Excited about Ivy Bridge and Speculated redesign...

[Aimson]

Hi Everyone!

I'm very excited to know that Ivy Bridge and the "redesign" that is just around the corner.. hopefully! I was going to purchase the 15" MacBook Pro, really didn't want the 15" but the 13" is quite pathetic so going to wait till Ivy Bridge next year as i'm not desperate for a new laptop. When does everyone think Ivy Bridge will come and do you think it will come with the redesign?

I believe that Ivy Bridge and the redesign will come in Febuary in the WWDC as it would be crazy to leave it out till April etc. Apple will get the Ivy Bridge early as they do with quite alot of technology. Hopefully it will come out then, what does everyone else think?

Also anyone got any mockups of the redesign?

 

[Naimfan]

the 13" is quite pathetic so going to wait till Ivy Bridge next year

It always cracks me up to see people saying the 13" is "quite pathetic." Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. It's faster than the fastest model available before the switch to Sandy Bridge. So on what basis do you think the 13" is "quite pathetic?"

 

[dusk007]

I'm very excited to know that Ivy Bridge and the "redesign" that is just around the corner.. hopefully!

Your definition of just around the corner is a bit different from mine. I would not regard 5-6 months as just around the corner. Up next is true.

Intel already announced that Ivy Bridge will launch in March/April therefore you can forget your Feb launch. April/May is what I would guesstimate.

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as it would be crazy to leave it out till April etc. Apple will get the Ivy Bridge early as they do with quite alot of technology.

That is a myth doesn't seem to die.
Apple got Thunderbolt early (not that was in any way very beneficial) because they helped developing it. But they didn't get any CPUs early. The last time Acer and HP got their lots first. The times before, it wasn't much different.
Intel may prioritize if Apple pays extra but they usually refuse to do that and Intel doesn't give care who gets stuff first otherwise. Usually they just ship the lots as the orders come in. Apple also has a smaller market share and comparably less negotiating power than the big ones like Acer.
The only tech they get early is the one they invest money in (R&D for that stuff like TB, or do them selves miniDP, or are the sole customers) otherwise they wait in line like everybody else.

 

[ssn637]

I was also excited about Ivy Bridge until I'd read that the updated Intel IGP is only expected to be around 30% faster than the current HD3000. Assuming the new 13" model still retains integrated graphics you may as well buy it now.

I'm curious as to when the fiber-based thunderbolt ports will be available. This would be a significant feature and would certainly pave the way for external dedicated graphics solutions. Imagine coming home with that 11" MacBook Air and pugging it into a 27" monitor driven by a dedicated graphics card! Time for work, time for play...

 

[squeakr]

It always cracks me up to see people saying the 13" is "quite pathetic." Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. It's faster than the fastest model available before the switch to Sandy Bridge. So on what basis do you think the 13" is "quite pathetic?"

Their is more to the package than speed alone. With the limited graphics capabilities (still decent for what they are, but no external option available) and the limited display choices, I concur that the 13 is "pathetic". I bought one for my wife as it fits her needs "sufficiently", but would like to see Apple step up o the plate and offer more configuration choices than they do. Move up to the 15 and 17 and you get different drive, 3 screen, 3 processor, and GPU choices. With the 13 you only get drive and 2 processor choices, very limited. I feel it should at least have the same number of configurations as the others.

 

[Aimson]

ahh yeah, I heard that they were going to drop Ivy Bridge if they didn't get it first, but thats probably just a lie like most things! the 13" is not the fastest, i'd prefer the 13" Samsung Chronos but i want Mac OS X not crappy windows lol.

If they announce it at end of febuary and have it ready for early march that could still happen! hopefully it will but we'll have to keep our fingers crossed, i dont see how they can change the design to make it more perfect?

 

[Naimfan]

Their is more to the package than speed alone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .

You may safely assume that I know that. I just find it tiresome to have people spout off about how something is "quite pathetic" without saying why they think that. Overall, the Sandy Bridge models are substantially better than the Core 2 13" MBPs. Graphics? They work better on my 2.4 GHz i5 than they did on my 2.66 Core 2 13".

 

[Tanax]

Your definition of just around the corner is a bit different from mine. I would not regard 5-6 months as just around the corner. Up next is true.

Intel already announced that Ivy Bridge will launch in March/April therefore you can forget your Feb launch. April/May is what I would guesstimate.

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That is a myth doesn't seem to die.
Apple got Thunderbolt early (not that was in any way very beneficial) because they helped developing it. But they didn't get any CPUs early. The last time Acer and HP got their lots first. The times before, it wasn't much different.
Intel may prioritize if Apple pays extra but they usually refuse to do that and Intel doesn't give care who gets stuff first otherwise. Usually they just ship the lots as the orders come in. Apple also has a smaller market share and comparably less negotiating power than the big ones like Acer.
The only tech they get early is the one they invest money in (R&D for that stuff like TB, or do them selves miniDP, or are the sole customers) otherwise they wait in line like everybody else.

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Apple come out with Sandy Bridge before it was released to the rest of the consumers?

 

[shardey]

OOOOO another post on ivy bridge and MBP redesign.

Ivy bridge will be a great step for apple and toning down the high heat coming from the MBP.

 

[Ant.honey]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

The next MBP will utilize a Hibiscus Span R789x processor from Atari. The case will be made of titanium and will be oval shaped, the width of 7 sheets of thermal fax paper, will be available in 9", 12.5" and 39" and have a 83.5 hour battery life. It comes out tomorrow.

 

[grahamnp]

People speculate about a redesign before every single release. Don't get your hopes up, if you get it wrong, you wouldn't have been the first.

Apple doesn't get any CPUs first. Or at least, they haven't so far. Quite often, they are the last because they don't time their product releases around Intel's. The early 2011 happen to coincide with general time period of SB's launch but even then, they weren't the first.

 

[squeakr]

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Apple come out with Sandy Bridge before it was released to the rest of the consumers?

No. Apple just released the first group of "corrected" Sandy Bridge CPUs and brought them to full scale market. Several other manufacturers were releasing their systems at the same time and recalling them due to the internal issues, thus very few made it to market and shipped. They then had to wait for the supply to be replenished with the second generation SBs. A guy at work got his the same time as mine and his was recalled due to the issues. He has since moved on to something else.

 

[dusk007]

Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Apple come out with Sandy Bridge before it was released to the rest of the consumers?

Very much wrong indeed.
Sandy Bridge release to market was jan 9th.
MBP release was feb 26th.
And quite a few Asus, HP, Acer notebooks were available mid January.

Where did you even get the idea that could be true? I know the myth that Apple gets stuff sooner doesn't die although history disprove it a few times over, but haven't heard anybody claim that with the Sandy Bridge launch they were in any way faster than the competition. They were faster than when they introduced Arendale (2010) were they really took their time. 2009 and 2008 I think it was also about 1-2 months after CPU release. If nothing goes wrong 1-2 months after official release is what I would expect.

 

[warvanov]

If they announce it at end of febuary and have it ready for early march that could still happen! hopefully it will but we'll have to keep our fingers crossed, i dont see how they can change the design to make it more perfect?

Apple is not in the habit of announcing update to their Mac product lines ahead of their release. They do this for the iPhone but not for the Macs. When Apple updates the Macs they're usually available same day or very soon, not a month or more later.

I wouldn't expect to see a major update to the line until at least May/June. Maybe as early as April but that's pushing it. And I also don't think it will be as big of a redesign as people are hoping it will be. MAYBE the optical drive will be dropped in favor of a larger battery and/or better grahics capability, but I don't expect to see a major shift in the form factor or size of the machines themselves.

 

[mwells65]

If you think Ivy Bridge will make Sandy Bridge look pathetic, you'll probably be happiest if you wait for Broadwell to come out

 

[dusk007]

If they announce it at end of febuary and have it ready for early march that could still happen! hopefully it will but we'll have to keep our fingers crossed, i dont see how they can change the design to make it more perfect?

Seriously don't keep your hopes up. I am watching the hardware market quite closely for years now and it is fairly predictable.
If they say March/April it usually means March 28 or something if there are no hold ups. Mid/Late April if they need a few extra days.
Intel has no competition they have no reason to hurry, they might run the risk of releasing something buggy.
While Apple could they usually don't release immediately after release. They wait at least one month or more for two main reasons.
1. if there are any bugs that show up late (does happen as history proves) they can still react and delay the launch. Good if you can enact a plan b.
2. They role out globally in volume. Most other vendors only update one model after another to SB and often they aren't available in quantity all over the place. Apple replaces everything and usually that needs a bit of extra time. Otherwise they indeed would have to pay extra for Intels first lots. Wouldn't really get them anything but worse margins. That would be a bad business decision just to be 2 or 3 weeks faster than the competition and maybe revive this myth we are discussing here.

Ergo forget your February launch that would only happen if Intel accelerates the timetable to January and even then Apple might having everything planned out for later and isn't changing all the plans for one single ingredient (even if it is an important one).
There is JIT production lots to be planned of all other components too. It is unlikely those planes would change too February if they currently aim at late April.

BTT ivy bridge is nice. The GPU is said to be twice as efficient. Does twice the work for every mW. 60% faster. And at the same time there will be 28nm GPUs which should also be faster by a healthy margin.
CPU side of things will be mostly more power efficient in medium load I think, faster in high load but not earth shattering and guessing at idle consumption is something I cannot make an accurate guess. Idle consumption might be almost the same, to slightly better, to a lot better (there are too many unknowns for me).
I think that the important usable battery life will go up significantly (per Wh nobody knows if Apple doesn't use a smaller battery in a redesign). When they currently yield about 4h with normal use I would guess at 5-6h at similar usage.

 

[newdeal]

...

Specs are stupid at this point. All the cpus are fast enough you wont notice a differance, the majority of people dont do anything graphically that will exceed what the intel graphics can do. What i would be fine with is the exact same computer they currently ship but with flash storage, no dvd drive and a big ass battery.

 

[Ant.honey]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Specs are stupid at this point. All the cpus are fast enough you wont notice a differance, the majority of people dont do anything graphically that will exceed what the intel graphics can do. What i would be fine with is the exact same computer they currently ship but with flash storage, no dvd drive and a big ass battery.

As long as the "ass battery" is huge I'll be happy

 

[What?Say,What?]

I'm happy you're happy! But..

It always cracks me up to see people saying the 13" is "quite pathetic." Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. It's faster than the fastest model available before the switch to Sandy Bridge. So on what basis do you think the 13" is "quite pathetic?"

I think it's pathetic (early 2011 model at least, and do you really think the 100MHz boosts to the cpus are gonna make it scream now?) because my wife has one and it has increased the speed of workflow only a little bit compared to her late 2006 macbook (that melted itself, also quite pathetic)... that's why ! Just about everything she does on it is only slightly faster... give me a break Apple: 4.5 years later and c2d vs. i5? maybe it's the intel HD 3000 crap-hics? Sorry, really disappointed. A brand new machine shouldn't be waiting around just checking webmail and word processing, it should just friggin do it! Don't you think? I'm not being a smarty, it's just by far the most disappointing apple purchase I've witnessed in recent times, even more disappointing than the original "MacBook Pro 17-inch", being only 32-bit (which is a problem now), it at least had a screamin hot gfx card for the time. I'm actually contemplating taking it in, because it just seems lame, even though it passes AHT, etc.

I actually hope they DON'T give it a major external redesign (except getting rid of the SDXC slot and replacing it with something useful, like an Expresscard slot!!! on the 15 inchers at least). I need all those ports! and some more!

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

The next MBP will utilize a Hibiscus Span R789x processor from Atari. The case will be made of titanium and will be oval shaped, the width of 7 sheets of thermal fax paper, will be available in 9", 12.5" and 39" and have a 83.5 hour battery life. It comes out tomorrow.

that is hilarious.

However, I predict it having:
an IBM G7 14nm 8-core processor @ 1.6 GHz clock, with 1.6GHz bus -->with 128-bit addressing (and undressing), a BFG 2-GB GDDR12 gfx card plus and Apple ApeSkeit200 on-chip gpu that shares ALL the main memory of the system, which comes with 8GB stock ram (even on 13") of DDR8 1600MHz memory with one channel for each chip on the DIMM. And at only 15w TDP the new Stem-Cell-Polymer battery can optionally be recharged by a thunderbolt blood-sampler (think like a blood sugar monitor) to 85% max capacity in under 5 minutes. 22 hours of battery life under "normal" conditions.
Note*: Normal means listening to iTunes on low volume with Apple Certified Headphones while using Mail.app to write an email to Apple Customer Service telling them how happy you are donating your blood to your own computer, while shopping for accessories at store.apple.com.

 

[GermanyChris]

I think it's pathetic (early 2011 model at least, and do you really think the 100MHz boosts to the cpus are gonna make it scream now?) because my wife has one and it has increased the speed of workflow only a little bit compared to her late 2006 macbook (that melted itself, also quite pathetic)... that's why ! Just about everything she does on it is only slightly faster... give me a break Apple: 4.5 years later and c2d vs. i5? maybe it's the intel HD 3000 crap-hics? Sorry, really disappointed. A brand new machine shouldn't be waiting around just checking webmail and word processing, it should just friggin do it! Don't you think? I'm not being a smarty, it's just by far the most disappointing apple purchase I've witnessed in recent times, even more disappointing than the original "MacBook Pro 17-inch", being only 32-bit (which is a problem now), it at least had a screamin hot gfx card for the time. I'm actually contemplating taking it in, because it just seems lame, even though it passes AHT, etc.

I actually hope they DON'T give it a major external redesign (except getting rid of the SDXC slot and replacing it with something useful, like an Expresscard slot!!! on the 15 inchers at least). I need all those ports! and some more!

I think most people havn't noticed a difference between C2D and Core iWhatever for daily use. The only time I notice a difference between my Core iWhatever and my C2D is video and audio transcodes it's the same with everything else. I bought an '11 mac because I had an unreal offer for my '10
and SATA 3..

 

[What?Say,What?]

interesting...

she watches lots of netflix/youtube/networkwebsite streaming videos though, but doesn't en/trans-code too much. thanks for your report! Maybe I won't waste my time going in then... those geniuses are very abrasive to anyone with an opinion.

 

[GermanyChris]

she watches lots of netflix/youtube/networkwebsite streaming videos though, but doesn't en/trans-code too much. thanks for your report! Maybe I won't waste my time going in then... those geniuses are very abrasive to anyone with an opinion.

I wouldn't take it in..

Try the html5 for you tube it makes me happy..

to your other question, the the cheaper of the 2 computers unless your running dual screens you're just not going to need the extra video memory..I don't game but I run a 24" 1080 monitor from my "pathetic" 13"

 

[dusk007]

I think it's pathetic (early 2011 model at least, and do you really think the 100MHz boosts to the cpus are gonna make it scream now?) because my wife has one and it has increased the speed of workflow only a little bit compared to her late 2006 macbook (that melted itself, also quite pathetic)... that's why ! Just about everything she does on it is only slightly faster... give me a break Apple: 4.5 years later and c2d vs. i5? maybe it's the intel HD 3000 crap-hics? Sorry, really disappointed. A brand new machine shouldn't be waiting around just checking webmail and word processing, it should just friggin do it! Don't you think? I'm not being a smarty, it's just by far the most disappointing apple purchase I've witnessed in recent times, even more disappointing than the original "MacBook Pro 17-inch", being only 32-bit (which is a problem now), it at least had a screamin hot gfx card for the time. I'm actually contemplating taking it in, because it just seems lame, even though it passes AHT, etc.

How do you imagine any of this is going to change with Ivy Bridge. It is just an other incremental step. Useful but it won't change the game.

 

[shardey]

I think it's pathetic (early 2011 model at least, and do you really think the 100MHz boosts to the cpus are gonna make it scream now?) because my wife has one and it has increased the speed of workflow only a little bit compared to her late 2006 macbook (that melted itself, also quite pathetic)... that's why ! Just about everything she does on it is only slightly faster... give me a break Apple: 4.5 years later and c2d vs. i5? maybe it's the intel HD 3000 crap-hics? Sorry, really disappointed. A brand new machine shouldn't be waiting around just checking webmail and word processing, it should just friggin do it! Don't you think? I'm not being a smarty, it's just by far the most disappointing apple purchase I've witnessed in recent times, even more disappointing than the original "MacBook Pro 17-inch", being only 32-bit (which is a problem now), it at least had a screamin hot gfx card for the time. I'm actually contemplating taking it in, because it just seems lame, even though it passes AHT, etc.

Sounds like a symptom of a non SSD user

Seriously, the performance difference of the two cpus you would be comparing is dumbfounding. Fix your bottleneck first and then start complaining, because my g5 1.8ghz boots up faster with a SSD in it than my 2.3ghz i7 MBP with a 5400 750 (although I use 2 80gb Intel 320s in it now and is no comparison).

 

[What?Say,What?]

Sounds like a symptom of a non SSD user

Seriously, the performance difference of the two cpus you would be comparing is dumbfounding. Fix your bottleneck first and then start complaining, because my g5 1.8ghz boots up faster with a SSD in it than my 2.3ghz i7 MBP with a 5400 750 (although I use 2 80gb Intel 320s in it now and is no comparison).

Wow, hot stuff man... haha... I would like that if we could afford to put OWC 240GB 6g ssds in it... and maybe a new machine for myself... it's simply not in the budget. sad face

How do you imagine any of this is going to change with Ivy Bridge. It is just an other incremental step. Useful but it won't change the game.

yeah, well, looking at the specs you might be right... makes me kinda sad though... looking forward to the day when SSD's are standard, and magnetic coasters are only for super⁻ hi-cap applications.

man you two have me convinced... still can't afford it. ha!