
Everything about the state of the Mac - golanggeek
http://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/10/27/new-macbook-pros-and-the-state-of-the-mac/
======
nl
I think the smartest thing anyone has said about the new MacBook was A16Z's
Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky on their podcast[1] where they said (to
paraphrase) "There's no point building more powerful PCs (and Macs)".

The personal computer market is now in the "sustaining innovation" phase.
There will be minor changes (USB-C. Touch bar thing. etc) but there is no
point doing major changes.

Basically if you - like me - need more RAM, or faster graphics, or more CPU in
your MPB then you aren't going to get it, except as gradual changes that are
easy for Apple to drop in.

My maxed out MPB is currently using 97.5% CPU, 14.7GB RAM (out of 16BM) and I
had to delete stuff this morning because my SSD filled up.

The thing is - I know perfectly well that fixing this isn't just more CPU and
more memory. It's a completely different way of working.

I should be working on a mobile terminal device (like a Chromebook.. or an
iPad Pro) and using my 400 core cluster with 1.5TB of RAM. Sometime I do
things that way, but it isn't as convenient.

This "isn't as convenient" things are the things that Apple are trying to fix,
NOT "my MBP doesn't have enough RAM".

[1] [https://soundcloud.com/a16z/pc-devices-architectures-
ecosyst...](https://soundcloud.com/a16z/pc-devices-architectures-ecosystems)

~~~
ant6n
Huh. They could offer better specs. It just seems they focussed all their
energy on making the laptop thinner, as if this in any way a meaningful/useful
attribute for a laptop (compared to say, weight).

This focus may also be the reason they're so 'brave' to provide a small set of
ports which is completely disjoint from the previous model? Thinness is
probably also the reason they're not offering 32GB of ram?

In a way, Apple doesn't seem to agree with you that innovation has plateaued.
I'd like them to improve the specs, maybe make the laptop fanless, reduce the
reflectivity -- i.e., evolve the platform to make it better and remove issues.
Instead they are trying so hard to revolutionize (touch bar...) that they
don't bother improving the laptop.

~~~
nl
The touch bar is hardly revolutionary. As others have pointed out there have
been plenty of (barely working) implementations before.

Really the touch bar is a UI element (a toolbar) made available elsewhere. I
like it, but..

This is kind of the point: sustaining innovation over radical change.
Incremental improvements will continue.

~~~
mpweiher
>The touch bar is hardly revolutionary.

Well...

>there have been plenty of ( _barely working_ ) implementations before.

...but that's the key point, isn't it? That the existing implementations don't
really work. Just like there were plenty of "non-lame" MP3 players and plenty
of smart phones and plenty of tablets...that all didn't really do the job.

Making something work great that already kinda exists, that people have tried
and failed to really make great, isn't that _exactly_ Apple's MO?

I certainly have an immediate application for the TouchBar for interactions
that (a) have the potential to be really valuable but (b) have so far been too
fiddly to do well. And that was only the _immediately obvious_ one, my guess
there are a lot more.

So while I had the same immediate reaction (yawn, gimmicky, ...), I have
revised that opinion. I think it has the potential of being more useful than a
full touch screen would be, in a laptop setting, and that's despite the fact
that I think a touch screen might be useful in addition, for example swipe for
"casual" scrolling.

In terms of hardware being not that amazingly more powerful (a point made
elsewhere). Yes. That's what the end of Moore's Law looks like. What faster
Intel CPUs was Apple to have used? Kaby Lake? Apparently not available yet in
the configurations/quantities required, and also not really all that much
faster And yes, the geek in me is always m/sad about the 13" not having a nice
high-perf GPU to play with, but the actual user in me has never really needed
it.

Instead of seeking to be saved by faster hardware, we now have a _lot_ more to
gain from optimising the software side, and we're currently leaving that on
the table. Hmm..."leaving on the table" is not really strong enough, more like
pushing away with maximum force.

As a small example the Swift compiler is _tremendously_ slower than the clang
based Objective-C/C compiler is. And that in turn is a lot slower than it
should be, with a big part being LLVM (see Jonathan Blow's video on Jai
compiler performance[1]).

His goal is to compile a medium sized program in well under a second, and a
larger one in a couple of seconds. Sound ridiculous? Really the only thing
that's ridiculous is that we don't _have_ that level of performance generally
available, our machines are fast enough for it. For example, I tried tcc[2],
and it compiled a (synthetic) 300KLOC C program in 0.269 seconds. Swift took
96.6 seconds, for a factor 359 difference. And that was purposely avoiding the
various constructs that make the Swift compiler run into the weeds.

In my upcoming book [3] I talk about various simple examples that get order(s)
of magnitude difference from a bit of tuning love. One example went from 20
minutes using the "standard" accepted techniques to slightly under 1
second...all without any heroic optimisations, just straightforward tuning.

So coming back to the MacBook Pros: yes, they're probably not going to get
appreciably faster, that's the new reality. But maybe they don't really _need_
to get appreciably faster, we just have to get off our collective derrieres.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ7-j1nK9gk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ7-j1nK9gk)

[2] [http://bellard.org/tcc/](http://bellard.org/tcc/)

[3]
[http://www.pearsoned.co.nz/9780321842848](http://www.pearsoned.co.nz/9780321842848)

~~~
nl
_...but that 's the key point, isn't it? That the existing implementations
don't really work. Just like there were plenty of "non-lame" MP3 players and
plenty of smart phones and plenty of tablets...that all didn't really do the
job.

Making something work great that already kinda exists, that people have tried
and failed to really make great, isn't that exactly Apple's MO?_

I think we agree entirely. Incremental innovation - fixing things that are
broken.

The performance of Swift doesn't matter much to Apple. Swift is a demand-pull
thing: Developers care about iOS, and will pay the horrible performance tax.
The developer experience for iOS developers has always been horrible but it
has one thing that matters more than that: users.

~~~
mpweiher
>Incremental innovation - fixing things that are broken.

Yes and no. Yes in that it is incremental in a way. No in that all of Apple's
"revolutionary innovations" have been of this sort, not that I am saying the
Touch Bar is necessarily of that scope.

> The developer experience for iOS developers has always been horrible

Do you think there might be a point in making it less horrible?

------
comex
Much the flak that's been posted about the new MacBook Pros implies there are
better offerings from PC manufacturers, and certainly there are plenty if your
priorities are very different from Apple's (e.g. you care more about
upgradeability than sleekness). My personal priorities are pretty similar to
Apple's, but not quite the same: I'm skeptical about anything that reduces key
travel. So I browsed around to try to find something that could compete with
the new 15" MacBook Pro for my next purchase. To my surprise, I couldn't find
a single model from the major vendors that had all of the following:

\- 15" or close

\- In the general "thin and light" category (ideally at least as thin as my
2012 rMBP at 1.8 cm; latest is 1.55cm)

\- Higher than 1080p screen resolution (old and new MBP are both 2880x1800)

\- At least 7 hours of battery life (advertised battery life of my 2012 rMBP;
latest advertises 10 hours)

It seemed to generally come down to 1080p and good battery life, or high
resolution (usually higher than the MBP) and crappy battery life. I think the
Surface Book was most tempting, but it has a significantly smaller screen.

If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear them. But for now my plan is to
suck up the reduced key travel and buy a new MacBook Pro...

~~~
caconym_
This is the thing. I was as bored by the new MBPs as everyone else, but they
really do still seem to have a combination of power, screen quality,
portability, and battery life that isn't matched elsewhere (not to mention the
more intangible benefits e.g. great touchpads). Every time someone tells me
about a PC laptop that supposedly beats the Apple equivalent, the PC ends up
either not being a reasonable equivalent or falls flat in at least one of the
areas I mentioned.

Maybe if the price is right then making sacrifices is fine, but that's up to
the individual buyer. Speaking for myself, a boring computer that's quietly
excellent is exactly what I want. My biggest problem with the new MBPs is that
i think the Touch Bar is a gimmick and losing the physical escape key is a
real bummer.

~~~
draugadrotten
> great touchpads

That's it. I could live without most of what Apple laptops offer, but the
touchpads are the selling point for me. I just love them. They actually WORK.
I haven't found a single Windows laptop that have an equally great touchpad.
The Dell touchpads certainly don't, they are very sensitive to "palm" presses.
Are there any good ones out there?

~~~
temac
Touchpads of Thinkpads is OK, although a little buggy (they insist in breaking
your middle button being the middle click, unless you restore some registry
key to historical values, but then this now unsupported function seems to
degrade with time and mandatory driver updates...) and using remote desktop
sometimes break two finger scrolling for 5 minutes... (I would really want to
know what happens technically, this seems only a truly horrible design would
yield that behavior...)

I just tested palm rejection (I don't need it 99.99% of the time) and out of 2
tries it failed once and produced zooms commands.

So yeah, it's probably worse than a mac, but stays usable enough for me.

(Warning: I'm more specifically talking about a T530, some Thinkpad like
T440/T540 have extremely terrible touchpads, and I don't now much about the
very last models)

For the recent laptops maybe precision touchpads are good, but IIRC sadly not
every vendor are shipping in that mode.

On my side I'm extremely annoyed by the current tendency of most 15.6" to have
a keyboard with a numeric keypad. That shifts your default position to the
left, which is not ok for my taste on a 15.6" (would be ok on a 17"). When
looking at powerful recent laptops around 15", I only found the MBP (but I
don't like the last one for various reasons), the XPS15 / Precision 5510 and
the HP ZBook Studio G3. But the last one seems to have heat problems, and
XPS15 have had QC issues. OTOH at least with PC you still sometimes have the
option for matte screens.

So yeah choosing a laptop is kind of difficult, especially if you have
criteria on lots of point. I doubt I'll ever get the one I really want (ex: I
found 16:9 aspect ratio idiotic, but I don't like glossy screens...). I can
live with my T530 for a few more years, given it has 16GB of RAM and a SSD.

------
prewett
Everyone seems to be saying the specs are bad, but what exactly is everyone
upset about? (Genuine question) You can configure it with the Radeon 460,
which seems like a top-end chip [1]. Apple's slideshow shows it being 1.8X
faster than then 450. You can configure it with a 2.9 GHz, quad-core i7 with
boost up to 3.8 GHz, which seems pretty top-end for a mobile chip, and it's
not like 2.9/3.5 GHz is that bad. So it's last-year's generation, it's not
like the one released last month is a huge leap ahead. Besides, as a
developer, I'm rarely CPU constrained even on my 2009 laptop, unless I'm doing
Swift in Xcode or RAW photo editing. You can get 1TB or even 2TB SSD. The only
thing you can't get is over 16 GB of RAM, and mitchty's post suggests it is
because of CPU/chipset limitations.

So what more does everyone (not just HN) think Apple should be offering?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units)

~~~
SamUK96
>Radeon 460

AMD GPU. Inefficient / power-hungry. This means that battery life will be
destroyed. Also, have fun with those endless driver issues.

Also, the configuration you quote costs around £2,500+, which is a total rip-
off. You could get a laptop with _better_ components from basically any
company that exists (even Razer!), and _still_ have enough money left over to
buy a second-hand car or a medium/top-of-the-range desktop.

They've shot themselves in the foot.

~~~
robhu
Even Razer?

Razer are one of the best companies out there for well designed high end
Windows laptops.

~~~
SamUK96
I was talking about price as another comment said. Although Razer _are_ well
built, you _do_ pay the price. Personally I think their products are worth it,
some don't however.

Apple though...they bring poor value to a new level. A new dimension. A new
universe not thought possible in the realm for expensive polished turds.

------
biehl
I think of myself as a pretty regular software developer, and the new MBP
sounds like it matches my priorities pretty well.

    
    
        # Thinner and lighter
        # Good specs
        # Able to drive 5K monitors (QHD retina)
        # Touch ID
        # I love a large track-pad
    

Also I don't seem hit by the claimed negatives.

    
    
        # I don't realistically use more than 16GB RAM in daily work
        # I don't use function keys
        # I don't use VI :). I do use ESC for modals though.
    

The price is a bit high, but I can wait a refresh-cycle for lower prices.

~~~
devopsproject
Does your debugger not use the f keys for step\into\out of?

~~~
biehl
Possibly. I don't really use debuggers often enough to use keys ...

------
asymmetric
For me the saddest thing is that all this outrage didn't come out when Apple
started making their laptops unrepairable (soldered RAM, glued battery, etc.),
instead it explodes now mostly for performance reasons.

~~~
theluketaylor
When apple moved to sealed black boxes they introduced a social contract with
their users. The deal was no more user upgrades, but in exchange apple would
make better systems. Apple hasn't held up their end of the bargain nearly
enough. They haven't iterated any of the lines nearly enough, and since you
can't make small improvements yourself any more that lack of dedication is
even more apparent. I think the outrage really is stemming from the
unrepairability, it's just the rage underneath people have struggled to
articulate.

~~~
fatbird
They didn't enter a social contract with users. They decided to trade off
modifiability for thinness because fully integrated systems are more
easily/cheaply made thin and with better/more predictable power
characteristics.

One of the most frustrating things about discussions like this, especially wrt
Apple, is the amount of projection and handwaving about concerns beyond "Apple
makes it; you choose to buy it or not". It's taken almost five days for
someone to make the obvious point in the linked article, that the new MBP will
be more than sufficient for most developers and so it'll continue to be a
strong seller to that segment, especially in light of the comment elsewhere in
the thread where someone asks for a drop-in alternative and no one can offer
one--every one fails on some major test of either weight, cost, or battery
life.

------
cletus
In 2010 I bought a MacBook Air 13 that I considered to be about perfect. It's
reasonably cheap (barely more than $1000) and is small and light without
making too many compromises (I'm looking at you, 12" MacBook).for years I've
been waiting for Apple to release one with 16GB of RAM and a Retina display.
They of course have not. About 2-3 years ago it became clear that that was a
choice rather than a technical limitation.

When the 12" MacBook came out I went to the local Apple Store and tried it.
Hate the keyboard. Performance is too much of a compromise. You can charge it
or use peripherals (or carry a dongle everywhere) and of course I knew th Air
was now doomed (Apple tends to limit their SKUs).

The new Macs have now lost me completely.

\- 2/4 C ports is shocking. 1/2 of these should be As. It's way too soon for
all Cs. I read a comment the other day: it used to be that if it fit it
worked. Now everything fits and nothing works. Apple might be imagining a
universal port but they're ignoring the cables. There are still active/passive
cables, USB 2 vs 3 A-to-C cables and so on. Apple used to only adopt
technologies once they were mature.

\- loved the old keyboard. Hate the new. Saving 0.5mm for a shitty keyboard is
too much compromise.

\- I use the escape key and function keys Asia like IDEs in particular. It was
already jarring having different key bindings in OSX vs Windows/Linux (the
latter two being relatively consistent within Jetbrains IDEs at least).

\- Loss of MagSafe.

Recently I bought a refurb Dell XPS 15 with minimal specs for $900that I spent
$450 upgrading to 32GB of RAM and a Samsung 950 Pro 512GB SSD. It has a
respectable GPU (960M). It's trackpad isn't as good as a Mac's but where PC
trackpads were once woefully bad (embarrassingly so), it's not bad. The gap is
livable.

Come December there'll be an update and likely you can upgrade one to 32GB
with a Samsung Pro 512GB/1TB/2TB which. With a GTX 1060 will be a pretty
versatile machine.

Will we be waiting another 2 years for the next Mac update? Will some lines
flounder without updates after much fanfare like the Mac Pro?

See this is the real problem: I no longer have faith that this is a sector
Apple gives a shit about. I realize laptops and desktops are "trucks" (to
quote Steve Jobs) but he understood you still need tucks. Post-Jobs Apple
seems to not understand and/or care about this.

------
JohnBooty
I'm underwhelmed by the newly-announced MacBook Pros, but this is just kind of
where we're _at._

There isn't much more CPU performance to be had. Intel doesn't really sell
anything faster. A peek at current Thinkpads tells me you can drop
$3,000-$4,000 on a 7.5lb luggable with a Xeon-branded CPU, which would have
been cool to see in a Mac, but.... yeah.

Aside from the 16GB RAM limitation, Apple's not really holding out on us here.
We've hit Moore's Law pretty hard.

~~~
symfoniq
I don't think most people are complaining about the new MacBook Pro's CPU.
There are many other design choices that are problematic for a lot of
professionals.

------
brazzledazzle
Has anyone tried the Razer Blades? They were linked on that page and I must
say they look very nice.

~~~
acabal
Yes, I commented above. I have a 2015 model and I frequently recommend it. The
color scheme is tacky but the machine is basically unbeatable in the non-Apple
category. Excellent Linux support, which is something Apple makes very
difficult, is the icing on the cake.

~~~
dijit
It's also 17.3" and 3.5kg

Not sure what the battery is like, but that thing is huge.

~~~
Matthias247
The homepage lists 3 models, a 12", a 14" and a 17" one.

------
mcculley
Is there some good reason why Apple doesn't ship an LTE modem in the MacBook
Pro? Every device they ship has a cell modem. Why not the laptop?

------
tajen
Despite the bad reviews from most well-known experts, the AAPL stock didn't
vary. There was a 1% fall on Oct 26, but it seems due to a technical change,
not a trader evaluation.

Proof that either the Macbook Pro isn't bad enough, either it won't hurt their
bottom line at all. Proof that the MBP is here to stay. Proof that 2017 could
be the year of Linux on the desktop ;)

------
mouzogu
Would I be wrong to suggest that the majority of people who buy the Mac Pro
(or who have them assigned to them at work) are neither creative professionals
or unix-centric developers?

I would say for these people that sleek design, high battery life and low
weight are the three somewhat superficial attributes that stand out the most -
or are the most important in making a purchasing choice.

I understand all the dissapointment. However, I think if you analyse Apple's
decisions, it probably does make sense from a marketing perspective. They seem
to be aiming at the premium aesthetic market that has emerged in the last 5
years within the Mac fanbase. Only thing I dont understand and seems kind of
cheeky to me is the price hike.

btw - I am a developer, I use a Macbook Pro at work and a Dell XPS 15 at home
- so I am somewhat aware of the price/spec/value differences.

~~~
dagw
Anecdotally, among people who are neither creative professionals or
developers, the MacBook and MacBook Air completely dominate, and these laptops
outnumber MBPs in the wild at least 10:1 unless I'm at a developer meetup.

------
elcapitan
> Understanding history is important – to a point. But Apple’s obsessive naval
> gazing in the Mac event today speaks volumes. This is a company with no real
> vision for what its most creative users actually do with their most advanced
> machines. So, instead, they look into the past.

That was also my impression. The funny thing is that this is not the first
time in their history, and they used this "our laptops of the past" thing to
showcase some of the horrible examples of the 90s, which were just adding
bloat and uglyness rather than innovating. Then they present the new model
with a bloaty new feature.

------
lurkinggrue
I thought what Apple did a few years ago with Finalcut was the signal that
Apple didn't really care about the professional user thought.

Looks like the trend continues.

~~~
maratc
As someone said, there is always outrage, just never the same amount of it as
this time.

~~~
lurkinggrue
That seems to be the case.

------
dreamcompiler
It's not possible to develop for IOS on Linux, Windows, or IOS itself. So not
only is Apple hurting future app development on IOS with this move, they're
also hurting their _internal_ developers of IOS. Their cash cow -- IOS --
cannot survive without strong pro-caliber Macs. I find it shocking that Apple
doesn't understand this.

------
mcculley
What hardware are developers at Apple using? It's hard to imagine they are
using the currently available Mac Pro or one of the new MacBook Pros. Do they
have some special hardware build that Apple doesn't sell to the public?

I've been wondering the same thing about Apple's server infrastructure ever
since they quit selling the Xserve.

