Current state of the "Apple Tax"

[Joelist]

You need to be sure it's the latest one, as from the outside they are literally identical.

The Apple Store where I know the people is a VERY busy one. Most of their Genius Bar stuff (outside of the land office business in cracked iPhone displays) is late 2012 MacBook Airs as those have thermal issues. It's the same store where in the Mavericks thread I described the celebration when they were allowed to wipe all their stock of Snow Leopard and put Lion on them. But the late 2013 Pros and Airs are not coming in a lot.

 

[Overmind One]

You need to be sure it's the latest one, as from the outside they are literally identical.

The Apple Store where I know the people is a VERY busy one. Most of their Genius Bar stuff (outside of the land office business in cracked iPhone displays) is late 2012 MacBook Airs as those have thermal issues. It's the same store where in the Mavericks thread I described the celebration when they were allowed to wipe all their stock of Snow Leopard and put Lion on them. But the late 2013 Pros and Airs are not coming in a lot.

Yep, but considering the marketing campaign for those 2012 Airs was almost the same as the new one. It means that Apple was lying to their customers then, as they are right now. The construction of that SSD array card is not very high tech. The 2012 Air had it's SSD inside of it's own enclosure which added to the thermal problem you mention. The new one simply does away with that and the cooling fan is bigger inside the new Air. In either case, I still consider the Air a high end netbook and not a full fledged ultrabook.

 

[Joelist]

Actually it is a very high tech SSD. It is vastly smaller than the old ones and over double the performance. By getting rid of the enclosure they enable the whole notebook chassis to be a lot smaller (also by getting rid of the SATA bus and connections).

BTW I think the Air is silly also. If you want that size factor and just have to have Apple for virtually the same money you can get a 13 inch MacBook Pro. The size and weight difference are negligible and the performance jump is massive. Now the last generation of "retina" MacBook Pros in the 13 inch bracket had issues with the integrated graphics not being powerful enough to drive such a hi density display without hitches - with the Iris class IGPs that is in the past.

 

[Overmind One]

Actually it is a very high tech SSD. It is vastly smaller than the old ones and over double the performance. By getting rid of the enclosure they enable the whole notebook chassis to be a lot smaller (also by getting rid of the SATA bus and connections).

BTW I think the Air is silly also. If you want that size factor and just have to have Apple for virtually the same money you can get a 13 inch MacBook Pro. The size and weight difference are negligible and the performance jump is massive. Now the last generation of "retina" MacBook Pros in the 13 inch bracket had issues with the integrated graphics not being powerful enough to drive such a hi density display without hitches - with the Iris class IGPs that is in the past.

If Apple thinks that moving towards the form factor of a piece of paper for computing is a good thing, then please show me which offramp to take where I want to go. . I prefer my tech to be beefy and rugged, even if most of that comes from protective cases. That means I dont give squat how many millimeters thick it is. think my Macbook Pro is 0.98" thick. Thin enough for me!

 

[Joelist]

And that is partly why I think the MacBook Air is dumb. There is no logical reason to go thin, thin, thin like that. Note that the MBP 13 from the same company uses that extra space from the vastly smaller storage and chipset to give the notebook better cooling and a lot more battery oomph. And with all that they put a much better CPU and GPU in too (the Air uses a low clocked ULV i5 and the Pro 13 either a full clocked i5 or i7 quad).

The Air is a toy probably targeted at teens - the 13 Pro is a small notebook and the 15 Pro is a notebook with real muscle.

 

[Overmind One]

And that is partly why I think the MacBook Air is dumb. There is no logical reason to go thin, thin, thin like that. Note that the MBP 13 from the same company uses that extra space from the vastly smaller storage and chipset to give the notebook better cooling and a lot more battery oomph. And with all that they put a much better CPU and GPU in too (the Air uses a low clocked ULV i5 and the Pro 13 either a full clocked i5 or i7 quad).

The Air is a toy probably targeted at teens - the 13 Pro is a small notebook and the 15 Pro is a notebook with real muscle.

Even my late 2008 unibody Macbook Pro 15" maxed out with 8gb RAM and the Samsung 840 SSD still qualifies as a nice laptop, even with just a fast dual core.

 

[Joelist]

The Retina MacBook Pro is in the house. Once I get it all set my way I will start with performance under OSX.

 

[Overmind One]

The Retina MacBook Pro is in the house. Once I get it all set my way I will start with performance under OSX.

Did you get the 13" or the 15"? How much RAM?

 

[Joelist]

15" MBP

Retina display

256GB PCIe SSD

Iris Pro

8GB RAM (I'll bounce it up to 16 if I need to).

 

[Overmind One]

15" MBP

Retina display

256GB PCIe SSD

Iris Pro

8GB RAM (I'll bounce it up to 16 if I need to).

CONGRATS!

 

[Joelist]

Okay.

So far I did a BlackMagic test on the SSD. The numbers are:

Sequential Read: 954Mb/Sec

Sequential Write: 966Mb/Sec

Random Read: 60.3Mb/Sec

Random Write: 123Mb/Sec

iOps were also crazy. This is one seriously fast drive.


On the WiFi, I am getting gigabit Wifi speeds so now the only bottleneck is my actual internet connection itself. This puppy has 802.11ac WiFi.

 

[Overmind One]

Okay.

So far I did a BlackMagic test on the SSD. The numbers are:

Sequential Read: 954Mb/Sec

Sequential Write: 966Mb/Sec

Random Read: 60.3Mb/Sec

Random Write: 123Mb/Sec

iOps were also crazy. This is one seriously fast drive.


On the WiFi, I am getting gigabit Wifi speeds so now the only bottleneck is my actual internet connection itself. This puppy has 802.11ac WiFi.

Will you be primarily using Mac software or will you install Parallels and use Windows/both?

 

[Joelist]

Both I think.

I am currently trying to find out how to get performance benchmarks in both. Run em in OSX than install Windows in Boot Camp and run them again there.

 

[Bluce Ree]

Okay.

So far I did a BlackMagic test on the SSD. The numbers are:

Sequential Read: 954Mb/Sec

Sequential Write: 966Mb/Sec

Random Read: 60.3Mb/Sec

Random Write: 123Mb/Sec

iOps were also crazy. This is one seriously fast drive.


On the WiFi, I am getting gigabit Wifi speeds so now the only bottleneck is my actual internet connection itself. This puppy has 802.11ac WiFi.

What were the IOPs? The random read/write seems a little low.

 

[Joelist]

Hi Bluce!

Chalk that up to my inexperience with BlackMagic - I configured it wrong on the random tests (I had it simulating as if the machine had only 1GB of RAM). Let's try this again with a proper setting:

Sequential Read: 954Mb/Sec

Sequential Write: 966Mb/Sec

Random Read: 167.87Mb/Sec

Random Write: 299.5Mb/Sec

Now I am just going to hope I did this set right as I am not used to using OSX benching tools.

This is one crazy fast SSD. By comparison here are numbers for a Samsung 840 SATA-6Gbps SSD:

Sequential Read: 413.6Mb/Sec

Sequential Write: 372.6Mb/Sec

Random Read: 101.4Mb/Sec

Random Write: 281Mb/Sec

Next step is to get some CPU numbers. Seeing as Haswell was not so much about raw power as improving power efficiency I imagine the results will be similar to Ivy Bridge.

 

[Joelist]

Okay, here it comes.

This laptop has the Intel i7-4750HQ clocked at 2.0 Ghz. It's a quad core with on die graphics (Iris Pro) and has L2, L3 and L4 cache along with turbo boost and Hyper Threading as well. I'm having problems finding any benchmarking software that does not use synthetic benchmarks so I am more or less at the moment restricted to stuff I can test using Terminal. So for example Floating Point comes in at 94.09 Gflops/sec. I can say that I have been doing some fairly heavy work and the laptop ramps up smoothly and everything is lightning quick.

Also, Iris Pro is as advertised and as I wrote about in another thread:

http://gatefans.net/gforums/threads...ated-graphics-gets-serious.27251/#post-864947

So far it has handled smoothly everything I have thrown at it including games and video encoding. I think that the 128MB of high speed eDRAM that is L4 cache helps. So does Iris Pro having 40 Cores/EUs as opposed to 16 in the nearest competing iGPU and pumping out 832 GFLOPS.

So this is pretty strong hardware. It also has only USB 3 ports, Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi is AC so this laptop actually has Gigabit Wifi.

I admit I am very curious to see what this hardware kit performs like on Windows in Boot Camp.

 

[Bluce Ree]

Hi Bluce!

Chalk that up to my inexperience with BlackMagic - I configured it wrong on the random tests (I had it simulating as if the machine had only 1GB of RAM). Let's try this again with a proper setting:

Sequential Read: 954Mb/Sec

Sequential Write: 966Mb/Sec

Random Read: 167.87Mb/Sec

Random Write: 299.5Mb/Sec

Now I am just going to hope I did this set right as I am not used to using OSX benching tools.

This is one crazy fast SSD. By comparison here are numbers for a Samsung 840 SATA-6Gbps SSD:

Sequential Read: 413.6Mb/Sec

Sequential Write: 372.6Mb/Sec

Random Read: 101.4Mb/Sec

Random Write: 281Mb/Sec

Next step is to get some CPU numbers. Seeing as Haswell was not so much about raw power as improving power efficiency I imagine the results will be similar to Ivy Bridge.

Looks much better.

 

[Joelist]

I'm being spoiled by Gigabit WiFi.

I just downloaded a 1 GB file in roughly 5.5 minutes. The bottleneck such as it is isn't my WiFi but rather my U-Verse router now. The nice part is now it does it all at full speed.

 

[Joelist]

I have finally been able to do a little bit of playing around with other OSes on this machine. Specifically Windows 8.1 with Start8 and Ubuntu 13.10.

Interestingly, the fastest OS on this Apple laptop is Windows 8.1 - it screams. Everything is basically instantaneous in operation to the point that it feels like the laptop is a smartphone.

Next fastest is OSX 10.9 Mavericks. It is also pretty snappy but some areas it has short lags as well (like Safari). Strange that Apple's own OS is not optimized that well for the hardware they have put together.

Slowest by a good deal was Ubuntu. Everything felt sluggish and the display was unable to run at normal resolution. Not really surprising as more cutting edge hardware typically is lagging in having Linux drivers that really let it go at full power.

What am I using everyday? Right now splitting time between OSX and Windows. I am also using Eclipse a good deal and it has a really strong OSX version hence the OSX usage. Windows is when I am working SQL Desktop, Visual Studio and the like.

 

[Overmind One]

I have finally been able to do a little bit of playing around with other OSes on this machine. Specifically Windows 8.1 with Start8 and Ubuntu 13.10.

Interestingly, the fastest OS on this Apple laptop is Windows 8.1 - it screams. Everything is basically instantaneous in operation to the point that it feels like the laptop is a smartphone.

Next fastest is OSX 10.9 Mavericks. It is also pretty snappy but some areas it has short lags as well (like Safari). Strange that Apple's own OS is not optimized that well for the hardware they have put together.

Slowest by a good deal was Ubuntu. Everything felt sluggish and the display was unable to run at normal resolution. Not really surprising as more cutting edge hardware typically is lagging in having Linux drivers that really let it go at full power.

What am I using everyday? Right now splitting time between OSX and Windows. I am also using Eclipse a good deal and it has a really strong OSX version hence the OSX usage. Windows is when I am working SQL Desktop, Visual Studio and the like.

You are programming now?