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Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Rick Churchill
The new MacBook Pro is released and Apple have learned from its mistakes by reintroducing a variation of ports, dropping the Touch Bar and going back to a Magsafe power connecter. The ports are a card slot, 3 off USB-C (Thunderbolt 4) and an HDMI port, sadly no USB-A and no analogue audio in. It has up to 8TB of storage and comes with a better screen, webcam, speakers and microphones. If you have to ask the price you can’t afford it.

Review: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/macbook-pro-14-inch-2021

The 14 inch screen will do, honest I’ll be good!

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Eleanor Spenceley
Those MacBook Pros do look very nice but I'll pass this year...

What I would like is a Mac Mini Pro with that M1 Max chip.... I hope santa will do another 'One more thing' Apple event this month or it'll be a quiet xmas here.

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Mick Burrell
I'm expecting the Mini to be held off until the M2 is available (maybe not!). You could wait to see if they come good with the rumoured "small" Mac Pro. You never know, it may be a sensible price. (For sensible, read "ridiculous" but one I will stretch to just for the joy of such a machine ;-) )

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Stuart Affleck
Mac mini & 27" (or larger)should be getting the M1 Max & Pro when they are refreshed, sadly probably some time early in 2022. You may have seen this image, or read the details..
https://hypercritical.co/2021/05/21/images/city-of-chiplets.png
Jade-C (10 core CPU, 32 core GPU) corresponds exactly with M1 Max. Jade-C Chop (10 core CPU, 16 core GPU) is M1 Pro. So, bodes well for the Mac Pro (possibly plural)- 20 core/64 core GPU, 40 core/128 core GPU will be absolute monsters.

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Euan Williams
This Ars Technica article adds some detail. Speculation has suggested that several Jade dies can be combined in clusters, but the thing to watch for is ARM v9 architecture which allows longer instructions and much else. Current M1 chips are based on ARM v8 which is due for this major update.

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Tony Still
I would be surprised if the Mini got an M1 Max or an M2 (whatever that turns out to be) in the short term. The flagship SoC is likely to be reserved for the more expensive machines. Apple needs a big screen iMac, an obvious place for a Max especially given the need to pitch something to iMac Pro updaters. So a Max/Mini is only really likely when the Max is becoming legacy (which I think is what Mick was suggesting), even then, the Pro is a better cost/performance balance.

The most pressing need for the next SoC is probably more interfaces: the M1 Pro/Max are barely sufficient for a notebook, a higher model iMac will expect more ports. The Pro and Max are mostly about capacity versus the M1 - an M1 Mini will run them close on single-threaded apps without heavy graphics demands (and many are).

So I think the recent MBPs are a good purchase point, they really are a big step over the Intel devices (crudely, for 15"/16" MBP from 2016 to 2019, Intel managed a 20% performance improvement, the 2021 MBPs add 80% to that to make a 2x faster machine - please don't over-analyse these numbers!). They're analogous to the Intel Core 2 generation versus the last PowerPCs.

I can't agree with Euan on ARM v9: it brings a unified and improved SIMD capability (one instruction working on multiple data - think vector/array processing) and more security models but Apple is already going its own way on some of this.

Next year's machine will always be better but, frustratingly, you can't do any work on it yet.

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Euan Williams
That Ars Technica article was just for general information, not for any assertion (I come from Barcelona), but these two videos may cast some further light on Rick's Christmas aspirations.

Rene Ritchie on Apple and ARMv9 (with Ben Bajarin) on Apple's arm relationship;

and Max Tech (looking ahead from M1 SoC introduction in April 2021) explains Scalable Vector tech.

The Scalable Vector extension now becomes part of the armv9 architecture, and as Apple has licensed access to ARMv9, but is also able to design it's own architectural setup without feeding that back to arm for other manufacturers to use, it will be interesting to see how Apple adapt armv9 to their own requirements--especially for any new Mac M2 Max desktop. An Apple 'Fugaku' super computer anyone?

Meantime the sun is shining in Barcelona, and we can contemplate arm's vision for the decade !

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Eric Jervis
Please give our regards to Manuel....

Re: Rick’s Xmas Present List has been updated

Avatar Rick Churchill
Thanks Euan for the links but I'm afraid it was too deep for me and concentrated on architecture rather than results. From your remarks on Tuesday when I expressed disdain for the reviews in Mac mags, which seem to eulogise on any new product, I explored the link in your first response (the latter I hadn't read before the meeting) and came across a good review as you promised here
 
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