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Gurman: Apple Event on March 8, At Least Four M2 Macs to Launch Later This Year

Fomalhaut said:
Why can't Apple support the Mac Pro form factor?

Apple Silicon already supports PCIe
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"Supporting PCIe" is a non-issue - Apple Silicon already does that.

Next question is PCIe bandwidth - the Xeon W processors in the Mac Pro support up to a massive 64 lanes of PCIe which is what enables the Pro to have so many high-bandwidth PCIe slots.

If anybody knows of published details of what the M1 series offers in terms of PCIe, USB 3 etc. and how configurable it is, do say. I'm going to guess that the M1 Max has the equivalent of 16 lanes of PCIe - 3 lots of 4 internally for the TB4 ports, plus whatever is driving other on-board hardware, so the rumored quad-M1 Max would be in the right ballpark as far as potential PCIe bandwidth goes. It might even be ahead of the game if some things that use PCIe on the Xeon (the interface to the T2 chip for SSD etc?) are built in to the M1.

However, with the majority of that PCIe bandwidth already used for Thunderbolt ports (can they be re-configured on-chip as straight PCIe, or would that need a TB controller to 'convert them back' to PCIe?) the question is, would Apple use them for PCIe slots or go back to the "Thunderbolt for everything" policy of the trashcan?

If you look at the Mac Pro form-factor: the whole "MPX module" concept - wide slots with extra connections for power and routing video back to the thunderbolt controllers - is really based around adding powerful GPUs and Afterburner cards. Most of what Apple have done and said so far indicates that Apple Silicon is going to be integrated GPUs - on-package if not on-die - all the way, with hardware acceleration for Apple codecs on-chip. That would make MPX modules pretty much redundant (apart from, what, 1 RAID card) and reduce the need for so many 16x slots.

That doesn't mean that nobody needs PCIe slots any more, and there's no reason why Apple Silicon couldn't support them - but it might mean that the specific Mac Pro form-factor with 7 slots (plus a semi-dedicated 8th slot for the USB/Thunderbolt I/O card) no longer makes sense.

My suspicion is that the Intel Mac Pro will hang around for some years yet (heck, they're still selling them today, so they'll have to keep supporting them for 3-5 years) and maybe get a spec bump or two, and that the new "Apple Silicon Mac Pro" will be more like the trashcan in concept (that seems to be the way the wind is blowing with Apple Silicon, and it's clearly Apple's preferred way of thinking). Part of the trashcan's problem was, I think, that the preceding Mac Pro had been left to rot for too many years, so people who really needed a big box o' slots were forced onto it... also it was 100% dependent on Intel and AMD releasing future chips that worked with the physical/thermal design, so that it could be kept current. This time round, they have a more current Mac Pro as a fallback and full control over the roadmap for future upgrades to a NeoTrashcan.
 
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March 8th event must have some software component to it - a 5G iPhone SE and the iPad Air with center stage is press release material.
 
alpi123 said:
Last year's Spring event was just 1 hour. It's not limited to just hardware, I'm sure they will talk about software too - including iOS 15.4 and iPad OS.
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Don't forget the unnecessary social initiative.. In all seriousness, we gotta have an event, everyone's gone through the TV+ catalogue and needs something new to watch
 
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Mac Fly (film) said:
Entry level MBP should not exist. Pro should mean Pro. The only entry level Mac portables should be MBA and MBA should get SD Card and MagSafe. Mac portables vs Pro Mac portables should be differentiated by double the number of USB-C ports, support for additional external monitors, computer thickness, much greater power + fans (to justify fans), high refresh displays and larger speakers, purely because you can fit a larger speaker in a bigger chassis. MBA should take an obvious performance hit over all Pro machines, so MBA are fast and MBP are exceedingly fast. Port variety should not take a hit, but USB-C port count should. This makes MBA a great machine with extra portability and MBP a truly amazing machine at higher prices and with some additional expandability and heft—for certain kinds of professionals who need all the power and expandability a Pro portable Mac deserves.
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I agree Pro should mean Pro but when I was in college, everybody wanted a MBP even when they weren't really doing Pro stuff. So that version of the MBP kind of addresses that dilemma.
Don't really see the need now that the MBA is so similar but at the time it made sense and there weren't two version of a MBP at that time, just the 13" and 15"
 
Random (hopeful) thought: if the Mac Pro is supposed to be based on a multi-die M1 Max, wouldn't it make sense for the MacPro to come out sooner, before machines with the M2?
 
Makosuke said:
The M1 was launched in November 2020. Two years after that would be November 2022, which is... "later this year."

As for whether that's "too soon," the iPad Pro has been updated (along with a new CPU generation in all but one instance) quite consistently every 1 year and 4 months, give or take. That seems to be good enough for consumers, and the iPad Pro is priced similarly to the Macs that now use the same CPU. If the lighter-weight Mac laptops (or even the iPad Pro itself, with the most-power-efficient M-series processor) settle into a similar cadence, we'd be due for one some time this spring.

The MacBook Air itself has been upgraded on average once every 400 days; those upgrades usually included a new generation of CPU, and it seemed to have worked well enough for people buying them. It's been 453 days since the current model was released, so in terms of past Intel averages, it's already due for an upgrade. Intel's roadmap is kind of a mess, but I believe they're targeting a roughly 1.5-year cycle for new CPU generations.

That's ignoring the iPhone and associated A-series CPUs. Apple seems to have done just fine releasing a new one of each once a year, every year, for over a decade.

The timeline of the A##X CPUs seems to provide some idea of what Apple's chip team has done with higher-performance parts in the past, which is a new high-performance CPU based on the core of roughly every other A-series release. That cadence seems to align pretty well with the standard rate of Mac updates. It'll be a little unusual seeing the low-power CPU architecture being consistently updated before the Pro architecture, but Intel does that too, it's just not as conspicuous because of the naming scheme.

Launching into ill-informed and random speculation:

One thing that might mix things up over the next year or so is if Apple doesn't feel like the M1 Pro and M1 Max can outshine the existing high-end Intel-based machines dramatically enough, so need an M2 Pro/Max/Whatever before they can move the Mac Pro, or high-end iMacs, or resurrect the iMac Pro, to Apple Silicon. If so, they'll presumably be in a rush to get the M2 out the door, so it's possible they'd base it on the A15 core rather than waiting for the A16 core to be ready.

I could see why that might happen. I have a top-of-the-line 27" iMac from 2020 (which is still top-of-the-line), and while my shiny new M1 Max MBP pretty much matches its performance at a fraction of the heat and power, it does only pretty much match it. The M1/M1 Max/M1 Pro MacBook Air/Pros were all uniformly huge upgrades over their Intel predecessors. Releasing a 27" iMac with the same M1 Max as what's in the MBP isn't going to look like as dramatic an improvement at all, and indeed the max RAM would be only half of what the current 27" iMacs support (less than half if you include graphics RAM).

The wildcard is if Apple adds an M1 Max Extra (or M1X Pro, or whatever) desktop version with even more cores and 128GB (or more) of unified memory. Or if they can get dual CPU configurations working, although with the unified architecture I'm not even sure what that would look like. Either would be a surprise, but not impossible.
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Fair, thorough points. Only difference I see between macs and iOS devices is you keep them way longer. iPhones have turned into a cheap car lease you keep rolling over.
 
If iMac Pro is pushed back to September, then it better have an M2 chip in it because it would be insane for Apple to drop a premium desktop without a flagship cpu.
 
Doomtomb said:
I agree Pro should mean Pro but when I was in college, everybody wanted a MBP even when they weren't really doing Pro stuff.
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Professional (n):
(1) Someone who is doing a job to make a living rather than as a hobby
(2) A member of a recognised professional association, or possessor of other specialist qualifications related to their occupation
(3) High quality/thorough (as in 'They made a professional job of cleaning that toilet')
(4) (On a product label) supposedly better than the version that doesn't say "pro" on the label (see: toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners, shampoo, toilet seats...)
(5) Someone who does the same sort of important, skilled work that I do rather than other overpaid, overrated idiots who do lesser jobs (but who are welcome to own 'pro' toilet seats).
(6) (Of a person): someone who actually reads the specification of a computer and does research to see if it is appropriate for their personal workflow, rather than attributing any sort of significance to the product name... and buys a $40 Raspberry Pi rather than a $4000 MacBook if that will get the job done.
(7) Anybody with a sufficiently deep wallet.

So which of those should "Pro" mean? And which is "more pro" - a $3000 MacBook Pro laptop or a $50,000 high-end Mac Pro tower? I'd say that one is feasible if you're really, really addicted to Minecraft, the other comes under 'show me the $47,000 person-hour savings over 3 years'.

The best you can hope for is, maybe, that 'Pro' provides helpful product delineation within a range so you don't have to start by ploughing through the tech specs small print (although it will always end there)... which is where the 2016-2020 13" MacBook Pro's fell down, because the same name was being used for "entry level" and "high end" versions - with different numbers of ports and (at various times) touchbars vs. no touchbars and different TDP ranges and generations of Core i processors.

When a product has to be described as 'the non-touchbar 13" MacBook Pro' or 'the 4-port 13" MacBook Pro' - or when the entry-level '13" MBP with i7' has a totally different processor to the high-end '13" MBP with i7' then the 'Pro' label isn't doing its work.

Now, we have a '13" MacBook Pro with M1 processor" vs a '14" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro Processor' - which is also getting nonsensical - why would a Pro machine have a non-Pro processor?

If the MacBook Air gets replaced by an all-new M2 MacBook Air, with a new screen and (maybe) a 10-20% boost in performance and/or a 10-20% increase in battery life (Apple gets to choose the trade-off) will that even leave a gap for something in between the Air and the 14" pro?

Thing is, all of those problems stay the same if you replace the label "Pro" with "Super", "Deluxe", "Plus" or "Dogcow" - it's not about whether people who fail to meet your personal definition of "pro" are buying them.
 
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theluggage said:
Professional (n):
(1) Someone who is doing a job to make a living rather than as a hobby
(2) A member of a recognised professional association, or possessor of other specialist qualifications related to their occupation
(3) High quality/thorough (as in 'They made a professional job of cleaning that toilet')
(4) (On a product label) supposedly better than the version that doesn't say "pro" on the label (see: toothbrushes, vacuum cleaners, shampoo, toilet seats...)
(5) Someone who does the same sort of important, skilled work that I do rather than other overpaid, overrated idiots who do lesser jobs (but who are welcome to own 'pro' toilet seats).
(6) (Of a person): someone who actually reads the specification of a computer and does research to see if it is appropriate for their personal workflow, rather than attributing any sort of significance to the product name... and buys a $40 Raspberry Pi rather than a $4000 MacBook if that will get the job done.
(7) Anybody with a sufficiently deep wallet.

So which of those should "Pro" mean? And which is "more pro" - a $3000 MacBook Pro laptop or a $50,000 high-end Mac Pro tower? I'd say that one is feasible if you're really, really addicted to Minecraft, the other comes under 'show me the $47,000 person-hour savings over 3 years'.

The best you can hope for is, maybe, that 'Pro' provides helpful product delineation within a range so you don't have to start by ploughing through the tech specs small print (although it will always end there)... which is where the 2016-2020 13" MacBook Pro's fell down, because the same name was being used for "entry level" and "high end" versions - with different numbers of ports and (at various times) touchbars vs. no touchbars and different TDP ranges and generations of Core i processors.

When a product has to be described as 'the non-touchbar 13" MacBook Pro' or 'the 4-port 13" MacBook Pro' - or when the entry-level '13" MBP with i7' has a totally different processor to the high-end '13" MBP with i7' then the 'Pro' label isn't doing its work.

Now, we have a '13" MacBook Pro with M1 processor" vs a '14" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro Processor' - which is also getting nonsensical - why would a Pro machine have a non-Pro processor?

If the MacBook Air gets replaced by an all-new M2 MacBook Air, with a new screen and (maybe) a 10-20% boost in performance and/or a 10-20% increase in battery life (Apple gets to choose the trade-off) will that even leave a gap for something in between the Air and the 14" pro?

Thing is, all of those problems stay the same if you replace the label "Pro" with "Super", "Deluxe", "Plus" or "Dogcow" - it's not about whether people who fail to meet your personal definition of "pro" are buying them.
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People really get hung up on product names. Surface Pro is a complete joke for “pro” work by some people’s standards here. We need to have $50,000 systems to have the “Pro” in the name.

Just think pro = better. That’s all it means in product naming.
 
mielie said:
Pro should mean pro!!? And what exactly does pro mean? Are we talking pro video editor, pro musician, pro vlogger, pro coder, pro creative writer, etc, etc. There will be pro’s of all variety using Apple laptops and desktop, and probably just as many people buying the ‘pro’ kit that don’t predominantly use their machines for work related tasks.

Apple needs to cater for many different users, pro and not pro. I’ve never known Apple to only offer one ‘pro’ machine. Get rid of the 13 inch and then the 14 inch becomes the ‘entry level’ machine!

My profession is coding, and for me the 13 inch with M1 is currently the best option for me. So there you go, a ‘pro’ who wants to keep the 13 inch MacBook Pro. And yes, I love the touchbar, especially when using the Xcode debugger!
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I think ‘pro’ is intended to speaks more to the components of the device and less to the human using said device. As we know, having a ‘pro’ tool does not make one a ‘pro.’ ?
 
Mac Fly (film) said:
Entry level MBP should not exist. Pro should mean Pro. The only entry level Mac portables should be MBA and MBA should get SD Card and MagSafe. Mac portables vs Pro Mac portables should be differentiated by double the number of USB-C ports, support for additional external monitors, computer thickness, much greater power + fans (to justify fans), high refresh displays and larger speakers, purely because you can fit a larger speaker in a bigger chassis. MBA should take an obvious performance hit over all Pro machines, so MBA are fast and MBP are exceedingly fast. Port variety should not take a hit, but USB-C port count should. This makes MBA a great machine with extra portability and MBP a truly amazing machine at higher prices and with some additional expandability and heft—for certain kinds of professionals who need all the power and expandability a Pro portable Mac deserves.
Click to expand...

How bout:

Macbook Air 2: A resurrection of single port 12 inch Macbook that's the thinnest, lightest MBA ever with 14 hour battery life, and at lowest ever entry level price ($799?).

Macbook Pro Mini: 13 inch Macbook Pro with same M2 processor as Air, but 13 inch screen, 20 hour battery life and more ports starting at $1,099.

The MBP Mini would still be way cheaper than the other MBPs, but offer significantly more capabilities than the MBA for those that need them.
 
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Mac Fly (film) said:
Entry level MBP should not exist. Pro should mean Pro. The only entry level Mac portables should be MBA and MBA should get SD Card and MagSafe. Mac portables vs Pro Mac portables should be differentiated by double the number of USB-C ports, support for additional external monitors, computer thickness, much greater power + fans (to justify fans), high refresh displays and larger speakers, purely because you can fit a larger speaker in a bigger chassis. MBA should take an obvious performance hit over all Pro machines, so MBA are fast and MBP are exceedingly fast. Port variety should not take a hit, but USB-C port count should. This makes MBA a great machine with extra portability and MBP a truly amazing machine at higher prices and with some additional expandability and heft—for certain kinds of professionals who need all the power and expandability a Pro portable Mac deserves.
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Yeah, I remember how the only real differences between the M1 MacBook Air and M1 MacBook Pro were that the latter had a fan and the Touch Bar and a slightly thicker chassis and slightly richer display, but that was it. The Air could be ordered with the same 8-core graphics chip used in the so-called Pro. This is why when buying a new Mac laptop last spring I opted for the M1 MacBook Air, since with the 8-core graphics M1 chip with 16 GB of unified memory, performance could be up to par with the MacBook Pro equivalent, and I wouldn't have to deal with the Touch Bar. Despite being the thinnest and lightest MacBook Air to date, the M1 Air is very different from the first-generation Airs that were meant to be Apple's premium ultraportable laptop, as after Apple discontinued the polycarbonate MacBooks, the Air ended up becoming Apple's entry-level modestly-powered Mac laptop line, even taking the polycarbonate MacBook's position as coming an an education configuration for school districts to purchase in bulk.
 
ValueArb said:
Macbook Air 2: A resurrection of single port 12 inch Macbook that's the thinnest, lightest MBA ever with 14 hour battery life, and at lowest ever entry level price ($799?).
Macbook Pro Mini: 13 inch Macbook Pro with same M2 processor as Air, but 13 inch screen, 20 hour battery life and more ports starting at $1,099.
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Naming aside, a redone 12" would really be a 12.5-12.7" due to thinner bezels and the kbd dictating the same width as the 12".

So I would say:
MacBook: 12.x" superthin just as big as it needs to be to house a proper kbd.

MacBookProLight: 14" MBP with the base M2, and somewhat downscaled display (no MiniLED, no ProMotion or whatever).
 
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Boil said:
Data Center would most likely opt for at least the M1 Pro SoCs for the higher CPU core count & UMA bandwidth
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Not really, they would use them of course but lots of different use cases. I have 4 current M1 Mac Minis at 3 different providers. For a virtualisation approach higher CPU count is going to work better. The current M1 is pretty popular right now in DCs.
 
Boil said:
Data Center would most likely opt for at least the M1 Pro SoCs for the higher CPU core count & UMA bandwidth...
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LeeW said:
Not really, they would use them of course but lots of different use cases. I have 4 current M1 Mac Minis at 3 different providers. For a virtualisation approach higher CPU count is going to work better. The current M1 is pretty popular right now in DCs.
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So I say higher CPU core count, you say not really, then you say higher CPU core count...?!?

As for the M1 mini being popular right now for Data Centers, hard to judge if a M1 Pro/Max Mac mini might not be popular as well seeing as they are not available as of yet...?
 
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