
Apple Plans MacBook And MacBook Pro Kaby Lake Refresh For WWDC - rbanffy
http://hothardware.com/news/apple-plans-macbook-and-macbook-pro-kaby-lake-refresh-wwdc
======
gorodetsky
It's probably the wrong thread to share my hopes for the next-gen but still.
My family owns four 2016 models (maxxed out both 13 inch and 15 inch, a pair
used at a day job and a pair is personal) and we all experience similar
issues:

a) Touch Bar reacting to fingers that are accidentally touch it while resting.
Causes a lot of volume and Esc triggers. Latter is particularly annoying at it
usually cleans Slack/Skype/other active text input.

b) Keyboard quality is terrible. My work machine does not respond to Option
and Control presses anymore. My wife's machine has similar issues with up/down
arrows.

c) I don't get why Apple changed default/native resolution to be non-retina
trading extra screen real estate for image quality.

b) Last but certainly not least as mentioned on all previous MacBook threads
starting October 2016: running Docker/minikube/Chrome/Slack and et voila: you
have 4GB of RAM left. I'm not even talking about ML/Data Science work: AMD
GPUs are way behind even 1050 at the moment and I doubt that their new
offering that is meant to compete with nVidia P100 will ever make it into a
laptop.

Personally I think this news isn't real. Intel "promises" to release
Cannonlake this year (thanks, AMD!) and I don't see much sense in either
updating MacBooks with Kaby Lake nor releasing them just after 8 months after
last refresh. That's the CPU that you get when company stops trying.

If they are going to mention MacBook Pro, I'd probably expect them to do a
small price drop but not a refresh.

~~~
ajeet_dhaliwal
I have the non touchbar version. The keyboard is the one thing that has
surprised me. I've done a complete 180 and love it. I bought this to replace
my 2008 Macbook and at first found the travel too shallow but now I can
actually type much faster than on the old one and I'm convinced it's better. I
hope that any of the issues you mention come up within the 1 year warranty
period though.

Your issues about the touch bar are the reason I bought the non touch bar
version, I use function keys too much to have the physical ones gone, also I'd
rather not have it go to sleep and prefer to have the bigger battery. EDIT:
just adding that I did spend time testing the touch bar version in the Apple
store as the price difference was not a major factor for this type of one time
purchase for me, and I think if it's a good idea to do so if you live near
one.

~~~
gorodetsky
I wasn't unhappy about new keyboard feel but rather quality of keyboard
itself. Eventually I'll bring it for repair, I think that should be covered
indeed.

------
the_mitsuhiko
I really hope they open up to the idea of making more non touchbar models.

~~~
jbigelow76
Agreed. I found it ironic that Apple considers the function area unused space
so in their "Pro" line they replace it with something they view to be more
usable but it seems most pro software[1] already made use of function keys,
it's the consumer MacBook line that would miss the function row the least.

[1] Software dev tools

------
aviv
I love my Late 2011 17" matte MacBook Pro. I dread the day that I will have to
settle for a new MBP. I will probably end up getting a refurbished 17" off of
eBay or something instead.

~~~
limeblack
I almost bought one of those the other day. Well technically I was looking at
the matte 15 in MCP. It is a shame how much Apple has gottan rid of. According
to past OS updates wouldn't you run into the issue that it wouldn't run the
lasted OS?

~~~
aviv
I'm still on Mavericks 10.9.5. Works great, I see no reason to update. It's a
workhorse at its current state, no need to mess with what works so well.

------
ChuckMcM
Given the news about a Core i9 leak ([https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/15/intel-
could-be-about-to-re...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/15/intel-could-be-
about-to-release-a-very-expensive-core-i9-cpu/)) I would not be surprised if
Apple had cut a deal with Intel to make a sku for the macbook pro.

~~~
jpalomaki
Those CPUs in the leak have TDP values of over 100W. Not very suitable for
slim laptops like MBP. Or was there something for mobile market as well?

~~~
ChuckMcM
There was no discussion of a mobile SKU that I could see, which is what made
me wonder when I read the news. If you look at Intel presentations, and over
the years I've looked at a lot of them, they tend to present 'complete'
families of their lines. So the budget sku, the high power sku, the low power
sku, the enthusiast sku, etc. the ones you would put in laptops seemed to be
missing.

There are probably more than one possible explanations about that, but one
that has happened in the past has been a vendor has asked for (and received)
Intel's commitment to give them all of the early production.

And so I thought "I wonder if this is the part in the rumoured Surface Pro 5?"
but it wasn't because Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop. And now we here
"ooh, big Apple announcement coming up." and I note that the last Macbook pro
announcement was underwhelming to say the least, and Microsoft is making
annoying[1] noises about how their laptop is faster/thinner/better than
anything Apple makes, and _that_ makes me wonder if Apple decided to do
something about it and make an update to the Macbook pro that they _knew_ No
one else would be able to beat because they bought exclusive early access to
the chip that they use.

Entirely speculation at this point of course, and I will not be shocked to be
completely wrong here. But I also wouldn't be surprised if this is what they
announce.

[1] Annoying to Apple but fun for consumers as they get more choices and the
competition keeps everyone on their toes.

------
flexie
It beats me why they don't just update their MacBook Air. This is the computer
that serve most people's needs.

It's by far the sleekest (the MacBook and MacBook Pro being thicker and
heavier), it's not exactly cheap but it's priced just right at around 1,000
euro, it's not fast enough for graphics work or gaming but it really serves
the need of 90 percent of college kids and professionals who just need
internet, emailing, a text editor and a spreadsheet, and to be able to watch a
movie and save pictures. And maybe do some light hacking.

Update the MacBook Air and I would buy it right away.

------
mhoad
Didn't see any word as to if this refresh would also be improving any of the
other criticisms of the 2016 model like the RAM for example. Does anyone have
any inside information or insight on that?

~~~
Cyphus
The ram issue was purportedly about battery life. The 2016 mbp uses LPDDR3
ram, which limited the device to 16GB.[0] They couldn't use LPDDR4 ram, even
though it was available at the time, because Skylake chipsets didn't support
it.

If the rumors are true that this year's model will use Kaby Lake, which will
open up for the possibility of LPDDR4 and higher capacities.

[0] [https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/28/new-macbook-pros-
no-32g...](https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/28/new-macbook-pros-no-32gb-ram-
battery-life/)

~~~
mozumder
Doesn't look like Kaby Lake supports LPDDR4:
[http://ark.intel.com/products/97462/](http://ark.intel.com/products/97462/)

------
marsRoverDev
Is there any information on how well the latest MBP model has sold? I want to
see Apple's bottom line being hit by the poor decision making. I personally
went for a dell XPS 13 (and I'm regretting it, but that's another story).

~~~
roymurdock
Apple doesn't report out MBP numbers separately, it bundles them with all
products in the Mac line.

Mac product sales declined 10% YoY from 25.4B in 2015 to 22.8B in 2016. Units
shipped were also down 10% YoY from 20.6M to 18.5M. Apple's explanation: _Mac
net sales and unit sales decreased during 2016 compared to 2015. The year-
over-year decline in Mac unit sales during 2016 was at rates similar to the
overall market. The effect of weakness in most foreign currencies relative to
the U.S. dollar also negatively impacted Mac net sales._

The entire Mac line only makes up ~10% of Apple's revenues, whereas iPhone
sales generate ~60% of revenue, so the MBP (guesstimate: 1-2% of overall
revenue?) is not hugely important to Apple.

[http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1628280-16-...](http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1628280-16-20309&CIK=320193)

------
mtgx
I'm hoping we'll see some Ryzen in Apple computers before long.

------
jwr
I would like a refresh of the MacBook Pro that would include much-requested
features, like one additional row of keys (including the ESC key), ports that
you can connect something to (like USB-A) and an SD card slot. I would have no
problem with the new laptop being slightly thicker than the current
generation, especially if we could get good, reliable keyboards.

I'd upgrade my MacBook Pro in an instant, gladly paying a price premium for
those (premium) features.

~~~
ashark
Yeah, I was expecting to upgrade my personal 2014 when the 2016s were
announced, but "slightly faster but worse in every other way, oh and also we
raised the price a bunch" was... not a compelling sales pitch.

------
arrty88
Arg, kills the resale value of my Dec 2016 pro.

~~~
dvcrn
The ever known MacBook problem :D

------
sergior
It seems like Kaby Lake is so last year. When they actually come up with
something exciting like they used to?

------
strictnein
Kaby Lake laptops started rolling out a week or two after the new Macbooks
were available. Apple must have decided it wasn't worth waiting that extra
week or two? Or was there something else going on?

~~~
marricks
Probably a big difference between "available" and available at the quantities
needed to satisfy the millions(?) of people waiting for an updated MBP

~~~
strictnein
Yeah, that's very possible. I was just surprised at the time, because I bought
a Kaby Lake based laptop from Asus in early November, but they don't move
units like Apple does.

------
HugoDaniel
Seems like fake news. Apple rarely introduces new hardware in WWDC. And the
ammount of references to the Surface Laptop make it read a bit like sarcasm,
even though it surely does not seem intended.

"Part of the motivation with these upgrades is to remain competitive with
Microsoft and its newly introduced Surface Laptop"

~~~
makmanalp
I don't think this is true - 2013's WWDC had new macbook airs, for example:
[https://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/06/10/everything-
announced...](https://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/06/10/everything-announced-at-
apples-wwdc-2013-keynote-in-one-handy-list/)

~~~
danjoc
While it may be true that Apple sometimes released hardware at WWDC in the
last decade, there's still the elephant in the room; Why have no big name
sites like fool.com or wsj put their name on this "leak" if it is real? When
there's real hardware coming, those guys usually get the inside scoop (and
preview hardware if weeks from release). They'd be furious if Apple let small
beans sites scoop them.

[https://www.wsj.com/news/technology](https://www.wsj.com/news/technology)

Not one mention of Apple anywhere.*

*laptops

~~~
framerate
Bloomberg reported it:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-16/apple-
sai...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-16/apple-said-to-plan-
laptop-upgrades-as-microsoft-enters-market)

~~~
danjoc
>>big name

>Bloomberg

I stand by my post. Bloomberg spams HN for traffic. They don't get inside
scoops from Apple.

~~~
fred256
The article was written by Mark Gurman who had an excellent rumor track record
when he was at 9to5mac.

