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Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro (2016)
- xojoc 5y agoOther threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12834902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12834902 [2016-10-31] (110 comments) https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5ajxlj https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/5ajxlj [2016-11-01] (149 comments) All discussions: https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/https%3A//blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the_new_macbook_pro/ https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/https%3A//blog.pinboard.in/20... Discussions with similar title: https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/Benjamin%20Button%20Reviews%20The%20New%20MacBook%20Pro%20%282016%29 https://discussions.xojoc.pw/q/Benjamin%20Button%20Reviews%2... Archive: https://archive.md/newest/https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the_new_macbook_pro/ https://archive.md/newest/https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/b...
- arexxbifs 5y agoMakes me think of the "Surface Tension" strip by Joel Watson: http://hijinksensue.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2012-06-19-surface-tension.jpg http://hijinksensue.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/2012-06-1...
- valine 5y agoOther than the Touch ID bit it’s hilariously accurate, even down to the trackpad size.
- methyl 5y agothankfully! I would despise removal of the touch id
- gnicholas 5y agoSpot on, except for: > Despite the many improvements, Apple is actually dropping the price on its flagship 15" MacBook Pro by $400 I would have been happy if the price had stayed the same or even gone up a bit. But the jump to $2k (which is $2,500 including AppleCare and tax) is a bridge too far. I'll keep suffering with my butterfly keyboard until amazing futuristic features like HDMI and SD trickle down into the more affordable machines. /s
- paxys 5y ago$2K for the cheapest possible build. Add in a couple upgdades (1TB SSD, 32GB RAM) and it isn't hard to hit $3K+. There are great machines but a bit too pricey for my liking.
- ZetaZero 5y agoThree years ago, my COO bought a $5,100 MacBook Pro.
- wavefunction 5y agoA virtual machine here or there for your spreadsheet and email apps and it really starts adding up.
- masklinn 5y agoThe top end is now above $6k, though most of that is down to the $2k you drop on an 8TB SSD.
- resters 5y agoI think the price point sets the stage for a lower cost offering in the $699-$1299 range that will not be branded as "pro" and will likely have more of the eco cores and incredible battery life.
- 5y ago
- omarhaneef 5y agoRight a review for the MB pro 2026: The new USB-Cs allow you to transmit power and data. The fingerprint reader gives you an extra layer of security and saves you from constantly typing in new passwords. The one complaint is the [some peripheral that goes bad] The joke is they go around in a cycle and everyone notes with a mix of praise and nostalgia how things have changed.
- bla3 5y agoI do wish one of those USB-C ports was a USB-A port. I still need adapters multiple times a week.
- tumblewit 5y agoI feel like the only complaint of the 2016 MBP was keyboard and ports. The M chips are literally a lottery at this point. Apple making their own chips is probably a rare thing in any business where the maker of a product eventually makes the most complicated part of the product themselves from scratch which only a handful of other people in the industry have managed in 2 decades. Yes iPhone chips were designed by Apple for quite some time but a general purpose computer is a lot more different than a heavily controlled App Store only device.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoThey aren't making a chip from scratch though--they've licensed an ISA and built a derivative design customized to their needs. This isn't to knock the work Apple has done--it's not trivial and clearly not everyone else is able or willing to do it. But going from absolute zero and inventing an entire new ISA, all of the tooling for it, etc. is an order of magnitude more work for both Apple and all of its developers. They made a smart move to use ARM's ISA and liberal licensing that allows them to build on top of it and make exactly the hardware they need.
- Tagbert 5y agoThe ISA is roughly equivalent to an API. It specifies how to talk to the chip but does not define how it is implemented. Apple has done a lot of custom design of their chips to optimize them for use with Mac OS and Mac software. This is not just Apple copying a chip design.
- duskwuff 5y ago> They aren't making a chip from scratch though For all intents and purposes, they are. None of Apple's SoCs since the A6 (2012) have been based on ARM's Cortex-A cores; the CPU design is fully in-house at this point.
- runako 5y ago> None of Apple's SoCs since the A6 (2012) Yes, but the M1 is nothing like a new product. As you indicated, Apple's first custom SoC was released in 2010, 11 years ago. They have >10 years of experience shipping SoCs for Apple products. The M1 family can be viewed, to some extent, as an extension of the work on the Ax chips, which likely builds on their experience customizing chips for the iPod family.
- jdhawk 5y ago> Rumors are also swirling that the company will add a headphone jack to its already popular iPhone. The announcement could come as early as this month. lol
- truculent 5y agoIf only
- runaway 5y agoEveryone derides Apple for not listening to the demands of users and then, when Apple finally does give in they... continue to deride them. I'm just happy with +magsafe -touchbar. Even if the price is Apple saving face and pretending this was their idea the whole time, so be it.
- smoldesu 5y agoThat strikes me as less of a compliment to the new devices and as more of a testament to how terrible Macbooks got towards the end of the 2010s.
- Stevvo 5y agoWho is this "everyone"? Taking a look at the announcement thread here on HN, the response to these machines has been extremely positive. I can't really find any criticism of the machines themselves. Negative comments are directed at Apple for pre-existing customer-hostile behavior like their repair policies.
- jzb 5y agoIt’s probably because Apple ignored them the first time, and then pretends re-adding things people never wanted removed is “innovation.”
- ashtonkem 5y agoNah, this absolutely looks like the result of Jony Ive leaving. Head of design quits and suddenly a long term trend under his leadership suddenly reverses? Makes more sense than any sinister explanation.
- manquer 5y agoBoth are not mutually exclusive. His leaving may be why they changed track. However that is not why they are harping these reverts as new features/innovation.
- 5y ago
- KennyBlanken 5y ago> Maciej Ceglowski describes the new macbook pro
- jonpurdy 5y agoI think that the new laptops are a huge deal for Apple. Some folks argue that we're celebrating them putting back ports that should have been there from the beginning. And that the keyboards should have never gotten so bad. I see it as a celebration. It's essentially an acknowledgement that they were wrong about all that, and they've built a heavier and "uglier" machine that people actually want/need. As SJ said, design is how it works. Dongletown + bad keyboards was a bad design, and now they're back to prioritizing usability.
- jzb 5y agoAn actual acknowledgement would be cool.
- mccolin 5y agoAn acknowledgment of what? Apple does not owe you anything. You chose to buy their products, with or without the need for dongles. They have allowed feedback and the market to correct this by offering revised products.
- smoldesu 5y agoApple doesn't allow any leeway though. It's "my way or the highway" with displays, keyboards, ports, headphone jacks, charging cables, programming languages, API entitlements, app distribution, content integration, graphics API, coreutil versions, package managers and even your goddamn operating system. If I had room to protest, I would.
- dymk 5y agoWhat exactly do you want to see them say, and how?
- mixmastamyk 5y ago"We're sorry. We f'd up." They did something similar with the Mac Pro, didn't they? I don't particularly care.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- a-dub 5y agonow all they need is hardware acceleration for rosetta and specifically hardware acceleration for x86 virtual machines.
- smoldesu 5y agoI don't think Apple is very keen on upgrading a piece of software they intend to completely phase out after a few years.
- liuliu 5y agoM1 does have x86 compatible memory ordering: https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1331735383193903104 https://twitter.com/ErrataRob/status/1331735383193903104 IMHO, this is the biggest hurdle for x86 emulation on ARM.
- a-dub 5y agoyeah i think the rub is that much of the internet world uses x86 containers/vms because so much backend infra is still x86 and that will probably stay the case for a long time. my understanding is that when you're on intel, vms are accelerated with this vt-x hardware support stuff that essentially runs the machine code in the vm on bare metal. before vt-x, vms were dog slow and involved running the code in a full software emulation of the target cpu which is slow because there's a whole layer of indirection that adds loads of instructions for every target instruction executed and breaks all the caching and branch prediction and such. the rosetta thing seems cool in that they essentially jit and cache translations of intel binaries that are executed under darwin, translating them once and caching the result, and it turns out they tweaked their chips to be intel like to make this translation lightweight... so you can run intel binaries from the darwin shell and after the first run, they're quite fast... but... the question is, are there effectively two layers of emulation that break each other's acceleration? the vm emulation and then the x86 processor emulation? can you run x86 vms in a vt-x like way, while taking advantage of rosetta's jit translation (and the caching of those results)? it seems really hard as the host machine would not have any knowledge of when a child vm is even launching a process, let alone its identity, and if it doesn't know these things, how would it know to jit that executable and save the result? seems you would need some sort of special hardware emulation support, but i'm just speculating... edit: it seems you could also do something by adding support in the guest os, but i have doubts as to how the maintainers would feel about such a thing!
- kerng 5y agoHilarious
- jstsch 5y agoI ordered a 16" M1 Max 64GB and am excited for it, but I'm sad that Apple dropped the touch bar. I do use it all the time, scrubbing through slides in Keynote, audio controls in Logic, hanging up a Facetime call...
- avitous 5y agoBeautiful machine, but with 64GB it's about a $4K machine, and that's without adding any SSD upgrade, software, AppleCare or tax. Yikes.
- azinman2 5y agoIt’s a high end computer with high end specs. Apple makes lower end computers that are cheaper. They’re not going for the bottom of the market, so you’ll always be able to find a cheaper PC. What’s the complaint? Options are good.
- nfoz 5y agoA bit off topic but as much as we can praise the return of some ports on the new MBP, it's amazing to compare with products like https://us.vaio.com/collections/vaio-sx12 https://us.vaio.com/collections/vaio-sx12
- wmf 5y agoVAIO is an outlier even among PCs. I think it's a great strategy for an underdog in a standardized modular market, but not for Apple.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoNeat, I had the TR2 back in the day and loved it. However, VGA in 2020+ is not something many need. Also, I won't buy another 16:9 screen, I was forced in the past, but there are options now.
- nfoz 5y agoYeah, my argument is simply: you can be a small modern laptop with a ton of ports. Sure there are tradeoffs (e.g. battery-life). But here's a 14" with as many ports as the VAIO, a 3:2 display, a hot-swappable second battery, and more: https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/products/fv1f/ https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/products/fv1f/ Ports: https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/products/fv1f/spec.html#interface https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/products/fv1f/spec.html#interfac... (not generally for sale in the U.S. though; some truly innovative products are only in the East!)
- arxpoetica 5y agoIt's real: https://web.archive.org/web/20161103093653/https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the_new_macbook_pro/ https://web.archive.org/web/20161103093653/https://blog.pinb...
- eweise 5y agoI bought a mac mini with 8gb ram for $650. It significantly outperforms my company macbook pro which cost almost $3k. I run logic, docker, intellij, and it never complains about not enough memory.
- manquer 5y agoYou are comparing a portable device with a powered one. If you don't need portability/mobility of your device any manufacturer is going to be costlier for comparable performance even if they can reach that level. Even with jump in M1 performance at lower power envelopes, top of the line deskop chips will easily beat it. Apple has only reduced the gap in the performance between high power draw and lower power draw machines, they have not surpassed it.
- eweise 5y agoHow much would it cost for a top of the line desktop running OS X vs a mac mini?
- manquer 5y agoThe Mac pro is still a Intel based machine, it comes with relatively beefy GPU configurations as well ( the PC world has even better options) and with a lot of expansion slots that you cannot do in a Mini, the top of the line model is a 28-core 2.9 GHz processor. It will definitely beat the M1 Mini[1] in performance and cost(~5-10x). You(I) may not see the value of that increased performance[2] and will be unwilling to pay the premium (assuming there is no use for other features like expansion cards), however there is decent market who do value that 2.5x more than the 5-10x price difference it costs. [1] Roughly 2.5x in multi core performance. https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks [2] The power draw is also considerably more for the Mac pro ~ 1180W compared to 150W for the Mini, so not 1:1 comparison technically, however if you are only looking at non portable compute as the only value prop then it shouldn't matter.
- mirekrusin 5y agoI got one as well (+£200 for 16GB) and... stopped using £5k macbook pro from year before. M1 beats it, much faster and 5x+ cheaper. Crazy stuff.
- systemvoltage 5y agoI think Benjamin Button needs to review: web browsers and JS stack, graphic and brand design, product design, domestic manufacturing industry, social media, subscription model of product pricing, political party extremism, car UX/UI, smart appliances and IoT gadgets.
- gnicholas 5y agoI'd love to see social media, especially the 'upgrade' when FB gets rid of the timeline, leaving an uncluttered interface where you can interact with your friends without distractions.
- matthewowen 5y agoThe title here is misleading (there's no 2022 in the linked page). The joke is that this was released in 2016 when the new MBP with the touch bar came out, and was reviewing the _previous_ version as an improvement over the new one. I feel like people are missing the joke here for lots of reasons, but the addition of 2022 to the title here contributes.
- smarx007 5y ago"There's even speculation that Apple may refresh its antiquated Mac Pro and desktop macs, neither of which have been updated since their release in 2022." So, the fictional review is set in 2022 or later. Edit: I should watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button :)
- matthewowen 5y agoNo, it's meant to be moving backwards in time, so 2022 is in the past. I realize that this isn't how Benjamin Button works. It's not the perfect concept. I can't believe I'm actually spending time typing this explaining how this kinda cheap joke someone else wrote works and acknowledging the weaknesses of it, but here we are.
- allturtles 5y agoYes, it's actually like Merlin, not Benjamin Button.
- mandevil 5y agoNo, this is Benjamin Button: the gimmick is he is traveling backwards in time. So when he says "since 2022" in 2016, he is living in 2016 having just lived through the period 2022->2016 in that order. So this was a prediction, in 2016, that the Mac Pro and desktop macs would not be touched by Apple between 2022 and 2015. Pity he didn't mention the pandemic. Could have been a useful warning to everyone.
- jms703 5y agoYeah, I think this flew over everyone's heads. The date of the article is at the bottom.
- hajile 5y agoI feel we should take a moment to appreciate the USB-C end on the magsafe charger so we can replace the cable when it breaks instead of paying for the entire brick.