While I understand the sentiment, if this is something you do often, you'll have an adapter at hand.
If you've been using computers long enough, you'll have survived this before. If you haven't, you're lucky because it's not out of question that the next step is wireless everything — no ports at all! (Then you'll just need a little dongle for all of old equipment that doesn't support wireless.)
I don't know if I'd call this sentiment... USB is bar by the most ubiquitous connector I've seen. It's not like loosing firewire or some proprietary keyboard jack.
This comes across more like Apple refusing to make a mouse with two buttons.
"Apple refusing to make a mouse with two buttons."
That hasn't worked out so badly for them. Their trackpads don't have two buttons, either. And in line with the analogy, Apple doesn't prevent you from using a mouse with two buttons: you can buy other input devices and use them with a Mac if it has the appropriate drivers. In this case, you just need to buy an adapter.
Edited to add: By the way, please don't read me as saying you're wrong, or naïve. If it's coming across that way, it's poor writing on my part. I don't realistically see a way for Apple to handle this in a way that's going to push the industry in the direction it wants it to go and please everyone at the same time. There's an element of truth to a tweet I saw the other day: I paraphrase "It's not a MacBook release without someone complaining about ports."
Seriously. Between work and home I have zero things that can plug into the 2016 MBP without adapters. Monitors/TVs, peripherals, storage, mobile devices. Nothing. Even the couple of very new Android phones at work with USB-C connectors have USB-A on the other end of the cable. So close but so far.
This circles around the real point, which I think is that "Pro" is a marketing term. As the author points our, he makes money off a machine without the Pro label. I do as well, with my main Mac being an iMac. Pro used to designate more clearly between models, but it has always been a marketing term first and foremost. A chef is only as good as their food, not their knives.
> Experiment, but not on my lawn
That's the real crux of it, isn't it? Everyone wants Apple to innovate and change and stuff, up until it affects the pieces of the Mac they like. Apple just managed to step on a lot of toes simultaneously by wiping the exterior of nearly all connectors and slots.
> That's the real crux of it, isn't it? Everyone wants Apple to innovate and change and stuff, up until it affects the pieces of the Mac they like.
Right, but if Apple seriously wants to continue targeting Developers, then they need to produce a product that will actually target them properly.
It's like music equipment. If you look at home music equipment, the marketing and user-friendliness is completely different from the pro music market, despite the fact that they essentially just play music.
I genuinely don't think Apple wants to target developers, and I don't think they ever have. WWDC Is a great example - they could easily fit every interested developer in the expanse that is all of Moscone, if not going to larger venues altogether, but instead they limit. Part of this is because of the interest from consumers in Apple and the absence of a consumer show like MacWorld, but if Apple really cared about developers, they wouldn't make us enter a lottery to attend a conference for us. Apple is a publicly traded company, and their first responsibility is to shareholders, not developers - or any other field where the term "Pro" could apply, like artists, or musicians, or videographers, or photographers.
USB, HDMI, 32G RAM, escape key.
Also wouldn't mind a better graphics card.
Looks like I need anything except the new MBP.
If only OS X wasn't so good...
UPD: how could I forget about a hardware camera/mic switch?))
I think the best argument in this article that hasn't really been stated elsewhere is (paraphrasing): "the pro machine needs to adapt to the needs of the professional producers (music, dev, writers that need insane battery life, etc)".
His main thesis was "play with the Macbook Air, iMac, Macbook lines, but if you're going to use the 'Pro' branding, be capable of supporting professional use cases."
The other interesting thought nugget from the article was buried up at the top: (paraphrasing) "perhaps too many consumers have been buying Macbook Pros because it's a sturdy, dependable machine. This consumer support and use product may be producing marketing and usage metrics drowning out the ACTUAL use cases of the professionals that need a more powerful machine."
If this new generation MBP is really just a slightly enhanced Macbook Air because that's how several million people choose to use their MBP, it ignores the tens of thousands of people that need "pro" level hardware (or even just modifyability) in order to create content (iOS apps, music, video, software) that actually drives Apple's Walled Garden ecosystem.
Replaceable components: ram, disk and battery should be easy to swap, and the system should supoort plenty more than the base configuration (preferrably up to 32Gb ram and simultaneous sata and m.2 drives).
Don't forget a good, centered, trackpad (apple is fine on this front, but many competitors are not) and keyboard with the common keys but no numpad.
Couple these two things with a clean-looking, sturdy build in a 13,3 inch laptop and my money is yours to take. I can atand the weight/thickness of pre-retina macbooks no problem.
Not gonna happen. If you could just buy replaceable parts, they'd lose a lot of money on hardware sales, even if a lot of the replaceable parts were sold by them. Both planned and perceived obsolescence is good for their business, for their revenue stream.
If you look at the laptop on iFixit, you will notice that Apple is simply going the same road than the iPhone. Very small hardware, large screen, large battery.
If you compare the iPhone with what existed at the time, doing your own custom very integrated and very compact logic board, allowed a massive screen and a massive battery. That was a game changer.
They are just trying the same trick, only I'm not sure (to be polite) that it brings any real competitive advantage. Sure a thin, ultralight and still powerful laptop would be appealing. But the MBP is just not that smaller or light compared to the competition or even the previous generation. Especially not the 15in version.
It is just a lot of sacrifice for a perceived marginal improvement over the competition. Nobody would be complaining if the 15in MBP weighted 1.5 pound and still lasted 10 hour with a quadcore i7.
Amen on the trackpad and keyboard alignment issue - for many other "Pro" laptops (looking at you Lenovo) is horrible. Is 10-key desired so much for these laptops that the alignment of the trackpad is off? Who signed off on this design atrocity? [1]
I tried to use a coworker's Lenovo the other day and the offset keyboard drove me batty. I couldn't imagine trying to use that one on a lap-pad.
I'm not sure this is as important than what the "Pro" suffix has implicitly meant to a significant group of users in the past. From Apple's perspective, the meaning seems to have changed a little ("premium model" vs "powerful + flexible"), and that's irked a lot of people.
fta>> "This Macbook Pro is a great machine and, with USB-C ports, is future proof."
It is a great machine, and it is future proof, but it's also "present-unfriendly". IMO, Apple should have treated 2016 as a "bridge" year and left a legacy port or two, and then done away with legacy ports a year later, but that's just me.
I think what this kind of articles are missing out is Apple usually sacrifices something for something else.
For example, the MacBook Air sacrifices performance for extreme portability and decent battery life. The first retina MacBook Pro bets heavily on high-DPI screen for the first time ever in computers, but less connectors and no DVD. It was risky bets, but a vision was behind. This generation of MacBook Pro asks for a lot as sacrifices (CPU almost already a generation behind, no legacy ports, no SD card, limited RAM, no battery life improvement, ifixit scores lowered, no magsafe, no Nvidia GPU, no screen DPI improvement, etc.) for nothing substantial or exciting. I think that's the reason people are complaining loudly, and I think for the first time in the past 10-year MacBook history, it's fair.
One type of port to rule them all, and fastest storage available are pretty good advances.
The ifixit teardown makes the machine look like a real mess inside, but I think drastically simplifying the connections to all external add-ons and the continued focus on the bottleneck of storage speed give reason to be optimistic about what the future holds.
One type of port that requires most professionals to buy a bunch of dongles. That's not more useful, that's a hassle.
Macbooks have had available SSD's for awhile.
When it comes down to it, a bunch of sacrifices were made to make this Macbook thinner, which simply is of very little benefit to professional users. It's nice, but not when it comes at the expense of performance and usability.
It's double the speed of last year's SSD. Competitors' computers with the same speed hard drives will be upgraded more easily, but they aren't any cheaper right now.
While ridiculous that Apple doesn't ease the transition with more included cables, my house is full of different types of monitor cables, hard drive cables, and iOS device cables that seemed to change every two years. At least now I might get a decade out of the next generation of them.
> simplifying the connections to all external add-ons
The problem is that Apple did not simplify the connections. They unified them. The focus on a single hardware port is all well and good, but in this case it's just glossing over the fact that there are a wide array of different protocols that talk over this hardware and not all of the hardware supports them.
Isn't Apple simply launching a half backed MBP to better contrast when the new Intel CPU are available? (looks like the same strategy with the iphone 7, but for different reason)
The first iPad mini was released in October 2012 without retina. iPad gen 3 was released March 2012 with retina. I don't understand why they couldn't have included retina in the mini... maybe they purposefully withheld it so people would buy gen 2?
> Unless there is an external factor which drives iPhone sales: the availability of iPhone software, which is not controlled by Apple. This software is developed by external Pros. On Macs.
I wouldn't say the demand for iOS apps is as elastic as the author thinks. The big push towards building for iOS isn't 'mostly people just playing around with xcode', but people actively pursuing profit off the market of users the iOS env has.
Even if fewer MBP users led to a significant ramp-down in the number of unique quality-app devs in the app store (I doubt it), the big players and their apps would still be around, as would many more hopefuls trying for a slice of the pie.
I'm fine with the new ports[1]. I even found an ok hub[2]. I'm not fine with the Touch Bar or the horrible arrow keys, but I guess I'll live. I'm also not fine with the price increases.
What I want from a Pro machine, is standard, expandable memory and storage. I would have been an amazing cheerleader
if I could put in more RAM[3] and a bigger M.2 drive.
If that means that its not quite as thin, then all good. Thin isn't my first Pro item.
1) I'm not as fine on the iPhone since obsoleting my headphones was really not acceptable for a proprietary connector (Lightning) instead of a standard (USB-C). Finding a dongle that allows listening and charging is not cool.
I would be willing to pay for a macOS license that would allow it to run in any machine I like. This will probably never happen but, who knows, if Microsoft has become a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation, anything can happen.
I wouldn't. I am a pro developer and I need my computer to be reliable. Of course speed, style, specs are all great plus, but what I really need is a computer that is reliable. That always works with as few issues as possible.
In my personal experience Mac are the closes platforms to this stability; it's probably because the HW and the SW are designed together. Using the same software on other HW would be a terrible experience that would break the only real benefits of the Macs. I have used linux for many (many, really many) years, with many different distributions; I love it; it's my first choice for servers. But not as a developer, because it never gave me the feeling that I can trust it whatever it happens.
What I really need is a computer that can be updated without worries (I'm currently writing on a mid 2009 MBP 13" which got updated multiple times without one single formatting), great screen, fantastic keyboard and wonderful touchpad, because these are the things I touch and see everyday. I wouldn't trade Mac's touchpad for more RAM, neither the great keyboard for longer battery.
Of course these are my key points, while others might have different needs.
A nice dream, but who's going to build all the drivers? Or would you expect Apple to do some Windows-Certified / MFI type of program for driver compatibility?
Color me surprised if we ever see this, as this kind of approach almost killed Apple in the early 90s.
1) Drivers already exist for a huge list of hardware, that can run macOS ( Hackintosh project did a lot of work on that part ). Maybe there will be some unofficial list of supported CPU / Motherboards, etc, for which list Apple will not care anyway ( NO WARRANTY part of the TOS ).
2) Apple nowadays earns millions from phones & tables. MacBooks / iMacs are not as big as they were a couple of years ago.
So you're asking Apple to give up a proven revenue stream and full control of the platform for a chance to compete with Microsoft (as prominent desktop OS)?
Pretty sure you'll be waiting a long time for that, despite how awesome it may sound.
I'll make a possibly controversial statement, but... The fact that someone uses a laptop to make money do not qualify such laptop as a "pro" laptop.
Accountants can happily use a random sub-500$ laptop and make money.
If your job is to poke people with a stick, is your stick a pro stick?
Pro is more likely to be defined as something particular/peculiar that you do not find on other usual/consumer/widespread brands and accomodates very particular use-cases.
Let me exemplify:
- you are a professional video editor. you do not only enjoy, you need fast storage, a lot of fast storage.
- you do CAD. you do need a fast video card and cpus.
- you are a researcher who needs computing power. not enough power to justify a fancy coud solution or stuff like that, but enough that a regular core i5 is not enough.
If your very rare use-case can be met by a laptop, then said laptop is a pro-level laptop. Otherwise, without any more fuss, it's not.
Sidenote: according to what i have said until now, ThinkPads have always been and currently are pro-level laptops (xeon cpus, multiple hard disks, removable bays, ports, docking stations, nvidia quadro cards, hi-res displays, intergated colorimeters, fingerprint readers, you name it).
Stop complaining and wasting your money, join the pro side.
>> Pro is more likely to be defined as something particular/peculiar that you do not find on other usual/consumer/widespread brands and accomodates very particular use-cases.
FWIW, Dell, HP and other vendors use the term "workstation" to cover what you're talking about.
IIRC, Schiller did use "workstation" in the keynote when he talked about connecting the MBP to two external 5K monitors, but in general, the meaning of "Pro" is so diluted (esp compared to "workstation") that it means different things to different people.
> ThinkPads have always been and currently are pro-level laptops
Except for the offset trackpad and keyboard to support the 10-key numpad. It's not just ugly, it's not comfortable or usable. I know I'm not alone on this.
> ThinkPads have always been and currently are pro-level laptops
Except for the offset trackpad and keyboard to support the 10-key numpad. It's not just ugly, it's not comfortable or usable. I know I'm not alone on this.
I'm a "pro" user that does development. I do all my work via Microsoft Remote Desktop so I care most about portability, battery life, screen size, and keyboard/trackpad usability and comfort.
But I also like to play video games in Bootcamp, so a ~2x faster GPU than the Radeon 460 would be nice, like the Geforce 1060 in the Razer Blade.
At the risk of being a contrarian, Apple's focus on being a consumer-product company is deeply rooted from the beginning. You could argue its focus on UI since the beginning of OS X was for consumers rather than developers.
Microsoft is a famously developer-friendly company (sorry, "developers, developers, developers," comes to mind). However during Ballmer-era years, user experience was jumpy, and developers had free reign to build their products even if it was disconnected from the OS look and feel. The transition to Windows UAC, for example, was a result of Microsoft being too lax on developers for many years before (writing to anywhere on C drive), until Microsoft said they couldn't just write to anywhere.
Apple has been restrictive to developers, and that has been the way with Steve Jobs. They've locked down many APIs (even abruptly deprecated them) and punished apps that don't conform to Apple's consistent look and feel. So in that sense, Apple may not be the friendliest to developers, but it has pushed a more consistent product. Perhaps these restrictions are why Apple's products give all users a good experience despite more annoyances to the developer.
Those versions of Python and Ruby are terribly old. Java is no longer included by default. Clang/LLVM/Git is installed only after you download Xcode.
I believe that is a consequence of macOS being built with BSD foundations. They're there. But let's not pretend macOS *nix/POSIX stuff is great; there's a reason that MacPorts exists.
I'd argue that Ubuntu does offer greater. Let's not pretend Xcode is a good IDE, either. I can't even recall the number of times I had my project crash on me.
macOS doesn't offer Ruby/Git on default install either. Even the situation during Leopard, people railed about how old the versions Apple distributed (many libraries and binaries were riddled with security vulnerabilities and updated infrequently).
Actually, I believe you can install Ruby/Git on Ubuntu install if you toggle Development tools. But anyone doing serious Ruby development will use rvm/docker.
Even when Ruby was included in Lion, nobody developing Ruby apps could use the vendor-supplied stuff. I remember this from back in 2008. There were countless blog articles telling you to download Ruby and compile. The situation from a decade ago caused a ton of pain in bootstrapping a developer setup.
Why should Ruby, Git and a bunch of other tools be in the default installation? If you are a developer installing it is easy enough. If I want a minimum dev environment, I don't want to go around searching and uninstalling a bunch of packages.
Convenience to development should be measured by how easy it is to install/access development tools when you need them -- such as how well the package manager work, not how much stuff the base system come with.
USB-C only: fine. I am a happy owner of Macbook'2015 with a single USB-C port, this works for me.
16G RAM maximum: what is it, 2013? I am a Scala software engineer, and 16G is the minimum to feel comfortable. OK, I could live with it, if only...
Dual core mobile CPU: dual-core?! in 2016? These days, _mobile phones_ spot 8 cores. Apple's own iPhone has 4-core CPU. This is a joke, right?
GPU: Intel Iris Graphics 510, with no discrete graphics option. OK, right, this _is_ a joke.
tl;dr A computer with a dual core CPU and integrated graphics is not a developer's machine, no way. Goodbye, Apple. I have spent tens of thousands dollars buying your stuff, but enough is enough.
If you work with machine learning / data science, you need GPU for accelerated computing. Yes, I can train my models on servers rented at Amazon (which I used to do), but those are expensive.
Pricey! And while the touch bar is an excellent addition, I wish they didn't remove function keys. Half of my IntelliJ IDEA shortcuts are mapped to function keys. :( Also, no CUDA. I understand it isn't Apple's fault to stick with AMD instead of nVidia, however, OpenCL is not nearly as popular as CUDA-based frameworks.
For the moment, for the same price I've assembled the ultimate desktop: Core i7 6700K, 32G RAM, nVidia GTX 1080, 2x512 SSD, 4K display. I don't know what else to wish for. OK, I'll have to live with Ubuntu, but the hardware is worth it.
I am keeping my thin Macbook'2015 for travel-related stuff: 80% of tasks I can do with that, and for remaining 20%, I can do remote desktop connection to my home machine.
Timely updates so we don't see particular lines rot for more than a year. With regards to ports, its fine if you want to move to the new "port" that will be the future. However when doing so please consider providing an inexpensive solution to support older ports required just to connect to other products you released just this year.
I know some are tired of the port argument, but something is broke in Apple when the various product lines require adapters to connect.
As for other products, more flexibility in configuration. having to buy the top model to get a gpu choice isn't consumer friendly. plus your ssd prices still make me flinch. and if you aren't going to update then a price reduction is owed
What annoys me is that they don't even bring out 1 additional decent model. How much work would that be? Or to upgrade the Mac Pro?
This is just a slew of poor decisions that would've never happened under Jobs, who was really always future proofing and 2 steps ahead. Ive checked out mentally and Cook's interpretation of Jobs vision is obviously just below par.
Macbook Pro became _the_ developer's machine due to a curious incident.
Remember Ruby on Rails and the initial hype? DHH, the author of Rails, is a marketing genius. He was probably one of the first people who introduced a development platform with screencasts. Those screencasts featured beautiful pixel-perfect TextMate editor, available only on Mac OS X.
Everybody said "wow!" and started buying Macs and coding Rails. After sluggishly slow IDEs of the day and geeky vim/emacs stuff with dangling corners and UI flickering, TextMate was pure visual Nirvana. Thankfully, Ruby came preinstalled with Macs.
And thus, the market was created. Apple probably didn't intend to make Macs a solid developer's machine, but it happened, and it was supported until recently.
Now, the support has been withdrawn, and it left many people in Limbo. I have moved to Ubuntu, but I will miss my happy days with OS X.
I think it started even earlier than that, with the launch of Mac OS X. At that time, all dev software on Windows was expensive or pirated, and while Linux had the free tools, the desktop experience wasn't the best. So here was OS X, with all the OSS compilers and such, and you could still run Photoshop and Word.
Now, Windows has free dev tools, and Linux has a much nicer desktop.
I still think OS X is a good environment. Not great. Somebody needs to make OS X/macOS great again, because it has become sluggish, bloated, and over-encompassing.
I think the earliest versions of macOS/OS X since the Intel transition (that's when I joined) were great. UI was intuitive and minimalist, and OS did an adequate amount of functionality, and Spotlight was great. Now Finder lags and caches wrong items all over, and occasionally crashes.
Anybody know of a laptop+OS combo that can give me the same fluid navigation of windows/workspaces as OS X?
That has always been the best feature for me: snappy, fast, fluid window/workspace navigation with the 3-finger swipe. Great for going back and forth between docs and the IDE (split-screen makes texts too small for my 13").
A few standardized ports like USB, HDMI, audio in/out, not requiring 3000 different dongles to connect to every peripheral and accessory currently in existence
An Escape key that is hardware, and in a regular location
Decent battery life
Note the prior generation MacBook Pro lines largely met those requirements, except for more RAM.
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[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadNot all monitors have that capability though.
If you've been using computers long enough, you'll have survived this before. If you haven't, you're lucky because it's not out of question that the next step is wireless everything — no ports at all! (Then you'll just need a little dongle for all of old equipment that doesn't support wireless.)
This comes across more like Apple refusing to make a mouse with two buttons.
That hasn't worked out so badly for them. Their trackpads don't have two buttons, either. And in line with the analogy, Apple doesn't prevent you from using a mouse with two buttons: you can buy other input devices and use them with a Mac if it has the appropriate drivers. In this case, you just need to buy an adapter.
Edited to add: By the way, please don't read me as saying you're wrong, or naïve. If it's coming across that way, it's poor writing on my part. I don't realistically see a way for Apple to handle this in a way that's going to push the industry in the direction it wants it to go and please everyone at the same time. There's an element of truth to a tweet I saw the other day: I paraphrase "It's not a MacBook release without someone complaining about ports."
The USB + wifi cutting out issue raised by Louis Rossman is pretty indicative that it's really bleeding edge (still!) to be USB-C only.
> Experiment, but not on my lawn
That's the real crux of it, isn't it? Everyone wants Apple to innovate and change and stuff, up until it affects the pieces of the Mac they like. Apple just managed to step on a lot of toes simultaneously by wiping the exterior of nearly all connectors and slots.
Right, but if Apple seriously wants to continue targeting Developers, then they need to produce a product that will actually target them properly.
It's like music equipment. If you look at home music equipment, the marketing and user-friendliness is completely different from the pro music market, despite the fact that they essentially just play music.
UPD: how could I forget about a hardware camera/mic switch?))
His main thesis was "play with the Macbook Air, iMac, Macbook lines, but if you're going to use the 'Pro' branding, be capable of supporting professional use cases."
The other interesting thought nugget from the article was buried up at the top: (paraphrasing) "perhaps too many consumers have been buying Macbook Pros because it's a sturdy, dependable machine. This consumer support and use product may be producing marketing and usage metrics drowning out the ACTUAL use cases of the professionals that need a more powerful machine."
If this new generation MBP is really just a slightly enhanced Macbook Air because that's how several million people choose to use their MBP, it ignores the tens of thousands of people that need "pro" level hardware (or even just modifyability) in order to create content (iOS apps, music, video, software) that actually drives Apple's Walled Garden ecosystem.
Don't forget a good, centered, trackpad (apple is fine on this front, but many competitors are not) and keyboard with the common keys but no numpad.
Couple these two things with a clean-looking, sturdy build in a 13,3 inch laptop and my money is yours to take. I can atand the weight/thickness of pre-retina macbooks no problem.
If you compare the iPhone with what existed at the time, doing your own custom very integrated and very compact logic board, allowed a massive screen and a massive battery. That was a game changer.
They are just trying the same trick, only I'm not sure (to be polite) that it brings any real competitive advantage. Sure a thin, ultralight and still powerful laptop would be appealing. But the MBP is just not that smaller or light compared to the competition or even the previous generation. Especially not the 15in version.
It is just a lot of sacrifice for a perceived marginal improvement over the competition. Nobody would be complaining if the 15in MBP weighted 1.5 pound and still lasted 10 hour with a quadcore i7.
I tried to use a coworker's Lenovo the other day and the offset keyboard drove me batty. I couldn't imagine trying to use that one on a lap-pad.
[1] http://www.toptenreviews.com/computers/gaming/best-gaming-la...
I'm not sure this is as important than what the "Pro" suffix has implicitly meant to a significant group of users in the past. From Apple's perspective, the meaning seems to have changed a little ("premium model" vs "powerful + flexible"), and that's irked a lot of people.
fta>> "This Macbook Pro is a great machine and, with USB-C ports, is future proof."
It is a great machine, and it is future proof, but it's also "present-unfriendly". IMO, Apple should have treated 2016 as a "bridge" year and left a legacy port or two, and then done away with legacy ports a year later, but that's just me.
For example, the MacBook Air sacrifices performance for extreme portability and decent battery life. The first retina MacBook Pro bets heavily on high-DPI screen for the first time ever in computers, but less connectors and no DVD. It was risky bets, but a vision was behind. This generation of MacBook Pro asks for a lot as sacrifices (CPU almost already a generation behind, no legacy ports, no SD card, limited RAM, no battery life improvement, ifixit scores lowered, no magsafe, no Nvidia GPU, no screen DPI improvement, etc.) for nothing substantial or exciting. I think that's the reason people are complaining loudly, and I think for the first time in the past 10-year MacBook history, it's fair.
The ifixit teardown makes the machine look like a real mess inside, but I think drastically simplifying the connections to all external add-ons and the continued focus on the bottleneck of storage speed give reason to be optimistic about what the future holds.
Macbooks have had available SSD's for awhile.
When it comes down to it, a bunch of sacrifices were made to make this Macbook thinner, which simply is of very little benefit to professional users. It's nice, but not when it comes at the expense of performance and usability.
While ridiculous that Apple doesn't ease the transition with more included cables, my house is full of different types of monitor cables, hard drive cables, and iOS device cables that seemed to change every two years. At least now I might get a decade out of the next generation of them.
The problem is that Apple did not simplify the connections. They unified them. The focus on a single hardware port is all well and good, but in this case it's just glossing over the fact that there are a wide array of different protocols that talk over this hardware and not all of the hardware supports them.
With SSD speeds in macbooks being over one GB/s for years I also do not really see where storage throughput is a bottleneck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XSC_UG5_kU
I wouldn't say the demand for iOS apps is as elastic as the author thinks. The big push towards building for iOS isn't 'mostly people just playing around with xcode', but people actively pursuing profit off the market of users the iOS env has.
Even if fewer MBP users led to a significant ramp-down in the number of unique quality-app devs in the app store (I doubt it), the big players and their apps would still be around, as would many more hopefuls trying for a slice of the pie.
What I want from a Pro machine, is standard, expandable memory and storage. I would have been an amazing cheerleader if I could put in more RAM[3] and a bigger M.2 drive.
If that means that its not quite as thin, then all good. Thin isn't my first Pro item.
1) I'm not as fine on the iPhone since obsoleting my headphones was really not acceptable for a proprietary connector (Lightning) instead of a standard (USB-C). Finding a dongle that allows listening and charging is not cool.
2) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0Y44N600...
3) I understand ECC RAM is out the windows with Intel.
In my personal experience Mac are the closes platforms to this stability; it's probably because the HW and the SW are designed together. Using the same software on other HW would be a terrible experience that would break the only real benefits of the Macs. I have used linux for many (many, really many) years, with many different distributions; I love it; it's my first choice for servers. But not as a developer, because it never gave me the feeling that I can trust it whatever it happens.
What I really need is a computer that can be updated without worries (I'm currently writing on a mid 2009 MBP 13" which got updated multiple times without one single formatting), great screen, fantastic keyboard and wonderful touchpad, because these are the things I touch and see everyday. I wouldn't trade Mac's touchpad for more RAM, neither the great keyboard for longer battery.
Of course these are my key points, while others might have different needs.
Color me surprised if we ever see this, as this kind of approach almost killed Apple in the early 90s.
1) Drivers already exist for a huge list of hardware, that can run macOS ( Hackintosh project did a lot of work on that part ). Maybe there will be some unofficial list of supported CPU / Motherboards, etc, for which list Apple will not care anyway ( NO WARRANTY part of the TOS ).
2) Apple nowadays earns millions from phones & tables. MacBooks / iMacs are not as big as they were a couple of years ago.
Pretty sure you'll be waiting a long time for that, despite how awesome it may sound.
Accountants can happily use a random sub-500$ laptop and make money.
If your job is to poke people with a stick, is your stick a pro stick?
Pro is more likely to be defined as something particular/peculiar that you do not find on other usual/consumer/widespread brands and accomodates very particular use-cases.
Let me exemplify:
- you are a professional video editor. you do not only enjoy, you need fast storage, a lot of fast storage.
- you do CAD. you do need a fast video card and cpus.
- you are a researcher who needs computing power. not enough power to justify a fancy coud solution or stuff like that, but enough that a regular core i5 is not enough.
If your very rare use-case can be met by a laptop, then said laptop is a pro-level laptop. Otherwise, without any more fuss, it's not.
Sidenote: according to what i have said until now, ThinkPads have always been and currently are pro-level laptops (xeon cpus, multiple hard disks, removable bays, ports, docking stations, nvidia quadro cards, hi-res displays, intergated colorimeters, fingerprint readers, you name it).
Stop complaining and wasting your money, join the pro side.
I was a long-time ThinkPad user before switching to Macs. Macbook Pros were more reliable and developer-friendlier. Until recently.
FWIW, Dell, HP and other vendors use the term "workstation" to cover what you're talking about.
IIRC, Schiller did use "workstation" in the keynote when he talked about connecting the MBP to two external 5K monitors, but in general, the meaning of "Pro" is so diluted (esp compared to "workstation") that it means different things to different people.
Yes, indeed. And as with many other things, Apple being Apple, decided to name their workstation differently.
Except for the offset trackpad and keyboard to support the 10-key numpad. It's not just ugly, it's not comfortable or usable. I know I'm not alone on this.
I agree.
But I also like to play video games in Bootcamp, so a ~2x faster GPU than the Radeon 460 would be nice, like the Geforce 1060 in the Razer Blade.
Microsoft is a famously developer-friendly company (sorry, "developers, developers, developers," comes to mind). However during Ballmer-era years, user experience was jumpy, and developers had free reign to build their products even if it was disconnected from the OS look and feel. The transition to Windows UAC, for example, was a result of Microsoft being too lax on developers for many years before (writing to anywhere on C drive), until Microsoft said they couldn't just write to anywhere.
Apple has been restrictive to developers, and that has been the way with Steve Jobs. They've locked down many APIs (even abruptly deprecated them) and punished apps that don't conform to Apple's consistent look and feel. So in that sense, Apple may not be the friendliest to developers, but it has pushed a more consistent product. Perhaps these restrictions are why Apple's products give all users a good experience despite more annoyances to the developer.
Python? Preinstalled. Git? Got you covered. Ruby? Sits right there. Java? Check. Ant, Maven? You bet!
There is no other OS offering the same level of convenience to developers, no matter what stack they used.
I believe that is a consequence of macOS being built with BSD foundations. They're there. But let's not pretend macOS *nix/POSIX stuff is great; there's a reason that MacPorts exists.
I'd argue that Ubuntu does offer greater. Let's not pretend Xcode is a good IDE, either. I can't even recall the number of times I had my project crash on me.
And no, e.g. Ubuntu doesn't include Ruby or Git in default installation, nor FreeBSD.
Actually, I believe you can install Ruby/Git on Ubuntu install if you toggle Development tools. But anyone doing serious Ruby development will use rvm/docker.
Even when Ruby was included in Lion, nobody developing Ruby apps could use the vendor-supplied stuff. I remember this from back in 2008. There were countless blog articles telling you to download Ruby and compile. The situation from a decade ago caused a ton of pain in bootstrapping a developer setup.
Convenience to development should be measured by how easy it is to install/access development tools when you need them -- such as how well the package manager work, not how much stuff the base system come with.
16G RAM maximum: what is it, 2013? I am a Scala software engineer, and 16G is the minimum to feel comfortable. OK, I could live with it, if only...
Dual core mobile CPU: dual-core?! in 2016? These days, _mobile phones_ spot 8 cores. Apple's own iPhone has 4-core CPU. This is a joke, right?
GPU: Intel Iris Graphics 510, with no discrete graphics option. OK, right, this _is_ a joke.
tl;dr A computer with a dual core CPU and integrated graphics is not a developer's machine, no way. Goodbye, Apple. I have spent tens of thousands dollars buying your stuff, but enough is enough.
For the moment, for the same price I've assembled the ultimate desktop: Core i7 6700K, 32G RAM, nVidia GTX 1080, 2x512 SSD, 4K display. I don't know what else to wish for. OK, I'll have to live with Ubuntu, but the hardware is worth it.
I am keeping my thin Macbook'2015 for travel-related stuff: 80% of tasks I can do with that, and for remaining 20%, I can do remote desktop connection to my home machine.
Timely updates so we don't see particular lines rot for more than a year. With regards to ports, its fine if you want to move to the new "port" that will be the future. However when doing so please consider providing an inexpensive solution to support older ports required just to connect to other products you released just this year.
I know some are tired of the port argument, but something is broke in Apple when the various product lines require adapters to connect.
As for other products, more flexibility in configuration. having to buy the top model to get a gpu choice isn't consumer friendly. plus your ssd prices still make me flinch. and if you aren't going to update then a price reduction is owed
This is just a slew of poor decisions that would've never happened under Jobs, who was really always future proofing and 2 steps ahead. Ive checked out mentally and Cook's interpretation of Jobs vision is obviously just below par.
Remember Ruby on Rails and the initial hype? DHH, the author of Rails, is a marketing genius. He was probably one of the first people who introduced a development platform with screencasts. Those screencasts featured beautiful pixel-perfect TextMate editor, available only on Mac OS X.
Everybody said "wow!" and started buying Macs and coding Rails. After sluggishly slow IDEs of the day and geeky vim/emacs stuff with dangling corners and UI flickering, TextMate was pure visual Nirvana. Thankfully, Ruby came preinstalled with Macs.
And thus, the market was created. Apple probably didn't intend to make Macs a solid developer's machine, but it happened, and it was supported until recently.
Now, the support has been withdrawn, and it left many people in Limbo. I have moved to Ubuntu, but I will miss my happy days with OS X.
Now, Windows has free dev tools, and Linux has a much nicer desktop.
I think the earliest versions of macOS/OS X since the Intel transition (that's when I joined) were great. UI was intuitive and minimalist, and OS did an adequate amount of functionality, and Spotlight was great. Now Finder lags and caches wrong items all over, and occasionally crashes.
That has always been the best feature for me: snappy, fast, fluid window/workspace navigation with the 3-finger swipe. Great for going back and forth between docs and the IDE (split-screen makes texts too small for my 13").
If the Intel chip isn't available yet, what can Apple do? The latest chip they use only supports 16gb.
32GB and 64GB RAM options
A replaceable SSD because they can and do fail
Options for good GPU
A few standardized ports like USB, HDMI, audio in/out, not requiring 3000 different dongles to connect to every peripheral and accessory currently in existence
An Escape key that is hardware, and in a regular location
Decent battery life
Note the prior generation MacBook Pro lines largely met those requirements, except for more RAM.