jdiamond

FWIW, I found the best performance using Azul's Java 17 ARM64 JDK with ManyMC.  It's truly amazing - peak is about 100x faster in everything - imagine selecting a Minecraft world and being able to start playing in less than 4 seconds! . Minecraft and Java really seems to have the single greatest speedup going native of all applications.  For me, #2 was Blender, which was about 12x faster.

Your mileage obviously may vary.  I have a 16" Macbook Pro with the 10 CPUs and 32 GPU cores.  Running straight x86 Java Minecraft through Rosetta is honestly barely playable - sometimes you can get 20 fps, but you get frequent slowdowns.  It's a lot like trying to play Minecraft on my 2015 MBP.  Then I used MultiMC with (and this is important) an ARM version of Java that is NOT the one that comes bundled with MacOS.  I was shocked to immediately get 500-700 frames per second, just like YouTubers got!  But I found this was a peak case - it can drop as low as 60FPS.  But mind you, this is at high resolution and a render/simulation distance of the full 32 chunks.  (It you use the java that's bundled with Macs, you only get about 45 fps.)

I've been doing a lot of comparisons with M1 native versions vs Intel, and Minecraft hit the #1 spot, often running a solid 100x faster in the best case, and about 5x faster in the worse case.  I will be overjoyed if the new Minecraft Java for M1 will be this good.  All they ever had to do was switch out which JVM they bundled Minecraft with, but I'm not surprised they kept this really low key - they don't want people noticing how much faster Java with M1 is versus Bedrock on Wintel.
 

So glad you wrote this article - glad to find out about this hub.  Certainly looks less "Hideous" to me than the other hubs out there.  You missed two important features of the hub, though:

1) You can hook a hard drive up to the USB-A port and charge at the same time.  There is no penalty - it reads and writes files at the same speed, whether on the USB-C port or the USB-A port, both at 5 gigabits (USB 3.0 speeds).  And USB-C to USB-A cables are ubiquitous.

2) It not only supports HDMI, but the USB-C port also supports Displayport 1.2 with HDCP!  (But only up to Full-HD resolution.) . But now you really can't charge at the same time.

Buy a 16" Macbook Pro with an 8TB hard drive.  Tear the screen off with your bare hands.  Done.

Intel is partly fabless.  Their high end chips are fabricated at TSMC, and their lower end chips are fabbed using their classic technology.  Intel's hope was that by 2025 to be able to make their own chips again.  We'll see how that timeline plays out.

tomahawk said:

McJobs said:

I'm so sick of the Tim Cook era, where every product redesign comes with a substantial price increase over previous model. When Steve was there, products got better at the same price points (e.g. MBP--->unibody MBP), or even were less expensive at the same time (e.g. polycarbonate iMac--->aluminum iMac).

Why wouldn't a new device, with a larger screen, and likely a true "Pro" version of the Pro, cost more? It's going to have a more expensive screen, likely larger battery and potentially more powerful CPU/GPU combos.  It should cost more...  Even if it has the same config as the "better" 15" (8-core, 16GB and 512GB SSD) it would only be ~$200 more than the 15".

And Jobs raised prices too.  Look at the Mac mini. Started at $499, raised to $599 in 2006, and raised again to $699 in 2010.

Because technology gets better and therefore cheaper over time. I paid $3,000 for a top of the line Macbook Pro from 2007 through 2015, and it kept getting better and better.  Now, the minimum Macbook Pro that matches those old specs and meets my needs cost over $4,000, but it actually performs worse than before due to thermal issues and is less useful due to connectivity options.

That being said, if they make an enjoyable keyboard again, I'm willing to suck it up and pay a lot more.  One problem at a time.  Don't discount inflation - what did cars and houses cost back in 2007?

Even the new Mac Pro and Pro Display are really cool - they just are priced out of reach of home users, so they're more like what you'd put on a poster on your wall.

The worst part of Apple's focus on Metal is it means the Mac loses a lot of cross platform games because it doesn't support a cross platform graphics API and they can't afford to write an entirely different engine just for the Mac. Maybe someone can write an OpenGL compatibility library in Metal? I get that Vulkan is supposed to replace OpenGL, but it's a mess right now - it's the Itanium of standards.

Apple made almost $90 billion last quarter alone!

Personally, I love the ATH-M50x headphones, and have a pair myself, but they aren't wireless, so I'm not sure why they're included in this article.

I also did many tests on my awesome car stereo and iPhone of wired vs bluetooth, and the bluetooth quality was horrible!  It was like throwing away the entire stereo and replacing it by a small boom box.  So I did some Googling and found out that there are many reasons you won't even get the 350 kbit/sec max of bluetooth 4.  First, the receiver and sender must support identical codecs.  And second, they must negotiate a minimum compatible transfer rate.  Some receivers, even if they could support the full rate, may just default to the 50 kbit/sec transfer rate.  And finally, there is the quality of the codec itself, which can be extremely lossy.

I really think Woz said it best - don't FORCE people into wireless until a standard exists that has quality comparable to wired.  That's why people throwing around the floppy disk analogy are wrong - when Steve ditched the floppy disk, there were new storage mediums that had higher capacity and were faster than flash.  What bluetooth needs is a STANDARD, LOSSLESS codec that can be supported across the board.