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Waiting for the 2018 MBP

fokmik said:
Where i can find the spec for those vega m gpu that can fit into the 15”
The same as a 1060 should be fine. Since the current 560 is worse than even an 1050 Ti
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There are no specs released, so we can only guess. But I think it’s a certain that we are getting some version of Vega. And no, it’s not likely to be on the same level as the 1060. That GPU is twice as hot as any video card that was ever used in a MBP and you can’t put it in a MBP chassis without sacrificing something else.

I expect about 30-40% increase over the current Polaris, should put it on par with 1050 Ti or so but with half the power consumption.

If you are looking for a mobile computer with a powerful GPU, Apple was never your choice and is unlikely to be your choice in the future. See also my post above.
 
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leman said:
There are no specs released, so we can only guess. But I think it’s a certain that we are getting some version of Vega. And no, it’s not likely to be on the same level as the 1060. That GPU is twice as hot as any video card that was ever used in a MBP and you can’t put it in a MBP chassis without sacrificing something else.

I expect about 30-40% increase over the current Polaris, should put it on par with 1050 Ti or so but with half the power consumption.

If you are looking for a mobile computer with a powerful GPU, Apple was never your choice and is unlikely to be your choice in the future. See also my post above.
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Yep, you are right. I thought I had read it somewhere, but apparently just wishful thinking.

Now with the egpu situation maturing nicely a fast dGPU is not as required as it used to be [for me at least....]. In my work I need a very powerful GPU about 20% of the time and the remainder I am fine with a standard one [3D design / CAD, visuals etc]. I think Apple is a great choice if you can work with an egpu, and realise you need to be desk bound for more challenging situations.
Mobile only, yes go elsewhere as Apple wont have the answers.
 
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leman said:
There are no specs released, so we can only guess. But I think it’s a certain that we are getting some version of Vega. And no, it’s not likely to be on the same level as the 1060. That GPU is twice as hot as any video card that was ever used in a MBP and you can’t put it in a MBP chassis without sacrificing something else.

I expect about 30-40% increase over the current Polaris, should put it on par with 1050 Ti or so but with half the power consumption.

If you are looking for a mobile computer with a powerful GPU, Apple was never your choice and is unlikely to be your choice in the future. See also my post above.
Click to expand...
40% increase over amd 560 that doesnt mean 1060 level?
 
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fokmik said:
40% increase over amd 560 that doesnt mean 1060 level?
Click to expand...

Poki said:
No, it doesn't. The GTX 1060 has almost three times the performance of the Radeon Pro 560, depending on the benchmark.
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Exactly, the 560 is about 2x slower than the Max-Q 1060, and the hotter "regular" 1060 will be a bit faster yet. The notebook check benchmarks here need to be taken a bit pessimistically, since they seem to test with stock bootcamp drivers. My performance with updated modded drivers is significantly better.

In the end, the performance per watt is the same. And with Vega, the performance per watt will be better than anything Nvidia can muster at the moment. HBM2 has excellent performance at very low power consumption, which means that more power can be dedicated to the GPU itself.
 
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Interesting.

„Today we are announcing the Intel Thunderbolt™ 3 controller JHL7x40 series, code named Titan Ridge. Comprised of three controllers, the JHL7x40 series is a compatible extension of the current line of Intel JHL6x40 Thunderbolt 3 controllers, code named Alpine Ridge. The JHL7540 and 7340 controllers provide computer makers the same Thunderbolt 3 40Gb/s performance and feature set as Alpine Ridge, and also adds DisplayPort 1.4 capability for increased video performance.”

https://thunderbolttechnology.net/b...yport-14-and-basic-peripheral-compatibility-u
 
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Falhófnir said:
I don’t think iris pro was ever part of the plan for skylake as Apple was the only real customer and it was an expensive programme for Intel which never quite delivered the sort of competitive performance they wanted it to. Broadwell parts were literally available for a month or two, but I’m sure if Apple had switched to those chips, Intel would have obliged them? Apple have backed themselves into a bit of a pricing corner eliminating the iGPU option, I don’t see them getting the dGPU models down to $1,999 and the Intel-AMD combi-chips look to be higher cost than would suit such a machine. The only option I see when the 2015 15” is finally untenable is to go with a 28W part with iris plus, like a scaled up TB 13”...
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Tend to agree Apple has become so arrogant, demanding it's own way akin to a spoilt child, yet Apple remains to be a smaller player therefore hardly surprising NVida & Intel have little love. Right now Apple seems to be making a habit of painting itself into a corner, yet we it's customers are left with the aftermath.

Maybe, just maybe Apple should get off it's high horse and relearn to collaborate and deliver the best for it's customers not itself, cut the hubris and do the job...

Q-6
 
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thadoggfather said:
without reading 83 pages, what are you waiting for?

it'll probably be same thing with a modest CPU bump

intel moves at snail like pace these days
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Dear Mac Enthusiasts-

If you don't become IOS enthusiasts, your future will be nothing but disappointment. People need to realize that the future is iOS and tablets. If it seems like apple doesn't care about the MacBook, its because they don't! Get an iPad pro already. Every common task is nicer from browsing to creating documents to consuming media. We will need to keep our macs around for another 10 years before this change is complete, but the nice thing is that macs will last that long. I'm a hardware developer so it is going to be a while with my CAD and vendor supplied IDEs, but remember that barely 5 years ago everything was windows-only and now almost universally they support windows, osx, and linux. With processor speeds not even achieving 5% improvement year over year, a 2027 MacBook will not even be twice as fast as a 2017. Get an iPad pro, you will like it.
 
spacebro said:
Dear Mac Enthusiasts-

If you don't become IOS enthusiasts, your future will be nothing but disappointment. People need to realize that the future is iOS and tablets. If it seems like apple doesn't care about the MacBook, its because they don't! Get an iPad pro already. Every common task is nicer from browsing to creating documents to consuming media. We will need to keep our macs around for another 10 years before this change is complete, but the nice thing is that macs will last that long. I'm a hardware developer so it is going to be a while with my CAD and vendor supplied IDEs, but remember that barely 5 years ago everything was windows-only and now almost universally they support windows, osx, and linux. With processor speeds not even achieving 5% improvement year over year, a 2027 MacBook will not even be twice as fast as a 2017. Get an iPad pro, you will like it.
Click to expand...

While I don't agree in recommending an iPad Pro for raw power over a MacBook Pro, due to iOS limitations vs. macOS being more of a functional productivity device (unless you just write books and surf or something) , I do agree that the future will be disappointment on the Mac front. Tim Cook can say whatever he wants, Mac is all but completely abandoned. its an afterthought to the iOS profit train.

You'll literally be waiting forever for what? Things that may not come.

Mac Pro trash can was long in the tooth. Mac mini obviously long In the tooth

People already craving some novel update to the 2016 form, I suspect you'll be in for hurt too

the upside is by waiting you aren't spending money, and not spending money you don't need to is a virtuous endeavor
 
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spacebro said:
Dear Mac Enthusiasts-

If you don't become IOS enthusiasts, your future will be nothing but disappointment. People need to realize that the future is iOS and tablets. If it seems like apple doesn't care about the MacBook, its because they don't! Get an iPad pro already. Every common task is nicer from browsing to creating documents to consuming media. We will need to keep our macs around for another 10 years before this change is complete, but the nice thing is that macs will last that long. I'm a hardware developer so it is going to be a while with my CAD and vendor supplied IDEs, but remember that barely 5 years ago everything was windows-only and now almost universally they support windows, osx, and linux. With processor speeds not even achieving 5% improvement year over year, a 2027 MacBook will not even be twice as fast as a 2017. Get an iPad pro, you will like it.
Click to expand...

Speed is just a tiny part of the equation. Give me an iPad Pro with a keyboard, a trackpad and software that's optimized to be used with a keyboard and trackpad and I might be on board. But thinking about that, this would just be a MacBook, wouldn't it?

I recently tried working on some visuals on my iPad Pro. And even though the Apple Pencil is nice at times, the workflow is just incredibly cumbersome. A trackpad and a keyboard with customizable shortcuts is something that absolutely needs to be there so that I can work with a computer. Let alone the support for multiple monitors and an almost endless amount of software and windows I can run and see at the same time. Something like this just isn't going to happen on an iPad.

Also, the 8th generation of Intel CPUs offers a performance increase north of 40%, far beyond the 5% we got the past years. We've yet to see any ARM chip outperforming one of Intel's 8th gen 15W CPUs, let alone their new 6-core mobile i9 chips.
 
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Poki said:
Speed is just a tiny part of the equation. Give me an iPad Pro with a keyboard, a trackpad and software that's optimized to be used with a keyboard and trackpad and I might be on board. But thinking about that, this would just be a MacBook, wouldn't it?

I recently tried working on some visuals on my iPad Pro. And even though the Apple Pencil is nice at times, the workflow is just incredibly cumbersome. A trackpad and a keyboard with customizable shortcuts is something that absolutely needs to be there so that I can work with a computer. Let alone the support for multiple monitors and an almost endless amount of software and windows I can run and see at the same time. Something like this just isn't going to happen on an iPad.

Also, the 8th generation of Intel CPUs offers a performance increase north of 40%, far beyond the 5% we got the past years. We've yet to see any ARM chip outperforming one of Intel's 8th gen 15W CPUs, let alone their new 6-core mobile i9 chips.
Click to expand...

The magic keyboard works great with iPad pro. Once you take out all the screen management shortcuts, and once you replace all short text entry tasks with scribbling what you want with the apple pencil, the keyboard is not used very often. I'm not about to try to scribble curly braces or write code with the apple pencil, but I found out that I am not spending that much time actually typing out code. Most time spent is figuring out what to type by switching between technical documents. This is much easier to manage a lot of documents on the iPad pro than it was by having a 43" screen and a ton of windows open. It added a lot of overhead to figure out where the document I wanted to look at actually was on the screen among a ton of other windows, or which shell prompt was in the directory I wanted to do a thing in.

It has something better than a trackpad- the whole screen is a better, more intuitive trackpad. Forget about keyboard shortcuts, everything is an intuitive finger swipe that you don't have to think about. You do not have to memorize what 2, 3, 4 finger swipes do, all of those functions are a 1 finger swipe in ios. Even typing this on a MacBook I find myself trying to touch the screen all the time, I want to touch a word to edit or put the cursor somewhere. On mac, we are all very used to this, but it actually takes time and work to grab the mouse or reach for the touchpad and move the cursor where you want.

Living in the future is better than living in the past. Accept the future!
 
spacebro said:
Living in the future is better than living in the past. Accept the future!
Click to expand...

Except that your future seems to be very different from mine. I'm not a programmer, I'm a full time graphic designer. Being able to see a huge Excel list, multiple InDesign files, a Photoshop window and a browser at the same time, spread across three 27" monitors, is crucial to my workflow. I cannot switch between Excel and InDesign, for example, since everything I change in one of the windows more or less directly affects the other.

Or even leaving the multi screen debate, what about InDesign itself? Placing an object pixel perfect on cut path I got from the printing company is not something I can do by dragging it there – I have to enter coordinates, which is much faster when I have a keyboard. Or when I need to quickly open a Photoshop file, change multiple smart objects which are stored across different file servers, and then automatically refresh the .psd in every InDesign document I've placed it?

What when I need to work on a project in Cinema 4D? My Mac quickly connects to our render farm, giving me hundreds of teraflops of processing power whenever I need it. I don't know of any iPad app that can do that, and I'm not even sure if Apple would allow such an app in the App Store.

A touch screen is - due to the nature of your finger - also far less precise than a mouse or a trackpad. Sure, you can use the Apple pencil, but switching between the pencil and the keyboard all the time grows tiring far more quickly than using a mouse and a keyboard, especially when you work ten hours non-stop, five days a week.

Heck, the 12.9" display doesn't even allow me to view an A4 spread at full size. The iPad doesn't allow me to use external GPUs, or to use the power of huge tower PCs to support my workload. It doesn't even allow me to natively access files on a local file server, which is crucial to a workflow in an agency with dozens of graphic designers. The files app, while it's a nice thing, can't replace a file system for more complex workflows.

Let alone the advantages of Scripting. Apple Script has saved me so much time, I wouldn't want to give up that option. App availability is a thing too. Need to use Capture One? Premiere Pro? After Effects? InDesign? Illustrator? Well, your iPad is out of luck.

When switching from an iMac Pro to an iPad Pro, you give up so much, and get so little. The iPad is a great accessory to the Mac, when you want to scribble something on the go, or when you want a cheap graphic tablet to use with your Mac. It's absolutely not a replacement for one. Not now, and if Apple doesn't significantly change iOS, it never will be one for full time graphic designers. I can absolutely see how it could replace a computer for many other people though.
 
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For all new readers... my wish list:

New Pro MBP with a thickness around rMBP or Unibody MBP with:

- 16-17" Display at 4k, to enable NATIVE 1920x1200@2x without scaling!!! XPS like bezels would go well with that too
- Hexacore i7, ideally even i9 just for ***** and giggles
- 32GB RAM default (like iMac Pro), with 64GB Option (in an ideal world as SO-DIMMs rather than soldered)
- 4xTB3, HDMI 2.x, SD Card Slot (in an ideal world also MagSafe, and legacy USB-A (but that ship has sailed I believe))
- Since it has space... enough space, put a keyboard WITH F-Keys, and the TouchBar ON TOP of that.
- Face ID

Oh and... before anyone asks... for this machine... I would GLADLY pay €5k. Without even thinking twice. Not because I am rich though... I am not... but the current MBPs imho... aren't worth the ~€3k+ asking price.
 
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Naimfan said:
Apple could use DDR4 but claims it would affect the (already poor) battery life. Of course, if they had kept the 99.5 watt-hour battery, it wouldn't be a problem. But thin is more important than work . . .
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Current MBP is absolutely restricted by it's power supply USB 3 resulting in mediocre GPU performance at very best. As the power supply is incapable of coping with a decent GPU and after all we "all" want ever thinner lighter Mac notebooks that are literately crushed by their Windows counterparts.

Ironically some of Apple's most ardent defenders equally stand to benefit from a serious MBP, not a consumer based appliance...

Q-6
 
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jerry70450 said:
Nope blame intel for that
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Ignorance abounds. Intel has sets out there that can. Apple simply chose not to use it. Get your facts straight.

EDIT: All I want is a keyboard that won't crap the bed when I'm not in a clean room environment, a thicker MBP (more battery) since I already have a knife at home to slice bread, and also a smaller touch pad that doesn't take up 50% of the hand rest area. I like using my fingers, not wrists, on the track pad.
 
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spacebro said:
Get an iPad pro already. Every common task is nicer from browsing to creating documents to consuming media.
Click to expand...

I have a MBP, a 12.9 iPad Pro and a 10.5 iPad Pro and could not disagree with this more. About the only thing I find an iPad better for is consuming media. There are far too many limitations in iOS for me to use it for most of the things I use my MBP for.
 
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drewyboy said:
Ignorance abounds. Intel has sets out there that can. Apple simply chose not to use it. Get your facts straight.
Click to expand...

I think you might be mistaking LP DDR4 for regular DDR4. He said to blame Intel for not allowing users to configure 32GB of LP DDR4, and he's right. Neither the current Kaby Lake or the coming Coffee Lake support 32GB of LP DDR4. Intel's controller simply doesn't allow it.

Apple only use LP or low power memory to allow for better battery life.

It looks like Cannon Lake will allow this though. Whether we will see that this year is a coin toss.
 
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