Why 2016 is such a terrible year for the Mac

I have all Macs, and I'd be pretty pissed at the universe if the best laptops feasible in this reality were just my current hardware when you take the limit as versions of USB and Thunderbolt tend towards infinity.

You really don't even need to install Ubuntu anymore. Other distros, yeah, but you also know your hardware is fully supported at least.

(And, yes, there are open source replacements for all of these that run on Linux. I know, but the UX is not the same!)

That all said, I think apple are up to more than is immediately apparent. They're spending huge amounts on r&d. From the frankly incremental improvements seen on their existing hardware line over the last several years the majority is going somewhere unseen. We saw patents for hmd/ar related tech a few years back.

I wouldn't be surprised if they do something nobody currently expects and move aggressively into the hmd/ar space.

UK Macbook Pros are the cheapest in Europe dollarwise, so that can't be true.

Cygwin is pretty good. With sshd and putty you've got a decent setup.

But there are still little things that osx does better. Virtual desktop support finally showed up in Windows about a decade late. But keyboard shortcuts are still a crapshoot.

Text selection and cursor navigation being uniform across everything is nice once it all becomes automatic.

Osx has its own list of problems... But most of them are solvable in a well supported way.

Running Linux desktop full time.. logging in every day is a roll of the dice. The Year of the Linux Desktop(tm) just isn't here yet.

For folks like software developers or anyone else who is bottlenecked by single-threaded CPU performance, the Mac Pro is no faster than a machine like an iMac, and not necessarily even much faster than a current laptop.

For folks like photo/graphics/video pros who care about the best large high-resolution display, previous-gen Thunderbolt connectors/protocols and external display hardware weren’t quite ready until the past year. Apple could hack around the problems with the iMac because everything was internal, but the problems hadn’t quite been solved for a desktop tower.

For folks needing beefy GPU performance, the market is segregated between those needing workstation class GPUs and ECC memory, etc., many of whom are running CUDA software that will only run on nvidia chips (oops), and those who want to play video games or similar, and would rather cut costs with consumer-grade hardware.

For folks worried about future-proofing a big purchase, there was a lot of uncertainty about ongoing product support and upgradeability.

And of course for anyone trying to cut costs, there are a variety of cheaper Windows PC towers optimized to particular use cases.

Etc.

Ultimately, for many customers (say, university computer labs, software developers, photographers, graphic designers, even pro audio and video people), an iMac makes a better desktop machine than the current form of the Mac Pro, whereas for the folks who need absolute max performance, it makes more sense to run their work on some server cluster or something. Pro creative software that used to run primarily on desktop workstations doesn’t necessarily need them anymore in the same way. Video game players who make up much of the PC tower market are happy to stick with Windows.

It’s not that easy to find a cohesive market of folks who really need a super-expandable mid-to-high-end Mac desktop tower, and sell a specific bundle of features to them.

If they release a new Mac Pro within the next year or so, with the same concept/chassis as the first one but upgraded internals, it might become a reasonable fit for some of those customers, or they might have been chased away by now, it’s hard to say.

This bit from the OP also rings true:

> In this case, Apple’s timing appears to have been bad. There’s no way to know for sure, but it seems like Apple decided to dance to its own rhythm, skip an Intel chip generation, and then wait for the good stuff, only to get bitten by slippage in Intel’s schedule. If that’s what happened, it’s hard to blame it on Intel. After all, it was Apple’s gamble.

I think if there had been a couple of additional Mac Pro hardware updates since the original release people would be substantially less pessimistic about it now.

With two 27 inch lcds, and a thunderbolt external drive, it's been solid development machine. I can also boot an external windows drive to play PC games, with ok performance on the last gen of games. The form factor is great for traveling (I can stuff it in a suitcase and take it anywhere).

Last few weeks it's been kernel panicking a couple times a day (when under heavy stress). And it'd be nice to have upgraded GPU to play the latest batch of PC games (and VR).

I'm pretty disappointed Apple has made zero updates to this model in over 1000 days. Given how much use I'd gotten out of this machine, it's hard to say it's been a mistake purchasing it. But there's also not really much I can do to upgrade it since external GPUs don't really work with Thunderbolt 2.

My guess is the Mac Pro line gets quietly discontinued by next year. 15 yrs ago I bought a G4 Cube, some lessons I never learn.

- Limited internal expansion / high speed external bus : In a future world where every computer has USB-C and/or ThunderBolt ports external expansion is going to be the obvious choice for most people. Very few individuals/companies use desktops exclusively so interoperability between laptops & desktops is another factor here. This is also true of internal storage. Fast internal storage + NAS/SAN are clearly the right direction to go here.

- Less CPU / more GPU : You can scale many highly parallel / CPU intensive tasks in the cloud or on a rack of your own servers better than you can buying the latest and greatest Mac Pro every few years. GPU processing is harder to scale outside of the box sitting on your desk. This doesn't meet everyone's needs today but we're talking about the future here. In 5-10 years are people going to be replacing their desktops often for more processing power? Some but probably not enough to make a high end desktop Mac a sustainable product for Apple.

- High base price : This is the real test. Anyone can say they want a high end Mac desktop but how many people are actually going to buy a $3k+ desktop? How often will they replace it? The price probably reflects the minimum amount of profitability Apple wants to continue making Mac Pros. Now it has sat on the shelf for 3 years. Are people still buying it? Like it or not that's a factor Apple has to consider. Can they sell old stock or do they have to update this thing every 6 months for it to be a viable product?

So if this was indeed an experiment we can only speculate about the results. Either the Mac Pro (in it's current form) is not a viable product for Apple or they're going back to the drawing board based on their experience with the 2013 model.

Both MBPs lost half a pound (16% on 13", 11% on 15"). That's not enough thermal room to both fit a faster intel processor and requisite battery increase, and same for AMD graphics on the 15". Granted, that IS enough to go from 16GB to 32GB max RAM, but Apple probably felt faster disk IO (3.1GB/s) would compensate for all but the most demanding workloads. Since a tiny % of users need 32GB, and LPDDR4 is probably going to deliver that when Intel gets around to adding it, they chose to slightly slim down the next chassis as they always have, and in a year or two it'll work itself out. Totally reasonable way to optimize a multi-year product launch.

Honestly I think people are blowing out of proportion what's possible here. Intel is slow to add important features (like LPDDR4), and USB-C is a temporarily annoying transition. Given the typical constraints Apple has always tried to follow (battery life, thermals, build quality, margins), this release says tons more about what Intel can ship than what Apple can.

Their breaking online preorder sales records indicate that they've made the right choice.

Snapnator - It's not the same thing, but at least something

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/436147229/snapnator-you...

(I got a Dell Latitude last time and will probably buy another one next year. Good for Linux, lots of ports, ok screen, not so expensive and sturdy. But an ugly plastic box that is not so well designed. The touch pad sucks compared to Apple's, etc. The deciding factor was that I need apt and had problems with the package managers before on MacOS.)

I think one of the good points made last week is that at this point, you're into workflow management when you hit limits like RAM because, yes, you could run two more VMs on your laptop if you had 32GB instead of 16GB, but you're already running 4, and then you'd run 6 and complain you couldn't run 10. Your base laptop will always have some limit that you'll need to deal with.

The question remaining unanswered for me is how much developers, like creative professionals before them, are influencers that drive secondary sales. I remember people crying doom for Apple when they gave up being the primary education computer with sweet deals for schools and students, because KEY DEMOGRAPHIC KEY INFLUENCE POINT KEY... and yet it didn't appear to hurt them at all. I actually question the whole "influencer" theory of marketing because of it.

AIUI, Apple made a choice to limit the memory to 16GB based on size and weight, and battery life. They'd need more power if they went with processors that handled 32GB, and that in turn would either diminish battery life or increase size and weight. Apple does have a strong desire for good battery life, size, and weight. That doesn't square with some of their existing or potential customers, but I'm sure they took that into account when they made their choice.

And there were rumors that there are going to be updates coming out next year.[0]

[0]: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/31/macbooks-2017-price-cuts...

Note the update that this rumor does not line up with leaked Intel roadmaps, so it sounds doubtful. I also don't know the history of Kuo as a rumor source. I'm leaving this in for informational purposes only.

As an aside, I think SSD has changed this discussion quite a bit over the years as well. While still slower than RAM, SSD is so much faster[1] than HDD. We do always want faster, understandably. That said, swapping isn't nearly as bad as it was.

[1]: Yeah, that's an SI unit, I believe :)

Edited to qualify rumors of the 32GB MacBook Pro.

From the article.

Not sure why people still pass this around as if it's positive.

The main strike against it I can think of is the performance hit for nested virtualization if you want to use something like Parallels or Docker inside macOS, but you can virtualize "sideways" without too much more effort in a lot of cases.

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/31/macbooks-2017-price-cuts...

Whether the trash can Mac Pro gets an update is anyone's guess.

I imagine they've got the next iMac lined up, and the Mac Pro with Skylake-E / DDR4 and some 14nm AMD chips with HBM2. The iMac today is already a Skylake product, so the things the next one needs for feature-parity are TB3, USB-C, wireless keyboard with touchbar, and a new 14nm graphics chip. Wouldn't be surprised if it also got DDR4 as well. These may come earlier and/or cheaper due to user feedback.

One change I expect that won't be driven much by feedback is price. The thing with releases like the new MBP is they typically command a price premium for a while and are then brought down in price. I'd imagine in a year the 13" MBPs will start at $1299 and 13" touchbar MBPs at $1499, roughly tracking with older prices. As the supply chain ramps up and gets more efficient, the cost of parts will drop. Hitting a target margin is the driving factor in this. Apple really does like new features (like the touch bar) to have broad availability in the lineup as quickly as possible, margins notwithstanding.

Honestly, a lot of the pent up frustration is ultimately the fault of Intel - they didn't dedicate enough R&D on Broadwell to make it a proper next step, they botched the Skylake mobile launch with bad firmware (see: buggy Surface products earlier this year), they didn't include several features important to Apple including LPDDR4 support and DisplayPort 1.3 (necessitating MST Thunderbolt connection for 5k displays) not to mention HEVC encoding, their Core M chips are way overpriced which delays the transition of the MBAir to the Macbook chassis, etc. Not to mention AMD/Nvidia have been stuck on 28nm process for far too long (5 years) due to delays and quality of 20nm process, which necessitated the wait until 14nm parts were ready to do a joint launch with the 15" MBP. It was a confluence of bad timing from third party chip manufacturers.

Also, when Apple launches something, they need them in super high volume. 13" MBPs are the #1 Mac by sales. Many other manufacturers can announce/launch flagship devices distinct from other products in their lineup with the latest chips, but wind up delaying them or just launching in very low volumes. Those manufacturers get the benefit of offering the latest & greatest, without the same level of demand to fulfill, nor level of scrutiny if delayed as would be with an Apple launch.

So unless Apple has some exclusivity with Intel & AMD for new chips, they're necessarily going to be lagging a bit based solely on volume, and have to make up for it with exclusive features (like touchbar) and fit&finish (like new chassis). Apple invests a huge amount in controlling the chip manufacturing process in iDevices including redundancy in the supply chain and (I believe) building different variants on different process nodes in parallel, all in order to push the frontier as far out as possible on capability + volume. But they can't on Mac, which means they're going to be less focused on it. Nothing like owning 100% of success or failure for you to care about it.

There's fair criticisms about USB-C but that's just how Apple does things; maybe they're 6-12mo early on it, but not much further. Same with chassis - they're dedicated to making each generation slightly smaller, and besides easing that constraint wouldn't have changed the current state of intel+amd chips, so they chose slightly lower performance now over larger chassis for years to come. I think they should have started with lower dongle prices; they clearly misread the frustration there.

We'll see what the sales are and how long this storm lasts. MBPs are going to be the driving force in mainstreaming USB-C, at least that problem will go away in a relatively short period of time. Dongles will be a way of life for older devices, but so will drivers not being updated by manufacturers and other annoyances of aging tech.

I will be confused if the next iPhone is not using the usb-c standard though. I feel like that is one thing Jobs would have not let happen. One thing he always seemed crazy about was the ecosystem and all things Apple working together.

My knee-jerk response is that no, they will pay no attention to this and will follow the current course with prejudice.

The world of the expandable, versatile, technically minded mac pro (tower) gave way to the world of the dead-sexy-but-shackled wastebasket mac pro - and I don't see them going back on that.

The one thing that gives me pause, however, is the evolution of the mac mini which changed form factor and became much, much easier to open (your thumbs, vs. weird special prybar tools that were very hard to use) and much, much easier to upgrade, customize and configure.

So their track record is a disappointing one, but it's not a perfect one ...

EDIT: I can't remember the details, but I seem to remember there was also some particular omission in macbook airs that they finally "fixed" ... when it was introduced we were told this omission was on purpose and was better for us, but then later they fixed it ... I just can't remember what it was ... something about the USB ports or ... ?

So if apple wanted the low power cpu, they had to limit everyone to 16GB.

I have seen the difference between each generation of i7 and my build times keep going down. For about 5 million LOCs of C/C++ the first takes about half an hour and the 6 gen takes about 3 minutes.

For systems developers this makes the Mac Book Pro a poor choice. But other laptops are almost as good as Desktops until we start needing things like CUDA (or more than 8 cores).

Why are you selling the option of having ONLY USB-C or ONLY USB-A as a binary thing?

Unfortunately to be replaced with 'crap, does anyone have a USB-C cable that can handle 90W?' or 'is this USB-C cable good enough to handle Thunderbolt? Why isn't my Thunderbolt device connecting' or 'is this USB-C port 3.0 or 3.1?'

Unless we standardise on over-engineered USB-C cables that can handle all possible use-cases ( and thus able to handle 100W even just to connect a mouse ) or introduce some sort of labelling system ( which doesn't move us on from the current cable-zoo ), then there's going to continue to be hair-pulling at the start of Powerpoint presentations in unfamiliar rooms.

It makes more sense to me that these machines were never intended to be released in 2017 but something happened and Apple didn't have a choice.