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Apple Said To Plan First Pro Laptop Overhaul in Four Years (bloomberg.com)
It's been a while since Apple upgraded most of its computer lineups. It has come to a point, where it's being advised that the Cupertino-based company should stop selling the dated inventories. But the wait will be over later this year, says Mark Gurman, the reporter with the best track record in Apple's ecosystem. Reporting for Bloomberg, Gurman says that the company will be overhauling its MacBook Pro laptop line for the first time in over four years, packing it with a range of interesting features. From the report: The updated notebooks will be thinner, include a touch screen strip for function keys, and will be offered with more powerful and efficient graphics processors for expert users such as video gamers, said the people, who asked not to be named. The most significant addition to the new MacBook Pro is a secondary display above the keyboard that replaces the standard function key row. Instead of physical keys, a strip-like screen will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application. The smaller display will use Organic Light-Emitting Diodes, a thinner, lighter and sharper screen technology, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said earlier this year. Apple's goal with the dedicated function display is to simplify keyboard shortcuts traditionally used by experienced users. The panel will theoretically display media playback controls when iTunes is open, while it could display editing commands like cut and paste during word processing tasks, the people said. The display also allows Apple to add new buttons via software updates rather than through more expensive, slower hardware refreshes. [...] Apple is using one of AMD's "Polaris" graphics chips because the design offers the power efficiency and thinness necessary to fit inside the slimmer Apple notebook, the person said.
If you open a Macbook Air, the entire thing is filled with tamper-proof epoxy and glue and any type of serviceability is practically impossible.
a touch screen strip for function keys
please no. i get it, its 2016 and everything has to look like the holodeck had sex with minority report but your original concept of function keys interlocked with brightness and UI controls is infuriating enough for unix/linux users.
a strip-like screen will present functions on an as-needed basis that fit the current task or application.
they already did that, they were called function keys. they didnt need to change to suit applications. again, it sounds like we're ginning up a product thats reached the end of its conceivable means of enhancement.
Apple's goal with the dedicated function display is to simplify keyboard shortcuts traditionally used by experienced users
then just keep the function keys where they are. you know, function keys, the things weve been using for 30 years simply and without the added complexity of a dedicated AMOLED strip of independently driven touchscreen representations of whatever you think the application needs. im sure fanbois will go nuts for this strip, but the rest of us just see this refresh as coming off desperate.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Lets hope they get a clue and allow upgradable RAM again. VM'ing on laptops is sucky without upgradable RAM.
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That was a joke about circuit traces, in case you missed it. The OP was miffed about glued in batteries.
I'm more concerned about an AMD GPU. Nvidia Pascal would be much more efficient and powerful enough for 1800p60. Stop making the pro thinner! 2012 size is perfect. Larger battery and GPU is preferred Apple.
Wow. Are there really that many folks out there who touch-type with their function keys? I mean, I honestly don't know -- maybe there are, but I certainly haven't seen them.
Think about how awful Apple's current scheme is, where fkeys are overloaded for brightness control, volume control, keyboard backlight control (really?), and whatever else.
Now picture mapping those controls onto a touch-strip with a display. A small cluster of controls to the left (right, whatever), one for screen brightness, one for volume, one for keyboard backlight (again, whatever).
Touch one, and a slider control expands out from it. Slide left to decrease, slide right to increase. Maybe, if extensive user testing supports it, "drag off the bottom" to commit your new setting or "drag off the top" to cancel it. Or maybe just lifting your finger commits it, and cancel isn't needed; we certainly don't get "cancel" with the current up/down key controls. Maybe touch detection only gives an x-axis value, but if I were sitting on Apple's patents, I'd certainly add at least a rudimentary y-axis measurement, and multi-touch detection.
Double-tap (or "mash") the volume control to mute or unmute.
Double-tap or mash screen brightness to blank or restore the screen.
Don't want controls? Map a simple out-of-band gesture (again, drag-up or drag-down seems ideal) to move between fkeys, system functions, and application functions.
I don't have any idea what Apple will actually do with this strip, but I hope it's less of a disappointment than their touch keyboard and multitouch stuff so far. I used the FingerWorks Touchstream keyboard for years, and I'm still bitter that Apple hasn't used more than 30% of the gestural technology they got when they bought out and shut down that company.
Doesn't Mac OS have cooling profiles like Windows does? On Windows 7 and later you can configure the cooling profile in the advanced power management settings to be either "active" or "passive". Active ramps the fan up, passive throttles the CPU to keep the temperature down. I used to use it when I was downloading stuff overnight to keep the fan on silent.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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I genuinely wonder exactly how much Apple cares about the creative segment anymore. You're right that PCIe SSDs are great for video editing (and even high counts of multitrack audio editing), but 1TB (the highest available in a MacBook at any price) gets really cramped, really fast. If Apple weren't trying to make their laptops look like a supermodel on a hunger strike, having a PCIe system disk and a 2TB, 7200RPM storage disk would be great...at the very least, two USB ports is ridiculous. The new GPUs are a welcome update, since the existing chipsets were being overtaken by even midrange, $800 Asus laptops...but it'll be interesting to see how Apple balances 'thin', 'heat dissipation', 'battery life', and 'performance'; I have a gut feeling that 'performance' is going to be the weak link.
On the software front, Aperture was discontinued, there's been no update to iDVD to allow Blu-Ray burning, Final Cut folks are starting to look into Adobe Premiere, and Logic Pro and Garageband are starting to become increasingly blurry; Ableton and FL Studio are both becoming solid contenders in the space while ProTools has become a lot more afforable than when Logic started making inroads.
I'd argue that the creative fields are more in a place where they need Apple more than Apple needs them. Windows (Win10 upgrade hell and telemetry concerns not withstanding) has done plenty of growing up since the Win9x days when Apple dominated the creative market for good reason, and with the exception of the first party Apple applications (Logic, FCP, Motion) nearly all the major creative production applications (Adobe Everything, Quark, Avid, Ableton) are cross platform, so it's not even that there's a whole lot of revamping established workflows or losing access to past projects that's much of a problem.
Switching to Windows, where hardware choices abound from the $600 budget-friendly Asus machines to the $3,000+ Origin/FalconNW/Sager hardware behemoths, has never been easier, meaning that plenty of the aversion to switching is the Apple lock-in, whether literal (e.g. an extensive backlog of Final Cut projects) or perceived (the file management learning curve between OSX and Windows), meaning that all Apple has to do to keep the Apple-or-bust creative market is to make sure the past 2-3 releases of those applications keep working with OSX, and as long as that takes place, Apple can keep slimming down their laptops to cater to the Facebook/Youtube crowd with little to no consequence. I'd wager that even if Apple went down to Intel Integrated graphics across their Pro line of MacBooks, Apple would probably still make more money than keeping dedicated nVidia/AMD chipsets, because they could tout "thinner", "doesn't run as hot", and "longer battery life" as features, all three of which matter a lot more to the majority of the present day Macbook purchasing crowd than disk I/O or render times.
No, you shouldn't. But that's the direction Apple seems to be willing to go.
I used Mac Pro for 7 years, but built a workstation PC that I'm using now - the 'trash can' Mac Pro just didn't have decent GPU options, and they haven't changed in two years. Is there anyone actually buying that thing right now?
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So you have only Macs and bargain-basement Acers?
Really, Apple choose style over function when it comes to cooling. Smaller inlet and outlet vents means higher sound levels compared to a machine with large (clearly visible) vents even if the fan and heatsink/heatpipe is kept the same. However Apple machines tend to have small heatsinks, small fans.
And then physics get in the way -> louder. Yes one can innovate by improving the fan efficiency, the sound profile of the fan (by spacing the fan blades right), making more efficient heatsinks etc. Physics still is a problem in getting the cooling working right.
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My current machine is a MSI GS60 gaming notebook. Compared to a MacBook it also have two fans however instead of one (large) heatpipe it have two heatpipes, 4 heatsinks (one per heatpipe and fan) and 7(!) cooling vents (2 outlets at the back, 1 outlet per side, one combined inlet/speaker housing above the keyboard and two vents at the bottom). Doesn't look as nice and clean as other notebooks but runs silent normally (even when loading it somewhat) and acceptable during heavy loads.