dreyfus2

After some time with the new (15") MBP, I am mainly happy with it. Screen, speakers, SSD, performance, battery life, Touch ID: all great. The Touch Bar is useful and works very well, I just wished it would expand the default controls when using an app without support for it. Displaying an empty strip with collapsed controls on the right is silly.

I absolutely love the keyboard, I am typing faster and with less errors than ever before. Absolutely hope Apple's next external keyboard will be the same. The improved backlighting with almost no bleeding is also great. The only minor downside is the increased noise. It is not severe, and should not make a difference in normal environments, but e.g. in a library it is a bit annoying.

I have no problems with using adapters, but still think one USB-C to Lightning cable and one Type-A adapter should have been in the box. A machine in this price class should be usable out of the box. And since USB-C is nowhere ubiquitous as of yet, this is not the case.

But there are a few negatives, and they should be mentioned:

• Dell's approach in the XPS laptops (provide a normal power port, plus support charging through the USB-C port) is far superior. It allows for a proper brick with cable management, you get a light indicating charging/full. Plus they still provide an external battery indicator allowing to check battery status without powering the device up. Apple should have kept MagSafe.
• The USB-C charging cable already looks like the Linguini Incident after a few days in my bag.
• The new MBP has several sharp edges (around the vents and around the hinge). Not a biggie, but not something that should have escaped them either. Carrying it while holding these areas is uncomfortable.
• Palm rejection on the bigger trackpad works fine some 99% of the time, but I experience erratic behavior once or twice per day. I hope future software updates improve that.
• The autostart when opening feature is nice, but it introduces some problems: Demonstrating that the machine is off in security checks is impossible. Checking if the machine is powered off (e.g. before boarding flights where this is a requirement) is equally impossible.
• I still want my sleep light back :-)

The problem is not the new MBP, or Apple's decision for thin and light over other options. I received my new 15" and it is fantastic. If I have one criticism so far it is that keyboard, while nice to type on, is really a bit noisy. I used mine in the library today and got some annoyed looks. The problem truly is that there is no other option, unless you want to change the OS. Dell and HP both make machines having the same weight and CPUs and UHD displays and better graphics (like GTX960M, which really helps with Adobe apps) and do support 32 GB DDR4 LV, while being only slightly thicker. Battery life is indeed not the same, but very close (XPS 15 with 32 GB achieves over 8 hrs while running 13 VMs in Hyper-V). The point is that they give you that option, and Apple, likely selling more $3-$4k laptops than Dell and HP combined, does not. Giving the creative user base (people depending on more RAM and technologies like CUDA) on the go at least one single model would not hurt Apple in the least and make many people happy. I see absolutely no point in criticising people for needing something different.

I plead clueless on that, but... Are there really people who put an always on camera into their home and connect it to Google of all things? And if yes, when did protozoons pass us when it comes to intelligence?

ireland said:

The $1,898 starting price in Europe would affect the star rating for me.

Well, but nothing about this is new. The European pricing includes VAT. The 13" w/o Touch Bar is EUR 1,699 here including 19% VAT (approx. 1,845 USD). If I subtract the VAT it is around 1,550 USD, or 50 USD more than in the US. This includes local support (something nobody else even offers), EU mandatory 2 year implicit warranty (which you do not get in the US and which partially eliminates the need for Apple Care)... Premium priced, for sure. But it is a premium article.

And as far as price "increases" are concerned, I do not really see them (other than what you might spend on adapters). If you upgrade last year's base model to a 256 GB SSD (128 GB was standard), you are at a price just around EUR 50 below the new model. These EUR 50 give you much faster storage, a much better display, a better trackpad, a better keyboard (ok, that is a personal choice, I absolutely love the 12" MacBook keyboard, and I will like this one), much better speakers, longer battery life, all in a smaller and lighter package. I would pay these additional EUR 50 in a heartbeat.

Now, what can be debated is if Apple should have kept a cheaper 128 GB option around to lower the entry-level price. Since this machine has ultra-fast I/O, adding more external storage without a real performance penalty later is no big deal. External SSDs like Samsung's T3, or the even faster San Disk one provide ample performance, are minuscule and they have come down a lot in price. You can find the external 1.9 TB San Disk SSD for around EUR 500 now.

paxman said:

It hurts. But beyond that I always thought high visibility items in the Apple ecosystem such as monitors would have more value in terms of marketing than direct margins. Even if all Apple did was design the casing it would signal the Apple brand loudly. Ditto Apple TV - I thought the value of a large Apple branded screen as the central focus in people's living rooms would be valuable in terms of brand awareness. Clearly I was wrong. Maybe Apple decided we have become much more sophisticated and see right through the large monitor on the wall or on the desk. 

Cinema Displays (and their successors) certainly did a lot for the Apple brand – people wanted these gorgeous things on their tables. Nobody wants Lucky GoldStar's latest plastic monstrosity, except for maybe specs and value for money. I (think I) do understand the TV thing. As long as the vast majority is on cable, there is no way to control the user experience. An Apple TV TV would still be a box relying on mediocre junk and displaying it. Plus, there is really no dime there.

What starts to puzzle me quite a bit is Apple's output. What are all these additional employees they hired over the last years actually doing? Just a few years ago  they were actively maintaining and updating desktops, laptops, iPhones, iPads, even iPods still, displays, Airports, Time Machines, iWork and iLife were under constant development, plus there were several pro apps. Now, with all this additional staff, we get no desktops at all, laptop refreshes every four years, iWork is virtually dead, the only iLife app being developed is iTunes (and let's not talk about where this is going), Airport and TM far behind everything, displays dead, Aperture dead, Logic seeing no true love... Not saying all these things need to be updated all the time (most don't since Apple's stuff holds up extremely well), but I can't remember a recent time when they have done less. OK, I might have a bit tunnel-vision here since a lot of things they are doing now do not interest me (Apple Music, Siri, fireworks and emojis in messages, a photo stream that does not really work - or has a life of its own, but doesn't tell me, etc.). Then they start things and just seem to forget about them, like the 12.9" iPad Pro. It is fantastic hardware, and it was forgotten the day it was released. Not a single software feature in iOS 10, some of Apple's own apps still do not work properly on it, still no mean to find optimized (not scaled) apps in the store for it... it is like it never happened. Love the Watch 2, the 7 Plus and look forward to getting the new MBP on the 22nd, but I am fairly uncertain about where all this is going.