Apple To Launch Thinner, Lighter MacBook Pro Models With OLED Touch Bar, Touch ID In Fall (9to5mac.com)

Apple plans to refresh its MacBook Pro line later this year. The makeover will see both 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pro models replace their function keys atop laptop keyboards with an OLED touch bar, according to a report. Both the models will also have Touch ID fingerprint sensor, and will support Thunderbolt 3 USB-C port, multiple outlets are reporting citing ever-so-reliable KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The refreshed MacBook Pro model will be thinner and lighter as well. There's no word on if -- and when -- the MacBook Air lineup will receive a refresh.

Comments

Thinner and lighter...

[The-Ixian]

This is still the main marketing touch point?

I am starting to believe all the "Apple is starting to stagnate" hype...

Apple, I think it's time to reformulate the sales pitch...

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, i dont know anybody who wishes their laptop was thinner.

My brother has a macbook somethingorother & he wishes it was -thicker-... well he did before he broke the thing.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Apple really is stagnating. Watch the 2014 Keynote when they introduce the "new" Mac mini. The hype and bullet points are misleading.

They wrote "PCIe-based flash storage" as if that was the default setup but they're still putting slow 5400 RPM in their computers, the flash storage is optional in all models. I would have been happier to see even only 120GB flash storage in the low-end rather than a slow 5400 RPM hard drive.

The fact that the low-end model is only 1.4GHz and that RAM is soldered on-board means that you absolutely need to buy a more expensive model right out of the gate, making the mini more expensive than it really needs to be. I was able to go from 4GB, then 8GB and now 16GB in my 2010 mini and I also removed the optical drive to add a 7200 RPM WD Black in the second bay. The only thing I'm not able to update is the old Core 2 Duo CPU. All those extra expenses were done over the course of 6 years, I would never have been able to pay the total price in 2010.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[NMBob]

I have 4TB of slow hard drives IN my 2012 mini. Doesn't affect what I use it for in the least. Cost was about $200. When SSDs can beat that I'll switch.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup. You got it. When you see a company make any kind of 'big deal' about adding a technology that anyone can easily add than that's a sign that they've run out of 'new ideas'.

Heck, I have an idea for them that would possibly be more marketable, though not necessarily 'game changing'. Simply provide a 120 GB 'caching SSD' in the device where all reads/writes go through that device. You could add whatever size & speed of SATA drive you want & the speed would still be way faster than just the SATA drives themselves. A user should be able to easily replace this caching SSD drive with something bigger (or just to replace it if it fails). Properly implemented it would be 'safe' for data storage (at least no bigger issue than just having your main SATA drive die) & way faster.

Seriously, replacing the function keys with an OLED touch screen? How is that all that big a deal, that will surely make everyone want to run out & refresh their mac mini...NOT!

Though its hard to blame Apple here specifically, as a device manufacturer they are at the mercy of what technology allows. The iPhone wasn't revolutionary in any real way other than it used the latest technologies available in a way noone had done before in a 'big way' (there were Palm Pilots, Blackberries etc. that we're certainly 'smart phones', there we're likely some with touch screens that I don't recall, Apple simply slammed all the available technology together in a different way, marketed it better & 'boom' they have a hit. The rest of course is history & since there wasn't really anything special about the iPhone it has now been replaced with cheaper & better Android stuff. Which of course is the lesson of all technology, a lesson they should have learned from the PC/Apple II era but didn't seem to).

O well, I'm not a fan of Apple one way or the other so I guess I don't really care. They are sitting on a mountain of cash & thus it will take a while for them to fail or reinvent what they actually do so as not to fail...whatever happens happens, I have no stock in the company so again I don't care.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[goose-incarnated]

Yeah, i dont know anybody who wishes their laptop was thinner.

My brother has a macbook somethingorother & he wishes it was -thicker-... well he did before he broke the thing.

Don't you mean *after* he broke it?

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[LongearedBat]

Reminds me of Ericssons mobile phones back in 2000. They won the race against Nokia to make them the smallest in the world, but they lost to Nokia in usability. Wasn't that partly why Ericsson died?

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped listening when apple unveiled its thinner, lighter CEO. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/527:_Keynote

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[evileeyore]

Yep.. users of the pro line of macbooks dont really focus on the thin metric. Especially at the expense of battery life, and fewer ports. If i am buying a pro i want at least 4-5 ports, and a shitload of horsepower.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[Rob Y.]

The whole laptop market is 'stagnating' in the sense that most of current laptop users don't really need traditional laptops at all. No incremental features or hardware bumps are going to make most laptop users go out and buy a new one - when all most of them need is a Chromebook. Companies tied to Windows, will keep buying replacement laptops for a while, I suppose. And those who are not tied to Windows might buy Macbook Airs as party favors for their 'high-status' employees - but for the most part, if a company has weaned itself from Windows dependency to the extent that it's users can get by with a Mac, they're well on their way to being able to hand out Chromebooks to everyone as party favors. That can run Android apps too... or RDP... or Citrix.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[Darinbob]

I don't like the MacBook air, they trimmed out too many features, fewer ports (so you can plug in stuff to make it more usable), etc. My current MacBook Pro at work is fine enough, which it had more disk (for vmware). But if they remove the function keys then that's pretty stupid, this is the "PRO" laptop not the "I'm just a dumb exec" laptop.

Re: Thinner and lighter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe for the office drones, but some of us do real work there boss. We all don't have the same luxury as you, being able to stare at spreadsheets and office docs all day.

Tldr: some people produce stuff, not consume.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[LWATCDR]

As a MacBook Pro users all I can say is NO NO NO.
Make MacBook Pro with at least one M.2 slot and user upgradeable ram!
The price of ram and SSDs keep dropping! It is insane to lot let you upgrade them after purchase on a "professional" machine.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is still the main marketing touch point?

I am starting to believe all the "Apple is starting to stagnate" hype...

Apple, I think it's time to reformulate the sales pitch...

This is an analyst's speculation. Apple haven't said a single thing about upcoming MacBook Pros. The marketing and sales pitch you're attacking is in your head.

Re: Thinner and lighter...

[Anonymous Coward]

What good are fatter, broken pieces? Wishing after is moot.

Wishing before it happened would have been better, assuming wishing did something.

Re:Thinner and lighter...

[armanox]

Seriously. This is why when I purchased a new MBP this year I bought a 2012 model, the last ones to have a "Pro" feeling to them. The cost of buying that plus 16GB (of Apple blessed RAM, no less) and an SSD (when I get around to it) will be far less then the cost of buying one of these new, handicapped models with that ship with worse specs.

Yeah, we know

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello?

Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[blackomegax]

Lenovo tried getting rid of F-keys with a touch bar in the X1. It failed SPECTACULARLY. I suspect the same will happen to Apple here. Professionals use F-keys. A lot. and not being able to touch type them is a glorious, horrible, pain in the ASS.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Dog-Cow]

I very rarely use any function keys except for the 3 volume controls. Certainly nothing I have to touch type. I suspect you don't use Mac OS X.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[ColdWetDog]

This isn't about professionals. Apple missed that boat awhile back. Professionals need a decent keyboard. Ooops. Professionals need computing horsepower. Not quite oops but certainly nothing high end about the presumed stats. And don't talk to me about soldering RAM on the motherboard.

Professionals need ports. More than one or two. Dongles are for dorks. Professionals need batteries. Professionals need screens that do not double as a mirror. Nor do they need 3D touch or the latest silly gizmo thingy that Apple dreamed up.

Professionals DON'T need super thin. Professionals are strong. They can cart around a few extra ounces. Triple shot 16 oz mochas go a long way. As long as they can get their work done, we're happy. Professionals actually need a decent graphics system.

And for the love of God, bring back the 17 inch MacBook Pro.

Gotta go. Nurse says its time for morning meds.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

F-keys.

Not those shitty model specific function keys...

Re: Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bring back the xserv too!

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[OzPeter]

I very rarely use any function keys except for the 3 volume controls. Certainly nothing I have to touch type. I suspect you don't use Mac OS X.

I use a Macbook Pro and I DO use the function keys .. albeit when I am either running windows VMs (which I commonly do) or when remoted into a windows computer.

Perhaps for pure OS X usage they are underused, but for a professional user they are a required tool.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Solandri]

Depends on exactly what it means. On laptops, the F1-F12 keys along the top are doubled up in function with laptop adjustments like sleep, screen brightness, volume up/down, etc. You access these alternative functions by pushing the F1-F12 while holding the Fn button down. (Some laptops even reverse this, with the laptop functions primary, and you have to hold down Fn to use the F1-F12 keys. A real PITA even for web browsing since most browsers use F3 for "find next" after a search.)

If they're going to convert the F1-F12 keys to an OLED touch bar, then yeah that's really stupid.

But if they're going to keep the physical F1-F12 keys and move these function keys to a separate OLED bar, thus allowing them to get rid of the Fn button, then great!

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[serviscope_minor]

Professionals DON'T need super thin. Professionals are strong. They can cart around a few extra ounces.

Depends on whether professionals have a bad back or not. I don't give a crap about thinness, but weight really really matters to me. That's why I kept on using my eee 900 for serious stuff on the road for long past a reasonable amount of time. It was robust and very, very light (including the PSU) and I could cope with the slow speed.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[angel'o'sphere]

You missed the part that those keys still exist but are replaced by OLED ones, or if I understand that "stripe" thing correct, a bar going from left to right over the top of the keyboard. In other words: the f-keys are now just more fancy.

Except for Eve-Online I don't use any function keys. I prefer memorizable keyboard shortcuts.

I don't think I have used a function key on a PC the last 20 years ... or perhaps 30. And on a Mac: never, except for games like Eve online.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[organgtool]

I agree with everything you've said. My 17-inch MBP is almost 10 years old and I refuse to replace it with the newer models that have a smaller screen, fewer ports, and no ability to upgrade the memory, storage, or battery. Apple should rename the MBP because there's almost nothing "Pro" about it anymore - it's barely even "Prosumer".

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

They're the same keys. F8 is also play/pause, F10 is also mute/un-mute, etc.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[angel'o'sphere]

(Some laptops even reverse this, with the laptop functions primary, and you have to hold down Fn to use the F1-F12 keys. A real PITA even for web browsing since most browsers use F3 for "find next" after a search.)
And every laptop I'm aware of has a system setting where you can define what the Fn key is doing.

If they're going to convert the F1-F12 keys to an OLED touch bar, then yeah that's really stupid.
Why? The standard keys on that bar from left to right will be F1 - F12, that is a no brainer.

thus allowing them to get rid of the Fn button, then great! See above, just learn how to configure it to your liking.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Dog-Cow]

My Macbook Pro is a company laptop. I use it for work. That would make me a professional user.

There's a reason why the function keys default to not acting as function keys (changeable in System Preferences).

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

A real PITA even for web browsing since most browsers use F3 for "find next" after a search.

Command+G.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Tower]

Professionals need screens that do not double as a mirror.

This. Always this. The glossy screens look nice until you need to use them. I don't need to be watching everything behind me and have my eyes constantly focusing on the movement.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Feral Nerd]

This isn't about professionals. Apple missed that boat awhile back. Professionals need a decent keyboard. Ooops.

You mean the Apple specific keyboard layout? Been using that and PC keyboards for years, rarely have any problems switching.

Professionals need computing horsepower. Not quite oops but certainly nothing high end about the presumed stats.

On your local box? For what? Graphics programming? Game programming? Photoshop Work? Only the last one would make any sense to me, no serious developer develops games for the Mac because. For any other kind of development I have plenty of horsepower on the development machines I use but I'd still like better graphics performance on the Mac so I'll echo any criticism of Apple's graphics performance.

And don't talk to me about soldering RAM on the motherboard.

Never had a reason to be pissed off about that but I suppose if you want to do heavy duty graphics work or something you might miss that option although, if you are in such a busines why not just buy a machine with proper RAM right off the bat? It's not that much more expensive.

Professionals need ports. More than one or two. Dongles are for dorks.

Yes they do and no they are not?

Professionals need batteries.

6-7 hours is not enough? What are you doing rendering 3D on your laptop at maximum CPU during a train ride? /

Professionals need screens that do not double as a mirror.

Eh? Some people like glossy displays others like matt ones I suppose it might be a good idea to offer matt displays as an option but how many of Apple's competitors do that? Personally I don't give a rodent's rear.

Nor do they need 3D touch or the latest silly gizmo thingy that Apple dreamed up.

You mean Force Touch and haptic feedback? You can turn that off.

Professionals DON'T need super thin. Professionals are strong. They can cart around a few extra ounces. Triple shot 16 oz mochas go a long way. As long as they can get their work done, we're happy.

A number of professionals I know including a large number who do not even use Apple products would disagree with you on that one. If I want a weight lifting exercise I'll go to the gym. In the mean time I'll take my computers in the smallest format I can get.

Professionals actually need a decent graphics system. And for the love of God, bring back the 17 inch MacBook Pro.

I'll give you that one although I don't play many games, Apple's choice of graphics cards has sometimes sucked and I do miss good graphics cards and proper OpenGL performance for other purposes than gaming which I consider a waste of time for the most part.

Gotta go. Nurse says its time for morning meds.

True, and nice rant/troll.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[berj]

I think your definition of professional is different than mine.

I write software every day on my MBP. It's got a ton of ports and the battery lasts me more than an entire working day. The keyboard is *fantastic*. I used to have a ton of RSI problems with all of the typing I do. I tried many different keyboards over the last 20 years (ergonomic/split keyboards included). It wasn't until I started using the thin aluminum mac keyboards that all of my wrist and finger pain went away for good. The current MBP laptop keyboards are similarly fantastic for me.

I've typed on the new super thin MB keyboard for maybe 10 minutes and at first blush the keys feel fantastic to me. Just enough response and feedback but very low finger strain. The jury is still out on whether I could handle it for 8 hours a day, every day but the indications point to yes. I can spend 5 seconds on a shitty keyboard and I know I don't like it.

I travel sometimes multiple times a month with my laptop. I want the thinnest and lightest I can get while also getting the performance I want (the current crop of MBPs gives me that). 7-10 hours of battery life is way more than enough for me.

I run (and write software for) 3D animation software and rendering software on my MBP. The graphics system is just fine for what I need when I'm travelling. It's not going to compete with my Mac Pro or the thousands of Linux CPUs in my render farm but I don't need it to.

I get a *ton* of work done with and because of my MBP.

This is not to say that everyone does or even should have my same experience or needs.. but neither is the converse true that no professional is like me in finding these machines to be basically perfect for them.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[ColdWetDog]

Same here. You can take my 17 inch MBP away from my cold, dead hands. And, at the rate that it is chugging along with the rate that I'm falling apart, that might well happen......

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[ColdWetDog]

Some of us actually do Photoshop / Premiere / Maya / etc on MBPs (they're 'professional' programs to be run on 'professional' hardware). Not all of existence is programming....

Of course, Apple apparently thinks more like you than like myself. I suspect they're just waiting for my generation to die off or at least degenerate into iPad users and then ... world domination.

Or something like that.

Kids these days.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[ameline]

My 17 inch Macbook Pro just turned 4 years old -- It was one of the last made (2.5Ghz SandyBridge CoreI7). Now upgraded with 16GB of 1600 Mhz DDR3, and 1.5 TB of fast SSD, it's not noticeably slower than a new machine. Motherboard is only 1 year old -- replaced under warranty.

I'm keeping it for as long as possible. If they come out with a new 17" machine, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. But Lenovo make badly thought out shit.

If anyone's going to pull it off It's apple.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[wonkey_monkey]

You can take my 17 inch MBP away from my cold, dead hands.

Well, I could try, but I probably wouldn't get far before calling a taxi.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[UnknownSoldier]

Well said! Couldn't have said it better myself.

I picked up a MBP Mid 2014. I wouldn't a single thing except to swap out the GPU from the nVidia 750M for a nVidia 1050M. Leave the dam ports alone!

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[shawn2772]

I very rarely use any function keys except for the 3 volume controls. Certainly nothing I have to touch type. I suspect you don't use Mac OS X.

I use OS X, and I use the function keys a lot. Enough that I've toggled the setting so their normal behavior is as function keys and I have to hold the "Fn" key to get them to act as volume controls, light controls, etc.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[BronsCon]

why not just buy a machine with proper RAM right off the bat?

Let's look, first, at the last line of MacBook Pro to have user-serviceable RAM. It shipped with 8GB in its highest configuration, that was the most you could buy with it, period. Need more? Get fucked, Apply says you can only have 8GB. Though, if you had a brain, you could buy the 2GB model and a couple of 8GB SODIMMs and BAM 16GB, and it'd work (my 2011 17" MBP still does in that configuration).

No big deal, because you can upgrade it after purchase and get more than Apple would have been willing to sell you, right?

Now, let's hit fast-forward and jump to today. Apple sells systems with chipsets and CPUs capable of handling 32GB of RAM, there are 16GB SODIMMs on the market, so you can buy 32 GB of RAM for a laptop now, but the most they'll actually sell you is 16GB. Soldered on.

Why not buy a machine with the proper RAM right off the bat? Because, if I want a MacBook Pro, I simply can't, because Apple won't sell me one.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[presidenteloco]

I don't agree with you. The super-thin Macbook keyboard is unusable for long text entry like documents, articles, and code.
The current macbook pro keyboards are about as small a key travel as you can go for adequate tactile feedback.

If Apple replicates the Macbook keyboard to the pro, I would have to seriously look around for what my next serious work computer would be. I really don't want to leave MacOSX and other Apple hardware design features, but they might force me.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[friedmud]

I agree with this. I use the the function keys as function keys and have it toggled as needing the Fn key for volume/brightness/etc. I have almost all of the Function keys mapped to things in Emacs...

That said... I wouldn't mind replacing the Function keys with a touch sensitive OLED strip. It would let me put my own icons there to represent what I want those "keys" to do.... it could even allow them to change depending on the application. Sounds pretty cool to me.

Re: Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eat a dick.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[UnknownSoldier]

> For what? Graphics programming? Game programming? Photoshop Work?

[x] Graphics
[x] Game Programming
[x] Photoshop Work

Check, check, and check.

My day job is WebGL and a MBP is my main dev machine. For anything non-trivial I'll prefer to develop shaders with OSX instead of Windows.

> Only the last one would make any sense to me, no serious developer develops games for the Mac because.

You don't know what the fuck you are talking about W.R.T. game dev.

Look, just because you don't do these things doesn't imply no one else does. I've shipped numerous games. I'm developing a few indie games. They just work across Windows, Mac, and Linux because a) I'm using SDL, and b) I have and use all 3 OS's so it is mandatory that I support all 3.

> I use but I'd still like better graphics performance on the Mac so I'll echo any criticism of Apple's graphics performance.

Agreed. GPU's have always been Apple's sore spot. Give us the nVidia 1050M dammit !

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[friedmud]

Completely agree with your entire post.

I'm a professional developing high-performance, scientific simulation software. My entire development team (which is about 50 scientists) all use 15" MBPs and MacPro desktops... all backed by large linux clusters for the heavy lifting.

MBPs are just the perfect mix of power and portability.

As long as they keep battery life about the same I would love for mine to be thinner and lighter. We travel a lot for conferences and meetings and any weight savings is always a blessing.

I always find it funny that people think "pros" want a huge Dell brick of a laptop...

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Andreas Mayer]

Perhaps for pure OS X usage they are underused, but for a professional user they are a required tool.

So... what you are saying is, there are no professional users that use OS X only?

(I hardly ever use the functions keys.)

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're everyone then? I use the function keys.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Andreas Mayer]

I use OS X, and I use the function keys a lot.

What for? Just curious.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[sexconker]

No, they aren't. What you have is a keyboard that uses a single key to send different scan codes, or you have an OS/driver/application that overloads the scan codes.

There are various media key standards that aren't actually standard, and they are distinct from the function keys.
We already dropped F13-F24 on most keyboards. I'm sure as hell not going to give up F1-F12.

Re: Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have the hands, imagine what you could do with a extra set of hands.

New Human Pro models coming out in June. Now with quad hands.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[greenfruitsalad]

are we talking about the same professional?

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[macs4all]

Gotta go. Nurse says its time for morning meds.

Tell her to tell the doctor that the dosage needs increased.

Sorry. Really I am. Couldn't resist...

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[macs4all]

Professionals need screens that do not double as a mirror.

This. Always this. The glossy screens look nice until you need to use them. I don't need to be watching everything behind me and have my eyes constantly focusing on the movement.

I tend to agree; but just try to find a laptop made in the last few years with a matte screen. And it is a proven fact that clarity and black-levels suffer pretty dramatically with matte screens.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not going to compete with my Mac Pro or the thousands of Linux CPUs in my render farm but I don't need it to.

Here's the thing, most of us need one or two dedicated workstations with upgradable GPU's. Apple have not delivered that; we have crappy consumer laptops, imacs, half-assed mini and whatever that Darth Vaders butt-plug thing is supposed to be.

Apple make great phones but customers who need a workstation for creative work are now looking elsewhere.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[just another AC]

spoken on behalf of the (presumed) majority, not the entirety.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[SvnLyrBrto]

> If I want a weight lifting exercise I'll go to the gym. In
> the mean time I'll take my computers in the smallest
> format I can get.

^^^ This. So very much this.

I hate, Hate, HATE "desktop replacement" laptops. Even the 13" Retina MBP is just too damn big and too damn heavy. I have a nice, beefy, multi-monitor, stationary, desktop for primary productivity. Laptops are for mobility. My 11" MacBook Air is easily the best laptop I've ever used. All but silent, small enough to be usable in the air even in coach, wakes from sleep faster than I can open it, almost too light to even be noticeable... I'm sometimes just amazed that I ever tolerated anything larger. And for my normal mobile workflow, (mostly bash, a couple of browser tabs, and Sublime Text); I even get a full workday out of the thing. So I can usually save myself carrying around the power adaptor too! Granted, with the reduced screen real estate, I'm not as productive as on the desktop. But I neither expect, nor am expected, to be.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[sproketboy]

Huh? Theses look like normal keys to me:

https://www.lenovo.com/images/...

What does this OLED touch bar supposed to look like?

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[chispito]

There's a reason why the function keys default to not acting as function keys (changeable in System Preferences).

I suspect the average Mac user isn't a heavy typist. The average Windows user may not be either, but you have a choice of manufacturers so it doesn't matter.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

how much did that cost you in time and effort?

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[O6171]

describing what _you_ want/need and passing it off as what _all_ professionals want/need is dumb

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[CauseBy]

I got divorced from Apple in 2009 but it was just last year that I gave up custody of our bastard child, iTunes.

Ubuntu is mostly better than MacOS, but WHY CAN'T THEY FIGURE OUT HOW TO GET SOUND TO WORK? Seriously, I had trouble with sound on Linux in 1999 and now it's almost 20 years later and have the same problems.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

My Apple keyboard has F1 through F19, although I've never used F13 and beyond.

Now that I think about it, it might be time to put them to some use and bind them to functions of some sort.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[rthille]

If it's like my older one, very little time/energy. Unscrew about 8 screws, pop some clips and replace (RAM/disk) away.

I've got 8GB/1TB-SSD in my 2010 17" MBP, but it won't do Airplay due to the no H264 encoding in the GPU, and 8GB is the max it'll go on RAM.

I'm hoping the new MBP will do 32GB and the Xeons you can get in a Dell look interesting...

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[shawn2772]

I use OS X, and I use the function keys a lot.

What for? Just curious.

Emacs, mostly. Other things, but especially Emacs.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[berj]

And that's a fair opinion. I don't pretend to speak for all people -- especially in the realm of ergonomics. I just don't like it when people feel the need to speak for *me*.

Currenly, the machines Apple currently make work really well for me and my team. Could they be better? god yes. They've made some bone-headed decisions over the years.

For example.. why aren't the Mac Pro graphics cards the same? They're actually mirror images of each other which is dumb. Or why isn't there a machine with the form factor somewhere between the Mini and the Pro but the performance of the iMac (ie. a headless machine in the middle)?

But, for all their faults, their hardware and software best fit most of my needs across the board. And when my needs don't align with their offerings I either compromise or I buy something else.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[ChunderDownunder]

Well thankfully, touch wood, I don't have a bad back.

So I bought a 15" Core 2 Duo second hand a while back for $AU50... The biggest problem for me and big laptops was finding a backpack (or 'day-pack' as the Brits call 'em). I went online to the store I'd bought one 8 years ago only to find a dearth of choices in the 15"+ market.

If one is happy with 17-25 litres, stylish brands like Herschel or Crumpler have your bag. Of course then you can't stash tins of cat food and misc groceries on the way home in the same backpack.

Not satisfied, I went to a luggage retailer at the central train station and bought a Chinese knockoff with a 30 litre capacity. It's a hideous bright blue but has discoloured over time!

Smaller and lighter for me is more about being able to lug other stuff around simultaneously.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[polyp2000]

'day-pack' ? Im a Brit , and i can say this is a term I've never heard.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[ChunderDownunder]

Hmmm, dunno then.

A former colleague, who was British, explained a backpack was something one might take on a month-long hiking adventure across Spain, while a day pack was something a 3rd of the size for a sightseeing afternoon on the streets of Rome.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Shirley Marquez]

Somebody has to develop the apps for those iPads. You can't do it on an iPad, you need a Mac.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Shirley Marquez]

I think 4GB SODIMMs were the largest ones available when your 2011 MBP was introduced, and that's why Apple said the maximum amount of RAM was 8GB. Larger modules came later.

Also, when you upgrade older systems and want to go above the original RAM maximum, you have to be careful about which modules you get. I'm typing this on an old Lenovo x200 that I recently bought used ($20!). When I went to upgrade it from the 2GB it came with to 8GB (which works although the original spec maximum was 4GB), the first set of modules I received didn't work. You have to use low-density modules (8 chips on each side), not higher density ones (4 chips on each side or 8 on just one side), because they're the only 4GB modules that the motherboard will recognize.

Yes, I spend $50 to upgrade the memory on a $20 laptop. The modules that were incompatible would have only been $30. But all in all that means that I have a $70 laptop that suits my needs and has a wonderful keyboard. I'll take that.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[BronsCon]

I think 4GB SODIMMs were the largest ones available when your 2011 MBP was introduced

Well, it was 2012 when I did the upgrade, so that may be true.

and that's why Apple said the maximum amount of RAM was 8GB. Larger modules came later.

In 2011, possibly. However, I said:

Let's look, first, at the last line of MacBook Pro to have user-serviceable RAM.

That is, not my 2011, which I was simply mentioning illustratively, but the current offering. Which still sells with a max of 8GB of RAM because, well, it hasn't seen a refresh since 2013. Incidentally, it only supports 16GB for the same reason; while Apple still claims it only supports up to 8GB (because that's how they sell it).

So, then, even if it is true that Apple claimed the 2011 MacBook Pro only supported8GB of RAM because that is all you could actually buy at the time, what's their excuse in 2016? Or even 2012?

Also, when you upgrade older systems and want to go above the original RAM maximum, you have to be careful about which modules you get. I'm typing this on an old Lenovo x200 that I recently bought used ($20!). When I went to upgrade it from the 2GB it came with to 8GB (which works although the original spec maximum was 4GB), the first set of modules I received didn't work. You have to use low-density modules (8 chips on each side), not higher density ones (4 chips on each side or 8 on just one side), because they're the only 4GB modules that the motherboard will recognize.

You can look up the chipset and CPU in your system to see what they support, it's really not rocket science. That said, I fail to see how that is relevant here.

Yes, I spend $50 to upgrade the memory on a $20 laptop. The modules that were incompatible would have only been $30. But all in all that means that I have a $70 laptop that suits my needs and has a wonderful keyboard. I'll take that.

Indeed, and that was exactly my point. As a "professional" machine, it needs to be user-upgradable; anything less is "prosumer" at best.

I paid $0 for the 2011 MacBook Pro in 2012 (it was my wife's and her dad passed down a 13" early 2012 because he wanted a 15", she gave it to me because the 17" as too big for her) and $75 for the 16GB, so I have a $75 laptop that very well met my needs until the GPU died (taking out the DisplayPort in the process). I can still use it with Intel graphics, which limits me to Linux, as OS X and still-supported versions of Windows both ship with a driver for the dead GPU and both insist on initializing that GPU during boot which, of course, fails, halting the boot process.

So yes, it still works in the 16GB configuration, it's a great little Linux machine, and no, the RAM upgrade didn't affect the GPU (which has its own GDDR on-board), it's a known issue (with a recall and all) on that model and I was ready to upgrade my daily driver when it failed anyway so I never bothered getting it fixed.

IMO, Apple should take their current MacBook and turn it into the MacBook Air, the current retina MacBook Pro should become the MacBook (as its lack of upgradability makes it anything but "Pro"), bring back 15" and 17" models of the older unibody and put the same class of hardware (current CPUs, PCIe SSD, retina display) that the current retina models have in that older unibody case. If they keep the spinning disk as an option, allowing that space to be instead filled with additional battery, and keep the optical drive as an option, allowing that space to be instead filled up with another spinning disk or more battery, and they keep actual RAM sockets, well, then they'd be offering a pro machine. That should be the MacBook Pro. Well, almost; they'd also need to stick a better GPU in the thing than

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Gr8Apes]

My primary gripe with Apple's offerings are lack of upgradable RAM, especially in the new minis along with dropping the quad cores. Ridiculous. The 2012s were the best minis ever for certain tasks, and the new ones are way overpriced by comparison. If they maxed out at roughly $700 fully loaded, maybe the changes would be acceptable, especially if a Mac Pro dropped into the $900 or so price range. But that's a different conversation.

As for laptop memory, I get why they soldered it on - it reduces the thickness of the machine by at least a quarter inch and/or increases battery capacity. Plus, it removes a primary area for damage and operational problems. While you and I may be savvy enough to grab the correct RAM for an upgrade, especially when that may exceed the officially supported max ram, many people think the cheapest "laptop" RAM sold at whatever store is near them should work just fine. After they zap their motherboard, they take it to the Genius bar with the original RAM in it, and now it becomes a "what failed" question. With the pricing offered, at least when I bought mine on sale, it wasn't a huge issue. (I'm guessing pricing mistake, because I paid at least $700 under a later price for what I think was the same machine).

Now, in 2016, I agree they should be offering at least a maximum 32GB laptops, however I haven't needed more than the 16 in mine. with the drive hardware in the laptops, swap space is no where near as useless as with the old spinning disks and is actually fine the handful of times I have needed it. Spinning disks in a meant to be portable device? No thanks. I'd hazard a guess an optical drive is useless for more than 99.999999% of the use of the laptop away from home base. An external optical works well and doesn't impact weight or performance. I have 2, because one is an HD-DVD player that sits in the closet....

Re: Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell brick? I think you're comparing two different products (same price point).

Dell offers docking stations, so you have the tons of ports to make it usable at your desk, and detach for slim operation while mobile. To me, that's the best trade off.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[stoatwblr]

Why aren't there any OLED 17" laptops?

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[macs4all]

Why aren't there any OLED 17" laptops?

Cost.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[BronsCon]

I get why RAM is soldered on in a consumer laptop, as well, and we agree on the reasoning. Once you start calling something "Pro", you need to stop treating it like a typical consumer good and make sure it keeps as much of its professional appeal as possible; for professional equipment that means maintainability and upgradability. Of course, that also means recognizing the difference between a "professional" user and a professional user; the former needs Word, Excel, and Outlook and a lightweight super portable machine is probably perfect for them, they should get a MacBook "Pro" (but Apple doesn't sell a machine with that label -- just one that deserves it). The latter, on the other hand, probably has a big beefy desktop workstation and generally doesn't move their laptop workstation around much (so weight and size are less of an issue) and, when they do need to work from a remote location, they need it to have as much beef behind it as their desktop, or at least as close as possible. That's what a professional user needs; not thin and light, but beefy and maintainable. Of course, those same professional users will probably also want something light and portable for general, off-hours, use. Apple could sell two laptops to these people, rather than zero, if they'd just figure that out.

As for whether or not 32GB of RAM is necessary in a laptop? Nah, I don't think it's necessary for even the most demanding single-host activities. If I need to test something on Windows, Linux, and OS X without closing my dev tools or rebooting a bunch of times, I can carry three laptops with me. Or, I can carry one slightly heavier laptop with 32GB of RAM and run Windows and Linux in VMs with 8GB each. Suddenly, that 1/4" of thickness doesn't seem like such a tradeoff, it's sure a hell of a lot thinner than two additional laptops, so if Apple doesn't want to sell that configuration, they could still at least sell a laptop with RAM slots and let the end user sort it out.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Gr8Apes]

I guess this is where we differ. I've tested my late model MBP 16GB RAM and 500GB SSD system against my hexcore desktop. It's faster in quite a few things, and the only place where the laptop struggles to meet the desktop is in video encoding (something about 6 cores running around 3.5GHz trumps 4 cores of a newer couple of gen CPUs turbo'd at 3.4GHz every day, but the laptop is still no slouch :) As far as running compilations, the laptop is actually faster than the dual 850 RAID0 setup on the desktop, with or without running the full unit test suite as well. That shocked me. I've also had 3 VMs up and running including 2 Windows VMs and a Linux VM with no trouble on the laptop, and a couple of DBs. To say it's not beefy enough, you're likely outside the capacity of most if not all laptops. The SSDs they use in these MBPs are nothing short of amazing and blow everything SATA connected out of the water.

I'd say the MBP has earned its "Pro" moniker. Yeah, I may not like the lack of serviceability, but if I don't need to service it, what's the problem? That was the entire thing that drew me to MBPs in the first place. Buy it, configure it like you want, and then use it for 5+ years and never worry about hardware again. I've had 5 Apple laptops, a PowerBook I sold after 5 years, a 2006 early intel that is still in use but long in the tooth and going out to pasture shortly, a 2009 that developed a SATA controller glitch in early 2015, a 2013 work system that is still in daily use, and my current 2014 laptop (replaced the 2009) that has had no issues to date. I only mention this to note that the only changes were to the 2006 getting an SSD and memory upgrade, and the 2009 also getting an SSD and memory upgrade. The rest came with full memory and have needed no updates. The only battery replacement was for the 2006 and was done for free in the 5th year due to a recall.

I understand that OWC now has SSD upgrades, but I have no reason to get one at this point. 500GB for a working laptop is sufficient, as long as you don't carry around every bit of digital cruft you've collected for the last 20 years. It's portable, you have external storage for those things. You really have to ask yourself at this point what do you need vs what do you want. My needs are covered, my wants are mostly covered or can be accommodated easily.

Now where I think Apple is screwing up is with the mini/Mac Pro configurations. I get that they don't want to cannibalize their Mac Pros, but the 2012 minis rocked for low power reliable servers. Drop 2 SSDs in RAID 1 and you had a pretty rock steady low power Unix server for most things you could want. Mac Pros deal with a different group - they are for desktop use, but Apple's positioning them as a grid combo, if I read their intentions correctly, so they can use those GPUs in a grid application (basically lots of headless Mac Pros). The minis can also be used this way, and with quad i7s were actually pretty cost effective. The problem apple has is that a regular solid PC box with 4 NVidia or AMD cards linked will dollar for dollar beat a Mac Pro configuration, mainly because they haven't upgraded in 2 years.

A dual core i5 mini at a sub $400 price point is fine for casual desktop use, but for heavier desktop users that don't need the GPU firepower of the Mac Pro a quad i7 mini at a sub $700 price with reasonable or upgradeable RAM would certainly be nice.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[BronsCon]

I dunno man, the PC I bought in November (which I am currently typing this on) outspecs the highest-end MacBook Pro in every respect, including size, weight, and build quality, and cost me half as much (from memory: the highest-end configuration rMBP is about $3200 while I paid $1600) so Apple could well be doing a fair bit more for the money. It's also worth noting that this PC is a model that is roughly 2mo older than the 2013 (bought in early 2014) rMBP it works alongside, so Apple's had plenty of time to catch up to what was a mid-high-end PH laptop 3 years ago (almost to the day). Mind you, I bought the laptop (new in box, none of this open box or refurb shit) on an extreme sale and it should have cost me another $500 but that still makes it $1100 cheaper than a 3-year-newer and less capable machine.

Oh and, on top of being about 1mm thinner than the rMBP, I have actual RAM slots on this PC and dual m.2 SSDs. Oh, and better cooling. My rMBP kicks its fans up a LOT... and throttles shortly after; not sure how you're getting yours to run at turbo speeds, but congratulations, you got a good one. I have to actually constrict the airflow to the PC under heavy load to get it to throttle at all. Under moderate load it runs 10-15C cooler than the rMBP at idle. Oh, and it's a gaming rig, not even intended for professional use in any way, shape, or form; but it fits the bill better in every regard.

Perhaps that's why we disagree: you're not looking from the perspective of someone who has these two machines sitting side-by-side on the same desk, having torn both of them down to the frame and reassembled them just for kicks. My only gripe with the PC is, interestingly, also one of my gripes with the rMBP: it doesn't run Snow Leopard. I've liked OS X less and less with each release since SL and Adobe doesn't develop their tools for Linux so... Hi there, Windows, long time no see.

And I'm gonna guess I'm not so anti-Apple given that my household contains a 17" MBP, a 13" MBP, a 15" rMBP, a 1st gen iPad (still working), an iPad Air, iPad Air2, iPad Pro 9.7",an iPhone 6s Plus, and an Apple TV. You can blame my wife for the 13", the Air2, and the iPhone; the rest are mine (though the 1st gen iPad was hers and she wanted to toss it).

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it would look pretty cool, but if you can touch type you aren't looking at the keys, so what is on them is superfluous. It is more important that they feel like normal keys, a touch sensitive OLED strip loses that.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Gr8Apes]

Yeah, the m.2 SSDs are pretty cool, but the general market ones you see are generally significantly slower. You have to go high end to match the Apple MBPs of which the current crop actually use slot M M.2 drives. :) Those use 4 PCIe lanes for 1400+ MB/s. MBPs were ahead of the pack again, my 2014 has the 2 lane SSDs with 700MB/s transfers, which explains the huge speed improvement over my RAID0 850 SATA III setup on the desktop, even 2 850s just can't pump through more than about 400MB/s continuous. I'd have to go with 4 in a RAID 0 configuration, or buy faster drives, which I'm sure some exist by now as the last upgrade was over a year ago.

Now I bought my mid 2014 15" MBP on sale from B&H with AppleCare, 16GB RAM and 500GB storage, and it ran me about $2200, minus another $300 or so trade in for the flaky 2009 (I just didn't feel right selling it to someone knowing the root issue, so I recycled it) The 2015s are twice as fast disk speed wise, but I doubt I'd notice at this point :) I do notice when I have to use one of the 40MB/s (disk I/O) dev boxes I have lying around. Those things crawl.

Lastly, I'd 100% agree if gaming was my focus. It's not. So for non-game non-GPU specific loads I just don't notice a difference. BTW, you keep mentioning rMBP... exactly how OLD is that MBP? It hasn't been known as a rMBP since early 2013, IIRC, when they stopped selling non retina MBPs. Yes, marketing keeps the "MBP with Retina Display" going on their web site, but no one I know expects to see anything but a retina screen when someone says "I have a MBP". For my 2006, which is a MBP, I'd never say "oh yeah, use my MBP" and hand them that machine... :-D

I haven't tried back-porting SL to my MBP, I know it runs on the desktop, because I still have a SL image somewhere. It ran ML fine, which in its last iteration was somewhat stable, but 10.10.5 runs fine. Note: this is on an intel 980x LGA-1366 which is still standard BIOS, running currently with a substandard AMD card in it as I haven't bothered upgrading to a nVidia 960 or higher. 10.11 is supposed to run ok, but I haven't upgraded any of my daily systems to it yet as I'm not sure it is stable enough. I know why GCD was implemented in 10.6, and they've been continuing to migrate more and more subsystems to the GCD system with each release, but 10.11 wasn't smooth, same with all of 10.7 and the first couple releases of 10.8, 10.10, and 10.11. 10.11 is still having some issues even with 10.11.4. Once GCD is fully incorporated, I'll bet you $1 that you're going to see massive core counts on Apple products. 10, 20, 100+. Because a message passing paradigm greatly increases the ability to parallel process things over the old threading model and core clock speed is no longer increasing.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[BronsCon]

The current crop is finally using the slot M drives my 2013 model PC is using? I could swear my 2013 rMBP uses one as well, though I didn't look that closely and it might simply be PCIe.

And I question your knowledge of Apple's product lines given the following:

when they stopped selling non retina MBPs

Because, well, it seems they still sell the 13" MBP which, really, should have been obvious since I linked to it earlier in the thread.

For references, as a software developer who tests on all common platforms, gaming is not my focus either (I have consoles for that). 32GB in one machine capable of legally running OS X without a bunch of hackery would mean I no longer need to maintain 3 separate systems for testing purposes, which is why I'm seeking precisely that. No, a Mac Pro is not the solution, as it lacks the portability I often need. One of the perks of working for myself is that I can work from wherever (this means traveling with the wife when she goes to visit family), which basically requires that all of my equipment be portable.

+1 for holding off on the 10.11 upgrade, though; if I can't have Snow Leopard, Yosemite is the next best release IMO.

core clock speed is no longer increasing

Ah, but instruction efficiency is. Don't underestimate how important that is; you'll note that the performance of each subsequent release from Intel exceeds that of the previous generation at the same clock speed. Well, given your workload you might not, but a lot of others do, myself included.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Gr8Apes]

The current crop is finally using the slot M drives my 2013 model PC is using? I could swear my 2013 rMBP uses one as well, though I didn't look that closely and it might simply be PCIe.

It appears to be the case since 2014, at least.

And I question your knowledge of Apple's product lines given the following:

when they stopped selling non retina MBPs

Because, well, it seems they still sell the 13" MBP which, really, should have been obvious since I linked to it earlier in the thread.

go to that link, click on the MBP picture. You'll note that when you do, it will come up with an enlarged picture with "Macbook Pro with Retina". AFAIK, they no longer sell non retina MBPs, and haven't for at least the last couple of years. To go non-retina, you have to buy a Macbook.

For references, as a software developer who tests on all common platforms, gaming is not my focus either (I have consoles for that). 32GB in one machine capable of legally running OS X without a bunch of hackery would mean I no longer need to maintain 3 separate systems for testing purposes, which is why I'm seeking precisely that. No, a Mac Pro is not the solution, as it lacks the portability I often need. One of the perks of working for myself is that I can work from wherever (this means traveling with the wife when she goes to visit family), which basically requires that all of my equipment be portable.

I do the same, and my MBP and 1 external 2TB disk carries everything I "need", extending to my music library and latest few movies I haven't seen yet. ;) I have a set of configured VMs on the laptop for those support needs plus a set of pristine originals on the external. (Copy to the internal, then configure if I need something different, also allows me to keep any clients separated) I guess I've gone one step further along this path or you would have to make a concession that is not palatable.

Ah, but instruction efficiency is. Don't underestimate how important that is; you'll note that the performance of each subsequent release from Intel exceeds that of the previous generation at the same clock speed. Well, given your workload you might not, but a lot of others do, myself included.

As I mentioned, I have the 980x. When OC'd to match the turbo clock speeds of the current top of the line crop, the performance is no more than 50% improved in the new processors with several general benchmarks. That's a 6 year old CPU, and not enough of an improvement to warrant upgrading the system. Microbenchmarks show marked improvements in some cases, but microbenchmarks are not very useful for comparing general performance. With the next CPU releases with 20+ cores, I may consider it, but only once the price hits some reasonable number. Now, that's for desktops, for laptops which are power driven, the performance has definitely been improving per power consumption, but they're close to hitting desktop limits at this point as compared to desktop performance per core. You just can't cram 12+ cores in a laptop just yet and get reasonable performance (battery life) plus you could probably roast a turkey with it.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[BronsCon]

go to that link, click on the MBP picture. You'll note that when you do, it will come up with an enlarged picture with "Macbook Pro with Retina". AFAIK, they no longer sell non retina MBPs, and haven't for at least the last couple of years. To go non-retina, you have to buy a Macbook.

You, sir, are mistaken. They do appear to have an error on their site, not surprising given that they've let this model stagnate; however, if you head back to the Buy page and look at their offerings, you'll see that, at the bottom, below the "with Retina" listings, there is a lonely little listing for the 13" MacBook Pro. That is what I linked to. Now, if you click on Tech Specs, you'll see a side-by-side of the two Retina models; scroll down again. See it there, under the Other Models heading, just above Accessories? "13-Inch MacBook Pro Tech Specs" is the label and it's 1280x800, certainly not Retina.

I do the same, and my MBP and 1 external 2TB disk carries everything I "need"

Uh... I don't see how an external disk has any bearing on the amount of RAM available for running additional operating systems in a virtualized environment, but okay... I find, quite often, that my Mac is using upward of around 12GB of RAM (minus buffers, caches, and the like) while my PC sits comfortably at just over 8GB running the same applications. That's just running my IDE, a couple browsers, Skype, and a few terminal sessions.When I get to testing my application on various platforms, well, that puppy eats up another 4GB once it gets going (I should clarify, the test suite uses most of that, not necessarily the application itself). So let's do some quick back-of-napkin math (and we'll even ignore the RAM used by guest OSes, a concession I'm openly making in order to illustrate my point): RAM used by Mac running typical software and dev tools [12GB] + RAM used by test suite on OS X [4GB] + RAM used by test suite on Windows [4GB] + RAM used by test suite on Linux [4GB] = 24GB. You're right, I can't see any way 32GB of RAM in a MacBook Pro could be useful. None. At. All.

You know, if I could do it legally, I'd just throw the 32GB in my PC and run OS X in a VM and call it a day. But I can't, and I also can't buy a MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM and the models that come with RAM slots only support up to 16GB (again, only 8GB officially); so, I carry 3 laptops when I know I'm going to have to work remotely.

I mean, I could shut down my IDE, close my browsers, kill Skype, and run the tests on OS X first, then boot the Windows VM and run the test suite there, then kill that and boot the Linux VM and run the test suite there... you know... that might work. In fact, it does work, it's what I do when an over-night trip turns into a full week (e.g. I wasn't planning on having to work, so I only brought the Mac); yeah, it works, except that it literally takes 3x as long, requiring manual intervention (e.g. I have to switch VMs manually and actively monitor progress, lest it take longer because I left it sitting idle when the test suite on one OS completed), and I still wish I'd brought a 2nd laptop so I could still have a usable computer while all of that was going on. Yeah... nah... if I have to carry 2 laptops anyway, carrying a 3rd is less hassle than cycling through VMs, adding another manual procedure to the testing process, and making the already lengthy test suite take 3x longer to run. I absolutely abhor taking a 2hr process and turning it into a 6hr process, as it adds 4hr to my workday.

I'm good with not doing that; I just won't buy another Apple computer until they sell something that fits my needs. If the one I'm using currently (well, there are two but one won't boot OS X anymore for reasons discussed earlier in the thread) happens to break before Apple starts selling somethi

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Gr8Apes]

You, sir, are mistaken. They do appear to have an error on their site, not surprising given that they've let this model stagnate;

Well, I'll be darned. They're still selling the mid 2012 model. That's a surprise. Stagnate isn't what I'd call that. ;)

I do the same, and my MBP and 1 external 2TB disk carries everything I "need"

Uh... I don't see how an external disk has any bearing on the amount of RAM available for running additional operating systems in a virtualized environment, but okay...

It allows me to carry all those non-essential low-hit but desired things that otherwise would take up extra space on the high end SSD that is better served as swap space if needed.

I find, quite often, that my Mac is using upward of around 12GB of RAM (minus buffers, caches, and the like) while my PC sits comfortably at just over 8GB running the same applications.

I'm running 3-4 IDEs, XCode, Mail, Safari with multiple tabs open (memory hog), multiple terminal sessions, MySQL, H2 test suites, and currently my memory stack is at 20GB out of 24GB, mostly due to some heavy research involving about 20+ safari tabs being open (you know how much RAM that eats). My laptop runs a similar stack, minus the 20-40 safari tabs, and rarely exceeds 16GB. This includes running both XCode iOS emulation and Android Studio plus emulation, and the entire server side stack and applications. My windows VMs are restricted to 4GB RAM max generally because I'm testing, not running production levels, or, for browsers, down to 1.5GB. Linux VMs, depending upon use, are similarly restricted, except they range from 1-4GB. I also tend to tune my VMs to not be running crap they don't need. Memory hasn't been a problem yet, even on a project that required Oracle on windows, SugarCRM on windows (separate VM) and JBoss on Windows (yep, 3 windows servers, on a laptop no less)

You're either trying to run a fully scaled out production configuration that forces memory consumption, or your requirements are far far higher than mine, which would surprise me and result in "I wish to subscribe to your newsletter" ;)

As for test suites - I run a full set today, my laptop runs it fastest. It still takes 45 minutes or so to run upwards of a total of 2000 unit and integration tests across the entire build. I could, if I really wanted to spend the week working on it, likely reduce that entire runtime down to around 5 minutes, but it would be a wasted week since I hardly ever run the entire set and wait on it, I offload the full suite to my CI server and only deal with the subset I need locally 99% of the time.

You know, if I could do it legally, I'd just throw the 32GB in my PC and run OS X in a VM and call it a day. But I can't, and I also can't buy a MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM and the models that come with RAM slots only support up to 16GB (again, only 8GB officially); so, I carry 3 laptops when I know I'm going to have to work remotely.

I would have sworn that the last pluggable set supported 16GB officially and 32GB max. I just checked, you are correct, only 8GB officially. At this point, that's unbelievable. Even the minis are 8GB officially. I have a few of those, and they're all maxed out at 16GB and have been, for years. I guess that just made me assume 16GB was the official max.

I'm good with not doing that; I just won't buy another Apple computer until they sell something that fits my needs. If the one I'm using currently (well, there are two but one won't boot OS X anymore for reasons discussed earlier in the thread) happens to break before Apple starts selling something that actually suits my needs (or begins allowing OS X to run on non-Apple hardware, legally and without hacks), well, I g

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[BronsCon]

You're either trying to run a fully scaled out production configuration that forces memory consumption

Precisely. I'm not just running a test suite against the code (which should have been obvious as I could run tests against code for any platform from any platform, thus negating the need to run the actual OSes) but automated functionality testing against individual builds. I need a production environment (e.g. one that closely matches what the end user will be using) in order to do that; so, yes, I'm running a fully scaled out production configuration. Out of necessity.

you're still running a MBP in the first generation SSDs, which were only 300MB/s or so

Whatever was the highest-end model they sold in January 2015. I peak over 500MB/sec for both reads and writes so I'm guessing no. Looking farther up in the discussion, I do see that i said i bought it in 2014; I'm not so 100% with timelines, I was still working for someone else in 2014 and didn't buy the rMBP until the 2011 (17") died in January 2015 when I was relying on it for my work, as I was working for myself at the time. Sorry for the confusion.

To be sure, I just checked. System Information lists it as a MacBook Pro 11,3 and About This Mac states Mid 2014.

The latest rumors have the next generation of SSDs running at 10 times that speed. More memory may not be the smartest bang for your dollar at that point.

At that point, I'm sure we'll be considering whether we should have RAM at all, beyond a small amount to store status flags to allow us to reset a deadlocked machine. That or, well, you know, RAM is getting faster, too; and if I need to use more than 16GB of it and that's all I happen to have, well, I'm still gonna be swapping to a slower medium.

Just to bring home how fast these SSDs are

I have two of them, each capable of 1100MB/sec writes, in a RAID0. I'm acutely aware of how fast they are. DDR3-1866 (which my PC laptop uses) has 14933.33MB/sec of bandwidth, about 7.5x as fast as my SSD RAID stripe in raw throughput; faster when you consider seek times. DDR3-2133 has 17066.67MB/sec of bandwidth, further widening the gap. Of course, the DDR3-1600 soldered into my rMBP has only 12800MS/sec of bandwidth, which might account for the performance variance between the two systems (until the rMBP throttles, then that accounts for most of it).

And now we have DDR4, which goes up to 19200MB/sec bandwidth in currently available modules. Faster speeds will be developed, so... wake me when I can buy an M.2 SSD that tops 20GB/sec with seek times measured in clock cycles rather than microseconds. I'll write a fat check for a couple of them.

If you're not running high-end games or video, the built-in Intel graphics should suffice just fine.

Unless you're RAM-constrained, in which case sharing some system RAM with the Intel GPU might just be the thing that gets you swapping.

Re:Apple is copying...Lenovo?

[Gr8Apes]

You're either trying to run a fully scaled out production configuration that forces memory consumption

Precisely. I'm not just running a test suite against the code (which should have been obvious as I could run tests against code for any platform from any platform, thus negating the need to run the actual OSes) but automated functionality testing against individual builds. I need a production environment (e.g. one that closely matches what the end user will be using) in order to do that; so, yes, I'm running a fully scaled out production configuration. Out of necessity.

Fully scaled out production system can mean several things - one is using 128 GB of RAM to support 100K+ concurrent users in sub 500ms service call times, the other is a complete system scaled out to support 100 users in 4GB of RAM in sub 500ms service call times. (I hate waiting, I will rarely sacrifice response speed for scalability into smaller footprints)

To be sure, I just checked. System Information lists it as a MacBook Pro 11,3 and About This Mac states Mid 2014.

Exact same laptop I have, 500GB SSD. There is something seriously wrong with yours if the fans kick up and it throttles watching a youtube video. Mine doesn't even have a blip on the front page trump video, although now I need some mint.

I have two of them, each capable of 1100MB/sec writes, in a RAID0.

Still slow.... NVMe promises 3GB/s +, per drive. ;) Apple's MBPs are supposed to be running NVMe in the next release, but that is an unsubstantiated rumor at this point. It would follow the previous 3 releases though, roughly doubling disk performance on each release.

And now we have DDR4, which goes up to 19200MB/sec bandwidth in currently available modules. Faster speeds will be developed, so... wake me when I can buy an M.2 SSD that tops 20GB/sec with seek times measured in clock cycles rather than microseconds. I'll write a fat check for a couple of them.

And seek times are dropping with NVMe as well. But the point is having a "smaller" high performance memory with a reasonably fast swap space may suffice unless you're willing to drop serious coin on pure memory as it's always faster, we all know that. But I do wish they'd offer a 32 or 64 GB option, just to have more than I need available on my next laptop.

Unless you're RAM-constrained, in which case sharing some system RAM with the Intel GPU might just be the thing that gets you swapping.

Well, there is that.

Please stop.

[lw54]

My iphone is warped. Your products are becoming crap. Please stop. Full stop.

I don't want a thinner laptop but I would like a more tactile keyboard. (sent from my 2015 mac pro)

Re:Please stop.

[blind biker]

My dream is that an enterpreneur will found a company that makes phones that are NOT thin! In fact, their motto will be "Our phones are indeed fat - and you'll love the gloriously long battery life!"
And after swallowing a sizable chunk of the market that thirsts for such phones, they could then go on to making thick, somewhat heavy but oh so long-lasting laptops! With full-travel keys, or at least like the ThinkPads of 5 years ago.

I can dream, can't I.

Re:Please stop.

[Overzeetop]

They should make a fat-phone with a removable back.surround (like the OEM LG G3 bumper that was a replacement back with a silicone piece that wrapped the edge) that (1) protects the phone without the need for a "case" and (2) is replacable for abou $10-20 so when you do scuff it up, you can get a brand-new shiny look just by swapping on a new back.

Re:Please stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Laptops are starting to get so thin that that they're starting to look like skeletons. I like my laptop to have curves.

Though a skeletal laptop sounds like it could be pretty cool, except for all of the gunk that it would accumulate.

Re:Please stop.

[AmiMoJo]

And more than one port, and RAM sockets, and an upgradable SSD, and half way good sounding speakers... The MacBook Pro seems to be becoming more like a tablet.

Fortunately there are lots of real "pro" laptops on the market. Many manufacturers do Ultrabooks so unless you really need MacOS there are plenty of better choices.

Re:Please stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Highscreen Boost 3 (6000mAh battery)
Russian company, tho.

Re:Please stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Our phones are indeed fat - and you'll love the gloriously long battery life!"

Double the thickness and you will presumably get double battery life. So, charge once in two days? You would not get near an old Nokia phone in battery longevity even with the same thickness, as the phones consume a lot more nowadays.

You would need the battery to last at least a week for it to be a good in practice. Charge phone every weekend, or charge it every day, both can be made an easy routine. But charging every other day? Brain does not like holding a state for things like that.

A smartphone with a week of battery life would be very thick (thicker than old Nokia phones, probably), and weigh considerably, as a big portion of the weight is already battery. Based on Galaxy S5's battery, which can last a full day in not-too-heavy use, adding 6 more days would add 270 grams of extra weight, for a total of 416 grams. About the same as a regular iPad apparently, so perhaps it could be manageable. Might be a bit uncomfortable in a pocket, though.

Re:Please stop.

[macs4all]

My iphone is warped. Your products are becoming crap. Please stop. Full stop.

I don't want a thinner laptop but I would like a more tactile keyboard. (sent from my 2015 mac pro)

If you have a Mac Pro, then the discussion of Keyboard-type is moot. Completely, utterly moot.

Don't like Apple's keyboard? Then just purchase any one of a zillion other USB keyboards. Done.

You can even have a replica of what a lot of people around here think of as the "God" of keyboards, the Model M, FFS.

Re:Please stop.

[macs4all]

My iphone is warped. Your products are becoming crap. Please stop. Full stop.

I don't want a thinner laptop but I would like a more tactile keyboard. (sent from my 2015 mac pro)

They still sell iPhones?!?!?!?!? hahahaahahaha

Yeah. Only about 51 MEELION iPhones last QUARTER. Poor Apple. Might look into it.

Re:Please stop.

[damnbunni]

Blackberry said they could've made the Priv thinner but didn't want to cut down on the battery.

It's a 3400 mAh battery, so it's bigger than what most phones have.

Of course, a slider wasn't really going to win the 'thinness race' no matter how small they made the battery.

Re: Please stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^ fucks his laptop

Re:Please stop.

[GuB-42]

The removable back was one of the best features of Samsung smartphones. Too bad they don't do it anymore.

Re:Please stop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go:

http://www.banggood.com/OUKITEL-K10000-10000mAh-Battery-5_5-inch-MT6735p-1_0GHz-Quad-core-Smartphone-p-1021743.html

Ugly design IMO, but you'd be hard pushed to find a phone with a bigger battery.

Great, here come the fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

Fanboys in 3...2...1...

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

You'll notice that over the last few years, even the fanboys are getting annoyed by the stupid shit Apple is doing.

Keys with less travel on a supposedly "pro" laptop? Thinner computers for the sake of... what, exactly? People want more battery life, Apple keeps innovating on that end but it only results in the same battery life because they stupidly keep making their laptops thinner.

The low-end computers keep getting slow 5400 RPM drives, as if 7200 RPM drives were somehow incredibly more expensive. And Apple keeps using laptop parts in desktop computers which is just insane, not to mention that they're even making their desktop computers thinner. That doesn't help anyone. The last straw is that they're now soldering the RAM, meaning you can't even upgrade your computer a few years later. That's the complete opposite of being a green company. You can use all the solar panels all you want, Apple, it doesn't mean squat if your hardware gets discarded sooner than it needs to be.

Re: Great, here come the fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

So far it's been a 'haters gonna hate' party. Apparently you lot that hate Apple talk more about them than the fans do.

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[c]

Thinner computers for the sake of... what, exactly?

The theory is that if they can make them thin and light enough, they'll see a sales increase due to people rebuying stuff that they lost in the couch cushions or that got blown away in a brisk wind.

Re: Great, here come the fanboys

[The Grim Reefer]

Apparently you lot that hate Apple talk more about them than the fans do.

I seem to have fallen into a parallel universe, or something. ;-)

Re: Great, here come the fanboys

[vux984]

Apparently you lot that hate Apple talk more about them than the fans do.

I'd say that most of the people complaining here are using apple and are frustrated that the the macbook pro has become steadily less useful for doing anything a pro would like to do with it.

I still like my early 2015 macbook pro; it runs faster and cooler than my old one, and the battery lasts longer. But I sorely miss the ethernet port. The fact that it is lighter and thinner, though was of no value. I'd gladly have bought it thicker and heavier with an ethernet port and even more battery life.

And what do they do this generation? Lighter and thinner again. They already have a macbook air for people who have made that their top priority. But other people have other priorities, and right now Apple only caters to exactly one group.

I'm not married to OSX. I use a windows desktop (in large part because apple doesn't make a single one worth owning.) Yeah, I game with it, but I'd have bought an apple and used bootcamp for when i felt like gaming if they actually made a desktop worth owning. I like the build quality of the macbook pro... and i like having at least one OSX device aruond to keep my hand in OSX; but the device is becoming steadily less than what I want from a laptop with each iteration. I don't want finger print id. I dont' want lighter and thinner again. I do want actual function keys. And I still want my ethernet port back.

billions in the bank... maybe its time for them to introduce a new line of laptops, you know for pro/power users. And just rename the current pro the macbook air+ or something.

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

Thinner computers for the sake of... what, exactly?

So they can ship more in the same space and spend less on shipping due to less weight.

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

> slow 5400 RPM drives

Which isn't all bad on a laptop since it's quieter and uses less power. It doesn't hurt performance that much if you have enough RAM. That's the important part, but since Apple hasn't upgraded the amount of allowed RAM in over half a decade, slow drives are a problem. I upgraded my 2011 MacBook Pro to 16 GB. That's still the max you are allowed to have in a new MacBook Pro! Apple needs to allow us to have more RAM than we did five years ago!

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[cmdr_klarg]

> slow 5400 RPM drives

Which isn't all bad on a laptop since it's quieter and uses less power.

SSDs are even quieter and use even less power. Only real advantage the 5400 drive has is cost.

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

And size. I love my new 4 TB laptop drive. It was $201 from Newegg. I'd love to have an SSD, but the 250+ GByte bloated Windows virtual machine images I have to use prevent that.

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

it doesn't mean squat if your hardware gets discarded sooner than it needs to be

= profit!

Re: Great, here come the fanboys

[Anonymous Coward]

If your Windows is 250GB, you're doing it wrong. Also, use thin provisioning. Though, if I have to explain that, it's likely over your head.

Re: Great, here come the fanboys

[Blaskowicz]

I don't have the same requirements as you, therefore you are an idiot and a liar.

Re:Great, here come the fanboys

[cthulhu11]

Huh? Do you really need your SSD to be spinning at ANY rate?

Yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but can it run Linux?

Re:Yes, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. You could even run Linux on a ham sandwich.

Innovation

[110010001000]

And who said innovation was dead? OLED touch bars are what I want!

Re: Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol I had an HP laptop from 12 years ago that had OLED function keys.

Innovation at its best.

Gimmicky changes

[OzPeter]

Swapping the function keys for a touch bar is gimmicky on a machine that is labeled as "pro". And that is before even getting to the stories of OLED burn in.
Upgraded ports are always nice, but again on a Pro model you need to have as many as you can cram in.

But what is obviously missing from TFA is the things that make a computer important: CPU, memory, drive space, screen resolution. None of them get a mention.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[djbckr]

Apple doesn't make computers. They make toys. No point in listing specs for a toy.

When I compare my Mac to my Toshiba, or really any other laptop, the Mac feels more solid, works faster, and crashes less than any other computer I've ever seen. I know I'm feeding a troll, but you obviously have never really used a Mac. You would change your mind if you did.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno. My MBP has produced better results and for a longer time than either one of my 2500+USD HP laptops did. In my mind that shows who made the toys and who made the tools. How about backing your crap up with more than just throwing around a buzzword?

Re:Gimmicky changes

[Anonymous Coward]

How long?

Because the OP is right: Today's Apple produces toys, not computers for professionals. They've killed all their pro software and locked down OS X to the point it's useless for pros. I won't argue about Apple under Steve Jobs (I don't know enough to) but modern Apple absolutely produces toy computers.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[chihowa]

And that is before even getting to the stories of OLED burn in.

Using OLED really is short-sighted here. OLED, with its burn-in issues, is the absolute worst display tech to use for key and their mostly static images. Backlit e-ink would be a far better choice, unless they're going for full-color, constantly moving key faces (cringe).

Re:Gimmicky changes

[zenlessyank]

I don't use Apple products on principle. You can ship me a pallet load of Apple products and I wont even cut the packing tape. They believe that a closed ecosystem is the best way to promote their products. I didn't get into computers to be told what I could or could not do with them. The whole point of a computer is to do what you want with it. Not what you want me to do with it. I will never change my mind about that. Ever.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Than your opinion is baseless and can safety be ignored.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair, that's because Toshiba computers are crap. They have been for a long time. Try comparing a Mac to an NEC or Panasonic, something in a similar price range. Lenovo, ASUS and Acer do some good kit too, and the latter two have built Mac hardware in the past.

Personally I like the NEC LaVie ultrabooks. Lighter, better battery life and exceptional build quality. Upgrading is as easy as taking out half a dozen screws and slotting in a new SSD, although RAM is soldered on some models.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[Andreas Mayer]

The whole point of a computer is to do what you want with it.

Absolutely! So it's a great thing that I can do what I want with my Mac.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[macs4all]

They believe that a closed ecosystem is the best way to promote their products.

Are you conflating iOS and the iOS App Store with OS X?

And that's not even true of iOS. Just fire up XCode and have at it. Anything your little heart desires you can code for yourself. No Dev license required.

Oh, and BTW, you didn't mention that Apple gives away its IDE. I guess that's yet another example of their "closed ecosystem". (rolls eyes)

Re:Gimmicky changes

[macs4all]

locked down OS X

In what way? Because they "hid" (until you un-hide them) some system directories from the noobs who have no business in them anyway? I mean, WTF good can EVER come from Grandma poking around and deleting things in /System, or /Library?

Or perhaps it's because they made the Default for Gatekeeper such that noobs were less likely to fubar their system with malware, just because they were duped into installing some random thing from a scarebait banner-ad?

Bottom line: If you think OS X really is "locked down", then you don't have the requisite knowledge to be poking around under the hood, anyway. That's not conceit; it's a fact.

Re:Gimmicky changes

[macs4all]

And that is before even getting to the stories of OLED burn in.

Using OLED really is short-sighted here. OLED, with its burn-in issues, is the absolute worst display tech to use for key and their mostly static images. Backlit e-ink would be a far better choice, unless they're going for full-color, constantly moving key faces (cringe).

You can avoid burn-in on OLEDs to a large extent with the "random walk" approach. Plus, if they pick a monochrome OLED (probably won't), there are some OLEDs with very good burn-in and lifespan specs.

Plus, I would bet they are also thinking of expanding the use of the OLED strip to "Notifications". I am on the fence as to whether that would be more, or less, annoying tha pop-up "bubbles", though.

Re: Gimmicky changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Your problem is this made up "being told" rather than seeing if as "enabled".

If it doesn't enable you to do what you want, move on and stop whining.

I guess its helpful?

[nimbius]

replace their function keys atop laptop keyboards with an OLED touch bar

not terrible, but can i get a real delete/backspace key and an option to have something other than chiclet keys? maybe work with cherry or something non island/non scissor switch? do people even like this keyboard style or are we so used to it now that to question it is just another mark of heresy in the forums?
And while we're at it, its 2016, can we please quit making our laptop cases with an intentionally low coefficient of friction? the iphone already slides like a greased hog at a county fair...i can only imagine a thinner lighter macbook slipping out of my hands and flying off into the horizon never to be seen again.

Re:I guess its helpful?

[fermion]

I have a real switch keyboard, the German thing that everyone uses. While it is a bit nostolgia, I don't really see myself more efficient on it than on my Air.

What I hate is my HP laptop. Typing is a real pain. It has the full backspace, delete, and a hundred other keys that no one uses.

I think the aluminum was for weight, and all of the sudden it was a thing that everyone had to have, and it slide out of control. I don't use a laptop on my lap so much anymore.

Of course a light computer is what we have been striving for since the Obsornes. I orignally did not get an air because the work I was doing required the power of a Pro, but then worked changed and the Air became a real option.

Given that I am older now and a 15" screen would not be horrible, probably equal to the old 17", it might be time to go back to a MacBook Pro. I do think the Air line has run it's course.

Why not OLED for the whole screen?

[RogueWarrior65]

Is it still too expensive to make an OLED screen that big?

Re:Why not OLED for the whole screen?

[110010001000]

Because OLED suffers fro burn in. Waste of time.

Re:Why not OLED for the whole screen?

[zenlessyank]

I believe OLED has crashed before it could fly. Something about tiles falling off and it catching fire /s

Re:Why not OLED for the whole screen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody else has done that yet.

So there's nobody for apple to copy. And that's about all they do anymore.

Re:Why not OLED for the whole screen?

[danbob999]

They make it for much larger 4k TVs, so I guess it's possible.
Apple is not a strong backer of OLED however. They still use LCD on their $800 iPhones.

Re:Why not OLED for the whole screen?

[macs4all]

They make it for much larger 4k TVs, so I guess it's possible. Apple is not a strong backer of OLED however. They still use LCD on their $800 iPhones.

But, I believe the Apple Watch is OLED. So they have their toe in that water, and the OLED reps calling on their R&D dept.

Re:Why not OLED for the whole screen?

[thegarbz]

OLED still has some major technical hurdles to overcome before it leaves the phone. The key point is burn-in and more so uneven degredation depending on the colour. Not only do screens burn in (which could be solved with a screen saver) but they slowly yellow as blue burns faster than green or red.

This isn't an issue for a device that spends a large portion of it's day with it's screen off and is discarded after a couple of years anyway, but it's an absolute non-starter on a PC.

Great. How about a matte display?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one feature that would get me to replace my 2012 MBP right fucking now is if Apple just put a matte display on its current model. That's it. That is all it has to do.

My current machine is dying, quickly (been dropped too many times), but it has a matte display installed by TechRestore and they don't do this mod anymore, so I have to use this thing as long as I can....which, unfortunately, will not be that long.

Re:Great. How about a matte display?

[omnichad]

You can buy stick-on anti-glare covers for most mac screens. Chances are, though, that a new screen would be bright enough to outweigh the bad. Or get yourself some polarizing glasses to use with it.

Re:Great. How about a matte display?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stick on stuff sucks.

And I'm not going to go get myself a pair of prescription polarized glasses to wear with a computer. That is a ridiculous "solution".

I'd rather Apple just offer a matte display and charge an extra $500 or whatever for a usable screen.

No wonder Apple is losing money

[hsmith]

I've been waiting to upgrade my MBP for a year now. It is a 2012 and feeling long in the tooth. Been waiting for a "redesign" - but Q4? Lord.

Re:No wonder Apple is losing money

[ausekilis]

I've been waiting to upgrade my MBP for a year now. It is a 2012 and feeling long in the tooth. Been waiting for a "redesign" - but Q4? Lord.

I think you mean the 2012-2017 model. You've still got a decade before you're 2 revisions behind. Just put that $2k into high risk stocks, then maybe you'll be able to afford the next version of the MBP, due in 2025.

Re:No wonder Apple is losing money

[apoc.famine]

Same exact situation here. My 2012 MBP is still running fine, but I want something with a bit more processing power. Looking at the current lineup of MBPs, I just can't fathom spending so much money on such a limited machine. All the MBP models have tiny little hard drives and tiny little batteries and will get lost in a bookbag they're so thin. I just need a decent laptop with decent battery life that has a 1TB hd and some computing power. I guess I could buy the low-end MBP and upgrade it myself for far less than a high-end one, but it seems ridiculous to me to have to do that.
 
Thinking about a higher end System 76 laptop instead of a new MBP, because I can get the same or better guts as a new MBP for ~$1000 less. As much as I love my MBP, OSX is turning into such shit that it doesn't even come close to making up for that price difference. I did various forms of Linux for a decade, ran OSX for 7-8 years, and now I'm quickly being driven back to Linux.

And this "upgrade" really isn't looking like anything I'd be interested in. OLED touch bar and dropping the magsafe connector for a USB Type C? That's fucking stupid. Check out the ports in a System 76 laptop! The Kudu has: 3× USB 3.0, 1× USB 2.0, SD Card Reader, DVD-RW Drive, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, VGA, Headphone Jack, and Mic Jack. Or......you could get a 1-2 USB Type C ports on a new MBP for $1000 more. Now that I think about it, I think I'll see of I can configure one of those to drop the DVD drive and cut the weight a little (6lbs is a little much) and just pull the trigger.

Re:No wonder Apple is losing money

[pipingguy]

Apple's Q4 is July, some people are saying.

Did you take yours in for any screen issues? I think it's still covered if it's a mid-2012 model.

Re:No wonder Apple is losing money

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this.. Apple is losing money? Fuck, forget it.

Re:No wonder Apple is losing money

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine is a mid 2010 and upgraded with SSD etc.. and its still pretty good but having been dying for them to release a new Mac

Zero innovation

[cachimaster]

The last time Apple innovated was with the iphone, in 2007. It basically have the same product line for 10 years straight.

Meanwhile, Lenovo and Dell keep throwing out freak notebook after notebook, with the hope that some design sticks, and some actually do (Yoga, Hybrid tablets, rugged notebooks, etc.)

Re:Zero innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, just like how Lenovo copied Apple's touchpad (T440) only to do such a poor job of it to revert back to their original design (T450)?

Keep on joking. We're laughing at you.

Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[Lumpy]

We want Fatter with multi day batter and 17 freaking inches in size with a retina display.. The fact that used 17" MBP laptops are going UP in value are a fantastic indicator of this. It's the only peice of electronics outside of an Apple -I that gains in value almost daily.

Give us a workstation 17" that is fat as the 2012 MBP that allows the installation of 2-3 .2 SSD drives and the option to install metric buttloads of ram.

Dammit Apple, people will pay $2500-$3000 for that.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[garcia]

Did you ever think you may want to rethink how you're doing things if you require 3 SSDs, a 17" screen, and a metric buttload of RAM in your laptop?

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[Overzeetop]

Some things require real estate. It's one reason I have a pair of 4k monitors and a TB SSD docked to my Surface Pro 4 for doing CAD work (day) and music production (evening). And it would be nice to not have to pay a king's ransom for a bit of extra memory and storage ($1400 for 768GB of SSD and 8GB of memory seems steep, don't you think?).

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[boristdog]

Do you want to know how I know you aren't a developer?
Screen real estate makes your life MUCH easier.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[angel'o'sphere]

My first G4 17" Mac Book Pro costed far more than that :D
And yes, for a decent new 17" or bigger I would pa yup to 5k. But decent!

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[angel'o'sphere]

Well, if I still would do C++ then on one SSD would be the headers, on the other the sources, the object files would be written on the third and the linked exec on the second again.
No idea if that makes sense on SSDs, on rotating SCSI discs that spead up a build from 6 hours on one disk to a little bit more on 2 disks.

OTOH, the last time I tried to speed an C++ build up, we figured the build time was completely CPU bound and not IO bound. Hard disks and SSDs are just so much faster than 20 years ago.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us do real work and not just surf the internet all day.

3 SSD capability means fast and storage expandability. Lots of ram means more VM's or applications that need to chew a lot of ram.

Someone that does spreadsheets and powerpoints? thinner and lighter is a good idea as their feeble bodies atrophy. Some of us that actually do work like software, science, video and audio editing, art, etc... we can use all the storage and power we can get.

I personally want a 8 core XEON option. Fuck battery life, give me a portable high end workstation.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[grumpy-cowboy]

This is why a got a Dell Precision M4800 (end of 2014) to replace my 17" MBP (for almost the same price) and never looked back :

    - Intel® Core i7-4940MX (Quad-core Extreme 3.10GHz, 4.0GHz Turbo)
    - 32 GB of RAM
    - 1 SSD (256GB)
    - 1 HD (1 TB , Hybrid)
    - NVIDIA Quadro K2100M (2Go)
    - 15.6" UltraSharp QHD+ (3200x1800)
    - ...

This bad ass machine weight 6.4 pound but I have the horsepower/space I need for long time. Ho and I can replace any part myself! Nothing soldered on the board. I'm a software engineer and I can run many VMs, Dockers, IDE (Java), Emacs, ... without much trouble.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[garcia]

You'd be wrong.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[garcia]

I do what is arguably 'real work'; however, I don't use my local machine to do it because the work I do is not something which can sit on a desktop or especially a laptop.

I just don't think it's worth it to carry around a tank when you could just connect remotely to these machines to do your work.

YMMV.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[rthille]

Depending on the new MBP, that might be my new machine (or the latest equivalent) if I can Hackintosh it...

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you want to know how I know you aren't a developer?
Screen real estate makes your life MUCH easier.

you are a spoiled developer! XD

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine to be doing hefty work on a hefty machine, but you should really rethink about doing that kind of work on a portable laptop machine. I treat laptops for their strength: as portable terminal machines. All power to you if you want a luggable workstation replacement but make no mistake of conflating these monstrosities as laptops. Leave the hefty work to your beefy workstations and let the laptop take care of the various lightweight applications that it can do well.

Re:Nobody wants thinner and lighter.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no laptop screen that could ever compete with a proper 24" screen let alone two or three of these screens. Stop doing your heavy development work on a laptop and start doing it on a proper workstation. The only work you should be doing on a laptop is lightweight editing work.

Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Jethro]

I'm writing this on an Early 2011 15" Macbook Pro, which is frankly on it's last legs. In fact, it's at the point where I can't really move it around.

It would have been pretty unusable years ago, except that this is one of the last Macbook Pros that you could upgrade the RAM and harddrive on. I got this thing with the least amount of RAM and cheapest harddrive I could, and as time went on I added more RAM and an SSD. New lease of life. And that stuff all cost me about $250 rather than the extra > $1000 Apple would have charged.

I want (and pretty much need) a new laptop, and Apple makes great ones. Yeah, people say "Apple Tax!" a lot, but spec-for-spec, Apple laptops are pretty much equal to other manufacturers and the *usability* is *phenomenally* better. From the UI design to the friggin *trackpad*.

But if I can't upgrade my own machine... sorry, not happening. And that goes for any other laptop maker.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Anonymous Coward]

And that stuff all cost me about $250 rather than the extra > $1000 Apple would have charged.

Yeah, people say "Apple Tax!" a lot, but

So the Apple Tax is real, but it doesn't exist. Right.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Jethro]

EVERY manufacturer charges insane amounts for their own RAM and HDD upgrades. If I buy a Lenovo or HP or Acer or whatever, they'll likely charge you $400 (or more) to go from 8 gigs to 16 gigs, even though I can get 16 gigs on Amazon for well under $100.

Apple has become way more extreme about making their laptops unupgradable. They claim this is in the name of design and efficiency, and yes, to a degree it is. Doesn't make it OK for me, though.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Anonymous Coward]

I upgraded to a larger SSD in my Mid-2012 MBP... Nothing but 7 total screws to remove. Obviously you're talking crap.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Jethro]

I said it was ONE of the last. Not the absolute last.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Holi]

Yep the 2011 was the penultimate MBP when it came to upgrades. After the mid-2012 it was the switch to retina and all the soldered on goodness/proprietary ssd "goodness" that came with it.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still get the Mid-2012 MBP model new, by the way. I just got one after my fell down a stairwell and died. It's probably the last Mac I'll own, though.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[danbob999]

Yeah, people say "Apple Tax!" a lot, but spec-for-spec, Apple laptops are pretty much equal to other manufacturers

spec-for-spec, they lose in 99% of the use cases out there. In the other 1% which represent what Apple has to offer, they are pretty much equal to other manufacturers. What you lack with Apple is choice. When calculating the Apple tax, you must take into account all those who wanted a $500 PC, but ended-up with a $800 one because it was the cheapest Mac available. In that case, the tax is $300, even if the Mac is better.

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[tingentleman]

Lots of us are waiting for the next dev laptop - and praying for one with a decent graphics card / amount of RAM / SSD space.

We pine for Razer Blades and other such hardware - but if you are tasked with deploying to (a) a *NIX server or (b) multiple handheld devices and want that machine to be portable (with a working trackpad - I'm looking at you Ubuntu) there is no other realistic choice to OSX and thus Apple hardware

Re:Not if I can't upgrade my own laptop.

[Jethro]

I'm having IT flashbacks now.

"You're in charge of administrating several thousand UNIX machines, using UNIX tools and UNIX utilities. Here's a Windows laptop."

Mac Pro, want

[fyngyrz]

No interest at ALL in a macbook. Miserable chicklet keys, extremely limited I/O, small display... meh.

I would be interested (VERY!) in a new Mac Pro if they go back to a real computer case that can hold multiple drives, allows memory expansion, choice of and multiples of, graphics cards, a reasonable measure of physical security (a surface full of desk warts I most definitely do NOT want.) The current round model simply drove me to EBay to buy older units. I'd be interested in a couple of minis, too, if they were still actually upgrading them instead of downgrading them. Apple's choosing to go backwards with CPU capacity and memory upgradability closed the mini door pretty sharply.

Honestly, I think Apple has lost their way in the computer space. They've left a trail of severely buggy, unfixed OS's behind them, broken applications and services, dropped support for various aspects of the system, pretty much hosed the app store, limited (or eliminated) expandability and choice, built a bewilderingly non-functional macpro, knocked the mini back to much less of a computer than it used to be, and are pathologically fixed on the "thinner, thinner" mantra and associated tunnel-vision-like goals while functionality and bugfixing goes wanting.

I like working with OS X, but without the company having a decent vision, I can't move along with Apple, I just hang with my current OS level and hardware, or buy more hardware from the same series off EBay, and continue waiting to see if Apple is going to come to their senses, or not. I test my commercial and free software development under the latest OS X, but I don't use it, because it simply isn't functional enough. Things like missing PPC emulation are show-stoppers for me, I have many thousands of $ of PPC apps that work just fine and no intention of abandoning them, nor is it convenient to only run them in a VM. Nothing else I can really do. Don't like Windows, been there, been burned by Microsoft, not going back; and until/unless linux builds in a standard GUI layer I can depend upon without compromising my commercial software development financially or GPL-wise, it's not even in the running.

Re:Mac Pro, want

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you considered getting something a like Dell Precision mobile workstation like a 6500 or a 6600 and then running it as a hackintosh? Two drive bays, four ram slots, dedicated graphics, and i5/i7 procs. Plus a nicer keyboard, (I don't like the chiclet keyboards).

Re:Mac Pro, want

[Darinbob]

The Dell I last purchased came with a chiclet keyboard, same as the external Apple keyboard only black. I don't mind them myself, I got used to it and can type as fast or faster than I could before (touch typist), and the office is much quieter with those types of keyboards. No one seriously uses the laptop's own keyboard on any model of laptop if there's any real keyboard nearby.

Re:Mac Pro, want

[pipingguy]

"I would be interested (VERY!) in a new Mac Pro if they go back to a real computer case

OK, but we'll have to put it in a torus. Rounded edges everywhere!

Re:Mac Pro, want

[Anonymous Coward]

I curious to know what features the PPC software you speak of have that are so amazing/important that you're unable to bring yourself to move on to more modern software?

Re:Mac Pro, want

[armanox]

Not anymore - the new ones have fallen to the chicklet line.

8 year old MBP

[Matrix9180]

I have an 8 year old mid-range MacBook Pro (pre-unibody) that I upgraded to 4GB ram, a 120GB SSD, removed the optical drive & replaced with the original 5400 spinning platter and set up the SSD+HD as a "fusion" drive and the GeekBench scores are barely below the low-end 2016 MacBook. I was only able to do this because it's from before Apple's anorexia infected their laptops. Still a great machine aside from having to bake the logic board every month or so because of the bad solder on the graphics chip (which didn't start failing until just after apple ended their extended replacement for it). Apple doesn't make computers anymore, they make sealed-off, anorexic "devices"

The Emperor's New MacBook

[PopeRatzo]

I think Apple is inexorably moving toward products so thin that they can not be seen or used at all. This will be considered the height of elegance. Hipsters and women who don't shave their armpits will line up to buy them.

Does marketing actually TALK to humans?

[geekmux]

It's obvious to me now that the mindless marketing drones at Apple need to spend more time around humans to understand that we can actually carry around a portable device that weighs more than a dog fart. Sorry, but I just don't get the whole lighter and thinner bullshit, especially after Bendgate.

With all the damn statistics and metrics being captured in this world today, it floors me that companies still feel zero need to actually ASK the damn customer what they would want or even need in a new laptop design. I'm willing to bet exactly no one was demanding or even asking about thinner at this point, and weight is a pathetic metric anyway when everything out there is already been reduced considerably in the last few years. We're humans, not mice.

Hackintoshing

[fyngyrz]

Have you considered [...] a hackintosh?

Not into violating software agreements, terms of service, etc. As far as I know, OS X isn't licensed for use on non-Mac hardware. Be interesting to learn differently, though. Are you aware of a legally clear path to do this? If the answer to that is yes, the next question would be, are you aware of a high-end machine where OS X will install cleanly without any screwing around?

Re:Hackintoshing

[Anonymous Coward]

Legally? No. Install cleanly? Not 100%. You usually have to use modified kexts to make it work.

Re: Hackintoshing

[fyngyrz]

Okay, thanks. That was my understanding as well.

Re: Hackintoshing

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL grow a set of balls and violate that TOS.

Re:Hackintoshing

[just another AC]

so if they use their software to maliciously delete all your data, or somehow murder your family, you would not sue them because their EULA attempted to say you couldn't?

We are all guilty of theoretical small crimes because so many corporations/governments have overreached.

Only just laws deserve to be followed.

Re:Hackintoshing

[Anonymous Coward]

The last I looked; Apple said it was legal to install on "Apple Labeled Hardware." The installation I bought for OSX conveniently came with an Apple Label(sticker) that I stuck on the hardware. Therefore it was a legal install. They wrote the EULA, they included the Apple(tm) labels. Their loophole, why not use it?

Re:Hackintoshing

[Anonymous Coward]

If Apple gave me a copy of OS X to run on my non-Apple computer, then Apple would be placing me into a dilemma; on one hand, I would have to make a promise to Apple that I would not install my copy of OS X on my non-Apple computer; on the other hand, I would be promising to agree but also choose to break the promise and continue to install/run my copy of OS X. The most practical way for me would be to make then break my promise to Apple. Now this is a bad choice - it is not upstanding to make a promise (in good or bad conscience) only to break it later.

A more ethical way to act is simply to reject those companies who mistreat their users or customers. The existence of proprietary software like OS X is inherently mistreating their users. This is the reason why I only support the usage and development of free software because the developers of free software do not control their users as the developers of proprietary software do. I agree that just laws deserve to be followed but I also argue that we should also leave those people (such as Apple) who inherently mistreat us, the users of their software.

Re: Apple is catching up!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly, I've needed a new Mac for a few years and have been quietly waiting for a decent new Mac Mini or a laptop which wasn't designed for housewives reading Facebook.

One word...

[Frosty Piss]

Thinkpad...

Re:One word...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, Frosty, have you SEEN what Lenovo did to the Thinkpad since the 2012/*30 series?! It's gotten to the point I'm legitimately scared of my trusty, 8 year old T500 dying (what a trooper! 6+ hours a day EVERY day!). Lenovo could make scads of money if it would put back the old keyboard layout, even if it stuck to chicklet keys.

This.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Macbook Air. It's fine for what it is, and if they want to keep making them even thinner, OK with me. But the Pros are supposed to be fore getting serious work done. You can't keep shrinking the form factor without compromising usability, performance, and expandability. "Hey, let's make the Pros more like the Airs!" isn't innovation, it's not even a good business plan.

Re:This.

[Jethro]

True. There are things you can go ahead and shrink, but there are also things you /can't/. Keyboards, for instance. Apple laptops used to have great keyboards, then they went all chicklet on us...

But does the "Pro" model have an ethernet port?

[exabrial]

Apple's war on ports is annoying. There's not enough wireless spectrum for me to transfer files at gigabit speeds in anywhere but the middle of a wheat field.

Re:But does the "Pro" model have an ethernet port?

[The-Ixian]

I think that the middle of a corn field would also work.

Re:But does the "Pro" model have an ethernet port?

[macs4all]

Apple's war on ports is annoying. There's not enough wireless spectrum for me to transfer files at gigabit speeds in anywhere but the middle of a wheat field.

So plug in that Thunderbolt Ethernet port adapter and enjoy your gigabit speeds. You're just too much of a luddite to realize the true wonderfulness that is Thunderbolt.

Heck, with Thunderbolt, you can go whole-hog with several brands of third party adapters and easily do 10gig or FibreChannel. Try THAT with an RJ45 GigE on any laptop.

Re:But does the "Pro" model have an ethernet port?

[Blaskowicz]

It's a good thing, but precisely because it goes back to exposing the internal computer's bus like PCMCIA, PCCard did on 90s PC laptops :)

Re:But does the "Pro" model have an ethernet port?

[macs4all]

It's a good thing, but precisely because it goes back to exposing the internal computer's bus like PCMCIA, PCCard did on 90s PC laptops :)

Actually, Apple had laptops with PCMCIA slots, too. So there! ;-)

One of the things I like about the "dongle" approach is that it provides at least a degree of ESD protection to the motherboard. To an extent, if you do something to toast that TB DVI port, it MAY not reach back to the mobo, and all you have to replace is a $30 dongle, instead of a $500 mobo.

Nothing but gossip.

[Anonymous Coward]

One person makes a rumour, thin on content, and thinner on evidence- and everyone complains. Why not wait until the release to actually complain.

I don't get it

[erp_consultant]

Why is Apple stubbornly staying with soldered memory when users clearly don't like it? Are they not supposed to be the company of great customer service that loves and listens to their community? Not in this case. I can sure see how it benefits Apple to do it that way but Joe Public...not so much.

Here is my wish list:

1) Bring back the 17" Macbook Pro. Yes it's big and bulky but I'm willing to put up with that for the extra screen real estate.
2) Bring back user upgradable memory. If it truly is a Macbook Pro then it should come with 8GB minimum and I should be able to plug in up to 32GB (or maybe even 64) as and when I need it. If the laptop was aimed at home users I could maybe see not wanting them to be able to do this but I'm a professional and I know how to open laptops and upgrade them. I should be able to do this on my own and without a trip to the Genius lab.
3) Ports - lots of them. Wireless is nice but sometimes I prefer a hardwired network connection. Gimme a network port. I also need a couple of HDMI ports and at least 3 USB ports. Why not throw in a Firewire port too? I know that it's kind of old technology now but a lot of people still have firewire drives and would like to be able to plug them in.
4) Bootcamp. Why not have the option to have Bootcamp pre-installed if you know you're going to use it? Or maybe a prebuilt virtualized Windows. Yes, some of use would prefer to do it ourselves but others might appreciate the convenience.
5) I'm tired of the race to the thinnest laptop. I want something with a battery big enough to last the whole day, or more, doing intensive processing. If that adds a half pound or a half inch so be it. This is supposed to be a big boy laptop, not some hipster toy.
6) 4K display. Could you imagine a 4K display on a sweet 17" laptop with a matte finish? Heaven.

Until then I'm hanging on to my creaky old 2008 era Macbook Pro.

Re:I don't get it

[dbc]

Well, yes and no. YMMV.

1) Bring back the 17" Macbook Pro. Yes it's big and bulky but I'm willing to put up with that for the extra screen real estate.

Not for me, thanks.

2) Bring back user upgradable memory. If it truly is a Macbook Pro then it should come with 8GB minimum and I should be able to plug in up to 32GB (or maybe even 64) as and when I need it. If the laptop was aimed at home users I could maybe see not wanting them to be able to do this but I'm a professional and I know how to open laptops and upgrade them. I should be able to do this on my own and without a trip to the Genius lab.

Well, having run the numbers on other products, I know that every connector is a reliability liability. If the memory is soldered in and factory tested, the machine will be more reliable for you, and have fewer warranty issues for Apple. I'm with Apple on this one.

3) Ports - lots of them. Wireless is nice but sometimes I prefer a hardwired network connection. Gimme a network port. I also need a couple of HDMI ports and at least 3 USB ports. Why not throw in a Firewire port too? I know that it's kind of old technology now but a lot of people still have firewire drives and would like to be able to plug them in.

Truth.

4) Bootcamp. Why not have the option to have Bootcamp pre-installed if you know you're going to use it? Or maybe a prebuilt virtualized Windows. Yes, some of use would prefer to do it ourselves but others might appreciate the convenience.

You have a good idea here, although for my use I want a Linux VM.

5) I'm tired of the race to the thinnest laptop. I want something with a battery big enough to last the whole day, or more, doing intensive processing. If that adds a half pound or a half inch so be it. This is supposed to be a big boy laptop, not some hipster toy.

Truth

6) 4K display. Could you imagine a 4K display on a sweet 17" laptop with a matte finish? Heaven.

I can imagine it, but I probably wouldn't be able to see the fine detail because my vision just isn't that good any more. But I *do* want the ability to drive a 4K external monitor the size of a football pitch right out of the box, using some kind of modern video subsystem.

Re:I don't get it

[erp_consultant]

I hear what you're saying about the memory soldering. But I have to say that my 2008 Macbook Pro has been rock solid and I have added memory more than once. so the connectors have not been an issue, at least for me. Besides, how many times would someone add or remove memory? Not more than a few times I would think. My issue with soldering the memory is that once you buy the laptop you cannot upgrade the memory. What happens to the person that cannot spring for the extra money for the memory right then or the person that buys the laptop thinking it will be fine and they come to find out later that they need more memory? With the soldered memory you are SOL. And, admittedly, I do like to tinker and I just feel like I'm missing out if I can't fiddle with stuff :-)

Re:I don't get it

[O6171]

majority of customers don't care for swappable memory

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is Apple stubbornly staying with soldered memory when users clearly don't like it?

I suspect part of this is to make upgrading more difficult. However, on the flip side those older style MacBook Pro's (without soldered ram) if treated hard the battery will hit the ram (design fault) and can not only knock the ram out of the ram sockets but actually damage the sockets connection to the logic board.

What I am getting at is soldering the RAM directly saves Apple cost in terms of the need to purchase RAM sockets and modules and it also saves them the cost of logic board repairs due to this kind of design issue.

They are eliminating a point of failure (good) while also making upgrading of the RAM very tricky (not so good).

Bottom line is this is that this sword has two edges.

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is not bringing it back because it doesn't sell that well. Most people have figured out lugging around a 17" laptop is unpleasant. And if you are not lugging it around, a desktop gives more bang for the buck. But if you do need mobility, a small laptop with a big external display works well.

Re:I don't get it

[erp_consultant]

Yes it would be a niche product (the 17" laptop). My current rig for travel is a 12" laptop and when I can hook it up to an external monitor its great. The problem is that often my clients don't have spare monitors and if they do they are mostly junk ones that nobody else wants.

Your point about the extra weight is well taken. But having a 17" display means that I don't need to go look for a spare monitor. If I can find one then all the better but having the larger screen means that it can function just fine on its own.

I don't know the investments he's trying to rescue

[tlambert]

I don't know the investments he's trying to rescue... but Ming-Chi Kuo at KGI Securities has been predicting OLED and AMOLED displays for Apple products the last 3 releases, and Apple has not been stupid enough to oblige him with a product containing one.

Also, I can not see Jony Ive putting a different looking bar at the top where the functions keys normally go, and breaking up the overall design into three zones that end up looking so incredibly different from each other, and certainly, not to draw a display down where it ends up taking up attention from the main display. That just totally violates the design principles he espouses when you talk to him about it.

But I'm sure a lot of people clicked that link, which I guess is the point...

MBA - Dead Mac Walking

[DevCybiko]

I'm betting they will retire the MacBook Air in favor of the MacBook.

Video subsystem??

[dbc]

All I really want is a refresh/update to a modern video subsystem. Is that too much to ask?

So, rather than complain here...

[Anonymous Coward]

So, rather than complain here...

apple.com/feedback ?

I mean, I'm pretty sure all of mine go into their "crackpot" spam filter by now, but some of yours may get to be seen by a human at some point?

Me - "And another thing!"
Apple - "Oh God, it's him again"

Re:Apple is catching up!!!

[macs4all]

Great, now they will only be about six or seven years behind in hardware instead of ten. OS X will still feel like it's stuck in 2005, though. And iTunes will be even worse. Yay Apple! The fanbois will pretend that Apple has the best hardware and that this dominates all PC laptops.

And yet, everyone (well nearly everyone) on Slashdot (including me) wants Windows to look and feel like it's "stuck in 2005". Moral to that story: Be careful what you wish for...

So, now what?

That's not innovation...

[grumpyman]

...wait until the entire keyboard is replaced with touch bars guys!

Re:That's not innovation...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still haven't figured out why apple still doesn't make notebooks with two touch screens.
Seems to me a more elegant design, less moving parts.
But I guess they haven't figured out yet how to give high resolution tactical feedback yet.

But does it run...

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Reality?

Why all the hate?

[Codeyman]

I code for a living, and I love my mac book air to death. I use it mainly as a thin client to connect to servers/build servers to do actual heavy lifting.. and the usual presentation/writing work for which this is more than enough. This is connected to an external keyboard and display.
The battery lasts for around 6 hours, which is good enough to last a conference. I would rather have a thin *nix machine than a heavy one. If you'd rather have a heavy box that you don't want to move, get a desktop.

Simple user interface

[DrYak]

Yup exactly my though.

Apple's hardware isn't know to target the same kind of geeky professionals (e.g.: admins) that Lenovo does.
They tend to target more e.g.: artists.
People who won't remember whatever weird Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift-F12 sequence is the sortcut to the function they need (they won't even remember it in their muscle memory).

Thus their system is designed less around keyboard shortcuts.

And thus people mostly use this row of key for the advanced alternate functions (volume control) (probably not even like backlight control or external monitor switching as these can be handled automatically).

There's a logic to apple's switch to a touch bar:
- Mac users use less shortcuts, F-keys don't need to be physical (even less mechanical).
- Making it OLED will make a bright low-power adaptable *icon* bar.

- People who use the volume key will be happy: there are possibility to put even more adaptable functionnality - say VLC (or more likely QuickTime or whatever is the iVersion of an iMovie iPlayer in i-Land) could automatically put its control as glowing icon on the touch bar while the movie is playing full screen.
(Again, typically Mac users aren't shortcut oriented and probably don't use shortcuts to play/pause)

- Artists are going to go completely banana about it. Not only because they are more "reality-distortion field"-sensitive than the rest and automatically adore everything that Apple's marketing department tells them to, but also because instead of having to remember complex short-cuts for their most beloved function, they have new icon appearing on the touch bar (say a less used key like "exposé" - which is now handled by a multi-finger touch-pad gesture anyway and thus doesn't make sense - getting replaced with an important tool icon) or even more complex behaviour (replacing all the estate taken by "keyboard -light down / -light up", "screen back-light down/up" with 2 horizontal slider).

- Seems to me like the closest thing to Microsoft's "Ribbon" icon panes done wright, if it was possible to actually do a ribbon right.

Like everything that Apples does (they didn't in fact invent it themselves) there has been some precedent of some adaptive keyboards:
Art Lebedev studios (which leans on the heavily side of apple adoration)
They did design a couple of keyboard and keypads featuring LCD and OLED screens to have the face of the keys changed on the flight.
They received positive review, though didn't see widespread adoption given the price of the technology back then.

Apple *might* be onto something though none of us /. dweller are their target market.
(ME ? I'm busy using shortcuts on my mechanical Unicomp (formerly IBM) keyboard)

Marketing team saves the day

[rasmusbr]

So sales of their ageing current generation Macbook Pro were in terminal decline and their next generation product was delayed because some of the people in engineering screwed up...

That's when the marketing team came up with a solution: to threaten to make the next-gen product so bad that people would think that now might be their last chance to get a halfway decent Mac, by buying the current generation product.

Cue the design guy with the pretentious British accent.

"All truly great products have a golden age. In order to say that a product has had a golden age, the next product must be, in some way, less desirable. The definition of a legendary product is that it was, in the past, so good that legends were written about it. Our next generation computer is not only better than the previous generation, but also considerably worse in all key technical areas."

What about the "Tess Holiday" model?

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Can the MacBook Vegan be far behind?

[ZecretZquirrel]

Can it?

Is it too much to ask...

[sootman]

... to wait until Apple actually *ships* said device before we start shitting all over ourselves in rage? Rumors are often wrong.

That said, they could replace the F keys with a nail file for all I care. I never use them. (Note: I understand that I am not everyone.)

'In the fall' ?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's now right? it's already 'Fall' here in the southern hemisphere.

It's time that tech 'journalists' stop using the awful 'in the fall' thing..

Lenovo Thinkpad P70

[gentryx]

Honestly, that device is almost exactly what you speficied: 17", high DPI display, options for IIRC 3 2.5" drives (or swap a 2.5" drive for two M.2 drives), loads of ports... Too bad OSX is so hard to get running on non-Apple hardware.

no such thing as a trustworthy homosexual.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3582640/Open-sewers-mildewed-walls-one-toilet-FORTY-people-Shocking-pictures-dirty-dormitories-Apple-s-iPhone-workers-live-like-animals.html

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Apple+iPhone+6+Teardown+by+X-ray/29640

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Cook

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China

Re:Apple is catching up!!!

[armanox]

And what's wrong with OS X? Heaven forbid that an interface be consistent and not change every other year...

Macbook without keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm still waiting for this model
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

Re:Apple is catching up!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you pick 2005 for the year you want Windows' look and feel to be stuck in? XP was released in 2001, Vista was released in 2007, and 7 was released in 2009. Personally I prefer the Windows 7 look and feel.

Re:Apple is catching up!!!

[macs4all]

Why did you pick 2005 for the year you want Windows' look and feel to be stuck in? XP was released in 2001, Vista was released in 2007, and 7 was released in 2009. Personally I prefer the Windows 7 look and feel.

Sorry. That was a badly-phrased sentence on my part, based on trying to tie-in with the GP's comment about OS X.

What I meant was "before Metro" (which would be like what you said, 2009).

IOW, the GP was complaining that OS X "looked old", and I was TRYING to counter that most Slashdotters WANT Windows to "look old" (as opposed to "looking 'new' (i.e. Metro)").

Does that help??? ;-P

Facepalm...

Downward Facing Spiral

[jman.org]

Let's see...

Soldered, nearly-impossible-to-upgrade memory. Check.
Non-standard difficult-to-upgrade SSD drive. Check.
Deep-six the other cooling fan. Check.
Deep-six the ethernet port. Check.
As hard to otherwise repair as their gluey, gluey phones. Check.

Over time, my '09 15" MBP has had most of its innards replaced. Even the logic board was pretty easy to swap out.

Until Apple goes back to making machines that can actually be serviced and upgraded by their owners, I wouldn't consider buying one. I'd switch to *nix if Adobe would run on it. Haven't touched 'doze except to fix someone else's machine in some years now, or when (under duress) doing something in VirtualBox.

They really need to remove the "B" off their supposedly "Professional" portables until they get their act together and remember why they were so "Insanely Great" to start with...