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Entry-Level 13-Inch MacBook Pro Updated With 8th-Gen Processors, Touch Bar, Touch ID, and T2 Security Chip
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I don't think there are any quad-core Amber Lake-Y parts, nor are there 15 W Coffee Lake-U parts. (Coffee Lake seems reserved for higher-end purposes.)
There are, however, 15 W Whiskey Lake-U parts, but Intel doesn't (yet) list one clocked this low.
It's probably either a previously unannounced Whiskey Lake-U SKU, or they used cTDP to get it to 1.4 GHz. (Or perhaps Apple's specs contain a typo.)
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Apple's policy tends to be that if a new product gets released within days of you buying one, you can exchange it for free. Give it a shot.
I was also leaning towards my second option. And I only wrote Coffee Lake because that is what most current mobile processors seem to be. I don’t really understand Intel’s naming strategy anymore. Whiskey Lake is labelled as a (partial) successor to Coffee Lake but its processors are 8th-gen while some Coffee Lake processors are 9th-gen. And then Whiskey Lake doesn’t come with Iris Plus GPUs but Coffee Lake does.
Me neither, TBH.
They've failed to ship 10 nm at scale, so they've been iterating and branching out the Skylake architecture, and will in fact continue to for at least another year (while slowly moving some chips to 10 nm Sunny Cove).
Best as I can tell:
- Cascade Lake replaces Kaby Lake on the server/workstation end (S, X, SP)
- Coffee Lake replaces it on the high-end mobile/desktop end (B, H, U @ 28 W)
- Whiskey Lake is for medium mobile (U @ 15 W)
- Amber Lake is for low-end mobile (Y)
In parallel, they're launching Ice Lake-U and -Y this fall (based on Sunny Cove instead of Skylake), which should be much nicer than Whiskey Lake or Amber Lake, making those kind of redundant; my guess is they're still not confident they can ship 10 nm at enough volume to fully substitute Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake in time.
Oh, and let's not even start with "generations".
The issue isn’t the TouchBar per say but the lack of an always there ESC key.
Yeah, Sidecar is good. It signals that Apple is still committed to the Touch Bar, and it adds a clever new use case.
It's also good that there's no longer a weird MacBook Pro model that inexplicably doesn't have the Touch Bar. Love it or not, the inconsistency was bad.
But I wish 1) the MacBook Airs had it, 2) there were any desktop option at all of getting it (I suppose the closest you can get is to buy a low-cost iPad for that?), and 3) it had haptics.
With Sidecar, presumably the Touch Bar on the iPad theoretically has haptics? And maybe we'll see that rolled out on MacBook Pros next yeaR?
This, more than any other move in a while, seems to reflect the absence of overall product leadership at Apple. All the signs to date have suggested that Apple was moving away from the Touch Bar. After all, Apple has had years to add it to its desktop keyboards (which would have provided the ultimate test of its mass-market acceptance and would have given developers much stronger incentive to incorporate it into their software plans) and has not done so. That was true even with the introductions of the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro, two great opportunities to release a "pro" keyboard with a Touch Bar (if that indeed were the plan). Now, after foregoing those opportunities and letting this technology seemingly languish, Apple has doubled-down on it, seemingly out of nowhere. To me, this suggests that the person in charge of the MacBook Pro line did not coordinate with the person in charge of desktop Macs, or that they disagreed and didn't receive a centralized directive to resolve that disagreement.
I'm not anti-Touch Bar, BTW, but my needs aren't everyone's needs. I do like Apple's simplification of the product matrix and (slight) price cuts, both of which were badly needed.
I'm not anti-Touch Bar, BTW, but my needs aren't everyone's needs. I do like Apple's simplification of the product matrix and (slight) price cuts, both of which were badly needed.
I interpret it the opposite way.
They have today dropped a model that didn't have it (the 12-inch MacBook) and changed another model (the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro) to have it.
Plus, as they've recently announced, macOS Catalina will open it up to anyone with an iPad + Mac.
I wish the MacBook Air also had it, though.
My guess is putting the Touch Bar in an external keyboard is actually non-trivial, but yes, they should've had a strategy from day one (October 2016) on how they were going to roll this out to the desktop.
Not at all. Consider the Sidecar feature in Catalina, or the integration with Quick Actions in Mojave.
Yes, that's true.
I have the old school 2012 Non-Retina 13" Dual Core i7 2.9 with an upgraded 500gb ssd and 16gb of ram.
On top of the basic system stuff, I run excel (some light files and a few with tens/hundreds of thousands of entries), word (anywhere from 2-6 docs at once), outlook, adobe pdf / preview (multiples at once), firefox with 5-10 tabs (firm management system is cloud based), vonage business (for phone, fax, voicemail), fujitsu scan snap manager (with an individualized uploader program) and two external 27" 1080p monitors.
Would a 258 ssd, quad core i5 w/ 16gb satisfy my needs and give me something that will last a while and do all that I need doing without worrying it will be useless in four to five years?
On top of the basic system stuff, I run excel (some light files and a few with tens/hundreds of thousands of entries), word (anywhere from 2-6 docs at once), outlook, adobe pdf / preview (multiples at once), firefox with 5-10 tabs (firm management system is cloud based), vonage business (for phone, fax, voicemail), fujitsu scan snap manager (with an individualized uploader program) and two external 27" 1080p monitors.
Would a 258 ssd, quad core i5 w/ 16gb satisfy my needs and give me something that will last a while and do all that I need doing without worrying it will be useless in four to five years?
I think a lot of people would like the Touch Bar a lot more, if they just put a REAL escape button in the corner, like they have a real button for the power/touchID thing in the other corner. Make the Touch Bar display nestled in between a real escape key and a real power key on either side.
Now I don't feel so bad I bought the TB MBP just over 2 weeks ago. If they had updated the base version without changing it to TB, I would have felt bad, and would have tried to return the TB one. But now the base version has all the bad stuff (TB) and none of the good stuff (charging on any side, more capable processor/graphics).
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After the FCC database rumors last week, I really got my hopes up and thought Apple was finally going to update the non-Touchbar Macbook Pro. Extremely disappointed.
Short answer: probably not much.
We don't know yet what those processors are (probably unannounced Whiskey Lake-U parts), so I recommend waiting a few days for benchmarks.
What we do know:
- these actually start at a much lower clock than before (1.4 GHz vs. 2.3 GHz before)
- OTOH, they have twice the cores
- the old CPU was a 7360U. It scored 4341 at single-core and 9084 at multi-core. From Whiskey Lake-U, the similar 8265U at 1.6 GHz scores 4411 at single-core and 12512 at multi-core.
- this MacBook Pro is clocked 12.5% lower than that. Assuming linear scaling, that'd be 3860 and 10948. In reality, it'll probably a bit more.
(This is ignoring various minor architectural improvements. Whiskey Lake includes fixes for Spectre and Meltdown.)
There likely won't be a huge jump. Those won't happen until Ice Lake-U.
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Because Intel's CPUs supporting LPDDR4 won't be ready until fall.
Yeah, my antennae twitched a bit at this update at first. The wife is still relying on my MacBook Air 2011, and the letters are already practically smeared off the keys at this point. But the Air and Pro seem a bit underwhelming.
Imagine having a not being able to buy a laptop from your 'Pro' line without that tragic Touch Bar.
Is there anybody at Apple that knows what a decent computer is these days?
They aren’t listed in the ARK yet (https://ark.intel.com), but I’m hoping they are Whiskey Lake 15w U-Series variants based on the i5-8365U and i7-8665U with Iris Plus GPUs Nostradamus of the UHD 620. These could be 15w TDP or maybe, 28w TDP parts. If they are 15w, then chances are they will run fairly consistently at a Turbo Boosted frequency more often than not...it speaks volumes that it took this long for Intel to cough up the part for OEMs. Although I suspect Apple will be the only customer.
I certainly don’t want to quote Geekbench numbers, but I can see the Core i5 running ~4500 single-core and ~15,000 multi-core and for the Core i7 over ~5,200 SC and 16,500-17,000 MC.
These could be very good performers once they get into user’s hands. We’ll have to wait a little while to get performance numbers. Fun times.
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Perhaps they do, perhaps not.
What they do know for 100% certain is where to find the highest concentration of overly dramatic, whining and complaining end-users.