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As a side issue to the current crop of first-adopter issues (I'll wait till this model is on its second generation - then I'm sure it will be a great piece of k

As a side issue to the current crop of first-adopter issues (I'll wait till this model is on its second generation - then I'm sure it will be a great piece of kit). I was thinking about the outrage concerning the denomination of 'Pro' on these models - with people crying that they're no longer suitable for 'Pro' use but I think I've come to the conclusion that the 'Pro' user of 5 years ago is a dying breed - Apple sees a future where they no longer exist. Think about it - music production, video editing, photo editing, graphic design, coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software. Huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields and the new MacBook Pro recognises this - software development (and other areas) are moving increasingly to the cloud and a huge development machine is no longer a necessity.. I'd suspect that Apple sees the future of its products and services in the cloud and the machines it provides will be slightly different gateways to that future.

kyriakos 10y ago
Maybe for when done for personal use. The same tasks are still difficult and demanding in hardware when done for professional purposes.
rocky1138 10y ago
I develop virtual reality games professionally. I cannot do that on a Mac Pro or a Macbook Pro.
- foldr 10y ago
  Can you do it on any currently existing laptop that is not much heavier and much thicker than a Macbook Pro?
  - slantyyz 10y ago
    There are VR capable (gtx 1060) laptops around the size of the 2012 MacBook Pros.
    - foldr 10y ago
      Ok, could you link to one?
      - emp_zealoth 10y ago
        Not the parent, but you could literally get off your high horse and google "laptop gtx 1060" I did that and had several options within 10 sec
        foldr 10y ago
        They tend to be 15" or 17". The new 15" Macbook Pro also has better 3D graphics (Radeon Pro 450). It's not as fast as the gtx 1060, but it uses 35W of power in comparison to 120W, and needs less active cooling. Apple generally don't compromise on noise and battery life. I'm sorry for the snarky nature of my previous comment, but in my experience, all of the suggested alternatives require compromises which Apple are justified in not making. I'm not sure why people think that Apple are obliged to make laptops to suit every use case. If you just want a portable desktop, there are plenty of other options.
  - banachtarski 10y ago
    To be fair OP included the Mac Pro. If the top of the line product from Apple's macbook line can't cut it, maybe they shouldn't have abandoned the mac line so prematurely.
- etnos 10y ago
  >virtual reality games Who are buying those? if VR headsets sales numbers are to believe... not that many I get what you said, bu you realize you are in a fringe area of the software industry right?
Waterluvian 10y ago
I get what you're saying. But the things you can't transition to the cloud are microphones, cameras, keyboards, other HIDs. If they see a future where there is no "pro" because we can all be pros, wouldn't you want to reduce the cost of entry as much as possible? Ie. make it trivially easy for anyone to plug almost any HID in and begin authoring content.
gkafkg8y8 10y ago
> the 'Pro' user of 5 years ago is a dying breed... Think about it... coding... huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields... a huge development machine is no longer a necessity Mac (not macbook) pro user here, and I disagree. I bought a mac pro when it came out because it was a mac so it was reliable and intuitive, and the dev environment rocked, AND because it was fast (for the time). My team's builds and tests require a lot of processing power, and our company likes to keep things in-house. I don't think that all of the world has progressed as far into the cloud as you propose, and I just want a fast mac.
thro32 10y ago
16GB was not much even 5 years ago. That "fantastic, accessible software" eats a lot of memory.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  I have 8GB on my laptop and never managed to use more than around 5 GB. Using Visual Studio, Android Studio, Netbeans.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Try running a VM and compiling inside that...
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      You mean like using Swift, D and Rust on a VMWare instance running Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS?
      - rockdoe 10y ago
        Linking some amount of C++ code can get very painful very quickly on a constrained VM.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Linking C++ is painful anywhere, this from the point of view of someone that likes the language since 1993. Modules might finally solve it, but it will a Python3 like story until they get integrated across major compilers, libraries and frameworks.
    - bdcravens 10y ago
      The nature of VMs is that you can assign memory to it. So if your machine is already light, you wouldn't give it much memory to start with, and it'd run (just slower)
santaclaus 10y ago
> Think about it - music production, video editing, photo editing, graphic design, coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software. Huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields and the new MacBook Pro recognises this - software development (and other areas) are moving increasingly to the cloud and a huge development machine is no longer a necessity.. While some of these professions may be moving towards cloud based solutions, video editing especially is still difficult. You'll end up waiting half your life to upload half a terabyte of footage to the cloud before you can start doing any work.
falcolas 10y ago
Calling these "first adopter" issues seems like it's allowing Apple too much leeway. The product line is a decade old, and none of the hardware being used here is untested or unproven. This strikes me as another example of Apple's reality distortion field falling apart at the seams. Why are these issues occurring in the public's view, and not on some Apple developer's workstation or testing lab?
- BoorishBears 10y ago
  >Apple's reality distortion field I always hear talk like this implying Apple's products are only acceptable if they live up to the legend of their hardware and software "just working" Honestly, for me they could put a 100% tax on your average off-the-shelf, not-promising-good-build-quality, already-made-in-the-same-factory-as-a-macbook consumer laptop just to provide OS X with official support and I (and a lot of people I know) would be just fine with it. Of course it doesn't help their bottom line or strategy to tightly couple the OS and their hardware so they'd never do it, but can we stop pretending that all there is to Apple hardware is branding? OS X is a pretty big deal. I'll take average hardware with OS X over average hardware any day.
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    > but can we stop pretending that all there is to Apple hardware is branding? Sure. All there is to Apple hardware and software is branding.
    - BoorishBears 10y ago
      The day I see a Linux distro put together as coherent an experience as OS X is the day I'll agree to that. Even in it's supposed decline, OS X still manages to put together a more compelling UX story than every Linux distro I've ever tried. I get that some people don't really care about the UX their OS provides as long as there's a terminal and deem GUIs as unproductive for those who "really know what they're doing" (I often hear something about moving from their keyboard to their mouse taking too long?) but to me it's paramount. I spend a lot of my life using a computer and I need my desktop environment and the tools I use in it (GUI ones included) to feel like a joy to use, not something I'm trying to duck out of the way of to drop in to a terminal.
etnos 10y ago
Couldn't agree more, I got a 2016 12" Macbook to disbelief of my co workers. Seriously all I do all day is edit text in the cloud, this machine is wonderful for that. I compile the iOS front end once in a while, no problem at all.
vacri 10y ago
> coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software. Coding!?

kyriakos 10y ago

Maybe for when done for personal use. The same tasks are still difficult and demanding in hardware when done for professional purposes.

rocky1138 10y ago

I develop virtual reality games professionally. I cannot do that on a Mac Pro or a Macbook Pro.

foldr 10y ago
Can you do it on any currently existing laptop that is not much heavier and much thicker than a Macbook Pro?
- slantyyz 10y ago
  There are VR capable (gtx 1060) laptops around the size of the 2012 MacBook Pros.
  - foldr 10y ago
    Ok, could you link to one?
    - emp_zealoth 10y ago
      Not the parent, but you could literally get off your high horse and google "laptop gtx 1060" I did that and had several options within 10 sec
      - foldr 10y ago
        They tend to be 15" or 17". The new 15" Macbook Pro also has better 3D graphics (Radeon Pro 450). It's not as fast as the gtx 1060, but it uses 35W of power in comparison to 120W, and needs less active cooling. Apple generally don't compromise on noise and battery life. I'm sorry for the snarky nature of my previous comment, but in my experience, all of the suggested alternatives require compromises which Apple are justified in not making. I'm not sure why people think that Apple are obliged to make laptops to suit every use case. If you just want a portable desktop, there are plenty of other options.
- banachtarski 10y ago
  To be fair OP included the Mac Pro. If the top of the line product from Apple's macbook line can't cut it, maybe they shouldn't have abandoned the mac line so prematurely.
etnos 10y ago
>virtual reality games Who are buying those? if VR headsets sales numbers are to believe... not that many I get what you said, bu you realize you are in a fringe area of the software industry right?

Waterluvian 10y ago

I get what you're saying. But the things you can't transition to the cloud are microphones, cameras, keyboards, other HIDs. If they see a future where there is no "pro" because we can all be pros, wouldn't you want to reduce the cost of entry as much as possible? Ie. make it trivially easy for anyone to plug almost any HID in and begin authoring content.

gkafkg8y8 10y ago

> the 'Pro' user of 5 years ago is a dying breed... Think about it... coding... huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields... a huge development machine is no longer a necessity Mac (not macbook) pro user here, and I disagree. I bought a mac pro when it came out because it was a mac so it was reliable and intuitive, and the dev environment rocked, AND because it was fast (for the time). My team's builds and tests require a lot of processing power, and our company likes to keep things in-house. I don't think that all of the world has progressed as far into the cloud as you propose, and I just want a fast mac.

thro32 10y ago

16GB was not much even 5 years ago. That "fantastic, accessible software" eats a lot of memory.

pjmlp 10y ago
I have 8GB on my laptop and never managed to use more than around 5 GB. Using Visual Studio, Android Studio, Netbeans.
- gcp 10y ago
  Try running a VM and compiling inside that...
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    You mean like using Swift, D and Rust on a VMWare instance running Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS?
    - rockdoe 10y ago
      Linking some amount of C++ code can get very painful very quickly on a constrained VM.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Linking C++ is painful anywhere, this from the point of view of someone that likes the language since 1993. Modules might finally solve it, but it will a Python3 like story until they get integrated across major compilers, libraries and frameworks.
  - bdcravens 10y ago
    The nature of VMs is that you can assign memory to it. So if your machine is already light, you wouldn't give it much memory to start with, and it'd run (just slower)

santaclaus 10y ago

> Think about it - music production, video editing, photo editing, graphic design, coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software. Huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields and the new MacBook Pro recognises this - software development (and other areas) are moving increasingly to the cloud and a huge development machine is no longer a necessity.. While some of these professions may be moving towards cloud based solutions, video editing especially is still difficult. You'll end up waiting half your life to upload half a terabyte of footage to the cloud before you can start doing any work.

falcolas 10y ago

Calling these "first adopter" issues seems like it's allowing Apple too much leeway. The product line is a decade old, and none of the hardware being used here is untested or unproven. This strikes me as another example of Apple's reality distortion field falling apart at the seams. Why are these issues occurring in the public's view, and not on some Apple developer's workstation or testing lab?

BoorishBears 10y ago
>Apple's reality distortion field I always hear talk like this implying Apple's products are only acceptable if they live up to the legend of their hardware and software "just working" Honestly, for me they could put a 100% tax on your average off-the-shelf, not-promising-good-build-quality, already-made-in-the-same-factory-as-a-macbook consumer laptop just to provide OS X with official support and I (and a lot of people I know) would be just fine with it. Of course it doesn't help their bottom line or strategy to tightly couple the OS and their hardware so they'd never do it, but can we stop pretending that all there is to Apple hardware is branding? OS X is a pretty big deal. I'll take average hardware with OS X over average hardware any day.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > but can we stop pretending that all there is to Apple hardware is branding? Sure. All there is to Apple hardware and software is branding.
  - BoorishBears 10y ago
    The day I see a Linux distro put together as coherent an experience as OS X is the day I'll agree to that. Even in it's supposed decline, OS X still manages to put together a more compelling UX story than every Linux distro I've ever tried. I get that some people don't really care about the UX their OS provides as long as there's a terminal and deem GUIs as unproductive for those who "really know what they're doing" (I often hear something about moving from their keyboard to their mouse taking too long?) but to me it's paramount. I spend a lot of my life using a computer and I need my desktop environment and the tools I use in it (GUI ones included) to feel like a joy to use, not something I'm trying to duck out of the way of to drop in to a terminal.

etnos 10y ago

Couldn't agree more, I got a 2016 12" Macbook to disbelief of my co workers. Seriously all I do all day is edit text in the cloud, this machine is wonderful for that. I compile the iOS front end once in a while, no problem at all.

vacri 10y ago

> coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software. Coding!?