The benchmark to power consumption comparisons were very interesting. It seemed very un-Apple to be making such direct comparisons to competitors, especially when the Razer Blade Advanced had slightly better performance with far higher power consumption. I feel like typically Apple just says "Fastest we've ever made, it's so thin, so many nits, you'll love it" and leaves it at that.
I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart when people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for me to give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively to linux for the past couple years.
I think that for the first time, Apple has a real performance differentiator in its laptops. They want to highlight that.
If Apple is buying Intel CPUs, there's no reason making direct performance comparisons to competitors. They're all building out of the same parts bin. They would want to talk about the form factor and the display - areas where they could often out-do competitors. Now there's actually something to talk about with the CPU/GPU/hardware-performance.
I think Apple is also making the comparison to push something else: performance + lifestyle. For me, the implication is that I can buy an Intel laptop that's nicely portable, but a lot slower; I could also buy an Intel laptop that's just as fast, but requires two power adapters to satisfy its massive power drain and really doesn't work as a laptop at all. Or I can buy a MacBook Pro which has the power of the heavy, non-portable Intel laptops while sipping less power than the nicely portable ones. I don't have to make a trade-off between performance and portability.
I think people picked apart the comparisons on the M1 and were pretty satisfied. 6-8 M1 performance cores will offer a nice performance boost over 4 M1 performance cores and we basically know how those cores benchmark already.
I'd also note that there are efforts to get Linux on Apple Silicon.
Apple used to do these performance comparisons a lot when they were on the PowerPC architecture. Essentially they tried to show that PowerPC-based Macs were faster (or as fast as) Intel-based PCs for the stuff that users wanted to do, like web browsing, Photoshop, movie editing, etc.
This kind of fell by the wayside after switching to Intel, for obvious reasons: the chips weren’t differentiators anymore.
Apple almost single-handedly made computing devices non-repairable or upgradable; across their own product line and the industry in general due to their outsized influence.
Just today I got one 6s and one iPhone 7 screen repaired(6s got the glass replaced, the 7 got full assembly replaced) and battery of the 6s replaced at a shop that is not authorized by Apple. It cost me 110$ in total.
Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using an SSD and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon.
What’s that narrative that Apple devices are not upgradable or repairable?
It simply not true. If anything, Apple devices are the easiest to get serviced since there are not many models and pretty much all repair shops can deal with all devices that are still usable. Because of this, even broken Apple devices are sold and bought all the time.
>Just today I got one 6s and one iPhone 7 screen repaired
Nice, except doing a screen replacement on a modern iPhone like the 13 series will disable your FaceID making your iPhone pretty much worthless.
>Previously I got 2017 Macbook Air SSD upgraded using an SSD and an adapter that I ordered from Amazon
Nice, but on the modern Macbooks, the SSD is soldered and not replaceable. There is no way to upgrade them or replace them if they break, so you just have to throw away the whole laptop.
So yea, parent was right, Apple devices are the worst for reparability period since the ones you're talking about are not manufactured anymore therefore don't represent the current state of affairs and the ones that are manufactured today are built to not be repaired.
Hardware people are crafty, they find ways to transfer and combine working parts. The glass replacement(keeping the original LCD) I got for the 6S is not a procedure provided by Apple. Guess who doesn’t care? The repair shop that bought a machine from China for separating and re-assembly of the Glass and LCD.
Screen replacement is 50$, glass replacement is 30$.
iPhone 13 is very new, give it a few years and the hardware people will leverage the desire of not spending 1000$ on a new phone when the current one works fine except for that broken part.
Only if Apple wants to let them as far as I have seen. The software won't even let you swap screens between iPhone 13s. Maybe people will find a work around, but it seems like Apple is trying its hardest to prevent it.
And yet they authorize shops to perform these repairs. They’re not trying to prevent repairs, they’re trying to ensure repairs use Apple-supplied parts. Which, sure, you may object to that… but it’s very different from saying they’re preventing repairs full stop. And there’s very little chance such an effort would do anything other than destroy good will.
By changing chips. There are already procedures for fun stuff like upgrading the RAM on the non-retina MacBook Airs to 16GB. Apple never offered 16GB version off that laptop but you can have it[0].
You clearly don't have a clue how modern Apple HW is built and why stuff that you're talking about on old Apple HW just won't work anymore on the machines build today.
I'm talking about 2020 devices where you can't just "change the chips" and hope it works like in the 2015 model from the video you posted.
> I would love to be enlightened about the new physics that Apple is using which is out of reach to the other engineers.
That’s known as private-public key crypto with keys burnt into efuses on-die on the SoC.
You can’t get around that (except for that one dude in Shenzhen who just drills into the SoC and solders wires by hand which happen to hit the right spots). But generally, no regular third party repair shop will find a way around this.
I know about it, it simply means that someone will build a device that automates the thing that the dude in Shenzhen does or they will mix and match devices that have different kind of damage. I.e. if a phone that has destroyed screen(irreparable) will donate its parts to phones that have the face id lens broken.
You know, these encryption authentications work between ICs and not between lenses and motors. Keep the coded IC, change the coil. Things also have different breaking modes, for example a screen might break down due to the glass failure(which cannot be coded) and the repair shop can replace the broken assembly part when keeping the IC that ensures the communication with the mainboard. Too complicated for a street shop? Someone will build a service that does it B2B, shops will ship it ti them, they will ship it back leaving only the installation to the street shop.
Possibilities are endless. Some easier some harder but we are talking about talent that makes all kind of replicas of all kind of devices. With billions of iPhones out there, it's actually very lucrative market to be able to salvage 1000USD device, their margins could be even better than the margins of Apple when they charge 100USD to change the glass of the LCD assembly.
I know Luis, he made a career of complaining that it's impossible to repair Apple devices when repairing Apple devices.
Instead of watching videos and getting angry about Apple devices being impossible to repair, I get my Apple devices repaired when something breaks. Significantly more productive approach, you should try it.
Louis makes "Apple impossible to repair" videos since ever. It's not an iPhone 13 thing, give it a few year and you can claim that iPhone 17 impossible to repair, unlike the prehistoric iPhone 13.
He recently moved to a new larger shop in attempt to grew his Apple repair operations. Then had to move back to a smaller shop because as it turns out, it wasn't Apple who is ruining his repair business.
You don't. It's a technological progress similar to one where we lost our ability to repair transistors with introduction of chips. If this doesn't work for you you should stick with the old tech, I think the Russians did something like that on their soviet era plane electronics. There are also audiophiles who don't even switch to transistor and use vacuum tubes. Also the Amish who stick to the horses and candles who choose to preserve their way of doing things and avoid the problems of electricity and powered machinery.
You will need to make a choice sometimes. Often you can't have small efficient and repairable all the time.
> Nice, but on the modern Macbooks, the SSD is soldered and not replaceable. There is no way to upgrade them or replace them if they break, so you just have to throw away the whole laptop.
I mean, you can replace the logic board. Wasteful, sure, but there's no need to throw out the whole thing.
In modern Apple laptops (2018 and later), the storage is soldered as the memory has been since 2015. Contrast this with a Dell XPS 15 you can buy today within which you can upgrade/replace both the memory and the storage. This is the case with most Windows laptops. The exception is usually the super thin ones that solder in RAM Apple-style, but there are some others that do as well.
There's also the fact that Apple does things like integrate the display connector into the panel part. So, if it fails - like when Apple made it too short with the 2016 and 2017 Macbook Pros causing the flexgate controversy - it requires replacing a $600 part instead of a $6 one.
True, but you are talking about devices that are 4-6 years old. Storage is now soldered. Ram has been soldered for a while now, and with Apple Silicon its part of the SoC.
not that I've heard of anyone popping out a DIMM over time, but I'd rather pop it back in rather than having to ship it to a repair shop with BGA workstation to replace if a DRAM chip develops fault over time.
newer MacBooks have both the SSD and RAM soldered on board, it's no longer user upgradable, unless you have a BGA rework station and knows how to operate it.
>According to iFixit, the Surface Laptop isn’t repairable at all. In fact, it got a 0 out of 10 for repairability and was labeled a “glue-filled monstrosity.”
The lowest scores previously were a 1 out of 10 for all previous iterations of the Surface Pro
I'm still daily driving a 2015MBP. Got the battery replaced, free under warranty, a few years ago. Running lates MacOS without any issues
The phones in my family are an iPhone 6S, iPhone 8 and an iPhone XS. All running the latest iOS. The 6S got a battery swap for 50€, others still going strong.
Similar with tablets, we have three and the latest one is a 2017 iPad Pro. All running the latest iPadOS.
Stuff doesn't need to be repairable and upgradable if it can outlast the competition by a factor of two while still staying on the latest official OS update.
Can't do that with any Android device. A 6 year old PC laptop might still be relevant though.
Apparently, you didn't compare Apple devices with what the bulk of the market consists of.
Also, implying that repairability is required for environmental sustainability is questionable at best. People in their vast majority tend to get rid of 5 years old phones and laptops.
FWIW, they are in general quite accurate with their ballpark performance figures. I expect the actual power/performance curves to be similar to that they showed. Which is interesting, because IIRC on the plots from Nuvia before they were bought their cores had a similar profile. It would be exciting if Qualcomm could have something good for a change.
> I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart when people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for me to give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively to linux for the past couple years.
I really enjoy linux as a development environment, but this is going to be VERY difficult to compete with..
I skip getting a Starbuck's latte, and avoid adding extra guac at Chipotle.
I'm kidding, that stuff has no affect on anything.
Justifiable, as in "does this make practical sense", is not the word, because it doesn't. Justifiable, as in, "does it fit within my budget?" yes that's accurate. I don't have a short answer to why my personal budget is that flexible, but I do remember there was a point in my life where I would ask the same thing as you about other people. The reality is that you either have it or you don't. That being said, nothing I had been doing for money is really going to max this kind of machine out or improve my craft. But things that used to be computationally expensive won't be anymore. Large catalogues of 24 megapixel RAWs used to be computationally expensive. Now I won't even notice, even with larger files and larger videos, and can expand what I do there along with video processing, which is all just entertainment. But I can also do that while running a bunch of docker containers and VMs... within VMs, and not think about it.
This machine, for me, is the catalyst for greater consumptive spending though. I've held off on new cameras, new NASs, new local area networking, because my current laptop and devices would chug under larger files.
Hope there was something to glean from that context. But all I can really offer is "make, or simply have, more money", not really profound.
There's also future-proofing to some degree. I'll probably get a somewhat more loaded laptop than I "need" (though nowhere near $6K) because I'll end up kicking myself if 4 years from now I'm running up against some limit I underspeced.
Yeah I forgot to mention that, its a given for me.
Like there’s the potential tax deductibility, along with being a store of value (it will probably be $2300 in a few years but thats okay), making it easier to rationalize future laptops in the future by trading this one in. But I’m not betting on any of that.
I’ve just been waiting for this specific feature set, I’m upgrading from a maxed out dual GPU 2015 MBP that I purchased in 2017.
I skipped the whole divergence and folly.
No butterfly keyboards, no tolerating usbc while the rest of the world caught up, no usbc charging, no touch bar, I held out. And now I get Apple Silicon which already had rave reviews and blew everything else out of the water in the laptop space, and now I get the version with the RAM I want.
Surprisingly little fanfare, on my end. Which is kind of funny because I remember fondly configuring expensive maxed out Apple computers on their website that I could never afford. Its definitely more monumental if you save money for one specific thing and achieve that. But now I just knew I was already going to do it if Apple released a specific kind of M1 upgrade in a specific chassis, which they did and more. So it fit within my available credit, and which I’ll pay off likely by the end of the week, and I’m also satisfied that I get the points and a spending promotion my credit card had told me about.
A few thousand dollars per year (presumably it will last more than one year) is really not much for the most important piece of equipment a knowledge worker will be using.
I mean, the Audi R8 has an MSRP > $140k and I've never been able to figure out how that is justifiable. So I guess dropping $6k on a laptop could be "justified" by not spending an extra $100k on a traveling machine?
To be clear, I'm not getting one of these, but there's clearly people that will drop extra thousands into a "performance machine" just because they like performance machines and they can do it. It doesn't really need to be justified.
Truthfully, I'm struggling to imagine the scenario where a "performance laptop" is justifiable to produce, in the sense you mean it. Surely, in most cases, a clunky desktop is sufficient and reasonably shipped when traveling, and can provide the required performance in 99% of actual high-performance-needed scenarios.
If I had money to burn, though, I'd definitely be buying a luxury performance laptop before I'd be buying an update to my jalopy. I use my car as little as I possibly can. I use my computer almost all the time.
and yet, when I commented on Apple submissions about 16GB of maximum RAM being not enough in 2021, especially at that price point, people answered to me that I was bragging and their M1 Air with 8GB of RAM was more than enough to do everything, including running a production kubernetes cluster serving thousands of customers.
When commenting on Mac hardware it is always difficult for me to separate wishful thinking, cultism and actual facts.
That's fundamental to how NAND flash memory works. For high-end PCIe Gen4 SSD product lines, the 1TB models are usually not quite as fast as the 2TB models, and 512GB models can barely use the extra bandwidth over PCIe Gen3. But 2TB is usually enough to saturate the SSD controller or host interface when using PCIe Gen4 and TLC NAND.
Not OP but ordered a maxxed out 16" with 1TB SSD (can't justify 2k more for disk space, I'll just buy an external and curb my torrenting).
My work flow is intensive yet critical:
I have at all times the following open:
ELECTRON APPS: Slack, Telegram, Teams, Discord, Git Kraken, VSCode (multiple workspaces hosting different repos all running webpack webservers with hot module reloading), Trading View.
NATIVE APPS: Firefox (10 - 32 tabs, many with live web socket connections such as stock trading sites, various web email providers, and at least one background YouTube video or twitch stream), Chrome (~6 tabs with alternate accounts using similar web socketed connections), iTerm, Torrent client (with multiple active transfers).
All of this is being displayed on two external 4k screens + the laptop.
So ya, I can justify maxxed out specs as my demands are far higher than that of an average user and that's with me actively closing things I don't need. Also my work will happily pay for it, so why not?
Perspective. It was a noise word really. Imagine instead a contractor working $100 an hour and pulling enough hours to make $200k a year. Does that change the discussion any? I don't believe so.
I'll be very curious to see those comparisons picked apart when people get their hands on these, and I think it's time for me to give Macbooks another chance after switching exclusively to linux for the past couple years.