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MacBook Pro Supplies Constrained, Steve Jobs Says 'Not to Worry'
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I dont care which GPU they use as long as its the fastest on the market i'll be stoked... GPU is the only thing stopping me from getting a new MBP right now, C2D or iX i'm not fussed. 9600M GT is just a little old for my liking
they propably just had to correct the summer time... too bad> I hope tuesday will be the day. Well I've been hoping that for 15 weeks now....
you are clearly not the only one...!!!!!
damn
Very rarely does Apple throw the fastest mobile GPU on the market into the MBP. The MBP tends to lag quite a bit behind.
I would prefer this as they are faster but I doubt it very much.
Reason 1
Nvidia has Optimus, which AMD will probably copy in their next Gen GPU but in this one they can only make something similar work with a performance hit. Switching from IGP to AMD takes a noticeable time in best case. Optimus can switch seemless even when Applications use the GPU at the switching moment. Why is this important because there was a rumor that Apple would enable automatic switching in the next Gen MBP. Could be wrong though and all they do is remove this whole logging out BS you have to do now.
Reason 2
OpenCL. HD 5000 are definitely much better for Gaming then current 300M or 200M GPUs relatively to their power draw and heat dissipation. But for GPGPU the Nvidia is definitely better and if they are serious on doing more then just a little Photoshop acceleration then Nvidia is just the more future proof way. AMD's Architekture is more efficient for its task because it has more dedicated fixed function units but Nvidia's is better for all the GPGPU stuff. Especially the next 400M generation will be and I doubt Apple will switch back and forth.
400M will not make it into the next MBP as it doesn't seem to be very good in terms of Power requirements. It is a great architecture but it is again like GT200 build on a too big fabrication process. I think they would have to cut their precious CUDA cores by too much to fit those GPUs into notebooks.
AMD already has their own seamless switching solution. A long time before Optimus even had rumours.
ATI PowerXpress™
You'll be supprised how many times AMD is actually first to do something.
Indeed, and all we get is a "not to worry"? not to worry it won't be long? or not to worry we don't care and you can wait!
I said it before unless it's name starts with an "i" it's not that important right now to apple, yet it is to everyone else who's hardware products are latest and greatest.
I'll tell you this: the tipping point between my building a new PC and buying a Mac Pro was my wife's insatiable iPad lust. I've always admired the MPs, and I knew if I ever went Mac, it would have to be an expandable/customizable one, but I'm not sure I'd have laid out the coin if it weren't also enabling my wife's to have her dream device.
Peace
policy
i suppose Apple will only release the MBP after all the racket about iPad died down a bit. releasing MBP now would only let it either be dwarfed by the iPad or dampen the excitement over that new (rather useless, IMHO) innovation.
still, realizing that, it seems to me that Apple is enjoying the power of keeping things a secret and letting the market hold its breath til it's blue. Steve Jobs' "not to worry" bit rattles me a bit as being ungrateful and uncaring for loyal Mac fans.
poor us, we're just so hooked that we really have nowhere to go even after such a treatment....
funny how we keep track of how long has the latest MBP (or MBA or iPod or iMac etc) been out and unwilling to fish out the dough for year-old machines, but once we reach the limit of our patience, we don't really pay attention to how old is the latest HP/Vaio/Dell/whatever...
btw, rijno, that's a good one! lol
still, realizing that, it seems to me that Apple is enjoying the power of keeping things a secret and letting the market hold its breath til it's blue. Steve Jobs' "not to worry" bit rattles me a bit as being ungrateful and uncaring for loyal Mac fans.
poor us, we're just so hooked that we really have nowhere to go even after such a treatment....
funny how we keep track of how long has the latest MBP (or MBA or iPod or iMac etc) been out and unwilling to fish out the dough for year-old machines, but once we reach the limit of our patience, we don't really pay attention to how old is the latest HP/Vaio/Dell/whatever...
btw, rijno, that's a good one! lol
I'll still betting the Mac Pro will come before the MacBook Pro. It's LONG overdue.
Bold Predictions
Based on what I have seen and heard in the media including Steve's in houses keynote compounded with the long time between hardware refreshes for the MacBook Pro and Air, big changes in the hardware offerings may be upon us at WWDC.
Here are my predictions:
1. MacBook Air goes the way of the Dodo bird.
There is now much overlap between the iPad, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro 13". I think the air is a great machine. I would hate to see it go. It has set the standard for what today's unibody Macbook Pro's are today (i.e. Sealed Battery, unibody, black keyboard design, etc). However having 3-4 products that somewhat overlap does not make much business sense.
2. MacBook Pro goes thinner and lighter
Based on my prediction the MBA gets discontinued I see Apple making the MBP line thinner and lighter across the board maybe with the exception of the high end 15" models and the 17" models meant as desktop replacements. I see the 13" and 15" loosing the optical drives altogether. Based on what we have seen in the MBA and iPad and the plummeting price of solid state storage, I would not be surprised to find 1.8" ipod classic style drives installed on these machines while being fronted with somewhere between 16 and 64 gb of flash.
3. All Macs go multitouch.
Whether it makes real sense or not... every mac in the lineup will go multitouch in a somewhat similar fashion to iPad/Pod/Phone (i.e. pinch to zoom/scale etc) Today if you have a unibody MBP or imac with magic mouse you have some multitouch capability. I expect sometime this year to see additional multitouch gestures being enabled on the tracpad/magic mouse.
4. Beginning of integration between iPhone OS and MacOS
Do not be surprised to see iApps being able to be run in OSX in a Dashboard like environment in the near future. The iPad is going to start blurring the lines between portable appliances and traditional computing solutions. I expect to see something this year that at least hints of this happening in future project launches this year.
Just my two cents... If any one of these predictions come true it will certainly be worthy of a keynote, which tells me not to expect any Mac based update until WWDC.
Based on what I have seen and heard in the media including Steve's in houses keynote compounded with the long time between hardware refreshes for the MacBook Pro and Air, big changes in the hardware offerings may be upon us at WWDC.
Here are my predictions:
1. MacBook Air goes the way of the Dodo bird.
There is now much overlap between the iPad, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro 13". I think the air is a great machine. I would hate to see it go. It has set the standard for what today's unibody Macbook Pro's are today (i.e. Sealed Battery, unibody, black keyboard design, etc). However having 3-4 products that somewhat overlap does not make much business sense.
2. MacBook Pro goes thinner and lighter
Based on my prediction the MBA gets discontinued I see Apple making the MBP line thinner and lighter across the board maybe with the exception of the high end 15" models and the 17" models meant as desktop replacements. I see the 13" and 15" loosing the optical drives altogether. Based on what we have seen in the MBA and iPad and the plummeting price of solid state storage, I would not be surprised to find 1.8" ipod classic style drives installed on these machines while being fronted with somewhere between 16 and 64 gb of flash.
3. All Macs go multitouch.
Whether it makes real sense or not... every mac in the lineup will go multitouch in a somewhat similar fashion to iPad/Pod/Phone (i.e. pinch to zoom/scale etc) Today if you have a unibody MBP or imac with magic mouse you have some multitouch capability. I expect sometime this year to see additional multitouch gestures being enabled on the tracpad/magic mouse.
4. Beginning of integration between iPhone OS and MacOS
Do not be surprised to see iApps being able to be run in OSX in a Dashboard like environment in the near future. The iPad is going to start blurring the lines between portable appliances and traditional computing solutions. I expect to see something this year that at least hints of this happening in future project launches this year.
Just my two cents... If any one of these predictions come true it will certainly be worthy of a keynote, which tells me not to expect any Mac based update until WWDC.
No way. The MBA targets a very specific market and is a high-margin product. The two are quite dissimilar.
Agreed about the specific market but i am not sure about the high margin. I cant imagine the 1 off mother board/cpu/soldered dram combo is inexpensive to produce with current leading edge components.
I am hoping RocStarr is correct about the MBP (at least the 13") being lighter.
I don't care so much about thickness, but 4.5lbs is a bit much for a 13" that's supposed to be sleek, right?
The problem is, how much weight can they chop off before -1- they hurt the battery life or -2- it makes the product so much like the MBA that you'd be a fool for buying the MBA? Realistically, making a significantly lighter version of the 13" MBP, especially without the optical drive, will most likely not be done *if* Apple plans to continue selling the MBA.
I disagree about the small SSDs, though, as people (for reasons G-d only knows) suddenly have some necessity for 500GB hard drives on their laptops. What on earth they're storing on there is anyone's guess, but the moment they see 64GB, they'd freak out.
I don't care so much about thickness, but 4.5lbs is a bit much for a 13" that's supposed to be sleek, right?
The problem is, how much weight can they chop off before -1- they hurt the battery life or -2- it makes the product so much like the MBA that you'd be a fool for buying the MBA? Realistically, making a significantly lighter version of the 13" MBP, especially without the optical drive, will most likely not be done *if* Apple plans to continue selling the MBA.
I disagree about the small SSDs, though, as people (for reasons G-d only knows) suddenly have some necessity for 500GB hard drives on their laptops. What on earth they're storing on there is anyone's guess, but the moment they see 64GB, they'd freak out.
But the Air is underpowered for a laptop. It is really the gimped up netbook of the group. All it's really been good for are the same things the ipad does.
Drop the Air and lighten up the other laptops and you back at least some of the portability of the Air. Get SSD to a decent price and you get back a little more. They probably won't drop the optical drives so you can't get the flat but downloads and flash cards aren't there yet so we stay fat a little longer.
What I would go for is to bring back the blank PCI slot they had in the previous laptops. Even as an option perhaps. I sometimes have need for a SD reader but I very often would use an esata card if I could. So I am stuck with the last gen laptop
It's underpowered because it has to be. There's a direct relationship between frequency and heat. The reason the MBA uses so many seemingly inferior parts is that it's making the tradeoff between performance and heat/size.
You can't just make the MBP magically smaller. It's pretty darn thin as laptops go right now. To shrink its size means using parts that are either more expensive or inferior in performance -- and sometimes both. That's why it's not a very viable strategy. There are a lot of people willing to put up with 2x the weight to keep the performance/price point where it is. The MBA market is a high-end niche market, by contrast.
As for the SSD, Apple doesn't have much control over pricing here. That's all third party produced. They have come down quite a bit in price, but they're still nowhere within spitting range of spindles with capacity 2x the size. That's why I think it doesn't play. The SSD is a good choice for the savvy user, but again, for the price/performance point, it won't be the choice of most today. As an aside, Apple's choice of SSD is pretty weak, so any intelligent user buying a MBP today who wants an SSD goes for a third party (either the Intel, or one of the OCZ/Crucial/whatevers that are faster albeit less battle tested).
Actually, I believe Apple used the word "magical" to descbribe what they did to make it smaller:
They just call it the iPad now.