'M1X' MacBook Pro set to arrive in 'several weeks'
Apple's "California Streaming" event has a chance of showing off new MacBook Pro models sporting the M1X chip, with a report claiming orders could open up within "several weeks" of the event.
After weeks of reports about the expected 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro experiencing delays in production that were then seemingly rectified, it is claimed a launch of the new models is happening soon.
In Sunday's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman says the M1X MacBook Pro models should "hit shelves in the next several weeks." While it is likely that Apple will use the special event to launch the updated models, Gurman doesn't outright say they will appear during the presentation, but that they are planned for a fall release.
As for the specifications of the new models, Gurman says they will use "high-end M1 chips," will have "MagSafe magnetic charging," and won't have a Touch Bar. As previously rumored, they will include mini LED-backlit displays, allowing for high contrast levels and improved color representation.
Aside from the MacBook Pros, Apple is also anticipated to launch a slate of products this fall, including the iPhone 13, Apple Watch Series 7, AirPods 3, and new iPads.
Read on AppleInsider
After weeks of reports about the expected 14-inch MacBook Pro and 16-inch MacBook Pro experiencing delays in production that were then seemingly rectified, it is claimed a launch of the new models is happening soon.
In Sunday's "Power On" newsletter for Bloomberg, Mark Gurman says the M1X MacBook Pro models should "hit shelves in the next several weeks." While it is likely that Apple will use the special event to launch the updated models, Gurman doesn't outright say they will appear during the presentation, but that they are planned for a fall release.
As for the specifications of the new models, Gurman says they will use "high-end M1 chips," will have "MagSafe magnetic charging," and won't have a Touch Bar. As previously rumored, they will include mini LED-backlit displays, allowing for high contrast levels and improved color representation.
Aside from the MacBook Pros, Apple is also anticipated to launch a slate of products this fall, including the iPhone 13, Apple Watch Series 7, AirPods 3, and new iPads.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
seems weird that Apple would take 1 year to ship new MacBook Pro with just some new version of the M1, when it already has new CPU cores ready to use...
Just imagine that the new A15 iPhone SoC will almost certainly have better single core performance than the M1 in many tests.
Although it's always smart to avoid purchasing products that are about to be updated, I've heard pundits back in January 2021 advising purchasers to wait until the M1X comes out. Meanwhile I've been using this machine daily for nearly a year, and loving it.
Meanwhile, M1x is already built on the A14 architecture and apparently has been ready to ship since June.
M2 should be built on the new A15 technology, and should replace M1 - and Apple may rejigger the core counts and configurations. We should hear more about improvements to the A15's architecture on Tuesday.
There is nothing that stops Apple from having a new architecture ready for both kinds of SoC - they basically did that last year, one month between launches is nothing. It’s not like Apple doesn’t have the resources to develop more than one SoC at the same time, they did it a few times with the X series SoC.
And there is no proof that they actually made a M1X, or thought about using a M1X, it could have been an M2X all along.
The weird part is launching a new Mac CPU that is already outdated by a new iPhone SoC, where some software will have better performance on an iPhone than on a brand new high end MacBook Pro.
The Moment the revised edition was made with a separate physical ESC key, everything was fine.
The only instance where the touch bar wasn’t an asset but a drawback was during a Boot Camp Windows recovery boot, when one was supposed to press an Fn key before the touch bar drivers to enable it acting as function keys was loaded, but that was easily fixed by temporarily attaching an external USB keyboard.
If Apple does indeed do away with the touch bar entirely, and not just some entry level models, it’s a pity.
Though it’ll probably never happen, my ideal updated setup would be a Mac Mini Pro for production/animation/editing with an iPad Pro able to run the entire Adobe Cloud Suite, with truly separate external monitor support, to replace my aging MacBook Pro.
it could happen. 🐖🦋
There is nothing that stops Apple from launching more than one SoC at the same time - the past demonstrates such capability. That capability is a fact, while the existence of a M1X, M2 or M2X are not facts, are assumptions.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/06/iphone-13-a15-chip-performance-continues-dominance-over-android-rivals
It showed around 15% gains vs A14, which is to be expected from the 5nm+ process.
M1 is faster than A14:
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=Apple+M1
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/search?q=a14
The equivalent M-series chip this year should be around 15% faster than M1 just like A15 vs A14.
They could call it M2/M2x, they are marketing terms. It will likely ship October/November, which is a year since the M1 Air. They can refresh the Air with a 3TFLOP M2 chip (4/4-core CPU, 8-core GPU) and have a 6TFLOP M2x with 2x the CPU and GPU (8/4-core or 10/2-core CPU, 16-core GPU).
There was a rumor about a 32-core GPU but they could just increase the clock speeds. M1 GPU is clocked at 1.28GHz, they could boost that to 1.6GHz (or higher) for an extra 25% performance boost to get a 7.5TFLOP 16-core GPU. It would need to be 32-core to come close to an Nvidia 3070 mobile but a 16-core like that would perform similar to a 3060. A 24-core GPU would be somewhere in between.
A 27"+ iMac would be better with an M2x Duo option but a 7.5TFLOP GPU would be ok on the entry model, the current entry level is a 4TFLOP 5300 and goes up to a 7.6TFLOP 5700 XT. This way they could get away with 32GB RAM per chip and have 64GB on the higher iMac duo option.
Every component adds to the cost of the laptop. When they introduced the touch bar, the prices went up around $300. They must have brought the costs down a bit since then as the 13" MBP with touchbar starts at $1299 now but the M1 Air and M1 13" MBP have the same spec except for the 8-core vs 7-core GPU, the Air is $999 and the MBP is $1299. Matching the chips, it's $1499 vs $1249 so the touch bar plus touch id has to be adding somewhere in the region of $250-300 to the retail price, which is far more cost than the functionality it offers.
I've used laptops with and without the bar for a couple of years and the bar has only made things worse. I have one without a physical escape key and sometimes the bar removes the escape button and restarting the touch bar process shows it again.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/379627/esc-button-from-touchbar-has-disappeared
In theory the shortcuts should be more efficient for some things like emoji or menu items but they just haven't been for me, the buttons are pretty small, hard to read and require looking down at the bar. Touch id is nice but I would be happy to see standard buttons for audio, exposé and brightness again, especially if it brings the prices down by $100-200. It would be great to see the 16" start at $1999 like the pre-touchbar 15" models instead of $2399 because then that extra can go into getting 32GB RAM, which is far more useful for creative work.
A 15-20% performance improvement for the A15 would make it around 9% better than the M1, while the new TSMC process states only 5% performance increase at isopower.
They are all physically different chips that are manufactured independently of each other. They may share the same CPU and GPU core microarchitectures, or they may have different microarchitectures between them, but all of them are designed for performance commensurate for the box they are going in. The larger the chip, and especially for Apple as this is new territory for them, the longer it takes to design and get it shipping, so that's why everyone thinks the transition to Apple Silicon will take longer for the higher performance machines. Not a surprise that the M1X seems to be taking so long. I do think the pandemic has added about 6 months to their schedule as well.
So, an upcoming A15 or M2 with 1.15x single core performance over a M1X is not that meaningful when the M1X has 2x the performance cores. Same story on the GPU performance. People buy the more expensive machines because they have more performance, and the M1X will have above 80% to 100% more CPU and GPU performance than the M1 or M2 depending on how they set the clocks.
I was quite explicit that I was talking about single core centred tasks. Those are not affected by the number of cores, and if the A15 adopts the new ARM v9 instruction set, things might get weirder, compared with an M1 based SoC!
The point of mentioning this is about public perception, in other words how this detail affects marketing, the risk of some backlash.
I was just watching an Intel ad on YouTube where some supposed creative was saying he gamed and created and needed a lot of graphics power which he couldn't get on a Mac <snicker>.
A lot of those ads just won't work any more, and I expect to see pretty amazing graphics performance - without the Wintel copying graphic workload overhead - as well as some impressive battery life.
If the application that you are using relies in single core performance (stated already as precondition), then the SoC will only be using 1 core at maximum performance, in other words, it will produce much less heat and it won’t create a thermal problem. Thermal throttling is mainly a multicore management problem.
Secondly, if you look at most single core benchmarks scores you hardly see any effect from throttling, there is very little variation in database values.
Apple will make improvements on the GPU side AND the Neural Engine. I would expect the M1X (or whatever Apple ends up calling it) will have massive improvements on the latter. They are introducing more machine learning algorithms in macOS Monterey and my guess is that Apple will accelerate moving certain tasks to the ML cores as the transition to Apple Silicon continues.
These are performance improvements that aren't easily quantifiable in today's CPU benchmark suites. Looking at Apple's SoCs through the lens of common benchmarks will soon be obsolete unless those benchmark authors can capture ML performance in a way that is relevant to real world usage.