Why are you using Apple’s discontinued 15” model as a benchmark here?
The 16” MacBook Pro most certainly does not have those same cooling issues.
But that’s the thing: Apple had to make their flagship performance laptop bigger including a larger battery than its original design in 2016 because Intel was never able to hit their roadmap goals.
That doesn’t sound like progress to me, it kind of sounds backwards.
In other words, Apple couldn’t give you a reason to buy their performance laptop four years later without making it physically larger. Because if they didn’t do that their customers would only have minimal incremental improvement to compel them to consider a newer system after four years.
In contrast, a four year old iPhone is over twice as slow from a raw performance perspective than the current model.
So yeah, I could buy a much cheaper PC laptop with proper thermals and cooling for much cheaper than a 16” MacBook Pro to get that fantastic performance. Maybe it’d even be a lot better than the M1 Macs.
But I can’t buy a Windows laptop, for any price, that has no fans at all and manages performance and battery life of the MacBook Air.
Apple’s throwing a CPU into their *cheapest laptop that is marketed for basic usage (students, home users) that benches faster than basically all but AMD’s most performant chip, a chip that would probably get you pretty terrible thermals and battery life in a 16” MacBook Pro.
A lot of evolutionary products were, in retrospect, revolutionary. Was the guts of an iPod or Walkman or iPhone or IBM PC or Honda Civic all that different from conventionally available parts? No, consumer electronics almost never have anything particularly exotic going on.
But it’s the whole package that can be revolutionary. The Civic was a dirt cheap car with excellent fuel economy and reliability. Is it all that different from other cars? No, not really, but the entire Japanese auto industry was a disruptive product in the 1980s.
The rumor mill is already telling us that the 16” MacBook Pro may ship with a 12 core (8 big, 4 little) “M1X” or “M2” chip. If the tech media landscape is head over heels for the M1, this new chip is going to make serious waves, because if you double the performance cores in the M1 it’s basically going to be untouchable by anything that can remotely be considered a laptop.
If Apple doesn’t touch the form factor of the 16” MacBook Pro it’s going to have similar results: it’s going to run quieter, cooler, and longer.
In short, it’s just my own opinion that calling this bit of incremental improvement evolutionary rather than revolutionary is something of an understatement.
The 16” MacBook Pro most certainly does not have those same cooling issues.
But that’s the thing: Apple had to make their flagship performance laptop bigger including a larger battery than its original design in 2016 because Intel was never able to hit their roadmap goals.
That doesn’t sound like progress to me, it kind of sounds backwards.
In other words, Apple couldn’t give you a reason to buy their performance laptop four years later without making it physically larger. Because if they didn’t do that their customers would only have minimal incremental improvement to compel them to consider a newer system after four years.
In contrast, a four year old iPhone is over twice as slow from a raw performance perspective than the current model.
So yeah, I could buy a much cheaper PC laptop with proper thermals and cooling for much cheaper than a 16” MacBook Pro to get that fantastic performance. Maybe it’d even be a lot better than the M1 Macs.
But I can’t buy a Windows laptop, for any price, that has no fans at all and manages performance and battery life of the MacBook Air.
Apple’s throwing a CPU into their *cheapest laptop that is marketed for basic usage (students, home users) that benches faster than basically all but AMD’s most performant chip, a chip that would probably get you pretty terrible thermals and battery life in a 16” MacBook Pro.
A lot of evolutionary products were, in retrospect, revolutionary. Was the guts of an iPod or Walkman or iPhone or IBM PC or Honda Civic all that different from conventionally available parts? No, consumer electronics almost never have anything particularly exotic going on.
But it’s the whole package that can be revolutionary. The Civic was a dirt cheap car with excellent fuel economy and reliability. Is it all that different from other cars? No, not really, but the entire Japanese auto industry was a disruptive product in the 1980s.
The rumor mill is already telling us that the 16” MacBook Pro may ship with a 12 core (8 big, 4 little) “M1X” or “M2” chip. If the tech media landscape is head over heels for the M1, this new chip is going to make serious waves, because if you double the performance cores in the M1 it’s basically going to be untouchable by anything that can remotely be considered a laptop.
If Apple doesn’t touch the form factor of the 16” MacBook Pro it’s going to have similar results: it’s going to run quieter, cooler, and longer.
In short, it’s just my own opinion that calling this bit of incremental improvement evolutionary rather than revolutionary is something of an understatement.