As somebody that’s been wanting to get a new MacBook Pro to replace a very long in the tooth desktop PC (for various reasons including living in a small space and trying to reduce my amount of stuff) I find these design decisions infuriating. I’m a developer so I need my physical function keys. The touchbar is an unnecessary and largely useless abomination. #donglelife really sucks. The keyboards on the newer models are awful (which is a damn shame since Apple used to make the best laptop keyboards) - they are like typing on a solid block of wood. And now the newest models having poor thermals largely due to this stupid insistence that every piece of tech must be wafer thin?
Man, fuck Jony Ive and his stupidly spelled name and stupid non-functional design aesthetic. Someone needs to rein this guy in.
I really wish they would bring back the 2015 models with upgraded internals. I’d buy one of those in an instant.
Yeah that’s the thing here. The sort of regular user that doesn’t need the i9. Won’t buy the i9 model. The kind of power user that does now shouldn’t.
But the sort of guy who buys the top apple laptop on the regular for bragging rights? He won’t even notice it’s borked. And he doesn’t care. He has the one with the i9. It’s the best Mac and Macs are the best.
I know people who buy these at every release for email and browsing.
Not mine personally, not modern exclusively, and nothing to do with liking the style. Just the general category of building designs which sacrifice functionality for aesthetics. It’s a well-known and common problem, and totally separate from the even more common problems of “old construction from before we had current materials and methods” and “made shabbily by builders who didn’t care about doing things well.”
I went to iBuyPower and looked - they don’t have i9 processors on their laptops, but pricing out a i7 with similar configuration to Apple’s $2799 MacBook Pro came out at about $1,600 with the same 500GB SSD, 16GB RAM, with a 1080p screen and a better vid card by default (GTX 1060 with 6GB of RAM vs Apple’s Radeon Pro 560X with 4GB) I don’t know what resolution the ‘Retina Display’ is - probably better than 1080p.
So basically, identical hardware with a worse GPU and a likely-better screen (plus that useless touch bar) costs about $1,100 more. If he spent $1,000 on switching software he’d still save money.
I’d pay a mint for a a Pismo G3 keyboard hack to connect to a modern motherboard. I think that keyboard was the highlight of 30 years of mac portables.
Those are usually problems of the McMansion sort. There’s usually no architects or proper designers involved. Developer or construction sides handle that. And its mostly about maximizing size and appearance of wealth/expense while minimizing construction costs. The “functionality” their focusing on is availability/cost of materials. Keeping specialized labor low. And speed. How quick can they throw it up. The market for them is more about showing social import and wealth by having more front entrances than the guy next door. Even if they’re pre-fab plaster from Lowes, and 5 of them costs less than having proper tile put in the bathroom by a dedicated tile guy.
They vary. Usually north of 1440p. But the issue with Apple’s displays is they’re an ever changing list of non-standard resolutions. They’re never really going to match up to anything you’re displaying or working on. Noone makes 5k video. Noone makes 1800p media. You won’t be working on 5k or 1800p media. Save trying to make aps or web pages display properly on Apple’s every changing list of screens. Its difficult to get a clean comparison when every mac resolution is either just a few hundred pixels up or down from the nearest standard resolution.
Looks like the current 15" mac book has a 1800p monitor. Best chance at a price comparison is probably a 4k screen. Probably a couple hundred bucks additional.
That is definitely frustrating. Dell has a 4K 15" laptop that would probably run badly for $1,300. Pricing one out on Origin for an extremely overpriced, custom-built laptop with identical specs to the MacBook Pro except full 4K screen and a much better vidcard by default is still $100 less than the base MacBook Pro.
Put the fastest, hottest processor in a laptop (a brand new processor btw @SeamusBellamy!), and max it, it’ll throttle. Unless your laptop is 2" thick with a million fans this is going to happen.
This happens to phones, too! So one asks: Why do they put such fast processors in phones, when at full speed they’ll be thermally throttled?
Answer: Because most users need full speed for only short bursts - where throttling isn’t an issue. The thermal envelope of a laptop is usually suboptimal if you’re purchasing it to mine bitcoin or run desktop-pro apps at max utilization or the most demanding hardcore games. I game extensively on mine and went ahead and got a stand with a dedicated fan to help keep it cool, since Apple’s all-metal chassis are excellent heatsinks of their own - get a metal laptop stand with a fan and you can dissipate a lot of heat that way.
This is, of course, the tradeoff one makes for a portable device, be it laptop, phone, tablet.
It makes comparison pricing difficult. But as a user you’ll almost never notice. The only benfits I’ve heard about the non-standard resolution is from photo guys and graphic design friends. Where the slight bump in desktop space (specifically on the 5k desktop monitors) is useful for work reasons.
The sort of people I know who get paid to make things work and look nice on the ever changing list of non-standard Retina resolutions hate it. For everything else on the market you just have to work out the standard stack of resolutions. But now you have to do that work again. For each generation of Retina displays likely to be in use. Because they don’t match from generation to generation.
Its very much more of that brand name + one number bigger than the other guy marketing.
And of course at 15" a 1800p monitor is pretty unlikely to show much difference from 1080P. Thanks to that whole pixel density thing.
Which is why most other manufacturers who put powerful processors and discrete gpus in laptops allow them to be thick and have fans. So you can use your powerful processor and gpu.
The problem people are complaining about is that they put that stuff in their standard chassis. Which causes the whole problem.
Exactly. I couldn’t find many 4k laptops to compare because most people don’t bother to make them - like you said, pixel density makes the concept basically pointless on a 15" screen.
And endless non-standard resolutions on a standard-size screen are just ridiculous.
I’m a big fan of the 12" MacBook. Definitely the best of the current slate. Absolutely have to get it maxed out, though (i7 CPU, 16 GB RAM) to get acceptable performance and be aware that the CPU can’t handle sustained load.
Sigh. Calling people who prefer macs “fanboys” is an excellent way to show that you have no idea why some people prefer Macs and to ensure that you never do learn.
Some groups which prefer Macs include:
ordinary people who are not tech savvy. In particular because the OS is noticeably more user-friendly than windows, and also because Apple’s customer service is head and shoulders better than any other computer maker’s. The comparison between Windows and Mac OS is less stark now than it used to be in the days of XP (when it seemed like the Windows team had slept through a lecture on usability once), but as long as Microsoft makes Windows primarily for IT departments and then bolts on a consumer friendly facade, that difference is not going to go away.
Scientists, programmers, and other professionals who require a computer running a flavour of Unix but don’t have the desire to waste time dealing with the quirks and headaches of Linux. For those who regard Windows as a non-serious toy OS, the demise of SGI, Sun, and their ilk has left Apple as the only company providing a polished, mature, supported, “it just works” flavour of desktop unix.
Artists, designers, and others who like their tools to be aesthetically pleasing as well as functional. Apple spends perhaps too much time and effort making their hardware and software look good because a significant segment of their customers care deeply about appearances as well as functionality.
Film makers, audio engineers, artists, and other creative professionals. Because of the founder effect, going back to the days when it was silly to even try doing the kind of work they do on Windows, Macs are still the default choice in these professions. On the one hand, these customers can jump ship any time (and some do so, loudly, every time Apple makes a misstep) but on the other, Apple does a lot to keep them in the fold - for instance, now that most other computer makers provide high dpi IPS displays as an option, Apple has been upgrading all their displays to support wide gamut colour. When that becomes a common option, Apple will introduce some other desirable feature which is difficult or impossible to get from Lenovo or Dell.
I was going to weigh in, add my own two cents worth, but then saw the epicly long string of comments, counterpoints, and other considerations, and thought, ‘Whoa, I have nothing to add here!’ So I’ll just keep to myself. Also, I’m not a Mac user, so what do I know. I’ll just be outside if anyone needs me.
Great list. I’m #2/#3 above, with a splash of “I appreciate good design and devices I can use for a half-decade or more at a time and still resell for a significant amount of their initial cost”.
The Air machines had the same issue, they initially were heavily throttled, but as Intel improved their process, the new machines ran faster, because the chips were cooler, so they could. Probably the same here, a late production machine will be much faster than the current ones, despite identical specs.
Yes. On iBuyPower, that appears to add about $160 to the price. Again, still saving close to $1,000, with a mildly-lower-but-standard resolution screen, and with a better video card. Still one heck of a premium, even if one is very fond of iOS.
I doubt that. Intel is currently operating a pretty damn mature version of the process node used to produce the processor line in question. They’ve struggled to get their next production node up and running. And recently delayed it for the umpteenth time to next year. The new line of processors the i9 in question is from. Are essentially some lightly tweaked versions of the pre-existing line with cores added to push back on what AMD is offering.
There isn’t going to be thermal improvement on these chips as manufacturing matures. Because the manufacturing for these chips is already about as mature as it gets. Improvement on that front is going to come from either a node shrink when they finally get their 10nm node to work. Or from the launch of a genuinely new or significantly tweaked architecture. Both of which mean a different processor “generation”, sku, and specs.
