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Also only a single external display (6K@60Hz) for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro as per the tech specs, which is a deal breaker for me. The Mac Mini supports o

Also only a single external display (6K@60Hz) for the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro as per the tech specs, which is a deal breaker for me. The Mac Mini supports one on thunderbolt also and a second at 4K 60Hz that has to be on the HDMI port. https://www.apple.com/au/macbook-pro-13/specs/ https://www.apple.com/au/macbook-pro-13/specs/ “Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display in millions of colours and: One external display with up to 6K resolution at 60Hz”

rowanG077 6y ago
WTF. That's insane. Instant dealbreaker.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  Those people can still get an Intel-based Mac. For me, the dealbreaker is the 16GB memory limit - it's too little for comfort right now and I assume a 32 or 64GB machine is what it would take to carry me for the next five years or so.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    16GB memory is completely fine for me. I have had it the last 5 years and never had even close to saturation. But I do use two screens every day.
    - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
      That is the problem. In _2015_ I bought a tablet PC (!) which had 16GB of RAM. I've been having 16GB of RAM as standard/minimum for at least 5 years already. And it was on the same pricing that these 2020 machines which have 16GB of RAM _as a maximum_. I am not willing the entertain the idea "more RAM is no longer possible nor necessary", either. Software keeps creeping up as usual (MS Teams _by itself_ uses >2GB, and I have already complained dearly -- Teams is basically a glorified IRC client!). And next year if not this year already it's highly likely my phone will have 16GB of RAM. My phone! On my pocket! It's just ridiculous that a $1200 laptop has 8 GB, and it is just unbelievable it maxes out at 16GB. Looks designed to be thrown away next year.
      - simonh 6y ago
        What laptop manufacturers sell $1200 laptops that don't come with a base 8GB RAM option? I don't know any. Not Dell, or HP, or Lenovo. Apple still sells 13" Macbook Pros that go up to 32GB RAM, they're just Intel ones. If you need more than 16 GB in a Pro Mac, or a Mini you can still get it. So these options have not been taken off the table. The M1 machines simply offer a new tradeoff of smaller but faster memory if that works for you. Not every machine needs to offer every possible configuration.
        easde 6y ago
        Dell even sold a 4GB (!) version of the XPS 13 for $999 up until a few months ago.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >It's just ridiculous that a $1200 laptop has 8 GB Is it? Dell sells a $1499 laptop with 8GB. They also have 16GB models, but once you add specs equivalent to the new MacBook (at least i7, SSD, 13") the prices are $1299 and above (and you get a plastic box, not exactly the same build quality, trackpad, etc - though you do get a probabl better camera and more ports). https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/intel-core-i7?appliedRefinements=6084,15674,23085,13248 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/inte...
    - rangoon626 6y ago
      I thought 16 GB never seemed saturated until I installed 64 GB. The OS will definitely use more if you have more. It seems like I use typically around 32 GB.
    - aldanor 6y ago
      To each his own, I'm close to saturating 2013 32G iMac almost every day. To me personally, anything less than 64-128G these days is a joke, especially given how cheap the ram is (non-integrated, of course).
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      I also think 16GB is a perfectly reasonable amount of memory (and even 8GB is fine on a low-end machine), but the fact that it's the limit is... troubling. I assume it'll be fixed in time, but, still.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      I thought my MBP's 16GB was fine. For a long time I rarely saw usage over 8GB. But for a few months everything was running rather slow and I put it down to other causes. One day I looked at the memory usage and saw it was using 10GB swap in addition to about 14.5GB RAM. And when I clicked things that responded slowly, the memory pressure meter was lighting up. Swapping was why it was slow. It's pretty fast swap, being on SSD, but it was the reason for the slowdowns. Probably not doing the SSD any good either (they wear out if written to constantly). Turns out Safari was using 8GB by itself. Restarting Safari helped (it's quick to restart which is nice). Safari, like Chrome, uses a lot of memory after opening a bunch of tabs because of using separate processes for each tab. I also use Firefox, but it uses 6-8GB for me too. Then there's my VM running my Linux dev environment. Now I only give it 4GB, which is a bit tight but I run some things remotely so it's ok. I had to shrink it from 6GB to get my performance back. Sometimes I'm foolish enough to have LibreOffice or MS Word open to look at documents. They aren't memory hogs, but when you've lost most of it to the browser(s) and dev VM, little things like office apps push it a few GB over the edge. I'm also running Emacs with quite a lot loaded into it, and many iTerms, but they use so little RAM compared with the big stuff, it barely registers. Nowadays I pay more attention to memory use, mostly use only one browser at a time, and restart more often. Even so, it's hovering around 5GB swap at the moment, and I haven't got much going on at the moment. Based on this, I know I can live with 16GB but it is restricting what I use and how I work now. 32GB would be let me stop thinking about RAM again, and I expect in a few years it will be nearly full, as usage tends to grow over time (as I found already). If I could buy a new MBP knowing I could upgrade the RAM I'd be happy to buy at 16GB, but as you can't upgrade, and I want a new laptop to last at least 5 years, I wouldn't be comfortable buying a dev machine at 16GB now.
- lastofthemojito 6y ago
  The memory limit was the dealbreaker for me, but I've seen people mention several others for their uses cases - no eGPUs, weak multi-monitor support out-of-the-box, etc. Apple obviously knows that a lot of people rely on those power-user features, so I'm sure at some point you'll be able to buy an ARM Mac with 128GB RAM that you can hook 6 monitors up to. I do think starting at the low end makes sense for Apple though. These machines will sell mostly to everyday folks who just use a handful of common apps - I wouldn't be surprised if Safari is the #1 app used on these machines. That gives Apple a start to this transition, without the reputational hit that might have occurred if they sold a bunch of machines to power users right away. We'll whine a little bit that the machines weren't what we wanted, and then we'll just wait for the M1X machines. But that's better than if we all bought M1X MacBook Pros yesterday and then were disappointed when a couple of crucial apps didn't work yet. This "flattens the curve" of application incompatibility reports if you will.
- coldtea 6y ago
  I'd say that's an exaggeration. Hannibal Lecter is insane. An entry-level laptop not supporting dual 4K screens (for whatever reason) sounds more tame, especially if the vendor has statistics that show that a tiny minority use theirs with such a setup even in the Intel version that does support it... The 16GB max memory is another problem, but again mostly not for the kind of users the machine is intended for.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    a €1.909,00 laptop(Cost of macbook pro 13 inch with 16gb of RAM) is not entry level. It's not even mid-tier. That is a high-end laptop. Entry level would at least be sub €600 laptop.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >a €1.909,00 laptop(Cost of macbook pro 13 inch with 16gb of RAM) is not entry level. For Apple it is. And for most other companies (Dell, Lenovo, Razer, etc). When you configure any kind of developer-class or workstation-class machine, it gets way above $2000 soon regardless of vendor. I wanted to try a Lenovo or Razer with compatible specs to a high end MacBook Pro 16 (to use if as a high end Linux workstation), and it gets into the same ballpark very quickly as you narrow the specs down. The sub €600 category Apple doesn't cater to.
      - rowanG077 6y ago
        Entry level and workstation class are completely orthogonal concepts. You can have an entry-level workstation. But the macbook pro 13 inch is not an entry-level workstation. It's not a workstation at all. It's also not an entry-level laptop. Razer, like Apple, doesn't offer entry level laptops. Apple and Razer simply don't operate in that market segment. But Dell and Lenovo do. Here are some examples of their entry level stuff: Dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/inspiron-laptops https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/insp... Lenovo: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-100-series/lenovo-ideapad-s145-15ast/p/81N3001RUS https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-100-ser...
m-p-3 6y ago
I'm wondering if a DisplayLink docking station like the Dell D6000 would support more, if they manage to get the drivers working for it (or if Apple integrates DisplayLink support natively, which I doubt will happen).
- nhumrich 6y ago
  Apple has never supported Displaylink or even the DisplayPort 1.2 spec that allows daisy chaining using MST
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    I don't know about daisy chaining, but they definitely support MST because Dell's UP2414Q uses that to run its 4K @ 60Hz mode
    - wlesieutre 6y ago
      Based on downvotes, I guess people don't believe me. Here's a support document from 2014 explaining the capability: http://web.archive.org/web/20140628022826/http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6008 http://web.archive.org/web/20140628022826/http://support.app... Single displays driven as two half panels over MST has been supported since 10.9.3, including the UP2414Q that I mentioned. Otherwise, DisplayPort 1.2 could only give the screens enough bandwidth to run at 30 Hz. > MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) or Mac Pro (Late 2013) also support 60 Hz displays using multi-stream transport (MST). These displays need to be manually configured to use MST. Follow the steps below to use the display's built-in controls to enable this feature. > [display specific instructions omitted] > Your Mac will automatically detect an MST-enabled display. However, your display may require a firmware update to support 60Hz operation. Please contact your display vendor for details. If your specific DisplayPort display is not listed above, check with the display’s manufacturer for compatibility information. Having used that Dell screen on both OS X and Windows, I can tell you this MST capability was better supported on Mac than it was on Windows. On a Mac it worked perfectly. On Windows you'd frequently get half of the screen either black or shifted sideways, creating several visible seams in the image. Not my screenshots, but see here for examples: https://www.dell.com/community/Monitors/UP2414Q-Rev-A03-Wake-Up-Half-Screen-Wrong-Screen-resolution/td-p/4745902 https://www.dell.com/community/Monitors/UP2414Q-Rev-A03-Wake...
m463 6y ago
We're not the target market. I suspect what macs may become to many of us is the trusted machine we buy for child/spouse/parent, then run off to our linux machine. I was going to say windows for games, but it seems I wasn't paying attention and linux machines run lots of games well nowadays.

rowanG077 6y ago

WTF. That's insane. Instant dealbreaker.

rbanffy 6y ago
Those people can still get an Intel-based Mac. For me, the dealbreaker is the 16GB memory limit - it's too little for comfort right now and I assume a 32 or 64GB machine is what it would take to carry me for the next five years or so.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  16GB memory is completely fine for me. I have had it the last 5 years and never had even close to saturation. But I do use two screens every day.
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    That is the problem. In _2015_ I bought a tablet PC (!) which had 16GB of RAM. I've been having 16GB of RAM as standard/minimum for at least 5 years already. And it was on the same pricing that these 2020 machines which have 16GB of RAM _as a maximum_. I am not willing the entertain the idea "more RAM is no longer possible nor necessary", either. Software keeps creeping up as usual (MS Teams _by itself_ uses >2GB, and I have already complained dearly -- Teams is basically a glorified IRC client!). And next year if not this year already it's highly likely my phone will have 16GB of RAM. My phone! On my pocket! It's just ridiculous that a $1200 laptop has 8 GB, and it is just unbelievable it maxes out at 16GB. Looks designed to be thrown away next year.
    - simonh 6y ago
      What laptop manufacturers sell $1200 laptops that don't come with a base 8GB RAM option? I don't know any. Not Dell, or HP, or Lenovo. Apple still sells 13" Macbook Pros that go up to 32GB RAM, they're just Intel ones. If you need more than 16 GB in a Pro Mac, or a Mini you can still get it. So these options have not been taken off the table. The M1 machines simply offer a new tradeoff of smaller but faster memory if that works for you. Not every machine needs to offer every possible configuration.
      - easde 6y ago
        Dell even sold a 4GB (!) version of the XPS 13 for $999 up until a few months ago.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >It's just ridiculous that a $1200 laptop has 8 GB Is it? Dell sells a $1499 laptop with 8GB. They also have 16GB models, but once you add specs equivalent to the new MacBook (at least i7, SSD, 13") the prices are $1299 and above (and you get a plastic box, not exactly the same build quality, trackpad, etc - though you do get a probabl better camera and more ports). https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/intel-core-i7?appliedRefinements=6084,15674,23085,13248 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/inte...
  - rangoon626 6y ago
    I thought 16 GB never seemed saturated until I installed 64 GB. The OS will definitely use more if you have more. It seems like I use typically around 32 GB.
  - aldanor 6y ago
    To each his own, I'm close to saturating 2013 32G iMac almost every day. To me personally, anything less than 64-128G these days is a joke, especially given how cheap the ram is (non-integrated, of course).
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    I also think 16GB is a perfectly reasonable amount of memory (and even 8GB is fine on a low-end machine), but the fact that it's the limit is... troubling. I assume it'll be fixed in time, but, still.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    I thought my MBP's 16GB was fine. For a long time I rarely saw usage over 8GB. But for a few months everything was running rather slow and I put it down to other causes. One day I looked at the memory usage and saw it was using 10GB swap in addition to about 14.5GB RAM. And when I clicked things that responded slowly, the memory pressure meter was lighting up. Swapping was why it was slow. It's pretty fast swap, being on SSD, but it was the reason for the slowdowns. Probably not doing the SSD any good either (they wear out if written to constantly). Turns out Safari was using 8GB by itself. Restarting Safari helped (it's quick to restart which is nice). Safari, like Chrome, uses a lot of memory after opening a bunch of tabs because of using separate processes for each tab. I also use Firefox, but it uses 6-8GB for me too. Then there's my VM running my Linux dev environment. Now I only give it 4GB, which is a bit tight but I run some things remotely so it's ok. I had to shrink it from 6GB to get my performance back. Sometimes I'm foolish enough to have LibreOffice or MS Word open to look at documents. They aren't memory hogs, but when you've lost most of it to the browser(s) and dev VM, little things like office apps push it a few GB over the edge. I'm also running Emacs with quite a lot loaded into it, and many iTerms, but they use so little RAM compared with the big stuff, it barely registers. Nowadays I pay more attention to memory use, mostly use only one browser at a time, and restart more often. Even so, it's hovering around 5GB swap at the moment, and I haven't got much going on at the moment. Based on this, I know I can live with 16GB but it is restricting what I use and how I work now. 32GB would be let me stop thinking about RAM again, and I expect in a few years it will be nearly full, as usage tends to grow over time (as I found already). If I could buy a new MBP knowing I could upgrade the RAM I'd be happy to buy at 16GB, but as you can't upgrade, and I want a new laptop to last at least 5 years, I wouldn't be comfortable buying a dev machine at 16GB now.
lastofthemojito 6y ago
The memory limit was the dealbreaker for me, but I've seen people mention several others for their uses cases - no eGPUs, weak multi-monitor support out-of-the-box, etc. Apple obviously knows that a lot of people rely on those power-user features, so I'm sure at some point you'll be able to buy an ARM Mac with 128GB RAM that you can hook 6 monitors up to. I do think starting at the low end makes sense for Apple though. These machines will sell mostly to everyday folks who just use a handful of common apps - I wouldn't be surprised if Safari is the #1 app used on these machines. That gives Apple a start to this transition, without the reputational hit that might have occurred if they sold a bunch of machines to power users right away. We'll whine a little bit that the machines weren't what we wanted, and then we'll just wait for the M1X machines. But that's better than if we all bought M1X MacBook Pros yesterday and then were disappointed when a couple of crucial apps didn't work yet. This "flattens the curve" of application incompatibility reports if you will.
coldtea 6y ago
I'd say that's an exaggeration. Hannibal Lecter is insane. An entry-level laptop not supporting dual 4K screens (for whatever reason) sounds more tame, especially if the vendor has statistics that show that a tiny minority use theirs with such a setup even in the Intel version that does support it... The 16GB max memory is another problem, but again mostly not for the kind of users the machine is intended for.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  a €1.909,00 laptop(Cost of macbook pro 13 inch with 16gb of RAM) is not entry level. It's not even mid-tier. That is a high-end laptop. Entry level would at least be sub €600 laptop.
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >a €1.909,00 laptop(Cost of macbook pro 13 inch with 16gb of RAM) is not entry level. For Apple it is. And for most other companies (Dell, Lenovo, Razer, etc). When you configure any kind of developer-class or workstation-class machine, it gets way above $2000 soon regardless of vendor. I wanted to try a Lenovo or Razer with compatible specs to a high end MacBook Pro 16 (to use if as a high end Linux workstation), and it gets into the same ballpark very quickly as you narrow the specs down. The sub €600 category Apple doesn't cater to.
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      Entry level and workstation class are completely orthogonal concepts. You can have an entry-level workstation. But the macbook pro 13 inch is not an entry-level workstation. It's not a workstation at all. It's also not an entry-level laptop. Razer, like Apple, doesn't offer entry level laptops. Apple and Razer simply don't operate in that market segment. But Dell and Lenovo do. Here are some examples of their entry level stuff: Dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/inspiron-laptops https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sr/laptops/insp... Lenovo: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-100-series/lenovo-ideapad-s145-15ast/p/81N3001RUS https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-100-ser...

m-p-3 6y ago

I'm wondering if a DisplayLink docking station like the Dell D6000 would support more, if they manage to get the drivers working for it (or if Apple integrates DisplayLink support natively, which I doubt will happen).

nhumrich 6y ago
Apple has never supported Displaylink or even the DisplayPort 1.2 spec that allows daisy chaining using MST
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  I don't know about daisy chaining, but they definitely support MST because Dell's UP2414Q uses that to run its 4K @ 60Hz mode
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    Based on downvotes, I guess people don't believe me. Here's a support document from 2014 explaining the capability: http://web.archive.org/web/20140628022826/http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6008 http://web.archive.org/web/20140628022826/http://support.app... Single displays driven as two half panels over MST has been supported since 10.9.3, including the UP2414Q that I mentioned. Otherwise, DisplayPort 1.2 could only give the screens enough bandwidth to run at 30 Hz. > MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) or Mac Pro (Late 2013) also support 60 Hz displays using multi-stream transport (MST). These displays need to be manually configured to use MST. Follow the steps below to use the display's built-in controls to enable this feature. > [display specific instructions omitted] > Your Mac will automatically detect an MST-enabled display. However, your display may require a firmware update to support 60Hz operation. Please contact your display vendor for details. If your specific DisplayPort display is not listed above, check with the display’s manufacturer for compatibility information. Having used that Dell screen on both OS X and Windows, I can tell you this MST capability was better supported on Mac than it was on Windows. On a Mac it worked perfectly. On Windows you'd frequently get half of the screen either black or shifted sideways, creating several visible seams in the image. Not my screenshots, but see here for examples: https://www.dell.com/community/Monitors/UP2414Q-Rev-A03-Wake-Up-Half-Screen-Wrong-Screen-resolution/td-p/4745902 https://www.dell.com/community/Monitors/UP2414Q-Rev-A03-Wake...

m463 6y ago

We're not the target market. I suspect what macs may become to many of us is the trusted machine we buy for child/spouse/parent, then run off to our linux machine. I was going to say windows for games, but it seems I wasn't paying attention and linux machines run lots of games well nowadays.