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wkirby

What I wanted:

- 7th generation Intel chips. Skylake (6th generation) is from August 2015.

- A move to Nvidia GPUs

- Retain the magsafe power adapter

- At least one dedicated display-out port, preferably HDMI

- 32GB RAM for the 15 inch base model

- Support for the airpods using their new W1 chip

What I'm mad they included:

- Price increase for low value

- Touch Bar does away with physical keys I use daily (most importantly escape), while providing very little functionality I see using in my daily workflows (auto-complete on a desktop? I type faster than that.)

What they could have surprised me with:

- A full touch screen

- Support for the Apple Pencil on the new larger trackpad

- Any mention of their desktop lineup

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> - 7th generation Intel chips. Skylake (6th generation) is from August 2015.

Nonsense, 45W Skylake are from April-May, 45W Kaby is not expected until February-March.

edit: oh I just remembered they didn't use Iris Pro parts in the 15" so you are correct that these are 2015 parts. The corresponding KL parts still aren't out though.

Razer blade uses kaby lake available now

While you are correct, the Kabylake processor that the Razer Blade uses is a low power 15W TDP chip. By nature this means that it is still slower than the range of 28W TDP Skylake processors the new 13" MacBook Pro family is receiving in this update. The 28W TDP variants of the Kabylake family is not yet available from Intel.

Sources: http://ark.intel.com/products/95443/Intel-Core-i5-7200U-Proc... http://ark.intel.com/products/91164/Intel-Core-i5-6287U-Proc...

> - Support for the airpods using their new W1 chip

AirPods work over Bluetooth 4.0 so of course they work. The iCloud pairing is software, included in Sierra.

The AirPods are Bluetooth, but I was under the impression that the improved pairing and battery life technology relied on the source also featuring the W1 chip. After looking into it, an article[^1] from 9to5mac implies otherwise. If that's the case, we can strike this complaint from the list.

1. https://9to5mac.com/2016/09/12/apple-w1-chip-how-it-works/

Couldn't have said it any better. Though I read somewhere that there apparently is a good reason to go for Skylake now and do a bump next summer.

Here is to hoping the last gen will experience a price drop by non-apple retailers. Keeping the same price is just shameless. I feel like they could decrease the price without any problem but also know that many people prefer the old version and want to milk their money.

This is a company that still charges you $1200 to upgrade your Mac Pro from 16 to 64GB of RAM...

But their memory is magical.

And courageous

>32GB RAM

Everybody asking for more RAM, what do you use it for? I have 8GB and they never seem to become a bottleneck.

The usual culprits are virtual machines, large images, video editing. A little less common: big data, large matrices, scientific computing in general.

I never hit 16 GB on my laptop (I even disabled swap) but I got close once with three browsers open (I segregate some web apps into different browsers), a few VMs, some other random application running. It made me think if it was time to buy the extra 16 GB I can fit into my laptop. I just checked, it's about $100.

I see. So this is also part of the cross-cutting problem everybody is mentioning here of Apple not catering to the pros.

For sure, I regularly sit between 12-16GB used (mainly doing web development + docker work, large systems, many services), but frequently will be above that when running a lot inside of VMs.

You are also up against a loosing battle of programs using more RAM to do the same job. You get a better experience now, but you can also expect normal PC usage to result in big RAM usage.

Running one instance of Android Studio, a VM and like 3 chrome tabs is enough to blow 8gb out. We need 16GB min with a 32GB option in pro laptop

On the average work day I've got 4 VMs running at any given time, eating up 6-8 GB of RAM. Put Chrome, my IDE, etc, and it's definitely relevant.

My real complaint here, though, is that besides the GPU and CPU, this is essentially the same specs as my 2013 MBP. I'm not going to drop $3.6k for an incremental upgrade.

Would a full touch screen provide functionality for your daily workflows? I think the touch bar has more potential uses, no?

Not at all. To me the touch bar is mostly a gimmick that removes tactile feedback from some commonly used keys --- most importantly escape. What the full touch screen offers, by comparison, is all the same potential functionality, in a place my eyes are already looking. On top of that, stylus support becomes an instant reality.

Now, in my daily workflow it's unlikely that I reach up and tap my screen very often (I'm usually in a text editor), but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that if you ask anyone with a full touch-screen laptop if they'd trade their touch screen for the touch bar, they'd laugh in your face.

They used to have Nvidia gpus as an option (mine is, from 2014). Soo.. looks like they are staying away from Nvidia now

They tend to tick-tock between Nvidia and AMD. Although this update is once again an AMD (Mid 2015 is AMD as well).

My late 2013 was Nvidia.

> They tend to tick-tock between Nvidia and AMD

I'm not sure "tick tock" is the right word. The MBP used AMD in 2006, NVidia from 2007 to 2010, AMD in 2011, NVidia from 2012 to 2014, and 2015 is AMD. It's actually a break in the pattern for them to use AMD chips two years in a row.

> They used to have Nvidia gpus as an option (mine is, from 2014).

And the laptops tended to die because of that (mine is, from 2010)

My understanding was this generation of nvidia GPUs is a pretty solid step above the AMD offering.

They are using AMD's latest polaris generation GPU's which are $/perf/W on par with Nvidia, just don't have any super-high end offerings (GTX 1070 and GTX 1080 are unrivaled)

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