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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

To everyone surprised by the news, just remember: you are not Apple's target audience anymore. The developers did an amazing job of advertising the Macbook to the general public and making it seem like the cool, sexy thing that professionals use, but it's no longer just for professionals. When I went to college, I saw kids who used Macbook Pros to do nothing more than take notes, send emails, and browse facebook. I go to coffee shops and see seniors with MBA's, browsing the news.

The widespread developer backlash against the new MBP is a trivial percentage compared to the average Joe's who are going out and continuing to buy Macbooks. Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore.

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There's was very vocal backlash from some developers. Most professional developers I talked to are perfectly fine with the changes. They just weren't interested in taking part in the online drama. Maybe they were slightly annoyed or confused by one change or the other but they still thought the whole package was a good deal. And bought one.

Exactly. I am very happy with the new changes and with the direction Apple is going, but I simply have no interest in arguing with people who are unhappy. Vote with your money, I will buy the new MacBook Pro.

I think that's the thing, there's a bunch of us that have already been getting less happy with Mac OS updates over the years, so MBP was a crystallisation point of that. My next Laptop wont be a Mac in all likelihood, but the MBP changes have little to do with that.

Was it even developers? Or was it people attempting to create relevant content/build a brand online?

I know there is some overlap, but I'm shocked at how credulous HN seems to be in the face of the Internet Outrage Cycle.

Every newsworthy event generates a hoard of people that try to cultivate outrage to drive traffic to their site or to gain some recognition. A lot of this is natural, people aren't even cynical about it.

But it's useless to pay attention to it.

I think they always said "creators"

Yep. I actually looked around for alternatives, something that I haven't done in years, but I haven't seen anything else more compelling. If you want a laptop with 16 GB of RAM, HiDPI screen, a discrete GPU and 10 hours of battery life, then there really aren't very many choices. So yeah, the new MacBook Pro still looks like a pretty good options for developers.

I am surprised about them dumping MagSafe, because it's a superior power option to USB-C. And it's also surprising that they didn't include at least one USB-A port for compatibility, but that's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The touch bar I am actually excited about for what it's worth. There's a lot of developers out there that still use the mouse for a lot of actions in their editor / IDE because they can't be bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts. When those IDEs start to embrace the TouchBar it will make a lot of their lives easier by surfacing actions like stepping through a debugger, refactoring, etc.

So on the whole I really don't see that Apple is abandoning developers. I just look at what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line and I wish that Apple was investing more heavily in the same direction.

I think the new MBP seem expensive like everyone else, it I species out a Lenovo Carbon X1. There was a rebate available at the time. But otherwise the price was pretty much the same ... as usual.

It's definitely a bit more expensive, especially if you opt for the 1TB SSD. But the X1 Carbon doesn't have a discrete GPU.

There is one line of laptops I definitely prefer and highly recommend: the previous generation of the MacBook Pro.

The current generation of MacBook Air, with Five (5) Ports (Power, 2xUSB, 1xTB, 1xSD), not including the mic is pretty good value as well for a certain group of people who use a lot of connected devices in the field. I have zero reservations about recommending the i5 1.6Ghz w/8GB to anybody but the most demanding professional, who probably already knows they want something different.

I bought my 2015 15" refurb the day of the MBP Apple Event from the Apple Store. A couple of days ago all of the 15" models were sold out, but I think they have since replenished with a new batch. They seem to be selling well.

It's funny that this whole "controversy" about the new MBP had me take a closer look at my mid-2014 MBP, which is my daily workhorse. I honestly had no idea that it even had an HDMI socket. I've never once used either of the Thunderbolt sockets. I routinely forget about the second USB plug. So I basically need a single USB socket to allow me to run apps on my phone for testing. I sometimes use the SD card slot to pull images off my camera, but I could easily use a dedicated USB-C interface for that.

So am I a "pro" user? I make iPhone and web apps with lots of users that generate many millions of dollars per year, so I'm at least "prosumer", which is probably more in line with Apple's target market for MBP than someone who makes 3D games or does VFX or motion graphics, etc.

Lol...I used my 2014 MBP as my daily for about a year with an external screen running off a DisplayPort to HDMI dongle before I realized it had an HDMI port built-in. (The only reason I even noticed is because I tried to use it as a USB port...I just never looked closely at the ports on that side.)

I don't think most developers make use of the discrete GPU. Does forgoing this open up alternative options?

> If you want a laptop with 16 GB of RAM, HiDPI screen, a discrete GPU and 10 hours of battery life, then there really aren't very many choices.

Off the top of my head:

Dell XPS 15 has up to 17 hours of battery life, a 4k screen (that can be upgraded to a touchscreen), dedicated Nvidia GPU and up to 32 gigs of Ram

The Razor Blade and perpetually on the horizon Razor Blade Pro have QHD or better touchscreens, 16 gigs or more of RAM, and the best line up of dedicated graphics cards you're going to find in a laptop. Oh, and they did reactive/programable touch keyboards without removing core functionality from the device. Can't find specs on battery life at the moment. Plus, mechanical keyboard and glowy lights!

And there's the ThinkPad line up which has basically everything under the sun now.

Not to mention the Surface Book, which claims 12 hours of battery life, meets your dedicated GPU and RAM needs, and has a killer scree, that supports a some rather interesting input devices. And it can connect to an iPhone 7 without a dongle.

There are options out there.

>Dell XPS 15 has up to 17 hours of battery life, a 4k screen (that can be upgraded to a touchscreen), dedicated Nvidia GPU and up to 32 gigs of Ram

Every report I've seen from owners of the 15 says that even the 1080 version struggles to get 6 hours so where did you get 17 hours from?

Dell's own self reporting on their website, I presume. I got an XPS15 a couple of months ago and I have no idea what crack Dell smoked to get that number. I don't have a problem with the battery life personally since I'm coming off a very old laptop which has about a 6 minute lifetime, so the 4-5 hours I can get is a breath of fresh air, plus I tweaked the battery to the "mostly plugged in all the time" setting which I think works by lowering the max charge limit to 80%, so most people will probably get more than I do (at least at first). But if you're used to getting 10 hours from an existing system you may be disappointed.

Are you guys seeing 15" MBPs with discrete GPUs really get 10 hours of battery life? I've got one at home and one at work, and moderate usage manages to kill them both in 4 or so hours a lot. Big difference from the 13", which consistently lasts longer for me. That GPU likes to switch on, and that screen is a big hog too.

What are you using that causes the discrete GPU to turn on? Install Gfxcardstatus to find out.

I get about 8 hours on my 2 year old 15 rMBP with Safari. Less than 4 hours with Chrome.

Interesting, haven't tried Safari. Chrome and Firefox are both big big culprits for flipping the GPU on for me.

Safari has improved dramatically in the past couple years. Give it a shot.

Chrome and Firefox drain batteries really fast. When I use Chrome on my MBP, I have 2 to 4 hours less battery life compared to Safari. Google / the Blink developers really don’t care about draining the battery. It is infuriating because Opera, Vivaldi and other browsers using the Blink engine suffer from the same problem. Safari has come a long way, both in terms of battery savings and usability. I use Safari Technology Preview[1], which is the most up-to-date version of Safari. Apple releases an update every two to four weeks.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/

No, I don't even think 6-7 hours is bad unless I'm flying and even then most seats have plugs these days it's just a pain to have the cables all out. I just noticed the huge disconnect from the 17 hour claim.

Between Chrome and Photoshop my GPU seems to be on pretty much all the time on my MBP. I get probably 5-6 hours on it working unplugged(my power cable is usually at my standing desk and some days I'm lazier than normal so I get close to this before standing up again).

Not in European planes.

>Are you guys seeing 15" MBPs with discrete GPUs really get 10 hours of battery life?

I get close to 8 hours with a late 2013 MBPr 15".

Pulled it from their website. Should have said 'claims up to' like I did with the Surface Book.

>Dell XPS 15 has up to 17 hours of battery life, a 4k screen (that can be upgraded to a touchscreen), dedicated Nvidia GPU and up to 32 gigs of Ram

I don't see any 32Gig update, either as standard (16GB) or even as a customization option.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd

As for the battery life, LaptopMag gives: 10:26 for the 1080p XPS 15 and a meagre 6:36 for the 4K screen.

I also think the SSD is quite slower, single thunderbolt port (it has 2 USB 3 ports and HDMI), and the touchpad is worse. So there's also that.

The fact that the Razor Blade doesn't even advertise the battery life tells me everything I need to know about what I should expect from that line.

Also, dell battery life is only decent with the 1080p screen. Everything I heard about the higher resolution touch screen is that it eats battery life (and the 16 GB of RAM on the XPS 13 only comes with the touch screen).

Thank you for the list, but how is this an alternative? None of those run macOS (not Hackintosh). I'm not being fastidious, but I have an nontrivial software investment in macOS and Windows Any Version is not an alternative.

Yes, the new MBP wasn't all we could have hoped for, but I had held out for a very long time and it's the best option I have.

EDIT: A actually do also have an XPS 15 w/Ubuntu, but that combination isn't quite a replacement for an MBP.

I would be surprised if most of the vocal ones didn't still go out and buy one...

As someone who has been on MBP's for the last 7 years I recently jumped ship for 15" Dell XPS with Windows 10 and I am happy I did. However, that is because to me Win10 is now way more appealing than OSX. I hadn't updated OSX since Mavericks because there were exactly 0 new features that interested me. I don't have an iPhone/iPad/iEtc and I don't use the built-in OSX apps and it honestly seems like those two thing are all that Apple has cared about with OSX in recent years.

It wasn't easy to find a laptop with hardware that is acceptable coming from an MBP, it was a short list. But OS wise, Windows 10.1607 is, for me, way better than OSX at this point. IMO OSX feels dated, and toy-like compared to what Win10 has become. I was a heavy terminal user in OSX, like many dev's it was the *nix part of OSX that got me. But now with both the updated command prompt and WSL I don't miss the terminal, period. Also, Win10 virtual desktops already work better than OSX!

One month ago I bought gaming PC with Windows 10 for my son and I helped him to install some programs and games. After 3 years of exclusive usage of OS X, my first impression of modern Windows 10 was "hm, it looks great even on 4K monitor (UI scaled well), takes few seconds to load and works fine - maybe I should try it again". Only annoying thing I found is extreme level of espionage in OS and fact that sometimes Windows will install updates and reboot even if I don't want it.

This! I mean, it's not full of every feature and every performance optimization, but you know what? It is still the best tool for the job.

"The best deal available" isn't necessarily "the best possible deal".

I agree. I'm actually totally fine with the changes. The only thing I need to do is get a USB-C to lighting connecter so I can build code on the go and I'll be fine. I do feel this is a transition, but Apple has always been out in front willing to make the tough decision to force it's customers to move.

Probably the easiest lighting solution is to use the existing cable with USB C to USB A adapter (couple $ on Amazon)

Yeah. I just bought an iMac earlier this year - Top CPU specs updated to 64GB of ram so I mostly just develop on that and it's got 4 USB-A ports. I'll probably stick with that until the spring version of the rMBP is released.

> Most professional developers I talked to are perfectly fine with the changes. They just weren't interested in taking part in the online drama.

You just described my reaction to every single MBP thread I've seen since the announcement. Not only did I not want to participate in the drama, I have a feeling that a fair number of people who did will turn around and buy an MBP anyway. People are risk-averse and howl indiscriminately when things change. Let's hear about some real experiences of developers having problems using it, then it may be legitimate to revisit the issue

I bought one. The dongle situation will be annoying for a while, and I don't know what my hybrid options will be when I get my first USB-C monitor. Hopefully it will have a thunderbolt 2 port for my older computers that I'm at Apple's mercy with (the Mac Pro being the primary example, but also the iMac).

Otherwise, it looks like a solid upgrade. I don't need the battery life and would prefer to trade it for 32GB, but I understand why they made that decision.

I'm not enthused about the touchbar and price increase, but I'll reluctantly buy one anyway because macos is still the best OS available, and the touchpad and gestures actually work. I could give two shits about thinness, dongles, and slick-looking aluminum bodies. If Windows ever gets good gesture support, working virtual screens, non-wonky hiDpi support, and a comparable trackpad, I'll switch immediately.

Most professional developers have simply no choice if they don't work with Windows. I've been investigating a current Linux laptop that is not too heavy and supports external 4k monitors over dp 1.2 - no luck. Most modern models (e.g. dell xps 13 and 15) struggle with the USB-C alternate mode for displayport, and DP-provided models (e.g. xps 9343) are not on sale anymore.

Not to say that external monitor support in Linux, especially Ubuntu, is terrible: try using a 4k monitor along with a non-4k monitor. It will simply create so many issues that, in the end, you'll open your wallet and get a Macbook Pro. I've just bought a 2015 15-inch.

I guess you tried it with Unity then. Monitor support and how it feels strongly depends on the Desktop environment used. I never had a issue with Gnome Shell or even Fluxbox, it is even way less of a pain than the crazy bugs OSX seems to have with multi monitor setups.

Running Linux. I don't have a 4k monitor, but multiple monitors are trivial to set up and automate with XRANDR. In addition, window managers like I3 allow for fully customizable, keyboard-driven navigation between screens and windows. Not saying there are no problems, but once you figure things out the setup is much more extensible than what I was experiencing on Windows previously (former Windows dev here).

Mixed HiDPI with regular resolutions are horrible in Linux, I use it daily and probably tried most DE's and WM's, problem is that it will either look bad on the HiDPI-monitors or the standard ones. The resolution to dot independence in OS X is probably one of the strongest features today, especially paired with quick resolution switchers.

I'll even dispute the "widespread developer backlash" -- it looks good to me, and this reception seems no different from the reception to previous Apple products that broke with the past (no floppy drive, USB for keyboard & mouse, etc.)

It's temporarily painful, but USB C seems like a tremendous improvement, and 4 full ports is mighty.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I sure will miss the magsafe. I knock mine out at least once or twice a week. Maybe someone will make a USB-C cable with a magnetic breakaway in the middle.

you can already find those on amazon fyi

https://smile.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3...

What I really want is a dongle that lets me use my existing magsafe bricks with the new MBP. Is there one of those coming?

There's a cheap Chinese one on Amazon but apparently it doesn't work properly https://www.amazon.com/HIOTECH-MagSafe-Adapter-Converter-Con...

Sounds exactly like something I want to plug into my brand new up-to-$4K laptop...

The other guys managed to design one with a < 3mm profile. It should be possible, shouldn't it?

The big problem would be with the voltage. But it looks like the USB-3.1 spec supports 20 volts (same as the 85W brick that comes with high end MBPs), and the mac power bricks only send 3-7V until they've had a handshake with the computer.

So it seems at least within the realm of physics that you could make a dongle about the size of the old magsafe-1 to magsafe-2 adapter...

Wow, that's cool. There are apparently ones for micro USB, which means that ... I can have a magsafe adapter for my phone. I might have to buy one, as my kids destroyed the last charger they tried to unplug from my phone.

Now they just need to get USB-C on the next iPhone, and everyone will complain that Lightning was fine. They should have done USB-C from the beginning for lightning, but it wasn't ready yet (and still really isn't in terms of ecosystem and standardization in practice).

> USB-C on the next iPhone

Not gonna happen, iOS devices are Apple devices.

The best you can hope for is a short 1st party lightning to USB-C female, but this probably won't happen for a while as USB-C spec requires ANYTHING with a receptacle to talk to the thing on the other end.

USBc was a response to lighting, so that would be difficult.

Please do not recommend the Griffin product for the MacBook Pro. It is not rated for 87W.

Shouldn't it negotiate with the Source using its Cable Identifier and simply provide 60W (20V @ 3A) maximum to the MBP? So a slow charge, but not dangerous?

Has anyone tested this scenario in real life? I'd imagine that if the machine is idle, 60W would at least provide break-even, and in sleep, should be able to charge it. But that's assuming that the identity negotiation works properly with this hardware combination.

I haven't calculated it, but I don't see that laptop consume more than 60W.

Unless you've got all CPU and GPU cores blazing, and one or more devices quick-charging. And then it'll temporarily dip into the battery.

I wasnt trying to recommend a specific product, which is why i linked to the search rather than a specific product page.

I havent used any of them so wouldnt feel comfortable recommending any individual model

While I haven't tried it yet, as far as I can tell the USB-C connectors have a lot less friction than other connectors, so maybe magsafe is just simply less necessary now?

Less friction?

Personally, as a developer, I also have no trouble whatsoever with the new macbook pro. shrug

Four ports is not enough. If you plug in three displays and a charger, they're all taken already. At the very least a fifth port for a usb hub, or a usb hub integrated into the charger, should have been included.

You expect to have four usb-c/tb3 displays, but none of them to provide power to your laptop?

If you want a hub, plug in a usb-c hub that provides power and it will power the laptop.

Do people even read about how things work before they make up crazy scenarios to justify their outrage?

If you plug in three displays, why would you get a portable laptop in the first place?

Because one may occasionally needs to also bring it out?

You have the option of "docking" a portable but you will never be able to conveniently lug along something like a desktop unless you carry some display device along with it.

If you plug in three displays and a charger...

...then you're the kind of person that has no problem plugging all of that stuff into a hub so that you only have one cable to connect.

It's a made-up problem with an easy solution that is arguably the only correct solution. If Apple put five ports on there, I suspect your imaginary scenario would then involve four displays.

You can't plug USB type C displays into hubs, they need to be connected directly. A display with a built in hub (like the thunderbolt display) is possible but doesn't yet exist. My imaginary scenario doesn't involve 4 external displays because the Intel chipset in the macbook can only drive 4 displays total, including the internal one.

Just to add to the pile-on, displays are the new hubs. If you're plugging into even 1, you can get a whole range of ports available again.

With issues like these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYVjIjBMx6o I'm having doubts if the new mac book can even handle 3 displays.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204154

It says use Thunderbolt, and you can daisy-chain a display. Thus, with 1 port you can connect two Thunderbolt displays.

It also says it doesn't support more than two displays in any case.

USB type-C/Thunderbolt 3 is a fantastic technology, but I guarantee you that USB type-A devices will still be around by the time these new USBC-only MBP's are replaced. Embracing the future at the expense of the present is not innovative or courageous, it is intentionally designed to sell more accessories.

Oh, come on. Just a quick search "usb c to usb a" on Amazon gives lots of options. This [1] is two compact adapters for $8. Buy couple of these, put it on every cable you're using and you're golden.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/AUKEY-Adapter-MacBook-Google-OnePlus/...

That's not the point.

Here is what you can say about USB-A: * Ubiquitous; it is literally everywhere on this planet * Extremely cheap, reliable and easy to use * Not actually a competitor to USB-C/TB3 * Does not prevent the inclusion of USB-C/TB3 * Does not present packaging or legacy support issues

USB-C/TB3 is a great technology and I wouldn't want to buy a system without at least one port, but it is NOT a replacement for USB-A yet. USB-A will continue to be the most prevalent peripheral connector for long after these new MBP's are retired.

I will add: USB-C/TB3 is not exactly easy to use at this point. The convenience of using that same port for both protocols (TB3 and USB3.1) is introducing confusion. Not every USB-C port/peripheral is also a TB3 port/peripheral, this includes adapters and dongles. Additionally, the power options of USB-C/TB3 add another wrinkle: what hubs/docks/devices can provide enough power to charge specific devices? Not to mention that the current crop of USB-C/TB3 accessories don't always 'just work'[1]. Hopefully this will get better, but again it is not going to displace USB-A for a long, long time.

[1] http://www.apple.com/ca/shop/reviews/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital...

Pay for new shiny ports and then pay for cheap adapters to make ports less new and less handy and less portable, but usable. Awesome idea.

I'm a full time iOS developer and I think the new MBP will meet my needs. I'm looking forward to buying one and trying it out.

I'm disappointed it won't be configurable with more than 16 GB of RAM but that appears to be an Intel issue (I know you can argue they could choose a different CPU, but it is a mobile device and low power CPUs make sense in that regard).

I would love to hear from Apple what their plan is for the Mac Pro, but I'm planning on buying a new MBP soon.

What do you mean it's an Intel issue? There are other Skylake laptops with more than 16GB, e.g. the Dell XPS 15.

Edit: The Dell can have the same CPU i7-6700HQ with 32GB RAM.

The CPUs in question support up to 16 GB of LPDDR3 or 32 GB of DDR4, but do not support LPDDR4. Apple needs the LPDDR* variant to meet their power budget.

So... because the CPU that Apple chose doesn't support >16GB RAM in a way that's convenient for Apple to meet an Apple-imposed specification, it's Intel's problem?

It was a design trade off Apple made. They could sacrifice power efficiency for additional memory (LPDDR4 on the CPU is limited to 16 GB, DDR4 can go up to 32 GB).

I'm pretty confident if Intel's CPU supported more RAM they would of made it a configurable option. Apple still has configurable graphics cards, hard disk sizes and CPU speeds. RAM could of easily been another configuration they could of offered.

Like I said previously, the MacBook Pro is a mobile device so making a trade off for power efficiency makes perfect sense to me.

A largely Apple-customer imposed specification, and one which I, for one, welcome.

Sure, so am I. My Air has 4GB RAM and it's mostly fine - I was hoping to see an upgrade in October, but 8GB would suffice.

My only point was that this really isn't something that Intel does or even should care about, it's the result of Apple's decisions; isn't even necessarily their "problem".

Well, it kinda is, because low-power/long battery life is a reasonable requirement for a laptop, and it is a limitation of the Intel chipset that doesn't allow more than 16GB of low-power memory. Or in other words, how could Apple solve the requirement of low-power/long battery life together with 32GB RAM without Intel?

Also, if low-power, long battery life and low weight are not your requirements, maybe you're not in the market for a laptop?

Intel only supports LPDDR3 and DDR4, not the lower power variants of DDR4. Switching from low power uses a lot more battery (idle usage is especially low in LP).

How on earth is that an Intel issue when it was Apple that decided to put even less battery in the thing than the previous model?

Engineering is about finding a balance among opposing constraints; Apple clearly decided that a svelter profile was more important than larger memory sizes for its market.

Don't know why your comment is getting down voted. I think that's the core issue here. Everybody loves that Apple provides high quality hardware, and a neat operating system that is very dev friendly (unixy). It is the choice of sacrificing compatibility for thinner and svelte that pisses some of us off. The best would've been for them to choose DDR4 instead here and add more battery with the same size MBP as earlier versions. I'd have been perfectly happy. Again, that's just me. Looks like there are several others perfectly content with Apple's choices.

Is it really necessary to have over 16GB on a developer's machine? I know 16GB is not enough when one is into heavy data mining, but to write a code even if that requires to run several VMs? For example, I do occasional development on MacBook and 8GB is very OK.

Whether or not someone needs it depends on their circumstances. You may argue that a dev shouldn't, but that doesn't mean that some do.

Whether or not Apple produces a laptop with more than 16GB is up to them and what tradeoffs they make.

Easily done if you have a couple of VMs, a couple of IDEs with big projects, a SQL editor, 50 chrome tabs as well as the standard suite of programs (audio, calendar, email etc).

That's what I'm using right now. 16GB may be just about fine for this, but in a couple of years it would be nice to have 32GB just to be on the safe side..

Have you ever ran Xcode? :)

I have macbook air 13" with 4 gb RAM. I use it for app development using XCode.

Me too.

I've heard that the SSD drive makes it the XCode experience more tolerable when it has to hit the swap disk. Personally on my iMac without an SSD and 4GB it was unbearably slow, but it improved a lot when I upgraded to 20GB of RAM and no longer had to hit the swap disk.

I've used Xcode on my Asus EeePC with 2 GB RAM. It uses most of the free memory, but it doesn't crash or slow down.

This was probably 10.6 before they dropped Atom support in the XNU kernel or are you using a replacement kernel?

Yes, it's running 10.6.8.

I would look at how much memory it consumes. It takes about 2-3gb on my large 300kloc project.

Just wanted to point this blog article out. https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355

The author tested Xcode and ran "four production Objective-C projects, all cleaned and rebuilt."

Same guy also says you shouldn't use Chrome or Slack because they use lots of RAM (I guess it sucks to be the developer that has to use both of these). Apple's new "Pro" machines have similar specs to their three year old pro machines. They are a lot thinner, but that's not a Pro feature.

> A couple apps you won’t see on this list are Chrome and Slack. Both of these applications have widespread reports of being memory pigs, and in my opinion you should boycott them until the developers learn how to write them to play nicer with memory.

I got my 2013 Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and I'm happy I did, it has aged well. Will a 2016 MBP age similarly well? I guess we'll find out.

With projects which are purely code, Xcode works fine. Projects with large Storyboard files make the dev experience painful.

At the moment on my machine, I have 16 GB of RAM but I've already got 3.91 GB of swap being used. I'm on a MBP Early 2015 with the upgraded i7 CPU.

Xcode is currently using 4.15 GB of RAM (3.20 GB Compressed), its definitely my biggest memory hog. lldb-rpc-server is using 680.4 MB (387 MB Compressed), so that doesn't help with my memory usage.

I often watch for when my computer will start swapping so I can know to close some of the higher memory usage apps to reduce the swap death effect.

My 2012 MacBook Air has 8GB of RAM, drives three displays, with nine virtual desktops, and I'm usually running with Windows and Debian VMs simultaneously.

I do some heavy data mining, but any problem that won't fit in RAM gets offloaded to a cluster on AWS.

I write c++ and regularly run out of memory on my workstation with 32GB ram. Mind you, I'm not in the market for a laptop to do this on. If I had to compile my work projects on Mac, I'd be buying a Mac Pro.

My pc at home has 8GB, I use mostly for games. It's more and more commonly not quite enough.

I don't think products are designed on what's necessary. They have a core set of features designed for the 'mainstream' and a more specific set designed for the 'long tail'. Apple probably thinks the long tail is not so long or that their product is not competitive in that segment - which it isn't.

>I do occasional development on MacBook and 8GB is very OK.

What sort of development?

Not parent, but I'm working on a late '13 MBP, 8GB ram.

I spend basically all day doing Rails development, with MySQL, ElasticSearch, background job processing, etc. I'd be happier with 16gb, but tbh memory isn't the thing stalling my work (even with a lot of chrome tabs open) - it's usually waiting for my app to load to run some tests, or reloading my dev server.

I do mostly C++ dev work in Visual Studio, and occasionally run CAD/Engineering tools, in addition to processing large data files. ALso, I usually have 1-2 VMs running in the background (but they dont see much use). I used to think 16GB was enough, till I upgraded to 32GB. A lot of the benefit is derived from the fact that I never shutdown my PC, and so the cached data tends to stick around for a long time (last time I rebooted was around 75 days ago). I've run perfmon over the course of a week and watched my page faults drop as more and more stuff gets cached. I won't say its going to be the same for you but IMHO its worth a shot. You could at the very least test how much time you're spending on page faults over the course of a week or so since per-day savings would probably be minimal.

I use my MacBook 2015 mostly for my personal projects with few VMs running copies of web sites, compilers, QtCreator and Eclipse. This works nicely. On the other hand with things like Jupyter notebooks at work 16 GB is clearly a bare minimum when running algorithms on 100GB dataset..

My MBP drives a 32in display and these apps open on startup - 3 IDEs (Java, PHP, Python), excel, chrome, firefox, iterm2, sublime, slack, hipchat, oxygenxml, sqldeveloper.

The above open in desktops (Misson Windows). I do not do heavy data analysis. I never run low on memory with 16GB.

Performance is not a problem. I do open 1 VM form time to time and again no problem.

The VMs are a killer. I fairly often wish to debug our mobile app. This ends up involving spinning up both the client and server (which is a collection of VMs) plus both IntelliJ and Unity. 16GB isn't really enough to do this without being very careful about memory.

If VMs are Linux, try to activate zram there, it allows to reduce VM's memory significantly. With typical compression factor of above 2 this allows to shrink VMs by at least 30% with tolerable loss of performance.

Developer? I guess not. For a DevOps engineer? Probably yes. It's not impossible but having to spin up/down virtual and/or complex docker-compose configs to release RAM would slow you down considerably.

Even for a developer... When I'm in the middle of development I'm running two or three Vagrant / VirtualBox instances on my laptop, along with a handful of Visual Studio instances and that can easily chew up more than 16GB of RAM.

Doing Node development... Not such a big deal.

On top of that, they have the fastest SSDs in a laptop. It's not optimal, but swap is still extremely viable. Also, doesn't macOS have memory compression on top of that?

With my workflow the memory compression on macos does not help much. zram in Linux works much better. For example, few years ago I could run a couple of Eclipse instances and a browser with a few opened tabs on 2GB Chromebook, but 4GB Macbook Air with Yosemite struggled to run a browser, IDE and 1.7GB VM. It turned out that bumping VM size to 2.2 GB, activating zram there and running IDE inside VM lead to much more responsive setup. And it seems Sierra has not changed the picture, https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/52779

I'm an iOS and Rails stack developer, and 8GB on my last-gen MBP is just fine. Sure, now I do regret not making the upgrade to 16GB, but that's just thinking about the future, not the now.

That being said, I don't do microservices/many VMs/containers, etc.

> you are not Apple's target audience anymore

recently researched dozens of Windows notebooks and I found two reasons why the new Macbooks might be still for developers:

- Only notebooks which can drive 2x 5k displays + the internal, there is no Windows notebook which can do this; and having two ultra sharp 27" 5k displays is something that might be attractive for developers

- the new MBP 15 is the lightest quad-core 15" machine by far, also not the worst thing

Mhm, have you looked at the Razer Blade, or the Razer Blade Stealth? I'm very certain that the bundled in NVIDIA 10XX will power through.

Company has a very poor track record with supporting reasonable operating systems, the build quality is notably sub-par on older editions of the laptop and the support is apparently awful.

I don't think I will be citing this as an example of "something to compete with apple"

The only competing option to the 15" is the XPS 15, and it looks like (judging by the non-touchbar) Apple is going to stomp Dell in battery life in the high res configuration.

The battery life is "good enough" for both of them... besides developers do not necessarily require fantastic battery life.

When I buy a laptop I don't just care about the battery life it has now - but also about the one three years later. Actually, these days I'll probably keep a laptop for five years, the desktop even longer, since there just is no compelling reason to buy something new sooner. So I want the battery to be good for me even when it's only half the initial capacity.

Developers is a broad term. "drive 2x 5k displays + the internal" might be appealing, in the same way that gloves are appealing to car drivers.

Maybe your developer archetype is too specific. #NotAllDevelopers

The ability to connect two 5K monitors is sure to sell a ton of units. /s

The number of people buying the much more expensive 5K monitors instead of the already great 4K monitors is rather small. That's why there are only three different 5K monitor models on the market.

There should be no surprise here. Macbook pros haven't been for 'pros' for at least 4 years: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/11/08/reddit-mbps

Another dev who is very happy with the new machines, ordered one right away. In fact, I was very close to ordering a 12" MacBook, but the 13" was close enough, 1 port is a bit on the low side (4 USB-C is awesome, and I can't wait to get everything unified) and the TouchBar is quite intriguing.

I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads (except for maybe some very specialised ones). While the Apple II with 48KB was a bit cramped, even an Amiga with 512k + 2MB RAMDisk was pretty decent, never mind the workstation-class NeXT cube with 16 or 32MB. (IIRC, developers at NeXT had 8MB machines, with compiles farmed out to servers, in order to "encourage" efficiency). I also developed significant Java server software on a 12" PowerBook G4.

Of course, the reality is that Xcode with clang/LLVM based tooling and its dictionary-based programming style sucks up RAM and CPU like you wouldn't believe, and various other decisions have been made in favour of recompiling/reindexing the world whenever possible. Swift takes that direction and dials it up to 11.

Anyone interested in more efficient dev tooling? Factor 10-100 improvements in performance are well within reach. Sub-second rebuild instead of minute+, MacBook/iPad plenty fast enough. etc.

One port is "a bit on the low side".....

German: "Not entirely atrocious" → American: "Amazingly fantastically awesome"

>I am personally appalled that 16GB could be considered too little memory for developer workloads

It depends what you are developing. If I am debugging, I often have to spin up Unity, plus a crapton on 3D models and assets, plus the server which is a bunch of VMs, plus IntelliJ. This is in addition to Chrome and slack. It's okay on 16GB but I occasionally get issues and a couple of years from now this will likely get worse.

I'm not actually clear how this laptop is supposed to be worse for developers. It's not like most of us are EEs; we hardly ever need any sort of weird ports or anything. In fact, about half my work is EE and I'm doing fine with a 12" MacBook. The only thing we've lost is the physical escape and function keys, and that's not exactly a show-stopper. Possibly a mild inconvenience.

I'll probably buy a MacBook or MacBook Pro for my next laptop, unless something obviously better (including quality and support lifetime) is on the market, which right now it doesn't appear to be.

The problem is that we were expecting a significant upgrade and got minor tweaks. The new Macbook Pro doesn't give me a strong reason to upgrade, and I would have liked to have one.

I feel like this is a common, quiet sentiment amongst developers. The freakout about the direction the line is going is very vocal minority.

Yep. I'm a freelance developer and I bought a new MBP. I don't mind a soft-key function row, and I'm kinda curious what people can do with it. I don't need an SD card slot.

Losing Magsafe, 16GB top-out on the RAM are disappointing, but when I looked at alternatives nothing stood out as 'better'. I could get something much more powerful, but generally bigger and/or with worse battery. I've got a desktop for when I need nothing but horsepower. When I'm out working for clients I need something that fits in my bag on my bike.

HW developer here with similar experience. The only thing I could really use is more than 16 GByte of memory. Otherwise, the new MBPs are enough for basically all my work. Being able to that in a small package is great.

I went from MBA to MBPr for the better screen resolution and more than 8 GByte RAM which was a big problem running VMs with FPGA tools, but missed the size and low weight of the MBA. The new MBP without TouchBar is basically the machine I wanted when I switched to MBPr

When the MBP don't have the oomph to build a big FPGA, run huge simulations in reasonable time, build big SW systems etc, you need to use a server anyway. IMHO.

For me the other issues I can overlook somewhat, but the killer is the keyboard. It seems to divide people strongly one way or the other, but to me its horrendous. There's basically 0 key travel, the keys just click. I average about the same typing speed as my 2014 mbp but the experience is not nice, and for longer days spent coding I'm sure it'll become uncomfortable on your finger tips.

And the question is why? I can only think the decisions behind the keyboard are to facilitate the goal of making the MacBook thinner and thinner, the point of diminishing returns on that was passed 2 years ago.

On top of that, I bought my MacBook pro in 2014 for £1200, to replace it today with the bottom 13" model would cost £1750. That's some price hike!

Completely agree. The keyboard is the dealbreaker for me too. When I need a new laptop Apple will no longer be producing a machine with an adequate keyboard. Stupidly, the keyboard is what will force me to switch to Windows/Linux.

I actually like the keyboard. I tend to glide over the keyboard to find the right keys, minimizing wrist movement. Combination of feel, sound, flatness are somehow very satisfying.

But! The butterfly keys are stiffer for smaller keys so ironically(?), the Fn keys and arrow keys are hard to find and press. I actually use the arrow keys so I find using the Ctrl shortcuts more often for moving the cursor around.

> The only thing we've lost is the physical escape and function keys, and that's not exactly a show-stopper. Possibly a mild inconvenience.

Show-stopper for me. I have no need to retrain my coding habits, there are plenty of computer companies that still happily provide the ESC key as they have for the last 30 years, so I'll just move to one of those computer brands.

or use an external keyboard, which is what I plan on doing.

I code a lot sitting on the couch, external keyboards are pretty inconvenient.

But to your point, there are many ways I could workaround this change (changing key mappings, for example). But my point is; I don't have to. There are plenty of companies willing to sell me a computer with the same keyboard layout that's been standard for the last 30 years. I'll just buy one of those.

I see this no different than any other product I use on a daily basis; I would be resistant to change if it aversely affected my use. Luckily, I don't need to change my habits to conform to Apple's latest bravery. Apple needs to know this; they don't own their customers.

Have you tried using 'jj' or 'jk' instead?

Honestly curious, as I don't have a strong opinion against the Touch Bar.

Is your main gripe that the esc key is no longer a physical key? Or that learning a new placement of the esc key is difficult to adjust to?

I'm an EE. I use my mbpr when I can, which is generally when I'm developing a tool.

I do python, clojure, haskell, rust dev on my mbpr using spacemacs and VSCode. I make heavy use of the escape key, and I'll probably miss that. On windows my capslock is both escape and ctrl depending on how I use it. On my mbpr it's just ctrl until karabiner catches up with the current OSX release.

I have 16GB right now. Photoshop makes use of it, but it's gratuitous use. It worked fine on my 8GB previous mbpr too. ZBrush does just fine with it. I'd have to look again, but I don't think I've ever come close to using all my ram without running VMs.

And with docker-for-mac maturing, I don't really run many VMs anymore.

I think all the people complaining about having to "look down" at their keyboard for the touchbar are full of it. There has to be something wrong with your eyes if you have to move your head to see it. It's about an 30mm away from the edge of the screen.

You can still buy Macbooks with an escape key. Most of the TouchBar layouts still have Esc (though not in the optimal fitts-law position).

I personally think the issue is way overblown. 16GB RAM is far more of a concern for me. Logging in via TouchID would be a very nice feature.

The physical function keys seem like more of an issue than escape, since I thought most people who use escape a lot in their work already use the capslock key in its place. The discussion can be weird here, someone posted that they wished the MacBook Pro came with a GPIO port, though maybe it was only that they wished it did, rather than they thought it should have a GPIO port.

Just an opinion, but I do kind of wish that the new touch bar was at the bottom of the keyboard (with good palm rejection intelligence) instead. I'm not sure I'll transition to using it if it is a pain to reach. Being able to choose external keyboards with the touch bar at the top or bottom would be kind of nice.

One thing that I would have liked about having an SD slot was the potential to store 100-200GB iTunes library on silent, slow, inexpensive flash, rather than wasting space on the main fast but expensive drive. Even though a cheap SD card could be unreliable, the music would be backed up elsewhere, and changes within the last day aren't important.

> The physical function keys seem like more of an issue than escape, since I thought most people who use escape a lot in their work already use the capslock key in its place.

I assume you are talking about Vim users. The escape key is the default. Be careful about assuming that "most people" change the defaults, that's almost never the case.

Agreed that it's not actually worse, but it is a bit underwhelming after the (long) wait and the (high) price.

I would have liked one or more of

- an extra port (or included dongles)

- CUDA-ble graphics card (obviously mostly for testing)

- More RAM.

but I can live without all of those things for now....

Its pretty bad for on-the-go audio people. Many good/common/popular audio interfaces are still firewire-based, and I havent seen a solution that involves fewer than 2 dongles.

Not every developer on this planet cares about the coincidence that macOS is a UNIX, it is a nice to have feature, but that is all about it.

Actually I bet that those that regularly attend WWDC, the actual developers that Apple cares about, don't care that much about the vocal minority.

I am a developer, XCode and all the other developer tools work perfectly fine for mac OS, iOS and tvOS applications.

Also for those workflows, targeting actual Apple customers that love the whole packaged experience of hardware + software, we hardly fill 8GB, let alone 16GB.

Yet, we all know what happens to companies who lose their developers. It just takes a few years to materialize.

Maybe Apple need Steve Ballmer to remind them what's important ;)

There's a difference between losing your developers and losing the developer market. Plenty of companies thrive without targeting the developer market.

I'll bet you those companies don't hold a monopoly on the platform, though.

> Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore.

Maybe, and maybe not.

For example, I bumped into an issue with the older MBP where if you plug in a Universal Audio audio interface and a 4K monitor, the audio interface starts to hiccup. The 4K monitor moves too much data over Thunderbolt in a single transaction and so overruns the latency limits for the audio interface. I had to solve this by putting the 4K monitor on the HDMI.

So, what "end user type" is going to figure this out? Universal Audio somehow missed this--nobody doing audio driver development on 4K monitors, possibly--and likely couldn't do anything about it anyhow. Apple likely missed this because it's just a couple of people. Most end users just return the audio interface with a "doesn't work".

The fact that everybody missed this means that Microsoft now has a windows of opportunity in audio. They have a gigantic touchscreen with huge resolution. If they didn't mess up and they separated the interfaces, they have a clean run to displace Apple in the audio space for years.

These are the kind of things your developers run down. Piss them off at your peril.

>To everyone surprised by the news, just remember: you are not Apple's target audience anymore. The developers did an amazing job of advertising the Macbook to the general public and making it seem like the cool, sexy thing that professionals use, but it's no longer just for professionals.

Two things:

They were never "just for professionals" -- they were the "computer for the rest of us". Marketing wise at least.

They also were never about raw power. They were never the ultimate number crunching machines nor gaming laptops.

And the CEO of a company, executives, journalists, doctors, managers, etc -- people who don't need the latest Nvidia card or 32GB RAM -- are also professionals.

For videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, the MBPr 15" is one of the most popular, and well speced machines out there. Individual PC laptops can have this or that spec better, but rarely the all around package (weight, size, sturdiness, touchpad, screen quality, SSD speed, battery, etc) -- and in those rare cases, the price is very close.

> videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers

I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day. A lot of people in the audio industry went nuts when Apple stopped letting you add RAM because you could hardly have a serious production machine without maxing it out. After Effects, C4D, Blender, etc. will be rendering for a week straight (if at all). Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers. Ever sat there watching a progress bar for a minute or two just to crop an image? That's what you're proposing as "well spec'd".

Your point about non creative professionals does hold water, though - that's the main audience IMO, the tech clueless types who are nevertheless obsessed with being involved with a "premium" brand. And yep, if you just want a couple spreadsheets, some social media, and maybe some reports, they're spec'd phenomenally for that kind of thing.

>I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day.

While 32GB would have been nice (especially for video) I've used NLEs professionally and DAWs semi-professionally for years, and it was already 4-5 years ago that DAWs could run almost everything you threw at them in a normal session. 100s of audio tracks and tons of effects. And we still have freeze etc. Tons of pro musicians still use 3-5 year old laptops or iMacs with 8GB or less just fine. Most pro studios don't even have latest or maxed out Macs (or PCs for that matter) unless the owner is technophile. And for stuff like notation, tracking, mastering etc (as opposed to mixing) cpu power / ram is not even needed.

>Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers.

Where was that ever an issue and on what jobs? Pro designers did the most complex composites and layouts, for print media and billboards, 5 and 10 and 15 years ago. It's not like resolutions have gone up since then (the high dpi computer screens are nothing much compared to high quality large sized print jobs people did in Photoshop even 10 or 20 years ago).

Of course Apple wants to sell MacBooks to developers, and I'm sure a lot of devs will happily buy it. Because many of the flaws and issues, that are notoriously being pointed out on HN/Reddit, don't really apply to the individual buyer, or are vastly exaggerated. I mean I'm a dev, and getting a couple of USB-C cables is really that hard and inconvenient? The answer you get from the online collective is yes, but in real life the buyer decides most of these things are non-issues for himself. Same thing with every Apple product as far as I can remember, always lots of controversy, everybody has a opinion on why/what went wrong, but at the end of the day it's a perfectly fine for most people (including devs).

Nobody is surprised, or incapable of understanding that. The touchbar is a mostly a gimmick. Its a tiny screen that you have to poke at while your finger obscures the display. However, I'd say its still worth it for the touch ID alone - assuming people figure out a way to link it to online logins.

Professionals complained about several lacking features in product that used to be designed for professionals. People need to recalibrate. A "Pro" label doesn't mean anything anymore.

> Apple doesn't have to listen to what the developers want--they don't need your business anymore.

I'd say they already got their money. Instead of repeat business, they're looking for new ppl to keep buying their products.

s/MBP/$1200 Facebook machine/g

(This has been the MBP nickname de rigeur for a few years, but I'm too lazy to dig up the original source.)

http://m.quickmeme.com/img/4a/4a7f932881de8723c2f5ab516b69f8...

As a developer, I am not unhappy about the new MBP. I have a feeling that they are abandoning me. I can understand that they are focusing on making profit, but at least they should keep me/us informed of the mac future.

I want a desktop machine with modern GPU, at least 32gig ram. That I can upgrade if needed.

My hackintosh runs fine, but it is, well, a "hack"intosh.

And Apple should remember that their platform is very little with no third party developer.

Ive ordered parts for a beefy Hackintosh, for 3 reasons.

The 17" MBP that had to have the logic board baked to reflow solder - took Apple 4 years to acknowledge that one.

My 15" 2013 MBPr whose battery swelled up to the point of breaking the touch pad.

New MBP announcement.

Looking forward to user upgrade-able gear for once.

After today, I'm not surprised by any news anymore.

I think the idea was to create a machine that inspires creators. Those seniors reading news could be writers documenting their next novel and those kids, potencial creators. I though Apple always sold that you don't need technical skills to be able to create something cool with the computer. This thing that apple was for developers I only read about it since the launch of the new macbook.

Maybe this is because for years, the only trackpad that didn't suck were Macbooks. Vista was a disaster, and so many people used a relatively insecure Windows XP. The list goes on and on.

These days, folks who don't want to pay for Win10 Enterprise and don't want telemetry will be choosing between macOS and Linux.

Developers were never really the 'target' of Apple.

They are small demographic.

Also - that a 'new' laptop is outselling a highly fragmented group of other laptops for a few days is completely unsurprising.

Wait for 3 months, then compare laptop sales across the board - I don't think much will change.

You're implying that developer adoption fueled widespread adoption of the MacBook, yet now saying that the developer user base no longer matters to Apple. If this is true it is short-sighted. Would the abandoned developer base not eventually drive mass adoption to an alternative?

That's possible. It happened in browser space with Firefox first and Chrome later.

It happened with Apple in general too - almost overnight, every seemed to ditch their windows machines and replace them with macbook pros.

In part, that was because of things like ios, where a mac was mandatory. In part it was because of things like Ruby which was simply much easier on a mac and in part it was because having a "real" unix shell is so damn useful.

Ruby is (or was?) almost impossible on Windows because everybody was using it for Rails on Linux servers. Running all the related services on Windows is just too hard. I used to have a Linux VM in my XP laptop, then I formatted it to Ubuntu with a XP VM.

Shouldn't the inverse be true? If a small percentage of evangelical developers made it cool, couldn't they make it uncool? The hip techies making fun of internet explorer, aol, and myspace certainly made a difference to the general public who didnt know any better.

Techies definitely didn't make it cool across the general population. It became cool through brand association with cool phones and MP3 players and its aesthetics.

I'm betting the biggest feature of the "Late 2017" MBP will be a 32GB option.

2019

I doubt it. New CPUs are not going to support LPDDR4 and I highly doubt Apple is willing to make a thinker&heavier machine to cater to a small subset of users. Look at the battery life of XPS 15.

>>they don't need your business anymore.

Who's going to build all the iOS apps?

"Average Joe's" don't put $2000+ in a laptop.

Developers have their preferences, but I've had to do dev work on a Pentium II over frickin' telnet over a modem connection. We can make do, because we know how to. Apple knows this, so they have no reason to care.

In a cafe right now, everyone here is on a Macbook Pro except the two government workers on identical Dells.

Not only that, but it's safe to say Apple isn't a tech company anymore. They're a luxury brand selling luxury products -- evidenced merely in how they spend all their time talking about how the thing looks instead of how powerful it is (it does look and feel very nice).

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

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