5 ms·

> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. > I run a browser [...] Building a single config & platform - with no

> The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane. > I run a browser [...] Building a single config & platform - with no other significant processes running - will cause OOM crashes on 12GB CI boxes with swap files enabled, when 4-5x 4GB linker process spin up in parallel when building my projects. This is my bread and butter, and it's still way too slow for my tastes on a 16GB box that isn't swapping excessively, which is the new MBP's maximum "give Apple all my money" spec. Your day to day works on it? Great. Mine hasn't for around a year at least, nevermind next year's. I could theoretically use it as a dedicated docs machine, or as a dumb terminal to an actually decent machine... or I could buy a quad-core laptop with twice the RAM - throw in an extra 4K monitor for good measure - and still end up paying less than a MBP configured with half the cores and down 0.6Ghz in speed. > It's not just a about specs, especially in a laptop. Versatility, weight, battery, ease of use. MBP's max specs aren't enough to handle my workload. MBP's 8GB models may not even handle Chrome, if the people bellow are to be believed. That's not "versatile". Weight is just another spec - 33% (~1.5lbs) lighter than the laptop I'm comparing against is nice, but not "who cares about any of the other spec" nice. Battery? More specs! Battery wattage just went down, as pointed out in the post you're replying to. Ease of use - finally something squishy and subjective! ...I'll prefer the numpad over the touch bar. Perhaps, on that front, I'm a weirdo. But hey, if it works for your specific case, and you like 'em, enjoy!

chrischen 10y ago
Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%. Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing) to satisfy your computing needs is unreasonable. They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most. For your use case I recommend buying a spec'd up PC, such as a gaming laptop or desktop replacement laptop.
- uabstraction 10y ago
  Except no one's asking them to "gimp" the available models. People are asking for more options in the high performance space. If Apple doesn't make it, you can't simply go to HP and get it there. You have no choice. It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack. Apple is forcing a segment of it's customers to abandon it's ecosystem to continue getting their work done . Their lack of reassuring response insinuates that macOS is a non-scalable toy platform. I have no horses in this race myself, but if I had hundreds+ invested in Mac software and accessories, with no machines available on the market to handle my workload, I would be pretty bent.
  - josteink 10y ago
    > It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack. Considering how all the tools you mentioned were written for and runs best on Linux, I don't buy your argument. You'll have to leave a DE behind. Big deal.
    - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
      What's your setup for doing native iOS builds, code signing, and debugging (including shaders, opengl context setup, etc.) from Linux? I'd love to have a viable alternative to XCode.
      - josteink 10y ago
        Running VNC into a $200 Mac Mini stored in a server-cabinet.
        seanp2k2 10y ago
        I guess if you get the 2012 model you can even get that with 4 cores and 16GB RAM.
- y4mi 10y ago
  urm, isnt the hole point of having a 'pro' version of your product that it can handle workloads the previous poster mentioned? i'm pretty sure his problem is only that the new mbp has the specs of a budged laptop, at best. Which is perfectly fine for most usecases, hardware has gotten pretty good over the last few years. still, shouldn't qualify as a 'professional' version.
  - nihonde 10y ago
    "Pro" is not some standard measurement. In fact, it's marketing above all else. They could call it Plus or Extra or Super. It's not required to fit your notion of what a professional does. For example, I'm both a professional developer and a professional lawyer. The new MBP meets both of my pro requirement sets.
- pavanky 10y ago
  > Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1% Dude, are you seriously suggesting a laptop marketed for developers not be used by people writing and compiling code? Seriously any project of decent size written in a systems language just consumes all the ram you can throw at. If you think this only happens to 1% of the developers, you need to step out of your echo chamber and see what other developers are doing.
  - gaius 10y ago
    Dude, are you seriously suggesting a laptop marketed for developers not be used by people writing and compiling code? I know right - it's like everyone has forgotten that Pro means "for professionals". And also forgot that the booming sales of the iPhone and iPad owe everything to the ecosystem of apps and content created on Macs. People doing 3D, engineering simulations, computational bio and chem, financial modelling, yadda yadda, there are loads of people who can make use of every byte of RAM and every core for Real Work. So some guy can make websites adequately on a smaller machine - he or she needs to look up and realize that that's a tiny corner of what computing is about...
    - sjwright 10y ago
      Nobody for whom absolute CPU power is paramount is crunching on a laptop anyway. The sorts of examples you cite are better off implemented on a grunty workstation or even cloud computing. If portable access is needed, remoting in is the answer.
      - gaius 10y ago
        For many people these days their laptop is their only computer and they value the ability to work without cheap, fast connectivity, while traveling say. You know, the entire use case for portable computers existing at all.
        deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
- MaulingMonkey 10y ago
  > Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%. This was on a small - fairly certain <1MLOC - codebase. I'm small fry. The only unusual thing would perhaps be having small enough compilation times (due to e.g. incremental compiles and small changes not rebuilding the world) for linking of multiple projects to overlap. Boost and the Linux Kernel, noodling in at closer to ~20MLOC, or VS2012's ~50MLOC, might spend more time compiling in their typical edit cycles. > Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing) I suppose I'm having difficulty here seeing how a small weight and size increase for more DDR chips, or a larger battery, is going to "completely gimp" the macbook. Since I already touched on dev - I'll let someone else touch on video editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJtrQ5CcCN0&feature=youtu.be&t=124 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJtrQ5CcCN0&feature=youtu.be... . Things will only get worse on that front as 4K becomes popular. > They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most. Agreed. I'm just not sure they have covered most "pro" users.
  - mpweiher 10y ago
    Maybe the problem isn't Apple's hardware, but 20-50MLOC code bases? Xerox PARC had, effectively, a simple version of what we consider "Personal Computing": word-processing, E-Mail, laser printers, software development, proto-Internet. Alan Kay claims it was less than 20KLOC, and that's a plausible figure considering the Alto had 128K RAM and a 2.5MB disk pack. MS Office alone is >400MLOC. That's 20000x the code, or 20KLOC^2. There is no way it is 20000 times better or more useful. However, let's assume for the sake of argument that it is 100x better/more useful (something I'd consider dubious, but it's a good upper bound). That still leaves a factor 200x unaccounted for. Or 99.5% of the code. TBL's first web-browser was ~5KLOC, took him a couple of months to write, in his spare time IIRC. It included editing. NCSA Mosaic took a team of five one year to complete, was 100KLOC and did not include editing. The current (last time I checked) version of Firefox is 13MLOC. Is it 2500x better? And if you think compile-times are the biggest problem with multi-MLOC code-bases, you're not paying attention.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
PebblesHD 10y ago
Hate to throw in yet another counter-argument, but here goes: I'd consider myself one of the main target markets for the MacBook Pro, and have for several years been a faithful consumer of them. I compile multi-gigabyte codebases on a semi-regular basis in addition to database work and number crunching that would put a normal consumer laptop totally out of its depth. Its the combination of the ability to do this easily and with great battery life and general usability that makes my MacBook so nice. I'm convinced that if you're doing more heavy-hitting work than what I throw at my laptop day in day out then a MacBook or any easily portable device isn't for you, and a 2 inch thick Dell monster with a proper desktop chipset and memory controller is what you're really after, or even a couple of c4.xlarge instances running in AWS with a MacBook as the client. For any load too much for my little notebook its straight into amazon and I go get a coffee.
- tw04 10y ago
  No offense, but everytime I hear a response like this, I can't help but think the person typing it is so engrossed with the Mac world, or so desperate to defend Apple, that they haven't spent 30 seconds look for alternatives. Razer has made the power machine every is asking for in a Macbook like format. A company that makes less in total yearly INCOME than Apple makes in INTEREST on a monthly basis. http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - seanp2k2 10y ago
    Yeah, the blade pro is pretty cool, but it's still consumer kit. No pro GPU, no ECC RAM, no xeon, no smartcard reader (non-starter for tons of people working with classified stuff / government contractors). Looks like a great gaming / development machine though, esp if you're doing AI/ML stuff that can take advantage of that awesome GPU. Keyboard looks nice to use as well. For the price, I agree that it makes the MBP look like a joke. The touchpad on the MBP has been the best you could get for about a decade though, and I still haven't used any laptop where the trackpad is even close to as good.
adamlett 10y ago
What I find so frustrating about this discussion is the inability so many seem to have to take themselves out of the argument and separate the two notions that 1) this machine does not fit their needs in particular and 2) this is a great machine for a lot of other people. Also, how hung up people are on the word pro. Whether this machine is for you or not, can we all please just agree that pro doesn't mean anything other than the most expensive option? Certainly, noone is saying that Apple aims to serve every single market of people who self identify as pro users. If you think this machine is inadequate to do the kind of work that you do, then maybe, just maybe, it wasn't intended to? It doesn't mean that it's inadequate when it comes to countless other pro tasks. One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm...
- gaius 10y ago
  Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade and that they will explore alternate solutions. Your argument is silly anyway, in the 1980s people were using Macs a tiny fraction of the power of today "professionally" for DTP, does it logically follow now that anyone complaining that a modern machine isn't suitable for modern use cases, was never a "real professional"?
  - adamlett 10y ago
    But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade. That's not what the grandparent was saying. She was saying that the new MacBook was inadequate for her needs. Your argument is silly anyway No yours is. Clearly, yesterday's hardware is inadequate for the software of today. But what I am saying is that hardware of today is probably ok for the software of yesterday.
- MaulingMonkey 10y ago
  > What I find so frustrating about this discussion is the inability so many seem to have to take themselves out of the argument and separate the two notions that 1) this machine does not fit their needs in particular and 2) this is a great machine for a lot of other people. This lack of separation cuts both ways. I read "The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane" as dismissing the latter of: "This machine is a great machine for me." and "This machine is not a great machine for a lot of other people." > One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm... Ahh, that doesn't quite follow. Aftermarket upgrades have been around to e.g. bring previous gen MBPs up to 16GB for years. Some people have found that their professional needs are expanding faster than the hardware is, and where they were once avid users, they're now being forced to reconsider their options. And then there are those who have been reluctantly limping along with computationally inadequate hardware because they're tied to it for some reason. There's a whole spectrum out there.
muninn_ 10y ago
Buy a desktop then.
- gurkendoktor 10y ago
  Apple hasn't updated the Mac mini and Mac Pro in years. The iMac is okay, but it's painful to buy a 2015 computer at 2015 prices, and I don't really need a 5K screen.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    Buy a windows desktop then I guess? The issue I have is that people want desktop power in a laptop. Yes, I'd love to have the latest Nvidia chip in my pencil-thin MacBook but there are trade offs. The 32gb ram issue. Well, they can design for the 99%, or they can design for the 1%. Their choice is pretty clear. The sales numbers are pretty clear. The vast majority of people don't use even 8gb of ram, let alone 16. I would like to see a 32gb option, but Intel has not released the chip that Apple needs. That's on Intel.
patcheudor 10y ago
I have a MacBook Pro but my other laptop is an HP Workstation running 32GB of RAM for good reason: $ java -d64 -Xms12g -Xmx24g BigDataApp Personally I would have been willing to trade battery life for 32GB of RAM because today I must carry two laptops.
- danudey 10y ago
  I doubt most people would make that same trade, though.

chrischen 10y ago

Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%. Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing) to satisfy your computing needs is unreasonable. They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most. For your use case I recommend buying a spec'd up PC, such as a gaming laptop or desktop replacement laptop.

uabstraction 10y ago
Except no one's asking them to "gimp" the available models. People are asking for more options in the high performance space. If Apple doesn't make it, you can't simply go to HP and get it there. You have no choice. It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack. Apple is forcing a segment of it's customers to abandon it's ecosystem to continue getting their work done . Their lack of reassuring response insinuates that macOS is a non-scalable toy platform. I have no horses in this race myself, but if I had hundreds+ invested in Mac software and accessories, with no machines available on the market to handle my workload, I would be pretty bent.
- josteink 10y ago
  > It's either run out of memory, or abandon your whole OS and software stack. Considering how all the tools you mentioned were written for and runs best on Linux, I don't buy your argument. You'll have to leave a DE behind. Big deal.
  - MaulingMonkey 10y ago
    What's your setup for doing native iOS builds, code signing, and debugging (including shaders, opengl context setup, etc.) from Linux? I'd love to have a viable alternative to XCode.
    - josteink 10y ago
      Running VNC into a $200 Mac Mini stored in a server-cabinet.
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        I guess if you get the 2012 model you can even get that with 4 cores and 16GB RAM.
y4mi 10y ago
urm, isnt the hole point of having a 'pro' version of your product that it can handle workloads the previous poster mentioned? i'm pretty sure his problem is only that the new mbp has the specs of a budged laptop, at best. Which is perfectly fine for most usecases, hardware has gotten pretty good over the last few years. still, shouldn't qualify as a 'professional' version.
- nihonde 10y ago
  "Pro" is not some standard measurement. In fact, it's marketing above all else. They could call it Plus or Extra or Super. It's not required to fit your notion of what a professional does. For example, I'm both a professional developer and a professional lawyer. The new MBP meets both of my pro requirement sets.
pavanky 10y ago
> Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1% Dude, are you seriously suggesting a laptop marketed for developers not be used by people writing and compiling code? Seriously any project of decent size written in a systems language just consumes all the ram you can throw at. If you think this only happens to 1% of the developers, you need to step out of your echo chamber and see what other developers are doing.
- gaius 10y ago
  Dude, are you seriously suggesting a laptop marketed for developers not be used by people writing and compiling code? I know right - it's like everyone has forgotten that Pro means "for professionals". And also forgot that the booming sales of the iPhone and iPad owe everything to the ecosystem of apps and content created on Macs. People doing 3D, engineering simulations, computational bio and chem, financial modelling, yadda yadda, there are loads of people who can make use of every byte of RAM and every core for Real Work. So some guy can make websites adequately on a smaller machine - he or she needs to look up and realize that that's a tiny corner of what computing is about...
  - sjwright 10y ago
    Nobody for whom absolute CPU power is paramount is crunching on a laptop anyway. The sorts of examples you cite are better off implemented on a grunty workstation or even cloud computing. If portable access is needed, remoting in is the answer.
    - gaius 10y ago
      For many people these days their laptop is their only computer and they value the ability to work without cheap, fast connectivity, while traveling say. You know, the entire use case for portable computers existing at all.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
MaulingMonkey 10y ago
> Whatever you're using it for, clearly it's the 1%. This was on a small - fairly certain <1MLOC - codebase. I'm small fry. The only unusual thing would perhaps be having small enough compilation times (due to e.g. incremental compiles and small changes not rebuilding the world) for linking of multiple projects to overlap. Boost and the Linux Kernel, noodling in at closer to ~20MLOC, or VS2012's ~50MLOC, might spend more time compiling in their typical edit cycles. > Expecting Apple to completely gimp the macbook for the average pro user (dev, photoshop, video editing) I suppose I'm having difficulty here seeing how a small weight and size increase for more DDR chips, or a larger battery, is going to "completely gimp" the macbook. Since I already touched on dev - I'll let someone else touch on video editing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJtrQ5CcCN0&feature=youtu.be&t=124 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJtrQ5CcCN0&feature=youtu.be... . Things will only get worse on that front as 4K becomes popular. > They can't cover all use cases, but they can cover most. Agreed. I'm just not sure they have covered most "pro" users.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  Maybe the problem isn't Apple's hardware, but 20-50MLOC code bases? Xerox PARC had, effectively, a simple version of what we consider "Personal Computing": word-processing, E-Mail, laser printers, software development, proto-Internet. Alan Kay claims it was less than 20KLOC, and that's a plausible figure considering the Alto had 128K RAM and a 2.5MB disk pack. MS Office alone is >400MLOC. That's 20000x the code, or 20KLOC^2. There is no way it is 20000 times better or more useful. However, let's assume for the sake of argument that it is 100x better/more useful (something I'd consider dubious, but it's a good upper bound). That still leaves a factor 200x unaccounted for. Or 99.5% of the code. TBL's first web-browser was ~5KLOC, took him a couple of months to write, in his spare time IIRC. It included editing. NCSA Mosaic took a team of five one year to complete, was 100KLOC and did not include editing. The current (last time I checked) version of Firefox is 13MLOC. Is it 2500x better? And if you think compile-times are the biggest problem with multi-MLOC code-bases, you're not paying attention.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

PebblesHD 10y ago

Hate to throw in yet another counter-argument, but here goes: I'd consider myself one of the main target markets for the MacBook Pro, and have for several years been a faithful consumer of them. I compile multi-gigabyte codebases on a semi-regular basis in addition to database work and number crunching that would put a normal consumer laptop totally out of its depth. Its the combination of the ability to do this easily and with great battery life and general usability that makes my MacBook so nice. I'm convinced that if you're doing more heavy-hitting work than what I throw at my laptop day in day out then a MacBook or any easily portable device isn't for you, and a 2 inch thick Dell monster with a proper desktop chipset and memory controller is what you're really after, or even a couple of c4.xlarge instances running in AWS with a MacBook as the client. For any load too much for my little notebook its straight into amazon and I go get a coffee.

tw04 10y ago
No offense, but everytime I hear a response like this, I can't help but think the person typing it is so engrossed with the Mac world, or so desperate to defend Apple, that they haven't spent 30 seconds look for alternatives. Razer has made the power machine every is asking for in a Macbook like format. A company that makes less in total yearly INCOME than Apple makes in INTEREST on a monthly basis. http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- seanp2k2 10y ago
  Yeah, the blade pro is pretty cool, but it's still consumer kit. No pro GPU, no ECC RAM, no xeon, no smartcard reader (non-starter for tons of people working with classified stuff / government contractors). Looks like a great gaming / development machine though, esp if you're doing AI/ML stuff that can take advantage of that awesome GPU. Keyboard looks nice to use as well. For the price, I agree that it makes the MBP look like a joke. The touchpad on the MBP has been the best you could get for about a decade though, and I still haven't used any laptop where the trackpad is even close to as good.

adamlett 10y ago

What I find so frustrating about this discussion is the inability so many seem to have to take themselves out of the argument and separate the two notions that 1) this machine does not fit their needs in particular and 2) this is a great machine for a lot of other people. Also, how hung up people are on the word pro. Whether this machine is for you or not, can we all please just agree that pro doesn't mean anything other than the most expensive option? Certainly, noone is saying that Apple aims to serve every single market of people who self identify as pro users. If you think this machine is inadequate to do the kind of work that you do, then maybe, just maybe, it wasn't intended to? It doesn't mean that it's inadequate when it comes to countless other pro tasks. One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm...

gaius 10y ago
Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade and that they will explore alternate solutions. Your argument is silly anyway, in the 1980s people were using Macs a tiny fraction of the power of today "professionally" for DTP, does it logically follow now that anyone complaining that a modern machine isn't suitable for modern use cases, was never a "real professional"?
- adamlett 10y ago
  But that's not what people are saying: they are saying there is no reason to upgrade. That's not what the grandparent was saying. She was saying that the new MacBook was inadequate for her needs. Your argument is silly anyway No yours is. Clearly, yesterday's hardware is inadequate for the software of today. But what I am saying is that hardware of today is probably ok for the software of yesterday.
MaulingMonkey 10y ago
> What I find so frustrating about this discussion is the inability so many seem to have to take themselves out of the argument and separate the two notions that 1) this machine does not fit their needs in particular and 2) this is a great machine for a lot of other people. This lack of separation cuts both ways. I read "The claim that the new macbook will have issues with day to day performance is insane" as dismissing the latter of: "This machine is a great machine for me." and "This machine is not a great machine for a lot of other people." > One final thing: This machine is more powerful than the ones it replaces. Ergo, if it's not computationally up to the task of some pro task, then its predecessor certainly wasn't either. Which must mean that many of the people complaining weren't Mac users to begin with. Hmmm... Ahh, that doesn't quite follow. Aftermarket upgrades have been around to e.g. bring previous gen MBPs up to 16GB for years. Some people have found that their professional needs are expanding faster than the hardware is, and where they were once avid users, they're now being forced to reconsider their options. And then there are those who have been reluctantly limping along with computationally inadequate hardware because they're tied to it for some reason. There's a whole spectrum out there.

muninn_ 10y ago

Buy a desktop then.

gurkendoktor 10y ago
Apple hasn't updated the Mac mini and Mac Pro in years. The iMac is okay, but it's painful to buy a 2015 computer at 2015 prices, and I don't really need a 5K screen.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  Buy a windows desktop then I guess? The issue I have is that people want desktop power in a laptop. Yes, I'd love to have the latest Nvidia chip in my pencil-thin MacBook but there are trade offs. The 32gb ram issue. Well, they can design for the 99%, or they can design for the 1%. Their choice is pretty clear. The sales numbers are pretty clear. The vast majority of people don't use even 8gb of ram, let alone 16. I would like to see a 32gb option, but Intel has not released the chip that Apple needs. That's on Intel.

patcheudor 10y ago

I have a MacBook Pro but my other laptop is an HP Workstation running 32GB of RAM for good reason: $ java -d64 -Xms12g -Xmx24g BigDataApp Personally I would have been willing to trade battery life for 32GB of RAM because today I must carry two laptops.

danudey 10y ago
I doubt most people would make that same trade, though.