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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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).
As a dev, I'm going to go against the comments here. I don't even know why this is surprising or a big deal, or why all the squabbling.
If you're using vim, the keyboard will probably revert to default. The fake "escape" key will be at the end, where it will be very easy to feel. But you should have known better and been using emacs anyway.
Others have pointed out that 32GB of ram isn't really a good tradeoff because of Intel.
Most of the code that I write is either run remotely or python. I don't need that much memory and CPU power because cloud (aren't we all more proud of our infrastructure-as-code AWS setups these days?), and honestly, I care about one thing:
How long can I stay connected to the DC on my phone tether.
This new Macbook does it for me. The touchbar, I guess it's good for emojis, but I really did just want a lighter laptop that has a mostly-all-day charge. I'm going to go against the grain with the general sentiment in the comments. My current Macbook Pro usually lasts me most of the day, and I need at most an hour of plugged-in time. I'm a light guy, and I don't like having to lug my current giant tank around.
That's because as a software dev, your requirements are relatively lightweight. I do video editing, computational 3d geometry work, and none of these operations run easily on the cloud.
I'm not sure I understand the hate for this MacBook Pro on HN. To be fair I never quite understood the now defunct Apple love on HN either. I think this new MacBook Pro is actually a very decent laptop [1], if a tad expensive. I mean I actually carry my laptop a lot, and not in a car since I'm a mere pedestrian (and formerly cyclist, used to bike to work 30 minutes each way every day carrying my laptop in my backpack, now I just walk to work). I always dreamed of a MacBook Pro the size of a MacBook. I've never bought a MacBook Pro because previous models were too bulky, but this model is a pretty solid compromise. I'm waiting to try it before buying it, but it looks almost perfect. A tad too heavy still, and obviously expensive...
[1] I really dislike the pro moniker: being a pro is not a function of what you do with your tools, but of whether you are paid (or aim at being paid) to do it. There are many non-pro that need very high end specs (e.g. for video editing, playing games, enjoying VR experiences, etc.), and plenty of pro that really just want to send an email, tweak an Excel spreadsheet, or write an Elixir app. Nothing that would require an overspec beast.
Does it really means that much? I think that numbers will always favor Apple when there so much choice on the other side, the diversity will make the sales number for a specific product be on the low side compared to a single product (with different variations of it, counted together).
Just like when there are headlines saying "iPhone X beats the [make][model] in sales", if you pool together all Android flagships from different makes that get released that same year then those numbers could vary significantly against Apple.
>Just five days in, the MacBook Pro models had already hit almost 80% of combined 2015 and 2016 MacBook sales – and look set to exceed 18 months of sales in the first week.
So Apple is having incredible sales numbers for Apple, not compared to some smaller manufacturers.
It's useful to know when combined with an awareness of how Apple also dominates profit margin. Strong sales on a unit basis indicate they will continue to do well in profit share as well. Which turns out to be about 60% of the profits of the entire desktop/laptop market, and according to recent figures 104% of profits in the smartphone market.
Just to offer a somewhat contrarian opinion: I'm a professional developer who is very excited about these new MacBook Pros.
I routinely run multiple VMs, Vim is my primary text editor, and I picked up a DSLR this year and have been getting into photography as a hobby. After some initial skepticism and consideration, I'm mostly happy with the design tradeoffs that they made. Of course I'll have to use one for a while to know for sure.
The price increase is obviously unwelcome, but it isn't new as far as their laptop redesigns go and I expect the price will fall back to "normal" over the next year or two.
The problem is not what is happening now. N years ago professionals started to buy macbooks. Because they are largely the people other people listen to when there is to make a technological choice, and because the product was sounding, in a few years Apple got a very large percentage of non professional customers. Now they should be worried of the same thing: they left many professionals looking for alternatives, and a competitor can exploit these "trend setters" providing a good product, that later may get mainstream.
I mean if Apple sold way less MacBook Pro's in 2015/2016 it's really simple to explain that their sales now jumped!?
Comparing percentage values, just sucks. It would be better to compare their sales now with the sales of the last "upgrade" of the MacBook Pro, that would be a way more solid number.
so without nowing their customers these numbers could be extremely misleading. Not every shop has access to every Laptop brand and Dell generates most of his sales on their own Website (which might be or might be not a customer of slice.com)
I think the "16GB limit" thing is a red herring. That's more than enough for plenty of people, including many developers.
What I'm still annoyed about is, where are the low-end laptops? Where are the new desktops? The MBP still looks like a very good laptop, but it's worrying that Apple seem to want to push everyone to use basically a single model. They have a wider range of up-to-date iPads than Macs at this point.
Desktops = not popular enough to update frequently (desktops have become a small sliver of the laptop market which is itself a small piece of the computer market)
Based on profitability alone, I would not be surprised to see Apple exit the computer market entirely and sell only iOS devices. Macs may only be around anymore to run XCode, from the perspective of strict business necessity. Port that to another platform and Apple can narrow its focus to iOS.
Can you imagine the internals of XCode for Windows? It would make the iTunes Windows compatibility layers look small.
N.B. A large number of people waiting over a year for a MBP refresh ordered one within 5 days of release.
I'm sitting this rev out. I bought a i7 X220 ThinkPad for £189, and installed elementary. The thing flies, and will do perfectly well for now… if I ever go back to Apple.
Apple would do well to ignore the immediate success / failure of the macbook pro line. When your ecosystem reaches a tipping point there is a lag before the inadequacy of your product starts showing up in the bottomline in terms of units sold. Think of Microsoft in the early 2000s, by every financial metric they were delivering, but somewhere a crowd of silent power users muttering under their breath was growing.
So I still have not found an answer on what is the real replacement for a MacBook Pro 15" for a professional developer these days? I cannot believe the Dell XPS or some Lenovos are the sole options out there targeted towards developers.
I want something, with good battery life, looking nice and having >16GB RAM, a decent screen & keyboard and not being too heavy. Any suggestions?
The best laptop I ever had was an i5 2010 Macbook Air (paid about 1000€ at the time).
Reasonably fast, incredibly think and light, instant wake-from-sleep, great screen (for the time), great trackpad, decent keyboard, long battery life.
Having owned previously only bulky Windows laptops (I still have nightmares about a company-issued 17' Sony Vaio, heavy as heck and with the grand total of 30 mins battery life), it was a joy to use.
When the screen cracked I was heartbroken, decided that somehow I needed more power and splurged for an i7 2013 15' Retina Macbook Pro with dedicated graphics.
Apart from the gorgeous screen, I cannot think of any real benefit I got over the previous model:
- More USB ports ? I only used the occasional USB drive on the road, when at home I always use the single port of my hub with mouse/keyboard/ext.drive attached.
- Faster CPU ? It was noticeable when compiling big projects or very specific things like video conversion, but 90% of the time spent "developing", I'm just looking at code in an editor.
- More RAM ? Ditto. Never felt that the Air was slow or unresponsive due to lack of RAM, at least for my use cases.
- Faster GPU? The main reason was gaming, but mobile GPUs are a far cry from their desktop counterparts, and under sustained load it is throttling all the time anyway. Of course it might be just Apple's fault, but I cannot say that my previous experience with Windows Laptops was any different.
What I lost in exchange was portability. Not that the 2013 15' Pro is bulky, but I could casually drop the Air in my backpack without really feeling it, and open it during my commute if I felt like it.
I could use it on the couch, in bed, when traveling.
Now the competition has catched up, and there seems to be great Windows laptops that are a serious alternative to Macbooks.
Regardless, it is clear to me that my main priority for a LAPTOP is portability and construction quality.
I'm fine with reasonable compromises in terms of speed, screen, keyboard. I really don't care about number of ports, upgradeability.
This long and boring post to make the point that different people have different requirements, if your personal ones differ from what Apple is offering, there are plenty of alternatives nowadays, all the drama is difficult to swallow, for me.
I want to be able to integrate command line tools with the Touch Bar to (finally) teach myself vi properly (think vi cheat sheet showing current mode etc.).
Is there anyway we can have the terminal integrate closely with the Touch Bar - and more importantly programs within it inform the toolbar of their state?
Currently this looks impossible because it looks like the Touch Bar is only changed by the focused window.
MBP used to be best(or the one of the best) developer laptops. And probably still are (if that touch-bar is removed) although over priced.
The quality of MBP's aside, the coffee-shop hanging cult of Apple will buy even anything with an Apple logo faster than you can say "touch-bar and over-priced".
I don't think so; I think it proves that real professional users will work with what they're given, even if what they're given is not what they wanted or needed. We're just too good at working around issues.
I wonder if they'll introduce a "Pro+" line or something similar to cater to the real professionals. Or maybe that just doesn't make business sense at this point.
The Mac Pro is competing against the sum of those other laptops. iOS vs Android isn't broken down per device and it shouldn't apply to laptops either.
A better indicator would be comparing total sales with previous Pro models (not just online sales) - and we won't have that until the next quarter
There's also likely to be a lag in sales as developers consider their options over the next upgrade cycle (that is exactly the situation I find myself in).
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jkrems|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neolefty|9 years ago|reply
It's temporarily painful, but USB C seems like a tremendous improvement, and 4 full ports is mighty.
[+] [-] ash_gti|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] greenspot|9 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] herge|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpweiher|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wyager|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjmlp|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] std_throwaway|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zyb09|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lambdasquirrel|9 years ago|reply
If you're using vim, the keyboard will probably revert to default. The fake "escape" key will be at the end, where it will be very easy to feel. But you should have known better and been using emacs anyway.
Others have pointed out that 32GB of ram isn't really a good tradeoff because of Intel.
Most of the code that I write is either run remotely or python. I don't need that much memory and CPU power because cloud (aren't we all more proud of our infrastructure-as-code AWS setups these days?), and honestly, I care about one thing:
How long can I stay connected to the DC on my phone tether.
This new Macbook does it for me. The touchbar, I guess it's good for emojis, but I really did just want a lighter laptop that has a mostly-all-day charge. I'm going to go against the grain with the general sentiment in the comments. My current Macbook Pro usually lasts me most of the day, and I need at most an hour of plugged-in time. I'm a light guy, and I don't like having to lug my current giant tank around.
[+] [-] W0lf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheeze|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kokwak|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brenschluss|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rahoulb|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Xixi|9 years ago|reply
[1] I really dislike the pro moniker: being a pro is not a function of what you do with your tools, but of whether you are paid (or aim at being paid) to do it. There are many non-pro that need very high end specs (e.g. for video editing, playing games, enjoying VR experiences, etc.), and plenty of pro that really just want to send an email, tweak an Excel spreadsheet, or write an Elixir app. Nothing that would require an overspec beast.
[+] [-] AdrianDeAnda|9 years ago|reply
Just like when there are headlines saying "iPhone X beats the [make][model] in sales", if you pool together all Android flagships from different makes that get released that same year then those numbers could vary significantly against Apple.
[+] [-] eastWestMath|9 years ago|reply
>Just five days in, the MacBook Pro models had already hit almost 80% of combined 2015 and 2016 MacBook sales – and look set to exceed 18 months of sales in the first week.
So Apple is having incredible sales numbers for Apple, not compared to some smaller manufacturers.
[+] [-] simonh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnthedebs|9 years ago|reply
I routinely run multiple VMs, Vim is my primary text editor, and I picked up a DSLR this year and have been getting into photography as a hobby. After some initial skepticism and consideration, I'm mostly happy with the design tradeoffs that they made. Of course I'll have to use one for a while to know for sure.
The price increase is obviously unwelcome, but it isn't new as far as their laptop redesigns go and I expect the price will fall back to "normal" over the next year or two.
[+] [-] addicted|9 years ago|reply
Im genuinely curious. This is not meant to be a rhetorical question.
[+] [-] antirez|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robert_foss|9 years ago|reply
The entire Macbook Pro line is summed up, where as the pro lines of other vendors are not summed.
[+] [-] ProAm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] merb|9 years ago|reply
https://xkcd.com/1102/
I mean if Apple sold way less MacBook Pro's in 2015/2016 it's really simple to explain that their sales now jumped!? Comparing percentage values, just sucks. It would be better to compare their sales now with the sales of the last "upgrade" of the MacBook Pro, that would be a way more solid number.
Edit: Also the origin site is: https://intelligence.slice.com/apples-macbook-pro-launch/
so without nowing their customers these numbers could be extremely misleading. Not every shop has access to every Laptop brand and Dell generates most of his sales on their own Website (which might be or might be not a customer of slice.com)[+] [-] iainmerrick|9 years ago|reply
What I'm still annoyed about is, where are the low-end laptops? Where are the new desktops? The MBP still looks like a very good laptop, but it's worrying that Apple seem to want to push everyone to use basically a single model. They have a wider range of up-to-date iPads than Macs at this point.
[+] [-] neolefty|9 years ago|reply
Cheap low-end laptops = not profitable
Expensive low-end laptop = MacBook / iPad
Desktops = not popular enough to update frequently (desktops have become a small sliver of the laptop market which is itself a small piece of the computer market)
Based on profitability alone, I would not be surprised to see Apple exit the computer market entirely and sell only iOS devices. Macs may only be around anymore to run XCode, from the perspective of strict business necessity. Port that to another platform and Apple can narrow its focus to iOS.
Can you imagine the internals of XCode for Windows? It would make the iTunes Windows compatibility layers look small.
[+] [-] digi_owl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravityloss|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjtgraham|9 years ago|reply
I'm sitting this rev out. I bought a i7 X220 ThinkPad for £189, and installed elementary. The thing flies, and will do perfectly well for now… if I ever go back to Apple.
[+] [-] dman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fdomig|9 years ago|reply
I want something, with good battery life, looking nice and having >16GB RAM, a decent screen & keyboard and not being too heavy. Any suggestions?
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kurtz79|9 years ago|reply
Reasonably fast, incredibly think and light, instant wake-from-sleep, great screen (for the time), great trackpad, decent keyboard, long battery life.
Having owned previously only bulky Windows laptops (I still have nightmares about a company-issued 17' Sony Vaio, heavy as heck and with the grand total of 30 mins battery life), it was a joy to use.
When the screen cracked I was heartbroken, decided that somehow I needed more power and splurged for an i7 2013 15' Retina Macbook Pro with dedicated graphics.
Apart from the gorgeous screen, I cannot think of any real benefit I got over the previous model:
- More USB ports ? I only used the occasional USB drive on the road, when at home I always use the single port of my hub with mouse/keyboard/ext.drive attached.
- Faster CPU ? It was noticeable when compiling big projects or very specific things like video conversion, but 90% of the time spent "developing", I'm just looking at code in an editor.
- More RAM ? Ditto. Never felt that the Air was slow or unresponsive due to lack of RAM, at least for my use cases.
- Faster GPU? The main reason was gaming, but mobile GPUs are a far cry from their desktop counterparts, and under sustained load it is throttling all the time anyway. Of course it might be just Apple's fault, but I cannot say that my previous experience with Windows Laptops was any different.
What I lost in exchange was portability. Not that the 2013 15' Pro is bulky, but I could casually drop the Air in my backpack without really feeling it, and open it during my commute if I felt like it.
I could use it on the couch, in bed, when traveling.
Now the competition has catched up, and there seems to be great Windows laptops that are a serious alternative to Macbooks.
Regardless, it is clear to me that my main priority for a LAPTOP is portability and construction quality.
I'm fine with reasonable compromises in terms of speed, screen, keyboard. I really don't care about number of ports, upgradeability.
This long and boring post to make the point that different people have different requirements, if your personal ones differ from what Apple is offering, there are plenty of alternatives nowadays, all the drama is difficult to swallow, for me.
[+] [-] donatj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|9 years ago|reply
Is there anyway we can have the terminal integrate closely with the Touch Bar - and more importantly programs within it inform the toolbar of their state?
Currently this looks impossible because it looks like the Touch Bar is only changed by the focused window.
[+] [-] sarveshseri|9 years ago|reply
The quality of MBP's aside, the coffee-shop hanging cult of Apple will buy even anything with an Apple logo faster than you can say "touch-bar and over-priced".
[+] [-] baobrain|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] falcolas|9 years ago|reply
That's my take on the whole debacle.
[+] [-] jws|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Retr0spectrum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dep_b|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nikcub|9 years ago|reply
A better indicator would be comparing total sales with previous Pro models (not just online sales) - and we won't have that until the next quarter
There's also likely to be a lag in sales as developers consider their options over the next upgrade cycle (that is exactly the situation I find myself in).