Apple dodges global supply chain woes with new MacBook Pro and AirPods launches Tuesday, October 19, 2021 4:14 pm
Eric J. Savitz for Barron’s:
D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte made a similar point. “Given the increasingly challenging environment with supply-chain disruption and logistics inflation, we paid particular attention to the launch dates and price points of new products,” he writes. “We were pleased that the new MacBook Pro and AirPods are set to be available next week and the HomePod Mini is expected in November.” Forte repeated his Buy rating on Apple, while lifting his price target to $175 from $167.
Forte also made the point that Apple is “taking price” on both the new MacBooks and the new AirPods, in what might be a move to offset higher component costs. He notes that the 16-inch version of the new MacBook Pro starts at $2,499, up $100 from the base model of the previous generation of Pro laptops.
MacDailyNews Take: For the fastest, most capable, most intuitive, and most secure notebook computers ever made, the price Apple is asking is a tremendous value. (Even with a stupid, inelegant, and wholly unnecessary notch. And even at a $100 greater starting price due to supply chain issues caused by the various and sundry responses, rational and irrational, to COVID-19.)
First benchmarks: Apple’s M1? Max absolutely destroys Intel Tuesday, October 19, 2021 11:33 am
The first Geekbench benchmarks for Apple’s high-end ?M1? Max chip featuring a 10-core CPU and 32-core GPU have appeared and, as expected, it’s not good news for beleaguered Intel.
Juli Clover for MacRumors:
The chip features a single-core score of 1749 and a multi-core score of 11542, which offers double the multi-core performance of the ?M1? chip that’s in the 13-inch MacBook Pro machine.
Based on these numbers, the ?M1? Max outperforms all Mac chips with the exception of the Mac Pro and iMac models equipped with Intel’s high-end 16 to 24-core Xeon chips. The 11542 multi-core score is on par with the late 2019 ?Mac Pro? that is equipped with a 12-core Intel Xeon W-3235.
We should be seeing additional ?M1? Max and ?M1? Pro Geekbench results in the coming days as the new MacBook Pro models are expected to arrive to customers next Tuesday and media review units will be going out even sooner than that.
MacDailyNews Take: Using Geekbench 5, we just benchmarked a 16-inch MacBook Pro (2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel i9, 32GB 2667MHz DDR4 RAM, AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB, Turbo Boost Enabled) and, with fans whirring like a 747, got these results:
1114 single-core, 6872 multi-core (afterwards, the Mac’s aluminum case is very warm to the touch with a CPU temp of 196°F, fans running at top speed).
On the road, we have to disable Turbo Boost (using Turbo Boost Switcher Pro) in order to get any reasonable battery life from the machines (even then, the inefficient Intel i9 is a battery vampire). With Turbo Boost disabled, the machines benchmark just 619 single-core, 4565 multi-core.
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