An update with these slightly faster chips or a worthwhile update?
@chucker23n1 follows the Intel roadmap leaks, maybe he’ll chime in.
As far as "worthwhile update" goes: to be fair, we just got a massive update on basically everything but the CPU in November.
On the CPU, well…
Comet Lake-H was just announced a week or so ago. It brings Wi-Fi 6 (though I’m unsure how relevant this is; it seems Apple uses third-party Wi-Fi anyway), slightly faster RAM (can’t hurt), and slightly higher turbos. IOW, it’s rather boring and wasn't worth waiting for.
Right now, AMD seems far more compelling
for the 16-inch.
It’s possible Apple won’t bother with this update at all, especially since it already saw a major update in November.
Beyond this, around early next year, there’s two possibilities: either Intel will first ship Rocket Lake-H. That will hopefully bring Xe graphics, which could help the 16-inch switch to dedicated less often (thus saving battery life). That in turn, for Apple, could also mean the return of a pure integrated option. It will also likely bring much faster RAM, which Ice Lake already has (it’s wild how the Air cites much faster RAM than any other Mac, isn’t it?). It will likely bring PCIe 4 and Thunderbolt 4; this should break the 3 GiB/s barrier for SSDs. It might bring ten-core options. Comet Lake was originally rumored to, but only the S (desktop) variant ultimately got them. But otherwise, it’ll still be yet another Skylake++++++ CPU.
Or they could skip that. It looks like Ice Lake is finally ramping up, and as a result, they killed much of the Cascade Lake line-up on the server side in favor of going straight to Ice Lake. That’s great. If they do skip Rocket Lake-H, they could go straight to Alder Lake, and that’d be the first exciting one in a long time. Alder Lake will be 10nm, so it will bring Ice Lake to the full line-up. That means a nicer performance boost, at long last. It is also rumored to bring a big.LITTLE-like configuration in the high end: 8 fast cores, 8 slow cores. So, less power draw, more performance.
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Well, any spec bump, even if it is small, that happens 1 day after the return window on a new MPB 16' purchase, will annoy me lol
I can see that, but if you buy a Coffee Lake Refresh-H 16-inch MBP today, and Apple brings out a Comet Lake-H one just outside your return window, that's unlikely to annoy you.
(There's other specs they could bump, like Wi-Fi, or the GPU, but as far as the CPU is concerned, things will be low-key for a while.)
Unless they go AMD, anyway.
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Apple blamed screen resolution on battery life? Where was that, I must have missed it...
Apple actually uses higher pixel densities on their Retina laptops than they do their desktop Retina displays, whether that’s the 4K 21.5” or 5K 27” iMacs, or the 31.5” XDR.
In any case, the ppi is in the range of 218-227, regardless of resolution.
I do hope we'll see a 3840x2400 panel eventually.
