Some 15-Inch MacBook Pro Models Misreporting Intel Iris Pro 580 Graphics

[DCIFRTHS]

I will win. Millennials always get what they want.

When you've been brought up to believe that you are the only star in the sky, shine brightly you will.
Hmmm... or could it be because they are just legends in their own minds?
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I really hate that people think of us this way. I, and many other people in my life, work hard for the things they want.

You are correct, and my comment was not directed at an entire group, but rather a response to an attitude that is, unfortunately, far too common.

 

[flottenheimer]

the PRO part is an error.

Why?

I am a creative professional, working as a creative director and partner at an ad agency serving several top brands.
Pro software I mainly use is: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere, After Effects, Suitcase Fusion, Office + a bunch of smaller apps.

To this date, I've done all my work on a mid-2012 15-inch MacBook Pro / 8GB / GeForce GT 650M / Hires display (not retina) retrofitted with a Samsung SSD.

I create and design campaigns (from posters and tv-ads to websites, small games, and banners), retouch photos, write manuscripts, edit movies, make illustrations and manage thousands of fonts. Every task I throw at my current Mac runs great. It really does.

The 2016 15-inch MacBook Pro I ordered / 16GB / Radeon 460 will smoke my old one. And my main reasons for upgrading are weight (I carry it around a lot) and a better screen. For my current Mac I carry and often use a HDMI adapter (for presentations). For my new Mac (which is currently shipping, yay) I'll need a new HDMI adapter + an USB-A adapter.

I know there are more hardware demanding pros than me. And pros with different needs. There always are. I also know there are many who need way less power than I do.
Saying that this is not a Pro laptop, when many, dare I say most, creative professionals will be served very well by this machine is just wrong.

 

[Schizoid]

If you see the word "Iris" with any graphics card, it's not really a cause for celebration is it?

 

[yurc]

Just cosmetic issue , but better apple should rename their cumbersome device name properly in their ACPI table, they messed up their DSDT configuration.

 

[theluggage]

I have USB A, micro, a usb c to usb male adapter, and ethernet, as well as HDMI, and a micro SD reader, and i've paid less than 60 bucks USD....

I'm happy for you. I'm especially happy for you that the cheap no-name cables and adapters you've obviously bought have apparently worked and not fried your new Mac (See https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?tag=skim1x139863-20).

I need far more to replicate what I already have (and I don't think I'm particularly unusual in that). For starters, I'm 'commuting' my laptop too and from work so I need two of a lot of things (including either a second power supply for work or a hub/dock with PSU because I can't use the Magsafe built into the ACD any more). Yes, I could plug/unplug and carry a bunch of cables to and from work every day - but I don't have to with my existing setup and I was kinda unreasonably expecting a new machine to be a step forward...

There's an awful lot of "it works for me, so it must work for everyone" floating around in these discussions.

 

[magbarn]

I'm happy for you. I'm especially happy for you that the cheap no-name cables and adapters you've obviously bought have apparently worked and not fried your new Mac (See https://www.amazon.com/review/R2XDBFUD9CTN2R/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?tag=skim1x139863-20).

I need far more to replicate what I already have (and I don't think I'm particularly unusual in that). For starters, I'm 'commuting' my laptop too and from work so I need two of a lot of things (including either a second power supply for work or a hub/dock with PSU because I can't use the Magsafe built into the ACD any more). Yes, I could plug/unplug and carry a bunch of cables to and from work every day - but I don't have to with my existing setup and I was kinda unreasonably expecting a new machine to be a step forward...

There's an awful lot of "it works for me, so it must work for everyone" floating around in these discussions.

Yup, I wouldn't be plugging in the $2 USB-C adapters into a $3000 rMBP 15... Almost took out my wife's rMB using one of the cheapies, luckily I ran into one of Leung's reviews before I plugged in the adapter. I only buy Apple USB C stuff now for my wife.

 

[theluggage]

I do understand the value of that convenience, and that you've grown accustomed to it, but it's certainly more of a deferrable purchase. Your ACD cost a lot more than £100, and you've already gotten many years of usage out of it.

If I drop £2700 on a new laptop, I expect the result to deliver at least the same utility as the older, cheaper model it replaced - and then some. I don't currently need to carry my PSU or display cable to and from work. My VGA adapter doesn't need to leave my travel bag unless I'm giving a presentation. I don't have to carry a hub/dock on the road to connect mobile drives or USB sticks. So, yes, when I price up the new machine I'm going to add up the cost of everything needed to get the same, or better utility as before... and then expect added benefit. Its why it's called "upgrading".

If I needed to "get by" I'd get a £800 PC with the required horsepower.

For hooking up the ACD, you might want to check out the HyperDrive USB Type-C Hub with Mini DisplayPort (for 2016 MacBook Pro & 12" MacBook) for $49.95.

Thanks for the link - I found an article on that a week or so back when I made my list, and it would have been perfect, but the link to the product page was broken then & I couldn't find it on the Hyper site so I wrote it off as vapourware. I note, however, that the article was written in May and the product is still "pre-order" so I'm not holding my breath.

Then you say, "and still not replacing the USB-C to B/micro-b cables on every last device I might use."

I said I wasn't replacing them, so I've already accepted they weren't essential.

Turns out the Type-C to DisplayPort cables are still rare creatures and a bit pricey where you can find them. Do you really need two though? My DP displays are the daisy-chainable kind, so only one would need a Type-C cable.

Last I heard, MacOs didn't support DisplayPort chaining & my displays don't have DP out anyway. Also, you can't daisychain 5k or 4k@60Hz over USB-C - and my next deferrable purchase might have been to replace one or both of my home monitors with 4k/5k.

If you want to quibble, go ahead and deduct one of the DP cables - since my 2011 MBP can't drive two directly (I use Screen Recycler)... but then being able to drive 2 external displays would be a major reason for me upgrading; the 2015 MBP could have done it with a DP and HDMI cable that I already have and ScreenRecycler won't run on newer Macs.

 

[vpro]

"Touch disease" migrates to Macs. All of the rMacBooks and MacBook Pros 2016 in the Apple stores here do not support 3 finger drag

I love the 3 finger drag so much

 

[otternonsense]

Totally new product. I'm sure these things will be resolved via software fixes. If not, that's why there's a year warranty or the 3 years of AppleCare options. Or worst case, return policy. I just ordered one last night, so I'll be hoping for the best.

I can feel your buyer's remorse and I don't even know you.

 

[Jcknows0]

Everyone is going to pile on Apple for this, since that's the cool thing to do on the Internet right now, but this is simply an errant string in this particular build of MacOS causing System Information to misreport the GPU. It in no way affects anything performance wise.

The more interesting takeaway is why Apple isn't shipping the SKL-H 4+4e SKUs when one certainly would have expected them to. Clearly this string being present means that at some point the OS team thought it might be used. So of course everyone will say "margins" or "greed", but the reality is that Intel have entirely failed to deliver 14nm mobile 4+4e. The last HQ Iris Pro part seen in the wild aside from an Intel NUC was in the Haswell era. Hence the last 15-inch MBP used Haswell Refresh.

Not true, guess you haven't seen the Skull Canyon NUC running with Iris Pro 580. Outperforms the entry retina iMac in GPU. The more you know. Running hackintosh 24/7 on it. Only problem right now is getting to report all 32 GB RAM installed.
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Wait! What's this: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-NUC-Ki...8&qid=1479479551&sr=8-2&keywords=Intel+i7+nuc
Available today with amazon prime with iris pro 580 igpu which not only speeds up GPU operation on battery it also significantly speeds up the CPU courtesy of its edram cache that's missing in the 530. That's why haswell rmbp come close to the gimped 1 year old CPU that Apple is using.

BTW this has been available for 6 months - with no shortage - now AND Apple is one of the very few laptop manufacturers to use iris pro in their laptops. I think Apple was forced to use the weaker skylake due to their thinner chassis as likely the 580 variant doesn't do very well when restricted to run in a thin chassis..

The Skull Canyon is a beast and one hell of a hackintosh. Will tide me over nicely until Kaby Lake desktop CPUs come out and I decide if hackintosh is worth it (HEVC support in FCPX)

 

[-BigMac-]

Should blur out the Serial Number

Clover users scrambling

 

[repoman27]

Not true, guess you haven't seen the Skull Canyon NUC running with Iris Pro 580. Outperforms the entry retina iMac in GPU. The more you know. Running hackintosh 24/7 on it. Only problem right now is getting to report all 32 GB RAM installed.
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The Skull Canyon is a beast and one hell of a hackintosh. Will tide me over nicely until Kaby Lake desktop CPUs come out and I decide if hackintosh is worth it (HEVC support in FCPX)

I guess you were trolling too hard to notice that I mentioned the NUC in the post you were replying to. And as I pointed out earlier as well, Intel either never found an outside customer for these, or was only able to produce a handful of the lowest binned chips and decided to just use them internally for a low volume product. I'll also say that the NUC ain't mobile, so perhaps there was a power / leakage issue that made these chips entirely unsuitable for their target market, just like the Broadwell generation that preceded them.

 

[rodpascoe]

Not true, guess you haven't seen the Skull Canyon NUC running with Iris Pro 580. Outperforms the entry retina iMac in GPU. The more you know. Running hackintosh 24/7 on it. Only problem right now is getting to report all 32 GB RAM installed.
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The Skull Canyon is a beast and one hell of a hackintosh. Will tide me over nicely until Kaby Lake desktop CPUs come out and I decide if hackintosh is worth it (HEVC support in FCPX)

I thought I'd take a look at the Skull Canyon Hackintosh you refer to. I'll just copy and paste from their page here....

what's not working:
- wi-fi and bluetooth (will not work since apple uses broadcom chips)
- audio
- when I try to connect to the NUC using Apple Remote Desktop, the NUC crashes
- memory: I have one 16GB ram module, but the system shows 8GB ram
- quicktime when playing mp4 videos ( i have to use VLC for it)

what's annoying:
I randomly get the infamous error allocating xxx pages at xxx alloc type 2 so sometimes i have to restart 5-6 times before the system boots properly. Sometimes it boots properly 4-5 times in a row and sometimes it doesn't. I noticed that if I play around in the clover startup screen like removing 'dart=0' from the boot options, sometimes I am able to boot up. But you never know when you will be able to boot.

Are you kidding me? How is it "a beast and one hell of a mackintosh" when half of it doesn't work and it keeps crashing?

I'll just stick to genuine Apple stuff I think.

 

[TigerWoodsIV]

I can feel your buyer's remorse and I don't even know you.

lol I actually did buy one, but after this story was posted. Only sad part for me is estimated delivery is over a month away. I hope that's conservative.

 

[repoman27]

If I drop £2700 on a new laptop, I expect the result to deliver at least the same utility as the older, cheaper model it replaced - and then some. I don't currently need to carry my PSU or display cable to and from work. My VGA adapter doesn't need to leave my travel bag unless I'm giving a presentation. I don't have to carry a hub/dock on the road to connect mobile drives or USB sticks. So, yes, when I price up the new machine I'm going to add up the cost of everything needed to get the same, or better utility as before... and then expect added benefit. Its why it's called "upgrading".

Your old laptop only came with a single charging brick, same as the new one would. The convenience of having a charger at work was provided by way of a $1000 ACD. So you can either think of the adapters as a massive savings compared to the previous outlay in your quest for feature parity, or you can shell out another $1000 on an LG UltraFine 5K Display and actually upgrade instead of retrofitting. If you can live with the ID of that thing.

An unwillingness to give up anything when moving forward can be a serious impediment to progress. Sometimes it's OK to give up what you used to have in order to have something different. Sometimes less can be better. And accessories purchased to work with one thing will almost always work with that thing, may well work with other things, but there's no guarantee that they'll continue to work with everything you purchase going forward.

Last I heard, MacOs didn't support DisplayPort chaining & my displays don't have DP out anyway. Also, you can't daisychain 5k or 4k@60Hz over USB-C - and my next deferrable purchase might have been to replace one or both of my home monitors with 4k/5k.

D'oh! I forgot about that. I've been using a Dell, and my MBP is old enough that it doesn't support DP 1.2 anyway. I wonder if MacOS will actually support MST DisplayPort daisy chaining for Macs with Thunderbolt 3? One of the theories as to why Apple disabled it was because of the potential for confusion due to Thunderbolt 2 using the miniDP connector.

 

[theluggage]

Your old laptop only came with a single charging brick, same as the new one would.

Noo... it came with a single charging brick the same as spare magsafe adapters I already had, was compatible with the ACD I already had, and the same as all my Mac-using colleagues at work had. The new one comes with an incompatible charging brick which might be an ubiquitous standard 3 years down the line (by which time the new MacBook is landfill because the SSD soldered to the mainboard has either failed or can't be updated to the 3TB XPoint drives that might then be on the market).

The convenience of having a charger at work was provided by way of a $1000 ACD.

...which would still do the job perfectly in the new MBP had MagSafe. Sorry - I don't buy the "sunk costs" gobbledygook - If I bought a new MacBook Pro I'd need to buy an extra £100 power brick to replace the perfectly good one in that display.

An unwillingness to give up anything when moving forward can be a serious impediment to progress.

I've got cupboards full of expensive things that I've given up to go forward - this new machine is asking me to give up things (or buy lots of extras) to stand still. Past upgrades have bought huge, immediate benefits. At the end of the day, the new MBP is only few percent faster than last year's model, a few percent smaller and a few percent lighter - its also a few percent less upgradeable and quite a few percent more expensive. That doesn't open up new vistas of possibility, and is certainly not worth upgrading all my peripherals for.

 

[otternonsense]

This generation of macbook pros may be a win on aesthetics side but its a total disaster from a hardware standpoint. It's way too limiting...

Sadly even the aesthetics are subject to discussion. The end result feels imbalanced, from the comically enlarged trackpad to the carpal-tunnel-waiting-to-happen placement of the touchbar, peppered with baffling details such as the "MacBook Pro" display etching that made a comeback. And I can't help but wonder, how hard would it be for Apple to implement an edge-to-edge 4K display like Dell already has for years now? :-/

 

[repoman27]

Noo... it came with a single charging brick the same as spare magsafe adapters I already had, was compatible with the ACD I already had, and the same as all my Mac-using colleagues at work had. The new one comes with an incompatible charging brick which might be an ubiquitous standard 3 years down the line (by which time the new MacBook is landfill because the SSD soldered to the mainboard has either failed or can't be updated to the 3TB XPoint drives that might then be on the market).

----

...which would still do the job perfectly in the new MBP had MagSafe. Sorry - I don't buy the "sunk costs" gobbledygook - If I bought a new MacBook Pro I'd need to buy an extra £100 power brick to replace the perfectly good one in that display.

----

I've got cupboards full of expensive things that I've given up to go forward - this new machine is asking me to give up things (or buy lots of extras) to stand still. Past upgrades have bought huge, immediate benefits. At the end of the day, the new MBP is only few percent faster than last year's model, a few percent smaller and a few percent lighter - its also a few percent less upgradeable and quite a few percent more expensive. That doesn't open up new vistas of possibility, and is certainly not worth upgrading all my peripherals for.

Your attitude is the result of combining a sense of entitlement with flawed accounting and logic, but you've decided to blame Apple and the new MacBook Pro for the way you feel. MagSafe had an 11 year run, and you've been reaping the benefits of Apple maintaining that connector and building the ecosystem for a good chunk of that time. Now they've switched to the non-proprietary USB Power Delivery specification and a USB Type-C connector, which means that soon Mac users will benefit from a much broader ecosystem and a ubiquity of compatible charging options everywhere they go. So sit it out for a year or two if you don't want to pay the price of being an early adopter. Let your office mates take the hit this year and borrow their adapters next year.

This is the same garbage that everyone complained about when Apple switched from 30-pin to Lightning, but now I can literally buy a $5 Lightning charge/sync cable at the gas station or Rite-Aid up the road. It was an inevitable and largely painless transition by Apple, and not even remotely a cash grab as everyone made it out to be. Apple is now shipping millions of devices with only USB Type-C ports and USB PD for charging. But that represents less than 5% of the total PC market which has the potential to ship 100's of millions of units with USB PD, or the overall USB device market which stretches well into billions of devices annually. We're looking at the new Bondi Blue iMac here. By shipping essentially their entire notebook line with only USB Type-C, Apple is forcing a sea change. Maybe you don't want to take part in it, but that's not Apple's fault.

 

[AppleScruff1]

Another day another tiny issue blown up by MR

Just another day on the Internet, right Tim?

 

[repoman27]

Sadly even the aesthetics are subject to discussion. The end result feels imbalanced, from the comically enlarged trackpad to the carpal-tunnel-waiting-to-happen placement of the touchbar, peppered with baffling details such as the "MacBook Pro" display etching that made a comeback. And I can't help but wonder, how hard would it be for Apple to implement an edge-to-edge 4K display like Dell already has for years now? :-/

It would be easy. All they have to do is buy an off-the-shelf component offered to them by a vendor and slap it in a cheap, stamped aluminum and injection molded plastic case (complete with faux carbon fiber texture) while performing barely passable factory calibration and combining it with a broken auto-brightenss feature—like Dell did. Oh, and then charge a bunch more for it because it's not even a standard feature.

Instead, Apple focused on making their OS support for high-DPI displays the best available, their calibration flawless, maintaining a more desirable 16:10 aspect ratio and webcam placement, increasing color gamut, brightness and power efficiency, working on their AR coating (which was admittedly a fail in prior generations). You know, things that matter a lot more when it comes to user experience than having moar pixels and the slimmest possible bezels (available as an optional extra). The new MacBook Pros have a more desirable screen by every measurable metric except pixel count and the width of 3 out of 4 bezels (although some might argue that not making the top bezel wide enough to accommodate the webcam is actually a minus for the Dell), and it comes standard. Incidentally, by my calculations, the side bezels on the new MBPs are about 4 mm wider than on the XPS.

 

[ladycsr]

Step 1: (Jobs era) state of the art hardware.
Step 2: (end of Jobs era) Just use last gen hardware
step 3: (Steve dies) Just use hardware from 2 generations ago.
Step 4: (the future is now) Upgrade the hardware via software by rename it to next gen.
Now that is courage my friends!

 

[theluggage]

Your attitude is the result of combining a sense of entitlement with flawed accounting and logic, but you've decided to blame Apple and the new MacBook Pro for the way you feel.

1. If I'm paying the thick end of $3000 for a premium laptop then, yes, too right I've got a sense of entitlement - if I wanted "be happy with what you've got and stop complaining" I'd buy something from Dell or HP for a lot less - sure, there would be compromises, but there would also be a big hunk of change from three grand.

2. Flawed accounting and logic is when you fail to cost up all the bits and pieces you'll need, in reality, to get your new purchase to do exactly the job you'd bought it for.

but you've decided to blame Apple and the new MacBook Pro for the way you feel.

It may have escaped your notice that I'm not the only one, by a long chalk, that feels this way - so maybe, just maybe, it is something to do with Apple and the new MacBook Pro that people feel this way?

This is the same garbage that everyone complained about when Apple switched from 30-pin to Lightning, but now I can literally buy a $5 Lightning charge/sync cable at the gas station or Rite-Aid up the road.

Well, the thought of having to replace my camera connection kit & VGA adapter certainly didn't have me rushing out to upgrade my iPad 3 at the time. At least you didn't need complete new power bricks - of which I had several distributed around home, work and luggage - by that time.

Do Rite-Aid have the Lightning-to-USB-C version in yet? Or the "guaranteed not a fake that will put your iPhone into Galaxy Note 8 emulation mode" version...

 

[RMD68]

Apparently you only need to have passed high school science with a B+ in order to work in Apples Engineering Dpt.

God I hope Ivey goes to hell. I want to slap his face every time I see it.

File this under Dunning-Kruger effect.
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no problems! I want the 13"!

(without the touch bar)
I do not understand, why should I pay $300 more to test their new "product" (the touch bar), that will distract me and I'll be unable to do my work? I think they should pay me to test the new "extra".
Just give me the base 13", but the dark one ! It's time for a change...

Would jingling keys also distract you?
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Pathetic QC, Apple.

The downhill slide continues. So glad I bought last year.

What downhill slide are you talking about?

A small subset of graphic design pros who don't want to use the Walcolm?
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Tim Cook should have been fired the moment he approved on Apple selling disposable computers.

As opposed to the perpetual machines that existed at Apple when Steve Jobs was alive or every other company besides Apple now?

Good lord...
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No worries, Apple will fix for $149.

Behahahahahahahahahhahahhaa

Or patch it quickly via the net?

 

[bladerunner2000]

As opposed to the perpetual machines that existed at Apple when Steve Jobs was alive or every other company besides Apple now?

Good lord...

Things were a LOT better during the Steve Jobs days. At least back then their devices weren't disposable CRAP. Funny how you don't seem to think that matters.

 

[RMD68]

Things were a LOT better during the Steve Jobs days. At least back then their devices weren't disposable CRAP. Funny how you don't seem to think that matters.

No. I don't know what you mean by disposable crap.