Joe Hutch
Mate of the bloke
We need to see the director's cut! All four hours of it!
New Macbook Pro? Should I wait
- Thread starter cutting42
- Start date
We need to see the director's cut! All four hours of it!
Stunsworth
pfm Member
I meant more like the first video where the camera changes focal length between sentences. But anyway, I watched the first video and I think it’s safe to say he’s impressed. It makes you wonder what next year’s models are going to be like. Having billions to spend on R&D has obviously helped.
Tony L
Administrator
I am very tempted by the Mini it has to be said. A 16GB 1TB model would be a great thing to run along with my iPad Pro. Just use it via my 50” 4K Sony TV. I’d need to play with text size and screen resolution to be able to view it easily from the 2 meters or so I sit from the TV, but I think it should be ok.
To be honest the thing that concerns me with all Apple kit these days is the soldered-in SSD. I can deal with it on a iPhone or iPad, but I’m in for the long-haul with proper computers and want a good 8 years or longer out of anything I buy. I’m not convinced I trust an SSD that long, but by saying that so much of my usage is the iPad now it would only be getting light use, maybe just a few hours a month.
To be honest the thing that concerns me with all Apple kit these days is the soldered-in SSD. I can deal with it on a iPhone or iPad, but I’m in for the long-haul with proper computers and want a good 8 years or longer out of anything I buy. I’m not convinced I trust an SSD that long, but by saying that so much of my usage is the iPad now it would only be getting light use, maybe just a few hours a month.
deebster
Half Man Half Biscuit
Plus one, and folks like the bloke in the lumberjack shirt a couple of posts above, who talk much too quickly and constantly repeat the full name of the item. Painful.
claire.foxx
-⃝⃤
...seeing as then SSD is already soldered onto the board and Apple has effectively done away with what a Northbridge would do, its probably not too far off (when Apple gets the failure rate of 5nm manufacturing down) to simply put a high-speed SSD into the next iteration of silicon and produce a range of SSDs for eac generation... 1TB 2TB and 4TB CPUs. no need to hulk about legacy pipelines like AHCI or NVME, just a high speed blitter swapping pages of storage in and out hyper-fast. If its all soldered in and inaccessible then why even go through the ritual of buying SSD to solder onto your board.
Apple's coming for integrated SSDs next, mark my words.
Apple's coming for integrated SSDs next, mark my words.
SteveS1
I heard that, pardon?
I must have been lucky, none of my (ordinary) Mac HDDs have failed within 8 years. This mid 2012 is fine. My wife's Air of similar vintage died - or rather needed a non economic repair to the logic board but SSD was fine.
Nick_G
pfm Member
Review of the new MacBook Pro here:
Wow!
One thing which seems odd is that apparently not all iOS apps are available (he specifically mentions Instagram). Unless I'm missing something I thought all iOS apps could run natively on Apple Silicon as it's the same architecture. I get that specialised apps that rely on, say, an iPhone's GPS system would be hobbled, but surely Instagram would be downloadable from the App Store, no?
Wow!
One thing which seems odd is that apparently not all iOS apps are available (he specifically mentions Instagram). Unless I'm missing something I thought all iOS apps could run natively on Apple Silicon as it's the same architecture. I get that specialised apps that rely on, say, an iPhone's GPS system would be hobbled, but surely Instagram would be downloadable from the App Store, no?
cantgetnonut
Active Member
I bought a 120GB MacPro a few years ago, believing cloud storage would be satisfactory. I won't make that mistake again.
cantgetnonut
Active Member
Oops, was responding to
Stunsworth
pfm Member
It's up to the developer. They have the option to not have their iOS app available to Mac users. I'm guessing typically that would be someone who already had iOS and Mac OS versions of an app and wanted to protect the revenue stream from the Mac version.
Nick_G
pfm Member
Thanks. I can see why it would be done but a fully-featured version of Instagram working on a desktop computer would appeal to me.
Stunsworth
pfm Member
Perhaps they feel that their touch enabled app wouldn't work well with a keyboard and mouse? Just a guess.
Nick_G
pfm Member
Maybe Apple could release MacBooks or even iMacs with touch screens. That would be interesting.
Nothing unless you’re a Luddite or just don’t understand the benefits!
Apple's big performance wins are from close-coupling of RAM to CPU. That's not something that can be replicated with flash storage, for a couple of reasons:
1. Size. Fifty to a hundred gigabytes of Flash memory is physically too large to share a die with the other parts of a SoC, even at a 5 nm process. Bigger dies are not a good idea: the yield falls dramatically (flaws are randomly distributed across a wafer; a big chip is an easier target than a small one), and heat becomes a problem very quickly as area increases.
2. Speed. The second point is that flash memory is about 1,000 times slower than DRAM on read, and about 20,000 times slower on write, so there's actually no real throughput improvement in bringing it closer to the CPU - the saving in signalling overhead is tiny in relation to the inherent latency of the flash itself.
3. Flash isn't uniform. Flash memory is byte-addressed on read, but block-addressed on write (...effectively. Flash is actually byte-addressable for write, but only if you never want to set a bit to 1): unlike RAM where you select an address and read/write, Flash always requires an intermediate controller for writes. The other solid-state storage technology that you can buy easily, Intel and Micron's 3D Xpoint ("Optane") memory gets a lot of its performance gains because, unlike Flash, it is byte addressable for both read and write. That's why you can buy Optane in DIMM format, but NAND Flash is limited to NVMe. A memory techology like that might benefit from closer coupling to the CPU, but the chances of Intel allowing TSMC to bake 3D Xpoint onto a SoC for Apple are effectively zero.