Yup, I have a by-now pretty trashed-up Pixel One, and when I travel I only need to take my mac power adapter and a couple of USB-C cables (although one is fine for short trips). Everything connects to everything seamlessly and charges rapidly.
I'm living the one-port-to-rule-them-all dream with my ancient Google phone, and I find it weird that even current-gen iPhones still required a weird proprietary Lightning cable.
And why do you think they care? I bet they've done a lot of extremely careful market analysis and are pretty certain it's an important factor for consumers.
Very true. They should have pushed the limits of portability with the Air and then moved the Pro in the other direction in terms of speed and versatility. I don't even understand what the MacBook (not Air, not Pro) does in the middle.
What about people who want a workstation-like setup and also portability?
The technology is there to allow us to have both without too much compromise either way. That's great!
Yes, there are a minority of people who want to fully optimise for one at the expense of the other, but Apple are serving the majority of the market, and the majority of market wants both in one machine, compromises included.
>The technology is there to allow us to have both without too much compromise either way. That's great!
Except it's not there, there are compromises, mainly around durability and repair costs. In my experience modern macs laptops are more fragile than older ones and cost a lot of money to fix when they break. Sometimes they break due to design compromises and even more design compromises up the repair cost through the roof (see complaints about the display cable for an example).
I don’t! I love the new form factor, the new keyboard, and I don’t need ports I use once a month, if ever, to create clutter on my machine. Those few MMs are huge savings. I love the new style pro. Looking forward to a bigger model and especially LOWER PRICES, which they’ll hopefully do. The prices are a bit outrageous and dont signal an intent to movie inventory, which hopefully now will change that the iPhone is stumbling. Though, maybe not, since the iPhone may recover.
Much more power. I used an Air, on principle, for way too long. A very old Air at that. It was stupid of me. I got a beefy late-2015 MPB, the last model with the ports, and it was life changing. I then tried a 2016 (I think) new style MBP and it was even better. It was as light as my old air, but with the MBP specs. Liked it, but it was just a loaner so I had to return it.
I don't need it thinner but I do need it lighter. LG makes a 17" that weighs 2.95bs. Their 15" weighs 2.4lbs and their 13.1 inch at 2.1lbs. Those effectively put Apple's Macbook/Macbook Air/Macbook Pro lines to shame. Of course I don't personally want to run Windows but damit Apple used to gloat at how light their laptops were. They are no longer competitively light.
To be fair, I have both 2018 MBP 15 (work) and 2015 MBP (home), I notice the weight of the 2015 a lot. Performance has been relatively the same - hasn't been mind blowing if I'm honest.
I really do hate the new keyboard to the point where I simply don't do any dev work until I plug in my dongle with my screen/keyboard. It's really that bad. The touch bar has been useless as well and more of an announce sometimes, especially when it would freeze randomly.
I've yet to find a monitor that "just works" with my MBP. I'll take whatever they release.
My LG is nice, but often gets confused about when my laptop is plugged in. Both of my Dells are ok, but randomly lose signal and can't control the volume from the Apple keyboard or from the OS. It would also be nice to not need a docking station and or adapter anymore.
This is something I cannot stand. I have two external monitors, and each time it wakes from display sleep they switch around - so the desktops are reversed. It's infuriating. I have tried and tried to find a solution but so far have nothing.
I had the same, though after three days I just gave up and physically switched the monitors. It shouldn't be necessary, but at least I don't have to deal with it anymore.
+1 most annoying thing. There is a workaround. Create a new desktop on one of the display, this will then give you options to move app around when you right click on the app icon. Still pretty bad but it beats moving around windows manually.
IIRC this happens because some monitor companies are cheap/lazy and assign the same EDID to all monitors of a particular model (EDIDs are supposed to be unique), making it difficult for operating systems to distinguish between them.
Are you all using TB3 monitors? My experience with an eGPU using TB3 has been that TB is an awkward technology in any operating system so far, I have to routinely power down in specific order all the way to disconnecting from the wall to ensure the device is detached correctly and will attach correctly next time.
The 27” Dell I have at work won’t see my Mac’s signal if I install an update and reboot or boot up from cold shutdown — I have to physically unplug the monitor from power and then replug it and then it’ll pick up the signal. Feels like a monitor firmware issue.
I'm using an LG 4k and while I have no idea what model yours is I had an interesting revelation that made the coexistence of my monitor with my MBP more palatable. I turned off the "Buzzer" setting (it's more of a beep) and now that I am not being confused by the beep I feel perfectly satisfied with the monitor and the laptop recognizing one another. Nothing changed except my perception but I think that beep was just noise (in the sense of irrelevant information) and I have since developed a sense for the time that it takes for my monitor to wake up and take the display off of sleep mode after I press a key.
All I wanted was to stick the laptop under my desk and run a keyboard, a mouse, two monitors, speakers and an external hard drive off of a single USB-C port and that one small change to silence the monitor's "wake-up beep" made a huge difference in the experience.
I’ve got an old (as in, no Thunderbolt) 27” Cinema Display that just keeps chugging away. It won’t do 4K or anything, and won’t be much good for modern Macs, but it has without fail worked as expected. Oh, and it makes a great docking, station, too, for period Macs. I want one of those again, only bigger and moar pixels.
Have you tried the Ultrafine displays? I use the Ultrafine 4k with my 13" tbMBP and it is pretty streamlined. Even features like True Tone work. Volume control and Brightness control is controlled by MacOS itself natively. Also works as a dock for my keyboard, mouse, webcam etc and charges my Mac. One cable is all I need.
The 16.5" screen I would have never seen coming. I wonder what the target is or if they are just going edge to edge on a smilar size to what we have now in the 15
The 6K screen I predicted. It's the most data you can send over ThunderBolt 3. It does however, gimp any dock you could be able to use.
Now, will other manufacturers be quick to copy the 16" laptop?
Lol, all the people waiting for a nice update on the 2017 mbp, that maybe would take care of the retarded keyboard and instead they release a macbook that nobody wanted
Hopefully they will bump the pixel density and keep the 15” footprint by just using the black bezels around the screen. It’s kind of a shame that’s the current 15” doesn’t have a pixel density high enought to support 1:4 pixel matching in their default resolution. It results in blurry text.
I don't see Macs going to OLED for a long time. OLED is very hard to control burn in for system with static GUI elements. All brands pulled their OLED laptops last year (2017 OLED laptops went back to LCD in 2018) and they just restarted their efforts this year. Macs don't even have touch screens.
Our best case scenario is such a laptop came out with an optional touch bar, but really Cook's probably shaking his head laughing while the only thing they're working on is quadrupling their bet on MRR from services people are going to use for decades.
An improved MBP would be great, but they've lost me. Those ridiculous keyboards (butterfly keys, touchbar), the general falloff in quality, and the insane prices sent me searching elsewhere. My main machine is now a System76 Darter. $2100 buys an 8-core i7, 32GB, 1TB SSD, running Pop OS (a very good-looking variant of Ubuntu). The hardware is not quite as stunning as a Mac, but it's nice, and the keyboard is excellent.
How's the trackpad compared to the Mac's? I don't need force touch. Just smooth precise scrolling. The trackpad is actually one of my top considerations when buying a laptop because I rarely use a mouse any more.
I think it's very good. It feels very slightly less glassy than the MBP.
Actually, I first bought a Galago, just before the Darter came out. They have a 30-day return policy, and the Darter was a better match for what I was looking for, so I traded. In a progression of "glassiness", I would put the Darter between the Galago and the MBP.
I really don't care about USB-A port. USB-C is the future, and all my cable connect natively to USB-C now. The only thing I have is a 10€ dongle for my screen.
The last two claims of the article are deceptive in my opinion. Starting Apple "could" fix the flex cable, and has "addressed" the keyboard issue. Apple technically "could" , but will they? Also even though they have addressed the keyboard problem, they have not actually fixed it yet.
I work in the live events industry, and like many of my colleagues I use my old 15" Pro every day, often in some pretty wildly varying conditions. Within the past few months I've used it on beaches, in underground tunnels, and in the roof of dusty old church. I take it to client meetings to talk about graphic design work, it's running presentations when people forget their own, it's with me underneath outdoor festival stages configuring show-control networks. It's simultaneously standardised enough that I never have to worry about device drivers when an artist needs to replace their own on stage at the last minute, but with enough flexibility to make it an enjoyable programming experience in my spare time.
It's over five years old now, and starting to feel the strain, but I'll get a few years out of it yet. Some colleagues deeply regret "upgrading" to the newer MBPs. The keyboard and the constant dongle switching are the main bugbears, but there's other build quality issues as well.
Either Apple gets it right with this revision, or ours is one industry that will inevitably move to other machines. There's not that many of us, but Apples dominance of the creative industries has been a huge part of it's marketing appeal to a more general audience. It'll be interesting to see if they'll regret alienating it down the line.
81 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadI want the same ports on the iphone as on the macbook.
No one cares about the damn touch bar. No one cares to have another few tenths of a mm shaved off the thickness.
My phone came with a USB to USB-C adapter so now I can plug in the mouse as well.
I'm living the one-port-to-rule-them-all dream with my ancient Google phone, and I find it weird that even current-gen iPhones still required a weird proprietary Lightning cable.
Apple's marketing department cares.
I do. (To be fair, it's why I use a MacBook Air.)
Apple's R&D department also does. Miniaturization is still a trend. By pushing the envelope on the iPhone they were well positioned for watches.
The technology is there to allow us to have both without too much compromise either way. That's great!
Yes, there are a minority of people who want to fully optimise for one at the expense of the other, but Apple are serving the majority of the market, and the majority of market wants both in one machine, compromises included.
Except it's not there, there are compromises, mainly around durability and repair costs. In my experience modern macs laptops are more fragile than older ones and cost a lot of money to fix when they break. Sometimes they break due to design compromises and even more design compromises up the repair cost through the roof (see complaints about the display cable for an example).
Apple has proven that they will trade repair cost & repair-ability away for anything. Even nothing.
I really do hate the new keyboard to the point where I simply don't do any dev work until I plug in my dongle with my screen/keyboard. It's really that bad. The touch bar has been useless as well and more of an announce sometimes, especially when it would freeze randomly.
My LG is nice, but often gets confused about when my laptop is plugged in. Both of my Dells are ok, but randomly lose signal and can't control the volume from the Apple keyboard or from the OS. It would also be nice to not need a docking station and or adapter anymore.
unplugging and re-plugging the mDP cable doesn't help, I have to reboot the laptop to get the screen to turn on (Dell U2415)
All I wanted was to stick the laptop under my desk and run a keyboard, a mouse, two monitors, speakers and an external hard drive off of a single USB-C port and that one small change to silence the monitor's "wake-up beep" made a huge difference in the experience.
The 6K screen I predicted. It's the most data you can send over ThunderBolt 3. It does however, gimp any dock you could be able to use.
Now, will other manufacturers be quick to copy the 16" laptop?
Also the LG gram: https://www.lg.com/us/laptops/lg-17Z990-RAAS8U1-ultra-slim-l...
Hopefully they will bump the pixel density and keep the 15” footprint by just using the black bezels around the screen. It’s kind of a shame that’s the current 15” doesn’t have a pixel density high enought to support 1:4 pixel matching in their default resolution. It results in blurry text.
Only thing I ever fullscreen is Netflix/Hulu/etc
can't imagine a miniscule dark spot at the top of the image bothering me
The current MacBook Pros are 15.4” and 13.3”.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/22/explosive-apple-s...
Actually, I first bought a Galago, just before the Darter came out. They have a 30-day return policy, and the Darter was a better match for what I was looking for, so I traded. In a progression of "glassiness", I would put the Darter between the Galago and the MBP.
It's over five years old now, and starting to feel the strain, but I'll get a few years out of it yet. Some colleagues deeply regret "upgrading" to the newer MBPs. The keyboard and the constant dongle switching are the main bugbears, but there's other build quality issues as well.
Either Apple gets it right with this revision, or ours is one industry that will inevitably move to other machines. There's not that many of us, but Apples dominance of the creative industries has been a huge part of it's marketing appeal to a more general audience. It'll be interesting to see if they'll regret alienating it down the line.