There is a lot of consternation over the new MacBook Pro, as people feel it is not powerful enough. It is best summed up when looking at the performance numbers, collected partly by @felix_schwarz:
Basically CPU is just 10% better, GPU up to 190%, and battery life 40% compared to the original 2012 Retina model. Compared to the constant improvements we have seen for iPhone and iPad, this feels utterly slow. But Intel did not stop improving because they are resting on their laurels, it is simply that frequency scaling has become very hard to do beyond 3GHz, and has caused single thread performance to stagnate. The energy efficient way to improve performance are extra cores, and more SIMD width1, and I suspect that Apple’s Ax cores will soon run into that same wall. It is no surprise that Apple is pushing Metal as GPUs are currently the best bet to get raw performance thanks to parallelism.
In addition we see the flight to quality in full swing, as Macs increasingly cede the low ground to iOS. This brings us an annoying transition to a new, higher performance connection standard (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3), and missing clarity on the 5K display cable: will it be Thunderbolt 3 or DisplayPort 1.4? While I welcome the ability to add a high quality 5K monitor, I see the risk that Thunderbolt 3 will not become the standard connector: it is more expensive than DisplayPort, and power delivery is only useful for notebooks, not desktops. And annoyingly, the LG 5K monitor only supports one computer connection. But at $1200, it is cheap enough to take a risk.
USB-C is the right move, and while the transition will cause teething troubles, and another round of adapters, in a few years we will not miss USB-A. I wonder whether Apple has left just enough room between the ports to allow you to place USB-C to -A plugs side by side, to ease the transition somewhat.
- Many Intel performance improvements are now tied to AVX, and help only where we can exploit parallelism ⏎