Apple's PSUs are about 85W tops. If you don't have a power brick of the above size, then it wouldn't be powerful enough to run the laptop. The Alienware also comes with a 96Wh battery, pretty much the same as Apple's 95Wh Retina Macbook Pro (and the 17" MBP). With a heavy load, the Alienware would drain in under an hour, possibly half an hour.
You really have to keep the spec within the 85W limit of the power supply and Apple's current spec just slightly exceeds it already. The i7 and 650M have 45W TDPs each so can draw 90W on full load plus the screen and powered ports.
It's not likely that the performance spec of the 17" would exceed the 15", which has been the case in the past.
Ouch, so much for that. Well whatever the best graphics card that can fit in a specific computer is, please max out the memory. It's the least one can ask for. Right?
I work in an industry where you do have the option of buying custom made tools for the job or of the shelf units. Of the shelf hardware is cheaper by a large margin at times multiple magnitudes cheaper. Sometimes it is justified. In any event if you think a 17' laptop is so damn important to you then have someone go out and build one to your specs.
Now if you are not willing to pay for it don't come whining here. As configured, not enough people where apparently buying the 17" laptop so Apple dropped it. No surprise there, companies drop losing products all the time, that is in fact business 101, you can't make bread on stale products that don't sell.
This comment really made me laugh. A customer who spends many thousands of dollars on his work tools to make a living has every right to express their desires to the company
he PAYS and who PROFIT from his trade. BTW their are MANY in my field who feel the same way.
Maybe! I suspect that people just don't want to suffer your personality and agree in the hopes that you will go away.
This is business 101. I find it utterly bizarre that this disturbs you.
What Apple is doing is business 101, would you expect Chevy or Ford to continue to produce a money losing product just because you wanted it? You really have to get over the idea that the world revolves around you, it doesn't. Never has really, in Apples case they need to serve the needs of their many millions of customers first. The also need to serve Apple, its share holders and its employees with profitable products that keep the company afloat.
Winer this is a fundamental design issue for every PC made, that is to fit the machine into a desired power envelope. Even a Mac Pro has a limit on its design centered on power that a standard AC outlet can reliably supply, not to mention the ability to remove that power reliably from the machine chassis.
Now a Mac Book Pro is marketed as a high performance portable computer, that mean that power use is allowed to be higher than what is possible on some other machines. The problem is laptops are expected to run on batteries from time to time and as such the have tight constraints on what those batteries can power. Mix in rather questionable design powers from Intel and you get less than ideal run times when the hardware is being ran hard.
This highlights one important fact. Power dissipation in modern electronics is not constant and can often exceed the wattage ratings stamped on a part by a large margin. Even memory can impact the power usage in a platform so it isn't always wise to max that out. In the end laptops are about trying to balance performance against power use and that is not something that will go away any time soon.
Ouch, so much for that. Well whatever the best graphics card that can fit in a specific computer is, please max out the memory. It's the least one can ask for. Right?
Now if we flip this over to a discussion about a beefed up Mini or an XMac we could focus a great deal of the discussion on what is proper video support. In a nut shell my biggest problem with the Mini has been terrible video support, even 2011's Mini with GPU was a joke. Maybe the 2013 Haswell Mini will address that but I'm not putting any bets on Apple doing the right thing here nor do I trust Intels leaks and suggestions of performance. Proof is in the pudding. Even here though the limit is on power in the Mini, which is one reason I support the idea of a bigger Mini or a XMac. I don't want to go after 130 what processors in either of these machines but lets be honest the Mini severely limits, based on power dissipation what can realistically be built into a Mini today.
Now all of our hand wringing may be addressed in the near future by process shrinks that lower power and double what is possible on a chip. This is the one caveat that limits the possibility of new hardware formats from Apple, a Mini like machine will be pretty impressive with 14nm processors, 3D memory and other shrinking components.
Seeing as you used a figure of $53 million, that would have been huge during the era where they made only Macs.
It was $47m but the rest of the models make up $2-3b. They sell 5 million Macs per quarter with ~40-50% being the MBP.
The bottom line is, if it was profitable enough, they wouldn't have dropped it. The people who work at Apple know what they're doing as far as turning a profit.
It was $47m but the rest of the models make up $2-3b. They sell 5 million Macs per quarter with ~40-50% being the MBP.
The bottom line is, if it was profitable enough, they wouldn't have dropped it. The people who work at Apple know what they're doing as far as turning a profit.
Notice that I said prior to the days of the idevices. Macs have obviously grown too. Even with the percentages, the number of imacs today likely dwarfs the total macs sold 10 years ago. I can't find the graph I was looking for, but I did find an old AI article. The presence or absence of a 17" macbook pro doesn't mean much to me personally. In this case I just wanted to comment and mention that screen size may be a critical point for some.
Quote:
In terms of raw performance, it probably doesn't matter much these days:
That video is cool, but I don't know enough on the subject to get context out of it.
I would add that the Air is quite capable. I think one of the biggest restrictions for some time was the 4GB ram limit.
Quote:
You mean closer like plugging in a 24"? That's pretty close. That's why they have display outputs on them.
I think you know that I meant when they're away from their desks. A big reason people like notebooks is due to their being less restrictive, but I've also mentioned that if you have a bunch of other peripherals, it can get somewhat restrictive anyway.
But I eventually went iMac rather than waiting for Apple to show any motivation for the Mac Pro re: prices, updates, gpus....etc.
If you want value AND performance, you buy an iMac or a Macbook Pro. But it still won't come cheap. That's Apple. You'll pay way over £1000 for getting in.
I guess they canned teh 17 inch Macbook because of sales?
If so...I guess the Mac Pro must look vulnerable. Seeing as Apple are selling far more laptops than desktops.
The 17 inch 'book' looked imposing for laptop. It was mighty fine.
I tend to think of laptops as next generation 'desktops' as many people I know use them on tables and rarely use them on their laps at all.
And to me, that's what they are. Slim-line desktops AIOs. The iMac is a bigger slim-line desktop AIO.
You get the value of the screen in with decent performance...
...portability and elegance.
The pro and mini are clunky by comparison and offer far less value.
I bet they made more money on it then they did the Cube.
Lemon Bon Bon.
This would result in an interesting discussion. The first question you have to ask is how much does it cost Apple to engineer a new model rev. I wouldn't be surprised if it hit several million dollars. Just paying for the salaries of the engineering teams would cost a small fortune. This due the suspicion that lead developers at Apple make well over $100,000 a year plus the overhead for each person. So maybe a half million in salaries would have to be allocated for the 17" rev. Throw a lot of other expenses on top of all of that for R&D and contractor activities and you easily exceed a million dollars.
So the question is how many 17" MBPs do you sell to cover the expense of a new rev to the machine? Lets say the profit $1200 dollars on a $3000 dollar machine, that may be a little high, so if the engineering cost is $3,000,000 then they need to sell $2500 machines to cover engineering costs. If the profit is $500 they may need to sell 6.000 machines.
Mind you I'm only talking about the cost of engineering here and the profit over the cost to have each machine built. Once you add in marketing and all the other overhead costs it gets pretty ugly. They could easily be put into a position of having to sell 50,000 a year to start to make a profit. I really doubt they have been selling that well. Why? Pretty simple you don't see that many 17" machines around. You will see AIRs and MBP of a lesser size by the hundreds before you see a 17" MBP.
So yeah they may have made some money on the machine but I bet it was very hard for them to justify the engineering effort at this time. In a way it is sad because with the advent of the retina MBP the 17" could have been reengineered into something that filled a niche left with the retinas shrinking capacity. Specifically the 17" machine would have been the perfect p,ace to implement a Fusion type drive in a laptop. Apple really had a lack of vision here as the one shortcoming Apples laptops have is bulk storage.
In any event the way Apple has handled the 17" MBP has me wondering if it is really dead and gone. Carrying around a 17" machine has all the utility of carrying around a sheet of plywood yet I can still see people leveraging a machine of this size. If the demand is really there, that is people are bitching at Apple instead of on these forums, we might see the 17" come back.
I'm writing this on my 2009 unibody anti-glare 17-inch MacBook Pro that I received exactly 4 years ago. I don't find it a hinderance to carry around & at the time I bought it there were plenty of smaller 15-inch laptops from all of the other manufacturers that were heavier than this one is. I tote it with me every day to work. There have only been a handful of times I can recall thinking maybe I should down size. I'm now forced to go smaller if I want a faster, new laptop from Apple. It's not a deal breaker by any means but I really like this size. If Apple brought the 17-inch MacBook Pro back I would get another one. I hope they do, but realistically that's probably not going to happen.
If Apple brought the 17-inch MacBook Pro back I would get another one. I hope they do, but realistically that's probably not going to happen.
It depends really. There were technical limitations that made it not such a good idea too. The native resolution on the 17" was 1920 x 1200. If this was made Retina, it would require a 3840 x 2400 render resolution, which the original HD 4000 drivers couldn't handle (they got updated in Windows later). While the Macbook Pros have discrete GPUs, they all switch down to Intel IGPs to save power. One of Haswell's marketing tags is being able to support 4K resolution.
I suppose they could have used the same resolution as the 15" but 1920 x 1200 wouldn't be the optimal mode. That's another thing that the 15" Retina model added - the 1920x1200 resolution so it has the same desktop space as the old 17".
There's also the yield to think about. The possibility for dead pixels on such a high res display is quite high. It would also start at $3099 if not higher. Combine all that with the low audience and it didn't make sense.
At this revision, the IGP will handle the high resolution, the dedicated GPU will get a speed boost too, they seem to have sorted production issues with the current laptops ok and there will potentially be a price drop to eliminate the old model, leaving a gap at the top. With the new slimmer, lighter design there's more reason than ever to make one but only they can decide if the volume of sales justifies it. Now that the 15" handles the higher screen resolution, there's not much to separate the 17" from it besides being physically bigger.
I wouldn't mind the same form factor, IPS display at 1920 x 1200. They could even do the same screen bonding as on the retinas. But instead they just gave up on the 17-inch model.
You have been hard to follow lately, what does this mean. Apple gave up on the 17" MBP just like they gave up on the Mac Pro and Mini. The only difference is that they canned the 17" MBP while the Mac Pro was put into hibernation.
Frankly I'm not convinced that we will never see anoth 17" MBP, but to be successful Apple has to do more than plug in a bigger screen to what amounts to the same old hardware. I still think something like a big fat Fusion type drive would set a 17" MBP apart enough to drive sales. At least in my case I don't get worked up over screen size as much as I do on board storage. One problem Apple has is that they can't seem to come up with feature sets that really distinguish one model from another. Retina is really the only thing they have really used hardware wise to set those models apart for the rest. Skinny SSDs don't cipurrent the mustard and frankly are quickly becoming mandatory technology on all platforms.
Apple gave up on the 17" MBP just like they gave up on the Mac Pro and Mini.
Buyers gave up on it, Apple is just acknowledging that by stopping selling it. Apple has no reason to sell products that people aren't buying and they have no reason to discontinue products that are in high demand. I know you like to take the point of view that they should do everything possible to make products sell but they have limits to what they are prepared to offer at a certain price point and probably have minimum volume targets.
They haven't given up on the Mini at all. It's a great entry level machine. It's not a high-end desktop to replace a $2400 iMac for $800 but it's not supposed to be for that very reason.
What I wonder is whether there will be as much fanfare on the Rev. B edition of the retina MacBook Pro as there was when it was introduced. Certainly the discrete graphics won't be too much of an improvement until next year with nVidia's Maxwell series.
I still am going to lock horns with Marvin (I believe it was him) on the idea of a 15" rMBP with just integrated graphics. The cost needs to go down and the graphics are not ready no matter what Intel claims.
I stand by my opinion of less is more. Two 13" rMBP models and two 15" rMBP models. The 13" stay with integrated and the 15" have integrated/discrete.
Also I am against the idea of a retina MacBook Air, however I would absolutely love to possibly see a $999 13" retina MacBook Pro at some point.
If it stays the way it is, memory isn't an issue since even with DDR3 memory prices going up, it will still be cheaper to upgrade yourself vs. upgrading with Apple.
The SSD just needs to have a 512 GB option perhaps at $400 and drop the 256 GB option to $200 from $300.
If it stays the way it is, memory isn't an issue since even with DDR3 memory prices going up, it will still be cheaper to upgrade yourself vs. upgrading with Apple.
The mini doesn't seem very diy upgrade friendly in terms of ram and SSDs. I've never tried it, but I've read about many people breaking things. The ifixit photos don't make it look terribly difficult, but at the same time I've never read of such problems with other models from Apple or any other oem.
Comments
Ouch, so much for that. Well whatever the best graphics card that can fit in a specific computer is, please max out the memory. It's the least one can ask for. Right?
Now if you are not willing to pay for it don't come whining here. As configured, not enough people where apparently buying the 17" laptop so Apple dropped it. No surprise there, companies drop losing products all the time, that is in fact business 101, you can't make bread on stale products that don't sell.
Maybe! I suspect that people just don't want to suffer your personality and agree in the hopes that you will go away.
What Apple is doing is business 101, would you expect Chevy or Ford to continue to produce a money losing product just because you wanted it? You really have to get over the idea that the world revolves around you, it doesn't. Never has really, in Apples case they need to serve the needs of their many millions of customers first. The also need to serve Apple, its share holders and its employees with profitable products that keep the company afloat.
Now a Mac Book Pro is marketed as a high performance portable computer, that mean that power use is allowed to be higher than what is possible on some other machines. The problem is laptops are expected to run on batteries from time to time and as such the have tight constraints on what those batteries can power. Mix in rather questionable design powers from Intel and you get less than ideal run times when the hardware is being ran hard.
This highlights one important fact. Power dissipation in modern electronics is not constant and can often exceed the wattage ratings stamped on a part by a large margin. Even memory can impact the power usage in a platform so it isn't always wise to max that out. In the end laptops are about trying to balance performance against power use and that is not something that will go away any time soon.
Now if we flip this over to a discussion about a beefed up Mini or an XMac we could focus a great deal of the discussion on what is proper video support. In a nut shell my biggest problem with the Mini has been terrible video support, even 2011's Mini with GPU was a joke. Maybe the 2013 Haswell Mini will address that but I'm not putting any bets on Apple doing the right thing here nor do I trust Intels leaks and suggestions of performance. Proof is in the pudding. Even here though the limit is on power in the Mini, which is one reason I support the idea of a bigger Mini or a XMac. I don't want to go after 130 what processors in either of these machines but lets be honest the Mini severely limits, based on power dissipation what can realistically be built into a Mini today.
Now all of our hand wringing may be addressed in the near future by process shrinks that lower power and double what is possible on a chip. This is the one caveat that limits the possibility of new hardware formats from Apple, a Mini like machine will be pretty impressive with 14nm processors, 3D memory and other shrinking components.
It was $47m but the rest of the models make up $2-3b. They sell 5 million Macs per quarter with ~40-50% being the MBP.
The bottom line is, if it was profitable enough, they wouldn't have dropped it. The people who work at Apple know what they're doing as far as turning a profit.
In terms of raw performance, it probably doesn't matter much these days:
[VIDEO]
You mean closer like plugging in a 24"? That's pretty close. That's why they have display outputs on them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
It was $47m but the rest of the models make up $2-3b. They sell 5 million Macs per quarter with ~40-50% being the MBP.
The bottom line is, if it was profitable enough, they wouldn't have dropped it. The people who work at Apple know what they're doing as far as turning a profit.
Notice that I said prior to the days of the idevices. Macs have obviously grown too. Even with the percentages, the number of imacs today likely dwarfs the total macs sold 10 years ago. I can't find the graph I was looking for, but I did find an old AI article. The presence or absence of a 17" macbook pro doesn't mean much to me personally. In this case I just wanted to comment and mention that screen size may be a critical point for some.
Quote:
In terms of raw performance, it probably doesn't matter much these days:
That video is cool, but I don't know enough on the subject to get context out of it.
I would add that the Air is quite capable. I think one of the biggest restrictions for some time was the 4GB ram limit.
Quote:
You mean closer like plugging in a 24"? That's pretty close. That's why they have display outputs on them.
I think you know that I meant when they're away from their desks. A big reason people like notebooks is due to their being less restrictive, but I've also mentioned that if you have a bunch of other peripherals, it can get somewhat restrictive anyway.
Apple made money on every single 17" macbook pro they ever made.
I had respect for the 17 inch Macbook.
It looked very alluring.
But I eventually went iMac rather than waiting for Apple to show any motivation for the Mac Pro re: prices, updates, gpus....etc.
If you want value AND performance, you buy an iMac or a Macbook Pro. But it still won't come cheap. That's Apple. You'll pay way over £1000 for getting in.
I guess they canned teh 17 inch Macbook because of sales?
If so...I guess the Mac Pro must look vulnerable. Seeing as Apple are selling far more laptops than desktops.
The 17 inch 'book' looked imposing for laptop. It was mighty fine.
I tend to think of laptops as next generation 'desktops' as many people I know use them on tables and rarely use them on their laps at all.
And to me, that's what they are. Slim-line desktops AIOs. The iMac is a bigger slim-line desktop AIO.
You get the value of the screen in with decent performance...
...portability and elegance.
The pro and mini are clunky by comparison and offer far less value.
Lemon Bon Bon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trajan Long
Apple made money on every single 17" macbook pro they ever made.
I bet they made more money on it then they did the Cube.
Lemon Bon Bon.
So the question is how many 17" MBPs do you sell to cover the expense of a new rev to the machine? Lets say the profit $1200 dollars on a $3000 dollar machine, that may be a little high, so if the engineering cost is $3,000,000 then they need to sell $2500 machines to cover engineering costs. If the profit is $500 they may need to sell 6.000 machines.
Mind you I'm only talking about the cost of engineering here and the profit over the cost to have each machine built. Once you add in marketing and all the other overhead costs it gets pretty ugly. They could easily be put into a position of having to sell 50,000 a year to start to make a profit. I really doubt they have been selling that well. Why? Pretty simple you don't see that many 17" machines around. You will see AIRs and MBP of a lesser size by the hundreds before you see a 17" MBP.
So yeah they may have made some money on the machine but I bet it was very hard for them to justify the engineering effort at this time. In a way it is sad because with the advent of the retina MBP the 17" could have been reengineered into something that filled a niche left with the retinas shrinking capacity. Specifically the 17" machine would have been the perfect p,ace to implement a Fusion type drive in a laptop. Apple really had a lack of vision here as the one shortcoming Apples laptops have is bulk storage.
In any event the way Apple has handled the 17" MBP has me wondering if it is really dead and gone. Carrying around a 17" machine has all the utility of carrying around a sheet of plywood yet I can still see people leveraging a machine of this size. If the demand is really there, that is people are bitching at Apple instead of on these forums, we might see the 17" come back.
I'm writing this on my 2009 unibody anti-glare 17-inch MacBook Pro that I received exactly 4 years ago. I don't find it a hinderance to carry around & at the time I bought it there were plenty of smaller 15-inch laptops from all of the other manufacturers that were heavier than this one is. I tote it with me every day to work. There have only been a handful of times I can recall thinking maybe I should down size. I'm now forced to go smaller if I want a faster, new laptop from Apple. It's not a deal breaker by any means but I really like this size. If Apple brought the 17-inch MacBook Pro back I would get another one. I hope they do, but realistically that's probably not going to happen.
It depends really. There were technical limitations that made it not such a good idea too. The native resolution on the 17" was 1920 x 1200. If this was made Retina, it would require a 3840 x 2400 render resolution, which the original HD 4000 drivers couldn't handle (they got updated in Windows later). While the Macbook Pros have discrete GPUs, they all switch down to Intel IGPs to save power. One of Haswell's marketing tags is being able to support 4K resolution.
I suppose they could have used the same resolution as the 15" but 1920 x 1200 wouldn't be the optimal mode. That's another thing that the 15" Retina model added - the 1920x1200 resolution so it has the same desktop space as the old 17".
There's also the yield to think about. The possibility for dead pixels on such a high res display is quite high. It would also start at $3099 if not higher. Combine all that with the low audience and it didn't make sense.
At this revision, the IGP will handle the high resolution, the dedicated GPU will get a speed boost too, they seem to have sorted production issues with the current laptops ok and there will potentially be a price drop to eliminate the old model, leaving a gap at the top. With the new slimmer, lighter design there's more reason than ever to make one but only they can decide if the volume of sales justifies it. Now that the 15" handles the higher screen resolution, there's not much to separate the 17" from it besides being physically bigger.
I wouldn't mind the same form factor, IPS display at 1920 x 1200. They could even do the same screen bonding as on the retinas. But instead they just gave up on the 17-inch model.
Originally Posted by DHagan4755
But instead they just gave up on the 17-inch model.
It was the other way around.
You have been hard to follow lately, what does this mean. Apple gave up on the 17" MBP just like they gave up on the Mac Pro and Mini. The only difference is that they canned the 17" MBP while the Mac Pro was put into hibernation.
Frankly I'm not convinced that we will never see anoth 17" MBP, but to be successful Apple has to do more than plug in a bigger screen to what amounts to the same old hardware. I still think something like a big fat Fusion type drive would set a 17" MBP apart enough to drive sales. At least in my case I don't get worked up over screen size as much as I do on board storage. One problem Apple has is that they can't seem to come up with feature sets that really distinguish one model from another. Retina is really the only thing they have really used hardware wise to set those models apart for the rest. Skinny SSDs don't cipurrent the mustard and frankly are quickly becoming mandatory technology on all platforms.
Originally Posted by wizard69
Apple gave up on the 17" MBP just like they gave up on the Mac Pro and Mini.
Right, in that they didn't do that in any respect. Exactly.
One problem Apple has is that they can't seem to come up with feature sets that really distinguish one model from another.
That's a problem? That's their point. Think of them as different sizes of the same model.
Skinny SSDs don't cipurrent the mustard and frankly are quickly becoming mandatory technology on all platforms.
Is there a single PC that uses stick-based SSD over 2.5" form factor?
Buyers gave up on it, Apple is just acknowledging that by stopping selling it. Apple has no reason to sell products that people aren't buying and they have no reason to discontinue products that are in high demand. I know you like to take the point of view that they should do everything possible to make products sell but they have limits to what they are prepared to offer at a certain price point and probably have minimum volume targets.
They haven't given up on the Mini at all. It's a great entry level machine. It's not a high-end desktop to replace a $2400 iMac for $800 but it's not supposed to be for that very reason.
I still am going to lock horns with Marvin (I believe it was him) on the idea of a 15" rMBP with just integrated graphics. The cost needs to go down and the graphics are not ready no matter what Intel claims.
I stand by my opinion of less is more. Two 13" rMBP models and two 15" rMBP models. The 13" stay with integrated and the 15" have integrated/discrete.
Also I am against the idea of a retina MacBook Air, however I would absolutely love to possibly see a $999 13" retina MacBook Pro at some point.
Mini is a decent computer and hopefully Apple will make it even better soon. Put in a SSD and more memory perhaps.
If it stays the way it is, memory isn't an issue since even with DDR3 memory prices going up, it will still be cheaper to upgrade yourself vs. upgrading with Apple.
The SSD just needs to have a 512 GB option perhaps at $400 and drop the 256 GB option to $200 from $300.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Winter
If it stays the way it is, memory isn't an issue since even with DDR3 memory prices going up, it will still be cheaper to upgrade yourself vs. upgrading with Apple.
The mini doesn't seem very diy upgrade friendly in terms of ram and SSDs. I've never tried it, but I've read about many people breaking things. The ifixit photos don't make it look terribly difficult, but at the same time I've never read of such problems with other models from Apple or any other oem.