Well at least they heard the bit about 'expandability and storage' - two things completely absent from the trash can Mac Pro. Unless you count paying extra for less performance by way of Thunderbolt, which I don't.
Thunderbolt might take care of the storage bit by way of 10gbe and fiber channel adapters. It is a sorry excuse for GPU expandability though, especially since Apple has gone out of their way to prevent GPUs from working on Thunderbolt by way of software lockout.
Skip the 'pro iMac' and just make a Mac Pro like you had in 2010, except with 2017 hardware inside. How fucking hard is that?
Thunderbolt may make less sense on a conventional "tower" peripheral card cage disguised as a computer; but it makes a HELLUVA lot of sense on laptop and All-In-One designs.
Just as an aside, and not tackling the question of whether touchscreens make sense on desktop computers: There's a difference between "a lot of manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon of including this feature," and "this is a useful feature that people will use an appreciate."
I agree with this sentiment. Touchpads are the ultimate in dumbing down a HID to make it 'friendly' but ultimately less efficient. I refuse to use a consumer notebook these days, so I stick with my T-series ThinkPads with TrackPoint. I understand why some people like touchpads, but I find them irritating, slow, awkward, and inaccurate. Also, nothing like moving a mouse without taking your hands off the home keys.
You must have only used non-Apple trackpads, then.
That may have been true for the first two weeks after launch. And then the market caught up. It's just a fancy winter laptop running a weirdo unixy OS, at the end of the day
1. Fastest SSD on market - not even close. I've got PCI-E SSDs a year old that are faster than anything in any Apple hardware, period.
2. The most I/O bandwidth on market - not in their gimped as fuck GPUs
3. Thermal design - yea, doesn't go anywhere. I've got a stress-test program that ignores all the safety stuff and does a real stress test, no matter the machine. Every Apple product burns up.
4. Uhh, my Sager notebook has dual GPUs. I can drive EIGHT 4K displays without issue, at the same cost as your shitty craptop.
2. Most I/O b/w. Four TB 3 ports say 80 Gbps of raw I/O. Sorry.. Dem's da facts.
3. Sorry, the new MBP DOESN'T even GET to the thermal limits. According to multiple reviews, Both the CPU and GPU run flat-out 100% duty cycle 24/7. They really did fix it. Try again, Slashtard.
4. Dual GPUs. And at nearly THIRTEEN POUNDS, (nevermind the power bricks you have to lug around!) that Sager is more properly classified as a "luggable", than a laptop. You can't rest that thing on your lap for more than five minutes without your legs going numb! But that's ok, since you won't be venturing far from an AC outlet for long...
That was one of the main reasons that Apple didn't adopt it back in the Leopard days, when they had that experimental ZFS driver running.
Not sure if you missed my original post or what...but I don't use Apple crap *because* of the brain-damaged 'features'. Like APFS. I use ZFS on FreeBSD and occasionally Linux. Booting works fine from both, although FreeBSD has a nice polished installer to do it for you. In Linux it's a very manual process to set it up. As for ZFS on Apple? I have no clue. In two decades I only ever had one client that absolutely couldn't be switched from Apple to FreeBSD or Linux to achieve better results.
Well, I was simply asking when the ZFS folks got booting working, because it used to be a problem IIRC.
But since you can't hold a rational discourse with spewing Apple Hate, I guess we're done here.
This isn't like the A6 SoC Apple designed - where everyone else was licensing and using the same ARM v7 design for their SoCs, and all Apple had to do was tweak it to make the A6 perform better than other ARM SoCs. There's no standard modern GPU hardware architecture for them to license - they'd have to start from scratch.
You do realize, of course, that Apple has an "Architecture"-class license from ARM, meaning they can, and DO, "roll their own" ARM-instruction-set-compatible CPUs. They don't just "tweak" or rearrange the deck-chairs, they actually have their own ARM designs, reflecting the fact that they have more ARM experience than almost anyone else on the planet.
Also, they've been neglecting their Mac line for years now. Many Macs aren't getting serious refreshes for 2-3 years, while competitors refresh every year.
Unlike most other laptop mfgs., Apple doesn't just throw together "this year's chipset", and call it a "New Design". They refresh stuff when it will actually result in a better-performing product, like with the latest MacBook Pro.
The Macbooks are temperature constrained because their designer-centric "form over function" mentality prevents them from cutting ventilation holes into the bottom of the chassis, severely limiting the power of the GPU they can put in.
You're full of shit. The latest MacBook Pro can cruise along all-day at full-tilt CPU + GPU without thermal throttling at all. And the GPU choice was made not because of power consumption; but because there was no nVidia GPU that could drive as many displays as the AMD ones they used.
1. The fastest SSD on the market. 2. The most I/O bandwidth on the market. 3. A Thermal design that can go full-tilt all-day-long without thermal throttling of the CPU nor GPU, and which the case temperature never rises above 40 c (skin temp. is about 35 c)\ 4. The ability to drive FOUR 4k or TWO 5k External Displays (no one else's laptop can do that, either).
The summary seems to suggest that but the title is vague. It would arguably be an even bigger bombshell if they were developing a GPU to compete with NVIDIA and ATI on the desktop market.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Apple is not normally in the business of competing in the chip and components market. Apple designs its own motherboards but it does not market them to third parties and it would surprise me if they did any more with an in-house GPU design than use it in their own devices. If this design turns out to be superior to what you can get from NVIDIA and ATI, limiting its use to their own line of devices would help them sell those devices which fits their business model. If there is anything to hope for in this context it's mostly for Apple users who can hope that this will improve Apple devices as a gaming platform and that maybe one of the next couple of iterations of Apple TV will be a truly worth while gaming console (not holding my breath though).
Now, please give a cheer for the long line of local slashdot commenters eager to explain to us why Apple is the source of all evil and how this is a part of Apple's nefarious plan to achieve world domination.
I think you are spot-on that Apple has no intentions on selling any GPU, CPU or SoC designs or components outside of Apple.
They have been designing custom silicon since the Apple ][ days (some of it which would have been GREAT in the embedded world), and custom ARM designs since at least the Newton's time; and yet NEVER have they sold designs or components outside of their own company.
Its not the desktop PC issue. Apple has the surrounding hardware, OS, cpu, the developers, a way to pay developers for their software. The GPU is the last part that still has outside considerations. Control over the OS, developer tools, battery usage, resolution and the CPU tasks can allow for an interesting new internal GPU concept.
I think that Apple is getting REALLY tired of having their "roadmap" at the mercy of others, and with the new R&D facilities opening up, is going to go on a quite a push to bring all the key silicon designs "in house".
Then then only thing left is fabrication, in which Apple seems totally disinterested. But if they continue to have BEEELIONS burning a hole in their pocket (which it looks like they will), that will eventually come, too...
There are a few things that mobile GPUs do to favour compute over off-chip data transfer because it saves power, but generally phone, tablet, and laptop GPUs are not that different other than in the number of pipelines that they support.
Well, aside from a massive difference in performance level and feature support. There's a reason Intel (despite actually making integrated desktop GPUs) doesn't try to compete with nVidia or AMD for the discrete market: modern desktop GPUs are very nearly as complicated as modern CPUs (in terms of transistor count, actually vastly more so, by a factor of 10-20 or so).
Modern GPUs are nowhere near as complex as a modern CPU.
They have high transistor counts; but they are generally made up of fairly simple computational units. Just LOTS of them.
Yeah, because everyone who's in the know about Apple realizes that a desktop upgrade is imminent. Even I recommended to someone not to upgrade their aging iMac (2007, still going strong, but the display is getting a bit dim), but rather buy an external monitor for it and wait for the next models. So, $250 and he has a nice Dell display that has the same resolution as his 24" iMac, and will eventually serve as the replacement display for his wife's mini, who's display has developed a brightness-difference between the left and right sides.
The one doesn't preclude the other. There are a few things that mobile GPUs do to favour compute over off-chip data transfer because it saves power, but generally phone, tablet, and laptop GPUs are not that different other than in the number of pipelines that they support. That said, the numbers aren't really there for the larger parts. The iPhone and iPad between them make a sufficiently large chunk of the high-end mobile market that it's worth developing a chip that's used solely by them. The Mac lines are a sufficiently small part of their overall markets that it's difficult to compete with the economies of scale of companies like AMD and nVidia.
You haven't looked at Intel, nVidia and AMD's prices lately, have you?
Apple can put a fair amount of R&D $$$ into walking-away from those guys, AND get the ability to move their capabilities at a pace that isn't controlled (hampered) by them, too.
Both of those things are VERY enticing to Apple, I assure you.
The summary seems to suggest that but the title is vague. It would arguably be an even bigger bombshell if they were developing a GPU to compete with NVIDIA and ATI on the desktop market.
Microsoft still hasn't released a full NTFS document, and their source code isn't available except to limited numbers of people under an NDA. But there is a full read-write implementation of it in Linux, so that source code should reveal a lot about how NTFS works.
And recent versions of macOS also have full R/W NTFS drivers; but you have to explicity enable the write-permission in Terminal, and on a drive-by-drive basis, because Apple doesn't really trust it, I guess...
By my math this thing is close to 600 pixels per inch. WHY? 300ppii, 400ppi at the most is just all that most people can see from any reasonable distance. The rest is just waste, resulting in worse battery life and slower performance as useless pixels are driven.
Proving that Samsung has NO idea what PRODUCT design means, and pure specsmanship for no real advantage is actually a DISadvantage.
The silly thing is Samsung is the world's largest DRAM and NAND manufacturer. It would cost them literally a few dollars to bump up the amount of RAM and storage on their devices.
You're assuming that Samsung is just big pile of products and divisions.
In reality, Samsung's mobile device manufacturing company has to BUY components from Samsung Semiconductor company. They probably get an extreme sweetheart deal; but I can guarantee they don't just "transfer stock" for zero dollars over cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Well at least they heard the bit about 'expandability and storage' - two things completely absent from the trash can Mac Pro. Unless you count paying extra for less performance by way of Thunderbolt, which I don't.
Thunderbolt might take care of the storage bit by way of 10gbe and fiber channel adapters. It is a sorry excuse for GPU expandability though, especially since Apple has gone out of their way to prevent GPUs from working on Thunderbolt by way of software lockout.
Skip the 'pro iMac' and just make a Mac Pro like you had in 2010, except with 2017 hardware inside. How fucking hard is that?
Thunderbolt may make less sense on a conventional "tower" peripheral card cage disguised as a computer; but it makes a HELLUVA lot of sense on laptop and All-In-One designs.
Just as an aside, and not tackling the question of whether touchscreens make sense on desktop computers: There's a difference between "a lot of manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon of including this feature," and "this is a useful feature that people will use an appreciate."
DING DING DING!!! WE HAVE A WINNER!
You have EXACTLY hit the nail on the head!!!
debatable but in 2017 it's becoming more or less a standard feature on any iMac-killer Windows 10 all-in-one PC.
Which people then proceed to never use; because the app and OS support for it is so dodgy.
I agree with this sentiment. Touchpads are the ultimate in dumbing down a HID to make it 'friendly' but ultimately less efficient. I refuse to use a consumer notebook these days, so I stick with my T-series ThinkPads with TrackPoint. I understand why some people like touchpads, but I find them irritating, slow, awkward, and inaccurate. Also, nothing like moving a mouse without taking your hands off the home keys.
You must have only used non-Apple trackpads, then.
No trackpoint. Still.
Pass.
No trackpoint, thank God.
" it didn't well suit some of the people we wanted to reach," admitted Apple SVP Craig Federighi. "
That is totally PR speak for "WE F'D THE POOCH OVER A CHAIR.
Hey, at least Apple will admit their mistakes, unlike Microsoft, which seems to just double-down on them.
That may have been true for the first two weeks after launch. And then the market caught up. It's just a fancy winter laptop running a weirdo unixy OS, at the end of the day
Sounds like sour grapes to me.
1. Fastest SSD on market - not even close. I've got PCI-E SSDs a year old that are faster than anything in any Apple hardware, period.
2. The most I/O bandwidth on market - not in their gimped as fuck GPUs
3. Thermal design - yea, doesn't go anywhere. I've got a stress-test program that ignores all the safety stuff and does a real stress test, no matter the machine. Every Apple product burns up.
4. Uhh, my Sager notebook has dual GPUs. I can drive EIGHT 4K displays without issue, at the same cost as your shitty craptop.
Mediocre, beyond belief.
1. Fastest SSD. Not my benchmark; but, BTW, where's yours?
2. Most I/O b/w. Four TB 3 ports say 80 Gbps of raw I/O. Sorry.. Dem's da facts.
3. Sorry, the new MBP DOESN'T even GET to the thermal limits. According to multiple reviews, Both the CPU and GPU run flat-out 100% duty cycle 24/7. They really did fix it. Try again, Slashtard.
4. Dual GPUs. And at nearly THIRTEEN POUNDS, (nevermind the power bricks you have to lug around!) that Sager is more properly classified as a "luggable", than a laptop. You can't rest that thing on your lap for more than five minutes without your legs going numb! But that's ok, since you won't be venturing far from an AC outlet for long...
News to me. When did they get that working?
That was one of the main reasons that Apple didn't adopt it back in the Leopard days, when they had that experimental ZFS driver running.
Not sure if you missed my original post or what...but I don't use Apple crap *because* of the brain-damaged 'features'. Like APFS. I use ZFS on FreeBSD and occasionally Linux. Booting works fine from both, although FreeBSD has a nice polished installer to do it for you. In Linux it's a very manual process to set it up. As for ZFS on Apple? I have no clue. In two decades I only ever had one client that absolutely couldn't be switched from Apple to FreeBSD or Linux to achieve better results.
Well, I was simply asking when the ZFS folks got booting working, because it used to be a problem IIRC.
But since you can't hold a rational discourse with spewing Apple Hate, I guess we're done here.
This isn't like the A6 SoC Apple designed - where everyone else was licensing and using the same ARM v7 design for their SoCs, and all Apple had to do was tweak it to make the A6 perform better than other ARM SoCs. There's no standard modern GPU hardware architecture for them to license - they'd have to start from scratch.
You do realize, of course, that Apple has an "Architecture"-class license from ARM, meaning they can, and DO, "roll their own" ARM-instruction-set-compatible CPUs. They don't just "tweak" or rearrange the deck-chairs, they actually have their own ARM designs, reflecting the fact that they have more ARM experience than almost anyone else on the planet.
Also, they've been neglecting their Mac line for years now. Many Macs aren't getting serious refreshes for 2-3 years, while competitors refresh every year.
Unlike most other laptop mfgs., Apple doesn't just throw together "this year's chipset", and call it a "New Design". They refresh stuff when it will actually result in a better-performing product, like with the latest MacBook Pro.
The Macbooks are temperature constrained because their designer-centric "form over function" mentality prevents them from cutting ventilation holes into the bottom of the chassis, severely limiting the power of the GPU they can put in.
You're full of shit.
The latest MacBook Pro can cruise along all-day at full-tilt CPU + GPU without thermal throttling at all. And the GPU choice was made not because of power consumption; but because there was no nVidia GPU that could drive as many displays as the AMD ones they used.
Please try to keep up.
Mediocre: Like their laptop that has:
1. The fastest SSD on the market.
2. The most I/O bandwidth on the market.
3. A Thermal design that can go full-tilt all-day-long without thermal throttling of the CPU nor GPU, and which the case temperature never rises above 40 c (skin temp. is about 35 c)\
4. The ability to drive FOUR 4k or TWO 5k External Displays (no one else's laptop can do that, either).
Yeah. Mediocre.
The summary seems to suggest that but the title is vague. It would arguably be an even bigger bombshell if they were developing a GPU to compete with NVIDIA and ATI on the desktop market.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves here. Apple is not normally in the business of competing in the chip and components market. Apple designs its own motherboards but it does not market them to third parties and it would surprise me if they did any more with an in-house GPU design than use it in their own devices. If this design turns out to be superior to what you can get from NVIDIA and ATI, limiting its use to their own line of devices would help them sell those devices which fits their business model. If there is anything to hope for in this context it's mostly for Apple users who can hope that this will improve Apple devices as a gaming platform and that maybe one of the next couple of iterations of Apple TV will be a truly worth while gaming console (not holding my breath though).
Now, please give a cheer for the long line of local slashdot commenters eager to explain to us why Apple is the source of all evil and how this is a part of Apple's nefarious plan to achieve world domination.
I think you are spot-on that Apple has no intentions on selling any GPU, CPU or SoC designs or components outside of Apple.
They have been designing custom silicon since the Apple ][ days (some of it which would have been GREAT in the embedded world), and custom ARM designs since at least the Newton's time; and yet NEVER have they sold designs or components outside of their own company.
Its not the desktop PC issue. Apple has the surrounding hardware, OS, cpu, the developers, a way to pay developers for their software. The GPU is the last part that still has outside considerations. Control over the OS, developer tools, battery usage, resolution and the CPU tasks can allow for an interesting new internal GPU concept.
I think that Apple is getting REALLY tired of having their "roadmap" at the mercy of others, and with the new R&D facilities opening up, is going to go on a quite a push to bring all the key silicon designs "in house".
Then then only thing left is fabrication, in which Apple seems totally disinterested. But if they continue to have BEEELIONS burning a hole in their pocket (which it looks like they will), that will eventually come, too...
There are a few things that mobile GPUs do to favour compute over off-chip data transfer because it saves power, but generally phone, tablet, and laptop GPUs are not that different other than in the number of pipelines that they support.
Well, aside from a massive difference in performance level and feature support. There's a reason Intel (despite actually making integrated desktop GPUs) doesn't try to compete with nVidia or AMD for the discrete market: modern desktop GPUs are very nearly as complicated as modern CPUs (in terms of transistor count, actually vastly more so, by a factor of 10-20 or so).
Modern GPUs are nowhere near as complex as a modern CPU.
They have high transistor counts; but they are generally made up of fairly simple computational units. Just LOTS of them.
MacRumors' buyers guide rates everything but the MacBook Pro as "Don't buy" right now...
https://buyersguide.macrumors....
Yeah, because everyone who's in the know about Apple realizes that a desktop upgrade is imminent. Even I recommended to someone not to upgrade their aging iMac (2007, still going strong, but the display is getting a bit dim), but rather buy an external monitor for it and wait for the next models. So, $250 and he has a nice Dell display that has the same resolution as his 24" iMac, and will eventually serve as the replacement display for his wife's mini, who's display has developed a brightness-difference between the left and right sides.
The one doesn't preclude the other. There are a few things that mobile GPUs do to favour compute over off-chip data transfer because it saves power, but generally phone, tablet, and laptop GPUs are not that different other than in the number of pipelines that they support. That said, the numbers aren't really there for the larger parts. The iPhone and iPad between them make a sufficiently large chunk of the high-end mobile market that it's worth developing a chip that's used solely by them. The Mac lines are a sufficiently small part of their overall markets that it's difficult to compete with the economies of scale of companies like AMD and nVidia.
You haven't looked at Intel, nVidia and AMD's prices lately, have you?
Apple can put a fair amount of R&D $$$ into walking-away from those guys, AND get the ability to move their capabilities at a pace that isn't controlled (hampered) by them, too.
Both of those things are VERY enticing to Apple, I assure you.
The summary seems to suggest that but the title is vague. It would arguably be an even bigger bombshell if they were developing a GPU to compete with NVIDIA and ATI on the desktop market.
That's Phase II of the Project...
Then it's the Axx CPU/SoC that can run x86...
Can you boot from your ZFS drives?
Yes. Is there some reason I shouldn't be able to?
News to me. When did they get that working?
That was one of the main reasons that Apple didn't adopt it back in the Leopard days, when they had that experimental ZFS driver running.
Microsoft still hasn't released a full NTFS document, and their source code isn't available except to limited numbers of people under an NDA. But there is a full read-write implementation of it in Linux, so that source code should reveal a lot about how NTFS works.
And recent versions of macOS also have full R/W NTFS drivers; but you have to explicity enable the write-permission in Terminal, and on a drive-by-drive basis, because Apple doesn't really trust it, I guess...
Well, since APFS has been in development for only a year or so ...
Uh, actually, AFPS has been in development for several years.
Citation, please?
By my math this thing is close to 600 pixels per inch. WHY? 300ppii, 400ppi at the most is just all that most people can see from any reasonable distance. The rest is just waste, resulting in worse battery life and slower performance as useless pixels are driven.
Proving that Samsung has NO idea what PRODUCT design means, and pure specsmanship for no real advantage is actually a DISadvantage.
White POWER!!!
Clayton Bigsby oblg ref.
My all-time favorite Chappelle bit!
Dear AC, we have 164 different phones on sale with removable battery. /Samsung
And WHY would any company want to have 164 different phones on sale, PERIOD?
Samsung is a sad, sad joke.
Congratulations on bring last years OS to this years phone!
That's ok; it'll probably never get an update through your Carrier's "approval" process...
The silly thing is Samsung is the world's largest DRAM and NAND manufacturer. It would cost them literally a few dollars to bump up the amount of RAM and storage on their devices.
You're assuming that Samsung is just big pile of products and divisions.
In reality, Samsung's mobile device manufacturing company has to BUY components from Samsung Semiconductor company. They probably get an extreme sweetheart deal; but I can guarantee they don't just "transfer stock" for zero dollars over cost.