MacBook Pro 14 and MacBook Pro 16 with new processors released

MacBook-Pro-Notch-Feature.jpg
Apple is calling the event 'Unleashed' and its expected that they would be demonstrating the true power of their new silicon which they introduced in the lower end MacBooks. Calling them lower end would not be accurate given how they outperformed the beefier Intel processors. So much so that Intel went scrambling in desperation to release a series of ads showing how non-apple laptops are better, not once comparing the actual performance of Intel vs Apple silicon.

The MacBook Pro laptops are also supposed to redesigned around the new processors which are extremely energy efficient thus leading to a more compact design. The screen bezels are supposed to even thinner than they are in the 16" MacBook Pro and introduce a new MacBook screen size of 14" instead of the regular 13" size. The displays are expected to be mini LED with higher resolutions.

The base models on the new processor, to be called M1X or M2, are supposed to start with 16GB RAM and 512GB storage. The processors themselves will get a bump up from 4 performance cores to 10 performance cores and 16 graphic cores from the 8 graphic cores. The cores are expected to run at a higher frequency. No wonder the event is being called Unleashed and Intel is scared out of their wits.

There are also rumours that the Touch Bar will go away in favor of regular function keys and we will have more variety of ports than just USBC ports currently available. A return to MagSafe charging is also expected.

All this however will likely cost 1,74,000 for the starting model here in India and would price it way out of reach for most of us.

Personally I would prefer that they introduce the redesigned chassis in the current base MacBook Pro model and take it from 13" to 14" with the current M1 processor in the market. I would happily take that model with a 16GB RAM option to replace my ageing MacBook 12. Had been saving every month for past 2 years for this day.
 
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rsaeon said:
This is true and it stems from the way Mac software is designed, every program is colour space aware. You can make Windows colour accurate, but it's never going to be system-wide across every program. This really needs to change, but it hasn't yet so it might never change.
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Trying to get color accurate caliberated setup running windows/linux can become very very very expensive. In laptop world there is no equivalent. I used to gave a toshiba laptop which was technicolor certified 4k screen. It was very rare thing.
 
Nice try Apple...but your latest and greatest non Intel Macs still don't fully support your own best selling "Pro" software.
There's a huge "Pro" market beside video and photography and they have already spent thousands upon thousands for this M1 compatible upgrades.
50 percent of Slate Digital all plug-in bundle doesn't work. The latest iZotope Neutron, Ozone, Rx have minds of their own on M1, same with FabFilter bundle ( all these works perfectly fine on intel and latest AMD chips)
Other than software developers who are considered "Pros" in Apple universe?
 
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It's really infuriating...you spend couple of grands on a laptop just for one truly awesome software ( which thankfully is very cheap compared to others and works wonderfully in the Intel Macs)
Then you spend another 2-4 grands for other "compatible" softwares...just to find most still do not work...and the support forums become battlefield of these SW manufacturers vs Apple.
And only one solution comes up....buy an Intel Mac or go to Windows.
Go to Native Instruments / iZotope forums...same thing everywhere for more than a year now!!
Most of the members there are full time audio engineers and using Macs for decades.
Thank God, I learnt both Ableton and Studio One...the way Apple is going... anyday they will announce do everything in GarageBand, Logic is too complex for our iphone/ ipad generation.
 
princeoo7 said:
this is so true :arghh:

at max M1 Air with 16gb ram show work for everyone. don't know what the PRO version does differently ...
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I got an M1 air 8gb at work and I think short of video editing or any other similarly RAM/GPU intensive work I think it should be enough for anybody. I frequently have 10-20 tabs open in Chrome, a few windows of visual studio code, pycharm, 3 running application servers, plus two or more database tools open, plus all my non-work stuff (Spotify, WhatsApp web, mail, etc.) and I have yet to see it visibly slow down in any way.

In fact, the single core performance is so good that it actually outperforms the AWS instances (proper ones too) we use for compilation in one step that is limited to a single thread.
 
rudiv said:
I got an M1 air 8gb at work and I think short of video editing or any other similarly RAM/GPU intensive work I think it should be enough for anybody. I frequently have 10-20 tabs open in Chrome, a few windows of visual studio code, pycharm, 3 running application servers, plus two or more database tools open, plus all my non-work stuff (Spotify, WhatsApp web, mail, etc.) and I have yet to see it visibly slow down in any way.

In fact, the single core performance is so good that it actually outperforms the AWS instances (proper ones too) we use for compilation in one step that is limited to a single thread.
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I have the 8gb air. It was very good till I started running containers. It kinda becomes sluggish. It's still good but wouldn't call it a replacement for my workstation. Should try the 16gig variant sometime as I think RAM is the bottleneck in my case.
 
rudiv said:
I got an M1 air 8gb at work and I think short of video editing or any other similarly RAM/GPU intensive work I think it should be enough for anybody. I frequently have 10-20 tabs open in Chrome, a few windows of visual studio code, pycharm, 3 running application servers, plus two or more database tools open, plus all my non-work stuff (Spotify, WhatsApp web, mail, etc.) and I have yet to see it visibly slow down in any way.

In fact, the single core performance is so good that it actually outperforms the AWS instances (proper ones too) we use for compilation in one step that is limited to a single thread.
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I have a question. how do you manage this all on a 13inch window ? or do you use it with multiple monitors ...
 
j3rwin said:
I have the 8gb air. It was very good till I started running containers. It kinda becomes sluggish. It's still good but wouldn't call it a replacement for my workstation. Should try the 16gig variant sometime as I think RAM is the bottleneck in my case.
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Definitely, running x86 containers is quite heavy on it. ARM64 containers are better, but still not great. I think that is mostly because the way that container engines are running on it (I only know about Docker's beta version for M1 vaise) is not optimal because it's running the container runtime within a VM. Of course, maybe that's how Docker has always run on Macs? Most of my dev usage before I got this work laptop has been linux.
princeoo7 said:
I have a question. how do you manage this all on a 13inch window ? or do you use it with multiple monitors ...
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I have a monitor at work, and I spend so long at the office that I rarely have to use it at home for work. Unfortunately that generation of M1 Macs doesn't even support more than one external display, which really sucks.
 
rudiv said:
I got an M1 air 8gb at work and I think short of video editing or any other similarly RAM/GPU intensive work I think it should be enough for anybody.
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Nope, even basic editing of 1080p 5/6 minutes in FCPX with LPX lags severely ( only old fashioned AIFF somewhat works)
LPX now reads and writes FCPXML files. When you're ready to do some semi serious, semi heavy editing of your audio clips...it lags and throttles SERIOUSLY. Forget any heavy editing.
I don't know what you guys/ girls edit in FCPX, but anything slightly complicated with audio (except absolutely basic things like slapping on a reverb).... everything becomes unusable.
 
red dragon said:
Nope, even basic editing of 1080p 5/6 minutes in FCPX with LPX lags severely ( only old fashioned AIFF somewhat works)
LPX now reads and writes FCPXML files. When you're ready to do some semi serious, semi heavy editing of your audio clips...it lags and throttles SERIOUSLY. Forget any heavy editing.
I don't know what you guys/ girls edit in FCPX, but anything slightly complicated with audio (except absolutely basic things like slapping on a reverb).... everything becomes unusable.
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That's exactly what I said, no? (that video editing is one of the things not achievable with an 8gb M1 air).
Isn't AIFF an audio format, btw?
 
Yes, it is. My bad!! Thought you were being able to do short video edits. Some people were claiming they can!!
I couldn't do anything productive with the M1 Air ( base model) that couldn't be done in an older ipad Pro ( but I know nothing about coding/ SW development)
 
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red dragon said:
Yes, it is. My bad!! Thought you were being able to do short video edits. Some people were claiming they can!!
I couldn't do anything productive with the M1 Air ( base model) that couldn't be done in an older ipad Pro ( but I know nothing about coding/ SW development)
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I've heard as such from other people also (I haven't tried to do any video editing since the video editors in the computer club in school saw my work and made disgusted faces :sweatsmile:)
I think it's because a lot of the snappiness on the original M1 especially on the 8gb version comes from the OS very aggressively swapping out memory between RAM and disk. The tight hardware-software coupling makes it possible for them to enable very high swappiness (I have been assured this is a word) by default. You can see this by the relatively high rate of SSD wear even when you're not actually writing a lot of data. E.g. I've had this air for 6 months and have used the storage very little but I just checked and the SSD has had 8.61 terabytes written to it! The aggressive usage of swap memory makes it very quick to switch between apps and makes it seem like you have a lot more RAM than you actually do in terms of having many apps open, but I don't think those benefits would extend to applications like Premiere etc. that actually need to use a large amount of RAM simultaneously. In fact AFAIK video editing apps usually have their own memory management built in, which would probably conflict with the system when the system behaves so differently from almost all other computers.
TechNick said:
Will be interesting to see how the integrated GPU of the M1 Max compares to dedicated GPUs from NVIDIA/AMD
Waiting for benchmarks
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Apple has been pretty bad with benchmarks in the past but if I'm not wrong the benchmarks they initially released for the first M1 chip were actually from this realm and not completely ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if the benchmarks they gave are, like, within 15% of accurate. :tongueout:
 
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rudiv said:
I've heard as such from other people also (I haven't tried to do any video editing since the video editors in the computer club in school saw my work and made disgusted faces :sweatsmile:)
I think it's because a lot of the snappiness on the original M1 especially on the 8gb version comes from the OS very aggressively swapping out memory between RAM and disk. The tight hardware-software coupling makes it possible for them to enable very high swappiness (I have been assured this is a word) by default. You can see this by the relatively high rate of SSD wear even when you're not actually writing a lot of data. E.g. I've had this air for 6 months and have used the storage very little but I just checked and the SSD has had 8.61 terabytes written to it! The aggressive usage of swap memory makes it very quick to switch between apps and makes it seem like you have a lot more RAM than you actually do in terms of having many apps open, but I don't think those benefits would extend to applications like Premiere etc. that actually need to use a large amount of RAM simultaneously. In fact AFAIK video editing apps usually have their own memory management built in, which would probably conflict with the system when the system behaves so differently from almost all other computers.

Apple has been pretty bad with benchmarks in the past but if I'm not wrong the benchmarks they initially released for the first M1 chip were actually from this realm and not completely ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if the benchmarks they gave are, like, within 15% of accurate. :tongueout:
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Yes its writing a lot of data to disk, but there is no confirmation that its due to Swap usage. Obviously an 8gb ram machine will use swap.
Swappiness is the value set in linux or linux based systems, that determines how readily the system will use swap file.

The reason the M1 system is so fast has to do more with its processor / SOC architecture than ssd speeds, swap or anything else. The unified memory means the gpu has as much ram as the CPU, plus there's no copying etc going on of same data. So a lot of redundant tasks have been eliminated.
Intel being intel, never really cared for consumer experience, so things like how fast system comes out of sleep etc were never their priority even though they did show it in their marketing. Now with M1 people actually see whats possible. Had AMD come out with Ryzen a few more years ago, they could have made far more advancements than just focus on IPC. It was about time someone worked on other stuff.

People say its close integration of hardware and software and all that shit, but no one stopped Intel, AMD or Microsoft from doing it. Microsoft has been making ARM based OS since 2012, for a decade now with those pathetic Surface RTs. They had all the money and muscle to do it. Its always been the lack of intent. Apple is a high intent company and that is why they are able to change the status quo. Yes I know they do bone headed things all the time too, but that's just a byproduct of being on the cutting edge and doing mad stuff.
red dragon said:
Nope, even basic editing of 1080p 5/6 minutes in FCPX with LPX lags severely ( only old fashioned AIFF somewhat works)
LPX now reads and writes FCPXML files. When you're ready to do some semi serious, semi heavy editing of your audio clips...it lags and throttles SERIOUSLY. Forget any heavy editing.
I don't know what you guys/ girls edit in FCPX, but anything slightly complicated with audio (except absolutely basic things like slapping on a reverb).... everything becomes unusable.
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What are you saying, everyone loves it for editing. Define what you call complex? A few timelines with a few filters is complex too and Air does it without issues. Must have seen tens of videos about it.
 
rudiv said:
I've heard as such from other people also (I haven't tried to do any video editing since the video editors in the computer club in school saw my work and made disgusted faces :sweatsmile:)
I think it's because a lot of the snappiness on the original M1 especially on the 8gb version comes from the OS very aggressively swapping out memory between RAM and disk. The tight hardware-software coupling makes it possible for them to enable very high swappiness (I have been assured this is a word) by default. You can see this by the relatively high rate of SSD wear even when you're not actually writing a lot of data. E.g. I've had this air for 6 months and have used the storage very little but I just checked and the SSD has had 8.61 terabytes written to it! The aggressive usage of swap memory makes it very quick to switch between apps and makes it seem like you have a lot more RAM than you actually do in terms of having many apps open, but I don't think those benefits would extend to applications like Premiere etc. that actually need to use a large amount of RAM simultaneously. In fact AFAIK video editing apps usually have their own memory management built in, which would probably conflict with the system when the system behaves so differently from almost all other computers.

Apple has been pretty bad with benchmarks in the past but if I'm not wrong the benchmarks they initially released for the first M1 chip were actually from this realm and not completely ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised if the benchmarks they gave are, like, within 15% of accurate. :tongueout:
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Does it even matter if it uses a lot of swap as long as it is completely transparent to the user- and exhibits no delays ..

BTW it would appear they are using high write threshold chips.
My MBA is about a year old now - with SSD TBW at 21-22 TBW (and moderately heavy usage)
The SSD usage is 1% so at this rate, the SSD would be expected to last anywhere between 50-100 years :lol:
 
By heavy editing I meant editing music videos ( with audio stereo track processing between LPX and FCPX)
Back in the days we used to export the AIFF from master out and reimport it in FCPX basic syncs etc.
For last 4/5 years we are doing something called FCPXML round trip in studios. As logic can now write / read FCPXML files.
It's a very simple process and intel Macs can do it like champions ( personally have managed 37 chopped stereo tracks in LPX with 78 non Logic native plugins and FCPX open in a 16 inch MBP)
It's not a heavy workload at all. I've done almost similar thing in Windows with a free DAW Cakewalk and Premiere, but since ASIO4ALL only works with one software at a time ( or I don't know how to configure it to work with two SW simultaneously) you have to be very cautious with A/V sync issues (can be easily fixed later also, but it takes time)
One thing for sure, M1 can render the final output from both LPX and FCPX really fast (but getting to that point can be really rocky and infuriating) and that's been shown in many youtube videos/ online articles.
It's entirely possible that we were doing things wrong, with evolving tech the human component should also evolve. But it's not easy to change the workflow overnight.
 
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