DukenukemX
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You've used FFMpeg at some point, even on Mac. You use VLC? That makes use of FFMpeg. So does Handbrake, Audacity, Plex, Jellyfin, and etc.
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Apple Could Unveil M5-Powered MacBook Pro and Vision Pro This Week
- Thread starter erek
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It runs on a celeron toaster too I don't see why avx512 is important for vlc whatsoever...
DukenukemX
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Your paying for the form factor, and the screen, pair it with the pen and there are some small use cases where it’s worth it to a professional. So if you have a use case where it’s worth it then $2K is a small price to pay.
Outside those exceedingly few use cases, it’s a flex and little more.
DukenukemX
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Yes but you're getting an inferior product just because. I don't just mean against Windows products, because that should be a given, but against Apple's own products. At $2k it would be worth it to get a Macbook instead, but if you do art and need that Apple pen then you can't. Firstly because Apple doesn't put touchscreen on their Macbooks, and secondly the Apple Pen... Pro isn't usable on a Macbook. That 13 inch iPad Pro would only come with 256GB of storage and 12GB of ram. We can throw out that theory that Apple put 16GB for Apple Intelligence, because they do advertise Apple Intelligence for the 12GB M5 iPad. The 14 inch base model M5 Macbook Pro is $1,600 with 16GB of ram and 512GB of storage. The only reason a Macbook isn't a choice is because no touchscreen and Apple Pen. The dude already has an Apple Pen, but he can't use it on newer iPad Pro's because screw him.
I just wish they released the base CPU (not Pro or Max) in the 16" shell. I don't need ninja macho CPU for most laptop tasks, but I need the screen space. Single core performance is the same anyway.
Plus the battery life of a M5 base in 16" would be awesome, easiest the longest of any laptop on the market.
I'd like that too, but I can understand why Apple wouldn't — the odds are that someone willing to spend extra on both a larger screen and Pro-specific features is probably willing to step up to an M5 Pro as it is.
With that said, the next best thing (a 15-inch MacBook Air M5) is likely a few months off, and that's unfortunate.
NamelessPFG
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That's nothing new for the iPad Pro, the M4 model could easily top $2,000 with the higher-end configs; in fact, that's what a 13", 1 TB storage/16 GB RAM, cellular M4 iPad Pro would have cost you directly from Apple already, not including a further bump to 2 TB of storage or the nano-texture glass.
Not that I'd pay that much when Micro Center got me the config in question for a bit over $1,500 open box, which is still a pretty damn hefty price, but for certain niches like digital art, the iPad Pro is seriously hard to beat. The screen quality is second to none, and the Pencil Pro is a legitimate challenger to Wacom EMR in terms of pen performance, the only one I've found to date.
However, if you don't need the Pencil functionality, you probably don't need an iPad and would be better off putting that money toward a MacBook Pro instead if you don't already have one, just because of dumb iPadOS limitations that even iPadOS 26 hasn't fully addressed. (Multiple audio inputs? Great, but you still only have one audio output, no listening to background music while watching a video! File management's still siloed between apps. UTM still isn't allowed to have JIT for its App Store release. You know, dumb crap like that.)
The good news is that the base 256 GB/512 GB models have a jump to 12 GB of RAM, while the 1 TB/2 TB configs are still at the same old 16 GB rather than the expected 24 GB. I probably would've been far more comfortable with the base M4 configs if they had that much RAM to begin with, but 8 GB doesn't seem adequate with today's bloated Web pages.
If you need an M5 iPad over the A16/A17 version... you are doing some serious tableting (one reason tablet sales declined is because old one are good enough and people stopped upgrading until forced, usually because of some website-application that do not support the older iOS).
If you are buying a form factor (a lot of time, you want it to be tablet when you buy a tablet), you would not be better with a macBook that as a tactile screen (if it is not a detachable one), better with a MacBook + Wacom, maybe...
If you are buying a form factor (a lot of time, you want it to be tablet when you buy a tablet), you would not be better with a macBook that as a tactile screen (if it is not a detachable one), better with a MacBook + Wacom, maybe...
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NamelessPFG
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Carrying around a laptop and a separate Wacom Cintiq is unwieldy superjank. I've done that before with my Cintiq Companion Hybrid, which just makes me increasingly concerned about the not-an-iPod proprietary breakout cable connector sticking out the side and possibly breaking when the cable's levered in the wrong direction too hard - and you still have to rely on the CCH's battery, while other Cintiq models aren't bus-powered and require an AC adapter, which defeats the portability.
I am also admittedly a bit of a screen snob. 120 Hz spoils me rotten to the point that I can't easily go back, on desktop and mobile devices alike, the contrast on the OLED iPad Pros is even more mindblowing than the mini-LED ones, and the OLED iPads have a Reference Mode that may come in handy for color-proofing stuff down the line. Yes, it's a luxury that costs you dearly, but it really is quite impressive screen tech.
I'd also say Thunderbolt would be a big selling point of the iPad Pro models in particular (the M-series iPad Airs don't have it as a product segmentation measure), but it's a bit crippled when your intended use is big RAID storage arrays that require a KEXT driver to work on ARM Macs, which is an automatic no-go on iPadOS because you can't install third-party drivers. That just leaves being able to use it with my 2011 Thunderbolt Display, paired with a TB3 to TB2 adapter - but I've leaned more toward using that for a recently acquired M4 Mac mini instead and running Sidecar or Universal Control between the two.
exactly, the idea you would be better with a laptop when you are buying a tablet for a reason.... seem a bit far fetched.
Which would be a sign that you are doing seriously tabletting, Ipad still start at $350 new on the Apple website for a reason, I am not sure the issue about them scalling over $1200 for the high end users with means. Those are not for regular tablet use, doing serious audio-video stuff in the field type (or for sitted at a desk, very serious artist that would have bought a $3000 Wacom not so long ago instead...).
This (wacom mobilestudio pro line) is not cheaper at all: https://www.henrys.com/wacom-mobile...WCgDesen8cbxCiAQezx9m0e_H2jlUE7eXsDv6906nDuuz
DukenukemX
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Samsung pens are Wacom pens, which means you get the same quality. Those pens are also used on their Windows laptops. You can easily find them for $1,500 with specs that make the M5's look expensive. It does say all day battery but that's up for interpretation.
View: https://youtu.be/IGou8tjSOts?si=gP70F5ZaR2z_QZto
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You can get some serious work done natively on the iPads.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/davinci-resolve-for-ipad/id1581363826
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adobe-illustrator-graphic-art/id1018784575
For many, it is a solid alternative to a MacBook and a drawing tablet. To expand the storage, just get a USB-C NVME enclosure and format it to exFAT. I'm personally using a cheep UGREEN encolsure I got on Amazon, with a 2TB Crucial P3 Plus in there.
The highest-end iPad Pro configs are definitely niche, but there is a market for them. If you're doing heavy-duty creative work (artistry, audiovisual editing) and want a touch- or pen-friendly UI, and don't want a big two-in-one, it could be a good match.
Having said all this: the iPad Air is generally a wiser buy, even for those who do rely heavily on pen input. It's fast enough and, of course, saves a ton of money.
NamelessPFG
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I'm well aware of that fact; every "S Pen" is just Wacom EMR Penabled/UD series, but with a weirdly different cursor offset that actually precludes you from using Tablet PC and old Cintiq pens properly at any angle other than perfectly perpendicular. Wacom tends to keep the Intuos Pro/modern Cintiq professional line stuff that supports the Pro Pens for their own branded product lines.
It's also how I know that Wacom gatekeeps pen tilt sensitivity at the digitizer end, because those same Tablet PC pens suddenly gain tilt support in Clover Paint on anything from the Galaxy Note 4 onward.
The problem with Samsung is that they kinda treat their Galaxy Tab S lineup as second-class to their smartphones, what with the inferior SoCs and all compared to a Galaxy S Ultra (which has effectively become the Galaxy Note this decade), and the Android tablet app situation is even worse than for iPadOS, much as I like the base OS better.
That said, Samsung also happens to be doing the most out of any Android vendor in the tablet space, between DeX Mode and actually giving their stuff OS updates, which is more than I can say for Wacom themselves until their new MovinkPad Pro proves otherwise - which would have been a compelling iPad Pro alternative if it was out about a year earlier. Too late, Wacom!
To elaborate on that, iPadOS definitely supports APFS and defaults to formatting external drives to APFS now that the Files app actually lets you do that (no more need for a Mac and Disk Utility!), but exFAT is still the preferred option if you need to use the same drive across Apple and non-Apple devices. Other OSes have a hard enough time supporting the decades-old HFS+ as it is, never mind APFS.
I kinda want to try a Thunderbolt NVMe enclosure just to get full speed out of it if at all possible, but those enclosures tend to be pretty pricey - and in this context, only work on iPad Pros. In the meantime, I have a pair of Samsung T7 Shield SSDs that can saturate a USB 3 10Gb connection pretty nicely.
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The MacBook Pro M5 reviews are trickling out, and Ars Technica has a good example, and there are video reviews from folks like The Tech Chap.
The gist:
- Across tests, the M5 generally beats the M3 Pro but won't outrun an M4 Pro. Interestingly, in Handbrake it solidly outperforms the Ryzen AI HX 370, Core Ultra Series 2 (the V-series), and Snapdragon X Elite.
- The jump to PCIe 4 storage is a big deal if you do a lot of large file transfers.
- The GPU represents the biggest improvement, as you've heard, but in some cases it's very surprising. Tech Chap notes that Cyberpunk is more than twice as fast versus an M4 Air, and on-device AI that uses the GPU is sometimes multiple times faster.
In short: you won't rush to buy this if you have an M4-anything, but it should be worth buying new if you want the perks of the MBP design (120Hz mini-LED, more ports, fan cooling), are happy enough with a base M5, and don't want to wait for the M5 Air.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHlLPTRM8JI
The gist:
- Across tests, the M5 generally beats the M3 Pro but won't outrun an M4 Pro. Interestingly, in Handbrake it solidly outperforms the Ryzen AI HX 370, Core Ultra Series 2 (the V-series), and Snapdragon X Elite.
- The jump to PCIe 4 storage is a big deal if you do a lot of large file transfers.
- The GPU represents the biggest improvement, as you've heard, but in some cases it's very surprising. Tech Chap notes that Cyberpunk is more than twice as fast versus an M4 Air, and on-device AI that uses the GPU is sometimes multiple times faster.
In short: you won't rush to buy this if you have an M4-anything, but it should be worth buying new if you want the perks of the MBP design (120Hz mini-LED, more ports, fan cooling), are happy enough with a base M5, and don't want to wait for the M5 Air.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHlLPTRM8JI
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DukenukemX
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It's as if Apple is trying to make Macbooks good at gaming. That can't be because everyone knows you don't play games on a Mac.
paradoxical
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I will probably jump from my m3 max to a m5 max when it comes out. I don't really need to but the gpu improvements will be nice for some gpu accelerated scientific work I'm doing.
arthur_tuxedo
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Apple’s M-series hardware is more than capable of entry-level to midrange gaming, but they’re never going to make any inroads until they stop expecting developers to come to the temple of Apple, hat in hand, willing to rewrite everything in Metal and play by Apple’s ever-changing rules. As long as they maintain that attitude, Mac gaming will be forever stillborn, and any hopes of leveraging the Apple TV into a makeshift console or bringing more than a handful of “serious” games to iOS will be stillborn with it.
DukenukemX
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Apple has a number of problems to try and solve.
- Apple should work with Valve to help getting games on Mac. If there's anything the gaming industry has learned is that nothing happens without Steam involved.
- Including a fully working Vulkan driver as an option would make this easier for developers.
- Allow MacOS to work on none Mac hardware. I know this blasphemous but this is a big hurdle for a lot of people. Apple hardware isn't the best performance per dollar hardware on the market, despite what advantages many would claim. The Mac Mini is cheap but the moment you want more ram and storage then you're in high end PC pricing territory, without the high end PC performance.
View: https://youtu.be/F-X_-Vq0HIE?si=6j2XB6fbjMX93fMU
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I think it's a fair price for people who want the most powerful tablet they can get. If you're more frugal with price/performance then you're not getting an iPad Pro.
Honestly as I get older, I could give a shit less. Want to get a Cybertruck even though most conventional trucks will outlast/outperform it? Your money - do whatever the fuck.
DukenukemX
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My point is that Apple is clearly trying to create a separate market for iPads and Macbooks by limiting functionality. All a Macbook would need to do the things an iPad can do is put in a touchscreen and allow the Apple Pen to work on it. For a company that's known to have an ecosystem that just works, they seem to be preventing these things from working on their Macbooks. Like Microsoft not allowing Xbox games to work on Windows.
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They would and charged a extra $2000 for a MacBook with a touch screen.
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I'll forward this comment to Tim Cook immediately.
Twisted Kidney
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Apple never seems to be willing to cooperate with any other company, but you're absolutely right: Steam IS PC gaming. I don't doubt for even one single second that Valve would absolutely be willing to work with Apple if Apple would ever deal with them straight. The big thing is that Apple would want a cut if they cooperated with Valve and Valve probably thinks it wouldn't be worth it, and let's be honest, Valve has no reason to put up with Apple's malicious nature when their market is so piddly small. Apple just always wants to get paid.
Number two is possible, very possible, perhaps even easy, certainly logical, but unlikely. Because Apple.
Number three is just complete madness, not that it's a bad idea but... Apple gotta Apple, and I don't think they're all that interested in turning MacOS into Windows. A not-insignificant amount of Windows problems bubble up from the shear amount of stuff Windows supports - sometimes not all that well. I suppose an awful lot of Windows' more recent problems come from Microsoft's focus on aggressive enshitification as well.
It's all about the App store and that delicious 30% cut. I suspect that if Apple could make Macs locked down like iPads they would unify them in a heartbeat, but limiting Macs like that would probably cost them enough sales that even 30% from the App store wouldn't make up for it.
DukenukemX
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To be clear - I don't actually disagree with your position. Apple is and always will be Apple. Practicality be damned, money savings be damned. They gonna do what they gonna do. Whether it's brilliant or nonsensical. It's how they be.
DukenukemX
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Valve has helped get Steam on ChromeOS and even Xbox. Working with Apple would be a better choice than ChromeOS.
Wouldn't be shocked. Microsoft tried to avoid Steam for a long time as well.
Asahi Linux has a working Vulkan driver so we know it's possible.
Apple wouldn't want competitors to their hardware. Apple probably wouldn't want other companies to ruin their brand quality. As much as Apple gotta Apple, if they want gaming on MacOS then this would be the move. A Qualcomm based MacOS machine would not be an upgrade over Apple's hardware. Nvidia on the other hand would be a big boost to MacOS gaming.
I think Apple has been trying to push consumers towards iPads, but consumers gravitate towards Macbooks. Remember that Apple had that infamous "what's a computer" ad and which didn't go down well with people. Remember the ad said "computer", and not Windows or PC. It's not just Apple taking a jab at Windows machines but also Macbooks as well. If the iPad in the commercial needs an attachable keyboard to function then a laptop is obviously the superior choice.
View: https://youtu.be/3S5BLs51yDQ?si=vKIrG2Q6rdKO5stq
Isn't steam already perfectly working on MacOS ? (https://store.steampowered.com/macos)
I thought you meant valve getting involved into their emulation/porting game stage.
DukenukemX
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That's what I meant. MacOS has Steam but no effort is being done on Valve's end to bring more games to MacOS. MacOS has the same problems as Linux in that nobody wants to port games. Maybe if Valve got Proton working on MacOS if Apple brought native Vulkan support to MacOS? Works great for us Linux users, and I can see Mac users benefiting from this as well. Speaking of Vulkan.
FFmpeg now has Vulkan acceleration for Apple Pro res video decoding. Gets 178 fps on a 6700 XT.
Is winTel pc game emulation on ChromeOS that good ? I thought it kind of failed as a project, seem so: https://www.tomshardware.com/softwa...led-games-will-no-longer-be-available-to-play
It is not like Apple work on emulation as been terrible when they want to have it (Rosetta 2 etc...), they probably want to push native a lot (there game porting toolkit), they would probably be ok with good support of new games/most popular top 50 steam one only for the older title, but more and more gaming must be seen as a must for Apple, entertainment dollar direction seem clear and for the "masses" the only reason they would ever want better than a M1 performance, it is hurting their update cycle.
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Digital Foundry's John sick of Windows, praises macOS and Macs.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZLio3AN4fY&t=2683s
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZLio3AN4fY&t=2683s
DukenukemX
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No it was horrible.
Apple isn't going to have better luck at native ports than SteamOS did back in 2015. Games drive people to buy fast computers and for Apple this would be a good incentive to get Windows games working through Steam. I could buy a Steam copy of any game and play it on anything I want, including Linux and MacOS. If I buy a game off Apple's store then it'll only work on MacOS. Why would I buy it off Apple's Store besides the native port is only available on it?
I don't care what Digital Foundry people say. This guy has problems with external displays? And he praises Mac over this?
NamelessPFG
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Funny thing is, Apple did allow Macintosh clones in the '90s, and a few vendors such as Power Computing, Motorola and Daystar took up that offer - but then they bought out NeXT for NeXTSTEP's sake, brought back Steve Jobs in the process, and Jobs quickly put an end to that.
A big reason why is because the clone vendors just undercut Apple at the high end, rather than expanding the Mac market as intended. Case in point: the Power Computing PowerTower Pro is literally just a Power Mac 9500/9600 in a different case, same motherboard architecture.
Even Apple had to concede that the Wintel PCs were too dominant to ignore, by way of DOS/PC Compatibility Cards. Yeah, imagine having a Pentium 166 PC on a PCI card lurking in a Power Mac, readily accessible with a key combination, also complete with a gameport wired to a Sound Blaster 16 so you could get some PC gaming on with a proper joystick. Very reminiscent of the Amiga bridgeboards and SunPCi cards, except those didn't have gameports.
The problem I find is that it's more than just a matter of not having a keyboard and mouse by default - it's iPadOS being limited in ways that are frustrating for any power user that are only gradually being lifted with each OS update, and I'm saying this as an iPad Pro M4 owner (who got it mainly for art purposes because Wacom was way too slow in getting the MovinkPad Pro out the door).
The biggest one: no Xcode. You need a Mac to develop for your iPad like it's a damn game console that needs a proprietary devkit.
Another big thing is that while iPadOS 26 touted multiple simultaneous audio input sources as one of its new features, you're still limited to one OUTPUT, meaning that your background music pauses if a video starts playing in your Web browser or messaging app, for example. Quite jarring.
You can also forget about virtual machines and many forms of emulation on iPadOS, unless you're willing to futz around with sideloading and janky ways to enable JIT so UTM isn't a complete slog performance-wise.
Things like file management and just being able to format external drives were also pain points for the longest time, and only recently became less painful compared to just using a Mac.
What this all means is that even if you do splurge the big bucks for a Magic Keyboard, it's still going to be a letdown as a laptop stand-in the moment you do more than Web browsing, and the only way to truly substitute for a laptop entails a constant Internet connection to a remote desktop, because as it turns out, iPads make fantastic thin clients. (Ironically better with Windows than macOS + Jump Desktop, because Windows at least resizes the desktop display to better fill the iPad's screen and supports hi-DPI/Retina modes pretty well.)
DukenukemX
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As a consumer you want this. As a gamer you want this. As a shareholder at Apple you really don't want this. I'm surprised the EU hasn't come up to Apple and complained how their OS only works on their hardware.
I remember those devices, and they were awesome.
Any changes to iPadOS is just moving it closer to being MacOS without being MacOS. It makes no sense to continue to put iPadOS on iPads.
Don't be surprised that's Apple direction with their products, and that's to be more like game consoles. Game consoles are like the ultimate closed ecosystem, and even Google is moving in that direction with Android. Also, that's another good reason to put MacOS into iPads.
This can all be fixed if Apple just made MacOS for iPad. Doesn't have to be exactly MacOS, as it could be a special UI for touchscreens adapted to MacOS. Like a iPadMacOS.
If the iPad needs a real computer then the iPad needs a real OS. Apple spent so many years turning iOS into the constrained hell hole that it is that it's nearly impossible to make it into a halfway decent power user OS. What iPads need are iPadMacOS.