14"/15" Retina display Magsafe Slightly faster processor than current MBA 2 more hours battery life than current MBA Analog 3.5mm headphone jack ~2.2 pounds or less Force touch
The reason why Skylake hasn't been made available on the Mac is simply because Intel has only recently submitted their Skylake patch to LLVM few days ago. Without this, Apple could not take any of the performance advantage offered by Skylake. And a swap from Broadwell to Skylake without recompile will likely offer little to no benefits. Same goes to GPU as well, as it offer same execution units to Broadwell. ( With little additional features set )
After this submission it is likely Apple will need time to do further testing before rolling out an OSX update. This will likely take at least a month or two, inline with the rumored March / April launch.
As others have said; just give me one more USB-C port, and a decent speed bump. That should be about enough to pluck the wallet out of my pocket.
You won't get a second USB-C on the 12" MacBook, but you will get a Lightning port where the 3.5mm headphone jack is. ;-)
To be honest, I'd be happy with any useful additional port. But USB-C would just be 1st choice (especially if MacBook could be charged from either port on either side).
Maybe the rumoured keynote in March will be mainly about a new redesigned MacBook lineup, that would be interesting. An iPhone 5SE and iPad Air 3 just the...a little bit boring starters.
In June 2012 I purchased the MacBook Pro with Retina Display as soon as it was announced. I maxed it out - 16GB RAM, 750GB SSD storage, Intel 3d generation i7 2.7GHz processor. It was the most incredible computer. Showing it to others was a delight as it was so quick (graphics could be better).
This machine is now 3 years 6 months old. I’m always running out storage space and needing to use external drives for day to day usage. 16GB RAM is insufficient for the number of virtual machines I need to run and my other workloads. It’s also starting to have issues - for instance the “e” key is dodgy and I don’t quite understand why the fan seems to need to run continually. It’s out of warranty.
I’d love to buy a new notebook. In fact, I would have loved to have bought a new notebook 12 months ago which is my typical cadence (2.5 years).
But Apple have effectively released the same machine continuously in all the time since I purchased it - if I bought a fully spec’d MacBook Pro as refreshed last year I’d still be stuck with 16GB RAM, storage would only be 1TB which is still insufficient for my usage, and the processor would be an Intel 4th generation i7 2.8GHz processor. Effectively the same machine as I have now. (admittedly graphics would be better, SSD storage speed has improved).
Intel had released the 5th generation processors (i7-5950HQ) when Apple refreshed the notebook last year that would have allowed 32 GB, and SSD over 1TB was also available. But instead we got a new touchpad - woopty do.
Suitable Skylake processors (i7-6920hq and E3-1535M V5) were announced back in Q3 last year and have been available but still Apple still haven't released anything.
I’d also love to marry a new MacBook Pro with a 4K (or 5K) monitor. But the Apple monitors haven’t seen a refresh in over 4 years. My 30” Cinema display is not going to last forever (it has to be at least 8 years old at present and is having issues - but why would I want to buy an outdated monitor that they’ve kept in market for so long, with so many 4K screens so cheaply available?).
It’s fantastic that Apple are releasing / developing all these new product categories (watch, Macbook, iPad Pro, “car”) - but it seems to be at the abandonment of existing product lines and customers (MacPro was unloved for so long, updated and since “abandoned” with no real updates in 2 years; Mac Mini seems the same - I have two of these also needing to be replaced but the last update was a step backwards). It seems like they have completely abandoned any form of power users.
I’ve been a long time Apple user and want to stay that way, but it’s difficult when they don’t release updated products. It’s great that they always want to do a new revolutionary design, but just having the innards updated on a regular basis and be technically competitive would suit me.
Kuo gets way too much credit for his own good and websites giving it to him in spades should worry about their reputation. As for the 30% increase in battery life, MacBook could benefit greatly from this as 9 hours when new is no longer enough for me. Frankly I'd like to see MacBook Air go to 14 hours. My greatest wish this year is for MBA to get a slight redesign and go Retina.
If I was running Apple I'd separate the MacBook, Air and Pro models by a 2" screen size difference. I'd narrow out the bezels and I'd have 12", 14" and 16" machines separated by name, thinness, processing power and port count:
MacBook Retina (12") MacBook Air Retina (14") MacBook Pro Retina (16") 'A power monster'
I like your idea, that would be a really clean lineup. Minor objections: - I think that rather than boosting battery life to 14 hours Apple will slim down the notebook and keep around 10 hours battery. I don't see any notebook for them going beyond 10 hours, never. They'll build credit card thin notebooks before doing that. - Will they get finally rid of the boring "retina" term in the lineup? - This lineup is missing a portable pro notebook. The developer/dj/designer notebook favorite wich made Apple brand "cool". If they loose developer/dj/designer by missing a portable pro machine (by "pro" i mean with pro in and outs and processor) they will in my opinion make a big error. But again, who am I.
seeing as how Apple hasn't released their skyline MBAs yet, I held my nose and bought two base models last week, so I am in no hurry for Apple to update their line now. I also got an i7 6500u Skylake HP spectre x360 pro, the 13 inch rMBP equivalent. With the chip that is apparently still months away for Apple for some reason.
Anyhow, it is a lovely device, but does not seem to have soul compared with an rMBP. Set up on the MBAs was also a more pleasant experience. Not that the HP set up was bad, mind, you just not as good as the MBAs. And I also think an i5 broadwell MBA seems to hold up OK, pretty close in comparison too, if let down a bit by the screen.
Thing is, if Apple had updated, I would have probably bought higher spec MBAs and might have got an rMBP instead of the HP. That's lost $ to shareholders.
Yes those that have four cores now will have two cores and those with two cores will end up with one core. That was the trend recently at Apple and that's why some older versions of computers were selling faster thanthose newly released. Well I was part of the trend so I know it is not just speculative opinion but fact.
As most do, I think it's very possible we'll see some sort of Apple laptop with an A-series chip, but what I don't expect is that it'll run OS X. What's more likely is that they'll create some non-touchscreen form of iOS and run that in the A-series laptop as a (most likely) low-end device, appealing to masses of people, able to run all a user's existing iOS apps, but with a keyboard and trackpad for input instead of a finger. With tvOS they already have a rudimentary non-touchscreen version of iOS, it'll be an easier job to make that run in a laptop than to change OS X to run on an A-series chip (along with all the 3rd party apps that would need to be reworked) and it would open up a world of sales opportunity to offer an iOS A-series laptop to the world, much more than an A-series OS X laptop would ever offer. This is the year to do it, the chips are fast enough and the OS hits v10, perhaps instead of OS X, it'll be xOS.
The MBA's are on Broadwell, which is 14nm as well. Same for the retina MacBook and the 13" MBP.
Skylake has graphical performance improvements but CPU performance improves by 5% at most, Intel's numbers are bogus marketing fluff.
Skylake is is actually less power efficient than Haswell/Broadwell because it lacks the fully integrated voltage regulator. It makes up for that somewhat with new sleep states but the OS and drivers have to be customized to use that, as Microsoft has found out the hard way with the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book.
I will be moderately surprised if Apple does an MBA redesign. I expect these rumors of new 13/15 notebooks to be redesigned rMBP's rather than Airs.
Many of those "performance metrics" focus on single thread processing that uses one core. We live in modern world where advanced software is written with heavy parralelism and threaded processing where you need many cores and that has more performance gain than just few scycles of clock and someinternal optimizations to gain mediocre 5-10%.
Kuo gets way too much credit for his own good and websites giving it to him in spades should worry about their reputation. As for the 30% increase in battery life, MacBook could benefit greatly from this as 9 hours when new is no longer enough for me. Frankly I'd like to see MacBook Air go to 14 hours. My greatest wish this year is for MBA to get a slight redesign and go Retina.
If I was running Apple I'd separate the MacBook, Air and Pro models by a 2" screen size difference. I'd narrow out the bezels and I'd have 12", 14" and 16" machines separated by name, thinness, processing power and port count:
MacBook Retina (12") MacBook Air Retina (14") MacBook Pro Retina (16") 'A power monster'
Totally agree. The compactness introduced with the 12" means that your proposed 16" could be smaller and lighter than the current 15" Pro.
I would just present it as one MacBook lineup though with different price points depending on size, cpu, memory, disk etc. You could get a cheaper, weaker 16" if you aren´t a power user but want a bigger screen, for example.
Yes but the whole point here is to make it very clear to consumers. You can't give everything people want, compromises must be made. This is how design works. Having each one being bigger, more powerful and with more ports and naming them as such makes it simple to distinguish each notebook from the next. There's no confusion. This would make the middle one the rMBA the most popular and the small or large ones sensible choices for many people too.
I like your idea, that would be a really clean lineup. Minor objections: - I think that rather than boosting battery life to 14 hours Apple will slim down the notebook and keep around 10 hours battery. I don't see any notebook for them going beyond 10 hours, never. They'll build credit card thin notebooks before doing that.
In June 2012 I purchased the MacBook Pro with Retina Display as soon as it was announced. I maxed it out - 16GB RAM, 750GB SSD storage, Intel 3d generation i7 2.7GHz processor. It was the most incredible computer. Showing it to others was a delight as it was so quick (graphics could be better).
This machine is now 3 years 6 months old. I’m always running out storage space and needing to use external drives for day to day usage. 16GB RAM is insufficient for the number of virtual machines I need to run and my other workloads. It’s also starting to have issues - for instance the “e” key is dodgy and I don’t quite understand why the fan seems to need to run continually. It’s out of warranty.
I’d love to buy a new notebook. In fact, I would have loved to have bought a new notebook 12 months ago which is my typical cadence (2.5 years).
But Apple have effectively released the same machine continuously in all the time since I purchased it - if I bought a fully spec’d MacBook Pro as refreshed last year I’d still be stuck with 16GB RAM, storage would only be 1TB which is still insufficient for my usage, and the processor would be an Intel 4th generation i7 2.8GHz processor. Effectively the same machine as I have now. (admittedly graphics would be better, SSD storage speed has improved).
Intel had released the 5th generation processors (i7-5950HQ) when Apple refreshed the notebook last year that would have allowed 32 GB, and SSD over 1TB was also available. But instead we got a new touchpad - woopty do.
Suitable Skylake processors (i7-6920hq and E3-1535M V5) were announced back in Q3 last year and have been available but still Apple still haven't released anything.
I’d also love to marry a new MacBook Pro with a 4K (or 5K) monitor. But the Apple monitors haven’t seen a refresh in over 4 years. My 30” Cinema display is not going to last forever (it has to be at least 8 years old at present and is having issues - but why would I want to buy an outdated monitor that they’ve kept in market for so long, with so many 4K screens so cheaply available?).
It’s fantastic that Apple are releasing / developing all these new product categories (watch, Macbook, iPad Pro, “car”) - but it seems to be at the abandonment of existing product lines and customers (MacPro was unloved for so long, updated and since “abandoned” with no real updates in 2 years; Mac Mini seems the same - I have two of these also needing to be replaced but the last update was a step backwards). It seems like they have completely abandoned any form of power users.
I’ve been a long time Apple user and want to stay that way, but it’s difficult when they don’t release updated products. It’s great that they always want to do a new revolutionary design, but just having the innards updated on a regular basis and be technically competitive would suit me.
Your requirements for a laptop are quite challenging. You probably represent the upper 2% of power users in terms of CPU and storage. If 1TB isn't enough for you right now then it sounds likely that even the largest single SSD available right now, a 2TB in a 2.5" form factor, won't be enough and you need a hard drive.
If I were you I'd consider myself fortunate in that so much can be done on a laptop that doesn't weigh 9 pounds and isn't 1.5" thick.
If I was running Apple I'd separate the MacBook, Air and Pro models by a 2" screen size difference. I'd narrow out the bezels and I'd have 12", 14" and 16" machines separated by name, thinness, processing power and port count:
MacBook Retina (12") MacBook Air Retina (14") MacBook Pro Retina (16") 'A power monster'
You've lost me here Ireland, hence the dislike:
Why am I supposed to carry a humongous 16 inch Macbook Pro on me as a professional?
Your/Apple's logic to allocate small screens to non professionals is fraud, if not laughable, especially for laptops that can be plugged into a gargantuan external display
In June 2012 I purchased the MacBook Pro with Retina Display as soon as it was announced. I maxed it out - 16GB RAM, 750GB SSD storage, Intel 3d generation i7 2.7GHz processor. It was the most incredible computer. Showing it to others was a delight as it was so quick (graphics could be better).
This machine is now 3 years 6 months old. I’m always running out storage space and needing to use external drives for day to day usage. 16GB RAM is insufficient for the number of virtual machines I need to run and my other workloads. It’s also starting to have issues - for instance the “e” key is dodgy and I don’t quite understand why the fan seems to need to run continually. It’s out of warranty.
I’d love to buy a new notebook. In fact, I would have loved to have bought a new notebook 12 months ago which is my typical cadence (2.5 years).
But Apple have effectively released the same machine continuously in all the time since I purchased it - if I bought a fully spec’d MacBook Pro as refreshed last year I’d still be stuck with 16GB RAM, storage would only be 1TB which is still insufficient for my usage, and the processor would be an Intel 4th generation i7 2.8GHz processor. Effectively the same machine as I have now. (admittedly graphics would be better, SSD storage speed has improved).
Intel had released the 5th generation processors (i7-5950HQ) when Apple refreshed the notebook last year that would have allowed 32 GB, and SSD over 1TB was also available. But instead we got a new touchpad - woopty do.
Suitable Skylake processors (i7-6920hq and E3-1535M V5) were announced back in Q3 last year and have been available but still Apple still haven't released anything.
I’d also love to marry a new MacBook Pro with a 4K (or 5K) monitor. But the Apple monitors haven’t seen a refresh in over 4 years. My 30” Cinema display is not going to last forever (it has to be at least 8 years old at present and is having issues - but why would I want to buy an outdated monitor that they’ve kept in market for so long, with so many 4K screens so cheaply available?).
It’s fantastic that Apple are releasing / developing all these new product categories (watch, Macbook, iPad Pro, “car”) - but it seems to be at the abandonment of existing product lines and customers (MacPro was unloved for so long, updated and since “abandoned” with no real updates in 2 years; Mac Mini seems the same - I have two of these also needing to be replaced but the last update was a step backwards). It seems like they have completely abandoned any form of power users.
I’ve been a long time Apple user and want to stay that way, but it’s difficult when they don’t release updated products. It’s great that they always want to do a new revolutionary design, but just having the innards updated on a regular basis and be technically competitive would suit me.
I appreciate your perspective. But about 12 years ago, I bought a house. When I moved in, it was completely empty, and I showed it off to my friends, took them on tours, and had a nice party in it with lots of people in attendance. Now it is so jammed with stuff, I can't show it off to people. I actually have to keep some of my stuff somewhere else. The amount of stuff I have expands to the amount of space I have for it. I don't need a new house: I need less stuff. I've started throwing things away.
Comments
14"/15" Retina display
Magsafe
Slightly faster processor than current MBA
2 more hours battery life than current MBA
Analog 3.5mm headphone jack
~2.2 pounds or less
Force touch
After this submission it is likely Apple will need time to do further testing before rolling out an OSX update. This will likely take at least a month or two, inline with the rumored March / April launch.
This machine is now 3 years 6 months old. I’m always running out storage space and needing to use external drives for day to day usage. 16GB RAM is insufficient for the number of virtual machines I need to run and my other workloads. It’s also starting to have issues - for instance the “e” key is dodgy and I don’t quite understand why the fan seems to need to run continually. It’s out of warranty.
I’d love to buy a new notebook. In fact, I would have loved to have bought a new notebook 12 months ago which is my typical cadence (2.5 years).
But Apple have effectively released the same machine continuously in all the time since I purchased it - if I bought a fully spec’d MacBook Pro as refreshed last year I’d still be stuck with 16GB RAM, storage would only be 1TB which is still insufficient for my usage, and the processor would be an Intel 4th generation i7 2.8GHz processor. Effectively the same machine as I have now. (admittedly graphics would be better, SSD storage speed has improved).
Intel had released the 5th generation processors (i7-5950HQ) when Apple refreshed the notebook last year that would have allowed 32 GB, and SSD over 1TB was also available. But instead we got a new touchpad - woopty do.
Suitable Skylake processors (i7-6920hq and E3-1535M V5) were announced back in Q3 last year and have been available but still Apple still haven't released anything.
I’d also love to marry a new MacBook Pro with a 4K (or 5K) monitor. But the Apple monitors haven’t seen a refresh in over 4 years. My 30” Cinema display is not going to last forever (it has to be at least 8 years old at present and is having issues - but why would I want to buy an outdated monitor that they’ve kept in market for so long, with so many 4K screens so cheaply available?).
It’s fantastic that Apple are releasing / developing all these new product categories (watch, Macbook, iPad Pro, “car”) - but it seems to be at the abandonment of existing product lines and customers (MacPro was unloved for so long, updated and since “abandoned” with no real updates in 2 years; Mac Mini seems the same - I have two of these also needing to be replaced but the last update was a step backwards). It seems like they have completely abandoned any form of power users.
I’ve been a long time Apple user and want to stay that way, but it’s difficult when they don’t release updated products. It’s great that they always want to do a new revolutionary design, but just having the innards updated on a regular basis and be technically competitive would suit me.
Minor objections:
- I think that rather than boosting battery life to 14 hours Apple will slim down the notebook and keep around 10 hours battery. I don't see any notebook for them going beyond 10 hours, never. They'll build credit card thin notebooks before doing that.
- Will they get finally rid of the boring "retina" term in the lineup?
- This lineup is missing a portable pro notebook. The developer/dj/designer notebook favorite wich made Apple brand "cool". If they loose developer/dj/designer by missing a portable pro machine (by "pro" i mean with pro in and outs and processor) they will in my opinion make a big error. But again, who am I.
Anyhow, it is a lovely device, but does not seem to have soul compared with an rMBP. Set up on the MBAs was also a more pleasant experience. Not that the HP set up was bad, mind, you just not as good as the MBAs. And I also think an i5 broadwell MBA seems to hold up OK, pretty close in comparison too, if let down a bit by the screen.
Thing is, if Apple had updated, I would have probably bought higher spec MBAs and might have got an rMBP instead of the HP. That's lost $ to shareholders.
http://i.imgur.com/C9xuRpy.png
If I were you I'd consider myself fortunate in that so much can be done on a laptop that doesn't weigh 9 pounds and isn't 1.5" thick.
Why am I supposed to carry a humongous 16 inch Macbook Pro on me as a professional?
Your/Apple's logic to allocate small screens to non professionals is fraud, if not laughable, especially for laptops that can be plugged into a gargantuan external display
Here's to the 12 inch Macbook Pro!