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Calling these "first adopter" issues seems like it's allowing Apple too much leeway. The product line is a decade old, and none of the hardware being used here is untested or unproven.

This strikes me as another example of Apple's reality distortion field falling apart at the seams. Why are these issues occurring in the public's view, and not on some Apple developer's workstation or testing lab?

>Apple's reality distortion field

I always hear talk like this implying Apple's products are only acceptable if they live up to the legend of their hardware and software "just working"

Honestly, for me they could put a 100% tax on your average off-the-shelf, not-promising-good-build-quality, already-made-in-the-same-factory-as-a-macbook consumer laptop just to provide OS X with official support and I (and a lot of people I know) would be just fine with it.

Of course it doesn't help their bottom line or strategy to tightly couple the OS and their hardware so they'd never do it, but can we stop pretending that all there is to Apple hardware is branding? OS X is a pretty big deal. I'll take average hardware with OS X over average hardware any day.

> but can we stop pretending that all there is to Apple hardware is branding?

Sure. All there is to Apple hardware and software is branding.

The day I see a Linux distro put together as coherent an experience as OS X is the day I'll agree to that.

Even in it's supposed decline, OS X still manages to put together a more compelling UX story than every Linux distro I've ever tried.

I get that some people don't really care about the UX their OS provides as long as there's a terminal and deem GUIs as unproductive for those who "really know what they're doing" (I often hear something about moving from their keyboard to their mouse taking too long?) but to me it's paramount.

I spend a lot of my life using a computer and I need my desktop environment and the tools I use in it (GUI ones included) to feel like a joy to use, not something I'm trying to duck out of the way of to drop in to a terminal.

> their hardware and software "just working"

Yes, how dare we expect that something we spend multiple thousands of dollars on, and have to work with 8+ hours a day, to "just work."

> OS X is a pretty big deal

With Linux subsystem for Windows, Ubuntu, and other such systems, OSX isn't the big deal it once was. I have to restart it weekly to fix issues with software just not working right. I have to buy five to ten extra utilities just to ensure that my extra mouse buttons, windowing system, and keyboard shortcuts work as expected.

Sure, it could be worse, and I'm glad you have good luck with it; but it could be a hell of a lot better too. And it's not wrong to expect more when we spend so much money on our tools.

> Think about it - music production, video editing, photo editing, graphic design, coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software. Huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields and the new MacBook Pro recognises this - software development (and other areas) are moving increasingly to the cloud and a huge development machine is no longer a necessity..

While some of these professions may be moving towards cloud based solutions, video editing especially is still difficult. You'll end up waiting half your life to upload half a terabyte of footage to the cloud before you can start doing any work.

> the 'Pro' user of 5 years ago is a dying breed... Think about it... coding... huge amounts of specialist hardware are no longer necessary or indeed desirable in these fields... a huge development machine is no longer a necessity

Mac (not macbook) pro user here, and I disagree. I bought a mac pro when it came out because it was a mac so it was reliable and intuitive, and the dev environment rocked, AND because it was fast (for the time). My team's builds and tests require a lot of processing power, and our company likes to keep things in-house.

I don't think that all of the world has progressed as far into the cloud as you propose, and I just want a fast mac.

I get what you're saying. But the things you can't transition to the cloud are microphones, cameras, keyboards, other HIDs. If they see a future where there is no "pro" because we can all be pros, wouldn't you want to reduce the cost of entry as much as possible? Ie. make it trivially easy for anyone to plug almost any HID in and begin authoring content.

Maybe for when done for personal use. The same tasks are still difficult and demanding in hardware when done for professional purposes.

I develop virtual reality games professionally. I cannot do that on a Mac Pro or a Macbook Pro.

Can you do it on any currently existing laptop that is not much heavier and much thicker than a Macbook Pro?

There are VR capable (gtx 1060) laptops around the size of the 2012 MacBook Pros.

Ok, could you link to one?

Not the parent, but you could literally get off your high horse and google "laptop gtx 1060"

I did that and had several options within 10 sec

They tend to be 15" or 17". The new 15" Macbook Pro also has better 3D graphics (Radeon Pro 450). It's not as fast as the gtx 1060, but it uses 35W of power in comparison to 120W, and needs less active cooling. Apple generally don't compromise on noise and battery life.

I'm sorry for the snarky nature of my previous comment, but in my experience, all of the suggested alternatives require compromises which Apple are justified in not making. I'm not sure why people think that Apple are obliged to make laptops to suit every use case. If you just want a portable desktop, there are plenty of other options.

To be fair OP included the Mac Pro. If the top of the line product from Apple's macbook line can't cut it, maybe they shouldn't have abandoned the mac line so prematurely.

> coding.. These are all things which used to be considered extremely difficult but have now been made easier with fantastic, accessible software.

Coding!?

16GB was not much even 5 years ago. That "fantastic, accessible software" eats a lot of memory.

I have 8GB on my laptop and never managed to use more than around 5 GB.

Using Visual Studio, Android Studio, Netbeans.

Try running a VM and compiling inside that...

You mean like using Swift, D and Rust on a VMWare instance running Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS?

Linking some amount of C++ code can get very painful very quickly on a constrained VM.

Linking C++ is painful anywhere, this from the point of view of someone that likes the language since 1993.

Modules might finally solve it, but it will a Python3 like story until they get integrated across major compilers, libraries and frameworks.

The nature of VMs is that you can assign memory to it. So if your machine is already light, you wouldn't give it much memory to start with, and it'd run (just slower)

So you're saying the Mac "Pro" is OK for running things slowly.

Not saying that at all. Saying that if someone says it'll run in 8GB instead of 16GB, or 16 instead of 32, it's possible, but those claims ignore performance. The presence of those statements means absolutely nothing absent of context (for instance, the required performance of a Windows 10 VM isn't the same for someone just testing a site on IE versus a developer running a 300GB SQL Server database)

I run 2-5 instances of Visual Studio and each one takes up 1-2 GB

Why on earth do you need so many open?!

You can only have one solution open at a time. For example you may be working on a complex DLL (composed of multiple sub-projects compiling to static libs) as one solution. You may also want to have the solution for a consuming application open so you can test changes there as well.

Yes, but that usually means 2, not up to 5.

I don't use the visual studio IDE for my work (just msbuild from the command line) but if I did it would be more than 5 solutions that I use daily. In rare cases I need to enlist in even more projects. I'm not the original OP but I can certainly emphasize with his problem.

That said my work gets done on a Xeon workstation not a laptop, so in that respect we are different.

VS is 32-bit so it will never use more than 3.5GB. However that limitation is super annoying when you have > 3GB in symbols trying to load.

VS was just one example on my list.

Hey I'm with you. I would love for VS to use more RAM so it would stop crashing due to running out of address space all the time.

Is your point that claims of memory need are exaggerated, or that everyone else is doing it wrong?

Chrome alone can take up 5GB. Right now DataGrip and RubyMine are on my machine are taking up 4GB, and even iTunes is taking up 1GB for some inexplicable reason.

Then I fired up a Windows 10 VM. 4GB by itself.

That most people are doing it wrong.

I configure my set of actual running programs for the work being done on that specific moment, not for the work being done during the week.

For example, I only open multiple browser tabs when searching for documentation, and even there I barely go over 10. Which I anyway close, after I am done with it.

Each application is only running for the time it is actually needed and does provide value to my workflow, otherwise it just a waste of CPU, memory and screen estate.

Apart from VM usage ( Which i have no idea if this could be minimized ), May be we should ask the Apps developers, and even Apple is guilty in this, Why their Apps are using GB of memory? Why is Slack using 3GB? iTunes 1.2GB? OSX consuming 4GB.

The abundance of memory and CPU has let developers create monster apps that doesn't take performance or resources in mind.