October 18th Apple Event - Unleashed - Apple Silicon, MacBook Pro upgrades, HomePod mini, AirPods 3rd Generation

[BondiBlue]

Summary

The Apple Unleashed event is over! Here are the new products that were announced:

• AirPods
  • New AirPods 3rd Generation: MagSafe wireless charging, Adaptive EQ, and longer battery life
• HomePod mini
  • In addition to Space Gray and White, HomePod mini now comes in Blue, Yellow, and Orange
• Apple Music
  • New Voice Plan starts at $4.99/month, allows for Apple Music through Siri, including new custom playlist
• And yes, new Macs and Apple Silicon
  • The M1 chip is now part of a lineup of three SoC designs, including the M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max
  • The MacBook Pro has been redesigned, bringing back more ports, MagSafe charging, better battery life, and more
    • The 14" MacBook Pro starts at $1999, and the 16" starts at $2499. The 13" M1 MBP is now the base model
    • Support for up to 64GB of unified memory and 8TB of flash storage
    • M1 Pro and Max both have 10 CPU cores, and M1 Max can have up to 32 GPU cores
    • Fast charging has been added to the MacBook Pro, allowing for up to 50% charge in only 30 minutes

 

My thoughts

I'm really excited for the new MacBook Pros. I plan on upgrading to a new 16" MacBook Pro within the next couple months, and I can't wait. 

 

Sources

Apple Events

The Verge

[saltycaramel]

My body is ready.

 

I have a feeling people are not ready for the power of the M1X though.

[Commodus]

This is the big test: we should find out how well Apple Silicon scales to pro-level machines.

 

I'm sure Apple will try to put the M1X in best light possible and stay relatively light on details, but I suspect it'll be enough to get at least some pros excited. The rumors have the M1X using 10 CPU cores (eight perf, two low-power) versus M1's eight (four perf, four low-power) and jumping to a 16- or 32-core GPU depending on the model. Apple probably won't make you regret your RTX 3080-packing gaming laptop, but it could be plenty for the kind of pro work you normally see on a laptop.

 

Of course, the bigger deal for some might simply be the rumored returns of MagSafe, SD slots and even HDMI, plus the death of the Touch Bar. It'd be the MacBook Pro you actually wanted in 2016, just a lot faster, quieter and longer-lived.

[StDragon]

Your wallet, unleashed!

 

Or would that be savings unleashed Naahh.

[saltycaramel]

I hope they’ll show a simple non-labeled power/performance curve like they did for the M1 so Linus will be triggered again.

 

Gee I wonder why Apple doesn’t bring a fast paced marketing-oriented presentation to a halt to show detailed tech_youtuber-style benchmarks.

[Lightwreather]

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I AM HYPED ( Tho I probably shouldn't be, Hype generally = disappointment)

[adarw]

just watch it be worse than the m1. 

 

[saltycaramel]

4 minutes ago, adarw said:

just watch it be worse than the m1. 

 

Yeah, with double the performance CPU cores (8 the M1X vs 4 the M1) and 2-4x the GPU (16-32 the M1X vs 7-8 the M1) that’s not super probable.

[adarw]

1 minute ago, saltycaramel said:

Yeah, with double the performance CPU cores (8 the M1X vs 4 the M1) and 2-4x the GPU (16-32 the M1X vs 7-8 the M1) that’s not super probable.

its a joke lol

 

i dont think apple would make something worse than before, and if they really want people (not from the apple ecosystem already) to buy a mac they better make it good lol

[Commodus]

21 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

I hope they’ll show a simple non-labeled power/performance curve like they did for the M1 so Linus will be triggered again.

 

Gee I wonder why Apple doesn’t bring a fast paced marketing-oriented presentation to a halt to show detailed tech_youtuber-style benchmarks.

If you think that'll cause havoc, just imagine the furor if these MacBook Pros outperform higher-end Core and Ryzen chips, even if the graphics performance likely won't be on par with dedicated GPUs in some ways (ray tracing, anyone?). Luke Skywalker's "that's not true, that's impossible!" cry comes to mind.

[saltycaramel]

I think the fact that they will run circles around any x86 laptop CPU is a given. 

The question is how many desktop setups they will beat. 

 

Speaking of more mundane little details, I wish they introduced 2.5GbE as standard on the magsafe power+ethernet charging brick… (the iMac M1 brick has Gigabit)

[Dracarris]

40 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

I hope they’ll show a simple non-labeled power/performance curve like they did for the M1 so Linus will be triggered again.

Or, just maybe, do it properly this time and label 4 points on the axis and highlight some points where there is a lot of improvement.  This takes maybe 10s and won't halt anything, yet can be analyzed in more detail later by people that are interested.

[RedRound2]

Even their cover image of the event signifies speed. Pretty damn excited to see what's in store for higher end Apple Silicon.

 

Hopefully this time people will think better before going on and on about unlabelled graphs.

[saltycaramel]

Mini-LED AND 120Hz?

 

Oh boy.

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/12/macbook-pro-120hz-mini-led-display/

 

 

[HenrySalayne]

2 hours ago, Commodus said:

 

Of course, the bigger deal for some might simply be the rumored returns of MagSafe, SD slots and even HDMI, plus the death of the Touch Bar. It'd be the MacBook Pro you actually wanted in 2016, just a lot faster, quieter and longer-lived.

I would like to see the return of a M.2 NVME slot.

[Commodus]

10 minutes ago, saltycaramel said:

Mini-LED AND 120Hz?

 

Oh boy.

 

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/12/macbook-pro-120hz-mini-led-display/

 

 

MiniLED seems like the only one you'd really want to put money on, but if it's also 120Hz... that'd be a blast. Not that Apple was really behind on screens, but you'd have a hard time finding a good all-around laptop display to rival this. Most of the other eye-catching alternatives are focused on either resolution or refresh rate above all else.

[Commodus]

3 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I would like to see the return of a M.2 NVME slot.

That I wouldn't count on, unfortunately, although the dropping costs of SSDs at least increase the chances that you'll get the capacity you want out of the box. I'm not counting on Apple starting at 512GB, but I wouldn't rule it out, either.

[BondiBlue]

31 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I would like to see the return of a M.2 NVME slot.

Apple has never used M.2 drives. 

[saltycaramel]

38 minutes ago, Commodus said:

I'm not counting on Apple starting at 512GB, but I wouldn't rule it out, either.

Current 4-port Macbook Pros already start at 512GB ssd and 16GB ram.

So the new ones are basically guaranteed to start at 512GB/16GB. 

 

This is assuming the 2-port 13” M1 MBP is staying in the line-up and is not being superseded by a lower end 14” newMBP with 256GB/8GB/2-ports/inferior_cooling.

[hishnash]

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

Apple probably won't make you regret your RTX 3080-packing gaming laptop, but it could be plenty for the kind of pro work you normally see on a laptop.

Given that the GPU will have access to the full system memory for many pro tasks it will not be hard for the 32Core GPU to massively out perform a mobile 3080.   But also even in games (if those games are well optimised for Metal on Appel Silicon GPU family 8...) the GPU will outperform a mobile 3080... however there really are no games out there that are optimised for the full feature set of apples GPUs.  What apple need to do is be a little bit like sony and pay a big studio to develop a game (elusively for their platforms) that is very well optimised for the hardware and software stack but even then this will just be one game... so unless they do this to an existing large e-sports title (were apple could massively reduce input to pixel update latency) i don't see it having much impact. 
 

43 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

I would like to see the return of a M.2 NVME slot.

Given that apple use their own SSD controller embedded within the SoC, (this provides big power savings and perfomance in latency and IOPS) a move to NVMe (even PCIe4) would big a downgrade. What i do hope is that they move from a 2 NAND die to a 4 or 8 die config increasing perfomance accordingly. (would also be amazing but extremely unlikely if they published the spec on these so that repair shops could with confidance offer NAND upgrades)

 

2 hours ago, Commodus said:

likely won't be on par with dedicated GPUs in some ways (ray tracing, anyone?)

Given the large updates to Metals Raytracing api options oner the last year i think apple might well have some things in the stack, remember there is not such thing as `hardware accreted ray tracing` all there is is better support for ray interception math. From an API perspective metal has arguably the best range of raytracing features as it includes both the DX12 method as well as the VK and adds to this the fact that you can inline these within the tile compute shaders (custom programatic blending stages) so from an API perspective apple is very well placed, we also have GPU accreted interception tree germination and some powerful debug tools as well. 



 

[HenrySalayne]

28 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

Apple has never used M.2 drives. 

True and all because of their typical Apple shenanigans. They changed the connector almost every single generation but basically it's pretty much the same as M.2 and on newer devices M.2 NVME drives are even compatible (with a simple adapter).
Nowadays they would probably lock the system down to accept only "certified Apple storage" but at least data from a broken Macbook could be easily recovered on another machine.

[Blademaster91]

4 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

True and all because of their typical Apple shenanigans. They changed the connector almost every single generation but basically it's pretty much the same as M.2 and on newer devices M.2 NVME drives are even compatible (with a simple adapter).
Nowadays they would probably lock the system down to accept only "certified Apple storage" but at least data from a broken Macbook could be easily recovered on another machine.

Thats just Apple being Apple, and they haven't let users upgrade their own storage since the 2015 macbook, which also have the awful butterfly keyboard. I wouldn't expect them to use an SSD with a slot connector, even a proprietary one, unless they were forced to make laptops easier to repair, which I don't see happening considering the things apple always pulls.

[HenrySalayne]

18 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Given that the GPU will have access to the full system memory for many pro tasks it will not be hard for the 32Core GPU to massively out perform a mobile 3080.  

How? They have to fit the entire SoC including CPU and GPU on a similar or even smaller die compared to the 3080. The 3080 (GA104) has almost 400 mm², the current M1 has just 120 mm². If Apple could outpace the 3080 (mobile) "massively" they should just start building graphics cards.

[StDragon]

38 minutes ago, hishnash said:

Given that apple use their own SSD controller embedded within the SoC, (this provides big power savings and perfomance in latency and IOPS) a move to NVMe (even PCIe4) would big a downgrade. What i do hope is that they move from a 2 NAND die to a 4 or 8 die config increasing perfomance accordingly. (would also be amazing but extremely unlikely if they published the spec on these so that repair shops could with confidance offer NAND upgrades)

BS. The SSD is capped at PCIe 3.0 speeds at best. SED drives are just as fast on a PC.

[BondiBlue]

23 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Thats just Apple being Apple, and they haven't let users upgrade their own storage since the 2015 macbook, which also have the awful butterfly keyboard. I wouldn't expect them to use an SSD with a slot connector, even a proprietary one, unless they were forced to make laptops easier to repair, which I don't see happening considering the things apple always pulls.

The 2015 MacBook Pro has a removable SSD, but it absolutely does not have the butterfly keyboard. The 2017 13" non-TB MacBook Pro is actually the last to have a removable SSD.