Of course this isn’t a solution for people who use their MacBooks in closed position with bluetooth accessories this won’t work, so we will has to wait for an apple fix or manually turn bluetooth off and on at night.
Bloomberg is reporting on rumors of the new versions of Apple Silicon. There will be a redesigned MacBook Pro, then MacBook Air, new lower end MacBook Pro and finally the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
The next M1’s will support 64 gigs if RAM with 8 high energy cores and 2 energy efficient cores and either 16 or 32 graphics cores. The M1 currently 4 high performance and 4 efficiency with 8 graphics cores.
The chips for the Apple Silicon MacPro will have 20 and 40 core with either 16 or 32 high performance cores and either 64 or 128 core graphics.
Let’s hope the MacPro doesn’t top out at 64 gigs of combined RAM, but the rest of the specs sound impressive.
If performance scales with the cores, the performance will be impressive.
The OWC RocketYard Blog has a really interesting article on how the new M1 Macs actually have 2 thunderbolt busses even though they only have 2 ports. This is unlike previous Thunderbolt macs which had 4 thunderbolt ports, but only 2 busses, with 2 ports split on each bus. The new M1 Macs have only 2 ports but 2 busses, and with the new ability to use USB4 Hubs to split thunderbolt you can have the more ports.
AppleInsider has an article on how the new M1 Macs in fact support USB 4, and not just Thunderbolt 3. I hadn’t realized this at all, but it makes sense as it is new open standard, but amazing that it is before Intel managed to release it. They do need to add more ports though, 2 ports on the laptops when it includes charging is nuts. I have problems with only 4 thunderbolt 3 ports on my imac pro as is.
I still hope for external graphics card support in the MacPro, but think it is less and less likely that will happen, but maybe I will pleasantly surprised. And if not just how much memory will a pro need to run the graphics and system memory? And it won’t be expandable, you are stuck with what you buy.
Apple had a Keynote today, and announced some cool new products.
The new iPad Pro looks impressive, as does it’s new wireless charging Pencil, and I love my 1st Gen 12.9 inch iPad Pro, but still don’t see it as a pro device. And I can’t see how the hard edges will make it easier to hold. Still I want one. Especially as it is lighter and thinner (though the camera sure looks to stick out allot! And I still don’t see it as a pro device, though I use mine every day! The near $200 price increase totally sucks though!
The New MacBook Air is impressive as well, finally getting retina, but also moving exclusively to USB C Thunderbolt ports. This is what my wife needs for sure.
And finally a new MacMini in quad and 6 core models, and you can even get 10 Gigabit Ethernet as an option, which will make it much more useful in high end facilities!
And they announced, though did not price, that in late November, the MacBook Pro will be getting optional Radeon Pro Vega Graphics as an option. If only they would get rid of the damn touch bar and give back function keys and make the screen touch based! Can’t get everything.
And OF COURSE NO MENTION OF THE 2019 MACPRO! I am already worried about it, especially since Mojave basically does not support NVIDIA cards (and they already have released the first point release of the OS today). So what is the point of even having PCI slots if you can’t use the most powerful and power efficient graphics cards in them!