You keep saying this but you have supplied no evidence for this claim, nor have I found any myself.
All I want is a Double Blind Test. Just one, that’s all.
2 Likes
In case anyone besides me is interested…upon further reading Thunderbolt was co-developed by Apple and Intel which is why it carries an Apple licensing fee to non-apple products. The name was trademarked to Apple but they transferred the name trademark to Intel.
Thunderbolt 3 allows PCI-E over usb-c making DMA attacks possible over usb-c 
…
Interesting stuff…at least i think so! 
2 Likes
I have an iPhone 7 and the only time I’ve been frustrated by the lack of a dedicated 3.5mm port was when I was on a plane recently and realized that god damnit I couldn’t charge my phone and listen to music at the same time. (If this was a regular issue I’d get one of those stupid splitter thingys). By and large it’s a non-issue. I have a few of the 3.5mm to Lightning adapters and just keep them packed with my earbuds and headphones.
On the other hand, #donglelife on the new legacy free Macbook Pro is a real fucking hassle.
1 Like
What I specifically said was that in my personal experience, the Lightning version of Apple’s EarPods sound better than the 3.5 version, which bears out their claim of better quality, and that of reviews. I don’t know of a double blind test to provide.
http://gpunerd.com/external-gpu-buyers-guide/gpunerd-egpu-comparison/
Doesn’t quite work on a imac, though. Plus, there’s a bit of a premium,
Hah. If this was the case the Pixel would have a USB C port instead of a headphone jack. Apple is being scatter shot in support of standards. If they truly cared the iPhone 7 would come with C to C cable and the MBP wouldn’t have a headphone jack. Lightning would and should be dead.
1 Like
Same here. As a matter of fact I just picked one up a few days ago due to some nasty battery expansion happening to my 2011 MacBook Air. So far very happy with it.
It just so happened that I was able to get the 13" touch bar, i7, 16gb ram, 512 ssd “off the shelf” at the Apple Store in Nagoya, Japan. I would have bought the base model but since the “loaded” one was available with no wait time, I just went for it.
FWIW I go back to the Apple //+ and have used various DOSes, Windows, OS/2, and a number of UNIXes, Linuxes, and some etc over the years.
The iPhone 7 comes with a free adaptor to let you use any kind of headphones out there on it. I’m not sure why that’s an issue.
Having a losable bumpable dongle sticking out of a phone is a big issue for me.
So much of this crap seems to be driven by an urge (not only from Apple) to make devices thinner and thinner - and I just don’t see why that’s desirable, especially on laptops, where I want some key travel.
4 Likes
Have you seen that claim anywhere except Consumer Reports?
Consumer Reports stated that they only observed that battery behaviour when using the Safari browser. They explicitly state that the battery life was very consistent (at the high end of that range) when they used Chrome for their benchmarks, instead of Safari.
Yes, it is well known and discussed all over the net. I don’t need to be your google but I’ll provide a few links to get you started. I only linked to the Consumer Reports because they are a trusted non-biased review source that has positively rated all previous macbook pros and did their own testing.
At first it was thought that it was just tied to just to safari, but turns out that other apps can trigger this issue as well. A lot of them in fact. Even iMessage. Have you not been following this issue? It is so bad that apple removed the time remaining from the battery life menu widget in the last update.
Are you getting the full 10hrs on yours? Or do you not have one?
https://9to5mac.com/2016/12/15/2016-macbook-pro-battery-life-estimates/
Apparently the 10hrs is only in the low power cpu mode with the intel gpu mode, anything that triggers the cpu mode switching to turbo boost uses almost twice the power. The gpu switching also draws more power, so if an app triggers the high power cpu mode and the more power gpu processing it can drop to a quarter of expected life.
More the half the users report 3-6hrs is their average battery life.
Even apps as simple as iMessage trigger the better gpu and battery life drop.
Apple called extra attention to the issue this week in the newest macOS Sierra update, not by fixing it but by removing the “time remaining” estimate that some users had been sharing to demonstrate the battery problems they were having.
Explaining the battery life problems with the new MacBook Pros | Ars Technica
Apple was a little to eager to shave off every millimeter and gram that they really cut batter life compared to previous macbooks, such a shame.
1 Like
There’s a reason Apple removed the estimated time remaining.
2 Likes
Yes and no. OsX was a mach kernel, with a BSD userland, with a shiny apple gui on top. Over the years, apple has been tweaking the userland to their liking as well.
3 Likes
I don’t have one; I’ve mostly swapped back to Linux desktops for my day-to-day computing needs, although I do still use my early-2013 MacBook Pro when I need a laptop.
But that laptop’s battery life isn’t fantastic when it’s in its high-performance GPU mode, either; I certainly don’t get anything even remotely approaching six hours from it that way. On the other hand, running iMessage doesn’t kick it over to the high-performance GPU. That sounds likely to be a power management firmware issue, to me, though I’m certainly no expert.
When my laptop was new, it had a somewhat similar (though inverted) issue; if the laptop was jostled while in sleep mode (for example, if you moved it roughly while the lid was closed), then it would often end up in a state where it was stuck in low-performance GPU mode. Once in that state, it would not switch to the high-performance GPU no matter what, even after a machine reboot, unless you reset the machine’s NVRAM (by holding an obscure combination of keys during a restart of the system). This could result in catastrophic performance in all applications which needed intensive 3D rendering (many games, CAD, etc). Only way to avoid this issue was to always fully shut down the machine before moving it.
Battery life was presumably better, though. 
It was more than a year before Apple released a firmware update that fixed that issue. Was very frustrating; can totally see why folks would be upset.
2 Likes
Well Yes and No :-), OSX/MacOS uses a hybrid kernel XNU which is based on both Mach and BSD Lite, and Mach has its roots in BSD 4.2 anyway from the work NeXT did. The userspace was largely ported from FreeBSD. All of this became Darwin which is what is under the hood of OSX and iOS. So both of its parental linage trace to BSD. the GUI stuff is all apple Carbon/Coca/Aqua/Quartz, as is the I/O Kit and Filesystem. Yes Apple has been tweaking it ever since, and Darwin is still opensource.
I was pretty psyched when Darwin was first released which was quite a bit before the first GUI OSX, I was working for Intel, Seattle office at the time and we had it running on several servers for testing. Everyone knew what apple was making was going to be great even before they released the first consumer version because of its very solid base. The fact that they were able to run old Mac apps via PowerPC emulation was no small feat of engineering either, but that is a side nerd discussion. As is how awesome NeXTSTEP was at the time, loved working on those machines even more then the SGI ones.
It is all pretty complicated, but since the userspace was from FreeBSD and the Mach kernal derived from BSDLite, I refer to it as a BSD flavor that was forked and made into a fantastic (usually) OS.
3 Likes
Battery life and crashing issues have happened, I think, for every major hardware revamp/OS release of OSX since the dawn of time. That’s not new.
And I already debunked debunked the idea that 16GB of ram is “meager”. It’a not. And no touchscreen? Compared to what other Mac model?
these are the same specious complaints that are made literally every time Apple releases a new product. I travelled for years with an 11" macbook air. Remember those? The laptops everyone said the public were nuts for buying, because of expandability, and performance/price tradeoffs? You know, the one that became the top selling mac laptop?
3 Likes
Yes, though Mach was always supposed to be BSD binary compatible, the micro-kernel architecture wasn’t exactly a fork of the BSD kernel, but I get your point. 
3 Likes
A few times, not every, but never this bad. It is the first one to not get a recommend buy. The first one with so many different issues. I’ve been an apple user this entire time so I’m no newcomer to the previous speed bumps and am surprised that you’d compare them to the current iteration.
Sorry about the delay in reply, had to read the blog post.
The result? I ran out of things to do before I ever ran out of RAM.
I’ve run out of RAM on my 16GB iMac, and “running out of ram” only happens when the memory is filled with things that cannot be paged out to swap. If you look at how much your system is paging out to swap long before you run out of ram, and memory pressure, and memory compression, you’d realize the performance impact that it is having and how having more ram would improve it. that is a fundamental thing to understand before you can debunk in such a simplistic way, and based on your “about you” i have to believe you understand those things and hence why the assertion is flawed.
another misunderstanding that is incorrect in your post is that having more ram causes heat issues or battery issues. The macbook ram limit is due ONLY to the low voltage high speed ram (LPDDR3E) onboard (not user upgradable) that apple used for the macbook pro has 16gb limit. If they hadn’t soldered the RAM onboard then the chipset and machine could have used two 16gb IM DDR3L sticks for 32gb of ram, which is also low voltage and doesn’t draw hardly any more power or make any additional heat. Users could even do their own upgrades to 32gb today. It wouldn’t be an issue, but then they couldn’t charge 4x industry standard for the bump from 8 to 16gb. Really it wasn’t power or heat, it was their ram choice and onboarding of it so it was no longer user replaceable that is the cause of the limit.
Also considering the operational life of past Mac computers which have only been kept in service because of memory and ssd upgrades, isn’t it a mistake to judge today’s memory needs with those in 4-5yrs? In the past that has been the case, unless you can think of some reason why things would be different now…
Compared to the industry, their answer to the widespread adoption of touchscreens is to refuse to add one but instead to lose part of the keyboard for a 1cm one? Most “not olds” have had touchscreens as their main primary computer interface. my daughters always wonder why my apple computers are the only ones that don’t do anything when you touch them. the 9yr old even coined “dumb screen” herself to describe apple computers.
examples? as a long time apple user, i’m pretty darn worried about apple as are no small percent of long time loyal apple users. this is a new turn of events is being actively discussed in all my developer circles, not the same ol same ol, despite whatever you tell yourself. I know many long term apple users who are considering switching despite loving OSX because they see “the writing on the wall” with apple’s latest string of choices.
basically i disagree with most of your assertion about the latest apple hardware.
i wish it wasn’t so, i’d give anything to have Jobs back even with all his shortcomings.
(nice photo on the blog, is that sweden?)
1 Like
Just because I am curious…as a long time apple user myself.
- Worried about the direction Apple is taking recently.
- Happy with the direction Apple is taking recently.
- Don’t Care.
0 voters
2 Likes
Is that poll working right? I selected “happy with” but it reported 0%
3 Likes
it seemed to be jammed up, i refreshed the browser page and suddenly 5 results including yours. thanks for voting.
2 Likes
