Apple's REALLY tempting me...

[Emily Young]

Apple Silicon took the world by storm with M1, but now we’ve got the next generation: M1 Pro. The 14 inch MacBook Pro is the next major redesign and Apple has gone all-out to make sure it impresses… Mostly.

 

 

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[emosun]

Are they still carving these things out of a block of aluminum like they were previously , that process was so energy inefficient

[DominicBauers]

the new MacBooks seem hella nice, can't wait to see what they'll do with the Mac Mini next!

[Lightwreather]

*Mouth starts watering*

[Commodus]

34 minutes ago, emosun said:

Are they still carving these things out of a block of aluminum like they were previously , that process was so energy inefficient

Not sure. Apple hasn't discussed the MacBook Pro manufacturing process for a while. 

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Commodus said:

Not sure. Apple hasn't discussed the MacBook Pro manufacturing process for a while. 

if they switched to just stamping them out of aluminum that'd be an improvement 

[Matttis]

Ok, this isn't about Apple or the new Macbooks at all, but I noticed something while watching the video.
The image of the tiger they use on hdmi.org to show the difference between the different resolutions? Shown at about 6:11?

 

 

His name is El-Roi, he lives at the zoo in Duisburg, Germany, where I am volunteer staff photographer and that photo is one of mine

 

 

 

That was a nice surprise

[Commodus]

34 minutes ago, Matttis said:

Ok, this isn't about Apple or the new Macbooks at all, but I noticed something while watching the video.
The image of the tiger they use on hdmi.org to show the difference between the different resolutions? Shown at about 6:11?

 

 

His name is El-Roi, he lives at the zoo in Duisburg, Germany, where I am volunteer staff photographer and that photo is one of mine

 

 

 

That was a nice surprise

Small world! Have you been around El-Roi to know his personality? He's a beautiful cat, that's for sure.

[alphaLONE]

Would be cool if the test of the M1 Max models would include a battery life/power consumption comparison between the best M1 Pro available and the lowest priced M1 Max. I hope that these bottom of the bin cheapest Maxes aren't like the 3900X vs 3950X (12 core consuming more than the 16 core).

The price difference for jumping to a 32GB Pro model and jumping to a Max (with 32GB as default) is "only" 100 bucks, so I wonder if going with the Max isn't a better choice outright with the added GPU grunt and doubled memory bandwidth.

 

Thank goodness my software needs are completely incompatible with macOS on ARM, else I'd have bought one already

[Matttis]

8 minutes ago, Commodus said:

Small world! Have you been around El-Roi to know his personality? He's a beautiful cat, that's for sure.

The keepers told me he is a bit of a coward and jokingly said I would probably be fine if I were to fall into his enclosure XD
He and his partner also had babies twice since I took this photo

 

Edit
Fun fact: They use it as an example to show the quality of 4k and 8k vs 1080p... But the resolution of the file is actually lower than 4k
I took it with a D7000, which has a 16mp sensor, but the image is pretty heavily cropped to just over 7mp. 4k is about 8mp and 8k roughly 33mp.

[HenrySalayne]

@GabenJr

The "bulged envelope" design is not only for hiding the contour and size of the device, it also increases stiffness.

So I'm quite curious if the new design is flexing more than the old one or if the had to add more material to make it stiffer.

[n0stalghia]

The H.264 and H.265 results make sense. The encoding speed also got worse on NVidia across generations. I'm sure if someone gets this to Anthony's attention they'll be able to reproduce that.

 

 

Obviously the testing is not up to par with LTT's, but I ran this on my system using the same constant fan curves and CPU set to constant (no boosting), so the results should be relatively good. The only difference was the GPU. This was taken using Handbrake to encode Sintel (the open-source blender movie) from MKV to H264/H265, I used the 4K version of the movie for the test.

 

I believe the quality improvements between the two GPU generations caused the encoding speed to go down, but on NVENC, which is super fast anyway, this makes no difference - you are only encoding live for streaming anyway, and it's fast enough for that. Better quality was more important to them.

 

 

The 670 is not present here because it had no Nvenc encoder.

 

----

 

TL;DR: H.264 and H.265 slowdowns on Mac might have something to do with increased graphic fidelity of the encoders, as the same can be observed on Nvidia.

 

EDIT: In case this wasn't clear enough, those are my results, there's no source for it except my (unpublished) paper. LTT better double-check it themselves if they're curious.

[Ahmedelgohary94]

2 hours ago, alphaLONE said:

Would be cool if the test of the M1 Max models would include a battery life/power consumption comparison between the best M1 Pro available and the lowest priced M1 Max. I hope that these bottom of the bin cheapest Maxes aren't like the 3900X vs 3950X (12 core consuming more than the 16 core).

The price difference for jumping to a 32GB Pro model and jumping to a Max (with 32GB as default) is "only" 100 bucks, so I wonder if going with the Max isn't a better choice outright with the added GPU grunt and doubled memory bandwidth.

 

Thank goodness my software needs are completely incompatible with macOS on ARM, else I'd have bought one already

As a structural design engineer, none of the software I use is available under macOS, with the move to Apple Silicon having boot camp is gone. Only Autocad is available for macOS. (Revit, Robot, CSI Etabs and SAP200 aren't available for macOS.). I don't know why Apple doesn't consider engineers as pro users. I hope companies like Autodesk and CSI pay attention to the new Apple Silicon and macOS.
For me, 14" with M1 Pro (10+16) with 16 GB of UM is enough, but it's expensive in my country.

[alphaLONE]

9 minutes ago, Ahmedelgohary94 said:

As a structural design engineer, none of the software I use is available under macOS, with the move to Apple Silicon having boot camp is gone. Only Autocad is available for macOS. (Revit, Robot, CSI Etabs and SAP200 aren't available for macOS.). I don't know why Apple doesn't consider engineers as pro users. I hope companies like Autodesk and CSI pay attention to the new Apple Silicon and macOS.
For me, 14" with M1 Pro (10+16) with 16 GB of UM is enough, but it's expensive in my country.

For me it's software such as Intel Quartus Prime or Xilinx Vivado. They run on Linux, but I doubt they'd support running on ARM anytime soon, since some components in these design suites are honestly more than ancient. I can see them holding off any rewriting of their software until AMD64 is well and truly dead, just because the Windows x86 emulator on ARM64 is just too slow to use.

 

I think they don't focus towards engineers because they'd always moan and complain about how the computer could have been better and cheaper haha. At least Matlab and Simulink are getting ported to ARM64.

 

I'd be wary of 16GB, it's already a bit tight for some applications as of right now, so if it can't even be upgraded it kind of sucks.

[Ahmedelgohary94]

8 minutes ago, alphaLONE said:

For me it's software such as Intel Quartus Prime or Xilinx Vivado. They run on Linux, but I doubt they'd support running on ARM anytime soon, since some components in these design suites are honestly more than ancient. I can see them holding off any rewriting of their software until AMD64 is well and truly dead, just because the Windows x86 emulator on ARM64 is just too slow to use.

 

I think they don't focus towards engineers because they'd always moan and complain about how the computer could have been better and cheaper haha. At least Matlab and Simulink are getting ported to ARM64.

 

I'd be wary of 16GB, it's already a bit tight for some applications as of right now, so if it can't even be upgraded it kind of sucks.

I've been using HP Z workstation since i was a student (Z600,Z420 and now Z4 G4) it's not a cheap system when you add powerful CPU and GPU with more ram but it's a desktop workstation. There are HP Z mobile workstation out there and it's very powerful option but i don't see it as efficient  as Apple Silicon. plus i do prefer macOS over Windows. I think emulating X86 using Windows 11 on ARM is far better than the old one in Win 10. in my country the 14" with 10 CPU 16 GPU 16 GB 512 SSD is sold for 57K EGP (Egyptian pound)

[RadientPapaya]

I wished in the next part they had more compile tests. Different compilers and even different sized projects might have very different memory and cpu characteristics I’ve noticed.

[WhitetailAni]

2 hours ago, n0stalghia said:

The 670 is not present here because it had no Nvenc encoder.

??
Kepler has an NVENC encoder, albeit an old and slower (first generation) one. Both my GTX 650 Ti BOOSTs and GTX 690 have NVENC so I'd be surprised if your 670 doesn't, unless it's the 670M in which case it's based on Fermi and doesn't have an NVENC encoder.

[mhebes]

Great video! Can you guys please update how you show your graphs?

 

They’re very hard to read quickly, especially on mobile when you switch between “higher is better” and “lower is better” in quick succession. There’s just so much changing info shown so quickly that the graphs are almost useless even though they have a lot of interesting data.

 

Maybe an animation that sets up the labels first, then shows the best bar, then the rest or something?

[Spindel]

8 hours ago, Ahmedelgohary94 said:

As a structural design engineer, none of the software I use is available under macOS, with the move to Apple Silicon having boot camp is gone. Only Autocad is available for macOS. (Revit, Robot, CSI Etabs and SAP200 aren't available for macOS.). I don't know why Apple doesn't consider engineers as pro users. I hope companies like Autodesk and CSI pay attention to the new Apple Silicon and macOS.
For me, 14" with M1 Pro (10+16) with 16 GB of UM is enough, but it's expensive in my country.

That companies like AutoDesk being retarded can not be blamed on Apple.

 

I very much think that Apple consider egineers as professionals, but since Apple don’t make engineering software themselves they do not focus on this aspect in their marketing.

 

Luckily for me my AutoCAD work needs are fully met by the M1 Mini. I just hope AutoDesk will get the stick from their ass and do a native version.

[theorist]

I understand the SSD speed on the M1 Max/Pro varies with size, maxing out at 4 TB. Since they've got so many configs, maybe they could test this? And also explain why it varies with size?

Would also like to understand why the M1 Pro can only support a total of two external displays, and why the Max is limited to three. Also curious whether their TB4 implementation supports Display Port Alt Mode 2.0, which allows TB4's 40 Gbps full duplex to be reconfigured to 80 Gbps unidrectionally.

If they don't have Alt Mode 2.0, that could explain why they couldn't do HDMI 2.1: Since the HDMI signal has to go through TB4 on this design, and HDMI 2.1 is 48 Gbps, if the TB4 is limited to 40 Gbps (in each direction), it wouldn't offer the unidirectional bandwidth to support HDMI 2.1.

[hishnash]

15 hours ago, emosun said:

Are they still carving these things out of a block of aluminum like they were previously , that process was so energy inefficient

Well they cast the aluminum into something that is very close to the final part then cut out the final form from that. Also worth noting that these bits are all most from the trimmings from the iPhone aluminum cases! 
 

1 hour ago, theorist said:

Would also like to understand why the M1 Pro can only support a total of two external displays, and why the Max is limited to three.

Number of display port controllers on the SOC. This is not a bandwidth issue of the TB ports.
 

1 hour ago, theorist said:

I understand the SSD speed on the M1 Max/Pro varies with size, maxing out at 4 TB. Since they've got so many configs, maybe they could test this? And also explain why it varies with size?

Maxes out at 8TB.


 

[Commodus]

5 hours ago, theorist said:

I understand the SSD speed on the M1 Max/Pro varies with size, maxing out at 4 TB. Since they've got so many configs, maybe they could test this? And also explain why it varies with size?

That's quite common for SSDs — the smallest capacities are more speed-limited. Larger drives have access to more channels and thus are more likely to reach their full potential.

[D13H4RD]

I'm honestly quite tempted by the 14" with the M1 Max.

 

If my photography really does take off, this could be a very nice portable photo-editing machine that pairs well with the Nikon Z7ii

[Commodus]

19 minutes ago, D13H4RD said:

I'm honestly quite tempted by the 14" with the M1 Max.

 

If my photography really does take off, this could be a very nice portable photo-editing machine that pairs well with the Nikon Z7ii

Practically what it was meant for — although I'd be tempted to stick to the M1 Pro for the extra battery life, and roll the savings into more RAM or storage.

[D13H4RD]

3 hours ago, Commodus said:

Practically what it was meant for — although I'd be tempted to stick to the M1 Pro for the extra battery life, and roll the savings into more RAM or storage.

The RAM is the reason I'm looking into the Max. I've frequently made 32GB look tiny with my files.

 

M1 Pro would work fine, but I'm not entirely sure if it's the happiest doing 100+ megapixel HDR merging.