This case this year the MBP16 won't see more updates, but I still see a very frozen big pond.
I wrote MBP14, I'm confident on both 14/16 sharing PCH not using -U CPUs.
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Kuo: Apple to Launch Several Macs With Arm-Based Processors in 2021, USB4 Support Coming to Macs in 2022
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I wrote MBP14, I'm confident on both 14/16 sharing PCH not using -U CPUs.
…you think the MBP14 will move to the -H CPUs? That's possible, but given how good the -U ones are right now, that would be a weird moment to move to them.
I have my doubts, H CPUs lack of Iris makes a dedicated GPU necessary, and they already had enough problems making that work in a 15" chassis. A 14" is going to be smaller still in footprint, meaning components even closer together. Maybe they could set the TDP down but then you're probably sacrificing a good chunk of performance gained. The 35W AMD H parts would be very interesting, but the OS optimisations would be quite far reaching to make that raw performance translate into a good experience with MacOS and particularly third party software.
Ah, yeah. I knew Iris Pro was dead, but I didn't have on my mind that Iris Plus isn't a thing on the H chips either.
Anyway, like I said, it's kind of moot. Comet Lake-U or Ice Lake-U will make the 13-inch so much better that moving to H at this junction would be strange.
I just don't think the 13/14 is the one that has a problem that needs urgent solving. They'll likely move to six cores soon!
The 16, OTOH, will see very little improvement on the CPU front for quite a while.
The point is that you can't base the price of a laptop on the price of the iPhone.
You can base the price of their laptops by the price fo their laptops, though. People hoping for a cheap Mac laptop because of ARM are setting themselves up for disappointment.
It's not math. Apple doesn't care about how much they're saving, they're still going to price them however they want to price them. If you haven't learned that from Apple by now I don't know what to tell you.
It is fairly simple. Intel‘s tdp number are always the power consumption when the cpus are not turbo boosting. When it is turbo boosting power usage can be much higher. For example the old 12“ MacBook with 5w tdp cpus uses more than double the power of the iPad Pro when under load. That’s why we will never see intel cpus in a phone - even ones with low tdp.
This is outright misleading as all of intels cpu have turbo boost on by default. So in conclusion intel’s tdp numbers do not equate to maximum power usage of the chip As evidenced by the power figures above.
Why not?
Steve Ballmer laughed at the iPhone being $500, and then Apple went and made it a huge success.
Then people balked at the iPhone X going above $1k, and Apple went on to sell it.
Then Samsung made the Galaxy Fold, and it's $1,980.
It's a computer. With a small screen. In your pocket. Why can't that be priced like a laptop?
because it ****ing isn't? It doesn't have same capabilities, same functionality and therefore it can't and shouldn't be priced the same. The only reason apple and others get away with it is because zoomer idiots take it as a fashion/status thing.
A phone is the main computer for many people these days. You can call them "zoomer idiots", but they probably go by "businesspeople" instead, and generally are too old to be part of Gen Z.
business person that uses phone instead of computer? Who? Name one person who writes invoices or emails with a ****** phone keyboard.
I quite regularly respond to client's or my accountant on my phone if I'm away from my Mac.
Two nights ago I rolled back the deployed version of a site from my phone at 4am in bed, because I noticed a message saying there was a problem, when my son came in and woke me up wanting to get into bed with us.
Every lawyer and CTO i know writes emails on their phones.
I said can, not would. But Apple’s gross margin for hardware has been shrinking as higher margin services become a larger part of the mix. It’s somewhere around 32% now, it’s been in the 40s in past years.
In other words, Apple’s prices have been increasing less than their costs have been.
There’s no reason to think Apple would just stuff cost savings in their pocket. Look at recent products to see what Apple does with cost savings: Air (price reductions, base config increase), the 16” MBP (better machine and base config increase with no price increase), iPhone 11 (better device, price decrease) and recent iPad Pro (better device, base config increase).
You missed my point entirely.
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I believe Apple will enable Wi-Fi 6 in the 2019 16" MacBook Pro and the 2020 MacBook Air with a firmware update later on. The onboard chip in these models has the Wi-F 6 capability.
E-mails? Tons of people.
Invoices? You use accounting software for that, and generally, it’s not done by a businessperson.
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Maybe you didn’t state it well?
Several people have been trying to tell you this for years. Have no clue why it took until 2020 to come around, seeing as this has been a fundamental law of consumer technology from day 1.
My first PC cost well over $1,000 and came with 32 MB of RAM. I'm going to go out on a limb that a $1,000 machine will come with slightly more RAM than 32 MB these days.
Apple's markups for spec upgrades are obscene. They bear to relationship to actual costs. Never have.
1) Apple increases base specs when they can do so without affecting margin—which rarely happens. When they can’t, you get things like the 2014 8/128 Mac mini at $749 vs the 2018 8/128 Mac mini at $799.
(It drove some crazy that I was right when I told them they weren’t going to see a 2018 8/128 mini for $499-599. But but but technology gets cheaper all the time!, they cried. Yeah, no. Sometimes prices go up. NAND is a perfect example. And even if component costs drop, those savings can be sucked up by increases in Apple’s operating expenses. Oh well.)
But within the past year, global supply finally caught up (and exceeded) the voracious demand we’ve seen for flash memory over the past 5-7 years. With the marked drop in NAND, you not only see Apple increase base spec SSD capacities, but also significantly cut prices in SSD upgrades, particularly at the higher capacities for obvious reasons. (Yes, Apple cuts prices. Again, when they can do so without affecting margin.)
2) None of those market forces have anything to do with Apple’s pricing strategy for base model vs. upgrades. Apple keeps prices down on the entry level and lower-end SKUs by accepting lower margins on them, but subsidizing them with higher margin upgrades (to offset the lower margins of the low-end SKUs).
They still make their desired average margin across the mix of SKUs though; Apple is very good at forecasting the market share various SKUs will take. Lower margin, lower-end base models + higher margin upgrade prices = desired average margin. It’s simple!
Of course, if they so chose, they could lower the pricing on upgrades. But they’d have to raise the price on the base model to make up for the loss of margin. There’s no such thing as a free lunch 🙁 Either way—low base model with higher priced upgrades, or higher base model, with lower priced upgrades—you’re looking at an expensive Mac.
The only question is how tight a range do you want the base SKU vs. the max config SKU to be in. Apple chooses a wide range, you would prefer it tighter. (Just having all prices lower isn’t an option, since Apple isn’t suddenly going to decide their target gross margin is 22% instead of 32%.)
Would you be happier with a $1,500 base model Air, with upgrades priced at half (or less) of their current cost? Well, trick question lol. It doesn’t really matter what you want, because Apple wants a $999 entry level price point for the Air. So upgrades are going to be costly.
You call upgrade prices obscene, but they’re not. However they are high priced (expensive)—though not overpriced (too expensive). Exactly like iPhones, btw.
3) Many people make the mistake of conflating component cost with burdened cost. They think Apple should give them upgrades at Newegg prices lol. In fact, component cost is only just the starting point when calculating overall cost.
Why? Because Apple is a huge company, with relatively high overhead costs: $3 billion a month in operating expenses—half of that R&D. Those costs have to be covered by the prices Apple charges. If Newegg had 500 retail stores, 130,000 employees and spent $1.5 billion a month in R&D, do you have any idea how high their RAM and SSD prices would be lol?
4) Let me know if you still don’t understand why Apple’s prices in general are high, why upgrades in particular are priced high or why component costs aren’t the same as burdened (i.e. including overhead) costs. It’s really not that complicated, but sometimes people have a mental block that prevents them from understanding. I can probably help 🙂
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sounds a like a temporary issue. Windows universal binaries have made big strides.
Windows on ARM has been a thing for 7 years. Microsoft still hasn't released ARM binaries for Office. Why would anyone else?
It's striking how much faster the iPad Pro is compared to the MacBook Air, while I guess using less power, not needing a fan and such.
It's obvious that the chips needed for ARM macbooks are existing already. I guess it's just a matter of software implementation. And especially if there will be some kind of emulation software to allow current macOS software to run on such devices. Would gladly update my 2015 MBP...
It's obvious that the chips needed for ARM macbooks are existing already. I guess it's just a matter of software implementation. And especially if there will be some kind of emulation software to allow current macOS software to run on such devices. Would gladly update my 2015 MBP...
.... An iPad Pro being competitive with a dual or quad core, ~1.2 GHz MBA is hardly grounds for "I can't wait to replace my MBP"... unless all you need is the power of a MBA in which case, why not just get an iPad Pro?
