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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Hands up who would happily trade 5mm extra thickness for 32G, 8 cores and a bigger battery? For me its a no-brainer... And I'll wager for anyone else who wants a workhorse not a fashion accessory...

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I just want to meet the consumer who looked at the old MBP and thought, "wow this is far too thick!". And the same goes for cell phones. Thinner is better, but only to a certain point and certainly not at the expense of battery life and features.

Ok I'll bite. I'd like the power of the 15" MBP, but after having the 15" in 2008 which I found to be too heavy to carry with me in my bag constantly, I've always bought the 13" Mac laptop (had a 2011 Air, now a 2015 Pro). I find the current 13" Pro to be about as heavy as I would like to comfortable carry in my backpack for hours at a time. I appreciate that the new 15" MBP is only .5 lbs heaver than the current 13" Pro which makes it a real option for me.

Yeah, I agree. I have a 15" MBP from 2008 and that thing is heavy. Was eyeing the 13" only for the weight.

The real question:

If the new 15" MBP was the same weight as last generation and included the new Kaby Lake processor, more RAM, better battery, etc. would you pass on it for the weight?

You could say that about every feature though. If they hadn't bothered improving the battery but had refreshed the processor, RAM, and dropped the weight, would you pass on that just for the battery? Each individual feature is going to be marginal for most users, but together they add up to making the upgrade worthwhile.

That's why there used to be two lines: the Air and the Pro. The new MBPs announced the past week feel more like ultraportable machines versus potential desktop-replacement workhouses.

If Apple had the same announcement last week, but instead of calling MBP and calling it just the MacBook, people wouldn't be in as much of an uproar (aside from the fact that the MBPs are delayed yet again).

USB-C and thinness are great--no one is arguing against that--but for a Pro line, to sacrifice utility and power is foolhardy. However it seems like Apple is going down some path of convergence, which doesn't look good for many professionals.

>> I just want to meet the consumer who looked at the old MBP and thought, "wow this is far too thick!". And the same goes for cell phones. Thinner is better, but only to a certain point and certainly not at the expense of battery life and features.

> Ok I'll bite. I'd like the power of the 15" MBP, but after having the 15" in 2008 which I found to be too heavy to carry with me in my bag constantly

He was talking about thickness, not weight. Those are correlated, to a degree, but it seems like Apple has compromised on things in its quest for thinness that it wouldn't have had to in a quest for lightness.

I just want to meet the consumer [...]

I don't think consumers care at all. I have some non-tech family members/friends who buy a new MacBook every two or three years. Not because they have specific new features that they want. They are happy with a Mac and want to have the latest and greatest, just because plus high resale value after that time period. Though, I expect that many consumers will skip this generation, simply because they don't want to drop 79 Euro on Apple's USB-C to VGA/HDMI connector.

As for compromising features for thinness and weight: the 2nd generation Air was very popular and had relatively weak CPUs and only 2GB RAM in the base models.

I don't think consumers care at all. I have some non-tech family members/friends

Right but this is the Pro model...

As a digital nomad I need something thats capable enough to let me run my business while traveling but is still light as possible. I upgrade every 2 1/2 years or so and was always skipping over the Macbook Pro for the fully optioned 13" Macbook Air instead--the 8GB RAM limit was the bottleneck for me but I didn't want the extra weight to go up to the MBP, and didn't like the small screen on the MB.

The fully loaded 13" MBP I just ordered is about the same weight and size which can easily be lugged around in a day bag without being too heavy and lets me get the 16GB of RAM I wanted - happy days.

I currently use a Vostro 17" beast (7lbs) as I really don't care about thinness or lightness at all, I'm a 200lb 6ft bloke so carrying it around/resting it on my knee isn't an issue.

This trend towards thin/light everything at the expense of upgrade-ability and repair-ability confuses me but I'm not the target demographic.

I'd like to see that used on a plane in economy. Given that I travel a lot and don't always end up in business/first, this is one of the first questions I ask myself when considering any new laptop.

But how does extreme thinness help there?

I got alot of work done on planes with what passed for a laptop in the 1990s...

Not so much size, but weight. If your carry-on allowance is 7kg and you don't check baggage, having a laptop that weighs 3kg like the Vostro 17" is a big deal. If you've got a heavy laptop, you've got to either bring less stuff with you on your trip, or go through the hassle of checking baggage.

What percentage of your time over it's entire lifespan is spent using a it on a plane?

Being a 6' tall 200lb person will be worse in economy than whatever laptop you're trying to use.

Probably depends on what you do. And, I've luckily really never had to repair a laptop. Never drop my phone either, except a tragic drop of a blackberry pearl from 2 feet onto concrete that killed it.

60% or my work is through SSH, 30% writing in outlook, and 10% in various trace analyzers and debuggers. When it came time to upgrade my work laptop, I just asked for the lightest one I could get. A 15" with an extended battery I felt was irritatingly heavy to lug around.

My personal laptop is a 2009 Dell 13". Not very thin, but light.

(Irritatingly enough, outlook is probably more demanding on my laptop than the debuggers and analyzers)

Absolutely depends on what I do, I don't travel on planes and 99% of laptop usage is client meetings, sofa programming (that is in the sofa not programming the sofa though with IoT that won't be long) and coffee shops so big and heavy isnt an issue if it gets me the things I want.

Performance is the single biggest issue keeping me from getting a new MBP.

16GB just flat out isn't enough.

What on earth would you want/need 32G or 8 cores for? My laptop is for doing work but that just sounds like an obscene spec unless you're doing 3D rendering on it or something. 16G is plenty, and while I'm not that fussed about thinness per se I wouldn't want my laptop to be any heavier.

Ive 16gb but everything fits under 8.

Til i kick in an osx vm. Then i need an additional 8gb easily. Macosx tends to eat memory for breakfast

I want to run lots of VMs to simulate different network topologies. But lots of people these days can make good use of power: 3D as you say, CFD and FEA and other engineering applications, computational chemistry or bio, machine learning, financial modelling...

If I was running network simulations I'd certainly run all those VMs on a server cluster and not my laptop.

My iMac with 32G of memory sometimes gives me even out of memory dialogs because Safari has leaked about 30 gigabytes of memory by sitting idle with many tabs open. Reopening Safari fixes this, but it shows that these days even web browsing can put an enormous pressure onto the memory usage. And if you are running VMs on your machine you can use up 32G fast.

The thing is, the macbook pro is Apples "workstation" machine, by price and by the fact that they don't offer many alternatives. So people expect it to support workstation loads, and 32G and 8 cores is not excessive for that today.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody"

I use my MBP for dev work, and would love to have faster compile times for example

I want my laptop to still have enough memory for workloads 3 years from now, too. My VMs keep getting bigger; browsers (and web apps) keep demanding ever more RAM; image and video resolutions keep increasing and demanding more memory to edit; the websites I develop are designed for ever beefier servers.

The P in MBP stands for Professional.

Yes especially since the new macbook pro is 250g lighter but you have to carry 250g in adapters...

I have a macbook for portability but for the macbook pro, I don't need it to be light or thinner, I need it to be powerful.

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