't use Activity Monitor; I use top and vmmap.
EDIT: It must be mentioned that even VPRVT isn't perfectly accurate, because it accounts for deferred allocations in the stack. Since each thread has an 8MB deferred-allocated stack, VPRVT may be off by as much memory per thread in a single process, meaning that for a Safari process running 18 threads (which is the case here) and a WebProcess running 9 threads (also the case here), VPRVT can theoretically be off by as much as 216MB (though in practice the error is never this high since I'm assumes a 0% stack usage). This also begs the question as to why Safari isn;t using Grand Central Dispatch yet.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chabig
I suspect you don't understand what you see in Activity Monitor. My Mac has been on for a few weeks, and I run Safari all the time with lots of tabs. Currently I have four tabs open and Safari is using 292MB of RAM. I just launched Notes and it's using 35MB.
The poster is actually correct, but it's not limited to first party apps, and not necessarily an Apple issue. ALL Software in general is constantly increasing in size and demanding more and more resources. Not sure about the "100 times more" ratio of the Notes app, but for example, Office 95 requirements were 8-16 MB of memory, and 28MB - 89MB of HD space. Office 2010 Standard (for comparison) requires 3GB of HD space and 512MB of ram recommended, not to mention they recommend a 1Ghz processor to run all its features. It's just the normal evolution of software.
I just hope somehow they allow the user to upgrade the memory like the cMBP.
Quote:
Originally Posted by zoffdino
The original poster knows perfectly how to read Activity Monitor. My PC from 1996 has 32MB of RAM in it, which ran Office 95 comfortably. I’m looking at my Word 2011 process on my Activity Monitor, and it shows 40MB. 40MB for a full blown word processor compared to 35MB for a plain text editor is pretty worrying.
Much more is necessary and expected of modern software. Modern apps have multiple languages installed; multiple sets of high resolution graphics for every icon, button etc.; Notes was mentioned: it and many other apps are capable of iCloud Sync—a feature I absolutely love for storing part numbers (car, boat, bike—oil filter, air filter, tire sizes, spark plugs and gap etc.) for shopping lists and many other times for which I need quick reference. The way machines handle and prioritize memory usage, processing load, background apps, virtual memory etc. has also changed radically since the 90s, as have security requirements. System architecture and memory allocation has changed as we’ve moved from 16 to 32 to 64 bit processes.
In short: there are plethora of reasons modern software uses more memory than Mid-90s software—most are perfectly legitimate and no cause for worry. I say most because that damned ‘Clippy’ was certainly the illegitimate child of Steve Balmer and that infernal dog helper…
So if the screen is the same, there should be no reason for it causing a delay. It's not like the current Pro Retinas are flying off the shelves, causing a great backlog in supplying LCDs to the new models.
I know the MacBook Pro is supposed to be using a different class of Haswell chips, not the same "ultrabook" ones in the MacBook Air. Are other OEMs using these other class chips destined for the Pro yet? If not, the delay may be everyone (including Apple) waiting for Intel to ship the processors in volume. And it may also be delayed for Mavericks.
The memory is being stored due to the shared frameworks being pre-loaded. More importantly, those Core Data Frameworks are shared across the system of OS X. Please just stop while you're all behind in understanding shared resources.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Epsico
When you launch them, they don't take a lot of RAM, yes. Safari is eating 1093MB of RAM with two processes here (613MB for Safari and 480MB for WebProcess); it hasn't been running for long. Notes is eating 231MB.
The field you're reading is RSIZE, which only accounts for the resident footprint, meaning backing store (swap) and deferred allocations are not account for; if you want to have a real perspective of memory usage, you have to look at the amount of virtual memory privately allocated by each process (private allocation exclude memory from shared libraries, which are always present in the Darwin runtime environment regardless of application requirements), which is given by VPRVT.
PS: I don't use Activity Monitor; I use top and vmmap.
EDIT: It must be mentioned that even VPRVT isn't perfectly accurate, because it accounts for deferred allocations in the stack. Since each thread has an 8MB deferred-allocated stack, VPRVT may be off by as much memory per thread in a single process, meaning that for a Safari process running 18 threads (which is the case here) and a WebProcess running 9 threads (also the case here), VPRVT can theoretically be off by as much as 216MB (though in practice the error is never this high since I'm assumes a 0% stack usage). This also begs the question as to why Safari isn;t using Grand Central Dispatch yet.
Because WebKit 2 isn't fully implemented yet is the main reason Safari isn't joinly leveraging GCD and OpenCL correctly across the GPGPU and CPU. OS X 10.9 clearly points to a massive improvement on both these fronts.
> Modern apps have multiple languages installed
That don't need to be loaded all at once.
> multiple sets of high resolution graphics for every icon
Loaded to VRAM, not main memory.
> Notes was mentioned: it and many other apps are capable of iCloud Sync
The Usenet already did that -- in the early 80s, on PDP-11s, over 2.4kbps modems (i.e.: it's trivial).
> The way machines handle and prioritize memory usage, processing load, background apps, virtual memory etc. has also changed radically since the 90s, as have security requirements. System architecture and memory allocation has changed as we’ve moved from 16 to 32 to 64 bit processes.
Security requirements have not changed that much for the applications themselves, in fact the change was quite seamless for them, it was mostly achieved by implemented canaries in compilers to prevent buffer overflows, randomizing memory allocations in the runtime environments, disabling execution in the stack (a hardware feature), static analysis, and dynamic analysis through instrumentation; memory management has received mostly performance-enhancing optimizations, some of which (like deferred allocations and copy on write) actually drastically reduce memory usage.
> In short: there are plethora of reasons modern software uses more memory than Mid-90s software—most are perfectly legitimate and no cause for worry. I say most because that damned ‘Clippy’ was certainly the illegitimate child of Steve Balmer and that infernal dog helper…
One of the main reasons why this is happening is because of generic frameworks targeting languages that are not designed to support generic programming. Objective-C, for example, makes the most mundane of tasks, like accessing an array element, extremely complex, but this isn't even the main culprit: the main culprit are lots of layers of bloated and poorly designed frameworks that try to abstract semantics when they should only be abstracting implementations, software engineers who don't really understand what's going on under the hood, and a general "don't reinvent the wheel" mentality that favors re-using bad code (thus perpetuating the mediocrity) over writing decent software.
If you want to see a field where this does not happening, check out graphics computing, where the hardware is still light years away from having a decent performance, and thus real software engineering still happens.
This state of affairs is saddening, because we have vastly superior hardware than we did 20 years ago but aren't doing a lot more than we did back them, outside the realm of the Internet, which is irrelevant in this context.
If you keep track of what is happening development wise, Apple is moving to ARC (Automatice Reference Counting) instead of garbage collection. The rumor is this has vastly improved the behavior of XCode.
It will be interesting to see how the bundled Apps work in Mavericks. I would not expect every app to transition to ARC but a few might. However even ARC will not solve all of the memory usage issues. Some features are simply destined to use lots of RAM until the programmers come up with better solutions.
Actually I think they are taking the extra time they have here to shore up Mavericks. We are going through a long debug cycle and it already looks pretty good to many users. But yeah, nothing will ship from Apple until Intel releases the chips, schedules can change but that won't be until sometime after the September launch.
1) 32 MB of RAM (at least as a BTO option!!)
2) Better GPU.
the current GPU is good. but it's been a year...
and I am one of those who NEED all the RAM I can get.
The new Mac Pro will help out quite a bit in these two areas at the office, but not on the road (and no, though it is "portable," I am NOT taking it out of the office.)
Maybe you should have kept your PowerBook 520 with its meager 4MB of RAM since you obviously are so in love with Microsoft Office from 1994.
Haswell is nice, but Apple really needs to get the Retina screen cost down so that a low-end Retina 13" can send the non-Retinas packing.
Shipping two sets of the same notebook is problematic. It's muddying the choices for MacBook buyers.