Almost certainly for this event: “M1X” 14/16” MacBook Pros. Maybe the new MacBook Air if you’ve been a good egg.
Stream starts at 10 PM Pacific/2 PM Atlantic. As always, I’ll be the real-time tl;dr.
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Stream starts. An OG iMac in a garage. Musicians surrounding it and sampling the bong. Maccore? Sampling more Apple sounds. Applecore, I guess. Apple Park. Tim’s standing in a field. Another event so soon! Two areas: Music and Mac.
Music. Apple: they like music (even for a lawsuit early on). Sync music state between devices, all the devices with speakers they sell, etc. And that streaming service you don’t subscribe to.
Zane to talk more about that service, I assume. Siri can already be told to play specific things. More curated playlists for Siri to select for various moods and places. Do they have lo-fi hip-hop beats? Another sub plan for Apple Music. Voice plan, for Siri to access only all the music in the service (I think?) at 5$/mo. 17 country/regions. Half the price of the normal plan.
Tim. Dave about HomePod Mini. Promo video. They come in more colours now (yellow, orange, blue?)? Colour is in the mesh, touch space, and cabling. Typical use case for a whole-home setup shown. New colours in addition to white/grey. 99$, avail in Nov.
Back to Tim. AirPods. Susmita on AirPods. Spatial audio. Music is starting to come in it (remember DVD Audio w/ 5.1 mixes?) nowadays. And movies too! Spatial audio support in Pro and Max on all Apple devices. Third gen normal AirPods. These support spatial audio now. New design. Force touch sensor on the stem for controls. New driver for low distortion w/ bass and high frequencies. Sweat/water resistant. Design for different ear shape. Adaptive EQ from Pro in normal AirPods that automatically adjust. 6 hour battery life, 5 minute charge time -> 1 hour usage. 30 hours/4 charges worth in the case. Case now supports wireless charging. Dynamic head tracking. $179 for 3rd gen. Order today, available next week. 2nd is 129$ now.
Tim. He’s still in the weeds (literal). Mac time. Apple Silicon’s curbstomping of the competition led to a lot of Mac sales.
John on Mac. MacBook Pro. A new one. Pro chip. M1 Pro.
Johny on M1 Pro. Flaunting, but Pros need a bigger chip. Two chip (C/GPU) require sep memory pools and more thermals. SoC pro chip. New fabric. Double memory interface, faster DRAM. 200GB/s memory bandwidth, 3X M1. UMA 32 GB w/ custom package. 5nm, 33.7B transistors, twice M1. 10 Core, 8P/2E, 70% than M1. 16 GPU cores, 2x perf than M1. Media engine now supports ProRes. Multiple 4k/8k ProRes with fraction of power requirements. Newer DCP and Thunderbolt for multiple displays.
DJ Khaled goes “another one”. M1 Max. Doubles memory, newer fabric. 400GB/s bandwidth. Six times M1, twice M1 Pro. 64 GB UMA. 57B transistors. 10 cores as well, but 32-core GPU. 4x GPU perf from M1. Twice the ProRes, twice the perf in general decode/encode. Leading perf-per-watt, versus everyone else. 1.7x versus leading “PC chip” in same power envelop, general at 70% less. Now GPU, comparing against IGPs - Pro is 7x faster than presumably Intel IGP. M1 Pro is slightly above most dGPUs at a fraction of the power, 40% for Max vs. top end. (I’d like to see what specific models, but the ballpark seems accurate.) Same performance on battery, unlike competition.
Craig on Mac OS. It’s obviously fast on this. Optimizations for pro applications. Better assignment of cores, especially between perf/efficiency cores. More ML optimizations, 3-20x perf than i9 MBP. Security stuff like secure boot. Reiterating application support, but new updates for Apple’s pro apps. Faster spatial audio mixing in Logic. 5x perf improvement for object tracking in FCP. 10x perf w/ ProRes in Compressor. 10K ARM applications. Developers when told about M1 Pro/Max. 4x perf in Resolve. Real-time multi-level colour correction. Cinema 4D gets 3x faster. Scene edit detection is 5x faster in Premiere.
Back to John. A new MBP that has it. Promo video. MagSafe. Type C. HDMI. 3.5mm. SD slot. No touch bar. Looks kinda thick. 16” and 14”. 50% more air at same fan speed. Most tasks the fans can remain off. 16.8mm thicc/4.7lb on 16”. 3.5lb 15.5mm on 14”.
Shruti on it. Keyboard. Full-height function row, going back on the touch bar in a way only Apple could. Black well. Big trackpad. Connectivity. As said, TB4, HDMI and SD on the right. On left 3.5mm with high-impediance, 2 TB4, and MagSafe 3. Can charge via TB4. M1 Pro has 2 Pro Display XDRs, Max can do 3 and a 4K TV. (That’s a lot of pixels and ports.). No dongles, baby!
Kate on the display. Less bezel; 3.5mm, 24% thinner. Up too, 60% thinner too, with a notch. Raised menu bar that spans across, and includes the notch. 16” is 16.2. 1.8M more pixels. 7.7m 3456x2234 in 16”. 14.2” 3024x1924. ProMotion 24-120hz display. Adaptive refresh rate. Stops when needed, goes up for scrolling, can be locked in. “Liquid Retina” HDR with more colours. Thin display with mini LEDs with local dimming zones. 1000 nits sustained, 1600 peak, 1M:1 contrast ratio.
Camera and audio with Trevor. 1080p with wider aperture front camera. Better ISP. 2x low light perf. Computational video. Better mic array, 60% lower noise floor. 16” has 6 six speakers, 2 tweet, 4 force-cancelling woofers. Bigger diaphragms. Twice as much air displacement, 80% more bass, more octaves. Also on the 14” Spatial audio.
Shruti again. Performance. 2x perf than the i9 MBP. Graphics are up to 2.5x for Pro than fastest x86 MBP GPU and 4X for Max. 5x ML perf. 3.7x perf than 13” i7 CPU and even more brutal for GPU/ML. 16 GB of VRAM on dGPUs, but UMA means the M1 Pro/Max can use even more. 30 streams of 4k ProRes 422 or 7 streams of 8K. Even more than the Mac Pro. 7.4 GB/s read SSDs. Efficient too. Battery life. 2x more battery in Lightroom, 4x more compiles in Xcode. 14” has 17 hours of video playback. 16” has 21 hours of video playback. Fast charging, 50% in 30 minutes, Environment. 100% recycled Al, less harmful substance, more renewable energy during manufacture. Promo video.
John. 14” vs. previous high end 13” compares favourably. 2000$. 16” is 2499$. Order today, available next week. Further into the transition.
Tim. The party line. Stream ends.
Shout out to the sweet intro with the vintage hardware and sounds!
That came out of nowhere. Several changes I like:
I liked TouchBar, as I do not use these keys anyway, then having per-application specific functionality available right away was great.
I thought that the Touch Bar was a good idea badly implemented. I very much like the idea of a soft keyboard, but the fact that a) it wasn’t universal on Apple keyboards and b) only existed above the keyboard on a laptop meant that it was going to be impossible for Apple or 3rd parties to rely on.
I do not recall the old Macbook Pro price, but ~$2000 for the base model is breaking a mental barrier.
IIRC 1799$ for prev “high-end” model.
When was this?
This is the 15” from 2016 I’m using now:
So the new base model is more expensive than the previous “high-end” model. That’s an outrageous increase.
Except the MBP line had two “base” Pro configs - the low end one (2 ports, optional touchbar, now M1 based), and the high end one (which could be specced with a dGPU before, 4 ports). There was a significant price difference between the two. This replaces that latter one. I think it’s pretty confusing how they have a barely-Pro Pro model now, but I’m assuming it’s vestigal and will get replaced or killed off.
I haven’t owned my own laptop for years, since my employer’s been supplying me MacBook Pros as work machines. But my current one is the 2018 model with the awful keyboard, and lately the IT department has been making us install
spywaredevice management tools and warning us not to install unauthorized software nor use the laptop for personal projects … so I’ve been lusting after a full-size ARM MBP of my very own.The good thing is that most of the CPU-transition glitches seem to have been worked out by now, like problems with HomeBrew. I wonder how long it’ll take to get Linux running on the new hardware?
Asahi seems to be doing pretty well per their progress reports. They’ve got most of the hardware situated, just stuff like sound, 3D acceleration, etc. to write, and polishing up their drivers for i.e. display to upstream.
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An organization has to ensure security controls are in place and keep everything up to date and full-disk encrypted, and to an extend, prevent unauthorized software execution. I would say that device management is a very reasonable thing to use for an IT department. If your employer notify you that you are not moving your mouse or typing, device management is not the issue, neither does an employer need that to be abusive.
Any latitude they give individual users is an opening for cybersecurity problems. If you can install and run arbitrary software, your organisation is going to get exploited at some point.
The cleanest solution is ‘Good screen / Bad screen’ where you get a work device they manage and lock down, and you have a personal device that they have no control over.
Every other arrangement is an unhappy compromise - you cannot possibly satisfy both parties at once.
Yeah, same here, but I’m sticking with “my” (work) MBP 2015 top of the line configuration, so far so good.
Just bought a 2015 13” MBP and 15” MBP also 2015… great year for these machines. I may buy yet another 2015 13”, the form factor is so great and they’re pretty cheap on craigslist
I mean, you are in dangerous IP waters in some jurisdictions if you use company-provided hardware for personal projects. I don’t like the MDM crap any more than anyone else, but the solution here is to use your own machine, really.
With regards to the slightly info-free graphs Apple has shown:
So slightly slower than a 3080 at 160W. Not bad.
I know I’m in the minority of people who enjoy using the Touch Bar, but I didn’t realize until today just how much vitriol there was towards it. What is it that makes it so off-putting to users?
I think lack of haptic feedback was the big motivating factor. I thought the idea had potential, but it wasn’t really iterated on before its quiet death.
Considering Apple have fully functioning haptic feedback on the otherwise mute touchpad, it’s mysterious they never implemented it for the touch bar.
But… you don’t feel the haptics in the touchpad when you stroke across it, only when you click it. Which makes sense for a touchpad, because it’s a big uniformly smooth surface without features. Function keys, on the other hands, require you to hit a specific spot; haptic feedback when clicking wouldn’t help you feel your way to the right key. You would need something where I can stroke across it and feel the contours of a key, and it would have to only activate when applying force.
Right. I would possibly appreciate such a feature on the touchpad as well.
I hated the keyboards it came with. I might’ve been interested in the ability to add a touch bar to a keyboard that didn’t suck.
Removing the esc key made it a complete non-starter for me. I didn’t care for the removal of the function row. By the time they put the esc key back and fixed the keyboard, I had moved on from the platform.
That’s all background for my hot take: I don’t think people hated the touch bar per se so much as the inability to put a keyboard with the expected facilities onto some very high-end pieces of gear. If the touch bar had been purely additive, I suspect some detractors might even have become fans.
I had a touchbar without esc (with butterfly keyboard) for years, and have had a touchbar with esc (with good keyboard; M1) for the last year. Honestly, it still sucks. Even looking at it I can still fudge and hit the wrong thing. It is just about strictly worse than physical function keys. It’s hard to think of a single time when it has been useful.
I assume it’s going to be useless to a lot of people here at lobsters. But my wife find it super handy because she doesn’t use the escape key do often, or keyboard at all, when there’s a touch{bar|pad} option.
Yeah, I think it would be good in addition to function keys. When it replaces the function keys, it doesn’t seem appealing at all. When it replaces the esc key, it makes me want to avoid the whole computer.
It requires you to look at the keyboard to use it, which is bad ergonomics in my opinion.
I wish they’d have put it into the touchpad, and then also in the external touchpad. I’m a weird duck as I never ever ever use a laptop as a laptop, so.
I use my Touch Bar about once a week…. always by accident.
Finally 1080p webcam! and it only took a global pandemic and millions of dead people to happen!
Thanks
I am most pleased with today’s announcements. Can’t wait to get my hands on the 16” M1 Max. I was looking to configure it with 64GB memory but that pushed my ship date to late November. I’ll make do with the (ridiculously powerful) 32GB base config.
This laptop should last for quite some time.
Ouh wait, there are no people?!
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