14 ms·

Everything about the state of the Mac

166 points by golanggeek 10y ago

nl 10y ago
I think the smartest thing anyone has said about the new MacBook was A16Z's Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky on their podcast[1] where they said (to paraphrase) "There's no point building more powerful PCs (and Macs)". The personal computer market is now in the "sustaining innovation" phase. There will be minor changes (USB-C. Touch bar thing. etc) but there is no point doing major changes. Basically if you - like me - need more RAM, or faster graphics, or more CPU in your MPB then you aren't going to get it, except as gradual changes that are easy for Apple to drop in. My maxed out MPB is currently using 97.5% CPU, 14.7GB RAM (out of 16BM) and I had to delete stuff this morning because my SSD filled up. The thing is - I know perfectly well that fixing this isn't just more CPU and more memory. It's a completely different way of working. I should be working on a mobile terminal device (like a Chromebook.. or an iPad Pro) and using my 400 core cluster with 1.5TB of RAM. Sometime I do things that way, but it isn't as convenient. This "isn't as convenient" things are the things that Apple are trying to fix, NOT "my MBP doesn't have enough RAM". [1] https://soundcloud.com/a16z/pc-devices-architectures-ecosystems https://soundcloud.com/a16z/pc-devices-architectures-ecosyst...
- ant6n 10y ago
  Huh. They could offer better specs. It just seems they focussed all their energy on making the laptop thinner, as if this in any way a meaningful/useful attribute for a laptop (compared to say, weight). This focus may also be the reason they're so 'brave' to provide a small set of ports which is completely disjoint from the previous model? Thinness is probably also the reason they're not offering 32GB of ram? In a way, Apple doesn't seem to agree with you that innovation has plateaued. I'd like them to improve the specs, maybe make the laptop fanless, reduce the reflectivity -- i.e., evolve the platform to make it better and remove issues. Instead they are trying so hard to revolutionize (touch bar...) that they don't bother improving the laptop.
  - nl 10y ago
    The touch bar is hardly revolutionary. As others have pointed out there have been plenty of (barely working) implementations before. Really the touch bar is a UI element (a toolbar) made available elsewhere. I like it, but.. This is kind of the point: sustaining innovation over radical change. Incremental improvements will continue.
    - mpweiher 10y ago
      >The touch bar is hardly revolutionary. Well... >there have been plenty of (barely working) implementations before. ...but that's the key point, isn't it? That the existing implementations don't really work. Just like there were plenty of "non-lame" MP3 players and plenty of smart phones and plenty of tablets...that all didn't really do the job. Making something work great that already kinda exists, that people have tried and failed to really make great, isn't that exactly Apple's MO? I certainly have an immediate application for the TouchBar for interactions that (a) have the potential to be really valuable but (b) have so far been too fiddly to do well. And that was only the immediately obvious one, my guess there are a lot more. So while I had the same immediate reaction (yawn, gimmicky, ...), I have revised that opinion. I think it has the potential of being more useful than a full touch screen would be, in a laptop setting, and that's despite the fact that I think a touch screen might be useful in addition, for example swipe for "casual" scrolling. In terms of hardware being not that amazingly more powerful (a point made elsewhere). Yes. That's what the end of Moore's Law looks like. What faster Intel CPUs was Apple to have used? Kaby Lake? Apparently not available yet in the configurations/quantities required, and also not really all that much faster And yes, the geek in me is always m/sad about the 13" not having a nice high-perf GPU to play with, but the actual user in me has never really needed it. Instead of seeking to be saved by faster hardware, we now have a lot more to gain from optimising the software side, and we're currently leaving that on the table. Hmm..."leaving on the table" is not really strong enough, more like pushing away with maximum force. As a small example the Swift compiler is tremendously slower than the clang based Objective-C/C compiler is. And that in turn is a lot slower than it should be, with a big part being LLVM (see Jonathan Blow's video on Jai compiler performance[1]). His goal is to compile a medium sized program in well under a second, and a larger one in a couple of seconds. Sound ridiculous? Really the only thing that's ridiculous is that we don't have that level of performance generally available, our machines are fast enough for it. For example, I tried tcc[2], and it compiled a (synthetic) 300KLOC C program in 0.269 seconds. Swift took 96.6 seconds, for a factor 359 difference. And that was purposely avoiding the various constructs that make the Swift compiler run into the weeds. In my upcoming book [3] I talk about various simple examples that get order(s) of magnitude difference from a bit of tuning love. One example went from 20 minutes using the "standard" accepted techniques to slightly under 1 second...all without any heroic optimisations, just straightforward tuning. So coming back to the MacBook Pros: yes, they're probably not going to get appreciably faster, that's the new reality. But maybe they don't really need to get appreciably faster, we just have to get off our collective derrieres. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ7-j1nK9gk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ7-j1nK9gk [2] http://bellard.org/tcc/ http://bellard.org/tcc/ [3] http://www.pearsoned.co.nz/9780321842848 http://www.pearsoned.co.nz/9780321842848
- SiVal 10y ago
  I agree with the idea that using a client device as a window into a cloud machine with an arbitrary level of resources on demand is something we will and should move toward. I strongly disagree with any suggestion that there is no point currently in building a more powerful Mac. Gamers are the best illustration of the phenomenon I'm referring to. Serious gaming is a large market of people who are poorly served by the Mac market and well served by the Windows market, and the difference is NOT that Windows (OS) is inherently better for gaming than Mac (OS) but entirely due to the fact that Apple won't build hardware configured to meet the needs of serious gamers and, worse, refuses to allow anyone else to build good gaming Macs, either. You can get bulky Windows laptops that are much better for gamers (yet no more expensive) than fashionably anorexic Mac laptops, and you can get even better gaming machines for no more money if you buy even bulkier (less-compact) desktops instead of laptops. Relaxing the tight size constraints allows you to provide much more power for the same price. Some people would rather pay for the power than the thinness. Many developers are in an analogous situation: MacOS itself meets our needs better than alternatives, and Apple can clearly deliver high-end hardware build quality worth paying extra for, but they build hardware optimized for things that don't matter as much to many of us (thinness, elimination of unsightly "lines", minimal connectors, etc.) at the expense of things that matter a lot more. If they doubled the thickness, for example, they could give us more battery life and would have more room for less-compact, cheaper, previous-generation components, giving us more RAM and SSD for the same price. I believe that thinness is extremely important for some products, such as a tablet (should be large enough for easy reading yet light enough to hand hold for long reading sessions), and a type of laptop for working on the go with a laptop always at your fingertips (frequent business travelers, college students). A MacBook (with more connectors!) would be great for that. BUT, thinness above all else does not have to be the design ethos for EVERY product line. The MacBook PRO line could use the same OS, high-quality screens, battery mgt., wifi, etc., but be optimized for how much screen (offer a 17" again), battery (replaceable), RAM and SSD (large and upgradeable), and so on, while still being "thin enough". Although various business objectives (ex: wanting to be associated with wealthy, fashionable partiers, not workaday drudges) may make it not useful for Apple, the general idea that there is "no point" in machines optimized for power instead of thinness is wrong.
  - nl 10y ago
- sorokod 10y ago
  > The thing is - I know perfectly well that fixing this isn't just more CPU and more memory Just because Apple choose not release a version with gen 7cpu /32GB/1TB at this time? Will you "know perfectly well" otherwise if such a machine does become available in say six months? What if it turns out (just a thought experiment here) that you can upgrade the memory and ssd yourself?
- deleted 10y ago
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- pavlov 10y ago
  I should be working on a mobile terminal device (like a Chromebook.. or an iPad Pro) and using my 400 core cluster with 1.5TB of RAM. The cloud just isn't all that useful for pro users because it's in a datacenter far, far away and shared with an unknown number of other simultaneous users. What good is 1.5TB of working memory when my data is local, for example video? At typical network speeds, it would take me months just to upload that 1.5TB of data.
  - nl 10y ago
    I am exactly that professional user (not that video use case, but I deal with multi-TB datasets frequently). Professional use is all about sharing stuff. Cloud video editing is a better model than local. Yes, latency and bandwidth both suck, but downsampling video for scrubbing works, and caching small amounts of high-res locally works too. It's not here for everyone yet, but it's clearly coming. Non-pro tools already work that way, and thing like the Avid Cloud Composer show pro tools are moving that way too.
    - blowski 10y ago
      I'm not a video editor, but I do work a lot with big files. The suckiness depends on your internet connection. If you've got a steady 50Mbps upload speed, it's just about OK. If you've got < 2Mbps, it's totally unworkable. And sometimes your internet connection is not under your control - if you travel a lot, you're contracting in an office without good internet, etc. Even frequent uploads of small files make for a painful experience when internet is bad.
      - nl 10y ago
        Right. This is an even better argument for what I'm saying. Work is clearly moving towards a place where files are kept online by default, and where software is optimized for working with them there, instead of moving them up and down.
        blowski 10y ago
- Cthulhu_ 10y ago
  Personally I think if you're doing heavy-duty work you should get a desktop machine; laptops are fine (and I use one for my day-to-day work), and they should be strong enough for most applications (so far they are). But for heavy-duty work - which in my case was iOS development, since the Swift compiler could make the thing sweat, and for others is stuff like rendering - you'd be better off with a fixed machine where size and energy usage isn't a constraint. Which is why I'm a bit disappointed that Apple yet again didn't announce an update to the Mac Pro. They could do a lot more with that. Volumes are probably way too low for it to be viable though. I've asked my boss if I could get a Mac Pro or iMac instead, but, no dice. I'd like the 17 inch Macbook to make a return too, but also not likely to happen. Alas.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  There's no point in buying them then either?
comex 10y ago
Much the flak that's been posted about the new MacBook Pros implies there are better offerings from PC manufacturers, and certainly there are plenty if your priorities are very different from Apple's (e.g. you care more about upgradeability than sleekness). My personal priorities are pretty similar to Apple's, but not quite the same: I'm skeptical about anything that reduces key travel. So I browsed around to try to find something that could compete with the new 15" MacBook Pro for my next purchase. To my surprise, I couldn't find a single model from the major vendors that had all of the following: - 15" or close - In the general "thin and light" category (ideally at least as thin as my 2012 rMBP at 1.8 cm; latest is 1.55cm) - Higher than 1080p screen resolution (old and new MBP are both 2880x1800) - At least 7 hours of battery life (advertised battery life of my 2012 rMBP; latest advertises 10 hours) It seemed to generally come down to 1080p and good battery life, or high resolution (usually higher than the MBP) and crappy battery life. I think the Surface Book was most tempting, but it has a significantly smaller screen. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them. But for now my plan is to suck up the reduced key travel and buy a new MacBook Pro...
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  At least go try out the latest Dell XPS and HP Spectre, possibly at a Microsoft Store if you can. To be fair, I probably should have got a Macbook as my last laptop upgrade. The laptop before that was the Lenovo X1 Carbon - slow, memory constrained and expensive to repair. I've got a Dell XPS 9350 at the moment, and it was more expensive than the top end Macbook at the time (!). It's quite good, but I can't recommend it against the last gen MacBook - there's still a coil whine issue that Dell refuse to really fix (or can't), there's issues with Broadcom wifi cards, and then there's this fun issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_randomly_wakes_up_when_lid_closed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_ra... It gets ~6 hours of battery life in power saving mode, but closer to 4 if I'm doing dev work. It could be so good, but it's just not there yet. For $3000AUD I expect utter perfection.
  - rjzzleep 10y ago
    Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram? HP Spectre doesn't have 16gb ram. The xps only has it in offering with their QHD touch screen which has less battery than the FHD screen, which I guess is fine because apparently the FHD screen is crap. Macbooks have significantly better thermal zone than the dell alternatives(e.g. the 7370 is significantly slower than the macbook 12" even though it has the same specs + 16gb) and don't get me started on the touchpad. There's so many threads on reddit about who seemingly fixed the touchpad issue. Bash on windows by the way is nice, but it's no way near production usable.They use a custom file system that resides in your AppData. Until recent insider builds you could neither use inotify(which means most node apps would have some sort of issue) nor would it keep your Ubuntu when during an update. Now the system is somewhat usable, but I've spent so much time whitelisting different folders so that random windows tools don't eat up CPU and I/O that make this 2016 device feel like something from 2011 that I wonder what the hell microsoft is thinking. The recent windows insider build also fixed an issue with windows defender eating up all CPU. You can forget about the surfacebook if you want a decent terminal running on it. WsL isn't there yet and linux support is flakey. So yeah the only contender if you care about both battery AND performance AND a proper terminal right now is the dell xps. The thinkpad x260 is nice, but they don't have nvme, only supports sata express(and i'm not sure i wanna gamble on the intel dc 3500 drives to get me the performance).
brazzledazzle 10y ago
Has anyone tried the Razer Blades? They were linked on that page and I must say they look very nice.
- acabal 10y ago
  Yes, I commented above. I have a 2015 model and I frequently recommend it. The color scheme is tacky but the machine is basically unbeatable in the non-Apple category. Excellent Linux support, which is something Apple makes very difficult, is the icing on the cake.
  - dijit 10y ago
    It's also 17.3" and 3.5kg Not sure what the battery is like, but that thing is huge.
    - Matthias247 10y ago
      The homepage lists 3 models, a 12", a 14" and a 17" one.
    - aeharding 10y ago
      Some review sites I checked list "Below average battery life" as a con, which is a deal-breaker for me.
  - vr46 10y ago
    It looks truly excellent in all areas - and I may have to go hunt one down. The website is somewhat confusing, however :)
lurkinggrue 10y ago
I thought what Apple did a few years ago with Finalcut was the signal that Apple didn't really care about the professional user thought. Looks like the trend continues.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Maybe they just decided that the prosumer market is larger than the pro one and they can charge the same prices. They don't build many models so they're placing theirs in the larger market and leaving the smaller one.
- maratc 10y ago
  As someone said, there is always outrage, just never the same amount of it as this time.
  - lurkinggrue 10y ago
    That seems to be the case.
asymmetric 10y ago
For me the saddest thing is that all this outrage didn't come out when Apple started making their laptops unrepairable (soldered RAM, glued battery, etc.), instead it explodes now mostly for performance reasons.
- eropple 10y ago
  I insure my machines. If my MBP breaks, I get a replacement within 48 hours (and I provision all my machines with Chef so rebuilding my machines is trivial). I functionally don't have a reason to care about repairability, so long as I can retrieve my data. I care about performance because that actually impacts my day-to-day.
- provemewrong 10y ago
  This. I own a mid 2012 non-retina MBP as that's the only MacBook that I could justify buying. It's actually a serviceable and upgradable computer and not just an appliance. It's sad to think that for this reason it will most likely be my last Mac, as I genuinely like macOS and the trackpad alone beats any other laptop in usability on-the-go.
- theluketaylor 10y ago
  When apple moved to sealed black boxes they introduced a social contract with their users. The deal was no more user upgrades, but in exchange apple would make better systems. Apple hasn't held up their end of the bargain nearly enough. They haven't iterated any of the lines nearly enough, and since you can't make small improvements yourself any more that lack of dedication is even more apparent. I think the outrage really is stemming from the unrepairability, it's just the rage underneath people have struggled to articulate.
  - fatbird 10y ago
    They didn't enter a social contract with users. They decided to trade off modifiability for thinness because fully integrated systems are more easily/cheaply made thin and with better/more predictable power characteristics. One of the most frustrating things about discussions like this, especially wrt Apple, is the amount of projection and handwaving about concerns beyond "Apple makes it; you choose to buy it or not". It's taken almost five days for someone to make the obvious point in the linked article, that the new MBP will be more than sufficient for most developers and so it'll continue to be a strong seller to that segment, especially in light of the comment elsewhere in the thread where someone asks for a drop-in alternative and no one can offer one--every one fails on some major test of either weight, cost, or battery life.
tajen 10y ago
Despite the bad reviews from most well-known experts, the AAPL stock didn't vary. There was a 1% fall on Oct 26, but it seems due to a technical change, not a trader evaluation. Proof that either the Macbook Pro isn't bad enough, either it won't hurt their bottom line at all. Proof that the MBP is here to stay. Proof that 2017 could be the year of Linux on the desktop ;)
prewett 10y ago
Everyone seems to be saying the specs are bad, but what exactly is everyone upset about? (Genuine question) You can configure it with the Radeon 460, which seems like a top-end chip [1]. Apple's slideshow shows it being 1.8X faster than then 450. You can configure it with a 2.9 GHz, quad-core i7 with boost up to 3.8 GHz, which seems pretty top-end for a mobile chip, and it's not like 2.9/3.5 GHz is that bad. So it's last-year's generation, it's not like the one released last month is a huge leap ahead. Besides, as a developer, I'm rarely CPU constrained even on my 2009 laptop, unless I'm doing Swift in Xcode or RAW photo editing. You can get 1TB or even 2TB SSD. The only thing you can't get is over 16 GB of RAM, and mitchty's post suggests it is because of CPU/chipset limitations. So what more does everyone (not just HN) think Apple should be offering? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin...
- ogeidix 10y ago
  A keyboard that doesn't feel like typing on an iPad ?! I am struggling to understand how mbp owners are planning to code or write documents on that keyboard. while this is butterfly-v2, not v1, reviewers seems to agree that it's still a "butterfly" keyboard with extremely little travel space. also, nice to have: sd reader, hdmi, esc-button.
  - pavlov 10y ago
    I write almost everything on a 12" MacBook these days. Coming from a previous 15" MBP it was jarring at first, but I got used to it very quickly (a day later I wasn't thinking about it at all).
    - rorykoehler 10y ago
      What made you switch to the macbook? What kind of work do you use it for? Do you have another machine? I'm curious as to who uses these apart from people with very basic computing needs. They seem to be very limited machines (though admittedly I've never used one).
mouzogu 10y ago
Would I be wrong to suggest that the majority of people who buy the Mac Pro (or who have them assigned to them at work) are neither creative professionals or unix-centric developers? I would say for these people that sleek design, high battery life and low weight are the three somewhat superficial attributes that stand out the most - or are the most important in making a purchasing choice. I understand all the dissapointment. However, I think if you analyse Apple's decisions, it probably does make sense from a marketing perspective. They seem to be aiming at the premium aesthetic market that has emerged in the last 5 years within the Mac fanbase. Only thing I dont understand and seems kind of cheeky to me is the price hike. btw - I am a developer, I use a Macbook Pro at work and a Dell XPS 15 at home - so I am somewhat aware of the price/spec/value differences.
- dagw 10y ago
  Anecdotally, among people who are neither creative professionals or developers, the MacBook and MacBook Air completely dominate, and these laptops outnumber MBPs in the wild at least 10:1 unless I'm at a developer meetup.
biehl 10y ago
I think of myself as a pretty regular software developer, and the new MBP sounds like it matches my priorities pretty well. # Thinner and lighter # Good specs # Able to drive 5K monitors (QHD retina) # Touch ID # I love a large track-pad Also I don't seem hit by the claimed negatives. # I don't realistically use more than 16GB RAM in daily work # I don't use function keys # I don't use VI :). I do use ESC for modals though. The price is a bit high, but I can wait a refresh-cycle for lower prices.
- rz2k 10y ago
  Also in the plus column is the significantly faster NVMe SSD. I suspect that a good portion of the people who use esc already have it mapped to another key like capslock using Karabiner. I think the conversation about this model being flawed would be entirely changed if the iPhone 8 had dropped Lightning for a USB C connector. USB C/Thunderbolt ports on the new MacBook Pro are a huge step in the goal of getting away from the endless collection of adapters with an unpleasant transition. For example I haven't had a laptop charger in the car for 10 years, but now the USB phone charger will give it at least a slow charge.
- devopsproject 10y ago
  Does your debugger not use the f keys for step\into\out of?
  - biehl 10y ago
    Possibly. I don't really use debuggers often enough to use keys ...
elcapitan 10y ago
> Understanding history is important – to a point. But Apple’s obsessive naval gazing in the Mac event today speaks volumes. This is a company with no real vision for what its most creative users actually do with their most advanced machines. So, instead, they look into the past. That was also my impression. The funny thing is that this is not the first time in their history, and they used this "our laptops of the past" thing to showcase some of the horrible examples of the 90s, which were just adding bloat and uglyness rather than innovating. Then they present the new model with a bloaty new feature.
JohnBooty 10y ago
I'm underwhelmed by the newly-announced MacBook Pros, but this is just kind of where we're at. There isn't much more CPU performance to be had. Intel doesn't really sell anything faster. A peek at current Thinkpads tells me you can drop $3,000-$4,000 on a 7.5lb luggable with a Xeon-branded CPU, which would have been cool to see in a Mac, but.... yeah. Aside from the 16GB RAM limitation, Apple's not really holding out on us here. We've hit Moore's Law pretty hard.
- symfoniq 10y ago
  I don't think most people are complaining about the new MacBook Pro's CPU. There are many other design choices that are problematic for a lot of professionals.
cletus 10y ago
In 2010 I bought a MacBook Air 13 that I considered to be about perfect. It's reasonably cheap (barely more than $1000) and is small and light without making too many compromises (I'm looking at you, 12" MacBook).for years I've been waiting for Apple to release one with 16GB of RAM and a Retina display. They of course have not. About 2-3 years ago it became clear that that was a choice rather than a technical limitation. When the 12" MacBook came out I went to the local Apple Store and tried it. Hate the keyboard. Performance is too much of a compromise. You can charge it or use peripherals (or carry a dongle everywhere) and of course I knew th Air was now doomed (Apple tends to limit their SKUs). The new Macs have now lost me completely. - 2/4 C ports is shocking. 1/2 of these should be As. It's way too soon for all Cs. I read a comment the other day: it used to be that if it fit it worked. Now everything fits and nothing works. Apple might be imagining a universal port but they're ignoring the cables. There are still active/passive cables, USB 2 vs 3 A-to-C cables and so on. Apple used to only adopt technologies once they were mature. - loved the old keyboard. Hate the new. Saving 0.5mm for a shitty keyboard is too much compromise. - I use the escape key and function keys Asia like IDEs in particular. It was already jarring having different key bindings in OSX vs Windows/Linux (the latter two being relatively consistent within Jetbrains IDEs at least). - Loss of MagSafe. Recently I bought a refurb Dell XPS 15 with minimal specs for $900that I spent $450 upgrading to 32GB of RAM and a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB SSD. It has a respectable GPU (960M). It's trackpad isn't as good as a Mac's but where PC trackpads were once woefully bad (embarrassingly so), it's not bad. The gap is livable. Come December there'll be an update and likely you can upgrade one to 32GB with a Samsung Pro 512GB/1TB/2TB which. With a GTX 1060 will be a pretty versatile machine. Will we be waiting another 2 years for the next Mac update? Will some lines flounder without updates after much fanfare like the Mac Pro? See this is the real problem: I no longer have faith that this is a sector Apple gives a shit about. I realize laptops and desktops are "trucks" (to quote Steve Jobs) but he understood you still need tucks. Post-Jobs Apple seems to not understand and/or care about this.
dreamcompiler 10y ago
It's not possible to develop for IOS on Linux, Windows, or IOS itself. So not only is Apple hurting future app development on IOS with this move, they're also hurting their internal developers of IOS. Their cash cow -- IOS -- cannot survive without strong pro-caliber Macs. I find it shocking that Apple doesn't understand this.
mcculley 10y ago
What hardware are developers at Apple using? It's hard to imagine they are using the currently available Mac Pro or one of the new MacBook Pros. Do they have some special hardware build that Apple doesn't sell to the public? I've been wondering the same thing about Apple's server infrastructure ever since they quit selling the Xserve.
mcculley 10y ago
Is there some good reason why Apple doesn't ship an LTE modem in the MacBook Pro? Every device they ship has a cell modem. Why not the laptop?

166 points by golanggeek 10y ago

nl 10y ago

I think the smartest thing anyone has said about the new MacBook was A16Z's Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky on their podcast[1] where they said (to paraphrase) "There's no point building more powerful PCs (and Macs)". The personal computer market is now in the "sustaining innovation" phase. There will be minor changes (USB-C. Touch bar thing. etc) but there is no point doing major changes. Basically if you - like me - need more RAM, or faster graphics, or more CPU in your MPB then you aren't going to get it, except as gradual changes that are easy for Apple to drop in. My maxed out MPB is currently using 97.5% CPU, 14.7GB RAM (out of 16BM) and I had to delete stuff this morning because my SSD filled up. The thing is - I know perfectly well that fixing this isn't just more CPU and more memory. It's a completely different way of working. I should be working on a mobile terminal device (like a Chromebook.. or an iPad Pro) and using my 400 core cluster with 1.5TB of RAM. Sometime I do things that way, but it isn't as convenient. This "isn't as convenient" things are the things that Apple are trying to fix, NOT "my MBP doesn't have enough RAM". [1] https://soundcloud.com/a16z/pc-devices-architectures-ecosystems https://soundcloud.com/a16z/pc-devices-architectures-ecosyst...

ant6n 10y ago
Huh. They could offer better specs. It just seems they focussed all their energy on making the laptop thinner, as if this in any way a meaningful/useful attribute for a laptop (compared to say, weight). This focus may also be the reason they're so 'brave' to provide a small set of ports which is completely disjoint from the previous model? Thinness is probably also the reason they're not offering 32GB of ram? In a way, Apple doesn't seem to agree with you that innovation has plateaued. I'd like them to improve the specs, maybe make the laptop fanless, reduce the reflectivity -- i.e., evolve the platform to make it better and remove issues. Instead they are trying so hard to revolutionize (touch bar...) that they don't bother improving the laptop.
- nl 10y ago
  The touch bar is hardly revolutionary. As others have pointed out there have been plenty of (barely working) implementations before. Really the touch bar is a UI element (a toolbar) made available elsewhere. I like it, but.. This is kind of the point: sustaining innovation over radical change. Incremental improvements will continue.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    >The touch bar is hardly revolutionary. Well... >there have been plenty of (barely working) implementations before. ...but that's the key point, isn't it? That the existing implementations don't really work. Just like there were plenty of "non-lame" MP3 players and plenty of smart phones and plenty of tablets...that all didn't really do the job. Making something work great that already kinda exists, that people have tried and failed to really make great, isn't that exactly Apple's MO? I certainly have an immediate application for the TouchBar for interactions that (a) have the potential to be really valuable but (b) have so far been too fiddly to do well. And that was only the immediately obvious one, my guess there are a lot more. So while I had the same immediate reaction (yawn, gimmicky, ...), I have revised that opinion. I think it has the potential of being more useful than a full touch screen would be, in a laptop setting, and that's despite the fact that I think a touch screen might be useful in addition, for example swipe for "casual" scrolling. In terms of hardware being not that amazingly more powerful (a point made elsewhere). Yes. That's what the end of Moore's Law looks like. What faster Intel CPUs was Apple to have used? Kaby Lake? Apparently not available yet in the configurations/quantities required, and also not really all that much faster And yes, the geek in me is always m/sad about the 13" not having a nice high-perf GPU to play with, but the actual user in me has never really needed it. Instead of seeking to be saved by faster hardware, we now have a lot more to gain from optimising the software side, and we're currently leaving that on the table. Hmm..."leaving on the table" is not really strong enough, more like pushing away with maximum force. As a small example the Swift compiler is tremendously slower than the clang based Objective-C/C compiler is. And that in turn is a lot slower than it should be, with a big part being LLVM (see Jonathan Blow's video on Jai compiler performance[1]). His goal is to compile a medium sized program in well under a second, and a larger one in a couple of seconds. Sound ridiculous? Really the only thing that's ridiculous is that we don't have that level of performance generally available, our machines are fast enough for it. For example, I tried tcc[2], and it compiled a (synthetic) 300KLOC C program in 0.269 seconds. Swift took 96.6 seconds, for a factor 359 difference. And that was purposely avoiding the various constructs that make the Swift compiler run into the weeds. In my upcoming book [3] I talk about various simple examples that get order(s) of magnitude difference from a bit of tuning love. One example went from 20 minutes using the "standard" accepted techniques to slightly under 1 second...all without any heroic optimisations, just straightforward tuning. So coming back to the MacBook Pros: yes, they're probably not going to get appreciably faster, that's the new reality. But maybe they don't really need to get appreciably faster, we just have to get off our collective derrieres. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ7-j1nK9gk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ7-j1nK9gk [2] http://bellard.org/tcc/ http://bellard.org/tcc/ [3] http://www.pearsoned.co.nz/9780321842848 http://www.pearsoned.co.nz/9780321842848
SiVal 10y ago
I agree with the idea that using a client device as a window into a cloud machine with an arbitrary level of resources on demand is something we will and should move toward. I strongly disagree with any suggestion that there is no point currently in building a more powerful Mac. Gamers are the best illustration of the phenomenon I'm referring to. Serious gaming is a large market of people who are poorly served by the Mac market and well served by the Windows market, and the difference is NOT that Windows (OS) is inherently better for gaming than Mac (OS) but entirely due to the fact that Apple won't build hardware configured to meet the needs of serious gamers and, worse, refuses to allow anyone else to build good gaming Macs, either. You can get bulky Windows laptops that are much better for gamers (yet no more expensive) than fashionably anorexic Mac laptops, and you can get even better gaming machines for no more money if you buy even bulkier (less-compact) desktops instead of laptops. Relaxing the tight size constraints allows you to provide much more power for the same price. Some people would rather pay for the power than the thinness. Many developers are in an analogous situation: MacOS itself meets our needs better than alternatives, and Apple can clearly deliver high-end hardware build quality worth paying extra for, but they build hardware optimized for things that don't matter as much to many of us (thinness, elimination of unsightly "lines", minimal connectors, etc.) at the expense of things that matter a lot more. If they doubled the thickness, for example, they could give us more battery life and would have more room for less-compact, cheaper, previous-generation components, giving us more RAM and SSD for the same price. I believe that thinness is extremely important for some products, such as a tablet (should be large enough for easy reading yet light enough to hand hold for long reading sessions), and a type of laptop for working on the go with a laptop always at your fingertips (frequent business travelers, college students). A MacBook (with more connectors!) would be great for that. BUT, thinness above all else does not have to be the design ethos for EVERY product line. The MacBook PRO line could use the same OS, high-quality screens, battery mgt., wifi, etc., but be optimized for how much screen (offer a 17" again), battery (replaceable), RAM and SSD (large and upgradeable), and so on, while still being "thin enough". Although various business objectives (ex: wanting to be associated with wealthy, fashionable partiers, not workaday drudges) may make it not useful for Apple, the general idea that there is "no point" in machines optimized for power instead of thinness is wrong.
- nl 10y ago
sorokod 10y ago
> The thing is - I know perfectly well that fixing this isn't just more CPU and more memory Just because Apple choose not release a version with gen 7cpu /32GB/1TB at this time? Will you "know perfectly well" otherwise if such a machine does become available in say six months? What if it turns out (just a thought experiment here) that you can upgrade the memory and ssd yourself?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pavlov 10y ago
I should be working on a mobile terminal device (like a Chromebook.. or an iPad Pro) and using my 400 core cluster with 1.5TB of RAM. The cloud just isn't all that useful for pro users because it's in a datacenter far, far away and shared with an unknown number of other simultaneous users. What good is 1.5TB of working memory when my data is local, for example video? At typical network speeds, it would take me months just to upload that 1.5TB of data.
- nl 10y ago
  I am exactly that professional user (not that video use case, but I deal with multi-TB datasets frequently). Professional use is all about sharing stuff. Cloud video editing is a better model than local. Yes, latency and bandwidth both suck, but downsampling video for scrubbing works, and caching small amounts of high-res locally works too. It's not here for everyone yet, but it's clearly coming. Non-pro tools already work that way, and thing like the Avid Cloud Composer show pro tools are moving that way too.
  - blowski 10y ago
    I'm not a video editor, but I do work a lot with big files. The suckiness depends on your internet connection. If you've got a steady 50Mbps upload speed, it's just about OK. If you've got < 2Mbps, it's totally unworkable. And sometimes your internet connection is not under your control - if you travel a lot, you're contracting in an office without good internet, etc. Even frequent uploads of small files make for a painful experience when internet is bad.
    - nl 10y ago
      Right. This is an even better argument for what I'm saying. Work is clearly moving towards a place where files are kept online by default, and where software is optimized for working with them there, instead of moving them up and down.
      - blowski 10y ago
Cthulhu_ 10y ago
Personally I think if you're doing heavy-duty work you should get a desktop machine; laptops are fine (and I use one for my day-to-day work), and they should be strong enough for most applications (so far they are). But for heavy-duty work - which in my case was iOS development, since the Swift compiler could make the thing sweat, and for others is stuff like rendering - you'd be better off with a fixed machine where size and energy usage isn't a constraint. Which is why I'm a bit disappointed that Apple yet again didn't announce an update to the Mac Pro. They could do a lot more with that. Volumes are probably way too low for it to be viable though. I've asked my boss if I could get a Mac Pro or iMac instead, but, no dice. I'd like the 17 inch Macbook to make a return too, but also not likely to happen. Alas.
Gravityloss 10y ago
There's no point in buying them then either?

comex 10y ago

Much the flak that's been posted about the new MacBook Pros implies there are better offerings from PC manufacturers, and certainly there are plenty if your priorities are very different from Apple's (e.g. you care more about upgradeability than sleekness). My personal priorities are pretty similar to Apple's, but not quite the same: I'm skeptical about anything that reduces key travel. So I browsed around to try to find something that could compete with the new 15" MacBook Pro for my next purchase. To my surprise, I couldn't find a single model from the major vendors that had all of the following: - 15" or close - In the general "thin and light" category (ideally at least as thin as my 2012 rMBP at 1.8 cm; latest is 1.55cm) - Higher than 1080p screen resolution (old and new MBP are both 2880x1800) - At least 7 hours of battery life (advertised battery life of my 2012 rMBP; latest advertises 10 hours) It seemed to generally come down to 1080p and good battery life, or high resolution (usually higher than the MBP) and crappy battery life. I think the Surface Book was most tempting, but it has a significantly smaller screen. If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them. But for now my plan is to suck up the reduced key travel and buy a new MacBook Pro...

voltagex_ 10y ago
At least go try out the latest Dell XPS and HP Spectre, possibly at a Microsoft Store if you can. To be fair, I probably should have got a Macbook as my last laptop upgrade. The laptop before that was the Lenovo X1 Carbon - slow, memory constrained and expensive to repair. I've got a Dell XPS 9350 at the moment, and it was more expensive than the top end Macbook at the time (!). It's quite good, but I can't recommend it against the last gen MacBook - there's still a coil whine issue that Dell refuse to really fix (or can't), there's issues with Broadcom wifi cards, and then there's this fun issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_randomly_wakes_up_when_lid_closed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3v6tvp/dell_xps_15_ra... It gets ~6 hours of battery life in power saving mode, but closer to 4 if I'm doing dev work. It could be so good, but it's just not there yet. For $3000AUD I expect utter perfection.
- rjzzleep 10y ago
  Am i the only one that cares about 16GB ram? HP Spectre doesn't have 16gb ram. The xps only has it in offering with their QHD touch screen which has less battery than the FHD screen, which I guess is fine because apparently the FHD screen is crap. Macbooks have significantly better thermal zone than the dell alternatives(e.g. the 7370 is significantly slower than the macbook 12" even though it has the same specs + 16gb) and don't get me started on the touchpad. There's so many threads on reddit about who seemingly fixed the touchpad issue. Bash on windows by the way is nice, but it's no way near production usable.They use a custom file system that resides in your AppData. Until recent insider builds you could neither use inotify(which means most node apps would have some sort of issue) nor would it keep your Ubuntu when during an update. Now the system is somewhat usable, but I've spent so much time whitelisting different folders so that random windows tools don't eat up CPU and I/O that make this 2016 device feel like something from 2011 that I wonder what the hell microsoft is thinking. The recent windows insider build also fixed an issue with windows defender eating up all CPU. You can forget about the surfacebook if you want a decent terminal running on it. WsL isn't there yet and linux support is flakey. So yeah the only contender if you care about both battery AND performance AND a proper terminal right now is the dell xps. The thinkpad x260 is nice, but they don't have nvme, only supports sata express(and i'm not sure i wanna gamble on the intel dc 3500 drives to get me the performance).

brazzledazzle 10y ago

Has anyone tried the Razer Blades? They were linked on that page and I must say they look very nice.

acabal 10y ago
Yes, I commented above. I have a 2015 model and I frequently recommend it. The color scheme is tacky but the machine is basically unbeatable in the non-Apple category. Excellent Linux support, which is something Apple makes very difficult, is the icing on the cake.
- dijit 10y ago
  It's also 17.3" and 3.5kg Not sure what the battery is like, but that thing is huge.
  - Matthias247 10y ago
    The homepage lists 3 models, a 12", a 14" and a 17" one.
  - aeharding 10y ago
    Some review sites I checked list "Below average battery life" as a con, which is a deal-breaker for me.
- vr46 10y ago
  It looks truly excellent in all areas - and I may have to go hunt one down. The website is somewhat confusing, however :)

lurkinggrue 10y ago

I thought what Apple did a few years ago with Finalcut was the signal that Apple didn't really care about the professional user thought. Looks like the trend continues.

pmontra 10y ago
Maybe they just decided that the prosumer market is larger than the pro one and they can charge the same prices. They don't build many models so they're placing theirs in the larger market and leaving the smaller one.
maratc 10y ago
As someone said, there is always outrage, just never the same amount of it as this time.
- lurkinggrue 10y ago
  That seems to be the case.

asymmetric 10y ago

For me the saddest thing is that all this outrage didn't come out when Apple started making their laptops unrepairable (soldered RAM, glued battery, etc.), instead it explodes now mostly for performance reasons.

eropple 10y ago
I insure my machines. If my MBP breaks, I get a replacement within 48 hours (and I provision all my machines with Chef so rebuilding my machines is trivial). I functionally don't have a reason to care about repairability, so long as I can retrieve my data. I care about performance because that actually impacts my day-to-day.
provemewrong 10y ago
This. I own a mid 2012 non-retina MBP as that's the only MacBook that I could justify buying. It's actually a serviceable and upgradable computer and not just an appliance. It's sad to think that for this reason it will most likely be my last Mac, as I genuinely like macOS and the trackpad alone beats any other laptop in usability on-the-go.
theluketaylor 10y ago
When apple moved to sealed black boxes they introduced a social contract with their users. The deal was no more user upgrades, but in exchange apple would make better systems. Apple hasn't held up their end of the bargain nearly enough. They haven't iterated any of the lines nearly enough, and since you can't make small improvements yourself any more that lack of dedication is even more apparent. I think the outrage really is stemming from the unrepairability, it's just the rage underneath people have struggled to articulate.
- fatbird 10y ago
  They didn't enter a social contract with users. They decided to trade off modifiability for thinness because fully integrated systems are more easily/cheaply made thin and with better/more predictable power characteristics. One of the most frustrating things about discussions like this, especially wrt Apple, is the amount of projection and handwaving about concerns beyond "Apple makes it; you choose to buy it or not". It's taken almost five days for someone to make the obvious point in the linked article, that the new MBP will be more than sufficient for most developers and so it'll continue to be a strong seller to that segment, especially in light of the comment elsewhere in the thread where someone asks for a drop-in alternative and no one can offer one--every one fails on some major test of either weight, cost, or battery life.

tajen 10y ago

Despite the bad reviews from most well-known experts, the AAPL stock didn't vary. There was a 1% fall on Oct 26, but it seems due to a technical change, not a trader evaluation. Proof that either the Macbook Pro isn't bad enough, either it won't hurt their bottom line at all. Proof that the MBP is here to stay. Proof that 2017 could be the year of Linux on the desktop ;)

prewett 10y ago

Everyone seems to be saying the specs are bad, but what exactly is everyone upset about? (Genuine question) You can configure it with the Radeon 460, which seems like a top-end chip [1]. Apple's slideshow shows it being 1.8X faster than then 450. You can configure it with a 2.9 GHz, quad-core i7 with boost up to 3.8 GHz, which seems pretty top-end for a mobile chip, and it's not like 2.9/3.5 GHz is that bad. So it's last-year's generation, it's not like the one released last month is a huge leap ahead. Besides, as a developer, I'm rarely CPU constrained even on my 2009 laptop, unless I'm doing Swift in Xcode or RAW photo editing. You can get 1TB or even 2TB SSD. The only thing you can't get is over 16 GB of RAM, and mitchty's post suggests it is because of CPU/chipset limitations. So what more does everyone (not just HN) think Apple should be offering? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin...

ogeidix 10y ago
A keyboard that doesn't feel like typing on an iPad ?! I am struggling to understand how mbp owners are planning to code or write documents on that keyboard. while this is butterfly-v2, not v1, reviewers seems to agree that it's still a "butterfly" keyboard with extremely little travel space. also, nice to have: sd reader, hdmi, esc-button.
- pavlov 10y ago
  I write almost everything on a 12" MacBook these days. Coming from a previous 15" MBP it was jarring at first, but I got used to it very quickly (a day later I wasn't thinking about it at all).
  - rorykoehler 10y ago
    What made you switch to the macbook? What kind of work do you use it for? Do you have another machine? I'm curious as to who uses these apart from people with very basic computing needs. They seem to be very limited machines (though admittedly I've never used one).

mouzogu 10y ago

Would I be wrong to suggest that the majority of people who buy the Mac Pro (or who have them assigned to them at work) are neither creative professionals or unix-centric developers? I would say for these people that sleek design, high battery life and low weight are the three somewhat superficial attributes that stand out the most - or are the most important in making a purchasing choice. I understand all the dissapointment. However, I think if you analyse Apple's decisions, it probably does make sense from a marketing perspective. They seem to be aiming at the premium aesthetic market that has emerged in the last 5 years within the Mac fanbase. Only thing I dont understand and seems kind of cheeky to me is the price hike. btw - I am a developer, I use a Macbook Pro at work and a Dell XPS 15 at home - so I am somewhat aware of the price/spec/value differences.

dagw 10y ago
Anecdotally, among people who are neither creative professionals or developers, the MacBook and MacBook Air completely dominate, and these laptops outnumber MBPs in the wild at least 10:1 unless I'm at a developer meetup.

biehl 10y ago

I think of myself as a pretty regular software developer, and the new MBP sounds like it matches my priorities pretty well. # Thinner and lighter # Good specs # Able to drive 5K monitors (QHD retina) # Touch ID # I love a large track-pad Also I don't seem hit by the claimed negatives. # I don't realistically use more than 16GB RAM in daily work # I don't use function keys # I don't use VI :). I do use ESC for modals though. The price is a bit high, but I can wait a refresh-cycle for lower prices.

rz2k 10y ago
Also in the plus column is the significantly faster NVMe SSD. I suspect that a good portion of the people who use esc already have it mapped to another key like capslock using Karabiner. I think the conversation about this model being flawed would be entirely changed if the iPhone 8 had dropped Lightning for a USB C connector. USB C/Thunderbolt ports on the new MacBook Pro are a huge step in the goal of getting away from the endless collection of adapters with an unpleasant transition. For example I haven't had a laptop charger in the car for 10 years, but now the USB phone charger will give it at least a slow charge.
devopsproject 10y ago
Does your debugger not use the f keys for step\into\out of?
- biehl 10y ago
  Possibly. I don't really use debuggers often enough to use keys ...

elcapitan 10y ago

> Understanding history is important – to a point. But Apple’s obsessive naval gazing in the Mac event today speaks volumes. This is a company with no real vision for what its most creative users actually do with their most advanced machines. So, instead, they look into the past. That was also my impression. The funny thing is that this is not the first time in their history, and they used this "our laptops of the past" thing to showcase some of the horrible examples of the 90s, which were just adding bloat and uglyness rather than innovating. Then they present the new model with a bloaty new feature.

JohnBooty 10y ago

I'm underwhelmed by the newly-announced MacBook Pros, but this is just kind of where we're at. There isn't much more CPU performance to be had. Intel doesn't really sell anything faster. A peek at current Thinkpads tells me you can drop $3,000-$4,000 on a 7.5lb luggable with a Xeon-branded CPU, which would have been cool to see in a Mac, but.... yeah. Aside from the 16GB RAM limitation, Apple's not really holding out on us here. We've hit Moore's Law pretty hard.

symfoniq 10y ago
I don't think most people are complaining about the new MacBook Pro's CPU. There are many other design choices that are problematic for a lot of professionals.

cletus 10y ago

In 2010 I bought a MacBook Air 13 that I considered to be about perfect. It's reasonably cheap (barely more than $1000) and is small and light without making too many compromises (I'm looking at you, 12" MacBook).for years I've been waiting for Apple to release one with 16GB of RAM and a Retina display. They of course have not. About 2-3 years ago it became clear that that was a choice rather than a technical limitation. When the 12" MacBook came out I went to the local Apple Store and tried it. Hate the keyboard. Performance is too much of a compromise. You can charge it or use peripherals (or carry a dongle everywhere) and of course I knew th Air was now doomed (Apple tends to limit their SKUs). The new Macs have now lost me completely. - 2/4 C ports is shocking. 1/2 of these should be As. It's way too soon for all Cs. I read a comment the other day: it used to be that if it fit it worked. Now everything fits and nothing works. Apple might be imagining a universal port but they're ignoring the cables. There are still active/passive cables, USB 2 vs 3 A-to-C cables and so on. Apple used to only adopt technologies once they were mature. - loved the old keyboard. Hate the new. Saving 0.5mm for a shitty keyboard is too much compromise. - I use the escape key and function keys Asia like IDEs in particular. It was already jarring having different key bindings in OSX vs Windows/Linux (the latter two being relatively consistent within Jetbrains IDEs at least). - Loss of MagSafe. Recently I bought a refurb Dell XPS 15 with minimal specs for $900that I spent $450 upgrading to 32GB of RAM and a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB SSD. It has a respectable GPU (960M). It's trackpad isn't as good as a Mac's but where PC trackpads were once woefully bad (embarrassingly so), it's not bad. The gap is livable. Come December there'll be an update and likely you can upgrade one to 32GB with a Samsung Pro 512GB/1TB/2TB which. With a GTX 1060 will be a pretty versatile machine. Will we be waiting another 2 years for the next Mac update? Will some lines flounder without updates after much fanfare like the Mac Pro? See this is the real problem: I no longer have faith that this is a sector Apple gives a shit about. I realize laptops and desktops are "trucks" (to quote Steve Jobs) but he understood you still need tucks. Post-Jobs Apple seems to not understand and/or care about this.

dreamcompiler 10y ago

It's not possible to develop for IOS on Linux, Windows, or IOS itself. So not only is Apple hurting future app development on IOS with this move, they're also hurting their internal developers of IOS. Their cash cow -- IOS -- cannot survive without strong pro-caliber Macs. I find it shocking that Apple doesn't understand this.

mcculley 10y ago

What hardware are developers at Apple using? It's hard to imagine they are using the currently available Mac Pro or one of the new MacBook Pros. Do they have some special hardware build that Apple doesn't sell to the public? I've been wondering the same thing about Apple's server infrastructure ever since they quit selling the Xserve.

mcculley 10y ago

Is there some good reason why Apple doesn't ship an LTE modem in the MacBook Pro? Every device they ship has a cell modem. Why not the laptop?