I'm glad glad glad the magsafe connector is gone. Every single one I've had has gone flaky at the magnetic connector, such that you have to fiddle with it to get just the right alignment for it to charge.
Funny how different two people's experiences can be. The magsafe is one of my favorite parts of my macbook (hardware-wise), and I've never had an issue with them connecting correctly.
Yeah the magnetic bit is the one part that does survive for me. Don't get me wrong, the cords are shit and constantly frayed, detached, or overheated on me, but I sure miss MagSafe now that I've left Apple products.
Well, if you have a USB-C port that charges your device, this does exist, although some reviews say the magnet is currently weaker than the MagSafe's was:
I guess I'm the middle ground in that it's never flaked on me but I've never needed the magnetic lock either.
The one thing I'll miss is you don't really need to aim a magsafe connector, just bring it around the slot and it'll jump in. Not a huge gain though, and probably offset by the ability to plug power on the right side, not have to snake around to the left.
I'm not happy that the magsafe connector has gone. They could have come up with another version to prevent the issues that you and others have described.
However, in 4.5 years. I've only had 1 connector fray at the tip and ultimately fail. The second one I bought, has lasted for 18 months now and is doing just fine with very careful use.
Still, that said. Magsafe has saved my laptop a whole bunch of times. I'd rather have a laptop with it, then without it.
I feel like I've saved a couple thousand dollars on machines not destroyed from being yanked across the room by accident.
But for me, the worst bit of hardware Apple has ever made is the MagSafe-to-MagSafe 2 adapter. _That_ is where the flakiness happens for me. If I'm plugging "native" plugs straight in, never a problem, but that darn little adapter — that can sometimes be 10 minutes of my morning getting it to connect.
Yeah for me the MagSafe was always just "that" connector that kept disconnecting as soon as I put my laptop down on an uneven surface and even started falling off everytime I moved the laptop. Which is even stranger, since my older Dell had a connector that provided same safety without the downsides.
Moving to a standardised non-proprietary charging interface is a move ahead.
They are pretty, aren't they? What makes you feel they are the most Apple-like in years?
My research into alternatives made me think the Thinkpads are probably the best option. But I just can't buy them because they're so ugly (to me). I feel really silly about that but, dammit, if there's one object where I want it to be pretty as well as functional, it's the laptop I stare at most of my day...
I understand all the criticism and have held off on pre ordering one myself (still shopping for a good Linux laptop with solid battery and resolution+light weight) but some of the comments seem a bit ridiculous to me.
16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development...come on now. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? That's even enough to run a couple of VMs with full web stacks and some testbrowsers + git and whatever editor you use
I can see why people prefer more RAM, but I also agree for regular development it might not be needed.
Overall, I find it sad Apple is ignoring the professional market. Even if it only brings a small portion of their sales, I think it's bad from a strategic point of view. Developers are those who made their ecosystem so nice. Alienating them is not smart.
At the same time, their design decisions have been copied by Lenovo, in a bad way. So ThinkPads are a bit different from what they used to be, and we are left with few good options.
I understand the complaint about the memory restriction, when it's coming from video editors, but for developers 16GB is fine. Web development on even 8GB isn't an issue, it's fine.
The only issue I have with the new MacBook Pro, from a personal perspective is the touch bar, it seems pretty useless. Mostly my problem is that I can't opt to not get the touch bar on larger models, so I have no means of indicating to Apple that I don't need it, or want it. Let's say it turns out the the touch bar is just a gimmick, and not of any actual use to anyone. Would Apple ever admit to that? I doubt it, so now we're stuck with it.
Also perhaps price. The MacBook Pro is somewhat overpriced.
I'm not a web dev, I'm a back-end dev and data herder. For me, 16GB is doable, but tighter than I'd like. I prefer new computers to be roomy, because of the way data volumes tend to grow over time.
I do frontend web and backend web services. I have 4GB on my Mac, it's tight but it works. As someone else below said, I want something for the future, and I don't think 16GB will last 5 years.
Considering you can get a ThinkPad with 64GB ram (P50) for a couple of hundred more than Apple'a base price, they seem very overpriced. Apple's laptops were already thin and light enough for me, I don't see the point in paying more to get less anymore.
Really? I frequently have two user accounts logged in, each with their own VMs running. Along with a dozen open apps each. RAM has never been an issue for me. Like, not once.
Ok, but will it be enough in 5 years? My current MBP lasted 5 years. I'm counting on my next one to be around for 5 years as well. It's something I have to think about since I can't upgrade it to 32gb down the road.
5 years ago 16GB was fine, 16GB is still fine now.
My prediction: In 5 years 16GB will be fine.
Why? Because RAM requirements passed from "We need more, it'll speed things up" to "We've got enough" a while back, and there just isn't much you can do with the extra. Once you're no longer space constrained it just ceases to move the needle.
I'm not defending Apple here, but generally it's hard to think of something that would require 32GB of ram that doesn't better belong on a server. Once you get to that kind of size you'll probably want ECC or stable uptime or other features you'll get on an actual server rather than a machine you turn on and off several times a day.
5 years ago 8GB was the max you could buy for a MBP.
16G wasn't available and was considered overkill. I remember that quite clearly because it was 2011 and I bought my fully maxed out Macbook Pro from apple with 8G of ram and I was looking at 16G upgrade kits on iFixIt a year later.
So, no, 16G was not "fine", 16G was considered future proof.
I do a lot of puppet development and parts of my development cycle require me to spin up a whole virtualization cluster with a master node and at least one worker node ot test interactions - possibly even starting vms in that cluster. I can certainly start simulating that with docker, but I'd prefer to be as close as possible. This does indeed require substantial RAM, but doesn't require any ECC or stable uptime.
I can certainly do that part of my development on some bit of dedicated hardware that sits in the office, but that means I need networking there, which means I can't code on the road etc.
> Because RAM requirements passed from "We need more, it'll speed things up" to "We've got enough" a while back
And when that happens, some developers start getting lazy and careless with how they use memory, and we return to the "we need more" part of the cycle.
I use two old computers at home, one has 3GB of RAM and I have recently upgraded the other to 8 (from 4). Both are running fine. I use both for development.
Unless some radical shift happens then I think 16GB will be completely fine in 5 years.
It shouldn't. This is mostly shaving time from assets pipeline, doing more at single time eg. editing design in graphics software that autoexports it to your frontend where its grabbed and served by locally running instance of an web app you are working on, shorter times needed to recreate your data to initial state, shorter times needed to populate your database with test dataset, shorter times needed for you to run your test suite, etc ect. Stuff thats manageable, but you never can't make fast enough.
I imagine that most web devs run a version of the server on their local machines, which these days might mean one or more of mariadb, mongodb, couchbase, postgresql, rethinkdb, cassandra, together with redis, rabbitmq, ELK, all the backend services and the API gateway that manages them, consul and/or etcd/kube and/or swarm... It's easier to run the full environment in development than it is to worry about bugs introduced by differences between development and production.
I would recommend a Samsung Ativ Book (940X), which is excellent with Fedora, were it not for an infuriating issue where the trackpad stops working reliably. Closing it a reopening generally solves the issue, but if you use an external mouse, it will probably be fine.
Android Studio becomes unbearable once it starts garbage collecting, which invariably happens while typing code and code completion kicks in, yanking you out of the flow. It is the one piece of software I would give 64 GB to last a day without a GC pause. JetBrains should sell hardware that is fast enough to run their software. I've also run into similar pauses on Xcode unfortunately.
This is just a bit mysterifying as there review of the MacBook pro sans touch said it was perfectly capable for final cut pro, Photoshop, etc. They used the CPUs in the correct thermal envelope for the laptop, except maybe the sans touch model which they said was an air replacement.
The real use case for 16 GB + of ram is video editing or tons of memory hungry VMs. Edge cases. Not only that but people begrudge them for not waiting for Canonlake* with LPDDR4, but they'd miss the holidays and have to launch in the middle of the year! Intel is continually dropping the ball with deadlines. Is it that hard to wait for a refresh which will likely have 32 GB ram next year?
These laptops seem more than capable for most professionals, The Verge just seems to be giving in to the perennial fanboy hate whenever Apple does something new...
> The real use case for 16 GB + of ram is video editing or tons of memory hungry VMs.
Or you know... running modern Electron apps. New Slack update burns over 1GB of RAM regularly and it's not the only thing running on the machine. 16GB might have been enough for year, but with current crazy wasting of memory for simple apps it's not that spacious anymore.
Because it sits on top of a web browser, and keeps all chats, images, gifs etc in memory across all channels instead of just loading those for the current channel.
The "native" app is a Chromium wrapper of essentially the webapp, so it shouldn't be surprising that the performance profile is similar to that of running another web browser. Cost-effective for the developers, less than efficient for end-users. This is the same tradeoff we've collectively chosen for many things in the "rich webapp" space.
What I'm curious of is the impact of NVMe SSD on swap performance. In the case you saturate the 16GB, the time to swap some on disk might be so small it could be an acceptable performance hit.
Sure, but I remember how swapping became livable when I had my first SATA SSD, and it wasn't a high perf one (200MB/s instead of the 500MB/s you'd see maxing out SATA today). I've read latest MBP SSDs were around 2GB/s. Naively you can free 1/8 of your ram in a second. I'm no heavy user these days but it seems it can make pro users life good enough.
That said Apple memory limits are stil love for a pro line where people expect to be able to have as much as their budget can afford.
ps: maybe the iPhone mindset got to the MBP designers, iPhone are regularly behind in terms of ram specs, which somehow doesn't equate to low perf for users.
These are Intel's limits. AFAIK, the mobile parts that support more than 16 GB are not available have lower performance than the parts currently going into this machine. It'd be odd to have a new Pro lineup update with slower machines.
ps: got me thinking, maybe MBP refresh forced Apple to accept already on shelf intel model (compromising memory limits); so maybe next year new Intel chips => new MBP. Or ... maybe Apple will double down on their own CPU IP to ensure more options.
It could be a process/tooling/manufacturing thing, something Apple could no longer stop at the point it was, that would cause the current lineup capacity to be reduced and a new lineup to be introed regardless of what was soldered on the PCB.
No, they're not "perennial fanboys". They're just copywriters copying the same ravings about "whatever lake", "only 16 Gb", "why no touchscreen", "Surface Studio is better" from other adblock-blocking popup-opening video-autoplaying gadget-review press.
"The Verge just seems to be giving in to the perennial fanboy hate whenever Apple does something new."
Contemplate the alternative: new MBPs aren't announced until Kaby Lake is ready. Analysts fill the internetz with "OMG APPLE HATES PROS, NOT INNOVATING ANYMOREZ"
In 2012, Apple announced the new rMB with new intel CPUs which weren't released yet for PC. Now, 1/10 of PCs has Kaby Lake and Apple introduce new MacBooks with previous generation. I don't see how this is not fail compared to 2012.
But the Kaby Lake processors that Apple wants to use (with a good integrated GPU) are not shipping yet. Also, there will not be a version of this processor with support for 32G ram until Coffee Lake apparently. Apple has decided to use this one line of processors and Intel failed to deliver a suitable one in time. Of course since this is the only new machine people naturally think that this is their only option. Hopefully Apple will release new desktop computers soon.
I think the lack of any news on other products accounts for at least 50% of the backlash. As Apple's product line stands the only products looking forward to a USB/TB3 future are laptops. Evaluated in this vacuum, the new MacBook Pro doesn't deliver. If they had showed us new iMacs and and updated Mac Pro there would be more options and more insight into what Apple's vision of that future looks like.
I don't fully get why I am being downvoted. The first rMB was released with third generation Intel CPUs in mid-2012. The corresponding third generation Intel CPUs were released to the public market only in 2013:
When was a notebook ever the choice for running multiple VM's or heavy editing of video?
This is what I don't understand about the current criticism.
I bought my current mac 7 years ago, and though it has dedicated 3D hardware, it was never meant for heavy gaming or rendering 3D movies, and everybody loved it. It also came with very little RAM, even for the time.
But today it is apparently a travesty that MacBook Pro doesn't offer tons of memory and high-end 3D graphics. When did they ever do that? The hall mark of the pro has always been the form factor, battery life, screen, mousepad.
>When was a notebook ever the choice for running multiple VM's or heavy editing of video?
There has been a category of laptops that are classified as mobile workstations for quite some time now, including IBM/Lenovo's retired W5xx series and current Pxx series and Dell's Precision laptops. The MacBook Pro is (or was) considered to be Apple's equivalent.
And just for comparison, a 2010 Lenovo W510 already supported 32 GB. The Pxx series currently can do 64.
(But they are heavier, power-hungry and more complicated than the MacBook Pro, which IMHO isn't really in the "mobile workstation" class, but . But in comparable form factor you get 32 GB right now in various ThinkPads. Some new models only offer 16 as well, maybe for similar CPU availability reasons. But you have the choice if you need it.)
> The hall mark of the pro has always been the form factor, battery life, screen, mousepad.
Form factor was always a secondary factor. First and foremost was high specs in CPU, memory, storage, connectors and screen. i.e. for a Pro-fessional user (photographer, graphics designer, film).
I think you're getting confused with the non-Pro macbooks and 'air' line.
I'm wondering what you've been using your mac for if performance isn't a concern... I'd be concerned that you might have been paying over the odds ...
A few months after the mid-2009 MacBook Pro release there was a MacBook release with identical specs.
In 2009 the difference between a professional and an amateur MacBook was literally screen, keyboard mousepad and aluminium vs. plastic.
> I think you're getting confused with the non-Pro macbooks and 'air' line.
The air was more expensive than a pro in the early days.
> I'm wondering what you've been using your mac for if
> performance isn't a concern
Writing, researching and programming. I payed for high-quality components and a great form factor, and that has payed off well. It has always had good performance, but for the same price, I could have gotten much faster PC laptops.
> When was a notebook ever the choice for running multiple VM's or heavy editing of video?
When they became powerful enough to do it, and so more cost effective for companies to just buy laptops for everyone, rather than provide desktop computers as well as laptops for those that need to travel. Alternatively, when open plan offices and hotdesking became popular.
Everywhere I've worked for the last 5 years I've been given laptops as my main/only development device. Admittedly I'm not generally running multiple VMs, but 8GB isn't enough for my workload, 16GB would be, but I could easily see others wanting more for a future proof work laptop.
As for graphics and gaming, a few years ago they did have models with Nvidia graphics, and that doesn't seem to be the case now. That said, they were usually mid range GPUs, and Intel graphics have come a long way in that time, so there's probably not a huge difference in relative performance for modern games.
16 GB of RAM may not be enough for some classes of professionals - beyond video editing - in the future. Considering these laptops are not upgradable, I think it's legitimate to complain about a 16 GB cap.
Using adobe apps confirms the theory that 16gb is not enough. Maybe those who think otherwise still think a 16gb iphone is adequate these days. Memory is cheap, apple is purposely building in disposability.
I wish these "tech journalists" copying nagging about "some lake" and "16 Gb" from each other again and again to use "comparable Windows alternatives" til the end of their lives. Even if these alternatives are hottest tablets with detachable keyboard and mouse and not Lenovo SuperfishBook Pro.
They should change its name to MacBook Leisure. It should be very fine piece to watch videos on the go and touch bar could be used to skip boring parts.
As a developer, I really don't see a MacBook Pro any more. They should have really called it a MacBook Air Pro.
Also being a MBPr 2012 owner. When thinking about an upgrade, I was wanting MORE of the same but BETTER specifications.
This is what I am seeing, when I look at the MBP 2016.
- No magsafe
- No glowing apple logo
- No startup chime
- No SD card slot
- No HDMI
- No USB 2/3 ports
- No 32GB / DDR4 ram
- No Nvidia graphic card
- Reduced battery
- Reduced Keyboard travel
There is nothing that shows "Apple innovation" in this Macbook Pro 2016.
As such, no upgrade from me. I am more than happy to wait another 18 months for the next refresh. I really hope Apple takes on board why developers really loved the previous MBP line.
I'm sad to see the glowing logo go. That was a defining element of MacBooks for me. Visually speaking, nothing really differentiates MacBooks from their Samsung/Dell/etc clones anymore.
It was just visual pollution for the people not using the computer. A public disservice. Would you like it, if i walked around and shine a flashlight randomly into your face?
It however also was a good way to separate polite people from the more mindless ones, depending on wether or not they put a sticker or other obstruction on it.
Crikey, I never realised my glowing MacBook Air logo was visual pollution and by not covering it I was breaking an implied social contract with my fellow humans.
Good job I'm upgrading to the latest MBP and upon receipt will cease the ongoing infliction of my selfish ways on the general public.
Wow, I didn't realize others felt so strongly about this. Now I feel like a rebel for just not covering my glowing Apple logo. That's a good way to start the day.
After attending a hackathon yesterday, I was going to cover my Mac with the stickers I picked up. But just for you, I'm going to leave the logo uncovered.
A gently-glowing logo is far less disruptive or distracting than a flashlight shining in one's face.
If you expect people to cover the logo on their laptops, I can only assume you keep your phone on silent and never, ever, ever answer it in public, because a ringing phone is far more distracting as is a phone conversation. For that matter, so is in-person conversation, so I hope you never hold conversations in public either.
Or put another way, calling a glowing logo a public disservice is ridiculous and if you believe it you're either a recluse or a hypocrite.
You weren't replying to me, but I genuinely do keep my phone on silent (no, not vibrate) and will never answer it (both because it's rude and because I don't notice it).
But I do try to check it regularly whenever I get the chance.
I still find it odd that people bring up Thinkpads in comparison with MacBook Pros. I have used Thinkpads for a while. Both my personal and business laptop are Thinkpads, and I'm unimpressed. The screens are low quality. The one on my personal device is utter trash. The trackpads are low quality mostly due to drivers. I won't buy another. They are better than some alternatives but I don't think they compare to MacBooks for finish or feel, and they cost about the same for similar specs.
A lot of the Thinkpad comparisons are based on nostalgia, IMO. I used to love Thinkpads, but ever since they went to Lenovo, they've been steadily going downhill.
USB-C is celebrated as the dock mode connector. Isn't a constant dock to all those great things you mentioned sufficient? Is it really necessary to have all those ports everywhere you go? Take HDMI for example: do you really need that everywhere such that an extension will not work? Or a graphics card: another one cannot be added via USB-C?
The rest of your points are pretty funny e.g. no glowing apple logo!
[edit] For comments to this post, I add Apple is known for eliminating clutter before the industry does, without regard to cost. By making every user specifically buy adapters if they need it, they are simplifying the product, conserving resources, and making money too. Win, win, win.
It's about convenience and servicing the greatest number of people. Some may need an SD slot often. Others may need to plug into an external display wherever they go. Maybe in five years C will be more universal, but now is not the time to remove them. They should have also left 1 or 2 USB-A ports. I don't have a single USB-C device.
having a laptop currently (Latitude 7370) which has only one "classic" usb slot...I'd kill for 2...so having none would be even harder. It comes down to doing the simple things like using USB flash drives quickly without immediately needing a dongle.
I agree that USB-C is awesome and is technically superior in every way. The problem is that right now very few things actually support being attached to a USB C host without some sort of adapter.
My biggest gripe, however, is the sudden loss of Magsafe in favor of USB-C charging only. This is a huge step backwards as Magsafe was developed to protect the computer and the charger from damage in case of a sudden, omni-directional tug. I can't imagine the internals of a USB-C connector holding up to that abuse. While they say you wont need to charge it as frequently, I don't buy that this will always be the case, not to mention it is very difficult to change user behavior and people will still attempt to charge it casually.
> I agree that USB-C is awesome and is technically superior in every way. The problem is that right now very few things actually support being attached to a USB C host without some sort of adapter.
In 3 years when you still own the machine and almost everything is USB-C, you'll probably feel differently about the ports.
> My biggest gripe, however, is the sudden loss of Magsafe in favor of USB-C charging only. This is a huge step backwards as Magsafe was developed to protect the computer and the charger from damage in case of a sudden, omni-directional tug.
This is my biggest gripe, too. Magsafe saved my ass more times than I want to think about.
I think you're really optimistic about how quickly everyone is going to switch to USB-C. Three years isn't enough time to have it be the standard for new devices, much less replace legacy stuff.
> I think you're really optimistic about how quickly everyone is going to switch to USB-C.
At this point, many new computers have USB-C, and a growing number of computers have only USB-C. So there's a market of people who need USB-C connectors, and untapped markets with a strong demand and a proven willingness to spend premium money attracts device manufacturers heavily. So maybe I'm being optimistic, but I don't think overwhelmingly so.
> Isn't a constant dock to all those great things you mentioned sufficient?
Then why not include it in the box?
Apple increased the price and removed the mains extension cable, surely they could have done something to make the transition easier?
We've been told that early Thunderbolt 3 compatibility is not consistent. So at this stage it's probably safer to stick with Apple branded dongles and adapters.
Something as simple as connecting my existing monitor through Display Port now needs an adapter. £30 [1]
As it stands it's not even clear yet what will and won't work with the new machines.
E.g. do I need to buy another USB-c Superdrive for the 2 times a year I have to burn a DVD for someone? £79 [2]
The existing USB-A Superdrive won't even work through a generic USB hub, will it work through a USB-A to USB-C converter? £9 [3]
I don't use HDMI very often except when I'm doing presentations but that's another £49. [4]
Not to mention I now need to spend £19 to connect my iPhone and another £19 to replace the extension cord they were too cheap to include.
It all mounts up; nickels and dimes.
[edit] I should probably add that, yes, I can expense this stuff to my business but it's still, it's a pain on a such a high end product.
I find it amusing that you list "no glowing apple logo" as a downside. That's pretty much the only good part about the new MacBook Pro in my book. Besides being obnoxious (which is admittedly subjective), it lets light through in both directions. So when you have a strong enough light source in front of you, you can see a ghostly Apple logo in the middle of your screen. Chime too, I had to manually disable it on the my old MBP, why would anyone want that is beyond me.
The lower tier model does have an escape key. For Touch Bar machines, there will be an escape "key" on the touch bar, which I don't think will be much more inconvenient than reaching for the actual escape key. Lots of Vim users map that key to something else anyway — it's not well placed for such a commonly used key.
Ctrl-[ is a better Escape, though. (and is enabled by default in Vim, in your terminal, and Vim modes in other editors.) You don't even have to lift your fingers off the home row.
However it's a console escape key, which means it doesn't work in graphical applications (VS Code, Atom, IDEs, ...). You might also want vim mode there. Or want easy access to escape for other reasons (intellisense can sometimes be annoying, ...).
If you need Escape, there is always a way to get it. Whether you bind the touch bar top-left to Escape (which you should in an editing application basically and nowhere else) or you use the widely-held Ctrl-[ default bind from your favorite Vim mode. Plus, the agency of being able to dynamically rebind the rest of the keys or use it as a separate HUD could be seen as useful.
I agree the MacBookPro 2016 is bad. But this is a stupid reason to think it's bad.
As an owner of a mid-2014 Macbook Pro who is tired of the trackpad clicker clicking itself when the case is warped even a quarter of a millimeter (such as on my... lap... it's a laptop, after all), I appreciate the new solid-state trackpad taken from the Macbook.
I had a few Powerbooks in the 90's. I can't remember which one it was (I think it was a Pismo) but I was working on the couch one day with the laptop on a small stool in front of me.
Someone knocked on the door and I got up, catching the power cord on my leg. The stool fell over and the screen shattered.
Magsafe is definitely a great feature on my MBPro 2012
"less battery is possible without less battery runtime" -> doesn't work with CPU bound software like Hangouts or external appliances that need to be powered. Fact is the battery is much smaller.
- Better display: granted
- Better sound: Nope, there's no substitute for bass response, all of which gets better the larger the speaker and enclosure is
- Lighter: Yes. This is a professional's priority number 2749 though.
- Structural engineering: It's half as thin. If you know mechanics, you'd need a material double as tough in order to make up for the loss in structural stability. Not gonna happen, maybe their most recent super duper aluminum alloy is 20-30% tougher. Overall, a thinner structure is ALWAYS more brittle.
All in all, OP is completely right: This simply isn't a professional machine.
> Lighter: Yes. This is a professional's priority number 2749 though.
I use my laptop in a professional capacity and weight is a huge factor for me. I carry my laptop everywhere.
Incremental yearly changes in weight have generally not been that impressive but in aggregate the difference is huge. Go pick up a 10-year-old laptop and you'll probably agree.
> Structural engineering: It's half as thin. If you know mechanics, you'd need a material double as tough in order to make up for the loss in structural stability.
I'm no mechanical engineer, but I don't believe that's correct. There are a number of factors that impact the structural stability of an item. The internal structure has a huge impact, which is why I-beams exist.
It's also not as if the space saved is the result of just milling out half of the original aluminum. The actual metal case is probably the same thickness or close.
most developer(few thousand) in my company and most other I know of work for hours on desk in stretch, attend few meetings within office, use it some more in commute, back at home work/play some more on desk/bed. Once in few months travel to client/remote office/conference where they have to carry it for stretch. I expect same pattern from graphic/app designers, animators, video editor and PROfessionals in general. Sure marketing, consultant and similar profile move a lot but they don't need a pro level performance.
So a lightweight/reasonable performance Macbook line and a little heavier/high performance Macbook Pro makes so much more sense.
You're describing people who are picking up and carrying their laptops multiple times per day and carry it back and forth to work and home every day. These people seem like the target market for a lightweight laptop.
carrying but not for long, never seen a programmer wary of to carry their current Macbook Pro few floors down the lift and then walk to meeting room. If you start feeling the weight for this little, problem is not your laptop. And, I am all for lightweight if that does not include compromise in battery life and performance.
I don't think I said that people have trouble carrying their laptops. No one really had trouble carrying 10 lb laptops either but it's quite a bit nicer to carry a modern lighter laptop.
Forever people have said that they would prefer a heavier laptop with a bigger battery and for better or worse, companies have generally ignored that. I don't think it's really a "pro" issue either way.
I am a mechanical engineer. GP is correct: if the skin stays the same thickness, then halving the distance between the two skins halves the strength to resist bending. Central reinforcement, like an I beam, don't help with the bending force but rather stops the two skins from moving towards or away from each other, AKA buckling. The other way it helps is as a shear web, in that it stops the skins from sliding past each other.
But basically, for a laptop to be half the thickness and equivalently strong it will need the structure to be twice as heavy, as the skins and webbing need to be twice as thick. That leaves even less room for battery, quiet fans and replaceable components, a high price to pay for something which is labeled "Pro".
Well, I'm not a mechanical engineer, so I won't argue this further. Nonetheless, this discussion is irrelevant unless the new MacBook pros are too easy to bend, which I don't believe is a known issue. I've never heard of anyone having bending issues with MacBook Airs, so I don't see why it would be an issue here.
I also carry my laptop everywhere and have never felt the weight to be an issue. Perhaps you should go to the gym more. The last-gen laptops weigh less than a decent hardcover book. How is that too much to deal with?
> Charging with normal smartphone battery packs is now possible.
I was going to rebut this statement as useless (my instincts were telling me that it should be under 10% of the total built-in battery), then I did the math. Your typical high capacity charging pack providing 15,000 mAh actually has almost double the capacity of a built in battery for the 13" MBP.
15,000 mAh * 5V / 1000 = 75 watt-hours
Compared to ~50 watt-hours for the MBP
I'll say that again. A sub $50 battery pack provides almost double the battery life of the one built into a $1,500 laptop.
It would be less, given the (dis)charging efficiency. Quick look at search results suggests about 80% (so ~60Wh), which is still nice for that price though.
I'm in the same boat. I have a 2012 rMBP and I am sticking with it instead of getting one of these new machines. They bring nothing to the table I care about.
They have optimized for thinness and lightness where those should be nice bonuses on a machine focused on being a fantastic work machine for professional developers. Not a machine focused on being thin and light that developers can "make due" with.
At their rate of taking sane stuff away in the name of "design", their 2017 MacBook Pro and the 2017 iPad Pro will be the same device. Because by now, there's honestly not so much more to lose than 3 USB-C connectors and a keyboard.
Skipping the whole pro-vs-not-pro debate entirely, I never understand the whole 'pros are smart with their money and Mac is poor bang for buck' argument.
If a pro is someone who earns their living through using a computer, what's more important? Saving a few hundred dollars on a laptop? Or purchasing the machine that you feel allows you to work the most efficiently?
> Saving a few hundred dollars on a laptop? Or purchasing the machine that you feel allows you to work the most efficiently?
It's a fair point, but there's a limit. Pro's will pay over the odds for efficiency and ruggedness, but the new pricing has an air of exploitation. At some point, the prices become unjustifiable.
In what sense though? Because the premium they're charging doesn't feel fair? That sounds odd to me. Pros have a history of paying ridiculous sums to work on exotic hardware like SGI's because it was the best tool for the job. A few hundred doesn't seem like that big a deal.
I'm afraid Apple is thinking exactly this way. As a 'Pro customer' I know that I can and probably will end up paying more for 'less' eventually and get one of the new MacBook Pros.
But for the first time in my life as an Apple user (just short of 10 years, I think), for the very first time I feel the price is only barely justifiable and I actively looked into alternatives.
I suppose the fact that I couldn't find an alternative that was good enough validates Apple's current offering and pricing. But it's a solid chunk of goodwill gone, and the moment I find an alternative that is good enough, they'll lose at least one well-paying customer.
And even then it's probably not a problem for them. They make so much on their mobile devices that the Pro can be an afterthought.
I'm happy to pay more for a MacBook than I would the equivalent Windows machine or Linux laptop because I value the experience of using MacOS, the superior (for me) software ecosystem, and what I consider to be better hardware and support.
But, I don't attach an infinite value to each of those. I will pay more for those things — even more than they're worth on a strictly rational assessment — because I can't get them elsewhere.
But at a certain point, the "Apple premium" becomes so obviously punitive that I start thinking that it wouldn't be so bad to deal with Windows or Linux, that the hardware from other manufacturers isn't all that inferior, that I'll put up with the support from a Lenovo.
But, on the other hand, I'll probably just hang on to what I have until the next iteration.
Every windows laptop I've bought has had a faulty hinge or hard drive failure. I've seen similar things with my girlfriend's computer. My next laptop I want to be more expensive but last half a decade.
Sadly XPS 13 and other "leading" windows laptops seem to fall victim to the same less than perfect manufacturing. Apple charges more, but there laptops are also well built.
Something I use every day for a long time I don't want to save a few bucks on it the short term.
Every Windows laptop I've bought has worked perfectly, with zero defects.
Same thing for my wife. And we're both heavy users who use our machines all day for work. We've had every brand of PC and never had any problems. Ever. Not even kidding a little.
The only problems I've ever had were with Apple hardware. Their laptops would overheat and the Mac OS would crash often. In every Macbook Pro I've had, the batteries died sooner than any other laptop brand.
Furthermore, upgrades and repairs are next to impossible or a real pain in the butt with Apple hardware. One of my Apple machines is a 2012 Mac Pro that I want to get a new video card for - but can I go to Amazon and just buy one off the shelf? No. I must go to www.macvidcards.com to get a card that works fully. I must also buy special, non-standard internal power cables for it.
Is there a Windows equivalent of Time Machine, which offers backups but also setting up your new computer with the old OS in no time? And how are the trackpads of your current machine?
These are my main concerns before I make any jump back to Microsoft-world (which I'm really considering).
I don't use touchpads, even on my laptops. I use a vertical five button wireless mouse because I don't like to rotate my cuff all day since I get repetitive stress syndrome. However, my wife does use the touchpad on her Surface Pro 3 and it works just fine for her. Actually there is one touch pad that I do use for my entertainment PC in my living room and that is a logitech K400R. It also works just fine with two finger scrolling, swiping etc.
Sure, but none of my problems with Apple hardware have had anything to do with reliability.
The fact that various Macbook Pro models get very hot is a well documented issue. I wonder if we can get some data on how much the Mac OS crashes though, relatively?
Apple's extreme efforts to lock you into their hardware and prevent upgrading are also very well known.
That last one is my biggest gripe. They are anti-choice and ultimately, anti-consumer. The Apple hardware lineup is small, sterile and boring to me. There's so much more, better and newer stuff going on outside of Apple's tiny little world.
The 16Gb RAM 'let's throw the toys out of the pram' problem has not been handled very well.
The Skylake CPUs I have seen all seem to be limited to 16Gb max RAM. Allegedly there are desktop variants that take more. The Skylake CPUs also have fewer cores in them than one might expect, e.g. two cores (with hyperthreading so '4') in a i7 CPU, for years one has expected four cores (with HT, so '8') in anything branded 'i7'.
There is NVMe for the SSD and I am sure the Apple folks have some nifty driver to swap to disk a lot quicker than in the olden days. So main memory is a bit more like 'cache' in that there is no need to be that hung up on the specifics. If your main program can reside in 16Gb RAM with operating system then all is good. Throwing more memory at the CPU is not how it works on Skylake.
Apple could have avoided the latest CPUs but imagine the outrage of 'old hardware' The new CPUs are low power, you get all day battery. I also wonder whether those people complaining about a lack of RAM are after selling website clicks or doing real work.
Really not sure where you're getting your info. The Skylake series is not limited to two cores and can handle more than 16GB. With DDR3 it's 32GB, with DDR4 it's 64GB. This is true of their mobile and desktop parts.
With that new Windows Subsystem for Linux feature, I'm honestly starting to consider a post-Mac future for my dev work. I'm sure there are a bunch of things about Windows 10 that will annoy me, but the value proposition of Mac is starting to disappear as Microsoft does better and Apple does worse. If Apple didn't tie iOS dev to its own desktop OS, I might be taking Windows for a spin right now.
I recommend just keeping your dev environment in a VirtualBox or VMWare VM that is mobile between physical machines and OS'es. That way you at least get some insurance, AND you get snapshotting and easy backups.
Gee, I wish I could run the Mac OS in a VM though. Too bad Apple won't let me do that unless I'm running it on their overpriced, under-powered hardware with the one supported configuration: running the Mac OS as the host OS.
(Sorry, I won't call it "macOS" anymore because my marketing services don't come free - I'll continue to refer to it as "the Mac OS" since it's the OS that you can only run on a Mac.)
Windows has a better business model for everybody. You can run it anywhere you want without restriction. It's also a vastly superior OS both technically and with regards to UX for Pro and Business users. For those that enjoy UNIX - Apple is still shipping 10 year old GNU utils with the Mac OS and meanwhile, Windows now comes with Ubuntu...and it's fucking awesome!
> Too bad Apple won't let me do that unless I'm running it on their overpriced, under-powered hardware with the one supported configuration: running the Mac OS as the host OS.
Somewhat agree: If Apple considers iOS the current "cash cow", then they should just open-source "macOS" and thereby expand its potential userbase. They could even charge to "certify" certain hardware or VM configs for it, while leaving the rest of the troubleshooting on uncertified hardware to the masses.
> You can run it anywhere you want without restriction.
Hahahaha no. I can copy my entire MacOS install/drive to literally any other Mac, or copy it to an external drive and hook it up to ANY Mac, and it boots just fine off it. It doesn't force me to re-validate, it doesn't force me to call Apple, it essentially doesn't assume I'm guilty until proven innocent. You absolutely positively cannot do this with Windows, which makes moving installs (such as to new PC's) ridiculously painful (to any experienced Mac user such as myself). And having to revalidate every time you upgrade your own hardware? LOL.
> It's also a vastly superior OS both technically
OK now you're literally smoking crack. The OS with the most security holes, by far, in history, is "vastly superior." The OS with such incredible UX oversights as completely removing the ability to shut down from the UI if you enable Fast Boot mode (which is really just a renamed "hibernate"), is superior for Pro users? That's just my most recent encounter of hundreds. LOLOLOL. (I use a Windows machine for gaming. Because that's all it's good for- it's too fucking naggy to tolerate if I want to get any actual work done. And forced reboots without saving the entire state of the apps you're running are fucking stupid... at least MacOS has a facility to save the entire state of a running application if there is EVER a need to involuntarily reboot... Which there almost never is.)
> For those that enjoy UNIX - Apple is still shipping 10 year old GNU utils with the Mac OS
Apparently you don't use a Mac at all for development or you'd know this: Everyone who's anyone who enjoys UNIX dev on MacOS has long since moved on to Homebrew http://brew.sh/ which puts all those latest utils into userspace.
I'm close to making a similar decision. But then I think about not having the convenience of Time Machine (and seamlessly moving to a new laptop), apps like OmniFocus, the quality of the trackpad, the 'just-works' sleep mode and a bunch of other things, and much as I hate to admit it I still end up at the MacBook Pro line...
Really don't understand this. Why can't those demanding Pro people just get iMacs. It's cheaper and supports 32GB of RAM. Of course, it's stationary, but pretty sure those specific professionals are mostly stationary anyways because they use multiple monitors. This while freak-out about the MBPs ist just silly.
One of the benefits of being a developer is being able to develop from anywhere. If you're unable to take advantage of this, you're seriously missing out on one of the best perks IMHO.
You answered your own question. I need a machine that is portable that I can hook up to multiple monitors at home and at work, and that I can use on the go for meetings, customer visits, etc.
But that's a matter of priority then, isn't it? If portability is important then you have to sacrifice some power.
I'm curious, what do you run on your computer to max out a brand-new MBP with 16GB of Ram?
I currently do design and dev work on a 3 year old MBP with 8GB Ram. This includes running VMs for I.E. and back-ends for various projects, using Xcode to build apps, editing Sketch files with 50+ screens, photo editing in Photoshop and motion graphics in AfterEffects. Naturally I don't everything at once, but even with a combo of some of them, everything runs just fine. So this makes me genuinely curious what people do that these brand-new machines can't handle. And are those demands really the majority use case? If not, then there is an argument for having different machines for the demanding work loads and maybe a smaller laptop or even iPad for meetings.
That's what apple wants you to do, buy a macbook and iMac. Apple had the competitive laptop edge for a long time but now they've lost it to dell, samsung, and hp.
I think you presume to know too much about the habits of these MBP users. Even if you spend 90% of your time at the same desk, you have meetings at customers', you travel, you work on the weekend or at night and no one wants to have 2 machines.
This is a sincere question: what do people need with 32 GB of RAM on a dev laptop?
I work on an MBA 11" with 8GB and I'm using Parallels to run Visual Studio 2015 for a work related project (100k+ C#/C++ codebase). Other than that work I do some Haskell and C++ work locally. It chugs along just fine and I don't feel like I'm hurting with it compared to compiling on my dev box at work.
Are people just spinning up a lot of VMs? I've got a beefy box at work for when I need to do heavy lifting because I value battery life on the laptop over doing it locally. Additionally, I like the static context - work on code at work ok beefy workstation then go home and remote in if I still have more to do.
TL;DR: what are people's use cases for 32gb on a laptop if you're a developer? Why not remote into big box?
Ya - that was my assumption though I can't envision spinning up more than one a laptop at a time. That said, I don't do client work so my context is relatively static.
And being reliant on connectivity to a "big box" to simply get your work done is suboptimal. Also, how big of box do you need when you've got hundreds if not thousands of devs? Much easier (and cheaper, since there's no upkeep) to throw another 16GB of memory inside every developer's system.
To be fair, being a Professional at a computer covers a lot more than just C#/C++ code. Back when I was doing neuroscience research, I could eat up 32 GB of RAM in a MATLAB simulation easy. Using microscopy data people could eat up 32 GB with images (or videos) in no time flat. There's tons of algorithmic work that needs large enough in-memory data to be useful.
It suggests you work on one client at a time. I'll often have a few VMs running as I switch between 2-3 clients in a given day. For me 8GB is a minimum.
What type of work do you do exactly? I'm just curious because in my experience, I've never run virtual machines with front ends. As of late, I haven't been running VMs at all and have been using Docker containers on my Mac to emulate the environment I need something to run in.
No. They buy insane amounts of RAM they don't need, open up the resource monitor, see the greedy apps taking over 19GB of RAM and scream "see guys!! i told you i needed 32gb!1"
I am in spinning up a ton of VM's category as well as the artistic category. With networking options available I can have a complete, closed environment that only disturbs my PC. From the artistic side once you start slinging 4k+ images around on multiple layers RAM vs. no RAM is death. What's great though? On my 32GB+ systems I can just do both on the same time and then come back to it later. If you have the ability to leave things spooled up you really miss when you start having to do a hard context switch.
It's more realizing the promise of hibernate/suspend options- if you don't have to reboot or stop what you are working on to do something else, why would you? And when it's in a portable laptop you can just take it anywhere, where a big box may be unavailable/down. Not to mention the TCO of a big box versus a laptop in electricity and everyday costs is actually much lower and comes with free battery backup, embedded keyboard and screen! I repurpose many of my old laptops to be servers/development support for that reason and I want my systems to be expandable, because RAM is what I really want to keep things speedy.
Robotics Engineer(ing student).
Also annoyed that only the most expensive pro has a real graphics card.
Things that need a lot of RAM:
Solidworks, Fusion360 (I can't even run it on 8bg with and an integrated gpu) And using Solidworks remotely is a bad joke.
Robot Path planning, motion planning
AI Assignments,
ROS + RVIZ + Gazebo + actual robot software
Anything written in python
[EDIT almost forgot] Matlab, VMs
Playing music or having a web browser open while any of the above things are running...
16bg would probably be fine for 2 years. But >$2000 is a lot to pay for only 2 years of use. People seem to think that just because its no longer current_year-1 that their desktop app can use previous_version's_RAM+0.5gb
There are enough people with enough reasons for having only a laptop. The dell precision m5510 is around same price as mbp (depending on setup) and yet it comes with a real graphics card, and the option for 32 gb of RAM.
Internet is not reliable. Pls, we are talking about PRO work.
> What do people need with 32 GB of RAM on a dev laptop?
Databases. I run Sql Server, PostgreSQL, MySql, Firebird. All at the same time? Yes.
Also, the thing about "Big Data" is need as much RAM as possible.
---
I could live with a iMac (what I have) or a MacPro (that I can't buy because the dolar in my country double in price!) but the main issue here is the signaling. Apple is like telling "We don't care anymore about you".
How will be trust the (maybe next?) upgrades to the rest of the line will be almost good now? And what about the next after this ones?
I work from home too. The internet is ok here. But is reliable? Not. Also, the internet somethings get slow just because, I need to reset the modem, or call to get it fixed (so the provider replace it with another (?)) and things work for weeks, until not again.
Full transparency - I work at a "Big Company" and I've got gigabit. So when I say internet is good, it's quite good. No latency issues and no hardware issues in the 1.5 years I've had it.
Either way - fair enough. You don't like the reliability of your internet so the power of the machine locally is important.
16Gb is ok for now I am already feeling the constraint and know my next laptop which should last 3+ years will have to have 32 gb to be comfortable with my future usage pattern and apps memory feature creep.
My usage is obviously not like everyones: lots of docker container and vagrant vms both with dedicated memory, unhealthy amount of browser tabs, memory hogging intellij (especially with scalaz implicits and having lots of projects open at the same time). And the biggest memory killer: working for clients with very large ecosphere stack of JVM based microservices that you spin most of up locally including dbs.
Whenever I pair with devs using 8gb MBAs on these projects they continually apologises for the MBA's slowness and their need to continually shutdown part of microservices stack as they run into 8gb constraints.
16gb is a sweet spot today, but not in 2 or less years.
Remoting into private/cloud vms or integrating with staging environments is possible sometimes, but I work on the train for 2 hours a day as well as from home a lot, and in demos, meetings, coffee shops. So relying on dodgy VPNs over fragile connections is painful. So spinning up the whole stack locally has always been a must for me. Again, this is not most people's pattern.
> have to pay the premium for the touch bar although most of the time I use the machine it is closed and connected to my display and keyboard
Well at least this one is optional. I'm hoping more people opt for the function-key model, so they actually release one with 4 usb-c ports instead of 2. Why did they do that, anyway?
I think Apple mostly choose excellent components to build their devices, be it the screens, ssds or cameras. For a buyer getting an iPhone or Macbook is usually the best way to get hold of a well put together and high quality device.
Sure you can get the same quality in other devices but it takes research and most devices of equivalent quality are usually as expensive as Apple devices and sometimes even more.
The Dell XPS, Surface book or HP Spectre are not cheap or without issues. Even equivalently configured Asus Zenbooks with i5 and not core-m are not cheap.
For instance the previous generation 13 retinas were the only laptops with 28W i5 SKUs. The rest of the i5 ultrabooks in the Windows ecosystem were the standard 15W SKUs, so with the Macbook 13 Retina you got slightly better performance and Iris graphics.
The current dissappointment is valid as people rightly expect far more from Apple than boring incremental updates. The magsafe ommission is head scratching and 1299 to 1499 is a huge jump.
I think people are getting disenchanted with paying for 'let's make things thin' brand of engineering that adds little to no value to end users.
As surprised as I am to say this; I think Google could steal a large chunk of the developer market overnight with some slight changes to Chrome OS.
I needed an emergency machine last week (My 2011 Pro finally died), and I opt'd for a £200 Chromebook (EDGAR), thinking all I need is a browser and a terminal right this second and I'd worry about what Apple is doing later.
A solid Linux laptop with working sleep, working wifi, great battery life. Tad underpowered but hey it's £200. I'm _really_ impressed.
If Google relaxed the constraints a little on the OS, or supported a Crouton-like workflow for containers without having to stick it in dev-mode, they could make A LOT of developers very happy.
I can't recommend Dell's Developer Edition laptops enough. I switched from a MacBook Pro about 6 months ago and haven't run into any of the usual obnoxious Linux-on-a-laptop headaches like sleep or wifi.
It's not as good as the force trackpad on the current MBP, but it's not bad, either. My only real gripe is that the physical click is a little heavy & loud. I'd put it in the same ballpark with prior generations of MBPs that physically clicked. You can always go play with one at a Micro Center or other box store.
You do, and xiwi (X11 in a window) is almost magic in letting me spawn a proper terminal emulator integrated with ChromeOS's window manager (Aura?).
...but it feels like a bit of a hack. I have to have the laptop in dev mode and there's a slight fear that an automatic update might prevent the chroot from working, or that my stateful downloads directory might disappear.
My thought was that ChromeOS is kinda where OS X 10.0 was... a great UI on top of a great base that just works. That's what drove many of us to Apple when we got bored of re-configuring linux, it's what made many of us recommend Apple to friends/family.... Apple have dropped the ball, Google is in a pretty good place to pick it up.
This macbook pro is incompatible with my current set up and will not be purchased, as I had intended to prior to the launch event. I have 4 mag safe power supplies(I travel with one and I keep one at my desk) it was bad enough when you switched from mag safe one to mag safe 2. I use my Macbook pro to run logic and record and mix audio. I have an internal 256gb mini SD card that stores my samples. I will need dongles for my external ssds, my 2000 dollar UAD apollo 8 and several other USB synthesizers and drum machines. I have 8 years of logic projects that Im not intereted in converting to some other format. I dont think that Apple could have fucked over anyone who makes music much harder.
Oh, and that touch strip? too small for anything but emoticons. I went from being semi excited about this macbook to realizing just how mid grade this thing really is. If the next update doesnt put the features I need back in place, this will be the last of my apple purchases. I've owned a mac pro, 4 macbook pros, every iphone save for the 3g. I like that you make them out of nice materials and strive for better. But you are now just making luxury laptops for consumers, not pros.
A few days ago there was an article that some Thunderbolt devices don't work with the new machines. A little disconcerting but since I don't have any I don't care.
But I do care about my USB-A devices. I don't mind using an adapter because I only need it at home on my desk. However the description of the Apple USB-C to USB-A adapter says it doesn't work with some devices.
Great. Now what?
[I'm also a little ticked off that they don't include an adapter in the box. Most people will have legacy USB-A devices and should need one.]
CORRECTION: They don't say anything when I add the adapter to one of the new MacBook Pros during the purchase process.
But they do include the caveat when I add the adapter to the 12" MacBook which I've also been looking at (sorry, German page):
" Mit dem USB-C-auf-USB-Adapter kannst du dein MacBook mit USB-C-Anschluss an viele USB-Zubehörgeräte anschließen, z. B. an deine Kamera, einen Flash-Drive oder an ein Lightning auf USB-Kabel, um iPhone, iPad oder iPod aufzuladen und zu synchronisieren.*
*Einige USB-Zubehörgeräte werden nicht unterstützt.
"
The last sentence reads: Some USB accessories are not supported.
Correction: They don't say anything when I add the adapter to one of the new MacBook Pros during the purchase process.
But they do include the caveat when I add the adapter to the 12" MacBook which I've also been looking at (sorry, German page):
"
Mit dem USB-C-auf-USB-Adapter kannst du dein MacBook mit USB-C-Anschluss an viele USB-Zubehörgeräte anschließen, z. B. an deine Kamera, einen Flash-Drive oder an ein Lightning auf USB-Kabel, um iPhone, iPad oder iPod aufzuladen und zu synchronisieren.*
*Einige USB-Zubehörgeräte werden nicht unterstützt.
"
The last sentence reads: Some USB accessories are not supported.
239 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread1. Three years ago before they had finally released the over due Mac Pro?
2. Final Cut Pro X?
3. After iPod and iPhone took over Apple's products?
https://smile.amazon.com/Griffin-BreakSafe-Breakaway-Chromeb...
The one thing I'll miss is you don't really need to aim a magsafe connector, just bring it around the slot and it'll jump in. Not a huge gain though, and probably offset by the ability to plug power on the right side, not have to snake around to the left.
However, in 4.5 years. I've only had 1 connector fray at the tip and ultimately fail. The second one I bought, has lasted for 18 months now and is doing just fine with very careful use.
Still, that said. Magsafe has saved my laptop a whole bunch of times. I'd rather have a laptop with it, then without it.
That's kind of a standard feature all around.
But for me, the worst bit of hardware Apple has ever made is the MagSafe-to-MagSafe 2 adapter. _That_ is where the flakiness happens for me. If I'm plugging "native" plugs straight in, never a problem, but that darn little adapter — that can sometimes be 10 minutes of my morning getting it to connect.
Moving to a standardised non-proprietary charging interface is a move ahead.
I personally love the latest MacBooks (Pro 2016 and 12"), they are beautiful and the most Apple-like computers they have released in years.
I say that as an owner of a bunch of Thinkpads. It's not that I favor form over function, but I kind of like Apple being Apple.
My research into alternatives made me think the Thinkpads are probably the best option. But I just can't buy them because they're so ugly (to me). I feel really silly about that but, dammit, if there's one object where I want it to be pretty as well as functional, it's the laptop I stare at most of my day...
16 GB of ram as the bare minimum for web development...come on now. Is there anything obvious I'm missing? That's even enough to run a couple of VMs with full web stacks and some testbrowsers + git and whatever editor you use
Overall, I find it sad Apple is ignoring the professional market. Even if it only brings a small portion of their sales, I think it's bad from a strategic point of view. Developers are those who made their ecosystem so nice. Alienating them is not smart.
At the same time, their design decisions have been copied by Lenovo, in a bad way. So ThinkPads are a bit different from what they used to be, and we are left with few good options.
The only issue I have with the new MacBook Pro, from a personal perspective is the touch bar, it seems pretty useless. Mostly my problem is that I can't opt to not get the touch bar on larger models, so I have no means of indicating to Apple that I don't need it, or want it. Let's say it turns out the the touch bar is just a gimmick, and not of any actual use to anyone. Would Apple ever admit to that? I doubt it, so now we're stuck with it.
Also perhaps price. The MacBook Pro is somewhat overpriced.
I'm not a web dev, I'm a back-end dev and data herder. For me, 16GB is doable, but tighter than I'd like. I prefer new computers to be roomy, because of the way data volumes tend to grow over time.
Considering you can get a ThinkPad with 64GB ram (P50) for a couple of hundred more than Apple'a base price, they seem very overpriced. Apple's laptops were already thin and light enough for me, I don't see the point in paying more to get less anymore.
My prediction: In 5 years 16GB will be fine.
Why? Because RAM requirements passed from "We need more, it'll speed things up" to "We've got enough" a while back, and there just isn't much you can do with the extra. Once you're no longer space constrained it just ceases to move the needle.
I'm not defending Apple here, but generally it's hard to think of something that would require 32GB of ram that doesn't better belong on a server. Once you get to that kind of size you'll probably want ECC or stable uptime or other features you'll get on an actual server rather than a machine you turn on and off several times a day.
It's not a question of whether 16GB is sufficient. It's a question of whether 16GB is an reasonable maximum for a "Pro" machine.
OK, forget about expansion and maybe adding 16GB RAM and a few more TB of flash in a couple years. Clearly that ship has sailed.
But 16GB RAM is the absolute minimum I would buy with a new machine today. For that to be the Pro's maximum is wrong.
16G wasn't available and was considered overkill. I remember that quite clearly because it was 2011 and I bought my fully maxed out Macbook Pro from apple with 8G of ram and I was looking at 16G upgrade kits on iFixIt a year later.
So, no, 16G was not "fine", 16G was considered future proof.
I can certainly do that part of my development on some bit of dedicated hardware that sits in the office, but that means I need networking there, which means I can't code on the road etc.
And when that happens, some developers start getting lazy and careless with how they use memory, and we return to the "we need more" part of the cycle.
Unless some radical shift happens then I think 16GB will be completely fine in 5 years.
- Chrome alone eats 2-3GB of RAM
- Windows 10 needs at least 6GB allocated in a VM
- Slack, Skype, an editor, Firefox etc. take up another 2GB easily.
That's just 10-11GB for boring stuff. If you have Photoshop open or sites like Zeplin that consume a lot of RAM you can reach 16GBs easily.
No need to be dismissive.
Pretty sure you need that much just to resolve the npm dependency tree for many projects these days.
I guess my viewpoint is skewed as a developer. I spend most of my time making the product I work on use as little RAM and CPU as possible.
RIP js developer's RAM.
Sun tried that. Didn't go well.
You're missing the power price you have to pay for more RAM. This is not an Apple problem. This is a physics problem.
The real use case for 16 GB + of ram is video editing or tons of memory hungry VMs. Edge cases. Not only that but people begrudge them for not waiting for Canonlake* with LPDDR4, but they'd miss the holidays and have to launch in the middle of the year! Intel is continually dropping the ball with deadlines. Is it that hard to wait for a refresh which will likely have 32 GB ram next year?
These laptops seem more than capable for most professionals, The Verge just seems to be giving in to the perennial fanboy hate whenever Apple does something new...
Or you know... running modern Electron apps. New Slack update burns over 1GB of RAM regularly and it's not the only thing running on the machine. 16GB might have been enough for year, but with current crazy wasting of memory for simple apps it's not that spacious anymore.
Is this right? This is a glorified chat client! Why so much?
That said Apple memory limits are stil love for a pro line where people expect to be able to have as much as their budget can afford.
ps: maybe the iPhone mindset got to the MBP designers, iPhone are regularly behind in terms of ram specs, which somehow doesn't equate to low perf for users.
ps: got me thinking, maybe MBP refresh forced Apple to accept already on shelf intel model (compromising memory limits); so maybe next year new Intel chips => new MBP. Or ... maybe Apple will double down on their own CPU IP to ensure more options.
The annoying part is, you don't really know if 32GB model is coming out next year or not. This of course applies to most other vendors as well.
And what laptop in the Apple ecosystem are those who are running VMs and doing video editing meant to use? A Macbook Pro-Pro?
Contemplate the alternative: new MBPs aren't announced until Kaby Lake is ready. Analysts fill the internetz with "OMG APPLE HATES PROS, NOT INNOVATING ANYMOREZ"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro#Third_generation_.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)
This is what I don't understand about the current criticism.
I bought my current mac 7 years ago, and though it has dedicated 3D hardware, it was never meant for heavy gaming or rendering 3D movies, and everybody loved it. It also came with very little RAM, even for the time.
But today it is apparently a travesty that MacBook Pro doesn't offer tons of memory and high-end 3D graphics. When did they ever do that? The hall mark of the pro has always been the form factor, battery life, screen, mousepad.
There has been a category of laptops that are classified as mobile workstations for quite some time now, including IBM/Lenovo's retired W5xx series and current Pxx series and Dell's Precision laptops. The MacBook Pro is (or was) considered to be Apple's equivalent.
(But they are heavier, power-hungry and more complicated than the MacBook Pro, which IMHO isn't really in the "mobile workstation" class, but . But in comparable form factor you get 32 GB right now in various ThinkPads. Some new models only offer 16 as well, maybe for similar CPU availability reasons. But you have the choice if you need it.)
Form factor was always a secondary factor. First and foremost was high specs in CPU, memory, storage, connectors and screen. i.e. for a Pro-fessional user (photographer, graphics designer, film).
I think you're getting confused with the non-Pro macbooks and 'air' line.
I'm wondering what you've been using your mac for if performance isn't a concern... I'd be concerned that you might have been paying over the odds ...
In 2009 the difference between a professional and an amateur MacBook was literally screen, keyboard mousepad and aluminium vs. plastic.
> I think you're getting confused with the non-Pro macbooks and 'air' line.
The air was more expensive than a pro in the early days.
> I'm wondering what you've been using your mac for if > performance isn't a concern
Writing, researching and programming. I payed for high-quality components and a great form factor, and that has payed off well. It has always had good performance, but for the same price, I could have gotten much faster PC laptops.
> high-quality components and a great form factor
Yep you could have made do with a cheaper mac.
When they became powerful enough to do it, and so more cost effective for companies to just buy laptops for everyone, rather than provide desktop computers as well as laptops for those that need to travel. Alternatively, when open plan offices and hotdesking became popular.
Everywhere I've worked for the last 5 years I've been given laptops as my main/only development device. Admittedly I'm not generally running multiple VMs, but 8GB isn't enough for my workload, 16GB would be, but I could easily see others wanting more for a future proof work laptop.
As for graphics and gaming, a few years ago they did have models with Nvidia graphics, and that doesn't seem to be the case now. That said, they were usually mid range GPUs, and Intel graphics have come a long way in that time, so there's probably not a huge difference in relative performance for modern games.
Those aren't edge cases in the "Pro" market, those are common professional use cases.
Also being a MBPr 2012 owner. When thinking about an upgrade, I was wanting MORE of the same but BETTER specifications.
This is what I am seeing, when I look at the MBP 2016.
- No magsafe
- No glowing apple logo
- No startup chime
- No SD card slot
- No HDMI
- No USB 2/3 ports
- No 32GB / DDR4 ram
- No Nvidia graphic card
- Reduced battery
- Reduced Keyboard travel
There is nothing that shows "Apple innovation" in this Macbook Pro 2016.
As such, no upgrade from me. I am more than happy to wait another 18 months for the next refresh. I really hope Apple takes on board why developers really loved the previous MBP line.
It however also was a good way to separate polite people from the more mindless ones, depending on wether or not they put a sticker or other obstruction on it.
Good job I'm upgrading to the latest MBP and upon receipt will cease the ongoing infliction of my selfish ways on the general public.
After attending a hackathon yesterday, I was going to cover my Mac with the stickers I picked up. But just for you, I'm going to leave the logo uncovered.
Would you refuse, i would not start a fight, but just look for another place or another way to block the view for myself.
If i was Santa Claus, you would however get no gift.
That sounds like a pretty heavy safe space invasion. I don't think I'd appreciate you talking to me about my hardware preferences.
If you expect people to cover the logo on their laptops, I can only assume you keep your phone on silent and never, ever, ever answer it in public, because a ringing phone is far more distracting as is a phone conversation. For that matter, so is in-person conversation, so I hope you never hold conversations in public either.
Or put another way, calling a glowing logo a public disservice is ridiculous and if you believe it you're either a recluse or a hypocrite.
But I do try to check it regularly whenever I get the chance.
Initially I thought it was a step backwards, but now I don't miss it, and it helped to improve battery life on mobile devices too.
Walking into a gathering with all those Apple logos lit while carrying a ThinkPad did make me feel like a bit of a rebel. Rather ironic.
http://vwordpress.stmarys-ca.edu/ame1ian/files/2014/03/think...
I want a machine that is customized to work the way I want it to work. I don't want a machine that is generalized to suit non-techs.
But the rest of the points the OP/article made are spot on; this isn't a Pro machine.
Just walk in to any conference and you could instantly assess the Mac's popularity among the group
You see it in movies too
In fact Inwatched a movie the other day with an iMac and no glowing logo and it looked weird
The rest of your points are pretty funny e.g. no glowing apple logo!
[edit] For comments to this post, I add Apple is known for eliminating clutter before the industry does, without regard to cost. By making every user specifically buy adapters if they need it, they are simplifying the product, conserving resources, and making money too. Win, win, win.
My biggest gripe, however, is the sudden loss of Magsafe in favor of USB-C charging only. This is a huge step backwards as Magsafe was developed to protect the computer and the charger from damage in case of a sudden, omni-directional tug. I can't imagine the internals of a USB-C connector holding up to that abuse. While they say you wont need to charge it as frequently, I don't buy that this will always be the case, not to mention it is very difficult to change user behavior and people will still attempt to charge it casually.
In 3 years when you still own the machine and almost everything is USB-C, you'll probably feel differently about the ports.
> My biggest gripe, however, is the sudden loss of Magsafe in favor of USB-C charging only. This is a huge step backwards as Magsafe was developed to protect the computer and the charger from damage in case of a sudden, omni-directional tug.
This is my biggest gripe, too. Magsafe saved my ass more times than I want to think about.
At this point, many new computers have USB-C, and a growing number of computers have only USB-C. So there's a market of people who need USB-C connectors, and untapped markets with a strong demand and a proven willingness to spend premium money attracts device manufacturers heavily. So maybe I'm being optimistic, but I don't think overwhelmingly so.
I'm actually really surprised Apple didn't make it themselves.
Then why not include it in the box?
Apple increased the price and removed the mains extension cable, surely they could have done something to make the transition easier?
We've been told that early Thunderbolt 3 compatibility is not consistent. So at this stage it's probably safer to stick with Apple branded dongles and adapters.
Something as simple as connecting my existing monitor through Display Port now needs an adapter. £30 [1]
As it stands it's not even clear yet what will and won't work with the new machines.
E.g. do I need to buy another USB-c Superdrive for the 2 times a year I have to burn a DVD for someone? £79 [2]
The existing USB-A Superdrive won't even work through a generic USB hub, will it work through a USB-A to USB-C converter? £9 [3]
I don't use HDMI very often except when I'm doing presentations but that's another £49. [4]
Not to mention I now need to spend £19 to connect my iPhone and another £19 to replace the extension cord they were too cheap to include.
It all mounts up; nickels and dimes.
[edit] I should probably add that, yes, I can expense this stuff to my business but it's still, it's a pain on a such a high end product.
[1]: http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MMEL2/thunderbolt-3-usb...
[2]: http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MD564ZM/A/apple-usb-sup...
[3]: http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MJ1M2/usb-c-to-usb-adap...
[4]: http://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MJ1K2ZM/A/usb-c-digital...
> Vintage supports these ctrl key bindings:
Atom-vim-mode-plus has it by default. https://github.com/t9md/atom-vim-mode-plus/blob/master/keyma...VSCodeVim doesn't have it by default, but it's an option. https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim#usectrlkeys
If you need Escape, there is always a way to get it. Whether you bind the touch bar top-left to Escape (which you should in an editing application basically and nowhere else) or you use the widely-held Ctrl-[ default bind from your favorite Vim mode. Plus, the agency of being able to dynamically rebind the rest of the keys or use it as a separate HUD could be seen as useful.
I agree the MacBookPro 2016 is bad. But this is a stupid reason to think it's bad.
I think i would be bothered by missing F keys more…
Someone knocked on the door and I got up, catching the power cord on my leg. The stool fell over and the screen shattered.
Magsafe is definitely a great feature on my MBPro 2012
- more efficient CPU (less battery is possible without less battery runtime)
- better display (Display P3 color, more nits)
- better sound
- lighter
- better structural engineering (all metal, even the hinges) and therefor also no apple backlight (which makes the structural part better).
- Charging with normal smartphone battery packs is now possible.
"less battery is possible without less battery runtime" -> doesn't work with CPU bound software like Hangouts or external appliances that need to be powered. Fact is the battery is much smaller.
- Better display: granted
- Better sound: Nope, there's no substitute for bass response, all of which gets better the larger the speaker and enclosure is
- Lighter: Yes. This is a professional's priority number 2749 though.
- Structural engineering: It's half as thin. If you know mechanics, you'd need a material double as tough in order to make up for the loss in structural stability. Not gonna happen, maybe their most recent super duper aluminum alloy is 20-30% tougher. Overall, a thinner structure is ALWAYS more brittle.
All in all, OP is completely right: This simply isn't a professional machine.
It's far from clear that this is 'simple'.
I use my laptop in a professional capacity and weight is a huge factor for me. I carry my laptop everywhere.
Incremental yearly changes in weight have generally not been that impressive but in aggregate the difference is huge. Go pick up a 10-year-old laptop and you'll probably agree.
> Structural engineering: It's half as thin. If you know mechanics, you'd need a material double as tough in order to make up for the loss in structural stability.
I'm no mechanical engineer, but I don't believe that's correct. There are a number of factors that impact the structural stability of an item. The internal structure has a huge impact, which is why I-beams exist.
It's also not as if the space saved is the result of just milling out half of the original aluminum. The actual metal case is probably the same thickness or close.
So a lightweight/reasonable performance Macbook line and a little heavier/high performance Macbook Pro makes so much more sense.
Forever people have said that they would prefer a heavier laptop with a bigger battery and for better or worse, companies have generally ignored that. I don't think it's really a "pro" issue either way.
But basically, for a laptop to be half the thickness and equivalently strong it will need the structure to be twice as heavy, as the skins and webbing need to be twice as thick. That leaves even less room for battery, quiet fans and replaceable components, a high price to pay for something which is labeled "Pro".
I was going to rebut this statement as useless (my instincts were telling me that it should be under 10% of the total built-in battery), then I did the math. Your typical high capacity charging pack providing 15,000 mAh actually has almost double the capacity of a built in battery for the 13" MBP.
15,000 mAh * 5V / 1000 = 75 watt-hours
Compared to ~50 watt-hours for the MBP
I'll say that again. A sub $50 battery pack provides almost double the battery life of the one built into a $1,500 laptop.
It would be less, given the (dis)charging efficiency. Quick look at search results suggests about 80% (so ~60Wh), which is still nice for that price though.
They have optimized for thinness and lightness where those should be nice bonuses on a machine focused on being a fantastic work machine for professional developers. Not a machine focused on being thin and light that developers can "make due" with.
You also forgot about the vga, mouse/kb ports, also no slot for CF cards :(
How am I supposed to connect to a printer with this pro machine? It has no printer port.
If a pro is someone who earns their living through using a computer, what's more important? Saving a few hundred dollars on a laptop? Or purchasing the machine that you feel allows you to work the most efficiently?
It's a fair point, but there's a limit. Pro's will pay over the odds for efficiency and ruggedness, but the new pricing has an air of exploitation. At some point, the prices become unjustifiable.
In what sense though? Because the premium they're charging doesn't feel fair? That sounds odd to me. Pros have a history of paying ridiculous sums to work on exotic hardware like SGI's because it was the best tool for the job. A few hundred doesn't seem like that big a deal.
But for the first time in my life as an Apple user (just short of 10 years, I think), for the very first time I feel the price is only barely justifiable and I actively looked into alternatives.
I suppose the fact that I couldn't find an alternative that was good enough validates Apple's current offering and pricing. But it's a solid chunk of goodwill gone, and the moment I find an alternative that is good enough, they'll lose at least one well-paying customer.
And even then it's probably not a problem for them. They make so much on their mobile devices that the Pro can be an afterthought.
But, I don't attach an infinite value to each of those. I will pay more for those things — even more than they're worth on a strictly rational assessment — because I can't get them elsewhere.
But at a certain point, the "Apple premium" becomes so obviously punitive that I start thinking that it wouldn't be so bad to deal with Windows or Linux, that the hardware from other manufacturers isn't all that inferior, that I'll put up with the support from a Lenovo.
But, on the other hand, I'll probably just hang on to what I have until the next iteration.
Sadly XPS 13 and other "leading" windows laptops seem to fall victim to the same less than perfect manufacturing. Apple charges more, but there laptops are also well built.
Something I use every day for a long time I don't want to save a few bucks on it the short term.
Same thing for my wife. And we're both heavy users who use our machines all day for work. We've had every brand of PC and never had any problems. Ever. Not even kidding a little.
The only problems I've ever had were with Apple hardware. Their laptops would overheat and the Mac OS would crash often. In every Macbook Pro I've had, the batteries died sooner than any other laptop brand.
Macbook Pros are terrible overpriced crap. (But they're really thin now, yay!)
Furthermore, upgrades and repairs are next to impossible or a real pain in the butt with Apple hardware. One of my Apple machines is a 2012 Mac Pro that I want to get a new video card for - but can I go to Amazon and just buy one off the shelf? No. I must go to www.macvidcards.com to get a card that works fully. I must also buy special, non-standard internal power cables for it.
These are my main concerns before I make any jump back to Microsoft-world (which I'm really considering).
I don't use touchpads, even on my laptops. I use a vertical five button wireless mouse because I don't like to rotate my cuff all day since I get repetitive stress syndrome. However, my wife does use the touchpad on her Surface Pro 3 and it works just fine for her. Actually there is one touch pad that I do use for my entertainment PC in my living room and that is a logitech K400R. It also works just fine with two finger scrolling, swiping etc.
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/laptops/LaptopReliability
The fact that various Macbook Pro models get very hot is a well documented issue. I wonder if we can get some data on how much the Mac OS crashes though, relatively?
Apple's extreme efforts to lock you into their hardware and prevent upgrading are also very well known.
That last one is my biggest gripe. They are anti-choice and ultimately, anti-consumer. The Apple hardware lineup is small, sterile and boring to me. There's so much more, better and newer stuff going on outside of Apple's tiny little world.
The Skylake CPUs I have seen all seem to be limited to 16Gb max RAM. Allegedly there are desktop variants that take more. The Skylake CPUs also have fewer cores in them than one might expect, e.g. two cores (with hyperthreading so '4') in a i7 CPU, for years one has expected four cores (with HT, so '8') in anything branded 'i7'.
There is NVMe for the SSD and I am sure the Apple folks have some nifty driver to swap to disk a lot quicker than in the olden days. So main memory is a bit more like 'cache' in that there is no need to be that hung up on the specifics. If your main program can reside in 16Gb RAM with operating system then all is good. Throwing more memory at the CPU is not how it works on Skylake.
Apple could have avoided the latest CPUs but imagine the outrage of 'old hardware' The new CPUs are low power, you get all day battery. I also wonder whether those people complaining about a lack of RAM are after selling website clicks or doing real work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylake_(microarchitecture)#Li...
Edit:
Maybe you're just confusing Skylake and Kaby Lake?
(Sorry, I won't call it "macOS" anymore because my marketing services don't come free - I'll continue to refer to it as "the Mac OS" since it's the OS that you can only run on a Mac.)
Windows has a better business model for everybody. You can run it anywhere you want without restriction. It's also a vastly superior OS both technically and with regards to UX for Pro and Business users. For those that enjoy UNIX - Apple is still shipping 10 year old GNU utils with the Mac OS and meanwhile, Windows now comes with Ubuntu...and it's fucking awesome!
Somewhat agree: If Apple considers iOS the current "cash cow", then they should just open-source "macOS" and thereby expand its potential userbase. They could even charge to "certify" certain hardware or VM configs for it, while leaving the rest of the troubleshooting on uncertified hardware to the masses.
> You can run it anywhere you want without restriction.
Hahahaha no. I can copy my entire MacOS install/drive to literally any other Mac, or copy it to an external drive and hook it up to ANY Mac, and it boots just fine off it. It doesn't force me to re-validate, it doesn't force me to call Apple, it essentially doesn't assume I'm guilty until proven innocent. You absolutely positively cannot do this with Windows, which makes moving installs (such as to new PC's) ridiculously painful (to any experienced Mac user such as myself). And having to revalidate every time you upgrade your own hardware? LOL.
> It's also a vastly superior OS both technically
OK now you're literally smoking crack. The OS with the most security holes, by far, in history, is "vastly superior." The OS with such incredible UX oversights as completely removing the ability to shut down from the UI if you enable Fast Boot mode (which is really just a renamed "hibernate"), is superior for Pro users? That's just my most recent encounter of hundreds. LOLOLOL. (I use a Windows machine for gaming. Because that's all it's good for- it's too fucking naggy to tolerate if I want to get any actual work done. And forced reboots without saving the entire state of the apps you're running are fucking stupid... at least MacOS has a facility to save the entire state of a running application if there is EVER a need to involuntarily reboot... Which there almost never is.)
> For those that enjoy UNIX - Apple is still shipping 10 year old GNU utils with the Mac OS
Apparently you don't use a Mac at all for development or you'd know this: Everyone who's anyone who enjoys UNIX dev on MacOS has long since moved on to Homebrew http://brew.sh/ which puts all those latest utils into userspace.
You answered your own question. I need a machine that is portable that I can hook up to multiple monitors at home and at work, and that I can use on the go for meetings, customer visits, etc.
How the hell will an iMac help me there?
I'm curious, what do you run on your computer to max out a brand-new MBP with 16GB of Ram?
I currently do design and dev work on a 3 year old MBP with 8GB Ram. This includes running VMs for I.E. and back-ends for various projects, using Xcode to build apps, editing Sketch files with 50+ screens, photo editing in Photoshop and motion graphics in AfterEffects. Naturally I don't everything at once, but even with a combo of some of them, everything runs just fine. So this makes me genuinely curious what people do that these brand-new machines can't handle. And are those demands really the majority use case? If not, then there is an argument for having different machines for the demanding work loads and maybe a smaller laptop or even iPad for meetings.
What are your thoughts?
I work on an MBA 11" with 8GB and I'm using Parallels to run Visual Studio 2015 for a work related project (100k+ C#/C++ codebase). Other than that work I do some Haskell and C++ work locally. It chugs along just fine and I don't feel like I'm hurting with it compared to compiling on my dev box at work.
Are people just spinning up a lot of VMs? I've got a beefy box at work for when I need to do heavy lifting because I value battery life on the laptop over doing it locally. Additionally, I like the static context - work on code at work ok beefy workstation then go home and remote in if I still have more to do.
TL;DR: what are people's use cases for 32gb on a laptop if you're a developer? Why not remote into big box?
And being reliant on connectivity to a "big box" to simply get your work done is suboptimal. Also, how big of box do you need when you've got hundreds if not thousands of devs? Much easier (and cheaper, since there's no upkeep) to throw another 16GB of memory inside every developer's system.
The message I'm getting from folks is that if you do contract/client work, you want everything local for many reasons.
In my case, I work for a Large Software Company so my scenario is more constrained.
I'm not contesting people's needs, I'm curious what they are.
<sigh> Because when you demo, being tied to a box on the other side of the planet is asking for trouble.
I really can't believe the "why do you need that much RAM?" question still gets asked.
I record my demos now as I don't care for live demos but that's just my way of dealing with it.
:)
It's more realizing the promise of hibernate/suspend options- if you don't have to reboot or stop what you are working on to do something else, why would you? And when it's in a portable laptop you can just take it anywhere, where a big box may be unavailable/down. Not to mention the TCO of a big box versus a laptop in electricity and everyday costs is actually much lower and comes with free battery backup, embedded keyboard and screen! I repurpose many of my old laptops to be servers/development support for that reason and I want my systems to be expandable, because RAM is what I really want to keep things speedy.
Things that need a lot of RAM:
Solidworks, Fusion360 (I can't even run it on 8bg with and an integrated gpu) And using Solidworks remotely is a bad joke.
Robot Path planning, motion planning
AI Assignments,
ROS + RVIZ + Gazebo + actual robot software
Anything written in python
[EDIT almost forgot] Matlab, VMs
Playing music or having a web browser open while any of the above things are running...
16bg would probably be fine for 2 years. But >$2000 is a lot to pay for only 2 years of use. People seem to think that just because its no longer current_year-1 that their desktop app can use previous_version's_RAM+0.5gb
There are enough people with enough reasons for having only a laptop. The dell precision m5510 is around same price as mbp (depending on setup) and yet it comes with a real graphics card, and the option for 32 gb of RAM.
Internet is not reliable. Pls, we are talking about PRO work.
> What do people need with 32 GB of RAM on a dev laptop?
Databases. I run Sql Server, PostgreSQL, MySql, Firebird. All at the same time? Yes.
Also, the thing about "Big Data" is need as much RAM as possible.
---
I could live with a iMac (what I have) or a MacPro (that I can't buy because the dolar in my country double in price!) but the main issue here is the signaling. Apple is like telling "We don't care anymore about you".
How will be trust the (maybe next?) upgrades to the rest of the line will be almost good now? And what about the next after this ones?
I work from home 2-3 days a week so good internet is key - especially since my main machines need to be domain joined so RDP is ideal.
Just trying to understand what your scenario is.
Also the latency make some things slower.
Either way - fair enough. You don't like the reliability of your internet so the power of the machine locally is important.
My usage is obviously not like everyones: lots of docker container and vagrant vms both with dedicated memory, unhealthy amount of browser tabs, memory hogging intellij (especially with scalaz implicits and having lots of projects open at the same time). And the biggest memory killer: working for clients with very large ecosphere stack of JVM based microservices that you spin most of up locally including dbs.
Whenever I pair with devs using 8gb MBAs on these projects they continually apologises for the MBA's slowness and their need to continually shutdown part of microservices stack as they run into 8gb constraints.
16gb is a sweet spot today, but not in 2 or less years.
Remoting into private/cloud vms or integrating with staging environments is possible sometimes, but I work on the train for 2 hours a day as well as from home a lot, and in demos, meetings, coffee shops. So relying on dodgy VPNs over fragile connections is painful. So spinning up the whole stack locally has always been a must for me. Again, this is not most people's pattern.
( Though spinning up microservices not just locally is a frustration why I in anger started https://github.com/flurdy/philharmonic )
- have to buy a new power adapter so I don't have to carry one to work and I am still left with an unused wire appendix from the display
- have to buy a Thunderbolt to USB-C adapter for the display
- have to buy a new cable to connect iphone or USB stick, HDD, etc. to the laptop
- have to pay the premium for the touch bar although most of the time I use the machine it is closed and connected to my display and keyboard
- I can not connect the headphones from iphone 7 because of the missing lightning connector
Hopefully they will realize how broken this is now for existing users and fix some of this nonsense next year.
Well at least this one is optional. I'm hoping more people opt for the function-key model, so they actually release one with 4 usb-c ports instead of 2. Why did they do that, anyway?
128GB/Intel® Core™ i5-8GB- $1,499
With tax the price comes to 1650. (I do realize its touch screen) Is M$FT trying the Apple's path?
Sure you can get the same quality in other devices but it takes research and most devices of equivalent quality are usually as expensive as Apple devices and sometimes even more.
The Dell XPS, Surface book or HP Spectre are not cheap or without issues. Even equivalently configured Asus Zenbooks with i5 and not core-m are not cheap.
For instance the previous generation 13 retinas were the only laptops with 28W i5 SKUs. The rest of the i5 ultrabooks in the Windows ecosystem were the standard 15W SKUs, so with the Macbook 13 Retina you got slightly better performance and Iris graphics.
The current dissappointment is valid as people rightly expect far more from Apple than boring incremental updates. The magsafe ommission is head scratching and 1299 to 1499 is a huge jump.
I think people are getting disenchanted with paying for 'let's make things thin' brand of engineering that adds little to no value to end users.
I needed an emergency machine last week (My 2011 Pro finally died), and I opt'd for a £200 Chromebook (EDGAR), thinking all I need is a browser and a terminal right this second and I'd worry about what Apple is doing later.
A solid Linux laptop with working sleep, working wifi, great battery life. Tad underpowered but hey it's £200. I'm _really_ impressed.
If Google relaxed the constraints a little on the OS, or supported a Crouton-like workflow for containers without having to stick it in dev-mode, they could make A LOT of developers very happy.
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-lapt...
...but it feels like a bit of a hack. I have to have the laptop in dev mode and there's a slight fear that an automatic update might prevent the chroot from working, or that my stateful downloads directory might disappear.
My thought was that ChromeOS is kinda where OS X 10.0 was... a great UI on top of a great base that just works. That's what drove many of us to Apple when we got bored of re-configuring linux, it's what made many of us recommend Apple to friends/family.... Apple have dropped the ball, Google is in a pretty good place to pick it up.
Oh, and that touch strip? too small for anything but emoticons. I went from being semi excited about this macbook to realizing just how mid grade this thing really is. If the next update doesnt put the features I need back in place, this will be the last of my apple purchases. I've owned a mac pro, 4 macbook pros, every iphone save for the 3g. I like that you make them out of nice materials and strive for better. But you are now just making luxury laptops for consumers, not pros.
But I do care about my USB-A devices. I don't mind using an adapter because I only need it at home on my desk. However the description of the Apple USB-C to USB-A adapter says it doesn't work with some devices.
Great. Now what?
[I'm also a little ticked off that they don't include an adapter in the box. Most people will have legacy USB-A devices and should need one.]
CORRECTION: They don't say anything when I add the adapter to one of the new MacBook Pros during the purchase process.
But they do include the caveat when I add the adapter to the 12" MacBook which I've also been looking at (sorry, German page):
" Mit dem USB-C-auf-USB-Adapter kannst du dein MacBook mit USB-C-Anschluss an viele USB-Zubehörgeräte anschließen, z. B. an deine Kamera, einen Flash-Drive oder an ein Lightning auf USB-Kabel, um iPhone, iPad oder iPod aufzuladen und zu synchronisieren.*
*Einige USB-Zubehörgeräte werden nicht unterstützt. "
The last sentence reads: Some USB accessories are not supported.
I'd be genuinely surprised by that though. Isn't it just a passive adapter?
But they do include the caveat when I add the adapter to the 12" MacBook which I've also been looking at (sorry, German page):
" Mit dem USB-C-auf-USB-Adapter kannst du dein MacBook mit USB-C-Anschluss an viele USB-Zubehörgeräte anschließen, z. B. an deine Kamera, einen Flash-Drive oder an ein Lightning auf USB-Kabel, um iPhone, iPad oder iPod aufzuladen und zu synchronisieren.*
*Einige USB-Zubehörgeräte werden nicht unterstützt. "
The last sentence reads: Some USB accessories are not supported.