*** Apple event 10th November @ 6pm - One More Thing: Apple Silicon Macs Reveal ***

[HACO]

You can watch the event on Apple website:
https://www.apple.com/apple-events/

The event will also be live-streamed on YouTube here.

Expectations:

Apple Silicon Macs:
According to Gurman at Bloomberg, three new Macs will be announced:

• 13-inch MacBook Air
• 13-inch MacBook Pro
• 16-inch MacBook Pro

Bloomberg had also previously reported that Apple will make three variants of the A14 family this year:

• A14: 2 Big cores, 4 Little cores, used for iPhone 12 family and iPad Air 4
• A14X: 4 Big cores, 4 Little cores, already leaked in iOS code and Geekbench, likely for MacBook Air and future iPad Pro
• A14??: 8 Big cores, 4 Little cores, probably for MacBook Pro's

We will probably also get a release date for macOS Big Sur.

Other possible minor products: AirTags, Apple-branded over-the-ears headphone

 

[HACO]

That's two good points actually - I even forgot that I'm forever consigned to 10.13 High Sierra, so I don't get any new macOS features either, and Big Sur is looking great. Perhaps you're right in that a refurbed Intel from 2016+ would serve me very well for a couple of years. My only concern is lack of upgradability; having to pay extra to get the spec I need rather than be able to upgrade storage/RAM etc.

You can upgrade storage on pre-2016 MBPs. There's a £20 adapter that you can buy and then most M.2 NVMe drives (Samsung, WD, A-Data, etc) will work just fine.

You can also do a OS upgrade to the latest one, just need to do a few extra steps. There are always guides for upgrading older macs to lates macOS, and after that they work very well.

 

[HACO]

I can't wait to just rid my house of any and all Intel products

 

[HACO]

You'd have thought so given the dev kit is a Mac Mini. All the rumours however, point to them doing the laptops first, an iMac and a smaller form factor Mac Pro. Mac Mini seems to have next to no rumours circulating around it. Unless it's just implied because of the dev kit?

A retail AS Mac Mini (as a dev kit) makes a lot of sense (developers actually need to return these DTKs to Apple within 1 year). So Apple should definitely release a retail alternative.

 

[HACO]

I agree!

I don't hate intel, as much as I do the mess which comes with x86 app compatibility

The move to arm I assume means the move to a more app centric sandboxed system. Hopefully it means your OS remains a lot cleaner.

I just don't want to give my money to a company that's as uninventive as it comes. 10+ years of stagnation, I don't want to reward them. I'm happily buying AMD because they've become innovative. Happy to buy Intel products in the future if they change their ways.

 

[HACO]

Is the M1 between the Air and the Mini likely to be actually identical? And therefore we will see what thermal throttling is doing when we compare the two?

MBP and MM likely run it at significantly higher clocks than MBA.

 

[HACO]

I genuinely don't know what I will go for now... the Air or the Pro. The fan-less benefits might win out... do I need the extra performance? I do mainly office type tasks. Let's see.

The difference is likely in sustained performance, rather than burst performance.

 

[HACO]

Looks like all three are 'Up to 16GB Memory' wonder if that will be a limiting factor at all.

Yeah, looks like it is. Apple would otherwise love to sell you overpriced ram

 

[HACO]

I suspect the 16 inch will get a boosted version of the M1, maybe an M1x or something like that. Same goes for iMac

Very likely.

 

[HACO]

I'm going to go for the Mini - I'm still a Desktop kind of guy, with big monitors - and just use the iPad for mobile.

That's pretty tempting as well, buying 5K LG displays with Mac Mini. 16GB ram though, I guess I'll wait for next generation.

 

[HACO]

That's my only concern the memory. Then again, I currently only have 16GB in my mBP and I never run into any issues with it running out of memory even whilst coding or doing virtualisation.

I have 32GB on my iMac and I run into issues, I'm probably going 64GB next generation.

Interesting that they don't list the CPU speeds anywhere.

They don't do it for any of their own Apple Silicon chips.

The upgrades are price gouged like hell.

£250 extra for going from 256GB to 512GB. Another £200 for going to 1TB.
£200 extra for 16GB ram.

They're likely high-end PCIe 4 SSDs but still, that price...

 

[HACO]

So the 13" Pro doesn't even get the "higher end" model yet which in the current/out-going gen had the twin fans, faster internals and RAM plus 4 USB-C instead of 2. Hmmmm.

Yeah, clearly a midrange device. We'll need to wait for a more complex chip for those features.

 

[HACO]

This shows it all:

As Anandtech says:

Anybody looking at the absurdness of that graph will realise that there simply was no other choice but for Apple to ditch Intel and x86 in favour of their own in-house microarchitecture – staying par for the course would have meant stagnation and worse consumer products.​

 

[HACO]

Looks like M1 has a 2x GPU of A14. That means Geekbench Metal score of ~30,000, roughly as fast as the Radeon 5500M (the same dedicated GPU in the 16-inch MBP).

 

[HACO]

Are you all secretly students or is there a dastardly way into the edu store? HMU.

You don't need to be a student, you only need to know a student

 

[HACO]

Sauce?

M1's 8 vs A14's 4 GPU cores, assuming they're the same architecture (fair) and run at the same clocks (conservative). The rest is extrapolation from the Geekbench browser.

 

[HACO]

People really need to stop using Geekbench in 2020. Its so **** as a benchmark and not an accurate representation at all

It's actually a very decent benchmark, comparing it with SPEC, it has a R^2 of over 0.99. The only issue is that it's short and therefore not for sustained performance, so it doesn't take into account thermal throttling.

Read more:
https://nuviainc.com/blog/performance-delivered-a-new-way-part-2geekbench-versus-spec

Also from Anandtech:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4

There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM.​

Maybe you want to say SPEC is also isn't a decent benchmark, at that point the question becomes why you'd think that, and what do you consider a good general-purpose multi-workload benchmark?

 

[HACO]

Not necessarily a case of it not being a "decent benchmark", but is it relevant? A Single threaded benchmark isn't relevant for anything in this day and age.

Many workloads still are (and likely forever be) single threaded. For example, Javascript performance (for web browsing) is 100% single-threaded. Most programs also have a main thread that relies on single-threaded performance and just assign workloads to new threads as necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

But again, multithreaded benchmarks will also say the same thing as the single-threaded ones on all modern platforms (Cinebench single and multithreaded scores have a R^2 of over 0.99 once corrected for the number of cores, same as Geekbench). All of these platforms handle multithreading very well. This really becomes a concern when you scale upwards of 100 cores on shared memory architectures. Not an issue at all on consumer computers.

Cinebench R23 is already ported to Aarch64 on macOS, so we'll see the results soon enough. Maybe once those results are out, the "Geekbench is bad" crew will turn into "Cinebench is bad" crew

 

[HACO]

You just sound like a massive apple fanboy, do you own every product they dish out?

So I'm just going to assume that you didn't have an actual response to what I said about benchmarks, so you resorted to personal shots.

 

[HACO]

You'll be able to run it via Rosetta2 until the Universal binary is available.

The big big question is, whether Photoshop and other software run faster under Rosetta 2 compared to the Intel-based macs that they're replacing. As long as you're no worse off, there's nothing to lose by migrating to AS macs.