Intel down, Nvidia next?
Random observations about the new MacBook Pro’s
The new MacBook Pros are top-notch.
Everything that was asked for and more*.
* more notch / more money needed
But enough with the bad jokes. The notch isn’t pretty and obfuscates some mouse behavior, but it should fade in the background in daily usage.
The height doesn’t go beyond the menu bar and the menu bar can be set to black. In Full-Screen mode Apple places black to the left and right so that the notch effectively disappears (and the bezels become as thick as on older MacBook’s).
It is actually easier to list the downsides/omissions on the new Macbook’s than the other way around:
- There’s no Face ID.
- It’s only HDMI 2.0, meaning external monitors run only 4k / 60 Hz.
- Still no cellular option.
- The power brick is bigger than it needs to be and doesn’t offer Ethernet like the new iMac.
- The battery life is great. But not as superb as seen before with the MacBook Pro 13". Keep in mind that Apple lists the run time for video viewing which disproportionally benefits from ProMotion’s variable refresh rate and is quoted at 200 nits brightness, not the 1000 nits sustained as advertised. Back in 2020 Apple went with the old battery size suited for power hungry x86 chips and just replaced Intel with the M1. As Federighi said “we overshot”.
- Still no Touchscreen. Not that I expected it. But it hurts nonetheless. Now that the screen is de facto an iPad screen, I would love to see macOS with touch. Like written before, the game changing aspect is not a laptop screen becoming touch-sensitive (I call it the Ultrabook-trap). It‘s a game changer as soon as that laptop screen could be used as standalone tablet.
A lot has been said about the fact that Apple brought back ports and therefore reverted previous changes. In case you managed to only buy MacBook’s with SD card slot… congratulations. Glass half-empty or half-full?
Anyway, the whole thing is completely not Apple-like. Just watch the 2 minute marketing video full of CGI processing and spec sheets. Companies go back to communicating specs when they don’t have another story to tell. The thing is, the story of the laptop doesn’t necessarily need a new narrative.
At least in case we get upgrades like this huge on a yearly basis. Who forecasted that >50% more performance is now common in laptops instead of smartphones?
The lesson here is that the usual Apple approach works best when introducing new device categories — not the refinement of established categories.
Have we talked about the insane performance yet? It has only been a few weeks that the new iPad mini was the fastest JavaScript interpreter available.
The M1 Pro/Max trump that easily. If you follow me the slightest, you know that I’m not a Apple fanboy — but with their custom ARM chips Apple is running circles around the competition.
Actually that was true already since last year. What was questionable back then was the GPU part. Can the M1 be scaled to match dedicated graphic cards worth hundreds of dollars?
The performance on a single SoC with shared RAM is stellar. Even more so if you consider the metric achievements per energy needed.
But does that mean Intel and Nvidia are toast?
Probably not, at least not in the short-term. Developers are accustomed to x86, particular on servers. Gamers won’t be happy with these machines as well.
And the best thing for both companies: Apple doesn’t care about others. No hardware vendor can buy the M1 Pro and put it in a laptop of his own. Given that macOS runs still only on 1 out of 10 computers, this hinders the adoption of ARM.
That’s maybe the most interesting part about the chip. For historical reasons, Apple always tries to make the crucial elements “in-house”. They happily trade the efficiency of a specialized supply chain in favor of autonomy. But this time it’s undeniably the better product, too.
Modularization failed. In theory a dedicated ARM supplier like Qualcomm would offer the better chips — they can spread their R&D spend across the whole smartphone industry. But Qualcomm has a history of underdelivering, so that numerous Big Tech companies have chosen to design their own chips instead.
A good, non-exclusive ARM chip is what stands in the way between me and the laptop/tablet combo I mentioned earlier.
Wait, that’s not entirely true. As in almost all other contexts — the hardware is way easier to get right than the software. The Surface Pro X is not only bad because of its ARM chip — it also hosts plenty of not optimized software. What you get is basically an expensive Chromebook. Not to forget the cruft of decades of Windows that lurk behind a new start menu.
On the other end of the spectrum I (unluckily?) don’t have the use cases to utilize the new MacBook’s. And yes, that would be needed to justify spending € 2.400 on a notebook. For the base configuration. I would like to see a rough calculation with the M1 “beast mode” doing crypto mining, but other than that?
Maybe even the entry level MacBook Air is too fast for regular usage, you know like web browsing and streaming videos or even the occasional vacation video with iMovie.
If Apple would have designed their MacBook portfolio for the customer segments that are currently out there, we would have seen a scaled-down € 600 Air and a € 1.300 Pro (basically what the MB Pro 13" costs, the device which doesn’t have a place in the current lineup).
Of course, you would still be welcome to spec out the Pro to pay Apple what others pay for their car. Margins would be worse than what we got but still very, very good.
The price increase for MacBook’s would make a lot more sense if the iPad were positioned to take over basic laptop needs, but iOS is hindering.
What Apple means by Pro:
- Mac lineup: You only need the Pro version if you’re a serious professional in some performance intense field.
- iPad lineup: Sorry can’t do proper external monitor support. Better get a workaround before we kick it out the store.
At least on macOS the user can look up or invent tasks for the machine that utilize the raw power.
One can decide to save money by using a Nifty drive for storage and stay on 16 GB RAM.
I love digging into the whole semiconductor space because the competitive landscape is structured so differently than x86. The performance of the M1 (Pro/Max) rests on the shoulders of not 1 but 4 monopolists:
There are a few interesting questions in the semi industry right now. Does the industry adopt the Apple’s ARM architecture and will we see blockbuster games for it is one of them. Then there’s the question if Qualcomm will finally catch up, they acquired human capital from Apple. And don’t forget, there’s also the political question about TSMC which is behind all of 5mm chips and China.
It’s feels good to have “real” computers making leaps again, after a long time in the shadows.
