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I'll sum up the points I've seen for the 2016 Macbook Pro. 1) No esc key or fkeys. These are pretty important for vim, and vim is the defacto editor on most Li

by danjoc 10y ago

I'll sum up the points I've seen for the 2016 Macbook Pro. 1) No esc key or fkeys. These are pretty important for vim, and vim is the defacto editor on most Linux systems. If you want these keys, you have to accept the lower end dual core CPU and no discrete GPU. 2) 16GB of RAM, not really enough for running multiple VMs. 32GB has been common for years from other manufacturers. Phil Schiller responded that this was to conserve battery life. 3) Skylake. This CPU is old. Kaby Lake has been shipping since late August. It's a bit of a stretch to call a laptop "premium" or "pro" when it ships with the last generation hardware. 4) GPU. Same gripe. NVidia is the undisputed leader in GPUs. Shipping a Radeon which is half the speed of a comparable NVidia offering is really disappointing. 5) Magsafe. They removed Magsafe in favor of USB-C charging. Great for Apple repair and replacement sales, not so great for end users. 6) Price. Everyone expects to pay some premium for an Apple, but this round is really excessive. They've made it worse by axing the lower priced Macbook Air line, so the least expensive model available now is a $1299 Macbook, and that's an even older 5th generation Broadwell CPU model they've been selling for nearly two years now.

majewsky 10y ago
> 1) No esc key or fkeys. These are pretty important for vim, and vim is the defacto editor on most Linux systems. Ooohhh, I can already see the angry complaints from Emacs users. More seriously though, vim doesn't rely on F keys at all. (The only default function mapped to an F key is F1 for help, which is only there to assist newbies AFAICT.) The F keys are useful as a blank slate for one's own mappings, though, so a lot of individual vim users (me included) might be upset about their favorite functions gone. The F keys are of much bigger importance in Xcode, where F6/F7/F8 are the default bindings for stepping during debugging. (I cannot comment on this myself as I'm from the printf-debugging camp, but a lot of people pointed to this concrete function in HN commentary in the past few days.)
thatswrong0 10y ago
> 4) GPU. Same gripe. NVidia is the undisputed leader in GPUs. Shipping a Radeon which is half the speed of a comparable NVidia offering is really disappointing. This one is understandable - the AMD 450/455/460 all fit within a 50W TDP. The Nvidia 1060M is at 80W... way too high. The 1050M should be 50W, but it won't be out until early 2017. The timing of all of this seems weird to me. Since Apple already waited so long to release this update to begin with, would it have killed them to wait just a bit longer to be able to integrate Kaby Lake and the mobile Nvidia cards?

by danjoc 10y ago

majewsky 10y ago

> 1) No esc key or fkeys. These are pretty important for vim, and vim is the defacto editor on most Linux systems. Ooohhh, I can already see the angry complaints from Emacs users. More seriously though, vim doesn't rely on F keys at all. (The only default function mapped to an F key is F1 for help, which is only there to assist newbies AFAICT.) The F keys are useful as a blank slate for one's own mappings, though, so a lot of individual vim users (me included) might be upset about their favorite functions gone. The F keys are of much bigger importance in Xcode, where F6/F7/F8 are the default bindings for stepping during debugging. (I cannot comment on this myself as I'm from the printf-debugging camp, but a lot of people pointed to this concrete function in HN commentary in the past few days.)

thatswrong0 10y ago

> 4) GPU. Same gripe. NVidia is the undisputed leader in GPUs. Shipping a Radeon which is half the speed of a comparable NVidia offering is really disappointing. This one is understandable - the AMD 450/455/460 all fit within a 50W TDP. The Nvidia 1060M is at 80W... way too high. The 1050M should be 50W, but it won't be out until early 2017. The timing of all of this seems weird to me. Since Apple already waited so long to release this update to begin with, would it have killed them to wait just a bit longer to be able to integrate Kaby Lake and the mobile Nvidia cards?