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Apple2

Most of Apple'south product lines are severely overdue for a refresh. Autonomously from the recently refreshed MacBook, many of the company'due south Mac products are well over a year old. The Mac Mini is nearly 2, the high-end workstation Mac Pro is about three, and the sole remaining non-Retina MacBook Pro is now more than four years old.

Writing for The Verge, Sam Byford recently argued that "Apple should end selling iv year-old computers." He's non incorrect to note the 2022-era MacBook Pro is pretty long in the tooth with its 4GB of RAM and Ivy Bridge-based processor, or that Apple has neglected specific products, like the Mac Mini. I thought about writing a similar article terminal month, only with a specific focus on the Mac Pro. After excavation effectually in Intel's Ark (a tool that lets you lot compare the specifics of diverse Intel processors), I realized that while there are exceptions, Apple's relatively lax refresh cycle is mostly driven by the low rate of improvements in PC hardware these days. Apple is simply more honest about it.

Run into the new CPU, same as the old CPU

Setting aside the not-Retina MacBook Pro from 2022, most of Apple'south laptops are running on Broadwell or Skylake (the 2022 MacBook). There'due south a single SKU left over from Haswell at the $1,999 price point, only the laptop lineup is pretty new.

Byford is correct when he calls out the almost iii-year gap between the Mac Pro's debut and the present twenty-four hours, but he doesn't specifically talk over just how little this has meant to the auto's top end performance. The Mac Pro ships in two configurations we'll address: An Ivy Bridge Xeon quad-core at 3.7GHz with 10MB L3 (E5-1620 v2) or a 2.7GHz 12-core IVB-EP CPU with 30MB L3 (E5-2697 v2). Permit's compare those with their counterparts today.

Xeon-Comparison-Chart

In the chart higher up, nosotros've arranged each IVB bit on the left, followed by its modern counterpart. Intel doesn't have a 12-cadre Broadwell fleck in the 135W TDP bracket, merely in 105W and 160W flavors. At that place are higher-core count systems with lower clock speeds, but our hypothetical test-case is a user who wants both loftier clocks and high core counts.

The outset thing to note is how piffling Intel's chip lineup has actually changed in the past three years. The modern E5-2687 v4 has a slightly higher base clock speed simply a significantly higher TDP. Tiptop frequency is identical between the two. Broadwell offers essentially no clock speed improvements over IVB-E at the quad-cadre level — in fact, the IVB-EP actually clocked higher than its counterpart. True, architectural improvements will compensate for some of this, but not by much — Haswell was roughly 8% faster than IVB-E, and Skylake hasn't come to the E5 family withal. You'd get some uplift if your application supports and makes meaning use of AVX2, but otherwise? There's not a lot of upgrade to be had.

In curt, there's merely not much reason to update the Mac Pro's CPU — not until and unless Intel tin can field designs that truly merit it. While Apple volition likely eventually refresh the Mac Pro, the merely big winners will be Mac users who desire to pack as many threads as possible into a unmarried-socket arrangement (Intel at present offers Xeons with up to 22 cores in the E5 family).

What about GPUs?

GPUs are where the lengthy look times in betwixt refresh cycles really does bite customers. The electric current tiptop-cease Mac Pro fields a pair of D700 graphics cards based on AMD's original GCN 1.0 architecture. AMD has built multiple cards that could've been used to upgrade these configurations, while the Polaris GPU inside the RX 480 would evangelize meliorate operation and more VRAM at a much lower TDP and cost point.

The problem with criticizing Apple's GPU performance is that Apple doesn't care all that much about graphics, menstruation. Os Ten continues to field a version of OpenGL that'south almost six years old and Apple isn't supporting Vulkan, instead choosing to field its own close-to-metal API, Metal. Apple tree isn't exactly out of step with the remainder of the manufacture; outside of bazaar laptops, there just aren't very many systems shipping with discrete GPUs any more than — at to the lowest degree, not many below the $ane,000 price point, and not with decent graphics hardware. If your workloads depend on GPUs and scale with graphics horsepower, y'all aren't using Apple. (There are plenty of workloads that run better on GPUs than CPUs, but don't actually scale all that well, which is why I make that stardom).

For a brief moment in 2022, with the launch of the Mac Pro, information technology looked like Apple might comprehend OpenCL, GPGPU programming and offload, and put a new focus on integrating high-terminate GPUs into its various products. That moment has come and gone. While I practise suspect nosotros'll see Apple hardware with refreshed graphics hardware, it'll be the 14nm refresh bicycle that drives it, not any particular interest in GPU computing or graphics as a whole.

So… where's that get out us?

I'k not an Apple apologist. I use an iPhone, granted, but I'm yet back on the 5c and I plan to apply it until the screen cracks or the battery dies. Posts like this inevitably ignite arguments over whether Apple devices are worth paying for, and whether a dissimilar manufacturer offers more value at a given price point. Spoiler warning: Oftentimes, they do, though you may have to do an infuriating amount of searching before finding a system you really like.

It's been a while since Apple updated its hardware, some of that hardware could exist meliorate than it is, and the internet result would exist systems that were at least a fiddling sexier than they are today. But Apple has kept updating nigh of its laptop lines to take advantage of better bombardment life and performance improvements, while the operation of desktop CPUs has largely stagnated. Is it ignoring GPUs? Yes — but that's completely par for Apple. The Mac Pro in 2022 was unusual precisely considering it put GPU compute kickoff and foremost. Apple's decision to mostly ignore the segment afterwards might be unfortunate, only it'south scarcely surprising.

Apple has held off on making fundamental platform changes precisely considering it's been waiting for the underlying engineering science to advance plenty to make the changes worthwhile. Given the frustration of sorting through hundreds of nearly identical laptops from multiple manufacturers every time a friend or family member asks for assistance choosing a laptop, I'm not sure I tin blame them.