6 ms·

The fact that the Intel graphic appearing about halfway down the page suggests that the Core M is more suitable for "premium tablets", and "2 in 1's" further su

by bt3 12y ago

The fact that the Intel graphic appearing about halfway down the page suggests that the Core M is more suitable for "premium tablets", and "2 in 1's" further suggests to me that Apple has introduced the worlds most expensive netbook. Which will likely pair well with their five-figure watches as well. There was a comment on another similar article I read awhile back where an Intel employee commented on how the Core M is a "premium Atom".

epistasis 12y ago
In that section it mentions ultra-thin notebooks, but you felt it more important to mention 2-in-1 and premium tablets?
wlesieutre 12y ago
The Intel graphic that recommends it for ultra-thin notebooks? http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9117/Slide%206%20-%20Choosing%20the%20Right%20Processor_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9117/Slide%206%20-%20Choosi...
- IkmoIkmo 12y ago
  Well that's his point. If you have a chip that's used in an ultra thin laptop, whose performance-grade suits tablets, then you can slap a derogatory 'netbook' label on it. And I can definitely see why you might say that. If you look at the Macbook Air 13", it's a cheaper and more powerful device, despite being among the most portable devices, without generally a need for externals like USB hubs, or even a charger with its excellent 12h battery life. And it wasn't considered noisy either. Instead of improving that MBA: USB-C to make it slightly thinner. Full HD resolution to make it slightly sharper. Butterfly keyboard and zero-click magnetic touchpad to allow it to be thinner. Slightly smaller bezels and a slightly bigger keyboard to make it smaller. Layered battery to make it last longer, or use less space. Instead of that, they said 'prettiness first, let's make it as thin as possible', and then let's see what performance we can squeeze in. And that performance came in behind a cheaper, older MBA, and its because uses a chip that you find in tablets. Now I'm excited about the new Macbook, not the first one but future generations will likely be something quite special. And I fully understand and even appreciate why they did it. Set a new standard, a new model, for mobile consumers, in a world where even laptops are squeezed by tablets/phablets, and where most consumers don't need the performance of a MBA (that blurred the line between consumer & pro. The MBA's are popular lightweight development machines for example). And set the stage for increasing wireless/cloud. And I also appreciate that mocking it as a mobile chip is a bit myopic. It's actually quite fast and seems to do nicely in the early benchmarks. But yeah I see his point, it's still a bit weird to see a performance downgrade from the 'mobility line' in the Air, with a price bump and weird things like 1-port, or a 480p camera that is humbled by a the 2010 iPod Touch 720p camera. Expecting a 2nd generation of this Macbook, especially when USB-C takes off, skylake launches and the Air stops selling, to make a lot more sense than it does today.
  - jfb 12y ago
    The new Macbook has significantly better than a 1920x1080 screen, though.
    - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
      Does it, really? I think it depends, for me personally I'm not so sure it does. So first they're 16:10 displays, meaning 1920x1200 not 1080, I should have said WUXGA instead of Full HD, sorry. My rMBP is my main driver, I love it. And its PPI is 227, nice and sharp. Similar to the new Macbook (226). While a 1920x1200 MBA display would be 170 PPI. Big difference? So the generally considered quite beautiful iMac sits at 109 PPI. Even the 5k iMac is only 218. It's true, it's not quite a 12" Retina at 226 PPI. But if you asked me if I'd rather have a 13.3" screen with 170 PPI, or a 12" screen with 200+ PPI, I'd go with the former. For me, anything above 100 is good enough for computing, anything above 150 is starting to get really nice, and 200+ is an unnecessary bonus that I can still discern, but not get really excited about. 170 PPI would have been plenty for me. So I agree it's better, but significantly better? While researching for a new buy I took 3 friends to the Apple store while we were in the neighbourhood, and none of them could easily discern the iMac from the riMac at first glance. After I told them and let them do side by sides, they sorta saw. Which really surprised me, I could definitely notice, but for me too both displays were awesome. There are some real diminishing returns to ever increasing sharpness. You remember the Dell Ultrasharp U3011, a 30" monitor a few years old. It had 84 PPI, and this is still a nice display. Double that and you get 168 PPI, ought to be plenty, right? Double the pixel density of a few years old 'ultrasharp' by Dell. Still, it's less than the proposed 170 PPI on a Macbook Air. One may wonder if a PPI of 1 million would be 'significantly better', because at laptop distances of say 18" or so, eyes start to stop being able to discern pixels at 165 PPI or so, all the way up to the 260ish PPI range where virtually all eyes even with perfect vision lose the ability to discern pixels at laptop ranges. At the end of the day, few people are going to be doing high-res photoshopping or video editing on their 12" Macbook with Intel M Core, where 200+ PPI is useful. At 170 PPI, I think it's generally sharp enough for text & video. At the end of the day it's subjective, 226 vs 170 PPI may well be a significant difference for you. Not for me. And if I could have more performance, more battery, 1.3" more screen, more ports etc, I'd prefer the latter.
tracker1 12y ago
I think it's a segment worth having... I took down my home servers last year, one of which was an 8-core AMD (FX-8350) that I put into my aging HTPC case... the power usage was pretty high, so I started shutting it off when not using it. I just got in a Gigabyte Brix Core i3-5010U, which is supposed to sit around 15W of power (around 1/8-1/10th of the amd), with similar single-core performance and roughly 40% multicore... I do browsing and watching a lot of 1080p video on it. With the i3 I can just leave it on... if I could get similar performance (real-world usage) with 1/3 of that power, I might have been willing to pay another $150 for it. Another issue is when the fans kick in... I want quiet and good enough performance. The same is true of laptop use for most people as well... honestly, other than only having a single USB3 port, I think the new macbook is a good (if a bit overpriced) fit.

by bt3 12y ago

epistasis 12y ago

In that section it mentions ultra-thin notebooks, but you felt it more important to mention 2-in-1 and premium tablets?

wlesieutre 12y ago

The Intel graphic that recommends it for ultra-thin notebooks? http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9117/Slide%206%20-%20Choosing%20the%20Right%20Processor_575px.png http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9117/Slide%206%20-%20Choosi...

IkmoIkmo 12y ago
Well that's his point. If you have a chip that's used in an ultra thin laptop, whose performance-grade suits tablets, then you can slap a derogatory 'netbook' label on it. And I can definitely see why you might say that. If you look at the Macbook Air 13", it's a cheaper and more powerful device, despite being among the most portable devices, without generally a need for externals like USB hubs, or even a charger with its excellent 12h battery life. And it wasn't considered noisy either. Instead of improving that MBA: USB-C to make it slightly thinner. Full HD resolution to make it slightly sharper. Butterfly keyboard and zero-click magnetic touchpad to allow it to be thinner. Slightly smaller bezels and a slightly bigger keyboard to make it smaller. Layered battery to make it last longer, or use less space. Instead of that, they said 'prettiness first, let's make it as thin as possible', and then let's see what performance we can squeeze in. And that performance came in behind a cheaper, older MBA, and its because uses a chip that you find in tablets. Now I'm excited about the new Macbook, not the first one but future generations will likely be something quite special. And I fully understand and even appreciate why they did it. Set a new standard, a new model, for mobile consumers, in a world where even laptops are squeezed by tablets/phablets, and where most consumers don't need the performance of a MBA (that blurred the line between consumer & pro. The MBA's are popular lightweight development machines for example). And set the stage for increasing wireless/cloud. And I also appreciate that mocking it as a mobile chip is a bit myopic. It's actually quite fast and seems to do nicely in the early benchmarks. But yeah I see his point, it's still a bit weird to see a performance downgrade from the 'mobility line' in the Air, with a price bump and weird things like 1-port, or a 480p camera that is humbled by a the 2010 iPod Touch 720p camera. Expecting a 2nd generation of this Macbook, especially when USB-C takes off, skylake launches and the Air stops selling, to make a lot more sense than it does today.
- jfb 12y ago
  The new Macbook has significantly better than a 1920x1080 screen, though.
  - IkmoIkmo 12y ago
    Does it, really? I think it depends, for me personally I'm not so sure it does. So first they're 16:10 displays, meaning 1920x1200 not 1080, I should have said WUXGA instead of Full HD, sorry. My rMBP is my main driver, I love it. And its PPI is 227, nice and sharp. Similar to the new Macbook (226). While a 1920x1200 MBA display would be 170 PPI. Big difference? So the generally considered quite beautiful iMac sits at 109 PPI. Even the 5k iMac is only 218. It's true, it's not quite a 12" Retina at 226 PPI. But if you asked me if I'd rather have a 13.3" screen with 170 PPI, or a 12" screen with 200+ PPI, I'd go with the former. For me, anything above 100 is good enough for computing, anything above 150 is starting to get really nice, and 200+ is an unnecessary bonus that I can still discern, but not get really excited about. 170 PPI would have been plenty for me. So I agree it's better, but significantly better? While researching for a new buy I took 3 friends to the Apple store while we were in the neighbourhood, and none of them could easily discern the iMac from the riMac at first glance. After I told them and let them do side by sides, they sorta saw. Which really surprised me, I could definitely notice, but for me too both displays were awesome. There are some real diminishing returns to ever increasing sharpness. You remember the Dell Ultrasharp U3011, a 30" monitor a few years old. It had 84 PPI, and this is still a nice display. Double that and you get 168 PPI, ought to be plenty, right? Double the pixel density of a few years old 'ultrasharp' by Dell. Still, it's less than the proposed 170 PPI on a Macbook Air. One may wonder if a PPI of 1 million would be 'significantly better', because at laptop distances of say 18" or so, eyes start to stop being able to discern pixels at 165 PPI or so, all the way up to the 260ish PPI range where virtually all eyes even with perfect vision lose the ability to discern pixels at laptop ranges. At the end of the day, few people are going to be doing high-res photoshopping or video editing on their 12" Macbook with Intel M Core, where 200+ PPI is useful. At 170 PPI, I think it's generally sharp enough for text & video. At the end of the day it's subjective, 226 vs 170 PPI may well be a significant difference for you. Not for me. And if I could have more performance, more battery, 1.3" more screen, more ports etc, I'd prefer the latter.

tracker1 12y ago

I think it's a segment worth having... I took down my home servers last year, one of which was an 8-core AMD (FX-8350) that I put into my aging HTPC case... the power usage was pretty high, so I started shutting it off when not using it. I just got in a Gigabyte Brix Core i3-5010U, which is supposed to sit around 15W of power (around 1/8-1/10th of the amd), with similar single-core performance and roughly 40% multicore... I do browsing and watching a lot of 1080p video on it. With the i3 I can just leave it on... if I could get similar performance (real-world usage) with 1/3 of that power, I might have been willing to pay another $150 for it. Another issue is when the fans kick in... I want quiet and good enough performance. The same is true of laptop use for most people as well... honestly, other than only having a single USB3 port, I think the new macbook is a good (if a bit overpriced) fit.