Apple just unveiled its new MacBook Pro 2016 flagship laptop on Thursday, Oct. 27, and its product already started to have its first critics.
MacBook Pro 2016 With AMD Polaris Radeon Pro GPU
According to Seeking Alpha, Apple's MacBook Pro 2016 lineup features exclusively AMD's Polaris Radeon Pro GPUs manufactured on 14-nm technology. Since Nvidia has won the Nintendo Switch console chip supply contract, AMD needs to offset the market loss with the GPU supply business for Apple.
It is expected that Apple will offer the Radeon 460 discreet GPU in the 15-inch, entry-level MacBook Pro 2016 as a upgrade for a price tag of $200. It is likely that $100 from this amount will go to AMD. This looks like a good deal for AMD. The chip manufacturing company can maintain an important market advantage by retaining its exclusive GPU supplier status for Mac computers.
For a recovering company like Advanced Micro Devices, public perception is particularly important. Apple's decision to exclusively offer 14-nm Radeon Pro discreet GPUs on its newly launched 15-inch MacBook Pro 2016 laptops is great boost for AMD's brand reputation. This shows that Apple, unlike Nintendo, has not lost its faith in Radeon GPUs.
Apple's orders for Radeon GPUs could replace AMD's lost opportunity in the Nintendo Switch. For AMD's newly unveiled Radeon Pro 400 Series of GPUs especially designed for laptops, Apple's new MacBook Pro represents its first customer.
Critics On MacBook Pro 2016 Graphics Performance
According to MacRumors, it's been already around four years since Apple introduced the last major MacBook Pro redesign. Four years is a period long enough to generate pent-up demand and large customer anticipation for a new upgrade. The MacBook Pro 2016 version will not only face great demand but also expectations to be an outstanding product.
According to BGR, Apple spent quite some time on stage at the Mac launch event on Oct. 27 explaining how the new MacBook Pro is powerful and fast. However, the newly-released specs for AMD's Radeon Pro 400 Series suggest quite a different picture.
AMD's new Radeon Pro 400 range is composed of three new cards, according to AMD's website: the Radeon Pro 450, Radeon Pro 455, and Radeon Pro 460. All three Radeon Pro 400 graphics cards are available in various configurations of the 15-inch MacBook Pro 2016, all run on 35W or less and all use AMD's new Polaris architecture.
Just by comparing some basic specs, tech analysts argue that Radeon Pro 400 GPUs' performance is similar to or a little worse than the GTX 965m graphics card that is incorporated in other portable laptops, including the new Surface Book. By looking at the benchmarks of that card, we can expect it to provide acceptable performance for easy playback of 4K video, running Photoshop, or gaming at only a 1080p resolution.
That might not sound so bad, but it's actually a problem. The 15-inch MacBook Pro's display works at a much higher resolution than 1080p. A more powerful graphics card would be required for higher resolution. For gaming enthusiasts, in order to do any gaming on the new Pro, they will need to lower either the resolutions or the settings or the resolution. Certainly, this doesn't sound so fun, for a supposedly newly upgraded flagship Apple laptop.
