
Where the hell are the new MacBooks? - Stamy
http://gizmodo.com/where-the-hell-are-the-new-macbooks-1781910047
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morley
This article, in my opinion, didn't raise above the level of a petty rant. For
a more nuanced look at Apple's Mac pipeline (which also predicted that WWDC
wouldn't have hardware announcements), there's this from MacRumors:

[http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/08/new-macbook-air-pro-
june...](http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/08/new-macbook-air-pro-june-
unveiling-rumor/)

~~~
Naritai
Honestly, when was the last time WWDC had HW announcements? Those almost
always come in spring/fall now.

~~~
rhodysurf
2013

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grandalf
If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market
than the vast majority of laptop users.

Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life,
and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving
technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed.

Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major
deficiencies in one or more of the above areas.

If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a
broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that
shows you ads on the desktop.

If you are a Linux user you take on the task of making sure your bleeding edge
hardware works with linux. This is no small task and in many cases it's over a
year after release that linux support for new technology becomes anything
approaching reliable.

A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a
reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and
ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.

I suppose if you are a gamer there is a case to be made for running Windows on
bleeding edge hardware, but such gamers are a very small percentage of laptop
users.

~~~
trurl
> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market
> than the vast majority of laptop users.

Yeah, I think they call those people developers.

> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a
> reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and
> ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.

Except MacBooks max out at 8GB of memory. At this point 16GB doesn't cut it
anymore for my development, so MacBook Pros and iMacs are out too. I have
entertained the idea of getting a Mac Pro, except they are even more woefully
out of date at this point.

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paulrpotts
I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that a developer needs some kind
of massive AV workhorse with 32 GB of RAM.

Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor?

How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a
web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your
laptop, including databases?

I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a big clear screen
and a port to connect another big, clear screen when I'm at my desk. Since my
work products are largely text files, I don't even need a large hard drive. A
fast CPU helps build large codebases but since I have incremental compilation
in my C/C++ toolchain, it's not like these days I spend a large part of my
time compiling.

Genuinely curious -- what kind of a developer needs more than 16 GB of RAM to
make a machine viable for development?

I have a Mac Pro with four hard drives and a big screen too, but I use that
for audio and video production where it is helpful.

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trurl
I am building a next generation database product. With debugging symbols
enabled, the running database can easily take up 8GB in some of our unit
tests. Then there is a web services layer written in Java above that. And then
there is my IDE. And a web browser that leaks abysmally on Google Apps. And a
bloated chat application for communicating with all my remote colleagues. At
that point the OS starts spending a lot of time trying to compress pages.

I have also experimented with doing building and testing on a remote server,
but the overhead of having to synchronize local changes to the remote server,
rebuild, etc. tends to overwhelm the cost of debugging and iterating on
individual tests.

~~~
paulrpotts
Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.

For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten
used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I
had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent
in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a
database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept running
overnight and crashing. These days it could easily fit in RAM without hitting
VM and I'm not sure it would even make the fans speed up. (Hmmm, I think I
might have the old data set and source; I should give it a try!)

Once in a while I have to do something horrific, like build an embedded Linux
kernel with customizations on a VM... and that is punishing, so I do try to
run that on a desktop box with some Xeons...

~~~
trurl
Oh, I definitely recognize the absurdity of the amounts of memory modern
software consumes. Twenty years ago I used Linux with 256MB RAM and had pretty
much the same sorts of applications running.

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overcast
The real question is where the hell are the new Mac Pro towers? There are
people outside of Mom and Dad that require something more than a laptop
integrated into a monitor.

~~~
nsxwolf
It's crazy that they undertook such a radical redesign effort and then
appeared to drop it. I'm typing this reply on one right now. I do love the
machine, but the fact that there still isn't an official source for SSD
upgrades is baffling. Apple has a helpful page on how to swap the SSD, but
won't sell you one at any price. You can get OEM parts that "fell off a truck"
on eBay, or you can get expensive OWC parts that lack TRIM support.

It seemed like the video cards would be upgradeable too, but nope. And no
Crossfire support in macOS is really sad. Under Windows, these are actually
fairly capable gaming machines.

~~~
overcast
Yeh a radical compact design, that no one asked for in that market space. I'll
grant them the iMac crowd, but for everyone else, giving us the ability to
easily swap some common components shouldn't have been effectively taken away.
I'm not sure how much longer my 2008 MacPro is going to live, and it sucks
because I don't have anything to replace it with. Hackintosh might be my ONLY
option.

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brightball
I'm still breathing life into my 17" MBP from 2010 holding out for Apple to
finally make another one.

~~~
pbhowmic
same here. Mine is 2012 and if they don't offer something decent this fall, I
will just add in an SSD to replace the HDD. That ought to hold the perf for a
while longer.

~~~
brightball
I've done that twice (a 500GB then a 1TB). The 8GB of RAM wasn't getting it
done without it.

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Overtonwindow
I don't just want new MacBooks. I want new MacBooks that I can fix myself, and
have someone other than Apple to fix it. I'm hanging on to my 2012 Pro model
as best I can, and see no reason to spend the money on a product that isn't
really mine.

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masukomi
> by omission it’s made something startlingly clear: your next laptop won’t be
> an Apple one.

not if you're an attendee of WWDC or anyone else developing for iOS or
macOS....

I agree with @morley... it's just a lame rant.

~~~
wwweston
If the primary reason someone's next laptop is going to be an Apple one is
that they're developing for iOS (or OS X for that matter), that reinforces the
article's point rather than counters it.

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ryantuck
kind of wild there was no mention in the article of the new macbook, which IMO
is an objectively better overall machine than either the air or the pro.

~~~
JonathonW
Objectively better in what respect? It's thinner and lighter, yes, but it's
also slower, has extremely limited connectivity to external devices (only one
USB-C port and no Thunderbolt), and has a nontraditional low-travel keyboard
design that would be most politely described as "polarizing".

Better for some use cases, yes-- it's a great machine if you need something
small and light for travel and don't need to do particularly intensive
computing on the road. But it (intentionally) makes enough compromises that
you can't make a blanket statement that it's "objectively better" for
everyone.

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jlarocco
What a whiny article.

My 2013 MBP is still working great, and I'm in no hurry for new ones to come
out. I use mine mostly for my photography (RAW editing, catalog management,
etc.) and it handles the 36 megapixel images from my camera just fine - I drag
sliders and the changes show up in real time. I keep all of my RAW files on an
external HD, so if I really needed things faster my first step would be to buy
a faster one (SSD).

I also occasionally use it for development, and I don't have any problems
there, either.

The most true statement in the article is that my next laptop may not be an
Apple, but that has a lot more to do with Apple's crappy software quality
lately, and the fact the photo software I use also works on Windows.

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mr_tristan
I just wonder if we're seeing Apple try to slowly move away from being a
"devices" company and identify itself in terms of "general computing", so
including software and services.

So yeah, everyone has this super-strong connotation of "Apple = awesome
devices", and they still wait in anticipation for new, beautiful hardware. But
it sure seems like Apple is trying to drive a different identity.

I'll truly believe this is happening when iMessage hits Android, which I
didn't hear any mention of, despite the rumors.

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creshal
If you look at just how painful the Skylake launch was on Windows and Linux, I
figure they're waiting on hardware/drivers that actually work as intended.

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inputjoker
Macbook air is somewhat in apple terms an old technology(it's the best value
for money imo). So there is a great chance that we won't see a refresh for
macbook air. Pro 13 gets thinner and lighter taking over the air.

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mieses
I stopped holding my breath after hearing that the function keys in a "Pro"
laptop might be replaced by a touch sensitive strip like Lenovo tried on the
X1 Carbon.

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cmaggard
They'll hold off on hardware announcements until they can ship them with macOS
12 already on them. Why would they announce new hardware that you'd have to do
a full OS upgrade on in a few months?

~~~
MBCook
They've done that numerous times in the past.

The truth is they had plenty to announce, so it's not too surprising that they
didn't include hardware. I imagine there will be an update later, perhaps at
the usual Back to Mac event.

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danpalmer
The fact that journalists still expect Apple to announce hardware at a
software engineering conference amazes me.

~~~
notatoad
That expectation might have something to do with the fact that apple almost
always announces new hardware at their WWDC keynote. For both google and
apple's developer conferences, the developer conference part of it happens in
the sessions after the keynote, and the keynote is mostly just a press event.

~~~
giarc
No hardware announcements at 2014 or 2015. Perhaps a new trend.

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heavymark
Lol. Yesterday's event was a software event, a jam packed incredibly long one
at that. It was so packed they didn't even have time to talk about all the
changes to the app store, which is why Apple disclosed that info ahead of
time. Not sure when you would expect them to all also announce new hardware.

Just download iOS10 and open the new Breathe app, and Breathe. New Macbooks,
iPhones, Macbook Pros, and Apple Watches will all come in time in future
events.

~~~
rayiner
It was also incredibly boring as a software event. Extended discussion of
emoji, but nothing about Apple's brand-new copy-on-write file system. At a
"developers" conference!

~~~
tptacek
Being able to link apps into iMessage is probably a lot more interesting to
most developers than APFS is. Very few developers will make a dollar off APFS.

