Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

5k

Even better although Red have that 8K res out now.

its in my shopping cart since last night .. dont need it AT ALL ..

That HomePod is a real Apple product, a year or two late to the market and twice the price of the competition. Will be interesting to see if it manages to gain traction through the Apple name and looking pretty.

The real deal-breaker will be how good the voice recognition is. The Amazon Dot ($50) that I have is generally decent but when it doesn't understand you it gets irritating fairly quickly.

True, but as impressive as the Google version is it sounds like a nat farting in a tin can.
You can't get a decent speaker for sub £150 IMO, let alone one with smart gubbins in. It looks worth the price to me, tempted to sell on my B&O speaker in the bedroom and replace it with that.

Just costed up a MacBook, eGPU and Display, not miles away from iMac Pro... hmmm...

I wanted a classic iPod HiFi with siri. Close enough.

nah, surely the real deal-breaker is sound quality, a $50 device that has a speaker and recognizes your voice isn't the same product as a £400 sound system containing multiple speakers, smart EQ and echo cancellation

iMac pro kind of reminds me of this...

The $50 device does have a crap speaker but can be plugged/bluetoothed into something decent. I just say "Turn on Bluetooth" and it connects to my amp.

I'm not convinced that the Homepod will be a £350 speaker (it's not really an area where Apple are full of expertise and there are some established companies in at that point) and if it's voice controlled a slick Apple interface will be less apparent so it really needs to get the voice control right. Otherwise it will just end up as a glorified bluetooth/airplay speaker where there is a lot of competition.

I bought a MBP 3 weeks ago, so a bit narked they refreshed them so soon but, given the RAM capacity hasn't been upped it's no big deal. As a contractor the MBP is my on-site machine, and I'm about to get a new MacBook + 4K display for the house. Much excite.

YAY!
Also, think you can still take your MBP back... its within its month time frame for returns? Or is it 2 weeks? The update is hardly massive though to be fair.

If it's anywhere near as good as my $500 B&O speaker it'll be worth it.

Reading early reviews it seems to be a great sounding speaker, so comparing it with googles tin can seems a bit off.

It's 14 days, though I reckon I could moan loudly enough. If it had more RAM or was really significant I'd care more, but setting up a machine again etc... ugh.

I'd swap. Get an external hdd, time machine, done.

they are indeed available with 16gb now!

If anyone is interested in the whole antiglare wear on the older MacBook pros, I ended up dropping to one of the other authorised retailers in Islington with no appointment. They basically accepted it straight away. They've ordered the part which should come on Thursday. Sounds like they can change it on the day which will be a big plus, just need to bring it in when they email me saying the part has arrived. Much more carefree then I thought it'd be.

Ok, so - the Macbook has three processor options and two HDD sizes, I'm not interested in the 512 GB HDD so it's down to processor.

Which gives us:
1.2 Ghz m3 £1,429
1.3 Ghz i5 £1,519
1.4 Ghz i7 £1,654

Is this the standard case of want the fastest, pick the one in the middle, or is i5 significantly inferior to the i7?

Or is the m3 fine and it's all down to RAM and HDD speed these days?

Sorry to add to this, (because I think I posted about it originally, but not sure I updated) I took mine down to an Apple retail store, where they took it in as a QC issue without fuss, and replaced in in ~3 days.

I don't know processors enough to say but I do design work on my low end 2015 MBP and it's been solid. Think it has an i5 in there, so go with that. Not much monies in between anyway.

This should explain the processor differences

http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/best-intel-processor-core-i3-i5-i7

This should explain the processor differences
http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/b­est-intel-processor-core-i3-i5-i7
@Dammit

The mobile processors' branding doesn't reflect the chips' speed well though.
Looks like, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_(Retina)
that the 3 chips are

Core m3: m3-7Y32
Core i5: i5-7Y54
Core i7: i7-7Y75

Side by side
https://ark.intel.com/compare/97538,95452,95441

There's almost no difference apart from the clock speeds. The i7 has a few things enabled the other two don't. Most you won't care about

Intel® vPro Technology
Intel® Stable Image Platform Program (Intel® SIPP)
Intel® Trusted Execution Technology
^ ^^ ^^^ for enterprise management/security I think

Intel® TSX-NI
^ looks like something that helps multi-threaded applications. But it's only a 2 core machine so probably not massively helpful (maybe, I don't know really)

They all have the same number of cores, the differences are just clock speed (1.2, 1.3, 1.4 GHz) and graphics chip speed (900, 950, 1050 MHz).
So looks like the core i5 version will be approx 8% quicker than the core m3.
And the i7 will be ~9% quicker than the i5, and 17% faster than the m3.

Probably a bit less noticeable for anything where the processor isn't maxed out though.

So they're all fine. Pay more, get faster but nothing huge.

Seems to be little difference between the processors
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-7Y54+@+1.20GHz
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7Y75+%40+1.30GHz

For comparison this is what is in the i7 surface
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6600U+%40+2.60GHz

Always interesting to see the performance of these mobile processors compared to what you get in a desktop (this is the 5 year old, mid-level processor in my desktop https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-3570K+%40+3.40GHz ).

I guess the focus for the laptop processors in the past few years has been very much low power/heat which the Apple ones manage admirably.

You already got your answer, so no point in me adding to it... (hence I edited my original reply... :-) )

Thanks Aggi/Duncs/Jon. which one would you chaps buy yourself?

Hmm, if I was getting one I'd prob get the base model. It would do everything I need to on the move. If you need more power, then given the small differences between processors, you might be better off with a Pro. Depends what your use for it is.