Fair enough. In fact I use a TB port for an HDMI dongle. However one can get HDMI plus other peripherals out of each TB port.
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New MacBook Pros With M2 Pro and M2 Max Chips Now 'Well Into Development'
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Losing the fourth TB kinda bummed me, even though the rest of the system has been stellar.
MagSafe + 4TB without HDMI would've been the best solution in my opinion.
I am really interested in how AMD's current Ryzen 6XXX chips and the upcoming 7XXX (later this year) stack up against the M2. Apple marketing and consumers parrot the idea that Apple Silicon is years ahead of the competition in performance per watt but marketing talk and anecdotal evidence is not valid. We need to see numbers on paper.
I have read some pro-Apple reviews and they say Apple Silicon is 5 years ahead of the competition and x86 is dead. I have read neutral reviews and they say the M2 is ahead in performance per watt but it's not as big as we thought. AMD's recent chips are closer to the M2 in power consumption than people think. I have also read pro-Intel and AMD reviews and they say the M2 isn't ahead at all.
How can we take an objective, comprehensive look at the M2? Is it really ahead of the competition? If yes, how do measure it? We can't use the popular benchmarks either because we get inconclusive data.
I have read some pro-Apple reviews and they say Apple Silicon is 5 years ahead of the competition and x86 is dead. I have read neutral reviews and they say the M2 is ahead in performance per watt but it's not as big as we thought. AMD's recent chips are closer to the M2 in power consumption than people think. I have also read pro-Intel and AMD reviews and they say the M2 isn't ahead at all.
How can we take an objective, comprehensive look at the M2? Is it really ahead of the competition? If yes, how do measure it? We can't use the popular benchmarks either because we get inconclusive data.
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I hope the price on preowned M1 Pro/Max models will go down after. My M1 MBP is really struggling with After Effects, it won't even generate more than a second preview at 1/4 4K resolution if I screen a single smoke effect.
This feels right. But I wonder if they’re worried about the M1 MBPs taking a sales hit as many rank and file purchasers see that the M2 Macbook Air is already out.
Intel was struggling on a 12-month cycle… but was hitting 18 month cycles. Except Apple PR’d it that they were hamstrung by that, impacting their yearly product cycle, even while Apple ignored many of the Tocks to the Ticks, or the 2nd Tock (Intel’s 3rd iteration) altogether, and inexplicably continued to sell old cpus (Mac mini 2014, anyone??).
Soooo… what do we all say if Apple now moves to an 18 month cycle??? Apple can’t be allowed to have it both ways. Esp since Intel has “woken up”… looking forward, it doesn’t look good. And, besides, 18-month cycles make for all kinds of tertiary purchasing “interference wave” problems. It’s just not smart.
The biggest reason I feel Apple MUST keep iterating on a yearly schedule is that a) it is how business and consumer schedules work and b) as we’ve already seen with the Media Engine improvements in the M2 outpacing the M1 Max (h265 and AV1), basic core updates make a market where “pros” are stupid if they buy “last year’s” “Pro” machine because last month’s $1200 entry-level laptop does a faster job…so they don’t… again, they’re not stupid… they wait. They slow purchasing and wait Apple out. Only Apple seems to be stupid enough, and perhaps spiteful enough, to not seem to realize this (ie the Mac Pro in the last decade). It really is inexplicable. A $3T company should never be forcing their “best” customers to buy “last year’s gear” and expecting them to smile about it. Everywhere else this happens, other industries, like automobiles, we laugh at that, as silly. Only Apple seems to get the pass.
Oh, and meanwhile, completely contrary to Apple’s “Apple Silicon success story” PR narrative, both global and US Mac market shares are back below 10%, by every metric. Those are “Apple is a dead company walking” numbers… yet… why isn’t Apple trying harder to make Macs more affordable (which you’d think would be a great “DEI” move) or not make their best customers wait?? Dell, Lenovo, HP, and ASUS are selling machines globally at numbers greater than Apple, so it can’t all be “supply chain”. Sure, Apple isn’t “dead” because they now have iPhone… but if the Mac market share 25 years ago wasn’t enticing enough to developers, with the global PC market declining altogether now where does that leave the Mac/macOS???
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Same. I got the max with 64gb of ram, and it will take a huge performance increase to push me to upgrade. I'm thinking it won't be until m4/m5.
Yup. Guaranteed, M1 MBP sales are being seriously impeded because darn good low end M2 MBA and 13" M2 MBP laptops are on the street, and because Studios are more powerful for less money. However supply constraints of high end M1 MBPs may be such that the sales hit is not really being felt that much. Only Apple knows.
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Mostly I lurk the AnandTech site to get a feel for real comparisons among chips.
After ten months? Seems like a stretch.
(As for the Studio being cheaper: sure, an equivalent configuration is $900 more. But… that buys you a display, a keyboard, a trackpad, and, oh, you can carry the thing around.)
I assure you I'm not a "low-end user".
I don't particularly care about SD cards, but getting HDMI back is a big win for me. MagSafe is a nice cherry on top.
I would wager that the amount of people who were annoyed by needing a dongle for HDMI is outsized by those who truly need four(!!) Thunderbolt ports.
No matter how "higher-end", many just connect a dock or hub and that's it. Having a port on each side is nice, and arguably one of the Air's weaknesses. But three ports is plenty.
AMD was never particularly great on performance per watt, and they also aren't doing so hot (no pun intended) against Alder Lake.
x86 isn't dead, and Apple Silicon is maybe a generation or two ahead of Intel.
It depends on what "ahead" means. You can get Intel CPUs that are faster than the M2. You just can't achieve those speeds in a machine like the MacBook Air.
That means these are M2 based (M2 Pro / M2Max) - and are processor upgrades. I wonder if this was an actual leak to help slow down rumors that consumers are going to get 3nm chips in CY22...
I'd like to see that 3nm 13" Air, or hopefully a 12" variant as soon as possible after the new year with maybe 32GB memory support.
Well I was referring the rumor of mini m2 pro.. and am waiting for Mac mini m2, not the pro.There's already a "mac mini pro". It is called Mac Studio.
Mac Studio
The ultimate pro desktop. Powered by M4 Max and M3 Ultra for all-out performance and extensive connectivity. Built for Apple Intelligence.www.apple.com
It was a design decision, actually, as the M1 Pro and M1 Max have four TB4 controllers and each controller handles one port.
And it was the pros who were bitching for the last five years about Apple moving to four "do anything" TB ports with the 2016 model and dropping all the "do one thing" ports the 2015 model had. And now that the 2021 model has those ports back, the pros have been showering the model with praise and don't much care they lost a TB4 port as a consequence.
But hey, maybe Apple will give us a 5 kilogram and 5cm thick MacBook Pro with an M2 Ultra in it and then we can have five TB ports!
Like everyone else, I m waiting for the 3nm thick SOC M2/M3 before I upgrade my 16” MacBook Pro. May come with an OLED screen too! Many high end Windows notebooks already have OLED screens in them.
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SVE allows for many more loops to be auto-vectorized by the compiler. ULTIMATELY this is probably worth 10..20% performance increase, but it will likely never seem like a big leap because it's a few percentage points added each new compiler release as a slightly different type of loop pattern is made SVE-compliant.
Here are updates as of early 2021 and early 2022 so you get to see a feel for how performance improves a few percent each year, but there's still a lot to do.
New features for LLVM12 for Arm
This blog provides more details about LLVM 12 for Arm and the new features that it provides.
community.arm.com
LLVM 14
This blog post outlines all of the new features and improvements for LLVM 14.
community.arm.com
SVE is not necessarily in tension with AMX; I could see Apple supporting both. SVE has flexibility (which is why I say it helps with auto-vectorization) while AMX has raw throughput for more obvious straight-line numerical code.
Another ARMv9 feature that *may* help performance is the memory movement extensions; we'll have to see if Apple considers those a worthwhile feature (thus given extreme support to work really well) or a dumb feature that's given the minimum support necessary to meet spec. (Extreme support could, for example, move the instruction up to an offload engine that operates in the L2, so that the instruction can copy multiple L2 lines per cycle without even touching L1. Such an engine would also be useful for zero-ing large blocks, which is a surprisingly common workload; as a simple example think of wiping a page after it has been returned to the OS.)
Your experience is with different "pros" I guess. Certainly some user who still uses slower SD cards constantly no doubt likes SD in the MBP, but today those of us who now use faster media find SD a waste of a port. Same with HDMI; it is convenient but much less versatile than having a Multiport Adapter (HDMI, USB-A, USB-C) dongle into Thunderbolt. 4 TB ports is 33% more versatile than 3 TB ports.
MagSafe is nice (who does not likel MagSafe?) but is not the huge value add it was when it first came out. Today's USB-C ports are nowhere near as problematic as the pre-original-MagSafe charging ports were. Not enough that I would intentionally trade away a TB port - - and I should not have to.
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The bulk of them were posting on this website.
Personally, I preferred the four TB ports on my 2017 15.4" MacBook Pro because it gave me maximum flexibility, but then I rarely needed HDMI or SD/CF card or Ethernet and I bought a third-party TB MagSafe adapter to handle power. But because of that, three TB ports on my 2021 14" MacBook Pro are enough, as well. Clearly, others mileage may vary depending on their use case.
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It would be a very stupid choice from a production standpoint.
Waste all that money on tooling for a single year run? Nah. No company would do that. They like making money, not pissing it away.
all these 'pros' have different opinions to what a 'pro' is. I love the discussions, being a 'pro' myself...... although my favourites are those who tell others what is powerful enough for them or what ports they need.For someone who has been in the forums for six years, guess you don't visit them that often because it is in this forum that I have encountered all these "pros" complaining about losing ports and celebrating having them back.
Personally, I preferred the four TB ports on my 2017 15.4" MacBook Pro because it gave me maximum flexibility, but then I rarely needed HDMI or SD/CF card or Ethernet and I bought a third-party TB MagSafe adapter to handle power. But because of that, three TB ports on my 2021 14" MacBook Pro are enough, as well. Clearly, others mileage may vary depending on their use case.
I also prefer the 4 TB ports over what we have now, but am also not really complaining about anything. The current range of laptops from Apple is superb [in my humble pro opinion......].
I will get the 16" M2 and max it out. My 14 is a bit of a compromise currently [screen size and throttling].
A lot of companies do it, and Apple will do it. I will be very surprised if we don't see updates to M2 in October.
If this rumour pans out? Then the upgrade for M2 Pro and Max will be very incremental.
Therefore, your wish for the midnight colour coming across to the Macbook Pro could come true to help sway would be buyers?
Just depends how conservative Apple will be on the Pro lineup?
I have been waiting for a retina 5K iMac replacement for years. The current 24-inch model is a downgrade in terms for design and connectivity. Small desktop + standalone display ain't my cup of tea for use in the office.
Hence why all Apple will do is replace the M1 family SoC and system board with an M2 family SoC and system board. You won't be able to tell them apart unless you go into "About This Mac". That way they leverage everything else for another generation.
I think it's very likely that we'll see Apple engage in more and more of these kinds of shenanigans. The YouTubers did an excellent job explaining why people should upgrade. Apple loved it! Apple will find more ways to get people to upgrade laptops in the future.