This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history. A lot of the time was wasted in:
- Mildly funny jokes and comparison with 90's technology.
- 90% of the talk was about the touch bar.
- Awful demos of Photoshop & some cringy DJ.
I was hoping we would see:
- A new MacBook with all day battery life and touch bar, even thinner design. Ok, I understand that they are trying to consolidate their product line but the category of a web-browsing machine that is 12", super small design and an adequate processor is left without any update.
- A MacBook pro with some real innovation. They could just copy Microsoft with a detachable screen (oh but they would cannibalize iPad market), pen input, touch screen. But, instead we get this touchbar thing which is great but I am just disappointed that it is the only thing they have innovated here.
- Killed Macbook Air.
- No iMac update (!!!).
- No monitor announcement.
Microsoft really hit it out of the park yesterday. Apple's entire presentation felt like they are trying to fill the 1.5 hours of time with bullshit.
Also, Panos Panay sounds like a genuine, authentic, passionate and knowledgeable whereas Jony Ive sounds like an Evangelical designer who feels "fake". I don't know how to explain it.
> Microsoft really hit it out of the park yesterday.
Did we watch the same event? Microsoft introduced a $3,000 desktop PC in an era when nobody uses desktops anymore. It introduced a minor update to the Surface Book that starts at $2,300 with dual-core CPU, only 8GB of RAM, and last-gen graphics hardware.
For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen, twice the RAM, and a quad-core CPU, and it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park?!
No. Microsoft introduced an entirely new kind of tool for digital artists. I'm not one myself, but the Surface Studio makes me wish I were. And the people I know who are, are over the moon about it. They can't wait to get their hands on one.
Yes, it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park, and made Apple look amazingly weak by comparison. Today's event wouldn't have been particularly impressive even on its own. By comparison with yesterday's, it's just embarrassing.
I'm a digital artist myself. I'm a more goal based guy, so I use both Windows and Mac hardware and software. I know that I am probably the target market for both the Macbook Pro and the Surface Studio, but I have to say, I'm not impressed. And I'd argue that the only people who are would have to be Microsoft or Apple fans. Certainly not tech based artists.
First, this is a business for me. And I suspect it's a business for anyone that Apple or Microsoft expects to sell this stuff to. And having to pay $3000 for outdated hardware is a tough pill to swallow. The hardware in the Macbook "Pro" is simply inexcusable. (REALLY???? 16GB RAM MAX!?!?!?) But the hardware in the Surface Studio is equally galling. They give you an NVidia what? 965 for $3000??? And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980??? And for that magnanimous gesture on their part I would be obliged to pay a MINIMUM of $4100??? For LAST GENERATION graphics cards???? On a machine purportedly about graphics???? (A 1080 would run both faster AND cooler using LESS power Microsoft. And at this point in time, for a business investment 64GB of RAM should really be offered by anyone NOT trying to screw you. What's the deal Microsoft???)
I think to objective observers who were waiting for these presentations... both proved SEVERELY underwhelming considering the pent up expectations. I mean... OK... if you put a gun to my head, I'll probably buy the Surface Studio. But don't expect me to pretend that I don't know that both Microsoft and Apple are robbing me.
I think you (and a few others here) are making the mistake of equating digital art with a need for high-end graphics cards. 99% of what most digital artists consider to be "digital art" does not require state-of-the-art GPUs. Graphic design work, retouching, painting, etc. barely even scratch the surface of what the last generation of graphics cards could handle.
Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs. Apart from a relatively small number of professionals who work with 3D rendering, high-end graphics cards are an even greater waste of money (unless of course you're buying the machine for gaming, which doesn't really fit the "digital artist" target of these machines).
Microsoft and Apple may still be pricing these products too high ("robbing you" as you say), but that's a separate discussion.
"...I can't help but notice that you (and others here) are making the mistake of equating digital art with a need for high-end graphics cards. 99% of what most digital artists consider to be "digital art" does not require state-of-the-art GPUs. Graphic design work, retouching, painting, etc. barely even scratch the surface of what the last generation of graphics cards could handle..."
I can't help but notice that you are equating that 99% of "digital art" that can be handled by mobile graphics cards, to the 1% of "digital art" that anyone's going to actually PAY someone to produce. As I said, this is a business. If I could make the living I currently make retouching photos, then I'd gladly pay $3000 for an underpowered machine...
but I can't.
because no one is going to pay us that kind of money to retouch photos are they?
Look, these machines, to a business, are INVESTMENTS. You invest for the FUTURE, not to take advantage of the past. A 1070 or 1080 is not too much to ask considering Pascal's MANIFEST superiority in efficiency. Additionally, I was being kind, I think MS should OFFER 64GB in the Surface Studio, but a 128GB option would really be necessary to future proof this thing.
I'll tell you what MS and Apple are going for here... it's a money grab. And they are setting themselves up to come back to guys like me every 18 to 24 months for another mandatory money grab instead of just giving us a 60 month machine from the outset.
Offer me a 60 month Surface Studio at the $3000 price point and I'd update every workstation here. But that's not what they're offering is it?
What kind of art are you talking about? I've done much graphic design (yes, paid) and used Photoshop and Illustrator for nearly a decade (though I now use Affinity, as of last year), and I have never been in a situation where I was running out of resources.
Up until this year, I have never owned a machine with more than 8GB of RAM, and never a video card with more than 1GB of RAM until now either.
Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?
"...Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?.."
Yes. Video editing and CGI. The workflow normally requires the use of MASSIVE memory mapped files. Additionally, a given artist may do several "lo res" renders before shipping off to the farm. ("Lo res" being a relative word. Because in most cases we're talking about 2560x1440 or 1080p minimum.) I really don't see how your tech guys are able to get that to work for you on cards that have 1GB memory. But if they can, then you'd better NEVER let those guys go because they are worth their weight in gold. (Unless you don't do any CGI or video editing???)
Yes, this is the case in most of all VFX and animation studios. Pretty much everything is done on Linux, usually CentOS. That being said 8GB is a joke. 32GB is minimum and 64GB is what new machines would be ordered with for almost all artist workstations.
Source: I was a system engineer for VFX and animation for a number of years.
> Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance
Can confirm. Got up to 15GB RAM usage today, before closing 30+ tabs to get back down to 7GB. Maybe it's ridiculous, but based on the information I'm needing from those tabs--100% text--it's infuriating.
Oh, and also sitting awfully comfortably in that 7GB area is Dropbox, which is doing who knows what with all of its RAM...I do like the Linux command line tool though.
I had same issue but at home where my work flow is different. My solution was to use the extension "The great suspender" which sleeps tabs that hasn't been used in a while. Might help you too.
Firefox is even worse. I caught it using 37GB virt the other day on Linux and a pretty significant chunk of RAM too. I don't even have 37GB of physical memory.
"Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari." This is so true. I've recently stopped using Chrome and switched to Safari. Now my 5-year old MacBook Pro runs like butter.
Browsers and web is frankly getting ridiculous. The modern web has a lot going for it but when moving the web forward people seem to completely forget about the efficiency argument. I wonder how much of the worlds power we waste casually like that.
As a developer and a digital artist I am often running multiple VMs, my various development tools and 2-5 Adobe products on top of my 2 browsers and other misc programs. Agreed that for any single piece of digital design software 16gb should be enough (even to a certain extent After Effects). But if I could have a high quality laptop, that runs Adobe software, is Unix-y AND run the whole Adobe suite plus my development tools... (whilst not having to close all my research notes in Firefox)... gee whizz would I throw my money at that.
I'm probably an outlier though so can understand why it doesnt exist.
I don't think you're an outlier at all. 32GB is the absolute minimum I need to get my work done without disk thrashing. If I spent more time on video than audio I'd want 64GB.
That's completely realistic for pro and semi-pro users.
The cost of making a laptop that could take 32GB or even 64GB of RAM must be tiny. No one would care if Apple only supplied 16GB but left a couple of slots free, or even if the stock overpriced 16GB could be swapped for 32GB.
Why cut corners and make "pro" machines that can't be used for professional work?
It's counterproductive. It may increase margins in the short term, but over time it alienates users and erodes the appeal of the brand.
It seems "Think Different" has become "Don't Expect Much."
To be fair, I think most people's interaction with "graphics arts" is Lightroom, which is a pretty darn slow piece of software. Not the complicated stuff, where they reused code from Photoshop, but the simple stuff like opening the file import dialog.
I think people are imagining that a better computer will improve its performance, but it won't. There's a sleep statement in there or something. (Their blog post says something like "a cloud industry-leading innovation in picking-your-camera-out-of-a-list user experience story flow." Really? Just suck the files off my memory card in the background as soon as you detect one.)
Most people I know working as professional artists/designers are working with 2D assets in software like photoshop. Even the few working in print don't need crazy GPUs. I know some people who deal with video and 3d but most of them farm out to servers to do the heavy lifting. I'm not sure what you do but in my experience this is more than enough for most digital artists and designers.
Considering the extremely long time between hardware refresh on the MacBook Pro I entirely share your sentiment and am agog Apple didn't wait for a suitable Kaby Lake part. People have been waiting years, what's another six months? If you're going to charge me top end prices bloody give me top end hardware. It isn't simply top end by definition with a Microsoft or Apple logo plastered on the side, sorry.
This is 100% where I'm at. I'd buy a Surface Monitor right now, because I could be assured to use it on a...well, I almost said "a real computer", and I feel a little bad for that, but I also sorta don't. I need forward compatibility with my hardware, and my workstation already blows the doors off the little box they've saddled that great monitor with.
The stats for the Cintiq Companion 2 are in the same ballpark and, from personal use, the thing has a hard time providing smooth UI when editing very large photoshop, illustrator, or unity projects.
I think you're right that artists largely don't need what high end gaming PCs might require to play the newest steam titles at full graphics settings, but for what Microsoft is asking here, they do at least need enough GPU/CPU strength to have a very responsive UI when editing very large and complex graphical projects at 2560 x 1600 and beyond.
My worry about the Surface is simply that the minority report-style advertisement isn't really possible with a real-world PSD or 3dsmax scene.
High end graphics cards are usually much better than a gaming console, in that they offer much better frame-rates, and a lot more resolution, and at the same time even a single card can be more expensive than a complete gaming console.
So, yes, they are for gaming 99.9% of the time. But please don't compare them with consoles.
> Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs.
Look, I'm sorry - I'm with you for most of it, but you have this stick held by completely the wrong end. Gaming consoles are closer to APUs than discrete high-end GPUs.
your rant about GPUs on the Studio for 3k is heavily misguided. What you are paying for with that 3k is mostly the new screen and its capability. The closest rival to that screen is a Wacom tablet which is very near the same price point without all the hardware MS has added. Are you aware of the new stuff that is packed into that one screen? That is the question you need to answer for yourself to understand that price point.
As for having "outdated" cards, that is more a function of the production timeline. I am sure the Studio has been in the works for a while and those were probably the best in class cards around the time.
Pro tip: When you have to explain to people why they shouldn't be disappointed by something they've thought about, you've almost always already lost the argument.
And the video is outdated, period, no air-quotes. There is simply no argument there. Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech.
He is directly rebutting one person's opinion, not coming up with a talking point after consulting with a survey of people's reactions to the new announcements. Who's to say it's not the parent that was mistaken?
I know several artists who bought the Surface for exactly this reason and found it disappointing. The hardware in the Surface Pro is pretty mediocre unless you spend a lot of money on it (at which point a Cintiq Companion becomes an intriguing idea if you don't know what Wacom's customer support is like).
Most of those artists ended up buying iPad Pros to replace them with.
"Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech"
This is a weird complaint to me. So what if the display hardware is dated if it is perfectly up to the task it's presented with? Maxing out the specs on a machine for no other reason than to max out the specs seems to me to be nothing but a waist.
The GP was the one making the complaint. I have no interest in the device. But if it is important to people, then it is important to people.
And even if it is perfectly suited the the rest of the hardware and any additional RAM/performance would be wasted[1], that's not a good excuse to overcharge for old commodity hardware.
[1] I would be extremely surprised if the rest of the system were designed around the video card. Actually, designed twice, since there are two video card options.
Another pro tip: when marketing to professionals, they will get it over time. If you're a real professional, you will follow the news, see the reviews and tests, and after a while you will understand new technology that was not properly marketed in the first place.
This "digital art graphic card" is starting to sound like "for my Big Data project I need these nonstandard tools and big compute pellets" when all they have is moderate data queries and a batch-processing workflow.
Not even just that, it's the last gen mobile cards, which means you have to spend 4.2k just to have 4GB of VRAM on something that, at the end of the day, is really a desktop. the 980 desktop version is ~$600 with 6GB VRAM.
Except that you are paying for it. If it costs money (which is does) and you pay (which you do) then you are very much paying for it. And that's the problem. Not only are the 9 series GPUs a generation behind, the shift to the Pascal architecture delivers previous gen. performance for literally half the price (see GTX 970 vs. 1060).
Maybe the thing you want to pay for is the screen, but there's no avoiding the outdated GPU tax that you have to pay to get it.
Yeah, but my point was that if they were too far along with old tech, there were still drastically better pre-existing options for a product that isn't really mobile.
I share your surprise that Microsoft didn't use the 1080. I would really love to hear the back story on that, was it getting it to fit? was it power envelope? was it driver support? Etc. I expect that if they pre-sell a million Studios or more we'll see an updated unit ("Studio Pro" anyone?) that is a 64GB/1080 machine but time will tell.
If they started out with the max TDP of 100W for the cooling system - upgrading it to 150W in that small space it sounds like too much of a change to meet their DL?
Clearly this does not excuse the reengineering but it might explain why they went this route.
You're surprised that they didn't use a top of the line card when most of their target audience will never even make the thing sweat? I have a 1080 and use it to play games at 4k while driving two additional 1080p monitors. It kicks ass and I push it much harder than most digital artists ever will.
Well there are two reasons I was surprised they didn't use the 1080, one was that it is surprisingly hard on a GPU to do the sort of lag free drawing/manipulation. When I'm turning a 3D part around in "quality" render mode in TurboCAD and modifying it on the fly it works out the GPU fairly well. Unlike games its pretty much forced to recompute lighting fairly often.
The other was that they have already crossed over the "luxury" threshold from "just another PC" to "special hotness" sort of territory. So unless Nvidia is giving them a smoking deal on "old" GPU's it seems that from a marketing perspective you would want to check off all the boxes. Its reported that it would use less power and generate less heat, and Nvidia says it is 20% faster. That seems like it would be a "no brainer". But I clearly don't know.
That is why it surprised me when I read the high end Studio only had the GTX980 in it.
I think the idea that it's a digital drafting table that can also be used as a desktop computer is the right way to think of it (as many have alluded to in this thread).
I wonder why ms didn't stick with AMD (like the xbox one) if they weren't going to use a 1080 (or 1070, might make more sense).
As someone that used to enjoy drawing/doodling but never made the leap from mouse to a digital pen - sketching and doodling on the surface 4 was eye-opening. Any number of programs paired with the pen/screen feels a lot like ink drawing without the mess and with multi-level undo.
The combination of a decent pen and great screen makes for a very satisfying and immediate drawing experience.
While I really like the look of the Surface Studio I was shocked at the GPU choice and the fact it comes with a hybrid drive. I mean I do think it is still a good machine even for the price but come on!
In some use cases they are, since they contain an SSD as a large cache. They are also a lot cheaper than an SSD, so it's nice to get some of the benefits without all the cost.
They don't need to "max out" a card, because PS is not a game.
What counts is the time it takes to perform an operation like a Camera RAW import or a blur. If that goes down by a significant percentage, productivity goes up by a significant amount.
For drawing, good acceleration is the difference between a distracting experience that's laggy and unusable, and a smooth experience that gets out of the way of the work.
Besides, there are people with an interest in art and machine learning. Good luck with a 980M if that's your area of interest.
I am also puzzled by this... Maybe knowing they have more horsepower than they need empowers them. Or maybe they are doing a lot of high poly 3D work or something.
The architects at Foster + Partners designing the Apple campus use Revit and being architects they want the coolest tech. Surface Studio hits that sweetspot better than anything from Apple at the moment.
I'm struggling to believe you're a digital artist if you're complaining about the Surface Studio. A Cintiq monitor, with no computer, costs nearly what the surface studio does, and gives you an inferior display to boot.
The machine is not "purportedly about graphics", it's about 2D artists, and they made that clear in pretty much every presentation I've seen on the device.
Ok graphics shouldn't really be that big of a problem, if companies were trying to maximize it. Instead, they're trying to minimize the footprint of the actual computer without sacrificing productivity capabilities. Luckily, this provides incentive for the eGPU market, which will hopefully give us compact devices with modular powerful computing specs.
>> And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980???
Not only that- it's a mobile processor, 980M, so it would lag some distance behind a 980. That is cutting serious corners for a desktop at that price point.
Actual graphics and design pros (as opposed to Apple 'Pros') absolutely care about specs. Come hang out in VR developer land for a while, where interest in specs extends to system architecture choices.
Isn't something like the Mac Pro aimed more at you? It's packed with graphics hardware. Although admittedly they haven't updated that for several years.
For me, the most revealing piece of information from that Penny Arcade article was how much the 27" Cintiq costs ($2500). Makes the Surface Studio seem very affordable for what it offers.
In the last two years all of the artists at our studio (which does animation and interactive work) have switched to Cintiq's. We were really apprehensive to make the jump but they all seem extremely happy and some have even reported that pain they experienced after extensive tasks has gone away. I'd be really interested to see how they like the Surface Studio compared to a Cintiq.
Different strokes, I imagine. My fiancee is a graphic artist who had a wacom tablet and a cinema display as her setup for a long time, but she got the 27" Cintiq a few months ago and LOVES it. I had similar skepticism that it'd really be that big of a step up, especially given what she was spending on it, but she says it's noticeable improvement on her productivity.
and are you not a bit disappointed that the products you describe, Apple's desktop products, appear to have been totally ignored by Apple? No new iMac, Mac Pro or Mac Mini hardware announced, it seems like it's not a focus for them at all.
I think their focus has been on mobility for some time now. Very few people actually need the added horsepower a desktop platform can offer due to the relaxed power and space budget. I've been working from laptops exclusively since 2003 or so.
lol why would i be disappointed? Just use a laptop and dock it to a monitor when needed.
Why would anyone need a desktop in this day and age? Moore's law means the things that desktops used to do 5 years ago, laptops do now.
The compute requirements for photo editing, for example, haven't changed in 5 years. But the processors and systems (IO, displays, etc..) keep getting faster. It's only natural that laptops would cannibalize desktops. And phones/tablets will cannibalize laptops in a few years.
Can I suggest you learn something about a domain before commenting on it?
Photo editing can be hugely resource intensive. Camera RAW files have been getting larger over time, and all but the simplest edits demand an SSD, a fast processor, and at least 32GB of memory. 128GB isn't unusual for commercial work.
You can get by with less, but sooner or later - usually sooner - you run out of RAM and your machine starts thrashing.
Many Photoshop features are hardware-accelerated, so having a good graphics card makes a significant difference to editing speed.
3D animation definitely needs a good graphics card. So does video editing.
Audio doesn't, but it needs as much raw processor power as possible. I know DJs/producers who are running dual 12-core Xeon systems for their mixes, and adding PCI DSP cards on top.
Surface Studio looks very nice, but it fails to tick most of these boxes. The reality is there's a significant market for creative power users willing to pay good money for multicore server-grade towers for their work.
Neither Apple nor MS are paying attention to this market. The Mac Pro is an underpowered curiosity now, and Surface Studio has - sadly - been hobbled by greed and penny pinching.
MS definitely is not paying attention to the high-end workstation market. They are paying attention to the trends of interaction and new interfaces that technology is allowing us. The product here is the new styles of content creation and the accelerated pace of current content creation via the form factor and accessory knob thing. If you have needs that demand extreme resources, you can probably afford to have remote rendering or processing using all of the myriad of wonderful networking technologies that have advanced so much.
It can't be an effective interaction device and a server-level resource at the same time. Anyone who is enough of an enthusiast to require a dual Xeon workstation is clearly not who MS is targeting with a single product. Leave the multicore server-grade towers to HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. because there's nothing to innovate there - you just throw hardware, bought at market price, into a box. What is MS supposed to innovate on there if all you care about is specs/$ and ignore the design and use-case?
This is a very niche market. As laptops get more and more capable, it'll be an even narrower niche.
I love to have just as much power I can. I'd love to have a multi-CPU POWER9 loaded with a couple terabytes of RAM and a couple flash cards attached to a fast bus, but I wouldn't know what to do with it.
> The Mac Pro is overpowered for them.
I'm not sure if you are trolling?
Moore's law has slowed down btw and is predicted to end in 4-6 years (2020 - 2022) as it would be physically impossible to shrink transistors any further /unless/ there is a change from the current silicon CMOS technology.
In fact, manufacturers are no longer even targeting the doubling of transistors anymore! Instead they are focusing speeding them up.
I'm not sure if you're being facetious but for those of us who enjoy playing video games a desktop is the best choice. If you don't care about portability, why not get something that is by far more powerful, cheaper, customizable, and future-proof?
You're in the wrong discussion if you think gaming has any relevance to this line of laptops. People that own Macbook Pros don't play games seriously. Gaming is strictly for Windows devices, as it's largely an afterthought in the Mac world.
Are there many more studios outside of Blizzard that are developing for OS X? I hadn't realized there were more devs working with it. Every other game I know of that has Mac support is usually running in some WINE equivalent which isn't great.
So we have Blizzard and Source engine, who am I missing?
Ahaha ahaha... No, no it's not. I can't imagine you play any 'serious' games. Hell, even WoW, a game which is well supported by the developer on OSX, plays like crap on my $2600 MVP.
Well, I should have worded that better, shouldn't have been so dismissive. By 'serious' I meant 'resource intensive'. I don't know all of those games, bit the games I do know are definitely not very taxing on a GPU (aside from Skyrim, but what settings are yo uplaying it at? Does that seem worth it for the price tag?)
I don't think you'd argue that a mac is a good gaming rig from a performance / $ perspective (or any other perspective really).
Define 'good enough'. These aren't inexpensive machines. In the context of gaming, $2600 is far too much to pay for a laptop that gets ~30fps at medium settings.
I never used the Cintiq, but I've been using Wacom tablets for a good 15 years. I owned & used the Surface Pro 2 & 3, and the iPad Pro with pencil.
Both have their place - pen on screen or pen off. Working with your pen on a screen, especially a smaller screen, means you lose a good chunk of your visible space. Overall opinion -- it is great for artists that two major companies have made a significant effort on getting the pen on display right.
"Overwatch was fast and fun on medium settings. Civ VI is what I’ve played the most on the Studio and it looks and runs fantastic."
"When I first saw the device months ago in that secret room at MS, they asked me what I thought. I said, “Well I have no idea if anyone else will want it, but you have made my dream computer.”
Nothing about that is, I went out and paid my own money to buy this.
So you must've somehow missed the "Just to be clear, I don’t get paid to do any of this stuff but I enjoy doing it and I like to think I’m helping make the Surface better for artists." while reading the article, right?
Advertising is more than just paying actors to pretend to like something. News articles rephrasing press releases are often also adds. Video game reviews are usually not simply handing money to someone. That does not make them unbiased.
People spreading Viral Videos are often unpaid paid, even if they are a critical part of a marketing campaign. Hand someone some free hardware and they don't think is this worth X, just is X cool.
I suggest familiarizing yourself with the history of Gabe/PA and the Surface. Gabe initiated the relationship by writing a post out of the blue about its potential as a drawing tool, as well as complaining. In response, Microsoft invited him to a lab to try prototype Surface hardware/software and made a lot of changes based on his feedback. So, they've basically made a machine designed to be liked by him, and they continue to get his feedback to ensure that doesn't change.
So, it's not surprising or questionable that his reviews are positive.
I actually read his first post about the surface when it came our. The point is MS is continuing the relationship for good press, and by becoming part of the process they have become biased.
If the consideration is that they made the product work for his use case, then that's not corruption in any meaningful sense of the word. That is exactly the behavior you want to reward companies for.
IIRC, he returned his last trial-Surface device and bought one with his own cash.
Based on the article (he's been lent this device for the last week or so), I imagine the same thing may well happen if he's happy with it - which it sounds like he may be.
Pretty sure the guys who've been making a very successful business out of Penny Arcade for the last couple of decades don't need to take backroom deals from Microsoft in order to make ends meet.
Apple delivered meat and potatoes for ordinary users (albeit with a weird garnish), while Microsoft delivered a molecular gastronomy dessert that a tiny niche has any use for. I don't see how that is to Microsoft's credit, much less "embarrassing" to Apple.
They haven't replaced my laptop with anything new. They just released a newer model. Similar to every yearly company announcement ever. Nobody cares about version 7 with nothing new, they care about version 1 of something innovative.
Wacom hasn't released an innovative product in 10 years, and much like Texas Instruments and their $130 monopoly on school calculators, everyone is still paying the same $2500 to Wacom that they did decades ago for Cintiq.
The lack of competition for Wacom is criminal and has allowed them to coast on last-decades product line for a very long time.
Hell, the most innovative thing Wacom has done in 10 years is rebrand Graphire into Bamboo. Ooooooh!
I imagine the day the Apple Pencil was announced was a very grim day in what ever is left of the Wacom R&D department.
Does Wacom have an entire suite of comparable products, or do they cater specifically to a niche market? Was their announcement yesterday? Life has context.
> What does that have to do with new MBPs?
I'll go ahead and quote the original comment you originally responded to: "This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history". Apple had an event where they announced not much more than that we are now in late 2016. Nobody is saying MBP itself is bad, the event is comparatively lacking.
* I think you can reasonably make a case that Windows 95/98/NT were better than MacOS 7/8/9. (You could probably make a reasonable case for the opposite; I certainly wouldn't argue the point).
* The Zune was better than the iPod. Unfortunately for MS not better than the iPhone a few months later. The "Metro" design language it introduced was quite a bit better than Apple's at the time (and started the "flat design" trend that even Apple would end up aping, years later).
* Various areas where MS beat Apple by default, at least circa the 90s-00s, owing to Apple making no or a half-hearted effort. Office suites, gaming consoles, web browsers, the server, 3D graphics, yadda yadda.
* C# is a far better language than Objective-C, and Visual Studio is a far better IDE than Xcode.
* Edge is arguably a better browser than Safari. MS have also made some great tooling for webdev recently, VSCode and Typescript, while we haven't heard much from Apple.
* The Surface tablets have been arguably better than recent iPads, by virtue of running a full OS.
> * C# is a far better language than Objective-C, and Visual Studio is a far better IDE than Xcode.
C# is a nicer language, and VS a better IDE when it comes to language integration but.. the platform APIs are far more productive on OS X than they are on Windows and the GUI toolkit was good from the get go, whereas MS never commits to a toolkit fully (MFC, WinForms, WPF, now UWP which is like a restricted, not fully compatible WPF). Why do you think there's so many great, lightweight alternatives to Photoshop with non destructive image editing on Mac OS X, like Affinity Photo, Acorn, Pixelmator, and none on Windows ? why is it that Apple can dogfood and write everything in their modern platform APIs, even rewrote their file browser Finder, in it, but Windows out of the box comes with exactly zero .net apps? Recently Windows 10 brought some .net stuff out of the box on the desktop, but they're all toy apps no one would want to use, and certainly no equivalent to Apple Mail, Photos, iMovie, Garageband etc. The UWP mail client is pitiful.
C#/.net platform in general, on the desktop, as far as commercial, desktop apps sold to consumers come, is a dead wasteland. Whatever few .net apps I've seen as an enduser that made use of .net, I tend to associate with "slow, heavy, not featureful" particularly WPF apps. .net greatest success is the same as Java: on servers, or on the desktop for in-house business software where the well being of the enduser is not a priority and no one cares if the app feels sluggish or has terrible UI.
The lack of dogfooding has been a common complaint among windows developers for a long time, for example :
> I understand deadlines and priorities, and I know that probably Microsoft just had to ship something at some point, but it really seems that there was a big lack of dogfooding in the WPF case.
> There’s a striking example of this: what was the number one complaint that developers had about WPF since 2006?… Blurry text and images. And when did Microsoft fix it?… Only in 2010, when they started using WPF for Visual Studio.
> Another issue that has been bugging me since I started using WPF was the airspace limitation. It seems that it’s finally going to be fixed in 4.5. Why do I think it’s being solved now? Because they probably needed some native WinRT component to play nice with WPF…
Microsoft still doesn't really use .net outside of dev tools and server apps. UWP apps are just toy apps. UWP OneNote isn't even close to the desktop OneNote. And so on. MS themselves don't really produce high quality desktop apps with C#. If they won't, then who will? Compare to Apple and how everything they make, makes heavy use of their platform APIs such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation etc. How could .net not be a barren wasteland for desktop apps?
Apple always had the better developer platform, dogfooded and thus battletested, and now they're also getting a nicer programming language to work with, with Swift. Their IDE is still no visual studio, but AppCode from IntelliJ fixes that.
Well, you could argue that Apple hasn't done a tablet PC. They've done a tablet-sized phone. Of course, where you draw the line between those is probably different for different people.
They did, just not in terms of the underlying concept. The sheer size and weight of the iPad was innovative. Doing away with a physical keyboard altogether was innovative. Using a capacitive touchscreen for a far more pleasant user experience was innovative. In short, many small innovations rather than one big one.
What's interesting is that it's a dual volte face; Apple produced a gimmicky consumer-oriented iteration whilst Microsoft gave us something genuinely innovative, gorgeous looking, but aimed at a high-end, professional market with the money to spend. It follows on from Apple giving us desktop users a transparency abomination straight from the Windows Vista era. What is happening?
To continue the food analogy, it's as if Apple reheated some leftovers --the kind that taste better the next day, but when it comes down to it, it's the same food.
Some of you may remember when many many years ago Microsoft showed off an interactive coffee table. The Surface. And now finally with Studio they have brought to reality a device that will be nirvana for designers, factory planners, circuit designers and anybody else who can actually use an interactive surface (pun intended). Im a product manager for enterprise software and Im bubbling with ideas that such an eminently usable large screen touch device brings to the market. After decades of heaping scorn on MS for the stuff i had to work with that hasnt improved (talking about you Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Visual Studio) they have post-Balmer become an entirely different company and Im pleased about that. Competition is good for innovation and Studio is truly innovative in engineering and the things it makes possible.
> Microsoft introduced an entirely new kind of tool for digital artists.
It isn't an entirely new tool, it is an HDR, higher res, larger version of a Cintiq, with a built in slow PC with last-generation mobile graphics. The hinge and stuff was definitely an improved industrial design.
Those screen improvements alone are probably enough for lots of professionals to switch from cintiq, even if they lose support for professional-tier desktop hardware, but what about the pen? As far as I can tell the pen doesn't even have tilt detection and from videos you have to use the dial/puck to simulate rotating or tilting the pen.
In spite of that, it was definitely more innovative than anything Apple showed.
SURE! Except, of course, you're not going to be allowed to code it in Python, R, or Octave. Instead, it will be Microsoft(TM) Visual(TM) R#(TM) with the new NetDNA/DCOM/.NET/CloudyMcCloudface Framework (TM)!! (now, with 40% more Cortana!(TM))
> Microsoft introduced an entirely new kind of tool for digital artists
Actually I believe they introduced a competitor to the Wacom Cintiq that comes in a variety of sizes and does not require you to use a desktop or Windows 10.
Calling it 'an entirely new kind of tool' is really over stating it.
Have you used Surface before? Asking because when I picked one up about a month ago, I had an awful time with it. Makes me think their announcement won't really do anything but look interesting. I could be missing something, though.
>> when I picked one up about a month ago, I had an awful time with it
Did you get to play with it at a store or friends house, or actually take it home and use it for some time. Everyone i've met that has a surface (book, 3, 4, etc) loves it.
Microsoft announced a laptop that gets 6 more hours of battery life than the MBP, while Apple used a chipset a full year behind Microsoft's.
For the desktop, if you think people don't use desktops you're out of touch with reality. Microsoft introduced the Surface Studio primarily targeting what Apple has started to abandon, creatives & creative professionals.
A 27" Cintiq tablet costs $2800 on Amazon, and that's without the stand, which is an additional $600. This is what video editors, audio engineers and graphic artists use in their studios. The Surface Studio replaces all of that -and- it replaces the computer itself. What are you missing here?
> Microsoft announced a laptop that gets 6 more hours of battery life than the MBP, while Apple used a chipset a full year behind Microsoft's.
Which means Microsoft has introduced a dual-core low-voltage part significantly less powerful than the one in the MBP. Let's not kid ourselves here, Apple was not going to use 15W LV KL in either MBP, and the 45W parts are will 4~6 months from release.
> They do use the 15W Skylake in the non-touchbar MBP.
True. I wasn't talking about the red-headed step-child but you've got a point here. The hold-up there might have been that there's no Iris KL (incidentally I'm pissed that they've apparently gone with the non-iris pro on the 15", what the fuck)
Well, not only is there no iris KL, there's no quad-core KL yet, either. Dual-core 15W CPU in a pro machine seems... inadequate. Also, all the 15" have dedicated graphics so an Iris Pro would seem like just a waste of TDP to me.
The IGP on the CPU is considerably more power efficient, the dedicated graphics can be pretty much switched of for anything non-Gaming or GPGPU related.
Yup. I'm just saving having (better, more power hungry) integrated graphics seems like a waste when you already have a dedicated GPU for when you want more performance.
Dude, I use a desktop. A Mac mini, in fact, which has been struggling for the latter half of the past 6 years.
I'm seriously considering getting a PC instead, even though I've written http://taoofmac.com for 14 years.
(I do happen to work for Microsoft, by the way, but would very much prefer to keep my home setup on a separate tech stack for the sake of keeping an open view. I'm now ogling the Skullcandy NUC and wondering how well it will run Elementary OS)
On your blog, you wrote:
As far as I’m concerned, Apple is completely out of touch with my segment (call it UNIX-centric pros, if you will), so I’m going to seriously rethink my options over the next couple of weeks.
I would guess that just here on HN there are tens of thousands of us who could describe ourselves as "Unix-centric pros", who want powerful unixy client machines that match our unixy servers and who also want all the client-side stuff everyone needs (excellent video, audio, wifi, battery mgt., etc., drivers perfectly matched to hardware and working out of the box) plus a full range of apps. We can get the unixy client from Linux, BSD, or Mac. We can get the reliable, everything works consumer client stuff from Windows or Mac. The only overlap is Mac.
Unfortunately for us, this power user unix workstation stuff is just a historical accident for Apple, not a corporate objective. They're trying to get out of the computer business so they can focus on fashionable, high-margin, designer "lifestyle" products and services for the hip ones who consume stuff, not the old drudges in the back room who make stuff.
Microsoft holds their Windows legacy so dear that they'll slap more layers on the papier-mache balloon that is Windows but never put unix at its core, and all the nifty client-side Linux systems out there seem to have the motto "before you complain, realize that how much of it ends up working depends on how smart you are".
I would wish for Google to develop a line of powerful Linux-based workstations, but they would just spy on me until Google canceled the project altogether.
I wish Apple would create a wholly-owned subsidiary called "Apple Computer, Inc." that would have access to Apple's manufacturing expertise but would build a line of computers for power users who produce stuff--computers that weren't "thinner".
> Unfortunately for us, this power user unix workstation stuff is just a historical accident for Apple, not a corporate objective.
Many that went Apple when they showed OS X to the world, never really understood Apple, or for that matter, NeXT culture.
The POSIX layer never mattered, what mattered were the Objective-C frameworks on top and a workflow based on Xerox PARC ideas, that Steve Jobs brought to Apple and NeXT.
The UNIX compatibility was there, because NeXT was competing against Sun and Irix workstations, so it needed to be compatible to a certain extent.
Later Apple trying to promote the same compatibility because after the Copland failure, they needed to sell computers or close shop, so the UNIX with nice GUI was a way of doing it.
For those of us that develop native applications, it never really mattered.
> Microsoft holds their Windows legacy so dear that they'll slap more layers on the papier-mache balloon that is Windows but never put unix at its core
Bash on Windows isn't at all the same as Windows on Linux.
I do appreciate that they are trying to do as much as they think they can without throwing away the thing that they believe is the most valuable corporate asset they have: the mountain of stuff built over the years for Windows. They have carefully preserved this asset by making huge efforts to ensure than anything that worked on Windows in the past will keep working forever.
The thing is, what I wish they would do for me (which might not be what they need to do for themselves) is to take the equivalent of my Linux server and wrap a Windows API around it, the way a Mac is like a Linux server inside with a Mac API wrapped around it for client software usefulness. I'd be just as happy with a Windows GUI/API as a Mac GUI/API, but what I want is for it to resemble my servers under the GUI, so I can leverage whatever unixy skills and tools I may have.
Having a simulation of a unix shell on top of an NT core makes Windows more useful than it would otherwise be, but it's not the same as a Windows shell on a Linux kernel.
> the way a Mac is like a Linux server inside with a Mac API wrapped around it for client software usefulness
No, Darwin is Mach with BSD welded to it; it is not a pure Unix design. Likewise, WSL is the NT kernel with the Linux syscall interface on top, via the Pico Process interface. The NT kernel was designed for portability; in fact, POSIX compatibility was a design goal from the early days, in contrast to Mach where the idea of mashing together Mach and BSD was never considered.
In many ways, WSL is a much cleaner design than Darwin is.
I did exactly that. After using the Mac forever (started on 10.1), I got kinda fed up and made the jump to an Intel NUC with Linux. I tried Elementary OS and didn't find it to my liking. But I really really dig Fedora, specifically Gnome 3. The breadth of choice in Linux desktop environments at the moment is neat and not something I expected when I made the leap to PC.
Sure thing. First, some details. I switched to the NUC three or four months ago as my main machine. Mine is the NUC6i5SYH model. I installed 32GB of RAM and filled both drive slots. Windows 10 is installed on one drive, Fedora 24 is installed on the other.
As long as you have no plans to play games, it's a wonderful machine for development. It's really fast for its small size, noticeably faster than the Macs I'd been using before. I spend most of my time with the NUC doing Ruby development in Fedora, with some Clojure and Node.js on the side. I've done some office type stuff with LibreOffice. I've dabbled in OpenSCAD while working on a 3D print. The NUC is more than enough power for all of that. I haven't played with Windows 10 too much, but it's also snappy when I need to boot into it.
It's a very quiet machine. On full blast, you might get a blowing sound similar to a stressed MBP. But usually in normal usage it's no more than a low hum; I can't even hear it unless I listen for it. You can throttle down the processors in the BIOS to make it nearly (totally?) silent if you like.
The most annoying thing about the NUC was installing the BIOS updates before getting started. The NUC6i5SYH had a lot of problems at launch that needed to be patched. Once I got beyond that, everything was smooth. The NUC is basically a laptop board shoved into a small box instead. If the things you want to do are possible on a laptop, they'll be possible on the NUC no problem.
Thanks for the response, it seems that your use case is very similar to mine (Ruby, Node.js, etc.). I actually decided to go with the i3 model with 16GB of RAM, since I don't think that I will do anything extremely demanding or graphically intense and it's super affordable to boot. I'll run elementary OS or Fedora on it, hopefully it will all work out.
I wonder how Visual Studio runs on it - I am a gamer but I'm very tempted to go NUC for development and stay with the Xbox One for gaming until I can afford a proper gaming rebuild.
I still use a 2010 MacBook Pro (i7 8GB RAM 256SSD) to run my IDE and all the "normal" apps (Skype, Slack, Chrome), and a NUC (NUC5i7RYH) on Ubuntu to build and run the stack.
I mostly access the NUC via SSH (and rsync my codebase between the two computers). The NUC is also connected to a monitor and I use the MacBook keyboard and mouse to drive both computers with Symless Synergy.
If you are fine with dual core, get a NUC5i5 with 16GB RAM - Yosemite and higher run absolutely flawless there. Skylake NUCs are still a bit of a mess unfortunately.
> Microsoft introduced a 28" desktop PC in an era when nobody uses desktops anymore.
"a 28" desktop PC" is a bit of an understatement. It's a huge low-latency touch display which works like a drafting table.
> nobody uses desktops anymore
There's a desktop on most desks in our office. A Macbook is certainly an alternative option but not if you're looking for a large touchscreen display.
> For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen and quad-core CPU
If there was really a performance problem I think a lot more people would be upset with what was announced. Last gen means more stability and likely cooler temperature hardware. Also, does the 15" MBP have a detachable/touch screen? Does it come with Windows? These are real considerations for potential Surface adopters.
The Macbook is simply a laptop. There's no problem with that, but Surface is selling more than that, so a direct comparison on cost and performance isn't really fair. Or are you suggesting Apple is the only company capable of putting newer hardware into a computer?
Slight correction, though your point stands. You would need to buy the $2,800, 27" Cintiq[1] and a new computer to compete against the Surface Studio offering. This makes the Surface Studio a more compelling offering on the surface, at least to me.
Penny Arcade's Mike Krahulik has been using one for a week and compared it to his Cintiq:
> Tycho asked me to compare it to my Cintiq, and I told him that drawing on the Cintiq now felt like drawing on a piece of dirty plexiglass hovering over a CRT monitor from 1997.
It's kind of amusing watching Apple fans replay "spec" and "niche" arguments they used to poo-poo. Kind of like watching them do a smooth about-face on the superiority of PowerPC processors back in the day.
I've been running a custom desktop PC at work for years. I tend to want the best possible hardware and getting a custom workstation is the cheapest way of getting it. Very happy with my machine and I've never had any need for a laptop in the office.
It's just trendy to complain about everything Apple does although most likely 90% of the complainers will be getting these new macbooks anyway.
If they just push the specs up, increase battery life..."Apple isn't innovating anymore", "So what's new?", "It looks just like my old MBP" etc.
Now that they actually bring something innovative you'll get this kind of complains.
Now no matter if people liked this event or not I find it hard to believe anyone seriously though yesterdays MS event was any better. Overpriced useless last gen crap for insane price.
> Overpriced useless last gen crap for insane price.
That perfectly fits my opinion of Apple. ;)
I jumped off the Apple band wagon years ago, but an important point here is: Apple events used to be exciting. They would announce something interesting and worthy at every event, which is why so many even started watching life streams.
The iPhone is still a really great phone, but iOS has been playing catchup with Android for years. And apart from mobile Apple hasn't done much that's innovative or interesting for quite some time.
That's why opinions are so harsh. People have come to expect more.
If that's your opinion of Apple I wonder what you think of others then.
Apple products usually have top notch latest specs and are most powerful products out there. Both in laptops and in smartphones. So definitely not last gen crap.
Overpriced? Expensive maybe, but probably one of the least overpriced actually. Unlike most manufacturers who just throw in Windows or Android on top of their generic hardware, Apple design a lot of HW and SW and their integrations in-house and they actually have costs to cover. (I heard Silicon Valley engineers aren't exactly free)
I don't know what is "much that's innovative". I guess it's subjective. If we look at the last few years: 3D Touch, TouchID. That's not so bad.
If we look at the whole history of Android...eh...well...hmmm...Samsung Edge...maybe?
I agree that Apple isn't innovating as well as they used to back in the days of Jobs, but nobody else really didn't innovate back then and they sure as hell don't innovate now unless you see putting unnecessarily high specs on a smartphone as an innovation.
You mean low-spec RAM? Slow SSD's? Obviously soldered in, lel...
A GPU that is apparently is on par with last, severely slower (compared to 1000 series nVidias), generation of GPU's? 2GB of VRAM, lel again
A CPU that is nothing to gawk at? (2.6~2.8 GHz nominal)
Crappy sound, crappy cooling, zero moisture resistance, all for ~2800 bucks
Meanwhile Lenovo I've got in order to work with Autodesk Inventor has the same CPU, 1TB 7200rpm HDD + 128GB SSD (replaceable), up to 32GB RAM (I've got 16GB in 2 slots out of 4), 960M with 4GB VRAM, SD card reader that is amazing to have, bitching sound that kinda surprised me, full size keyboard, all for a whopping ~1000$. (And I'm fairly certain it will not die to humid air - I'm guilty of sometimes using it with water dripping off my fingers even)
Sure, it only has a 1080 screen and I don't care about battery life (since I use it as a mobile workstation that is plugged 99% of the time) and it obviously comes with Windows 10 (THE HORROR)
The point is: stop spreading bullshit about how amazing Apple hardware is. For the price you are paying it is a joke.
I used to be Thinkpad hardcore too. I switched to Mac when my x200/x201 hybrid that I built died (fell off the top of a server rack) and work bought me an MBPr. I'm pretty firm in the Apple camp now. I used to be a hater and holy shit was I wrong.
Now that my workflow is mostly photography and 4k video editing I couldn't imagine being back on a Thinkpad with Arch/CentOS. Windows is dead to me and has been for years, I'd go back to Linux FAR before Windows, but the workflow on OSX is just so damn sweet that I'm not even thinking about it.
There's really no company that comes even close to Apple for my use case. That being said I wouldn't pay $2800 either. Let the suckers buy it and I buy lightly used for half the price. The new screen is really, really, tempting though.
I think we would be all much more receptive to their innovation if it didn't also include the removal of important features like the Escape key, USB type A, HDMI, and headphone jacks.
If they replaced function keys with the touch bar and left everything else alone (save for faster components), I don't think half as many people would be complaining.
I just don't care about the Touch Bar. It's fine I guess, I'm not religious about the F keys. But only USB-Cs? No USB-A? Not event MagSafe?? That's the last nail in the coffin for me, I'm afraid. It's supposed to be a Pro machine after all.
I sit at an Apple desktop (macbook pro with 2 apple monitors) for most of my day so I can use my giant screen to design interfaces and I'm not cramped into a laptop's tiny 13 inch screen. The last office of about 5,000 devs and designers that I worked at had desktops with monitors. No one worked on laptops except a few people here and there.
I would lose HOURS of productivity per week if I were not on a dual screen set up. It's just better for what I do.
That being said, if I need to go mobile, which I normally don't I use my macbook. I think I've disconnected my macbook from my monitors probably 2 times in the last 2 years.
> I sit at an Apple desktop (macbook pro with 2 apple monitors)
You're kind of proving his point... even the people who doesn't need a portable computer do get a portable computer instead of a desktop one nowadays. (By the way, I don't agree on desktop computers not being used anymore: I spent most of my day using a desktop computer. And a desktop telephone, another supossedly dissapearing technology.)
> I would lose HOURS of productivity per week if I were
> not on a dual screen set up.
I agree that desktops have their place, but it's not because of dual screens... This latest MBP supports 2 at 5K (or, presumably, 4K if not buying Apple screens...)
Almost everyone I know has a desktop. In fact, the only people I know don't are my parents and people who only need a laptop for email.
I happily paid $1,200 for my graphics card, and while that is too much in general there is definitely a demand for high end computing and gaming.
Sure, this doesn't really apply but if I worked in a creative position this machine would be a godsend.
I work in an open-plan office of about 40 people; a mix of business and tech staff. I'm the only one with a desktop. The 'killer feature' of the laptop here is being able to take your computer into meetings for various reasons.
Mind you, if you totalled up all the staff hours wasted this year with people wandering around searching and asking others for various dongles, we probably could have afforded another couple of MBPs.
Scala development, and some devs ops stuff that required spinning up VMs. I mean not a lot; like 6 ~ 8.
At work, I use a 16GB ram laptop, Scala development an no VMs (we do everything in Docker and deploy to Mesos/Marathon).
I do have a desktop at home now with 32GB of ram, but it honestly feels like overkill and I may scale down. There is a lot of dev work that does require a pretty beefy workstation, but I've been doing HD video editing, Photoshop/Lightroom and Scala/Java work on laptops for years.
I run several Docker containers with Java-based microservices on Win10 Dell XPS 13 laptop, while debugging PhoneGap client app at the same time. Don't see any performance problems with that. The moment when laptops became good enough for cloud development happened 2 or 3 years ago.
Hm, I don't know -- have you used more powerful stuff? I have a 2x10 core desktop with 64G RAM and a relatively powerful Dell Latitude workstation laptop -- and the latter is significantly slower. (I'm also running Java microservices inside containers, mostly.)
No, I didn't use such beasts. I have a desktop with 8 cores/32 Gb RAM, but I don't spend much time on it. Top hardware wouldn't add much to my personal performance, so I won't spend money on building such workstation.
>> A lot of people have desktops, myself included. I'm not really sure where you got such an impression.
Not just that... If nobody uses desktops, why would Apple waste so much engineering and design resources on something like the iMac if there's no market?
>> For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen and quad-core CPU, and it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park?!
While they are alike in many respects, the Surface Book is an orange in comparison the the Macbook Pro in three important ways:
The Surface Studio isn't really just a desktop PC - the whole swivel stand and touch-screen thing makes it a really interesting proposition for people who do a lot of creative and design work. No, it's not mass market, but it is a lot more interesting than anything we saw today.
Overpriced Microsoft devices, although impressive. I am more worried about the silence from MS on MFC given the world's investment in it. We can't all just rewrite our apps in UWP overnight. The foundation classes were just that - a foundation, and we can't move the giant building built on top.
For the Mac, goodbye MagSafe and SD cards and optical audio in (or any audio line in, actually). What's the point of a super thin device if you have to carry it in a thick bag due to the bulkiness of the 24 adapters to make the device useful or connect it to anything? It beggars belief.
"We've made the thinnest car ever! Steering wheel is an optional extra".
I think we are reaching the pinnacle of computer hardware and software development. We may have even passed it.
In short, I'll stick with my current MacBook Pro for as long as I can. That new giant touchpad looks to make typing tricky.
"MFC can't be used for for Windows Store apps because it uses too many APIs that are banned for store usage. In order to allow MFC usage in your scenario we would probably have to break MFC into multiple DLLs, which would be a prohibitive amount of work."
I think the main difference isn't "who announced something that I'd prefer buying tomorrow", but who announced something that shows a ton of potential growth areas? The MBP refresh announced today seems OK. It's where the MBP is right now. The Microsoft announcement yesterday showed where computers should go. It's a different approach, and kind of subtle, but I see a much larger potential in the Surface Studio's future vision for desktop/portable PCs than in Apple's.
I'm pretty sure our office of 300 people only has desktops in, so saying that no one uses desktops is a bit much,no? Also, all of our artists(~80) have the CintiQ 24" Tablets, which can now be replaced by the Surface Desktop. It's a fantastic device, if you have a use case for it.
Most illustrators I know are using a combination of an iMac and Wacom tablet. If it is an agency, they'll possibly be using a Wacom Cintiq, which approaches $2,800. The cost of a Surface Studio is not out of the ordinary.
https://us-store.wacom.com/Catalog/Pen-Displays/Cintiq/Cinti...
For comparison, my 27" Wacom Cintiq cost me $2500, which is just a screen with a stylus and the Studio blows it out of the water in every measurable way.
I'll take my desktops for doing real work. I don't know any laptop that can drive four and five screen setups and an area about 4' x 3' of display area.
The laptop is fine for fooling around, or "working" from home on the couch, but I'd lose my mind trying to do anything that small a screen, that few pixels, and a cramped, irregular keyboard with no travel. Plus trackpads. Fuck trackpads.
We have about 150+ engineers with Macs - and precisely zero of them asked for a desktop versus a MacBook Pro. Consider the possibility that your statement, "The laptop is fine for fooling around" is a fairly personal experience that isn't necessarily representative of the broad population.
>"People dramatically overestimate their ability to manage their environment," Meyer says, adding that in some ways, using multiple monitors to keep all sorts of data visible is analogous to using a cell phone while driving.
Well, sure, but isn't it rather obvious that using resources to engage in distracting non-work activities is detrimental to work efficiency?
I've got 6880x1440 worth of curved display on my desk, and obviously, watching Netflix, browsing Facebook, or otherwise distracting myself with one of them would be a net productivity loss.
Studies show that it's true for the broad population, too. More screen real estate and faster processing directly and significantly impacts focus and working memory.
Perhaps your employees aren't perfectly rational actors whose incentive is to maximize the utility of their tools while at the office?
For example, there seems to be correlation between 1) wanting to keep git work local to a workstation and not push anywhere with public visibility, and 2) wanting to use a laptop so you can bring that local repository state with you.
Neither desires are necessarily aligned with what benefits the company (or the quality of work), but they do drive a laptop preference.
First, they provide a good summary of previous findings:
"Previous research has demonstrated productivity increases for users performing tasks on larger or multiple screens. For instance, a 9% productivity increase was noted while using wider screens (15” flat panel vs. 46.5” curved screen)
(Czerwinski, et al., 2003)."
"Similarly, a 3.1% increase was noted using dual screens over a single screen (Poder, Godbout, & Bellemare, 2007). Task success has been found to increase for tasks performed on 4 – 17” monitors vs. a single 17” monitor (Truemper, et al., 2008). Likewise, tasks were performed faster and with less workload while using 2 – 17” monitors over a single 17” monitor (Kang & Stasko, 2007)."
"Other studies have noted increased window interaction and open windows while using multi-monitor configurations (Hutchings, Smith, Meyers, Czerwinski, & Robertson, 2004)."
"Issues with single monitor use have been well documented. Generally, higher mental workload, more window switching, repositioning, resizing, inadvertent opening, and closing of files have been associated with single small monitor usage (Czerwinski, et al., 2003). Users generally perceive small single monitors as requiring more workload (Grudin, 2001; Hashizume, Kurosu, Kaneko, 2007)."
Second, their own findings:
"Participants felt more rushed, that they worked harder, and were more frustrated [with a single monitor configuration]."
"Participants spent more active time in the PDF reference document while completing tasks on the single monitor configurations"
"Participants were observed to leave the PDF reference document open and viewable (but not in focus) while working with other source documents when in the dual monitor configurations."
"Participants clicked less during tasks on the dual 22” monitors than the dual 17” monitors and single 17” and 22” monitors."
"Participants switched between windows more frequently during tasks on a single 17” and 22” monitors than the dual 22” monitors."
>> Given that they're using glossy-screened laptops — maybe they care more about looks and hipness than about getting the job done?
Why the hate against glossy screens? The colors pop more and unless you're sitting in a spot that's prone to glare, you're just as productive as anyone else. I've never had an issue with a Macbook's glossy screen affecting my ability to work.
If I need to look at it the whole day, I find glossy hurts my eyes more. If it is about having something pretty as a status symbol, then yeah glossy makes sense.
Sure, that's valid. But everyone's eyes are different, which is why I don't get why there are a lot of glossy screen haters out there. I never had that problem sitting in front of my glossy screened MBP for 8+ hours a day for 3+ years (it died but not because it had a glossy screen).
>> If it is about having something pretty as a status symbol, then yeah glossy makes sense.
Aren't glossy haters mocking/judging people basically using matte screens as status symbols? i.e., you must be a hipster or shallow and not a real programmer/{insert other profession here}?
Indeed. For me, it comes down to ergonomics. Monitor at eye height, keyboard comfortably positioned. Laptops force you to hunch in, eyes down, hands squished. It's a recipe for RSI. I'm sure some people can manage it fine, but I can't.
Both Apple and Microsoft presentations were overwhelming for the size of their companies. However, the latter introduced a completely new product which seems innovative. Meanwhile, Apple just gave their MacBook Pros a touch bar, and basically neglected any demanded updates for their other product lines (e.g. MacBook Air).
And honestly, MBP is not the best purchase for specs. You can get a cheaper Dell XPS 15.
This is microsoft making a product that designers love.
The behemoth which everyone considered dead is finding ways to make inroads into apple's old stronghold, with design innovations.
Yeah its going to have to deal with Windows, but this is a huge turn for a creature with that kind of momentum to overcome.
With the internal stack re-orgnization (rationalization), and having to build their own reference PCs, and buying their own pen tech, they are doing what a good firm should do - work hard on improving.
They have far to go but theres lots of signs of them moving in the right direction.
Whereas in sharp contrast you have
the Ipad pro which still runs ios, and the touch bar. And lets not forget their moment of courage, where they decided that they will obsolete the entire world of headphones.
Everyone has already chewed you apart for this but
> nobody uses desktops anymore
That's just not true. Maybe you only use computers for social media and youtube but other people need things that can actually run resource intense programs.
Noone uses desktop PCs? I don't know what type of hipster country you live in but they are certainly still used heavily.
The product that really hit both of them out of the park was the Razer Blade Pro. Legitimately better in every single way than both the Apple and Microsoft offerings.
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/razer-blade-pro-2016
Lots of people use desktops. And this is more than a desktop PC, the "studio" functionality makes that clear.
And last-gen/overpriced current hardware is what Apple has been doing for a long time, yet it's
easy to see by their success that it's not pure specs but rather the actual experience that matters.
There are plenty of existing laptops that can outperform a MacBook Pro ALREADY. Meanwhile, Microsoft is innovating. Apple replaced their laptop lineup; there are no new products, and for my job the lineup is virtually the same. Hell, the lack of an escape key has me looking at thinkpads + an iPad for music.
For general computing (e.g. web browsing), yes. But that doesn't cover all the possible uses of a computing device. Gamers, designers, scientists, video/media professionals are some of the people who use primarily desktops.
Maybe a relative perception. Apple has a historical relationship with content creation personal workstation landmarks, so a mild event is a let down; Microsoft is new in this, so triggering excitement there is a very positive surprise.
I'd argue that this isn't true, especially for high-end artists, developers, gamers, and... well, my anec-data (gathered in only the finest biased areas) shows that this is blatantly false.
i want the microsoft thingie, but know that the app scaling issues and other MSFT funkery will still be there, under the polished sheen. if only that thing ran some linux flavor, and some linux flavor ran adobe creative suite, we'd finally be free from mac/windows forever! it's the new bernie sanders.
new kind of tool? all in one pcs with touch screens have been there for ages.. The microsoft event was just cool branding, taking a page out of apple's manual of selling something that has existed forever and packaging it neatly and saying it's innovating, when it's really really not
Welcome to the world - a place where perception matters more than reality.
This is why every single company has giant marketing departments and this perception informs so many of our decisions both consciously and unconsciously.
This is the real danger that apple is in - that how it's perceived is changing even if its products continue to be superior.
Without taking a side, can I just say that this entire thread is bringing a little tear of nostalgia to my eye?
I love that even in 2016-- with all the new companies and platforms and wars, and desktops arguably being the least important battleground-- we can still have an old-fashioned bitter Mac-vs-PC argument thread once in a while, with all the swearing and name-calling, just like when I was on Slashdot in 2003. I love it.
Not just Slashdot in 2003. Also Slashdot in 1998, Hacker News in 2008, Usenet in 1988, and all throughout the intervening years and back to the very dawn of recorded history. Sumerians were exchanging angry commentary written on their clay tablets about the virtues of Microsoft, IBM, and Apple computers in the Euphrates swamps six thousand years ago.
Meh, I don't think this is the same. Back then, the PC mainstream looked at Apple buyers like a rabble of fanboys who didn't know what they were buying. And indeed a lot of them were exactly that: artists, musicians and schoolteachers overpaying for hardware in order to get the superior MacOS experience.
Today, the mainstream in tech circles is a mob of disgruntled Apple buyers that Cupertino spent decades courting and accumulating with bold moves (like the MBA and the MBPR), who now don't see a reason to stick around. It's a bad trend for Apple.
I'm glad someone made this comment, although I confess I stopped reading the whole thread after the comment count went above 700 or so, so for all I know there is another like it in the dogpile here.
There is something about this topic that really gets the comments going, and I wonder what it is.
It's not just Apple vs. Microsoft. It is also Apple vs. what Apple should have done, or Microsoft vs. what its competitors are doing.
I propose that a simple A vs. B discussion isn't enough to provoke all this. Today's Apple announcement is being taken as a kind of indirect referendum on the future of nerd-friendly high-end computing hardware as a whole. As you point out, the waning significance of this question (with the rise of phones and tablets) has caused a lot of anxiety out there!
I was going to say you were wrong because it was stated "starts at 16GB" near the end of the event. Checked the store and sure enough, I see no way to increase the RAM.
They even left the fact that it is still LPDDR3 out of the keynote. It was the first question I was thinking of. I wonder when Intel will support LPDDR4.
LPDDR4 is supported by some Intel CPU's but overall memory support across intel CPU's is pretty inconsistent for no apparent reason since they are all based on the same core design.
That said you won't see any difference in performance between LPDDR3 @ 2133 mhz and LPDDR4 at 2000-2400mhz.
It's likely not even in full production since the roll out was announced a week ago.
Also no where does it says the speed and bandwidth they'll support, overall there isn't much performance difference between LPDDR3 or 4, or between DDR3 and 4 when the frequencies are off by only a few 100's of mhz.
That said I'm actually disappointed that the memory on the MBP especially the 15" is LPDDR, no reason to degrade memory performance on a machine which already has a pretty big battery, DDR4 is pretty darn power efficient as it is.
This to me looks more like another cost cutting decision set by Apple to simplify board design and the supply chain.
No 7th gen CPU's, low power memory for no reason, dumping of ports, and a pretty steep price hike.
I'm glad I bought my mid 2015 pretty fully upgraded MBP 15 with a dedicated GPU for 1480 GBP on sale last holiday season, this one is not even meh, it's a full on pass, the only feature I like is the touch ID, I still don't understand why Apple doesn't allow you to unlock your Mac with your phone, but now I know why.
Low-power memory is kind of a big deal because unlike the CPU, memory doesn't sleep. Even as it is, I expect big battery life regressions relative to the already inadequate 8-9 hours of the 2015 models. Apple cut the 13" model's battery by 1/3 and the 15" model's by 1/4. No reason losing even more battery life by ditching LPDDR3.
As for the 7th gen CPU--there are no available quad cores. I don't think Apple wanted to release redesigned MBPs with the 15" flagship model having a CPU one-generation behind the 13" model.
While memory doesn't sleep, DDR4 supports Deep Power Down and Low Power Auto Refresh even in the non-LP form factor (this is 50-80% power reduction, there are also variable timing modes which can be used to reduce power consumption during normal machine power states).
I am ok with the LPDDR3 being used for the 13" one, but on the 15" they should've went with DDR4 tbh.
As for the chips yes no quad cores for KB yet, but then again I don't understand why they didn't just staggered the release like usual, MBP13 can come out with Kabby Lake Dual Cores and the 15 can come out later when the QC's are out which is December this year.
FWIW it looks like the only available option for 15" rMBP is 16GB. Personally it's more than I need, but it's still interesting that there's no room to adjust.
No 32gb? Is this true? Someone please tell me that's not true.
I was (against all odds), hoping for 64! If this is true, consider me disgusted. I had 16GB in my (long lost, loved) 17-inch Macbook Pro, in 2009! I really cannot fathom what this company is thinking. I'm bewildered, disappointed, angry, in equal measure. I've been waiting for a killer Macbook Pro for literally 18 months! Sorry. I'm going Lenovo/Dell or why not, Surface Studio. For the first time in 20 years. I'm going Windows. I will not support a company which insults me with this. If this is Jony Ive's work, if they are so self-confident in their "design" that they cannot put a decent hardware spec together, then these people need to be retired.
Or maybe I just haven't cottoned on? They just don't care about high end users? Or are they completely out of touch? I don't understand.
You're god damn right it's insulting. Same boat as you. It's really annoying. I'm trying to work here. It's not like software's getting any less bloated.
Now that ssds in macbooks are not user replaceable -- you have to buy as much disk as you want for 3 years all up front -- it's nearly $3k for the cheapest 15 inch macbook not even including applecare for 3 years. Ouch.
My instinct is that they are going to flood the early adopters market with low RAM laptops. Then silently introduce upgrade options something like a few months down the line. This serves the dual benefit of being able to pump them out faster and giving people a reason to buy more of them.
The first example I came across, they did it after 8 months in 2011. Maybe you're right, maybe the Macbook Pro is just a beefier Macbook now. They didn't even splurge on the most up to date Intel chips, but the price went up?
I don't think there very small bumps to CPU clock speed in your example are in anyway comparable to the suggestion that they will introduce 32GB as an option or the default in a few months. So I don't think this is an example of what is being discussed.
This is another great reason for serious power users to never buy the first generation of Apple equipment. Historically a quick refresh comes out, and it sometimes takes two gens to get it right.
Glad right now I timed my last Macbook pro purchase to have a year of applecare left on it, and it could easily last me another 2 years thanks to being maxed out when I bought it.
Apple is a company looking to maximize it profit as well as build good products. A lot of laptop manufacturers are starting to catch up on the hardware side (the new Zenbook).. it's just the MacOS experience that someone has left to create an equivalent to.
"Starting"? Competitors have caught up. The current Dell XPS 15'' blows the just announced MBP out of the water: same cpu, 32gb ram, equivalent GPU, more ports (including TB3), similar weight and dimensions -- at 50% of the price! The Razer Blade is "only" 20% cheaper, but has a smoking GPU. The HP ZBook Ultrabook is again 20% cheaper, 32gb, etc etc etc.
Apple dropped the ball, big time. I'll ride out my 2012 MBPr (which still works great), but at these conditions, my next laptop will not be from Cupertino.
Have used windows primary for 15 years, and mac for the last 10.. I've seen the new windows laptops walk right past apple past few months, my rMBP is about 2 years old so I'm not feeling the pinch so much in buying outdated equipment...
Even the new Lenovo T460p's are sliding by. Asus Zenbook is slick too.
I am more of a 13" guy, although i've used the 15" MBP and windows laptop at one time.
I'm hoping by the time my applecare is up they will throw a massive parade for doing the obvious hardware upgrades.
One possible reason they haven't is getting performance and heat managed in the new slim form factor.
Had a few macbooks that ran hot in the past, so I hope it's just that and not much else. It sucked having 15" macbook pros that had faulty video cards due to poor heat management and died prematurely.
You'll go Lenovo/Dell until you have to use their trackpads for any amount of time. I know; my wife has one. My 5-year old son can tell there's no comparison between a Lenovo trackpad and the Apple version.
Given that 99% of users don't require more than 8GB in a MacLaptop, it's hard to justify increasing the maximum ram beyond 16 GB for that fraction of 1% of users who do. Not impossible, mind you - because there is always value in chasing after the 1%, but to some degree, Apple's efficiency at running their operating system and applications on small memory footprints makes it less valuable to increase their maximum ram footprint.
My girlfriend is a nursing student, not a programmer and has 8 gigs of ram on her laptop. She's constantly asking me to look at her laptop when it beachballs and slows to a crawl when she's doing homework and her memory is maxed. She only has chrome, Word, Excel and some online courses open.
I'm a power user. I currently have 43 applications open simultaneously on my i5 MBAir with 8 GB Ram. I have VMware fusion running Windows 7 (With Visio running inside that), and virtualBox running 4 OpenBSD images, Google Earth, the entire Office Suite (PPT/Excel/Word), Safari with 12-15 Tabs, etc, etc..
Of the approximately 100 million or so Macintosh Laptop users, it's entirely possible that a million of them are High End video editing or Developers/3D modeling and require more than 8GB, but I"m pretty confident that the vast majority of Macintosh Laptop Users will require less out of their system than I do - and, for better or worse, a lot of the high end scientific workstation/CAD-CAM/Servers/etc... have departed from the Macintosh Laptop Platform, and are now running on the MacPro, or, or, more likely, Linux/Windows.
And yes, I realize I've just argued myself into a corner, that those people have had to leave the Macintosh Laptop world because they need the horsepower/memory that they can only get on other platforms - but that's who is left on the MacLaptop community, and that's who Apple is targeting.
Unfortunately Chrome is absolutely terrible not just for power usage but also for RAM usage. For some reason Chrome loves memory, it gobbles it up. Safari is much better about it.
I switched from Chrome back to Safari recently and while it took some time adjusting, I have been seeing almost 2 - 3 hours longer battery life, and I have had way less issues with "beachballing".
I can't believe I have to repeat this, in 2016: software workload naturally expands to use all available resources. Period. Nobody likes doing "memory optimization" work when developing.
I regularly have 50 tabs open on Chrome. Switched to Safari a month ago hoping it would leave me more memory.
Turns out my machine suddenly started beachballing, swapping like mad (battery usage up) and crashing. Switching back to Chrome completely fixed that problem.
Haha, not anymore. For some time now, the PRO in Apple products is for PROsumers, or its possibly just a meaningless vestigial acronym now. See also: Final Cut X "Pro" which was obviously not targeted at professionals.
Edit: for comparison, Lenovo T460p can be configured with quad-core i7, Nvidia GPU, 32GB RAM, 1 SSD + 1 HD/SSD, replaceable battery, 1.9mm key travel, base starts at $800 with many components user-replaceable, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t460p...
Hell, my three and a half year old W530 has a quad-core i7, Nvidia GPU (Optimus), 32 GB RAM, and a pair of Samsung PRO 850 SSDs.
My one year old MBP (which is really a "2013 MBP") has half the memory and storage of the ThinkPad. In fact, pretty much the only noticeable difference between it and the "new" one is the touch strip. :/
I have a rMBP, but these T460p's are excellent machines, even can come with a touchscreen. If I had to have only one laptop, and it had to be windows....
It's not that it's hard, it's just the logistics of running the virtual machines(s) and the applications they contain. You could use a minimal linux distro like Alpine or Tiny Core, but you still need to run applications on top of that if you're testing or developing.
Spinning up a basic devstack instance (for example) take a minimum of 6GB and that's before you even deploy any test vms inside that infrastructure. Another example, if you're doing config management development you may need several VMs running which in turn may have (say) large java apps with heavy memory requirements even when fairly unladen.
So, I guess the answer is, it depends on what you're doing and what the memory requirements of the thing you're running on VMs is.
Hyper-V has dynamic memory, so memory resources can be reallocated as needed, and has driver hooks so that linux vms can be resized too. There's also Intel's clear containers push which virtualizes for linux but shares a lot of kernel structures between the host and the VM.
>It seems like a really big opportunity, even if it's really hard.
It's not because it's a problem that is easily solvable by spending a small amount on better hardware. 16GB RAM costs $80 which is cheap if you're only going to use it for VMs.
For a 512GB SSD, no upgrade option vs 2TB, 14" vs 15" screen, and the crappiest NVidia graphics option even at the high end $1500 model.. What a joke, those are MBP 2013 specs.
It's not hard to bump into the 16 GB limit when doing video editing, photo editing, software development with virtual machines, etc. All of those tasks are commonly done by freelancers on-the-go, which necessitates a pro-level laptop. Instead we got a gimmicky touch bar and lost compatibility with decades of peripherals.
Well, this fact coupled with os x being absolutely SHITTY at managing and task-switching when you're doing this, and you've got a good argument for abandoning the platform.
Used windows for 15 years, osx for the last 10, haven't found a panacea between the OS, applications I need to run, and my essential human right to run 100+ tabs. Maybe 32 GB of RAM will do it.
I don't think I've ever used more than a gigabyte of RAM programming. I could even do it on a Raspberry Pi. What exactly in your workflow uses 64GB of RAM?
C++ games programming. Build process uses several gigabytes, but running the game in debug configuration takes 50-55GB because we store every allocation at the moment. If I need to run my own servers or bake data I go over that easily.
When you say "store every allocation" do you mean you never release anything, or do you just mean you store info about every allocation? If it's the former, that sounds kind of crazy, is it common for game developers to do that? If it's the latter, you could always write it to disk (which is what malloc stack logging does).
We had a random memory corruption problem recently, so we started storing every allocation without releasing, to verify periodically. We do free up old memory, but only every 10 million allocations or so.
Maybe it's not super common for games programming, but it's definitely common to not use ref counted pointers or anything that could help you here.
machine learning stuff - whilst training datasets are usually cloud-deployed, dev data alone can use up a lot of RAM. I've recently started dumping my matrices to disk for dev work now. Or turn off Chrome and Firefox which turns out to be the largest memory sucks in my ubuntu machine
16g ram: perhaps 13g available to the user. If you run chrome/spotify/slack/an editor you're often left with only 8g useable.
ml work commonly uses data that is 8g+ -- and regularly 32g+ -- just for the data itself. Yes you can work on remote servers but it's convenient to be able to work and develop locally.
No that's not why. If you have any application that sucks memory without releasing it, adding more memory just delay the inevitable.
As for the RAM in the rMBP. I'm only half disappointed compared to what I would have been 1 year ago. My workflow is pushing more and more stuff in the cloud, so instead of running a bunch of small VM locally I can have VM sized properly to the task at hand rather than limited to my laptop configuration.
That's the beauty of Capitalism. It doesn't matter if someone, no matter the position in society, doesn't understand why someone would need 32GB. As long as there's sufficient demand, it'll be produced by some business.
you are the entirely predictable, and, sorry, but very irritating, "who needs more RAM than I have ever needed" stereotype of every comment board ever. 16GB is peanuts for anybody doing anything serious in graphics, video, machine learning, statistics, or finance, or ....[put your professional subject here].
Not everybody wants to have the weight on their back of a clock-ticking cost of doing their R&D online in the cloud. Many of us, including me, want a highly capable machine with an upfront, quantifiable cost, but that is professionally credible.
Hear hear. The anecdata being thrown around in these comments is ridiculous. Like the above, and also the people saying "everyone i know has a desktop". So what? I need a powerful laptop, and i don't need to justify it to you. End of story. Apple's insistence on limitations are ridiculous and just as offensive as Bill Gates'.
This is highly subjective and anecdotal, but I find OSX to use a lot of RAM.
The in-OS memory compression helps, but when I still had a 16GB Macbook Pro, the system always found a way to use up all of the RAM to the point that the compression would kick in to handle the overage over my physical memory.
My habits aren't any different in terms of extraneous windows/apps open on Windows, and I rarely hit 100% RAM utilization on my 16GB Windows machine.
The system should use all the RAM. You paid for RAM, why have it sit there unused? As long as the next user process gets the RAM it asks for, I want the system to use all my RAM to cache everything.
Edit: even to the point of compressing pages, since it's faster to uncompress them than fetch from disk.
> Mac Pro: Buy. If you like paying 2013 prices for 2013 hardware.
It's even worse than that, if you're in the UK: the price of the 2013 Mac Pro has gone up by £500. Yes yes, Brexit and currency adjustment, and if it were new hardware I'd clench my teeth and bear it. But a £500 increase for hardware that's almost three years old is highway robbery.
Turned my gaming PC into a Hackintosh because games became boring. I'm amazed at how easy that went down.
Installing OS X took only a little longer than on my native Macs. I just had to tick a few checkmarks in the Hackintosh post-install software to customize for my setup.
OS X 10.11 updates I could install as soon as they were available from Apple. No problems at all. (I of course checked the appropriate forums for compatibility notes but there never were any problems reported). Haven't installed 10.12 yet (as I'm not too thrilled by the OS on my MBP anyways) but I heard it works just fine on Hackintoshes.
Now the caveats: I disabled the onboard audio and attached external USB speakers instead. Because onboard audio seems to be more broken than not and USB audio "just works". I'm also connecting the machine via ethernet and don't have a WiFi adapter attached. Oh, and I got lucky in the first place by choosing OS X compatible hardware (Intel CPU, ASRock mainboard, AMD GPU).
Things that doen't work: Browser DRM with Safari. I can't watch Netflix on the machine. iMessage support is cumbersome. And I can't submit binaries to the app store from the machine.
But otherwise for work it's a beast (compile times are great compared to my MBP) :)
As long as you use Intel CPU/AMD GPU you're golden. Intel's HD GPUs work, too. Nvidia GPUs need 3rd party drivers from Nvidia.
I was looking into it, and the answer seems to be fine if you (1) don't reuse hardware -- just buy exactly the components on tonymacx86; (2) don't install OS updates on release but wait until people have figured out how well they work and tweaked the hackintosh software; (3) are willing to suffer some pain around making imessage work.
edit: the key to a good experience seemed to be finding a working configuration then leaving it alone. If you want to update the OS regularly, you'll probably be unhappy.
I'm getting serious shades of "IBM clone vendor throwing darts at a board to try to appeal to every possible price point" instead of coherent product lines here.
My guess is it's a transitional period. The new low-end 13″ MacBook Pro, the new 12″ MacBook, and the outdated 11″ and 13″ MacBook Air probably ought not to coexist. But the MacBook Air is important to Apple as their entry-level (i.e. cheapest) laptop, and the MacBook is still too expensive and not quite featureful enough to replace it.
I think Apple would like to drop the MacBook Air in favour of a cheaper MacBook at some point, but they can't right now.
I was wondering what would happen if Intel bought Compaq back in 1991 (when Rod Canion and Jim Harris was still at Compaq) for a while now. Intel has a high profit margin too, and Compaq had higher profit margin back in 1991. Even back in the late 1990s laptops still had a higher profit margin, and laptop theft was more common in these days. Anyone remember the Apple price increases in 1988? Particularly for the Mac II it was worse.
I was for a while thinking of the case where Apple bought NeXT, but Gil Amelio and later Ellen Hancock stayed as CEO. While PC margins was declining, I was thinking that Apple could mostly focus on the higher-end PC and workstation markets. I wonder how this would have compared to Tim Cook today.
> This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history.
I very rarely respond with such a glib comment, but: really? Isn't that slightly hyperbolic?
This is very emotive language to describe a completely reasonable and innovative update to a laptop. It was never going to satisfy everyone's needs or wants, especially when some of those wants are not currently physically realistic ("all day battery life" and "even thinner design"?).
For myself, as a 2012 rMBP owner, this is a really solid upgrade that I would be delighted to use.
It's been what felt like forever since the last Mac update, aside from the new Macbook. Which is only a little more appealing to most people than the first-gen Air.
I, personally, have been feeling like it's upgrade time for my 2013 Air for a year or two, but there hasn't been anything beyond tiny little CPU bumps that they didn't bother making any noise about. This was going to be NEW! MACBOOK! PROS! for the first time in ages.
Yeah, it was pretty disappointing. Especially when Microsoft sat down in front of every digital artist on the planet yesterday and looked them straight in the eyes with an expression Mac users haven't seen since like 1994 or something.
These things are always personal... for my use case, I do need a quad core CPU and portability, but these CPUs seem like they're the best compromise for speed and TDP that Intel currently offer, so I don't see what else Apple could do there. I also really value the larger track pad, the better screen, and the reduction in weight. So for me it would be a nice upgrade. I can completely see how it wouldn't be suitable for someone else though.
Ok, now from my point of view: slower CPU (I don't edit video, I don't need 4 cores), new keyboard layout (I don't have any issues with current trackpad), same screen (100% brightness level? never), no USB-A port, no HDMI port (and I hate adapters hell). And 15" version is not even an option because it doesn't have Esc button and F-buttons - I use them every 5 minutes in IDE.
> 15" version is not even an option because it doesn't have Esc button and F-buttons
As for the Esc-button, they've added an option to macOS Sierra where you can map the modifier keys to Escape. Very useful to have Caps Lock mapped to Escape.
I don't know about Microsoft, but Apple now has two product launches in a row that failed to introduce anything really new. Especially when it comes to MacBooks, Apple's chief competition isn't even Microsoft. It's their own 1-3 year old products. Why should I upgrade do this new MacBook? It doesn't levitate or make me coffee.
With phones it's a little less clear cut because phones getting faster is still worth paying for, but that will slow down at some point.
It seems to me that Apple has finally hit their post-Jobs point where the radical innovation is outpaced by the comfort of not changing much and just printing money. Of course it's quite possible that iPhone 7S will in fact hover and make coffee, and they are just having an off year, but somehow I am pessimistic about it.
Having personally met Panos Panay as a fellow groomsman at a friend's wedding, I can tell you that guy is full of energy and passion. He's the type of person that brightens up a room given he's so fun and enthusiastic.
I was hoping to get one that supported multiple 4k displays. With the title of "Mac Event" I was anticipating at least 2 Macs updated, not just the MBP.
They killed the Mac Mini when they stopped making it upgradeable. They can kind of get away with that with the Macbooks because of the form factor, but there's no excuse with a Mini. I'm hanging on to my late 2012 model. Specced out to the max and with a hybrid drive, it still boots faster than my more recent rMBP.
I cringed when Apple's event started with a video claiming how great their products are for disabled people, just the same as Microsoft did the day before.
I don't recall either of them then going on to build on that with any product/feature announcements...
I had a friend in uni that was blind. He used a Mac for all of his work because he said, and I quote "It's the most beautiful OS I have seen".
He wasn't just legally blind, he had absolutely no vision what so ever... but with the voiceover technology and the accessibility built in to OS X 10.4 at the time it was already amazing to him. Apple has worked very hard to make iOS and OS X accessible to not just those with perfect vision or perfect control, but also those with various disabilities.
And now, they make a huge step back by launching an unaccessible touchbar that removes real keys, hence removing options for your friend. Yay, progress.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's more accessible. I would think it has voice over like the iPhone which is supposedly one of the smart phones for visually impaired people.
What exactly are you looking for that they aren't making? I don't know about Windows, but Macintosh and iOS have all sorts of software features for accessibility, and they've had for years.
> Macintosh and iOS have all sorts of software features for accessibility, and they've had for years
Yup, I remember seeing a blind guy on the subway using voiceover on an iPhone 3g (that would be the second iPhone ever) - totally blew my mind at how adeptly he was able to use the thing.
I cringed when Microsoft did it. Apple has been doing stuff like this for years. Accessibility has been at the core of the company since the 90s. Just look at all the accessibility meet ups, workshops, and presentations were given at this year's WWDC alone.
No, only the 11 inch one has been discontinued. The $1000 13 inch Air is still on sale[1], and so popular that I would predict it won't be killed off until the cheapest pro becomes sustantially cheaper than $1500.
- A MacBook pro with some real innovation. They could just copy Microsoft with a detachable screen (oh but they would cannibalize iPad market), pen input, touch screen. But, instead we get this touchbar thing which is great but I am just disappointed that it is the only thing they have innovated here.
You know, laptops with a pen input have been around for a long while. Even the convertible kind. I don't think that form factor is fully baked yet. In fact, I have a couple of HP tc1100s from the year 2000. You can still get good use out of them. But as a mass consumer device, they were not a runaway hit.
I suspect that Apple has a roadmap for conservatively rolling out more digitally configurable/reactive/touch interfaces on their laptop form factor. They will do this while working off the of strengths of each input device. My bet is that they will come out with e-ink keyboards and some kind of display built into the touchpad, perhaps with a stylus.
I would concur with you that this was a disappointing Mac event, however.
It has been written about many times (about Apple's TV business and a rumored Apple TV with an actual screen) that screens, whether monitor or TV are actually very dumb, it makes no sense whatsoever for today's Apple to be in the business of making dumb screens, while their main business is value-added products.
So, they passed on the opportunity to make the 'Apple monitor' to their main supplier of LCD screens, LG. Fair enough.
FWIW, I really, really don't want a detachable screen. Other users might, but if you're a programmer using your MBP as a work machine you just want something that opens and closes with a strong hinge, great battery life, and bulletproof wifi.
I think the touch bar is just horrid, its a step backwards if not simply a declaration of being out of touch. Who looks at their keyboard anymore? For a company with so many touch oriented devices the last thing they needed is an extension of the keyboard
I don't think it's that bad. I can definitely see the benefits for different applications.
However, watching the presentation at times the touch bar felt like an elaborate workaround for a full-blown touchscreen. Especially during the dj demo.
And with the Microsoft Puck for the Surface Studio still in the back of your head, the touch bar for Photoshop or video editing looked a bit outdated.
It is being years since Apple did anything innovative yet they are gaining users. Status conscious Chinese and Indians is their new Market and all they want is Apple in their homes and pockets.
Apple said on Tuesday it saw a nearly 30 percent decline in its China revenue in the quarter ending September, the highest fall among all regions, due to tepid demand for its iconic iPhones.
iMacs were refreshed in late 2015. It's typically ~3 years between new generations, often with a hardware refresh somewhere in between. Nothing new here.
> - No monitor announcement.
They partnered with LG (I think?) on a 5k monitor. Sounds like a reasonable replacement for the Thunderbolt Display.
> iMacs were refreshed in late 2015. It's typically ~3 years between new generations, often with a hardware refresh somewhere in between. Nothing new here.
147 May 2015
215 Oct 2014
387 Sep 2013
298 Nov 2012
577 May 2011
280 Jul 2010
We're currently 380 days since the last release, which is on the long side other than the one 2010-2011 outlier. I don't think anyone expects Apple to ship radically different hardware designs every year but they desperately need a tick-tock strategy which ships identical cases with non-obsolete components if they expect anyone outside of the die-hard Mac fans to keep buying.
This might have made sense a couple of years ago, but I don't think desktop hardware is advancing at a rate where yearly updates are a must. This seems even more true for typical Mac use-cases where users don't quite care as much about gaming performance. Intel deprecated tick-tock for a reason, so I don't think it would make sense for Apple to adopt that strategy now.
I don't think it needs to be a rigid update every year but they should have a policy of not staying more than one generation behind. The 5K iMac jumped to Skylake, so that's fine, but the rest of the iMac line is stuck on Broadwell, the Mac Mini is Haswell, and the Mac Pro is Ivy Bridge.
The solid industrial design, long service life, etc. are worth something but probably not 3-4 hardware generations, especially for the premium market Apple wants to be in. The PC market hasn't been completely stagnant and while nobody is buying a Mac for super hard-core gaming they really don't want to be in a position where someone drops a fair amount of cash and their new computer struggles with a game which came out a year or two back, 4K video playback, etc.
I'm more concerned about the ports. If Apple really is moving to Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C for everything, they need to start shipping iMacs and Mac Minis that support this too.
I think Microsoft has sensed their weaknesses and has made a change in strategy from focussing on what works for "ordinary people" and segmented their market and is now trying to win over people one segment at a time, developers, gamers, artists. Not sure if they will find more good segments to target, but this is certainly a good strategy for winning over those segments. They obviously have a path to travel, but it seems like a good one to be on.
Regarding the 15" version, I have the 15" 256 GB Intel Graphics 2015 Model and I really, really, was expecting the same unit with the Skylake processor version of the quad core with the Intel graphics that has the on-board graphics RAM.
I was hoping it would be lighter weight and longer battery life.
Instead we have the discrete GPUs that undoubtedly will need more battery life than the Intel internal GPU.
You understand that your point is flawed? Compromise isn't always necessary! The OP was looking for innovation in this space, similar to say what Tesla did for autos.
-.- but it is. You can't make thinner devices with more battery. The way battery tech is right now is that to make it thinner you need to sacrifice battery volume and consequently capacity. Nothing short of a major technological breakthrough will change this, and nobody on earth has shown even the slightest signs of having managed to produce a better battery technology, let alone it being ready for consumer tech. So no, my point is not in the least bit flawed.
> Also, Panos Panay sounds like a genuine, authentic, passionate and knowledgeable whereas Jony Ive sounds like an Evangelical designer who feels "fake". I don't know how to explain it.
>Microsoft really hit it out of the park yesterday
Hmmm, you make it sound as if the Microsoft event was a home run - it wasn't. The Surface Studio was interesting, but it's clearly aimed for graphic professionals and its stratospheric pricing put it out of reach for a lot of people. As for the Surface Book, well, considering all of the issues they've had with the previous version I'm not sure people will be so inclined to even upgrade. And let's not even get into the ridiculous pricing for the Surface Book.
>Also, Panos Panay sounds like a genuine, authentic, passionate
You're right about that one. I've never seen anyone so passionate about creating documents and highlighting them.
> stratospheric pricing put it out of reach for a lot of people
Look I'm not exactly a fan of MS but $3000 isn't stratospheric in an era where 'budget' gaming builds are $1000 for just the tower and people are regularly spending $1500 - $2000 for a laptop. The equivalent artist setup with a MacBook Pro, a high end external 4k monitor, and a Wacom drawing tablet will easily set you back $3k.
idk seems very impressive to me. engineering is v hard so much respect to the teams at apple for continually pushing consumer electronics to the state of the art.
i think it's pretty obvious the macbooks aren't the big money makers at apple. that lil apple pay button is there to subsidize and justify continued development of the mac.
apple probably wants to kill the mac. but some guy at apple's like what if we put a lil thumb scanner on it and apple pay then can we keep it pls and then the cfo was like sure okay fine the mac can stay only if you add an apply pay button.
also pretty sure all-day battery life isn't innovation and thus probably not what they're working on. how about eternal battery life wherein a solar panel so efficient is able to pull light even in the darkest of situations. how about remote charging.
i'm sick of charging shit. that's what's next, no charging.
Apple has replaced the MacBook Pro with a faster MacBook Air labeled "Pro". I have no idea how they could think that professionals would use a MacBook Air (no ports, shallow keyboard, no expansion, no innovative features, marginally lighter). A tiny ribbon display is completely useless to me. They removed the escape key. Twenty years of using Macs and I'm not sure what my next laptop is going to be.
I am feeling the same way, except that I know what my next laptop will be. I am ordering a Surface Book.
The weird screen thing looks terrible on this MBP. It will require me to look at my keyboard, not my screen.
Meanwhile, the Surface Book gives me a touch screen (which is important to me because I create web software that is used on touch screens), the pen is great, the dial looks interesting, so I will probably buy that too.
The Surface Book should work great on my desk with an additional monitor and keyboard / mouse / dial. Whereas the MBP completely loses the utility of that weird touch bar thing in that same setup.
Also, I use virtualization on my Mac to develop a .NET app. So, now I don't have function keys for the guest OS?
It was developers who led the way to Apple's dominance in the notebook space, and I suspect it will be developers who lead the migration in the opposite way.
The question for me is, will I end up ditching the iPhone too?
> It was developers who led the way to Apple's dominance in the notebook space, and I suspect it will be developers who lead the migration in the opposite way.
I don't think any serious developer wants to use Windows, but … maybe this will actually be the impetus for more folks to start using — and more importantly, start demanding — Linux.
Honestly, it makes life easier. No more dealing with the bits where GNU & BSD are gratuitously different. No more straitjacket: a good Linux WM lets you customise your workspace exactly for the way you work. No more throwing money down a hole in licensing fees.
Linux in Windows 10 is pretty usable now - I am on insider preview. You still have to use VM for things like Docker, but thanks to having real native linux shell at your disposal, the experience is great. In my opinion much better than with macOS.
In my journey to buying and moving to the Surface Book, I just stumbled upon this announcement from March.
I have a MSDN subscription, so will I have access to this preview as well?
Is it good enough to do Ruby development on Windows directly? I had been thinking that would be in a VM, but maybe not. Maybe Atom (or even Visual Studio) will do the trick.
The other shift that makes the transition to Windows easier for a developer like me is that more and more of my development ends up in the cloud anyway. Push to git and the CI runs the tests. I could probably make the last jump to using containers and local testing would not only be easy, but also more accurate representation of the production system.
I am actually getting kind of excited to ditch my MBP.
I'm very interested in this, is there anything that really feels like it gets in your way? I'm planning a setup that I'll need windows on and I'm considering not bothering with dual booting and just using this.
Honestly I'd rather write Common Lisp in emacs talking to PostgreSQL and fronted by NGINX than C++ in Visual Studio talking to SQLServer and fronted by IIS.
> "Meanwhile, the Surface Book gives me a touch screen (which is important to me because I create web software that is used on touch screens),"
Have you ever tried using touch screen on windows as a developer? I just don't understand how people can list it as a benefit, windows interface especially in any apps for developers is horrible for touch use, and don't forget that in order for you to touch the screen you have to raise your hand , how many times a day can you do that without your shoulders being sore?
The thing I applaud Apple for is standing (at least here) the ground and not going with a touch screen for laptops, I think having a touchscreen in a laptop is a horrendous and useless idea, touch screens should only be on the object where you already lay your arms on, like keyboard in this case with Apple, having a touch screen 5 feet away from your hands will make you not want to use it, and that's not even considering OS your which is not meant for that
He clearly stated that he develops web software that is used on touch screens. It seems like a pretty big benefit to be able to test how well your software works on a touch screen without having to a use a separate device.
Have you ever used a laptop with touchscreen? It's not that your touching it all the time.
You really miss it when you're switching between touch and non-touchscreens. You can't help but pointing at the screen only to realize: "Damn, this is not a touchscreen".
It's like that saying: Once you go touch, you never go back.
I've a SurfaceBook, I didn't think I'd use the touchscreen at all when in regular "laptop" mode. I end up using it _all the time_. It really is super intuitive to just reach up and touch the screen.
I have a laptop/tablet hybrid. My next device will not have a touchscreen, it's a waste of time on the windows ecosystem where most apps aren't touch friendly.
I've a feeling you're in the minority though. It's not that touch becomes the main method of interacting with Windows. It's that it becomes convenient for some things, particularly scrolling.
I have a laptop/tablet hybrid. Sadly it weighs too much for me to actually want to use it as a tablet. So I never use the touch screen, I have a wireless mouse that I use to scroll. Being touch is mostly annoying when people point at my screen and click things.
I still think the surface book is cool, but the weight factor is probably my biggest concern for the tablet mode.
Do you own a touch-screen laptop? I have one (a Razer Blade) and I actually love it. I thought it would be a gimmick that I never used, but now when I use my work computer (a Macbook) I find myself poking the screen and being irritated that it's not working. For UIs that are designed for it (like 50% of Windows 10) it's really nice to just poke at the screen.
While your dragging your finger across the touchpad to click on that thing you need to click on... everyone with a touchscreen is already on to the next task.
My problem is, I need Unix in order to get shit done. I need Emacs and I need a package manager that can install the missing parts of Unix I now rely on, like pv and entr. I just don't think I can live without that stuff and I'm terrified of trying to make Windows work for me. I know Microsoft announced their "Linux" support or Ubuntu for Windows or whatever—how does it compare to macOS and Linux?
At the same time, I fear how finicky Linux is on modern laptops. I especially hate touchpad-related sensitivity issues. I tried running Linux on my MBP and wasted days trying to get the touchpad sensitivity settings to something remotely close to the MBP and couldn't figure it out. I imagine the situation is probably worse on platforms like the Surface because I expect Linux driver authors are doing more work on inexpensive commodity laptops. Is that true or do you think Surface Book will have decent Linux support?
I don't like feeling like a prisoner of a platform that's drifting into stupidity. If I had a lot of spare income I could splurge on a couple of possibilities and see what works but I just don't have that much spare capital.
My thoughts exactly. My next laptop will be a Surface Book as well.
Limited RAM, no Fn keys, no ports used in enterprises all over the world... I'm not carrying the lightest laptop money can buy if it has to be accompanied by the largest bag of adaptors.
I get the sense that there is a movement inside Apple right now to abandon the professional market. Everything they've released lately for pros has been half-hearted at best. I'm getting increasingly concerned that one day soon they will drop Mac OS products altogether and just leave us to the wolves
It just seems like their definition of "pro" has changed.
It used to be video professionals and graphic designers. Now it's developers and web designers. Developers don't need SD slots or a screaming GPU (although you can never go wrong with a better GPU). I worked off of a 2012 MBA with an external display for years, and it still fits the bill! Light enough to carry around between work, home, and coffee shops, powerful enough to run a local web server and all the apps I used for development and 2-3 screens, and enough battery life to get a day's worth of work done.
Apple will never drop MacOS or their Pro level computers because their Pro line is what makes their iOS App Store revenue. Their definition of "pro" is just going to be less video-centric, and more developer-centric.
> Their definition of "pro" is just going to be less video-centric, and more developer-centric.
Their recent slate of choices makes me wonder how they are being developer-centric. Or if they understand developers at all. They sure don't make a point of showing off developer-centric features, innovations, and upgrades.
Apparently we have very different ideas of showing off products meant for developers. That's not the same thing as making things developers can use for consumer-focused applications. When is the last time WWDC featured developer-focused hardware, meant to improve developer productivity—or even something as subjective as happiness?
I think it's more accurate to say iOS developers are their focus. Apple just opened an academy in Italy for those developers, and gave them their first taste of programming on the iPad via Swift Playgrounds, a language Apple created for them.
They'll probably have an IDE on the iPad Pro, AKA the future of personal computers according to Cook, before we even see a hardware refresh with Kaby Lake.
Don't forget the audio guys. Logic has been neglected for such a long time. Unlike Final Cut and Garage Band it didn't even get a mention in the Hello Again event.
I hope not. I know more professional developers in startups using Apple laptops over anything else on the market. They have to recognize the size of that market.
Geographically once you get outside of major tech hubs, the Mac's market share as a developer workstation is quite tiny. I remember one time I was sent out on site to a big corp in an office park in New Jersey and everyone in the cubicles around me came up and cracked jokes about my MacBook, tried to challenge me because I wasn't a "real developer" since I used a Mac etc.
Honestly I'd guess the main people keeping the Mac line afloat at Apple are probably their own engineering staff. Imagine having to develop Apple products on another OS, how frustrating that would be
I think the macs are going to remain a necessity for development to be done on their precious mobile line. I don't think they will ever be killed off completely but they are certainly being de-emphisized
I think initially "pro" actually meant "for professional users," but it's clearly now just a marketing term. As a professional user, I want at least a mixture of port options (hdmi, usb) and a keyboard that supports touch-typing, not some gimmicky band I'm going to have to look at to see what it's showing. I've been using macs for ~20 years but my next laptop will not be from Apple.
I think Apple now thinks of the Pro as someone who is a pro at using a OS X and their consumer software line... They edit family videos in iMovie, write jams in Garageband and edit their photos in Photos! These novel features are geared directly for them, not the real professionals.
Can't think of too many people that edit in Final Cut on their 13" or 15" laptop screen. The touchbar would be pretty annoying to use with your laptop docked and plugged into a production appropriate screen.
The whole story about ECC ram in the computer industry is completely insane. RAM is basically the only place in most PC not protected by a form of ECC, except on expensive (or at least less produced) Xeon (or maybe some AMD, I don't know which ones). I don't know if caches on most ARM processors have ECC, but the situation might very well be the same on smartphone. Sad...
If I'm not mistaken, all Xeon E5 and E7 processors support registered ECC memory. Many (if not most) multi-socket Xeon motherboards won't even let you install non-ECC memory.
Here's the thing... there's really not much of a point in ECC memory for most desktops and laptops. In servers, sure... in mission critical applications even a tiny memory error could have devastating consequences. But for someone browsing facebook? Nah.
Thunderbolt is a multiplexed port. Typically, you plug it into your big screen. The external keyboard, mouse and speakers are attached to the big screen. Now your MBP charges from that cable too.
No need to tell me that your use case is slightly different. You can't please everybody.
Edit: I just discovered that the LG screen Apple is selling as a proposed match for their new laptops does NOT have legacy ports on the back, but just more USB-C ports. This seems very dumb. I don't want three $39 dongles on the back of my screen.
Yeah so now you have to carry some sort of multi-adapter in addition to your ultra clean laptop.
> It also doesn't have a floppy drive or an IBM serial port.
So how long do you think until cameras stop requiring a SD card? How long until most peripherals go to USB-C? Any way you slice it, for the next 3-5 years people are going to need to carry around a dongle (or dongles) with their Macbook. Not the worst thing in the world, but certainly doesn't make the user's life appreciably better.
Adapters and dongles are pretty much unavoidable these days. There are simply too many semi-modern ports still in use for each type to be included on a laptop to cover everyone's needs. It makes sense to move towards modern ports that provide more functionality and better backwards compatibility via adapters. In that sense I'd argue they do make people's lives better because it's a solution to almost every potential problem. Back in the USB2 era it was simply impossible to connect many devices to a laptop. Now we have multi-function ports that can accommodate multiple external PCI-E enclosures.
What's unavoidable about the basic requirement of a USB3 port and SD card? How about HDMI/DP at least? I take it this is a sign every Thunderbolt device is totally dead in the water now? It's not about including a port for every single type, it's about including at least SOME kind of port. It's one thing to make a leap like Thunderbolt 1 and then Thunderbolt 2 and Lightning etc. have been, then it's another to say it's all USB-C now (with no real transition!) and expect anyone to believe you when you say it's REALLY THE LAST PORT THIS TIME GUYS TRUST US. Would it really have ruined the laptop to include a single USB3 port?
I just bought their latest phone offering. If I also pick up their latest and greatest MBP, I won't be able to charge the phone with it unless I buy a dongle. I want to buy a nice pair of thunderbolt headphones, this won't work with the MBP. I don't know what the hell they're thinking. Nothing "just works".
Why waste space with an inferior port? A USB Type A port is useful for backwards-compatibility, but lacks the speed or the Thunderbolt support of USB-C.
When a client gives you documents on a thumb drive when they meet you at the airport 30 mins before your flight, and you sit on the flight for 6 hours with your useless laptop that can't read the contents of the drive, then maybe you'll understand why having the most popular connector currently in existence on your new laptop might be useful.
Just like I don't want a Leatherman® with just a knife blade on it, even if it is slightly larger I want my laptop to have all of the connectors I'm likely to run into over the next N years so that I don't need to carry a separate bag just for the dongles.
Because the inferior ports are used by almost everyone? If I just want to plug my laptop into a projector it doesn't matter that I have a technically superior port that I can't use.
Imagine they added a couple USB-C ports in place of the little used Thunderbolt ports and then waited a year to see the usage frequency... I bet the HDMI and USB-A ports would be used a ton more than USB-C.
I'm in no way defending Apple's decision here - I think having no standard USB ports is stupid - but this is kind of Apple's thing.
Apple knows you'll use the standard ports if they give them to you. And that's exactly why they've taken them away. Because it forces users to actually make the switch to something (they think is) better.
I know this, but since they haven't fully committed themselves to USB-C yet so this move feels early. It's insane that you can't plug an iPhone into your brand new MacBook Pro without another trip to the store for a dongle (they aren't shipping a dongle in the MBP box).
MacBook laptops have headphone jacks and USB-c connections but no lightning input ports. If I wanted to use my EarPods with the lightning end on my Macbook I'm screwed. Nor can I use the headphone jack or the USB-C ports on the Macbook with my iPhone.
The lack of integration here between Apple's own products is alarming and indicates that a high level someone is asleep at the wheel.
It's worrying. Apple didn't want to drop Lightning from the iPhone, because it would mean losing control over iOS accessories. But now their iOS and Mac products have incompatible connectors, which can't be easily fixed. I mean, they could go for USB-C on the iPhone 7S, but they just told everyone to switch to Lightning headphones. And Lightning, which is essentially a glorified USB 2.0 port, is a waste of space to add to the next MacBook.
Because it's still the port that nearly everything uses. USB-C is great and fast but I still have to replace all my cords and chargers because my new phone has USB-C and nothing else I own does. It's the same for a laptop, if everything I have expects USB-A USB-C for all it's great features is a hassle.
Insert USB connector
Ooops, must be wrong orientation
Insert USB connector upside down
Nope, that was right the first time
Insert USB connector correctly
USB C solves this very real time-wasting problem! =)
Waste space? My current Macbook Pro has 8 ports. The new pro mac pro has 5 ports. The non-pro mac pro has 3 ports. Surely we can fit a HDMI and a usb...
Oh wait, they had to make this thing thinner. Because thinner is more useful, right.
But now you get the silly extra-low-travel keyboard as well, like typing on a table.
I don't think this is going to really be a thing, aside from fairly specialized use cases. Some devices with integrated cables are going to require adapters (and, fortunately, an A->C adapter is tiny, or carry one of those Anker 4-port USB hubs that's the size of a pack of gum), but I'll just buy new five-dollar cables for my type-B devices and not really care too much about it.
Having to re-buy all of them is a drag, I am totally not saying that doesn't suck, but I'm not worried about having a bag full of them.
Wrong all around. Thunderbolt is a superset of HDMI. Thunderbolt is ALSO a superset of miniDP.
Mac laptops haven't had Ethernet for many, many years, except via the Thunderbolt or USB adapters, both of which will still be possible on this machine, too.
Yes, the SD card reader was left out.
Wrong on USB ports; it's absurd to suggest that "100 out of 100" keyboards and mice plug into USB-A. Most such products these days are, in fact, wireless, and those which aren't can simply use a very very cheap USB-A to USB-C adapter.
Connectivity includes AirPort Extreme (802.11a/b/g/n), Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet, a Firewire "800" port, two USB 3.0 ports, a "Thunderbolt" port, audio in/out, and an SDXC card slot.
Just to point out that assuming "most wireless HID devices are Bluetooth" is likely incorrect - a huge amount of the devices I see come with a dongle of some kind, that plugs into... (you guessed it) USB A sockets.
HDMI, miniDP and SD ports should never be present on a "pro" machine of any kind.
"Pro" doesn't mean "more". Sometimes it means less. Like fleet cars that don't have cruise control. You don't need cruise when your job is driving around the city and you shouldn't need a SD card slot for any job that's not photography.
My professional photographer friend will be mightily pissed off by the loss of SD slots. Every dongle is a bit more gear he has to drag around the city while shooting.
My professional radio guy will be mightily pissed off at losing HDMI. Or rather would be, if he were still bound to the Apple ecosystem - he left it several years ago, never to return, because the price/performance ratio on their desktops went down the toilet when they stopped making user-upgradeable "cheesegraters".
Apple has gradually abandoned the Pro market. I thought they were simply trying to move everyone to laptops, but now I can see that they really have no use for non-iDevices.
3D Printers typically have SD or MicroSD slots for uploading STLs for unattended printing. Most electronic music equipment like keyboards, synths or sampler pads have SD/MicroSD as well. Hell a lot of shop tools like CNC mills and welders have SD Card slots. Don't most Action Cameras use SD or MicroSD? Most professional grade video cameras will record simultaneously to multiple media formats and one of those is always an SD Card. Anyone tinkering with a Raspberry Pi is going to need an SD reader too. If you're doing any data logging with embedded micro controllers then you're probably using SD or MicroSD as well.
Probably CF cards. Most pro-level cameras have that as the primary card slot with some also offering a secondary card slot that is SD. Our cameras all do. The standard slot on regular cameras tends to be SD, though.
Which, apparently, is only an acceptable response if you're criticizing the decision to remove ports. I have literally no need for a 3 1/2 floppy these days, but I'm sure not everyone "is me". Should that be a standard adapter as well?
Clearly Apple believes there are more people like me (with bluetooth cars, headphones, keyboards, and trackpads) than people like you. Anyways, his "100 out of 100" comment is comically wrong.
Oh, come on. I don't "support" anything, being a fanboy of a peripheral plug variant is a life I don't even want to contemplate.
I'm very happy to adapt to new things, when they offer a demonstrable benefit to me. What benefit does a USB-C keyboard give me, exactly? I don't need the extra bandwidth to transmit keypresses. Why not include one or two traditional USB3 ports alongside the USB-C ports to ease people over to a new standard?
Unfortunately, there's no height for traditional USB ports! If you look at the photos, the 3.5mm jack is just barely fitting. USB-A is ~4.5mm tall, while USB-C is 2.5mm tall.
Not a knock here since I know this is not a majority case, but for marginally quick typists, I would say these wireless/bt keyboards are useless. Input lag is dreadful.
I type roughly 150 WPM without many errors, though I can burst much higher. The last disconnected keyboards I tried were:
* Apple Wireless Keyboard
* Logitech K 300
* Microsoft -god-knows-what-it-was-called- from back in the day.
In all cases, I experienced stuttering or dropouts of my input at high speeds. This did not happen all the time, but it was frequent enough where I felt the need to go back to a wired keyboard (currently Filco Majestouch). Maybe I had a bad batch, or something was interfering with the signals in my homes. Either way, I don't plan on recommending wireless alternatives for quite some time.
Might be a OK solution if it was not that OSX continuously losing Bluetooth connection, the mouse paring when switching mouse is buggy or you want to play computer games at all.
I despise bluetooth keyboards because they always disconnect at the wrong time.
Now, I do stick with wireless keyboards in general, but that's because the proprietary Logitech dongle has never failed me in years.
If Apple can ever make a Bluetooth keyboard that "just works" in the sort of way they're advertising their upcoming AirPods will, including working properly during the boot menu and every time I restart into Windows, then I might reconsider it.
> There seems to be some discontinuity between the Macbook and iPhone lines.
I'm amused that I'll be able to charge my Nexus 6P with my Macbook Pro charger (unless Apple really screws something up), but my colleague won't be able to charge his iPhone.
FireWire had higher bandwidth than USB 1.0/1.1. USB 2.0 had higher bandwidth (480 Mbps) in bursts. FireWire (due to the dedicated hardware) could sustain 400 Mbps transfers. The use of FireWire on the first iPods and DV cameras was a good choice.
Edit to add disclaimer: Re-reading the parent and GP, I'm likely misreading the disconnect to mean Lightning -> USB-A cables on iPhones with MacBooks having only USB-C ports. I think they likely meant the lack of 3.5mm plug on the iPhone while still having the plug on the MacBook. I'm leaving the comment as the former is still an interesting question, even if it's not the one originally intended.
Here are the alternatives that I see:
a. Don't switch to USB-C.
This isn't realistic. The change was going to happen sometime, to USB-C or some other improvement. USB-C is a better port, if only that it's smaller and are reversible.
b. Include both USB-A and USB-C ports with the new MacBooks.
I think a lot of people would like to see this. Drawbacks for Apple is that USB-A is larger (impacting design considerations), and removing USB-A entirely puts more pressure on manufacturers to support USB-C.
c. Start shipping the iPhone with both USB-A and USB-C cables prior to the MacBook announcement.
This isn't consistent with Apple's typical secrecy. It's also arguably wasteful.
d. Ship the iPhone with Lightning->USB C cables prior to announcing the new MacBooks.
iPhones wouldn't be able to connect to existing machines without an adapter. Also telegraphs the upcoming change prior to the announcement.
e. After announcing MacBooks with USB-C connectors, provide USB-C connectors for free, or some kind of exchange/buyback program.
While I'm sure this would be popular, it's not very typical of the industry as a whole, not just Apple.
Am I missing any options? Given these, I think the disconnect is inevitable. And given the machines people currently have, I don't think Apple will immediately switch to shipping Lightning->USB-C with iPhones (and iPads). I expect that transition will happen sometime over the next year.
>There seems to be some discontinuity between the Macbook and iPhone lines.
I wouldn't say that, the use case is different. I think wireless makes significantly more sense on mobile.
Laptops are "mobile" but in a different way. they are not meant to be used while on the subway or working out, you sit down pull out your laptop, and if you want to listen to music you can plug in headphones. having to walk away from the laptop while listening to music isn't as important
I find the lack of at least one legacy USB port extremely worrying. Will the following work with a USB to Firewire/USB-C dongle?
* boot from USB (bootable CarbonCopyCloner backup)
* Yubikey (government issued, so I can't easily get an updated key)
* Kensington R800 presenter (supposedly, it's "just a USB keyboard", but I've had it not work via Bluetooth dongle or with the USB to Lightning dongle for the iPad, even though regular USB keyboards work)
USB C is just the form factor. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is commonly supported by USB C ports. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is backwards compatible with USB 3.0/3.1 and 2.0 but not USB 1.0/1.1. You may need an active adapter or hub from 2.0 to 1.1 instead of just a passive cable.
I saw something yesterday to the effect that you can have your cake (Control) and eat it (ESC) too. The Caps Lock key can be set so that if it is pressed and released alone, it sends Escape, but if you use it as a modifier, Ctrl-A, say, then it's Control. I think that's clever, but my opinion might change after I try it.
I'm in college, and every time I turn an exercise in the assistant takes my keyboard, tries to navigate Vim with my Dvorak setup and stares blankly as something completly different than what they expected happened.
I already have contextual buttons. I remap keys to what I want, that's one of the main benefits of Vim's multi modal system. I don't need an expensive gimmick to do so.
Vim has contextual physical button remapping, and it's a positive thing.
Apple adds a hardware + software feature to provide a context-sensitive multi-touch region allowing for multiple types of physical input & visual feedback in any application, and it's a gimmick?
It's a gimmick because this is already possible, even without yet another piece of glass to pay for and repair and that comes at the cost of physical keys It looks flashy and futuristic and cool, but it adds no value that could not be gained elsewhere, cheaper, with greater utility.
I'm also not only talking about vim here. Nearly any PC game in the past two decades or more allows key rebinding. Many even allow macros. Most GUI IDEs offer the same. This isn't new.
Lastly, you seem to want to characterize me as "pissing and moaning". Personal attacks won't get you anywhere with me.
Oh right, silly me. I forgot that traditional individual physical keys can turn into sliders/scrubbers, display waveforms, show scrollable image previews contextually.
> Nearly any PC game in the past two decades or more allows key rebinding.
Right, I forgot that mapping X to Up is the same as showing a colour picker slider when you need to choose a colour.
They can't, but there's a big display in front of me that can show these things and I can see it without looking down. And yes, mapping game controls can be as simple as you describe or extremely complex, especially if you involve software outside the game such as the drivers for most gaming boards.
You seem to be far too hostile for a conversation about a piece of glass on a computer. You should take a break.
Your hands don't have to move around as much to select a toolbar item and you don't have to move your hands up to the screen like a surface. I think the touch bar will be great for productivity.
The only part that's similar is the key faces can change. They're still physical keys that press individually. It's not multi touch, a key can't suddenly become a slider.
The issue is that the MBP line previously had zero of these ports and now they have zero of anything else. That means we have to go buy adaptors so that we can use our hard drives, power adaptors, iPhone/iPad charge cables, and other peripherals.
It's nice that these aren't proprietary cables, but I'll have to spend over $100 on adaptors, or wait two years until there are cheaper alternatives.
Lastly, there may be 4 ports in total, but since 1 is used for charging, there are effectively 3. Not a deal-breaker going from 4 to 3, but definitely a problem going from 2 to 1 on the low-end MBP.
> Lastly, there may be 4 ports in total, but since 1 is used for charging
Only if you're using it exclusively for charging. They literally showed using it with a display that gets video out over the same cord it powers the laptop with.
> Four standard (non-proprietary) multi-use ports is a complaint?
Well they are incompatible with almost everything Apple makes. You can't even plug in an iPhone out of the box. You'll need a special adapter for every device you have (monitor, storage, phone, SD reader, etc).
I hadn't even thought that far yet. All of my Apple cables would need Apple adapters. Every future Apple cable is going to need an adapter back to USB 2.0... facepalm
kinda reminiscent of the 12 year old Nintendo DS display. and in that I suspect developers will by constantly trying to find a purpose, never to much avail beyond some hotkeys, that only hunt and peck typists could appreciate. remember the uber lusted, and uber expensive optimus keyboards?
I'm surprised you're the only person here who has so far mentioned Art Lebedev/Optimus.
I have an Optimus mini 3 and an Optimus keyboard.
The former I never really got along with as the oled drivers made a loud 18khz whine. The latter, however, I still use for photoshop, gaming, coding, etc. - ain't got no poxy touch strip, my entire keyboard is a technicolor discotechque.
That ribbon was updated dynamically depending on the application you were using? Did it allow you to re-arrange the commands on it? Did it support scrubbing/swiping as a method of input?
So did I, but it was a simply something that could have used physical keys. Was it dynamic based on the application you were using or configurable in any way?
> No innovative features? What do you call a ribbon display that no one has ever done before?
A definite step back for the sake of introducing a gimmick, whose consequences have not been given enough thought.
They could have tried buying a Lenovo Carbon Gen.2 and using it for half a day, and realized what a stupid idea it is.
I actually had one of those laptops for a little while - issued by my workplace.
It came with the same concept - a touch-sensitive strip, with (limited) display capabilities and which could change its function depending on the context.
Even if the touchstrip hadn't been an utter piece of junk (which it was - hello lack of feedback and failing to detect extremely deliberate touches), I wouldn't have hated it any less. I don't want to have to constantly look away from the screen when I'm working. I'll avoid mentioning all the other problems of the Lenovo touchstrip (or the rest of the keyboard, which was an utter abomination) because hopefully Apple gets those right - but it doesn't really matter. Give me my ESC key back, and stop breaking usability.
In their boneheaded move, actually Lenovo _at least_ had the presence of mind to realize that ESC is really off limits, so they moved it to the row below. At the expense of the ` key, which isn't really an optimal solution, but it shows some modicum of reasoning about the usability impact of that gimmick. Apple doesn't seem to care.
I gave that mostruosity back shortly after, am now a happy user of a T450s which even has an ethernet port!!!, very happy with it. Lenovo shortly after retired the gen2, replaced it with a gen3 which has an absolutely normal keyboard, issued an apology, probably fired the idiot who suggested that horrible usability compromised. I'm afraid Apple may have hired that idiot.
I now may need to have the Courage to spend my own money on a non-Apple laptop after so many years.
I was in the same boat about six months ago when I was fed up with instability in OS X. Time Machine backups getting corrupted, not waking from sleep, etc.
I switched to a Dell M5510 running Linux and haven't looked back. Battery life isn't as good, but otherwise it's been great. Touch screen works fine, trackpad clicks a little heavy but works fine, all the standard ports and an included network dongle, Libre Office gets the job done, Netflix still works on Chrome, no random crashes or freezes, and no proprietary lock-in, privacy concerns, or cloud nonsense. Best of all it's basically the same size & weight as a MBP, not your average clunky PC monstrosity.
Indeed. Didn't we try UIs that change on the user dynamically and concluded they absolutely suck (remember the Windows 98 start menu re-ordering menu item position based on frequency of use?). They go against muscle memory training, and decades (centuries?) of convention.
For someone who spends the day in Terminal (bash with readline in Vim editing mode) and Vim, missing physical ESC key is going to be a huge pain in the ass.
So, after a decade of Apple hardware I am yet again on the cross roads looking for decent hardware and OS to go with it. As it stands now, Linux with PC hardware is going to be the only real option. At least there are good mechanical keyboard for PCs.
You got that all wrong. The least powerful machine is for grownups. The more powerful ones are for kids who like colorful glowing bar that flashes from time to time to provide entertainment and distract them from facebook and twitter posting.
The Macbook Pro they're boasting as a possible replacement for the Air has the new key tech which they mentioned in the keynote as having more travel distance, it keeps the old FN keys, and it has two thunderbolt ports.
So yes, changing the ports isn't ideal and only having one to use to plug in peripherals which will most likely mean a hub is required is a bit of a pain, but the low end doesn't even include the touch bar so I'm not sure what you're getting upset about?
Plus, the current generation of Macbook Pros weren't expandible as far as I'm aware? I've got the 15" rMBP and I can't upgrade anything within it, so I doubt Apple is too concerned anymore about allowing expansion in their laptops and I could see that trend spreading across the rest of the industry as well.
The new keyboard has less key travel, not more. From the Macbook page:
> So we designed a unique butterfly mechanism, which is wider than the scissor mechanism and has a single assembly made from a stiffer material — allowing for a more stable, responsive key that takes up less vertical space.
I thought they said it had more travel than the butterfly keyboard that's used in the macbook without name. I mean the super thin 12" one they came up with last year.
My beefs are the low-voltage CPUs and that it's even more expensive than the MBP if you want 16GB RAM ($2700, though you do get 512GB SSD for that which brings the MBP to $2600), let alone 1TB SSD (that's $3300 versus $3000 on the MBP).
And that's comparing to the 15" rMBP, the 13" is $2200 (16/512) / $2600 (16/1TB), though in that case the SB adds a dGPU. And battery life in both cases of course.
And the SB doesn't have a single type-C port let alone TB3.
I'm not sure what laptop to get next either. This "pro" version and the ribbon are not a good fit for me. I'm really looking closely at the new MS surface books.
I've owned every version of the Surface Pro and used the Surface Book for around two weeks before returning it. I finally gave up on the Surface Pro 4 and switched to a 2009 Core 2 Duo Macbook Pro I picked up on eBay.
Surface
Pros: Beautiful hardware, touchscreen works decently, Windows 10 is generally a decent operating system. Keyboard is pretty neat.
Cons: Tremendously buggy software and hardware integration. The Surface Pro 4/Book dock was effectively useless until several firmware updates. Tons and tons of issues -- I had to warranty repair the Surface Pro 4 three times before giving up and selling it. Still plenty of hardware bugs. Scaling on Windows 10 isn't very good outside of most MS developed apps. Battery life is pretty terrible for what it should be. (Do not get an i7 version -- sucks down battery. i5 is better) Hard to do productivity work on the Pro 4 as I really prefer a standard 13 inch notebook minimum. The Book does solve this issue, but I never felt the need to pay the huge price premium for tablet mode. Video drivers for the Pro 4/Book were crashing when browsing for several months after launch. At the end of the day, taking notes in a notebook isn't quite as convenient but just works better than using the pen.
I love the potential the Surface line has, but that's just it, potential. Microsoft needs to focus 10x more on QA. If they control the hardware and software, the result needs to be as seamless as it usually is (or was) on Apple devices. I'd love to see a lower priced Surface Laptop without the screen gimmick for professionals.
Just a note from another user - I bought a book when they first came out and was disappointed in the poor battery management and some serious driver issues. I returned it.
Recently I had a chance to use one for a week and ended up buying it. My big issues were all fixed and it has been a great daily driver for the last month or so. The linux susbsystem has been very useful if you play within it s boundaries and I'm happy with it as a development machine.
What's the best laptop for Linux these days? It's been over a decade for me since I touched one. Will I still need to mess with xorg.conf every second week?
Or not. I didn't change my default settings and I'm not running Linux Mint or Ubuntu or some other newbie friendly distro. It's just all taken care of. At least games run fine, though it must be said that the games I play are either from '99 or not graphics-heavy. Factorio is the heaviest one.
What laptop are you using, if you don't mind my asking? Is there somewhere where someone has explicitly listed out the laptops that are most compatible with most Linux distros?
I don't know about a list of models but most laptops work quite fine for me. Usually I prefer Intel and nVidia so that might or might not have something to do with it. I've got an Asus N56VB S4054H myself and replaced the HDD with a Plextor 256GB SSD.
What do you mean "no ports?" Four USB-C thunderbolt ports--how much more ports do you need? They keyboard is also a huge draw for me--I love the MB's keyboard. It's very precise. I'm a light typer so I don't care about key travel.
My big concern is how much they had to shrink the battery to shave off the half-pound.
I think you are confusing MacBook Air with MacBook.
The Air has the pre-shallow keyboard, and standard port array (USB 3 x2, SD, MagSafe, and TB). Minus the non-retina screen, the 13" Air is a very capable dev machine with great battery life in a light and compact form factor.
Brilliant time for someone to make a move in the Linux space. I do not want a Windows box, but would love something as refined as a Mac running a slick GUI on top of Linux.
I dunno, the base model has two Thunderbolt 3 / USB type C ports, and the model with the touch bar has 4 of these ports. All models appear to have the headphone jack. It might only be two ports on the base model, but it's ports that are significantly more versatile than standard USB.
ironically of course if you've got a new iPhone, you'll need an adapter to use the headset on the Macbook pro.
The problem, to me, of the port selection is that it means pretty much every user is going to have to carry a selection of adapters for years to come given the installed base of USB peripherals + things like projectors that do not have a USB-C port. Other laptops seem to do a better job of phasing things in gradually introducing USB-C ports whilst not immediately dropping the older ones to give people time to adapt.
Precisely. When will Apple start shipping iOS devices with USB C chargers? When will the desktops move over to this "better" standard? If the main impetus is thinness (which isn't important for desktops), then will we have years of transition, where peripherals come with cables that may or may not work, depending on computer type?
To me, the signature feature of the MacBook Air is the low-wattage CPU. And maybe the non-retina display. This new MacBook Pro is a Skylake i7. Not at all in the same ballpark.
Precisely how I feel. Also, what's the deal with the ports? At the moment it seems that you have to carry a dongle/adapter for every single Apple device, that's crazy. After eight years with my macbook it's time to give linux a real shot on my next laptop.
I love my 7510 and I'd definitely recommend it, but the keyboards are a bit of a lottery (this probably applies to all current Latitudes and Precisions, as they all look to use the same boards).
There are two different designs that I've encountered, with one of them being massively inferior (noticeably mushier feel, and a weak point on the arrow key clips that gets worse over time, until the clip starts 'expanding' under pressure, causing it to get stuck or pop off of the board).
No coil whine on my one at least, but maybe I'm just lucky.
I doubt weight is much of a factor for most people considering one of these things, but yeah they are a bit heavy (they can take a lot of abuse, though).
The touch bar examples shown are a usability disaster. You're going to hide UI from the screen and make me keep looking at the keyboard to find functionality?
I stopped looking at the keyboard every 10 seconds when I learned how to touch type.
The presenter spent most of his time looking at the keyboard and not the screen.
This gimmick will disappear when Apple decides a touch screen is needed to complete the slow merge with iOS.
>The touch bar examples shown are a usability disaster. You're going to hide UI from the screen and make me keep looking at the keyboard to find functionality?
That's the wrong way to think of it.
It's not a keyboard, it's an adaptive toolbar. And it's close to what professionals in several industries pay handsomely for -- control surfaces, only this one is also adaptive.
>I stopped looking at the keyboard every 10 seconds when I learned how to touch type.
It's obviously NOT meant for typing heavy workloads. Secretaries and programmers coding will not use it when doing their thing.
These professionals in several industries paid handsomely for the Adaptive keys on the 2nd generation Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. So much so that Lenovo had to remove adaptive keys for the next iterations.
>These professionals in several industries paid handsomely for the Adaptive keys on the 2nd generation Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. So much so that Lenovo had to remove adaptive keys for the next iterations.
Things are not the same just because they are instances of the same concept.
Lenovo's implementation was black and white, did not have controls such as slide, sweep, multitouch gestures, etc, and was just a novelty from a single Wintel vendor with not much third-party app support or OS support.
Apple's implementation adds deep OS support, will have software vendors onboard (judging from the adoption of older features Apple puts into its hardware/OS, it wont be more than a year when most apps people use will support this, from Photoshop which does already, to the Apple Pro/iLife apps (of course), to Pixelmator, Premiere, and tons of others. It also has color, multitouch/gestures, etc, which increase the utility much more, along with higher definition (for thumbnails and such which it also does).
Also Lenovo's other than that didn't sell much to the creatives market, where such a feature would be appreciated more (if it was done properly of course). Macbook Pro's already sell very well to creatives.
It's the same old story really: more thought out, more integrated, and more supported implementation beats "first to market this general idea" every time.
Eh. In the days when the animals talked, there were keyboards with generic function keys in a top row, with enough space around them for a plastic template sheet labeling the keys with functions for specific software.
Some templates came pre-printed for specific packages, some were blanks for pencil-your-own. Rarely used, but at least those thingies were cheap and did not remove real keys.
Such things were even part of marketing features, lots of old calculators had them. HP calculators even had dedicated modules paired with custom .... stickers (or overlays) to adapt "like" the touchbar.
Everybody wants 'this' yet nothing nailed it. Keyboard are strange beasts, and designers rarely have the right context or experience. A virtual bar is awesome in theory; but the fixed and tactile qualities that seem idiotic today are actually part of the value. Imagine a piano without keys. Even non weighted keys are despised by any musician. Your mind and body have lots of subtle cue sensors to perceive and react accordingly. Anything that contradicts this will fail for refined/industry use.
>Even non weighted keys are despised by any musician.
Not exactly. Jazz and classically trained musicians, yes. Rock, pop, electronica, etc gigging keyboardists play non-weighted keyboards all the time.
>Even non weighted keys are despised by any musician. Your mind and body have lots of subtle cue sensors to perceive and react accordingly. Anything that contradicts this will fail for refined/industry use.
We have already been over this when the smartphones came out without actual keys.
To add to this, I didn't interpret it as "hiding UI" either. I don't think anything will be exclusively available for use on the TouchBar. The way I understood it was the TouchBar will behave like shortcuts to existing functionality.
+1 To me it was more about saving mouse movements than hiding UI. Don't mouse all the way to the top of the screen to click that. Press this dynamic, context aware, button on your toolbar instead. If you'd still rather use hot keys, go for it!
The thing about the Surface Dial is that you don't have to look at it. If you want to press a button on the TouchBar, you have to look at the keyboard.
Doesn't seem like an improvement. F9, F10 and F11 have done this quite well for the last 20 years for me. I can use those blindly while looking at the code and using the mouse to hover variables that I want to inspect...
Every single shortcut shown in the cringe-worthy demos today is already mapped to a well-known keyboard shortcut in the app. And pro users can use those shortcuts without ever having to look down at the keyboard.
Final Cut demo claimed that "some of these shortcuts are hard to find in the menus of an advanced app" whereas:
1. the touchbar was displaying the simplest of shortcuts, many of which are already mapped to keyboard shortcuts that professionals use
2. menus in MacOS have a built in search which touchbar lacks, obviously
3. the very next demo of Photoshop showed touchbar shortcuts nested two layers deep and are basically undiscoverable.
What the hell is touchbar if not a totally useless gimmick for actual pro users of pro apps?
>Every single shortcut shown in the cringe-worthy demos today is already mapped to a well-known keyboard shortcut in the app. And pro users can use those shortcuts without ever having to look down at the keyboard.
I'm a pro user (of NLEs) and I don't "use those shortcuts without having to look down at the keyboard". Only a few of them.
And it's not because I don't do shortcuts in general (I've used Vim for over 20 years in all its glory).
Profesionals use external interfaces all the time, e.g. for color correction, editing etc. While this doesn't fully replace this, it's more than adequate for a lot of what those do, and perfect for editing on the field.
It's also not about those "keyboard shortcuts". Flipping through movie frames with variable speed is not a shortcut. Applying filter resonance on a DAW is not done with a shortcut. Heck, this can even change several items together at the same time (e.g. 2 virtual sliders etc). There are literally tons of other things we now use sliders, dials, etc for in Pro programs, and which arbitrary speed and "jump to place" (not just "one click at a time" as shortcuts offer) will be great.
>What the hell is touchbar if not a totally useless gimmick for actual pro users of pro apps?
It also has no wifi and less space than a Nomad from what I heard. Lame.
Anyway, let's give it a year and we'll see how many pro's swear by it.
> Profesionals use external interfaces all the time
Hence the need for the touchbar is further greatly reduced
> It's also not about those "keyboard shortcuts"... There are literally tons of other things we now use sliders, dials, etc for in Pro programs, and which arbitrary speed and "jump to place"
Which are delegated to a tiny strip in an awkward location (notice how carefully everyone is holding their fingers at ~90 degrees to the keyboard) controlled by very imprecise finger movements
> Anyway, let's give it a year and we'll see how many pro's swear by it.
I can agree on that :) We need more actual field experience
> Which are delegated to a tiny strip in an awkward location
Yeah, it seems like it might have been more useful to put it on the side of the keyboard. And they wouldn't have even needed to get rid of escape and the F-keys then.
Well obviously it's not for coding, but I understand the one you're replying to perfectly. And I think there are hordes of developpers out there coding daily on their MBP. Which are now sort of left alone. Anecdote, though I doubt I'll be the only one for which the lack of F keys is a showstopper - also see other HN comments: after about 5 years on a Dell I was thingking maybe this year to go back to a MBP (even though my last one lasted only 3 years) but seeing I spend a lot of time debugging, which translates to repeatedly hitting F-keys which is burnt into muscle memory, it's just not going to happen. Even if I'd learn to do it with that bar thingie, it's a bit of a waste of time since going back to any other machine the bar isn't there.
Coders don't just write code (no, you don't need F keys for that and yes your hands kan stay on the home row) they also debug it (for which the environments I, and seemingly others, use, assigned the F keys many many years ago)
I always forget which is which. Now looking at the chrome debugger F8 is used for Pause/Resume. Step Over F10, Step into F11, Step out Shift F11. Hence I use the mouse.
As an occasional debugging user it would be a great addition to have this on the keyboard.
I wonder if it would have been better to just allow different images to be displayed on the existing hardware keys. That way, you have physical keys, and can use them without looking, but when you're in an app that you're unfamiliar with, you can look and see what the keys are for.
I always use those keys on a physical keyboard while looking at the display, but with a touchscreen, I always have to look where I'm pressing keys, and even then my fingers are sometimes slightly wrong.
I have something like a touch bar on my Windows laptop. The main problem I have with it is that I touch it without knowing I have. Many a time I've gone down a rabbit hole of WIFI network issues to only discover that I've accidentally toggled WIFI off by brushing the bar.
This is one feature on my Windows laptop I don't like and not excited for a new Mac with one.
If they use haptic feedback it might not be so bad. Plus, apple controls the OS and hardware together, so they can ensure notifications must be shown for behavior like turning off WIFI or something similar.
When Schiller showed how MS Office worked with the touch bar, I thought it was pretty hilarious.
All of the toolbar buttons and more were already on the main screen. If they had offered a touch screen instead, the user wouldn't have to take his/her eyes off the screen to perform the same functions. And that feature is already available on Windows machines with touch screens.
>If they had offered a touch screen instead, the user wouldn't have to take his/her eyes off the screen to perform the same functions.
If they had "offered a touch screen instead", the users would have to hold their hand horizontally which would get tiring in about 5 minutes and unbearable after 10.
Not to mention that the on-screen tools were and will still be there anyway if one wants to use them with the traditional, and not challenging to the muscles, mouse and touchpad technology...
>> If they had "offered a touch screen instead", the users would have to hold their hand horizontally which would get tiring in about 5 minutes and unbearable after 10.
Why do so many Mac users think the presence of a touch screen all of a sudden means using it full time?
I got a Surface Pro when I was still a predominantly Mac user and I only used the touch screen when appropriate, which was for a fraction of a second every now and then. And it worked great.
Using a touchscreen is definitely better than a touchpad in a lot of scenarios because of the ability to directly manipulate content instead of having to navigate to it.
>Why do so many Mac users think the presence of a touch screen all of a sudden means using it full time?
Who said full time? Full time it would be unbearable in 1 minute. I said unbearable in 10 minutes with casual use in mind: raising your hand now and then to click this or that button.
>Just like the bigger screen iPhone, which was supposedly a usability disaster because you couldn't reach the whole screen with a single finger.
There's this idea that people will buy everything Apple does, or that people put down things until Apple does them.
First, Apple started from nearly bankrupt in 1997 and so. People clearly didn't just buy what Apple put out. What build Apple's fortune was not some hundreds of millions of "sheep" who magically bought everything Apple put out, but a steady stream of products that increasingly more people bought.
People didn't just buy everything Apple put out. People had to be convinced, from the first post-jobs stuff (Cube, iMac) to start buying them -- increasingly over time. The iPod took years to really take off, for example.
Along with this idea, there's this other idea that Apple 'fans' will put down a feature until Apple releases something that has it.
Those saying that seem to forget that the internet is full of people, and the people who said "the iPhone doesn't need a bigger screen" are not necessarily the ones who bought one after Apple released it.
Apple still sells tens of millions of non-plus iPhones, to people who don't really like the large screen, and even put out the old 4" model again (iPhone SE).
I got a Plus and it's still a usability disaster on that regard. One hand use (which is what I mostly used to do on the smaller models) is pretty much out. But I coped mostly because I appreciate the extra ~50mm camera lens, and for reading stuff while commuting etc (with two hands).
>> There's this idea that people will buy everything Apple does, or that people put down things until Apple does them.
Part of the problem is that Apple / Steve Jobs sometimes helped perpetuate this idea.
Some examples:
* Steve Jobs saying video on an iPod type of device was pointless
* Steve Jobs saying that apps were pointless on the iPhone and that the web apps were good enough
* Apple putting out a TV ad emphasizing that the iPhone had the perfect screen size because your finger could go from end to end
Apple dislikers predictably misinterpret this as Apple taking an ideological position when all Apple is really doing is just trying to control the marketing message on what they think really matters with the current release of a particular product.
Maybe it's because I've gone for the biggest phones as daily drivers for a while now (Note series => Nexus 6 => Plus), but 1 hand is a total non-issue for me.
I just shift the phone around in my palm. Even with an oversized Otterbox like case I put it in from time to time I'm able to reach 80% of the screen with my thumb, and I reach around with my other 4 fingers to reach the rest of it.
Pretty similar to how I use/used my Nexus 6 one handed, and it was a little bigger than the Plus
This isn't how you use a touch screen on a laptop. I don't know why you're so insistent on this narrative but it's false. Adding a touch screen doesn't turn it into a tablet, it turns it into a laptop with a touch screen. That's a very important distinction.
You would do well to try one out for a few minutes with a typical workflow of...well, whatever you do on a computer. I thought it was stupid at first and now I miss it when I use my MacBook.
After getting a Surface Pro, I would constantly start swiping up and down on my Macbook Pro's screen thinking I could scroll. I still do that on other non-touch laptop screens too.
>Adding a touch screen doesn't turn it into a tablet, it turns it into a laptop with a touch screen. That's a very important distinction.
That's my point exactly. A laptop with a touch screen is not convenient, unless it can be somehow turned into a tabled (Surface does it IIRC).
>You would do well to try one out for a few minutes with a typical workflow of...well, whatever you do on a computer.
Tried a few times to get a sense of how it would be during this thread. It doesn't work for me at all (at least when sitting on the desk with the laptop). I don't want to raise my heads and hold them to the screen, and I'm not that hot into touching the screen with my fingers either.
>> Tried a few times to get a sense of how it would be during this thread.
On a real touchscreen laptop or simulating on a non-touchscreen laptop?
I think it makes a real difference to sit down with an open mind and go through some real use cases on a laptop with a working touchscreen (and the software you'd actually use). You'll realize that you're only using when it is appropriate for only a few seconds at a time, if that. And there will probably be huge time gaps (hours, days even) where you might not use it. But in the odd time when you need it, you're often glad that it's there.
I don't get how it can be unbearable in 10 minutes on a laptop. It's not going to be much further away from you than a tablet would be, and people love them their iPads. If the experience was -that- bad, nobody would be buying iPad Pros.
And it's not as though you can't continue to use the keyboard, touchpad and/or mouse.
I'll admit, when the Surface Pro first came out, I mocked the touchscreen too. I thought it would create Gorilla Arm. Then I actually got one and used it for an extended period of time. You don't even notice that you're touching the screen.
>I don't get how it can be unbearable in 10 minutes on a laptop. It's not going to be much further away from you than a tablet would be, and people love them their iPads. If the experience was -that- bad, nobody would be buying iPad Pros.
It's about the orientation, not the touch screen itself. A tablet you normally hold horizontally or at an angle when you use it.
Now, if it was a detachable screen, like the Surface, that could work, but a laptop screen you have vertical to the keyboard.
>> It's about the orientation, not the touch screen itself. A tablet you normally hold horizontally or at an angle when you use it.
I get that it might not be for everyone, but a LOT of keyboard cases have been sold to iPad and iPad Pro users (and many of these cases prop up the iPad screen vertically). And keep in mind that iOS pretty much necessitates use of the touch screen more than Windows 8/10 does. So there must be a LOT of people who would be OK with that mode of use.
With respect to the Surface, I use it with the keyboard attached 99% of the time so it's pretty much vertical all the time. It's not even remotely uncomfortable or tiring in normal use.
>I get that it might not be for everyone, but a LOT of keyboard cases have been sold to iPad and iPad Pro users (and many of these cases prop up the iPad screen vertically).
Yes, but those are for writing -- ie. using the iPad laptop style. Not for doing work e.g. graphics, etc with the iPad vertically held.
>You aren't really suggesting that writing is not work, are you?
No, I wrote "E.g. graphics" as a parenthetical expression to give an example of the kind of work they dont use those cases for. That is, what I wrote amounts to:
"Yes, but those [cases] are for writing -- ie. using the iPad laptop style. [They are not using the cases] for doing work [like graphics] with the iPad vertically held".
>And why would Schiller make a point of mentioning the touch bar integration with Office and iWork?
Because Schiller made this point about a laptop, and even more so a laptop with a flat horizontal strip.
Whereas what I said is that it's tedious for people to do that (touch interaction) on a vertical screen. In Schiller's example there's Office and iWork but no vertical touch screen -- just the strip, and the regular screen you handle with the mouse/trackpad (that is, without having your hands in the air to touch the screen).
Different strokes for different folks, I guess, but in my use of touch on a vertically oriented screen, it hasn't been negative at all.
There's something to be said about being able to use two fingers to directly manipulate a window's contents to zoom an image or vector diagram in an app to get to the precise size versus futzing around with control + or control - using the app's preset increments.
Yeah, I feel as if people try to hate touch screens because Apple doesn't think its right. Even though iPad users with keyboards use the interface. It requires a transition period but it becomes second nature after a while.
One of the important things for me with something like the surface is when you finally dock it to use a full setup you don't lose any capability. What happens when you do this with the new mbp? Is a new apple keyboard in the works?
I was considering getting the new mbp this time around thinking this was going to be an enhanced media button bar. But now I'm definitely back on the sidelines
> If they had "offered a touch screen instead", the users would have to hold their hand horizontally which would get tiring in about 5 minutes and unbearable after 10.
This is complete nonsense. I used to think this when I used a MacBook full time. I still do but buying a touchscreen PC has worked wonderfully and I never hover my hand long enough to do anything tiring. It's great for doing quick touches or scrolling / zooming in with precision. You wouldn't want to use it for everything because that's not its use case (this isn't a dedicated tablet this is a computer with a touch screen).
>This is complete nonsense. I used to think this when I used a MacBook full time. I still do but buying a touchscreen PC has worked wonderfully and I never hover my hand long enough to do anything tiring.
I never hover my hand period, so that's one better. Not that hot about touching the screen either...
>It's great for doing quick touches or scrolling / zooming in with precision.
With my hands on the keyboard and my thumbs close to the touchpad, I don't see the appeal of suddenly raising my hands to the screen, especially for general things like zooming, scrolling. It could make sense to manipulate something like an object directly, but to raise hands just for zooming or scrolling?
>> With my hands on the keyboard and my thumbs close to the touchpad, I don't see the appeal of suddenly raising my hands to the screen, especially for general things like zooming, scrolling. It could make sense to manipulate something like an object directly, but to raise hands just for zooming or scrolling?
I think I figured it out. You're spoiled by the quality of the Apple touchpads. A few minutes with a crappy Windows touchpad and you'll be wishing you could touch the screen.
FWIW, I hate all touchpads. I just hate Apple touchpads the least.
>I think I figured it out. You're spoiled by the quality of the Apple touchpads. A few minutes with a crappy Windows touchpad and you'll be wishing you could touch the screen.
Hmm, you might be on to something here. I'm so used to the Mac trackpads, than I almost never use a mouse with them (except for heavy illustrator/photoshop stuff), whereas with my Windows laptops I always use a mouse.
>FWIW, I hate all touchpads. I just hate Apple touchpads the least.
I hate the IBM's/Lenovo's red-nipple thing with the same passion!
>If they had "offered a touch screen instead", the users would have to hold their hand horizontally which would get tiring in about 5 minutes and unbearable after 10.
Lifting my arm up to the screen every time I want to use something from the toolbar? No thank you. I already hate lifting my hands from the keyboard to use a trackpad.
Except all of those which use an F-key are broken now. (You might interject that Mac OS itself does not use F-keys in shortcuts, but Linux and Windows apps in VMs do.)
This is not for when you are in "get stuff down quickly" mode. They might have predictive text, but I don't think anyone will use it. For me it's when I'm editing images in Lightroom I wish I could do more stuff full screen so that I don't have the visual clutter in the way.
This. Lightroom currently doesn't make it possible to view a photo fullscreen while at the same time having editing controls. A touch screen is also not ideal, because then your hand covers the image. The touch bar seems to make using adjustment controls in full-screen really easy.
All the keys will be virtual, and they will have haptic feedback. The shallow key travel now is to prepare people, similar to the coke <> new coke conspiracy.
Then they will make the keyboard half of the laptop an ipad. Then they will release two ipads that hinge together. Then they will figure out that ios/macos dichotomy is causing problems and finally go through with some hybridization.
Wouldn't count on that. I'm pretty sure for using the touchbar you have to look down and aim while you press the thing which takes some time. Compared to that you most likely already blindly can grab your mouse or find the touchpad and move the cursor in the fraction of a second.
I think it has the potential to be an interesting alternative to a touch screen. Some of the examples did look modestly useful. I will, however, miss the volume and music forward/back keys which I actively use. Like anything else, I'll have to wait and see how it works in practice.
I've been holding off on updating my macbook pro, but I think I'm going to skip this generation and buy used. The lack of an nvidia gpu is a giant pita. You never get good cuda performance on a laptop, but it's nice to be able to test code on one.
If they expand up to 32g ram though I'm buying one the second they go live on the site.
I waited until the new pages were up specifically to see that they are still using LPDDR3. They left this important info out of their keynote, only mentioning "2133Mhz".
Alas it's probably true. Albeit, maybe with time space memory kicks in if the app uses the bar in order to promote really important "instructions". I didn't see any mention of tactile feedback, which is sad. The idea of a more generic dynamic keyboard will have to wait for a v2, or maybe longer.
Exactly, I want to look at the screen continuously with my fingers feeling the keyboard. Too much eye movement and distraction from the main task. Personally, this will just slow me down.
Looks like they are using crappy dual core Ultrabook processors and calling it a pro notebook. As per the frequency of processor its looks like i5-6267U for 13inch touch bar and i5-6360u for non-touch bar. I would instead buy this laptop with i7-6820HQ for much cheaper.
That's absurd. There's no way they're using those processors and getting the performance improvements they described. It's not unheard of for Apple to get custom parts, or over/underclock the cpu.
Agreed, but what if something else actually happened. Apple wants to broaden its Apple Pay integration. They decide to add touch id, and adding a black glossy button on the side throws of the aesthetic. So instead, they replace the entire bar.
I know USB-C is the future, but it's going to be a long, long, long time before all our devices are using it - particularly external displays. My current Macbook Pro has an HDMI port. I use it every day. I do not want to carry a converter dongle with me everywhere (I did that with my old Air that only had a DisplayPort).
To echo other complaints: this is supposed to be a professional machine. I don't care about it being several mm thinner, especially when it comes at the cost of useful ports and a great keyboard. Give me a device that I can use, day in day out. Don't take away the damn escape key to trial out a new "touch bar" that inputs emojis, and don't bump the price up by this much when you know I'm going to have to go out and buy a host of $20 dongles when I buy the thing.
I agree that their devices have been getting unnecessarily thin, but their aggressive push towards Type-C is for the best. The industry will follow Apple's lead as usual, and in a year's time most devices will be Type-C compatible.
In the interim, I don't see the big deal with throwing an HDMI adapter in your bag unless you carry your laptop around in your hand.
Of course not being able to plug in USB sticks, mice, keyboards, or anything really due to lack of USB-A port is a significantly huge hassle and a rather big step back for "it just works" motto of previous laptops :/
USB-C flash drives are already out there, and cheap. Will still need the dongle for transferring between the new Macs and non-USB-C devices for ~3 years.
These are laptops with built-in keyboards and trackpads. People who opt for external input devices do so via Bluetooth. I've never seen a USB keyboard plugged into a MacBook; and even if you have a fancy gaming keyboard, USB-C replacements will be out in a matter of months. Or again, the dongle.
This series of laptops is a perfect progression. It needed to have 4 USB-C ports, and it does. No complaints.
Well, other than the lack of a hard escape key. Turning shift+F6 into shift+fn+F6 is annoying, but I'll get over it. The only applications that I use fn keys with have key remapping, so if I really can't stand it I'll change my shortcuts. The escape key though... not looking forward to the day I upgrade my hardware and find myself having to enable the "caps-lock is now the escape key" preference.
Bunch of generalisation. Plenty of people use external devices via USB with Macbooks. Now all of them will need adaptors. Same goes for people who have a bunch of flash drives. New ones may not be expensive, but it's still a waste of money when nothing actually stopped working.
Agreed. Accessory makers aren't going to build the ecosystem if they don't have to, and most manufacturers are apparently too chicken to commit to type C (let alone TB3).
It's no worse than the current situation, where most projectors only take VGA. If you have a MacBook Air or older MacBook Pro, you already had to carry a Mini-DispalyPort adapter regardless.
If you own a projector, you're used to keeping adapters around for different computers. If you give presentations frequently, you're used to keeping adapters in your travel bag for different projectors.
I suppose someone has written this already, but today's presentation made it more than clear that it's indeed for (aspiring) professionals, but not for fully-fledged IT professionals. So a musician, artist, photographer, writer etc. is in the target audience. Those people do not use function keys and in most cases (except for writers) do not touch-type. Everyone else is not in the target demographics and will have found the new generation unusable.
So in that sense, Apple's positioning of the new MacBook Pro is spot-on and probably has been this way for years. Most of us just thought that a good notebook with a "pro" label is meant for IT professionals. It probably never has been, it's just this year that the distinction is this striking.
Out of curiosity, what do you use function keys for?
I'm a developer, and the only key I routinely use from the top row is escape, for vim. (And Ctrl-Alt-F1 to drop out of X11 on a Unix system... but that's not applicable here.)
Anyway, it looks like you can still put a virtual escape key on the touchpad when Terminal is active. Or if you want a physical key, you can also remap one of the other modifier keys to act as escape.
I use the Function keys all the time while developing - mostly for debugging.
In IntelliJ, Visual Studio (through Parallels) and Chrome, the Function keys allow me to step through the debugger. It's pretty standard in my day to day workflow, and they all pretty much use the same keys.
Esc is pretty useful in vim and it's used frequently in Windows. I could remap a key, I just don't like being dependent on custom layouts since I sometimes have to switch between machines and I'd rather it be as consistent as possible.
* F3 - Find(Rarely, generally only works in older applications.)
* F5 - Refresh(Works in many applications.)
* F6 - Cycle through input box focus in Firefox.
* F9 - Expose, All Windows
* F10 - Expose, Current Application
* F11 - Expose, Desktop
* F12 - Dashboard
Plus many other function keys that are application dependent. I started with function keys in MS-DOS and Word Perfect since it came with a keyboard overlay.
I think the touch bar design is fine, but I doubt I would get enough value out it to make it useful enough to me while not making me regret losing physical function keys. They kept a 13" model with function keys, which is the size I prefer, so it will be fine into the future for me.
Yes, I've never once thought about my MPBr "This beast, it's just too thick!" Honestly the only improvements I would like are the following:
1. Stop making new power connector standards.
2. Stop making power adapters that fray after a year.
3. Increase battery life.
4. *Add* at least one standard USB port.
5. Decrease display bezel.
6. Increase RAM and HDD to 32G and 10TB.
1. They have, new Apple laptops are now using USB-C.
2. They have, new Apple laptops now use a USB-C charger that has a separate cable, rather than a fixed attachment point.
3. The 15" has increased by an hour.
4. USB-C is a standard, and is backwards compatible via cheap adapters/cables. USB-A ports are not forwards compatible, and cannot be used for charging, thunderbolt, display port, etc.
5. They have. Both 13" and 15" are smaller externally with the same screen size.
6. RAM, I agree with. My 2011 17" MBP has 16GB RAM so I don't know why they aren't up to 32GB yet, at least in the 15". I doubt 10TB is feasible as SSD in a portable device this size.
After a quick perusal of Amazon, if I got a new MBP I'd need to spend at least $100 to be able to plug in what I have hooked up to my current one. Not to mention the annoyance of turning my desk into a rat's nest of adapters
OTOH, since 2005 they've changed the connector _once_, and the adapter is seamless enough that I still use 2006 and 2008 model chargers without giving it a second thought.
The power connector had a good run but they couldn't get the video connector right! Every new generation Apple laptop I buy has a different video adaptor.
I've had similar - my 2007 MBP had full DVI. My 2011 MBP has Thunderbolt. My next one will have USB-C.
But what is the alternative you'd prefer? They still ship with that massive DVI connector?
Frankly, one they stopped using an apple-proprietary connector (ADC, which was basically DVI + USB + Power in a single cable, 14 years before USB-C) in 2004, there's not much to complain about.
Since they dropped ADC, they've used combinations of DVI, Mini DisplayPort, HDMI, Thunderbolt1 & 2, USB-C, and now Thunderbolt 3.
Those are all industry standard ports. Some are influenced by Apple, but none are limited to Apple.
But displays have advanced rapidly as well and have constantly increasing data requirements. The new MBP can drive a 5K monitor at 60Hz (two, even!), and that much bandwith requires TB3.
Are you high? Samsung just announced the 2TB 960 Pro for >$1200, their 4TB SSD the year before was like $4000. 10TB is enterprise-class 2.5" $10000 a pop land (or cheaper in bulk, Seagate announced a 60TB SSD for $40000 in 3.5" format)
Yeah, I would consider retiring my Air for one of the new Pros, but I'll have to spend ~$300 replacing power cords (home, office, backpack), monitor adapters (backpack, around office, at home), while still having to keep the old chargers and adapters due to my old work computer. That dissuades me.
At the office - this now means that the conference room adapters, power cords, etc will have to be swapped out as soon as a new employee starts.
In 1998 the iMac dropped most other ports.
Admittedly, maybe a bit less severe because it still had an ethernet port, and a couple FireWire. But it did drop the ports that were commonly used for peripherals and devices, which is the similarity. People used those, every day. In the exact same model, they also dropped floppy drives. A _lot_ of stuff people used frequently was no longer supported in that device.
I'm not sure that this time it will work out for them, that's not what I'm saying at all. Personally, I think HDMI is useful still. And I'm hugely sad to see the MagSafe go. I guess all I'm saying is it's not totally uncharted territory, or even that uncharacteristic of Apple.
I'd argue the iMac was a different situation because there was an immediate upside to using USB peripherals, namely they were much cheaper than Mac proprietary stuff. For example HP had a popular inkjet printer, the PC (parallel port) version was $150, while the Mac (serial port) version was $300. The floppy wasn't a huge loss either as most Mac users were using Zip disks.
There's no real advantage right now in using TB3/USB-C, because pretty much nothing else uses it. And I'd bet that, in 2020, USB-A, HDMI, DP, and even VGA will still be in common use, so I'll probably be using dongles forever.
This. Apple has lost touch with reality. They seem to confuse the consumer iPhone world where they basically get away with whatever they want (since they set the standards and it's all just toys and entertainment anyway) with the professional world where people actually have to get shit done.
I can't believe they are trying to sell this toy bar, ehm excuse me, touch bar, in a device that's supposed to be "professional". It's unreal. It reminds me of one of those "IoT hotels" that are replacing every light switch and toilet flush with a touch screen. Same kind of useful.
I suspect folks are still going to buy it because Apple. But I sincerely hope that the competition use this opportunity to execute on some real work machines.
From what I understand, they are merged. Meaning that USB C and Thunderbolt 3 are compatible, but you will get more throughput when you are TB3 to TB3 than when mixing with USB C (I may be off!)
Wow. I hate to say it, but I thought the products in Microsoft's event yesterday were way more exciting than anything from Apple lately. This plus macOS Sierra seems like a whole lot of "meh". This coming from a guy whose first computer was an Apple IIe, who owned a Mac Cube, and whose daily driver is a trashcan MacPro.
I try not to buy too much into the Jobs hype because it falls into the same line of thinking that leads to the "Great Man" theory which I don't put much stock in.
That said he did seem to have a way of understanding the whole ecosystem that Apple was trying to sell. In the post Jobs era the number of products and configurations available is getting pretty unruly and you now have an issue where you can't plug an iphone 7 out of the box into a new MBP without a dongle. That's pretty disjointed and strange. The TouchBar also seems to be misplaced on the MBP which every time I've had one for work is pretty much immediately folded up and put under a thunderbolt display (now requiring another dongle) and making the TouchBar worthless.
So yeah I don't know if you need Jobs specifically but you certainly need someone looking over the entire product range and making sure it makes some amount of sense.
I think it's been two or three years since I've plugged my iPhone into my computer to do something besides charge it. Good riddance! iTunes in the later years felt awkward and hard to use.
As much as the hacker crowd loves to hate Jobs, he really was the visionary for the entire company. Apple has a very far lead, but if these events continue to go the way they are going I don't see that lasting another 10 years.
They released the first mass market all-in-one personal computer with mouse input + pixel based text rendering, multiple fonts & cursive. They pushed for USB-A standard 19 years ago. They killed parallel & serial ports. They started the trend of making beautiful devices that don't feel like minified mainframes. They made UNIX truly mass market. They made the first music player that could handle more than 8 songs. They revolutionized smartphones + introduced touch based keyboards. They created WebKit.
They also advertised. And I love most of their ads (at least those during Steve Jobs' time).
"They pushed for USB-A standard 19 years ago. They killed parallel & serial ports."
Apple wasn't part of the initial group of companies that were involved in the USB standard. The iMac did greatly lead to its adoption. I think "killing parallel and serial ports" is a little over the top, but one could argue that the adoption of USB greatly reduced the use of serial and parallel ports.
+1. Writing this on a trashcan 'pro. I love it; I'm happy with it, 32G and a little La Cie RAID, but I know I paid too much for it.
Last year's MS rollout opened my eyes. I ordered a Surface Pro 4 the next day. Was skeptical about the keyboard, but it's good enough to code with. Install Git, Atom or VS Code, IntelliJ and I'm off. It's now my go to device when I want to do a little light coding on vacation. The kids love to draw with the pen. It's a lot of fun.
Completely agreed. Speaking of Microsoft, I wonder how the touch bar will operate in Boot Camp. I would hope that they'll at least leave the default F keys on there.
While I agree that Apple event was unimpressive today, I wonder what exactly was so "exciting" from the Microsoft? That $4200 desktop with an outdated unupgradable hardware and a touch screen for the OS which is know for being horrible at scaling things?
I've found Sierra to be very disappointing. A few new features I'll never use, and things I do use everyday are now broken, e.g., the new PDFKit broke Skim annotations. Sigh.
The new machine actually looks ok to me, though I agree the advance over the previous model seems very incremental.
I have the early 2013 MacBook Pro. It is still pretty fast.
Nothing I saw today makes me happy to upgrade as a developer. Sure it's lighter and thinner and HUUGE trackpad that's a nice to have when I'm traveling. But the TouchBar requires me to look down at my keyboard which slows me down. And they can't even leave the keyboard itself alone with the terrible butterfly implementation coming over from the 12" MacBook. And I am sure all the Mac developers will enjoy developing apps that both have and do not have TouchBar. Just wait 5-7 years for all the non-TouchBar based MacBooks to not be as common.
Then the ports. Apple seems to think that it can force upgrades to technology like they did with (arguably) floppy drives and cd-rom/dvd drives. But USB (non-C) is not a dying standard, neither is an SD-card slot. People still use SD-cards Apple! I don't want to buy dongles all the time. I am shocked they even bothered to include a headphone jack. Where's your courage now Apple?
All of this has been very off-putting as a developer. And where are the iMac and Mac Pro updates?
edit: also they got rid of magsafe. i guess thats a split since their magsafe 2 cables were way too loose.
>> with the terrible butterfly implementation coming over from the 12" MacBook
You missed the part where Tim mentioned that the butterfly mechanism is a second-generation upgrade with more travel time on the keys. It remains to be seen just how large of an improvement it is.
>> People still use SD-cards Apple!
I'm fine with the SD slot being gone. Just another space-wasting component most of us haven't used in a decade.
This is a portable series of laptops. If you're in a position that you are lugging around a DSLR camera and 5+ lenses (that's why you need SD reader, right?), and a host of other devices you seem to need USB for, you have enough space in your bag for a larger adapter[1] - it even has the SD card reader!
The kind of people who need so much aren't lugging around a laptop to a cafe. They're sitting in professional studios with million dollar hardware, and rendering their IMAX videos on external server clusters. Or at least at home/office with a proper desktop machine that better matches their profession.
Next I'll be hearing about how terrible it is that the Apple Watch can't edit 4k video.
> You missed the part where Tim mentioned that the butterfly mechanism is a second-generation upgrade with more travel time on the keys. It remains to be seen just how large of an improvement it is.
No I read about it. If the prev gen product was great I'd give them the benefit of the doubt. But as it stands their butterfly style keyboards are terrible for me.
> I'm fine with the SD slot being gone. Just another space-wasting component most of us haven't used in a decade.
> This is a portable series of laptops.
Versus the large non-portable laptops that Apple previously made.
> If you're in a position that you are lugging around a DSLR camera and 5+ lenses (that's why you need SD reader, right?), and a host of other devices you seem to need USB for, you have enough space in your bag for a larger adapter[1] - it even has the SD card reader!
No I need it like any other normal person who backs up their photos to their laptop. I don't lug around 5 lenses and I sure as hell don't want to lug around additional dongles that cost me $50 just to buy. Maybe USB-C becomes ubiquitous in 2-3 years time. Great, I'll consider my options then. Loss of MagSafe just to get this USB-C ubiquity is (again) not worth it for me.
Not really even sure why you're stating your opinion as some refutation of my opinion... My post was talking about why I won't be buying one. If you don't use an SD slot. Great, maybe this MacBook Pro is for you. If you want "the future in cabling and connection ports", this MacBook may be for you. If you want a "Touch Bar", this MacBook may be for you.
> The kind of people who need so much aren't lugging around a laptop to a cafe. They're sitting in professional studios with million dollar hardware, and rendering their IMAX videos on external server clusters. Or at least at home/office with a proper desktop machine that better matches their profession.
I am not sure what this has to do with me, a developer and photographer who is interested in upgrading his MacBook Pro and literally needs the exact opposite of this.
> Next I'll be hearing about how terrible it is that the Apple Watch can't edit 4k video.
Okay buddy. Never knew the current gen watches could edit 4K video.
I have a old Chromebook that I am using as my primary dev machine (at home). Was hoping to upgrade it to a MBP, but now i'm not sure. I know they are two different classes of machines, but what really struck me in that I can literally buy 10 Chromebooks for 1 MBP.
I have no idea with the idea of MagSafe, but on my Retina MacBook Pro (also early 2013), it's become extremely finicky. About 20% of the time, it just doesn't charge. I just have to connect and disconnect it a few times and eventually it works.
Clean your connectors and the problem will be solved. Do you know what will be extremely finicky in a permanent way? Your Thunderbolt 3 port after it's had the power cable unceremoniously ripped out from it.
At least there are 4 of them, so when one breaks you'll be able to use one of the others.
You have dirty contacts or a plug which doesn’t seat properly. Try wiping both sides with a dry q-tip (this is Apple’s recommendation) or use one soaked in isopropyl alcohol.
Sometimes little bits of magnetic debris can get stuck in the computer side, e.g. iron filings, staples, etc. You can try to get these out with Blu-Tack or similar if the q-tip doesn’t cut it.
I've made a point of keeping it clean ever since it started, but it doesn't seem to help much.
One time I noticed the connector was wobbly, and I found a very, very small piece of metal in there. I had hoped was the source of all my problems, but I think I caught it right when it happened because it didn't fix the problem.
Getting that metal out of there took a good half hour of trial and error. That magnet is powerful!
FWIW, in addition to cleaning the contacts which others have mentioned, I had the same problem and it improved when I reset my SMC: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295
- 7th generation Intel chips. Skylake (6th generation) is from August 2015.
- A move to Nvidia GPUs
- Retain the magsafe power adapter
- At least one dedicated display-out port, preferably HDMI
- 32GB RAM for the 15 inch base model
- Support for the airpods using their new W1 chip
What I'm mad they included:
- Price increase for low value
- Touch Bar does away with physical keys I use daily (most importantly escape), while providing very little functionality I see using in my daily workflows (auto-complete on a desktop? I type faster than that.)
What they could have surprised me with:
- A full touch screen
- Support for the Apple Pencil on the new larger trackpad
> - 7th generation Intel chips. Skylake (6th generation) is from August 2015.
Nonsense, 45W Skylake are from April-May, 45W Kaby is not expected until February-March.
edit: oh I just remembered they didn't use Iris Pro parts in the 15" so you are correct that these are 2015 parts. The corresponding KL parts still aren't out though.
While you are correct, the Kabylake processor that the Razer Blade uses is a low power 15W TDP chip. By nature this means that it is still slower than the range of 28W TDP Skylake processors the new 13" MacBook Pro family is receiving in this update. The 28W TDP variants of the Kabylake family is not yet available from Intel.
The AirPods are Bluetooth, but I was under the impression that the improved pairing and battery life technology relied on the source also featuring the W1 chip. After looking into it, an article[^1] from 9to5mac implies otherwise. If that's the case, we can strike this complaint from the list.
Couldn't have said it any better. Though I read somewhere that there apparently is a good reason to go for Skylake now and do a bump next summer.
Here is to hoping the last gen will experience a price drop by non-apple retailers.
Keeping the same price is just shameless. I feel like they could decrease the price without any problem but also know that many people prefer the old version and want to milk their money.
The usual culprits are virtual machines, large images, video editing. A little less common: big data, large matrices, scientific computing in general.
I never hit 16 GB on my laptop (I even disabled swap) but I got close once with three browsers open (I segregate some web apps into different browsers), a few VMs, some other random application running. It made me think if it was time to buy the extra 16 GB I can fit into my laptop. I just checked, it's about $100.
For sure, I regularly sit between 12-16GB used (mainly doing web development + docker work, large systems, many services), but frequently will be above that when running a lot inside of VMs.
You are also up against a loosing battle of programs using more RAM to do the same job. You get a better experience now, but you can also expect normal PC usage to result in big RAM usage.
On the average work day I've got 4 VMs running at any given time, eating up 6-8 GB of RAM. Put Chrome, my IDE, etc, and it's definitely relevant.
My real complaint here, though, is that besides the GPU and CPU, this is essentially the same specs as my 2013 MBP. I'm not going to drop $3.6k for an incremental upgrade.
Not at all. To me the touch bar is mostly a gimmick that removes tactile feedback from some commonly used keys --- most importantly escape. What the full touch screen offers, by comparison, is all the same potential functionality, in a place my eyes are already looking. On top of that, stylus support becomes an instant reality.
Now, in my daily workflow it's unlikely that I reach up and tap my screen very often (I'm usually in a text editor), but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if you ask anyone with a full touch-screen laptop if they'd trade their touch screen for the touch bar, they'd laugh in your face.
I'm not sure "tick tock" is the right word. The MBP used AMD in 2006, NVidia from 2007 to 2010, AMD in 2011, NVidia from 2012 to 2014, and 2015 is AMD. It's actually a break in the pattern for them to use AMD chips two years in a row.
They are using AMD's latest polaris generation GPU's which are $/perf/W on par with Nvidia, just don't have any super-high end offerings (GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 are unrivaled)
Unbelievably unimpressive compared to Microsoft's announcement yesterday, and 45 minutes into the keynote I still have no idea what the specs are.
I don't need some stupid touch strip on my Mac, I need a touch screen.
I haven't been this let down by product announcements ever as I have been this year with everything Apple's done.
Now we get all our standard USB ports removed, very little by way of actual hardware improvements, are we even going to get an upgraded Mac Pro that might meet the minimum 4GB gfx card requirement for Oculus, etc?
I've sworn by Apple products for a decade and a half. I'm done.
As a touch typist, I'm not sure this'd be an issue for me.
The distance between this Touch Bar and the monitor is minimal. With a bit of experience with a particular app, I imagine I'd be able to use my peripheral vision and muscle memory more often than not to achieve any particular function.
It's not like the distance between my desktop monitor and keyboard. That would be incredibly annoying as I'd actually have to take my eyes completely off the monitor to see the Touch Bar in that situation.
Admittedly not my phone, but I can touch type on my iPad. Not quickly (is there a way to switch it to dvorak? haven't checked), but it's doable. Probably 50-60 wpm with decent accuracy thanks to autoincorrect.
It feels weird as hell, though. Not getting any sort of finger travel as I press the keys.
EDIT: As well, on my phone (switched to a Nexus, not as familiar with it yet so still feeling it out), I can type pretty quickly without looking directly at the onscreen keyboard. My eyes see it, but my focus is on the text area itself. I imagine this touch bar will be like that for me, it's not so far out of my focal point that it'll totally disappear for me, and glancing at it won't require significant head or eye movement.
I mostly touch type without any serious errors at a pretty rapid clip on my phone. But that's with a pretty firm reliance on autocorrect. Which frequently makes stupid choices. But I wouldn't want to ever work like that.
What you are seeing is pure change resistance. It has no useful predictive power when evaluating whether the change will be good or bad overall, especially since the set of touch-bar use cases and the set of touch-type-heavy workloads does not seem to overlap much.
You would not be telling people "Oh we don't yet know if it's a good or bad change yet, we only know that it's a change" if Microsoft or any other company was introducing some strange feature no one asked for in order to avoid adding a feature a lot of people were asking for.
Telling people not to think about a skill they have probably used every day since they were near anything with a keyboard is a weird piece of advice
On the other hand, people wouldn't be complaining so much if it weren't Apple -- Apple is the company they associate with "change for change's sake", which isn't entirely deserved as a reputation.
But at any rate, yes, I would be telling people this if it weren't Apple, and had some fun with it:
Don't plug your twitter here to try and look smug... people are questioning the necessity of a piece of hardware, don't conflate that with not wanting to learn something new
Especially considering what they're charging for it.
I bought and still heavily use the most recent MBP model. I don't think I'll be upgrading for a long time. Retina + Force Touch + pretty good specs is more than enough for me.
I wasn't a fan of it about 3 years ago before I had to work with them daily at my job. Now when a user brings in a laptop that doesn't have a touchscreen I tend to smudge the display because touchscreens are so damn useful.
(Posted in another thread, that probably will not make it as high as this)
I think conceptually this is really neat, but it could potentially suffer from one major flaw: I hardly ever look down at my keyboard. A flat, digital screen containing changing buttons does not cater well to touch typists, of which you can reasonably assume most are who use a macbook pro.
Touch ID is sweet though.
I live in terminal about a third of my day. I seldom use the function keys for anything other than adjusting the volume and brightness. I can't remember the last time I needed to use a pure Function key in any app.
I am a keyboard junky. I have long used LaunchBar (since OS X Beta), Keyboard Maestro and other utilities to do almost everything on my computer and while keeping my hands on the home keys. And I mapped the CAPS LOCK to ESC many years ago.
For me the current Function Keys are mostly wasted space. I am not sure how useful the Touch Bar will be for me, but I feel it will be more useful than the current setup.
You don't remap the function keys to do stuff? I use F1 and F2 to switch between tabs in tmux for example. In the past I have also have mapped the function keys on the right side to run common scripts, like deploying an app staging/production.
I guess that it comes down to I have never liked the function keys because they pull my hands off of the home keys, and I never could accurately hit the F keys without looking for them.
Long ago, when I was using apps that made heavy use of the function keys, I mapped ctrl-alt plus a number for to the function keys. I use to love the Happy Hacker Keyboards for have this built in.
You got me there. htop is probably the one terminal app that I regularly use that has important FN keys. Still I bet only one out of 5 times do I actually use the FN keys in htop. I suspect that of the amount that I use them, Apple's access to old function keys via the Touch Bar will be fine for me.
(And I can always pull out my Happy Hacker Keyboard)
Thanks for directing me to LaunchBar and Keyboard Maestro.
I'm a touch typist, so for me the new touch bar is a no go.
Regarding function keys, they are configurable. I'm a programmer: debugging using function keys is been part of my coding live since I can remember. I guess this MBP is not for me.
Regarding the waste of space, I don't see that: there's plenty of space. The screen size mandates the amount of space available in the base of the laptop.
I understand Apple's rationale: touch bar = dynamic function keys but, why not keep the physical function and esc keys and add the touch bar on top of that?
As others have mentioned. I just remapped my function keys for common tasks or launching applications (e.g. f1 = Xcode, f2 = Slack, f3 = Terminal). Using something like Keyboard Maestro (which you use), you can also contextualize the functionality based on certain applications.
Not only does apple not care about sophisticated, or "power" users, it's becoming more and more clear that there are not many sophisticated users within apple itself.
Let's take multiple monitor support as an example - something that vacillates between barely working and a dumpster fire, depending on the release of OSX. Aren't there people within apple that need three screens ? Aren't there power users within apple that demand this functionality ? We are left to conclude that zero, or almost zero, people inside of apple are using this kind of configuration[1] - otherwise there is no way it would be allowed this kind of dysfunction.
Some other things that we are forced to conclude nobody at apple does:
- use USB cellular modems/dongles
- tile windows to hide unnecessary desktop
- primarily mouse-free usage
- move files in the finder with 'cut'
- use the god damned escape key, for the love of christ
We all knew this was coming - the day that Apple "mac pro'd" the rest of the lineup. We got a sneak peak with the 12" macbook. Now the other shoe drops.
[1] For instance, this relatively boring use-case: three primary screens on a desktop and a large flat panel connected as a secondary display. Kind of sort of works in snow leopard. Various, random dysfunction in each release of OSX thereafter.
What's wrong with Apple's multi-monitor support? At least mixed-DPI configurations have worked fine on Mac for years, unlike with Windows.
Also: (1) USB tethering to an iPhone is just about the easiest cellular solution there is; (2) Google "Divvy"; (3) a big draw of the touchpad is that mousing doesn't take your hands that far off the keyboard; (4) real men and women use Terminal for file management.
1 external monitor: for me, it hard locks 10.10 regularly -- no core, nothing in console, just hard lock. This was on completely stock brand new macbook pros.
2 external monitors: even worse. I quit trying.
btw, I love divvy [1] (best $13 I've spent in years). For those who don't know, it allows keyboard chords to move windows. Unfortunately, it doesn't have good multi-monitor support -- it moves windows only within they monitor they are on. That said, it's crucial for good typists. A typical use case: code in one window, docs in another. Use the keyboard to increase the size of the docs window so you can read it better, then shrink it back and put it back into the lower right corner of your monitor. It's awesome.
For the hard lock issue, check to see if the cpu is grinding to 200%+ utilization, especially spending most of the cpu on the kernel_task process. If it is, see if [1] will help. The tl;dr of that page is when the Mac laptops sense a high temperature, the quick and dirty fix Apple has in place is push kernel_task to eat up as much cpu as possible to slow down everything else enough to cool down the laptop.
I pointed my room air conditioner's vent directly against the bottom of my Mac laptop, and it happily drives my external monitors. Enclosure Bottomside temperature reads 18-20 degrees C, and CPU A Temperature Diode reads 60 degrees C while I'm cooling my laptop like this.
I agree with the great-grandparent's sentiment that the product polish for high-end Apple laptop products is definitely gone. It isn't that no one within Apple is unaware of these issues, it is too few are in a position to take actionable measures about these issues. The margin between picking a MacBook Pro and a high-end Dell/HP/Lenovo/System76 is as slim to me as back during the latter stages of the PowerBook days, the last time I switched back to non-Apple laptops for a few years.
Product marketing-wise, Cook is in a tough position that I don't envy. Apple is so big right now that every product revision has to support that "big", "successful" narrative, and he's getting painted into a corner to not jeopardize that story. This pushes severe compromises into product design decisions to go after the bulk of that bigness, and niches like influencer demographics get squashed in the process.
"What's wrong with Apple's multi-monitor support?"
One thing immediately comes to mind: configure a multiple (3 or 4) monitor setup (again, not exactly exotic) and then full screen a video in one of the monitors ... now change focus to a different window in a different physical screen. Fun ensues. Different fun, depending on OSX release.
USB or bluetooth tethering is great - I'd prefer to use that always - but some use-cases demand a physical thing stuck into the laptop and the plain old USB A-type is flexibility I don't like to see deprecated. I'll gladly take 1mm additional laptop thickness in order to retain those and I think the 11" macbook air, with one type-A on each side, is a pretty powerful swiss army knife.
I'm not sure why you indicate 3-4 monitors is not exactly exotic. Pretty sure its the 1% or less. Wouldn't that be the definition of exotic?
Wait'll you see what happens when you rotate them!
We are living in a bubble, our use case is not even remotely close to the average or above average use case. Looking at the data broadly, this barely registers as a 'thing'.
Is this including the mac itself (so 2 external screens)? Because I have that setup at work with a mid-2014 Macbook Pro and with the last 3 versions of OS X and everything works fine - video fullscreen while browsing on another screen is not a problem.
You know what's better for 'move a file' than 'normal shortcut for copying something + brand new unique shortcut for paste-and-delete-original'? Cut and Paste. Using the same shortcuts as every other piece of software. Why, on earth, can't we just have that?
"Cut" and "paste" is a bad abstraction for moving a file. When you "cut" text and then don't "paste" it's the same as deleting the text. You don't want that for files (it would be too easy to accidentally delete the file). In fact, Windows doesn't work that way--if you fail to paste, the original file will remain in its original location.
Apple's abstraction is more honest to what is actually happening.
That's purity getting in the way of practicality. Non-destructive cut with text isn't unfamiliar to anyone who has used a spreadsheet, so use that abstraction with files(like windows does).
Why is accidentally deleting a file worse than accidentally deleting text? Some files, sure, but there should be safeguards about deleting those files anyway. Plus backups, always backups.
In truth, I don't think many people are accidentally hitting that shortcut that often. And, if they are, so long as there's an action analogous to undo'ing a textual cut/copy/paste, it shouldn't be a problem.
> multiple monitor support vacillates between barely working and a dumpster fire
This. Earlier this month, I tweeted that "I threw out my hardware RNG, since #macOS's window placement behavior turned out to produce better randomness."
vim users (and I am one!) ^[ strictly dominates escape: it doesn't force you to move your left hand up or rotate at the wrist. Does emacs use escape? What else does?
I really hate using esc in its default position so I always map caps lock to esc. Mapping caps lock to ctrl seems so much more useful; I had no idea ^[ is the same thing.
I agree. For the first time in many years I'm going to be going back to Microsoft for my computers. The surface book seemed to expensive but then I realized that 1 surface book takes the role of a macbook pro + ipad pro.
>You are making the assumption that they care about sophisticated users
You are making the assumption that your workloads are what define "sophisticated users".
I don't think a professional videographer or a photographer (both of which I do, and am very excited about extra on-demand functionality that the strip brings, for which many fork $300 and $1000 for dedicated external control strips and surfaces) is less "sophisticated" than some code churner that has a typing-heavy workload and doesn't have a use for taking his hands off the home row.
That said, I wont be using it much when programming either. But for Photoshop, Cubase and such? Shut up and take my money!
You seem to have conflated sophistication with fear of change. The history of technology shows this fear is misplaced. If the interface provided is compelling, most people will adapt. Some will long for the old ways to be the only ways, but that's never been a segment of desire that gets much attention for what I assume are obvious reasons.
You seem to have conflated fear of change with desire not to have useful functionality removed and replaced with functionality that might prove useful.
The touch strip is cool, but it suddenly means looking down at the keyboard to use it, and the loss of the tactile sensation of the keys. Maybe it's a net gain for some people. For me, it's at best 2 steps forward, 1 step back. It's a mixed blessing.
It doesn't really rebut me to twist up a bunch of semantics to make it seem like something is being taken away from you by the fact that Apple is making a product you don't like.
I'm just saying that it's a change that I dislike on an emotional level, and that I believe that needing to look at my computers controls to use them will lead to a permanent net decrease in comfort using the machine.
They're making a product that I don't like, and that's not a new phenomenon. Categorically, I dislike things that seem like change for the sake of change, and I dislike things that feel like a company herding my behavior in the direction they want me to go.
On the other hand, I like progress. In my opinion, features like this are certainly change, but I doubt that they're progress. That is, I think that it both adds and removes features. Fear of change isn't a bad thing, in and of itself. I think the point that we disagree on the strongest is whether Apple's new hardware represents actual progress, or merely change.
Sure it does. People don't want to change their habits because of a hypothesized productive decline that is, by the necessity of not having tried the change, based solely on emotion. Call the emotion whatever you want if "fear" makes you feel too silly.
> You seem to have conflated sophistication with fear of change. The history of technology shows this fear is misplaced. If the interface provided is compelling, most people will adapt.
You're typing this on a keyboard layout designed to avoid jams on typewriters.
Yeah, I thought the same thing (specially since 95% of the time I'm using my laptop, I actually have it closed, hooked up to a screen and with external keyboard and mouse). But I guess this will be useful for most casual users, since they often look down to their keyboards (and to be honest, the keyboard and the screen aren't that far apart in a laptop) and who don't usually use/know hotkeys for common actions they perform, and which now they'll have access to through the touch bar. But for most developers, yeah this seems like a gimmick. And yes, Touch ID is sweet. That 3 second payment demo was great.
>A flat, digital screen containing changing buttons does not cater well to touch typists
Well, it's obviously NOT meant for touch typing workloads! This is not something to compete with Ctr-A-Alt-J-K-B of Emacs, or ^{"4j of Vim, or for writers to use.
It's for professional apps with lots of special dials, sliders, etc -- stuff useful from the creative industry (DAWs, NLEs, etc) to use cases such as medical equipment controls, etc (another industry that uses some special control surfaces and stuff).
Not to mention I work a lot of the time with my macbook closed connected to external display. What good is touchbar then? Oh wait, my external display is Thunderbolt display, now a $1k paperweight because I bought into the Apple closed ecosystem.
I was thinking the same - If i need extra controls for my app then the app provides them and use my trackpad with my eyes fixed on my screen, like this isn't hard. Seems gadgetry for gadgets sake, disappointing.
If I'm paying hundreds of dollars extra for this to, which seems to be the case, then I think I'll pass unfortunately.
I touch type, I hardly ever look down at my keyboard ... except for stuff like switching the volume off, brightness, or the rare key combo that uses a function key.
So there is gradient even in non-casual users. I would have cried with you if my OS was Windows.
I hate to take away from the complaining in here but I actually think it looks pretty nice. I was pleasantly surprised with the interactions they demonstrated with the new ribbon display. I knew they were going to announce it and didn't think I'd care but I will walk away from the video with the feeling that I want one.
Yep. I bought a 13" (512GB, 16GB) the instant the Store would let me.
Maybe I don't qualify as a 'Pro', but I work in IT, I regularly have more things open than comfortably fit across the Cmd-Tab HUD, I reboot about once a month, I open close sleep move charge monitor on, off, edit podcasts, blaaaah blah, and I do all of that today on my mid-2011 MBA.
And it's fine. So fine I almost don't need to update, really, I just want to. Oh, and that screen. I want the screen. Oh and the battery life! Ten hours. Yo mamma!
So this thing, this is going to be a screaming powerhorse compared to what I'm using. The ports? I'll get used to it. I'd prefer someone push us towards The Future. Can I run six hundred VMs on it while I'm rendering the next Toy Story movie from seat 4A on my flight to Caracas? Nope! But I wonder, who is doing that?
This is a fine update that should last me until whatever they release in 2021. Which is ridiculous, when you think about it.
Not really, all I see is stuff like: "they removed the escape key" (except its still there, even if it isn't a physical key), "no one looks at the keyboard" (touch typists aren't the target demographic), "only 8GB ram?!" (again, HN is not their target demographic), complaining about the removal of ports (not a surprise at all, and Apple is moving the industry towards USB C), and the expected "Apple stopped innovating after Jobs!" comments on every Apple event thread. Personally I found the Touch Bar to be cool in exposing common actions in a touch-friendly manner.
I can tell you it's not programmers who need the latest CPUs, 32GB RAM, mechanical keyboards, and every gizmo possible in their laptops. It's definitely a more casual professional user. (For anyone who truly needs that kind of power, they have the Mac Pro)
As a heavy Vim user, this might be my last Apple development machine. I can always remap Caps Lock to Esc, but years of muscle memory > a flashy feature I have little use for.
There's nothing I'd pay extra for in this new machine: touchbar is a meh, biometric authentication has been around since ~2005, the hardware specs are finally catching up with what everyone else has been shipping for a couple years, the new keyboard is horrible, Siri is the new ubiquitous feature nobody wants, USB C... meh.
I wonder if 2017 will finally be the year software developers go back to Linux machines? If only the story for mixed DPI displays was solid, I think it might finally be The Year of Desktop Linux :P.
"I can always remap Caps Lock to Esc, but years of muscle memory > a flashy feature I have little use for."
For what it's worth, as a perennial keyboard layout fiddler, in my experience you should expect it take about 5 minutes to adjust the first day, then about 3 the next, then about 1 the next, then you'll have an equally hard (or easy, if you prefer) time going back if you need to.
Moving one key is very easy, as long as you make sure that the original key doesn't work somehow. "The original key physically doesn't exist anymore" definitely meets that criterion.
(I theorize one could learn a new layout without having to drop one's productivity to the floor by switching all at once by switching one key at a time, about one per day, until you've entirely switched. I've never tried to learn it as I'm happy with my layout and nobody else has wanted to try it yet.)
Also, mixed DPI on Linux is at least getting better. I ended up with a 4K 15" screen, and I'm using XMonad with a whatever-I-feel-like mix of Gnome and KDE apps, which is probably just about the worst case you can get, and it was not anywhere near as bad as I had feared. It is certainly not perfect, don't get me wrong, but it's not disastrous.
Linux is not bad. But nobody is making decent Linux hardware, and the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, battery life plummets. My days buying Windows machines and struggling to get Linux on them are over. I'd rather buy a Mac and get a Unix I can use without having to install it.
Is anyone actually selling a decent preinstalled Linux laptop? If I really wanted to use Linux I would rather buy a Windows laptop and run Linux in a VM.
They are OK, but to be honest you might as well get the Windows version from the Microsoft store and slap Linux on it. For the same price you are getting a copy of Windows and a somewhat better customer experience.
> the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine,
> battery life plummets
Yep. I ran Arch on my MBA for a while, thought I might have more luck than Windows machines (since it's easier to find people doing the same thing) but driver support is meh.
I'm perfectly happy to configure things - it's why I don't really want to be on macOS, and oh boy do I miss i3wm - but as soon as I was looking up recommendations for configuring my CPU fan and power management on obscure blog posts, I gave up on it.
I think there's definitely a market for a Linux developer laptop that's a single awesome machine, that then makes a great single target for the kind of app support seen on macOS.
ThinkPads have always run Linux well. Dell makes laptops with Linux pre-installed, some explicitly for developers, even going so far as to make the manufacturer of some components (touchpad, IIRC) build and upstream Linux drivers.
My last try was Fedora and Mint on last years Dell XPS 13. Battery life was fine (comparable to my MBP) but the experience when plugging in my low-DPI destkop monitor was terrible. Supposedly the new Wayland-based distros provide a better story for that.
Other than that Gnome3 finally behaves nicely across the board. Still a lot of inconsistencies between applications (QT-based programs look like crap on Gnome and vice-versa, and TK programs look like crap everywhere) but all in all the experience was way better than in 2011 which was the last year I used Linux as my base OS.
Unless you're doing something that absolutely needs to use the Linux kernel, I've found the new Linux Subsystem on Windows really good for Unix-like tooling. It even runs Tensorflow!
> and the instant you slap Linux onto a Windows machine, battery life plummets.
So admittedly the last time I did this was in 2003, but back then, slapping linux on my Thinkpad tripled the battery life.
Has Windows power management gotten so good and Linux so bad that it's swapped now?
In linux I could do things like turn off disk syncing so the hard drive didn't spin up. I know with SSD that's not a thing now, but I always assumed there were things you could control with Linux that you couldn't control with Windows.
The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon is actually among the strongest MacBook competitors. It has a really strong i7 provessor, 512GB SSD and 8 GB of ram. All of this in a light carbon unibody enclosure, and at 1499 (without OS- saves Windows 10 licensing costs) its even pretty cheap for the specs you get.
I have a 2012 Zenbook UX31A on Arch Linux and I'm very happy with it, especially how it seemingly hasn't aged at all (except that I have to tighten the screws every once in a while).
The only thing that might prompt me to replace it someday is the 4 GB of RAM, which is frequently a problem with larger Minecraft modpacks.
As productive as Vim is for some, I think there'd be very few people in Apple asking the question "How can we make Vim more productive", there probably hasn't been for the last 20 years
I agree, in all of Microsoft and Apple's recent moves, the big winner is Ubuntu ( at least, for those in my immediate circle, who want an OS that Just Works )
Sure, but there's an argument for Linux as a development platform: most modern stacks are mostly OS agnostic. Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, Android development... unless you are doing iOS or Windows development, there's nothing tying you to one or another OS. Even .NET development is going that way.
When I am at a desk, the lid is closed so both TouchID and touch-anything effectively don’t matter, including any display information. In fact, I am worried about applications gradually putting information only on the Touch Bar that cannot be found anywhere else.
Perhaps they could have placed a TouchID button on the SIDE of the laptop (usable when open or closed). And hopefully the ENTIRE Touch Bar display is also available as a global window ON the screen so that it is still able to display/activate things when you are lid-closed connected to an external display.
The real shock though is that a lot of these changes show a lack of usability testing. Like, “10 minutes in the hallway” level of testing. How much serious work can actually be accomplished with such tiny touch keys that require you to look down at them, constantly changing and mostly unpredictable? Before ever creating new hardware for this, they should have enhanced macOS to provide an on-screen version of this ever-changing toolbar to encourage more universal support from developers and work out the usability kinks. Instead, now they’re stuck: this thing is in your laptop, with all its flaws.
That on-screen version would require a full-size touch screen, and eat into precious vertical screen space.
The naive implementation also would move the mouse whenever you touch the screen. I think that is loss of usefulness; now, one can select with the mouse, click a function, select with the mouse, etc. I expect there will be cases where this will be convenient (but, unfortunately, only when repeating the same function on each object. Also, power users currently can already do that by assigning a key combination to the function)
Also, I'm not claiming they did any, but what do you base "a lot of these changes show a lack of usability testing." on? My gut feeling also tells me this mostly is a gimmick, but I don't dare claim it is correct.
I never said the on-screen version would support touch (I wouldn’t want it to). The orientation doesn’t have to be horizontal (my Dock is vertical). For that matter, it doesn’t even have to be one-dimensional. Every aspect of Touch Bar is constrained by where Apple wanted to put it, and not what would be the best experience.
They should have started in pure software, and then they would have figured out just how many possibilities there really are. Some examples:
- What if I want my “system-wide ever-changing functions pad” to be a 4x5 grid of icons located in a window at the bottom-left of my screen?
- What if not every action/status item is ideally laid out in a bar? Maybe some items are vertically rectangular, some are horizontal, or some are shaped like triangles. Maybe I want lots of space between things. Maybe I want 4 different contextual areas, all over my screen, instead of being confined to one region. (This is a PRO laptop...)
- What if I want complete control over the show/hide mechanism? Examples: Floating, non-floating (can layer documents on top), sliding in from the side of the screen, popping up only while a certain key is pressed, attaching to Dock...
- What if I want my ENTIRE laptop screen to become a contextual display while doing working primarily on an external monitor?
Any one of these scenarios could come up when doing real work on a laptop and none of these can be handled by an expensive Touch Bar control. Conversely, we already have context-sensitive commands mapped to the keyboard and status mechanisms (menu bar, window toolbars, other application functions) and the Keyboard preferences pane lets you map commands any way you want.
Again: what do you base the implicit claim that they didn't do that and/or the implicit claim that this solution isn't worth the extra hardware costs on?
And again: I think it mostly is a gimmick, but I withhold my conclusion until I have used it and/or I've heard from many people who have had lots of experience with it.
"When I am at a desk, the lid is closed so both TouchID and touch-anything effectively don’t matter, including any display information."
"And hopefully the ENTIRE Touch Bar display is also available as a global window ON the screen so that it is still able to display/activate things when you are lid-closed connected to an external display."
You make a good point. I can imagine adding a Touch Bar to keyboards. That doesn't address the TouchID button, but I believe that might addressed with tech like the Apple Watch or iPhone.
There's no reason they couldn't add a full secure enclave on a USB based keyboard with TouchID.
Register your fingerprints into TouchID, they are stored securely on the keyboard, with some secure communication between keyboard/computer... now you can easily log in and or do Apple pay.
Are Apple going to sell the Touch bar and Touch ID as a separate peripheral? The price differential between the 13" non-Touch and 13" Touch is $300 USD. The other differences are 2.0GHz versus 2.9GHz Core i5 and Iris Graphics 540 versus 550. Let's call those other differences $50 for argument's sake. Is Apple going to sell this hypothetical Touch peripheral for $249 for instance? Or would they incorporate it into an external keyboard. What connector would it use? Regular old USB or Bluetooth?
Would you pay $249 to upgrade existing non-Touch kit? Would you pay $249 so that you could log on to your Mac (or PC) at a finger press? Would you pay $249 so that your apps have a contextual button bar? Would you pay $249 for a programmable touch strip plus fingerprint scanner?
Imagine if you could run a cable from the phone so that you could use its fingerprint sensor to log on to your Mac. Plus you could have an app called Context that acted like the Touch Bar. And on top of that you'd have a smartphone.
My point is. Touch Bar plus Touch ID might be the greatest thing since we started slicing bread into, uh, slices. But it's too frigging expensive by half. That's some premium you're paying for the privilege of a publicly untested hardware feature.
Why don't Apple also sell it as a peripheral that both Macs and PCs could use if they are so confident in it? Sell it with software drivers and a configuration tool and smart defaults. And price it at … $99? I bet they could hit that price point. And it might sell like hotcakes. And make the price differential between the 13" non-Touch and 13" Touch $100 while they're at it -- $1,499 versus $1,599.
I think anyone who forks over wedge for the Touch Bar and Touch ID Macbook Pros as it stands is being royally screwed. To be blunt about.
I don’t think that Apple needed to create anything separate because they already had separate things: the entire ecosystem of iPhones and iPads! It was ridiculous of them not to leverage those investments.
All they needed to make was an iOS app to display arbitrary “keyboard” keys, some Bluetooth/wireless connection to interface with the Mac (as Handoff and Air Drop practically do already), and a way to make the iPhone/iPad enter a special “display always on” mode when in close proximity to a Mac. This would have been way more flexible.
One advantage of closing the lid is that whatever you had open on the laptop will then “jump” to the big screen and may even figure out that there is more screen space and resize automatically. If you just open the lid and plug it in, everything you had open on the laptop remains cluttered on the small screen and your big additional desktop is just blank.
I’ve occasionally used both at once (e.g. E-mail in the small laptop window, everything else on the big screen) but that is generally for when I don’t plan to move for quite awhile. If I am constantly grabbing my machine, coming back, etc. then closed-lid is less of an interruption.
Replacing hardware keys with a touchscreen on a laptop made for power users is a sign that Apple has lost touch with what made the MacBook Pro popular in the first place. I think they could have just upgraded to the newest CPU and put a new battery in and made everyone happy.
I think the thing that is being missed here is that Apple doesn't make much money off of "power users". They make money off people buying movies on itunes and subscribing to icloud for their photos. Everything Apple is building is aimed toward that market, emojis and all.
If you feel that Apple isn't designing with you in mind it's probably because you've outgrown them. Time to look at alternatives.
You are missing the real statistics. Only 11% of all apple revenues come from services (app store, Icloud, itunes).
apple makes money from selling phones and computers. If you want to sell a $1,799 notebook (or even $2,399 for the 15 inch version), they need to think on power users.
Apple catered to power users for years with the MBP. That was the entire point of the device and why many programmers said it was the best laptop on the market. I'm not saying it was necessarily a good market decision (though you'll see no shortage of MBPs in the bay area) but that was the strategy. Now that's clearly changing.
Ugh. I don't know what to do here. I've been waiting for Mac updates for ages, and this is what we get. My 2008 Mac Pro is maxed out on upgrades, and has been on the fritz lately. I can't go forever on an 8+ year old machine. Especially one that is no longer "officially supported" by Apple, and now requires 3rd party patches to install Sierra and its updates.
Microsoft's Surface presentation yesterday was VERY tempting.
If you've already got experience doing hackintoshes you can't beat building your own Xeon machine and just dealing with a few hours here and there of update headache.
The price of raw commodity hardware is suuuuper cheap compared to off the shelf macs. There are even nice mini-itx cases if you want a powerful, slightly-larger-than-mac-mini machine.
I'm in the same boat. I have an 8 year old Macbook Unibody. Maxed out RAM to 8GB (officially supports 6 GB but there was a way to utilize 8 GB), have replaced HDD with a 256 SSD, replaced the battery once (sadly now can't do so again, they don't make it), replaced power adapter twice. I was looking forward to this event, this is the first year I cannot upgrade to the latest OS X without hacking around. I am ready to buy. However this event was disappointing. I don't care for any of the new features and really that would not have mattered, but then the prices surprised me. So much more than I payed for what I'm using right now. Feeling a bit stuck here. I don't need a lot of power with the type of code I write but the new Macbook is too small and has only one port. I'm actually considering the model without the touch bar but that's only got two ports. Touch decision especially because I don't like what I see out in Windows land either and I can't use Linux as a client OS because I use apps that are only available for Windows and OS X. Damn...
Have you bought one here? I bought a non Apple power adapter and it stopped working in two weeks so then I had to buy an official one (was trying to save money, ended up spending more). With battery it's a huge concern because I don't want my apartment to be go down in flames.
Yep - am using one right now and have had no issues. To be honest this is my third battery - the second one I got from Apple only last about 2 years and ended up swelling up to the point the track pad no longer "clicked". Have been with the one from OWC for almost 2 years now and no issues.
Thanks, this is great information. My current battery lasts a couple of hours so if it gets any worse I'll buy one here. At home I usually have it on power.
It's really not a matter of money. It's getting something at least comparable to eight year old hardware. I don't need 8 cores, but more RAM, and disk space should be realistic eight years later.
yeah, 256GB is much too small for a premium laptop, I understand they are trying to push their cloud storage, but programs and files are getting bigger and bigger these days and storage is pretty cheap.
Considered it, and I've built PC's since my very first one. Even have a PC dedicated for gaming. I just don't want to deal with it for my primary work space machine. Same philosophy with phone, and the reason I have an iPhone. I don't want to dick around with it.
Man...this just feels like such an epic letdown. All the new "killer" features just seem like gimmicks. I could care less if there's a touch strip (that I have to look at to use) on my keyboard. I also don't give a shit if I can scan my fingerprint instead of just typing my password to login. The hardware is also just not cutting edge (the price is though). Such a huge disappointment. It seems pretty clear that Apple just doesn't care about their desktop/laptop business anymore. And all this after months of waiting to purchase a new laptop since Apple delayed their normal product schedule.
My last 3 MacBook Pros were purchased just before Apple did a major redesign. This time around I don't have the usual pang of desire for the new model.
Maybe taking one of msfts new models for a spin might be opportune for you.
Interestingly they removed the pricing from their landing page, this morning the Macbook pro prices (for the old gen) were pretty prominent at the top of the page, above the fold and above any images of the computer.
The 13 inch now starts at $1,499 (but no touch bar at all unless you spend at least $1,799), up from $1,299.
Apple is being run more and more by marketers, rather than by techies.
As a developer, I don't want to see "emojis" on my keyboard, but I do want to be able to plug in any device I need in that exact moment, without looking for a right dongle.
Apple needs to stop sacrificing usability for "looks".
Agreed. The venn diagram of people that can afford the pro and those that care about emojis is likely rather slim.
However, watching the photoshop demo I could see the value. Honestly though, I think an add on accessory the size of a trackpad would be better. Unfortunately, that would sell in numbers so small that software support would be non-existent. So, this is a compromise solution that doesn't have Apple's usual boldness to it, rather a lacklustre add on that will deliver lacklustre results (to both sales and usefulness).
I don't know, I see emoji infiltrating my tools more and more. For example, I had to submit a PR to Yarn [1] to add a flag to disable the terrible things. GitHub uses emoji to indicate the type of commit [2].
I hate it.
Edit: I mean GitHub the company, not the product. Atom is maintained by GitHub.
It's nice how these emoji in [2] do not offer any advantage at all. In fact, they're worse than the appropriate words ("bump", "fix") because I can't Ctrl-F for them.
I really do not understand the attraction to it. It makes things harder to read and understand. It can destroy terminal formatting. They're harder to type on physical keyboards.
I don't often use emoji unironically in my personal life, but in computing tools it should be anathema.
Emojis: I'm with you. This seems dumb but I'm optimistic that people will find clever ways to use the screen. Even if it's just pushing away moronic "toast" style notifications off the important real-estate.
USB / dongles: In two years, almost all peripherals will be USB-C and C-to-A adapters will be tiny and cheap. USB-C will be the new Thunderbolt and it'll end up being more convenient. I'm looking forward to sharing displays with ultraportable Windows machines and chromebooks using USB-C.
In two years.... so not Today? Because they replaced the USB-A ports today... and not in their 2018 MBP.
Besides, the old peripherals won't disappear within the next few year and most of the world can't easily switch to type-C anyways - since they literally have no money to buy modern technology.
USB 2/3 is "good enough" for too many things to fade away. Any notebook should have 1 type-A port for convenience.
I think in a few years, we're going to be looking back at this as a half-assed hack before we were ready for a macbook with a full touch screen. Touch typists (which I'd imagine are an increasing proportion of computer users) don't look at the keyboard. Touch cues (ridges on the F and J keys, placement and size of keys) guide typing and control without the need to look.
Even if you just used the touchbar to allow for context-sensitive buttons, I'd lose the real tactical feedback of a keyboard and need to build new muscle memory for each application.
Worse is when you start putting GUIs on the touch bar—now I'm really expected to look down and scroll through a library of photos or find my favorite website on this tiny strip which isn't on my screen? Why?
Or maybe a full-sized touch 'interface' where the entire keyboard used to be. Imagine if the entire bottom half of the laptop was one of those touch-pads with some kind of haptic feedback. You could dynamically have mouse, keyboard, contextually customized input the entire mirror of the screen itself. Input below, output above. A curious concept. If this little touch panel merged with the trackpad (a better placement for it in my mind), you'd have a pretty powerful input system.
If done properly, I fully expect that kind of input idea to be inevitable. If done poorly, it's a total failure and prevents any work from being done. In order to bridge that gap it seems Apple is starting small.
While I want more RAM and better GPU to be able to connect more and bigger screens, I don't want any gimmicks. If they could get the keyboard to feel crisp longer, or make it cheaper to replace would also be great. But instead they add a bar that will probably make keyboard replacement even more expensive, and then they remove the magsafe which has saved my computer on several occasions, what's up with that ? Stupidly hunting for a mm thinner profile ?
I never really like Jobs, but to me he always appeared to want to build beautiful tools, and while I have not always agreed with the aesthetics and the hows, they were still tools, and I respected both him and Apple for that.
In contrast to that, Apple today appears to think they are selling a innovative fashion statement, or maybe a lifestyle ? Completely foregoing the tools aspect, and now it has reached the MBP line which have been mostly spared until now.
If I'm not a professional user I don't know what is - I spend a double digit percentage of my life on a laptop (wow that's depressing), running multiple VMs, Terminal, Sketch, Sublime Text, and around 15+ other apps all the time.
I went through two or three MBAs, have a MB, and am excited to be moving to a new 15" MBP. I am not sure if I'll be keeping the MB.
I am pretty sure my main use case for the ESC key is to close out full screen windows, which thankfully is still possible with the Touch Bar. I am a touchtypist - the only time I ever look at the keyboard is to figure out which function key will adjust the volume/brightness/skip track/pause music. I don't use the Mission Control function keys and I seldom adjust key brightness or use the power button.
I have wireless headphones and the only thing I ever plug in to my computer is my phone to charge it, and even then I usually just plug it in to my little travel USB/AC surge protector that the MB charges from. I bought a dongle for the MB and don't mind the negligible amount of space/weight it takes up. I can't wait for the day when everything (Lightning included) is finally replaced by USB-C.
Yea, it cost me nearly $4k out the door. Maybe I could save a couple bucks on another platform, or maybe they could've included newer/faster components. I stopped giving a shit about which model CPU was in my box around the same time I stopped building Windows desktops (hint: I was installing XP on them). I look back fondly on those days but very much enjoy the simplicity of today's computer, at least in terms of hardware.
Long story short: I consider myself a Pro user, am excited about the MBP, and really don't mind any of the growing pains that everyone seems so enraged about. If as many people do jump ship to Msft as are saying it, that's great - they need the users, and Apple needs the competition.
True, but on the laptops they did it on already declining technologies, like removing the CD/DVD drive. I don't think that USB is dying any time soon, no matter how great USB-C is.
I'm actually kinda surprised that they didn't remove the headphone jack. That would actually be a really effective way to push the adoption of USB-C :)
The removal of optical drives was accompanied by all this same hand-wringing and prognostication of doom, but if there's one thing I've learned over the last 20+ years, it's that nerds on nerd forums have no idea what people want and no ability to stop themselves from asserting they do.
Nobody except five Apple dorks in the world gives a damn about advising companies about how best to exploit their markets. We all just want a product that suits our needs.
No USB-A ports (and no Ethernet) really sucks for a lot of people. Apple will continue to be a profitable company. These things are not contradictory.
I think the touch bar is gimmicky, but I have to give Apple credit for bucking the trend of hiding UI and making functionality more rather than less visible to users. The trend in the mobile OSs has been to hide more and more functions being hamburger menus (Android), toolbars that only pop up when you tap them (Apple Maps), cryptic flat icons, etc. It's totally undiscoverable. This is the opposite: context-sensitive commands that show up and let the user know what he or she can do.
Don't forget the 2014 X1 Carbon had a similar touch strip design that they reverted due to user backlash.
It appears that the new MBP has a similar keyboard to the MacBook, if you're an Emacs user, you deserve a better keyboard.
I'm typing on a 2014 X1 Carbon now. Its touch-sensitive function row really is a disappointment. The inherent flaws in the design concept have all been elaborated in these discussions, but the X1C also had a poor implementation that Apple could easily improve on. For example, it takes almost a whole second to change modes, there's often a delay when tapping an icon, and sometimes taps just don't register.
It is surprising to see that they would add something like the touch bar. It's not like they're freeing up the UI space, since all of that same functionality will still need to be there for all of their other macbooks, or any pro user using an external keyboard / trackpad.
They should have called it "MacBook Hipster". Call me stupid, but this spring I bought mbp 13" mid-2012 model not because it's the cheapest one they have, but because that's the only one they had with swappable hdd, ram, battery and even with ethernet port that I personally don't care that much about.
I much rather have slightly lower specs but when the day comes and my ram is corrupted or i need ssd replacement I could order one online and get delivered the next day, rather than drive 200km to drop it for repairs, wait god knows how long and drive those damn 200km to pick it up.
Hispter glue sandwiches is not something I'm planing to buy as my next computer, I just really hope Apple will get their sh*t together and release another laptop for old school guys like me...
I've got the mid-2012 13" mbp as well and it has been great! I have the RAM maxed out to 16GB and replaced the CD drive with an internal SSD adapter. Now it has 1TB of space across two Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSDs. It's still very fast!
With that said, I'm leaving it on El Capitan. Nothing in Sierra tempts me to upgrade and pay the price of configuring everything again and being left with worse performance. It's sad, I truly believe this is the last Apple laptop that I will purchase as they continue down a path of adding things I don't care about.
TouchBar. Dead on arrival. This is a cute feature, but kind of embarrassing from an innovation perspective. And given the announcement of the Surface Book update and the new Surface Studio, Apple is inconceivably playing second fiddle to Microsoft on the innovation front.
The leap ahead on ports is premature at best.
I'm sure Apple will hold most of their fan base, but there are going to be quite a few defections me thinks.
I just don't get the appeal of having to look at your keyboard instead of the beautiful screen.
The Microsoft approach with the dial on the screen at least is on the screen. Why do I want to keep looking down to be sure the TouchBar has the keys I expect?
I'll take a look at them and see, but it seems like something that will be used very little and almost annoying.
The locked 16GB memory is a deal breaker for developers, can't even run OSX and Bootcamp for Windows 10 on it. 8GB per VM is not enough and really we need 32GB/64GB to have 16GB/32GB each. Same with their current iMacs, next update better have 64GB+ options or they are making themselves irrelevant to developers and designers without having to spend $6k on an Mac Pro.
"Why do I want to keep looking down to be sure the TouchBar has the keys I expect?"
How far are you looking down? I have to make more of an effort to look up to the menu bar than to look down at the function keys.
The touch bar looks great and makes a lot of sense. Far more than having to lift your hands up to touch a screen. I'm just not a fan of the price increases.
It might be cool, still have to check it. As an owner of the last lapzilla (17" screen) I think I'd just prefer a 17" screen and more space to put things. I feel like some of their demos are not as useful. Seems like fat fingers will be in the way instead of precise touchpad placement, same issue as using tablets/pads with just your finger, your finger hides precision.
- Picking a color with your fat finger having to look over your fingers and down to see it, why not just a color selector on the screen next to your work? Usually droppers are used as well, messes up flow.
- Browser tabs on the navbar, cmon, just use the tabs on the browser or hotkeys.
- Video editing on the navbar, not going to happen. Anything with sliders, precision will not be fun on that. Buttons will probably be fine.
- Placement changes, people know app dialogs/panels more than they will when having to look down at the changing buttons. If it sits there constantly changing while you do actions on the screen, it could be quite annoying almost like a flashy ad on a site forcing you to look down more than you want.
Customizing your keyboard a bit and the keys available is pretty nice, and it is probably cooler in person. But I feel like this won't be used much and will just be an annoyance.
I could be wrong, sometimes you get an Apple feature and it just works.
If you're questioning things that much, why have keyboard shortcuts at all?
>Anything with sliders, precision will not be fun on that.
Why wouldn't it offer precision? People do the same with trackpads right now. And multitouch on this thing looks far more useful than with a trackpad.
>Placement changes, people know app dialogs/panels more than they will when having to look down at the changing buttons
Why wouldn't people learn positions of buttons? Hell I can type faster on my iPhone without looking than most people can type with a physical keyboard.
I'd have expected people here to be far more accepting of this feature. This thing looks far more useful on a laptop than a touch screen, particularly for people like us who make heavy use of the keyboard.
Apple doesn't tend to make gimmicky features of this level, especially not at a $4-500 premium. It's a defining feature of the new MBP and I trust it has had a lot of thought put into it.
There's incredible potential here, it's sad a lot of people here don't see that.
It may very well be awesome, just pointing to concerns, I don't look at the keyboard all that much.
Keyboard shortcuts are precise and are unchanging.
Trackpad is precise because your fat finger isn't covering the result, same issue on tablets/pads if they don't offset selection from your finger, hard to get exact placement.
The touchbar demos they conveniently remove the persons fat finger. Larger sliders are fine like the Premiere timeline movement but trackpad and arrow keys work for that as well quite nicely.
From a button perspective it could be nice, I like customizing my keyboard.
I just wonder about the other things, I don't see myself changing browser tabs or sliders much on it.
I agree though that Apple doesn't usually throw in a gimmick that isn't well thought out but on the fence until I try it.
> Picking a color with your fat finger having to look over your fingers and down to see it, why not just a color selector on the screen next to your work? Usually droppers are used as well, messes up flow.
You don't have to look at the color picker, and you shouldn't. It is wide enough and will stand out in your peripheral vision, you can't miss it. Just shove your finger on it at random and slide while looking the text or element you are changing the color of. When you get to the desired color, you stop. Sounds nice to me.
> Browser tabs on the navbar, cmon, just use the tabs on the browser or hotkeys.
Depends on the implementation. Admittedly I don't keep an obscene number of tabs, but I usually navigate through them with ctrl-(shift)-tab. If the bar would let me slide my finger back and forth to go to the next or previous tabs, I might like it better than these keys. And of course, I wouldn't actually look at the bar: I would just shove my finger on it and slide.
I can think of a few other neat uses for this bar (albeit untested):
- A slider when you watch a video or listen to music that lets you rewind or go forward precisely (relative to the position of first touch). You would not look at it, you'd just reach and slide.
- Moving the cursor left or right to correct something: reach for the bar (without looking -- I don't know why everyone thinks they'll have to look at sliders to use them), slide in either direction. This could be faster than arrows in some situations.
- I think that using it to zoom or rotate might feel nicer than pinch/twist on the touchpad. I've never liked these gestures much.
- Subtitles when watching a video. I find them useful sometimes, but super distracting. Having them on the bar would be neat, you'd only look down once in a while.
The technology might get used badly, but it certainly has potential.
If you need 32GB of RAM, then the ThinkPad T460 would qualify. And Lenovo claims it has 18 hours of battery life, which seems more than decent to me.
I switched from MacBook Pros to the ThinkPad T Series running GNU/Linux a few years ago and I have not been disappointed. My only caveat is that I like to run Debian stable, and that seems to work better on older ThinkPads, especially for things like video chats. In my experience, the newer ThinkPads work better with distros that use newer kernels (at least I think that is why), such as Ubuntu or Fedora.
I would have suggested the T460s, which is lighter, but that only goes up to 20GB of RAM.
I have a T460p and I'm very happy with it. I can't give you a precise battery life but I've stopped plugging my laptop in when I'm using it outside the house. The only problems I've had have had to do with running Linux with a high DPI screen.
I have an earlier version of the precision. You can easily extend the RAM in the precision line, but I am not entirely sure about the XPS.
That said, two things I wish I could have known earlier:
- Get the 1080p version. The intel GPU can not handle 4K (or atleast the one on mine did not).
- The default battery is not enough. Go for the 90WHr battery. I chose the 2 hard disks option, but the good thing is that the battery is replaceable. So I am hoping to get the higher capacity battery soon.
I'd be interested in such a recommendation, too, as long as it also comes with an assurance of good external display handling and suspending capabilities. (Those are the primary reasons I went with a MBPr last time around.)
You could try going the Hackintosh route. I've had a Dell XPS 15" model (9530) with hi-dpi display (1920 x 1080), 512gb SSD drive (partitioned to two 256gb, one for Windows 10 use when needed).
There are few quirks, webcam light stays on after use, SD card slot not working but the whole Hackintosh community is great at solving problems.
I'm surprised (and a bit disappointed) by the lack of HDMI and DisplayPort/Thunderbolt ports.
I'm even more surprised by the lack of a physical escape key. I'm concerned that it could break some applications (Vim, Emacs, all kinds of command-line stuff), even if <Esc> isn't as big a deal with Apple's non-developer user base.
i upgraded to sierra on monday. vim wasn't working. just thought it was some new vim setting that came over from sierra.
then the following day i tried hitting escape to exit out of the search interface in sublime. didn't work. figured out that my esc key was broken. the fix was to kill siri which gave me back access to the ESC key.
i was wondering why QA, developers, product never ran into this problem when they were building out sierra.
then i saw those leaked version of the MacBook Pro, and then it made a lot more sense.
sounds like they're bringing esc-to-enter-command-mode to a native OS feature. Why settle for your crusty old vim command line when Siri is so much more courageous.
Plenty of other stuff uses escape too. Almost all games use it to get to the main menu. And every online video player uses it to get out of fullscreen.
Surely the Touch Bar will have Esc, along with a bunch of F keys if in Terminal. Indeed, many photos I saw today featured Esc in the Touch Bar. Indeed, it was a
large Esc, which would be nice for Vim work. I'm surprised people see a touch screen and somehow think there would be no way to make it a bunch of old-fashioned F keys.
That's not necessarily comfortable for everyone, and in any case, Caps may already be mapped to something else. (Personally, I've got vim-arpeggio and my Normal Mode key sequence is simultaneously mashing <jk>).
My point is, it shouldn't be necessary. Most people don't remap keys if they're using editors on a server because many people might use those, so setting up a personal configuration could be counterproductive and interfere with other users. If the soft <Esc> key conflicts with the editors in any way, this could cause a lot of annoyance.
Whoa, whoa... explain your magic wizard. I've had caps lock mapped to control for years (i don't use the actual control keys for anything, don't like the weird pinky motion), but having a quick esc like that sounds great.
I don't go too crazy with things. But I have the caps > ctrl+esc, shifts > parens when pressed alone, and I have my backtick/underscore key swapped so a single backtick press gives me an underscore, and I do shift+hyphen to get a backtick (which I need far less frequently than I need underscores). Sometimes, when I feel like going really crazy, I swap my numbers and symbols so I get symbols as unshifted keypresses and numbers with shifted keypresses. But that sometimes gets confusing to years of muscle memory.
EDIT2: I also have my pipe symbol & backslash swapped (mostly for Elixir, where pipes are more common than in, say, Python). You can setup your own private.xml with Karabiner to do that like so: https://gist.github.com/bobwaycott/d3a52718927519f3a11fbff8b...
I have a 4k monitor (LG 27UD88-W) that supports USB-C input.
The 12" MacBook drives it at full resolution at an unusable 15 Hz. It drives the screen at 1080P resolution at 60Hz. The laptop charges from the monitor's power supply while plugged in, so I think it is a pretty good setup if only the refresh rate was better at native resolution. The monitor has just two USB 3.0 type A ports so it can be used as a dock. It's no refresh of the thunderbolt display, but it'll do.
Thunderbolt 3.0 runs on USB-C so you can consider this a 4-port thunderbolt machine. USB-C should start catching on now that Apple finally made a decent machine with the port. I was really bummed when the iPhone 7 did not feature USB-C instead of lightning.
I'm optimistic about the new MacBook Pro driving a 4K display at 60Hz. Luckily I will get to order through work and test it out before considering it personally.
What is an iPhone headset? How does it differ from other headsets?
Edit: thank you. Does that mean the female lightning connector would only be used for headphones? Yeah, talk about vendor lockin and connector deprecation.
Given the opening of the Keynote and the focus around accessibility, I'm really curious how Touch Bar will work for non-sighted users. Will it require running your finger over the controls while VoiceOver relays the context of the button? Or, will the Touch Bar require "focusing" where a user swipes through the buttons, similar to iOS?
Personally, I don't need application aware function keys (sure, emojis are cool in messages...) and would love an option for the 15" MBP to have physical keys, similar to the 13" option...
I don't understand why there's so much backlash against the "bar". Personally I'm actually really excited. I'm a programmer. I can imagine all sorts of plugins and addons one can make for one's favorite editor. Imagine writing a plugin for vim or sublime text to inc/dec font size, mapping short cut functionalities to "named" buttons rather than F9. Don't like it contextually changing on you? Just program it to stay static. Some here complain that there's no escape key. But what prevents you from putting it there (better yet, maybe we could make it twice the width so you won't accidentally hit F1?).
In fact, extrapolating further, perhaps in 10 years, the entire keyboard (and touchpad) will eventually become one giant touch screen, with location specific haptic feedback. By then, the younger generation of programmers who grew up in the age of touch screen phones and ipads will not miss the real keyboards (like we don't miss the blackberries). And that one giant touchscreen will be infinitely more customizable.
honestly, pretty let down by the event. apple touchbar is ... i cant' even. it's like trying to force features that were on my phone on to the laptop. and this thing is supposed to be geared toward professionals.
1) what if i'm docked to an external monitor + keyboard? becomes completely useless.
2) going forward and back in safari? "quick type" autosuggestions when typing? really is that the innovation? i'm pretty sure i can type and/or correct myself faster than it takes to look down and touch an autocorrected version of what word i just typed. why not build that ui into you know.. the on screen software. this is just a terrible ui decision that was brought over from a phone... which makes 100% sense there given the small real estate.
anybody who uses pro apps already knows all the primary shortcuts or remaps them so they are easy to access by feel. now you require me to stare at my keyboard and manage two touch surfaces that aren't close to each other.
3) and thanks for removing my esc key and replacing it with a one that changes context every time i switch apps (or even within an app). i'm sure that goes well with all the developers out there.
that pretty much leaves being able to... quickly select emojis in messages and touch id (which admittedly was very cool). seriously debating this (given the bumped specs) or a previous gen macbook pro or new macbook. if i could move out of apple ecosystem i'm seriously considering it this time around.
Still can't go above 16GB RAM. As someone who is frequently running a lot of servers on my development machine (but still values portability), this is pretty disappointing.
HN is full of people who touch-type F9, I know. But I'm pretty excited about the toolbar. In anything but my primary editor, it will dramatically increase my ability to get by keyboard-only. For 99% of people, the increased discoverability will dramatically increase their ability to use shortcuts.
And even the other 1% don't spend all their time within a set of applications small enough to memorize all shortcuts.
This is interesting. I don't really have an opinion about the feature either way, but the touch-type issue didn't even cross my mind while reading about it. I never learned to do it and can't think of anyone I know who does. Although I'm sure more than enough people here have very different experiences. I wonder what percentages of computer users actually do touch-type regularly...
I can't think of any argument except the missing tactile feedback, considering it is strictly equal or better in any other regard (as you can apparently customize it to revert back to just static keys).
And I'm pretty sure 90%+ of people here touch type when within the 0-9a-Z range. I just doubt that many people press, without looking, F5 to `continue` in the chrome developer tools. Because (a) you don't remember shortcuts for any app you use less than an hour a day and (b) f5 is a bt too far out of reach (at least for me) to get their using the usual landmarks.
Sure, so long as you're OK looking down at your keyboard to find the right function on the touchbar every time you want to use it. Better, IMO, to use a mapped key chord.
In typical Apple fashion, there's a dongle for that.
Sarcasm aside, I wonder how well this will work if you use Boot Camp. Does the TouchBar revert to a normal function bar when OS isn't in control of it? Let's say I don't use VMware, and I want to boot into Linux or Windows, what happens to the TouchBar? Installing Linux or non-OS X operating system could be made more difficult without function keys. And yes, VIM and other modal editors are going to be less fun with the loss of tactile ESC.
I'm hoping the TouchBar will have some failsafe firmware mode that allows normal use of Func keys when OS doesn't have control over it.
The worst possible case in my mind is buying a small, tiny external keyboard (dongle) with just the Func keys if Boot Camp doesn't have a good solution.
On a german keyboard layout that's somewhere between hardly typeable (requires 3 keys) on Mac and impossible on other OSes (Ctrl+AltGr == AltGr == No Ctrl)
On my laptop, I already use Karabiner to make Caps Lock function as Control if used as a modifier key, and ESC if just tapped. Much easier to reach, works for both Emacs and Vim keybindings, only issue is that sometimes you hit ESC by accident if you start doing a chord but then decide against it. I personally think this is a better solution than a soft key for escape, but it may not be to everyone's taste.
Ah, that's disappointing. Another reason to be glad I haven't upgraded yet, I guess.
Also, wow, I'm glad I don't maintain any popular open source projects on GitHub: https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner/issues/660. I can't believe the number of people who think "+1", "me too", and "donated" messages are at all helpful.
Also, looks like Karabiner Elements exists as a rewrite for Sierra. https://github.com/tekezo/Karabiner-Elements Haven't yet checked if it supports the same dual behavior, though.
The entire function row still exists including the Escape Key. The Touch Bar is customizable, and I would imagine we will see a "global ESC" application pretty quick.
The fact that the function keys aren't "customizable" is a feature, not a bug. The contextualization being touted as a selling point of the Touch Bar means that instead of relying on muscle memory to push a key that is always going to be in the same place, I will now have to look away from the screen to make sure I'm doing the right thing.
Do you frequently use applications which, on the fly, change what their keyboard shortcuts are? Like, copy is Cmd+C right now, but five minutes from now, in the same application, it will suddenly be Option-P instead? And Fn-Q ten minutes after that?
If not, why do you assume that an application won't consistently present its contextual touch buttons in the same locations each time it presents them? Because the only case in which you couldn't develop muscle memory for those buttons is one in which they are not in the same location each time the application presents them.
(and if your retort will be that you use different applications which will make different choices for their contextual buttons, well, they probably already used different keyboard shortcuts for application-specific tasks, and you developed muscle memory for those, so...)
It's because they wanted to keep the same distance from the touchid on the right side. So in order to keep it nicely aligned they put it there (only assuming here).
I would guess the margin on the left is still in the touch area for esc. If you've used the split keyboard on an iPad, they went as far as to include invisible key duplicates for the keys at the edges. The ones on the border are actually usable on either the left or right half.
An app to display it in vim would be enough. But add another $9.99 app for the delete (forward) key, after all those years (it's fn backspace now). An example of market creation by the removal of features.
Even my Samsung tablet has a default keyboard with both backspace and delete.
You can remap the capslock key to escape. Or do what I do, have capslock be ctrl when combined with a non modifier key, and escape otherwise. I enter normal mode with my pinky.
16GB RAM max, DP1.2 (so no 5k display support), worthless Touch Bar when I use my current MBP dual monitor with the lid closed. Pass.
Sadly I really wanted something better since I'm on an old 2012 MBP that badly needs an upgrade but I'm not dropping $1500+ for something that doesn't support 32GB and 5k displays.
Not only does it have 5k display support, but it supports two of them in addition to the internal display:
--
Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display at millions of colors and:
Up to two displays with 5120-by-2880 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors
Up to four displays with 4096-by-2304 resolution at 60Hz at over a billion colors
--
Correct, but why would you use 3 screens when you can use just 2? And anyway I use external keyboard with numeric keys and a magic mouse instead of the trackpad. So why should I keep my Mac open anyway?
I need an upgrade even more. I'm still using my 2008 MB, the first macbook with the unibody aluminum casing. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB 4 years ago and had to change the battery around the same time. It proved to be a very resilient piece of hardware, even though now I can only use it when plugged as there seems to be something off with the battery that causes it to shut down sporadically.
Last year, I took the decision of waiting another year to upgrade, betting that the 2016 MBPs were probably going to introduce a significant upgrade to the line up, perhaps something of the same magnitude as the aluminum casing in 08. And I'm very disappointed that I was proven wrong...
The entire presentation was absolutely cringeworthy. The touch bar is a stupid gimmick being sold for a $300 price bump. Any serious developer, video editor or audio engineer knows all his shortcuts already and simply does not want to look down on his keyboard. The entire idea is flawed to begin with.
I really would not care if they put this on their toy-macs (the 12" "Macbook" or the "Air). Go ahead. But for the love of god, just leave one machine for people that use their Macs as a serious, professional everyday work tool
This does not seem like a major announcement to me. They added a bar and touch ID. But they added force touch with taptic engine last year and it took 3 minutes to introduce.
Between this and Surface with Bash built in, it's the first time since Windows 98 that I can see myself using a Windows computer.
This machine is not pro, as in not for professionals. No self-respecting Musician, Artist, Writer, Programmer, Photographer, Sportsman, etc. can make their living on this. This is what you take to a coffee shop to check e-mail. Anything else requires a dongle. It doesn't "just work" if you need to plug in a series of cables first. That's how Windows laptops were handled. They needed drivers for anything meaningful, this needs dongles.
I need a laptop to create. I don't need a laptop that competes with a notepad on thickness and usefulness. It was all Steve Jobs. All of it.
When is 4mm thicker laptop less elegant than thinner laptop with 5 dongles? Only on paper.
I agree with you here. Unfortunately I will still be buying one as I don't believe bash on windows is there yet. However it was a painful choice and if I hadn't dropped my old 2012 rMbP repeatedly I'd be holding out. I think in a year or two Windows is going to look far more compelling.
So apple won me with software. For now. The hardware is a step back though that I'm disappointed in. I'm strongly considering simply purchasing the latest rMBP release and use it for another couple years to see if anything meets my requirements then. That's a bad sign if you're Apple with a willing customer wanting to give you money whose primary driver is not cost.
I'm actually all for the move to USB-C, but that was enough. A HDMI port at a minimum is a requirement for a pro series laptop in today's business world. It's either resign myself to carrying a dongle around, or buy the older generation of hardware. Sounds trivial but it's the overhead of a mental tax that simply doesn't need to be there.
I run Windows 10 at home and it's getting pretty stellar as far as UI and features like high DPI. It sounds like they are rapidly making inroads on battery life (if not already surpassing Apple - the reason I switched to OSX in 2012 to begin with) on the same hardware, and as soon as they get some competent software like a terminal emulator that doesn't suck (assuming the linux subsystem development push continues) Apple really loses it's moat for this market segment. As far as I can tell though in the past couple years - they just don't care.
At this point the largest missing piece for me switching back to Windows is lack of a stellar terminal emulator. Everything I've tried so far on the desktop (@4k) still either annoys me for closed source reasons, or just does not look as good as iterm2 on the retina. It's a silly thing, but something I don't want to have to worry about. It's also an incredibly shallow moat.
I did the same thing. I have a 2015 MBP, and I plan to hold it at least till AppleCare expires and then see how's the landscape is. Having the 2015 model, I don't feel at all left out with this release. I think I have a better laptop that this release. They are still selling it on their website.
But I don't think it will be a just-buy-another-mac type of purchase when I'm out for my next machine.
I currently have 2012 rMBP and love the form factor, love the material. Why would I want something different from what I really like already? I am sure the display will be a lot better, but here, nobody talks about it.
I totally agree that functional keys take too much time and there are some I never ever use. Can't wait to jump on the new MacBook. I'll be more than happy if it lasts me nearly 5 years again.
I don't understand all the negativity recently here on HN. Do you try to look cool guys? Go get MSFT book and leave the rest of us to use what we already love, but better one.
Why is everyone so disappointed? This is still by far the best laptop out there - let's go through the painpoints:
- no 32gb RAM. Name one laptop (a laptop, not a battleship) that has 32gb. Dell and Lenovo have a couple monstrosities with trackpads from the 90s with that amount of RAM.
- no ESC key. C'mon, obviously the toolbar has it when running macvim or iTerm (or some other terminal) with vim.
- no Intel something, no Nvidia this and that. So? With regards to GPU and CPU this is probably the best laptop in the market that is this thin and light.
- 10h battery life. MBP already has the biggest battery that is allowed in airplanes. Nobody can do better with same amount of computing power.
- USB-C. In a way this is valid, however, the world is better off with less connectors (it's Apple, everyone's gonna follow suit). For MagSafe, look at something like ZapTip.
To people saying they are abandoning Apple after a decade of use: why?
- still the best keyboard and trackpad BY FAR in the market
- still the best build quality, design and dimensions in the market
- excellent display
- excellent software
- an actual laptop that you want to carry around instead of a Dell/Lenovo plastic monster battleship
I think other people already did the comparison against Microsoft. Surface Books are much more expensive ($/performance) with only the touch screen going for them.
> Name one laptop (a laptop, not a battleship) that has 32gb. Dell and Lenovo have a couple monstrosities with trackpads from the 90s with that amount of RAM.
This seems pretty unfair. "Name a laptop with 32GB of RAM, except the ones I don't like don't count."
> C'mon, obviously the toolbar has it when running macvim or iTerm (or some other terminal) with vim.
I don't see how that's a foregone conclusion. Moreover I like using the terminal app that comes with the actual machine.
> still the best keyboard and trackpad BY FAR in the market
Trackpad maybe, but Apple's keyboards have gotten tremendously terrible.
> still the best keyboard and trackpad BY FAR in the market
I beg to differ. Last time I was at a BestBuy, I find every single Macbook there featuring a keyboard floppier than the type cover on my Surface Pro 4, let alone pre-chiclet ThinkPads which I have been using for 9 years until I switched to SP4.
Apple Executive: Engineering team, make the new MacBook Pro 20% lighter and thinner!
Apple Engineering: OK!
(Many months later)
Apple Engineering: We're done! We had to make massive improvements in energy efficiency, thermal issues, etc. but we did it.
Apple Executive: Now give all that 20% weight/width back to the battery. Pro users probably care more about battery life than weight/width at this point which are more than good enough.
how do blind people use current macbook pro laptops? (serious question).
Edit: at least there is an option to get actual function keys in the 13" model if they are required to use Voice Over and they cannot be reliable found on the touch bar... and the user won't really care about the screen size (I'm joking, I can think of many reasons why a blind person might want/need to use the 15" model).
Exactly! I don't understand how Apple, known for being a pioneer in accessibility, does something like this. They might kill their keyboard altogether already.
Lots of negative reviews here. My first mac was a 15" rMBP-2014. I have really fallen in love with the machine and OSX.
Here is what I think Apple got right (from a personal perspective):
1- Lighter and thiner. When I'm out, I care only about how light it is; and how thin it is. I have a bluetooth mouse, and I don't really need an HDMI and SD card slot.
2- I can see myself using the TouchBar for Chrome and Mail. I usually browse/mail when I'm out.
3- The cheapest version has a good Graphic Card that supports 4 HD screens. My current retina does support only two HD screens and I have been thinking of building a 3or4 screen setup.
4- Larger Trackpad. I can see myself using this too.
Here is where I got disappointed:
1- Limited CPU upgrade. Would have loved if we got a real killer CPU here (xeon mobile or something like that)
2- Possibility of a 32GB RAM Upgrade.
3- Higher resolution screen, but this is low on my list as the current one is fairly high-res.
4- Better front-camera. 720p? Come on, it's 2017. At least a 5MP camera. It'd not add much to the cost and make my skype calls less miserable.
5- nano-SIM Slot for 4G internet. Seriously, I tether most of the time. This function has been in my 10" LG 6 years ago.
Replacing an expensive proprietary connector (that had widely available knockoffs that would explode at will) with a standard connector that will have $5 cables on Monoprice is a HUGE win. Plus, I can recharge it with an Anker battery off Amazon. I did like the Magsafe breakaway feature but there are enormous advantages to USB C.
I'm personally looking forward to cheap $2 USB-C cables catching fire with 87W firing down them. Seems most likely it will be running at 20V and thus approx. 4.3A - so may not happen as much as I hope but I'm sure we'll fine some xD
The new charging mode is way cheaper for them, and for their users. And way more convenient too. I really like the magnetic part of MagSafe, but everything after that sucks. The wire the MagSafe uses is really susceptible to being frayed at both of its attachment points, and the power brick itself is expensive (>$100). It looks like the new power brick thing is similar to an iPhone's, and uses a detachable USB-C cable. I presume the cable and the bricks will become fairly commonplace. And that means way less work in the long run.
The touch bar could do with being a little taller. Considering there is space above it it is a shame they couldn't make it 3-4mm bigger.
I find it amusing Apple makes such a big deal of adding a fingerprint reader to a laptop, I have had that for about a decade on all my Windows machines. Hardly anything special these days.
So it is thinner, yay!(?), but it was pretty damn thin anyway, would have been nice to have a 20 hour battery (estimating on size differences if same battery life as previous).
God I hope they improved the butterfly switches from v1. Those things were like using a Blackberry keyboard on a laptop. Disgusting IMHO.
Does anyone know if their "wide" colour display beats the OLED in the new Lenovo?
Edit: Also 4 USB-C, how long until they kill the Lightning port on the iPhone/iPad do you think? Seems idiotic to have a phone and tablet with one connector and a laptop (and desktops I assume in the future) with a totally different port. They should have switched to USB-C on the iPhone 7 when they killed off the 3.5mm jack IMHO.
"I find it amusing Apple makes such a big deal of adding a fingerprint reader to a laptop, I have had that for about a decade on all my Windows machines."
I think it's more than just the the fingerprint reader though, right? The secure enclave and integration with a payment system is pretty compelling as well, isn't it?
Granted, I'm not familiar with the fingerprint readers you've been using. Are they integrated into the machine? Do they have the equivalent of these secure enclave hardware?
The fingerprint should be stored in the TPM. The payment features have been possible for a long time although not built into Windows so you would have had to use third party software to manage that. This is what Windows Hello is supposed to unify however I cannot remember if Microsoft has actually deployed these features yet, I know they have talked about them. The hard part is getting everything to support a single way of managing secure payment. Obviously with Apple Pay this gives you that single platform however I wonder if Microsoft would fall foul of the law if they only support bio-metric payment with an MS Account?
Thanks for the details! I had forgotten about the fingerprint readers in ThinkPads (and likely others). How common were they? I think it's pretty cool that the fingerprint reader is being deployed in a pretty mainstream laptop. Edit to add: Even with all of the recent legal issues surrounding fingerprints as opposed to passwords. We can figure out what we want to secure using TouchId, perhaps even relegating TouchId to convenience rather than privacy/security.
Interesting point about limiting biometric payment through a particular account. Would it make a difference that Apple Pay serves as a gateway to existing payment services?
I think pretty much all ThinkPad models have had the option of an fpr for a while now. Dell and HP have also had TPM-based fpr in their business machines also.
I honestly don't know if how Apple Pay works is the same as how MS plans to do things. They had Microsoft Wallet before but it didn't go anywhere. I expect to see something from MS over the next year or two but as they failed so hard in mobile and clearly don't care much about trying to fix that at the moment I am not sure how much of a priority it is to them.
FWIW: Concurrent with the arrival of Surface Pro 4 last year, Microsoft released a Surface keyboard that included a fingerprint reader that could be used with Surface Pro 3 devices. This was done as a token gesture to Pro 3 users since the Pro 3 does not include the necessary IR camera for Windows Hello face recognition. The IR camera is only on the Pro 4 and Surface Book.
Does anyone else get the feeling that Apple are planning to kill desktops entirely? I went into this kind-of interested in the touch bar but thinking "how will they add it to external keyboards." Now, I don't think they ever will. The "pro workstation" sequence they showed during the live event is what they're aiming at: set your desk up so that the laptop us the keyboard and just add monitors (and perhaps external storage).
And you know, perhaps they're right. But may take me a while to accept.
This is how I've been working for a couple of years now. The ergonomics seem pretty good since the keyboard is narrow and central. You also aren't moving off axis to use the touch pad.
If a (desktop) eGPU over thunderbolt 3 can deliver the performance it would probably be my preferred solution long term.
This trend of killing hardware buttons needs to stop. It's very inconvenient. The sense of touch is important for me. It's one of the annoying things I don't like about many Android devices and it seems that Apple is slowly transitioning to this as well.
2056 After decades of touch interfaces, Apple releases, "Button" a revolutionary device that connects the physical world with the digital. FEEL the movement. HEAR the keypress.
Old millenials gesture wildly and swipe back and forth on VR forums saying how amazing it is to actually use senses of touch.
So in other words it's using Skylake, not Kaby Lake (7th-generation).
No mention of display resolution either, which leads me to believe the 15" model won't feature a 4K display. It's using an unspecified AMD Polaris GPU.
There's also a 13" MBP sans Touch Bar, featuring normal function keys.
I was either happy/neutral about everything but the price... not sure what to do now. I'm just too used to macOS and don't feel like making the switch to Windows or Linux.
I like OSX and Linux and have both systems running on different computers. 90% of the time I am in a browser or in the terminal anyways. So it doesn't really matter which one I'm on. When I want to watch a movie, my Macbook is far superior (even better than my TV). If I want to configure my user interface Linux is far superior. And sometimes I need OSX since I need to interact with people who mostly use proprietary tools all day long at work from time to time and OSX has the better support for these tools.
I'm in the same boat. For the moment I think a thunderbolt 2 eGPU on my existing 2103 13" MacBook Pro might be enough for what I need. When it gets a bit older, I'm not sure what I'll do.
Four Thunderbolt 3 ports that support USB-C. Any one of the four ports can be a charging port.
/win
Hopefully, this will disrupt the rest of the industry. The XPS 13 is a brilliant machine (IMHO better than the Mac) but why did they not use the USB-C for charging is beyond me.
For me it would've been a win if they'd also included some other ports for backwards compatibility.
Having only USB-C ports means that pretty much every user will have to have a set of dongles for things like USB2/3, HDMI, Display port etc, which doesn't seem like it's an ideal approach.
USB-C doesn't seem like a great replacement for their current solution though. I really like not having someone ruin my ports or having my computer fly off the table.
I was very intruged by the Dell XPS 13/15, especially since they come in a developer edition which runs Ubuntu. I've been holding off on a purchase because I wanted to see what Apple would come up with, Dell looks pretty strong today.
I have a 2016 XPS 15 and it's nowhere near a mbp when it comes to build quality. Keyboard and touchpad are much worse than on my 2010 mbp 13, palm rests are made of grease-absorbing plastic, fans can get VERY loud and it's impossible to open it with one hand. It just sits in my drawer nowadays.
No hardware problems on my XPS 13. But the trackpad, however, has never worked properly with Windows 10. They seriously dropped the ball on the trackpad. I don't understand how that's possible on a laptop.
Everyone's disappointed because we don't WANT innovation.
We WANT better battery life, not a slightly thinner laptop.
We WANT our USB ports and MagSafe.
We WANT a touchscreen MacBook.
We WANT significantly upgraded specs, and expandability.
We WANT to have the same physical keyboard layout we've had forever.
We WANT Apple to stop f•••ing us around by increasing the price while actively removing features.
THIS laptop is not 'excellent at what it does' if I can't:
• use any of my existing peripherals with it without paying an exorbitant $35 PER ADAPTER to get it to do so.
• provide me with a significant performance increase to a laptop I bought 4 years ago.
• provide me with the same features the previous laptop had (built-in HDMI, built-in SD card slot)
This is head-shakingly, miserably sad and would've been a punch in the balls already for any serious pro user if it wasn't an additional punch in the balls for Apple considering Microsoft showed yesterday it's actually willing to innovate.
I, for one, don't. At least wrt older USB ports. Yeah, I'm going to be annoyed over the next couple years having to have a USB-C to A adaptor around until everything gets converted over (USB->lightning, external hard drive) or an HDMI adaptor. But, fuck, I was sick of standard PC laptops still having a serial port years ago. And PS/2 connectors.
At some point, we have to move on. If USB-C is the future (and the industry seems tobe indicating it is), I'd rather us rip off the bandaid and be done with the move so I don't have a laptop 5 years from now (current one is 4, will probably be replaced now or this time next year) with outdated and useless ports from 15 years ago.
I never understand people who want to have a touch screen in such a form factor. I mean, I would have to move my hand from my keyboard to the screen. That sounds very inefficient to me (but I am a heavy keyboard user, though).
A friend of mine has a yoga 900 and for some stuff a touchscreen is quite cool, especially if you are lazily on the couch and you do Youtube or movie watching or you listen to spotify. For such stuff it's really nice to just press on the play or next button on the screen.
It's nothing you _have_ to have, but for lazy computer usage it's a nice feature.
Yup. I already own 4 chargers that can charge the new MBP and being able to plug the cord into either side is a GOD SEND on my Chromebook Pixel. Sound silly, but it isn't.
I don't think everyone agrees with you. But these are all opinions, I'm certain that not everyone agrees with you.
Although I'm unhappy at the loss of MagSafe, I really like all adapters being USB C. I think it'll ultimately be worth it, and I don't personally consider having to buy a few adapters to be a big deal.
I don't want a touchscreen. In fact, I'd say that I'm actively against a touchscreen. Adding a touchscreen would probably mean updating the UI to match iOS more closely. I want my UIs to be tailored for high precision mouse / trackpad and keyboard.
> There isn't that much to innovate on the laptop.
Just imagine they would make the thing 5 mm thicker and fill all the space with battery. Instant 2-3 day non-stop runtime. That's what I'd like to see.
I don't want innovation on my laptop, I want evolution. Make the battery last longer and the processor faster. These "innovations" are solving problems that don't exist, and they just made the product worse for me. All my computers since 2009 have been macs, but my next laptop isn't going to be one.
How come all that complaining and rambling about the missing upgrades for the iMac or Mac mini? I really think that Apple did a great job at evolutionally improving the MacBook Pro under the hood, and the TouchBar seems to be a really usefull addition for creative professionals.
Quite a fraction of the HN community really seems to enjoy complaining about what possibly could have been, rather than just beeing happy about the stuff Apple delivered today. And if you just can't stand the new MacBooks? Who cares! There are tons of other manufacturers to choose from and a different machine may just fit your taste perfectly.
HN just loves to be anti-Apple so they can say they aren't sheeple. Every keynote thread here has had comments about how Apple stopped innovating after Steve Jobs. And yet every year they still somehow innovate. Comments like that show how deep HN has fallen into the cult of personality, that they actually believed it was Steve who was coming up with all of these ideas. So much for not being sheeple ;).
I don't think this is fair. There are features many devs care about that going away. Everything soldered to the board meaning nothing can be upgraded, no increases in ram (which is fixed and makes this even worse), getting rid of ports that people use, now a touch bar that does not appeal to touch typists, and then to top it off a huge jacking up of prices .
The soldered-in stuff is not new to this model and is unlikely to be reversed. Your average user does not need more than 16GB of ram, and as said before, is not a new thing with Macbooks. (it's like expecting smartphone makers to suddenly include SD cards, sorry but the ship has long sailed) As for ports, they have USB C which can do everything the old ports did; that's where the industry is headed anyway, Apple is only jumpstarting it. Lastly, yeah the Touch Bar is not for touch typists, so what? No one is going to force you to use it. Price is price, that's just the Apple Premium (TM).
It's naive of the commenters to think that Apple is suddenly going to appeal to them, sorry, but you're not the target demographic. Go buy some decades-old Thinkpads and install Linux on them since that's what you were going to do anyway.
"We took that track pad that your palms occasional rub against and accidentally move your cursor.... yeah we took that and made it extra big so your wrists will now participate in cursor screw ups"... think different.
Sometimes! My current MBP misclicks occasionally when I'm typing. Even though the software is probably quite good and preventing 99% of the misclicks, the 1% of the time it occurs still ends up being a couple of times per session. It's frustrating and annoying.
Unless they have significantly improved their software, this is a net-negative change for me.
They really screwed over iOS devs here. I have multiple cables as backups and in different bags etc - all need replacing now...except that I can't use the USB-C variant in the power brick :( I also do Android dev...need to get a USB-C to Micro-USB too just for that! Just one big mess.
I wonder how long until the cables bundled with new iPhones/iPads have USB-C instead of USB-A. I suspect they'll start doing this with the next generation of devices, maybe with a bundled USB A to C adapter.
There's a lot of dislike for the new machines in this thread. It's a good time to remember that previous gen machines are often found in the Refurbished [1] and Clearance [2] sections of the Apple site in the months following a launch. Clearance is empty right now, but there are plenty of rMBP in refurbished.
My single biggest fear was that they would end the MagSafe and that has come to pass. 3 kids, 3 cats, 2 dogs, the MagSafe has saved my existing MacBook Pro so many times.
Someone already does. ZapTip etc.
But how often have we heard about issues? Short Circuits and even fires and it ended up being a non Apple Third Party acessory that was faulty and caused the issues?
Is it really that much to ask if one wants to use only official apple tech?
One dedicated magsafe and this would have been a non issue. It can't have made the macbook thicker seeing as how small the magsafe is.
They could have even mentioned in the keynote "and if you don't want to use the magsafe, charge your macbook from any of the usb-c devices"
And simply put both charging options in the store so people could get a non magsafe usb-c is they wanted.
Interesting fact: the 13" macbook without the touch bar has a 10% larger battery; however they don't describe it as having a 10% better battery life: they're both rated at 10 hours.
I've been looking forward to this for while now but my first reaction is that I don't think I need a new laptop. And I really wanted a new laptop.
It looks nice, the last model looks nice too.
The touch bar looks like it could be nice, 95% of my time I use an external keyboard.
The new display looks really nice, 95% of my time I use two large external monitors.
The USB-C ports will in the long run be more convenient, right now I'm looking at > $100 in adapters.
I'll check them out at the store but I may just look for a good price on the last model.
Would be curious to know if they tested the Touch Bar below the keyboard instead of above it.
I wonder if, as the concept further evolves, the bar might become larger or migrate locations. The comparisons they made to the original PowerBook were interesting, in that it really showed how constant incremental changes really add up in the long term.
Edit: Another possibility is to integrate an OLED display into the trackpad too, so then you have haptics as well, and could interact with both mouse and touch bar with one hand.
>> The comparisons they made to the original PowerBook were interesting, in that it really showed how constant incremental changes really add up in the long term.
I spent a huge chunk of my savings to get a Powerbook 170 in the early 90s to get the active matrix grayscale screen. I still miss that trackball. It was --awesome--.
There's a 13" MBP model that lacks Touch Bar, featuring normal function keys.
Apple is using last year's Skylake processors (6th-generation), not Kaby Lake (7th-generation), even though some OEMs are starting to ship hardware with Kaby Lake right now.
>Retina display
>15.4-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit display with IPS technology; 2880-by-1800 native resolution at 220 pixels per inch with support for millions of colors
No 4K display on the 15" models.
The GPU configurations are as follows based on the order page:
Intel Iris Graphics 540 (13" sans Touch Bar)
Intel Iris Graphics 550 (13" with Touch Bar)
Radeon Pro 450 with 2GB memory (15")
Radeon Pro 455 with 2GB memory (15" top-end)
Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB memory (both 15" models, optional)
As a WebGL developer, I'm really happy to see the Intel HD Graphics 4600 chipset die. It's basically been the performance target for consumer-oriented web applications for years now. Unfortunately, that target will still linger until older models finally reach obsolescence.
I mean really. They are trying to innovate but this thing still has a giant Caps Lock key, yet no Esc key? And who wants to use those tiny up and down arrows? I think the touch bar is a fine idea, it is actually way over due, but why make is so thin? And honestly I hate touch pads, force or no force. How about Leap Motion instead -- that would be innovative.
And then there's the price. I guess people in San Fran can afford it. But it's certainly not a computer for the rest of us.
Looking at the various missing keys and the touch strip, I couldn't help but laugh and cry. Less is more, right? I think we all know this is aimed at casual users, but it's still fun to poke at it.
The first thing that came to mind is any time now that I walk into a coffee shop, if I see someone passing themselves off as a programmer on a new Macbook, I'll know they are just screwing around or otherwise extremely angry (and should not approach). I guess carrying around your own keyboard is going to be more of a thing for people who like to work outside the home/office. As an Emacs user and someone who spent at least some time in Vim and Vi over the years, wow, I can't imagine the inner rage of some people I know if they tried to use this.
The other thing I thought of is hasn't this quite often been a problem for other people who tried similar approaches? For example, we tried the UI with not looking at the main screen with things like the WiiU, did we not? Obviously gaming is different than productivity, but still, the screen is the primary focus. Could we also not just throw dynamic UI like this on in other ways?
A few I've seen/heard of or could be a future tech:
* Remapping an icon or otherwise minimal custom glyphs/text per key.
* Remote style. Ex: Second display like they had with Vista or other things, but via iPhone or other devices - put it next to you, in front, whatever, boom - extra contextual touch screen. Apple even does this for many apps like Logic Pro X.
* Perfecting tactile response better and using a full dynamic keyboard like on some laptops out there right now (but with more mechanical response). Obviously easier said than done.
The problem with all this is I wonder who is looking down so much or wanting to look down. If you have time to look down, is it really such a problem then to use the OS UI to get the same thing done?
Probably the only time most people I know that can actually type decently tend to look down at a keyboard is to orient themselves again in some way. I know sometimes when I switch languages/locales on my machine to type in some other languages, it takes me a second depending on the language. But this tech doesn't help at all with that except giving me a button to flip, that is already a keyboard chord anyway.
I'm fully with you. Programmers NEED physical function keys, and at the very least the escape key. Anything that requires you to look down is just a joke.
Lenovo quickly learned their lesson with their (imho, as a touch typer, brilliant) X1 Carbon, when they went fancy with the function row in Gen2. Suffice to say, the near perfect keyboard layout of Gen1 was back in Gen3.
I think it's also interesting to note that for the first time Apple is lagging behind in term of CPU generation when introducing redesigned MacBooks.
The new MacBook Pro are said to be using 6th generation of Intel CPU (Skylake) when you have already on the market the 7th generation on Intel CPU (Kaby Lake). You are even competitive laptops using them already: http://www.gsmarena.com/new_dell_xps_13_laptop_comes_in_rose...
As a web developer, I think something like this laptop with Windows 10 is becoming more and more interesting. With Ubuntu native integration in Windows, you can even run the Ubuntu versions of the full stack including Node.js, Mongodb and Rails. 100% matching your deployment environment.
So what? Apple could do the same thing Dell did: release 13 inch version with Kaby Lake today, and postpone 15 inch till December. I personally can't wait until xps 15 with 7th gen Intel and NVidia Pascal debiuts
Bash for Windows needs to hurry up and fix/implement the networking stack already so I can actually make a decent switch. That being said, once they fix all that crap then it will be an easy switch.
TBH the touch bar seems like a half-arsed response to everyone else getting touch screens. Swiping photos, swiping timelines ... would be more natural on your actual screen, and almost as natural just using the trackpad or mouse.
The most exciting and practical product of the announcement was squeezed in at the end, the oddly named MacBook Pro replacement for the Macbook Air. And when I say exciting I am speaking relatively.
There was no mention of battery life, which is hugely important to me as a notebook user and which I guess I will have to find out from the Apple website once it refreshes.
I just found the whole thing to be kind of weird and underwhelming. Maybe the TouchBar is mind blowing in person. We'll see.
The non-touchbar version will probably last longer because in addition to having one less draining device, its battery apparently also has around 10% more watt-hours.
Apple removed a physical Esc key - clearly a productivity superstar, but they DIDN'T remove that IBM-wannabe boat anchor Fn key?! The touch bar is all dynamic and touch-screeny, why the heck would you even need a PHYSICAL Fn key?? Just make Ctrl nice and fat like it used to be and dump Fn!
I'd have less of a problem with Fn if Apple put it to the right of Ctrl like Dell does/did. But noooooo, they had to copy those usability whizkids at IBM.
Being able to charge from any of the four ports is legitimately cool. I also will be happy not buying an $80 power brick every time my cable frays. The touch bar will provide some significant user experience and workflow improvements. Overall I'd say it's a solid upgrade.
Mine just died and I was really looking forward to this event because I have wanted to switch to Mac for a while now (I really don't like the "new" Windows interface and I've only had trouble with my previous Windows Laptops) but I don't see a reason to pay what would amount to about 2 months pay for one of the just announced MBp.
I want to be able to do all kinds of hardware intensive things (photo and video editing, data science/statistics, maybe software development) because I don't know what exactly I will need my laptop for yet and want it to last for at least 4-5 years.
I'd also love my machine to be designed with some care, I just can't stand the look of the Thinkpad series.
I was considering that option. How much RAM do you think I'd need? My work machine is an old thinkpad with 12GB but it does slow down/freeze fairly frequently (this might be a because of other reasons though) so I am thinking that 8GB would never be enough.
Is macOS less or more resource intensive?
I think there's one fact that a lot of people overlooked here.
The new touchbar is optional.
The new MBP comes in two models and one still has your typical function row. I do agree that the announcement was disappointing, leaving me questioning if I'd get a new macbook anytime soon. I would have liked some more ram but its not work flow changing for those of us who are already accustomed to mac laptops.
Apple has failed at cloud. They have fired their car group. Software-wise, they want MacOS to be as restrictive (I mean featureful) as iOS. Underwhelming hardware updates -- I work for Microsoft and was waiting on upgrading to a new MBP...
I'm an apple household...
Apple 2016 is Nokia 2007.
No innovation, no inspiration.
A strong rival could bury them -- though it will take $$. I'm not seeing how Apple buys them self out of this hole.
I'm no longer the target audience of Apple. I still own an iPhone, but their notebook line doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm still using my aluminum macbook from '08 and my next one will probably be a chromebook running Fedora.
I find the back to back introduction of the Surface Dial and the Touch Bar to be interesting. These two input devices are going to rely on developer commitments for any real level of success, but why should developers spend time on them when they will only be available on a relatively small percentage of devices? If these were web browsers we would all be complaining about standards, but there seems to be little blow back because they are OS level devices. Meanwhile this would seem to be a big headache for developers of cross platform software.
my bets are, major devs (corps like Adobe) are going to integrate with the surface dial, a few more devs are going to integrate with the touchbar (and that will probably increase over time) but in my opinion, both are going to be relatively niche devices for the next few years (one more so, than the other)
UK prices are absolutely batshit crazy, I know, Brexit, but oh my God. Middle range MBP 13" has gone from £1100ish to £1749. Bottom priced one used to have 128gb SSD and now has 256GB, but they've crippled it by only giving it 2 TB3 ports where the others have 4.. and it's still £1449.
This event confused me. I had a bunch of emotions from happiness to utter confusion.
I love gimmicks and thought the TouchBar was cool. Then I thought about it how I would usually use it, and the answer was "close to never because I touchtype". Then I realized that the ESC key that I use for so many things blindly is now more awkward to reach. Then I realized that the TouchBar doesn't have haptic feedback which makes precision work more difficult. Then I realized the coming version might actually have haptic feedback and force touch.
Then I realized that the MBP is still limited to 16GB RAM max. If I buy this machine I want to use it for 6 years to come. 6 years with 16GB RAM doesn't seem realistic.
I am not a negative person and absolutely love my Mac. I love the apps that I own and I can't wait to get my hands on the new Final Cut Pro. But I don't know if I want to buy another Mac. Remember when everyone told you the 15" MacBook is effectively a desktop replacement? That's what I want. A desktop replacement for work that I can also put in my pocket and carry somewhere else.
I absolutely don't mind buying 2 Macs. One portable one (12") and one semi/non-portable one for the heavy lifting. But right now that doesn't seem to be the option.
For example: The new FCPX is amazing! But it requires a lot of specs to deal with the ever increasing resolution. It's highly possible that phones can soon record 6k footage in <6 years that need to get edited somewhere.
Funny, the original PowerBook they showed had a mechanical keyboard and a trackball, things that are much more compelling, and definitely more useful to me personally. You know, as a professional programmer I sort of take pride that I am immune to all this "innovation" crap. It is surprisingly easy to do as well. Erik Naggum sums it up pretty well [0]:
"... they don't make poles long enough for me want to touch Microsoft products, and I don't want any mass-marketed game-playing device or Windows appliance _near_ my desk or on my network. this is my _workbench_, dammit, it's not a pretty box to impress people with graphics and sounds. when I work at this system up to 12 hours a day, I'm profoundly uninterested in what user interface a novice user would prefer. ..."
You can just plug in Apple here instead of Microsoft and the truth still reigns. Now obviously Apple is not targeting professional developers with their products, no matter how much you try to pretend that they do, just stop, stop accepting inferior tools for doing stuff that puts food on your table, no other field is as bad at it as ours.
I was totally prepared to buy one of these new MBPs and now I likely won't. Spec wise these are not much better than last year's model. Frankly I don't care too much about the ribbon-bar thing. What I really needed, as a developer, was 32GB. Damn.
It's plain to see from reading the comments on here that Apple's graded on a curve, and they've gotten so good at what they do now that people are completely out of touch with reality. Bearing that in mind I think Touch Bar is amazing. Laptops still occupy a very important computing space - having a dedicated physical keyboard -, but this also makes it really hard to make them better. Which is why I was all the more impressed to see how how delicately it augments that laptop-experience I mentioned in such a subtle and nuanced way, yet decidedly introducing a new, patient dimension of interactivity. No, this isn't splashy or in your face "innovation", that would be too easy, but for those of us who have the imagination and can reserve judgement for a moment, this is going to dramatically improve the computing experience. And it's not about this being a "pro" product, hopefully Touch Bar will make it to their whole lineup down the road, it's about them being focused and disciplined in introducing something that people will actually find long term value in.
I hope the Touch ID reader w/ secure enclave can be used with 3rd party apps like LastPass. Could be more convenient than a Yubikey (that you now cannot connect without an adapter!).
My biggest worry is the new regular MacBook-style keyboard (which is complete rubbish), even if they claim it's improved. That's definitely something you'll want to try in person if you have a current MacBook Pro, at these prices.
I wonder what all the people complaining yesterday about Microsoft not using a 7th gen Intel processor instead of a 6th gen are going to say now...
Ultimately, neither one of these product launches could line up their supply chain with Intel's newest processors and nVidia's newest mobile chips. They just weren't ready yet.
Interesting, I really like the touch bar (see my comments about wanting to create something similar, if somewhat larger, in other responses) but the overall product leaves me flat. I get thinness in general but when is it thin enough? I certainly felt "if they just made it thinner" wasn't really something that would inspire me to upgrade. Now a cellular modem built in? Maybe. Doubling the battery life? Sure that would be pretty awesome. A clever way to turn it into much expanded "desktop" kind of experience? Sure that would have some interest (Macbooks have sucked at "docking" for a long time).
I think it looks great, and the design touches are top notch, but it doesn't seem to be an improved product than what it is replacing. I miss Steve Jobs keen insights into the way I used things or imagined I might use them. I always felt he was speaking to the issue of "what every you are trying to do, using this tool will make it easier/faster/more intuitive Etc." what I got from this Macbook event was "look how beautiful it is."
This is just another run of the mill update to me. I'm a developer and sys admin in research computing and to me, everything they removed I never used anyways.
F-keys? Practically never use them, I much prefer keyboard shortcuts that allow me to stay closer to home row.
Lack of ports? I never use them on my MacBook anyways so I don't really care
Lack of power? All my heavy computing is done on remote compute clusters
Not to say that my needs are homogenous or anything. I guess my point is, from my perspective, this update isn't some catistrophic failure on apple's part, and it actually fits my needs as a professional quite well.
That being said, I will definitely not buy the new MBP. My late 2011 MBP still runs flawlessly and does everything I need on the go. All I'd really want out of a new laptop is for it to be as small and light as possible. For me, the point of a laptop is to be portable, not some do-it-all machine that can hold all of Wikipedia in RAM at once
So as a programmer, this stupid touch bar thing is a huge downgrade. I use the function keys all the time in my development tools. Now I'm supposed to use some stupid tiny touchscreen with no tactile feedback? And I have to look down at it every time I want to tap something?
This thing solves approximately zero problems I had, but creates a bunch more.
I feel like a touch screen on the trackpad would've made more sense. Since it's so large there's room to be creative with on-screen shortcuts, dragging sliders, choosing an emoji :), etc. You can still keep all the keyboard shortcuts you need and not need to look at 3 things at once (screen, keyboard/trackpad, touch bar).
The internals aren't really upgraded though since I got the 3.1ghz i7 and 16gb memory. I've never once thought it to be heavy. And even if I agreed with those two points, it wouldn't be worth the loss of the ports.
I switched from Windows to Mac two years ago and I am really happy with my MBP 13". But this new announcement is pretty underwhelming. 16GB max RAM, more expensive, no touch screen, nothing new and interesting, but a need for even more adapter cables. But it's really thin!
I am not sure what I'll do when my current Macbook breaks down.
IMO, Mac laptop keyboards have been going down hill since they switched to the chicklet style. I much preferred the pre-2008 MacBook Pros with "regular" keyboards.
so it's more a toy than a work computer. They boosted the "entertainment" factor - nothing else really.
Lenovo ruinning the thinkpad, Apple turning pros into toys. it's been a harsh few years. - i think there's slowly a good hole to fill in terms of proper workstation laptops that are modular and robust.
are people still hanging on to their 2012 pros? last i checked they still are.
Yeah, one of those and one a bit newer. Have been waiting for one with 32G RAM since forever, but feared they would have time to bodge the entire line before getting around to it. Sometimes I hate being even _partially_ right.
I might grab one if apple doesn't bring something out next year that has proper builtin hardware. A Z book can take 64Gb Ecc ram and has a xeon inside I think and it's very modular. Sadly not very compact tho.
I am not sure if I have to pay so much extra money for fancy bels and whistles that do not help me as a programmer. I was really hoping for performance boost rather than fancy touch screen that makes me watch the keyboard instead of touch typing.
What I saw from the presentation made my actually go back home and check what Windows announced yesterday, since I was quite disappointed (I actually found the presentation of the surface book more close to what I was hoping the next macbook pro should be).
I believe the only thing that continues to save Apple for consumers like most of the ppl around here is that it is Unix based.
I have a long history with Unix (6th Edition on a PDP-11) and it was OS X that brought me to the Mac. I would hate to go back to Windows for commercial apps, except now there is the Linux subsystem in Windows 10. I was not impressed with today's Apple announcements and I thought the Surface Studio announced yesterday was pretty amazing. And expensive. My 2014 Macbook Pro may be my last Mac laptop. We'll see. I look forward to seeing what the next iMacs are like. I doubt at this point there will ever be a next Mac Pro.
Possibly because professionals with actual pro headphones won't stand for it? I'm seriously contemplating switching, but if they'd tried to make me buy a dongle for my $300 headphones, there'd be no question I'd buy a Win/Linux box.
Oh God, I miss Steve so much. I remember the time when Apple conference was a real event, everybody would watch, and second it was done we would call and talk for hours about it. Now after 10+ years at Apple camp, I am afraid that this machine I bought 9 months ago might be my last if something doesn't change in next few years. And I fear nothing will change, because Cook is leading this company by profit and numbers, and he is doing great! But that is what killed Apple many, many years ago. And worst of all, I do not see anyone who can fill the shoes Apple had 5-10 years ago.
Can anyone just point me to a 32gb ram 13" machine with TB3 Ports?
I would pay handsomely. If Microsoft had included a single Type-C port in the surface book, I would be at least in office bliss.
We could all have just bought Type-C dock monitors and had instant flexdesks with one cablee... But no... I have to wait at least half a year more for that to happen :(
If MS would just sell me a Surface Studio Display that works as a TB3 Dock for both Mac & Win Devices, offering Surface Pen & Dial support Windows only, or heck even Surface only, we would buy so many of them MS would have to become actually good at supply chains...
Didn't notice, but I like your hypothesis as it makes for a smart design. That you can't even power on the hardware unless your fingerprint matches--saves me from setting a firmware password that I may forget since I never go into the firmware.
Ironically this is the only thing that impressed me from the announcement, yet it wasn't discussed.
I will bet $1.43 that Apple's next version of the iMAC will have a tilt bevel like the Cintiq art monitor and the new MS Studio computer. I think Wacom still claims to have better pressure resolution that the MS touch (no sure if true). I have a small cintiq that I enjoy. I feel a bit bad for Wacom, they seem to have attracted some mighty competitors. Maybe Cintiq/Wacom could try to partner with Apple. Have some sort of Wacom/iMac thing. Microsoft seems to have gotten some good leadership.
I'm sure it's a great machine, but disappointed that it's still capped at 16GB (since there have been lightweight machines like the XPS15 that support 32 for a bit)
Makes me wonder how people here feel about the USB-C and basically all gadgets requiring adapters. I like Apple and Mac, but this piece.. Isn't it ugly at the end, that if you want to use an SD card from your camera you must get an adapter, adapter for your iPhone 7 lighting headphones and adapter for your $1k 27" Retina display which isn't 5k, but still pretty freaking good. That's 3 ports, and 1 USB-C port left you'll use for charging.
The idea of only needing one type of port is very appealing. No longer need to worry about ThunderBolt, DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort, VGA, HDMI, USB, Firewire 400, Firewire 800, Ethernet. ("What? We don't have all of those any more!" I hear you say. Yup! Isn't it grand?)
I'm ambivalent about losing MagSafe, but that's it.
"if you want to use an SD card from your camera you must get an adapter"
I can see how the SD card port is useful. That said, I remember the days when I had a camera with CompactFlash. Never had a computer than had a built in reader for that, and it wasn't that bad.
As for adapters for other accessories, now all of the adapters will be X to USB2/TB3. The piles of adapters from this to that that I've collected over the years amazes me, in particular for displays and old FW drives. I'll be able to get rid of a lot of old adapters going forward.
A tweet I saw today made me smile:
"If someone isn’t raging about a hardware port, it’s not really a successful Apple event."
Edit to add: Yup. Gonna be buying adapters. Won't be the first time, but going forward it's looking like that's going to be much more sane going forward.
Hm. Didn't get that. It's not that you've had USB->VGA or Thunderbolt->VGA etc adapters and you were confused which to buy. There was always 1 VGA adapter for projectors, 1 HDMI adapter for TV etc. (exception confirms the rule: there's combo Thunderbolt->VGA/USB-C/Lightning port) This won't change. It's basically the same now: you need all those adapters. So I'm going to throw away >= $100 of adapters to buy new >= $100 of adapters or more.
I feel like I'd dislike Apple less if there was cable and adapter buyback program.
I can see what you're saying. To paraphrase, I have this type of peripheral, I need to connect from that to that type of I/O port on my laptop. Over the years, I've seen a lot of different types of I/O. It might sound silly, and perhaps you'll fault me, but it's sometimes been the case that I don't remember what kind of port my current laptop uses for a particular interface type. (And is it my work machine or my personal one?)
For example:
Data: a couple different types of SCSI, FW400, FW800, USB, serial
Network: coaxial, RJ-45, RJ-11
Display: VGA, a couple types of DVI, HDMI.
Audio: 3.5mm out, mic in
This article from the Verge
And I know it's not including some of the variants of these.
Now having a common input to the laptop simplifies this a lot. Yeah, if the type of input changes again and we want to continue to use existing peripherals, we'll have to get new adapters. And I fully expect to. Until we no longer need to physically connect devices together, ports are going to change. I do think it's going to be easier to keep track of going forward.
I agree it looks like Apple has more port turnover than other manufacturers, and I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually the case. I don't expect everyone to agree with me when I say it's not a deal killer for me.
It doesn't make any sense to me tbh, why doesn't it have more than 4 ports in general, from the outside it doesn't look like there is no room for them, the USB-C ports are even smaller than all the ports that were there before.
Also 2 not 4 USB-C ports and a Headphone Jack ports on the lower end model (still $1500), are you freaking kidding me?
The USB-C charging option is fine, but why not also include MagSafe?
I tripped over the charger cable plenty of times, it just unplugs, now that's actually a great feature.
I have a camera and plenty of SD cards so I use the SD card reader all the time, I actually think I wouldn't want a laptop without it anymore.
My Monitor supports DP, HDMI and DVI, I can pretty much plug it straight into any current laptop on this planet except for the MBP 2016 and MacBook 12".
This is a bit underwhelming.
Also judging by se size difference of the ports, USB-A to C adapters are going to be pretty clunky.
I really dig how laptop input devices are in flux right now. There's this trackbar thing, and then there are RGB keyboards like on the Razer Blade Pro. Here would be my ideal input configuration:
* Touchbar with haptic feedback to make the buttons feel more concrete
* Physical escape key
* RGB keyboard with good travel
* Regular-size clickpad
Of course, this configuration doesn't exist anywhere.
The new MacBook Pro is intriguing, but I have concerns:
* Max 16GB RAM
* Oversized trackpad is going to be a palm-click nightmare
* Not sure if I'd like the new keyboard
* GPU performance is unclear---they didn't give enough details to assess it
Based on the level of detail in the video on Apple's website, I'm clearly not the target audience of this product. They hardly touched on the actual specs at all, except in a very handwavy, marketeering way.
I had been waiting to see what Apple would offer before replacing my ancient laptop. I just might go with the Dell XPS 15 but have been worried about build quality issues. I'd like something that can play games decently but I'm willing to sacrifice some performance in exchange for reasonable thermals and weight. 5.5 lbs is probably my max weight---I use it on my lap a lot.
I guess, that's the end of it. Hereby, my love relation will die when my early 2015 Macbook Pro dies. There is absolutely no reason I'd update. Nil. What kind of "pro" would care about a touch bar? It's merely a toy. More often than not, these machines are attached to larger screens. It's not even going to be used much even if you wanted to. It's stuck with a 16GB RAM. If I buy it now, then I will be stuck with a 16GB RAM laptop for several years. The only thing I can appreciate is it's lighter now, but then I need to carry all the adaptors for HDMI, SD cards, USB devices. I wonder if it would feel lighter or a headache to travel with the new MacBook pro. To sum up it up, I would not consider to replace my 2015 Macbook Pro to a new one even it's for free. What was needed a lighter, more powerful "pro" computer with more battery juice maybe. What we get instead? How am I supposed to benefit from this? Will being able to select emojis from the touch bar increase my productivity?
Ironically, I feel that the touch bar just makes it more glaringly obvious that the screen itself is not a touch screen. It invites you to expect that you can interact with your computer via touch. I'm sure there are going to be a lot of people who go right from tapping some icon on the touch bar to mistakenly tapping a close button on the actual display. Seems like a UX failure.
2. It protrudes more than 1cm from the edge of the case, so we're right back to where we started in terms of things unintentionally dragging the laptop around.
3. MagSafe is patented by Apple, and not licensed to anybody. To get around the patent, other manufacturers had to make an inferior product. In particular, the polarity of the magnets in MagSafe is optimized to make the connection as strong as possible, and that's written right into the patent (https://www.google.com/patents/US7311526). The knockoffs are wimpier.
4. Dropping $2500 on a laptop and then having to spring for a $40 part than came from free with your $1700, last-generation laptop is just annoying.
So it's looking like Microsoft may now be offering highly competitive and innovative hardware, now has a *nix subsystem and prompt you can drop to, better gaming, larger software library and so on, and tons of clone manufacturers who will ape Microsoft and Apple's offerings at a discount, why should my next machine be an Apple one?
Arguing with myself, I'd say hardware quality is probably going to be better from Apple -- but damn that's a hefty Apple tax to pay (and it doesn't stop when you buy the machine).
I can also say, working in a mixed shop, that most people who got Surface Pros in the last couple of years are generally happy with them, but they have all kinds of weird bugs and can be kind of flaky. A few folks with Surface books report similar issues. So there's that.
But really, this was honestly kind of a disappointing showing a day after Microsoft pretty much reinvented creative computing.
I really can't believe that 'OLED touchbar' is the lead off for this thing. a) if I hear 'OLED touchbar' one more time, think I'm going to freak/gag, b) if I cared less about anything regarding a mac in my life I'm not sure what it is.
Guess I'll be hanging onto my 2011 Macbook Pro a little longer.
I was looking to get a new laptop this year (black friday) and now I have no idea what I'm getting. I've waited years for a Retina Macbook Air and instead, we got this.
Overall, I'm less and less impressed with Apple. I am considering getting a mac mini for iOS development and calling it quits and moving over to the Windows world.
So if I compare the base model (13", no touchbar) with my current-gen 13" pro I see exactly one advantage:
Thunderbolt 3. Seems nice to have for future docking stations and monitors. Don't care if only used as a notebook
And lots of disadvantages:
No Magsafe connector, no HDMI (which most current-gen monitors have), no SD Card, probably a worse keyboard if they adapted the 12" Macbook key style and 300€ more expensive.
The touchbar might be a nice gimmick for some casual users which never used the function keys anyway. But I guess for most folks here that use their notebook for programming it will cause more trouble than help. It's not like most IDEs will support for the touchbar anytime soon if at all. And without special support it can be only worse then physical keys. They should have probably offered at least the 15" version without a touchbar too.
The most interesting new feature (to me) is that a Secure Enclave processor is built into the laptop. Depending on the details of the implementation, that may have interesting implications for the overall security of the laptop.
I do agree that the rest of the updates are pretty underwhelming.
I can see it being more annoying than useful. They could have set themselves apart by doing something grandiose like having small oled screens for each key that are changing dynamically according to apps and keyboards. But, I guess this time of true risks are gone.
100% agree with this. I'm still using the mid 2012 MBP 15 b/c I've waited for a major upgrade and now this... is probably going to wait 6 months and by the last MBP at close out prices then use that until the next version of the MBP because this one fucks up my work too much.
I currently have a mid 2012 Macbook air and I love it. I was thinking about buying a new Mac but now I gonna buy a Thinkpad. Apple strategy has become clear now. They are targeting the - wealthy that do not care much about technology and just want a fancy product - part of the market.
With all this confusion, has anyone figured out the best scenario for 1 cable to dock for work/home? Are there any good ones made yet? Lot of the third party docks have different watts and other issues. Plus, with TB3/USB-C (getting that right is a headache) what are people doing? Just have a million adapters? I was hoping this would make life more portable not less. I currently have a MBP 13-inch 2011 that I've upgraded RAM to 16GB and a SSD. Was waiting for this announcement for a long time and feeling kinda eh.
Thinking ethernet, charge iPhone, external HD, and connect to external monitor HDMI/DisplayPort?
Why do the Apple presenters keep bringing up the whole "use both hands" point when demoing touch bar. I mean isn't that how keyboards are used? Without looking I might add. I was ready to drop 3K on a new MacBook pro, but now I'm not sure.
Has nobody in their R&D, user-focus groups, etc., realised the inconvenience of now moving your focus between 3 disparate areas - the screen, the 'touch' bar and the trackpad.
With a touch screen, it's all on one surface. Using a mouse / trackpad it's all on one surface.
Sure, when using the keyboard, you have an additional surface, but then there are two things to offset it - touch-typing and keyboard shortcuts.
If you really want to help 'non-tech' users who can't manage shortcuts or mouse/trackpad.... just give them a standard touch screen.
Oh right. It's Apple.
Even using the phone would probably be more 'convenient' for most users in this category.
> I'm sure they are far more programmers than video editors on Macs
One would thing so, yes, but by reading these HN comments it seems that the only "professionals" worthy of the "pro" name are photographers and video-editors. There are even a couple of comments dismissing vim users (?!) for daring to touch-type, or something similar.
graphics card on their site for the 15 says its a "AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB of GDDR5 memory", but I think this is the current mbp gfx card. slides said radeon pro 450. maybe placeholder text didn't get updated?
Microsoft Ribbon on the HUD to Apple Touchbar on the Keyboard. I think this was a natural transition since it is more customizable and baked into more applications. The mobile/social UIs have created an opportunity for Apple to make a more modular interface that goes beyond the screen, or at least extends the screen onto the keyboard.
This also allows Apple to avoid making the primary screen a touchscreen since they ergonomics don't make sense with the current form factors. Also, by not making the entire keyboard surface touch it ensures the primary typing experience with haptic feedback stays intact.
The touch bar seems interesting, perhaps what I'd like is a separate product that sits beside my mac and gives the touch bar functionality - something the size of a trackpad would be fantastic imho.
Sigh. Looks like there is a typo in the article - "According to the company, it’s the thinnest and lightest version of the Pro to date, with the 17-inch version of the laptop measuring in at 14.9mm thick. The 15-inch version of the notebook weighs in at four pounds and the smallest 13-inch version comes in at three pounds." . That is a cruel error to make since it made me hope for one.
Apple is really struggling to innovate and its playing it safe with these updates. It would seem like they fear launching semi-failed products like the MS Surface RT, Google Glass, Amazon Fire Stuff, etc. What would happened if they did?. I guess they would become like any other tech company, not so special anymore. Was Steve Jobs really what this company had on their secret bag of tricks? or why are they going through this bland face. I would hope to be proven wrong.
Here is the evidence. The free thinking optimistic innovators of the tech community are really skeptical pessimists, doubting and disappointed.
Like the rest of us, I suppose.
It seems like they built the touch bar first and then asked people to build use cases around it. A touch screen with a software enabled touch bar would have been much better
I cracked it! the laptop was designed for DJs!
Now they can scratch and mix right from the laptop instead of putting it on a stand as if it was a super model..
Boy, I'm a little relieved to have a fully loaded 13" rMBP with 1TB SSD, doesn't look like the new 13" with touchbar can let you go higher than 256 GB storage. If one standard was going to be picked, maybe 512 would have been better for a $3000 computer.
The new Base model rMBP may be the next one for me for that reason for now. Keep finding it worth to always wait until the 2nd generation of a Mac laptop before diving in.
The touch bar is going to be really useful for a file manager I'm developing [1]. Traditionally, such file managers use function keys for common tasks (eg. copy with F5). On Mac, you have to press Fn to get the function keys, which is very inconvenient. Now my users can use the traditional key bindings _and_ remember them more easily!
> Traditionally, such file managers use function keys for common tasks (eg. copy with F5) On Mac, you have to press Fn to get the function keys, which is very inconvenient
or just press cmd+c, easier than reaching to the touch bar.
People are able to remap the keys [1]. It's just that fman is a dual pane file manager and in that niche it's been the convention for 20 years to use the function keys. I also use them on Mac, but I have configured OS X to not require me to press Fn.
It's strange that they killed all the port options, but choose to keep the one port that was removed from the iPhone (the headphone jack).
I appreciate that Apple kills off older tech to push the market forward. But, Thunderbolt, USB3, SD cards, nor HDMI strike me as legacy plugs needing a swift transition. I've yet to encounter a USB-C plug in the wild, so this port killing is a misstep.
The presentation at times looked like it was ready made for comedians to spoof. Tim Cook's delivery is like something out of Office Space. And that TV section. Statements of the sort "Look! What we've just watched has been added to the recently watched list.", "This is going to change the way we watch TV."
Is Apple including GPUs in all versions of the 15" now because of any future move around software development, augmented reality and VR?
Is there really a GPU-4gb guideline on Oculus or is it mostly to do with the power of the cards. If so, is there any speculation about how these "Radeon Pro" 450/455/460 cards map to the prevailing laptop GPUs?
So HTC recommends an RX 480 or up as a GPU for the Vive, how does the Radeon Pro 460 (highest available upgrade for the new MBP) compare to that?
I read on Reddit that it's about 85% the power of an RX 460...so I guess not enough raw power for VR? Didn't Apple promote the new MBP line as VR-ready or am I misremembering?
An aside, but I just watched the "design video" on the Apple site. Does Apple and Microsoft use the video production team? The exploded device views and the exploding color dust bombs made it seem like the Apple video and the Microsoft Surface Studio video were made by the same people at the same time. Very much the same look and feel.
Non-physical function keys are a horrible idea for programmers. I wouldn't go near the new MacBook Pro.
Lenovo quickly learned their lesson about that with the Gen2 of the X1C, and reverted to Gen1-style layout in the third generation. I could see myself upgrading then, if my 1st gen still didn't work so well (i7/8/256).
I got downvoted for this comment from 2 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12783720 =>
I am expecting apple to drop both the headphone port and usb ports this time around. Maybe 2x USB C ports on either side
Wait, why are they talking about "Thunderbolt 3"? Hadn't Apple finally decided to use a standardised protocol for its ports (USB C) rather than creating a new proprietary thing? Or was the Macbook 2015 just an interim design while they worked on some new bullshit proprietary connector? Goddammit.
I'm surprised by the number of people concerned about the lack of ESC key. I literally never ever use it. Perhaps that's because I've been a Linux user for most of my life and only recently began using Macs. I use emacs as my only editor. What do you use ESC for?
And despite Sterling getting a hammering at the moment, the UK price of the fully-specced out MBP works out 500 Euro cheaper than the price from Ireland.
>And if you really want to go crazy, you can use the 15-inch version to run two 5K displays side by side
Yeah... I wonder how well it can really do that. The thing that always makes me hesitant to jump back to a MB Pro is their terrible GPU performance. I hate spending that much on a machine which can barely run WoW.
Too many USB types now. Basically if you want the fancy new MB Pro, you have to sign up for new accessories or lots of ugly (and probably flaky) adapters all over the place. I totally get it, but it's annoying at the same time. I wonder if the Refurb Apple store is going to get nailed...
Congratulation Apple. You have added the worst feature ever: the touchbar with adaptive keys.
I discover this feature with Lenovo X1 Carbon (not the first generation): I would have paid not to have it.
I lost so many minutes everyday.
[Yes, I know this is optional on MacBook]
Why is it being thinner such a draw? This is bordering on too thin for me to comfortably grip.
I'll stick with the EliteBook I just bought for 10% of this price, and damn-near every port ever made. It doesn't really bother me that it's about 3" thick and doesn't have an emoji bar.
Apple's price points are no longer attractive anymore for the laptops. Previously you could buy a current gen MBA 11/13 for decent prices relative to what they offered. You could also buy MacBook Pros for less - for a 15" the starting price is now $2399!
Agreed. For non development use, an Air was fine and I'd actually recommend them at $900 (often on sale at BestBuy or Ebay).
I just bought a brand new Dell Latitude Ultrabook with i7 and SSD for $600 from the outlet store. I added ram for $40 and it has a three year warranty.
An i5 MBP at 2x-3x the cost is no longer worth the OSX premium, especially for those users who need only a browser and MS Office.
How does Apple always have the worst websites? They _never_ work properly for me. Do they not test in Chrome Windows? The video links never work, the horizontal sliders are always broken. Aren't they supposed to be good at design or something?
Every time I check out a new product page of theirs I get these problems. The video players never work or even open, and the horizontal sliders are always broken or sticky. I turned off all my plugins and nothing helps.
Fact that majority of comments here in MacBook Pro topic are about Surface Studio and whether people still use desktops, and not nearly enough comments about Touch Bar--the only real innovation during Apple event--says a lot about both events.
If I had to take some wild predictions/hopes, I'd say:
- The Thunderbolt Display live on with the iMac, the new iMac having
a new Thunderbolt target mode, allowing USB-C Macbooks to use all
its peripherals/ports, including the GPU.
- This new iMac will also be released with a touchbar keyboard
accessory
- e-ink keys keyboard will either be released with the new iMac or at
a later stage, also triggering an update on Macbooks, which, as a
side effect, will allow Apple to reduce its number of SKUs
- no new Mac Mini, the iPhone has now enough power to take over that
role with a new accessory or target mode and code updates on OS X
allowing everyone with an iPhone to try or use OS X
- Mac Pro will be updated
In short:
(1) the thunderbolt display will merge with the iMac
(2) the Mac Mini will merge with the iPhone
What's the next tool for developers? i'm happy with my mac pro, but this "upgrade" has set the milestone for the "don't buy it if you have to develop software".
what do you people buy?
I agree with lots of the sentiment here that the Microsoft lineup looked superior, but what option do I have if I do lots of development that gets deployed to a Linux environment.
I know I can do docker/VM but I like the native coding experience.
What would be the best time to buy the previous model of 15" MBP?
The slight bump in processor speed doesn't make up for the loss in connectivity to me. I don't think I could live without magsafe power and an integrated SD card reader.
Killing the escape key seems weird to me too, but do regular vi users actually rely on the real escape key? It's way too far from home row and sees too much usage for me to not remap something closer like Capslock.
the 15" now has less ssd space for the same price than it had previously, i'm not sure if that satisfies me.
also the lack of good docks for USB-c is a real bummer.
better wait till 17/18 and get one with kaby lake
What people don't understand is that the reason Apple stays so far ahead of the rest of the industry year after year is their ability to integrate software and hardware, which as Jony Ive says in the video, is unique to Apple.
I maybe should have been less subtle above, but this was me trolling.
On a side note, I cannot believe in 2016 Jony Ive actually mentioned integrating software and hardware in a product video. This is a shockingly disappointing product launch, if only for how lost in the wheat they are.
I'm starting to wonder if there's a very real possibility that Apple's marketing is so good that they've come to believe it themselves.
Other than the touch bar, I feel like the only really interesting thing here is the 4 thunderbolt 3 ports. The rest just seems really underwhelming and leaves me feeling like they hardly put any effort into this.
Do you know anyone that purchased Logitech keyboards for those sweet visuals on the tiny LCD screen? Me neither. This is a total gimmick. Power users don't look at the keyboard, it's a waste of time.
Constantly having to shift your vision forward and down and back again is a usability nightmare. This isn't too different from the gimmicky nature of the Nintendo Wii U. Apple has lost its compass.
So, really, new touchbar aside, the MBP doesn't really bring much to the table at all, does it? It's a device for pros... who already have the keyboard shortcuts for the same actions the touchbar provides long since memorized. I thought this was supposed to be a MacBookPro event - but it seems like it should be called the Apple touchbar event, really.
I personally found the suggestion that taking my fingers away from my keyboard to tap on the touchbar for autocomplete suggestions would let me "type faster" to be beyond ridiculous and even borderline insulting. Obviously Apple couldn't say - in a room full of developers - "When is the last time you used a function key?," and instead had to go with an awkward joke about no one using IBM mainframes any more...
And power users sharing MacBooks? That automatic profile switching belongs on the new iMac, which is actually a PC meant to be shared with family... oh wait, there is no new iMac, is there?
Craig also deftly avoided mention of the fact that as soon as you let go of the function key, the F1-12 buttons disappear once more - at a time when laptop developers have given up on forcing the alternate Fn behavior over the standard F1-12 buttons by default.
I'm also concerned Apple won't give a damn about making the UI of applications accessible and intuitive and simply assume everyone wants to use the touchbar instead. It seems they've given up on innovating when it comes to desktops and workstations and have decided to simply shoehorn any mobile innovations they have into their notebooks rather than come up with something -actually- useful.
I posted this part yesterday, and I'll post it again:
I just gave up on Apple ever shipping you are MacBooks and received my custom order HP two days before they announced the October 27th event. My (magnesium unibody) ZBook is as slim as my retina MBP, has a higher-PPI display, also comes with a glass trackpad, has user-replaceable battery, 2x M.2 PCIe SSDs, and upgradeable ram. I was able to pay a bit extra and get it with a mobile Xeon CPU (E3-1545m with Intel's top-of-the-line Iris Pro 580 integrated GPU) which is the equivalent of the i7 6920HQ only with more cache and better graphics, meaning I was able to buy 32 GB of ECC RAM for only $130. It has a 4GB nVidia Quadro and still manages to weigh less than my rMBP.
The only thing that sucks is the noise. It's fairly quiet even with the fan running at its highest RPM, but the frequency of the resulting noise is very distinguishable and it has a tendency to rev up and down quite suddenly (and often). It doesn't help that there are two fans, one on each side, which turn on and off independently - meaning you can suddenly feel like you've lost hearing in one of your ears until you realize the noise level is imbalanced.
I don't know if Apple will introduce Xeon workstations (update: they didn't. The crowd clapped at "6th generation Intel" because they didn't realize it meant two year old tech), but even if they did, I'm not sure I'm ready to give up my three USB 3.1 (non-C), three thunderbolt 3 (/USB-C), hdmi, gigabit ethernet, 3.5mm audio/mic, and power ports along with my function keys, home/end/page up/page down buttons, Kensington lock slot, and a proper typing keyboard that celebrates instead of denounces key travel in exchange for a more-pleasant acoustic profile.
While I might be willing to give up the ECC memory I use with my Xeon 1545m for the standard DDR4 Apple's new maxed-out MBP configured with an i7 6920HQ supports (which is otherwise more-or-less identical to the Xeon 1545m, except with less cache), I'm definitely, over-my-dead-body not willing to trade my 32GB of RAM for the paltry 16GB the new MBP offers [0].
Did I mention I've been a faithful Mac user for over a decade?
> an awkward joke about no one using IBM mainframes any more...
I was watching the video on my MBPr, while literally writing a C# program on my work Dell M6800 to automate running programs and fetching the resulting data... from a mainframe... by embedding a 3270 emulator.
I mostly agree with you, and as I've said my post about this in The Unshut, I would compare the Touch Bar in the MacBook Pro with 3D Touch on the iPhones: it looks nice on a demo, but I don't think it is as practical as Apple want us to believe.
I for one like the new MacBook pro. Good idea to bring touch id, touch bar etc. Think programmable bar. I m sure it can be locked to standard mode. HNers are a tough crowd to please.
Thank you apple, for not putting a touchscreen on that. As a developer One of the reasons I use mac is that, it is one of the few high end laptops without a touch screen.
Seeing this makes me want to go out and buy an 11" MBA (currently running a 2013 model), before they're gone. It reminds me of when the 12" Powerbook was retired.
In non-english keyboards [ is often behind some key combination (e.g. altgr - 8). Compared to just clicking esc (or remapped caps lock) it is difficult for me to see how people with these keyboards would be willing to go for ctrl-[.
They could've at least put lightning port in it. Android and Mac users can now charge and listen to music using same cables, but it's not the case for iPhone
I'm happy to see the escape button is still there,and you can bring back the function buttons by pressing the "function" button on the physical keyboard.
No Displayport 1.3/1.4 means no 5k displays. :( Why spend thousands on a new device when you can't even use modern displays from a standard out since 2014?
Wow, people are getting very emotional about this. You know, Apple doesn't have an obligation to create the perfect product for your unique snowflake use case. And you don't have an obligation to buy any of their products either. Like, what are you people expecting from Apple?
A few thoughts of mine:
Pros:
- Beautiful, thin, lighter design
- Great screen (could of course have been even better)
- Fast enough processor for most pro tasks
- Judging by Apple's history, very good build quality
- Up to 10 hours of battery life
- A great OS mixing UNIX and support for professional programs
Neutral:
- Touch Bar: might be amazing, might just be an irritation. We don't know yet. I for one think it could be nice for music production and DJing, but likely not for programming. A few people actually use the function keys a lot. As before, they will be available while pressing the fn key. But people might want real keys.
Since I use vim a lot, it's irritating that the Esc key won't necessarily always be where I expect it to. Sure, it will be available in the terminal, but in IntelliJ with the vim plugin? I might have to remap Esc to Caps Lock. An irritation but not a major deal breaker for most people.
- Only thunderbolt ports. I think this is the right move and in line with expected Apple behavior, but I guess some people want to be able to simply connect old/current generation USB peripherals without any adapters
- No more MagSafe.
- Faster AMD graphics. This is of course nice, except for CUDA people and people who want to install Linux on their MacBooks (but seriously, why would you want to do that?) Also, positive: good support for external screens. But only for certain ones? I'm not sure about this, has anyone figured out exactly what screens can be used?
- New keyboard, which some people will like and some won't.
Negative:
- Maximum of 16 GB of RAM, wtf? This is the only major deal breaker I see that applies to many people.
- Hefty price. But we're talking about Apple here, folks. Pay to play
To conclude, a great but expensive premium notebook with the major flaw of being limited to 16 GB of RAM. If you really need CUDA support, real function keys or have to be able to plug in various peripherals without adapters, this might not be the right computer for you.
ok agreed USB-C is way forward,
what about..
-no usb typeB (iphone 7 cable)
-headphone jack mismatch (lightning to 3.5mm)
-no hdmi
-no sdCard Reader (dslr pic transfers.?)
they should sell a docking station as well., or wait for 802.11ad for wireless hdmi etc but wait no 7th gen intel processors as well. hmm Mac Pro should be called Mac TouchBar
The day we get a believable competitor the Apple iPhone the MacBook will be dead. Zero innovation coming from Apple right now, just amazing!
I love Apple products but I had to buy a Surface Book due to the lack of updated hardware... guess what: it's a pretty decent laptop and the touch screen + pen is great.
I expected a little more from Apple. Sorry the lcd Fn keys just don't cut it for me I hope I'll be proven wrong but right now I think it's quite a poor gimmick.
hmm! Nice find. That Precision 15 5000 Series looks like it has fhd antiglare screen too, and can be configured with up to 32gb ram. A bit pricey but might be worth it.
I'd be more interested in which render engine was used. The animation portion could be easily be done in any of the software you memetioned. My guess would renderman due to apples relationship with Pixar, but that's complete speculation.
Its unlikely pixar is involved. It can be realy anything. But it has nice realistic atmosphere at times. Looks very unbiased. I would guess Arnold because unbiased would take too much time and Arnold just has that real vibe without being too slow.
Which ports do you currently use? On my MacBook Air (13-inch, Early 2015), I use the MagSafe and either a USB port for charging/syncing a phone or the ThunderBolt display. If I'm plugged into a display, I'm using USB ports on the display for charging.
If I were using additional peripherals, I think I'd most likely be using those when I'm also connected to a display, so I can use the ports on the display for those as well. That said, for the target market, I don't think it's unreasonable to think they likely need only two ports the vast majority of the time.
I'm not saying you don't have a use for more than two ports. Just that "two ports only is a joke" sounds quite dismissive without any additional details.
I was looking forward to this event as I was considering getting a new machine. However the new machines are full of compromises I would need to do (usual things I hear a lot are "oh you can remap Escape, you can buy a dongle, you dont need that much ports etc.")
I am a touch-typist (and I use the F keys), so the machine with Touchbar is no-go for me. What's left? The non-touchbar machine, with two ports. I will omit the thing I would need a bunch of adapters from USB-C to anything.
If I look on my current setup right now, that would be a charger (1st port), a monitor (2nd port), a mouse (3rd), a mobile device for development (4th). Ocasinally I use an external disk too (5th). So if I am doing the math correctly, I am missing 2-3 ports. I guess that would mean some extra adapters to be able to connect all of this. All of them on one side of the laptop (including headphones). That's just mess.
Two ports is not ideal on my current laptop. Normally use one for charging phones, the other for an external HDD. Plugging something else in (USB stick) usually means not being able to connect to my external or making my wife mad because she was charging her phone.
Does anyone know what is to become of the 2012 13" model that they still contine to sell that allows upgradable ram and HD?
You can still find them for $800 on EBay (brand new), but it doesn't look like it is still available on Apple's site.
There is a 4th 13th inch on the site, instead, but it is not the same as it has 128 SSD and newer graphics. It would be great if this had upgradeable ram and HD.
I think this was discontinued as of yesterday. It was definitely available on Apple's website until then.
I have one and it's great. Of course I ordered it with SSD, since the default spinning rust would have made it behave like a slug. But it is 1 pound heavier than more modern 13" models, and 1.5 pounds heavier than the newest ones just announced.
Normally I'm OK with the extra weight, but it makes a big difference for the occasional time that I'm a "road warrior".
I use Apple products for most things in my life, but their marketing department has jumped the shark. "A Touch of Genius," it reads. Did they copy this line from page 1 of the "Grand Book of Cliches" ?
If I had just a fraction of a penny for all the times in my life I've heard this phrase, I could buy a majority ownership in Apple, Inc.
I have been using the Dell Developer Edition since April of this year. There were a few hiccups because of some driver issues related to their USB-C dock (Correct me if i'm wrong, but I guess this problem was not limited to just their linux laptop?)
Ever since upgrading to Ubuntu 16.04 things have been pretty smooth. I believe any distro with a 4.4 series kernel or higher will behave pretty well.
Before this I had a thinkpad T series (I miss the keyboard, and the abundance of ports. It was really good), and I never had any problem with running any distribution of Linux.
In Summary: I think you cannot go wrong with either a Thinkpad or the Dell Developer edition. They are well made machines with good support for linux.
I've been looking around. These look like sub-par options. Horrible plastic cases are a deal breaker. Also the track pads seem to be toy like compared to the macbook pro. I've been waiting to get a new mbp but after yesterdays announcement I'm not so keen anymore. Would love to switch to a linux machine but the hardware needs to be equal or better than the mbp not only in specs but in quality of finish.
Dell XPS Developer Editions and ThinkPad workstations. No single specific model counts as a Macbook replacement. You have to choose. (Which isn't bad.)
I don't know if John Dvorak was the first to say it, but I recall him saying that in PC Mag (?) in the mid-80s: the price of the computer you want will always be about $3K. Less accurate over the last ten years or so, but for Macs it remains true.
Apple will literally replace the keyboard with a touchscreen an inch at a time. Then everyone will follow suit, so we will all have to use external wireless keyboards (because the USB3- USB2 adapter will cost more than a new keyboard).
Fast forward 5 years and Apple will announce "Macbook Bro",
a laptop with a tactile buttons!
Still no 17-inches version unfortunately. I don't get why they no longer make one - is there no demand at all for it? It's basically why I've switched to an ASUS laptop since I don't want to bother with an external monitor (not to mention the extra cost).
I am sorry, does anyone know how to navigate this comment page??? I can't even find the 2nd comment. The first comment has tons of replies and I have scrolled 30 pages and cant even find the 2nd comment.
There are now collapseable comments. Just click on the [-]. This works at any level of hierarchy. Of course, you need JavaScript enabled for that to work.
Microsoft’s dominance over desktops has never changed. Be it servers, PCs or game consoles. And it is Apple who have forged their own path into mobile computing these last 15 years.
At the time of this writing this article has 748 points and 1530 comments. For an uncommented link to a product page, really? This is not a shopping site!
Understand that for most, yesterday's event was a disappointment. For me it was a good step in the right direction, despite the boring presentation.
(I'm speaking as an Apple user, not claiming Apple came up with all these first)
1. Touch
First they made Apple users get used to, in laptops, working with a trackpad for more functionality than just moving the mouse and clicking. Then they reduced the profile of the keys. Now they've introduced a touchscreen in our keyboard area.
Wouldn't be surprised if we see a move towards a full touch keyboard. How? Not sure. Today "me" would think of some kind of glass like material that could display any layout and image while molding its surface to it (or at least something like the Optimus keyboard done properly). Tomorrow "me" will probably thinking of completely getting rid of it and using the future AirPods as wireless brain interfaces (you can ridicule me for this if you want, I know I would).
Nevertheless, we got physical keys replaced by something more flexible and that will give us a more meaningful interface for what you can do depending on the context we are working in. Alpha-numeric shortcuts will always have a steeper learning curve than an good icon or descriptive button (some real estate issues there for the number of combinations, one for UX to solve).
Know that this doesn't seem much, but it is once you start thinking of the possibilities and that it's only the beginning of what's to come.
Will talk about Microsoft later in this comment...
2. "Standard" ports
Finally! Thunderbolt 3/USB-C.
Dongle fest? Maybe in the first year or two. Then it means every single peripheral (power, external SSD, network, screens) will only use one physical interface to connect to your Apple laptop (others have also started doing this, so the wheels are in motion already).
What about your old peripherals? I'm a hoarder when it comes to tech, so still have PS/2 keyboards and mice at my parents'... Remember then? What about Serial? Sure, it was over a longer period of time, but things evolve quite faster now, especially when you are trying to simplify and make things smaller, lighter. Different physical interfaces are the enemy in these cases.
As I've previously said, was surprised that the iPhone 7 didn't come with Thunderbolt 3/USB-C. Imagine it was either some control issue they wanted to maintain or didn't want to rebuild/refactor that part of the device just yet. Would expect the next iPhone to make the jump and join the USB-C family.
Have addressed the issue of SD Cards and such in comments in the iPhone 7 thread. The future is wireless, which is also valid for cameras. Pain in the short term, bliss in the medium-long. My 2 year old Panasonic compact camera has Wi-Fi, others have Bluetooth (and I'm not saying it's the best experience as it is, mostly due to poor attention to the software, since cards are still the preferred way).
3. Apple TV
They now seem to be a bit more serious about Apple TV. Why? Remember when they used to go silent for years?
Sure, nothing groundbreaking or that it hasn't been done by others, but it is becoming a more enticing device now that they are at least catching up to the rest of the devices. Still think that using it for socialize during sports is grasping at straws. You know you want full screen for the transmission and just use your smartphone/tablet to comment... Maybe work on a better integration there?
4. What about computing (CPU, memory, graphics) power?
Need more than 16GB of RAM at this stage? Better graphics card? Mac Pro. Want a laptop? Not Apple at this point.
Wait for the next iteration. This wasn't one of those, as you only change so much between them to minimise complications.
5. What about the Air?
Look at the Macbook and the new Macbook Pro? The Air was the spearhead, the prototype that made both possible and prepared the audience, it will potentially die, which kind of makes sense (the amount of choice was becoming overwhelming and probably not that efficient from a production POV: more lines to manage and maintain, less focus on each one).
6. Microsoft
Yes, their new computer looks nice, for people in graphic design and audio/video editing maybe.
Going to be polemic, but I think the dial is a gimmick and will be the source of a lot of frustration. You can already do a lot with touch and I reckon physical device feedback is still better than bland plain touch. However apart for a niche application, I don't see the general public using it.
Big touch screen? Unless they revolutionise the way we do touch and interact with the OS, and I hope they do, it will get boring and a pain to use for most people that simply browse, watch videos, listen to music, send emails and play some games. Kids? You probably go for an iPad Pro or equivalent, something you can carry around easily.
Final thoughts
My take on Apple at the moment is that, despite what people say, that they've lost their way and are doomed, I think that's not going to happen, they do have a vision for their ecosystem and they are focusing on it, both on the hardware as well as well as the services side and experience.
They are slowly introducing changes which minimises the risk (of going down the wrong path) and allows them to learn more from users as they go. Think that 5 years from now when you look back, the evolution and experience will be quite clear (and again, the mostly mocked AirPods are going to be pivotal in this, not because of the sound or current function but because of what, as a device to be developed, they'll enable).
We cannot expect big bang innovation every year or even every few years and when it does happen, you then take a while to refine it and make it better.
I think Apple are looking to kill off desktops within a few years now. If you watched the event, they had a sequence showing a "pro workstation" with a laptop taking the "keyboard position on the desk" plus external monitors and thunderbolt storage. That's where they're heading...
That was quite a silly setup. The keyboard screen blocked the monitors and you have a break in the monitors right in the middle where you look most often. I currently use a MBP with an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.
It's ok, but with only 16gb of ram and no nvidia chips it's not exactly a good workstation. Professionals are now forced to have a second computer with a lot of ram and GPUs for computing. Very much not ideal.
But what do I do with a MacBook Air 11" for ultra portability and no desktop yet because old PC broke, and I wanted to get a Mini because no money but I don't know what to do now...?
- Mildly funny jokes and comparison with 90's technology.
- 90% of the talk was about the touch bar.
- Awful demos of Photoshop & some cringy DJ.
I was hoping we would see:
- A new MacBook with all day battery life and touch bar, even thinner design. Ok, I understand that they are trying to consolidate their product line but the category of a web-browsing machine that is 12", super small design and an adequate processor is left without any update.
- A MacBook pro with some real innovation. They could just copy Microsoft with a detachable screen (oh but they would cannibalize iPad market), pen input, touch screen. But, instead we get this touchbar thing which is great but I am just disappointed that it is the only thing they have innovated here.
- Killed Macbook Air.
- No iMac update (!!!).
- No monitor announcement.
Microsoft really hit it out of the park yesterday. Apple's entire presentation felt like they are trying to fill the 1.5 hours of time with bullshit.
Also, Panos Panay sounds like a genuine, authentic, passionate and knowledgeable whereas Jony Ive sounds like an Evangelical designer who feels "fake". I don't know how to explain it.