I will never buy a laptop that makes it difficult to run Windows apps. The transition to Intel gained Apple a lot of credibility because of improved compatibility and performance. The transition to ARM, if it happens, will be just the opposite for both. While I do not doubt it will happen, it will be a mistake and will force even more people to PCs.
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Pegatron Tipped to Manufacture Upcoming 'ARM-Based MacBook'
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One of those rare instances in which, as with the HomePod, there’s a rumor for a product that I couldn’t care less about but still find interesting.
Apple is like that one friend you often disagree with but still like the wacky rationals they make for their opinions.
I’m not worried at all.
Apple is like that one friend you often disagree with but still like the wacky rationals they make for their opinions.
I’m not worried at all.
Ok here’s the rest of my Mac ARM timeline:
- March 2019: ARM MacBook & ARM Mac mini. MacBook redesign I’ve talked of above. Mac mini will be super tiny.
- June 2019: redesigned iMac. Super thin. Features Face ID and Apple GPU. iMac Pro remains on Xeon for the moment as does the MacBook Pro.
- Fall 2019/winter 2020. Mac Pro. Shock reveal that its fully ARM - no x86 anywhere. And it’s incredibly fast. Uses ARM GPU with eGPU able to be plugged in. Apple announces that this is the foundation for the next decade of the Mac Pro.
- June 2020: MacBook Pro and iMac Pro fully transition to ARM. Both are redesigned and take their cues from the Mac Pro regarding innards. ‘Finally!’ is the general reaction from Pros. Previous Intel models are kept on sale for 2-3 years. Windows runs ok on Qualcomm ARM by now, anyway.
That is why I am hoping for a new and inexpensive mini as a temporary machine to use.
I don't want to carry a MBP, dongles, a Windows PC, an iPhone and an iPad all the time.
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So if those bad guys discover a way to ruin ARM based CPU, all Apple products are screwed?
No...It's about not being beholden and linked to Intel's roadmap that's stuck-in-the-mud with incremental annual improvements. Apple has an opportunity to break free from that, whether it's via ARM or full-custom in-house developed processors.
There's plenty of margin in current Intel-based laptops to hit Apple's reasonable 38% GPM.
Apple seem to be in an experiment of how much can they cut back in their product line and still be a company that makes stuff. Seems like a suicidal experiment to me. ARM computers is a terrible idea for those of use who use computers for work (research, multimedia, compatibilbity, IT etc.). So it will probably happen. The cutting of proffesional compromises will bite apple in the but, when they have nobody to lean on to save their company when more inovative companies beat them to the next must have widget.
It was the professional market that kept Apple on life support in the 90s. Who will keep Apple on life support in the future, a future that has no messiah to rescue the company either.
It was the professional market that kept Apple on life support in the 90s. Who will keep Apple on life support in the future, a future that has no messiah to rescue the company either.
Is Pegatron one of the good Transformers again?
“Pegatron is the robot who never gets updated yet never drops in value to reflect such” - M.Bay.
So it’s a bad Transformer then?
“Depends on your definition of bad. Personally, I’ve found there’s an audience out there who will always blindly pay over the coals just to have a flashy name to show their friends despite the cost. So for them it’s good!”
Thanks Michael for coming in to the studio.
“Pegatron is the robot who never gets updated yet never drops in value to reflect such” - M.Bay.
So it’s a bad Transformer then?
“Depends on your definition of bad. Personally, I’ve found there’s an audience out there who will always blindly pay over the coals just to have a flashy name to show their friends despite the cost. So for them it’s good!”
Thanks Michael for coming in to the studio.
Plus they have one tiny fan so unless you can do with a non hyperthreaded i5 the i7 not only throttles but the fan is very audible when doing any sort of work except moving around the OS.
Lets be fair the RX line is mid range and at the end of the day you cant get away from the fact its a 5k display 14mp. If you do anything that is render intensive even photo editing PS/lightroom every time you make an adjustment or want to move around the image the machine is trying to refresh at 60FPS at 14mp.... LAGGY AS HELL!
Nothing runs smooth on it at all because of that resolution. You have to decrease previews by half to get a smooth experience so whats the point in having all the pixels?
Thats our only option currently, there are no headless macs. Unless you buy it and add a second lower res screen and set it to the primary. If your happy about that going in... It should be perfect out of the box.
Unless you want to pay the same for a much slower and older mac pro with no display. Then there is the iMac Pro which is overkill with it being a 9-5 machine why is it a xeon... it wont be on 24/7 rendering they just arent the right tool for that. Most will encode and guess what the xeon doesn't support quick sync. Its double the price and has the same issues even with vega. The 56 is laggy the 64 is the only card that gives an ok experience atm and its a £600 upgrade!!! Thats how much they are on their own not including the £500 vega 56 thats included in the base price!
Same with all upgrades its absolute BS that they offer the upgrades at cost on their own on top of what is already specced to the machine.
Its just unreal...
You can add external TB3 GPUs but what people forget is you need to buy a £400 enclosure on top of your inflated card! There is no out of the box nvidia support so if you want cuda its the wrong platform... Its like a premise "you can buy GPUs down the line, but dont expect us to give official support" Who knows that GPUs apple will support they are all low to mid range so if thats all you need its an expensive way to get a little more performance.
You could buy a Vega 56 for £500 or a 64 for £600 and your total is £1000 with the external GPU and you get about 90% of its performance through TB3... its beyond a joke.
Spinning drives on the 21"... and £180 on top for a 256gb ssd.. When high sierra is designed to run on SSDs. Fusion hybrid ssd/Spinning hard drives really.... in 2018... with 512gb ssds still costing £180 on top... its a joke. Its a lovely product but its an expensive product that IMO is bang average in performance, not because of the specs because 5k displays are so intensive to run.
8gbs of ram as standard... High sierra uses the majority of that before you get going, yes it can swap with the SSD and for most people they probably wont notice because they are quick. At the end of the day thats not a great solution and its no where near as fast as adequate ram... What happens when you specced the machine with a spinner... The experience is awful, how disappointed would you be? The main thing is you can still replace the ram but for how long? The mac pro removed it... so why wont the standard iMac.
Then there is the CPU options... that throttle because in the huge container that is the 27" it has one fan. The speakers take up more room than the CPU, GPU, Logic board and fan and there is about 50% more room in the chassis completely unused.
So really in 2017 the top tier imac comes with a quad i5, 128gb ssd and a 2tb spinning drive, 8gbs of ram and a RX580 for £2300 im going to remove the 5k display from the equation because to me it ruins the performance... looks a pretty expensive machine. Thats the top end off the shelf option.
The fact they sell the base line 21" that will ultimately give a sh*t experience out of the box and isnt technically compatible as spinning drives arent supported by apples APFS file system. Oh and neither are raid devices as boot drives... mind boggles
So where in this is the 2017 a great product at a great price? Non of the off the shelf iMacs offer a good out of the box experience for anyone who is interested in doing any sort of medium level work even for occasional hard work its a pain to use.
I swapped to dell workstations 3 years ago because apple dont offer anything worth having. The whole mac line is a compromise and expensive. There is nothing that looks good value because nothing is up-gradable. You end up spending more to ensure "future proofing" then in the case of the iMac you hope nothing will fails rendering it useless as the chassis is glued to the display and you cant remove failed components like a spinning hard drive... unless you pay another £350 on apple care.
With a modular machine you add as you need. The fact the mac pro is exactly the same. I loved my 2010 mac pro but it was sidelined 3 years ago because it wasn't fast enough and i upgraded it every way I could. The trash can is exactly that, trash.
So I unfortunately had to buy a dual xeon dell workstation and it minces everything I throw at it. Ive been able to upgrade it over time as and when I need. Its so nice to have an internal storage space for a raid volume it has 4 8tb drives for 36tb or 24TB of raid storage meaning I only need one external server as a back up. With any of apples products you would need another 1 external nas/raid array as a usable drive and another to back up. These are loud, kick off loads of heat and massive... hardly the minimalist desk now is it.
Add an external GPU and a TB3 SSD scratch drive and its even worce!
TBH if the iMac pro is £5k the Mac pro will probably cost similar base and go all the way up to 25k when you have been able to buy dual xeon workstations from pretty much every major vender since 2013.
The worst bit is that for most people if you use another platform then your more likely to switch your other daily drivers too... The mac built on the popularity of the pros and they would recommend to people then the event of the iPod which pulled more people in then finally the iPad and iPhone until it became what it is today.
Apple dont seem to realize the whirlwind effect that lowering mac sales/pros switching will mean to portable sales, there is only so long you can serve BS and people not wake up to the smell.
You cant just raise the price to fill that deficit like they did with the macbook pro... £500 more for a machine with less ports, no SD reader, a sh*t keyboard and a touch bar nobody asked for. If you dont want the touchbar then you have to choose a mac that has a lower watt, lower powered CPU with one fan which also overheats...
The i7 macbook is 90% the speed of the top tier i5 macbook pro 13" apart from ports whats the difference? The macbook/pro line up is also full of compromise and incredibly difficult to make a choice.
The 13" macbook pro used to be a gold standard now its in the haze of loads of great products that are cheaper and do more. The macbook pro is exactly the same as it was at conception in 2006 exactly the same use case! honestly what has changed.. apart from speed bumps. Its actually lost functionality with the amount they have taken away, SD card slots, dvd drive, display ports, USB, magsafe, F keys, functional keyboard. Its the most expensive and the least useful macbook line in its history with ridiculous flaws and non upgradability.
Every macbook and macbook pro comes with 8gbs of ram... thats only just enough now, so the market will be flooded with 8gb machines unless they were build to order. This means they will be far less useful and last far less time! Which in tern means that they will be worth less because they are less useable down the line! The mac was always a good investment and generally lasted longer than the equivalent PC but now with all the components soldier to the board the product obsolescence is much quicker than its ever been.
Ive just given up with them tbh, at the end of the day all apps are cross platform and they offer the same experience. The OS just doesn't matter as much anymore. I use a macbook for my personal use but for work... windows is the only choice that makes sense. I can tailor the hardware to my needs not what apple thinks I need and upgrade as and when, the saving over a 5-6 year period with upgrades and increased productivity... I could probably buy a full spec iMac with because I would need 2 over that period with the same issues.
At the end of the day that cost and serviceability is worth more to me than using mac os. W10 isnt perfect and can be annoying but its far better than it was. The only way I can contribute to Apple making these decisions is to not buy them. There is a lot of great products outside the apple ecosystem and its worth exploring.
Apple has opened itself up to competition and they are doing some awesome things.
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Honestly, I'm a little surprised it hasn't happened sooner but then I think the appeal of running Boot Camp and Virtualization took Apple by surprise. It certainly is/was a big reason for people switch to Mac (although I doubt many of them still use those features much). I think the importance of Apple not being beholden to Intel's development schedule can't be overstated. The situation is worse then the PowerPC stagnation that led to Apple abandoning that platform.
Pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple weren't collaborating with AMD on GPU/chip designs. They seem pretty tight of late and AMD's forays into ARM powered servers were interesting but lacked the marketing clout that Apple could bring to the table. A scaled up ~20W A11X processor with Vega cores could be very compelling.
General consumers and super rich consumers in the world's largest population.
if you think the lack of updates for mini or other computers are related to lack of Intel Cpu, you're wrong! Just like when they continued to sell the airport express with it's outdated specifications for years. You'll eventually see that this won't change a thing.
Considering that’s only 18 months away is ARM ready to compete against 10-18+ core Xeon processors? Maybe the next Apple A chip will be more powerful then the best of the best x86 from Intel. If they are going to move everything over and convince everyone to dump their pro x86 Macs then it’s going to have to be a monster.
to be honest, for myself and a few mac using buddies, the ability to run windows and similar is an absolute requirement and not negotiable. that being said I do not doubt for a moment that Apple would make this move seeing how much of a cut they get from the App Store and putting the Mac fully behind that walled garden would cement those profits.
and lose nearly every windows user and for games the steam players too ...
now if this is simply an education machine, destined for schools only it would be a shot across the bow for many low end manufacturers
and lose nearly every windows user and for games the steam players too ...
now if this is simply an education machine, destined for schools only it would be a shot across the bow for many low end manufacturers
While I totally agree that Apple is losing the professional/creative market, what about the ARM transition would inhibit using your computer for professional work? Aside from losing virtualization (which is a big deal to some) I don't see the downsides. Apple's custom ARM chips compete very well against Intel's chips at the same wattage.
Of course there's Apple's increasing use of non-replaceable parts but that's a separate issue in my mind.
ew
The new Apple norm.
You know what those ratings are based on, right? They are based on MacRumors estimates of how soon each of those models will be replaced by a new one. Do you buy that a Mac Mini replacement is imminent?
It could also be about USPs. If Apple is stuck in the same upgrade cycles as every other OEM, people compare them and generally find Apple's are a bit on the pricey side. OTOH, if Apple is selling low-power/long battery-life ARM-based laptops running macOS and potentially iOS apps as well, they don't really have any direct competition.
Doh!
ARM Holding's technology, a British company that designs ARM architecture and licenses it out to other companies.
Er.... But.... Didn't Softbank (from Japan) buy 100% (or thereabouts) of ARM?
So it should probably read
ARM Holding's technology, a British subsidiary of the Japanese company Softbank, that designs ARM architecture and licenses it out to other companies.
ARM Holding's technology, a British company that designs ARM architecture and licenses it out to other companies.
Er.... But.... Didn't Softbank (from Japan) buy 100% (or thereabouts) of ARM?
So it should probably read
ARM Holding's technology, a British subsidiary of the Japanese company Softbank, that designs ARM architecture and licenses it out to other companies.
I'm glad your wife doesn't have issues with her MB, but give that keyboard enough use and it will fail. This was not a problem prior to Apple introducing the new keyboard in the 2015 MB (including your wife's MB) and the 2016 MBP. The number of repairs for Apple keyboards has skyrocketed and the persistent and widespread problems are why you see a class-action lawsuit against Apple.
Other sites have covered why the keyboard is failing--the physical design of the keyboard lacks durability. There are two problems: (1) the supports for the new butterfly switches are too thin and (2) the metal dome switch (Apple's attempt to revise the keyboard) under each key is highly susceptible to oxidization. The failure of the thin supports under the butterfly switches likely caused most of the failures in the first generation of this keyboard in the 2015 MB. Unfortunately, the second generation of the keyboard in the 2016 MBs and MBPs retained this design issue and Apple simply tried to bolster the durability of the keyboard by adding a metal dome switch under each key. However, Apple chose not to use a protective coating on the dome switch. This has made the dome switches very susceptible to oxidization. When the dome switch oxidizes, a key press will either fail to register or register as a double click. Dust and crumbs are a convenient excuse, not the real problem, or else Apple support documents (covered by MR) would not concede that Apple cannot fix the keyboard by spraying compressed air under the keyboard once problems begin to manifest themselves. Moreover, it is impossible to simply replace a single key or replace the keyboard without replacing the entire top half of the computer (a cost to the consumer of ~$700 out of warranty).
In sum, Apple's new keyboards are a complete design failure from the perspective of both durability (i.e. Apple's quest to thin the keyboard and its refusal to properly coat the dome switches) and repairability (i.e. the inability to fix a single key or to replace the keyboard without replacing half of the laptop). Apple has tacitly admitted the design flaw in the first generation by introducing the dome switch into the second revision of this keyboard and Apple's own internal documents, which basically admit that they only assuage the emotions of consumers by spraying air under the keys until the keyboard becomes so unusable that it must be replaced, imply they know that they have not fixed the problem with the second generation of keyboards.
Not surprising. The first baby step prior to Mac OS and iOS becoming Apple OS. The denials about it not occurring are simply more lies. 
Not surprising. The first baby step prior to Mac OS and iOS becoming Apple OS. The denials about it not occurring are simply more lies.
Lies? It's more about not letting competitors know what Apple is up to. Why would Apple telegraph its plans? Steve Jobs was a master of public disinformation, keeping competitors in the dark.