16 ms·

Open Letter to Tim Cook

210 points by Jerry2 10y ago

girfan 10y ago
The 15inch MBP has i7 Quad Core processor, Radeon graphics and double the RAM than the default 13inch models. This is not a minor jump in performance. I agree that they do sometimes prioritize size, thickness and beauty over performance but I don't see what else could go into the 15inch MBP that it currently lacks?
- timerickson 10y ago
  It will be interesting to benchmark the new Razer laptops against these new MacBook Pros. On paper the Razer will seemingly far outperform the MBP, at the same size, at actually cheaper cost. That being said, I'll wait for benchmarks to draw final conclusions.
  - santaclaus 10y ago
    I wish Razer would ditch the souped up Honda Civic vibe, the internals on the machines look cool. That green logo is terrible.
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      That's like asking Apple to stop making minimalist aluminum laptops—the gaudy lights and green logo are part of the experience.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - eropple 10y ago
        The logo is a nontrivial part of why I don't buy Razer gear. I would feel dumb bringing that into a client's office.
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Right, but the point is the specs really haven't changed since 2013... it's a very minor upgrade over the 3 year-old laptops. Would be curious to see what the benchmarks come back as, but I'd guess no more than a 10% improvement for common activities at most. MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,3 Processor Name: Intel Core i7 Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz Number of Processors: 1 Total Number of Cores: 4 L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 6 MB Memory: 16 GB
  - brigade 10y ago
    Which CPU exactly were you hoping for instead of i7-6920HQ?
  - lukeholder 10y ago
    Totally new CPU architecture lookup skylake vs the older haswell.
- timv 10y ago
  An escape key. (Sorry, it was too easy)
- hiram112 10y ago
  2 more ram slots.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  The new Macbooks are so close to being great it's annoying. The specs are fine by me and I'm neutral on the Touch Bar, but the price and lack of ports just makes them not worth it. While I'm glad Apple is trying to move the industry to use USB-C for everything, it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port. It's going to be at least 3-5 years until the industry uses USB-C and by that point a new series of Macbook Pro will have been released. This applies to the non-Touch Bar Macbook as well. Price and specs are fine, but why does it only have two USB-C ports?
  - curun1r 10y ago
    The lack of USB 3.0 ports I can understand. USB-C is the successor and, while still common, those older USB ports are legacy technology now. But HDMI is still current tech. The latest TVs still all use HDMI and requiring a special cable to hook up my laptop to a TV is a non-starter since the typical use case is hooking up my laptop to a friend's TV using the cable that's already plugged into their TV. It feels like the removal of the HDMI port is an attempt to get people to buy an AppleTV. On this "pro" model of laptop, they don't want people connecting it to a TV. But, at least for me, this doesn't cover my use case.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    > it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port. Magsafe, USB Type A, HDMI, and Mini DisplayPort / Thunderbolt 1/2 are all literally too wide to fit within the width of the new laptop’s sides. They would have needed to make the whole laptop noticeably thicker or otherwise differently shaped to fit any of those. The headphone jack barely fits.
    - pritambaral 10y ago
      > They would have needed to make the whole laptop noticeably thicker Or, they could have just stayed at the level of thickness Macbook Pros already had.
    - phire 10y ago
      My current laptop is thinner than the new 13" Macbook Pro (bearly, by just 0.5mm). Way thinner than the 15" Macbook Pro. Yet it has full sized USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port, SD slot and an HDMI port. The only reason those ports don't fit on the new MacBooks, is because the bottom curves up near the edges.
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  What you're seeing is people who never really liked Apple or its products, but ended up using them anyway because they were clear best-in-class products, and who consistently posted rants and conspiracy theories about Apple and threatened to jump ship at the earliest possible opportunity. And now they have what they see as an opportunity to exit while doing the most damage to a company they hate, by portraying the current hardware lineup as fatally flawed in all sorts of ways. Time will tell whether an extremely loud but mostly not-rationally-arguing crowd can really have an impact.
  - zaphar 10y ago
    When people who use your products because they are best in class stop using them the clear message is they no longer think they are best in class. Being a fan and using Apple sends very little signal regarding their quality. Being agnostic and using Apple sends a larger signal. Right now the signal seems to be that Apple is no longer making professional class hardware. Fans and status symbol seekers will still want them. People who need to get work done will slowly stop wanting them.
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      I really do think we're seeing a lot of people who either A) despite furiously posting about how they're "done with Apple" and this was "the last straw", etc. (and doing this at literally every product refresh) are still going to buy iPhones and Macbook laptops, or B) mostly only used a Mac because it was issued to them at work and now are going to demand something different because they think they can make a case against Apple.
      - zaphar 10y ago
        I think A is probably true. But I think you may be wrong on the B. Very few companies that I'm aware of forces someone to use a Mac. If you use one it's because you asked for it. If you stop asking for it you'll get something else.
- zamalek 10y ago
  > Radeon graphics That's like saying car has combustion engine. > I don't see what else could go into the 15inch MBP that it currently lacks? * Razer Blade[1]: 0.70", 4.30lbs. VR-ready performance. i7, DDR4, PCIe SSD, GTX1060. Starts at $1800. * Gigabye Aero[2]: 0.78", 4.16lbs. VR-ready performance. i7, DDR4, PCIe SSD, GTX1060. Starts at $1500. MBP is fine if you don't need performance. It straddles the line between netbook and laptop - which is probably why it does so well. Most people don't need more. However, Apple does not service the market that needs more in any way whatsoever. They probably never will: regardless of where the cost of Apple products comes from, they cannot compete with the bang-for-buck of the above examples (neither support Linux very well). [1]: http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade [2]: http://www.gigabyte.co.za/products/product-page.aspx?pid=6135 http://www.gigabyte.co.za/products/product-page.aspx?pid=613...
Mithaldu 10y ago
To be honest that zoolander phone is utterly excellent and if it were a real thing i would buy it in a heartbeat. If only so i have a phone i can use for phone calls where i don't need to worry about the battery running out, and which i can stuff into any pocket on my body.
- cialowicz 10y ago
  Have a look at the Long CZ J8. ~$50, 68mm x 23mm x 11mm.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    Dang, that is actually pretty nice. Thanks for the mention. :)
- redial 10y ago
  I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but if that Zoolander phone were real, the battery on it might not even last a day.
  - Mithaldu 10y ago
    Depends on whether you stuff an entire android OS into it. With only the minimum in user amenities most of it should still be the battery for a drop of hardware.
have_faith 10y ago
Not to beat a dead horse but I'm also considering abandoning Apple as I'm due an upgrade now. I'm still using a MBP from 2010 that I added an SSD and some extra ram too, it's still going strong although showing it's age it has served me very well over the years. Gluing parts in that used to be user replaceable, models now are 16gb of ram only (can someone explain this one?), thinness for thinness sake, removing standard ports etc. I can live with non-apple hardware but I would much prefer to use MacOS. Considering dual-booting a hackingtosh/linux. I get the impression they are trying to transition their laptops to life cycles closer to their phones and I won't be coming along for the ride.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  If you (or anyone reading) are attached to macOS in any way, getting a maxed out 2015 Macbook Pro might be a decent option. Refurbished might be a cheaper option as well. Sure, you're paying for "older" hardware, so I can understand being hesitant, but they still hold up fine and will last for a long time. Note that I don't use virtual machines, games, or video editing software so the 16gb of RAM is more than enough.
  - joshmanders 10y ago
    > Note that I don't use virtual machines, games, or video editing software so the 16gb of RAM is more than enough. I don't use games or video editing software, but I have 2 virtualbox machines running, one with Debian and one with Windows 10 for testing purposes, along with always on Docker containers. My 16GB of ram on my mid-2015 near maxed out 15" rMBP with a Dell 27" 4k display hooked up holds up very well.
- uptown 10y ago
  > "models now are 16gb of ram only (can someone explain this one?)" "Apple told me MBP maxes out at 16GB RAM because LPDDR3 limit is 16GB/chip; Apple uses it because of performance/energy ratio." https://twitter.com/DanFrakes/status/791754757404626944 https://twitter.com/DanFrakes/status/791754757404626944 So basically, it needed to be thin and light ... because, Apple ... which limits the size of the battery. And more RAM would consume more energy, requiring the device to potentially be thicker and heavier to accommodate a larger battery in order to meet their runtime expectations.
grzm 10y ago
I agree with the gist of the letter. Watching "Truth in 24" makes me appreciate Audi so much more. I thought this snippet from Jason Snell summarizes the new MacBook Pro offering well: "I don’t quite get the existence of the low-end, non-Touch-Bar-having 13-inch MacBook Pro. On stage, Phil Schiller argued that it was essentially a Retina replacement for the 13-inch MacBook Air, and I can see that. But it’s $500 more and is it really a MacBook Pro? Does the MacBook Pro line need to have this extra product attached at the bottom of it, lacking the most interesting feature of the rest of the line? "Then again, it’s not really a MacBook either, because it’s heavier and has two Thunderbolt 3 ports rather than the one USB-C port on the MacBook. It’s a tweener product and Apple has apparently decided that it doesn’t want to introduce another new name to its laptop line, so MacBook Pro it is. But it’s weird. Not necessarily bad—it really does fill a niche that’s between the full-on MacBook Pro and the MacBook—but weird nonetheless." https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/a-few-quick-thoughts-about-thursdays-mac-event-in-cupertino/#theotherothermacbookpro https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/a-few-quick-thoughts-abou... I think this is likely the beginning of a correction in Apple's laptop offerings. MacBook/MacBook Air/MacBook Pro was a departure from the consumer/pro split. Apple was overdue in updating the MacBook Pro and got a bit caught in the power/CPU/memory state of current offerings. For a lot of people the new MacBook Pro will be good. Just not the Pro (some) are looking for. Hopefully we will see a true Pro model next Fall.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Agreed on the price. I was holding out for a retina MBP/MBA around the $1,000 mark. As things stand though, I'll probably add another 4 GB ram to my 2011 MBA and use it for a few more years.
davedunkin 10y ago
Car companies don't sell their race cars.
- toufka 10y ago
  But they do sell to the public AMG, Motorsport, and TRD versions of their regular car lines even when they are not 'big sellers'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-AMG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-AMG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Racing_Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Racing_Development just as Apple used to have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro
  - treehau5 10y ago
    I don't know how to explain it -- but as an enthusiast, I sorely, sorely miss the S2000 and hope Honda comes out with something similar. It really feels like it lost something without it.
    - resist_futility 10y ago
      the new type R is probably the closest they'll make
- sjtgraham 10y ago
  Yes they do. Homogolation rules mean they have to do exactly that.
  - redial 10y ago
    But the cars on those competitions are not truly race cars, at least not in the way a normal person would imagine a race car. In fact, homologations rules are in place to prevent true race cars from competing. F1 and LMP race cars are not sold. Not even FE cars are sold.
ky738 10y ago
k. - Tim Cook
smegel 10y ago
The reason motorcycle companies invest in racing is not just to establish cred, but to actually push the boundaries of technology and innovation that they can then incorporate into their "consumer" models. A "true Pro grade" computer offers no such advantage - in fact most of the innovation comes from making things smaller and thinner - as soon as you take away the weight/size restriction, sure you can make supercomputers in a box, but it's also pretty darn easy to do so. And the final point - consumer bike customers usually watch bike racing, and probably dream of being a pro bike racer - few Mac customers could care less about "digital creative professionals" and don't really want to emulate being one of them.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  few Mac customers could care less about "digital creative professionals" and don't really want to emulate being one of them. What do you think most Mac users want?
  - smegel 10y ago
    A next-gen iPhone.
- robbrown451 10y ago
  I think that's unlikely. There are far more economical ways of pushing boundaries of technology than racing. And the technology for racing really only has a very small overlap for the sorts of R&D needed for a market competitive car or motorcycle.
- solatic 10y ago
  >A "true Pro grade" computer offers no such advantage - in fact most of the innovation comes from making things smaller and thinner - as soon as you take away the weight/size restriction, sure you can make supercomputers in a box, but it's also pretty darn easy to do so. Except that it's not easy to put supercomputer-level performance in a lightweight box (with decent battery life) that you can slip into your bag. If Apple really wanted to push the boundaries in that way - getting great performance while still using an impossibly small laptop - there's actually a few directions they could've gone in, namely anything where you push computation into the cloud and then see the results locally. Basically come to market saying "you Windows/Linux schmucks and your tons of local VM's. You don't need that, we'll run your VM's in the cloud, and we'll make it Apple-easy for you to do so." No more local rendering, local building, nothing. The original assets are kept on some Apple cloud, a cache is kept on your machine, and whenever you start an operation, it starts the operation both on the cache and on the Apple cloud, and if the Apple cloud finishes first, then the results are returned to your computer. Unfortunately, Apple just doesn't care anymore about its professional customers. It started with the EOL for XServe (which could've been transitioned, along with OS X Server, into a private-cloud oriented offering) and it has worked its way down into its end-user offerings.
IBM 10y ago
Best comment [1] I read a couple of days ago: >One thing constantly said to founders here is "don't let a vocal minority come in, tell you they love your product, and then turn into bullies that tell you how you should make said product. You never made it for them; they aren't your market. Don't get confused into thinking they are, just because they're loud." I think that about sums up the relationship between Apple and software developers who use their hardware. Which is good advice for Tim Cook and all of Apple. You don't want to end up making the MBP version of this [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818193 [2] https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/2236.html https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/2236.html
- graeme 10y ago
  Are professional users really a "vocal minority" of the MacBook Pro? I'm not a developer. I run an online business and use a MacBook Pro for video recording, editing, and general website admin. I needed the extra processing power, and the ports. The new model has me apprehensive, though I'll certainly look at it. What's the target demographic this new MBP is serving, though?
  - sjtgraham 10y ago
    > What's the target demographic this new MBP is serving, though? Apple doesn't seem to know or care. I don't know who this MBP is for. Increasingly less people can justify an Apple macOS portable when an iOS device covers their requirements satisfactorily and it doesn't meet the needs of many professionals at all (present and anticipated needs for the machine's useful life). Apple is behaving as if they're a boutique OEM.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      >Apple is behaving as if they're a boutique OEM. That's how Apple has behaved since day 1, save for the few years when Sculley was at the helm.
    - initram 10y ago
jmeller 10y ago
Apple built its PC business on the backs of creative professionals because they were among the few groups who thought Macs were worth more than $0.00, thanks to its superior experience with Adobe's creative suite when compared to Windows. Apple now has a dominant position in the PC market, not because they catered to creative professionals, but because they listened to their initial creative audience and focused on making their computers better. Apple doesn't focus on the Mac Pro because they want to abandon creatives, it is simply because the Mac Pro doesn't enable any meaningful use-cases not served by the 5k iMac or its notebook line. Form-factor, screen quality, battery life, weight, speed of I/O, and all the other design goals the author dismisses, are perhaps the most important metrics meaningful for the current generation of laptop buyers, including professionals.
- grzm 10y ago
  "Apple doesn't focus on the Mac Pro because they want to abandon creatives, it is simply because the Mac Pro doesn't enable any meaningful use-cases not served by the 5k iMac or its notebook line." Well said. This thought has been banging around in my head half-formed for the past couple of days. Thanks for expressing it so succinctly. I think this also answers why Apple has made the decision to limit/remove expansion and upgrade options in their hardware. "Apple built its PC business on the backs of creative professionals because they were among the few groups who thought Macs were worth more than $0.00, thanks to its superior experience with Adobe's creative suite when compared to Windows." This idea of creatives being the core market for Apple during its early years is often floated. I'm not questioning its veracity, though I'm curious if anyone knows of references that backs this up with numbers or research? Education was a pretty big market early on as well. How do they compare?
  - jmeller 10y ago
    > This idea of creatives being the core market for Apple during its early years is often floated. I'm not questioning its veracity, though I'm curious if anyone knows of references that backs this up with numbers or research? Check out Steve Job's first keynote after returning to Apple in 1997 starting at 18:35. He enumerates the assets the company still has at its disposable to claw its way out of almost imminent bankruptcy. He specifically mentiones creative proffesionals and educators and backs them up with some interesting stats. https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=18m35s https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=18m35s
andr 10y ago
Given the Mac's history in the last few years, and the fact that it only accounts for 12% of Apple's revenue and 8% of shipped units, I see two scenarios: 1) Apple gets out of the Mac business in a few years - Apple is not the kind of company to wait patiently for its product lines to run into the ground. The only reason they really need the Mac is Xcode for all those iOS apps that need to be developed. I wouldn't be surprised to see an Xcode for iCloud, or maybe even some kind of partnership with Microsoft (Visual Studio already lets you build iOS apps, just not in Swift). 2) Apple is working on the Mac's second act (third?), which could only be a switch to ARM. It makes business sense because a lot of the R&D will be united between iOS and Mac - making those A9s and A10s sure isn't cheap. And it explains the lackluster progress from customers' perspective. My bet is on #1, so all the criticism about the MacBook's ports or RAM is just barking up the wrong tree.
- mojuba 10y ago
  > The only reason they really need the Mac is Xcode for all those iOS apps that need to be developed. This is simply not true. MacOS is at the very least a companion OS that gets more and more tightly integrated with the iOS devices. App handover, now also copy/paste, etc etc. An iPhone without a Mac loses many of its advantages over Android. Let alone that there are no signs Apple is going to abandon the Mac business as you say, the recent MBP announcements being the best proof of it. On (2) switching to ARM: I personally don't believe in this, because this will break a lot of software and will seriously piss off a lot of people. The switch to Intel was relatively easier back in the day because the Mac user base at the time was laughable and there was a big promise that the Macs will become a lot more powerful. I know about the bitcode and stuff, but the more I think about it, the less I believe Apple is prepared to make the switch for its laptops and desktops. Maybe, just maybe one separate product line like MacBook Air switches to ARM, but then what's the point?
  - sjwright 10y ago
    There's simply no point for Apple to switch desktop CPU architectures unless there's a unavoidably compelling reason to do so. The move to Intel met this high threshold easily. A modest cost saving doesn't qualify and would be partially swallowed up by R&D costs. Energy/thermal savings might be a reason in theory, but how much of a laptop's energy use goes to the CPU anyway? Apple seems to be doing just fine with Intel's low-TDP parts anyway.
chrisbennet 10y ago
As a professional developer, I would have loved to stick with Apple laptops but clearly us pro's aren't one of their target demographics, maybe we never were. (And I don't mean that in a snarky way.) Metaphorically speaking, sometimes when a girl is nice to us, we think she's more interested in us than she really is. I think Apple was just "being nice" to us in the past and we took it the wrong way.
vacri 10y ago
Meh. With $200B in liquid assets, Apple can do whatever it feels like. If it ever did find itself in the doghouse (unlikely), it could survive there for decades while it figured out how to recapture the mojo.
daxfohl 10y ago
Because remember those popular Mac|Windows commercials from a few years ago? If you want a stodgy get-stuff-done kind of thing then you'll have to talk to some Microsoft nerds sporting antique crap like headphone jacks. Apple only cares about how hip you look, with your brand new airpods and all your disposable income.
votr 10y ago
I feel like Tim Cook decided to double down on the "Apple as a luxury brand" business model. If that's the focus, then it makes sense to emphasize thinness, aesthetics, and raise the price at the same time. Microsoft on the other hand seem to be working hard on winning developer mindshare again, as they know they can't compete with Apple in the branding space. I hope the surface book 2 will have a 32gb option.
- yasky 10y ago
  Alas without the 3-finger drag gesture on the Surfacebook, it's a non-starter for me. It's horrifying to think that even though the hardware supports it, that gesture is patented and cannot be used.
petersphilo 10y ago
Hello All, i am the OP of: https://petersphilo.org/#post-71 https://petersphilo.org/#post-71 Just wanted to add a couple of things: Pro hardware can exist and has existed at Apple for most of its existence, please look back at the post and comments for evidence.. My point was not that Apple should choose between 'pro' hardware and consumer/boutique hardware, in fact, Apple has a long tradition of keeping both happy.. Maybe Apple really isn't interested in the Mac any more, or even in developers. But who makes the apps, the games, etc.. Why not keep power users, keep their 'street cred' as the 'creative platform' and make a little (a lot, actually) scratch on the side... Old geezer cries out: Can't we all just get along?
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Developers on Mac were always using the same computers as everyone else. I don't remember having a Mac Classic Pro or a LC Pro and so forth.
  - dasil003 10y ago
    Very odd your selective memory. You don't remember the Macintosh IIfx?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      No. Back in those days the Mac was almost nonexistent in Portugal. There was just one official importer, Interlog, and buying anything Mac related meant traveling to Lisbon. So the first time I actually programmed on a Mac was in 1994, on Classic and LC models. The only ones available on the university campus on a single room! I think there were around 10 there. The remaining ones were located in the IT department, used by the secretaries and a few teachers.
      - dasil003 10y ago
        Ah! Boa tarde, então ;) So you were using education-targeted macs, but there were always pro-level computers from Apple ever since the very early days (Lisa, Apple IIGS, Power Mac G3, G4, G5, etc). It's only once they discontinued the cheese grater Power Mac that things started to get pretty bad for users who need expansion and massive power.
petersphilo 10y ago
Hello All, i am the OP of: https://petersphilo.org/#post-71 https://petersphilo.org/#post-71 Just wanted to add a couple of things: Pro hardware can exist and has existed at Apple for most of its existence, please look back at the post and comments for evidence.. My point was not that Apple should choose between 'pro' hardware and consumer/boutique hardware, in fact, Apple has a long tradition of keeping both happy.. Maybe Apple really isn't interested in the Mac any more, or even in developers. But who makes the apps, the games, etc.. Why not keep power users, keep their 'street cred' as the 'creative platform' and make a little (a lot, actually) scratch on the side... Old geezer cries out: Can't we all just get along?
anindha 10y ago
I don't get the racing analogy. It's not like you can buy a Formula One racing car. If Apple started making super computers to play chess then the analogy would be valid.
- toyg 10y ago
  Author says in the comment that F1 is the only competition where you can't buy what is being raced - every other competition requires vehicles that are actually sold. Besides, you can't buy an F1, but you will buy fast cars from manufacturers based on their F1 results. Ferrari could ship a Jeep tomorrow and people would still buy it thinking it's the fastest Jeep ever.
  - stonogo 10y ago
    This is true in name only. NASCAR, despite its name, races cars nobody produces. And you can't buy a MotoGP-spec motorcycle without essentially ordering one custom-built. The same is true for rally car races.
  - mxfh 10y ago
    Production car racing is the exception, custom build race car series are the norm. Even though Touring car and Sports car racing exist, they would be more of an analog to the (hardware manufacturer supplied) overclocking scene, than what is actually required for daily use by professionals, who don't want to sit in cages void of any comfort for endurance races. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_racing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_racing
kyriakos 10y ago
Outside HN I really haven't seen posts complaining about the new Apple offerings. So it could be Apple only pissed off a particular type of developers.
- toyg 10y ago
  Reddit is ablaze. The first comments on Ars were very snarky too.
  - kyriakos 10y ago
    What subreddits by the way? (I want to have a look)
    - toyg 10y ago
      On /r/apple, keynote megathreads were an angry affair. All subsequent MBP-related threads, even the ones with positive titles, are full of people discussing alternatives. The "preorder" thread has been hastily unpinned. These are the people who spent a year posting almost-daily "waiting" threads, and who would normally be discussing how to cheat or sell their souls to get the latest gizmo right away. I expect people in /r/pcmasterrace are laughing.
thomasjudge 10y ago
I'm sure that besides what appears in the various media outlets, this being one of them, plenty of people are communicating their dissatisfaction directly to Tim and others in Apple management. But I've come to the conclusion that they don't listen to customers, and they don't really care what we think. So rather than write emails to Tim, I'd like to try and start communicating with Apple's board. Any ideas on how to reach them?
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  Even if you could reach them, what arguments will you provide them with to even start to consider pushing for a change of plan? As far as they can predict (and they are probably quite knowledgeable about the market) people will buy their laptops and they will make a neat profit. That is, Apple upper management is doing its job — making a profit; having some long term strategic vision. They are undoubtedly aware of a certain amount of discontent being vented on the internet, and will most likely consider placating it (not addressing it) a process that needs to be looked into to. If you want to make a difference, vote with your wallet. System76 makes nice laptops, and Dell's XPS line isn't too bad.
neotek 10y ago
I'm looking forward to seeing what John Gruber over at Daring Fireball will have to say about all this, since his perspective tends to lean heavily toward giving Apple the benefit of the doubt and all I've seen so far is relentless negativity about the new MacBook Pro lineup. Personally, I'm extremely disappointed - I've been desperately holding off buying a new MacBook Pro to replace the aging mid-2012 non-retina model I'm still using, but what would I really be upgrading for now? I already have 16gb of RAM and a big SSD, sure I don't have a Touch Bar but I don't give a shit about it anyway. The only thing I truly need is a retina screen and for that I could just buy a second-hand MBP for substantially less money, and I wouldn't need to buy a thousand dongles.
- Yaggo 10y ago
  Same here. I only wished for 32 GB RAM (would happily pay for 64 GB even with Apple premium, but hey).
newscracker 10y ago
In the recent keynote about the MBP refresh with the TouchBar and the professional apps (like Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro) being adapted to it, Apple showed an MBP setup with a couple of 5K LG monitors (which Apple mentioned it worked with LG for) for professional work, along with external RAID storage from Pegasus. The message I got was that MBP is the pro line, which can be "expanded" on the display and storage fronts. Unfortunately, it still leaves RAM and internal storage stuck (pun intended) with whatever came in during the purchase! At the end of the keynote, I was left with the impression that the Mac Pro is going to be canned in a few months, probably along with the Mac mini - just disappear silently from the store. Even the iMac may get canned in a couple of years, leaving the portable MBP as the sole Mac available. This may be the leading act for introducing an ARM based MBP, thus eliminating the effort to deal with a refresh of other Macs to ARM based chips. I've expressed my frustration here on this topic before. Apple seems unwilling and incompetent to put in what it takes to show that it still can do and maintain things well.
- chongli 10y ago
  If you're going to be using the machine professionally and hooking up a couple 5k monitors for doing video or high end photo work, why not connect an external RAID or NAS as well? Are there use cases where one needs to carry around many terabytes of video portably but without access to a 5k monitor?
dolguldur 10y ago
Apple inverted the previous Christmas-like feeling of "we have something new for each of you" to a "we've removed something you personally liked" that seems to cover many of us. I haven't commented yet at all since I think several issues aren't actually as big as people are concerned about them, but overall, I'm frustrated with the situation for computing. I don't know how Apple works internally, but for me the problem is clearly not Tim Cook, but rather Jony Ive. He seems to be obsessed with some sort of purity that I appreciate in design. However form vs. function is too much of a tension to be bearable within one person. I think Apple lacks folks who weigh in on the functionality side of things. Why? Becasue Ive is magically associated with Jobs, Ive is almost like some medium to get to Jobs, or at least that's how I think some folks perceive him. In reality Ive seems to be the person who'd rather have a nice TouchBar that spans the whole width of the keyboard instead of keeping just the escape key, which is obviously used much more than the other function keys. I thought about this a lot and by now I know I'll definitely be okay with it, especially since there's no other non-tactile key near it (meaning my body will know I've hit escape once it touches the flatness that doesn't give in). Another personal thing for me is the Magsafe. I really liked it not just as a trip-proof charging solution, but also for the way you connect it. It's so effortless, it's fun again and again. It's one of these micro-reinforcements that makes us love products. And again I can see the conflict. The new beauty is that you can dock so many devices and charging with just one single cable. I think that's a pretty great feature. If there was more functionally thinking folks with power at Apple, they'd probably suggested to keep a Magsafe and allow the MBP to be charged by either that or over the USB-C. But you see how "ugly" even this though is, right?! It's a compromise and so in the end I think the current MacBook Pro is the result of not making any compromise in any of these decisions and that yields the product they showed us. So part of me hates this chasing of pureness since I see it almost as some neurotic obsession about the visual aesthetics. I guess it would take a lot of self-confidence for a company like Apple to be okay with things that could be easily portrayed as compromises by the press. On the other hand I realize I'm pathetic and I'm not really working on improving any of this, so I thank Apple for pissing us off because it's somehow stimulating as well. (Even if it's just stimulating as in "work harder", so I can buy one of these without thinking too much about it).
- stephendedalus 10y ago
znpy 10y ago
What is going to happen imho: Apple is doing and will do a shitload of money anyway. People will buy Apple stuff anyway because people already are: unless you are an Apple user, you should know how "religious" (I'm being kind here) Apple users are. They have been consciously been buying outdated and overpriced hardware until now, and they have been super proud about this too. So this is going to last anything from five to ten years at least, still imho. I have no true idea whether newer apple stuff is so bad or not (besides the idiotic drop of the audio jack on the iPhone). But Apple users have been subject to this Apple-isy for literally decades. I have a suspicion that now that Apple Macbook Pros are so widespread, complaining about Apple is the new hipsteria. This is what I feel, reading the news, on a foggy October, almost-November morning.
jbmorgado 10y ago
For me it comes down to a simple thing. When you launch 2 of your major products separated by 2 months (iPhone and Macbook Pro) and they can't work together without an adapter because you are using different ports in the iPhone and cannibalising ports in the MacBook Pro, then your company by definition, lacks vision and aim. We can apologize Apple all we want, we can pretend there is a greater vision going on behind the scenes, but sorry, it just isn't, I can't even use the headphones from my new iPhone to listen music/sound in my new MacBook Pro (not alone connect my iPhone to the MacBook Pro to charge/transfer media with the lightning port) without an adapter. That's an utter lack of vision, development path, aims of the products. It's literally a mess.

210 points by Jerry2 10y ago

The 15inch MBP has i7 Quad Core processor, Radeon graphics and double the RAM than the default 13inch models. This is not a minor jump in performance. I agree that they do sometimes prioritize size, thickness and beauty over performance but I don't see what else could go into the 15inch MBP that it currently lacks?

timerickson 10y ago
It will be interesting to benchmark the new Razer laptops against these new MacBook Pros. On paper the Razer will seemingly far outperform the MBP, at the same size, at actually cheaper cost. That being said, I'll wait for benchmarks to draw final conclusions.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  I wish Razer would ditch the souped up Honda Civic vibe, the internals on the machines look cool. That green logo is terrible.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    That's like asking Apple to stop making minimalist aluminum laptops—the gaudy lights and green logo are part of the experience.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - eropple 10y ago
      The logo is a nontrivial part of why I don't buy Razer gear. I would feel dumb bringing that into a client's office.
dbg31415 10y ago
Right, but the point is the specs really haven't changed since 2013... it's a very minor upgrade over the 3 year-old laptops. Would be curious to see what the benchmarks come back as, but I'd guess no more than a 10% improvement for common activities at most. MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) Model Name: MacBook Pro Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,3 Processor Name: Intel Core i7 Processor Speed: 2.3 GHz Number of Processors: 1 Total Number of Cores: 4 L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB L3 Cache: 6 MB Memory: 16 GB
- brigade 10y ago
  Which CPU exactly were you hoping for instead of i7-6920HQ?
- lukeholder 10y ago
  Totally new CPU architecture lookup skylake vs the older haswell.
timv 10y ago
An escape key. (Sorry, it was too easy)
hiram112 10y ago
2 more ram slots.
sotojuan 10y ago
The new Macbooks are so close to being great it's annoying. The specs are fine by me and I'm neutral on the Touch Bar, but the price and lack of ports just makes them not worth it. While I'm glad Apple is trying to move the industry to use USB-C for everything, it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port. It's going to be at least 3-5 years until the industry uses USB-C and by that point a new series of Macbook Pro will have been released. This applies to the non-Touch Bar Macbook as well. Price and specs are fine, but why does it only have two USB-C ports?
- curun1r 10y ago
  The lack of USB 3.0 ports I can understand. USB-C is the successor and, while still common, those older USB ports are legacy technology now. But HDMI is still current tech. The latest TVs still all use HDMI and requiring a special cable to hook up my laptop to a TV is a non-starter since the typical use case is hooking up my laptop to a friend's TV using the cable that's already plugged into their TV. It feels like the removal of the HDMI port is an attempt to get people to buy an AppleTV. On this "pro" model of laptop, they don't want people connecting it to a TV. But, at least for me, this doesn't cover my use case.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  > it wouldn't had killed them to include some USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port. Magsafe, USB Type A, HDMI, and Mini DisplayPort / Thunderbolt 1/2 are all literally too wide to fit within the width of the new laptop’s sides. They would have needed to make the whole laptop noticeably thicker or otherwise differently shaped to fit any of those. The headphone jack barely fits.
  - pritambaral 10y ago
    > They would have needed to make the whole laptop noticeably thicker Or, they could have just stayed at the level of thickness Macbook Pros already had.
  - phire 10y ago
    My current laptop is thinner than the new 13" Macbook Pro (bearly, by just 0.5mm). Way thinner than the 15" Macbook Pro. Yet it has full sized USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port, SD slot and an HDMI port. The only reason those ports don't fit on the new MacBooks, is because the bottom curves up near the edges.
ubernostrum 10y ago
What you're seeing is people who never really liked Apple or its products, but ended up using them anyway because they were clear best-in-class products, and who consistently posted rants and conspiracy theories about Apple and threatened to jump ship at the earliest possible opportunity. And now they have what they see as an opportunity to exit while doing the most damage to a company they hate, by portraying the current hardware lineup as fatally flawed in all sorts of ways. Time will tell whether an extremely loud but mostly not-rationally-arguing crowd can really have an impact.
- zaphar 10y ago
  When people who use your products because they are best in class stop using them the clear message is they no longer think they are best in class. Being a fan and using Apple sends very little signal regarding their quality. Being agnostic and using Apple sends a larger signal. Right now the signal seems to be that Apple is no longer making professional class hardware. Fans and status symbol seekers will still want them. People who need to get work done will slowly stop wanting them.
  - ubernostrum 10y ago
    I really do think we're seeing a lot of people who either A) despite furiously posting about how they're "done with Apple" and this was "the last straw", etc. (and doing this at literally every product refresh) are still going to buy iPhones and Macbook laptops, or B) mostly only used a Mac because it was issued to them at work and now are going to demand something different because they think they can make a case against Apple.
    - zaphar 10y ago
      I think A is probably true. But I think you may be wrong on the B. Very few companies that I'm aware of forces someone to use a Mac. If you use one it's because you asked for it. If you stop asking for it you'll get something else.
zamalek 10y ago
> Radeon graphics That's like saying car has combustion engine. > I don't see what else could go into the 15inch MBP that it currently lacks? * Razer Blade[1]: 0.70", 4.30lbs. VR-ready performance. i7, DDR4, PCIe SSD, GTX1060. Starts at $1800. * Gigabye Aero[2]: 0.78", 4.16lbs. VR-ready performance. i7, DDR4, PCIe SSD, GTX1060. Starts at $1500. MBP is fine if you don't need performance. It straddles the line between netbook and laptop - which is probably why it does so well. Most people don't need more. However, Apple does not service the market that needs more in any way whatsoever. They probably never will: regardless of where the cost of Apple products comes from, they cannot compete with the bang-for-buck of the above examples (neither support Linux very well). [1]: http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade [2]: http://www.gigabyte.co.za/products/product-page.aspx?pid=6135 http://www.gigabyte.co.za/products/product-page.aspx?pid=613...

Mithaldu 10y ago

To be honest that zoolander phone is utterly excellent and if it were a real thing i would buy it in a heartbeat. If only so i have a phone i can use for phone calls where i don't need to worry about the battery running out, and which i can stuff into any pocket on my body.

cialowicz 10y ago
Have a look at the Long CZ J8. ~$50, 68mm x 23mm x 11mm.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  Dang, that is actually pretty nice. Thanks for the mention. :)
redial 10y ago
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but if that Zoolander phone were real, the battery on it might not even last a day.
- Mithaldu 10y ago
  Depends on whether you stuff an entire android OS into it. With only the minimum in user amenities most of it should still be the battery for a drop of hardware.

have_faith 10y ago

Not to beat a dead horse but I'm also considering abandoning Apple as I'm due an upgrade now. I'm still using a MBP from 2010 that I added an SSD and some extra ram too, it's still going strong although showing it's age it has served me very well over the years. Gluing parts in that used to be user replaceable, models now are 16gb of ram only (can someone explain this one?), thinness for thinness sake, removing standard ports etc. I can live with non-apple hardware but I would much prefer to use MacOS. Considering dual-booting a hackingtosh/linux. I get the impression they are trying to transition their laptops to life cycles closer to their phones and I won't be coming along for the ride.

sotojuan 10y ago
If you (or anyone reading) are attached to macOS in any way, getting a maxed out 2015 Macbook Pro might be a decent option. Refurbished might be a cheaper option as well. Sure, you're paying for "older" hardware, so I can understand being hesitant, but they still hold up fine and will last for a long time. Note that I don't use virtual machines, games, or video editing software so the 16gb of RAM is more than enough.
- joshmanders 10y ago
  > Note that I don't use virtual machines, games, or video editing software so the 16gb of RAM is more than enough. I don't use games or video editing software, but I have 2 virtualbox machines running, one with Debian and one with Windows 10 for testing purposes, along with always on Docker containers. My 16GB of ram on my mid-2015 near maxed out 15" rMBP with a Dell 27" 4k display hooked up holds up very well.
uptown 10y ago
> "models now are 16gb of ram only (can someone explain this one?)" "Apple told me MBP maxes out at 16GB RAM because LPDDR3 limit is 16GB/chip; Apple uses it because of performance/energy ratio." https://twitter.com/DanFrakes/status/791754757404626944 https://twitter.com/DanFrakes/status/791754757404626944 So basically, it needed to be thin and light ... because, Apple ... which limits the size of the battery. And more RAM would consume more energy, requiring the device to potentially be thicker and heavier to accommodate a larger battery in order to meet their runtime expectations.

grzm 10y ago

I agree with the gist of the letter. Watching "Truth in 24" makes me appreciate Audi so much more. I thought this snippet from Jason Snell summarizes the new MacBook Pro offering well: "I don’t quite get the existence of the low-end, non-Touch-Bar-having 13-inch MacBook Pro. On stage, Phil Schiller argued that it was essentially a Retina replacement for the 13-inch MacBook Air, and I can see that. But it’s $500 more and is it really a MacBook Pro? Does the MacBook Pro line need to have this extra product attached at the bottom of it, lacking the most interesting feature of the rest of the line? "Then again, it’s not really a MacBook either, because it’s heavier and has two Thunderbolt 3 ports rather than the one USB-C port on the MacBook. It’s a tweener product and Apple has apparently decided that it doesn’t want to introduce another new name to its laptop line, so MacBook Pro it is. But it’s weird. Not necessarily bad—it really does fill a niche that’s between the full-on MacBook Pro and the MacBook—but weird nonetheless." https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/a-few-quick-thoughts-about-thursdays-mac-event-in-cupertino/#theotherothermacbookpro https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/a-few-quick-thoughts-abou... I think this is likely the beginning of a correction in Apple's laptop offerings. MacBook/MacBook Air/MacBook Pro was a departure from the consumer/pro split. Apple was overdue in updating the MacBook Pro and got a bit caught in the power/CPU/memory state of current offerings. For a lot of people the new MacBook Pro will be good. Just not the Pro (some) are looking for. Hopefully we will see a true Pro model next Fall.

enraged_camel 10y ago
Agreed on the price. I was holding out for a retina MBP/MBA around the $1,000 mark. As things stand though, I'll probably add another 4 GB ram to my 2011 MBA and use it for a few more years.

davedunkin 10y ago

Car companies don't sell their race cars.

toufka 10y ago
But they do sell to the public AMG, Motorsport, and TRD versions of their regular car lines even when they are not 'big sellers'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-AMG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-AMG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Racing_Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Racing_Development just as Apple used to have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Pro
- treehau5 10y ago
  I don't know how to explain it -- but as an enthusiast, I sorely, sorely miss the S2000 and hope Honda comes out with something similar. It really feels like it lost something without it.
  - resist_futility 10y ago
    the new type R is probably the closest they'll make
sjtgraham 10y ago
Yes they do. Homogolation rules mean they have to do exactly that.
- redial 10y ago
  But the cars on those competitions are not truly race cars, at least not in the way a normal person would imagine a race car. In fact, homologations rules are in place to prevent true race cars from competing. F1 and LMP race cars are not sold. Not even FE cars are sold.

ky738 10y ago

k. - Tim Cook

smegel 10y ago

The reason motorcycle companies invest in racing is not just to establish cred, but to actually push the boundaries of technology and innovation that they can then incorporate into their "consumer" models. A "true Pro grade" computer offers no such advantage - in fact most of the innovation comes from making things smaller and thinner - as soon as you take away the weight/size restriction, sure you can make supercomputers in a box, but it's also pretty darn easy to do so. And the final point - consumer bike customers usually watch bike racing, and probably dream of being a pro bike racer - few Mac customers could care less about "digital creative professionals" and don't really want to emulate being one of them.

ktRolster 10y ago
few Mac customers could care less about "digital creative professionals" and don't really want to emulate being one of them. What do you think most Mac users want?
- smegel 10y ago
  A next-gen iPhone.
robbrown451 10y ago
I think that's unlikely. There are far more economical ways of pushing boundaries of technology than racing. And the technology for racing really only has a very small overlap for the sorts of R&D needed for a market competitive car or motorcycle.
solatic 10y ago
>A "true Pro grade" computer offers no such advantage - in fact most of the innovation comes from making things smaller and thinner - as soon as you take away the weight/size restriction, sure you can make supercomputers in a box, but it's also pretty darn easy to do so. Except that it's not easy to put supercomputer-level performance in a lightweight box (with decent battery life) that you can slip into your bag. If Apple really wanted to push the boundaries in that way - getting great performance while still using an impossibly small laptop - there's actually a few directions they could've gone in, namely anything where you push computation into the cloud and then see the results locally. Basically come to market saying "you Windows/Linux schmucks and your tons of local VM's. You don't need that, we'll run your VM's in the cloud, and we'll make it Apple-easy for you to do so." No more local rendering, local building, nothing. The original assets are kept on some Apple cloud, a cache is kept on your machine, and whenever you start an operation, it starts the operation both on the cache and on the Apple cloud, and if the Apple cloud finishes first, then the results are returned to your computer. Unfortunately, Apple just doesn't care anymore about its professional customers. It started with the EOL for XServe (which could've been transitioned, along with OS X Server, into a private-cloud oriented offering) and it has worked its way down into its end-user offerings.

IBM 10y ago

Best comment [1] I read a couple of days ago: >One thing constantly said to founders here is "don't let a vocal minority come in, tell you they love your product, and then turn into bullies that tell you how you should make said product. You never made it for them; they aren't your market. Don't get confused into thinking they are, just because they're loud." I think that about sums up the relationship between Apple and software developers who use their hardware. Which is good advice for Tim Cook and all of Apple. You don't want to end up making the MBP version of this [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818193 [2] https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/2236.html https://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/2236.html

graeme 10y ago
Are professional users really a "vocal minority" of the MacBook Pro? I'm not a developer. I run an online business and use a MacBook Pro for video recording, editing, and general website admin. I needed the extra processing power, and the ports. The new model has me apprehensive, though I'll certainly look at it. What's the target demographic this new MBP is serving, though?
- sjtgraham 10y ago
  > What's the target demographic this new MBP is serving, though? Apple doesn't seem to know or care. I don't know who this MBP is for. Increasingly less people can justify an Apple macOS portable when an iOS device covers their requirements satisfactorily and it doesn't meet the needs of many professionals at all (present and anticipated needs for the machine's useful life). Apple is behaving as if they're a boutique OEM.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    >Apple is behaving as if they're a boutique OEM. That's how Apple has behaved since day 1, save for the few years when Sculley was at the helm.
  - initram 10y ago

jmeller 10y ago

Apple built its PC business on the backs of creative professionals because they were among the few groups who thought Macs were worth more than $0.00, thanks to its superior experience with Adobe's creative suite when compared to Windows. Apple now has a dominant position in the PC market, not because they catered to creative professionals, but because they listened to their initial creative audience and focused on making their computers better. Apple doesn't focus on the Mac Pro because they want to abandon creatives, it is simply because the Mac Pro doesn't enable any meaningful use-cases not served by the 5k iMac or its notebook line. Form-factor, screen quality, battery life, weight, speed of I/O, and all the other design goals the author dismisses, are perhaps the most important metrics meaningful for the current generation of laptop buyers, including professionals.

grzm 10y ago
"Apple doesn't focus on the Mac Pro because they want to abandon creatives, it is simply because the Mac Pro doesn't enable any meaningful use-cases not served by the 5k iMac or its notebook line." Well said. This thought has been banging around in my head half-formed for the past couple of days. Thanks for expressing it so succinctly. I think this also answers why Apple has made the decision to limit/remove expansion and upgrade options in their hardware. "Apple built its PC business on the backs of creative professionals because they were among the few groups who thought Macs were worth more than $0.00, thanks to its superior experience with Adobe's creative suite when compared to Windows." This idea of creatives being the core market for Apple during its early years is often floated. I'm not questioning its veracity, though I'm curious if anyone knows of references that backs this up with numbers or research? Education was a pretty big market early on as well. How do they compare?
- jmeller 10y ago
  > This idea of creatives being the core market for Apple during its early years is often floated. I'm not questioning its veracity, though I'm curious if anyone knows of references that backs this up with numbers or research? Check out Steve Job's first keynote after returning to Apple in 1997 starting at 18:35. He enumerates the assets the company still has at its disposable to claw its way out of almost imminent bankruptcy. He specifically mentiones creative proffesionals and educators and backs them up with some interesting stats. https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=18m35s https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=18m35s

andr 10y ago

Given the Mac's history in the last few years, and the fact that it only accounts for 12% of Apple's revenue and 8% of shipped units, I see two scenarios: 1) Apple gets out of the Mac business in a few years - Apple is not the kind of company to wait patiently for its product lines to run into the ground. The only reason they really need the Mac is Xcode for all those iOS apps that need to be developed. I wouldn't be surprised to see an Xcode for iCloud, or maybe even some kind of partnership with Microsoft (Visual Studio already lets you build iOS apps, just not in Swift). 2) Apple is working on the Mac's second act (third?), which could only be a switch to ARM. It makes business sense because a lot of the R&D will be united between iOS and Mac - making those A9s and A10s sure isn't cheap. And it explains the lackluster progress from customers' perspective. My bet is on #1, so all the criticism about the MacBook's ports or RAM is just barking up the wrong tree.

mojuba 10y ago
> The only reason they really need the Mac is Xcode for all those iOS apps that need to be developed. This is simply not true. MacOS is at the very least a companion OS that gets more and more tightly integrated with the iOS devices. App handover, now also copy/paste, etc etc. An iPhone without a Mac loses many of its advantages over Android. Let alone that there are no signs Apple is going to abandon the Mac business as you say, the recent MBP announcements being the best proof of it. On (2) switching to ARM: I personally don't believe in this, because this will break a lot of software and will seriously piss off a lot of people. The switch to Intel was relatively easier back in the day because the Mac user base at the time was laughable and there was a big promise that the Macs will become a lot more powerful. I know about the bitcode and stuff, but the more I think about it, the less I believe Apple is prepared to make the switch for its laptops and desktops. Maybe, just maybe one separate product line like MacBook Air switches to ARM, but then what's the point?
- sjwright 10y ago
  There's simply no point for Apple to switch desktop CPU architectures unless there's a unavoidably compelling reason to do so. The move to Intel met this high threshold easily. A modest cost saving doesn't qualify and would be partially swallowed up by R&D costs. Energy/thermal savings might be a reason in theory, but how much of a laptop's energy use goes to the CPU anyway? Apple seems to be doing just fine with Intel's low-TDP parts anyway.

chrisbennet 10y ago

As a professional developer, I would have loved to stick with Apple laptops but clearly us pro's aren't one of their target demographics, maybe we never were. (And I don't mean that in a snarky way.) Metaphorically speaking, sometimes when a girl is nice to us, we think she's more interested in us than she really is. I think Apple was just "being nice" to us in the past and we took it the wrong way.

vacri 10y ago

Meh. With $200B in liquid assets, Apple can do whatever it feels like. If it ever did find itself in the doghouse (unlikely), it could survive there for decades while it figured out how to recapture the mojo.

daxfohl 10y ago

Because remember those popular Mac|Windows commercials from a few years ago? If you want a stodgy get-stuff-done kind of thing then you'll have to talk to some Microsoft nerds sporting antique crap like headphone jacks. Apple only cares about how hip you look, with your brand new airpods and all your disposable income.

votr 10y ago

I feel like Tim Cook decided to double down on the "Apple as a luxury brand" business model. If that's the focus, then it makes sense to emphasize thinness, aesthetics, and raise the price at the same time. Microsoft on the other hand seem to be working hard on winning developer mindshare again, as they know they can't compete with Apple in the branding space. I hope the surface book 2 will have a 32gb option.

yasky 10y ago
Alas without the 3-finger drag gesture on the Surfacebook, it's a non-starter for me. It's horrifying to think that even though the hardware supports it, that gesture is patented and cannot be used.

petersphilo 10y ago

Hello All, i am the OP of: https://petersphilo.org/#post-71 https://petersphilo.org/#post-71 Just wanted to add a couple of things: Pro hardware can exist and has existed at Apple for most of its existence, please look back at the post and comments for evidence.. My point was not that Apple should choose between 'pro' hardware and consumer/boutique hardware, in fact, Apple has a long tradition of keeping both happy.. Maybe Apple really isn't interested in the Mac any more, or even in developers. But who makes the apps, the games, etc.. Why not keep power users, keep their 'street cred' as the 'creative platform' and make a little (a lot, actually) scratch on the side... Old geezer cries out: Can't we all just get along?

pjmlp 10y ago
Developers on Mac were always using the same computers as everyone else. I don't remember having a Mac Classic Pro or a LC Pro and so forth.
- dasil003 10y ago
  Very odd your selective memory. You don't remember the Macintosh IIfx?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    No. Back in those days the Mac was almost nonexistent in Portugal. There was just one official importer, Interlog, and buying anything Mac related meant traveling to Lisbon. So the first time I actually programmed on a Mac was in 1994, on Classic and LC models. The only ones available on the university campus on a single room! I think there were around 10 there. The remaining ones were located in the IT department, used by the secretaries and a few teachers.
    - dasil003 10y ago
      Ah! Boa tarde, então ;) So you were using education-targeted macs, but there were always pro-level computers from Apple ever since the very early days (Lisa, Apple IIGS, Power Mac G3, G4, G5, etc). It's only once they discontinued the cheese grater Power Mac that things started to get pretty bad for users who need expansion and massive power.

petersphilo 10y ago

anindha 10y ago

I don't get the racing analogy. It's not like you can buy a Formula One racing car. If Apple started making super computers to play chess then the analogy would be valid.

toyg 10y ago
Author says in the comment that F1 is the only competition where you can't buy what is being raced - every other competition requires vehicles that are actually sold. Besides, you can't buy an F1, but you will buy fast cars from manufacturers based on their F1 results. Ferrari could ship a Jeep tomorrow and people would still buy it thinking it's the fastest Jeep ever.
- stonogo 10y ago
  This is true in name only. NASCAR, despite its name, races cars nobody produces. And you can't buy a MotoGP-spec motorcycle without essentially ordering one custom-built. The same is true for rally car races.
- mxfh 10y ago
  Production car racing is the exception, custom build race car series are the norm. Even though Touring car and Sports car racing exist, they would be more of an analog to the (hardware manufacturer supplied) overclocking scene, than what is actually required for daily use by professionals, who don't want to sit in cages void of any comfort for endurance races. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_racing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_car_racing

kyriakos 10y ago

Outside HN I really haven't seen posts complaining about the new Apple offerings. So it could be Apple only pissed off a particular type of developers.

toyg 10y ago
Reddit is ablaze. The first comments on Ars were very snarky too.
- kyriakos 10y ago
  What subreddits by the way? (I want to have a look)
  - toyg 10y ago
    On /r/apple, keynote megathreads were an angry affair. All subsequent MBP-related threads, even the ones with positive titles, are full of people discussing alternatives. The "preorder" thread has been hastily unpinned. These are the people who spent a year posting almost-daily "waiting" threads, and who would normally be discussing how to cheat or sell their souls to get the latest gizmo right away. I expect people in /r/pcmasterrace are laughing.

thomasjudge 10y ago

I'm sure that besides what appears in the various media outlets, this being one of them, plenty of people are communicating their dissatisfaction directly to Tim and others in Apple management. But I've come to the conclusion that they don't listen to customers, and they don't really care what we think. So rather than write emails to Tim, I'd like to try and start communicating with Apple's board. Any ideas on how to reach them?

Freak_NL 10y ago
Even if you could reach them, what arguments will you provide them with to even start to consider pushing for a change of plan? As far as they can predict (and they are probably quite knowledgeable about the market) people will buy their laptops and they will make a neat profit. That is, Apple upper management is doing its job — making a profit; having some long term strategic vision. They are undoubtedly aware of a certain amount of discontent being vented on the internet, and will most likely consider placating it (not addressing it) a process that needs to be looked into to. If you want to make a difference, vote with your wallet. System76 makes nice laptops, and Dell's XPS line isn't too bad.

neotek 10y ago

I'm looking forward to seeing what John Gruber over at Daring Fireball will have to say about all this, since his perspective tends to lean heavily toward giving Apple the benefit of the doubt and all I've seen so far is relentless negativity about the new MacBook Pro lineup. Personally, I'm extremely disappointed - I've been desperately holding off buying a new MacBook Pro to replace the aging mid-2012 non-retina model I'm still using, but what would I really be upgrading for now? I already have 16gb of RAM and a big SSD, sure I don't have a Touch Bar but I don't give a shit about it anyway. The only thing I truly need is a retina screen and for that I could just buy a second-hand MBP for substantially less money, and I wouldn't need to buy a thousand dongles.

Yaggo 10y ago
Same here. I only wished for 32 GB RAM (would happily pay for 64 GB even with Apple premium, but hey).

newscracker 10y ago

In the recent keynote about the MBP refresh with the TouchBar and the professional apps (like Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro) being adapted to it, Apple showed an MBP setup with a couple of 5K LG monitors (which Apple mentioned it worked with LG for) for professional work, along with external RAID storage from Pegasus. The message I got was that MBP is the pro line, which can be "expanded" on the display and storage fronts. Unfortunately, it still leaves RAM and internal storage stuck (pun intended) with whatever came in during the purchase! At the end of the keynote, I was left with the impression that the Mac Pro is going to be canned in a few months, probably along with the Mac mini - just disappear silently from the store. Even the iMac may get canned in a couple of years, leaving the portable MBP as the sole Mac available. This may be the leading act for introducing an ARM based MBP, thus eliminating the effort to deal with a refresh of other Macs to ARM based chips. I've expressed my frustration here on this topic before. Apple seems unwilling and incompetent to put in what it takes to show that it still can do and maintain things well.

chongli 10y ago
If you're going to be using the machine professionally and hooking up a couple 5k monitors for doing video or high end photo work, why not connect an external RAID or NAS as well? Are there use cases where one needs to carry around many terabytes of video portably but without access to a 5k monitor?

dolguldur 10y ago

Apple inverted the previous Christmas-like feeling of "we have something new for each of you" to a "we've removed something you personally liked" that seems to cover many of us. I haven't commented yet at all since I think several issues aren't actually as big as people are concerned about them, but overall, I'm frustrated with the situation for computing. I don't know how Apple works internally, but for me the problem is clearly not Tim Cook, but rather Jony Ive. He seems to be obsessed with some sort of purity that I appreciate in design. However form vs. function is too much of a tension to be bearable within one person. I think Apple lacks folks who weigh in on the functionality side of things. Why? Becasue Ive is magically associated with Jobs, Ive is almost like some medium to get to Jobs, or at least that's how I think some folks perceive him. In reality Ive seems to be the person who'd rather have a nice TouchBar that spans the whole width of the keyboard instead of keeping just the escape key, which is obviously used much more than the other function keys. I thought about this a lot and by now I know I'll definitely be okay with it, especially since there's no other non-tactile key near it (meaning my body will know I've hit escape once it touches the flatness that doesn't give in). Another personal thing for me is the Magsafe. I really liked it not just as a trip-proof charging solution, but also for the way you connect it. It's so effortless, it's fun again and again. It's one of these micro-reinforcements that makes us love products. And again I can see the conflict. The new beauty is that you can dock so many devices and charging with just one single cable. I think that's a pretty great feature. If there was more functionally thinking folks with power at Apple, they'd probably suggested to keep a Magsafe and allow the MBP to be charged by either that or over the USB-C. But you see how "ugly" even this though is, right?! It's a compromise and so in the end I think the current MacBook Pro is the result of not making any compromise in any of these decisions and that yields the product they showed us. So part of me hates this chasing of pureness since I see it almost as some neurotic obsession about the visual aesthetics. I guess it would take a lot of self-confidence for a company like Apple to be okay with things that could be easily portrayed as compromises by the press. On the other hand I realize I'm pathetic and I'm not really working on improving any of this, so I thank Apple for pissing us off because it's somehow stimulating as well. (Even if it's just stimulating as in "work harder", so I can buy one of these without thinking too much about it).

stephendedalus 10y ago

znpy 10y ago

What is going to happen imho: Apple is doing and will do a shitload of money anyway. People will buy Apple stuff anyway because people already are: unless you are an Apple user, you should know how "religious" (I'm being kind here) Apple users are. They have been consciously been buying outdated and overpriced hardware until now, and they have been super proud about this too. So this is going to last anything from five to ten years at least, still imho. I have no true idea whether newer apple stuff is so bad or not (besides the idiotic drop of the audio jack on the iPhone). But Apple users have been subject to this Apple-isy for literally decades. I have a suspicion that now that Apple Macbook Pros are so widespread, complaining about Apple is the new hipsteria. This is what I feel, reading the news, on a foggy October, almost-November morning.

jbmorgado 10y ago

For me it comes down to a simple thing. When you launch 2 of your major products separated by 2 months (iPhone and Macbook Pro) and they can't work together without an adapter because you are using different ports in the iPhone and cannibalising ports in the MacBook Pro, then your company by definition, lacks vision and aim. We can apologize Apple all we want, we can pretend there is a greater vision going on behind the scenes, but sorry, it just isn't, I can't even use the headphones from my new iPhone to listen music/sound in my new MacBook Pro (not alone connect my iPhone to the MacBook Pro to charge/transfer media with the lightning port) without an adapter. That's an utter lack of vision, development path, aims of the products. It's literally a mess.