wizard69

melgross said:

Rayz2016 said:

bsimpsen said:

At 8-11% faster for the CPU, I think this would be the smallest generational improvement in the A-family since its introduction. Eventually Apple will run up against the wall or simply not need much additional horsepower, but I was expecting bigger gains, particularly in light of the rumored ditching of x86 in the next couple years.

You’re assuming that Apple will put the fastest chip they can make in the phone? If it has more memory and a bigger screen then they might step it down to preserve battery life. The same wouldn’t apply to a processor fitted inside an iPad or a laptop since they have much larger batteries. 

Yes, we do. Unless Apple has totally changed what they’re doing, we should be expecting at least a 25% boost for the individual core, and at least a 40% boost for the GPU cores. Of course, we don’t know what else Apple may have done for specialized purposes, but this would be disappointing.

I would t call these numbers disappointing until we know more, even then these are bigger gains than Intel is seeing from year to year.  

Things to consider:  


1.  The cores could very well be 3 + 3 that is geekbench may be confused as to the number of high performance cores. 

2.   The GPU resilts are fairly impressive and are supportted with sound growth in compute.   This is a very good thing in my mind because GPU performance is critical for midern apps.  

3.   In all likelyhood a prototype would be running heavily instrumented code slowing the benchmarks down.  

4.   There is good reason for Apple to spend engineering time on other sections of the SoC.   They could have easily place priority on the GPU, AI/ML hardware, and other sections that have or are starting to see increased importance.   Im as guilty as the next guy when it comes to looking at CPU performance first but the reality is that the CPU is only part of the game in modern hardware.   Iphone couldnt even exist without the capabilities of the GPU and that applies to many apps.  

5.   As others have suggested Apple may have heard from the sheep and decided that battery life is important.    This could be a huge win for some users as the process shrink is rumored to do very well when it comes to power.  

Seriously im going to wait for real figures.  Sadly if Apple doesnt lower proces significantky i wont be seeing an iPhone in my future.  

Mike Wuerthele said:

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

It is built in obsolescence. Windows will run on 15 year old computers while Mac OS will refuse to run on any Mac built more than six years ago. There is really no technical reason why Mac OS could not run on a 2010 Intel CPU. These are decisions made at the top of the company. Apple does what is best for Apple and not for its customers. The reason developers are not up in arms about Apple dropping OpenGL and OpenCL is that it really happened years ago when Apple stopped updating it. Mac OS is now about five years out of date. When you look at the extremely poor library of AAA games available on the Mac, know that it is Apple's poor hardware features and lack of cross platform software support that is the major reason. Of course people don't buy Macs to play games. Pretty soon people won't buy Macs at all.

I've been hearing this for 15 years, and yet, here we are.

When does "pretty soon" arrive?

Actually for me "pretty soon" arrived this year in January.   Not so much because of Metal but rather due to Apples apathy with respect to the Mac lineup.  That is the hardware is either so outdated or of such low quality that my money for a new laptop went someplace else.    I really hated to do that because there is a lot to like about Mac OS.  The problem is i can program in Python on just about any machine these days and my other uses only occasionally leverage the full potential of the systems. Notably this is delivered on a laptop with modern hardware (better CPU, far better GPU, ports that keep my legacy hardware usable, a great screen &etc), all on a laptop that is $700 less that Apples solutions.  

So yeah "pretty soon" is already here.   Yeah Windows sucks, there is no debate there but Linux can be a good alternative.   All i can say is that Apple must start updating its hardware because software is only part of the machine.  It has been more than a decade since Apples machines have been such a pathetic value.   I really cant tolerate price increases on such poor machines either.    So yeah there are problems in Mac land.  

mjtomlin said:

tylersdad said:

This still makes no sense at all. There is no reason why Apple can't support their native SDK (Metal) and OpenGL. Microsoft has been doing this for decades with DirectX.

The majority of game developers won't bother with creating Metal versions of their rendering engines. There won't be enough customers to justify it.

Two things...

First, Apple hasn't updated OpenGL for a while now. Probably when they starting pushing Metal. So the OpenGL implementation included with iOS and macOS are fairly old, I think it's at 2.1, while the latest is 4.6. So there really is only a limited amount of "cross platform" compatibility for developers.

Second, the entire industry is moving away from OpenGL. There is now a Khronos project, Vulkan, that is meant to replace OpenGL and OpenGL ES. And there is a version that "runs" on top of Apple's Metal called MoltenVk, so if developers must have cross platform compatibility, then they can move to it, instead of Metal.

It is my understanding that Vulkan and Metal are very similar, possibly developed from the same code base.    Im not a 3D graphics programmer so i can't say from experience from using the 2 APIs.  If true there is very little in the way of shimming required.  

As for OpenGL the problem there is that CAD and engineering software businesses depend upon it and had enough control over the development process to prevent OpenGL modernization.   The gaming industry on the other hand rushed to leave OpenGL behind.    This is almost completely due to performance issues with OpenGL, basically game developers want as much performance as they can get.  

On the otherhand developers of engineering and visulization software are more concerned about stability, correctness and other issues.   I suspect that most of these developers will leave OpenGL behind for Vulkan at some point.   They simply are not in a rush and frankly Vulkan needs to stabilize.   So what im saying here is that i expect Vulkan to be the industry standard moving forward.   That means API translation libraries for Apples Metal for non game related apps.  

melgross said:

Soli said:

melgross said:

lmac said:

If the new MacBook Air is in the pipeline, it will likely have the new, flawed, butterfly keyboard and the USB-C ports that nobody wanted.

Everybody wants USB C. So that’s not true. But one port on the Macbook isn’t enough. If they had two, most people would be happy. Apple has also been looking into what they describe as “stuck” keys. Possibly they have a solution. They certainly will for a new model.

While I never did get use to the 12" MacBook's keyboard during a trial run (which is fine as not every product should be geared toward my specific needs), my biggest complaint was only having a single USB-C port when it's such a versatile port interface. Long before that MacBook was announced had I suggested the USB-C on each side of the device would offer a great number of advantages moving forward. I was glad to see that Google's first foray with a USB-C ChromeBook came with a USB-C port on each side.

This is one of the decisions that Apple makes that I don’t understand. They said that there was no room due to the large stepped battery. But when seeing a breakdown, I could see that Apple could have, with a small redesign, put a port on the other side as well. It’s inexplicable.

but when Schiller stated that they were removing the SD slot from the Macbook Pro, because of low use, I immediately thought of two things. One was that use must be around maybe 5% or so, for it to be so low that Apple would remove it, and that if they updated the port to be the very latest, every time a new standard came out, more people would be using it.

but then he said that use was “just” 20%, and I was stunned. That’s a fairly big number, and would be bigger if they did update it to the latest. Of course people won’t use it if the latest cards for their cameras, and other devices won’t work with it!

so I don’t know what’s going on there, but it seems as though they want to remove as many hardware complexities as possible. We all know that Apple’s long term vision is a wireless world, but for some things, it’s just not here yet.

It is ignorant crap like this that has me running an HP laptop since the beginning of the year.   Frankly ignorant is the right word here if a business manager thinks screwing over 20% of the user base is good management.  It is pretty disgusting if you ask me.    

I really dont know what is wrong at Apple but they really seemed to have lost all sense of direction when it comes toMacs.  They have now designed of a half dozen machines that seem to be destined for sales failures.  It makes no sense at all to me.  

Sometime ago i got a survey from them asking a lot of questions about Macs and the fearures used.   The questions ask completely perplexed me as there should have been no reason to ask them in the first plac if they had any idea on how laptops or computers are used in general.  This especially considering that dual boot often means running Linux of Windows to run software and hardware that doesnt run under. Mac OS.   Take away ports and you take away the ability to usefully employ the missing hardware.  


Not to sound like that guy but i really believe i could  spec better hardware than the crap Apple has been putting out as Macs.  

lmac said:

If the new MacBook Air is in the pipeline, it will likely have the new, flawed, butterfly keyboard and the USB-C ports that nobody wanted.

After the heat Apple has taken for the crappy keyboards i really doubt that we will see butterfly keyboards.  The keyboards where crap before they even started breaking down.   

As for the USB-C ports, there is nothing wrong with them.   The problem is the complete deletion of all other ports which is beyond stupid.  They need to retain one old form factor USB port, the SD card slot and analog in and out.  

If we are lucky the new AIR will be ARM based.