Thank you. I hate when people say that Apple was FLAWLESS under Jobs. There were mistakes and misfires under him too...
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Thunderbolt 3 Ports on Right Side of 13-Inch MacBook Pro Have Reduced PCI Express Bandwidth
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Thank you. I hate when people say that Apple was FLAWLESS under Jobs. There were mistakes and misfires under him too...
Not just that, but the iMac had only USB-A ports, and not a single legacy port. Heck, USB wasn't even backward compatible with the older ports the way USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 are.
Just imagine what a big success the iMac could have been if only it had included a SCSI port!!!
I had issues with sync over wireless which I used to get Audiobooks and stuff on to my iPhone.
When that happened I just connected it with the USB - Lightning Cable.
Sadly I had to switch to a Windows Workstation because.. well.. look at the Mac Pro.. so I will not have that problem but it's there for people who buy that thing...
So wait...you're saying you were going to somehow plan on using 160 Gb/s of bandwidth on a machine that doesn't even have built in dedicated graphics? How were you going to do that? You only needed one port to have the setup that Phil Schiller used an example, with a 5k monitor and 24TB TB3 RAID setup. Doing a 2nd extra 5k monitor on the left AND an external GPU on the right side would see no performance slow downs at all. You still have a 4th TB3 port not even hooked up yet. That sounds pretty pro to me...
What else were you planning on?
Yes I have used the surface -- I do not like it and did not like my Lenovo, which was the "top" tier PC laptop I got before the MacBook Pro. I'm not saying that anything out there compares to my current 2015 MB Pro, I'm saying that if someone created a competitor to the 2016 touchbar pro that I would take it for a test drive... whereas before the lack of competition meant any new MB Pro would be a default purchase. The Mac line has languished without a major refresh for years, indicating that no -- it is not a major concern of theres -- although now I wish they hadn't!!
This thread has exploded rather quickly. I think the 12 CPU lanes from the 13" Macbook Pros are used for the Thunderbolt Ports, hence the reason why the quad core chips with 16 lanes have the 4 full speed ones.
I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I think the new machines will need an Ifixit teardown and some analysis from Anandtech to show how Apple have done what they did to provoke the tech note which has lit the blue touch paper on this thread.
My own speculation is that you need one Alpine Ridge Thunderbolt 3/USB-C controller for every 4 PCIe lanes you intend to present as a Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port. Apple have therefore provided 4 for the Macbook Pro 15" and 3 for the 13" models.
They wanted to have 4 physical ports on 2 of the 3 Macbook Pro 13" models so I think they wired up 2 ports to the one controller handling the right hand side of the 13" Macbook Pro. I think they SHARE bandwidth rather than have a fixed 2 lanes each so you might get full speed if you use one for high performance external storage and the other one solely for charging. If there was high performance SSD storage on both right side ports I took the Apple support document to mean that both would be sharing the total bandwidth available off the single controller and you might get a bottleneck. In the real world, I wouldn't expect simple peripherals plugged in on the right side to drag performance down.
In other words, plug your charger in one of the right side ports and you'll probably not notice any speed drop.
This thread wouldn't be here if Apple had instead chosen to put 3 Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports on ALL the 13" models and called it a day.
I agree with Zdigit2015 about the chipset PCIe lanes, of which there are up to 16 available on the QM170/HM170 chipset (as per Intel's ARK site). Apple's engineers have therefore given up 8x PCIe lanes for the Radeon Pro RX460 GPU (and presumably the 450 and 455), 4x PCIe lanes for the SSD, and you can bet they'll have split the remaining lanes up to feed the trackpad, toolbar, wifi and camera.
That sorts out the 15" model very nicely.
You have to ask in engineering terms why the 13" model, which doesn't have a GPU to use 8x lanes on, would then go out the door with either 2 or 4 ports depending on which one you buy.
Do you think it might be for aesthetic and/or marketing reasons?
I think most of the emotion being expended here is because prices have gone through the roof and 'innovation' seems a little lacking especially when Apple launch a day after Microsoft. What a contrast.
Somewhere in Apple the engineering department there was a bodge when they designed the Mac Pro and picked an expensive Xeon CPU capable of providing 40 PCIe lanes, gave the dual GPUs 16 lanes each when one of them spends most of its life just driving a display and the other one is supposedly on compute duties but there's not much software around that would tax it. They then use a SINGLE PCIe lane to drive 4 USB 3.0 ports (which if you hang lots of high performance external drives off them would be a bottleneck similar to what's been mooted earlier in this post). That's slower than USB ports in a Macbook Pro from 2013.
It just seems to me that there's things in a 2013 Mac Pro that are given more lanes than they deserve, while other functions could be bottlenecked unnecessarily.
Going very slightly off topic, while we are discussing PCIe lanes, we could see the next Mac Pro using the Intel C236 chipset which offers 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes on the chipset (up from the 8 used in the existing Mac Pro chipset). It might allow Apple to engineer a lower cost Mac Pro by boxing clever with a nice CPU/GPU combination.
Pick a Skylake Xeon E3V5 with 16 lanes, direct all 16 lanes to a single top class GPU. Or if the cooling solution demands 2 GPUs then split it into 2x8 PCIe lanes and go with efficient low end AMD ones for compute and wait for the inevitable grumbles. Bear in mind that for most GPUs 16 PCIe lanes is extravagant and unless Apple are using a really powerful one, then 8 lanes ought to suffice for most GPUs if Apple need extra connectivity.
From the 20 lanes available on the C236 chipset:
Use 12 PCIe lanes on the chipset to provide 3 Thunderbolt 3/USB-C connectors (allowing each to connect to a monitor)
Use 1 PCIe lane on the chipset to give us 1 Ethernet port
Use 1 PCIe lane on the chipset to give us fast wifi
Use 2 PCIe lanes on the chipset to give us 4 USB3 ports which aren't bottlenecked
Use 4 PCIe lanes on the chipset to provide fast SSD
The resulting Mac Pro ought to make a very respectable entry level machine. Better yet if you can strike a deal for an i7 CPU instead and gain economies of scale with the iMac. Such a solution would probably still draw moans about the price but if it could slip in at under £1999 it might be food for thought for some.
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Surface Studio? You have a point about RAM if you're comparing it (for some odd reason) to the MacBook Pro. But how are you not still going to have devices hanging off of it? And in that case, you get ONLY "legacy" ports with your $3k-$4k computer. There are peripherals a 13" MacBook can handle that a Surface Studio can not. Seems wrong.
Ditto. I've grown progressively disenchanted with the company and direction. I couldn't help but think that rather than "Hello! (again)", it is becoming much more akin to "Welcome to 1983!"
Maybe next year Tim can innovate us into all using big beige boxes on our desktops!
And, in addition to all that I/O horsepower, you get:
• a high performance color-accurate DCI-P3 gamut display
• a HUGE trackpad that's clickable over the whole surface and with haptic feedback
• Four USB C 3.1 ports at twice the data rate of the Surface Studio's USB 3.0 type A ports (only one high power, though on the Surface)
• The ability to hook up multiple 5K monitors with a single cable that also supplies display control programming and audio from the MacBook Pro to the display, and, battery charging to the MacBook Pro from the display
• Bluetooth 4.2 (the Surface Studio is 4.0)
Yeah, nothing "pro" about that (though I hate using that word - it's so silly).
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What nonsense.
Before the new MBPs were announced, there was only one MBP supporting either one 5K monitor, or two 4K monitors, and that was the high-end rMBP15", with the most expensive graphics card and 512GB SSD. Neither 13" nor the two cheaper 15" models would do. Now you can connect 5K or 2x 4K to both the 13" MBP. Something you couldn't do the week before.
And on the more expensive 13" model, you have another two ports, each capable of handling two SSD drives plus a huge hard drive without any problems.
Apple has published a detailed support document highlighting the capabilities of the Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports on the new MacBook Pro, unveiling some previously unknown details and outlining the different adapters that are needed to connect various accessories.
According to the document, while all of the ports on the 15-inch MacBook Pro and the 13-inch MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar offer full Thunderbolt 3 performance, only two of the four ports on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar support Thunderbolt 3 at full performance.
The two ports on the right side of the machine have Thunderbolt 3 functionality but with reduced PCI Express bandwidth. For that reason, Apple recommends plugging higher-performance devices into the left-hand ports on that machine.As for USB, all of the USB-C ports on all MacBook Pro models offer USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10Gb/s) transfer speeds when connected to a USB accessory.
Other interesting tidbits in the document include the fact that six devices can be daisy-chained to each Thunderbolt 3 port on the MacBook Pro, and only one power supply can be used to charge the machine. You can attach multiple power supplies, but it's only going to draw power from the one that provides the most power.
Power supplies that exceed 100W have the potential to damage the Macbook Pro, and accessories like the USB-C VGA Multiport Adapter or the USB-C Digital AV Multiport Adapter can only provide up to 60W of power, which will offer slow or delayed charging in the 15-inch MacBook Pro. Apple recommends charging the 15-inch model with the power supply it ships with.
Apple also outlines powering attached devices with Thunderbolt 3 ports. The 15-inch MacBook Pro and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar can power two devices that use up to 15 watts and two additional devices that use up to 7.5 watts. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with no Touch Bar and two Thunderbolt 3 ports can power one device that uses up to 15 watts and one device that uses up to 7.5 watts.
If you're planning to purchase a new MacBook Pro and are confused about which adapters you're going to need so it will work with your existing equipment and accessories, Apple's support document is a good reference to check out.
Article Link: Thunderbolt 3 Ports on Right Side of 13-Inch MacBook Pro Have Reduced PCI Express Bandwidth
Why would Apple deliberately throttle the speed on two of the ports? Does it serve a point? No. If anything, it took more to reduce the speed then to leave it alone!
Ferrari is the high end product line by Fiat/Chrysler. MacBook Pro is the high end product made by Apple... do you really not understand analogy? High end means NO compromises.
I'm an iOS developer, I have the phone connected 8 hours a day, since it's the only way to run on the test device. So yeah, the choice is baffling
If they think at these prices its value for money....yeah most are stupid
You cannot judge a persons intelligence by their ability to use a a computer. Most people who i know that have a phd, are hopeless with computers.
Apple's designers operate on profit first. You have worked this out.....? The current range is based on calculated obsolescence and tiers to get more money out of you, its about making $$ and not giving the customer what they need. If apple cared about the customer and not profit, we would not have to buy all these bloody dongles to get each task done....and guess where the biggest profit is....these dongles
Well stated, but I think there is a distinction between long term profits and short term profits. Apple's current dongle obsession generates short term profits at the expense of the company's long term health. A focus on long term profits would actually service customer needs.
Unfortunately this short term focus isn't unusual. All that's happened is Apple has come to resemble the normal large American corporation. They'll probably go the way of HP: always around, but generally mediocre and entirely attentive to the needs of investors rather than customers or some higher purpose.
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hehe.. i think we're all confused about which adapters to get.. and these two ports TB 3 speed restricted will just add to the already mixed bag.
It's almost like putting USB2.0 only ports on the Mac and saying one side is for USB 3, while the other side is usb 2.0 speeds.
Way to go Apple... stepping back a notch... .I'm sure there's a logical reason behind it.. Probably something to do with Apple favoring more power, or battery at the expense of...
It's almost like putting USB2.0 only ports on the Mac and saying one side is for USB 3, while the other side is usb 2.0 speeds.
Way to go Apple... stepping back a notch... .I'm sure there's a logical reason behind it.. Probably something to do with Apple favoring more power, or battery at the expense of...
I'm wondering if the internal components were a bottleneck. 40Gb/s*4=160Gb/s. That's a crazy amount of bandwidth to pump through a laptop. That even gets pretty close to the limits of some of the fastest DDR4 modules. I'm guessing this may have just been Apple saving money, rather than spending it on something which the computer itself can't handle.
Wrong-I work at a TV Network and most of the video department is switching to Windows PCs.
You used to never be able to find creative professionals working on a Windows. Now - Windows has taken this crown that made apple "cool".
Windows is now what's cool again. Surface proves that.
Apple under Cook has been great for the bean counters and returning profits; but for the pro consumer? Not so much.
There's a difference between making some mistakes and making a lot of mistakes.
I agree with your points, but at this point in time in my opinion there is nothing better than macOS, and if that changed I too would look, I love innovation and new things. But I am happy with the new MacBook features, I have ordered the 15" with 4K graphics and top spec i7.
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Look at apples revenue under Tim Cook the last 5 years and the growth of the company, shrewd acquisition of beats, and the ever improving Apple Watch, everyone wants to knock Apple, but who out there is better, Microsoft, Samsung, Google, I have used all products from these companies and in my opinion my Macs, iPads, iPhone and Apple Watch are the best.
you forgot one more thing.- New MacBook Pro Has Better Keyboard Than 12-Inch MacBook, But It's Expensive and Lacking Ports
- New MacBook Pros Max Out at 16GB RAM Due to Battery Life Concerns
- Apple Says It's Out of the Standalone Display Business
- New MacBook Pros Don't Include Backlit Apple Logo or Power Extension Cable
- Thunderbolt 3 Ports on Right Side of 13-Inch MacBook Pro Have Reduced PCI Express Bandwidth
- Apple Continues to Sell Base Model 2015 MacBook Pros at Same Price Points (ty @Pentium)
When will the bad news stop?
you can't manually change the brightness of the touchbar
[doublepost=1477867457][/doublepost]Apple needs to make 15inch without the touchbar
Tell us what magical technology you would have installed ?
Tell us about the power consumption this technology will use, how it impacts on battery life ?
Tell us how this will impact the selling price ?
Lets us know all the hardware and software compromises that will need to be made in order to get this all to fit/work
Thing is, with Apples diagnostics built into every machine, Apple has a HUGE data set of what is actually used, how many USB ports are actually used, how many people upgrade their RAM, how many Change the HD to a bigger one or to an SSD, how many use wireless vs ethernet, how often external displays are used, how often the SD card reader was used. etc etc etc etc. I know that I have done all these things for my laptop, but my wife's one has not been touched and she never plus anything into the USB, we back up wirelessly at home.
Their data is much bigger than the data set of one... the "me" example.
EVERY product release has been met with people like you, "ZOMG there is a limitation.... Apple is DOOMED I say DOOMED", and yet for the 95% plus of customers, life goes on, they find joy in the new hardware/software and find new ways to integrate it further into their lives.
A good example of this was the programmers and VIM users "ZOMG...there is no escape key...life is over" where as I went "wonder whats cool that can be done with that" and then thought "its programable, make the whole damn thing the escape key if you want, stop wetting your panties, you guys are supposed to be smart !, if the first thing you do to see how this works is to add an escape key, you have learnt something new and useful"
Stop snorting Pixie/Fairy dust, Apple has rarely been the first to jump on something new product category (iPod, iPhone, iPad , laptops), they have regularly made something better, more functional, easier to use. They have regularly dumped old technology first (serial ports, Parallel ports, 5 1/4 floppies, 3 1/2 inch floppies, CDs/DVDs, Hard drives, Flash, etc etc) all to the outcry of the few and all essentially gone within a few years on PCs too.
Learn a bit about product life cycles, the iPhone 7 was probably started 3 years ago, the engineering group then made certain choices that the Mac group did not (headphone socket). The lightening port was available and working for Apple before USB3 and USB-C, yep I am annoyed as hell about the MagSafe going missing, but being able to plug my laptop with ONE cable into an external screen and have it charge my laptop too...I can live with that.
The joy and wonder you are wanting is there, you just failed to see it in the rush to find the changes and hate them
Seems strange. If the current limit for Profile 5 at 20V is 5A, why would the MBP draw more than 5A and then damage itself? Shouldn't it be up to the device (MBP in this case) not to draw so much current as to damage itself?
Ever thought that was because they made the WRONG choices ?
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Yet....
Its programable, it does change brightness with ambient light, so the brightness too is software controlled, so its more a case of "yet" than outright "can't"