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Wow looks like Apple has abandoned every bad decision on the MBP for the past 5 years in one swoop. No touchbar, increased key travel, added back hdmi/sd/headph
by mizzack 5y ago
Wow looks like Apple has abandoned every bad decision on the MBP for the past 5 years in one swoop. No touchbar, increased key travel, added back hdmi/sd/headphone/power jacks.
Plus bumped up RAM limit, M1, new displays, 120Hz... Wow.
- Sephr 5y agoBringing back a dedicated HDMI port is a downgrade. This port can only do 4K 60Hz HDR (implying HDMI 2.0), which is inferior to previously-supported standards in addition to taking up space as a single-purpose port. The Intel MacBook Pro 16 supports DisplayPort 1.4 over USB-C, which can do 4K 98Hz HDR, and doesn't take up dedicated single-purpose ports.
- timmg 5y agoCan't you still use the USB-C ports for the higher bandwidth if you want to (and have the dongle?)
- mvid 5y agoBut you can't use the HDMI port as a USB-C. I would much rather another USB C to an HDMI, which never gets used
- bombcar 5y agoI doubt there’s another USB C bus available to be used so it’s not really stealing away one(or if it is it’s shared with other peripherals built in).
- jrochkind1 5y agoTrue, but you also have a dedicated power port, when before if you wanted to plug in that had to be one of the USB-C's too.
- Bud 5y agoNope! Not a downgrade. Distinct upgrade. You are aware this machine has THREE Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports, yes?
- fomine3 5y agoTheoretically Apple could implement HDMI 2.1 that supports 4K/120Hz and above with DSC. Maybe they think HDMI is just for a compatibility.
- Fiahil 5y agoNot a dowgrade as many conference rooms are still equiped with HDMI and it's still more practical to use when you are unsure about the setup.
- xanaxagoras 5y ago> Wow looks like Apple has abandoned every bad decision on the MBP for the past 5 years in one swoop. Not unless they disabled all of the spying in MacOS. Doesn't matter if you bought it, it still isn't yours. Hard pass. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078034&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25078034&p=2
- can16358p 5y agoDid they ever remove the headphone jack?
- simonbarker87 5y agoNo but a lot of people seem to think they removed it, they didn’t
- masklinn 5y agoThey did remove the input jack with G3 (2012-2015), and S/PDIF (digital line out) with G4 (touchbar) though.
- schrijver 5y agoThere’s optical digital line out up until the 2015 Macbook Pro, sending light out of the headphone jack. You need to add a little plastic adapter compared to standard TOSLINK cables, which I presume were getting too big.
- masklinn 5y ago> There’s optical digital line out up until the 2015 Macbook Pro, sending light out of the headphone jack. Yes, that's what I wrote was dropped in G4.
- petercooper 5y agoIt's interesting how silently they dropped the optical line out, I never saw it mentioned. I needed it for something on my iMac Pro the other week and was boggled that it didn't support it. The argument I read about it was the DAC is so high quality now, digital out is simply not needed.
- kefabean 5y agoI’m still slightly bemused as to why they dropped optical out from the Apple TV too. It’s not like it’s supposed to be a media hub at the centre of your house or they run a music streaming service or anything!
- robertoandred 5y agoAnd they made a new bad decision: a notch.
- hamstergene 5y agomacOS has grey menu bar where the notch is, that stays unused 100% of the time.
- bluescrn 5y agoThe XCode menus on my 2015 MBP 15" go well into the 'notch zone'.
- sings 5y agoYeah I wonder how this will be resolved. The screenshots of Photoshop on the Apple store page show a menu that runs quite close to the notch. Will menu items be truncated or pop up randomly on the other side? How will it work for less terse languages like German?
- dmitriid 5y agoI routinely don't have enough space there. Any professional app (and these laptops are squarely aimed at professionals) will eat into this "unused gray space". Add a few apps that add ions to the menu bar, and suddenly you already have no space even without the notch.
- spullara 5y agoThis isn't a bad decision. They are literally adding more space on the screen that would normally be useless.
- ghostly_s 5y agoThere is a generous bezel remaining below the screen. They could simply shift the display downward and have the same size display in the exact same footprint without the notch. It's a purely aesthetic choice.
- dirkg 5y agotouchbar was actually nice
- ofou 5y agoplease, ban this guy ahahah
- mFixman 5y agoDamn, I liked the touchbar :-( I think that Apple's biggest mistake is not making it more obvious that the bar is editable in all programs. It becomes pretty useful when you can keep only the functions that you use the most.
- ubermonkey 5y agoBecause I work at home and never travel anymore, I've been using a late 2019 15" for 2 years and I'm not sure I've had it in "laptop mode" often enough to have a real opinion about the touchbar. I use an external keyboard and a pair of 4K screens with it, so it runs closed at the back of my desk. :)
- ant6n 5y agoFunction keys should be usable in many programs as well...
- TheJoeMan 5y agoSince the non-touchbar folks across the internet are more vocal, I love the Touch Bar. What's sad is by killing it on the new MBP, they essentially kill it on my laptop as less and less developers will care to implement it. I wonder how long Apple software like Xcode will support the Touch Bar. Edit: times it's superior to buttons: scrubbing videos, changing Safari tabs
- mrtranscendence 5y agoI can't imagine having so few Safari tabs open that changing tabs with the touchbar would be useful ... Honestly, I'm on the side of "the touchbar is inoffensive". Never bothered me one bit, but I don't use it anyway so I don't care that they're removing it*. I'm sympathetic, though. I always liked the butterfly keyboard, and the general opinion on that has been made patently obvious. * I wonder if this has to do with the fact that I never look at the keyboard, so it just doesn't occur to me to use the touchbar, same as I never saw the point of keyboard backlighting.
- zarzavat 5y agoIt's not that people are against the Touch Bar. People are for physical function keys. If they had added the Touch Bar in addition to physical function keys then there would have been less resistance to it.
- ksec 5y ago>increased key travel I hope that is true. But they only state and quote >For the first time, Magic Keyboard brings a full‑height function key row to MacBook Pro — with the tactile feel of mechanical keys that pros love. Nothing really concrete about Key travel.
- shortstuffsushi 5y agoAs someone who bought a mid-2018 with the escape key on the touchbar, then watched the next model have it's own key, then watched all these ports get added back... I'm extremely frustrated to say the least. Trade in is valued at $840. If I had known either of these two updates would have gone "backwards" like this, I would have waited to purchase
- benwaffle 5y agoJust swap CapsLock with Esc
- WhompingWindows 5y agoSeems Apple loves to Think Different every couple of years. They make these paradigm shifts so quickly, it's a blessing and a curse.
- csomar 5y agoSame here. I bought the mid-2018 for $3.5k (full spec). It had battery issues and now I think it's mostly just junk especially that it's quite slow with the new macOS.
- behnamoh 5y agoYou should never upgrade to the latest macOS due to performance loss issues.
- diebeforei485 5y agoIt depends. Sometimes macOS upgrades are worth it for new features. For me personally, I installed Big Sur for the ability to use Stereo HomePods as an AirPlay output (previously you could only choose one, but not both in stereo). It made my movie/tv/video watching experience so much better that it's worth the downside of slightly lowered performance. That said, because macOS is not a fully sandboxed system like iOS, it's probably worth doing an erase install every 3-4 years, especially if performance has dropped noticeably. I did this with the 11.4 mid-cycle update earlier this year and it was helpful on my 2014 machine.
- trebor 5y agoActually, they kept one of the oldest mistakes: overcharging. $400 to upgrade from 16GB RAM to 32GB. $200 to upgrade to 1TB SSD. These guys control the whole supply chain without middlemen like WD, Samsung, Crucial, etc — and they charge basically double what anyone else charges. I'm not paying $2k for a laptop below what I need as a developer, when <$2k from literally anyone else will get what I need. Apple is ridiculous. Inflation is murder right now, and they JACK the prices without delivering more value.
- amelius 5y agoGet used to it. Apple will likely bust their competition at some point.
- Toutouxc 5y ago> I'm not paying $2k for a laptop below what I need as a developer, when <$2k from literally anyone else will get what I need. That's perfectly fine, you don't have to use a MacBook if the value isn't there for you.
- squeaky-clean 5y agoAre they also not allowed to comment about it?
- spacedcowboy 5y agoJust seems a bit pointless, that's all. I'm never going to buy a Bugatti Chiron, but you won't find me going to their forums and bleating on about how the gas mileage isn't as good as my Ford Focus...
- trebor 5y agoI have used Apple products because if you calculate how long they last and the original cost, they cost less over a longer period of time. Or at least they did. This loss in value is what I’m complaining about. And this isn’t Apple’s forums, now is it?
- black3r 5y agobumped up RAM limit but the RAM price is now more than triple the consumer price Top-Tier 32GB RAM costs 150€ and the Apple 32GB RAM costs 460€.
- andai 5y ago3X is standard Apple tax for many years (also for storage).
- a-dub 5y agoit seems the "one last thing" this time, is, well, a notch, at the top of the screen, on a proprietary system that makes heavy use of the top of the screen as part of the ui. the whole value proposition of the apple ecosystem is that it is all beautifully designed, integrated and pleasing such that it inspires you to go forth and design beautiful things. but now they've gone and stuck a webcam in the middle of the menu bar. jobs is probably rolling over in his grave.
- seviu 5y agoI just scrolled through the posts and I felt they were laggy. I think I am already biased to 120hz even without having experienced it myself.
- soheil 5y agoHeadphone jack never went away. Increase key travel was also fixed a few years ago. What do you mean by power jack? USB-C ports function as power jacks. Magsafe is incredible and I'm so glad it's back.
- whydoyoucare 5y agoThis ^^^^. Absolutely!
- Alex3917 5y ago> Plus bumped up RAM limit, M1, new displays, 120Hz... Wow. They couldn't use LPDDR5 RAM with Intel chips. They wanted to bump up the RAM years ago, but couldn't do it until now.
- fastball 5y ago2019 16" maxed out at 64GB, which is the same as the M1 Max.
- yurishimo 5y agoThey specifically mentioned the speed. DDR4 is used in 99% of PCs right now. Apple can use faster memory on the die directly.
- fastball 5y agoAh true, there might be a bit of crossed wires here. It seems like @mizzack was using "bumped up" to mean the amount of RAM, while @Alex3917 used the same phrase but this time to mean LPDDR5/speed, but obviously I interpreted the latter as amount (because that was the context).
- Alex3917 5y agoI was also talking about the amount of RAM. The reason they didn't allow people to increase the RAM at all for a couple years as because of the power consumption. After people freaked out they eventually added an option, but kind of discouraged it. I had forgotten that they even added that option though.
- Bud 5y agoSome of this had been previously fixed but not noticed by some: keyboard was fixed on the last Intel MBP models. Headphone jack was never gone to begin with. RAM had already been boosted.
- TMWNN 5y ago>Wow looks like Apple has abandoned every bad decision on the MBP for the past 5 years in one swoop. No touchbar, increased key travel, added back hdmi/sd/headphone/power jacks. It's taken two years to fully undo Jonathan Ive's obsessions.
- krzyk 5y ago> headphone Did they remove it? I checked my wifes Macbook Air (the one with 2 USB-C ports) and it has headphone jack, did they remove it only in MacBooks Pro? > increased key travel Is that good? I prefer smaller key travel, makes typing faster.
- madeofpalk 5y agoNo they never removed the headphone jack.