Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Yet they specify 60Hz there, so clearly they consider the refresh rate important for users to know. So why would they not mention the max combination if you want all your external displays running at 120Hz (if that were possible)? Makes no sense, especially when the target market here is pro users.
Most pro screens are 60 Hz, 120 and above are gaming monitors. The only screen Apple care about is their own 6K display which they say you can use two of them plus a TV or three of them plus a TV.
 
God these new pros look awful from this angle. And sd card but no usb-a.. meh. Given the pricing it looks like Apple went all out for the graphics community while forgetting about the IT and scientific sector. There is a huge capability gap between the only 16 gb ram, only one display Air and these powerhouse pros.

I am not really sure why they would build a "Pro" laptop with USB-A in it. Maybe they could make a non-Pro with USB-A, but the Air is too thin. Plus to add its to the Pro would be further splitting the high throughput busses to even more
ports, thereby slowing them down even further. That would be a bad move if you are targeting creative professionals.

Also, I have run Adobe Premiere on a new M1 MacBook Air editing 4K video. 16GB or RAM did just fine for that task. Mac's are not gaming machines. Since I can do entry level Pro workflows on a MacBook Air, I feel like it isn't really hindered in any way for someone who isn't using it for professional purposes. In fact it is likely a LOT more of a machine than the average home user needs and fits nicely with power users. Professionals finally now have their computer too!
 
  • Like
Reactions: smirking
Most pro screens are 60 Hz, 120 and above are gaming monitors. The only screen Apple care about is their own 6K display which they say you can use two of them plus a TV or three of them plus a TV.

They also mention 4K, not just 6K. And you'd think that game designers would want to test their games on 120Hz 4k displays and would thus want to know whether that is supported.

Maybe my logic doesn't match Apple's, though. To me, a tech spec sheet should be exhaustive regarding things like this, not selective, leaving users having to guess.
 
Yuck. That's confirmed? What an awful way to waste a TB4 port. The convenience is nice, but if I have a machine with this much horsepower, I want to use all of it.
UHS-II isn't all that fast to begin with. Just plug your camera right in or use a USB reader until you are ready to transition to CF Express A or B (depending on your camera brand.)
 
  • Like
Reactions: smirking
If it could drive ANY combination of external displays at 120Hz, they'd mention it. The fact that "120Hz" appears nowhere in the video support tech specs is to me a clear indication that it's not supported for external displays.
Why would they mention it, they don't in any other Mac spec sheet. They tell you the maximum which is almost always their own 6k screen and how many of them you can drive on a machine.

As Ruke mentioned, Apple focuses on promoting their own product line, not listing every possible configuration. As an example....


If the M1 MB Air can do 120hz, I am pretty sure the M1 Pro/Max will be able to ;)
 
Any application that needs TFLOPs of performance (video editing, rendering, etc.) will benefit from all the cores you can throw at it (provided the application is optimized to take advantage of them).

So I guess we could say that if you're not the kind of person who's buying eGPUs and don't need extra displays, you have little use for those GPU cores? I'm a back-end developer and photographer on the side. I don't think I need 32 GPU cores to process 24MP RAW files.
 
  • Like
Reactions: amartinez1660
wifi 6 is present, wifi 6e is missing. Then again there are barely any wifi 6e products out there right now and I highly doubt most people even care or know about it.
Point is - Wifi 6e devices will soon become more prevalent.
 
It’s due to bandwidth. Would you people rather have more tb4 ports or a faster hdmi? I like the trade off. You don’t have unlimited pcie lanes, so you have to choose. You didn’t have to get hdmi but they decided to add it. Always complainers it’s 100% due to I/o limits and making sure the tb ports can have full bandwidth.
 
So I guess we could say that if you're not the kind of person who's buying eGPUs and don't need extra displays, you have little use for those GPU cores? I'm a back-end developer and photographer on the side. I don't think I need 32 GPU cores to process 24MP RAW files.
Lightroom and Capture One use the GPU cores to speed up many operations. The M1 (vanilla) introduced a lot of performance improvements to both these apps on my 24 and 45 MB RAW files. You should expect to see improved performance when masking, applying adjustments, and even zooming in on files. How much the 32 core will give you over the 16 and 8 core will need to wait for benchmarks.

As for backend dev... sadly we can't run docker images on GPU cores so it is disappointing to say the least that we only get a 10 core CPU.
 
  • Like
Reactions: smirking
I would've preferred a fourth TB4 port. The SD slot is a nice addition.

Between having a hub for a single connection to all my stuff and Airplay I never use HDMI any more.
 
As Ruke mentioned, Apple focuses on promoting their own product line, not listing every possible configuration. As an example....


If the M1 MB Air can do 120hz, I am pretty sure the M1 Pro/Max will be able to ;)

That's just so bizarre to me. I mean, if this is for marketing purposes, then they ought mention their displays by name on the tech spec sheet there with a link to the product page. To me, a tech spec sheet should be simply an objective listing of the capabilities of the machine, not biased. Anyway, Apple doesn't make 4K displays, so I don't see how mentioning how many 4k displays could be run at 120Hz would hurt them. If 120Hz is important to someone, they're not going to be purchasing the Pro Display XDR anyway 🤷‍♂️

I see your link and think your reasoning is sound. I guess this is just an instance of backwards Apple "logic" to leave this out of the tech specs.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Arsenikdote


Apple in 2016 removed all of the ports from its MacBook Pro models except for Thunderbolt ports, a design that persisted for years -- until today. The newly announced 2021 MacBook Pro models include an SD card slot and an HDMI port alongside three Thunderbolt ports.

2021-MBP-Profile-Feature-Yellow.jpg

As noted in Apple's technical specifications for the new machine, the HDMI port is unfortunately not top of the line -- it is an HDMI 2.0 port instead of an HDMI 2.1 port.

The HDMI 2.0 port supports a single 4K display with a resolution of up to 60Hz. HDMI 2.1 technology would have allowed the port to run a 4K display with a 120Hz refresh rate.

It's curious that Apple did not include HDMI 2.1 in the MacBook Pro models because the Apple TV 4K that was released earlier this year does have an HDMI 2.1 port.


With the Thunderbolt 4 ports, the M1 Pro MacBook Pro models overall support up to two external displays with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz. The M1 Max MacBook Pro models support up to three external displays with up to 6K resolution and one external display with up to 4K resolution at 60Hz.

Article Link: New MacBook Pro Models Include HDMI 2.0 Port Instead of HDMI 2.1
No this really isn’t curious.. Makes total sense to anyone with a moderate understanding of the spec + hardware and I’d wager the vast majority of these “come on Apple this is Pro” commenters don’t even own a TV, projector, or monitor that’s actually capable of natively displaying 120hz content.. BUT surely a portion THINK their thing can cause 240hz or somethin was printed on the box of the projector or whatever they purchased😂🤦🏻‍♂️
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: colourfastt
I've used a dongle to get the ports I need. It was less than $30 at Amazon and includes: HDMI, 3xUSB 3.0, and Ethernet. We have taken a step backward though having the the SD card reader built-in is great for additional storage.
 
I figure most people with higher-end monitors have been using DisplayPort for a long time anyway?

Like the SD card slot, I see the HDMI port as a "built-in dongle". It's there to serve a specific common usage: interfacing with HDMI gear such as projectors.
That's exactly it. That's all I need it for. I don't know anyone with high end graphical workstation monitors who use HDMI and more importantly, the exactly 2 monitors I've worked with that actually support HDMI 2.1 at this point, also supported usb-c. So it's not like there's all these displays out there you can't connect to without HDMI 2.1 and probably won't be many, if any, for years to come.

I would like to hear the case for a computing pro out there as to why they would need a built in hdmi 2.1 port, specifically, how is that going to cramp your work exactly? What monitors are you using that require that interface that won't let you use usb-c?
 
So I guess we could say that if you're not the kind of person who's buying eGPUs and don't need extra displays, you have little use for those GPU cores? I'm a back-end developer and photographer on the side. I don't think I need 32 GPU cores to process 24MP RAW files.
Most jobs that use GPUs are highly parallel processing friendly and will easily scale to that many cores. Well-written software that uses the GPU will encounter a massive performance boost.
 
  • Like
Reactions: ruka.snow
Ha! If next year MBP14/16 feature only M2 Pro/Max updates, then no one will be willing to buy; if it includes HDMI 2.1, and Face ID, that will be much more attracting.

I don’t ever want FaceID on a laptop. Using it on the iPad Pro is a pain. I am constantly puling the entire tablet towards my face when using it on my lap.
 
  • Like
Reactions: DronesOn
I don't get why you would bring back things that have been gone for years. Everyone has adapted to life without these and it is fine, people will always complain but to me, I would gladly give up MagSafe/HDMI/SD for more USB-C.

Next apple will bring back the Newton
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.