16-Inch MacBook Pro Now Available With Up to 75% Faster Radeon Pro 5600M Graphics

[UglyCowboy]

Same here. Obviously Dell will have many more issues compared to the MBP. However, the XPS 17 gives you a much better 17" 16:10 4K 100% Adobe RGB screen with ultra slim bezels and touch input, fast SD card slot, Wifi 6, upgradable RAM and SSD, two M.2 SSD slots, IR sensor for Windows Hello (aka FaceID), Nvidia GPU with CUDA (a must for many apps), no Touch Bar, 130 watt USB-C charger (proprietary), vapor chamber cooler, 10th gen CPU (thinner die and STIM for better thermals), slightly cheaper price, similar footprint. Basically this is a list of almost everything that many MBP users have been begging for. Yes, build quality and QC will be much worse than MBP and XPS won't run macOS. Windows still can't sleep properly, trackpad has issues, scaling is terrible. At the end of the day the list of pros, for me, far outweigh the cons which I will have to suck up. Upgrading to the next day onsite warranty service will hopefully mitigate some of the customer service nightmares Dell is known for. A decent Windows box would also be helpful now that Apple is about to make a major migration to ARM. I have stuck with them through the PPC to Intel transition and it wasn't fun. Getting the XPS 17 would allow me to skip the transition period for the next few years and bounce back when the ecosystem is more mature.

So no 10th generation CPUs and no Wifi6 this year.

I don't get it. Did Apple invest heavily in Dell stocks? I was going to spend a lot of money on a new 16" MBP this year. I guess it's going to be the XPS17 instead.

 

[decisions]

After thinking about this over the day, and considering the price of the GPU, this is one of the most bizarre moves Apple has made for their MBP in recent memory.

Did Apple just release their first gaming laptop? Except the GPU is just really overpriced?

 

[NT1440]

After thinking about this over the day, and considering the price of the GPU, this is one of the most bizarre moves Apple has made for their MBP in recent memory.

Did Apple just release their first gaming laptop? Except the GPU is just really overpriced?

Maybe not gaming, but perhaps they’ve got something really GPU intensive to show us at WWDC and need devs to have the hardware capable of developing for it for a future release time? *cough*

 

[decisions]

Maybe not gaming, but perhaps they’ve got something really GPU intensive to show us at WWDC and need devs to have the hardware capable of developing for it for a future release time? *cough*

I think that's a safe prediction. If after WWDC we don't clearly understand why devs would want this it will seem really strange.

 

[PickUrPoison]

One now has to wonder if that's one reason Apple held off on Wi-Fi 6 on the Mac, although I assume this means that 802.11AX iOS devices will not be able to take advantage of 6E either?

Yes as &cmaier mentioned, 6E requires new hardware, so older devices and equipment, including routers/access points, can’t use the new 6GHz band.

As a member of the WiFi consortium, Apple certainly knew the roadmap and timeline. How much that figured into their planning is hard to guess.

I think it probably did take some of the urgency away from the WiFi 6 upgrade, knowing that 6E was in the wings, just waiting for the FCC to agree to re-allocate 6GHz.

 

[Sodium Chloride]

According to notebookcheck, the Radeon Pro 5600M is still considered a mid range card. Nowhere near the performance of RTX 2080.

 

[Abaganov]

So If I order a new 16" MBP today, will it say late 2019 or mid 2020?

 

[cmaier]

So If I order a new 16" MBP today, will it say late 2019 or mid 2020?

Late 2019. Because that’s what it is.

 

[Hieveryone]

You can buy a PC for $700. At Apple you get a chip.

Greedy a bit much?

 

[Fishcake21]

Tried to do a trade in with Apple on my 16 inch Macbook pro with 2tb of storage space, 32 gigs of ram, and 5500m 8 gig

They wanted to pay me 1800.


Ugh.

 

[cmaier]

You can buy a PC for $700. At Apple you get a chip.

Greedy a bit much?

Buy that gpu for less money someplace else and then you can complain.

 

[Hieveryone]

Buy that gpu for less money someplace else and then you can complain.

Where could I buy it for less? And also you wouldn’t be able to install it bc I’m guess it’s soldered in

 

[cmaier]

Where could I buy it for less? And also you wouldn’t be able to install it bc I’m guess it’s soldered in

That’s the point. It’s not greed if they’re charging the going rate.

 

[Hieveryone]

That’s the point. It’s not greed if they’re charging the going rate.

Well only if the going rate is $700 for dell etc. I get the Apple tax but still

 

[T-R-S]

Does it still overheat when you attach an external monitor?

its my favorite feature

 

[cheese01]

For $800 over the standard GPU, you could get an eGPU enclosure and a 5700 XT, which would be much faster than a 5600 and be upgradable.

This 5600M actually uses the same Navi 10 die as the 5700 XT, with the same number of compute units. It also has 8GB of memory, but in HBM2 instead of GDDR6 - if you put this thing in a desktop and let it clock high enough, it'd probably be faster than the 5700 XT.

Of course, constrained to 50W in a MacBook, it won't reach the same levels of performance. Really impressive card on a technical level though, for sure.

 

[CalMin]

Tried to do a trade in with Apple on my 16 inch Macbook pro with 2tb of storage space, 32 gigs of ram, and 5500m 8 gig

They wanted to pay me 1800.


Ugh.

I’ll give you $1900. Done 🙂

 

[Alexander Van Nevel]

My rule of thumb: Always order the slowest CPU und the slowest graphics card, if you want a quiet laptop.

But you never have too much RAM or too much SSD space and should get as much as you can afford.

That's not exactly true, it's not because the frequency is higher that it will consume more power, especially in mobile devices. The reason for that is that CPU's are cherry picked, not all CPU's are made equally, the best CPU's (that can reach higher frequency's at lower power consumption) are reserved for the higher-end models. Therefor a task can complete faster on one machine (higher frequency at same power levels) and save batterylife because it finished it's task faster.

 

[Wahlstrm]

I wonder what will hold up better for resale and longevity...I have to imagine graphics over some storage.

90%(?) of people who need/value specs don’t buy old/secondhand computers.

The only BTO option that might help resale is RAM, since that will one day be the difference between “still useful” and “completely useless”.

I’m quite sure it’s a lot easier to sell an older MBP/MBA with 8/16GB RAM today compared to one with 4GB. That was a $100-$200 well spent back in the day.

 

[playtech1]

This 5600M seems like an oddball choice at the price Apple has set, unless there is some specific use case that I'm missing.

It offers two improvements: more cores and faster memory, but neither are really game changers when you compare with Windows equivalents.

The 5600M uses (expensive) HBM2 to give a big memory bandwidth boost to 394GB/s, vs 192GB/s for the 5500M

But as nice as that is, it's not exceptionally fast. A mid-range Nvidia 2060 (laptop version) gets 336GB/s. On the desktop many GPUs exceed that memory speed with plain old GDDR6. The RTX2080 TI gets 616GB/s.

So the memory is good but not great. Why not just use cheaper GDDR6? Power consumption perhaps?

Compute units going from 24 to 40 gives a nice boost of up to 2/3. But I see that peak clock speeds have been dialled back (from 1.3Ghz on the 5500M to 1.03Ghz on the 5600M), so you will not get two-thirds more processing power, even with perfect scaling.

Given this, £700 seems like a crazy high upgrade price to basically move from something equivalent to a low-end Nvidia card (1650Ti) to, at best, something closer to a mid-range Nvidia card (RTX 2060).

Those who need the most power will pay for it, but it feels like customers being gouged.

What am I missing?

 

[stavibeats]

Does it still overheat when you attach an external monitor?

That's so weird... Mine works just fine with 4 external monitors. Maybe mine is broken?

 

[sbrunner]

Apple‘s solution is “there’s a dongle“ for that. They want their machines to look pretty for marketing, to heck with usability. If they would just let us have upgradable ram and storage for devices, it wouldn’t be so bad

I think TB3 is great. And dongles and hubs are very inexpensive. I love that I can hook up a PCIe enclosure with regular PCIe cards, or I can split a TB3 ports into a couple of completely independent USB channels. I love the flexibility of being able to connect up to four monitors on any port. Or being able to connect a power source to any of the four interfaces, for instance feeding power via a PCIe enclosure or via a hub. I love that I can charge devices through any of the ports, for instance speed charge my iPhone XS. I would not like to go back the old pre 2016 days.

What I would love are four independent TB3 channels, as we get with Ice Lake in the new MBP 13" 2020 TB4. With Titan Ridge in the MBP 16" 2019 we only get one for each of the two chips.

 

[limo79]

From the time perspective Ice Lake was miss rather than hit due to extreme prices of CPU and final price of premium laptops with Ice Lake 10th chips.

 

[DoorsFreak87]

Does anyone know if they will sell 5600m
configs at B&h and Adorama? May return my current config as I haven't opened it.

 

[Hjupter Cerrud]