New MacBook Pro 15

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maverick786us

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The new MacBook Pro 15 is a huge upgrade over an already good previous generation state of the art Mac Book pro. But apple removed the apple light, that lights up on its back :((

The light adds the extra premium look and feel which distinct's MacBook pro over other MacBooks.
 
OK.

Really, it's a modest upgrade with a big premium. The touch strip thing is a gimmick, the loss of magsafe is abysmal, the general lack of ports is stupid, and while I don't mind the super-low-profile keyboards, many people do not like them at all. All this for what, space grey? A bigger trackpad? A marginally better screen? A millimeter or two of thinner-ness that nobody asked for?

At work we've already decided to keep ordering the old models as long as Apple will let us.
 
SuperSubZero said:
OK.

Really, it's a modest upgrade with a big premium. The touch strip thing is a gimmick, the loss of magsafe is abysmal, the general lack of ports is stupid, and while I don't mind the super-low-profile keyboards, many people do not like them at all. All this for what, space grey? A bigger trackpad? A marginally better screen? A millimeter or two of thinner-ness that nobody asked for?

At work we've already decided to keep ordering the old models as long as Apple will let us.
Click to expand...

Most of this is pure "I hate change" internet forum silliness, especially your dismissal of the touch bar. Losing Magsafe is bad, but the lack of ports is not an issue thanks to USB-C's versatility.

I'm surprised Apple is using Skylake CPUs instead of Kaby Lake. Either Intel is giving them a really good deal on Skylake, or this design has been sitting on a shelf for quite a while.
 
Intel doesn't have Kaby Lake quads yet for anyone. I'm completely unsurprised that they're still on Skylake for the 15" models.

I'm very unhappy they didn't go with DDR4 and limited it to 16GB. That takes it out of the running for me. I gave up my 2013 15" MBPr in the spring, and hoped for a good replacement. I bought a P50 instead of dealing with the delays. Now seeing what the replacement was, I not only have no regrets on moving my portable virtualization stuff to the P50, I'm actually in no way interested in a daily driver 13".

I won't complain about losing Magsafe. It was nice, and I prefer it to physical plugs, but it's not a minus. It's no longer a plus.

Losing a USB port in order to charge is a negative, especially when I'm already lacking ports.

Requiring adapters to be carried around with the laptop negates any design advantages. It's no longer portable. We already dealt with 8 years ago

I won't even get into the touch strip. Looks interesting, probably can be more useful than just a key I have to remember the function of. Hopefully it works out well.
 
Terpfen said:
Most of this is pure "I hate change" internet forum silliness, especially your dismissal of the touch bar. Losing Magsafe is bad, but the lack of ports is not an issue thanks to USB-C's versatility.

I'm surprised Apple is using Skylake CPUs instead of Kaby Lake. Either Intel is giving them a really good deal on Skylake, or this design has been sitting on a shelf for quite a while.
Click to expand...
The touch bar is not a new idea. Lenovo tried a prototype model of it in the X1 Carbon, which I was all too familiar with as we deployed several at work. It was 100% genuinely bad. Lenovo got so much hate they promptly yanked it after one generation. The lack of tactile and the bugginess of the software needed to support it made it dismal, and I was only happy I figured out how to hard-set it to only do the function keys and volume control strips without the other stuff that usually didn't trigger right.

USB-C may be versatile, but it's in it's infancy, and going all-in from the start was a little TOO 'courageous'. It also solves a problem nobody was actually having. I don't remember anyone being like "man I wish this laptop had ports that were half the size of USB that would be SO useful!"... ? It's ironic now that Apple's flagship iPhone doesn't come with a way to charge off their flagship laptop. The solution to that? $35, and that's for a cable that you now can't use on most other computers.

LOL they now sell the USB-C charger for the new MBP, buuuut, it doesn't come with any cable. So $79 for the charger + $20 for the cable.
 
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I say wait until 2018 when most of us will have USB-C connectors and buy the 2016/2017 model as a refurb. Rock a 2015 MBP until then.

Just like PC hardware, staying one generation behind is much cheaper.
 
I just don't understand who at Apple is so obsessed with "thin". Seems like they give up so much in the pursuit of a device that's thinner than the last gen. They could have made ALL the changes they did to improve the hardware, added a touch bar, a HUGE track-pad, kept at least 2 regular USB ports, kept the keyboard that people preferred, and kept the much bigger battery. But they had to pass on half the improvements just to make it "thinner". Their phones have the same problem, battery life and headphone jacks both courageously dumped in favor of "thin".

What PROFESSIONAL user would make that sacrifice if they had the choice? All the "professional" laptops on the PC side are huge, heavy-ass bricks, but they're 100 times more powerful than a new MacBook Pro.
 
SuperSubZero said:
The touch bar is not a new idea. Lenovo tried a prototype model of it in the X1 Carbon, which I was all too familiar with as we deployed several at work. It was 100% genuinely bad. Lenovo got so much hate they promptly yanked it after one generation. The lack of tactile and the bugginess of the software needed to support it made it dismal, and I was only happy I figured out how to hard-set it to only do the function keys and volume control strips without the other stuff that usually didn't trigger right.
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Ah, yes, Lenovo, that great innovator of touch devices and user interfaces. Well, if they tried it, then certainly it counts as The Exact Same Thing and it will Totally Fail(TM).

USB-C may be versatile, but it's in it's infancy, and going all-in from the start was a little TOO 'courageous'.
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This is the company that killed off the floppy drive and the optical disc drive. Your reaction is exactly the same as the complainers who still wanted floppy disks and optical media.
 
I think the touch bar is kinda cool, but it's not a must have item for me. The two deal breakers for me are the keyboard change and eliminating the magsafe connector. The butterfly keyboard is awful on the 12" MB. I hate typing on it. And, I've lost count of how many times I've been spared disaster by the little magnetic power plug popping off when I or someone else stepped, pulled, or tripped on the power cord.
 
Commander Shepard said:
I think the touch bar is kinda cool, but it's not a must have item for me. The two deal breakers for me are the keyboard change and eliminating the magsafe connector. The butterfly keyboard is awful on the 12" MB. I hate typing on it. And, I've lost count of how many times I've been spared disaster by the little magnetic power plug popping off when I or someone else stepped, pulled, or tripped on the power cord.
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WTF instead of that magnetic power, apple i using old ports used by rest of the laptops? Thank God I didn't wait for this generation MacBook pro. I have an old thread about MacBook pro 2015 that I purchased last month
 
Terpfen said:
Ah, yes, Lenovo, that great innovator of touch devices and user interfaces. Well, if they tried it, then certainly it counts as The Exact Same Thing and it will Totally Fail(TM).
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Time will tell, but seeing as stuff like 'vi' rely heavily on ESC, they are already going to have to BE SURE that the ESC button is always there when 'vi' is running. That's just one app. App makers have to now care about that strip, even if they don't intend to use it. I'm curious what legacy apps are gonna do.

Terpfen said:
This is the company that killed off the floppy drive and the optical disc drive. Your reaction is exactly the same as the complainers who still wanted floppy disks and optical media.
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Floppy drives were already falling out of favor back in the bondi blue iMac days. One thing to remember with the removal of the floppy drive was that CD drives had already been standard on many Macs for several years when that decision was made. A mature format was already in place on Macs of the day, and the tools to migrate off floppy disks were already in the hands of most Mac owners (eventually). Rewritable disks were a little late but they came, so users could burn them, toss floppies, life goes on. With dropping 'legacy' USB ports, buying a new Mac means you are buying more than a new Mac, as everything you currently own that is USB based needs to be changed or adaptered, and not for the price of a single blank CD (remember, a CD could hold HUNDREDS of floppy disks). The chances that most Mac owners already have a phone charger that is USB-C based, an external drive that is USB-C based, or heck even a wired mouse or keyboard that is USB-C based, is very slim.

The original MB Air was a good idea; one new lone wolf product, trying a new idea, and seeing what happens. Brilliant. Testing the waters, with a device distinctly designed around the lack of ports and optical drive. Their other products evolved predictably with their normal assortment of doodads, so if that 2006 13" MacBook owner didn't like what the Air offered, "hey, the 2009 MacBook is an upgrade and most of the stuff I currently own will work with it with no change. I can just get that!" Apple didn't just yank the optical drives off everything when they debuted the Air. Optical drives were still sold on most of their stuff in 2011, and only gradually phased out over product refreshes since then. In fact the MORNING of the new MBP announcement, in October of 2016, you could still order a 2012 spec MacBook Pro 13" pre-Retina, new in the box, with an optical drive.

For the record, I was off floppy drives on my PC in around 1998. Many people (particularly on [H]) back then thought the idea to be insane. BUT HOW WILL YOU DO BIOS UPDATES?!
 
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SuperSubZero said:
Time will tell, but seeing as stuff like 'vi' rely heavily on ESC, they are already going to have to BE SURE that the ESC button is always there when 'vi' is running. That's just one app. App makers have to now care about that strip, even if they don't intend to use it. I'm curious what legacy apps are gonna do.
Click to expand...

This is a little bit like complaining that app developers have to accommodate non-native resolutions even if they don't intend their application to be run at said non-native resolution. This is such an incredibly minor complaint. If vi doesn't update to support the Touch Bar, then you either remap the Esc key, or you switch to another editor. If you are an advanced enough user to desire vi in the first place, then falling back on the "but what if" scenario doesn't fly. The kind of person who actively seeks out and uses vi is not some sort of mouthbreathing casual ignorant user.

You've scraped the bottom of the barrel so hard that you've cut it out entirely, and are simply complaining for the sake of complaining.
 
The Touch Bar is progressing Apple's plan all along.

*puts on conspirator's hat*

Magic trackpad - touch function on dominant hand.

Then

Glass trackpad - touch function at the bottom of the laptop

Then

Touch Bar - touch function at the middle of the laptop

Finally

Touch screen - touch function at the top of the laptop!!

It's a long game folks

*takes off conspirator's hat*

I read some 'reports' that says the guts of he touchbar is like the Apple Watch. I think it's just a way for Apple to offload inventory... at the Watch price.
 
Gookitron said:
The Touch Bar is progressing Apple's plan all along.

*puts on conspirator's hat*

Magic trackpad - touch function on dominant hand.

Then

Glass trackpad - touch function at the bottom of the laptop

Then

Touch Bar - touch function at the middle of the laptop

Finally

Touch screen - touch function at the top of the laptop!!

It's a long game folks

*takes off conspirator's hat*

I read some 'reports' that says the guts of he touchbar is like the Apple Watch. I think it's just a way for Apple to offload inventory... at the Watch price.
Click to expand...


Well, they'd better hurry it up. Microsoft with the Surface Studio is really setting itself up to take over a good portion of the space in a positive way. It's not enough to convince me to switch (it would have to take a lot more in terms of security and removal of telemetry etc to get me interested). However for a lot of users that are interested in productivity it's going to be a game changer.
It's simultaneously going to take business away from Wacom and Apple. As long as they get Adobe on board and some other software manufactures from pro work, it's going to be a coup. Between this and the Surface Pro laptop, they're going to lose people in droves.
What is surprising to me is that there hasn't been significant effort inside of Sierra to make way for a new way of touch computing. And there still isn't a device that does touch input on OSX yet. The Surface Pro is on 4 gens now. Although Apple has shown its ability to make a touch device well, its yet to be seen whether or not they can make a competent hybrid device.
 
UnknownSouljer said:
Although Apple has shown its ability to make a touch device well, its yet to be seen whether or not they can make a competent hybrid device.
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Apple has long stated that it isn't interested in pursing a hybrid input OS with Tim Cook calling the idea a "refrigerator/toaster". Clearly the reception of Windows 8.x made such an analogy and dismissal of the idea pretty easy. Whatever the faults of Windows 10, Microsoft solved most of the biggest UI issues in Windows 8.x from the hybrid approach. Coupled with the collapse of conventional tablets, the pretty solid reception of modern Windows 2 in 1s, and even the sluggishness of PC sales extending over to Macs, I think that Apple will sometime in next couple of years get into the hybrid market.

The iPad Pro was certainly an attempt to get into this market but for the price it's simply not competitive on the productivity side. I'm guessing some kind of macOS/iOS combination has almost certainly got to be in the works.
 
heatlesssun said:
I think that Apple will sometime in next couple of years get into the hybrid market.
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Therein lies the problem. It is difficult to guess what the "next big thing" would be in that time frame. Apple may already be too late to hop into the hybrid market and might just bypass it all.
I think that is what they are attempting to do with the iPhone7 and this new Macbook Pro: instead of creating a transition device that everyone wants (by adopting Bluetooth and dropping backwards compatibility with ports), they went all in with next gen connections (I think we all agree that USB will eventually transition to Type C -- not sure if it is the right call with BT). Then when the industry finally mature a few years later, the Apple folks can gloat and say "we did it first"
 
I went to the Apple Store today and saw the space grey 13" base model MBP (without the touch strip). They had one single display model out. A lot of people don't like the short travel keyboard style from the 12" Macbook, but it doesn't bother me, and the 13" MBP version of it is fine. The hueg trackpad is hueg. The new screen looked ok but to be honest I didn't see any dramatic difference, the uniform lighting of the store makes all of the devices look good anyway. The base model only has two USB-C ports on the left side.

I may recommend trying a few of these for our work, as we tend to issue 13" MBPs to our software team and I am not sure I want to get the touch strip ones for them yet.
 
Watch the new MacBook Pro get put through the paces. His stream stopped so there is a part one. Livestream so ask him to run some benchmarks.

 
heatlesssun said:
Perhaps. Many people claimed that they'd never make a digital pen enabled iPad but I think the market forced the Issue which could be the case with hybrids.
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They've publicly rejected the hybrid form factor multiple times over the last half decade.
 
Terpfen said:
They've publicly rejected the hybrid form factor multiple times over the last half decade.
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Sure, but the market may dictate otherwise. The iPad Pro is certainly a device that was in reaction to market realities. The 2 in 1 market has evolved beyond being niche and is the one area where Microsoft and OEMs are having some success in an otherwise shrinking PC market. And even Apple isn't immune to sluggish and contracting markets in their Mac and iPad offerings. Apple is going to have to push some kind of boundary beyond thinness and playing around with ports.
 
Terpfen said:
I don't know why every conversation with you on this topic becomes circular.
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If Apple thinks it can make money selling hybrid devices, it will make hybrid devices. Considering the price range, attention and growth these devices are getting, if these trends continue I don't see why Apple would exclude itself from a profitable market.
 
I suppose I'm in the minority, but as I type this on my 2009 MacBook Pro, I am anxiously awaiting my almost max'd out MBP. The only upgrade I didn't choose was 2TB SSD. I did bump it up from 512GB to 1TB though. My wallet is crying, but it's been 7.5 years since I bought a laptop. I think I'll be okay, and am excited for the TouchBar and whatever performance upgrades I'll receive.
 
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