I was shocked to see the new MacBook Pro. It really looks fat. Heavy.
It is. For anybody who likes to travel, the 14 inch seems better and the 16 inch looks to be one pound heavier in weight. I’d do the 14 inch if I was considering one.
I was pleasantly surprised that the 16" easily fit into my work/commuting backpack. The old 17" absolutely would not have fit. For me the larger screen is well worth the extra pound. If you are going to shuttle a laptop from desk to desk then yeah, the 14" would be a no brainer. I use my laptop as a laptop - on my lap the majority of the time, so the extra screen real estate is amazing. I've never had such a high resolution display on any laptop and I'm in heaven. I used this thing all day yesterday without plugging it in once too. I didn't even realize that until the end of the day. I still had over 40% battery. These machines are a home run in just about every way for me.
Sticking old versions of HDMI and SD reader utterly pointless. You’ll be able to get Thunderbolt 4 to HDMI/SD adapters that will offer higher performance than these built in ones, for those that one these. Myself, like the vast majority of people will never user these ports.
The extra ports are FAR from pointless. Unused ports cost you nothing.
However for those of us who need them, carrying a bag full of dongles around is a PITA. And what do you do if you don't have a dongle with you? You have a useless piece of junk instead of a useful tool. Apple is an experience company. Useless tools because you may not happen to have an adapter on you while on the go is the ultimate in a shitty use experience.
Suck it up and ignore the "pointless" ports. Adding them back was Apples smartest move with these new machines. When the rest of the world including our PC brethren go fully USB-C then Apple will be justified in removing them. Good luck waiting for that to happen any time soon.
Because post-Jobs/Ive Apple has transitioned from skating to where the puck is going to be to skating to where the puck was a few years ago. If the vocal minority want "faster horses" - new Apple delivers! They'd rather pursue marketshare than product excellence, sacrificing the portability of a portable computer to add a load of old, redundant ports.
lol - you don't think marketshare and product excellence are directly linked? This has to be one of the dumbest takes I have seen expressed in a while - and there have been some dumb takes.
Again if you don't need the extra ports - congratulations. Their presence costs you NOTHING. But for those of us who still rely on them for our regular workflows, they greatly improve our daily customer experience using these products.
Respecting your customers NEEDS and enhancing their experience with their products is absolutely delivering on excellence - and is why these PRO notebooks are indeed a home run. I can't help it if your an antisocial nit picker who doesn't have to interact with the broader world but can live ensconced in your USB-C and Thunderbolt only world. I suspect you are in the VAST minority. Thank god Apple was "brave" enough to actually listen to their customers and once again deliver products that better meet all their customers needs, not just the uber fan-bois in their isolated bubbles
you lose nothing unless you actually need 4 TB 4 ports (and even then you've got the MagSafe so you're not using a port for charging. So far I've seen exactly one person who says they use all 4 TB ports. If the sight of it is that offensive to you you can take some silver epoxy and fill it in so it disappears.
Absolutely. A port you don't need doesn't do a damn thing if it's there, but if it's not there and you need it then it's a huge PITA to deal with. If someone really needs 4 TB ports then, since (according to them) dongle's aren't a big deal, they can just carry a thunderbolt hub with them. Problem solved.
You can daisy chain Thunderbolt devices. Just buy better devices that have multiple ports built in or suck it up and carry *your* dongle (hub) of choice
As for the whole empty port offending their delicate sensibilities - they should just stick with the consumer laptops and leave the pro models to the pro's.
How so? None of the things you cited cost you one thing in functionality. You can simply ignore their presence (as you already are!) and they don't impact or impede you in ANY way.
However if any of those are missing for people that do need them it's a HUGE inconvenience to work around their exclusion.
Your take on the HDMI port, in particular, is utterly laughable. While I applaud you for being able to avoid having to interact with people and present to others while out and about, I assure you that you are in the vast minority. For anyone in a normal business setting, presenting in conference or meeting rooms and hooking up to external displays is a ROUTINE requirement and finally being able to once again do so without the need for a flipping dongle is a godsend.
Thank god Apple pulled their head out of their ass and stopped designing crap for some future that is never going to happen and once again started meeting their customers where they live TODAY and will continue to be forced to live for a long time. I would love to be in the same bubble you are; sadly I can't will everyone else around me to enter the USB-C/Thunderbolt only world. If I only had that power....
MplsP said: I'll miss being able to fast forward through ads on YouTube, but that's about it. The other problem I've been having lately is my Touch Bar will go black and non-functional, meaning I don't have an escape 'key' at all, forcing a reboot. At least the function keys were consistently functional.
If there are no ads you don't have to fast forward through them. 1Blocker in Safari or uBlock Origin in Chrome handily takes care of them
saarek said: At home I can just plug into a dock and off I go, but when visiting offices/other locations dongle town was an absolute pain in the arse!
Yes - while I'm happy for so many forum members that are ensconced in their ideal bubbles of non-interaction with the outside world, for the rest of us dongletown was an utter nightmare and PITA.
For those who have extra ports they don't need they aren't impacted in the least. For those of us who have need of a port and don't have it, we are SOL. Instead of a productive tool I have a useless brick. Thank god Apple regained some sanity and added these essential ports back. Respecting your customers needs and not some future utopian vision is indeed delivering excellence.
One of the features I really miss is the dual purpose headphone jack that also served as a toslink optical connector. My complete music library is digitized, and I use my MacBook Pro to play it through a high quality stereo system. Apple may have saved a dollar on each Mac by eliminating this ability, but it made my life more complicated. I also miss the headphone jack on iOS devices. That may have been deleted to force customers to buy wireless headsets. I see that as another Ivey error.
BTW - TOSLINK is analog, and pretty limited in bandwidth. Can't even support 5.1 surround sound; not enough bandwidth. Send out audio over HDMI - it will remain digital until it gets to your receiver. I just tested it and yup, as soon as you have an HDMI device that supports audio, it shows up as an output in the sound systems preferences.
The silly thing with these new laptops is we’ve gone from 4 universal ports that will do anything to 3 universal ports and 2 ports that can only do one thing, so technically a less flexible machine now.
Also, where’s the outcry about Apple using a proprietary charging port?
lol - only with this bunch is more flexibility in reality less flexibility. As for needing four thunderbolt ports - if you really do then just carry a dongle/thunderbolt hub! I'm sure those unitasker ports could easily be served by dongles, right? If dongles aren't that big of a deal then just carry your flipping thunderbolt dongle!
Same thing with charging. You can still charge with USB-C and utterly ignore that "proprietary" charging cable if it's being proprietary is so offensive to you.
They ADDED choice, yet for many the glass is half full. Utterly ridiculous.
lol - USB-C can't do HDMI without a dongle. And why would I need HDMI to do USB-C? That's ridiculous.
If you need more USB-C ports then just carry a USB-C hub around with you, especially since you think it's not a big deal for everyone else to have to carry adapters around
Oh sure, the "infamous" butterfly keyboard...it was supposedly more prone to failure than the prior scissor mechanism (according to tech blogs), yet nobody could provide any actual evidence or numbers that proved it. In fact, nobody could provide the repair rate of previous generation scissor keyboards, so it wasn't even possible to make a comparison.
I knew a few dozen people with them and every single person had issues with them. Some people got away with the compressed air trick, but at least half had to go without their machines for at least a few days if not weeks to get the keyboard replaced.
The butterfly keyboard represented the epitome of solving problems that didn't exist and causing far more real problems instead. I wasn't buying a new Mac laptop until it was gone; thankfully my wait is over.
They didn’t listen to my request to bring back optical audio.
HDMI audio has more bandwidth and thus fidelity; just output your audio over HDMI. If you are playing from an analog source, you aren't staying analog anyway doing that on a Mac; it gets converted to digital along the way anyway.
Optical audio is even more of a dinosaur than USB-A
This has nothing to do with Jony Ive. Intel forced Apple to go minimalistic because of the generous heat it produces. Give it more oenclosure it would retain more heat. Now that Intel has gone, with Apple Silicon you can make it as large as you want because the heat is minimal.
You have it backwards. You're confusing heat with temperature. If you go minimalistic on a device that generates a lot of heat, that heat will be 'concentrated' on a smaller volume, causing temperature to be higher, and it is temperature that damages internal components. The key is to think in terms of heat dissipation not heat retention. A larger enclosed volume (all other things equal) would have better heat dissipation especially if a lot of that enclosed volume is empty space that can be used for airflow to cool the internal components.
This is the metal mass that retains heat the most not the air that flows over or in it. Besides, the air flows only from the processor to the heat sink by means of a pipe and the fan, the flow is constrained to the pipe. There is no air "moving freely" in a larger enclosure. Since the air flows only from the processor to the sink, it has no (or minimal) effect on the overall cooldown of the enclosure. To make it cool down faster, you have to make it smaller so that it retains less heat and dissipates it faster. That "cooling air in a larger enclosure" is an urban legend. There is no such thing.
I didn't spell it out explicitly but of course when I said airflow, I'm speaking about it in the context of the MacBook Pro which has fans.
In an electronic device, the internal components generate the heat, not the enclosure. You want to dissipate that heat so that the temperature of the internal components don't rise to the point that they fry. What an enclosure does is absorb the heat generated by the components and then dissipate it by radiating it off its external surface area. (Heat never ever flows from a cold body to a hot body. At least not in this universe.) So, all other things equal, the smaller your enclosure, the less mass it has to absorb the heat from the components, and the less external surface area it has to dissipate that heat it absorbed from the components. And that's not even talking about heat sinks and cooling fans.
Now let's stick heat sinks and cooling fans into the narrative. If a smaller enclosure gives you less internal space, forcing you to use smaller heat sinks, smaller fans and smaller airflow channels, then clearly going minimalistic is going to reduce, not increase, your ability to dissipate the heat generated by the components.
This is why your assertion that the generous heat produced by Intel chips caused Apple to go minimalistic is problematic. The heat generated by a chip is in fact an obstacle to going minimalistic.
That's where the vicious death cycle begins. Put bigger fans, bigger pipes, bigger sinks, they will require bigger batteries and bigger enclosures that will retain even more heat that will require even bigger fans, bigger pipes, bigger sinks that will require.... and so on.
Bigger enclosure may absorb more heat, but once it absorbs that it becomes a heat source itself. According to your mentality we can cool down a hot object faster if we put it into an enclosure instead of leaving it in the open air !..
Bigger heat pipes and heatsinks do not require bigger batteries. Fans don't really either, they aren't a significant power draw, maybe a watt for a beefy one. And bigger enclosures do not act as heat sources, they dissipate heat over a greater surface area.
You don't need bigger heat pipes, sinks or fans on a bigger enclosure with the same components, unless you're trying to give yourself more thermal headroom. The idea that adding more cooling would in some way lead to a net heat increase should be immediately and obviously absurd.
Smaller computers have more problems with thermals. The new MBP 14 will spin up its fans much earlier and faster than the MBP 16 precisely because of the density of heat generating components, even though they're the same components as the 16. You're dead wrong on this.
The 16” is built for bigger chip that haven’t been released yet.
The point really being making it thicker isn’t the only way to get better cooling, which many of the commentators simply couldn’t comprehend. Your older Unibody & Retinas only got worse thermals cause their design, not just chips.
The upper limit really resides on your pipes, sink & fans, you can always improve them despite the chassis limit.
Sticking old versions of HDMI and SD reader utterly pointless. You’ll be able to get Thunderbolt 4 to HDMI/SD adapters that will offer higher performance than these built in ones, for those that one these. Myself, like the vast majority of people will never user these ports.
The extra ports are FAR from pointless. Unused ports cost you nothing.
However for those of us who need them, carrying a bag full of dongles around is a PITA. And what do you do if you don't have a dongle with you? You have a useless piece of junk instead of a useful tool. Apple is an experience company. Useless tools because you may not happen to have an adapter on you while on the go is the ultimate in a shitty use experience.
Suck it up and ignore the "pointless" ports. Adding them back was Apples smartest move with these new machines. When the rest of the world including our PC brethren go fully USB-C then Apple will be justified in removing them. Good luck waiting for that to happen any time soon.
My point stand, if I’d have to choose variety vs. bandwidth, I’d take latter.
You can ask why not both, now you have both.
nor you’re adding much either, only two data and one special charging ports.
nor you’re adding much either, only two data and one special charging ports.
As for this - that special charging port is more than just a charging port; it's a safeguard against damage. One of the biggest things I missed on the M1 MBA was magsafe!
And has already been discussed ad nauseam those other two data ports represent a HUGE increase in convenience and customer experience for those who need them. I'm happy that you're in this magical bubble where you have no need for them. You are far from the only user profile for these machines.
nor you’re adding much either, only two data and one special charging ports.
As for this - that special charging port is more than just a charging port; it's a safeguard against damage. One of the biggest things I missed on the M1 MBA was magsafe!
And has already been discussed ad nauseam those other two data ports represent a HUGE increase in convenience and customer experience for those who need them. I'm happy that you're in this magical bubble where you have no need for them. You are far from the only user profile for these machines.
Or stick a magnet on your Type-C. Not as pretty but does the same job.
Are we gonna make something this small to be a professional-grade issue? Most laptops till this day still rely on barrel jacks.
while we’re at it, how about an Ethernet function? Didn’t got room to put a controller, so, really minor for me. Most people on the planet knows how to take care their DC jack crap, not like they can’t live unlike pro commentators.
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However for those of us who need them, carrying a bag full of dongles around is a PITA. And what do you do if you don't have a dongle with you? You have a useless piece of junk instead of a useful tool. Apple is an experience company. Useless tools because you may not happen to have an adapter on you while on the go is the ultimate in a shitty use experience.
Suck it up and ignore the "pointless" ports. Adding them back was Apples smartest move with these new machines. When the rest of the world including our PC brethren go fully USB-C then Apple will be justified in removing them. Good luck waiting for that to happen any time soon.
Again if you don't need the extra ports - congratulations. Their presence costs you NOTHING. But for those of us who still rely on them for our regular workflows, they greatly improve our daily customer experience using these products.
Respecting your customers NEEDS and enhancing their experience with their products is absolutely delivering on excellence - and is why these PRO notebooks are indeed a home run. I can't help it if your an antisocial nit picker who doesn't have to interact with the broader world but can live ensconced in your USB-C and Thunderbolt only world. I suspect you are in the VAST minority. Thank god Apple was "brave" enough to actually listen to their customers and once again deliver products that better meet all their customers needs, not just the uber fan-bois in their isolated bubbles
You can daisy chain Thunderbolt devices. Just buy better devices that have multiple ports built in or suck it up and carry *your* dongle (hub) of choice
As for the whole empty port offending their delicate sensibilities - they should just stick with the consumer laptops and leave the pro models to the pro's.
However if any of those are missing for people that do need them it's a HUGE inconvenience to work around their exclusion.
Your take on the HDMI port, in particular, is utterly laughable. While I applaud you for being able to avoid having to interact with people and present to others while out and about, I assure you that you are in the vast minority. For anyone in a normal business setting, presenting in conference or meeting rooms and hooking up to external displays is a ROUTINE requirement and finally being able to once again do so without the need for a flipping dongle is a godsend.
Thank god Apple pulled their head out of their ass and stopped designing crap for some future that is never going to happen and once again started meeting their customers where they live TODAY and will continue to be forced to live for a long time. I would love to be in the same bubble you are; sadly I can't will everyone else around me to enter the USB-C/Thunderbolt only world. If I only had that power....
For those who have extra ports they don't need they aren't impacted in the least.
For those of us who have need of a port and don't have it, we are SOL. Instead of a productive tool I have a useless brick. Thank god Apple regained some sanity and added these essential ports back. Respecting your customers needs and not some future utopian vision is indeed delivering excellence.
Same thing with charging. You can still charge with USB-C and utterly ignore that "proprietary" charging cable if it's being proprietary is so offensive to you.
They ADDED choice, yet for many the glass is half full. Utterly ridiculous.
And why would I need HDMI to do USB-C? That's ridiculous.
If you need more USB-C ports then just carry a USB-C hub around with you, especially since you think it's not a big deal for everyone else to have to carry adapters around
The butterfly keyboard represented the epitome of solving problems that didn't exist and causing far more real problems instead. I wasn't buying a new Mac laptop until it was gone; thankfully my wait is over.
Optical audio is even more of a dinosaur than USB-A
The point really being making it thicker isn’t the only way to get better cooling, which many of the commentators simply couldn’t comprehend. Your older Unibody & Retinas only got worse thermals cause their design, not just chips.
The upper limit really resides on your pipes, sink & fans, you can always improve them despite the chassis limit.
You can ask why not both, now you have both.
nor you’re adding much either, only two data and one special charging ports.
No other laptops (except Alienware) can do eGPU+external SSD without any interference. Even if you only plug one, it’ll slow your system drive down.
And has already been discussed ad nauseam those other two data ports represent a HUGE increase in convenience and customer experience for those who need them. I'm happy that you're in this magical bubble where you have no need for them. You are far from the only user profile for these machines.
Are we gonna make something this small to be a professional-grade issue? Most laptops till this day still rely on barrel jacks.
while we’re at it, how about an Ethernet function? Didn’t got room to put a controller, so, really minor for me. Most people on the planet knows how to take care their DC jack crap, not like they can’t live unlike pro commentators.