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16-Inch MacBook Pro Features Adjustable Refresh Rate Below 60Hz
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Intel hasn’t released them yet. Next summer, Comet Lake.
I'm looking forward to a high refresh rate laptop monitor, but I think they're limited by Intel's integrated graphics. Only in the very new 10nm Intel chips with Gen11 Integrated Graphics do they support VRR, and since Apple connected the internal laptop monitor to the iGPU for power savings, until that support is there they can't add it to the laptop. Same issue exists on the Windows side where you can't get G-SYNC and Optimus in the same machine.
I'm positive it's an Intel thing.
Yeah, Apple could've put a different Wi-Fi 6 chip on there. But it isn't really that urgent yet, and Comet Lake-H is coming around April, and has it built in. So by the time the next speed bump comes along, around summer, the 16-inch MacBook Pro gets Wi-Fi 6 for free. They didn't why bother engineering a solution that's not critical, and will in fact be obsolete by the next revision.
Surely lid thickness is a huge part of it. As far as I can tell, competitors don't really have better cameras. Hope you like nose cams…
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They don't appear to have a controller that can dynamically adjust frame rate like that. Yet, anyway.
They do on the iPad Pro and the Apple Watch. Maybe it's something for the T3?
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There are no 45W 10th gen parts. There won't be until around April.
while its not a particularly “smart” (automatic) feature, i still think it’s a good feature, the 47.95 hz option being most useful.
A variable refresh display would be awesome given that it would almost certainly entail APIs which game devs and nle devs could use in their own software, but also automatic options can be too dependent: when their clever code fails then uncertainty is introduced and it might as well be like there’s no option to alter refresh rate at all because the software mechanisms in place are failing to account for the on-screen content’s frame rate.
i also wonder how such a system works if the mouse pointer is moving as video content is playing on-screen. I assume the system would restore to 60hz whenever the cursor is in movement but i suppose i dont have the technical acumen to understand fully how variable refresh systems work in these kinds of scenarios
A variable refresh display would be awesome given that it would almost certainly entail APIs which game devs and nle devs could use in their own software, but also automatic options can be too dependent: when their clever code fails then uncertainty is introduced and it might as well be like there’s no option to alter refresh rate at all because the software mechanisms in place are failing to account for the on-screen content’s frame rate.
i also wonder how such a system works if the mouse pointer is moving as video content is playing on-screen. I assume the system would restore to 60hz whenever the cursor is in movement but i suppose i dont have the technical acumen to understand fully how variable refresh systems work in these kinds of scenarios
I get around 800 Mbps in the room over from the router, but it quickly drops to 400-600 Mbps once I get to the living room. Would be nice to get 1 Gbit in the office and 800 Mbit in the living room
It's "Pro" because it's hidden behind the Option key just like so many other commands in MacOS. Years ago, Mac users were picked on by Windows and Linux users for using an operating system that was dismissed as childish and simplistic. Now those Mac users are having a reverse "Revenge of the Nerds" moment. They view these hidden Option key commands as a way to say"See, we have hidden stuff too. We have more hidden stuff than you". They treat finding hidden Option key commands as a badge of honor, where their self worth is based on the number of hidden commands they know about. Some of them may also view their knowledge of hidden commands as a way to attract sexual partners.
MacRumors and other publications have the opportunity to use their positions to call for organizing MacOS commands in a more transparent manner that does not treat MacOS like a video game full of easter eggs. But I suspect that these publications welcome the increasing number of hidden Option key commands as a way to bring more visitors to their websites.
I think I see where the confusion comes from. It's listed as 5.0 on the US website, but 4.2 on the Australia website (which is where I bought mine from so I was under the impression that it was 4.2). I see Apple put the wrong text in on the Australian one.
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Apple has never used Intel Wi-Fi on computers. They've always used Broadcom in recent times. (There was a string of Atheros more than 6+ years ago) Broadcom has basically quit the Wi-Fi PC client market because Intel's bundling and cheap Mediatek chipsets took over the market. The chipsets that are in Apple computers currently are basically router chipsets, and i'd guess that Broadcom hasn't got the power down.
If it was Intel, it would be done. Their Wi-Fi chipset has been out for more than half a year, go look on Amazon for a AX200.
No it's not. Intel's chips don't yet support Wifi 6. This has been pointed out repeatedly.
Funny thing is this is actually Pro Motion...letting the video editor change the refresh rate to match content they are editing for more precise work.
What Apple calls "Pro Motion" is just 120 Hz...a smoother-looking UI. It's great, but irrelevant.
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...a MacBook Pro is not a gaming computer. Not firstly, secondly, thirdly...
That is incorrect. ProMotion also includes variable refresh rates, although on the iPad Pro, it's automatic.
For very basic video playback. Has absolutely nothing to do with it, and is no comparison with, video editing on a Mac.
Not even remotely the same thing.
No it's not exactly the same implementation. However, I'm pointing out that your original assertion (re-quoted below) was simply just wrong:
"What Apple calls "Pro Motion" is just 120 Hz...a smoother-looking UI. It's great, but irrelevant."
ProMotion dynamically adjusts the framerate up to 120 Hz where needed, and much lower where it saves power. And as we can see in the Apple Watch, Apple can also go all the way down to 1 Hz to save even more power.
This feature on the MacBook Pro isn't even close to that. I have to imagine that it's only the beginning, and that we'll see some convergence on that front a few years from now.
Shouldn't the movie industry be upgrading to higher frame rates anyway? Since when does a manufacturer like Apple serve an entire industry? Shouldn't the entire industry serve the manufacturer? 
What if you have, say, a 24 fps video in one window and 30 in another? The system won't know which to prioritise.
CRT displays refreshed the screen by scanning the electron beam one row at a time. Then came passive matrix LCDs which refreshed pixels one row at a time. Then came active matrix LCDs where all pixels were refreshed simultaneiously.
When LED backlighting came to flat screen TVs, lower end models used an edge lit system which applied the same brightness to the entire screen. Higher end TVs had backlit systems with local dimming in which different parts of the screen could be lit at diffeent levels of brightness by the LEDs, providing blacker blacks compared to edge lit TVs. While local dimming has been available in high end TVs for several years, the technology has only recently begun to appear in computer monitors.
If manufacturers really wanted to, they could work on developing LCDs with local refresh zones where different areas of the screen can be refreshed at different rates at the same time.
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That's not how LCDs work. LCDs and OLEDs refresh one row at a time, just like a CRT. The difference is that in a passive matrix display, the liquid crystal only has a charge applied to it one row at a time. When the LC isn't being refreshed, it starts to fall back into the default state, white. Therefore, the LC is engineered to fall back very very slowly.
An active matrix display has a small transistor at each display. The transistor holds the charge on the LC or OLED element until the next refresh, or until the charge fades out. This is very similar to DRAM.
Again, in all display technologies, the display is refreshed one row at a time, from top to bottom. This has nothing to do with local dimming.
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