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Apple Unveils New MacBook Pro Featuring OLED Touch Bar, Touch ID - Powered By Intel Skylake Processor (arstechnica.com)
At an event on Thursday, Apple unveiled the new 2016 MacBook Pro. The redesigned MacBook Pro comes with "incredible extreme" all-metal body. The main attraction of the new MacBook Pro is an OLED touch strip at the top that Apple is calling the Touch Bar. The Touch Bar comes with a fingerprint scanner Touch ID that users can tap to log-in quickly to their computer as well as make online payments. The touch strip offers on-screen button that changes according to the application you're running. Schiller, Apple SVP, said it was time Apple gotten rid of the dedicated function keys. The new MacBook Pro is thinner and lighter than the existing model, and it is powerful too. It comes in two screen sizes: 13-inch, which weighs 3 pounds and measures 14.9mm -- down from 18mm from older MacBook Pro. The trackpad is larger too, Apple says, twice as larger than the older one. Also, it's Force Touch trackpad. ArsTechnica adds: Both laptops are still recognizably MacBook Pros, but in keeping with Apple's design priorities they've got slimmer profiles and smaller footprints. This is made possible in part by the move to USB Type-C ports like the one in the MacBook, all four of which support Thunderbolt 3. All four ports can be used to charge the system, too. Compared to the measly one port in the MacBook, the MacBook Pros are much more appealing to people who plug lots of stuff into their computers at once. Apple has also made the cowardly decision to retain the headset jack. Both systems include new Intel Skylake processors -- dual-core chips in the 13-inch Pro and quad-core chips in the 15-inch model, just like before. The 13-inch Pros ship exclusively with Intel Iris 540 GPUs, while the 15-inch models ship with Polaris-based AMD Radeon graphics at the high-end.The 13-inch model MacBook Pro starts at $1,799, whereas the 15-inch model starts at $2,399.
You've introduced the capacitive touch bar my wife's 10 year old HP Pavilion Media laptop has been rockin' forever!
(I really do to this day think that part of the laptop is really cool, except when I swipe to change the volume and it doesn't work the first time)
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Waited years for an update and this is it? Seriously? A touch bar? That's what they added? It took years to add something that other manufacturers added and abandoned?
What I'm most pissed about is that they are offering a "pro" system with a max of 16GB of RAM.
I'll be looking elsewhere and seeing what better, truly "pro" laptops can be hacked to run MacOS.
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I was ready to buy the 15" model sight unseen, but now I'm reconsidering. The fact that they put only USB-C ports in the machine, and then have the balls to charge $19 - $25 for each adapter cable, is what pisses me off the most, because they know full well that none of their previous products shipped with a USB-C cable. So Apple is basically giving their most loyal users a big "fuck you": $3000 for a 15" MacBook Pro, and they want to nickel-and-dime us for $40 worth of adapters that should have shipped WITH the machine because they decided to not make it backward compatible with their own products. Yeah. Fuck you Apple.
Wanted to give this one mod points, but figured I'll have too much to say in this thread.
In any situation where the display can change out from under an in-progress action -- for example, an Outlook reminder popping up in the middle of a standard Windows keyboard-and-mouse workflow -- the very first thing that a well-integrated system should do is to check the interpretation of the next user action (click, keystroke, etc) against the pre-existing interaction state, explicitly accounting for human reaction times. If I've just hit Return, and that event is going to a confirmation dialog that was displayed 0.05 seconds ago, there is no way that I've seen and read the dialog.
But I have yet to use any system that does this consistently. If anybody's going to lead the way on it, I'd expect it to be Apple, or Microsoft with the Surface stuff -- but I'm betting that they haven't, at least not yet.
OEM's have already started selling laptops with Kaby Lake CPU's. Apple, however, cheaped out on the core part of their system, so what makes you think they won't cheap out on everything?
You've got your facts backwards: Apple is the one that went with the more expensive, more powerful part, and it's the other OEMs who are cheaping out by using the chips they are.
The Kaby Lake chips that are available today are the dual core models. The quad-core Kaby Lake chips that would be suitable for use in a MacBook Pro won't be available for another few months. Moreover, even if they had waited, it wouldn't have made much of a difference. The performance gap between the generations is minimal (which seems to be the general trend for CPUs these days), whereas the dual core to quad core performance gap is substantial for the types of work you expect pro users to be doing. Sticking with Skylake was definitely the right call because it allowed them to release a more powerful machine without the wait, and it was definitely not the cheaper route.
Then you have the puffery about USB-C and TB3. My Dell has had that for nearly a year. Marketing is one thing, but don't insult me with your lies, Apple.
You accuse them of puffery and lies without citing examples of either. They said it has Thunderbolt 3 via USB 3.1 Type-C. They never claimed it was first laptop to offer it (nor would they, since they launched one earlier this year that had it), though they're definitely the first to embrace it to such a degree by putting four of the ports on one machine, making them the only ports the computer has, and making them equally usable for all tasks (i.e. you can plug any cable--including the power cable--into any of them).
Then there's the pathetic AMD GPU. Just make a goddamned nVidia driver for macOS already.
It's the not-yet-released Radeon Pro 460 (i.e. the mobile version of the RX 460), and the Polaris architecture has been going head-to-head with nVidia's latest architecture (Pascal) in terms of both performance and power efficiency. But facts be damned. It's apparently "pathetic" because an Anonymous Coward has declared it so.
There are certainly valid reasons to go from Mac to Windows (I'm even planning to do so myself before the end of the year) or vice versa, but it sounds to me like you're just grasping for any reason you can find to rationalize the decision you made.