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I guess there won't be an Intel upgrade to the 16" anymore?
- Thread starter zlep
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Hopefully:
It could be that Apple wanted to rush their M1 Macs out the door before Christmas as they couldn’t get New 11th generation Tiger lake Intel chips before Christmas, and so the Intel versions will be a silent update in early 2021.
Or
Cripple the intel Macs.
They could have decided never to update the high end Macs by keeping only very Old 8th and 10th generation intel Macs making their M1 Macs look much better….
?
It could be that Apple wanted to rush their M1 Macs out the door before Christmas as they couldn’t get New 11th generation Tiger lake Intel chips before Christmas, and so the Intel versions will be a silent update in early 2021.
Or
Cripple the intel Macs.
They could have decided never to update the high end Macs by keeping only very Old 8th and 10th generation intel Macs making their M1 Macs look much better….
?
Look at the cadence of refreshes in the MBP line - its now averaging half a year or so in the last couple years. They are sometimes minor (Vega, 5600M) and sometimes major (16 redesign), but I think they will continue to keep this up. This means we will get a Tiger Lake refresh probably quite soon, perhaps in the next month or the next few months. It will not be a big announcement, it will just show up in the Mac Store.
Also I'm quite skeptical they will deliver a 16 inch Apple Silicone redesign in 2021, given it was updated recently, and it requires a yet to be announced Apple Silicone CPU. The M1 placement in the lineup (budget) signals that they are not quite ready to displace their top end laptop chips yet.
Therefore it's in their best interest to keep their high end laptops (i.e mbp16) fairly updated for 2021, and why not, since a chipset is available anyway. They may even add a 16 inch AS laptop as a low tier model at some point before we see a full redesign of that model just as they're doing with the 13 inch.
Also I'm quite skeptical they will deliver a 16 inch Apple Silicone redesign in 2021, given it was updated recently, and it requires a yet to be announced Apple Silicone CPU. The M1 placement in the lineup (budget) signals that they are not quite ready to displace their top end laptop chips yet.
Therefore it's in their best interest to keep their high end laptops (i.e mbp16) fairly updated for 2021, and why not, since a chipset is available anyway. They may even add a 16 inch AS laptop as a low tier model at some point before we see a full redesign of that model just as they're doing with the 13 inch.
To put this into perspective: two days ago the 13" Air had been updated recently and required a yet-to-be-announced Apple Silicone CPU. It was still updated yesterday. Rest assured they have been working on 'M1X' for a while.
IMO it is in their best interest to restore feature parity to their laptops as quickly as possible. If they're touting M1 as the future and so much vastly superior vs. Intel then they need to get their other, more expensive laptops on ASi as quickly as possible. Imagine how strange it must be for the average Joe Blow consumer to see that the 16" MBP (and remaining Intel 13" MBPs) have half the battery life of the 13" M1 models. That's confusing. I really don't think Apple wants to leave their laptop lineup fragmented and mildly confusing for the next year+.
Well, if they are going to update the 16" with Apple Silicon, the next chip needs to have like... 3-4x the GPU performance of M1 just to be "on par" with the current 16" MacBook.
And I can't imagine Apple will be able to do that very easily without sacrificing on something (say, power consumption?).
So while M1's performance may be able to edge out the Core i9 in the 16" MacBook already, the GPU is the elephant in the room. Especially seeing as M1 Macs do not support eGPU.
So with that said, I firmly believe Apple will at least update the 16" one last time with 11th gen Intel CPU.
Now, the problem is: Intel has not come out with said chips yet. There's no 10nm 8-core part from Intel. Their 10th gen Core i9 is just rebranded 14nm parts running at slightly higher clocks. So assuming Apple has a rigid schedule they are adhering to, that means they'll just have to suck it up and use Intel's 10th gen parts. And that means the next 16" MacBook may not be drastically faster than the last one.
And I can't imagine Apple will be able to do that very easily without sacrificing on something (say, power consumption?).
So while M1's performance may be able to edge out the Core i9 in the 16" MacBook already, the GPU is the elephant in the room. Especially seeing as M1 Macs do not support eGPU.
So with that said, I firmly believe Apple will at least update the 16" one last time with 11th gen Intel CPU.
Now, the problem is: Intel has not come out with said chips yet. There's no 10nm 8-core part from Intel. Their 10th gen Core i9 is just rebranded 14nm parts running at slightly higher clocks. So assuming Apple has a rigid schedule they are adhering to, that means they'll just have to suck it up and use Intel's 10th gen parts. And that means the next 16" MacBook may not be drastically faster than the last one.
Intels next chip appropriate for the 16” MacBook Pro is rocket lake.
Rocket Lake - Wikipedia
it is due around feb-March next year And will be marketed as 11th gen
expect approx. 10% cpu performance boost compared to 9th gen parts. Integrated graphic will get a massive boost due to getting xe graphics.
funny thing is it is still 14nm. Intels 10nm must be getting awful yields to not release it at 10nm.
even funnier is that the core design is same as ice lake. So they have ported the ice lake cpu and intel xe graphics back to the 14nm process for this cpu.
I do not personally see a significant upgrade happening in the short term because Intel is yet to release a CPU with major gains over the current 9th gen (and the 11th gen that presumably will make gains could easily get further delayed), AMD had not announced a mobile GPU replacement to the Radeon Pro 5XXX series, the current 5600M GPU was only just recently added (and it was probably not a cheap GPU to design and produce), and Apple did not show an AS 16-inch at their event.
Overall, now is a great time to buy one IMO. You can find some pretty good deals and this is a mature system that is well-understood and proven. It will give you many years of dependable service.
Overall, now is a great time to buy one IMO. You can find some pretty good deals and this is a mature system that is well-understood and proven. It will give you many years of dependable service.
I know I keep saying this in these types of threads, but leaker @L0vetodream stated in early Sept there would be no more updates to the mbp 16" this year. At this point I'd have to think Apple's holiday lineup is set so I think he's gonna be right about that.
Get the 5600m graphics card if you can!
Get the 5600m graphics card if you can!
I definitely think the holiday lineup is set, but I don't believe @L0vetodream ever said anything about there being no updates to the 16"? I could be wrong, but I can't find evidence of it anywhere
On a separate note, I wanted to mention to this thread that Kuo has been frequently wrong lately. No slimmer notch on iPhone 12 mini, iMac was not one of the first machines transitioned to ASi, etc. So I hope that means his estimated timeline of the 14"/16" MBPs was off, and they're coming earlier in the year than the 'late Q2 to Q3' timeline he estimated.
It's kind of buried now, but on September 8th someone asked him if the 16" would get an intel update, and he said next year.
Here's the thread that talks about it with the twitter links:
Waiting for 2021 MBP
forums.macrumors.com
Twitter thread:
Although looking at it again, it doesn't say 16"... for some reason I thought it did originally. But he did ask about an intel refresh and that certainly won't be happening on the 13".
Last edited:
Hi all,
I´m currently running a quite old mid 2010 15" MBP, and as you can imagine w/o SSD it makes no real fun anymore... So it´s time to upgrade to a 16" MBP in short-term. Last week I ordered the basic version (2.6 GHz, 6-Core i7, 16 GB, 512 GB) for 2249€ and after reading several posts here, I´m thinking if I should return it within the currently running 14 days period and wait for the 10th/11th generation or even for AS...
I mostly need it for office stuff/web/e-mail/photo adaptation. I do know that I do not need the power of a 16" for that, but I need a larger screen as I wanna be mobile in general, w/o depending on an external screen. Also using Bootcamp/Parallels is nice for one application, but not a must-have.
For my use case, would you recommend to wait for a new 16" with a new Intel? I suppose I don´t need it from a performance point of view, but if a new Intel model will appear really this year, I think I will be annoyed...
I´m currently running a quite old mid 2010 15" MBP, and as you can imagine w/o SSD it makes no real fun anymore... So it´s time to upgrade to a 16" MBP in short-term. Last week I ordered the basic version (2.6 GHz, 6-Core i7, 16 GB, 512 GB) for 2249€ and after reading several posts here, I´m thinking if I should return it within the currently running 14 days period and wait for the 10th/11th generation or even for AS...
I mostly need it for office stuff/web/e-mail/photo adaptation. I do know that I do not need the power of a 16" for that, but I need a larger screen as I wanna be mobile in general, w/o depending on an external screen. Also using Bootcamp/Parallels is nice for one application, but not a must-have.
For my use case, would you recommend to wait for a new 16" with a new Intel? I suppose I don´t need it from a performance point of view, but if a new Intel model will appear really this year, I think I will be annoyed...
whatever it it, hopefully it can run 2 external monitors.... since thats kind of a deal breaker for me. I cant believe that the current M1 models can only do 1 monitor.
I see upgrades for the 16 for graphics, ports and compatibility. I suspect that there are some capacity constraints at TSMC as well and the ability to have Intel fab CPUs is not a bad relief valve. That said, I would not personally buy an Intel 16.
It's a close call, but I think unlikely that they use Tiger Lake for the 16", since intel doesn't even have it ready yet. Their ARM variant + onboard graphics just has to be ready by spring/summer 2021 for it to make sense. (Possible Apple is dragging on this though).
If I wanted or needed an Intel Mac, I'd do a Hack - laptop or desktop. I know that most people don't want to do a Hack (or don't have the technical ability), but I'd find it hard to pay the Apple hardware premium on something with two years of support and dwindling application software support.
From what I read, the transition to apple silicone is to take 2 years. Does that mean that 16" is destined to be the next mini? no upgrade, no refresh. I'm looking to get the Intel based MPB16 to replace my 2016 MBP13 instead of the M1 because I need a laptop for scientific computing (CFL, think FORTRAN, BLAS/LAPACK, PETSC, etc...), but I'm wondering if I should hold out till spring to see if Apple will drop in the 10th or 11th gen cpu? or get the last of the Intel MPB13?
Can you port your languages and tools to ARM?
If I needed an Intel system to run macOS, I'd build a hack or use a virtual machine or buy a used Intel 16. I can not see buying a new 16 unless money isn't a consideration.
Eventually the tools will be there, I'm sure gnu will have compilers for the M1 early next year, the question is about the libraries, which can be compiled once you have the compiler. But I am not about to pay for the exclusive right of being a guinea pig. I don't doubt the M1 capabilities in every day use, but the M1 is unproven in scientific computing as of now, and it will be a while before we start seeing some benchmarks in this arena.
I do like the build quality of Apple. So far I had very few issues, and their stuff does last. I am worried about going with the likes of Dell. Money is always an issue, but I am willing to pay the extra (to a point). Would hate to buy one now and then 2 months later have a refresh. I have linux workstations for the final "product", the laptop is primarily for mobility, developing and on the fly simulations.
It sounds like you want a new or used MBP 16 Intel.
I wanted a nice system so I bought the parts and built it myself. That's how you control build and component quality. The variance in quality and support for components is pretty wide out there. I also like the idea of being able to upgrade the CPU or motherboard down the road. And to run on a system where daily workload temperatures are around 30 degrees.
Building it yourself is a considerable pain but you only have to do it once.