The 2015 model was the best MacBook Pro. Perhaps the best laptop yet.
When they started removing ports I use I switched to a Thinkpad T-series. It's been the perfect laptop for my use.
That sort of creative also gets much more benefit from the four Thunderbolt ports than developers do (we mostly use them as inconvenient USB and/or display ports, and AFAICT Thunderbolt is borderline irrelevant. Same as with Firewire back in the day). As much as I enjoy using my iMac 5k for programming, it's when I use it for Lightroom that I really get a real benefit from it. Most of my development work doesn't benefit that much from an SSD (when I wrote C++ professionally, that was a different story...), but by gods it makes a difference when I try to edit 4k video.
Apple probably has better data on how it gets used than I do, but that's almost exclusively what I'd use it for if I had it.
I'm secretly hoping that my 2015 model dies so I can upgrade to a newer sexier one, but the damn beast keeps on working great.
It would seem, there is demand.
A quick search reveals the Razer costs around $500 USD more in NZ than in the US (converted prices to USD). The MBP 16" is $400 more. Wouldn't part of the reason it costs more be because of this legislation?
I'm sure that would go to one of the old Thinkpads; e.g. X220 still has a massive cult following to the point where it's being moded with modern parts just so people could still use it. You have a very valid point though - seems like 2010-2015 was the golden age of modern laptops then innovation was replaced by gimmick all of a sudden.
In 2008, it cost $2,400. The new 16” released today costs... $2,400.
TV got much much cheaper in the last 10 years too and that's not because manufacturer cut their margins, mass production + mature tech + price/perf going down = price stagnates or drops.
I agree, though. My old 2011 MBP was fantastic. A few months ago the video card finally died, otherwise I'd still be using it. Modern macbooks barely seem to have any keyboard keys anymore.
A friend claims I can temporarily fix my video card by 'baking' it, whatever that is.
You are very fortunate; mine got hit with the EM209 issue twice. An AASP told me that it almost inevitably affects the 2008 and 2009 models.
Apple did improve the model, though. The mid-2012 non-Retina model I'm typing on is seven years old and going strong, albeit with one keyboard repair (something that also affected my 2008 model twice).
Sometimes I like to look at the price of Apple stock in 2008 and wonder how much money I would have today if I had instead bought 2.5k USD worth of shares in 2008 instead of the laptop - it’s depressing.
The display is fantastic all around, 64 GB of ram, 8 GB of DDR6 VRAM, 8 cores, biggest battery FAA will allow on planes, 8 TB SSD, etc.
This will also be able to connect to Apple's upcoming 6K 32-inch display.
This is a very impressive update all around and it shows Apple putting a lot of space between their pro laptops and the MBA and iPad Pro now. The lineup is starting to make a lot of sense again.
Only when flattening the design for the 2016 year did they reduce it to 76Wh.
Then Apple turned the battleship and since 2014 (iPhone 6) we've gotten a thicker phone with improved battery life in every redesign.
I'm pretty happy about this new direction.
Have they fixed the damned keyboard? My early 2019 is still squishy.
TL;DR: Yes, it's a completely new keyboard design, with scissor switches, not butterfly, more key travel, slightly more key separation, more offset for the Touch Bar, and a physical escape key and separate Touch ID sensor.
"Pro" has basically been sapped of all meaning as a term.
Will there be some "pro" users (really: power users, people who run stuff that maxes out this new model's capabilities)? Yep. Will they be a minority, while most users will buy it because of its luxury status, keeping up with the times, or ecosystem familiarity/lock-in? Also yep.
Software is purely personal choice. Some people prefer windows, others mac, others linux. Modern Linux does everything you want, including support for a good portion of popular games through Proton under Steam
Apple support is a joke, they will upcharge quite a bit for replacing whole boards when its a matter of a simple repair. Watch any of Louis Rossmanns videos. Not to mention that for any of the other manufacturers, you can order and replace parts yourself with relative ease - all it takes is a screwdriver.
But is it strange to anyone else that a company that prides itself on being innovative and motto is "think different" is parading around a screen size change and a keyboard regression as the biggest selling points for a product launch?
They work. There's no need for needless new gimmicks. It's fine to have a reliable, consistent tool available for purchase. Just like Thinkpads, hammers and multimeters. It's ok to be conservative on new things in some market segments.
Not hating - I am getting this laptop.
Overpriced soldered RAM?
AMD GPU that's basicaly useless for ML instead of NVidia?
None of these are good selling points.
So you can see this as an improvement to the current gen MBP.. or you can see this as a selling item to those who skipped the 2016 and still have a 2015 (or who had a 2016 and got burned). When you are drowning your goals are not to get on a ship or to go someplace, they are to get air.
Which is still quite poor - Thinkpads offer between 1.3 to 1.9mm of travel depending on the model. It is surprising that a $1Trillion computer hardware company cannot design the best keyboard in the world while tiny Lenovo seems to have done much better.
Why would a "pro" user care more thinness and form than the usability of the primary input mechanism?
Add: It's not merely the travel. Lenovo keyboards are so slightly concave which offer perceivably better support for finger tips. The key surface also has a rougher texture instead of being flat, smooth and glossy, which I hope more manufacturers will emulate.
I have no idea if this new laptop's keyboard is any good, but it would have to take several steps back before you get to lenovo. One arrow key pops on and off as I use it. (This lappy is 4 months old and I've rarely done anything but remote into it so the keyboard should be pristine.) The escape key needs to be pressed extra hard -- beyond the "click" -- to register sometimes. Also, the right-click area on the trackpad expands and contracts mysteriously (best just to turn that off.)
Of course, my issue is that they have some sort of internal catastrophic process failure if they were able to release a keyboard that fails so consistently. It wasn't just bad design, it was a process that seemingly did zero testing behind some Apple employees typing "hello world" on a ground floor clean room and going "yep, seems good."
I look forward to see how the 16" MBP shakes out. I can believe that they redesigned the keys, but not that they fixed a gaping hole in their fundamental processes responsible for a dud keyboard that they had no idea how to fix.
Now that Apple has alternative hardware what they do next is very important - will they replace the lemons or spend the next decade claiming they're not responsible in court? Will the four year keyboard program be extended or are the 2016 MBPs almost junk already?
I use a laptop with a reader, the card is flush (not sticking out) and it's a great way of expanding storage. It's also the best way of getting photos out of digital cameras. Wireless is so much slower.
As for CD drives, the world moved on to bluray and that has a licensing cost as well as not fitting with the iTunes strategy of rent-and-never-own. Apple led, others followed. I'd still use it if it was built-in but not as an external: too much hassle to balance it on my lap and not drop the drive ruining the disk.
It's four USB-C/thunderbolt ports, two on each side, and a head-phone jack.
BTW, magsafe is an optimization from a bygone era when you had to keep your laptop plugged in while using it. You can now (generally) leave your laptop unplugged as you use it and stow it somewhere out-of-the way to charge when you aren't. Like your phone or tablet. Magsafe is nice, but probably not worth it now that you don't need to routinely charge your laptop in a vulnerable position. And, of course, USB-C is very easy to plug in.
we all want that, but apparently its not coming back
> Cupertino, California — Apple today unveiled an all-new 16-inch MacBook Pro — the world’s best pro notebook
It’s on apple.com for fuck’s sake and if you don’t know that Apple is based in California, do you really care? Why do they write this stuff as if it’s some other entity writing about Apple as opposed to “today we are pleased to announce...”?
Doesnt speak to the quality of the NAND, probably 3D/QLC though. For density.
Oh, but you trust every word of the press releases issued by other companies? C'mon, it's a press release, not a canonical religious document.
My Late 2013 MBP has been serving me well for the last 5 or so years, but I've been wanting to upgrade it ever since 2016 (the battery life is quite poor & the GPU is showing its age). I refused once I saw the changes in the 2016 MBP, and was glad I never bought in after seeing more and more complaints about the machines roll in every subsequent year. I spent the next two years hoping for a redesign & started to give up. As much as I didn't want to, I've been spending the past few months looking at ThinkPads and Dells and mapping out my transition from OS X to Linux.
As much as I love OS X (and I do -- I've been dreading having to leave it), I just could not spend $2000+ dollars on a computer that I was going to have to fight with to make it work like my old one. This is going to be a daily driver, not a novelty or a toy. Yes, I could've remapped my escape key to caps lock. Yes, I could've bought a bigger laptop bag that could fit a small external keyboard. Yes, I could have learned to live with the new key travel. This is all beside the point if you ask me: I shouldn't have to do that.
Frankly, I'd be okay if Apple kept the old model around, as some people (including many commenters above me) have grown to prefer the butterfly keyboard. Maybe some people prefer the extra touch bar space? (I don't see why it has to be one or the other; I remember how many MBP variations/SKUs Apple carried when I started buying MBPs back in 2010.)
Just give me the option to opt out of these things -- even most of these things -- and I'll keep writing you checks. I'm looking forward to doing this in a couple months assuming the reviews on this machine are good.
