I had a 2006 MBP, the mag-lock charging cables (mine and my colleagues) lasted about 6 months - bad strain relief design, something Apple continued for over a decade into the early iPads.
Just a small accessory, sure... now let's talk about the exploding batteries (replaced under warranty, if you knew to ask). Growing pains, yeah.
Now, let's talk about the lack of proper heat-sink compound on the GPU... 18 months into life we started having heat-death of the GPUs on those models - no warranty repairs offered here, would you like to purchase a main board replacement for 80% of the cost of a new laptop?
O.K. - that MacBook Pro model was just a lemon, they had been in the PC manufacturing business for 25 years, but this laptop thing is still sorta new, cut them some slack?
How about their "education model" iMacs that they have the Universities on contract to replace every 2 years - you can get those cheap (like $50) if you know when the dumping sales come around. Thing is, the "education models" are nerfed with max RAM capacities and other things to make them obsolete _even faster_ than the consumer grade stuff. Don't mind working with a 2GB RAM limit in 2014, then $50 is a steal for an iMac - really nice looking machine, just stare at it while you wait for everything to load.
Anybody can abuse a cable, or not. I have NEVER had an Apple charging cable failure; but then, as a former sound-engineer, I know how to treat cables...
Bulging batteries are a problem with every laptop manufacturer. If you leave your MacBook on "charge" 24/7/365, figure on replacing batteries every few years. Newer models got better at that.
Heat-sink compound misapplied: Contract Manufacturer's fault (although Apple maybe dropped the QC-ball on that one). Check Google. It has happened to EVERY laptop manufacturer at one time or another. Again, not a "design" problem, but a Contract Manufacturing problem. But I agree, Apple bears the ultimate responsibility. But as for "no replacement", for every story of "Apple wouldn't replace my motherboard", there is at least one "Apple replaced my motherboard even though it was way out of warranty/recall limits."
Intentionally-crippled iMacs? First: Citation, please? Second: One word: Firmware Upgrade. Apple CERTAINLY wouldn't bother to generate, qualify, and pay for standards-testing on TWO motherboard designs, so the difference MUST be Firmware, which is easily re-flashed by the iMac itself. Oh, and Everymac.com says that although certain Education-Only iMacs from 2011 only OFFICIALLY supported 8 GB of RAM, they actually DO support 16 GB. And although they seem to have temporarily limited RAM to 4 GB on the 2009 Educational iMacs through an EFI Firmware mod., they eventually removed that restriction, too. So, unless you have another, more reliable citation...
I'd like to see what the actual intended lifetime is of Apple products, by design. By observation, they seem to expect most of them to be replaced within 24 months or less, and the designs seem to intentionally self-destruct shortly thereafter.
That certainly isn't my experience, nor the experience of 99% of the people I know with Apple gear.
For example, my "daily drivers" are a mid 2012 non-retina 15" MacBook Pro, an iPad 2, and an iPhone 6 Plus (my iPhone 4s still works, but I don't use it anymore), and a 5th Gen Airport Extreme Base Station. All of them work identically to the day I got them.
The most extreme example is that one of my friends has a G4 Aluminum PowerBook he bought used about 4 years ago, a second-gen iPod, plus a first or second-gen Airport Base Station and an iPhone 4. His wife has a first-gen Intel Mac mini. All are their "Daily Drivers".
Yeah, built for a 24-YEAR replacement cycle is more like it...
Here's the problem: if your Mac with 2Tb is out of warranty and the logic board fails, you'll need a replacement logic board/SSD combo and that is going to be very expensive.
Looks like a nice cottage business for someone with a decent SMT rework station and an eBay account... Add a data transfer/recovery service, and go straight to the "Profit!" step!
On my previous job, there were about a dozen iphone developers and other hipsters who had macbooks as their workstation. Every single one of them had their SSDs replaced due to breakage at latest on the second year of usage. I bet they either had some really crap SSDs installed on factory or the devices were not ventilated well enough for full day usage and the drivers were literally toasted. I wonder if the apple's SSD lifetime is still the same?
SSD tech has come a LONG way in a very short time. The SSDs that Apple is installing in the new MBPs is incredibly reliable.
Having said that, I'm not so sure I'm "on board" with having the mass-storage permanently "on board".
If you look at TheFakeTimCook's posting history, you'll conclude that he's actually serving the koolaid. His posts are nothing but a constant stream of pro-Apple/anti-[everything else] drivel.
Looks like he pulled the trigger on this one with an anti-android dig without fully thinking it through.
I am honored that the AC has so little to actually do in his life that he/she can devote the effort to launch an in-depth analysis of my Slashdot Posts.
Perhaps if this alleged human would favor us with a Login, we could return the favor, and do an in-depth analysis if his/her Posting history, eh?
BTW, the balanced-signal RS-422 "serial port that no one but Apple used" easily drove a standard Unbalanced RS-232 port (and vice versa) with just a simple miniDIN to DB25 or DC9 connector cable; so removing those from the iMac was EXACTLY like removing all the DC9s from a Wintel PC.
Surface Pro 3 owner. I think it is the best computer on the market. Touch screen is phenomenal.
Then what are you doing TROLLING in an Apple-Thread?
- first, if you compare it by hybrid devices running Windows vs Hybrid devices running OS X, instead of comparing by each manufacturers separate hardware, the numbers show how minuscule Apple sales really are. It is great for their company, and quite profitable, but don't confuse that with a significant market share.
I didn't make the Comparison-List, that was the "slider.com" or whatever their name was that did the sales-study; nor did I compare the Surface Book to the new MacBook Pro. For that, you need look no farther than Microsoft. It is THEY that have decided to sell the Surface Book as a DIRECT COMPETITOR to the new MacBook Pro. So talk to them...
Regardless what I think, the decision was purely marketing, not practical. And the market has spoken. Whaddami gonna do? Guess I'll get a Razor Blade, with a matte screen.
You're an idiot. It WAS a VERY PRACTICAL decision!
By the time your late 2016 MBP is a year or two old (which is NOTHING for an Apple laptop), the industry will be about 75% USB-C, and Apple's decision will be recognized as being "forward-thinking", at the expense of a being temporarily just a little adapter-heavy.
I say that not as an Apple fanboi; but as someone who has seen the writing on the NON-Apple wall...
Yes, an adapter for the projector, no big deal because you had other ports to plug everything else into without adapters. There is an HDMI and/or displayport adapter permanently attached to the projector in nearly every conference room I've been in, so it is really never necessary to carry one; though I always do because I know the one time I don't I'll need it.
Now? Adapters! Adapters for EVERYTHING! Such glory!!!
Yes, but I happen to know that you're smart enough to realize that this is just a temporally-temporary situation. This time next year (or so), Apple's decision to go with USB-C/TB 3 exclusively is going to look pretty damn forward-thinking; and considering the amount of time Mac owners keep their machines, I feel 100% confident that this will work out every bit as well as when Apple decided to axe the RS-422 Serial Ports and the SCSI Port off the Macs in 1998 with the introduction of the iMac, in favor of the then-almost-unknown USB Port.
In that case, the entire industry went from ZERO USB peripherals (or close enough to it) to nearly ALL USB in less than a YEAR. I watched it happen; so I know it's true.
Great! Now plug in your hard drive at the same time. The other thing is that the USB port is not very robust. All that plugging in and out makes them pretty flaky in a very short time.
Practically this was a very bad move. The sales stats say otherwise. The owners manual needs to state 'some assembly required'
Well, if the USB-C connector is "flaky" (citation, please), then the WHOLE INDUSTRY is soon going to be having problems, because there is a metric shitpotfull of NON-Apple lappies with USB-C/TB 3 connectors.
And the MBPs have either 2 or 4 identical USB-C/TB 3 Ports; so I'm not sure what you are whining about with your "Now plug in your hard drive at the same time" statement.
23 computers, one slave as a server, and all worked swimmingly. Students could use any computer to access their works-in-progress. It was magic!
Why can't you do that now with a Mac mini and OS X Server? Twenty-three clients on a mini should be nothing, assuming you are simply doing file/print/mail serving, etc.
Oh, and I've got you beat. I created custom code in 1987 to allow a high-school computer lab with 31 Apple//e computers to share files on a Corvus OmniNet system, and my custom print-server code communicating directly with the Corvus Constellation I/F cards, along with a "slave"//gs that served as a print-server (and an anti-mischief network monitoring tool), allowed the students to print directly from (text-based) AppleWorks from their individual//e "workstations" to the "print-server". No sneaker-netting floppies around (although students could also save/load files to/from floppy to work on at home if they had AppleWorks).
I also created a custom text-based menuing system for that same computer lab that worked directly in conjunction with the Corvus Constellation cards and an "adminstrator"//e that allowed teachers to bring in a class and have the students be restricted to a set-selection of applications served from our two Corvus file servers. All the students had to do to move to the next application was to press Control-Reset, and the next program in the "lesson-script" would automatically load. The system could automatically and transparently load and switch to applications (while transparently switching OSes!) running under Apple DOS, ProDOS and even UCSD Pascal, IIRC.
And even better, from the "admin console" (//e in the computer-lab office), we could designate which computers would be involved in the "class", leaving the rest of the//e machines to be available for other student uses, which still allowed for those students to browse/load applications from my menuing/loader system that was disguised as a screen-saver, while watching for a student to press Control-A to load the top-most menu.
And the coolest thing of all (at least to me), was that, because the accesses were essentially "synchronized", the initial-load of however-many computers to the first application in a "class" was MUCH faster (like 5 mins vs. 20 mins if loading was started manually), because the Corvus server was smart enough to recognize that the many nearly-concurrent requests for the same group of blocks, and serve as much at a time from its cache memory as it could. That was just a happy accident; but it was cool as hell to watch!
Apple has no practical reason not to provide built in ports.
They DID provide "built-in ports". Just not the ones you seem to think they should have.
You do realize, of course, if you replaced the four USB-C/TB 3 ports on the MBP with all the Ports they CAN BE, there would literally not be enough ROOM around the entire laptop to place the connectors edge to edge, right?
You say you want some "classic" USB? Let's just start with SIXTEEN USB 3.0 Ports, each going full-blast at 5.0 Gbps.
Howabout some Ethernet? I don't know if OS X can even handle it (I assume not); but you SHOULD be able to turn those 4 USB-C/TB 3 Ports into (theoretically) EIGHTY 1 Gbps Ethernet connections (talk about a ROUTER!!!),
Hardly ever. Enjoy your new Windows 10 machine. I'm certain it will serve you well.
Don't confuse me with an Apple fanboy. Since I use all the major OS's on a daily basis, I know how a Mac works compared to a Windows compared to a Linux compared to a ChromeOS.
What's even funnier is that BronsCon is a Web-Developer; so it's REALLY hard to imagine why a Mac wouldn't suit his needs better than other machines; since he can run any OS and any browser completely legally, and because Web-Design/Testing in no way taxes the limits of any machine built in the last decade.
I really don't see most people using more than one adapter, and even less a few months from now when most new devices come equipped with an USB-C port.
That's what I've been saying for a couple of weeks, now: That any perceived "pain" in requiring an adapter or two NOW will be very-much "paid back" when USB-C starts showing up on everything under the sun by the middle of next year.
Dell charges $350 to go from HD to 4K on the same configuration so $600 for 6K isn't really that out of line. But another item you neglected to mention is that the SB comes with GTX 965M with 2GB dedicated graphics vs the MBP coming with Intel Iris Graphics 540 with shared memory. The GTX benchmarks are over twice the Iris.
It's REALLY hard to figure out exactly what's what on the Surface Book, PARTICULARLY with the GPUs.
It looks like the only one with the GTX 965M w/2 GB video RAM is the one with the "Performance Base", which is yet ANOTHER $100 more ($700 more total) than the non-touchbar MBP config, or $400 more than the touchbar MBP config.
Since I didn't spec the "Performance Base" model in my comparison, it looks like the i7-equipped model Surface Book has an NVIDIA® GeForce® dGPU with 1GB GDDR5 memory (doesn't say which NVidia GPU). FYI, the i5 model Surface Book has the Intel® HD graphics 520, with presumably shared memory.
But, as you said, if you pop for the top-of-the-line 15" MBP, with the Radeon Pro 455 with 2GB dedicated memory, the story is quite different, with each GPU having its stronger, and weaker, points; but overall, in the same ballpark.
Then buy the MBP. If you are not planning on doing any drawing or you do and already have a Wacom to attach to the MBP then obviously the Surface is not for you.
Just don't pretend that you are comparing two similar machines to show an Apple price advantage because they are not at all similar. The 50% screen resolution difference alone justifies the difference in price.
I have a Surface Pro 3 and haven't had any issues with the touch screen, but of course that is anecdotal. As I mentioned above the Surface Book is really a full fledged drawing tablet with 50% more resolution than the MBP. It is just not a fair comparison.
And if your life amounts to drawing on your lap, and you can stand Windows 10, it might well be a better choice. But for the other 98% of computer users, the Touchscreen aspect is a "that's cool" feature that hardly, if ever, gets used.
Curiously enough, building a Lightning-to-USB C cable is explicitly forbidden in the Apple Accessory Spec (at least up through R26, the last I have, from August 2016). You cannot make such a cable, Apple will not allow it. So - you have one LEGIT source of such cables: Apple. Those clones on Amazon use grey-market MFi chips - better hope they're not reported as grey-market, because use of them can be deactivated via software, leaving you unable to charge.
Who cares if there is one "legit" source or twenty? As long as you aren't talking about spec-ing a component in a product-design, "alternate sources" aren't really a big deal.
There are PLENTY of things in the world, both "tech-y" and not, that are single-source. For example, if you bust the knob on your car's climate control, guess what? You're not going to AutoZone to pick up an aftermarket replacement. If the controller board in your microwave suffers a failure of the Microcontroller, guess what? You'll be buying an OEM replacement of the ENTIRE controller, because it has the all-important CODE in it.
The moral of the story is: So long as there is ONE source, then WTF is the REAL issue?
I don't know if it counts as 'caring' but I think it's damn funny that you can't plug lightening headphones into the macbook because it uses the 3.5mm jack.
I think it's funny that people whined about Apple removing the 3.5 mm jack on the iPhone, AND whine about KEEPING the 3.5 mm jack on the MBP!!!
Slashdot Mirror
I had a 2006 MBP, the mag-lock charging cables (mine and my colleagues) lasted about 6 months - bad strain relief design, something Apple continued for over a decade into the early iPads.
Just a small accessory, sure... now let's talk about the exploding batteries (replaced under warranty, if you knew to ask). Growing pains, yeah.
Now, let's talk about the lack of proper heat-sink compound on the GPU... 18 months into life we started having heat-death of the GPUs on those models - no warranty repairs offered here, would you like to purchase a main board replacement for 80% of the cost of a new laptop?
O.K. - that MacBook Pro model was just a lemon, they had been in the PC manufacturing business for 25 years, but this laptop thing is still sorta new, cut them some slack?
How about their "education model" iMacs that they have the Universities on contract to replace every 2 years - you can get those cheap (like $50) if you know when the dumping sales come around. Thing is, the "education models" are nerfed with max RAM capacities and other things to make them obsolete _even faster_ than the consumer grade stuff. Don't mind working with a 2GB RAM limit in 2014, then $50 is a steal for an iMac - really nice looking machine, just stare at it while you wait for everything to load.
Anybody can abuse a cable, or not. I have NEVER had an Apple charging cable failure; but then, as a former sound-engineer, I know how to treat cables...
Bulging batteries are a problem with every laptop manufacturer. If you leave your MacBook on "charge" 24/7/365, figure on replacing batteries every few years. Newer models got better at that.
Heat-sink compound misapplied: Contract Manufacturer's fault (although Apple maybe dropped the QC-ball on that one). Check Google. It has happened to EVERY laptop manufacturer at one time or another. Again, not a "design" problem, but a Contract Manufacturing problem. But I agree, Apple bears the ultimate responsibility. But as for "no replacement", for every story of "Apple wouldn't replace my motherboard", there is at least one "Apple replaced my motherboard even though it was way out of warranty/recall limits."
Intentionally-crippled iMacs? First: Citation, please? Second: One word: Firmware Upgrade. Apple CERTAINLY wouldn't bother to generate, qualify, and pay for standards-testing on TWO motherboard designs, so the difference MUST be Firmware, which is easily re-flashed by the iMac itself. Oh, and Everymac.com says that although certain Education-Only iMacs from 2011 only OFFICIALLY supported 8 GB of RAM, they actually DO support 16 GB. And although they seem to have temporarily limited RAM to 4 GB on the 2009 Educational iMacs through an EFI Firmware mod., they eventually removed that restriction, too. So, unless you have another, more reliable citation...
I'd like to see what the actual intended lifetime is of Apple products, by design. By observation, they seem to expect most of them to be replaced within 24 months or less, and the designs seem to intentionally self-destruct shortly thereafter.
That certainly isn't my experience, nor the experience of 99% of the people I know with Apple gear.
For example, my "daily drivers" are a mid 2012 non-retina 15" MacBook Pro, an iPad 2, and an iPhone 6 Plus (my iPhone 4s still works, but I don't use it anymore), and a 5th Gen Airport Extreme Base Station. All of them work identically to the day I got them.
The most extreme example is that one of my friends has a G4 Aluminum PowerBook he bought used about 4 years ago, a second-gen iPod, plus a first or second-gen Airport Base Station and an iPhone 4. His wife has a first-gen Intel Mac mini. All are their "Daily Drivers".
Yeah, built for a 24-YEAR replacement cycle is more like it...
Here's the problem: if your Mac with 2Tb is out of warranty and the logic board fails, you'll need a replacement logic board/SSD combo and that is going to be very expensive.
Looks like a nice cottage business for someone with a decent SMT rework station and an eBay account... Add a data transfer/recovery service, and go straight to the "Profit!" step!
On my previous job, there were about a dozen iphone developers and other hipsters who had macbooks as their workstation. Every single one of them had their SSDs replaced due to breakage at latest on the second year of usage. I bet they either had some really crap SSDs installed on factory or the devices were not ventilated well enough for full day usage and the drivers were literally toasted. I wonder if the apple's SSD lifetime is still the same?
SSD tech has come a LONG way in a very short time. The SSDs that Apple is installing in the new MBPs is incredibly reliable.
Having said that, I'm not so sure I'm "on board" with having the mass-storage permanently "on board".
Stop drinking the koolaid.
If you look at TheFakeTimCook's posting history, you'll conclude that he's actually serving the koolaid. His posts are nothing but a constant stream of pro-Apple/anti-[everything else] drivel.
Looks like he pulled the trigger on this one with an anti-android dig without fully thinking it through.
I am honored that the AC has so little to actually do in his life that he/she can devote the effort to launch an in-depth analysis of my Slashdot Posts.
Perhaps if this alleged human would favor us with a Login, we could return the favor, and do an in-depth analysis if his/her Posting history, eh?
This is like Windows XP. What a cluster!
Lenovo... LOL
BTW, the balanced-signal RS-422 "serial port that no one but Apple used" easily drove a standard Unbalanced RS-232 port (and vice versa) with just a simple miniDIN to DB25 or DC9 connector cable; so removing those from the iMac was EXACTLY like removing all the DC9s from a Wintel PC.
Surface Pro 3 owner. I think it is the best computer on the market. Touch screen is phenomenal.
Then what are you doing TROLLING in an Apple-Thread?
- first, if you compare it by hybrid devices running Windows vs Hybrid devices running OS X, instead of comparing by each manufacturers separate hardware, the numbers show how minuscule Apple sales really are. It is great for their company, and quite profitable, but don't confuse that with a significant market share.
I didn't make the Comparison-List, that was the "slider.com" or whatever their name was that did the sales-study; nor did I compare the Surface Book to the new MacBook Pro. For that, you need look no farther than Microsoft. It is THEY that have decided to sell the Surface Book as a DIRECT COMPETITOR to the new MacBook Pro. So talk to them...
Moron.
Did you add in all the dongles and cables you have to buy. Just saying. Remember, it is total cost of ownership. :-)
You're just being ridiculous. And besides, Apple has reduced the price on all that stuff.
Regardless what I think, the decision was purely marketing, not practical. And the market has spoken. Whaddami gonna do? Guess I'll get a Razor Blade, with a matte screen.
You're an idiot. It WAS a VERY PRACTICAL decision!
By the time your late 2016 MBP is a year or two old (which is NOTHING for an Apple laptop), the industry will be about 75% USB-C, and Apple's decision will be recognized as being "forward-thinking", at the expense of a being temporarily just a little adapter-heavy.
I say that not as an Apple fanboi; but as someone who has seen the writing on the NON-Apple wall...
Yes, an adapter for the projector, no big deal because you had other ports to plug everything else into without adapters. There is an HDMI and/or displayport adapter permanently attached to the projector in nearly every conference room I've been in, so it is really never necessary to carry one; though I always do because I know the one time I don't I'll need it.
Now? Adapters! Adapters for EVERYTHING! Such glory!!!
Yes, but I happen to know that you're smart enough to realize that this is just a temporally-temporary situation. This time next year (or so), Apple's decision to go with USB-C/TB 3 exclusively is going to look pretty damn forward-thinking; and considering the amount of time Mac owners keep their machines, I feel 100% confident that this will work out every bit as well as when Apple decided to axe the RS-422 Serial Ports and the SCSI Port off the Macs in 1998 with the introduction of the iMac, in favor of the then-almost-unknown USB Port.
In that case, the entire industry went from ZERO USB peripherals (or close enough to it) to nearly ALL USB in less than a YEAR. I watched it happen; so I know it's true.
Great! Now plug in your hard drive at the same time. The other thing is that the USB port is not very robust. All that plugging in and out makes them pretty flaky in a very short time.
Practically this was a very bad move. The sales stats say otherwise. The owners manual needs to state 'some assembly required'
Well, if the USB-C connector is "flaky" (citation, please), then the WHOLE INDUSTRY is soon going to be having problems, because there is a metric shitpotfull of NON-Apple lappies with USB-C/TB 3 connectors.
And the MBPs have either 2 or 4 identical USB-C/TB 3 Ports; so I'm not sure what you are whining about with your "Now plug in your hard drive at the same time" statement.
23 computers, one slave as a server, and all worked swimmingly. Students could use any computer to access their works-in-progress. It was magic!
Why can't you do that now with a Mac mini and OS X Server? Twenty-three clients on a mini should be nothing, assuming you are simply doing file/print/mail serving, etc.
//e computers to share files on a Corvus OmniNet system, and my custom print-server code communicating directly with the Corvus Constellation I/F cards, along with a "slave" //gs that served as a print-server (and an anti-mischief network monitoring tool), allowed the students to print directly from (text-based) AppleWorks from their individual //e "workstations" to the "print-server". No sneaker-netting floppies around (although students could also save/load files to/from floppy to work on at home if they had AppleWorks).
//e that allowed teachers to bring in a class and have the students be restricted to a set-selection of applications served from our two Corvus file servers. All the students had to do to move to the next application was to press Control-Reset, and the next program in the "lesson-script" would automatically load. The system could automatically and transparently load and switch to applications (while transparently switching OSes!) running under Apple DOS, ProDOS and even UCSD Pascal, IIRC.
//e machines to be available for other student uses, which still allowed for those students to browse/load applications from my menuing/loader system that was disguised as a screen-saver, while watching for a student to press Control-A to load the top-most menu.
Oh, and I've got you beat. I created custom code in 1987 to allow a high-school computer lab with 31 Apple
I also created a custom text-based menuing system for that same computer lab that worked directly in conjunction with the Corvus Constellation cards and an "adminstrator"
And even better, from the "admin console" (//e in the computer-lab office), we could designate which computers would be involved in the "class", leaving the rest of the
And the coolest thing of all (at least to me), was that, because the accesses were essentially "synchronized", the initial-load of however-many computers to the first application in a "class" was MUCH faster (like 5 mins vs. 20 mins if loading was started manually), because the Corvus server was smart enough to recognize that the many nearly-concurrent requests for the same group of blocks, and serve as much at a time from its cache memory as it could. That was just a happy accident; but it was cool as hell to watch!
Apple has no practical reason not to provide built in ports.
They DID provide "built-in ports". Just not the ones you seem to think they should have.
You do realize, of course, if you replaced the four USB-C/TB 3 ports on the MBP with all the Ports they CAN BE, there would literally not be enough ROOM around the entire laptop to place the connectors edge to edge, right?
You say you want some "classic" USB? Let's just start with SIXTEEN USB 3.0 Ports, each going full-blast at 5.0 Gbps.
Howabout some Ethernet? I don't know if OS X can even handle it (I assume not); but you SHOULD be able to turn those 4 USB-C/TB 3 Ports into (theoretically) EIGHTY 1 Gbps Ethernet connections (talk about a ROUTER!!!),
etc.
Maybe it's more than just a talking point.
Hardly ever. Enjoy your new Windows 10 machine. I'm certain it will serve you well.
Don't confuse me with an Apple fanboy. Since I use all the major OS's on a daily basis, I know how a Mac works compared to a Windows compared to a Linux compared to a ChromeOS.
What's even funnier is that BronsCon is a Web-Developer; so it's REALLY hard to imagine why a Mac wouldn't suit his needs better than other machines; since he can run any OS and any browser completely legally, and because Web-Design/Testing in no way taxes the limits of any machine built in the last decade.
What about when you need to plug it in for a presentation in a random conference room you haven't had weeks or years to set up just how you like it?
You know, real world professional use cases.
Same thing MacBook Pro users have been doing to plug into VGA and DVI-based Projectors for pretty-much ever: Use an adapter.
So, next imagined hardship?
I really don't see most people using more than one adapter, and even less a few months from now when most new devices come equipped with an USB-C port.
That's what I've been saying for a couple of weeks, now: That any perceived "pain" in requiring an adapter or two NOW will be very-much "paid back" when USB-C starts showing up on everything under the sun by the middle of next year.
You don't know how big his bag is.
No, but we have a pretty good idea...
I still want my MagSafe
Your want is Griffin's Command!
Dell charges $350 to go from HD to 4K on the same configuration so $600 for 6K isn't really that out of line. But another item you neglected to mention is that the SB comes with GTX 965M with 2GB dedicated graphics vs the MBP coming with Intel Iris Graphics 540 with shared memory. The GTX benchmarks are over twice the Iris.
It's REALLY hard to figure out exactly what's what on the Surface Book, PARTICULARLY with the GPUs.
It looks like the only one with the GTX 965M w/2 GB video RAM is the one with the "Performance Base", which is yet ANOTHER $100 more ($700 more total) than the non-touchbar MBP config, or $400 more than the touchbar MBP config.
Since I didn't spec the "Performance Base" model in my comparison, it looks like the i7-equipped model Surface Book has an NVIDIA® GeForce® dGPU with 1GB GDDR5 memory (doesn't say which NVidia GPU). FYI, the i5 model Surface Book has the Intel® HD graphics 520, with presumably shared memory.
But I will agree: If you spend the extra money on the Surface Book, the Nvidia 965M does whip all over the Iris Graphics 550 as far as benchmarks go.
But, as you said, if you pop for the top-of-the-line 15" MBP, with the Radeon Pro 455 with 2GB dedicated memory, the story is quite different, with each GPU having its stronger, and weaker, points; but overall, in the same ballpark.
Then buy the MBP. If you are not planning on doing any drawing or you do and already have a Wacom to attach to the MBP then obviously the Surface is not for you. Just don't pretend that you are comparing two similar machines to show an Apple price advantage because they are not at all similar. The 50% screen resolution difference alone justifies the difference in price.
Really? $600 difference? I think not.
I have a Surface Pro 3 and haven't had any issues with the touch screen, but of course that is anecdotal. As I mentioned above the Surface Book is really a full fledged drawing tablet with 50% more resolution than the MBP. It is just not a fair comparison.
And if your life amounts to drawing on your lap, and you can stand Windows 10, it might well be a better choice. But for the other 98% of computer users, the Touchscreen aspect is a "that's cool" feature that hardly, if ever, gets used.
Curiously enough, building a Lightning-to-USB C cable is explicitly forbidden in the Apple Accessory Spec (at least up through R26, the last I have, from August 2016). You cannot make such a cable, Apple will not allow it. So - you have one LEGIT source of such cables: Apple. Those clones on Amazon use grey-market MFi chips - better hope they're not reported as grey-market, because use of them can be deactivated via software, leaving you unable to charge.
Who cares if there is one "legit" source or twenty? As long as you aren't talking about spec-ing a component in a product-design, "alternate sources" aren't really a big deal.
There are PLENTY of things in the world, both "tech-y" and not, that are single-source. For example, if you bust the knob on your car's climate control, guess what? You're not going to AutoZone to pick up an aftermarket replacement. If the controller board in your microwave suffers a failure of the Microcontroller, guess what? You'll be buying an OEM replacement of the ENTIRE controller, because it has the all-important CODE in it.
The moral of the story is: So long as there is ONE source, then WTF is the REAL issue?
You're comparing an Apple and an Orange though, unless you somehow configured the MacBook Pro with a touch screen.
From what I have heard about MS' touchscreens, most people would gladly trade it for a decent Touchpad.
I don't know if it counts as 'caring' but I think it's damn funny that you can't plug lightening headphones into the macbook because it uses the 3.5mm jack.
I think it's funny that people whined about Apple removing the 3.5 mm jack on the iPhone, AND whine about KEEPING the 3.5 mm jack on the MBP!!!