It’s been a few weeks since the last entry, so I should post something for posterity…
The new MacBook Pro laptop is amazing, and I’m with the countless reviews at this point; it’s the laptop Apple should have been making all along.
Now, I know why they didn’t make this thing all along; 10nm process chips from Intel that have supposed to have been available for like two years now coupled with Apple’s love affair with “single wire” Thunderbolt 3 charging…
Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) has an upper limit of like 100 watts of power it can supply, so everything in the laptop has to fit within that envelope at peak load — and Intel’s 14nm i9 9980HK consumes about half of that all by itself. Intel’s 10nm process chips would allow more headroom for GPUs both power-wise and thermally — but Intel can’t quite seem to make 10nm work… So Apple has been making due with what they have, and falling behind the tech arms race because of it.
The new laptop is still limited by USB-C power delivery, but because of AMDs 7nm process 5000 series GPUs (like the 5500 in the laptop), and Apple deciding thin is out and making space for a workable thermal solution (and ditching that butterfly keyboard), the 16″ MacBook Pro is finally “Pro”.