People bitch about dongles but if you think about it, who would make this progress if Apple doesn't?
Apple is probably the only consumer tech hardware company out there that can do this. I almost think it's their responsibility to push the boundary.
People make fun of the term "Courage" and I thought that was funny at first too. But the more I think about it the more I get what he's trying to say. Right now NO ONE other than Apple has the "courage" to make this decision. Do you think Dell would do it? Samsung? Only Apple has enough influence in the industry to be able to do something like this and NOT lose all their users. If Samsung got rid of all their ports, people would probably ditch them and buy a Lenovo or something. So Samsung cant' do it. Coming back to Apple, I'm an apple user and I have to buy it because it's just much better for me as a developer. And honestly speaking, I don't care about all these dongles arguments and "it's not for a pro" arguments. I'm not buying a device whose primary purpose is to stick in my USB cable. And pros don't complain about their tools.
Anyway Apple knows that if nobody makes this decision, laptops will just stay as some stagnant genre of devices that are only able to do things that people used to do in the 2000s.
In other words, if Apple didn't do this, I think the entire laptop category will just stagnate and be cannibalized by other platforms. See TV as an example.
Why wouldn't they complain? Because it's unprofessional? Nonsense. If a tool isn't up to it's designed task (especially if it used to be),complaining is certainly in order.
I think he misunderstood the venerable proverb, "a bad workman blames his tools." It's pithy, and people often overlook the the "bad" adjective and misinterpret its meaning.
PC Laptop world is actually really competitive. Check out Razer, Alienware, Yoga line, and Microsoft Surface.
They're innovating like crazy. Touch screens, OLED displays, external GPUs, different form factors, VR capable performance, etc. And many of those laptops integrated Thunderbolt 3 a while ago.
Regrettably, Apple has us all locked into their ecosystem via software so it feels like they are the only ones innovating.
> Check out Razer, Alienware, Yoga line, and Microsoft Surface.
A lot of their headline features gimp the user experience in some way.
Touch screens on laptops means you have to customize the UI so that each element is large enough to be tapped by a finger. So either you have to hide features to make room for these larger elements or pack the screen edge to edge, leaving a pretty cluttered interface. I'd rather have a better touch pad for precise input and without having to lift my arm from the keyboard.
Packing gaming-class hardware into a laptop leaves you with pretty terrible battery life, weight and heating issues. Something has to give. The metrics manufacturers should consider when building a portable device is performance per watt and durability vs weight. You'll always be better off money and performance-wise building a desktop PC for gaming.
Apple went with class leading storage speeds, an adaptable touch interface that's integrated with the keyboard and doesn't mess with the system UI, brought touch ID with the secure enclave, made a much larger touch pad which was already class-leading, made a considerably brighter screen - aiding outdoor use. It's a strong refresh with a premium price-tag, but you know you're buying quality when buying Apple.
I mean I keep looking around and I don't see what's so innovative. The Razer Stealth is in the 13" rMBP's weight class, but gets a third less battery life. Alienware makes big heavy gaming laptops. Surface is a good design that was poorly executed: http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/macbook-pro-13-inch.... Somehow, the Surface Book with Performance Base gets less battery life than the 13" rMBP, despite having a battery that's 60% bigger!
You have to nail the fundamentals before you start thinking outside the box. Surface Book, for example, had an innovative form factor, but it shipped with major bugs (heating up during sleep, screen refusing to detach from the base, etc.) Shipping a neat-o feature before it's ready for prime time is pointless. E.g. OLED is a disaster for battery life right now on typical white-screen desktop workloads.
See I don't see this as "innovating like crazy". I see it as "adding bullet-list features like crazy", which isn't quite the same thing.
This is always where Apple has excelled eg not adding touch screens to laptops cos it's ergonomically terrible (as Steve Jobs IMHO rightly said).
Apple has also historically taken technologies that have been in the market for awhile and made them not suck. Wireless is a prime example. Anyone else remember the days where you had to setup a wifi connection by specifying encryption type and trying to figure out if you were WEP, WPA1, WPA2 or WPA2-Enterprise? Apple came long and simply let you enter a password. OSX will figure out the rest.
The problem with the new Macbooks (IMHO) is that it represents a change in philosophy. As one review said "USB-C is the future but we're living unfortunately still living in the present" (paraphrased from The Verge IIRC).
How much would it have hurt to have 2 A and 2 C ports?
This rush to market has also led to some compatibility issues between TB3 devices.
A comment I read online (on HN IIRC) went something like "we've moved from a world where if the cable fits, it works to where the cable fits and nothing works". It's a salient point: the cost of a universal connector is putting us in cable hell.
PCs have long been a case of marketing pinheads building incoherent bullet lists (ie throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks). You're seeing negative reaction because people expect more from Apple.
It would have hurt to have the USB-A ports because that would have led to slower adoption of USB-C. All USB-C means that device manufacturers can't ignore it for as long, esp. for manufacturers that want to have their products featured in Apple stores.
So it is a bit painful for the end user, but in the long run everyone benefits from quicker adoption.
Yeah I agree that they are competitive, that's why they can add stuff but can't remove. Adding is easy. Adding is always good, which means it's easy to make that decision, but removing requires "courage" (haha I just can't help it although I agree with the term)
For example, it would be an idiotic move for Microsoft Surface to remove USB cables and headphone jacks because as far as hardware is concerned they're an underdog.
> For example, it would be an idiotic move for Microsoft Surface to remove USB cables and headphone jacks because as far as hardware is concerned they're an underdog.
That doesn't track with history. Apple was a huge underdog when they released the iMac and removed floppies and many non-USB ports.
Pros, in every industry, complain about their tools more than anyone else.
>See TV as an example
The TV industry, from both the physical panels to production and distribution of content, look drastically different than 10 years ago. I can't tell if you're trying to credit that to Apple or not? But it's hardly stagnant.
Are you talking about loosing ports? A lot of people think it's not progress but something limiting their options.
> I'm not buying a device whose primary purpose is to stick in my USB cable.
People don't stick cables to laptops just for the sake of sticking it, no? People work with lots of devices with different interfaces. People travel to different offices and need to "stick" a cable of a device which they don't own, don't have a dongle ready and maybe won't see that interface for months or years again. Having all possible dongles for all the devices you come across is impossible for some use cases.
> .. if Apple didn't do this, I think the entire laptop category will just stagnate...
Oh, come on! Will just stagnate because of too many ports?
They did it because the lightning port is proprietary and digital. You need to pay them to license it, and they can put DRM on it when they eventually choose to. That's main reason that they will never admit.
I keep hearing this silly conspiracy theory, but the numbers just don't add up.
Apple makes the princely sum of $4 per accessory on MFI licensing fees. Last year, those licensing fees made up less than one fifth of one percent of their revenue, a number so tiny that it doesn't even show up as a line item in their financial reports.
It would be such a spectacularly stupid decision to jeopardise sales of the world's most profitable smartphone just to try and add squeeze a minuscule amount of extra revenue out of MFI fees, it completely beggars belief that anyone is even considering it as a possibility.
Regarding DRM, Apple is the company that forced music labels to abandon DRM on their distribution platform the moment it became clear that Apple held all the power in that relationship. What possible conceivable benefit could there be for them to sneakily try and add it back now?
GP's point was that when Apple forces accessory makers to come to them for a license, they can arbitrarily chose to deny a license according to their whim. Apple (like many other companies, to be fair) uses product announcements as a way to force a positive press coverage bubble during product launches since only people who generally write nice things about them are given the products to review. It would be easy to see how Apple will 'delay' licensing of companies that don't play ball and produce accessories compatible with the new phones.
>What possible conceivable benefit could there be for them to sneakily try and add it back now?
They have always been pro DRM. For e.g. They force you to be on a constant iOS update treadmill, where they have made it impossible to downgrade iOS, and almost impossible to avoid updating it with the constantly popups to update.
>GP's point was that when Apple forces accessory makers to come to them for a license, they can arbitrarily chose to deny a license according to their whim.
Well it's a pretty fatuous point then, since Apple could have been playing that game for the last 10 years if they wanted to given the iPhone has had a custom port since day one and nothing about that has changed whatsoever.
It's more baffling when "pros" who claim to have been loyal to Apple for decades but aghast at getting only USB-C, forgetting that Apple have done this before, way back in 1998:
And again with the removal of the CD drives and Ethernet ports. Does anybody really miss any of those things? I'm sure the loss of RS-232 ports and floppy drives caused some people pain during the transition, but the world moved on and it will move on again.
Yes? I take it that you don't? I have a few hundred CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays that I like having access to. Generally, I'll access a floppy once, and just store an image on a USB drive for later use. My building is so jammed with wifi signals that sometimes the best option is to string an ethernet cable across the room, and the access point can't be configured over a wireless interface anyhow. I use serial and parallel connections (DB9 and DB25) to access various little hardware projects and pieces of network hardware I've got around.
I've got USB-based hardware for most of those. For others, I keep around some older computers. It feels "clean" to have a computer with fewer ports, but sometimes I wish I'd chosen a machine with a few more of the connections that my previous machine had.
There was plenty of progress in the laptop market before Apple became the power-player that it is today. Did Apple play a part? Yes. Did many of the other companies that have since gone out of business, merged, or still exist today? Yes.
Personally, I don't think touch interfaces are progress - for laptops (or desktops). There are many reasons this is true, but the biggest one for me is that your finger obscures things on the display when you use it, and there is often very poor or no tactile feedback. The touchbar idea is not entirely new. I think HP or Dell had some laptops years ago that used touch slider interfaces to adjust screen brightness or volume. Adding a display to that touchbar doesn't help that much as your finger just obscures whatever you are touching. Knobs, switches, and dials are better suited for this kind of work - which is why people complain about shallow keystroke movement on keyboards. The less and less key movement there is, the closer you are to a touch display.
The only reason that Apple is pushing touch interfaces like that is so they can reduce the unit cost and (maybe) improve the water/ingress resistance. It's the same reason they are removing ports. And yes, removing external physical interfaces may improve things like water resistance - but they make it harder for humans to use.
> There are many reasons this is true, but the biggest one for me is that your finger obscures things on the display when you use it, and there is often very poor or no tactile feedback.
This is a poor argument against touch interfaces on laptops/desktops. This argument applies 100% to every touch interface, and yet we use touch interfaces for phones, and tablets, and modern point-of-sale systems, and the decent car navigation systems, etc, etc.
There are compelling arguments against touchscreens on laptops and desktops, but this doesn't seem to be one.
Tactile feedback isn't a compelling argument against touchscreens on laptops and desktops?
The touch interface on my phone and tablet compromises some of the usability of the input to gain a ton of flexibility and portability. Laptops compromise some comfort and size to make it feasible to stick a keyboard and pointer device into a thin, portable computer.
The various compromises are worth it in some situations and very out-of-place in others. I don't really see the point of a touch interface for general desktop/laptop use.
No, I don't think "lack of tactile feedback" is, by itself, sufficient to demonstrate that touchscreens are a bad idea for laptops. There's nothing I can see about laptops that make the lack of tactile feedback a bigger concern than it is for other devices.
Lack of tactile feedback might be a bigger problem on laptops, but the reason it's a bigger problem is not self evident.
> here's nothing I can see about laptops that make the lack of tactile feedback a bigger concern than it is for other devices.
Agreed, there's nothing about it that makes it a bigger concern for a laptop than other devices. Touchscreens as inputs are suboptimal on other devices too. They're uncomfortable, slow, and imprecise.
I'm a huge fan of physical buttons. Sadly, it's impractical to have a phone with a screen large enough to be useful, thin enough to fit nicely in a pocket, and have it equipped with decent input.
One thing I just couldn't relate to during last couple of weeks is how all these people are criticizing the touch bar and saying it's a gimmick when they have never used it.
I am ready to listen to you if you come back after you use it for a month. But I think it's funny to make all these conclusions about something when you haven't touched it.
I think replacement of magsafe with usb-c is a step in the right direction. Hopefully one day products will all have the same ports...unless there's a cooler faster usb-d that has even more function. Maybe one day there will be no ports at all.
Actually, after a few months it is a problem because the adapter doesn't stay on when you're on a table in a coffee shop and the cord is hanging over the edge because you've got papers that you're typing from.
Many of us just want the 15" display preferring longer battery life and smaller size/weight to using a discrete GPU. I am at a university and the 15" rMBPs are popular with students as well as researchers. I currently have the 2015 rMBP 15".
Thus, it is disappointing that there is not replacement for the version that uses only the integrated graphics. Also, the Intel 530 graphics of the 2016 rMBP 15" appears to be lower performing than the 2015 rMBP 15" integrated graphics. While there were benchmarks for the battery life of the iGPU, there were no performance benchmarks comparing the rMBP 15" 2016 iGPU vs. the 2015 iGPU.
I've looked online and it appears that the 530 is about 20% slower than the 2015 rMBP 15" iGPU.
EDIT: Source for Iris Pro 5200 vs. HD 530: 5200 about 20% faster than 530 for same resolution.
> I've looked online and it appears that the 530 is about 20% slower than the 2015 rMBP 15" iGPU.
This is probably due to the increased screen resolution. If you make the resolutions of both models the same I suspect it will be comparable or faster in benchmarks.
(2015 MBP default resolution of 2880×1800 vs new, 3360×2100)
Something similar happened with iPads came out with retina displays. Pushing lots of pixels consumes more performance.
a little bit akward that they raised the resolution. 2880x1800 was just fine, having 3360x2100 also means that you again needs to tweak everything if you might use linux.
I sort of feel like anytime someone reviews a Lenovo laptop, they have a responsibility to mention in the review whether there's any of Lenovo's EFI dickery like self-reinstalling windows drivers, expunged options, or SSL-interposing malware included. Right now the guidance seems to be that if you get a Yoga you'll get the dickery, if you get a thinkpad you'll be ok. But I'd really like to see reviewers call this out explicitly.
It's also worth pointing out that the 910 can't be a MacBook replacement with that nonstandard keyboard layout.
Third option is to buy a "Signature Edition" [1][2] from the Microsoft Store (or participating retail stores such as some Best Buys and Staples, I think, if you ask nicely to someone that has the right sort of a clue). Microsoft's Signature Edition program expressly forbids selling the machine with anything more than a clean Windows install. It's definitely what I've started recommending anytime anyone mentions to me to be thinking about a new Windows computer.
Interesting - so they would actually use a different/clean EFI image on those?
If so, then I agree - that's by far the best way to get a Windows laptop. I'll pass on the recommendation next time someone asks me.
It does seem to be a bit more expensive, though; at least for Canadians. I'm seeing a $700 delta between what I'm seeing there and on the Dell store. Is that usual?
That's typical PC par for the course of different stores selling roughly the same machine at different prices. Just like some of the bad old days some of the OEM's Signature Edition PCs aren't ever quite one-for-one comparable models to their website/direct sales (or even to some of the other stores they sell in). It has long been the case that manufacturers have slightly different model numbers and subtly different configurations for every single retail channel they interact with so you can't always tell if you are getting a good deal or not.
There also is a case that some of the manufacturers do get enough advertising kickbacks from the junk they bundle with the computer that you do see some of that "savings" passed back to you as a consumer with the premium added to the Signature Editions.
So far as I'm aware (merely as a consumer) Signature Edition does seem to require a clean EFI image as well. I've seen reports that things like Lenovo's EFI problems are things the Signature Edition team screens for (for instance this PC Mag article specifically mentioning Superfish [1]), but I can't tell you how thoroughly they check, just that I feel sure they try.
I have a ThinkPad 450s with touch, and I regret buying one with a touch screen. It's almost impossible to see the screen under daylight, expensive, consumes more power and I only use touch when I use the laptop in cramped places, like a plane flight. Great machine otherwise, but I couldn't find my use case for touch enabled laptops.
For a while, I thought it would be useful if the screen was detachable as in the MS' Surface device, but realized that I'm also not using my iPad that much to justify the use case.
Apple's definitely playing the long game here. When the retinas came out, the absence of an ethernet port was a bit inconvenient for me, but now I don't miss it at all. It's possible that in a few years, when this model matures and goes down in price, the touch bar gets more wide support, and everything uses USB-C, then it will make a lot more sense to get one.
Yeah I'm very convinced this is going to happen. At the same time, at least for me, I can't afford to wait for this utopia of single-connectors. I need to be able to plug in my daily cords and the last time I had to deal with dongles I lost them all over the place.
I do think it was a big misstep that their flagship, brand new phone can't connect to their flagship, brand new laptop without an adapter that has to be bought separately. I also think they could have done it in a more phased approach without losing anything. But ultimately it will turn out to be a good decision.
When was the last time you plugged your iPhone in to your computer? I don't think I've ever plugged my current phone in to my computer since syncs and backs up to the cloud anyway for me.
I haven't in years but everyone who isn't technically savvy in my family still does. I don't know if that's indicative of anything larger than my anecdote but I work with people who are very involved with technology who still sync all of their stuff, with a cord, using iTunes and their iPhone 6s / 7.
No idea how common this is but I feel like it's common enough that it should have been handled better.
Two predictions from me. (1) They sell out and it is the most popular MBP model to date, (2) They don't reduce the price in the future.
Apple is awfully good at knowing just when to extract that little bit more from their customers. And I suspect that similar to the USB-C MacBook the concern over ports will just be from a vocal but tiny minority.
I have to disagree on that. Unlike the more vertically oriented iOS devices with their A series processors, Mac pricing has always been highly volatile, and new form factors always start at high prices which quickly degrade as Apple perfects the manufacturing processes. Macbook Airs, for example, started out as premium-priced devices, before settling into the entry-level.
I can't find hard numbers for MBPs, but here's a list of prices over years for Mac Pros; from a consumer perspective, the changes are essentially random.
They have gone too far this time. This is far beyond the usual expensive inconvenience dongle cost etc that we're used to seeing from them. They just want to game us. It's basically financial domination at this time.
How hard could it really be to make a basic Linux desktop environment work sorta close enough to OS X to make enough people switch to finance further development? My quick and dirty estimate is that 50 good people could pull off a great first release in 18 months.
(I do have relevant consumer UX software design management experience and feel that I can do reasonable quick estimates based on that.)
I think that could be good as well. If I were to spearhead it I'd have us hone in on one or two laptop models. Then spend the rest of the engineering time on making the install, upgrade, and user experience as smooth as possible.
I don't know what's the fuss about 32GB and OS X/MacOS but I upgraded my iMac to 32GB (from 8) and when booting, it still prefers to swap than to use the memory it has access to. For the next hour, it slowly starts using more memory and will use even more than 16GB. I suspect the OS isn't optimized to efficiently use more than 16GB.
?? The comment is based on the fact that they're equipped with quad core Skylake processors, therefore they probably have enough thermal headroom to handle what they actually have.
It's a long play because engineering those cases (including thermal) is very difficult. So Apple typically uses the same case through several revisions of the internals, to defray the costs.
What this means is that the very first model released with a new case is usually underpowered, because the chips are not quite as powerful and power efficient as the (upcoming) chips the case was optimized for.
For this and other reasons I tend to not buy the first version of a new Apple product.
According to Macrumors, there is a compatibility issue which means Nvidia might be out of the picture for a while. Nvidia is only capable of driving dual 5K displays with the Polaris GPUs with DisplayPort 1.3 which is not supported with Thunderbolt 3.
That makes a lot of sense, but I haven't seen any hints that it's coming soon. Keep in mind, you really need an upgradable GPU for that, since these $1000 5K displays have a long life cycle.
And it would probably require rewrites of high-performance apps and games to be something closer to client/server setups to manage communication between the CPU/memory and GPU.
There is really no difference for anything but the most demanding applications though.
5K displays won't cost $1000 for much longer. Right now they are premium products but soon they'll be the norm. By then, adding a good enough GPU to the screen will make sense (because your laptop doesn't need to carry - and feed - more brains than needed to push pixels to the built-in display) and, if the user wants more, they'll use whatever is installed in their computers.
The 2013 Air has a the same size battery as the non-touchbar model, a lower power GPU, the same TDP CPU. The display is possibly more efficient on the new pro compared to the older display, but it's got many more pixels, so, I'd give the nod to the Air, but they ought to be close.
Why ? Most office workers for example only untether their laptops when going to meetings. They are every bit as "power user" as those who use a 15 inch laptop.
Interesting. I guess my workflow and concerns are a little different since I often work without benefit of an attached monitor, and my meetings start by logging into whatever computer is in the conference room. If I'm at my desk, I'm working on hardware that's well beyond what I'd expect from any laptop.
The 'thinner, lighter' perspective just doesn't fit well with my particular requirements.
Apple is probably the only consumer tech hardware company out there that can do this. I almost think it's their responsibility to push the boundary.
People make fun of the term "Courage" and I thought that was funny at first too. But the more I think about it the more I get what he's trying to say. Right now NO ONE other than Apple has the "courage" to make this decision. Do you think Dell would do it? Samsung? Only Apple has enough influence in the industry to be able to do something like this and NOT lose all their users. If Samsung got rid of all their ports, people would probably ditch them and buy a Lenovo or something. So Samsung cant' do it. Coming back to Apple, I'm an apple user and I have to buy it because it's just much better for me as a developer. And honestly speaking, I don't care about all these dongles arguments and "it's not for a pro" arguments. I'm not buying a device whose primary purpose is to stick in my USB cable. And pros don't complain about their tools.
Anyway Apple knows that if nobody makes this decision, laptops will just stay as some stagnant genre of devices that are only able to do things that people used to do in the 2000s.
In other words, if Apple didn't do this, I think the entire laptop category will just stagnate and be cannibalized by other platforms. See TV as an example.