well, Intel also barely has new chipsets at this point
x86 devices are in a boring place in general, but Apple is really not helping
I’ll give them both one more year until Ice Lake but then I gotta buy whatever seems worth it
at least the rumour they are buying 1password got squashed quickly, it’s way too good to be locked into one platform
This gets them the +2 cores on all the Intel chips, which is the most meaningful upgrade since Sandy Bridge at least.
nah, ivy/haswell did a lot more in terms of GPU and thermal stuff
since haswell though yeah
Oh really, 2 cores isn’t as much as the step to Ivy from Sandy (for <20W only)?
if you’re looking purely at desktops, maybe not, but the creation of the U series thermal package, the move to a fully OpenGL4.5/DX12/Vulkan/Metal-compatible GPU, the addition of INVPCID, PCI-e 3x, LPDDR3, the small IPC bump, etc., are pretty substantial
I would not want to still be using a Sandy machine (a desktop OK, a notebook not so much), whereas Ivy/ Haswell are still fully usable, though it’ll be less so once most workloads start to assume more cores
and of course n.b. that Skylake sort of did fuck all compared to this
D:
1Password just got a new Windows client, too, after skipping two versions.
I keep looking at the greener pasture XP wallpapers of the 3:2 surface laptops but the consumer reports reliability announcement spooked me.
honestly the only OEM I mostly trust these days in terms of build quality and warranty service is… Dell. But I would really like to buy a Macbook. So.
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C’mon, 4xPCIe over thunderbolt in the XPS, y’all can do it!
I’m gonna go stand outside the window in Round Rock next time new chips come around with a sign.
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tbh four lanes of PCIe3 are not viable for a GPU worth buying imo, at that point I’d still rather just stick said GPU in my desktop and stream whatever I want to play (especially as eGPUs are no more portable than said desktop), as I do currently. I might reconsider when thunderbolt 4 or 5 are an option.
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I’d hear a case for the escape button, but function keys? Really? In 2018?
Uh, yes? I use them dozens of times a day, and much more frequently when I’m in a programming role. Are they used significantly less frequently in Apple environments?
My experience is that feature-heavy professional software uses them all the time. Disabling media keys over function keys is the first thing I do with a keyboard.
(also, ‘sometimes the escape key doesn’t work or you accidentally hit it’ is, uh, not a tradeoff I’m willing to make)
My bias I always towards buttons over touch-feedback because I don’t think buttons are anywhere near as useful without touchable edges and a distinction between feeling and depressing pressure.
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also like I’d still much rather have them for the dumb volume up down functions rather than something I have to look at which can be replaced by any other keyboard shortcuts
almost nothing is mapped to function key shortcuts on Mac or Linux though, that’s a Windows thing
Ah, I see. Fair enough, then.
I still don’t want a keyboard with buttons replaced by a touch screen same as I don’t want a car with temp controls replaced by touch screens.
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also like who in the world needs four USB-C ports
all they do is let you plug dongles into them
anyway. one more year. then maybe they’ll start the LPDDR4 models at 16GB/512GB so I don’t have to gouge myself on apple memory prices.
A weird thing about USB-C is that since you can’t daisy chain USB-C hubs (or at least no extant portable one allows it, the C ports are all power-in only on them), the more USB-C accessories become a thing, the more the 1 and 2 port Macs will seem inadequate.
I’d be happy with 3 as well, but with 2 I’d feel cramped because of my perma-yubikey. And the MacBook with 2 would be a lot better if they were on opposite sides: just plugging power on either side without fucking around is sweet.
I have charged my haswell notebook probably less than ten times during an actual workday rather than on my nightstand in the four years I’ve had it
though I am merciless about idle CPU cycles
Why is i9 CPU a thing now. Shouldn’t it be i11 since the theme was odd prime numbers
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felix are you reading marco’s tweets again
Making things worse is that since pro Macs have Thunderbolt 3 going over their USB-C ports, you actively need to be aware which USB-C devices are actually Thunderbolt devices, and plan for those to be connected directly to the machine instead of through a hub which is unlikely to support Thunderbolt at all. Repeat this process for most USB alternate modes that exists which allow you to pipe arbitrary protocols over a USB cable, and you quickly want nothing to do with USB-C.
The best case scenario at this point is that one day the industry agrees on a color-coding standard and all ports and cables are coloured in a way that indicates what modes and protocols they can handle, and even then, there are too many of them for that to make any sense to a regular user.
The only thing USB-C is kind of good at is being a universal charging connector for all your devices. As soon as you actually try to use USB-C for anything else, it falls apart, and I wish Apple had just chosen to use a proprietary connector instead of diving into this hellhole with the rest of the industry.
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