Nvidia's Studio Laptop Lineup Aims to Compete With 15-Inch MacBook Pro

[v0lume4]

Except it runs windows.

There's always this one comment.

For most users macOS and Windows are going to provide the exact same functionality these days. There's nothing wrong with you having a preference, however Windows AND macOS are both going to give you a good user experience.

 

[cggobbler]

I’d say there’s no competition. MacBooks nowadays are surpassed by every manufacturer when it comes to reliability, performance and usability ( their keyboards work)

Hmm please take a look at 'every manufacturer' ultrabooks or laptop forum. I can say that Apple has been the most reliable manufacturer in terms of QC and aftersales service. X1 Carbon has multiple QC issues that are as unacceptable as the earlier iterations of butterfly keyboards. Dell XPS has suffered a lot of thermal and build quality issues. Albeit their unpredictable QC, their customer service are not even on par with Apple's, which gave their users free repair service for their keyboards for futureproofing.

And I'd like to ask why Pixar and other high-end media companies are still using Mac as their main workstation. Maybe because it just works.

 

[d5aqoëp]

There's no market for Nvidia, and I wouldn't say its their incompetence. They don't become industry leaders because of incompetence.

The only computer that can take a video card is the ancient Mac Pro, why spend big bucks on a drivers for a platform that cannot (and will not) use their GPUs.

Have you forgotten people like me who use thunderbolt GPU enclosures to boost their MBPs?

 

[yAak]

Except it runs windows.
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I’d take OSX over windows any day.

Haha, yep. What's crazy is this used to be the total flip-flop for me. I used to be on Windows, and wanted a MacBook for the hardware, except it ran OSX.

Now I want nothing to do with Windows, and wish I could run macOS on nicer hardware.

 

[Janichsan]

There are many more but I will just add one.

Trackpad

Okay, yes, Apple's trackpads are really excellent. I'll give you that.

If a laptop is being purchased for an office environment , does battery life have a high priority of importance? Most people, from my observations of working in several companies with ONLY laptops, always have their laptop powered.

Not everyone uses their laptops just in an office. If you really need your laptop to work on the move, a good battery life is indispensable. I don't know how it's like in Canada, but here in Europe power outlets in trains and on airports are an rare enough commodity that you can't rely on hoping to find a free one when your battery goes flat, and the outlets in planes usually only deliver enough juice to charge a phone or tablet.

 

[Stella]

Not everyone uses their laptops just in an office. If you really need your laptop to work on the move, a good battery life is indispensable. I don't know how it's like in Canada, but here in Europe power outlets in trains and on airports are an rare enough commodity that you can't rely on hoping to find a free one when your battery goes flat, and the outlets in planes usually only deliver enough juice to charge a phone or tablet.

Yes, that's why I started with *IF* ( So, disregard, if you need long battery life ) .

If a laptop is being purchased for an office environment , does battery life have a high priority of importance? Most people, from my observations of working in several companies with ONLY laptops, always have their laptop powered.

Long distance trains in Canada have power outlets, and more buses are getting power outlets where I live. If you are going to be away from a power outlet for hours, then yes, of course, you'll need decent battery life.

In the context of this Nvidia initiative, I would suspect these laptops would be used in an office environment, or close to a power supply. If someone is going to require heavy use of that GPU, that laptop battery won't be lasting long anyway - the GPU will suck the battery dry quickly. If you don't need a more powerful GPU, then would you need one of these machines? That is pretty much my line of thought.

 

[BryanJ]

If it has an RTX graphics card there is no competition with apple. These laptops would be easily beat apple laptops

 

[09872738]

Apple hasn't missed any boat. The operating systems supply compute SDKs. It's the apps that are supposed to take advantage of that and some already do on both platforms.

Of course they do.
The compute SDK is worth exactly nought, since CUDA is the de-facto standard in both ML research and real world applications, which usually run in the cloud (Good luck finding anything but CUDA there). Both these applications use CUDA via Tensorflow, Keras or whatever. What those all have in common: they do not run on the compute SDK or AMD GPUs (apart from ROCm maybe, but again zero market significance).

In ML or AI in general, Apple has close to zero market share with no sign whatsoever that this will change anytime soon. Keeping nVidia out they shoot themselves (and a not so tiny fraction of potential customers which are about to become ex-customers) in the foot.

 

[willpost]

How many users are going to require or benefit from anything beyond what the latest Mac Book Pro model is offering? - 32 GB RAM Vega 20 up to 4 TB SSD and the processor are equaling a top of the line machine. (Who will benefit from another pc brand and how will it benefit them?) The keyboard issue is, IMO, not going to be an issue as it has been re-engineered. My gut instinct which is where my dollars are, say it will not be a problem. The cost however . . . In a perfect world, a 17" screen would be my choice. The 9th generation processor with high load heat throttling in the previous model issue are no longer an issue and the current model breaks the processing speed by something like four times a six core processor. Are these just advertising specs that don't pan out in real use? Not from the benchmark tests.

 

[Stella]

If it has an RTX graphics card there is no competition with apple. These laptops would be easily beat apple laptops

Sadly, Nvidia's last gen. 10x range of mobile GPUs would also handily outperform Apple's laptop GPUs...

 

[09872738]

How many users are going to require or benefit from anything beyond what the latest Mac Book Pro model is offering?

The vast majority of potential customers? Video/media creators, scientists, engineers... doing renderings, scientific / engineering applications all depend on powerful hardware, in the light of GPGPU computing the GPU becoming more and more important.

Apple asking close to 500 currency units as an UPGRADE for a lower mid tier GPU (that should be standard at that price in the first place) is so laughable, its just off the scale how comical that actually is.

 

[mikethemartian]

Except it runs windows.
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I’d take OSX over windows any day.

I greatly prefer OSX over Windows but it doesn’t justify the hardware limitations of Macs vs PCs unless someone specifically needs to use software only available on the Mac.
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Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Except for usability which is god ****ing atrocious on Win 10. Even died in the wool Windows users hate it.

I greatly prefer OSX but what exact Windows usability issues are you referring to? I still have to use Windows for work and I really don’t currently come across many issues on a daily basis. In older versions I always had the issue with Windows not being able to shutdown non responding programs but I don’t really have that problem with Windows 10.

 

[mrongey]

I want to use windows about as much as I want to stab myself in the eye with a rusty nail, but at this point Apple is almost forcing me to go back.

 

[mikethemartian]

Question for fellow Creatives: When or where are you using laptops capable of graphics tasks normally reserved for desktops?

I'm nearing retirement after 30+ years in commercial arts and used a laptop very seldomly—and never for design tasks. It was an early 17 in. MBP. Veterans like me spent decades advocating for bigger and bigger desktop displays. The thought of working with a 15 in. screen makes me cringe.

I can’t speak for graphics artists but running engineering/physics simulations often require high gpu processing performance. For my purposes I don’t need beautiful graphics on the screen itself but the gpu processing power makes a great difference in how fast you can run a simulation that can take days to run.
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It's not OS10. It's macOS 10. It WAS "OS X" (with X = 10). If you're going to make statement, at least get the name right.

I actually avoid calling it macOS and still prefer calling it OSX because the new name just sounds diminutive and indicative of the direction that the Mac line is going.
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How many users are going to require or benefit from anything beyond what the latest Mac Book Pro model is offering? - 32 GB RAM Vega 20 up to 4 TB SSD and the processor are equaling a top of the line machine. (Who will benefit from another pc brand and how will it benefit them?) The keyboard issue is, IMO, not going to be an issue as it has been re-engineered. My gut instinct which is where my dollars are, say it will not be a problem. The cost however . . . In a perfect world, a 17" screen would be my choice. The 9th generation processor with high load heat throttling in the previous model issue are no longer an issue and the current model breaks the processing speed by something like four times a six core processor. Are these just advertising specs that don't pan out in real use? Not from the benchmark tests.

I was trying to run an engineering simulation using design software called Lumerical last week on a remote session. The meshing stage by itself required more memory than 32GB.

 

[MrBat]

Haha, yep. What's crazy is this used to be the total flip-flop for me. I used to be on Windows, and wanted a MacBook for the hardware, except it ran OSX.

Now I want nothing to do with Windows, and wish I could run macOS on nicer hardware.

Once upon a time, when I wanted a MacBook Pro quality hardware but running Windows.
Nowadays, I'd like to code in macOS but not on these trashy new MacBooks (anything after 2015) plagued with keyboard issues and that disgusting emoji bar. Also, lack of MagSafe and ports. What the hell are you doing Apple?

In any case, wildly ironic.

 

[Sedulous]

Nvidia GPUs outperforms anything that AMD offer. These days there isn’t much difference between windows and OS10, and both are very stable.

I’d like to think that Apple will try to complete, but I doubt they will - the Pro market is such as what Nvidia are targeting, aren’t apple’s primary market anymore.

AMD as of now competes with or surpasses everything Intel and NVIDIA offer.

 

[09872738]

AMD as of now competes with or surpasses everything Intel and NVIDIA offer.

What AMD GPU can seriously compete with an RTX 2080 Ti?
What AMD framework can compete with CUDA?

We'll see what Navi can do, but for now AMD is in no position to keep up with nVdia. Not that I like it, but that's how it actually is

 

[Sedulous]

What AMD GPU can seriously compete with an RTX 2080 Ti?
What AMD framework can compete with CUDA?

We'll see what Navi can do, but for now AMD is in no position to keep up with nVdia. Not that I like it, but that's how it actually is

Not been keeping up with latest news? As far as hardware is concerned, AMD is now beating Intel severely on every front and their new GPU offerings are competitive with anything NVIDIA is offering. CUDA is great but obviously AMD does not offer it.

 

[09872738]

Not been keeping up with latest news? As far as hardware is concerned, AMD is now beating Intel severely on every front and their new GPU offerings are competitive with anything NVIDIA is offering. CUDA is great but obviously AMD does not offer it.

Yes, the 3rd gen Ryzen CPU update seem great and I agree they are very competitive with Intels products. Love to see that.

But in the GPU department, Nvidia is still ahead, in particular in AI applications. Will be interesting to see how the just announced Quadro RTX GPUs perform. Question is not if they outperform Vega 20, though, but rather by how much. Nvidias claims (up to 7x) are pretty optimistic for sure; I would not be surprised to see a 2-3 times margin however.
16 GB mobile GPU ... insane... in a good way

Would love to see a Quadro RTX 5000 in a Macbook, but very very unlikely to see that happening

 

[Sedulous]

Yes, the 3rd gen Ryzen CPU update seem great and I agree they are very competitive with Intels products. Love to see that.

But in the GPU department, Nvidia is still ahead, in particular in AI applications. Will be interesting to see how the just announced Quadro RTX GPUs perform. Question is not if they outperform Vega 20, though, but rather by how much. Nvidias claims (up to 7x) are pretty optimistic for sure. However, I would not be surprised to see a 2-3 times margin.
16 GB mobile GPU ... insane... in a good way

Would love to see a Quadro RTX 5000 in a Macbook, but very very unlikely to see that happening

Agreed, I would also like to see Apple bring NVIDIA back in... options are good (being tied to a single supplier is never good). Apple's hardware design team needs a serious refocus.

 

[Lone Deranger]

And I'd like to ask why Pixar and other high-end media companies are still using Mac as their main workstation. Maybe because it just works.

Source for that claim please.

 

[Stella]

AMD as of now competes with or surpasses everything Intel and NVIDIA offer.

GPUs? Err, No.

AMD can barely match an NVidia 2080. Forget about the 2080Ti.

Nvidia mobile GPUs also outperform anything from AMD.

 

[DeepIn2U]

Funny, I find Windows 10 to be the best version yet. Even my "I want my Word 6.0 on floppies" father likes it.

Win10 Enterprise right?
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If a laptop is being purchased for an office environment , does battery life have a high priority of importance? Most people, from my observations of working in several companies with ONLY laptops, always have their laptop powered.

Most meetings last one hour, most 3 hours, and again, those meeting rooms have power supplies if needed. These people want a laptop for portability, not necessarily to work for 8 hours, on battery alone.

Personally, I'd rather performance at the cost of some battery loss. However, that's me - others have other preferences.

For a large amount of corporations I've worked with public and now private ... yes in the office laptops are docked.

Depending on the employees department and travel itinerary and type of business this drastically affects the notebooks purchase and standardization use case:

Executives ... we already know that: slim, lightest, latest (within 2yrs; everyone else is a 3yr policy) with best battery life. Global corporate executives of public companies tend to travel VERY far and very often minimum 2-5x per month

Top level VP's/Directors ... usually get best performance and battery life: Lenovo T470s/480s/4890s. Barrick ... X1 Carbons across ... sweet jesus (this was before merger of 2018 so I'm sure this is drastically changed).

IT reps tend also to get same level of laptops as VPs since there requirement of power and efficiency and heavy multitasking is really above most users. Coders inclusive. Meetings usually are 1-3hrs per month or quarter yet some are back to back.

interns ... sorry usually get out of warranty laptops and many may not get VPN access so these stay in the office.
HR resps (not management level) usually the same.

For heavy travellers ... the battery usually needs to last from:
Leaving the hotel, in a cab, to the Airport (on WiFi) - in case of missed flight/change in booking etc (roughly 2hrs alone) ... laptop use on a 1-3hr flight ... this last part is usually where the battery can die.

You cannot fathom how many people forget their portable charger in the wrong bag just going home or in their desk at the office.

 

[Wanted797]

There's always this one comment.

For most users macOS and Windows are going to provide the exact same functionality these days. There's nothing wrong with you having a preference, however Windows AND macOS are both going to give you a good user experience.

Yeah I was joking as there’s always a comment saying how much better [insert windows laptop here] is.

 

[subjonas]

Are these VR-ready?