Apple’s New ARM-Based Macs Don’t Support External GPUs

[Uvilla]

Dear employee: Please choose your car, you can order anything from the Mercedes S- Class... Or a Ford Fiesta.

 

[Endgame]

Dear employee: Please choose your car, you can order anything from the Mercedes S- Class... Or a Ford Fiesta.

It’s not even that good - at least you would know you’re getting a fiesta.

it’s more: choose Mercedes S class, or we will select from whoever will give us the cheapest vehicle from Ford, Chrysler, Kia or possibly a 4th manufacturer of they give us a REALLY low price.

the only plus(?) side is that if I get the windows laptop, I get a new one every 30 months, while I have to wait 4 years for a new MacBook Pro

 

[Grimlakin]

Who is going to buy a 40k mac pro without a dedicated gpu?

 

[Brian_B]

Here is what it must have:
- Everything "normal" must be upgradeable. Drives, RAM, WLAN card etc. these things may not be soldered to the board.

I think your stuck on requirement #1 already. Your unicorn went extinct about 8 years ago.

 

[Zarathustra]

I think your stuck on requirement #1 already. Your unicorn went extinct about 8 years ago.

That's so incredibly stupid.

Things are supposed to get better with time, not worse.

I can't believe the entire laptop industry has gone to **** in less than 10 years.

 

[Endgame]

That's so incredibly stupid.

Things are supposed to get better with time, not worse.

I can't believe the entire laptop industry has gone to **** in less than 10 years.

Laptops have become an appliance like your cell phone. They are not intended to be upgraded, changed, etc.

 

[Zarathustra]

Laptops have become an appliance like your cell phone. They are not intended to be upgraded, changed, etc.

That's exactly the problem, and it needs to end.

 

[Grimlakin]

You can buy laptops you can 'build' as well. What was that manufacturer... just a second... **** I can't remember the name. The botique folks would rebrand then.. seg somthing... ****. No that's not it...

 

[LazyGamer]

What's wrong with the touchpad? I don't know what it is you are comparing it to. The Touchpad on my old latitude seems to work just fine for me, but I haven't tested many newer ones, so I don't know what I might be missing that you don't like.

Quite directly, the sensitivity even when set to its highest still required more than 'average' pressure to activate. I don't use buttons, ever, rather the 'tap to click' function, and I found this maddening. It may very well have simply been the somewhat archaic chassis that Dell is using for their 14" Latitudes, I do think that the 13" chassis is a bit better, but neither laptop was for me.

Also, buttons, and that stupid eraser mouse in the keyboard. The 14" Latitude had TWO sets of buttons, one for the touchpad and one for the eraser mouse. Thus, relative to basically anything modern, the touchpad was tiny. Too tiny to actually move the cursor across the screen.

Between those two points, it was a no-go. I went with an XPS 15 instead. Larger than I wanted (I really did want a 14" laptop), but only fractionally so.

I will say this though. I insist on having separate pads and buttons. I hate tap to click. I always disable that, and I only very minimally use any gestures.

I've been using tap-to-click since... we didn't have mice for the Toughbooks we were using in Afghanistan in the early 2000's. That was a place that mice didn't survive, especially ones with a ball. I've since adapted to tap-to-click. I know some folks hate it for various and probably legitimate reasons, but it doesn't slow me down in the least, and a good trackpad is usually more accurate and more ergonomic than setting up a mouse on the go. About the only reason I'd use a mouse on the XPS 15 would be for gaming.

I'll see if I can respond to your points:

- Everything "normal" must be upgradeable. Drives, RAM, WLAN card etc. these things may not be soldered to the board.

That's a Latitude / nicer HP / nicer Lenovo, at least, and you'll still need to be careful. Only thing soldered on to my XPS 15 is the WiFI card; it's a Razorfied Intel AX201, so I'm not really complaining. The laptop will be slow before AX becomes too slow to use (like a decade or more). But yeah.
I bought the XPS 15 with the minimum drive and RAM configurations, and promptly shoved a pair of 16GB sticks and a 2TB NVMe drive in it.

Everything must be accessible. If I need to remove more than 4 screws to replace the main drive, or access the RAM or WLAN card, It's not for me

More screws will be necessary, even for the business-grade stuff, but the beauty of thinner laptops is that anything that needs to be accessed is right there, because there's nowhere else to put it.

- No chiclet keyboards allowed. I can not stand those things. I'll take rubber dome or some other form of switch, but I will not put up with chiclet keyboards under any condition.

The Latitude 14's keyboard could best be described as 'mush', but it wasn't at all unusable. Perhaps like an MX Red with thick O-rings. The XPS 15 I have is also slightly squishy, but somehow a bit 'creaky' at the same time, and also not unusable. I have an old Toshiba with a 'chiclet' keyboard, but I think that thing actually has real switches, it has great feedback, when the keypresses work.

- Battery must be easily removable/swappable from the outside. No internal batteries.

Even my superthin ASUS folder (wife claimed) has a removable battery. Aside from Apple, I think a lot of companies realized that cranking down the manufacturing tolerances on lithium ion batteries just wasn't the best idea, and when you're not doing that, you don't have make them a permanent part of the chassis.

- Must support at least 16GB Ram
- Prefer at least 4 cores (Does not have to be a speed demon, but reasonable desktop responsiveness is a must)

Four's enough, in all honesty. Two's enough for most desktop work. But you absolutely want at least 16GB of RAM if you want to do anything other than browse.

At least 1080p screen

You can still get lower-resolution panels in business laptops for reasons unknown, but 1080p seems to be the running standard.

- Must have a gigabit or better ethernet port. (Preferably intel chip.)

Good luck with this one on anything other than a business laptop or 'gaming' DTR, and you'll probably have to get a business model to get an Intel wired NIC. And definitely good luck finding out beforehand. I really wish Intel (or someone) would put Intel NICs in slim USB 3 or preferably Thunderbolt enclosures.

- Must be designed with service in mind

"in mind" might be stretching it. The Latitudes probably fit the description, but anything consumer oriented probably doesn't.

- Must have analog Headphone/audio out port

I think only ASUS has been 'brave' enough to ditch that on a premium laptop (unless Apple has already), but I'm thinking that this won't be going away soon.

- Must either come with an SSD or be upgradeable to an SSD (SATA is Fine)

I'd say that SATA really isn't fine; at least going forward. Support for SATA M.2 seems to be waning a bit, especially as capacities increase.

- Hardware must be reasonably standard, and supported by the mainline Linux kernel. No rare or hard to find drivers allowed.

Honestly this isn't too much of an issue. I booted up the Latitude 14 with Ubuntu to copy stuff off and wipe (within reason), and everything seemed to work. Really the biggest issue I've had relates to the relationship of Secure Boot and Bitlocker, and I've mostly stuck to VMs on laptops as I haven't gotten dual-booting to work reliably. At some point I do need to try the latest Fedora again though, it's looking and feeling pretty sleek.

- Must be high quality. Latitudes will last you 10+ years and will still be alive when they are obsolete. This is what I am looking for.

That's really going to be luck of the draw, as I'm sure you're aware, but as far as the hardware still functioning business class is definitely the best bet.

- Thickness does not matter (within reason, my baseline are the old Dell Latitude D and E series) I mean, sure, who doesn't like a thinner laptop, but it still must meet everything above.)

You have like, three basic variables that dictate laptop size:

• CPU class and dGPU class if included
• battery capacity
• screen size

Batteries are supposedly limited to <99Wh, so even at 17" there's a fairly hard limit to battery volume. CPUs can range from 15w to... desktop-class, with obvious implications for cooling capacity, and screen size is what it is. Many times have to go larger on the screen if you want a numpad, which is something that I've been teaching myself to live without after having refused to give them up for the first few decades of my computing life.

- Sleekness and Aesthetics does not matter (Again, within reason. Don't care if it is pretty. This is not a pageant)

I draw the line at too pretty. Mostly just want something that doesn't stand out and scream 'steal me!' at a coffee shop.

- Weight does not matter. I prefer something sturdy over something flimsy. (Again, within reason, an adult male must be able to easily carry it in a bag)

I have an old 17" DTR, circa 2012. It's finally started to really give up the ghost this year. I used to carry it everywhere.

Right up until I did something that I knew was stupid: pulling the laptop bag with it, its giant power brick, and several heavy books inside across the car while stepping out. I spent a few months nursing that wrist back to health, and started watching what I put in bags.
A few years after that, I went to the UK with a messenger bag, mirrorless camera, half a dozen lenses, and a tripod strapped to the bottom. The XPS 13 I took with me was a godsend. That laptop is actually being used by my mother for her business, and is approaching four years old at this point!

- 3D rendering performance. This laptop will never see a game or CAD. It will be a work machine, spending its life in Ms Office, Adobe PDF, etc. etc..

I've gamed using Intel IGPs... and I'll say stuff like RTX Voice is pretty nice when you have a GPU to run it. Even the lowly 1650Ti in this XPS 15 runs it. I'll also say that if there's any content creation involved, you want an Nvidia GPU for the stuff that they accelerate and for their driver stability and compatibility. Intel IGPs (and I assume upcoming dGPUs) are more than adequate and steadily improving, while AMD seems to be working overtime to stay in third place.
Of course, if you can get an AMD CPU, those are turning out to be right awesome for mobile use.

- Don't care about bluetooth.

You're not going to get a laptop without it, but at least you can usually disable it in the UEFI if the Windows toggle isn't enough. It is certainly a fairly detestable technology.

I've posted in forums, I've googled, I've done everything I can think of, and I am finding nothing, and this is really frustrating.

All that and you've missed two of my peaves: rare high refresh-rate options and almost no FreeSync / G-Sync. I'm in the '120Hz VRR all the things' camp, just because that stuff should be standard, like they are becoming for phones.

But I feel you. On this XPS 15, I'm missing VRR, 120Hz, the VA panel is accurate (confirmed) but uniformity is noticeably poor at lower brightness levels, there's some annoying arrow key placement, and the combined power button and fingerprint reader is next to the delete key, above the backspace key.


Honestly, I'd point you toward moving your quest into its own post. The scope pretty much demands it!

 

[LazyGamer]

seg somthing... ****. No that's not it...

Sager, I have one, you don't want one. They're at best Inspiron / Pavilion grade, usually worse where it counts like the keyboard and trackpad.

 

[Zarathustra]

Honestly, I'd point you toward moving your quest into its own post. The scope pretty much demands it!

Yeah, you are right. Done.

 

[Endgame]

It’s not even that good - at least you would know you’re getting a fiesta.

it’s more: choose Mercedes S class, or we will select from whoever will give us the cheapest vehicle from Ford, Chrysler, Kia or possibly a 4th manufacturer of they give us a REALLY low price.

the only plus(?) side is that if I get the windows laptop, I get a new one every 30 months, while I have to wait 4 years for a new MacBook Pro

To quote myself, I just got an e-mail stating my laptop was about to begin its renewal cycle. I have exactly 2 options at this moment, I can choose:

Toshiba Tecra C50 (i5 8250U) w/ 16GB of ram and 500gb ssd...
or...
16" macbook pro (i9-9880H ) w/ 32GB of ram and 1tb ssd

If I choose the Toshiba, I can get a new laptop in 2023. If I choose the mac, I can get a new one in 2025.

 

[Grimlakin]

Does it have to run a corporate image? or can you take that Macbook and throw windows 10 pro on there? Because that is the way I would lean. The hardware is SO different it's not even funny.

 

[Endgame]

Does it have to run a corporate image? or can you take that Macbook and throw windows 10 pro on there? Because that is the way I would lean. The hardware is SO different it's not even funny.

It must use the Corp image. That said, I’m 99% sure the Corp image includes boot camp with a pre loaded Corp image of win 10

 

[Grimlakin]

It must use the Corp image. That said, I’m 99% sure the Corp image includes boot camp with a pre loaded Corp image of win 10

I'm not a mac admin or user so does bootcamp native boot to windows 10? If so... I know what I would be doing!

 

[Endgame]

I'm not a mac admin or user so does bootcamp native boot to windows 10? If so... I know what I would be doing!

I don’t actually know either. I’m guessing that if I go there mac route, I’ll get an upgrade earlier as well, because I doubt Apple will maintain support for x86 for another 4-5 years

 

[Grimlakin]

Yea I'm annoied that the developer laptops where I work are bottom basement i7's with 16 gig of ram and a 256 gig hdd.

 

[LazyGamer]

Yea I'm annoied that the developer laptops where I work are bottom basement i7's with 16 gig of ram and a 256 gig hdd.

Shoot, that's above average; I'd be more concerned with the accoutrements. Screen, keyboard, touchpad, fans...

Honestly that's the stuff that Apple computers are renowned for.