Where the hell are the new MacBooks?
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/08/new-macbook-air-pro-june...
Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life, and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed.
Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major deficiencies in one or more of the above areas.
If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop.
If you are a Linux user you take on the task of making sure your bleeding edge hardware works with linux. This is no small task and in many cases it's over a year after release that linux support for new technology becomes anything approaching reliable.
A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.
I suppose if you are a gamer there is a case to be made for running Windows on bleeding edge hardware, but such gamers are a very small percentage of laptop users.
This argument works reasonably well for the "MacBook" side of the equation, but it doesn't fare so finely on the "Pro" side.
However, when people spend a lot of money, they want to feel that they're getting a good deal, and they want to feel that they it will be useful for long enough to get their "money's worth".
It's these two mostly psychological factors that are coming into play here.
Yeah, I think they call those people developers.
> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.
Except MacBooks max out at 8GB of memory. At this point 16GB doesn't cut it anymore for my development, so MacBook Pros and iMacs are out too. I have entertained the idea of getting a Mac Pro, except they are even more woefully out of date at this point.
Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor?
How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases?
I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a big clear screen and a port to connect another big, clear screen when I'm at my desk. Since my work products are largely text files, I don't even need a large hard drive. A fast CPU helps build large codebases but since I have incremental compilation in my C/C++ toolchain, it's not like these days I spend a large part of my time compiling.
Genuinely curious -- what kind of a developer needs more than 16 GB of RAM to make a machine viable for development?
I have a Mac Pro with four hard drives and a big screen too, but I use that for audio and video production where it is helpful.
If you get into the realm of developing big data analytics solutions, machine learning algorithms or VR applications, well, 32 GB is the practical starting point and 64 GB is sounding less insane. At this point though you'll start to be inhibited by Apple's relatively anemic GPU horsepower as well as the lack of RAM.
Like anything it all depends on what you're doing.
I have also experimented with doing building and testing on a remote server, but the overhead of having to synchronize local changes to the remote server, rebuild, etc. tends to overwhelm the cost of debugging and iterating on individual tests.
For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept running overnight and crashing. These days it could easily fit in RAM without hitting VM and I'm not sure it would even make the fans speed up. (Hmmm, I think I might have the old data set and source; I should give it a try!)
Once in a while I have to do something horrific, like build an embedded Linux kernel with customizations on a VM... and that is punishing, so I do try to run that on a desktop box with some Xeons...
Spinning up a dev environment requires two Linux VMs and a Windows VM for the web service. Then the Visual Studio for C# development kills everything.
I would prefer to spend a bit of extra money for 32GB of RAM rather than a Windows laptop for the VS development.
They have no incentive to provide more RAM when the average IOS mobile dev only needs an existing MBP or Air. As long as every new mobile app developer is still buying a macbook, why should they bother? Maybe when people start showing up to conferences with non-apple laptops they'll start to think about upgrading!
I've had more problems with hardware not working on OS X than Windows.
I've never had a problem with malware in 20 years of using Windows. The only virus I ever got was the NY Boot Virus and that came on a floppy disk.
People on HN keep talking about how "Windows is adware"...I don't see it. At all! I have been running Windows 10 on my entertainment machines since it has been released and on my workstations for the past 6 months. What exactly are you talking about?
> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well.
My Surface Pro (first version) and my Dell Venue Pro 8 both just work and extremely well. My desktop workstation just works too and it's extremely fast compared to my Mid-2012 Mac Pro that I paid twice as much for. (Although even running Windows on my Mac Pro is faster than OS X.) Also, my Surface Pro battery is lasting longer than my Early 2008 Macbook Pro battery did (although at least I could replace the latter) and my Surface Pro never shocked me in the winter time like my MBP (which froze a few times after such an occurrence).
I've also had plenty of PC laptops that have outlasted, outperformed and "just worked" better than my Mac laptops. So, your viewpoint sounds way off to me and I am suspicious as to whether you've actually used Windows for any length of time.
It seemed like the video cards would be upgradeable too, but nope. And no Crossfire support in macOS is really sad. Under Windows, these are actually fairly capable gaming machines.
not if you're an attendee of WWDC or anyone else developing for iOS or macOS....
I agree with @morley... it's just a lame rant.
Better for some use cases, yes-- it's a great machine if you need something small and light for travel and don't need to do particularly intensive computing on the road. But it (intentionally) makes enough compromises that you can't make a blanket statement that it's "objectively better" for everyone.
My 2013 MBP is still working great, and I'm in no hurry for new ones to come out. I use mine mostly for my photography (RAW editing, catalog management, etc.) and it handles the 36 megapixel images from my camera just fine - I drag sliders and the changes show up in real time. I keep all of my RAW files on an external HD, so if I really needed things faster my first step would be to buy a faster one (SSD).
I also occasionally use it for development, and I don't have any problems there, either.
The most true statement in the article is that my next laptop may not be an Apple, but that has a lot more to do with Apple's crappy software quality lately, and the fact the photo software I use also works on Windows.
So yeah, everyone has this super-strong connotation of "Apple = awesome devices", and they still wait in anticipation for new, beautiful hardware. But it sure seems like Apple is trying to drive a different identity.
I'll truly believe this is happening when iMessage hits Android, which I didn't hear any mention of, despite the rumors.
The truth is they had plenty to announce, so it's not too surprising that they didn't include hardware. I imagine there will be an update later, perhaps at the usual Back to Mac event.
Just download iOS10 and open the new Breathe app, and Breathe. New Macbooks, iPhones, Macbook Pros, and Apple Watches will all come in time in future events.