MacBook Pro Launch: Perplexing
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mondaynote.com
> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201700
You can verify that you're using the correct version of the Apple
USB-C Charge Cable with your Mac notebook and its USB-C AC Adapter.
The cable's serial number is printed on its external housing, next
to the words "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China."
• If the first three characters of the serial number are C4M or FL4,
the cable is for use with the Apple 29W USB-C Power Adapter.
• If the first three characters of the serial number are DLC or CTC,
the cable is for use with the Apple 61W or 87W USB-C Power Adapter.
• If the cable says "Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China"
but has no serial number, you might be eligible for a replacement USB-C charge cable.
Here's a photo of an Apple USB-C charging cable to illustrate what finding the serial number looks like. http://i.imgur.com/ffVLDYl.jpg
The serial number is right below the control key, if you're curious.
You're talking about the company that no longer ships power cables with a little plastic clip to keep them tidy and now sells the extended lead as an extra, both of which have been in every one of their laptop chargers for 15 years+
http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...
The inane uninformed rant is more what this comment thread is about.
The different SKU's for similar cables is hardly the most illustrative example of Apple's current design process. The MacPro has left and right hand versions of the GPU board in order to provide a dual GPU configuration for the cylinder. Modularity is not a design goal. The "SSD" on the new Macbooks is some chips soldered to the motherboard. Not upgradable, potentially with a limited life.
Honestly, the further Apple goes in this direction the better it segments the market and filters out the less lucrative ones. The most valuable customers are people who will pay more for the touchbar because it's in the Apple store. They'll buy the smaller battery that comes with it for the same reason.
Did you read the linked page? That's what it does say. Not the part you "quoted".
[1] With a bunch of incompatible and identical looking USB-C cables.
Now we have a mess of incompatible cables AND you can't tell the difference by looking at them.
They should've called USB-C, USB 4, and said "Right, there's one type of USB 4 cable, and it works with everything it can be plugged into."
They had the same kind of support pages since forever, with the same kind of instructions (checking which exactly model mac or router you have, which cable goes where, what video connections your thunderbolt supports, etc). It's for troubleshooting specific conditions, not for everyday consulting. When you get your laptop and your cable in the box, it just works, obviously.
Sorry, this is not acceptable. Apple used to sweat these details. If they don't anymore I can as well buy PCs from now on.
Then maybe one could just use the higher ranked cables for everything in the family?
>Sorry, this is not acceptable.
Sounds totally acceptable, and relatively minor. It might be because I'm foreign, but a phrase like "not acceptable" sounds more fit for another country wanting to invade yours, or at least a guest making a pass at your spouse, not whether one can easily re-use cables between devices.
Even if we constrain it to computers, Apple did have its share of "not acceptable" issues (e.g. green cooling goo leaking out of old Mac Pros, display glitches, etc). Those were indeed not acceptable as they actually and actively prevented working with the computer. I don't see mixed cables with other devices as a reason not to accept (which to me would mean "return") a laptop.
USB-C wasn't an issue for me personally even though i have tons of electronics dev boards + associated junk i plug in all the time.
I ordered a new 2016 Macbook Pro 1 week after the Macbooks released, and my order is still processing with a shipping date of this week. I'm sure it will process, but the idleness (no credit card charges) and lack of emails from Apple has made me think it's in limbo.
"Holiday Return Policy
Items purchased at the Apple Online Store that are received between November 10, 2016 and December 25, 2016, may be returned through January 8, 2017. Please note that all other terms and conditions provided in the Apple Online Store Sales and Refunds Policy are still applicable with respect to such items purchased. All purchases made after December 25, 2016 are subject to the Standard Return Policy."
Note that it says received, not ordered. The vast majority of 2016 MacBook Pros were received after November 10th (they started shipping around November 13th IIRC), which means that they can still be returned up until January 8th next year.
In its place, I purchased a 2016 13" MBP with the 15W CPU and no Touch Bar. Oddly, its battery has about 11% more capacity than the Touch Bar model [1]. In their battery tests, Ars Technica reported that it lasts about 3 hours longer than the Touch Bar model with 28W CPU [2][3]. Here's hoping I see similar results.
[1] http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/
[2] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/touch...
[3] http://arstechnica.com/video/2016/11/the-2016-13-and-15-inch...
One surprise was how good the speakers were though. Really hard going back to the tinny garbage on most everything else after hearing those.
Who knows. I'm probably just crazy.
I've got a laptop keyboard on my desk (https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Compact-Keyboard-Trac...), and would have one of the new macbook keyboards if they made a standalone one.
I would say it was pretty predictable depending on how soft/hard the person typed on their current keyboard.
Pros: More clicky, almost like a mechanical keyboard with no travel
Cons: I apparently used the raised profile of the keys to align my hands. Without it I find I have to look down once in a while to start typing.
THIS!
I was checking out the new MBP's at the apple store and this was one of the first things I noticed when I picked it up by the sides. There is a huge gap along each bottom towards the side and it feels very sharp there when you pick it up. I could easily see someone getting cut or losing a fingernail. It's very unpleasant to hold there and just feels "wrong".
I have a 2015 15" MBP and this is not a problem on the 2015. While there is still the same gap, it is much narrower and is barely noticeable to the touch.
Shocking design flaw in the new body.
I previously wrote about my issues here [1].
For me, it was a combination of all the bad things: Touch bar (useless, distracting gimmick, no match for physical keys, nearness to keyboard results in inadvertent touches), lack of physical Esc key, meh keyboard (super loud, not enough key travel, annoying arrow keys), and absolutely no improvements over my current Mid-2015 MBP. The only thing I miss is the fingerprint reader.
I'm fine with donglegate, and I had bought all the cables/dongles I needed.
I'm surprised to read about everyone expecting 10 hours of battery life. My Mid-2015 gets 3-4 hours when I'm almost exclusively in Safari + VSCode + Terminal + Slack. Those are energy-hungry apps (especially Slack — only in 2016 would your chat app be the most CPU-intensive app!), and I got the same mileage with the 2016 MBP.
#no-to-calling-electron-a-native-app-movement
Man, BeOS was awesome.
Windows on the same machine? MP3 playback would stutter when you hit refresh on a webpage (bearing in mind those were one hell of a lot lighter than the ones today) or any number of other minor actions. Hourglasses constantly.
Linux? Window-smearing-on-drag as far as the eye can see. Even worse media performance than Windows(!), though maybe with some ricing/tweaking it was better.
Macs at the time? Oh god. I don't know how they got a reputation for being more stable than contemporary Windows machines. Fewer system crashed maybe, but apps crashed constantly. Multitasking performance mediocre. Disk swap all over the place.
BeOS? Buttery smooth UI and MP3 playback while running the Teapot 3D demo and browsing the web, all at the same time. It was awesome, and had the Unixy bits coupled with a good and consistent UI that we wouldn't see again until OSX. Faster booting than the competition. Neat extras like a built in web server (Poorman, IIRC) that could be run with a few clicks, too. I think BeOS was known for having an unusually pleasant and sane API in addition to performing so well, though I never wrote any software for it personally.
Actually, BeOS ran at first on proprietary hardware (BeBox), which featured dual or quad PowerPCs, and it was initially designed to make use of the multiple processors. Only later it got ported for Intel platform where single-processor was more common, but it was meant to shine on multi-processor boards.
In historical context as Apple's internal OS upgrade program failed, and they bought Next Computer instead of Be (rumored to be an option). The rest is history..
"Power Computing, cognizant of (Apple CEO) Amelio’s attitude toward the clones, attempted to avoid keeping all its eggs in Apple’s basket. It began to actively support Jean Louis Gassée’s BeOS. Be’s first public demonstrations were on Power 120’s (upgraded versions of the Power 80), and Power Computing began selling machines outfitted with BeOS out of the box, thus bypassing Apple’s 7.25% royalty." from: http://lowendmac.com/2014/power-computing-fighting-back-for-...
Less awesomely it used a C++ API which had huge fragile-base-class problems.
They tried to do the custom hardware thing and it went just about as well as NeXT, Amiga, etc. It was probably too late for Be to make it the day they started but by the time the ported to x86 it was already over.
We only have two historical examples but they both follow the same overall trend: Windows ate the desktop, Mac hoarded the scraps, everyone else died. Mobile repeated the pattern: iOS eats the profits, Android eats almost everything else, and there is no room in the ecosystem for a significant third competitor. At this point it's the technology equivalent of a gravity problem... there is room for two but anyone else gets ejected from the system.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/06/03/technology/apple-craig-feder...
How far has their social position slipped? If I say X will I get a strong response, or is it going too and will it receive a negative response, or does it go not far enough and will it seem bland and be ignored.
It's like gossip - or it is actually gossip. It's the currency (or securities market) of social status.
I used to follow a sports team where the head coach and one chief assistant were beloved. I said that if they don't play well then the other chief assistant is in trouble, because he had little reputation with the fans and would be blamed by process of elimination, whether or not it was his fault. Sure enough, despite undeniable, simple evidence that his area of responsibility was performing well (points are a very easy metric), he got the blame and then the shaft.
If Jobs was still around, unconventional decisions would be seen much more positively; Cook and Apple no longer have that cache and now their position will be tested until their new social position is established.
My solution was to buy the last gen mid 2015 mbp.
I meant, of course, that they've exhausted their cache of cachet. <ahem>
Maybe they have cached their cachet.
There is a super-serious case of rose-tinted glasses going on here. I think you're right - this is just the herd trying to decide which new opinion to coalesce around.
iCloud Photo Library works and works reliably for me every day. Apple Maps has much higher resolution satellite photos of SF than Google Maps and its transit directions are superior, giving specific exit numbers. The new MBP has a wicket fast storage subsystem, something that will make far more difference to far more people than a hypothetical 32GB of RAM.
I don't buy the doom and gloom.
Also, IMO, people are becoming more and more desensitised, always expecting big leaps in innovation and specs and not noticing the small steps, cornerstones of the vision Apple has for its user's experience.
Agreed. Even as someone rather disappointed with the new MBPs, I don't think for a second that this will have slightest effect on Apple's long term health.
Did something happen in the last year that made everyone demand 32GB?
But when Apple finally introduced a brand new generation, and it was still limited to 16 GB, that really set everybody off.
In my opinion, it is sad that Apple changed the meaning of its Pro label from “professionals” to “consumers with lots of money”. As another commenter once said, replace “Pro” with “Deluxe” in your head, e.g. MacBook Deluxe, and suddenly it all makes sense. The machines trade potential increases in performance for increases in thinness.
When I bought my Macbook Pro in 2011 it came with 4GB RAM and at that time it was suffice but through the years I did upgrade it. The RAM and SSD upgrade makes that I still use my machine till today. The fact that you can use a Macbook Pro for years makes it a bit sweeter to swallow the bitter price pill. With the "limited" 16GB RAM I'm not sure that will be also the case here.
Although it's at the point I simply can't afford it anymore. While it's nice to show off all the accessibility options for people with disabilities or health problems, the irony is that because of my disability (which has a big influence on my income) the apple ecosphere is becoming just to expensive.
Yeah, microservice hype. Now you need a lot of RAM to open all those services to develop on local.
It became available. No one was demanding 16 or 4 or 1 or 0.1 GB of RAM either before the option became available.
Personally I find that for everything I do either "4 GB or RAM is plenty" or "16 GB of RAM is barely enough". If I'm buying a laptop for only the first category of work, then the MBP is way too expensive for me (esp. since I'd also have to buy a second computer), and if I'm buying a laptop to handle both categories of work then it's under-powered.
The idea that 16GB will be sufficient 2 years from now is not believable to me.
As good as the MBP might be, if you don't need a new laptop right now, it's just not a good buy. The worst part is that it cannot be upgraded.
Yes, RAM-wise applications become more bloated due to containers, VMs, and the (ab)use of JS-based applications or 'apps'.
Take into account I am typing this on a MBP from 2010, 6 years old, which shipped with 4 GB RAM which I was able to upgrade easily to 8 GB RAM, with a 256 GB SSD which I put in myself after updating from a 512 GB 5400 RPM HDD.
By some (certainly not everyone) MBPs are bought to be an investment of several years, yet MBPs are no longer 'pimpable'. You can't upgrade their internals anymore. So what happens? People buy them with higher specs than they need. Which means a bigger or quicker SSD, and bigger or quicker RAM.
Which brings me to the following point: the MBP used to be a relatively bulky laptop/notebook, but a beast. A compact, less powerful version was the Macbook Air which as the name suggests was also lighter. At best, it has shifted. At worst, this is no longer the case. Because the MBP is designed to be light itself.
Finally, the battery. If it is already bad with 5 hours out of the box, this can be improved perhaps via software. Who knows? That is the risk of buying. You don't wanna take that risk. A product as expensive as this one needs to have high uptime out of the box. Plus, the battery will degrade over time as well, and Apple products haven't been known to have easily replaceable battery (compare to Dell XPS).
Now, the problem with all of the above points is that they're all made so that the MBP -supposedly the powerhorse of notebooks/laptops of Apple- is smaller and weights less. Whereas they had the Macbook Air line for that purpose before. It just doesn't make sense from a customer PoV to pay more for less!
You see, those who'd like to buy a device for years to come don't mind the USB-C debacle that much. Because in x years, it'll be everywhere (lets assume x=2 for the sake of argument, while the device is being used for 5 years and even if the device isn't used for 5 years it has resale value!).
I can't imagine why Apple has not been able to improve on the computer's specifications for serious professional engineer use in five years. The CPU increase and GPU increase is unimpressive. (Why no quad core in 13"?) Retina is fantastic, but not a substitute for proper amounts of memory. The only major improvement is the awesome bandwidth of the 1T SSD in the new models.
I use the F-keys extensively in my workflow. I could barely even reliably hit the ESC key at the Apple Store when testing vi. The keyboard was also atrocious, but I would probably adjust if it had F-keys.
The bottom line is this is just not a useful laptop for me. Super sad, cause I would have liked a top-of-the-line computer. I am going to get an Alienware 13R3 or Razer Blade instead. Sorry, Apple, you've taken too long to put out a reasonable professional laptop.
It's been incredibly reliable as a consumer laptop (dev work is on a desktop). I have had zero incentive to upgrade, except the difficulty of finding chargers whose cables don't fray. This was before the magnetic attachments.
I've finally been entertaining about getting another laptop/tablet for consumer non-dev use, and none of the options I'm considering are Apple.
To make the charging cables more durable you might try liquid electrical tape[1] which you can find at almost every hardware store. The trick to making this custom cable boot adhere the best is painting all the way around the cable and connector back to where you started before it sets. That way the material bonds to itself rather than only the cord and connector.
Yup. Those charger cables are such shit. They keep working since just the insulation frays, but I have to use more and more electrical tape to keep them covered.
On the tablet front, unless something's changed while I wasn't looking, you might want to consider Apple over Android. Android devices going from well-charged to dead while you're not using them gets really old really fast if you're used to iOS' nearly-miraculous levels of battery use while idle.
My two year old ipad air 2 still holds a charge for a month if I don't use it. I'd take your ipad back to the store and ask for a replacement. Oh, and uninstall fb.
I would also have made a bigger point of Apple not having enough USB dongles to supply their 'new, modern' laptops. It's a pretty big complaint to level against the "so what, it's one dongle" apologists, if you can't get one in the first place.
While it's okay if not everyone at Apple is interested in the MacBook Pros, the people designing them have to be disheartened by the reactions. Decisions to put off this release for so long seems like it must have been a strategic one made outside of the group which probably wanted to ship a Skylake MacBook Pro a long time ago.
Imagine (over-)simplified analysis that showed customers keeping their machines for an average of three years, or four product generations that were each about three quarters long. If Apple changed the time between generations to six quarters, then they would have retooling costs for only two cohorts of customers rather than four, and it would also get economies of scale similar to having twice as many customers buying each release.
Now imagine that suitable Kaby Lake CPUs with Iris graphics turned out to much further off in the future than originally expected, and Apple ended up deciding they had to release a Skylake MacBook Pro rather than being able to skip the microarchitecture.
So they do, but it's later than it might have been, and there end up being some issues that make it seem like it was designed and released quickly rather than like it had been refined even more than usual. And, on top of it all, the difficult, but ultimately beneficial, transition to all USB-C everywhere ends up being needlessly antagonizing to customers due to a cheap decision not to toss free legacy adapters and free USB-C/Lighting cables in the box of every new MacBook Pro.
The Razer Blade (regular, non-Stealth) is the model with the dedicated GPU.
[1]http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-systems/razer-blade-pro#spec...
Edit: Looks like there are some resources around the webs:
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sT9Hs6...
https://insider.razerzone.com/index.php?threads/new-razer-bl...
I've found that the Arch Linux Wiki is a pretty good resource for all of the Razer Blade laptops.
The best resource I found for this laptop and linux was actually on the Arch Linux wiki:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/razer#2016_version_.28R...
Does anyone have any links to someone running Linux on a razor blade stealth as their daily driver?
Air: 12.8" x 8.94" x .68" -- 2.96 lbs
RB Stealth: 12.6" x 8.1" x .52" -- 2.84 lbs
I bought the late 2016 edition, i7 kaby lake, 16GB RAM, 256GB M.2 PCIe, 12.5" IPS touch QHD (2560 x 1440 px). It really does run well and I'm using it as a daily driver.
I don't know what to make of that exactly.
I'm experiencing the same battery life problems reported by JLG. Activity Monitor doesn't report anything unusual, so I suspect the CPU is not the culprit. When I reported the problem to Apple Support, they asked me to run sysdiagnose and send them the output.
Apple cranks out a new beta of MacOS 10.12.2 every week or so, and I install them immediately because of the possibility of a software fix.
I recall that the first Retina MacBook Pro (mid-2012) had some problems too, so I'm not too surprised about this. I plan to be patient and see how responsive Apple is to the fast battery drain issue. I'm very happy with the machine otherwise.
The only strange thing is it has only two USB-C ports and an analog audio ports. One of the USB-C ports is used for the power adapter, so one port left.
There's a huge market opening here. We may see the rise of a third hardware giant just yet.
It is very logical that Apple will dump or merge some product categories sooner rather than later. There's little chance macOS will be made touch friendly and with little resources to keep the Mac updated (see Mac Pro) it just makes sense for them to sell the iPad Pro somewhat like Microsoft does for Surface line - lower cost model without physical keyboard and a Macbook like one that shares the same SoC and runs the same iOS. Get XCode running on it and that solves the problem of iOS App Developers. Make the Pro version of iOS little less restrictive and add better multitasking and that helps the regular iPad line as well. Much easier than redoing macOS for touch.
It also solves the margin and control issues for Apple. One OS, shared CPU/SoC, no need to do Mac and macOS development anymore and that frees up a ton of resources. It's just too good for Apple to not do it. And if they could solve the problem of pesky "pros" wanting to control their hardware and OS better by slowly making the Mac more and more inconvenient/unattractive - they are going to do it.
If they did have unlimited resources you would have seen more attention to Mac product lineup and they wouldn't have gotten rid of the Airport unit after not updating it for a while.
In other words, if you need to hire super engineers at a staggering million bucks a year, well, didn't Apple make 45B last year? That's enough for 45 000 such super people while I bet a few dozens would make big changes.
With the recent missteps, maybe you're right. It seems like they currently don't have enough talent to steer such a huge ship.
I definitely believe Apple has a plan far beyond what we are privvy to, and that that plan is focused on the long-term. But that said I'm skeptical of Apple's to deliver on the next big thing. Amazon and Google are the ones on the cutting edge of cloud services which I believe are shaping the next sea change, and Apple is playing catchup. I'm definitely biased, but I feel like nerfing the Mac and shrinking it's accessory line could lead to a reverse halo effect where all the influencers leave, and before Apple knows what happened their App Store ecosystem dries up and all the cool stuff is now happening somewhere else.
I keep seeing this written in various places and I don't understand it. Apple aren't short of a dollar and they haven't been short of a dollar for a good long time. How is it that they can find themselves with "limited resources"? What does that actually mean?
This was fine up to and including the first couple of iPhone releases; now it really sounds like bog-standard corporate weaselwords. Apple just built a space-age campus as big as a town, could run a small country for years with all the money stashed offshore, and keeps raking in cash from their ecosystem and content services. If they don't do X is simply because either they don't want to, or they are not good enough at doing it.
Wonder how much director time was spent signing off the minutiae of that project VS these so called Pro laptops and the touchbar as a concept over the past 2 years.
Well come on now. Apple is one of the richest company in the world and has a tiny tiny product line to care about. They have skipped a whole year of refresh on their entire Mac Line so they can focus on those 3 laptops. They also dropped their network equipment division and outsourced their monitor division to LG which must have freed some resource people or money.
This MBP release is catastrophic, even by Apple "don't buy iteration 1" standards. There is no excuse for the indeed poor story telling.
The Mac line is secondary business does not work either when they fucked up similarly the iPhone release. Promising that the world has moved from the headphone jack yet failing to deliver any headphone several months after the events, despite owning a whole business dedicated to that.
2016 is a miserable year for Apple. Hopefully that just an off year and they are preparing a unforgivable 2017, or it is just one of those crisis large companies goes through.
It's not very hard to imagine having resource issues when you're trying to do something that is under constant scrutiny and higher standards and you're also doing a bunch of other things while still trying to find the next big thing - I stand by my point on that one, but more so I wanted to allude that it is just too convenient for Apple to not pay much attention to the Mac.
I assume you mean "unforgetable"? :)
Nice they get to dabble in cars so a handful of SV/SF CEOs can drive around in a space black siri powered car in a few years. What a worthwhile endeavour.
Meanwhile the tool I use all day every day at my job is getting worse and worse and the tipping point where PC maintenance and dealing with Windows is starting to look very inviting to gain access to that raw computing power their platform is failing to provide.