Slashdot Mirror
Apple Launches MacBook 2016 With Intel Skylake Processor, Longer Battery Life
Apple, on Tuesday, announced a refresh for its 12-inch MacBook laptop. The 2016 MacBook comes with an Intel Skylake processor -- sixth-generation dual-core Intel Core M model, offering up to 1.3 GHz clock speed with Turbo Boost speeds of up to 3.1 GHz, faster 1866 MHz memory, and a 'rose gold' color variant. Apple assures 10 hours of wireless Web browsing time, or 11 hours of movie playback on a single charge. The new model will hit retail stores on Wednesday. It starts at $1,299 for the 256GB SSD and 8GB (up from 4GB) version, and goes all the way up to $1,599 for the top-of-the-line model which offers 512GB SSD.
A couple of points: the first-generation MacBook didn't fare well with reviewers and plenty of users alike. Second, today's announcement also hints that the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro lineups won't be getting the Intel Skylake upgrade for at least a few more months -- which is really sad, because, at present, they come equipped with almost three-year-old processor and graphics chips. No wonder, Oculus executive made fun of Apple's computers.
A couple of points: the first-generation MacBook didn't fare well with reviewers and plenty of users alike. Second, today's announcement also hints that the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro lineups won't be getting the Intel Skylake upgrade for at least a few more months -- which is really sad, because, at present, they come equipped with almost three-year-old processor and graphics chips. No wonder, Oculus executive made fun of Apple's computers.
Its a Mac so it must suck!!!!
If Apple cut their outlandish prices for their mediocre products by 50% or more I might consider buying one. I was almost sold on a Mac Mini until I found out that you cannot upgrade the RAM in the newer models.
Apple, you suck.
And watch the Apple fanbois try to justify the ridiculously overpriced outdated hardware in Macbooks. It's a shame because OS X really is a solid operating system, but the hardware in every Apple product lags well behind their competitors. All the Apple fanbois will stand in line for hours at the nearest Apple store while those of us who care about getting work done will use something else. Can we please stop worshiping Apple does? They haven't done any real innovation at least ten years. If you want good marketing and hype, go with Apple. If you want to get work done, choose something else.
Another increment in technology, overpriced to get as much out of the less technical as possible...smh
Does it have a physical "Turbo" button I can press? If not, I'm not interested.
it's $1299 for $499 worth of hardware, and you can't upgrade or replace any of it when it breaks, but people worry about that the other models will have a three-year-old CPU for a few more months, as if the computer is somehow totally unusable.
Wi-fi eats battery life as well. Don't need wi-fi to play video files off the hard drive but you do need it to web browse.
That would be, because pretty much all CPUs these days have dedicated hardware for rendering videos that takes near 0 power. That, and because many web pages are far from the "few static lines of text" you make them out to be. Web pages will cause javascript to get interpretted, which is a horrible CPU hog. Playing h264 is not a horrible CPU hog, so yeh... it's actually entirely expected that it can play more video than it can view web pages.
Just a single USB-C port. While I like the magsafe charging connection of older macboks, I can support charging via USB-C - the more devices that can charge via the same standard connector, the better. While I like having the USB-A plugs, I'm willing to bet peripherals will transition with time to USB-C, and I can even deal with needing a dongle until that happens. What I find unacceptable is the fact that there is only a single USB-C port.
This makes me think of the early days of USB -- it was assumed people would chin their devices, as was common with SCSI. But then, peripheral manufacturers stopped including the pass-through connector. At first, this was annoying, but the fact is, it would be annoying to have to disassemble a chain of devices because you want to remove one from the middle.
I jumped over to TonyMacx86.com and as of 4/12/16 they have moved the recomended CPU from Haswell/Broadwell to Skylake.
http://www.tonymacx86.com/buil...
For those that like to tinker and build your own Hackintoshes.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Video decode uses a specialized, highly optimized decoder chip, most likely part of the GPU. The silicon is designed to decode H.264 and probably the various MPEG codecs using as little power as possible. CPU usage is very low while playing video.
Web browsing does JIT compilation of text-based script languages, initiates dozens of network connections per page load to pull in resources, and has to parse & render all of that using the general purpose CPU. That requires much higher CPU usage, and much greater power demands.
The difference is obvious on smaller (IE less compute) devices like phones. Smart phones have been able to play video flawlessly for years, but they still generally feel slower, more jumpy than most full computers for web browsing. Video decode has a very well defined, relatively small set of operations that can be optimized in silicon. Web browsing is wide open, anything goes in terms of computation. The additional flexibility required makes silicon-based optimization much more difficult, and power demands increase.
the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro lineups won't be getting the Intel Skylake upgrade for at least a few more months
Technical or commercial reasons?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Compute CPU power is not much more than it was 3 years back. Software can be made faster with effort; hardware not any where near as simple to get gains.
Like Msft of old: "Yes, it's slow, but the hardware will catch up." when you know it was just sloppy coding that was the cause, and hardware was the problem like Snowden was the problem.
Make the code better. Make the algorithms better. Don't obfuscate it (they are). Open source it. yada yada.
Yours,
Carl Kolchak
I'm considering upgrading my 2013 model. Should I wait a couple of months?
"Which is really sad, because at present, they are running almost three-year-old processor and graphics chips."
That's one opinion. I still love my MBRP 15" RD after 2.5 years.
Speed is nice, but it isn't everything.
I eventually look forward to non-proprietary power adapters and spare battery packs for USB-C.
since skylake's power management sucks with it. Wonder how macos fares?
Well the battery lifetimes are all really weird, but....
Video playback has stayed about the same, but technology has advanced to specifically help that out a lot. When doing nothing but playing a video, a modern computer basically turns off most of itself (much like the brain of the people watching many videos).
On the flip side, 'web browsing' means more and more javascript and css animations and such. As bad flash was/is for browsing, it's status as a plugin not guaranteed to be everywhere forced some measure of restraint. Now with the advancement of browser technologies allowing developers to completely ignore flash, the playing field is leveled and they love the shiny little things.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
But if you follow that link to Apple and click "Buy" it 404's.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
A couple of points: the first-generation MacBook didn't fare well with reviewers and plenty of users alike.
My 2006 Black MacBook was useful for eight years until developers followed Apple's lead and started dropping support for 32-bit programs. Never mind that it runs 32-bit Windows 10 and Mint Linux without problems. I have yet to find a true successor to this great laptop.
I guess their reference movie for testing battery life is this one.
If you care at all about battery life, it pays to disable javascript by default when browsing the web from a laptop. It's silly, insecure, unneeded, and destroys your battery life.
the 15" line needs a refresh badly, and we need the return of the 17" with a 4K display.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Aside from what the other posters have said, text rendering is actually one of the most processor-intensive tasks that a typical desktop does. Each codepoint has to be converted to one or more glyphs. These glyphs are sequences of bezier curves that are rendered to raster images (which are typically cached). Next, you need some fairly complex calculations to work out the spacing between glyphs, which is starts as a fixed advance and is then subtly tweaked based on pixel alignment and shape of the next character. Now you have a set of glyph runs, but you want to render a paragraph of text, so you need to work out where to break the lines. If you're something that sucks less than MS Word, you then use a fairly simple dynamic programming algorithm to work out the place to break the lines for optimum readability, otherwise you use a greedy strategy. This is fairly easy in a rectangle, though gets more complex if there's a background. Now you know where the glyphs need to go, and all that's left is to alpha-blend them with the background (remember, antialiasing needs an alpha channel and sub-pixel AA means that each rasterised glyph will be in three colours). This last step is typically offloaded to the GPU, because the CPU hit of just that part is quite noticeable.
And then, if it's a web page, something tweaks the DOM, or a new CSS file finishes downloading, and you need to do the whole thing again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nah⦠I'm fine with new technology as long it doesn't break my workflow.
At least they are doing a refresh. Ideally, the entire line of Macs, from the lowly Mac Mini to the Mac Pro should be all redone at the same time (WWDC), just so people have some inkling on when to buy. For example, it is well known when the iPhone is getting its facelife. Macs may not be as glitzy, but they are still a workhorse product.
Having some models go almost three years without even a minor upgrade (such as more RAM, larger SSD, additional USB ports, etc.) is not a good thing, especially for a product that is pretty much the top of the line.
Thank you, and everyone... this is actually the best and most informative group of replies I've ever had to a post here on /.
There weren't even any flames, and my initial framing of the question was less-than-gracious.
It's OK they got VW to verify their battery figures!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Actually with improved video decoders it's true. The rest of the computer will low-power mode while only the computer runs. For example, a demo Carrizo machine got something like 11hr when playing a 1080p HEVC video, while lasting nowhere near as long at general use.
Your appy appp app jokes aren't even clever. Come up with something funny, will ya?
It's not even a legitimate complaint.
Does this get posted by script, or does someone actually bother to type it?
Can someone explain why it is funny? I don't get it.
I am currently a heavy linux user at home and was wondering if it was worthwhile to switch to OS-X for software development. I am currently using Ubuntu 14.04 and my main gripe is that it is very unpolished on my dell xps 12 - sleep/hibernate/suspend doesn't work correctly, the trackpad isn't very good and it is lacking the horsepower for the work I am trying to do.
I will mainly be using the laptop for java and python development. I am thinking of looking into some javascript frameworks also like node. I need a macbook pro class machine for this, eclipse is already laggy with ~12 open projects in my workspace and the external monitor hooked up to the laptop scrolls in a very jerky manner.
My main concerns with OS-X are:
- will be just as much work making OS X more like my linux machine in terms of a good terminal emulator?
- How about decent package management? How do fink/hombrew/pip etc compare to apt?
- How is the python tooling?
- Will common shortcuts like alt-tab, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X work in OS-X?
- What is the state of vertical splitting of the screen between programs - for eg, vertically splitting eclipse and chrome?
- I have heard that OS updates in OS-X break programs installed in userspace (especially those installed via package management tooks). To what extent is this true?
I have reached a point in my life where my time is worth more than money. If it is going to take me 3-4 weekends to get OS-X to a point where it is usable for development and I feel comfortable in it, I will just stick to linux and live with the lack of polish/hardware integration issues - maybe buy another Dell.
Anyways, hope developers with OS-X and Linux experience can share their experiences.
Microsoft launched their Surface Pro / Surface Book on the freshly-minted Skylake and have had no end to their driver headaches. Their promise of 9 hours of video playback on Skylake, with its snazzy new HEVC decode core, is possible only with local content in a very select number of programs. Fire up Youtube and watch your battery choke to death on all the optimized code out there.
The new version is certainly a good incremental improvement over the previous. I have been using previous model since it was first released and love it because it fits my needs.
- I do wish Apple provided the multi port adapter with the laptop. I rarely use it but have to have one around just in case (USB-A and HDMI)
- Now that they provide a USB-C to lightning cable, I can use the same charger for my phone and laptop. They should have the option to get these with new phones.
The changes in the new version does not justify an upgrade for me. I usually keep my laptops for around 4 years. I do wish they had a batter replacement program.
It's only funny to the gimp who writes it. I assume. Even then, he/she would promptly stop if they thought it wasn't annoying anyone.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Yeah, but this is a Mac and Mac users we're talking about here. They're all about the cloud and iTunes and if you actually own large amounts of local media, you will be labeled a pirate.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Since the majority of the American public now plays video games I suspect that the most processor-intensive task performed by the typical desktop, by a wide margin, is some part of video gaming. Since the majority of graphics processing seems to happen on the GPU now, I would presume that to be physics simulations, but I'm honestly not sure. It's clear that it's not font rendering, though. I can websurf without my CPU even bothering to clock up, and more to the point, we had rendering of kerned outline fonts on computers that operated at MHz speeds. And I don't just mean towards the end of that era, I mean for example on a Macintosh IIci. Even fully anti-aliased and kerned text could be rendered on that platform almost as fast as you could do anything with it. We're talking 25 MHz 68030 here. By the time we did get up into the hundreds of MHz, you really could render it as fast as you could mess with it; the transformations would be done by the CPU, but the actual drawing operations were already being offloaded to graphics cards, well before they even had 3D acceleration.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Oculus rant started with Marble Madness being the worst game he owned. I stopped reading after that. Maybe it wasn't a 3D VR super HD real life game, but it was still pretty fun.
Call me a pirate then, Apple user since 2000. I have about 2 weeks playtime on my playlist. Not including other albums. No cloud either. Disabled all that. I'm old school.
To unify the Apple Inc. portfolio, Apple will kill OS X and all hardware lines that depend on it.
Apple will replace OS X with iOS.
HFS+ will also be killed off. That is not a bad thingy.
However, in unifying around iOS, Apple will ban shells, sudo, and all command line applications. Timmy Cook and Jony Ives will penalize Apple Inc. employees and developers who use Bash and commands.
Timmy Cook, "Thou shall NOT Bashes, U gona Luz my penis with your jucies."
No wonder, Oculus executive made fun of Apple's computers.
They weren't even focused on the laptop platform (Since the vast majority of PC laptops can't effectively run VR), but on the mac pro, which is actually a quite powerful system - albeit not suitable for VR since it is focused as workstation platform and not a gaming one. If you're going to slight apple, at least make it generally relevant. Granted, I'm still not sold on the 12" models.
You need to send this memo out to Amazon video and Netflix. My macbook gets awfully warm when playing video from these sources. iPad stays nice and cool however. They (Amazon, Netflix, Apple) should fix this but alas, probably never will.
Except sadly, all the retarded "cool" web kids push heavily for javascript-only websites.
And because that are "elite", so too must angular / node / mongo, to push down the gullible throats of managers.
Sadly. it's difficult to come across a site these days that doesn't work without JS - except perhaps, public institutes.
I disagree, I think it's funny because it ironically casts the hipster drive to edge out everyone else in adopting the latest technology as a "luddite" backwardness - implying that by engaging in the struggle itself, one forfeits the attainment of its end goal: technological enlightenment.
Perhaps your Macbook is a little old to offload the video decoding to the GPU, especially with newer codecs?
For example, h.264 started becoming popular around 2008/2009, with some hardware coming out to support it.
Browsers started integrating it around 2010, along with Theora, WEBM/VP8.
And Intel integrated an initial implementation of the decoder in their Sandybridge-based CPU's from 2011.
But since then, there's been lots of revisions, even up to 2014, along with other video compression algorithms.
" they come equipped with almost three-year-old processor and graphics chips"
That must be a joke, right? Apple computers are expensive, but at least they give you the latest technology, isn't it?
The Oculus Rift comment was lame. Of course a Mac notebook isn't going to have graphics up to snuff for VR. How many PC notebooks are up to the task? 2? 3 maybe? Sure, Mac desktops suck for VR, but this article isn't about those.
The problem is Intel's chip. They have some hardware-accelerated h.264 (and HVEC/VP9) decoding support but they prefer you use the (lower quality) Quicksync they put in silicon to do video decoding. Browsers and apps have to specifically use that when decoding and the quality difference is noticeable.
Their newest Apollo Lake atom-based chip *finally* fully hardware-accelerates HVEC and VP9, so I think devices with those will be competitive with the iPad when it comes to video streaming. But I don't think Sky Lake does the same...
This apper gets it! Just like Dot Matrix from Neowin, who apped at anyone who didn't like Windows 8 by calling them LUDDITES for refusing "innovation", but when Windows 10 removed something he liked, he whined about it non-stop, almost as if he got apped by karma!
Apps!
What in the f*** allows you to render full motion video at screen resolution more efficiently than you can render a few static lines of text?
Video decoding is hardware assisted and it's power-optimized to hell and back. Javascript engines can't really compete. Modern websites are, unfortunately, power hungry. It's a combination of absolutely abhorrent APIs offered by the browsers, and the cluelessness of front-end developers. Unfortunately, browser APIs exposed via javascript seem to suffer from the same lack of direction, cohesion and foresight in API design as plagues PHP.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Heck, when you watch media from an optical drive through OS X's DVD player or iTunes, it'll read-ahead several minutes worth of material and turn off the drive for that time. That also saves battery, and watching DVDs is quieter that way, too.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
are they not using ddr4?
And if somebody is like you, they call you an idiot - completely justified.
If you care at all about battery life, it pays to disable javascript by default when browsing the web from a laptop. It's silly, insecure, unneeded, and destroys your battery life.
Better yet, do all browsing with Lynx or wget.
pirate
There's a small mistake in the original post.
The 2015 12in Retina Macbooks ALL came with 8GB of ram not 4GB.
The if you read the article, it was the MacBook Air line which got a bump in RAM from 4GB to 8GB.