Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music. It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful

Compared to a five year old 17"? More like double the power. And unbelievably faster SSD (even if you have an aftermarket SSD on your 17", it will be nowhere near as fast as the ones in current MPBr unless you pay top dollar).

>has a smaller screen

Smaller but hi-dpi, and with far greater color accuracy and brightness. Also, you can hook up an external monitor, apparently lugging 17" beasts around wasn't popular enough to carry the models forward.

>and less I/O functionality

Actually way way more. Less varied ports (basically 2 types: 4 USB-C and 1 headphone), but way way more I/O power and connectivity.

>and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I daisy-chain multiple adapters to get Firewire.

Or just get a USB-C to Firewire adapter of hub. Daisy chain multiple adapters? Huh?

View on HN

The high-end processor on the 2011 Macbook Pro was the 2860QM. Current options on the 15" are the 6700HQ, which is about 1% faster on single threads and 14% faster on multiple threads, and the 6920HQ, which is about 23% faster on single threads and 36% faster on multiple threads.

For the C++ codebase I work with my 6700 compiles 4.5 MLOC of code in a little less than half the time my 2nd gen i7 does. Hardly scientific, but the 6th i7s are really fast.

This is probably due to the improved storage iops of a PCIe flash drive more than the CPU.

Both machines have a RAID 1 of the same model of SSD (2x Corsair force 3 GTs) and no PCIE involved. Each gets about 1.1 gb/s when I benchmark it in Bonnie++.

That and all 8 cores (I am counting the HT threads as cores) in the system monitor are fully saturated on both machines until the the linking stage of the build. I have a great deal of confidence the newer CPUs are significantly for at least building C++ code when disk bandwidth is not an issue.

And more available memory, letting the OS cache more files in RAM.

The older machine as 32 GB of RAM and the newer has 64gb. This could potentially be an issue, but generally the build consumes no more than 6GB leaving a leaving amount unused. Memory bandwidth is more likely.

But really I am building C++, all the parsing and re-parsing is stupidly CPU intensive. most 5400 rpm drives can feed the compiler fast enough to keep them saturated.

With a hot cache, your disk is only going to do writes (and waiting on those writes is the reason why they suggest a make -jN with N higher than the number of cores). All reads are going to be serviced from memory. All writes will also go to the cache and will be coalesced on close().

The remaining memory will be used as a crazy fast file cache. As far as 5400rpm drives that may be true if it was just a linear read, but the real problem is latency.

The rest of the RAM could be used as a file cache, but it is a moot point. 100% CPU use on each of the 4/8 cores/threads. Nothing but more CPU horsepower will significantly speed that up.

If you look at a detailed graph of CPU usage you should see a pumping action as the CPU goes full bore and then stalls out waiting for data. Filling in those stalls is what gives you the extra performance.

What is your preferred tool for gathering this kind of detailed data?

On windows It's WPR and WPA. In sure Linux/Mac has similar system wide profilers. WPA will give you detailed wait analysis.

I don't have windows. I will google for "systemwide profilers". Thank you.

I doubt this will change anything, (because the compilation time decreased as CPU time was added) but the information could be helpful in other situations.

the 2011s may not have offered it as configured by apple, but they will use 16g ram if you buy 8g dimms.

They do. Apple claims 8 GB is the max, but mine works fine with 16 GB.

Source? Or did you just compare clock rates? Intel has improved single-thread performance by much more than 1% from Sandy Bridge to Skylake

Going by benchmark aggregates from PassMark.

2860QM: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2860QM...

6700HQ: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6700HQ...

6920HQ: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-6920HQ...

Interesting. For comparison, Geekbench 4 single/multi-core results (from https://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks):

MacBook Pro (17-inch Late 2011, i7-2860QM): 3180 / 9593

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016, i7-6700HQ): 3968 (+24%) / 12189 (+27%)

MacBook Pro (15-inch Late 2016, i7-6820HQ): 4093 (+29%) / 12883 (+26%)

Nice comparison, thanks. I wanted to stress "about" since no benchmark is going to be identical to real world performance.

I notice that you quoted this part:

> I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it.

but didn't mention it in your retort to the rest of that paragraph.

You can't upgrade the new macbooks. I am typing this from a 2015 Macbook Pro Retina, I bought it with the biggest hard drive they offered at the time, and am currently doing development off a thunderbolt hard drive. Do you know how much that sucks?

I would do anything to be able to just open up my computer and pop in more RAM or a bigger SSD, like I used to do with my matte 15" macbook. That macbook lasted me so long, and so many RAM upgrades / network card installations (for Bluetooth 4.0) / etc etc.

I've been using this computer for almost three years, I have have to go through a lot of trouble to do my work on it (I work at a .NET shop), and I'm strongly considering just getting a Windows 10 laptop instead of dealing with this mess. It sucks to have to carry around a hard drive for my SQL back-ups because I can't upgrade the hard drive in my computer.

> I have have to go through a lot of trouble to do my work on it (I work at a .NET shop), and I'm strongly considering just getting a Windows 10 laptop instead of dealing with this mess.

If you work at a .NET shop, why would you NOT use Windows 10? Seems like you're swimming against the current.

I work on the mobile ecosystem for Stack Overflow. I run the team that makes our Android and iOS apps, so I need Xcode at the very least. I also feel more comfortable on a UNIX environment because I know the tools more.

Most of the developers at the company either get a Macbook Pro and use Parallels for Windows (Boot Camp leads to headaches because you can't resize the partitions later on without deleting everything and reformatting, or paying for Paragon NTFS for Mac, which might still crash and lose all your data!), or build their own Windows desktop.

I'd rather continue using a laptop, since sometimes I work from an office sometimes I work from home and sometimes (like right now) I work from random locations while visiting family.

At home I mostly use a Linux desktop, I've been looking at System76 laptops but nothing grabs my eye.

None of the Win10 laptops have grabbed my eye either, it seems that Windows laptops that are performant are either massive gaming "laptops" or severely lacking in some other way (although maybe now that the new Dell XPS has the newest discrete GPUs, maybe).

You can upgrade the storage in the 2015 Macbook Pros, but the RAM is soldered on.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Disp...

The newer Macbook Pros you can't upograde the storage, and yeah, that really sucks. I get that most people don't upgrade anyway, but I spend a lot of time showing people how much faster systems can be with a few hundred bucks of upgrades when those same upgrades would have cost them a thousand or more at purchase time.

Now if I want something future-proof I efectively have to max it out even if I don't need those specs now, so I have to pay $3500 instead of $2500 because in five years I'll need that extra oomph and it's technically still cost-effective over the long term even if it's ridiculous now (and in a year or so these laptops will come down in price anyway).

Your code doesn't fit in 1TB? What kind of development is that?

Not the code, the databases. And actually the specific databases I need to run (we have minimal PII scrubbed versions we use for local testing) could live on my internal HD but I don't have enough storage for all my files + the backup files of the DBs for restoring + the restored database files.

I wonder if any of the AWS stuff would help with this. An EC2 instance or something. Sure there would be latency but if the data processing is mostly kept local to the AMI, it might work. But then I don't know your workflow.

Yeah we've been talking about setting up once-a-week-restored dev instances that people who aren't making database migrations / schema changes can point their codebase at so they don't have to have _all_ the databases. It's a struggle though, especially since most of the other devs have desktops with RAIDs of TBs of space haha.

Also @beat forgot to say "matte display". MATTE. Mine is a 6 year old 17 inches MBP and I still use it for everything.

It's still current. I can also rip CDs with it (it is handy children) :)

I've even found a VERY simple way to dual boot Windows 10 on it after trying to get the instructions I found everywhere to work (after Apple made sure it was indeed difficult).

I even play games on it.

To me it was the reference developer laptop and still is.

I would pay as much as $5000 for a 17 inches Retina Matte MBP, the same SSD speed as the TouchBar models, the Pascal chipset, an 8 core i7 and 64GB of RAM and I do not think I am alone in that category.

I agree with you, and I feel Apple is leaving money on the table by not doing this.

what's a CD?

"What's a record?"

"It's like an old-fashioned CD."

"What's a CD?"

> it will be nowhere near as fast as the ones in current MPBr unless you pay top dollar

Even with top dollar you cannot squeeze more than ~550 MB/s out of SATA3, compared to the ostensibly 2+ GB/s in the new MBPrs with NVMe.

Heh I have recently upgraded to a SATA3 SSD in my 2012 MBP and was amazed at the speed. The NVMe ones seem insane.

Anything is better than the 5200rpm Toshiba drive my MacBook came with, that's for sure!!

yes. totally.

i'm surprised Apple even offers mechanical hard drives in their Macs any more. they're soooooooo slow. they make the whole machine feel like a wet sponge.

Storage. 1TB+ SSDs are still quite pricey.

But, for the system drive, the drive that's inside the machine where the OS is installed and loaded from, the drive that cannot be (easily) replaced on most Macs -- why, nowadays, would anyone buying a new computer they're going to use for several years want that drive to be an old-school, 200 MB/s HDD?

Apple still gives users the option to buy the slow system drive (i.e. shoot themselves in the foot) rather than forcing them to ante up for (at least a 256GB) flash system drive.

But, given it's Apple we're talking about, I find it really, really weird. Historically, Apple is notorious for denying the user these kinds of choices (e.g. a floppy disk drive, optical drive, user upgradeable RAM ...)

But slow system drives? Apple lets people buy those all day long. I don't get it.

I bought a 1TB SATA Samsung 850 Evo for my MacBook and it is like a new machine. So so so slow before this.

>Smaller but hi-dpi, and with far greater color accuracy and brightness. Also, you can hook up an external monitor, apparently lugging 17" beasts around wasn't popular enough to carry the models forward.

Size on the screen does matter, I'd rather the screen do the work than my eyes.

With a 17 inches I don't need to hook up an external monitor. I am able to work at full proficiency anywhere.

>Actually way way more. Less varied ports (basically 2 types: 4 USB-C and 1 headphone), but way way more I/O power and connectivity.

If you don't mind paying for and carrying around a dozen dongles. Also no ethernet port. And you're forgetting about the ExpressCard slot...

Does a USB-C to FireWire exist?

If you're only using FireWire at a desk, look at thunderbolt docks. OWC's TB3 dock will have a FireWire 800 port.

It's a bit pricey at $300, but will also get you a power supply (so you can leave the original in your bag), displayport, gigabit ethernet, S/PDIF, and a bunch of USB-A all over a single cable.

If only there were a wired protocol that is high-speed, has a standard connector, can deliver power, and has both bandwidth and latency controls ... wouldn't that be wonderful? Then we wouldn't have to reinvent all of these wires.

(Yes, sarcasm. That protocol is called Ethernet. And basically every high-speed interface we currently have is a bad reimplementation of it for political reasons.)

Good luck with 40Gb/s speeds or pushing 100W on ethernet. (Sure you could use HDBaseT for 100W but we're talking about getting rid of adapters right?) It's definitely not just for political reasons, that's disingenuous at best.

There is no good reason why USB 3.0 wasn't USB 2.0 spliced with Ethernet other than politics. It wasn't cheaper. It wasn't faster. The drivers weren't better. The connector wasn't smaller.

However, HDMI (which is primarily four pairs of high speed serial--just like Ethernet) and later Displayport became the "solution" because of all the people pushing HDCP.

Thunderbolt was the "solution" to the fact that USB 3.0 wasn't coming down the pipe fast enough. And that drivers were just too complicated. Why solve the simple problem of loading a driver at boot time when you can just give the peripheral complete control over a system bus? What could possibly go wrong?

USB 3.0 is an "evolution" over 2.0 in the way that a jackalope is an evolution--splicing two completely unrelated things together (USB 2.0 spliced with 4 high speed pairs--just like Ethernet). But you can't charge a licensing fee for Ethernet ...

100Gb ethernet has been around since 2010.

Is there any reason we couldn't switch to a dual optic fibre (for signal) and copper (for power) ethernet?

Ethernet is not as cheap as USB 2 for low-cost/low-performance devices. And it's not as fast (plus higher overhead) than Thunderbolt for high perfomance applications. Thunderbolt is (very loosely speaking) PCIe extended outside of the computer.

(And yes, I'm assuming bare ethernet frames, not IP or such)

We're not talking Ethernet vs USB 2.0. USB 2.0 wins in terms of cheapness.

However, Ethernet IS cheaper than USB 3.0. And Ethernet is significantly less complex. Look at carnage from all the audio interface people trying to come to grips with Thunderbolt and USB 3.0. Whereas, people implement gigabit Ethernet interfaces all the time.

And this dovetails with USB 2.0. In terms of complexity, I have found that Ethernet wins. I have started removing USB 2.0 from anything I can and replacing it with Ethernet when possible. USB 2.0 is such a pain to handle in terms of drivers while Ethernet "just works".

100Gb ethernet seems to be faster than Thunderbolt (max 40Gb). PCI Express v4 x16 does win at ~250Gb, but 400Gb ethernet is in the works.

Ethernet does not have any of the guarantees that 1394 offers.

At the physical layer, gigabit PHYs can be used to send any logical protocol you want. You could implement something akin to 1394 over 1000base-T.

Incorrect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking

How I long for the day when I can configure the subnet mask of my mouse, the mDNS settings of my graphics card, and the routing table of my PCH!

(Yes, sarcasm. Two can play.)

ethernet has as much to do with TCP/IP and DNS as does radio waves with FM radio.

ethernet is a wire protocol upon which a TCP/IP stack runs on top of. if USB looked a lot more like ethernet, it would be far easier to write drivers for devices.

USB and PCIe are not layer 2 protocols, they're vertical over layers 1-6 so I filled in the blanks of the proposal, such as it was. If you want to pick nits, do it with bsder, comparing the two is his idea.

> it would be far easier to write drivers for devices

I can only assume this comes from a place of "I know a bit about ethernet and would like to transfer that knowledge to the embedded space." It certainly doesn't come from a place of "I write drivers for the USB and PCIe stacks and think ethernet would make my job easier."

There's also the matter of what HW/FW likes, which probably has greater bearing on the situation than what SW likes, and I can assure you that they'd be even less enthusiastic about the replacement than I am. Proof: they've got a choice! If they wanted to use ethernet, they could just do it. They don't. For good reason.

You know using IP is not a requirement for using Ethernet.

Yes, I do.

TB2->FW + TB3->TB2 in theory. http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD464LL/A/apple-thunderbol...

Exactly the chain of adapters that beat was complaining of.

FireWire has been dead for years, it's time for an upgrade.

Firewire is very much alive in my house. Why is it "dead"? Why do I have to upgrade?

You don't have to upgrade. Don't upgrade... but if you do, there are adapters for you that will allow you to continue using your old gear.

It's not just hardware. Apple has officially abandoned Firewire protocol maintenance. We're okay at the moment, but how many more MacOS upgrades will we have where Firewire still works?

And I'm not an outlier case. There are a lot of audio professionals and semi-pros that depend on old Firewire interfaces. These were Apple's market for selling high-end laptops! This is basically just disregard for your oldest and frankly most profitable customers. If I didn't feel like a new MBP would actually be sacrificing functionality, I'd probably have upgraded already. Instead, I'm considering a platform switch. That's bad.

out of interest, which platform still has better firewire support? most windows laptops don't have them either.

btw, as someone who didn't use firewire, i hated that port. waste of space, could have used an extra usb port instead. and it wasn't like there was a lot of gear that used it, unlike e.g. ethernet or vga which sometimes came in handy (i also loath vga).

In the beginning, USB1 was no competition for Firewire. 12Mbps vs 400Mbps.

USB2 was more competitive, but Firewire stuck around due to its lower latency for audio applications.

FireWire is a EOL technology at this point so why would they be continuing to work on the protocol ?

And actually you aren't Apple's most profitable customer since you are still clamouring for old technologies. It's early adopters that upgrade every year that are the most valuable to Apple.

They clearly are not Apple's most profitable customers if they're abandoning the tech. If they were Apple's most profitable customers, you'd see Firewire on everything.

I should clarify that I meant that Apple is abandoning the tech, not the customers.

You could replace FireWire in that sentence with LaserDiscs, BetaMax etc. Fact is some technologies just don't take off enough to warrant long term support.

We're living in a transitory period as we move from a world of wires and connectors to a wireless world. This is the pain we have to endure as technology is pushed forward.

If it were up to the luddites and their obsession with compatibility, a laptop would have a dvd drive, firewire, usb-a, usb-c, thunderbolt, hdmi, dvi, vga, sd, microsd,vga, and display port all in one laptop chassis.

Having one single port, that can do all those things and do them just as well, is a far preferable alternative. Couple that with the future transition to wireless-only technology, and we're on our way to the future.

This Luddite has rather a lot of money invested in a professional grade audio interface. Replacing it with modern connectivity would be upwards of a thousand dollars. Ouch. And it works perfectly. Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future?

Any recording interface more substantial than a headphone jack is wired. It's going to remain that way for a while. Audio is a quasi-realtime problem with a lot of bandwidth. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are really reliable enough for the task, and won't be for some time to come.

Preserving investment in hardware that works, rather than making a risky expenditure on hardware that may or many not work (and will change process), isn't "Luddite". It's realist. We have the same problem with much more static tech, like ATMs and voting machines. The "one single port" dream you're spouting? I've heard that dream before. It was called "Firewire" back then. Another decade or so, and we'll be digging Lightning connectors out of our junk drawer and saying "Hey, remember this? Do we even need to keep this anymore?"

But this is where I get pragmatic. I know I have compatibility issues, so I'm looking at semi-retiring the MBP just for the heavy lifting and compatibility of audio, and maybe looking at what else can be done about photo editing. And a Chromebook for web browsing and other not-hard-work sounds better and better all the time.

> Why am I throwing away hardware that I like and trust for the relentless march to the future?

It's all part of change. It's inconvenient(change) when done well, and absolutely show-stopping when done poorly. Apple took a ham-fisted approach to this, and decided you should go through that right now. Not a lot of choice left to people like you(those with significant hardware investments) beyond using refurb gear, or spending a large sum on a brand new set of hardware and accessories(which will go through this same cycle again in the future).

It kind of all stinks, but there isn't a terrible lot us little people can do about it.

What's the big issue with slapping a USB c adapter onto your audio interface and considering it a $30 upgrade? USB c is objectively better.

Look up the latency in the USB specs. There is a reason that professional audio equipment used FireWire. Thunderbolt is better, and there is some equipment available for it, but frankly it is overkill. And even then it only works with some USB-C ports, with some cables.

Many inexpensive USB C docks will have firewire. And I've used fw interfaces in the past for audio, I honestly prefer newer options but hey if it works just don't update anything and you'll be find until it dies.

Why would you throw away hardware that works? Your current computer still works with it, right? And if that stops working and you need to get another computer, there are adapters that will make it work with the new hardware that don't require you to spend thousands. I don't see the issue here. If the hardware is more important to you, buy the adapters needed. If the computer is more important, buy the new hardware to go with it. The new computers don't suddenly cause your perfectly good hardware to be unusable.

Should have stuck with ADAT!!!

They're still putting that crap* in interfaces!

*Note, I say "crap" only because I'm not cool enough to have any ADAT interfaces.

> ... professional grade audio interface.

What is that interface? And it's not supported through the USB-C interface?

Many interfaces of yore didn't do USB (especially ones with lotsa I/O). So many jumped on the FW train due to bandwidth and the fact that USB 3.0 just wasn't in audio hardware developer's sights.

Apogee Ensemble Firewire. A Thunderbolt replacement would be $2500. There are other, less expensive options, but I'm still stuck with a minimum of $300 (new interface that supports ADAT, reuse the Ensemble with that) and probably upwards of $1000 to get equivalent functionality. This, on top of the cost of a new computer.

Yeah it may suck for you, but it won't suck for the people that buy whatever this equipment is and then use it over USB-C once that company makes the conversion.

It's like if we had no common way of measuring things. Imagine having to walk around with like 10 different tape measures because there was no standard. It's stupid. All of these different port interfaces are just like that.

Yeah. It's no big deal. Santa will be coming by real soon with new shiny USB Type C toys to replace our obsolete ones. It's a good thing Santa can write blank checks.

You as the individual don't matter. Parts will fail, components will need to be replaced, time moves forward. The future will be those same devices (or similar) using a single cable that will be compatible with everything, or it will be wireless. If for some reason it's not, then you just buy an adapter (which people do now anyway).

Your view is short-sighted. You're saying "What about me? What about right now?".

I'm a customer. Of course I matter. They're losing sales because they're not giving me any reason to stay, and multiple reasons to go. That matters.

Suppose I bite the bullet and switch to Windows? Apple's lost me then. They're not going to win me back. And that's not just the Mac. That's maybe my next phone. My next pad. My next router (oh wait, they're getting out of the wireless router game too).

Losing customers who have been with them for decades, who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their products and will stop? That fucking well matters.

I do dislike them exiting the router business.

As for losing customers, well, then we will look at the sales numbers.

I wasn't "happy" with the new MacBook Pro lineup, but I personally love the direction they're going. The only bad thing is the price increase, but they will drop the price.

But for your "I'm a customer I matter" comment. No you don't. Apple isn't going to let people who want a gigantic laptop with a million different ports get in the way of a wireless or standardized port world. I hate the fact that my work monitors have all these connections. You have all these cords coming out, different port types that do the same thing, and how many times has somebody gone to a meeting only to have to bring some dongle or find out that they have hdmi and the conference room is vga only or something? All of that is stupid. It's 2016. We can do better. I don't want to be tethered to the wall or a some device like a slave.

So basically, Apple has chosen a direction, and that direction may make sense, but it involves abandoning longtime loyal customers who were/are dependent on parts of the Apple ecosystem they're no longer supporting.

Wasn't that my original argument?

> The only bad thing is the price increase, but they will drop the price.

Out of pure curiosity, when's the last time Apple lowered the price of an existing product?

Last time I bought a new Mac was five years ago, but at that time their website had a quiet corner where you could buy the remaining stock of the previous models at a substantially reduced price. They also sold refurbs of current and previous models with further discounts. I bought just after a new-model announcement, and got the machine I'd been looking at the previous week for ~25% off.

One single cable or one single port? I thought the problem with the USB Type-C port was that there is a myriad of different USB C cables that "fit" into the port but each cable has different capabilities and thus your device may only work with a certain USB C cable.

http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/total-nightmare-usb-c-th...

Except there needs to be some BENEFITS on the other side. What you're saying is he should upgrade for the sake of upgrading, at great cost, to something that will do effectively the same thing except in a bass-ackwards fashion.

I'm not opposed on principle to a Macbook with a touchbar but I'm not buying, why? Because it has plus or minus the same specs as my current model which also connects to my monitors and everything else I use. Why would I impose that cost and pain on myself? Just to have the latest and greatest for the sake of it? Screw that, I'd rather be a luddite than a lemming.

This is exactly the type of attitude that makes me dread the future. Why invest in technology at all?

Wires are great, honestly. Easy to debug and use. The original zero config.

I can't agree more. Wires are the best. Unfortunately we're in the rapidly shrinking minority. Most people would rather put up with regressions in reliability and debugability in the name of ease of use.

I lived in a house with several roomates for a year or so, and I never ever had a problem with the internet because I used an ethernet cable. My roomates went through 3 wireless routers and a wireless repeater and they were never able to completely solve the myriad of issues that comes with wireless technology on a congested spectrum.

It really boggles my mind that they'd allow themselves to be frustrated, waste many combined hours of their life troubleshooting, and spend hundreds of dollars on network hardware when the solution is SO SIMPLE and dates back to 1970s.

I can tell you never used token ring. :)

How about trying to find the PC with the beaconing condition? That shuts down the entire ring? Usually someone copied another DOS PC configuration that uses the same Token Ring address. Engineers were good for that. 1994 or 1995 and they bought a new PC and instead of filling out sheets to have IT set up the PC they tried to do it themselves.

Ha! Even Ethernet used to be a lot fiddlier in the '90s, when you had to worry about crossover vs patch cables.

Technology in this context isn't an investment. Wires aren't investments. Wires are a cost. Imagine if your kids grow up and never have to buy a single cable for anything. How much money would that save them over their lives? What if these kids grow up in a world where things are connected, seemingly alive, because they just know about the presence of other things and can "talk" to those things and do your bidding?

This is what we're moving to. It sucks that people can't see that.

This is only going to happen in the professional audio world if you can build wireless protocols with sufficient reliability in terms of latency - bandwidth isn't the problem, latency is. Neither Bluetooth nor 802.11 are designed for guaranteed latency. Firewire was designed explicitly for it. USB not so much, but it can be adequately faked. But wireless? I don't see that happening anytime soon. Right now, I can't get my computer to reliably do Bluetooth from ten feet away to handle a single one-way stereo stream. That's crap.

So this wireless dream future? It's just a dream, for those who have more demanding needs than surfing the web.

The pain is completely self imposed. Wired ports and wireless technology are not mutually exclusive. USB-C is great bit there's no reason to remove all other ports. Technology will get adopted. It doesn't have to be forced.

IMO they should have given us one transition model before going all USBC. Leave one USBA, HDMI, sdcard slot (my wife and I use it all the time, and it is the pro after all, used by many in graphics arts, film, and photography). Downgrade power to USBC (yeah, losing magsafe or moving it to a dongle is a downgrade) if you must, replace the thunderbolts and other USBA with USBC.

That way I'd have a chance to actually pick up any USBC devices whatsoever before moving to a laptop that can only connect to USBC without dongles. 'Cuz right now I have zero, and so does my Mac-only office. Even the couple of USBC Android testing phones floating around come with a to-A USB cable, so I'd have to buy a new cable for them.

The people who compared the USB-C move to Apple's past moves were completely ignoring that in the past Apple replaced the FLoppy drive with the CD rom, but still kept all the other ports around.

This time round Apple has replaced every port with a USB-C port, which means I don't need to transition only 1 interface. I need to transition all.

And the most painful part about this move is they are doing it to the product line that in the past was loved because it came with USB + FW400 + FW800 + Video + Magsafe. IOW, a design goal for the Pro line used to be easy compatibility so professionals could end up in any situation and have a great chance of getting their computers to work with their environment without any adapters.

> Apple replaced the FLoppy drive with the CD rom, but still kept all the other ports around.

What? That's not even close to true. The iMac replaced all of Apple's then-standard ports with USB. ADB: gone. Serial: gone. SCSI: gone.

Yes, but that was consumer / education market gear first (iMac) as I recall.

More or less back on topic ... I bought a HP Probook for my on-the-road studies/work last cycle because I needed a portable that I could do _work_ with and repairability, matte screen, mouse buttons, VGA, HDMI, and whole lot of other things were much more important to me than width or mass or shiny. It came with Windows and it's well supported.

I would like to get another 17" macbook pro someday (mine is pretty old and 80% retired), and this move and the messaging around it suggests that Apple doesn't care to make one. It's no surprise, but it still stings a bit, and as noted else where it is breathtakingly clumsy for their remaining mac business (as is that press conference).

The problem with USB-C as "the one port to rule them all" is that it is impossible to produce a cheap cable and still meet the design spec. Even major smartphone manufacturers have been caught including underspec cables with their phones that damage one device or the other right out of the box. This isn't just limited to USB-A to USB-C cables, there are plenty of USB-C to USB-C cables that pose a potential threat when pushed to their power transmission limits.

USB-C was a great idea taken one step too far. USB-C would be perfect if it hadn't been saddled with the requirement to handle 100 Watts of power. That's an overkill requirement for a feature that wasn't demanded by anyone aside from OEMs looking to cut an additional charging port off the bill of materials.

Let me see... My laptop has a DVD drive, USB 3 (A), HDMI, SD, and microSD. I already had to buy a DVI adaptor, and already had a VGA one.

It works well. I just miss a 4rt USB port.

You know what works better? One cable that does all of that or no cables at all.

As soon as someone invents an isochronous wireless interface with guaranteed throughput and latency, I'm sure all the recording studios will switch to that.

Doubt it, they won't have any peripherals for their aging unconnected G4 tower.

Buy a desktop or a special interface port if you need something specialized.

His point is that fundamental physics and information theory limit how good a wireless link can be. So wired links will always perform better and therefore high-end audio engineering will run cables forever.

Technically, you could create an isosynchronous wireless protocol. But 802.11 ain't it, and neither is Bluetooth. Both are very tolerant of lag and have little guarantee of latency.

"Buy a desktop" in a thread about deficiencies in Apple laptops is a joke, right?

It's not a deficiency. Laptops can't do everything. Apple can't build a computer that caters to every edge case. That's why I don't complain that I can't play the latest video games on my laptop, or run 50 VM boxes or something.

But I'm not complaining that it can't do something magical and new. I'm complaining that it can't do what the same product could do from the same vendor five years ago.

That's not my point. The new MacBooks may be disappointing, but they exist. The Mac Pro, iMac and Mac Mini didn't even get a refresh.

There will be no purely wireless ever. Wired interfaces have too many advantages coming directly from physics and their reliability is unparalelled.

Personally I dont use anything wireless apart from WiFi, and even then only on my laptop

You know what you find if you open up a wireless router? Wires!

(Well traces anyway, but you know what I mean.)

My laptop has nearly all of those ports, and more besides. It's fantastic. The obsession with light weight and slimness is silly. Lugging around a five pound or even ten pound laptop is not that much of a burden.

Wireless technology needs to get a whole lot more reliable to get its foot in my door.

I don't really care for making the laptops increasingly thin, but the ports are just nonsense. Carrying around a 10 pound laptop with a trunk full of adapters is going to be a thing of the past and I can't wait for the future.

A top dollar SSD over SATA III will be about 1/6 the speed of the new NVMe connected SSDs. Are there good options for external PCIe hard drives using Thunderbolt 2?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com