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To everyone surprised by the news, just remember: you are not Apple's target audience anymore. The developers did an amazing job of advertising the Macbook to

To everyone surprised by the news, just remember: you are not Apple's target audience anymore. The developers did an amazing job of advertising the Macbook to the general public and making it seem like the cool, sexy thing that professionals use, but it's no longer just for professionals. When I went to college, I saw kids who used Macbook Pros to do nothing more than take notes, send emails, and browse facebook. I go to coffee shops and see seniors with MBA's, browsing the news. The widespread developer backlash against the new MBP is a trivial percentage compared to the average Joe's who are going out and continuing to buy Macbooks. Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore.

std_throwaway 10y ago
Yet, we all know what happens to companies who lose their developers. It just takes a few years to materialize.
- matthewking 10y ago
  Maybe Apple need Steve Ballmer to remind them what's important ;)
- daveFNbuck 10y ago
  There's a difference between losing your developers and losing the developer market. Plenty of companies thrive without targeting the developer market.
  - hyperbovine 10y ago
    I'll bet you those companies don't hold a monopoly on the platform, though.
wyager 10y ago
I'm not actually clear how this laptop is supposed to be worse for developers. It's not like most of us are EEs; we hardly ever need any sort of weird ports or anything. In fact, about half my work is EE and I'm doing fine with a 12" MacBook. The only thing we've lost is the physical escape and function keys, and that's not exactly a show-stopper. Possibly a mild inconvenience. I'll probably buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro for my next laptop, unless something obviously better (including quality and support lifetime) is on the market, which right now it doesn't appear to be.
- daveFNbuck 10y ago
  The problem is that we were expecting a significant upgrade and got minor tweaks. The new Macbook Pro doesn't give me a strong reason to upgrade, and I would have liked to have one.
- fatbird 10y ago
  I feel like this is a common, quiet sentiment amongst developers. The freakout about the direction the line is going is very vocal minority.
  - ciaranm 10y ago
    Yep. I'm a freelance developer and I bought a new MBP. I don't mind a soft-key function row, and I'm kinda curious what people can do with it. I don't need an SD card slot. Losing Magsafe, 16GB top-out on the RAM are disappointing, but when I looked at alternatives nothing stood out as 'better'. I could get something much more powerful, but generally bigger and/or with worse battery. I've got a desktop for when I need nothing but horsepower. When I'm out working for clients I need something that fits in my bag on my bike.
- JoachimS 10y ago
  HW developer here with similar experience. The only thing I could really use is more than 16 GByte of memory. Otherwise, the new MBPs are enough for basically all my work. Being able to that in a small package is great. I went from MBA to MBPr for the better screen resolution and more than 8 GByte RAM which was a big problem running VMs with FPGA tools, but missed the size and low weight of the MBA. The new MBP without TouchBar is basically the machine I wanted when I switched to MBPr When the MBP don't have the oomph to build a big FPGA, run huge simulations in reasonable time, build big SW systems etc, you need to use a server anyway. IMHO.
- matthewking 10y ago
  For me the other issues I can overlook somewhat, but the killer is the keyboard. It seems to divide people strongly one way or the other, but to me its horrendous. There's basically 0 key travel, the keys just click. I average about the same typing speed as my 2014 mbp but the experience is not nice, and for longer days spent coding I'm sure it'll become uncomfortable on your finger tips. And the question is why? I can only think the decisions behind the keyboard are to facilitate the goal of making the MacBook thinner and thinner, the point of diminishing returns on that was passed 2 years ago. On top of that, I bought my MacBook pro in 2014 for £1200, to replace it today with the bottom 13" model would cost £1750. That's some price hike!
herge 10y ago
There should be no surprise here. Macbook pros haven't been for 'pros' for at least 4 years: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/11/08/reddit-mbps http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/11/08/reddit-mbps
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
s/MBP/$1200 Facebook machine/g (This has been the MBP nickname de rigeur for a few years, but I'm too lazy to dig up the original source.) http://m.quickmeme.com/img/4a/4a7f932881de8723c2f5ab516b69f8ea4cab3b6e454f4ec75605f890d0f5bedf.jpg http://m.quickmeme.com/img/4a/4a7f932881de8723c2f5ab516b69f8...
neolefty 10y ago
I'll even dispute the "widespread developer backlash" -- it looks good to me, and this reception seems no different from the reception to previous Apple products that broke with the past (no floppy drive, USB for keyboard & mouse, etc.) It's temporarily painful, but USB C seems like a tremendous improvement, and 4 full ports is mighty.
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  I'm inclined to agree with you, but I sure will miss the magsafe. I knock mine out at least once or twice a week. Maybe someone will make a USB-C cable with a magnetic breakaway in the middle.
  - unprepare 10y ago
    you can already find those on amazon fyi https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=magnetic+usb+c https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3...
    - hinkley 10y ago
      What I really want is a dongle that lets me use my existing magsafe bricks with the new MBP. Is there one of those coming?
      - tim333 10y ago
        There's a cheap Chinese one on Amazon but apparently it doesn't work properly https://www.amazon.com/HIOTECH-MagSafe-Adapter-Converter-Connector/dp/B0167WMHP0 https://www.amazon.com/HIOTECH-MagSafe-Adapter-Converter-Con...
        FireBeyond 10y ago
        Sounds exactly like something I want to plug into my brand new up-to-$4K laptop...
ash_gti 10y ago
I'm a full time iOS developer and I think the new MBP will meet my needs. I'm looking forward to buying one and trying it out. I'm disappointed it won't be configurable with more than 16 GB of RAM but that appears to be an Intel issue (I know you can argue they could choose a different CPU, but it is a mobile device and low power CPUs make sense in that regard). I would love to hear from Apple what their plan is for the Mac Pro, but I'm planning on buying a new MBP soon.
- lucaspiller 10y ago
  What do you mean it's an Intel issue? There are other Skylake laptops with more than 16GB, e.g. the Dell XPS 15. Edit: The Dell can have the same CPU i7-6700HQ with 32GB RAM.
  - alcari 10y ago
    The CPUs in question support up to 16 GB of LPDDR3 or 32 GB of DDR4, but do not support LPDDR4. Apple needs the LPDDR* variant to meet their power budget.
    - OJFord 10y ago
      So... because the CPU that Apple chose doesn't support >16GB RAM in a way that's convenient for Apple to meet an Apple-imposed specification, it's Intel's problem?
      - ash_gti 10y ago
        It was a design trade off Apple made. They could sacrifice power efficiency for additional memory (LPDDR4 on the CPU is limited to 16 GB, DDR4 can go up to 32 GB). I'm pretty confident if Intel's CPU supported more RAM they would of made it a configurable option. Apple still has configurable graphics cards, hard disk sizes and CPU speeds. RAM could of easily been another configuration they could of offered. Like I said previously, the MacBook Pro is a mobile device so making a trade off for power efficiency makes perfect sense to me.
      - 10y ago
nickhalfasleep 10y ago
I'm betting the biggest feature of the "Late 2017" MBP will be a 32GB option.
- ProAm 10y ago
  2019
- ropiku 10y ago
  I doubt it. New CPUs are not going to support LPDDR4 and I highly doubt Apple is willing to make a thinker&heavier machine to cater to a small subset of users. Look at the battery life of XPS 15.
pjmlp 10y ago
Not every developer on this planet cares about the coincidence that macOS is a UNIX, it is a nice to have feature, but that is all about it. Actually I bet that those that regularly attend WWDC, the actual developers that Apple cares about, don't care that much about the vocal minority. I am a developer, XCode and all the other developer tools work perfectly fine for mac OS, iOS and tvOS applications. Also for those workflows, targeting actual Apple customers that love the whole packaged experience of hardware + software, we hardly fill 8GB, let alone 16GB.
orbitingpluto 10y ago
Developers have their preferences, but I've had to do dev work on a Pentium II over frickin' telnet over a modem connection. We can make do, because we know how to. Apple knows this, so they have no reason to care. In a cafe right now, everyone here is on a Macbook Pro except the two government workers on identical Dells.
greenspot 10y ago
> you are not Apple's target audience anymore recently researched dozens of Windows notebooks and I found two reasons why the new Macbooks might be still for developers: - Only notebooks which can drive 2x 5k displays + the internal, there is no Windows notebook which can do this; and having two ultra sharp 27" 5k displays is something that might be attractive for developers - the new MBP 15 is the lightest quad-core 15" machine by far, also not the worst thing
- pmalynin 10y ago
  Mhm, have you looked at the Razer Blade, or the Razer Blade Stealth? I'm very certain that the bundled in NVIDIA 10XX will power through.
  - dijit 10y ago
    Company has a very poor track record with supporting reasonable operating systems, the build quality is notably sub-par on older editions of the laptop and the support is apparently awful. I don't think I will be citing this as an example of "something to compete with apple"
- rayiner 10y ago
  The only competing option to the 15" is the XPS 15, and it looks like (judging by the non-touchbar) Apple is going to stomp Dell in battery life in the high res configuration.
  - Tepix 10y ago
    The battery life is "good enough" for both of them... besides developers do not necessarily require fantastic battery life.
    - Noseshine 10y ago
      When I buy a laptop I don't just care about the battery life it has now - but also about the one three years later. Actually, these days I'll probably keep a laptop for five years, the desktop even longer, since there just is no compelling reason to buy something new sooner. So I want the battery to be good for me even when it's only half the initial capacity.
ksk 10y ago
Nobody is surprised, or incapable of understanding that. The touchbar is a mostly a gimmick. Its a tiny screen that you have to poke at while your finger obscures the display. However, I'd say its still worth it for the touch ID alone - assuming people figure out a way to link it to online logins. Professionals complained about several lacking features in product that used to be designed for professionals. People need to recalibrate. A "Pro" label doesn't mean anything anymore. > Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore. I'd say they already got their money. Instead of repeat business, they're looking for new ppl to keep buying their products.
jkrems 10y ago
There's was very vocal backlash from some developers. Most professional developers I talked to are perfectly fine with the changes. They just weren't interested in taking part in the online drama. Maybe they were slightly annoyed or confused by one change or the other but they still thought the whole package was a good deal. And bought one.
- 4ad 10y ago
  Exactly. I am very happy with the new changes and with the direction Apple is going, but I simply have no interest in arguing with people who are unhappy. Vote with your money, I will buy the new MacBook Pro.
  - Certhas 10y ago
    I think that's the thing, there's a bunch of us that have already been getting less happy with Mac OS updates over the years, so MBP was a crystallisation point of that. My next Laptop wont be a Mac in all likelihood, but the MBP changes have little to do with that.
- droopyEyelids 10y ago
  Was it even developers? Or was it people attempting to create relevant content/build a brand online? I know there is some overlap, but I'm shocked at how credulous HN seems to be in the face of the Internet Outrage Cycle. Every newsworthy event generates a hoard of people that try to cultivate outrage to drive traffic to their site or to gain some recognition. A lot of this is natural, people aren't even cynical about it. But it's useless to pay attention to it.
  - alfonsodev 10y ago
    I think they always said "creators"
- cstejerean 10y ago
  Yep. I actually looked around for alternatives, something that I haven't done in years, but I haven't seen anything else more compelling. If you want a laptop with 16 GB of RAM, HiDPI screen, a discrete GPU and 10 hours of battery life, then there really aren't very many choices. So yeah, the new MacBook Pro still looks like a pretty good options for developers. I am surprised about them dumping MagSafe, because it's a superior power option to USB-C. And it's also surprising that they didn't include at least one USB-A port for compatibility, but that's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The touch bar I am actually excited about for what it's worth. There's a lot of developers out there that still use the mouse for a lot of actions in their editor / IDE because they can't be bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts. When those IDEs start to embrace the TouchBar it will make a lot of their lives easier by surfacing actions like stepping through a debugger, refactoring, etc. So on the whole I really don't see that Apple is abandoning developers. I just look at what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line and I wish that Apple was investing more heavily in the same direction.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
zyb09 10y ago
Of course Apple wants to sell MacBooks to developers, and I'm sure a lot of devs will happily buy it. Because many of the flaws and issues, that are notoriously being pointed out on HN/Reddit, don't really apply to the individual buyer, or are vastly exaggerated. I mean I'm a dev, and getting a couple of USB-C cables is really that hard and inconvenient? The answer you get from the online collective is yes, but in real life the buyer decides most of these things are non-issues for himself. Same thing with every Apple product as far as I can remember, always lots of controversy, everybody has a opinion on why/what went wrong, but at the end of the day it's a perfectly fine for most people (including devs).
wnevets 10y ago
Shouldn't the inverse be true? If a small percentage of evangelical developers made it cool, couldn't they make it uncool? The hip techies making fun of internet explorer, aol, and myspace certainly made a difference to the general public who didnt know any better.
- nartsbtaa 10y ago
  Techies definitely didn't make it cool across the general population. It became cool through brand association with cool phones and MP3 players and its aesthetics.
mpweiher 10y ago
Another dev who is very happy with the new machines, ordered one right away. In fact, I was very close to ordering a 12" MacBook, but the 13" was close enough, 1 port is a bit on the low side (4 USB-C is awesome, and I can't wait to get everything unified) and the TouchBar is quite intriguing. I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads (except for maybe some very specialised ones). While the Apple II with 48KB was a bit cramped, even an Amiga with 512k + 2MB RAMDisk was pretty decent, never mind the workstation-class NeXT cube with 16 or 32MB. (IIRC, developers at NeXT had 8MB machines, with compiles farmed out to servers, in order to "encourage" efficiency). I also developed significant Java server software on a 12" PowerBook G4. Of course, the reality is that Xcode with clang/LLVM based tooling and its dictionary-based programming style sucks up RAM and CPU like you wouldn't believe, and various other decisions have been made in favour of recompiling/reindexing the world whenever possible. Swift takes that direction and dials it up to 11. Anyone interested in more efficient dev tooling? Factor 10-100 improvements in performance are well within reach. Sub-second rebuild instead of minute+, MacBook/iPad plenty fast enough. etc.
- magicbuzz 10y ago
  One port is "a bit on the low side".....
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    German: "Not entirely atrocious" → American: "Amazingly fantastically awesome"
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  >I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads It depends what you are developing. If I am debugging, I often have to spin up Unity, plus a crapton on 3D models and assets, plus the server which is a bunch of VMs, plus IntelliJ. This is in addition to Chrome and slack. It's okay on 16GB but I occasionally get issues and a couple of years from now this will likely get worse.
bsder 10y ago
> Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore. Maybe, and maybe not. For example, I bumped into an issue with the older MBP where if you plug in a Universal Audio audio interface and a 4K monitor, the audio interface starts to hiccup. The 4K monitor moves too much data over Thunderbolt in a single transaction and so overruns the latency limits for the audio interface. I had to solve this by putting the 4K monitor on the HDMI. So, what "end user type" is going to figure this out? Universal Audio somehow missed this--nobody doing audio driver development on 4K monitors, possibly--and likely couldn't do anything about it anyhow. Apple likely missed this because it's just a couple of people. Most end users just return the audio interface with a "doesn't work". The fact that everybody missed this means that Microsoft now has a windows of opportunity in audio. They have a gigantic touchscreen with huge resolution. If they didn't mess up and they separated the interfaces, they have a clean run to displace Apple in the audio space for years. These are the kind of things your developers run down. Piss them off at your peril.
eranation 10y ago
After today, I'm not surprised by any news anymore.
shopkins 10y ago
Not only that, but it's safe to say Apple isn't a tech company anymore. They're a luxury brand selling luxury products -- evidenced merely in how they spend all their time talking about how the thing looks instead of how powerful it is (it does look and feel very nice).
r00fus 10y ago
Maybe this is because for years, the only trackpad that didn't suck were Macbooks. Vista was a disaster, and so many people used a relatively insecure Windows XP. The list goes on and on. These days, folks who don't want to pay for Win10 Enterprise and don't want telemetry will be choosing between macOS and Linux.
cooperadymas 10y ago
You're implying that developer adoption fueled widespread adoption of the MacBook, yet now saying that the developer user base no longer matters to Apple. If this is true it is short-sighted. Would the abandoned developer base not eventually drive mass adoption to an alternative?
- pmontra 10y ago
  That's possible. It happened in browser space with Firefox first and Chrome later.
  - alasdair_ 10y ago
    It happened with Apple in general too - almost overnight, every seemed to ditch their windows machines and replace them with macbook pros. In part, that was because of things like ios, where a mac was mandatory. In part it was because of things like Ruby which was simply much easier on a mac and in part it was because having a "real" unix shell is so damn useful.
    - pmontra 10y ago
      Ruby is (or was?) almost impossible on Windows because everybody was using it for Rails on Linux servers. Running all the related services on Windows is just too hard. I used to have a Linux VM in my XP laptop, then I formatted it to Ubuntu with a XP VM.
aikah 10y ago
"Average Joe's" don't put $2000+ in a laptop.
kuon 10y ago
As a developer, I am not unhappy about the new MBP. I have a feeling that they are abandoning me. I can understand that they are focusing on making profit, but at least they should keep me/us informed of the mac future. I want a desktop machine with modern GPU, at least 32gig ram. That I can upgrade if needed. My hackintosh runs fine, but it is, well, a "hack"intosh. And Apple should remember that their platform is very little with no third party developer.
- locusm 10y ago
  Ive ordered parts for a beefy Hackintosh, for 3 reasons. The 17" MBP that had to have the logic board baked to reflow solder - took Apple 4 years to acknowledge that one. My 15" 2013 MBPr whose battery swelled up to the point of breaking the touch pad. New MBP announcement. Looking forward to user upgrade-able gear for once.
racl101 10y ago
Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
alfonsodev 10y ago
I think the idea was to create a machine that inspires creators. Those seniors reading news could be writers documenting their next novel and those kids, potencial creators. I though Apple always sold that you don't need technical skills to be able to create something cool with the computer. This thing that apple was for developers I only read about it since the launch of the new macbook.
coldtea 10y ago
>To everyone surprised by the news, just remember: you are not Apple's target audience anymore. The developers did an amazing job of advertising the Macbook to the general public and making it seem like the cool, sexy thing that professionals use, but it's no longer just for professionals. Two things: They were never "just for professionals" -- they were the "computer for the rest of us". Marketing wise at least. They also were never about raw power. They were never the ultimate number crunching machines nor gaming laptops. And the CEO of a company, executives, journalists, doctors, managers, etc -- people who don't need the latest Nvidia card or 32GB RAM -- are also professionals. For videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, the MBPr 15" is one of the most popular, and well speced machines out there. Individual PC laptops can have this or that spec better, but rarely the all around package (weight, size, sturdiness, touchpad, screen quality, SSD speed, battery, etc) -- and in those rare cases, the price is very close.
- eon1 10y ago
  > videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day. A lot of people in the audio industry went nuts when Apple stopped letting you add RAM because you could hardly have a serious production machine without maxing it out. After Effects, C4D, Blender, etc. will be rendering for a week straight (if at all). Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers. Ever sat there watching a progress bar for a minute or two just to crop an image? That's what you're proposing as "well spec'd". Your point about non creative professionals does hold water, though - that's the main audience IMO, the tech clueless types who are nevertheless obsessed with being involved with a "premium" brand. And yep, if you just want a couple spreadsheets, some social media, and maybe some reports, they're spec'd phenomenally for that kind of thing.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day. While 32GB would have been nice (especially for video) I've used NLEs professionally and DAWs semi-professionally for years, and it was already 4-5 years ago that DAWs could run almost everything you threw at them in a normal session. 100s of audio tracks and tons of effects. And we still have freeze etc. Tons of pro musicians still use 3-5 year old laptops or iMacs with 8GB or less just fine. Most pro studios don't even have latest or maxed out Macs (or PCs for that matter) unless the owner is technophile. And for stuff like notation, tracking, mastering etc (as opposed to mixing) cpu power / ram is not even needed. >Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers. Where was that ever an issue and on what jobs? Pro designers did the most complex composites and layouts, for print media and billboards, 5 and 10 and 15 years ago. It's not like resolutions have gone up since then (the high dpi computer screens are nothing much compared to high quality large sized print jobs people did in Photoshop even 10 or 20 years ago).
rorykoehler 10y ago
>>they don't need your business anymore. Who's going to build all the iOS apps?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
edblarney 10y ago
Developers were never really the 'target' of Apple. They are small demographic. Also - that a 'new' laptop is outselling a highly fragmented group of other laptops for a few days is completely unsurprising. Wait for 3 months, then compare laptop sales across the board - I don't think much will change.

std_throwaway 10y ago

Yet, we all know what happens to companies who lose their developers. It just takes a few years to materialize.

matthewking 10y ago
Maybe Apple need Steve Ballmer to remind them what's important ;)
daveFNbuck 10y ago
There's a difference between losing your developers and losing the developer market. Plenty of companies thrive without targeting the developer market.
- hyperbovine 10y ago
  I'll bet you those companies don't hold a monopoly on the platform, though.

wyager 10y ago

I'm not actually clear how this laptop is supposed to be worse for developers. It's not like most of us are EEs; we hardly ever need any sort of weird ports or anything. In fact, about half my work is EE and I'm doing fine with a 12" MacBook. The only thing we've lost is the physical escape and function keys, and that's not exactly a show-stopper. Possibly a mild inconvenience. I'll probably buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro for my next laptop, unless something obviously better (including quality and support lifetime) is on the market, which right now it doesn't appear to be.

daveFNbuck 10y ago
The problem is that we were expecting a significant upgrade and got minor tweaks. The new Macbook Pro doesn't give me a strong reason to upgrade, and I would have liked to have one.
fatbird 10y ago
I feel like this is a common, quiet sentiment amongst developers. The freakout about the direction the line is going is very vocal minority.
- ciaranm 10y ago
  Yep. I'm a freelance developer and I bought a new MBP. I don't mind a soft-key function row, and I'm kinda curious what people can do with it. I don't need an SD card slot. Losing Magsafe, 16GB top-out on the RAM are disappointing, but when I looked at alternatives nothing stood out as 'better'. I could get something much more powerful, but generally bigger and/or with worse battery. I've got a desktop for when I need nothing but horsepower. When I'm out working for clients I need something that fits in my bag on my bike.
JoachimS 10y ago
HW developer here with similar experience. The only thing I could really use is more than 16 GByte of memory. Otherwise, the new MBPs are enough for basically all my work. Being able to that in a small package is great. I went from MBA to MBPr for the better screen resolution and more than 8 GByte RAM which was a big problem running VMs with FPGA tools, but missed the size and low weight of the MBA. The new MBP without TouchBar is basically the machine I wanted when I switched to MBPr When the MBP don't have the oomph to build a big FPGA, run huge simulations in reasonable time, build big SW systems etc, you need to use a server anyway. IMHO.
matthewking 10y ago
For me the other issues I can overlook somewhat, but the killer is the keyboard. It seems to divide people strongly one way or the other, but to me its horrendous. There's basically 0 key travel, the keys just click. I average about the same typing speed as my 2014 mbp but the experience is not nice, and for longer days spent coding I'm sure it'll become uncomfortable on your finger tips. And the question is why? I can only think the decisions behind the keyboard are to facilitate the goal of making the MacBook thinner and thinner, the point of diminishing returns on that was passed 2 years ago. On top of that, I bought my MacBook pro in 2014 for £1200, to replace it today with the bottom 13" model would cost £1750. That's some price hike!

herge 10y ago

There should be no surprise here. Macbook pros haven't been for 'pros' for at least 4 years: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/11/08/reddit-mbps http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/11/08/reddit-mbps

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

s/MBP/$1200 Facebook machine/g (This has been the MBP nickname de rigeur for a few years, but I'm too lazy to dig up the original source.) http://m.quickmeme.com/img/4a/4a7f932881de8723c2f5ab516b69f8ea4cab3b6e454f4ec75605f890d0f5bedf.jpg http://m.quickmeme.com/img/4a/4a7f932881de8723c2f5ab516b69f8...

neolefty 10y ago

I'll even dispute the "widespread developer backlash" -- it looks good to me, and this reception seems no different from the reception to previous Apple products that broke with the past (no floppy drive, USB for keyboard & mouse, etc.) It's temporarily painful, but USB C seems like a tremendous improvement, and 4 full ports is mighty.

DigitalJack 10y ago
I'm inclined to agree with you, but I sure will miss the magsafe. I knock mine out at least once or twice a week. Maybe someone will make a USB-C cable with a magnetic breakaway in the middle.
- unprepare 10y ago
  you can already find those on amazon fyi https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=magnetic+usb+c https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3...
  - hinkley 10y ago
    What I really want is a dongle that lets me use my existing magsafe bricks with the new MBP. Is there one of those coming?
    - tim333 10y ago
      There's a cheap Chinese one on Amazon but apparently it doesn't work properly https://www.amazon.com/HIOTECH-MagSafe-Adapter-Converter-Connector/dp/B0167WMHP0 https://www.amazon.com/HIOTECH-MagSafe-Adapter-Converter-Con...
      - FireBeyond 10y ago
        Sounds exactly like something I want to plug into my brand new up-to-$4K laptop...

ash_gti 10y ago

I'm a full time iOS developer and I think the new MBP will meet my needs. I'm looking forward to buying one and trying it out. I'm disappointed it won't be configurable with more than 16 GB of RAM but that appears to be an Intel issue (I know you can argue they could choose a different CPU, but it is a mobile device and low power CPUs make sense in that regard). I would love to hear from Apple what their plan is for the Mac Pro, but I'm planning on buying a new MBP soon.

lucaspiller 10y ago
What do you mean it's an Intel issue? There are other Skylake laptops with more than 16GB, e.g. the Dell XPS 15. Edit: The Dell can have the same CPU i7-6700HQ with 32GB RAM.
- alcari 10y ago
  The CPUs in question support up to 16 GB of LPDDR3 or 32 GB of DDR4, but do not support LPDDR4. Apple needs the LPDDR* variant to meet their power budget.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    So... because the CPU that Apple chose doesn't support >16GB RAM in a way that's convenient for Apple to meet an Apple-imposed specification, it's Intel's problem?
    - ash_gti 10y ago
      It was a design trade off Apple made. They could sacrifice power efficiency for additional memory (LPDDR4 on the CPU is limited to 16 GB, DDR4 can go up to 32 GB). I'm pretty confident if Intel's CPU supported more RAM they would of made it a configurable option. Apple still has configurable graphics cards, hard disk sizes and CPU speeds. RAM could of easily been another configuration they could of offered. Like I said previously, the MacBook Pro is a mobile device so making a trade off for power efficiency makes perfect sense to me.
    - 10y ago

nickhalfasleep 10y ago

I'm betting the biggest feature of the "Late 2017" MBP will be a 32GB option.

ProAm 10y ago
2019
ropiku 10y ago
I doubt it. New CPUs are not going to support LPDDR4 and I highly doubt Apple is willing to make a thinker&heavier machine to cater to a small subset of users. Look at the battery life of XPS 15.

pjmlp 10y ago

Not every developer on this planet cares about the coincidence that macOS is a UNIX, it is a nice to have feature, but that is all about it. Actually I bet that those that regularly attend WWDC, the actual developers that Apple cares about, don't care that much about the vocal minority. I am a developer, XCode and all the other developer tools work perfectly fine for mac OS, iOS and tvOS applications. Also for those workflows, targeting actual Apple customers that love the whole packaged experience of hardware + software, we hardly fill 8GB, let alone 16GB.

orbitingpluto 10y ago

Developers have their preferences, but I've had to do dev work on a Pentium II over frickin' telnet over a modem connection. We can make do, because we know how to. Apple knows this, so they have no reason to care. In a cafe right now, everyone here is on a Macbook Pro except the two government workers on identical Dells.

greenspot 10y ago

> you are not Apple's target audience anymore recently researched dozens of Windows notebooks and I found two reasons why the new Macbooks might be still for developers: - Only notebooks which can drive 2x 5k displays + the internal, there is no Windows notebook which can do this; and having two ultra sharp 27" 5k displays is something that might be attractive for developers - the new MBP 15 is the lightest quad-core 15" machine by far, also not the worst thing

pmalynin 10y ago
Mhm, have you looked at the Razer Blade, or the Razer Blade Stealth? I'm very certain that the bundled in NVIDIA 10XX will power through.
- dijit 10y ago
  Company has a very poor track record with supporting reasonable operating systems, the build quality is notably sub-par on older editions of the laptop and the support is apparently awful. I don't think I will be citing this as an example of "something to compete with apple"
rayiner 10y ago
The only competing option to the 15" is the XPS 15, and it looks like (judging by the non-touchbar) Apple is going to stomp Dell in battery life in the high res configuration.
- Tepix 10y ago
  The battery life is "good enough" for both of them... besides developers do not necessarily require fantastic battery life.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    When I buy a laptop I don't just care about the battery life it has now - but also about the one three years later. Actually, these days I'll probably keep a laptop for five years, the desktop even longer, since there just is no compelling reason to buy something new sooner. So I want the battery to be good for me even when it's only half the initial capacity.

ksk 10y ago

Nobody is surprised, or incapable of understanding that. The touchbar is a mostly a gimmick. Its a tiny screen that you have to poke at while your finger obscures the display. However, I'd say its still worth it for the touch ID alone - assuming people figure out a way to link it to online logins. Professionals complained about several lacking features in product that used to be designed for professionals. People need to recalibrate. A "Pro" label doesn't mean anything anymore. > Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore. I'd say they already got their money. Instead of repeat business, they're looking for new ppl to keep buying their products.

jkrems 10y ago

There's was very vocal backlash from some developers. Most professional developers I talked to are perfectly fine with the changes. They just weren't interested in taking part in the online drama. Maybe they were slightly annoyed or confused by one change or the other but they still thought the whole package was a good deal. And bought one.

4ad 10y ago
Exactly. I am very happy with the new changes and with the direction Apple is going, but I simply have no interest in arguing with people who are unhappy. Vote with your money, I will buy the new MacBook Pro.
- Certhas 10y ago
  I think that's the thing, there's a bunch of us that have already been getting less happy with Mac OS updates over the years, so MBP was a crystallisation point of that. My next Laptop wont be a Mac in all likelihood, but the MBP changes have little to do with that.
droopyEyelids 10y ago
Was it even developers? Or was it people attempting to create relevant content/build a brand online? I know there is some overlap, but I'm shocked at how credulous HN seems to be in the face of the Internet Outrage Cycle. Every newsworthy event generates a hoard of people that try to cultivate outrage to drive traffic to their site or to gain some recognition. A lot of this is natural, people aren't even cynical about it. But it's useless to pay attention to it.
- alfonsodev 10y ago
  I think they always said "creators"
cstejerean 10y ago
Yep. I actually looked around for alternatives, something that I haven't done in years, but I haven't seen anything else more compelling. If you want a laptop with 16 GB of RAM, HiDPI screen, a discrete GPU and 10 hours of battery life, then there really aren't very many choices. So yeah, the new MacBook Pro still looks like a pretty good options for developers. I am surprised about them dumping MagSafe, because it's a superior power option to USB-C. And it's also surprising that they didn't include at least one USB-A port for compatibility, but that's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The touch bar I am actually excited about for what it's worth. There's a lot of developers out there that still use the mouse for a lot of actions in their editor / IDE because they can't be bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts. When those IDEs start to embrace the TouchBar it will make a lot of their lives easier by surfacing actions like stepping through a debugger, refactoring, etc. So on the whole I really don't see that Apple is abandoning developers. I just look at what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line and I wish that Apple was investing more heavily in the same direction.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

zyb09 10y ago

Of course Apple wants to sell MacBooks to developers, and I'm sure a lot of devs will happily buy it. Because many of the flaws and issues, that are notoriously being pointed out on HN/Reddit, don't really apply to the individual buyer, or are vastly exaggerated. I mean I'm a dev, and getting a couple of USB-C cables is really that hard and inconvenient? The answer you get from the online collective is yes, but in real life the buyer decides most of these things are non-issues for himself. Same thing with every Apple product as far as I can remember, always lots of controversy, everybody has a opinion on why/what went wrong, but at the end of the day it's a perfectly fine for most people (including devs).

wnevets 10y ago

Shouldn't the inverse be true? If a small percentage of evangelical developers made it cool, couldn't they make it uncool? The hip techies making fun of internet explorer, aol, and myspace certainly made a difference to the general public who didnt know any better.

nartsbtaa 10y ago
Techies definitely didn't make it cool across the general population. It became cool through brand association with cool phones and MP3 players and its aesthetics.

mpweiher 10y ago

Another dev who is very happy with the new machines, ordered one right away. In fact, I was very close to ordering a 12" MacBook, but the 13" was close enough, 1 port is a bit on the low side (4 USB-C is awesome, and I can't wait to get everything unified) and the TouchBar is quite intriguing. I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads (except for maybe some very specialised ones). While the Apple II with 48KB was a bit cramped, even an Amiga with 512k + 2MB RAMDisk was pretty decent, never mind the workstation-class NeXT cube with 16 or 32MB. (IIRC, developers at NeXT had 8MB machines, with compiles farmed out to servers, in order to "encourage" efficiency). I also developed significant Java server software on a 12" PowerBook G4. Of course, the reality is that Xcode with clang/LLVM based tooling and its dictionary-based programming style sucks up RAM and CPU like you wouldn't believe, and various other decisions have been made in favour of recompiling/reindexing the world whenever possible. Swift takes that direction and dials it up to 11. Anyone interested in more efficient dev tooling? Factor 10-100 improvements in performance are well within reach. Sub-second rebuild instead of minute+, MacBook/iPad plenty fast enough. etc.

magicbuzz 10y ago
One port is "a bit on the low side".....
- mpweiher 10y ago
  German: "Not entirely atrocious" → American: "Amazingly fantastically awesome"
alasdair_ 10y ago
>I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads It depends what you are developing. If I am debugging, I often have to spin up Unity, plus a crapton on 3D models and assets, plus the server which is a bunch of VMs, plus IntelliJ. This is in addition to Chrome and slack. It's okay on 16GB but I occasionally get issues and a couple of years from now this will likely get worse.

bsder 10y ago

> Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore. Maybe, and maybe not. For example, I bumped into an issue with the older MBP where if you plug in a Universal Audio audio interface and a 4K monitor, the audio interface starts to hiccup. The 4K monitor moves too much data over Thunderbolt in a single transaction and so overruns the latency limits for the audio interface. I had to solve this by putting the 4K monitor on the HDMI. So, what "end user type" is going to figure this out? Universal Audio somehow missed this--nobody doing audio driver development on 4K monitors, possibly--and likely couldn't do anything about it anyhow. Apple likely missed this because it's just a couple of people. Most end users just return the audio interface with a "doesn't work". The fact that everybody missed this means that Microsoft now has a windows of opportunity in audio. They have a gigantic touchscreen with huge resolution. If they didn't mess up and they separated the interfaces, they have a clean run to displace Apple in the audio space for years. These are the kind of things your developers run down. Piss them off at your peril.

eranation 10y ago

After today, I'm not surprised by any news anymore.

shopkins 10y ago

Not only that, but it's safe to say Apple isn't a tech company anymore. They're a luxury brand selling luxury products -- evidenced merely in how they spend all their time talking about how the thing looks instead of how powerful it is (it does look and feel very nice).

r00fus 10y ago

Maybe this is because for years, the only trackpad that didn't suck were Macbooks. Vista was a disaster, and so many people used a relatively insecure Windows XP. The list goes on and on. These days, folks who don't want to pay for Win10 Enterprise and don't want telemetry will be choosing between macOS and Linux.

cooperadymas 10y ago

You're implying that developer adoption fueled widespread adoption of the MacBook, yet now saying that the developer user base no longer matters to Apple. If this is true it is short-sighted. Would the abandoned developer base not eventually drive mass adoption to an alternative?

pmontra 10y ago
That's possible. It happened in browser space with Firefox first and Chrome later.
- alasdair_ 10y ago
  It happened with Apple in general too - almost overnight, every seemed to ditch their windows machines and replace them with macbook pros. In part, that was because of things like ios, where a mac was mandatory. In part it was because of things like Ruby which was simply much easier on a mac and in part it was because having a "real" unix shell is so damn useful.
  - pmontra 10y ago
    Ruby is (or was?) almost impossible on Windows because everybody was using it for Rails on Linux servers. Running all the related services on Windows is just too hard. I used to have a Linux VM in my XP laptop, then I formatted it to Ubuntu with a XP VM.

aikah 10y ago

"Average Joe's" don't put $2000+ in a laptop.

kuon 10y ago

As a developer, I am not unhappy about the new MBP. I have a feeling that they are abandoning me. I can understand that they are focusing on making profit, but at least they should keep me/us informed of the mac future. I want a desktop machine with modern GPU, at least 32gig ram. That I can upgrade if needed. My hackintosh runs fine, but it is, well, a "hack"intosh. And Apple should remember that their platform is very little with no third party developer.

locusm 10y ago
Ive ordered parts for a beefy Hackintosh, for 3 reasons. The 17" MBP that had to have the logic board baked to reflow solder - took Apple 4 years to acknowledge that one. My 15" 2013 MBPr whose battery swelled up to the point of breaking the touch pad. New MBP announcement. Looking forward to user upgrade-able gear for once.

racl101 10y ago

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

alfonsodev 10y ago

I think the idea was to create a machine that inspires creators. Those seniors reading news could be writers documenting their next novel and those kids, potencial creators. I though Apple always sold that you don't need technical skills to be able to create something cool with the computer. This thing that apple was for developers I only read about it since the launch of the new macbook.

coldtea 10y ago

>To everyone surprised by the news, just remember: you are not Apple's target audience anymore. The developers did an amazing job of advertising the Macbook to the general public and making it seem like the cool, sexy thing that professionals use, but it's no longer just for professionals. Two things: They were never "just for professionals" -- they were the "computer for the rest of us". Marketing wise at least. They also were never about raw power. They were never the ultimate number crunching machines nor gaming laptops. And the CEO of a company, executives, journalists, doctors, managers, etc -- people who don't need the latest Nvidia card or 32GB RAM -- are also professionals. For videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, the MBPr 15" is one of the most popular, and well speced machines out there. Individual PC laptops can have this or that spec better, but rarely the all around package (weight, size, sturdiness, touchpad, screen quality, SSD speed, battery, etc) -- and in those rare cases, the price is very close.

eon1 10y ago
> videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day. A lot of people in the audio industry went nuts when Apple stopped letting you add RAM because you could hardly have a serious production machine without maxing it out. After Effects, C4D, Blender, etc. will be rendering for a week straight (if at all). Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers. Ever sat there watching a progress bar for a minute or two just to crop an image? That's what you're proposing as "well spec'd". Your point about non creative professionals does hold water, though - that's the main audience IMO, the tech clueless types who are nevertheless obsessed with being involved with a "premium" brand. And yep, if you just want a couple spreadsheets, some social media, and maybe some reports, they're spec'd phenomenally for that kind of thing.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day. While 32GB would have been nice (especially for video) I've used NLEs professionally and DAWs semi-professionally for years, and it was already 4-5 years ago that DAWs could run almost everything you threw at them in a normal session. 100s of audio tracks and tons of effects. And we still have freeze etc. Tons of pro musicians still use 3-5 year old laptops or iMacs with 8GB or less just fine. Most pro studios don't even have latest or maxed out Macs (or PCs for that matter) unless the owner is technophile. And for stuff like notation, tracking, mastering etc (as opposed to mixing) cpu power / ram is not even needed. >Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers. Where was that ever an issue and on what jobs? Pro designers did the most complex composites and layouts, for print media and billboards, 5 and 10 and 15 years ago. It's not like resolutions have gone up since then (the high dpi computer screens are nothing much compared to high quality large sized print jobs people did in Photoshop even 10 or 20 years ago).

rorykoehler 10y ago

>>they don't need your business anymore. Who's going to build all the iOS apps?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

edblarney 10y ago

Developers were never really the 'target' of Apple. They are small demographic. Also - that a 'new' laptop is outselling a highly fragmented group of other laptops for a few days is completely unsurprising. Wait for 3 months, then compare laptop sales across the board - I don't think much will change.