Must I list them for a Slashdot audience?
If you've been here long enough to remember a time when the answer to that question would have been "no", you've been here long enough to know the answer is "yes".
I've seen you around a bit, but I've never seen you getting shit on like this, the same way I often do, for being a real person. Ever notice how it's never done by anyone with an account that can be linked back to a real person?
I know it's hard (I routinely fail at it myself) but the best thing to do is look at who's posting and, if you can't figure out who the person at the keyboard actually is, just ignore it.
This is in no way a judgment; as I said, I routinely fail at it myself. The hardest part is remembering to look at the username of every post before replying. All too often I'll be conversing with one person and not notice than someone else has butted in.
I get your feelings re: Windows, there's certainly plenty of unknown and it does have its blemishes. I won't get into an argument over it, as it's somewhat of a religious issue for many and I try to avoid those fights. No OSX on Ryzen, it just won't run, so that's not an option for me (I could have spent 3x as much to build my workstation, I suppose, and run an unstable hackintosh), no Adobe stuff on Linux, and no Apple offering that has the horsepower I'm looking for. I could have hackintoshed my Windows laptop but, again, stability matters and my experience with hackintosh systems is that they lack that one critical feature. And, so, Windows it is.
If you're relying on the underlying system to be secure, you're doing security wrong. Don't take my word for it, Bruce Schneier has written much on the subject.
You might want to watch those seeds. I've found exactly 0 in the several things I've taken apart.
Well, the iPod and iPhones I took apart were completely sealed devices, no way something the size of a sesame seed worked its way in there outside of the factory. The 2014 MacBook Pro was unboxed and immediately opened, it was never near a sesame seed between unboxing and disassembly, so the seed certainly came with it, as well. The 2011 and 2013 MacBook Pros, 2010 MacBook, and 2006 PowerBook G4 were all well-used by the time I got to them, so I suppose it's possible that someone might have dropped a seed. I do find it highly unlikely that only a single seed (and no other debris, mind you) would have gotten in that way, though; there would have been more ingress than just a single sesame seed.
Hell of a puzzle, that is. I might just have to go digging into the iMac next.
I note you didn't mention Boot Times, I'll bet those were significantly faster.
For a system that's left on (and sleeping when not in use), boot times are largely irrelevant. The difference between a 5 second boot time and a 50 second boot time is less than a second a day. That's the live most of the iMacs I've seen (let's just say more than a handful) live. Load times are what people who actually use their computers notice; most people seem to go get a cup of coffee or a snack while their computer boots, and they're gone much longer than it takes to do so no matter how fast or slow it is; but they're sitting at the damn thing when they launch a program, aren't they?
How many users do you think really spend "upward of $10-20k or more on a single workstation?" The numbers just aren't there.
Enough that companies exist just to serve them. If the numbers weren't there, those companies wouldn't be, either.
HOWEVER, I do get the sense that Apple is trying to figure-out how to address at least some of that market, by saying that the next Mac Pro is going to be "modular", and that the emphasis will be on "expandability, customize-ability, and 'A system that can be updated to continue to meet future needs.' "
You mean like the MacPro they killed off in 2012? Like I said, they were the darling of the video production industry until they did that and, by now, those systems have been replaced and the industry has migrated to new platforms; they won't be coming back after being bitten once.
What that translates to in actual hardware/software terms remains to be seen; but it is heartening that Apple appears to be listening and trying to address the "Pro" market in a much less "one size fits all" approach.
Indeed, and they shouldn't have tried to make it one-size-fits-all in 2013, either.
In other words: Jobs is dead. And Apple is just beginning to realize that some of his peccadilloes regarding a penchant for minimalism do not necessarily serve some higher-end market segments very well.
Funny, you blame Jobs for this, but the decision to destroy the Mac Pro came after his death. The trash can is not a path Jobs put apple on, that was all Ives. Professionals love Jobs-era Macs, many I know are still clinging to them for whatever tasks they can still be useful for.
Yes, but those laptops weigh 13 pounds (literally)
Some, not all. My entire workstation and 2 23" display barely weigh that much and there's way more in there than there is in the typical workstation-replacement laptop.
and still have shitty displays
Again, some, not all.
and generally horrible case-designs
Again, some, not all.
That's what you get it you try to pay less for your workstation-replacement laptop than you'd pay for a comparable workstation. Factor in the premium you pay for portability and be willing to shell out the cash and you can have something much smaller and lighter with a much nicer display. Look at machines targeting the video production market; those people give a fuck about portability, display quality, and durability; and the products geared toward them reflect that.
And they are "portable' only in name. You can't use any of them away from an AC outlet for more than an hour (if that).
What conference room doesn't have an outlet? The people who use these kinds of machines aren't the ones who work poolside, on the beach, or on long flights, they don't need insane battery life, but they do need insane power they can pack up and bring with them to the next place they'll be working at, where they'll have access to *GASP* (and I know this comes as a surprise since they're soooooooooo rare) an AC outlet!
On the desktop? Windows. My servers still live in Ubuntu land.
In all honesty, Windows isn't as bad as it once was; really hasn't been since 7 (but only because you could still use 7 after 8 and 8.1 were released -- THOSE sucked). The Windows 10 "spying" fears are way overblown (I know someone on the team responsible for managing all of that data; if there was a reason to avoid it, he'd have hooked me up with enterprise licensing so I could turn it off or, at least, told me so when I flat-out asked); the wording in the license is precisely what people jumped all over Samsung and Vizio for not having when some functionality of their devices necessitated communicating with an external server.
It's just proof that you just can't win -- don't include license terms dictating what data is collected and why, and you get hate for not being forthcoming; do include license terms dictating what data is collected and why, and you get hate for collecting the data in the first place (despite its necessity in order to provide a number of functions -- don't like it? disable those functions and the data won't be collected) and for not being forthcoming (because you don't present every single bit of data to the end user before, while, and after sending it.
The exception is error reporting; that can't be turned off (outside of Enterprise licenses). But still, the most common complaint I hear is that you can't see that data, not that you can't turn it off, because most people understand why they're collecting it. Here's the kicker: you CAN see it! Control Panel -> System and Security -> Security and Maintenance -> Problem Reports. That's every error report sent to Microsoft from the system you view it on, including every detail they received (unless, of course, you clear it). On my current system, with just about a month of use on it, there are exactly zero such reports.
There is the issue of it rebooting for updates in the middle of the workday (and while users are actively using the systems and have "Active Hours" configured to not allow it to reboot during those times). Yes, it does happen, I've had it happen to me -- twice on two different systems. Beyond that, it's fast, it's stable, and it gets the job done. I liken the automatic reboots to bluescreens, which I think is fair since the only bluescreens I've had in a year and a half of using Win 10 have been the result of poorly written virtual device drivers (specifically, a virtual filesystem driver used by an older version of my backup software) and the total number of them (including the mid-day update reboots) over a year and a half is a mere fraction of what I would typically see in a few months as a Win 7 user.
Hell, the number of bluescreens I've seen with Win 10 is dwarfed by the number of kernel panics I've seen on average in the same period while using Ubuntu on the desktop.
Yes, you have to disable a few things, but what reasonably usable desktop OS doesn't make you do that today?
And, while Windows isn't as bad as it once was, I would posit that OS X (neigh, Mac OS) isn't as good as it once was. You still run 10.6 on that PowerBook that supports 10.7; why is that? My reason for doing the same (before the GPU crapped out) was that 10.6 simply worked better. 10.7 was the start of a trend that has kept going ever since, one that I warned of and was told I was just an Apple hater.
Yeah, I recall the supposed GPU switching tech, it was in earlier versions of macs too. It pretty much sucked, and if you go back far enough even required rebooting. I don't recall having to reboot or relogin on a mac though, but it's been a long time. Apple did get the smooth switching done first, I thought, or at least what I experienced.:)
I dunno, like I said I had it back in 2010 without having to reboot or relogin. Then again, I just checked and it
I top 32 quite frequently on my workstation and I'm not doing anything I consider to be all that "intensive" as far as a professional workload is concerned. I wouldn't do everything I'm doing on my workstation on a laptop, though, but I to often run up against the 16GB in both my PC laptop and my MacBook Pro.
One example of how I manage to do this on a regular basis is matching the configurations of the various node types in one of my clients' production environments 1:1. Just having one of each instance running (the bare minimum for a functional 1:1 testing environment with no compromises) eats 9GB, plus overhead for the virtualization subsystem; we'll call that 10GB. Windows wants ~2GB for itself (and no, OSX is no better), so we're at 12GB. My IDE is currently eating a cool 1.5GB: 13.5GB. That leaves 2.5GB for my browser (1.25GB currently), disk cache, and buffers. Less if using integrated graphics as those share system RAM.
And that's before I start running test suites.
As a result, I do have to compromise the testing environment on both my PC and Mac laptops.
I'm sitting at 14.3GB right now, with the cluster of dev VMs shut down and the hypervisor not running, which means I'd be at 24.3GB with that stuff running. Before I built this workstation, I'd run up to the 32GB my old workstation had by doing just that, then running a test suite. There is also 35.2GB of data cached in RAM at the moment, so I'm really using 47.3GB when you factor that in.
These are things I do on a near daily basis.
I'm a developer, and my projects aren't that big. A lot of developers "get away" without much less, and that includes me as recently as a few years ago, by not doing proper test-driven development with continuous integration wherein the test suite (or an appropriate subset of it) is run after every change in order to give immediate feedback as to the state of the codebase.
Doing things right does require additional resources, but the end result is 90% less time wasted chasing down bugs when you should be deploying a finished product.
I don't watch it like a hawk, but I do peek at my RAM usage from time to time; the highest I've seen on this workstation is 47.6GB; plus cache and buffers, I had probably damn near topped out the 64GB I've got. The highest I've ever seen on my Windows laptop with 16GB is 18GB of swap used; my MacBook Pro has topped 20GB of swap -- there's a reason I had to compromise on the dev environment on those machines.
But no, nobody needs 32GB.
For Facebook, at least.
But, then, those users don't exactly need a MacBook Pro, either, and would be better served by a MacBook Air with 4GB and putting the savings toward apps, games, and/or retirement.
It wasn't the hard shift, but the seamless switching as necessitated by the GPUs. That's a pretty slick piece of hardware. And yes, IIRC, that was hardware driven. It's in the 2014+.
Indeed, it's driven by a mux circuit in the integrated GPU. That, combined with the dedicated GPU having driver support for reading textures out of the integrated GPU's shared RAM on the fly during switchover, provides for a seamless switch between the two. Switching back to the integrated GPU, the driver for the integrated graphics makes a few calls to any applications currently making use of 3D or compositing capabilities to get fresh copies of any textures, which takes a bit longer than going in the other direction, but that's acceptable because it's a performance downgrade and nobody will notice if it takes a half second longer to complete.
When I first learned of the feature several years ago, back when I was a full-time Ubuntu user, I wanted to get it working on my laptop. It didn't work readily out of the box. It barely worked on Windows systems that supported it, so that was no surprise; ATI (AMD hadn't killed the name yet after buying them) and nVidia hadn't gotten driver support working in any stable sort of manner at that time. I was able to get it working reliably with the help of a kernel module that acted as a shim between the iGPU and dGPU drivers to translate between the version of the graphics switching API (I forget what it's actually called but it has a name) nVidia had implemented (which was not the version Intel ended up releasing in their iGPU drivers) and the version the Intel drivers were using.
If I recall correctly, I needed that kernel module in place for 2 or 3 revisions of the nVidia driver, before nVidia corrected the issue. By then, it was working on Windows as well and I'm pretty sure that's when Apple started even considering it. That's not a stab at Apple, either; they were smart to wait until the vendors got their shit together. It's important for the Apple fanbois (which you're clearly not BTW) to remember, though, without PC users willing to tough-out being on the bleeding edge, there would be no matured and perfected technologies for Apple to adopt and convince the fanbois they had invented.
Those 960s are smokin. The new PCIe SSDs in the 2016 MBPs are running 3 or 4 GB/s as well.
Of course the SSDs in the 2016 MBPs are as fast as the 960's! They're using Samsung parts!
A couple of those will flood your CPU.:)
Not my Ryzen; plenty of cores and PCIe lanes to handle it.;)
Of course, I got tired of waiting for the MSI motherboard I had preordered, which came with 2 m.2 slots and ended up with an Asus that only has 1, so I may never know. MSI has pissed me off one too many times in the past year and a half so, unless someone else released an x370 based board with 2 m.2 slots (and I decide to upgrade to it), I won't get to try it.
But yeah, the i7 in my laptop? I don't think it can handle anything faster than what's in it currently. If I land another sizeable contract this year, I might just find out, though.
Honestly, the 2012s are pretty decent boxes, even today. Not top of the line, but you're not paying those prices either.
That's what I told him, but he doesn't like the idea of a used computer. At least, that was his excuse... a month before he bought an open-box 2014 rMBP.
His objections were validated in the end, though; the headphone jack was busted.
I told him he should have listened to me and gotten the Mini, at least then if it wasn't perfect out of the box he'd only have spent 1/3 as much on it. He was not amused.
As far as longevity goes, I would bet that later versions of OS X/macOS minimize the swapping between RAM and SDD
Just how does one minimize swapping when you're trying to fit a 26GB dataset into 16GB of RAM? You don't and you can't, as that data must be in RAM to be utilized. That means swapping 10GB in and 10GB out every time you need to scan through it. It's actually more than 10GB because some of that 16GB is taken up by the OS and applications, but you (should) get my point.
I do wish that Apple would have pushed the Fusion Drive concept more aggressively
Why? They're garbage. My wife's 2015 iMac with Fusion has no better load times than her 2013 MacBook Pro did when it used a spinning disk.
SDD is still too expensive, and as you point out, still creeps people out (me included!) about longevity, especially with long-lived Apple laptops...
If you have enough RAM for your use case, there's no reason to be creeped out by an SSD. I run all-SSD systems (except for my backup disks, which rotate out daily and need to be BIG rather than FAST; those are spinning disks, but that's for cost reasons rather than reliability).
And I think that the wait for "a computer that suits your needs" may soon be over, if the recent "peek under the covers" roundtable discussion regarding the Mac Pro and iMac (and possibly Mac mini) roadmaps are any indication.
Too little, too late. I built the system I needed last month.
As for the "people who need more than 16 GB of RAM", that appears to be a pretty small segment, most involving Virtualization (VMWare-type, not Virtual Reality), where you simply cannot ever have enough RAM, and some large-scale 4k and above video projects (where again, you can never have enough RAM).
You mean the "Pro" segment, which is who a MacBook "Pro" should be aimed at. Also, it's not that small of a segment (of professionals) who run VMs and edit 4k video; most every software developer should be virtualizing their test environments and everything on a professional scale is recorded and edited in 4k (or 8k) today, even if the final output format is to be 1080p.
The segment of Mac-using professionals who do this may be small, but that's more a factor of Apple not providing hardware options that are well suited to the tasks (where Apple's systems used to excel less than a decade ago, mind you) than it is to do with what actual professionals are doing with their systems. Those users use non-Apple systems because Apple systems that suit their needs don't exist; and those users spend upward of $10-20k or more on a single workstation. Hell, I've sat in front of more than one $50k video editing workstation (and that's before factoring in the $30k panel that was connected to it).
Why does Apple not want a piece of that market?
We're willing to pay a premium.
So, for now, those people have to be content with an iMac or a Mac Pro
Or a PC, since we're talking about portability. PC laptops that meet these needs already exist and that's what gets used where those needs exist.
But it is likely that the next gen of MBPs will be able to address more than 16 GB (at least 32 GB), because by then, LPDDR4 will be allowed by the Gods of Intel...
And, by then (in fact, by now), an entire industry that used to prefer Apple less than a decade ago will have (e.g. already has) moved on to platforms that can actually support their needs. It's been half a decade since Apple was the darling of the video production industry and workstations in that field are replaced or upgraded well within that timeframe.
Apple hasn't made a machine that can properly handle virtualization since the XServe line was killed off. The Mac Pro could have taken that torch, and it looked like it was going to in 2012, but then the trash
To someone who needs 32GB of RAM, having 32GB of RAM is more important than the slight battery savings of using DDR4L. What's your excuse for not understanding that?
I would imagine thrashing the SSD to swap data in and out or RAM takes a much bigger toll on battery life than the different between DDR4 and DDR4L. I certainly know it kills performance and isn't good for the longevity of the SSD.
And look, I made my point without calling anyone a dumbass. Dumbass.
I wonder what thrashing the SSD to swap to/from RAM does to battery life. Not to speak of performance or the longevity of said SSD.
Yes, battery life is a legitimate concern. However, it is less important than having 32GB of RAM to someone who needs more than 16.
I'd like to now address something you said a couple posts up:
Stop just spewing hate.
I'm not. I have waaaaaaaaaaaay too much Apple gear around here to be the Apple hater this site seems to think I am. More detail here.
If I hated Apple, I wouldn't give two shits that they don't currently make a computer that suits my needs, and I certainly wouldn't have bought my wife a brand new 5k iMac in November. In fact, if I hated Apple, I would be glad they didn't make a computer that fits my current needs, as that removes any potential temptation for me to give them a shot; more likely, if I hated Apple, I wouldn't know that they don't make a computer that fits my current needs.
No, I'm actually quite a fan of Apple. I do hate their current computer lineup, though, because it entirely excludes me.
You can pry my iPad Pro from my cold, dead hands, though.
What's interesting is that laptop makes no mention of the integrated Iris graphics. Are non mac laptops still bound by discrete graphics, or have they also included auto-switching to the integrated Iris graphics to save power when convenient?
Mac actually came late to the game with that feature. It's been a standard on the PC side for nearly a decade by now and I recall having it working (for nVidia at least) under Linux at least 7 years ago. The power LED switches between blue and orange to indicate which GPU is being used. Interesting that they don't mention that anywhere in the promotional materials; I picked up that info from the user manual.
Also, that laptop states it comes with dual spinning drives for the price I saw, which wasn't surprisingly high, but in line with what I expected. With bigger M.2 drive (only 1 supported?) and 1 or 2 SSDs, you can probably create a better battery life situation if you haven't already, if that's important to you.
Check that again, the spec sheet states "128GB M.2 SSD x 2 RAID 0 + 1TB HDD (7200RPM)". I let the spinner sleep after just a minute of inactivity and only store bulk media on it so it spins up maybe twice a week.
I will admit that the m.2 SSD in my MacBook Pro is just as fast as the m.2 RAID in the PC, but that comes down to component choice; to meet a price point, faster SSDs just weren't in the cards. I'm tempted to throw a bout of 960 PROs in there and see where that goes, I know the one in my Ryzen build hits multiple GB/sec reads and writes. A striped pair of them would likely be mindblowing.
It's also worth noting that I didn't actually pay $2399 for that laptop; I picked it up for a hair over $1700 after tax and shipping. It may have been $2399 when it was brand new, but it was much, much cheaper when I bought it.
A quick note - as these are older macs, and likely have been upgraded OS wise, you might wish to inspect your running processes. I had a mini just recently that shutdown due to heat sporadically. I traced it down to the upgrade process not having completed successfully due to XCode requiring registration agreement, or something like that.
Well, I doubt that's the issue with the 2011 running Ubuntu:)
Come to think of it, I do recall running into various issues with the last OS upgrade on the 2014, though. The end result was a complete wipe and restore of the system, which negates the possibility of any upgrade-related madness. Beyond that, I almost always have Activity Monitor open (and yes, I keep Task Manager open on my PC an top is almost always running on the 2011 running Ubuntu) because I do monitor processes. The number of times I've had to kill some rogue Adobe process (on both Mac and PC) is... insane.
My list of other systems is far longer, and usually ends with: junked after 'n' months as unfixable.
Oh, that was by no means an exhaustive account of my hardware past, that's just he current crop of Apple devices in my life. There are a number of PCs and Android devices around, as well, in current use; and there are many, many more in my past. I could start a museum.
BTW, that hack runs a 980x, which hasn't been worth upgrading since 2010.
Indeed! If it works, keep it and use it. But (and I'm repeating both of us at this point) new hardware should be NEW. That doesn't really apply to the average home user who just needs a Facebook machine, but if it has "Pro" in the name... well...
Actually I read an article on the latest Intel processors, Kaby Lake?, and why they weren't in the 2016 refresh. Essentially, the MBP design was already finalized, tested, and sent to manufacturing before the processor was available.
Right, that's a new architecture and thus a major refresh. Intel does also tend to release faster chips in the same family over time an
Actually - I get a twitter page on that link.... I was slightly confused.
Hahahahahahahahahaha! Sorry, that's a link I shared with my wife earlier in the day. THIS is the laptop.
As for heat and battery life, I dunno, both my 2011 17" and my 2014 15" retina run hot and don't last long; the 2011 claims 81% battery capacity still and it does seem to last about as long as the 2014. My wife's 2013 13" does the same, but it also has a bad RAM slot (common on that model) and a slew of other issues, so I attribute all of its problems to the faulty design and manufacturing. Ask anyone (other than Apple) who fixes these things for a living and they'll tell you the 2013 13" model is shite. Oh well, she inherited it from her dad when he upgraded 6mo after buying it, so no skin off either of our backs I guess.
I take a lot of heat here for being an Apple hater, but I just have too much Apple gear in my home for that to be true. I use what works and I absolutely love my 9.7" iPad Pro, and use an iPad Air (1st gen, bought on release day) to control a Chromecast because the Apple TV I have went to shit after a few OS updates and I didn't see any better performance from any that my friends own. My mother-in-law inherited the Air 2 when I got my wife a Pro, and my wife has has had 5 different iPhone models in the 7 years we've been together. I gifted my mother a Macbook and bought my wife a 27" 5k iMac this past November, we have 3 working and in-use MacBook Pros in the house (the 2011 suffered the GPU issue typical of that model, so it runs Ubuntu with just the integrated graphics since it can't successfully boot anything else). That's right, I've keep and frequently use a broken MacBook Pro. Yet I get shit for being a hater. Two pieces of wall art in my office consist of the top clamshell of a G4 PowerBook with the Apple logo painted red (with green leaf) and the side of a teal G3 Mac case, the Apple logo on my 2014 rMBP is painstakingly hand-painted the actual proper original Apple rainbow colors (which I spent hours matching perfectly to the logo on an old dead Mac Classic I keep around) with a slightly iridescent topcoat.
But I take shit here for being an Apple hater.
Now that I've gotten that rant off my chest: thank you for not contributing to that.
I really just want Apple to make something that I can actually use. I greatly prefer Mac OS to Windows (I'd prefer Linux to either of those if the apps I need ran on it), but the hardware just isn't keeping up. I'm buying a machine for the long haul and I need it to not already be 2-3 years out of date when I buy it.
That's not hate, that's reality, and it's what has kept me from buying an Apple computer since the rMBP I bought at the beginning of 2014; and I only bought that because a client fronted me the money when the 2011 took a dump early on in the contract and they insisted I stick with Apple at the time. If Apple happens to have some compelling hardware on the market when I need to upgrade again in the future (far, far in the future, as the Ryzen build I just put together will last me at least half a decade with minimal upgrades along the way - mostly in terms of storage), I won't think twice. But it has to be current hardware, as recent as the best PC I could put together or, at least, within a few months of that.
The slow refresh cycle is what kills Apple for my uses, and the excuse that it lets them polish the design and get everything perfect just doesn't fly when you talk to someone who repairs them for a living. Except for major refreshes, which only happen every few years (e.g. they can be working on it from the moment the previous major refresh launches), their refreshes are just faster CPUs, faster RAM, and faster storage, with a few components replaced based on failures in the previous model. That's not a whole redesign and that's not a
Well, he's not wrong. That said, it's good business; and they're BUYING the companies, nobody's holding a gun to anyone's head, the companies sell willingly. Some of what they buy is actually good and they certainly have a wide reach, so I'm not sure it's all bad.
Well, as listed on that page, it's 4k. Come on, man, I know you can read:)
As for battery life, continuous integration. Tests run nearly constantly; every time I save a file, the functional test suite runs. Whenever I upload a file to one of several VMs (one for each type of server in the application cluster), another test suite runs that interacts with the site hosted on that cluster of VMs to verify that critical use-cases function correctly.
The 2014 rMBP did a fine enough job keeping up, provided I didn't mind the system bogging down as the test suites ran, or artificially limiting how fast they'd run in order to avoid that (hey, we all like taking more breaks, right?) but, really, it got annoying after a time. Running that load, the rMBP could manage a couple hours of battery life, tops; seems about on par with the PC, but the PC doesn't bog down under the load. I wouldn't really say it eats batteries, considering it slightly edges out the rMBP under similar loads.
Really? My pro device has 0 hours of battery life. It's a desktop workstation and no laptop on the market can touch it in actual productivity.
Where are these supposed "professionals" working that they're away from power for hours on end? I don't know very many professionals who work poolside for hours on end; but, then I also never said that gaming machine was used professionally... I also didn't tell you it gets 5 hours under moderate load (and much longer under typical use), but it does.
Normally, I don't reply to ignorant AC comments, but you're just that special.
Kaby Lake CPUs didn't come out at all until October 2016 and, when they did, all of the quad-core SKUs supported 64GB of RAM. That's irrelevant, though, as the Kaby Lake CPUs aren't what's in the 2016 MBP. The two prior generations (at least) supported 32GB. That includes the i5-6360U in the lowest-end 2016 MacBook Pro.
No QUAD CORE, KABY LAKE's (or later) that supported more than 32 GB, sorry. That's what Apple was counting on.
Apple didn't need chips that supported more than 32GB in order to build a laptop with 32GB of RAM. Dafuq you talkin 'bout? And, even when they start using those CPUs with support for 64GB of RAM, you know they're only going to give us half of that.
Wait... Right, Apple does "need" a CPU that can handle 64GB of RAM before they'll sell a system with 32GB, because Apple artificially limits the quantities or RAM they'll sell in their systems to half of what the CPU can actually support.
Wasn't a big deal before they started soldering the shit to the gahdamn board.
And IIRC, your 2011 MBP only supported 16 GB after APPLE released a FIRMWARE REVISION.
Huh, they must have released that firmware revision on DAY ONE, then... Oh, wait, no... Intel makes the CHIPSETS that contain the RAM CONTROLLERS that DETERMINE HOW MUCH RAM IS SUPPORTED and APPLE'S FIRMWARE NEVER PLAYS A ROLE IN THAT.
By the way, it is very ANNOYING and REALLY DESTROYS YOUR CREDIBILITY when you type in RANDOM CAPITALS like you did throughout your ENTIRE POST.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself how annoyed you are and how credible you think I am after reading the above statements.
Interesting, something from Alienware, perhaps, or similar? How much does it weigh? I ask, because I did a rather thorough evaluation of top end laptops before buying the last one in early 2015, and one of my criteria was lugging it around. My second question is battery life? While I don't get 10 hours out of my MBP, I do get over 6. A brand new Lenovo upper tier business system I tried out lasted about 2 hours and weighed an extra pound.
This is the laptop. I'll admit, I can't really evaluate battery life as I never really use it unplugged for more than an hour or so. As one would expect, it will vary with workload and yes, I've had it nealy death after just over an hour, but I've also experienced the same with my 2014 rMBP; I've also never topped 5hr with that rMBP, but I've had that PC over 80% after an hour.
Considering that it's pushing a much heavier GPU and higher resolution display, it really wouldn't surprise me if it didn't manage to win any awards for battery life. Lighter and faster than my rMBP, though, and I've noticed it runs a fair bit cooler as well.
Right, because Intel hasn't yet released any mobile chips that support 32GB in 2 DIMMs. Well, other than the i7 in my wife's gaming laptop, which was already an older model when I bought it for her more than a year ago.
Right, it's Intel's fault Apple doesn't sell laptops with the maximum amount of RAM possible. You know, just like the 2011 MacBook Pro I have sitting next to me could only possibly use 8GB of RAM (again, due to Intel's limitations, supposedly) but it's been running just fine with 16GB (and able to use all of it as well) of aftermarket RAM for 6 years.
That's because it only affects a handful of phones in South Korea. My S8+ has a little less red than my S7 Edge, though it does have a perfect half-circle dead spot on the right side (a defect, for sure, and my replacement phone arrives on Monday). Every mass-produced device is going to have some defects; apparently the screens used in the batches of phones sold in South Korea (which were produced first as they were to be sold first) had the red tint issue, and the batch of screens they had in stock when my phone was made had black-spot issues (which aren't unheard of on "edge" models).
It happens. And it's really only a problem when the manufacturer doesn't offer the end user a fix. I'd like to point to Nintendo as an example of where it's a problem; yet people will defend Nintendo to the death when they deny the existence of any issues (though there clearly are many) while lambasting Samsung for having issue that they actually acknowledge and fix. In my opinion, though Samsung has more issues than Nintendo, Nintendo users have more problems than Samsung users, because Nintendo users are stuck with the issues Nintendo won't fix.
When you don't need to replace your laptop or desktop every 1-3 years like a Dell, well, I suspect your sales numbers won't be quite as growth oriented.
Funny, I have a $299 Toshiba that was bought in 2010 that's still in use. Well, I don't have it, I gave it to a friend 2 years ago, but they're still using it daily. I was actually going to reply with something along the lines of "that only happens when you buy the cheaper models, but you're still ahead dollar-for-dollar and get periodic performance boosts as a bonus; when you spend as much on a PC laptop as you do on a Mac, they tend to last as long"; then, I remembered that $299 gem.
But I'll still elaborate on my point: I can spend $2400 on a 15" MacBook Pro (I'm pulling this from memory of my purchase in 2015, prices may be different today) and hope it lasts me 5 years, of I can spend $300/yr on a cheap PC, only have spent $1500 after 5 years and, at the end of that 5 years, have something faster than the Mac I would have spent $2400 on. Going the PC route gives me a $900 savings every 5 years and continuous performance upgrades.
Of course, I need more performance than the $300 PC laptops will give me, so that's not a viable solution for me, but it does illustrate how the Mac doesn't necessarily demonstrate "better value" based on "lasting longer". For the average user, that $2400 Mac would have to last 8 years to match the value of the $300 PC; and that's generously assuming the PC is upgraded yearly like clockwork. Additionally, at some point in that 8 year cycle, the $300 PC will surpass the $2400 Mac in performance.
Apparently, since I bought the MacBook Pro in February 2015 and replaced it (I still have it, it's just rarely used now) in November 2015, I needed more performance than Apple's fastest offering at the time could provide, as well.
And it was beaten by a $1700 PC laptop which, I bet you won't guess, is still in use a year and a half later, with no signs of needing to be replaced any time in the foreseeable future. It's actually still competitive with the 2016 MacBook Pro so, if you want to say a Mac laptop will last 5 years, it looks like I'm gonna get at least 6 out of this; it's sure built well enough to do it.
If Toshiba can make a laptop that lasts (and is still going strong in daily use) 7+ years for $300, why can't Apple tap that market? Sure, there's a limit to the profit made on a $300 laptop; $150 has to cover R&N, parts, and manufacturing, then you can split the profit with the retailer (often times Apple itself) for a profit of $75 (or $150 for direct sales) per laptop. That doesn't seem too bad, to be honest. Especially when you're selling them by the warehouse-full. Which Apple would.
And Apple could totally do that with a more recent C2D than what's in your 2006 MBP. If that's enough performance for you, something more recent should be marketable to a wider audience, as well; after all, people have no problem paying $300 for a C2D-based PC these days.
But, you'll say, Apple is afraid they'll undercut MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro sales if they do that. Right? Why does someone buy a MacBook Pro when the MacBook is so much cheaper? They need the performance and wouldn't buy a $300 C2D-based MacBook Lite (we'll call it that). Why does someone buy a MacBook when the MacBook Air is cheaper? Ok, I really can't answer that one since the MacBook Air is both faster and performs better, but there's some reason that people do (I'm guessing vanity, since they can get it in colors and it's a bit thinner). Whatever the reason (which I'm sure Apple is well aware of), Apple can design a MacBook Lite around it. Make it a bit thicker than the others, only offer one color, give it a 5-6hr battery life instead of shooting for 10-12. For a $300 price tag, there's still profit to be had and people will accept the compromises; in fact, people would pay $400 because it's Apple.
And nobody who is buying their current models would touch
We'll see. Honestly, of the entire Mac lineup, the Mac Mini had the most enterprise appeal (after the rack-mountable Mac servers were discontinued) simply for the ability to cram a shit-ton of them into a small space. You can easily rack-mount 6 of them in 1U so, if you wanted to run OS X on your servers, or just wanted a multitude of smaller discreet servers, you could really pack some reasonable power into a rack. That changed when they downgraded the Mini in 2014 and I do hope they reverse course.
I wish I could get excited about the Mac Pro announcement and, had they made the announcement 2 months earlier, I would be. However, I jumped on the Ryzen bandwagon (and with no regrets, I might add) shortly before that announcement and foresee this workstation lasting me the next 5 years or longer.
I'm a software developer, I run development servers in VMs, I edit audio and video, I do graphics work, I basically do all the things that Ryzen does better than Intel's comparable (many times more expensive) chips, and I'm a casual gamer at best so I don't really care if Intel's gaming-oriented chips could buy me another 5FPS at the same price point. All-in-all, I am and will continue to be happy with my Ryzen build and won't really miss the idea of working on a Mac. Before WSL and Bash on Windows being able to do all the things I need a UNIX-like environment for, I did miss the Mac, but that reality has changed.
Pulling their heads out of their asses and refreshing the Mac Pro within a year of realizing abysmal sales would have kept me firmly in the Mac camp and I'm not the only (or even the first) person migrating away from Mac for my business needs. The new Mac Pros might be too little too late.
As long as they can still run Windows and Linux, though, there is still hope for a refreshed Mac Mini, for the above-stated reasons.
Outwardly, Apple states that they are still dedicated to the Mac, but I think that ship has sailed. We're also seeing iPad sales on the decline and there's nothing going on in iPad land; the iPhone is really what's keeping Apple afloat at this point. Yes, they're making money hand over fist, and they've got cash reserves that could pay everyone's salaries for a decade if money stopped coming in all of a sudden, I don't think Apple is going to die. But I do think the Mac has been on a death spiral for nearly a decade and has less than a decade left.
The 2012 Mac Mini wasn't underpowered (for what it was) in 2012. The 2014 Mac Mini was underpowered in 2014; in fact, it would have been underpowered in 2012 as well, while the 2012 Mac Mini was less so in 2014.
I explained the issue 3 different ways in 2 sentences, but here's a 4th in case you missed it: the Mac Mini took a huge step backward in 2014 and hasn't seen anything resembling a proper refresh since.
Slashdot Mirror
Must I list them for a Slashdot audience? If you've been here long enough to remember a time when the answer to that question would have been "no", you've been here long enough to know the answer is "yes".
I've seen you around a bit, but I've never seen you getting shit on like this, the same way I often do, for being a real person. Ever notice how it's never done by anyone with an account that can be linked back to a real person?
I know it's hard (I routinely fail at it myself) but the best thing to do is look at who's posting and, if you can't figure out who the person at the keyboard actually is, just ignore it.
This is in no way a judgment; as I said, I routinely fail at it myself. The hardest part is remembering to look at the username of every post before replying. All too often I'll be conversing with one person and not notice than someone else has butted in.
If nobody calls listen(), what do you connect() to?
If you're relying on the underlying system to be secure, you're doing security wrong. Don't take my word for it, Bruce Schneier has written much on the subject.
You might want to watch those seeds. I've found exactly 0 in the several things I've taken apart.
Well, the iPod and iPhones I took apart were completely sealed devices, no way something the size of a sesame seed worked its way in there outside of the factory. The 2014 MacBook Pro was unboxed and immediately opened, it was never near a sesame seed between unboxing and disassembly, so the seed certainly came with it, as well. The 2011 and 2013 MacBook Pros, 2010 MacBook, and 2006 PowerBook G4 were all well-used by the time I got to them, so I suppose it's possible that someone might have dropped a seed. I do find it highly unlikely that only a single seed (and no other debris, mind you) would have gotten in that way, though; there would have been more ingress than just a single sesame seed.
Hell of a puzzle, that is. I might just have to go digging into the iMac next.
I note you didn't mention Boot Times, I'll bet those were significantly faster.
For a system that's left on (and sleeping when not in use), boot times are largely irrelevant. The difference between a 5 second boot time and a 50 second boot time is less than a second a day. That's the live most of the iMacs I've seen (let's just say more than a handful) live. Load times are what people who actually use their computers notice; most people seem to go get a cup of coffee or a snack while their computer boots, and they're gone much longer than it takes to do so no matter how fast or slow it is; but they're sitting at the damn thing when they launch a program, aren't they?
How many users do you think really spend "upward of $10-20k or more on a single workstation?" The numbers just aren't there.
Enough that companies exist just to serve them. If the numbers weren't there, those companies wouldn't be, either.
HOWEVER, I do get the sense that Apple is trying to figure-out how to address at least some of that market, by saying that the next Mac Pro is going to be "modular", and that the emphasis will be on "expandability, customize-ability, and 'A system that can be updated to continue to meet future needs.' "
You mean like the MacPro they killed off in 2012? Like I said, they were the darling of the video production industry until they did that and, by now, those systems have been replaced and the industry has migrated to new platforms; they won't be coming back after being bitten once.
What that translates to in actual hardware/software terms remains to be seen; but it is heartening that Apple appears to be listening and trying to address the "Pro" market in a much less "one size fits all" approach.
Indeed, and they shouldn't have tried to make it one-size-fits-all in 2013, either.
In other words: Jobs is dead. And Apple is just beginning to realize that some of his peccadilloes regarding a penchant for minimalism do not necessarily serve some higher-end market segments very well.
Funny, you blame Jobs for this, but the decision to destroy the Mac Pro came after his death. The trash can is not a path Jobs put apple on, that was all Ives. Professionals love Jobs-era Macs, many I know are still clinging to them for whatever tasks they can still be useful for.
Yes, but those laptops weigh 13 pounds (literally)
Some, not all. My entire workstation and 2 23" display barely weigh that much and there's way more in there than there is in the typical workstation-replacement laptop.
and still have shitty displays
Again, some, not all.
and generally horrible case-designs
Again, some, not all.
That's what you get it you try to pay less for your workstation-replacement laptop than you'd pay for a comparable workstation. Factor in the premium you pay for portability and be willing to shell out the cash and you can have something much smaller and lighter with a much nicer display. Look at machines targeting the video production market; those people give a fuck about portability, display quality, and durability; and the products geared toward them reflect that.
And they are "portable' only in name. You can't use any of them away from an AC outlet for more than an hour (if that).
What conference room doesn't have an outlet? The people who use these kinds of machines aren't the ones who work poolside, on the beach, or on long flights, they don't need insane battery life, but they do need insane power they can pack up and bring with them to the next place they'll be working at, where they'll have access to *GASP* (and I know this comes as a surprise since they're soooooooooo rare) an AC outlet!
OK, what are you running now?
On the desktop? Windows. My servers still live in Ubuntu land.
In all honesty, Windows isn't as bad as it once was; really hasn't been since 7 (but only because you could still use 7 after 8 and 8.1 were released -- THOSE sucked). The Windows 10 "spying" fears are way overblown (I know someone on the team responsible for managing all of that data; if there was a reason to avoid it, he'd have hooked me up with enterprise licensing so I could turn it off or, at least, told me so when I flat-out asked); the wording in the license is precisely what people jumped all over Samsung and Vizio for not having when some functionality of their devices necessitated communicating with an external server.
It's just proof that you just can't win -- don't include license terms dictating what data is collected and why, and you get hate for not being forthcoming; do include license terms dictating what data is collected and why, and you get hate for collecting the data in the first place (despite its necessity in order to provide a number of functions -- don't like it? disable those functions and the data won't be collected) and for not being forthcoming (because you don't present every single bit of data to the end user before, while, and after sending it.
The exception is error reporting; that can't be turned off (outside of Enterprise licenses). But still, the most common complaint I hear is that you can't see that data, not that you can't turn it off, because most people understand why they're collecting it. Here's the kicker: you CAN see it! Control Panel -> System and Security -> Security and Maintenance -> Problem Reports. That's every error report sent to Microsoft from the system you view it on, including every detail they received (unless, of course, you clear it). On my current system, with just about a month of use on it, there are exactly zero such reports.
There is the issue of it rebooting for updates in the middle of the workday (and while users are actively using the systems and have "Active Hours" configured to not allow it to reboot during those times). Yes, it does happen, I've had it happen to me -- twice on two different systems. Beyond that, it's fast, it's stable, and it gets the job done. I liken the automatic reboots to bluescreens, which I think is fair since the only bluescreens I've had in a year and a half of using Win 10 have been the result of poorly written virtual device drivers (specifically, a virtual filesystem driver used by an older version of my backup software) and the total number of them (including the mid-day update reboots) over a year and a half is a mere fraction of what I would typically see in a few months as a Win 7 user.
Hell, the number of bluescreens I've seen with Win 10 is dwarfed by the number of kernel panics I've seen on average in the same period while using Ubuntu on the desktop.
Yes, you have to disable a few things, but what reasonably usable desktop OS doesn't make you do that today?
And, while Windows isn't as bad as it once was, I would posit that OS X (neigh, Mac OS) isn't as good as it once was. You still run 10.6 on that PowerBook that supports 10.7; why is that? My reason for doing the same (before the GPU crapped out) was that 10.6 simply worked better. 10.7 was the start of a trend that has kept going ever since, one that I warned of and was told I was just an Apple hater.
Yeah, I recall the supposed GPU switching tech, it was in earlier versions of macs too. It pretty much sucked, and if you go back far enough even required rebooting. I don't recall having to reboot or relogin on a mac though, but it's been a long time. Apple did get the smooth switching done first, I thought, or at least what I experienced. :)
I dunno, like I said I had it back in 2010 without having to reboot or relogin. Then again, I just checked and it
I top 32 quite frequently on my workstation and I'm not doing anything I consider to be all that "intensive" as far as a professional workload is concerned. I wouldn't do everything I'm doing on my workstation on a laptop, though, but I to often run up against the 16GB in both my PC laptop and my MacBook Pro.
One example of how I manage to do this on a regular basis is matching the configurations of the various node types in one of my clients' production environments 1:1. Just having one of each instance running (the bare minimum for a functional 1:1 testing environment with no compromises) eats 9GB, plus overhead for the virtualization subsystem; we'll call that 10GB. Windows wants ~2GB for itself (and no, OSX is no better), so we're at 12GB. My IDE is currently eating a cool 1.5GB: 13.5GB. That leaves 2.5GB for my browser (1.25GB currently), disk cache, and buffers. Less if using integrated graphics as those share system RAM.
And that's before I start running test suites.
As a result, I do have to compromise the testing environment on both my PC and Mac laptops.
I'm sitting at 14.3GB right now, with the cluster of dev VMs shut down and the hypervisor not running, which means I'd be at 24.3GB with that stuff running. Before I built this workstation, I'd run up to the 32GB my old workstation had by doing just that, then running a test suite. There is also 35.2GB of data cached in RAM at the moment, so I'm really using 47.3GB when you factor that in.
These are things I do on a near daily basis.
I'm a developer, and my projects aren't that big. A lot of developers "get away" without much less, and that includes me as recently as a few years ago, by not doing proper test-driven development with continuous integration wherein the test suite (or an appropriate subset of it) is run after every change in order to give immediate feedback as to the state of the codebase.
Doing things right does require additional resources, but the end result is 90% less time wasted chasing down bugs when you should be deploying a finished product.
I don't watch it like a hawk, but I do peek at my RAM usage from time to time; the highest I've seen on this workstation is 47.6GB; plus cache and buffers, I had probably damn near topped out the 64GB I've got. The highest I've ever seen on my Windows laptop with 16GB is 18GB of swap used; my MacBook Pro has topped 20GB of swap -- there's a reason I had to compromise on the dev environment on those machines.
But no, nobody needs 32GB.
For Facebook, at least.
But, then, those users don't exactly need a MacBook Pro, either, and would be better served by a MacBook Air with 4GB and putting the savings toward apps, games, and/or retirement.
It wasn't the hard shift, but the seamless switching as necessitated by the GPUs. That's a pretty slick piece of hardware. And yes, IIRC, that was hardware driven. It's in the 2014+.
Indeed, it's driven by a mux circuit in the integrated GPU. That, combined with the dedicated GPU having driver support for reading textures out of the integrated GPU's shared RAM on the fly during switchover, provides for a seamless switch between the two. Switching back to the integrated GPU, the driver for the integrated graphics makes a few calls to any applications currently making use of 3D or compositing capabilities to get fresh copies of any textures, which takes a bit longer than going in the other direction, but that's acceptable because it's a performance downgrade and nobody will notice if it takes a half second longer to complete.
When I first learned of the feature several years ago, back when I was a full-time Ubuntu user, I wanted to get it working on my laptop. It didn't work readily out of the box. It barely worked on Windows systems that supported it, so that was no surprise; ATI (AMD hadn't killed the name yet after buying them) and nVidia hadn't gotten driver support working in any stable sort of manner at that time. I was able to get it working reliably with the help of a kernel module that acted as a shim between the iGPU and dGPU drivers to translate between the version of the graphics switching API (I forget what it's actually called but it has a name) nVidia had implemented (which was not the version Intel ended up releasing in their iGPU drivers) and the version the Intel drivers were using.
If I recall correctly, I needed that kernel module in place for 2 or 3 revisions of the nVidia driver, before nVidia corrected the issue. By then, it was working on Windows as well and I'm pretty sure that's when Apple started even considering it. That's not a stab at Apple, either; they were smart to wait until the vendors got their shit together. It's important for the Apple fanbois (which you're clearly not BTW) to remember, though, without PC users willing to tough-out being on the bleeding edge, there would be no matured and perfected technologies for Apple to adopt and convince the fanbois they had invented.
Those 960s are smokin. The new PCIe SSDs in the 2016 MBPs are running 3 or 4 GB/s as well.
Of course the SSDs in the 2016 MBPs are as fast as the 960's! They're using Samsung parts!
A couple of those will flood your CPU. :)
Not my Ryzen; plenty of cores and PCIe lanes to handle it. ;)
Of course, I got tired of waiting for the MSI motherboard I had preordered, which came with 2 m.2 slots and ended up with an Asus that only has 1, so I may never know. MSI has pissed me off one too many times in the past year and a half so, unless someone else released an x370 based board with 2 m.2 slots (and I decide to upgrade to it), I won't get to try it.
But yeah, the i7 in my laptop? I don't think it can handle anything faster than what's in it currently. If I land another sizeable contract this year, I might just find out, though.
Honestly, the 2012s are pretty decent boxes, even today. Not top of the line, but you're not paying those prices either.
That's what I told him, but he doesn't like the idea of a used computer. At least, that was his excuse... a month before he bought an open-box 2014 rMBP.
His objections were validated in the end, though; the headphone jack was busted.
I told him he should have listened to me and gotten the Mini, at least then if it wasn't perfect out of the box he'd only have spent 1/3 as much on it. He was not amused.
As far as longevity goes, I would bet that later versions of OS X/macOS minimize the swapping between RAM and SDD
Just how does one minimize swapping when you're trying to fit a 26GB dataset into 16GB of RAM? You don't and you can't, as that data must be in RAM to be utilized. That means swapping 10GB in and 10GB out every time you need to scan through it. It's actually more than 10GB because some of that 16GB is taken up by the OS and applications, but you (should) get my point.
I do wish that Apple would have pushed the Fusion Drive concept more aggressively
Why? They're garbage. My wife's 2015 iMac with Fusion has no better load times than her 2013 MacBook Pro did when it used a spinning disk.
SDD is still too expensive, and as you point out, still creeps people out (me included!) about longevity, especially with long-lived Apple laptops...
If you have enough RAM for your use case, there's no reason to be creeped out by an SSD. I run all-SSD systems (except for my backup disks, which rotate out daily and need to be BIG rather than FAST; those are spinning disks, but that's for cost reasons rather than reliability).
And I think that the wait for "a computer that suits your needs" may soon be over, if the recent "peek under the covers" roundtable discussion regarding the Mac Pro and iMac (and possibly Mac mini) roadmaps are any indication.
Too little, too late. I built the system I needed last month.
As for the "people who need more than 16 GB of RAM", that appears to be a pretty small segment, most involving Virtualization (VMWare-type, not Virtual Reality), where you simply cannot ever have enough RAM, and some large-scale 4k and above video projects (where again, you can never have enough RAM).
You mean the "Pro" segment, which is who a MacBook "Pro" should be aimed at. Also, it's not that small of a segment (of professionals) who run VMs and edit 4k video; most every software developer should be virtualizing their test environments and everything on a professional scale is recorded and edited in 4k (or 8k) today, even if the final output format is to be 1080p.
The segment of Mac-using professionals who do this may be small, but that's more a factor of Apple not providing hardware options that are well suited to the tasks (where Apple's systems used to excel less than a decade ago, mind you) than it is to do with what actual professionals are doing with their systems. Those users use non-Apple systems because Apple systems that suit their needs don't exist; and those users spend upward of $10-20k or more on a single workstation. Hell, I've sat in front of more than one $50k video editing workstation (and that's before factoring in the $30k panel that was connected to it).
Why does Apple not want a piece of that market?
We're willing to pay a premium.
So, for now, those people have to be content with an iMac or a Mac Pro
Or a PC, since we're talking about portability. PC laptops that meet these needs already exist and that's what gets used where those needs exist.
But it is likely that the next gen of MBPs will be able to address more than 16 GB (at least 32 GB), because by then, LPDDR4 will be allowed by the Gods of Intel...
And, by then (in fact, by now), an entire industry that used to prefer Apple less than a decade ago will have (e.g. already has) moved on to platforms that can actually support their needs. It's been half a decade since Apple was the darling of the video production industry and workstations in that field are replaced or upgraded well within that timeframe.
Apple hasn't made a machine that can properly handle virtualization since the XServe line was killed off. The Mac Pro could have taken that torch, and it looked like it was going to in 2012, but then the trash
To someone who needs 32GB of RAM, having 32GB of RAM is more important than the slight battery savings of using DDR4L. What's your excuse for not understanding that?
I would imagine thrashing the SSD to swap data in and out or RAM takes a much bigger toll on battery life than the different between DDR4 and DDR4L. I certainly know it kills performance and isn't good for the longevity of the SSD.
And look, I made my point without calling anyone a dumbass. Dumbass.
Oops...
Yes, battery life is a legitimate concern. However, it is less important than having 32GB of RAM to someone who needs more than 16.
I'd like to now address something you said a couple posts up:
Stop just spewing hate.
I'm not. I have waaaaaaaaaaaay too much Apple gear around here to be the Apple hater this site seems to think I am. More detail here.
If I hated Apple, I wouldn't give two shits that they don't currently make a computer that suits my needs, and I certainly wouldn't have bought my wife a brand new 5k iMac in November. In fact, if I hated Apple, I would be glad they didn't make a computer that fits my current needs, as that removes any potential temptation for me to give them a shot; more likely, if I hated Apple, I wouldn't know that they don't make a computer that fits my current needs.
No, I'm actually quite a fan of Apple. I do hate their current computer lineup, though, because it entirely excludes me.
You can pry my iPad Pro from my cold, dead hands, though.
What's interesting is that laptop makes no mention of the integrated Iris graphics. Are non mac laptops still bound by discrete graphics, or have they also included auto-switching to the integrated Iris graphics to save power when convenient?
Mac actually came late to the game with that feature. It's been a standard on the PC side for nearly a decade by now and I recall having it working (for nVidia at least) under Linux at least 7 years ago. The power LED switches between blue and orange to indicate which GPU is being used. Interesting that they don't mention that anywhere in the promotional materials; I picked up that info from the user manual.
Also, that laptop states it comes with dual spinning drives for the price I saw, which wasn't surprisingly high, but in line with what I expected. With bigger M.2 drive (only 1 supported?) and 1 or 2 SSDs, you can probably create a better battery life situation if you haven't already, if that's important to you.
Check that again, the spec sheet states "128GB M.2 SSD x 2 RAID 0 + 1TB HDD (7200RPM)". I let the spinner sleep after just a minute of inactivity and only store bulk media on it so it spins up maybe twice a week.
I will admit that the m.2 SSD in my MacBook Pro is just as fast as the m.2 RAID in the PC, but that comes down to component choice; to meet a price point, faster SSDs just weren't in the cards. I'm tempted to throw a bout of 960 PROs in there and see where that goes, I know the one in my Ryzen build hits multiple GB/sec reads and writes. A striped pair of them would likely be mindblowing.
It's also worth noting that I didn't actually pay $2399 for that laptop; I picked it up for a hair over $1700 after tax and shipping. It may have been $2399 when it was brand new, but it was much, much cheaper when I bought it.
A quick note - as these are older macs, and likely have been upgraded OS wise, you might wish to inspect your running processes. I had a mini just recently that shutdown due to heat sporadically. I traced it down to the upgrade process not having completed successfully due to XCode requiring registration agreement, or something like that.
Well, I doubt that's the issue with the 2011 running Ubuntu :)
Come to think of it, I do recall running into various issues with the last OS upgrade on the 2014, though. The end result was a complete wipe and restore of the system, which negates the possibility of any upgrade-related madness. Beyond that, I almost always have Activity Monitor open (and yes, I keep Task Manager open on my PC an top is almost always running on the 2011 running Ubuntu) because I do monitor processes. The number of times I've had to kill some rogue Adobe process (on both Mac and PC) is... insane.
My list of other systems is far longer, and usually ends with: junked after 'n' months as unfixable.
Oh, that was by no means an exhaustive account of my hardware past, that's just he current crop of Apple devices in my life. There are a number of PCs and Android devices around, as well, in current use; and there are many, many more in my past. I could start a museum.
BTW, that hack runs a 980x, which hasn't been worth upgrading since 2010.
Indeed! If it works, keep it and use it. But (and I'm repeating both of us at this point) new hardware should be NEW. That doesn't really apply to the average home user who just needs a Facebook machine, but if it has "Pro" in the name... well...
Actually I read an article on the latest Intel processors, Kaby Lake?, and why they weren't in the 2016 refresh. Essentially, the MBP design was already finalized, tested, and sent to manufacturing before the processor was available.
Right, that's a new architecture and thus a major refresh. Intel does also tend to release faster chips in the same family over time an
Actually - I get a twitter page on that link.... I was slightly confused.
Hahahahahahahahahaha! Sorry, that's a link I shared with my wife earlier in the day. THIS is the laptop.
As for heat and battery life, I dunno, both my 2011 17" and my 2014 15" retina run hot and don't last long; the 2011 claims 81% battery capacity still and it does seem to last about as long as the 2014. My wife's 2013 13" does the same, but it also has a bad RAM slot (common on that model) and a slew of other issues, so I attribute all of its problems to the faulty design and manufacturing. Ask anyone (other than Apple) who fixes these things for a living and they'll tell you the 2013 13" model is shite. Oh well, she inherited it from her dad when he upgraded 6mo after buying it, so no skin off either of our backs I guess.
I take a lot of heat here for being an Apple hater, but I just have too much Apple gear in my home for that to be true. I use what works and I absolutely love my 9.7" iPad Pro, and use an iPad Air (1st gen, bought on release day) to control a Chromecast because the Apple TV I have went to shit after a few OS updates and I didn't see any better performance from any that my friends own. My mother-in-law inherited the Air 2 when I got my wife a Pro, and my wife has has had 5 different iPhone models in the 7 years we've been together. I gifted my mother a Macbook and bought my wife a 27" 5k iMac this past November, we have 3 working and in-use MacBook Pros in the house (the 2011 suffered the GPU issue typical of that model, so it runs Ubuntu with just the integrated graphics since it can't successfully boot anything else). That's right, I've keep and frequently use a broken MacBook Pro. Yet I get shit for being a hater. Two pieces of wall art in my office consist of the top clamshell of a G4 PowerBook with the Apple logo painted red (with green leaf) and the side of a teal G3 Mac case, the Apple logo on my 2014 rMBP is painstakingly hand-painted the actual proper original Apple rainbow colors (which I spent hours matching perfectly to the logo on an old dead Mac Classic I keep around) with a slightly iridescent topcoat.
But I take shit here for being an Apple hater.
Now that I've gotten that rant off my chest: thank you for not contributing to that.
I really just want Apple to make something that I can actually use. I greatly prefer Mac OS to Windows (I'd prefer Linux to either of those if the apps I need ran on it), but the hardware just isn't keeping up. I'm buying a machine for the long haul and I need it to not already be 2-3 years out of date when I buy it.
That's not hate, that's reality, and it's what has kept me from buying an Apple computer since the rMBP I bought at the beginning of 2014; and I only bought that because a client fronted me the money when the 2011 took a dump early on in the contract and they insisted I stick with Apple at the time. If Apple happens to have some compelling hardware on the market when I need to upgrade again in the future (far, far in the future, as the Ryzen build I just put together will last me at least half a decade with minimal upgrades along the way - mostly in terms of storage), I won't think twice. But it has to be current hardware, as recent as the best PC I could put together or, at least, within a few months of that.
The slow refresh cycle is what kills Apple for my uses, and the excuse that it lets them polish the design and get everything perfect just doesn't fly when you talk to someone who repairs them for a living. Except for major refreshes, which only happen every few years (e.g. they can be working on it from the moment the previous major refresh launches), their refreshes are just faster CPUs, faster RAM, and faster storage, with a few components replaced based on failures in the previous model. That's not a whole redesign and that's not a
Well, he's not wrong. That said, it's good business; and they're BUYING the companies, nobody's holding a gun to anyone's head, the companies sell willingly. Some of what they buy is actually good and they certainly have a wide reach, so I'm not sure it's all bad.
Well, as listed on that page, it's 4k. Come on, man, I know you can read :)
As for battery life, continuous integration. Tests run nearly constantly; every time I save a file, the functional test suite runs. Whenever I upload a file to one of several VMs (one for each type of server in the application cluster), another test suite runs that interacts with the site hosted on that cluster of VMs to verify that critical use-cases function correctly.
The 2014 rMBP did a fine enough job keeping up, provided I didn't mind the system bogging down as the test suites ran, or artificially limiting how fast they'd run in order to avoid that (hey, we all like taking more breaks, right?) but, really, it got annoying after a time. Running that load, the rMBP could manage a couple hours of battery life, tops; seems about on par with the PC, but the PC doesn't bog down under the load. I wouldn't really say it eats batteries, considering it slightly edges out the rMBP under similar loads.
Really? My pro device has 0 hours of battery life. It's a desktop workstation and no laptop on the market can touch it in actual productivity.
Where are these supposed "professionals" working that they're away from power for hours on end? I don't know very many professionals who work poolside for hours on end; but, then I also never said that gaming machine was used professionally... I also didn't tell you it gets 5 hours under moderate load (and much longer under typical use), but it does.
Normally, I don't reply to ignorant AC comments, but you're just that special.
Kaby Lake CPUs didn't come out at all until October 2016 and, when they did, all of the quad-core SKUs supported 64GB of RAM. That's irrelevant, though, as the Kaby Lake CPUs aren't what's in the 2016 MBP. The two prior generations (at least) supported 32GB. That includes the i5-6360U in the lowest-end 2016 MacBook Pro.
So, what's the excuse, again?
No QUAD CORE, KABY LAKE's (or later) that supported more than 32 GB, sorry. That's what Apple was counting on.
Apple didn't need chips that supported more than 32GB in order to build a laptop with 32GB of RAM. Dafuq you talkin 'bout? And, even when they start using those CPUs with support for 64GB of RAM, you know they're only going to give us half of that.
Wait... Right, Apple does "need" a CPU that can handle 64GB of RAM before they'll sell a system with 32GB, because Apple artificially limits the quantities or RAM they'll sell in their systems to half of what the CPU can actually support.
Wasn't a big deal before they started soldering the shit to the gahdamn board.
And IIRC, your 2011 MBP only supported 16 GB after APPLE released a FIRMWARE REVISION.
Huh, they must have released that firmware revision on DAY ONE, then... Oh, wait, no... Intel makes the CHIPSETS that contain the RAM CONTROLLERS that DETERMINE HOW MUCH RAM IS SUPPORTED and APPLE'S FIRMWARE NEVER PLAYS A ROLE IN THAT.
By the way, it is very ANNOYING and REALLY DESTROYS YOUR CREDIBILITY when you type in RANDOM CAPITALS like you did throughout your ENTIRE POST.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself how annoyed you are and how credible you think I am after reading the above statements.
Interesting, something from Alienware, perhaps, or similar? How much does it weigh? I ask, because I did a rather thorough evaluation of top end laptops before buying the last one in early 2015, and one of my criteria was lugging it around. My second question is battery life? While I don't get 10 hours out of my MBP, I do get over 6. A brand new Lenovo upper tier business system I tried out lasted about 2 hours and weighed an extra pound.
This is the laptop. I'll admit, I can't really evaluate battery life as I never really use it unplugged for more than an hour or so. As one would expect, it will vary with workload and yes, I've had it nealy death after just over an hour, but I've also experienced the same with my 2014 rMBP; I've also never topped 5hr with that rMBP, but I've had that PC over 80% after an hour.
Considering that it's pushing a much heavier GPU and higher resolution display, it really wouldn't surprise me if it didn't manage to win any awards for battery life. Lighter and faster than my rMBP, though, and I've noticed it runs a fair bit cooler as well.
Right, because Intel hasn't yet released any mobile chips that support 32GB in 2 DIMMs. Well, other than the i7 in my wife's gaming laptop, which was already an older model when I bought it for her more than a year ago.
Right, it's Intel's fault Apple doesn't sell laptops with the maximum amount of RAM possible. You know, just like the 2011 MacBook Pro I have sitting next to me could only possibly use 8GB of RAM (again, due to Intel's limitations, supposedly) but it's been running just fine with 16GB (and able to use all of it as well) of aftermarket RAM for 6 years.
That's because it only affects a handful of phones in South Korea. My S8+ has a little less red than my S7 Edge, though it does have a perfect half-circle dead spot on the right side (a defect, for sure, and my replacement phone arrives on Monday). Every mass-produced device is going to have some defects; apparently the screens used in the batches of phones sold in South Korea (which were produced first as they were to be sold first) had the red tint issue, and the batch of screens they had in stock when my phone was made had black-spot issues (which aren't unheard of on "edge" models).
It happens. And it's really only a problem when the manufacturer doesn't offer the end user a fix. I'd like to point to Nintendo as an example of where it's a problem; yet people will defend Nintendo to the death when they deny the existence of any issues (though there clearly are many) while lambasting Samsung for having issue that they actually acknowledge and fix. In my opinion, though Samsung has more issues than Nintendo, Nintendo users have more problems than Samsung users, because Nintendo users are stuck with the issues Nintendo won't fix.
When you don't need to replace your laptop or desktop every 1-3 years like a Dell, well, I suspect your sales numbers won't be quite as growth oriented.
Funny, I have a $299 Toshiba that was bought in 2010 that's still in use. Well, I don't have it, I gave it to a friend 2 years ago, but they're still using it daily. I was actually going to reply with something along the lines of "that only happens when you buy the cheaper models, but you're still ahead dollar-for-dollar and get periodic performance boosts as a bonus; when you spend as much on a PC laptop as you do on a Mac, they tend to last as long"; then, I remembered that $299 gem.
But I'll still elaborate on my point: I can spend $2400 on a 15" MacBook Pro (I'm pulling this from memory of my purchase in 2015, prices may be different today) and hope it lasts me 5 years, of I can spend $300/yr on a cheap PC, only have spent $1500 after 5 years and, at the end of that 5 years, have something faster than the Mac I would have spent $2400 on. Going the PC route gives me a $900 savings every 5 years and continuous performance upgrades.
Of course, I need more performance than the $300 PC laptops will give me, so that's not a viable solution for me, but it does illustrate how the Mac doesn't necessarily demonstrate "better value" based on "lasting longer". For the average user, that $2400 Mac would have to last 8 years to match the value of the $300 PC; and that's generously assuming the PC is upgraded yearly like clockwork. Additionally, at some point in that 8 year cycle, the $300 PC will surpass the $2400 Mac in performance.
Apparently, since I bought the MacBook Pro in February 2015 and replaced it (I still have it, it's just rarely used now) in November 2015, I needed more performance than Apple's fastest offering at the time could provide, as well.
And it was beaten by a $1700 PC laptop which, I bet you won't guess, is still in use a year and a half later, with no signs of needing to be replaced any time in the foreseeable future. It's actually still competitive with the 2016 MacBook Pro so, if you want to say a Mac laptop will last 5 years, it looks like I'm gonna get at least 6 out of this; it's sure built well enough to do it.
If Toshiba can make a laptop that lasts (and is still going strong in daily use) 7+ years for $300, why can't Apple tap that market? Sure, there's a limit to the profit made on a $300 laptop; $150 has to cover R&N, parts, and manufacturing, then you can split the profit with the retailer (often times Apple itself) for a profit of $75 (or $150 for direct sales) per laptop. That doesn't seem too bad, to be honest. Especially when you're selling them by the warehouse-full. Which Apple would.
And Apple could totally do that with a more recent C2D than what's in your 2006 MBP. If that's enough performance for you, something more recent should be marketable to a wider audience, as well; after all, people have no problem paying $300 for a C2D-based PC these days.
But, you'll say, Apple is afraid they'll undercut MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro sales if they do that. Right? Why does someone buy a MacBook Pro when the MacBook is so much cheaper? They need the performance and wouldn't buy a $300 C2D-based MacBook Lite (we'll call it that). Why does someone buy a MacBook when the MacBook Air is cheaper? Ok, I really can't answer that one since the MacBook Air is both faster and performs better, but there's some reason that people do (I'm guessing vanity, since they can get it in colors and it's a bit thinner). Whatever the reason (which I'm sure Apple is well aware of), Apple can design a MacBook Lite around it. Make it a bit thicker than the others, only offer one color, give it a 5-6hr battery life instead of shooting for 10-12. For a $300 price tag, there's still profit to be had and people will accept the compromises; in fact, people would pay $400 because it's Apple.
And nobody who is buying their current models would touch
We'll see. Honestly, of the entire Mac lineup, the Mac Mini had the most enterprise appeal (after the rack-mountable Mac servers were discontinued) simply for the ability to cram a shit-ton of them into a small space. You can easily rack-mount 6 of them in 1U so, if you wanted to run OS X on your servers, or just wanted a multitude of smaller discreet servers, you could really pack some reasonable power into a rack. That changed when they downgraded the Mini in 2014 and I do hope they reverse course.
I wish I could get excited about the Mac Pro announcement and, had they made the announcement 2 months earlier, I would be. However, I jumped on the Ryzen bandwagon (and with no regrets, I might add) shortly before that announcement and foresee this workstation lasting me the next 5 years or longer.
I'm a software developer, I run development servers in VMs, I edit audio and video, I do graphics work, I basically do all the things that Ryzen does better than Intel's comparable (many times more expensive) chips, and I'm a casual gamer at best so I don't really care if Intel's gaming-oriented chips could buy me another 5FPS at the same price point. All-in-all, I am and will continue to be happy with my Ryzen build and won't really miss the idea of working on a Mac. Before WSL and Bash on Windows being able to do all the things I need a UNIX-like environment for, I did miss the Mac, but that reality has changed.
Pulling their heads out of their asses and refreshing the Mac Pro within a year of realizing abysmal sales would have kept me firmly in the Mac camp and I'm not the only (or even the first) person migrating away from Mac for my business needs. The new Mac Pros might be too little too late.
As long as they can still run Windows and Linux, though, there is still hope for a refreshed Mac Mini, for the above-stated reasons.
Outwardly, Apple states that they are still dedicated to the Mac, but I think that ship has sailed. We're also seeing iPad sales on the decline and there's nothing going on in iPad land; the iPhone is really what's keeping Apple afloat at this point. Yes, they're making money hand over fist, and they've got cash reserves that could pay everyone's salaries for a decade if money stopped coming in all of a sudden, I don't think Apple is going to die. But I do think the Mac has been on a death spiral for nearly a decade and has less than a decade left.
The 2012 Mac Mini wasn't underpowered (for what it was) in 2012. The 2014 Mac Mini was underpowered in 2014; in fact, it would have been underpowered in 2012 as well, while the 2012 Mac Mini was less so in 2014.
I explained the issue 3 different ways in 2 sentences, but here's a 4th in case you missed it: the Mac Mini took a huge step backward in 2014 and hasn't seen anything resembling a proper refresh since.