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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.
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.
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...
As much as I enjoy mocking Apple, I have to say that my desktop PC at home is running a Intel i7-2600K which first showed up in 2011, so is five years old now (well, 4.5, it was released around October IIRC). It's still very competitive and runs modern games and apps just fine. The Skylake equivalent is only about 5-15% faster for most tasks.
That CPU was a great purchase with hindsight. It's more than justified its high price. More luck than skill of course.
So anyway, I can't really mock Apple in this instance. Their hardware still sucks for many other reasons though.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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
And please leave me my freedom to buy what I want for what reason I want for what price I want.
Take a deep breath. Now let it out slowly and repeat after me: "Everything's going to be okay. No one's going to prevent me from spending as much as I want on a laptop."
Now don't you just feel better!