Bloomberg: First Mac With Apple Silicon Will Be Announced in November

nt5672 said:
With Apple's quality history I would not want the first one, unless I could afford to use it as a door stop.
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Huh?? My first Mac (that I purchased) was a PowerBook 140 nearly 30 years ago. Loved everything about it. I've subsequently bought most V1.0 devices including watch, iPod, iMac, and iPad. Never experienced a dean flaw or production issue that made me regret not waiting for the next-gen or a "refresh". I lived through the Power PC transition and it was no big deal. I am intrigued because a major benefit to the ARM switch may be fewer watts meaning longer battery life which would be great.
 
zorinlynx said:
Eventually the hardware and software version you're on will lose support and will become more and more painful to use. Ask people who tried to stay with a PowerPC Mac post-2006.
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It doesn’t become less useful, it maintains it usefulness. It just won’t be able to do things it wasn’t designed to do. At that point, doing things it wasn’t designed to do would be difficult, but so would switching to an entirely new platform.
smulji said:
Then why go through all trouble pouring time and money into creating a custom SoC for a shrinking product line? Makes zero sense.
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Because, in the long run (depending on how long they keep it alive), it could be cheaper to move to a custom SoC than it is to continue to pay licensing fees to Intel. When you consider hundreds of millions of iOS devices sold per year, the 8 million or so chips they’d need for Macs is well within their R&D budget. In addition, they can carefully plan out future iterations KNOWING that the case they‘re making will ABSOLUTELY work with the chips available to them then. It makes the planning of the Mac future a lot easier.
 
DVD9 said:
So why did Apple ditch PowerPC chips for Intel?

Circular thinking. The circle is now complete.
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Because PPC didn’t have a roadmap to keep its edge over Intel at the time, both in speed and power efficiency. Motorola also wouldn’t commit to putting in more resources to accelerate development for a comparatively low volume chip that was just for the Mac. Now that Apple has both a mature design and scale, it’s natural that it would go back to using a custom solution.
 
dempson said:
Only considering models from 2006, both new families and new designs:
  • First generation of most Intel Macs (early 2006): 32-bit processors (late 2006 models were 64-bit apart form the Mac Mini which got there in mid 2007). This limited software updates as Mac OS X Lion required 64-bit in 2011. The support timeframe didn't improve much for later models until 2007 (iMac and MacBook Pro), Late 2008 (MacBook Air, Aluminium MacBook) or 2009 (MacBook, Mac Mini).
  • First and second Mac Pro (2006, 2007) also had limited support in later Mac OS X versions. Third generation (2008) is where it opened up.
  • First MacBook Air (early 2008) had limited software updates compared to its successor and was saddled with an obscure Micro-DVI connector for display output (later models had Mini DisplayPort, then Thunderbolt). Early models also had iPod hard drives as SSDs were still too expensive.
  • 2013 Mac Pro redesign ("trash can") turned out to be a mistake and it languished without ever getting updated, until it was eventually replaced with the iMac Pro or 2019 Mac Pro.
  • First Apple TV (2007) was a completely different design to all later models (based on a Mac rather than iOS devices) and had limited support. Apple TV 2 was somewhat limited in software updates; Apple TV 3 was a lot better.
  • First iPhone (2007) was only supported for three iOS versions. Its successor (iPhone 3G) wasn't much better (and sucked badly when running iOS 4). The third generation (iPhone 3GS) had reasonable support and performance.
  • First iPad (2010) was only supported for 2.5 years by iOS and was heavy. Its successor (iPad 2) was a much better design, and was supported for a lot longer.
  • First retina iPad ("iPad 3" or "the new iPad" in early 2012) was superseded within six months and its successor had much better software support.
  • First iPad Mini (late 2012) also had limited software support compared to later models.
  • First Apple Watch (2015) only had 3.5 years of watchOS support and performs badly compared to the Series 1 (or especially Series 2 and later). Later models got at least five years of support.
I was being conservative around 2007-2009 so waited for the 3rd gen MacBook Pro and iPhone, which turned out to be the right choice. I made the mistake of getting the original iPad. The original Apple Watch was not as bad but I should have waited a year for the much better series 2.

I'm still enjoying my first gen 12.9-inch iPad Pro (2015), so first generations aren't always bad, and on average have been improving in the last few years.

I'll probably get an early Apple Silicon Mac to familiarise myself with the platform, but it won't be my primary Mac.
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Thanks for the very detailed post! I’m not sure I agree with the reasoning for each one in the context of what we’re talking about though, but makes for an interesting read and viewpoint.
 
cmaier said:
Wish they’d hurry up. My wife’s 12” MB is on its last legs - constantly overheating and shutting off.
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Did you try opening it up? Usually that sort of thing is caused by copious amounts of dust in the cooling system/fans. I'd get a can of compressed air, a fine brush and open it up - or ask a computer repair shop to do it.
 
Hyperchaotic said:
Did you try opening it up? Usually that sort of thing is caused by copious amounts of dust in the cooling system/fans. I'd get a can of compressed air, a fine brush and open it up - or ask a computer repair shop to do it.
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No, the issue in this case is most likely bad thermal paste or the like. The system was recently brought to a repair shop under AppleCare (a week before it expired) because of a bad keyboard, and they replaced most of the machine (because they determined the battery was also bad). When they put it all together they either messed something up, or there’s a bad replacement component. I don’t want to take it apart myself right now because that model is particularly hairy to repair. I’ll give it a shot when we have a replacement for my wife - she can’t afford to be without it right now. And it’s not worth paying for a repair.
 
DVD9 said:
Should have switched to AMD Ryzen.
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What benefit does this give Apple? They would still have to buy the CPUs from AMD, and be dependenent of AMD's release cycle. The whole point of Apple Silicon is to return control (& profits) to Apple.
 
robinp said:
Probably. And my betting is it will be similarly powerful to the current top end MacBooks Pro
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The 16"? I doubt that very much, mainly because of the leap in GPU performance it would require. The new Apple Silicon would need to quadruple the GPU performance from the A12Z 8-core to match the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M in the top-end MacBook Pro. That is a stretch, even for Apple.

I think it is likely to be much better than the MacBook Air, and somewhat better than the 2-port MBP13s, but about par (or slightly worse) than the top-end MBP13. It will have better battery life and iGPU performance, and will be optimized for some Apple applications.
 
2ilent8cho said:
The most annoying part for me is all the products could have been showed off in a 2 hour event back in September if they removed all the unnecessary fluff from the videos and then said what dates they will be available from. Its driving me nuts waiting to see these Apple Silicon Macs and Apple just seem obsessed with dragging this process out in cringe videos you need a political correctness and inclusion bingo card to watch along with.
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The problem with making announcements far in advance is that slows down sales of your current line. Apple only ever do this for the Mac Pro, which is aimed at a more cautious professional audience who need to plan their upgrades and technology transitions.

Apple will probably announce in mid-November and launch 1-2 weeks later. I estimate that supply will be limited for a month or two due to all the other device chips being manufactured by TSMC.
 
cmaier said:
I haven't jumped on that train - I suffered from massive problems with catalina and SMB shares up until a couple months ago, so I skipped the betas this time around.
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I had lots of weird problems with Catalina too, but had no choice because it came with my 2019 MBP16. It seems more stable now after 7 minor releases ;-)

My general rule has been to wait for at least the 3rd "point release" before upgrading the OS, or 6 months whichever is longer. I might experiment with a newer release on a secondary computer or VM if I had one in order to test stability.
 
My gut feeling is that Apple will release a new version of their current 2020 Macbook Air as their first ARM laptop.

The 2020 intel cpu based Macbook Air has terrible thermals. It is almost as if the 2020 Macbook Air, along with it's terrible non existent thermal system was originally designed for an ARM cpu and at the last minute it was decided to release one last intel based Macbook Air.
 
Freeangel1 said:
I'm sticking with INTEL. APPLE is making a big mistake using ARM
Serious Graphic Designers and animators will now convert to windows 10 to Stay with INTEL and AMD
I know I'm right
MacOS should not look like a phone or Tablet OS. Its stupid

www.techradar.com

11th-generation Intel Rocket Lake processors are officially coming in 2021

As Team Blue doubles down on clock speed
www.techradar.com www.techradar.com
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Serious graphic designers will carefully look at the performance and capabilities of the new Macs with their chosen software before making an informed choice. Professional users base their purchase decisions on data, not some emotive brand loyalty.

(BTW the company names are "Intel" and "Apple" - they are not acronyms, so do not need to be capitalized)
 
cmaier said:
Apple has never cared about cannibalizing it’s own sales. Ever. If they did, iPads wouldn’t exist. Nor would iPhone, which destroyed the iPod market.
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While I agree that Apple doesn't mind replacing their own products with a better one, they will be careful not to replace an expensive model with a cheaper one that is also better - even if they could. This is why I don't think we'll see a new Apple Silicon laptop at $1000-1500 that suddenly exceeds the top-end Intel MBP16.
 
hagjohn said:
Yeah, well, good luck with that but I was talking about skipping or scaling back the announcements a bit.
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They had to announce so that developers that need to modify their apps to not use x86-specific instructions have time to make changes.
 
Fomalhaut said:
The 16"? I doubt that very much, mainly because of the leap in GPU performance it would require. The new Apple Silicon would need to quadruple the GPU performance from the A12Z 8-core to match the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M in the top-end MacBook Pro. That is a stretch, even for Apple.

I think it is likely to be much better than the MacBook Air, and somewhat better than the 2-port MBP13s, but about par (or slightly worse) than the top-end MBP13. It will have better battery life and iGPU performance, and will be optimized for some Apple applications.
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We shall see. I agree though that besting the BTO GPU is unlikely. But the 5500M is half the speed of that so doubling the performance of the A12Z seems more than doable. I think it will be close run on the GPU but it’ll overall be close to being as fast but in a MacBook Air like case.
 
Fomalhaut said:
The 16"? I doubt that very much, mainly because of the leap in GPU performance it would require. The new Apple Silicon would need to quadruple the GPU performance from the A12Z 8-core to match the AMD Radeon Pro 5600M in the top-end MacBook Pro. That is a stretch, even for Apple.
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I fail to see why it should be a stretch. The A12Z is built on two years-old technology for a device with no active cooling and 1/6 the volume of a 16".
 
interesting art deign
could mean
will take a big bite out of your wallet
super duper dark mode
arm chip will ne cloaked in secrecy
new macs will cost half of your yearly budget
 
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