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New MacBook Pro Tidbits: SD Card Speeds, Peak Brightness for SDR Content, eGPUs Still Not Supported, and More

Minxy said:
I think it's pretty obvious that Apple's not going to enable this. Perhaps the 2022 desktop computers will be powerful enough for gaming.
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the power is there but most developers will not dedicate the resources to metal development.
 
sdhalpern said:
The lack of eGPU support and the subpar performance for even old and well-developed macOS games are going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

Unless you are a content creator there’s precious little usefulness for the M1 pro/max’s GPU performance. I suppose it’s cool marketing to say your SoC’s GPU rivals the teraflop performance of a PS5. Unfortunately, these Macs can’t even run StarCraft 2 well. SC2 is an old game developed natively for Macs by Blizzard, a company known for making polished and high performing mac compatible games. Gaming remains a glaring problem for the Mac.
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I don’t see this. My 2011 MPB runs SC2 fine, my iMac from 2019 runs it near max settings. I don’t see it being an issue. The problem is more that companies won’t develop a native Metal implementation due to lower market share. It’s going to take time. I’m pretty disappointed the new Diablo remaster won’t support macs at all.
 
aevan said:
On iPadOS and iOS this is not true, and I believe it’s not true on macOS. The HDR can kick in on on a segment of the screen - unlike on TVs (and I think Windows, too) where the entire screen just lights up. If I open a HDR photo or video in a part of the screen on my iPad - it will be super-bright - while the rest of the screen will be SDR.

I expect it will be the same on the new MBPs.
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It's true right now on macOS for my 2018 MBP and external HDR monitor. The only way to watch HDR content is to manually enable it in System Preferences, which immediately washes out the desktop, and then manually turn it off again when I'm done watching my HDR video.

Maybe Monterey will work differently with these new Macs? I haven't read anything either way.
 
The other article was updated with "Update: Apple has since confirmed that the new MacBook Pro displays indeed have a peak brightness of 500 nits for SDR content."

Where did Apple say that?
 
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I wonder if eGPUs would work on Linux? Can be that they technically can connect, but there are no ARM drivers for Radeon or GeForce on the Macintosh OS. But perhaps an ARM build of the drivers exist for another OS?
 
xxray said:
The 500 peak nits brightness for SDR content is a bummer. Also, Apple might not have shared any FaceID plans for the future, but you can’t tell me that notch isn’t the perfect placeholder for FaceID to come in future iterations of the MBP.
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Yeah, majorly. :( They could have at least raised it to 600 to match the iPad Pro. I regularly use both a 16” x86 MBP and the miniLED iPad Pro and the 100 nits of extra brightness is much more noticeable than you’d think.
 
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Should HDR kick in when viewing HDR YouTube videos or dose it have to be a certain HDR content?

Also if HDR does turn on for HDR youtube can't we just open a HDR YouTube video in the corner of the screen, that way the screen will be brighter for everything else?
 
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Minxy said:
I think it's pretty obvious that Apple's not going to enable this. Perhaps the 2022 desktop computers will be powerful enough for gaming.
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Well, powerful enough for 2012 gaming; at least. No use asking for the moon.
 
aevan said:
The difference will most likely be small. You’re getting incredible performance in 14” form factor, comparable to a bigger MBP for the first time - that’s amazing. Of course the bigger chassis of a 16” will allow slightly higher performance due to thermals, but this difference will almost certainly be very small.

Let’s be honest, 90% of people here buying an M1 Max are enthusiasts that don’t need half of that performance and would be perfectly fine with a regular M1 or M1 Pro. It’s the same people who claim 64Gb RAM is needed for editing home photos in Photoshop.

Of course, people will jump on benchmarks as soon as they get new machines and we’ll see two results: incredible performance on 14“ and incredible performance +2% on 16”. Of course, the 14” people will be crushed and disappointed with these results and yell how Apple lied and how this wouldn’t happen with Steve and all that. Also something, something the notch.

This is not messed up. It does not totally suck for anyone who ordered a 14” Max. You’re getting 99% performance of the 16” in a smaller chassis. In fact, you’re getting performance that matches or surpasses the biggest, loudest PC laptops when running plugged in, and you’re getting it in this tiny laptop, on battery power. Of course, leave it to these forums to find ways to be disappointed by that.
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It’s not the slightly slower speeds that are messed up, it’s that the only available material at the time orders opened claimed the two sizes had “exactly the same” chips and cooling solutions. It’s a bit of a bait and switch, and since you can’t swap your order around without incurring potentially months of delays, that does suck for anyone who went with the smaller size explicitly for the “same” performance. It won’t matter in the real world for 99% of users, but it still does suck and is kinda messed up. Also, it’s not just that the 14” throttles a little sooner or more, as we might have expected, there’s an entire “high power mode” that wasn’t disclosed until orders had been live for three days. It’s not going to be 2% different in high power mode, that’s within margin of error. More likely it’s 10% faster.
 
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aevan said:
In fact, you’re getting performance that matches or surpasses the biggest, loudest PC laptops when running plugged in, and you’re getting it in this tiny laptop, on battery power. Of course, leave it to these forums to find ways to be disappointed by that.
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If it's that good, why's it no making any noise? 🤔
 
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David1986H said:
Should HDR kick in when viewing HDR YouTube videos or dose it have to be a certain HDR content?

Also if HDR does turn on for HDR youtube can't we just open a HDR YouTube video in the corner of the screen, that way the screen will be brighter for everything else?
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It would just be the corner.

But perhaps if you live stream your desktop in HDR and then watch yourself working… :rolleyes:
 
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sdhalpern said:
The lack of eGPU support and the subpar performance for even old and well-developed macOS games are going to be a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

Unless you are a content creator there’s precious little usefulness for the M1 pro/max’s GPU performance. I suppose it’s cool marketing to say your SoC’s GPU rivals the teraflop performance of a PS5. Unfortunately, these Macs can’t even run StarCraft 2 well. SC2 is an old game developed natively for Macs by Blizzard, a company known for making polished and high performing mac compatible games. Gaming remains a glaring problem for the Mac.
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This is probably an unpopular opinion, but Macs are not built to be gaming machines. They're for productivity. If you want to game buy a gaming laptop, PS5, XSX or build a PC.
 
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aottke said:
If I understand correctly, the unified memory in Apple Silicon is shared and used both as "regular" RAM and also as "VRAM." Is this correct? And if so, would people want to actually consider upgrading to higher memory levels in Apple Silicon computers compared to what they're used to?
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What people want is: the most expensive laptop/PC/iPhone/iPad that they can afford. Anything else is crazy talk.
 
xxray said:
The 500 peak nits brightness for SDR content is a bummer. Also, Apple might not have shared any FaceID plans for the future, but you can’t tell me that notch isn’t the perfect placeholder for FaceID to come in future iterations of the MBP.
Click to expand...
It's been speculated that they had every intention of adding Face ID, but the pandemic and supply chain issues prevented them from doing so. Seems plausible to me.
 
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baryon said:
Do you really think the GPU built into the M1 simply outperforms any GPU in existence? It will perform well for a laptop but the whole point of eGPUs was supposed to be to give desktop class performance to laptops. That never really happened because Macs never really supported eGPUs (except a very limited number of them for a very limited time and only with external displays).
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I previously had the i7 Mac mini with an 8 gb Radeon 5700 XT as an eGPU. It performed okay. It was big, sometimes noisy and a power hog. My M1 mini, on the other hand, outperforms that setup, is completely silent and cost me significantly less. IMO, the purpose of the eGPU option was to make up for the lackluster performance of the onboard Intel graphics in most of the Macs. The previous "pro" mini would have been unusable without one. My current M1 mini, on the other hand, crunches long stretches of 4k video just fine. And I have no problem working with complex models in Blender. If my current mini performs like that, I can only imagine how the Max performs.
 
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I need more clarification on the brightness for non-HDR content. I like working outside at home when I can and my old 2015 MBP simply isn't bright enough to do so consistently. 500 nits of normal brightness probably won't do it either and my iPhone 13 is far more usable in daylight than my older phones, so I'm hoping the ambient light sensor will crank things up to at least 600 when needed.
 
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