Agreed. The new MBP are going to be nearly outdated the day the ship by a year, and the refresh last year was minor and almost the same chip as the year before....
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Intel Begins Shipping First Kaby Lake Processors, but Most Macs Won't Get Them Until 2017
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Agreed. The new MBP are going to be nearly outdated the day the ship by a year, and the refresh last year was minor and almost the same chip as the year before....
Which makes me wonder if they're just going to skip Skylake. People keep saying that's a possibility, and I kept thinking it was ridiculous, but maybe it's true. Maybe we won't get a new MBP until at least spring 2017.
Does AMD still make processors? Maybe that would be an option.
Apple's new product release strategy: bands-bands-bands-bands-bands-bands-bands-bands-bands-bands
Hard to get excited about processors when so many machine skus are presently crippled with slow hard drives. At least make drives ugradable by end-uses with SSD's when budget allows.
I can't see the point of an Applexit from Intel. All it would really do isolate the platform and cause many people to jump ship. Although Intel's progress is slowing down, ARM is only advancing at a fast pace to just to catch up with Intel. It'd be at least 5-10 years before we would see Mac Pros, iMacs, rMBPs using ARM chips. If Apple was planning on switching any time soon, I figure they would have made the move with the 12" MB.
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Chip making took the turn when they started putting graphics on the chip itself. Chip manufacturers knew that speed was hitting a wall. No need for apple to look at some other chip maker besides Intel. All chip manufacturers are going to slow to a snail's pace the release of better / faster chips. Even phone chips are slowing greatly. Why do you think mobile release cycles are slow to almost non-existent (think tablets, ipads in particular). Apple simply hasn't decided when to jump in and put them in their latest machines. Why put out a new machine with a 10% processing speed upgrade? Waste of R & D, that is.
This is less about processing power for me and more about the redesign. If we're expecting some sort of shell change, I'm not buying something that was first released in 2012.
its not that speed is hitting a wall, it's that people will pay more for all day battery life, better heat management, screen resolution and lighter machines. The problem is unless you want to spend big money on a gimped machine, the whole rest of the line up is overpriced old hardware.
Yes... Perhaps the ARM Mac project used to run as a small "just-in-case" R&D effort. But at this point it's hard to believe Apple isn't shoveling resources into it with an eye to making ARM macs viable ASAP.
The A9X isn't really too far off. Consider that the Mac form-factors alleviate power and heat management constraints that Apple's current processors operate under -- with the more powerful form-factors having the least restrictions. E.g., an ARM iMac would not have battery constraints at all and can comfortably accommodate fans and other bulky heat management techniques. A MBP form-factor needs to run off a battery, but a large and powerful one and can accommodate smaller active heat management components.
I guess that's my long way of saying I don't think Apple is too far off making ARM-based macs as powerful as Intel-based macs across most of the lineup.
The software transition is the big question mark to me... developers will have to recompile and rerelease... this isn't the old days so many will be well positioned to do that with relatively little effort but many also won't. In the end users will have to wait to get some of the software they rely on, or pay for a new release, or find an alternative.
So... will Apple provide an emulation like Rosetta for the transition from PPC to Intel? That's certainly possible, but I wonder if it would really be able to run fast enough to provide a reasonable experience. Do they build support for the intel instruction set into their processors?!? Obviously they could not do this in a way that is anywhere near as sophisticated as actual Intel CPUs and this is an expensive proposition.
Hm... I wonder if they might not do *both* and get close to native speed for Intel binaries on an Apple ARM Mac without essentially including an Intel core. Translating one machine instruction set to another can be fast and result in native execution speed... but only when the target has a precisely equivalent instruction and processing model. Since Apple controls their CPU and seems to have the expertise, they could extend their ARM processor with instructions, modes, registers, etc. to make binary instruction set translation lightweight and run at native speeds (or close enough) for the vast majority of cases. That is, they can employ an emulation layer like Rosetta to support Intel binaries but in the common cases where that would result in an inefficient emulation, they could extend their processor with just enough to make an efficient emulation possible, yet come no where close to including support for the full Intel instruction set.
I'm sure Apple is well aware of this. Even their own employees agree to the dreadfully long wait.
I have to believe Apple will release new MBPs this year, they cannot afford to wait until the Kaby lake CPUS are ready - Heck their 15" MBPs are still on Haswell.
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Huge as in three months? (The deviation from the yearly MBP update cycle.)
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Anyone remember when Intel finished releasing all processors of one generation before releasing ones of the next generation?
That is a great idea - if your goal to to make desktops and laptops go away.
Software houses aren't going to go back to the bad old days.
Just curious, which applications do you have that you can do on a Skylake but not on a Haswell?
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Not it doesn't, you need an additional chip.
Yeah, with a yearly release cycle (eg, iMacs), by this definition, they are completely outdated already six months after their release.Because nothing says 'happy camper' quite like a completely outdated set of computers with the exception of the retina macbook
https://buyersguide.macrumors.com//#Mac
Turns out the "Apple can't innovate, my ass" guys were right all along.
Actually it is. It's relatively easy to be competitive in the performance space that Apple currently targets with its Ax line of processors, but there is still a lot missing to be competitive with Intel's fastest cores.
Really? Wikipedia lists the one going into the 13" MBP still as TBD as shipping date. Only the ones going into the 15" MBP have been released in the first quarter.
Yet you're here crying for people crying over something, so do I. We're all crying babies!
This is typical for most of Intel's CPU line.
The first customers are server OEMs and premium desktop PCs (gaming, graphics, etc.) Then the higher volume customers get upgrades as yields for the fabs improve for the wafers.
Imagine if AMD was a second source for lower end Mac's!
The first customers are server OEMs and premium desktop PCs (gaming, graphics, etc.) Then the higher volume customers get upgrades as yields for the fabs improve for the wafers.
Imagine if AMD was a second source for lower end Mac's!
And what about the software to run on it? MS Office? Photoshop? Lightroom? Parallels? VMWare?
Have we heard any rumours coming from MS or Adobe about OSX/ARM versions of their products?
I have no doubt that Intel would also be mightily peed off if Apple were to jump ship espeically given their results from yesterday.
While I have no doubt that at least some models on Macbooks might move to Arm but all in one go? Really?
How about a composite device? Ones with both ARM and Intel CPU's. That would smooth the move away from Intel.
Call it an exit plan if you like.
So a computer is a fashion accessory to you rather than a tool? Now don't get me wrong, I love myself a good update, and have often bought new Macs with new features, but I couldn't give a rat's arse about the design not changing.