I just went on the Apple site, and now the only “new” label is for the iMac Pro...
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Waiting for the 2018 MBP
- Thread starter benface
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A vehicle to sell more products, little else with Apple changing it's view to meet it's own agenda.
Q-6
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Unless you're writing iPhone apps in Swift, Apple doesn't care about developers.And developers are the ones that mostly dislike TB. It distracts us from our work, and there are no gains to developer with TB. Literally none. TB brings only problems to us developers. I could write a small essay on this matter actually
Hit the “buy” button and you’ll see it still says new for both MacBook and regular iMac ...but not the MacBook Pro anymore.
I think the G series does support LPDDR3, it would be a strange and hard to explain omission if it didn’t. The Intel ARK is inconsistent; it doesn’t list LPDDR3 at all, but states max memory capacity as 64GB (dependent on memory type). This is the same wording they use when there is a 16GB max for LPDDR3 but 32GB max (or 64GB, for some processors) if using DDR4.
Note that the soon to be released HP Spectre X360 15” uses the i7-8805G processor. HP positions it as “Revolutionary Power, Extraordinarily Thin”, “Imagination Meets the Height of Performance” and “Creativity in its Most Powerful Form” but the product page clearly states the limitation of a max of 16GB LPDDR3.
http://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/spectrex360/overview.html
The ARK is unfortunately very sloppy as of late, for example try to find the datasheet for the new H-series CPUs that we’re recently released like the i7-8559U. The “view now” link in the ARK provides docs S-series and Y/U series but not the H. Presumably the 32GB max listed in the specs only applies to DDR4 and not to LPDDR3, as usual, but without any technical docs available there’s no way to know.
All AMD has said is that Mobile Vega will ship in 2018. No details on cost, performance, availability, or OEM partners has been released AFAIK.
We may get a hint on AMD's next earnings call in early May.
You have several good ideas, but don't you think it's too late? It seems like it would be difficult to reignite tepid consumer and developer interest two years after the TB first shipped. Not impossible, but difficult.
I imagine Apple might focus their efforts on the "next big thing" e.g. spreading Face ID across their product line or something else entirely.
I would much rather have FaceID and ProMotion on the notebooks than the TouchBar - not even close!
Agreed.
Thing is, even as much as apple likes to coin a name for a technology and credit themselves for "introducing" it to mass market, they are years behind on both face authentication and 100+Hz screens in laptop market. Both have been implemented by many other vendors in a perfectly adequate way, so they would be covered by media as apple catching up tech-wise to windows hello and every mid-tier gaming laptop. Apple might well introduce those, but they probably won't feel that these features are flashy enough of an upgrade to name them front and center.
Having lost ground on uncontested superiority of engineering and materials, apple seems to yearn for features to set their products apart from others, rather than bring them to feature parity with competition (see also: the notch).
This isn't a bad thing in itself — apple has a history of making pretty bold and unpopular moves that ultimately served to move the market forward. I would even consider the new keyboard to be one of those. As controversial as its current state is, apple definitely started a very important discussion on whether it's necessary for a keyboard to have long travel to provide a good typing experience. Certainly, plenty other vendors experimented with low-travel keyboards a bit before, but now that apple has taken a stab at it I'd expect the industry to allot massive amounts of time and engineering resources on figuring out how to make those keyboards actually good. In a couple years, we'll have low-travel keyboards that are pretty good (or at least as good as possible).
TB feels off not so much because it's a useless gimmick, but because apple pursued a purely vertical segmentation of their laptop lineup (air for value customers, macbook for mid-tier, mbp for those looking to spend the most) rather than having faith in segmentation by usecases. I expect TB would've been received much warmer by both users and, ironically, developers, had it made its appearance on non-pro macbooks. Those seem to be a natural niche for users that would've actually benefited from TB context-based inputs, and would not have minded the drawbacks of lack of actual F-keys and tactile feedback as a lot of those users do not use shortcuts and/or are hunt-and-peck typists.
I've been watching a close eye on this thread for quite some time now. It just goes beyond me that it takes more than 309 days for Apple to deliver an updated MacBook Pro with the latest/current specs out there. It's 2018 Apple, Wake up! I just don't understand why they would want to wait until WWDC to announce this thing. Left and right other computer manufacturers are releasing a beast-type laptop that blows the current MB Pros out of the water. It's absolutely ridiculous.
WWDC is an event focused on iOS and Mac OS rather than the hardware. So why not launch this thing a month before WWDC, then as WWDC begins you announce all these amazing stuff you can do with iOS/Mac OS, and people are able to update and play with the software with their latest machine.
Can't stand the wait any longer. Especially since Intel has already launched these new chips and other Windows laptops keep popping up like clockwork.
WWDC is an event focused on iOS and Mac OS rather than the hardware. So why not launch this thing a month before WWDC, then as WWDC begins you announce all these amazing stuff you can do with iOS/Mac OS, and people are able to update and play with the software with their latest machine.
Can't stand the wait any longer. Especially since Intel has already launched these new chips and other Windows laptops keep popping up like clockwork.
I feel the same way. I'm getting trigger happy and have almost bought a surface book 2 and a x1 carbon several times in the past few weeks. The only reason I can think of for a WWDC release is that Apple will claim the news spotlight by releasing after the competition, overshadowing the new XPS 15 etc. They will be 'new' for the back to school season, which moves units. Then again, who really knows what Apple is thinking.
Also, for those interested in potential GPUs, this news about a updated rx 560x might be relevant.
https://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-rx-560x-polaris-refresh/
Wish this was the case, but the market size of MacBook Pro’s probably mean us guys in this thread have more enthusiasm for this product than Apple head office.
All comes to return on investment - the pro market is much smaller than the consumer market. And the consumer market isn’t knowledgeable about 74wh vs 99wh batteries, nor the different dGPU’s, CPU’s or the competition itself. They go by the headlines (Up to 10 hour battery! Twice as fast!) and reviews - and it’s easy to get positive reviews as a big Corp with many people lining up to kiss their bottoms.
Who said they would get announced at WWDC?
They might. Or they might get announced before WWDC. Or they might get announced after (if they want Vega for example).
I really think that Apple is just waiting for Vega. Otherwise, we would see a small press release and a updated hardware.
In fairness Apple do tend to have very specific requirements with each new generation of Intel processors, Iris as an example and it could well be Vega this time. It's true though they do appear to drag their heels but as long as old tech is still selling they rarely rush. As much as they like to sell themselves as being on the bleeding edge of technology they rarely are...Mac Pro...cough....Mac Mini.....iPhone wireless charging...finally.
As far as I know Windows laptops with the new six-core processors are not shipping in volume until May, possibly mid-May or later. Apple, as we know, tries to launch products very quickly after announcing them and in volume.
An announcement on Day 1 of WWDC with products shipping in volume and in stores 1-2 weeks later would put them just a few weeks behind the Windows OEMs. If that gives them time to incorporate Vega Mobile and make a big(ish) splash at WWDC, it would seem to be a no brainer for them to wait.
Can anyone ELI5 the implications of Vega? Would this be big gains for all the models or just the 15 inch models with dedicated GPUs? Feel like apple waiting for Vega would make sense if the performance gain is huge but I’m not knowledgeable at all about GPUs
This is exactly my point. They might do it before. They might do it at WWDC. They might do it long after WWDC. The case still remains the same. It takes way too long, specially in this day and age. They need to keep up the pace, especially with their Pro line (!!). Either way, people are not happy with their faulty keyboards, people still complain about TB (and TB is here to stay guys, don't wanna ruin the expectations) and I think WWDC is the perfect opportunity to bring TB to the next level software-wise, so we all can benefit from it for once. But for Apple taking more than 300ish days for an updated laptop that meets the expectations of today's hardware (which isn't too much to ask as we are already in april) goes beyond me.
That is just a clock bump. It does not mean there will not be RX 600 or smaller true Vega chips relatively soon.
Intel has on average a yearly chip release schedule. Same with AMD.
To me the interesting thing is that after years of minor cpu performance boosts, intel are upping the CPU core count only after AMD are suddenly back in the game throwing out threadripper processors and the like with huge core counts. But seemingly, suddenly its fairly easy enough for intel to up core count now also. Could they have done this long ago? Could it be that the lack of competition for many years had them resting on their laurels and putting out processors with 5% performance boosts over the previous years - simply because they didn't have to do any more than that to shift new product ?
Yes it’s most likely they could have done this years ago. Probably the thing holding them back is cost. It’s a heluvalot cheaper to mass produce 4-core CPUs than 6-core CPUs that are 50% larger but it didn’t matter before that they stuck with 4-core because AMD was so far behind on IPC.
BTW, I have a 6-core AMD desktop CPU from 2010 but back then the Intel Core i7 quad core was still faster so it made sense back then for Intel to stick with quad. Also, software back then wasn’t as well optimized for multi-core as it is now.
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People are interested in this because it could result in a fairly significant performance gain, although since there are almost no details on Vega mobile at this point, it's hard to know exactly how much performance gain to expect.
Arguably software still isn’t really optimised beyond four cores now. Though that is also on Intel (devs seeing vast majority of CPUs being quad core for 7 years would make them reluctant to invest beyond that, or look for alternate means of perf gains like GPU acceleration instead.)
Also weren’t the mobile 500 series already just a rebranding of 400s with minor clock increases? I don’t now how I feel about another round of that instead of getting Vega...
Also weren’t the mobile 500 series already just a rebranding of 400s with minor clock increases? I don’t now how I feel about another round of that instead of getting Vega...
I went from 2.9 GHz tri-core to a 2.8 GHz hex-core AMD CPU and it was a pretty noticeable improvement in overall feel, even just for surfing and watching a Netflix video. The boost in speed was even more noticeable if I tried to play a Netflix video and surf at the same time.
Granted, these are old CPUs but nonetheless it shows that even fairly basic stuff can leverage lots of threads.