I can see a version of the touch bar trickle down to the next iterations of the iPhone and iPad. The bar could replace the home button and bottom bezel. It would be useful to have a task specific function bar always available.
Sorry, it's MY money and I see no value in this machine for the cost. It's no more powerful than last years model so I just went ahead and bought a 2015 Macbook Pro.
So you can heat all of them at once by putting all in the 2012 case. Nice stove design, however. It has even a grid to heat your feet.
Can you explain to me what this picture means to you? Why would someone get a a 2013 MBP if they need a DVD-ROM or a Blu-ray drive attached (or two), all those separate, extra drives, and whatever the other things are*? And why wouldn't you have a surge protector for your 2012 Mac Pro, with whatever display and other device you have a attached? It seems really forced to me because if the 2012 Mac Pro did everything you need—without consideration for performance or that over half the stuff shown doesn't come with a Mac Pro—then why would the 2013 Mac Pro be a viable option.
For example, I think USB-C and the better display on the 2012 MacBook are brilliant and I can't wait to get my new MBP, but I didn't jump on the 12" MacBook for my everyday machine because it didn't suit my needs. You said the 2015 suited your needs better (which is a perfectly reasonable decision not to buy the 2016 model) but what does this picture have to do with anything?
* Is that some sort of HDMI breakout with USB Type-B and a parallel port? Is that a remote volume controller? And is that a PSU on the far right?
Can you explain to me what this picture means to you? Why would someone get a a 2013 MBP if they need a DVD-ROM or a Blu-ray drive attached (or two), all those separate, extra drives, and whatever the other things are*? And why wouldn't you have a surge protector for your 2012 Mac Pro, with whatever display and other device you have a attached? It seems really forced to me because if the 2012 Mac Pro did everything you need—without consideration for performance or that over half the stuff shown doesn't come with a Mac Pro—then why would the 2013 Mac Pro be a viable option.
For example, I think USB-C and the better display on the 2012 MacBook are brilliant and I can't wait to get my new MBP, but I didn't jump on the 12" MacBook for my everyday machine because it didn't suit my needs. You said the 2015 suited your needs better (which is a perfectly reason not to buy the 2016 model) but what does this picture have to do with anything?
* Is that some sort of HDMI breakout with USB Type-B and a parallel port? Is that a remote volume controller? And is that a PSU on the far right?
Yeah, that's the great thing about these cooked-up example that show up at every launch; in the real world, they just don't happen.
What this picture is actually saying is that the box on the left takes up a lot of room for stuff that I probably won't ever need.
What a misguided, arrogant and condescending article! If I have legitimate concerns about the course Apple have taken I am now a "hater". Apparently if I feel Apple could and should have taken a different design decision I am now a critic "pointing to heavy, thick models aimed at Windows video gamers, which clearly sell in obscurely small volumes and do not appear to be very profitable at all."
The sad reality is that many of the comments posted on this site and others reflect legitimate concerns from many different types of customer about the choices Apple made. I agree with many of those comments. By moving to an all USB C machine Apple is forcing it's customers to choose between a last generation machine that supports the legacy ports you so handily and easily deride or a machine built on more modern Skylake technology but which supports no outside peripherals without a large assortments of adapters or dongles. You yourself point out that Apple has sold over a billion iOS devices that have all shipped with USB A connectors and that the majority of PCs and Macs have USB A ports. "That effectively slows down how fast Apple can transition away from USB-A on its iOS power adapters." This clearly acknowledges that Apple needs a transitional strategy and expecting users to buy into the dongle / adapter concept isn't a strategy but a misguided fall back position that is clearly flawed. Why would Apple drop the price of their adapters by 40% soon after introduction if it isn't an acknowledgement that they got it all horribly wrong?
It didn't need to be like this. Apple could have built a transitional unit with both USB C and USB A ports when Skylake chips came out over 6 months ago to allow people a choice of how they would transition to the new USB C standard. And Apple has done this many times before. It's not new.
Unfortunately the flawed belief that everyone wants the thinnest laptop possible means that other design compromises have also occurred. I used the new keyboard in an Apple store a few days ago and this one design decision is enough for me to hold off on buying the machine. Again it's not necessary. I am happy with the size of the current MB pro's, especially when the alternative is losing a great keyboard.
It is most unfortunate that your article is written in such a way that it is not balanced or acknowledges the legitimate concerns that many people have expressed about these machines.
What a misguided, arrogant and condescending article! If I have legitimate concerns about the course Apple have taken I am now a "hater".
Wrong... what most people are complaining about are things many would label "legacy", and other items beyond Apple's control like the 16GB RAM limit.
The world will be going USBc, Apple just decided to go all in at one. Good for them. If Apple didn't do it, no one else in the PC industry would.
The 16GB limit is a hard limit because of Intel. Not Apple. People need to accept that and get over it. I don't want Apple putting in a desktop CPU in a laptop and then people complain about heat and battery life. 16GB (for now) is plenty and makes a good balance between power and mobility. If you're running 4 VM's 24x7 and every MacOS app concurrently, it's great that it can but perhaps you should be looking for a desktop machine.
This is a solid machine, and a solid update. Is it perfect? No. It never will be, but Apple at least always inches forward towards it.
Poorly written article. No data. No research. Vague anecdotes in place of evidence. I don't even know where to start. No one is asking for a 10 pound Windows gaming laptop. Building a 10lb laptop wasn't necessary to make this a Pro laptop. Plus making the argument 16 GB is good enough? Except for a small crowd? Really? I've been using Macs for 15 years. Really disappointed in the poor quality of this article. Fanboy much?
This fella has actually tried doing some 4K editing on it, and found the experience to be 'buttery smooth'.
Even ZDNet, a sheet that usually hates on all things Apple, has tried to inject a little bit of sanity into the argument by explaining why the Macbook Pros don't need 32GB.
And they even pointed to a video (a little out of date, but things will probably have improved on both the Mac and Windows) that demonstrates how extra RAM makes little difference to video editing once you get past 16GB. (Strangely enough, adding the extra 16GB to take it up to 32GB actually made things run slightly slower on a Windows machine for some reason).
The writer could have included all these links and a lot more, but it really wouldn't have a made a difference to you, because like so many here who fall into the Dunning-Kruger category, real world performance is nowhere near as important as spec bragging rights. No matter how many articles appear over the next few months, you will stick your fingers in your ears and scream that these reviews are made by fanboys, or that Apple is paying for reviews, or that the test machines have been rigged to show improvements for certain test apps.
There's even a fella here who's demanding that people not buy the machines because if we do, then Apple won't 'get the message'. How weird is that?
If I would make one criticism of the article, it would be that it didn't really expand on the future of the Mac, so I might as well have a crack at it.
Apple has been working, for years, to speed up the operations and reliability of SSDs. They will no longer focus on huge amounts of RAM because the architecture of their operating system and the design of their machines will utilise SSDs in place of this extra RAM. Given these improvements, and the battery drain that extra RAM causes, I'm not sure that we're going to see more than 16GB in Apple laptops, ever.
The 16GB limit is a hard limit because of Intel. Not Apple. People need to accept that and get over it. I don't want Apple putting in a desktop CPU in a laptop and then people complain about heat and battery life. 16GB (for now) is plenty and makes a good balance between power and mobility. If you're running 4 VM's 24x7 and every MacOS app concurrently, it's great that it can but perhaps you should be looking for a desktop machine.
That is just wrong on every level. The i7 quad core CPUs in the MBPs DO support up to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM (Dell and HP laptops using exactly the same CPUs can be bought with 32GB. I know, because I have one. And no, wrong again, there are no desktop CPUs involved anywhere.) Yes, there is a penalty on battery life (less than 10% overall) since it is "regular" DDR4 LV and not LPDDR4, but if I want 9 hours and 32 GB or 10 hours and the 16 GB RAM limit from 2007 should be a choice. Apple does not need to offer dozens of configurations like others, but two configurations should be doable.
4) You're not likely to get more than 16GiB RAM until 2018 when LPDDR4 arrives with Cannonlake. Apple could have an entire Kaby Lake update for the new MBP that still maintains a max of 16GiB LPDDR3 RAM.
Strange that HP sold an Elitebook four years ago capable of taking 32Gb of DDR3. Ok, it did use a desktop CPU but for VM use it was fantastic. Can't get anywhere near that even today with Apple. Intel have really dropped the ball here in recent years. Mediocre speed updates and ... well a bit less power and USB-C. I don't like the loss of the SD Card. most Photographers I know use them (even some Pro's). Yes I know that you can get an adapter but these get lost or forgotten. So you travel 24 hours to the other side of the world and then you realise that your SD card reader is back at home. Not everywhere has them available. So you are basically stuffed once your set of cards is full. With a SD reader built in, you don't even have to think about not taking it with you. I can't afford to not have the SD reader with me on my travels. Adapters are far too easy to forget/lose.
As a result, Apple has lost me as a laptop customer after 12 years. No more. My 2015 15in MBP will be the last one I buy. Lets hope that they don't fuck around with the iMac too much (if they ever update it). Sorry but that is the honest truth.
4) You're not likely to get more than 16GiB RAM until 2018 when LPDDR4 arrives with Cannonlake. Apple could have an entire Kaby Lake update for the new MBP that still maintains a max of 16GiB LPDDR3 RAM.
Strange that HP sold an Elitebook four years ago capable of taking 32Gb of DDR3. Ok, it did use a desktop CPU…
Yeah, real strange. Now do you want to tell me how it's real strange that other OEMs are using Kaby Lake but Apple couldn't be bothered to use it in these new MBPs?
There is one thing that the article got right: the uncertainty among the professional crowd of Apple users which has gotten a lot worse with this fall's (lack of) announcements.
It wouldn't take much to reassure that utterly loyal crowd, which is absolutely willing to live with compromises instead of switching platforms. So I really don't understand why Apple isn't, for example, just updating that Mac Pro routinely every other year - whether that's directly profitable or not.
Strange that HP sold an Elitebook four years ago capable of taking 32Gb of DDR3. Ok, it did use a desktop CPU but for VM use it was fantastic. Can't get anywhere near that even today with Apple.
Well, that is a different story. Their workstation class machines can even be upgraded with desktop Xeons and up to 64 GB ECC RAM... But these configurations do not compare to the MBP at all. These are heavy machines with almost no battery life, Apple was never in that business.
The only question is why they do not even offer what could be done since almost 12 months. I7 laptop quads and 32 GB DDR4 LV works just fine for everybody, just not for Apple.
Let's be clear on this Daniel, chatting to a Final Cut Pro user editing 5K H.264 does NOT constitute high end validation of the Mac platform. FCP X is optimised for current machinery, sure. It's the show pony for these machines.
But I'm ordering a projector worth $65K, I have a DaVinci panel that cost $30K, and my only-for-TV monitor was $12K from Flanders. My CPU/GPU combo will cost $10K+ if it's a new Mac Pro, and that's fine. But I want TB 3, this year's silicon, better-than-OpenCL graphics processing and the ability to chain stuff tidily in a rack box. Moving forward, that's clearly not about adding Nvidia 1080 cards into a 16-lane Cubix box on a 5,1 12-core - but until the Mac Pro does better, that's what I'll stick with, because a naked Mac Pro 2016 doesn't warrant the reinvestment - in new interfaces and limited GPU power.
Seriously, there's SuperMicro kit I could use running Arch that would eat a Mac on the things that matter (no, not nodes full of blurs, but temporal and spatial NR) but I'm a Mac guy. I like doing Mac things. Limiting the upper definition of "pro" users to FCP X speed cutters is to miss the point entirely.
That first line...</br> "There's no need to exaggerate reality into Facebook-style, factually-loose imagery that's emotionally reinforced with rage-inducing, apocalyptic panic mongering. Let's take a more rational look at Apple's recently revamped, premium laptop line."</br> </br> If only AppleInsider started any of the political posts recently with the same feeling.
Thinking about, I can see why ZDNet waded in to support Apple on this: the new Surface Pro also maxes out at 16GB.
It is a sad day when we have to defend a MacBook Pro by comparing it to hardware from M$.
Other mobile workstations have 32 GB RAM and real GPU power. You can even buy GPU docks for Windows computers (like we could with Apple Duo Dock). There is no excuse. Tim Cook was right in blocking the amalgamation of iPad and laptops. He should have taken the same stand on this combination of Air and Pro.
This isn't courage it is arrogance.
Too expensive and lack of conventional ports, a compete fail for pro-users, much like the 2013 Mac Pro.
In the past I have defended Apple choices but they really have forgotten pro users.
Try to learn not to carry something you don't always use. The same meaning for laptop ports. If you don't need them often, why are they needed to be there? I believe most people don't often use these ports.
Comments
For example, I think USB-C and the better display on the 2012 MacBook are brilliant and I can't wait to get my new MBP, but I didn't jump on the 12" MacBook for my everyday machine because it didn't suit my needs. You said the 2015 suited your needs better (which is a perfectly reasonable decision not to buy the 2016 model) but what does this picture have to do with anything?
* Is that some sort of HDMI breakout with USB Type-B and a parallel port? Is that a remote volume controller? And is that a PSU on the far right?
What this picture is actually saying is that the box on the left takes up a lot of room for stuff that I probably won't ever need.
The sad reality is that many of the comments posted on this site and others reflect legitimate concerns from many different types of customer about the choices Apple made. I agree with many of those comments. By moving to an all USB C machine Apple is forcing it's customers to choose between a last generation machine that supports the legacy ports you so handily and easily deride or a machine built on more modern Skylake technology but which supports no outside peripherals without a large assortments of adapters or dongles. You yourself point out that Apple has sold over a billion iOS devices that have all shipped with USB A connectors and that the majority of PCs and Macs have USB A ports. "That effectively slows down how fast Apple can transition away from USB-A on its iOS power adapters." This clearly acknowledges that Apple needs a transitional strategy and expecting users to buy into the dongle / adapter concept isn't a strategy but a misguided fall back position that is clearly flawed. Why would Apple drop the price of their adapters by 40% soon after introduction if it isn't an acknowledgement that they got it all horribly wrong?
It didn't need to be like this. Apple could have built a transitional unit with both USB C and USB A ports when Skylake chips came out over 6 months ago to allow people a choice of how they would transition to the new USB C standard. And Apple has done this many times before. It's not new.
Unfortunately the flawed belief that everyone wants the thinnest laptop possible means that other design compromises have also occurred. I used the new keyboard in an Apple store a few days ago and this one design decision is enough for me to hold off on buying the machine. Again it's not necessary. I am happy with the size of the current MB pro's, especially when the alternative is losing a great keyboard.
It is most unfortunate that your article is written in such a way that it is not balanced or acknowledges the legitimate concerns that many people have expressed about these machines.
This is a solid machine, and a solid update. Is it perfect? No. It never will be, but Apple at least always inches forward towards it.
Actually, he did point to this:
https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355
This chap loaded every single pro app on his new machine and found that the 16GB of memory wasn't a problem.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-grove-carter/one-professionals-look-at_b_12894856.html
This fella has actually tried doing some 4K editing on it, and found the experience to be 'buttery smooth'.
Even ZDNet, a sheet that usually hates on all things Apple, has tried to inject a little bit of sanity into the argument by explaining why the Macbook Pros don't need 32GB.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-macbook-pros-dont-need-32gb-of-ram/
And they even pointed to a video (a little out of date, but things will probably have improved on both the Mac and Windows) that demonstrates how extra RAM makes little difference to video editing once you get past 16GB. (Strangely enough, adding the extra 16GB to take it up to 32GB actually made things run slightly slower on a Windows machine for some reason).
The writer could have included all these links and a lot more, but it really wouldn't have a made a difference to you, because like so many here who fall into the Dunning-Kruger category, real world performance is nowhere near as important as spec bragging rights. No matter how many articles appear over the next few months, you will stick your fingers in your ears and scream that these reviews are made by fanboys, or that Apple is paying for reviews, or that the test machines have been rigged to show improvements for certain test apps.
There's even a fella here who's demanding that people not buy the machines because if we do, then Apple won't 'get the message'. How weird is that?
If I would make one criticism of the article, it would be that it didn't really expand on the future of the Mac, so I might as well have a crack at it.
Apple has been working, for years, to speed up the operations and reliability of SSDs. They will no longer focus on huge amounts of RAM because the architecture of their operating system and the design of their machines will utilise SSDs in place of this extra RAM. Given these improvements, and the battery drain that extra RAM causes, I'm not sure that we're going to see more than 16GB in Apple laptops, ever.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-grove-carter/one-professionals-look-at_b_12894856.html
which is referenced in this post
That is just wrong on every level. The i7 quad core CPUs in the MBPs DO support up to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM (Dell and HP laptops using exactly the same CPUs can be bought with 32GB. I know, because I have one. And no, wrong again, there are no desktop CPUs involved anywhere.) Yes, there is a penalty on battery life (less than 10% overall) since it is "regular" DDR4 LV and not LPDDR4, but if I want 9 hours and 32 GB or 10 hours and the 16 GB RAM limit from 2007 should be a choice. Apple does not need to offer dozens of configurations like others, but two configurations should be doable.
Intel have really dropped the ball here in recent years. Mediocre speed updates and ... well a bit less power and USB-C.
I don't like the loss of the SD Card. most Photographers I know use them (even some Pro's).
Yes I know that you can get an adapter but these get lost or forgotten.
So you travel 24 hours to the other side of the world and then you realise that your SD card reader is back at home. Not everywhere has them available. So you are basically stuffed once your set of cards is full.
With a SD reader built in, you don't even have to think about not taking it with you.
I can't afford to not have the SD reader with me on my travels.
Adapters are far too easy to forget/lose.
As a result, Apple has lost me as a laptop customer after 12 years. No more. My 2015 15in MBP will be the last one I buy. Lets hope that they don't fuck around with the iMac too much (if they ever update it). Sorry but that is the honest truth.
There is one thing that the article got right: the uncertainty among the professional crowd of Apple users which has gotten a lot worse with this fall's (lack of) announcements.
It wouldn't take much to reassure that utterly loyal crowd, which is absolutely willing to live with compromises instead of switching platforms. So I really don't understand why Apple isn't, for example, just updating that Mac Pro routinely every other year - whether that's directly profitable or not.
The only question is why they do not even offer what could be done since almost 12 months. I7 laptop quads and 32 GB DDR4 LV works just fine for everybody, just not for Apple.
But I'm ordering a projector worth $65K, I have a DaVinci panel that cost $30K, and my only-for-TV monitor was $12K from Flanders. My CPU/GPU combo will cost $10K+ if it's a new Mac Pro, and that's fine. But I want TB 3, this year's silicon, better-than-OpenCL graphics processing and the ability to chain stuff tidily in a rack box. Moving forward, that's clearly not about adding Nvidia 1080 cards into a 16-lane Cubix box on a 5,1 12-core - but until the Mac Pro does better, that's what I'll stick with, because a naked Mac Pro 2016 doesn't warrant the reinvestment - in new interfaces and limited GPU power.
Seriously, there's SuperMicro kit I could use running Arch that would eat a Mac on the things that matter (no, not nodes full of blurs, but temporal and spatial NR) but I'm a Mac guy. I like doing Mac things. Limiting the upper definition of "pro" users to FCP X speed cutters is to miss the point entirely.
"There's no need to exaggerate reality into Facebook-style, factually-loose imagery that's emotionally reinforced with rage-inducing, apocalyptic panic mongering. Let's take a more rational look at Apple's recently revamped, premium laptop line."</br>
</br>
If only AppleInsider started any of the political posts recently with the same feeling.
Other mobile workstations have 32 GB RAM and real GPU power. You can even buy GPU docks for Windows computers (like we could with Apple Duo Dock). There is no excuse. Tim Cook was right in blocking the amalgamation of iPad and laptops. He should have taken the same stand on this combination of Air and Pro.