Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports | Hacker News Reader

Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

businessinsider.com

507 pointstemp424 comments

Honestly to me the worst thing about the new MacBook Pro isn't that there are no legacy ports on it or that the battery may be smaller, it's that the new all-things-for-all-people ports it has are confusing.

The ports are all Thunderbolt 3 ports, which I believe by definition means they are USB 3.1 ports as well. But some devices out in the world have USB-C ports that are not Thunderbolt 3 compatible. No longer can you tell what sort of devices will work with a port by its physical shape. For instance, I have a Windows desktop machine with a single USB-C port on the back, but it's not a Thunderbolt 3 port. So while I could physically plug in a Thunderbolt 3-only device, it wouldn't function at all.

Thunderbolt 3 is backward compatible with Thunderbolt 1/2 via an adapter, but the Thunderbolt 2 adapter that Apple sells does not function identically to a Thunderbolt 2 port on previous generation Macs - e.g. you cannot plug a Mini DisplayPort display into it. Thunderbolt displays do work with it though.

Also, the lower-end 12" MacBook that Apple sells with a single USB-C port is NOT a Thunderbolt 3 port, so you have to know which devices that have identical connectors will work with it. Apple makes the distinction on its peripherals by screenprinting a little Thunderbolt logo onto the cable/connector housing. The messaging was reinforced with corresponding Thunderbolt logos next to the connectors on previous iterations of the MacBooks - making it obvious that these ports were not just Mini DisplayPorts but also Thunderbolt ports - but the new 2016 models don't appear to have anything like that on the hardware.

Additionally, there are USB-C cables and Thunderbolt 3 cables. Thunderbolt 3 cables are apparently higher-spec and will always work as USB-C cables, but the opposite is not necessarily true.

I've gotten myself into a stupid situation where I have purchased something like 4 adapters that don't accomplish what I thought they would when I bought them.

USB-C to DisplayPort -> DisplayPort to HDMI -> Monitor - doesn't work

USB-C to DisplayPort -> DisplayPort to DVI-D -> Monitor - doesn't work

USB-C to Ethernet - doesn't work

I'm actually planning to just go to Best Buy today and try to find anything that will let me plug this into my old monitor here even if it has to be the official USB-C to VGA cable from Apple since I don't have time to wait for shipping at this point.

I suppose this is my own fault but somehow I've never had this kind of problem in ~20 years of using a computer.

Edit: There are also currently very few resources about compatibility between all these new adapters and Apple hasn't done anything to help in their spec info so it's really just a guessing game right now.

I think the main source of the confusion is that the connector is called USB-C, but devices that use the connector may not be USB devices at all, since they can fully expect to only be used with devices that support a specific alternate mode (e.g. Thunderbolt). Yes, they all have to support USB at some level to negotiate the alternate mode (i'm not sure if for USB-C this is a passive signaling like sense resistors or something active like an authentication chip), but devices don't have to fall back to USB data modes at all if they don't want to.

If they had called the connector something distinct, like for example "Omnibus", then you could additionally specify the signalling required to make it work. So you could sell a device as being "USB via Omnibus plug", or "Displayport via Omnibus plug". Maybe even come up with little icons for each mode and place them on the host computers and peripherals to help people figure out what is going to work. Really just anything more than what they've done currently would be useful.

Yea, it used to be generally true that "if you can connect them with a cable, they will be compatible." Ports were single-use, and if two ports weren't compatible, then they would be physically incompatible. If you could get a cable to connect two different ports, they would probably be compatible because who would make the cable otherwise, right?

Now we have something like your "omnibus" port in USB-C, so you have potential incompatibility at the port level and at the cable level, and no good way to tell what will work and what won't. The good news is you only have one port, but the bad news is you don't really only have one port.

> if two ports weren't compatible, then they would be physically incompatible

they have forgotten about poka-yoke (inadvertent error prevention) which is very remiss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke

To be fair, that already hasn't been case with Thunderbolt 1 and 2 which reused the Mini DisplayPort.

There's actually a good number of very weirdly wired serial cables out there (incorrect pin mapping on one side), and if you use a standard cable your device won't work.

Hah, you didn't get the specs quite right. That's:

USB-C to DisplayPort -> DisplayPort++ to HDMI

But a DP++ device in a non-++ port won't work, and I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to know this.

Anyway, Google sells a bunch of high-quality adapters for about half the price of Apple's.

Googling displayport++ returns a bunch of confusing pages - can you summarize what the ++ signifies in your own words and with some examples?

DisplayPort++ means a DisplayPort port that can also use a passive DP-to-HDMI or DP-to-DVI adapter, such as a DP-to-HDMI cable. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort#DisplayPort.2B.2B

The graphics chipset will actually detect this and handle it as though you hooked up an HDMI cable.

As an owner of a Mac Mini from 5 or 6 years ago, I am fairly confident in guessing that this refers to what Apple calls “Mini DisplayPort with Audio”. My Mac Mini can use a Mini DP to HDMI adapter just fine — but it won’t include audio. Newer Mac Minis do support audio over Mini DP.

To be fair, I'm facing the same issue with a Dell XPS 13 9350 i bought instead of the new MacBook Pro:

I want to connect it to a 4k monitor at 60Hz via DP or HDMI 2.0. You have to find out how DisplayPort is done on the TB3 port (with USB-C plug) to know which adapter will work. The safest way seems to be to read Amazon reviews.

Thanks Amazon reviewers!

I have the same problem, but since I don't have Amazon here I'm testing different cheap adapters from aliexpress. No luck so far.

I found a USB-C -> HDMI -> DVI-D -> monitor works for that situation. But the HDMI adapter matters. Some Dell adapters we had laying around the office are what worked for me here, but it was flakey (plug in multiple times - plug in multiple monitors in the correct order).

If your monitor supports Displayport then that is the route you want to use. The MBP 2016 supports USB-C displayport alternate mode, and quality cables exist. This is pretty much bulletproof if it's an option to you.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EZH7CKO/ are the cables I bought since they were available next-day, but Monoprice also makes a quality cable.

http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/30/2016-macbook-pro-usb-cth... is also a great resource to get started, if you haven't seen it yet.

http://plugable.com/thunderbolt-3/ also has some good info. Apparently there are TB3 adapters which don't work with tbMBPs.

All I want is a single TB3 plug that powers my laptop and hooks up 2x4k displays at 60hz. A USB port or 3 would also be nice. Apparently this does not (can not?) exist.

From the Pluggable site: "Connect two uncompressed 4K 60Hz (4096 x 2160) displays (one via a DisplayPort++ port and the other via the 2nd USB-C port)"

Why can't I just have two real DP++ ports on the dock?

They do make one, but it's windows-only: Thunderbolt 3 DisplayPort Dual-Display Adapter for Windows (Plugable TBT3-DP2X)

Is there something about the new MBPs which prevents them from sending 2 HDMI or DP signals out over a single TB3 port? It seems like a huge step backward to now require a network of dongles, adapters, docks, and special cables just to replicate ports which other normal laptops have.

You can't expect an off-brand USB-C adapter to be able to fully support DisplayPort. USB-C does not natively contain DisplayPort. Also, don't daisy-chain adapters when you don't have to. Use a USB-C to HDMI adapter. Such as this one:

http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-av...

Herein lies the problem. Consumers don't understand or care why these things don't work, they just don't and it's frustrating. "I bought the adapter and plugs in, why doesn't it turn on?" I shouldn't need to explain to my dad why there are two indistinguishable plugs that follow different standards where one works and one doesn't.

"We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works." -Douglas Adams

  > "You can't expect an off-brand USB-C adapter"

Surely that's the point of standards: I don't have to purchase an Apple USB-C connector; I can purchase any USB-C connector, and it will perform correctly?

As an educated techie I understand that this isn't true because:

  - Some cables may be counterfeit/non-compliant
  - The nomenclature "USB-C" encompasses a multitude of differing standards
  - The differing standards are rarely identified or clearly explained at point-of-sale.

But this is, essentially, a consumer clusterf*ck.

This is poor advice. I have that exact adapter, and it fails to work with >50% of the HDMI devices (monitors, TVs, projectors) in our office.

This is kind of the point. I have to carry this, plus an offbrand HDMI adapter to hope to have greater than 50% chances of it working.

As far as I'm aware there is no reliable USB-C -> HDMI adapter on the market that works with the MBP 2016. If there is another someone knows about, I'd be happy to buy one for testing and let folks know the results.

Quick question! If we step back from the thunderbolt/displayport/displayport++/usb-c, distinction, which you use on the left-hand side of your arrow... when you wrote:

>"As far as I'm aware there is no reliable USB-C -> HDMI adapter on the market that works with the MBP 2016"

, do you exactly mean the broader statement (I've reworded what I thought you mean) :

>"As far as I am aware there is nothing that plugs into a MBP 2016 that gives a reliable HDMI port that I can connect with a simple HDMI cable to any output device that takes HDMI (screens/projectors/TV's/etc)"?

Is that what you meant? In other words, there is nothing you can carry around, together with an HDMI cable, that let's you plug the MBP 2016 into anything from a TV to a screen to a projector etc (as long as they take an HDMI input) without a chance that it won't work?

The Club 3D USB-C to HDMI 2.0 is perfect. I use it at the office to drive a LG 65" 4K screen at 60HZ for presentations from my MBP 2016: http://amzn.to/2hkM3hK

There is NO first party official Apple DisplayPort adapter. There actually is no first party adapter that would support 4k@60Hz officialy. It gets even more annoying since most 4K monitors made in last year will support 4k@60Hz only over DP, not HDMI.

I went through 2 adapters before I got one that actually worked with the new 2016 MacBook. Which was incredibly annoying.

I'm not sure how it compares, but I recently went 4k@60Hz with a Dell XPS 15 + docking station.(Dell WD15) + Vizio D40u-D1 (40"). That uses Displayport out of the dock, and a Plugable active DP to HDMI adapter before going into the TV as HDMI as 4k@60Hz. I find it surprising that the monitors, which likely cost 2-3 times what that TV cost ($400) don't support it over HDMI (but then again, the TV doesn't even have DP).

That said, Dell did have a USB-C dock, the TB15, which was plagued by a lot of the same things I hear about USB-C from the Macbooks with USB-C. Wifi and other components stop working intermittently, and on the dock, it flickered intermittently when connected at 4k[1]. Dell just released a new dock, the TB16, and there's a BIOS update for my XPS 15 that says it fixes some docking issues.

1: I seem to recall someone mentioning this was related to the firmware in some connected peripheral, but I'm not sure.

That's because you don't need an adapter to use DisplayPort with TB3 (on the MBP). Just purchase the correct [1] cable; the MBP implements DP as an alternate mode.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EZH7CKO/

The reason 4k monitors only support displayport is because current HDMI can only do 4k at 30hz. DP is a better cable with more bandwidth. Expect DP to overtake HDMI in the future.

USB-C does natively support DisplayPort as an alternate mode.

Whether your particular device does is not a given, though. the 12" MacBook definitely does, the specs specifically call out the native support:

http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs/

The specs for the MacBook Pro also purport DisplayPort capability:

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

DisplayPort is one of several options, but I wouldn't call them native because you can't rely on any of them being supported.

Also, the following does not work:

USB-C to HDMI -> HDMI to VGA -> Monitor

This forced me to buy a separate "USB-C to VGA" adapter. But with that, I cannot connect my USD laserpointer any more. It's a mess.

That may be because the HDMI to VGA adapter either doesn't work in general (there are so many cheap adapters on Amazon, and HDMI to VGA requires active circuitry, that I'd expect some of them to be fakes) or its pulling too much power over the HDMI port. I wouldn't trust any HDMI to VGA adapter that doesn't require external power.

Also, why does your laser pointer need to be connected to your laptop. If you mean USB presentation remote, you need more than one USB port.

And I suppose Apple has also made a healthy profit, either directly or through licensing on each of the purchases?

You suppose wrongly. It's clear from context that the user wasn't buying Apple adapters, and no, Apple doesn't get any licensing fees here either.

I get that the chinese manufacturers reverse-engineer everything, but you're saying that you can use "thunderbolt" on your packaging without paying some licensing fee to apple?

I mean, a bunch that just have the no-name plastic-bag packaging probably slip by on Amazon, but I would assume the lawyers wouldn't let you brand your cable "thunderbolt" without some official licensing fee process.

Apple receives licensing fees on USB Type C?

Actually it isn't precisely Apple's fault. It's the USB-IFs fault.

USB 3.1 in general is a mess. The spec allows for Alternate Modes, where the port is hardwired on the Motherboard to be able to be switched to deliver DisplayPort, HDMI, MHL, Thunderbolt, and damn near anything else you can figure out how to mux over the port's pins and cheaply demux on the other end of the cable. The best part is no one will actually list what Alternate Modes their laptop or motherboard supports. So if I want a laptop that supports, DisplayPort Alternate Mode with dual monitors, I'm opening support tickets with manufacturers asking "Does your USB-C port run this?"

Apple and Intel simply followed along what with what was already a mess.

Apple is lauded for making confusing technology simple. It's not Apple's fault, it's Apple's missed opportunity and it's our high expectations of Apple that are being eroded.

This! Thing is that situation with ports and adapters has never been worse, but Apple came there, wanted to be first again that will pull the plug on old technology and embrace the new one! But their execution was a miss. But anyway, my predictions are that from 2017. every Apple machine, wether it's computer or iPhone or iPad, will go down the USB-C route. Most probably next iPhone would use USB-C. And I just hope 2016. will be the year that was bad, and won't happen again. Since some Apple's small decisions were completely off, and we as costumers (or fans), are not used to it.

> Apple came there, wanted to be first again

Interesting point. Got me thinking about how the iPod was not the first MP3 player, and how the iPhone was not the first smartphone. I believe the philosophy was "don't be the first; be the first to get it right."

It's a little disappointing that they haven't been so magical lately.

Apple has never gone with an open standard when a proprietary closed standard would do.

More likely than using any sort of standard port would be Apple inventing yet another new proprietary port.

I'm pretty sure if you stick to apple hardware, things just work. So in a sense their technology is simple for those who stay in the ecosystem.

But don't dare buy a low-cost adapter from eBay or be damned for 10 generation.

So yeah it's a closed environment but is it so far worst than the jungle outside?

Yup. And they could have started by shipping a more compatible USB-C cable, instead of shipping a USB 2.0 one.

Well, it is partly Apple's fault in that they chose to go completely type c only, and that they chose not to provide the right sets of clearly marked and explained adapters that would be guaranteed to work with their hardware.

The whole ongoing Thunderbolt display fiasco where there are two different kinds of adapter from USB-C to mini-DisplayPort, each of which supports a non-overlapping set of monitors, is almost entirely Apple's fault though. They were the ones who decided to push Thunderbolt monitors using the mini-DP connectors, then chose to make and sell an adapter that didn't support actual DisplayPort.

So the alternate modes are required for proper operation? Or will it fall back to a standard mode and still work?

That's not how alternate modes work -- there isn't really a "standard" mode. When you plug in a Type C cable the two devices negotiate (via a combination of passives and some active negotiation) what protocols you want to use. Yes protocols with an "s." Power and, say USB 3.1 v2, or power and TB3 or HDMI or whatever.

Among the problems is you can have a cable that can't support a particular alternate modes, or can't support adequate power. The USB-IF hasn't defined a set of standard icons (not that there's much room for them -- they'd be microscopic).

Also the MacBook Retina has USB 3.1 v1 so supports just ordinary USB 3.0 & HDMI. The MacBook Pro supports several more alternate modes.

At least to Apple's credit, AFAICT all four USB ports are identical. Even that isn't required by the spec.

I read that the 2 ports on the left and right are actually slightly different. I don't recall exactly what it was but I think it was something about Thunderbolt 3 because of a lack of sufficient PCI-E lanes for all four ports.

Interesting. Sounds like they prioritized standardizing the connector but not the rest of the details.

Perhaps in the scope of large scale manufacturing, having multiple (redundant) connector styles is a low hanging fruit for cost reduction.

But it seems that there would be increased user confusion and technical support required. Very strange.

I dunno man, my eyes glazed over somewhere in the middle of that third paragraph and I'm just happy I don't have to deal with any of that.

Think they'll wise up and change any of it on the next model?

"Steve never would have backed down, remove more ports!" is how that product meeting will go.

The thing that bugs me about the argument for USB-C only on the new MBPs is that the early 2011 MBPs came out while Steve Jobs was alive.

That year was the first appearance of the Thunderbolt port on a Macbook Pro. You could have theoretically removed every legacy port outside of the MagSafe port and only had a bunch of TB ports to handle the I/O of peripherals. Yet Apple left the USB, FW800 (on the 15/17, maybe the 13 too) and SD reader instead of making people buy dongles to make up for the slack.

There wouldn't have been any auxiliary advantages to switching to full TB2.

TB2/mDP can't carry power. It was physically a much larger port, which means they couldn't scale down the size of the machine. And, ultimately, mDP is a much less useful port than the universally standard USB-C.

Jobs took medical leave January 17th, 2011.

"The future is wireless!"

That was actually Apple's summation when it came to issues like "why not support metered connections and data use limiting?" - that they didn't feel that is a compromise they should have to make.

> The ports are all Thunderbolt 3 ports, which I believe by definition means they are USB 3.1 ports as well. But some devices out in the world have USB-C ports that are not Thunderbolt 3 compatible. No longer can you tell what sort of devices will work with a port by its physical shape. For instance, I have a Windows desktop machine with a single USB-C port on the back, but it's not a Thunderbolt 3 port. So while I could physically plug in a Thunderbolt 3-only device, it wouldn't function at all.

There is no such thing as a "Thunderbolt 3-only device". Support for USB 3.1 is a part of the Thunderbolt 3 spec, and in your example the Windows machine and the device would talk to one another over USB 3.1.

If you can plug it in, it will work: every device with a standards-compliant USB-C port will work with any other device with a standards-compliant USB-C port. The only question is which underlying protocol will be used; in the worst case, it will be USB 3.1, and if both devices support Thunderbolt 3, it will be something fancier.

> If you can plug it in, it will work

Unfortunately, this hasn't been my experience. As an example, I have a display-port-based Apple cinema display, and I bought this adapter to try to connect it to a new macbook pro 15":

  http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMEL2AM/A/thunderbolt-3-usb-c-to-thunderbolt-2-adapter

The physical size of the connectors are compatible, of course; you can plug the monitor into the thunderbolt-2-side of the adapter, and you can plug the thunderbolt-3-side of the adapter into the laptop. But, since the adapter isn't display-port compatible, no joy.

If I remember correctly (and I might not), the apple store page for this adapter didn't originally carry a warning about this, but instead had text that made it easy to misunderstand whether this would work. The text on the page has changed.

As a weaker example, I have an LG 27UD88 Monitor. The USB-C connection from it works, but only carries 60W of charging "oomph," and the 15" macbook pro needs 85W of charging. So, even though the menubar icon on the mac signals that charging is happening, the battery is actually depleting over time. (Yeah, this one is more caveat emptor than the other, but still.)

The confusion is that most people don't understand how USB, TB2/3, and DP work (not saying they should either!).

TB3 is an "alternate mode" signaling over USB-C. As such, every TB3 port is a USB-C port, but not every USB-C port is a TB3 port. Same goes for DisplayPort over TB2. Every TB2 "native" port allows DP, but not every DP port does TB2. TB3 doesn't however carry DP signaling as before though because a cable is either TB3 over USB-C, or DP over USB-C, not both. TB3 and DP both use the "same" alternate-mode signaling. This was my only complaint with the 12" rMB, having only one port, you couldn't plug in a hub, then hub to monitor, because the hub wouldn't kick in the alternate mode signaling required. This required the monitor to always be first device. Now with the rMBP having multiple ports, not a problem anymore.

As mentioned before, USB-C also has an alternate mode for DisplayPort. That's how your LG 27UD88 (fantastic monitor btw!) gets the monitor signal. Buying a TB3 to TB2 adapter is the wrong way to adddress hooking up a DP monitor, despite it being a semi-logical conclusion for even most tech geeks. The right combo is to get a USB-C to DP adapter.

I don't know what the USB-IF folks were thinking, but clearly we need some of whatever they were smoking as this is going to be a mess for years to come i bet.

As to your last point about 60W vs 85W USB-PD, technically you are very correct, but in real life not exactly. The distinction comes to play with how hard you are working the machine. If CPU/GPU are maxed, you'll drain a little battery, but under normal load you'll see a very very slow charge. Same thing happened before with Magsafe2 when you used a 65W power cord on a 15" MBP (that normally used an 85W adapter).

> As a weaker example, I have an LG 27UD88 Monitor. The USB-C connection from it works, but only carries 60W of charging "oomph," and the 15" macbook pro needs 85W of charging. So, even though the menubar icon on the mac signals that charging is happening, the battery is actually depleting over time

It actually loses battery being charged @ 60W? I can't imagine the MBP 15" is actually pulling that much current over the long term... If this is the case, that means it's simply not using the power delivery whatsoever which seems utterly insane.

I've plugged in my 15W phone charger to my 15" MBP, and I was fairly certain at the time my battery was going down less than it was previously. This could of course been placebo.

Ugh, what a silly rollout if so. Plus Apple shipping USB-C 2.0 cables with their chargers in an effort to save... $1? On a $3,000 laptop? Just ridiculous.

Not having a viable USB-C -> HDMI adapter at launch has to be the biggest oversight/wtf for me though. I don't know many users of MBP's that don't do presentations/toss some code up on a projector/etc. from time to time. This is now genuinely hard to impossible. I have to carry 2 HDMI adapters in my bag, as some TVs work with one, some the other. And some not at all.

I'm all for the move to USB-C - but it's like they put zero thought into the transition. You can't cripple a generation of hardware like this.

I know most of these problems will be solved both in software and in third party support - but man this product feels like some manager pulled 4 different groups together and said "you guys have had 3 damn years, release what you have now" and they tried badly at integrating it all together in a couple weeks.

Then you get into actual day to day usability issues like the touchbar lacking the completely in-your-face-obvious feature of haptic feedback making it almost useless... Like how was that not the first thing the first UIx tester who used the escape key said? Just amazes me.

  > Not having a viable USB-C -> HDMI adapter
  > Many users of MBP's…toss some code up on a projector

Your projectors support HDMI?! I wish!

Joking aside, my "presentation" adapter is Thunderbolt(2) -> VGA, because VGA is the only thing I can be fairly certain that almost every projector will support.

That said, I've ended up with a bunch of adapters, as a fallback in case that doesn't work. I'm definitely not expecting to plug into a projector with USB-C any time soon!

> It actually loses battery being charged @ 60W?

I've seen this, very rarely, when getting power via a 27" Thunderbolt Display, and keeping multiple cores busy.

I had a similar experience. Two identical looking cables but one was mini display port, the other Thunderbolt. An old Mac Pro could be used as an external display with one cable but not the other.

Seen that, with conference speakers stressing out minutes before their talk, about why the laptop > projector adapter isn't working.

It's the worst-case scenario: adapters/connectors that appear identical, but behave differently.

>If you can plug it in, it will work

this is completely false, because alt-mode exists and alt-mode doesn't have to support a fallback to USB-C. Google sells a usb-c to hdmi adapter in their store. If you connect it to a Nexus 6P, nothing happens, because the phones don't support hdmi alt-mode.

This is pretty demonstrably false. I have a USB-C port on my Windows machine and I just plugged in a TB3->TB2 adapter, then plugged a TB ethernet adapter into that. Windows machine pops up an error when plugging it in, no new devices appear in the device manager, etc. It will not "just work" when your USB-C ports are not Thunderbolt ports.

Not entirely true, as the 2016 MacBook Pro disables/blocks some Thunderbolt 3 devices that haven't been Apple-certified (apparently including any device that uses a Texas Instruments TPS65982 USB-C chip):

https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/03/2016-macbook-pro-thunderbolt-...

Is the TI chip out of spec? Why is it blocked?

>If you can plug it in, it will work:

Not if there aren't drivers written for your OS it won't. Unless you are the type of person who can roll your own drivers.

With the amount of variation in support/standardisation of USB-C, drivers are last on the list of potential issues.

Sure, if there's no driver, the user will be out of luck, no matter what. But that's at least a clearer, separate problem, from incompatible adapters or cables, and whether they correctly support the device.

Putting everything and the kitchen sink into USB-C was a mistake. I already have a horrible mess of weird cables that aren't interoperable, don't support Superspeed, have current limits, etc.

USB should be one thing and one thing only; a Universal Serial Bus. Can you send video over a serial connection? Great, let's do that instead of using the same physical connector for 85 different incompatible video cable designs that may or may not work with any given device.

USB 1.1 was about the right level of complexity. Maybe a bit too high. Since then, we have gone off the rails. It's no longer reasonable to suspect that anything except super-high-end devices will even bother to support a majority of the things in the USB spec. How many laptops actually support most of the charge profiles? The MacBooks do, but none of my friends' non-mac laptops do. It's a mess.

The speed we have now is great. Let's keep that. But let's also erase all the cruft and bring USB back to the simple, universal protocol it was supposed to be.

Even better, try finding a laptop that will run DisplayPort alternate mode over the USB-C port. EDIT: Or HDMI for that matter.

Apple: 12" rMB previous or current gen, 13"/15" rMBP current gen.

Other: Alienware, Dell, HP, etc all have laptops doing it. I don't have the link handy that lists ten windows laptops supporting it last Spring, but I'm sure Google can find it for you and there's likely dozens more now.

Ironically the MBP 2016 is probably the best for DP alternate mode over USB-C - thus far it's just worked for me on 3 different monitors.

HDMI you should just give up on though...

Your description reminds me of the '90's Apple that had so many fricking Mac models that ordinary mortals didn't know what to buy. I remember fielding those questions more than once, and only barely having an answer because I frequently browsed the hobbyist and trade press at that time.

200\* Apple became one of a few models choices, each designed to (for something of a premium) deliver a consummate experience within its niche.

Apple buyers -- both professionals and premium-paying consumers -- want something that "just works", and works well.

For Apple to foist the Emotibar on them, before solving these other problems... Back-asswards.

> No longer can you tell what sort of devices will work with a port by its physical shape.

This isn't a new issue and USB-C is far, far from being the first port type to be ambiguous in this manner.

USB 1, 2, and 3 all used the USB A plug.

Yeah; and I have a special camera which works over USB 3 but simply does not function when plugged into a USB 2 port (as there is not enough bandwidth to transfer its information). The power differences among various USB-C ports is also not special: I have tons of USB-A power adapters which are capable of providing different amounts of power, and computers are also sometimes different in what they are willing to provide.

I think it is more a case that ports are USB-C, as Thunderbolt 3 can be used via their alternate mode (thanks to Intel).

Thing is that displayport over thunderbolt used half the bandwidth of thunderbolt to carry displayport signals (raw, not coded on top of thunderbolt). This similarly to how you can use USB-C alternate mode to carry displayport. Thus using thunderbolt over USB-C alternate to carry displayport is superfluous to the extreme.

In practice most people aren't going to have multiple Macbooks, and if that's you you should go to Monoprice and just get different color cables for different types.

I don't think I'm an outlier. I have a late 2013 Macbook Pro issued from my employer. I also have a personal Macbook Pro. My wife has a new Macbook. I also have an old 2012 Macbook Air. So between two people there are 4 apple computers in a single household. Add in 2 iPads, 2 iPhones, and an Apple watch and this whole adapter situation starts to become a major issue.

People? So Apple isn't interested in selling to families and couples anymore?

Families is fair, but I think my advice still stands.

I've had mine for a week now, and have been able to use it alongside my late-2014 rMBP, which has been a solid workhorse. I'm starting to notice very subtle preferences for the 2017 model creeping in - after an hour of typing, for example, going back to the old keyboard feels really, really inefficient and antiquated, and my typing rate is lower than on the new rMBP.

I also really enjoy the Touchbar - it hasn't been too intrusive, and binding ESCAPE to Caps Lock has been an acceptable re-configuration for me as a vim user.

Speed: okay, it seems slightly faster than the old machine, but then the old machine is 95% full while new-rMBP is not even 5% full yet, so .. no indexing hassles. (old-rMBP would often become unusable during Spotlight re-indexing..)

All in all, I'm happy with the upgrade - but with one huge big fat caveat: I didn't buy it. My work did. If it weren't for this fact, I'd be very reluctant to upgrade..

> I've had mine for a week now, and have been able to use it alongside my late-2014 rMBP, which has been a solid workhorse. I'm starting to notice very subtle preferences for the 2017 model creeping in - after an hour of typing, for example, going back to the old keyboard feels really, really inefficient and antiquated, and my typing rate is lower than on the new rMBP.

For me it's the EXACT opposite - everytime I return to my 2014, it feel so much better and the strain on my hands is significantly lowered. The new keyboard just doesn't feel right or comfortable even after weeks.

> I also really enjoy the Touchbar - it hasn't been too intrusive, and binding ESCAPE to Caps Lock has been an acceptable re-configuration for me as a vim user.

For me the touchbar is empty 90% of the time. And I can't even put application shortcuts there :/

FYI BetterTouchTools supposedly lets you customize the touch bar for arbitrary apps. Haven't tried it on a touch bar myself but it's an amazing utility regardless.

https://www.boastr.net/bettertouchtool-pre-alpha-with-touch-...

(I believe stable has this feature now as well.)

Hmm, doesn't this still require you to cmd-tab to the tool, since TouchBar only allows the currently focused app to display things?

I have used BetterTouchTool to add a lot of app shortcuts to my touch bar. It works great.

Same here, I prefer my older MBP keyboard. The giant trackpad always gets in my way as well. Afters years on my old MPB it's muscle memory that needs reprogramming now, which takes time and means mistakes.

How do you deal with the arrow keys?

I like the feel of the keyboard, but I found absolutely no way to orient my fingers over the arrow keys. There is no way tell whether I'm hitting the up arrow or the right shift.

As someone who works with text, it's a deal breaker for me.

The whole keyboard feels like that to me. When they made the keys bigger they basically took away the ability to 'feel' the outside edges of the keys and know where your hands are. It's very disoriented and most of my typing errors are off by one.

Yes I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this. The new left/right cursor layout is awful for me, I keep having to look down at the keyboard.

>How do you deal with the arrow keys?

I'm a vim user, so its hjkl all the way.. for the most part. And while I do agree that the older invert-T configuration of the arrow keys was ergonomic and sensible, I've found myself not having any problem with locating the arrow keys on the new 2017-rMBP due to the fact that the gap between up/down is also pretty easy to find by feel.

I guess I might be a little more tolerant for this change than most, since I try to change my keyboard every 6 months (for RSI reasons) anyway, and am also a keys/synth player with a room full of diverse haptic interfaces. But I do understand the frustration of having these ergonomics yanked out from under us by Apple ..

Yes I don't understand why more people aren't talking about this.

Because it's a subjective matter of personal opinion and not all people everywhere have identical opinions. Yet it is often presented, especially in places like HN, as an objective opinion that the new MBP is 100% completely, totally, permanently and irrevocably unusable for any person, for any use case, in any logically-possible universe.

Perhaps that is not the case, and instead it is the case that there are things you dislike which other people like.

I hadn't really used the cursors until now so I thought I would check. I agree with you, they're very awkward. When I press the left my brain then expects that the up and down keys will be the same size key, and I end up hitting the shift.

I seldom use the keys in day to day typing, so it's not a big issue, but they feel very wrong.

Apart from that the keyboard has grown on me, but I have changed my style to type much more lightly, partially because of how noisy the keyboard is.

In almost every Mac OS X application/text field, the emacs keybindings (Ctrl-p,Ctrl-n,Ctrl-b,Ctrl-f for up, down, left, right, respectively) work. I, personally, very rarely use the arrow keys for navigating text.

Ctrl-a, Ctrl-e, Ctrl-k and Ctrl-y also all work for beginning of line, end of line, kill and yank.

Same here. As I wrote in this [1] comment, the touch bar being in the way + no escape key + uniform arrow keys = very frustrating touch-typing experience.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13098257

Don't use arrow keys, it shifts the center of gravity when typing. You want to use hjkl for movement, even better, try not to use hjkl at all and use movement commends such as w b e etc for movement.

First thing I do when setting up vim. 1. unbind arrow keys 2. bind jk to Esc 3. Set up tmux + vim integration with clipboard / mouse support

Love the new MBP the keyboard is great to type on.

I'd never heard of using hjkl for cardinal directional movement.

I am familiar with ijkl where jl <—> W E and ik <—> N S (used in Lode Runner and BurgerTime for the Apple IIe).

I honestly don't know: is hjkl standard in a command line app?

Yeah, in vi: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys...

Only for vi users. Everybody else thinks they're weird.

It's the standard in vim.

I've had a new Macbook since it came out in April 2015. Still not used to the arrow keys.

This sounds EXACTLY how my impression is after about 2 weeks of non-primary machine use.

!00% agree with the keyboard, I even made a joke about it to my visiting parents yesterday (received no laughs). After working for a few hours on my new machine, jumping back to my old machine definitely feels greasy.

98% agree with touchbar, I wish there was a way to edit the default touchbar view (escape and mini functions). I'd love to have the mini functions maximized so I can have the old hot keys one less click away, but its a minor gripe.

100% agree with speed -- it's been awesome. No worries at all. I don't have as much on my new machine yet but it seems to not get bogged down at all where my last-gen rMPB gets all hot and bothered rather quickly. It also doesn't seem to run as hot, I don't think I've heard a fan kick in yet (it is the winter ;D). I used to run my neural-styles on my last-gen rMBP as it would max at like 60GB (thanks swap!) where my 32GB linux box would tap out at... ~31.5GB. I am dying to run an apple to apple to penquin RNN death match here soon, but... yanno... people need gifts.

RAM -- 16GB is fine, it runs swap off an SSD, life could be A LOT worse. I am not sure how big swap can get but my last machine was touching 60GB under max loads of the RNN.

Touchpad -- it's HUGE and it's AWESOME! I don't have to do that lil finger-shifty maneuver to drag all the way across the screen now. I don't have any palming issues either. It's AMAZING!

Battery -- I saw some weirdness when I first got it, like being stuck at 80% for 3 hours. But it seems to have gotten enough data now to make better calcs on the power remaining. It feels like it lasts a lot longer than my old machine while doing generally the same work (usually local GAE instances, pycharm, chrome, webstorm, bundler watchers, the usual).

Ports -- I got one dongle and have only needed to use it once to test mousewheel events on a standard mouse. It worked great and everything else I plan to upgrade to USB-C and reading the instructions (it's really not THAT confusing guys...)

I am super pumped about my new upgrade and I definitely DID buy this myself (though it's a business write-off I suppose). I was waiting for the next MBP for a new lappy and had plenty of time to make a choice and every other laptop I got my hands on simply didn't have the same build quality or level of standard that this does. I also am not a fan for ultra-do-anything coffee-breath Windows and Linux support is always more trouble than it's worth at times (personally, macOS is my favorite unix-like os flavor by far).

Not sure what this is "lil finger-shifty maneuver", but you can drag with two fingers. Click down on something you want to drag with one hand, and then start dragging with another hand (finger). While holding first finger down you can continue dragging.

What's your exact config?

I appreciate the fact that they made the keys on the pro much more clicker than the MacBook. The butterfly keys on them seemed unusable for serious typing, though I've only used them in stores, so perhaps it takes getting used to.

I've just switched from a 2014 MacBook Pro to a 2016 MacBook. I thought the keyboard would be a bit of a downgrade, but was willing to put up with it for the size and weight difference. After using it for a couple of weeks, the new keyboard is just fine even without the improvements they made to the Pro line. The only complaint I have is that the arrow keys aren't as distinguishable via touch as they used to be.

The keyboard on the 12" MacBook does take getting used too. Took me about a week, but loved it once I got used to it. My only "complaint" is how noisy it is. When I'm typing fast in a meeting, it's quite noticeable to others.

Agreed on all counts. There are two other things I dislike about typing on my 2016 12" rMB: 1) if I have to make transient use of arrow keys I always mess it up and 2) over long periods of time my hands start hurting from always being pushed up against the sharp edges whereas on my 15" rMBP there are a few inches on each side of my hands.

For the most part though I love that rMB. I wouldn't want to code on it several hours a day but for my general home computing and relatively light coding it is fantastic.

I think it's the best laptop for a management level person in engineering running from meeting to meeting who occasionally sits down to write some light code / test code that they are reviewing from others. Great screen, decentish (but not great) memory, and great battery life, all with the simplicity of a single cable connection for power/monitor/accessories. Best of all, it's fantastic traveling as it can be easily charged from a USB-C battery pack that doubles as a phone charger.

If I was writing code all day, then yes, a 15" rMBP would clearly be superior, but as I don't currently the 12" makes a perfect work laptop.

In my experience, spotlight re-indexing mostly happens if you run out of disk space and the OS decides to drop spotlights caches in favor of swap space. If you keep an eye on the size of your swap files (in the /var/vm dir), you can see when things go nuts and take corrective action before the index gets whacked.

IMHO, this is a "bug" because if you are running on battery, the indexing is a problem and it is also a problem if you are using spotlight. Is there an option to ensure that the spotlight cache is not deleted?

Spotlight has given me so many headaches in the last few weeks that I'm seriously considering investing the time to understand it well enough to build an app to wrestle it to the ground and beat it over the head with a big stick. If only there'd be a reason to do it other than "gain control over my life again" ..

If you just want to beat it over the head with a stick, you can simply turn indexing off on a per-volume basis:

    sudo mdutil -i off /

You can also exclude certain directories or volumes in the Privacy section of Spotlight preferences.

Well, I'd buy that tool. Spotlight watchdog.

> after an hour of typing, for example, going back to the old keyboard feels really, really inefficient and antiquated

Isn't that just because you are used to a different keyboard now?

Its because the new keyboard doesn't require as much haptic effort as the old one, in my opinion. A direct A/B comparison between the two leads me to conclude that I do in fact prefer the new keyboard on the 2017-rMBP over the old one. However, both are pretty decent and a matter of taste, I expect.

>> the new keyboard doesn't require as much haptic effort as the old one

I end up hitting the keys harder to get the feedback I'm expecting. Otherwise it feels like I'm typing on a flat surface with no keys at all.

I've had a similar experience. the new keyboard is much better. Except I keep palming the new huge trackpad.

I honestly don't get why they'd make the trackpad bigger. It's one of 99 reasons for which I won't buy these new models.

I do too, but over the last few days have trained myself not to rest on the trackpad and to find the little 'lip' region between keyboard and trackpad to rest on instead. I guess this is a habit thing though, and it can be difficult to break those habits. I do occasionally find myself thumbing the mouse around by accident, but generally don't find it that inconvenient.

I do wish to note that it has been difficult for me to acclimate to the new motionless trackpad and do things like complex hold/drag/click manoeuvres .. this has required a bit of getting used to, but generally I'm not bothered by the bigger trackpad. Just the haptic adjustment felt like user fail for the first few days - I've gotten over it.

A friend and I were testing out the huge trackpad. It fully rejected/ignored my palms, no matter how I typed. Impressive! But it didn't reject his nearly as well.

Conclusion: it depends on the shape of your palm, or the sharpness of the heel of your hand.

You don't address the point of the article which is battery life though.

I've been getting 6 - 7 hours average runtime on a full charge for the last few weeks, but I'm working (Xcode, vim and builds) and I don't think I have a representative work load - but I do note that this laptop 'seems' to be as long-lived without the charging cable as my previous machine. I suppose I'll pay more attention over the next week and see if its as bad as everyone makes it out to be - so far, I haven't even noticed.

One thing I do really like though, is being able to charge from either side of the laptop. This actually improves things for me when in 'hacking in bed mode', since the previous left-sided configuration was inconvenient .. and is now not an issue.

What's your config?

rMBP 15" 2.7ghz i7, 16G RAM, 500G SSD, Intel HD 530, etc.

So far I haven't loaded the machine up with anything heavier than my preferred homebrew+iTerm+vim+cscope+make/XCode tools, and I've been able to work pretty well with it all week. Going to try to keep it as clean as possible.

>binding ESCAPE to Caps Lock has been an acceptable re-configuration for me as a vim user

I've seen a lot of people say this but I dunno. I'm kind of leery of doing something that would cause me to develop problematic muscle memory when typing on normal keyboards, e.g. on other people's machines. I have enough trouble flipping between Mac and Windows keyboard shortcuts already.

Rebinding Ctrl to Caps Lock key was the lifechaning experience for me (I started to use Emacs for some things, and I couldn't stand using Ctrl down there). And as a matter of Vim, there are plenty of solutions to rebind exit to something like `jk` or use `Ctrl+[`.

I bind Ctrl to Alt and Alt to CapsLock so I can use my thumb to hit the remapped Ctrl next to the spacebar

I used to think the same thing until I analyzed how often I actually type on other people's machines. For me it's extremely rare, maybe once a month, and even then I'm rarely coding or doing anything that requires decent muscle memory.

I still probably wouldn't want to switch to another keyboard layout like Dvorak, but even that is more because of my personal learning curve and less about using other people's computers.

>I'm kind of leery of doing something that would cause me to develop problematic muscle memory when typing on normal keyboards, e.g. on other people's machines.

Who here routinely does a lot of work on other peoples' machines?

Honest question, because I keep hearing this claim re: remapping keys, but I rarely see people working on not their machine in the wild.

With collaboration tools like webex, meeting rooms with common ports and skype/slack I haven't touched a coworker's keyboard in 10+ years.

Given how germ-infested those things are, I generally don't want to, either.

I have suffered from RSI for some decades and one thing that helps alleviate it is to change my keyboard every 6 months or so .. and in that light, this change has actually been quite smooth for me. I've gotten used to it in a week, and will probably adopt it as standard from here on out, anyway ..

`Ctrl + [` is the best way IMO.

:ino kj <Esc>

'kj' is the ideal key combination for changing out of insert mode. Keep your fingers on their home row. Try it and you'll never go back. (Some people like 'jj' or 'jk' and they're fine people, too.)

Same on all accounts (including work buying it and those feelings).

The keyboard I thought I'd hate, but it's actually so much better than I imagined.

Are you enjoying the noise of the new keyboard?

https://vimeo.com/195645497

What's the 'r' in 'rMBP'?

Retina.

Apples very own throughly innovative marketing term for high resolution displays.

The "r" will very likely be dropped going forward, since the last remaining non-Retina MBP is now no longer produced.

Yeah, people seem to be calling the 2016 models tbMBP and ntbMBP.

It's the MacBook Escape and the Macbook Pro.

It stands for "retina display", which means the display has a higher pixel density.

The OS X Terminal integration is quite spiffy...amused they had an engineer specifically working on Terminal Touchbar integration!

This is an article that (incompletely) summarizes the Consumer Reports article[1]. The reason for the wildly varying performance appears to be due to a bug (presumably) in Safari. They had consistent results with Chrome:

> Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs.

I've been using a 13" MacBook Pro (without Touch Bar) for six weeks now, and have found the battery life very impressive (I use Chrome rather than Safari).

[1]: http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-...

The fact that Apple would ship a version of Safari that so deeply affected the battery of their newest MBP is concerning, and perhaps illustrative of why many MBP afficionados are so upset about the situation.

I've been having Safari issues since I updated to Sierra. Every once in awhile Safari will peg my CPU at ~250% and brings my computer to a standstill.

I took a screenshot of the activity monitor while this was going on[0]. Note that this wasn't the "Safari Web Content" process, which I typically see where there is a rogue tab doing something crazy. This was simply the Safari process itself. The only extension I have installed is 1Password which I've temporarily disabled to ensure it wasn't causing the issue. It isn't.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/YDv7c

I'm not familiar with the activity monitor, what does 247.9% even mean?! Two cores at 100% and one at 47.9%?

I haven't upgrade to Sierra but have started having Safari issues after the last El Capitan update. Same you're having - peg out the CPU and bring the computer to a standstill. Once I even had to power off the machine to get things back under control. I've never had to do this before in my 11 years of running MacBooks. I'm getting really concerned with Apple's overall quality. Their competitive advantage has always been they control the entire computing experience from the software to the hardware and they're starting to blow it. I hope they make adjustments before this gets out of hand.

I wonder if its not the Touchbar that draws the battery down. Chrome doesn't seem to have as much for the Touchbar to be doing as Safari does - though Safari surely demonstrates the functionality of the Touchbar in impressive ways. When I'm not laying flat in bed (i.e. sitting at the office) I've actually used the Touchbar a few times ..

From the article:

"The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next."

No excuse for shipping buggy software, but it has to be said that Safari uses a lot less CPU than other browsers under normal circumstances. I wonder how they do it.

They do it by caring. And the reason they care is because it reflects poorly on the entire platform when one gluttonous app drains the battery. Other browser vendors couldn't care less about how their app makes the platform look, especially if it comes at a cost to their app's performance.

Isn't it still a bug that is not new MBP specific therefore a completely wrong diagnosis of the problem?

Wouldn't it be observed on any Apple notebook?

Wow, I decided to make the switch to Safari when I got my new mbp to optimize for battery life. I guess this is the end of that experiment. Safari devtools are terrible anyway.

While I use chrome for debugging most of the time, I've had a good experience with Safari as my "general use" browser, and found that battery life does tend to be better on MacOS compared to Chrome, this particular issue notwithstanding.

Also, I believe that by default Chrome now sends your browsing activity to Google for ad targeting (https://mobile.twitter.com/phlsa/status/754337623964053504/p...).

It doesn't seem like it was that long ago that Apple was marketing Safari as the least power-hungry browser.

The only complaint I really have about the new MBP is the price. MBPs have always been expensive relative to the specs, and I've always been okay with that. But it seems Apple's pushing their margins up even higher and have eliminated more affordable options (e.g., a 15" model without a discrete GPU -- I personally have no need for the GPU, but really wanted the extra screen real estate).

After Apple Care and taxes, I ended up dropping over $3k on my 2016 15" MBP. This makes it the most expensive laptop I've ever owned.

Just a few points that might be of interest:

* Battery life has legitimately been fine for me. I consistently get 8-10 hours of light work (working in the terminal and browser). Despite all the battery life complaints, this is actually the best battery life I've personally gotten on any MBP I've owned.

* I love the trackpad. It's comically large, but I adapted fast, and the palm rejection has been working really well for me.

* The Touch Bar makes sense and is well-implemented. It's not revolutionary and I wouldn't recommend getting the laptop because it has the touch bar. But it's a legitimate (if small) step forward in usability. It is not without its compromises (e.g., no physical escape key), but I've found I adapted to the compromises very quickly.

* The form factor is incredibly portable for a 15" laptop.

* The port situation isn't a big deal for me personally because I don't use this laptop as a desktop replacement and rarely have any need for the ports.

* I'm fine with the keyboard. It's very satisfyingly clicky, and I can type very fast on it, just as fast as any other keyboard. I wouldn't say I prefer it to more traditional keyboards; it's not a big deal to me either way.

I think price is the only real complaint I have as well. I've only bought Macbook Airs because they were thin and light even though I wanted the power and connectivity of Macbook Pros. This is the first MBP that I want to buy.

By the time I'm ready to replace my 2012 MBA I expect the price will have fallen.

Agree with the price, especially being limited to 16GB of RAM. Often times I need to run a couple VMs, editor, browser, etc. etc. 16GB just isn't enough, especially with containers and VMs in the mix.

The URL should be changed to http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-..., since this only reports on that.

Honestly, the reporting in TFA is insightful, pointing out that Apple got complaints about battery life and instead of addressing them, chose to paper over it. Seems very relevant and, to borrow a phrase, wiggles its eyebrows suggestively toward a troubling trend.

71.8 watt-hour: 2013 13" MacBook Pro [1]

49.2 watt-hour: 2016 13" MacBook Pro Touch [2]

Why are so many people surprised that the battery life went down from ~10 hours down to ~7 hours?

When the physical battery size is only ~70% of the previous model, it's no surprise the new MacBook Pro only gets ~7 hours of battery life.

[1] https://support.apple.com/kb/sp691?locale=en_US

[2] http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

The really disconcerting thing here is that this is the first macbook in 10 years to be a major regression on key points. Since the first Intel macbook, Apple has focused on core competencies: good touchpad, good screen, good battery life. Every generation got consistently better on those dimensions. PC vendors will do stuff like ship a great touchpad one generation and a shit one the next, but you could generally count on each successive Apple laptop to meet or beat its predecessor on those core metrics.

The problem is that reducing thickness is a selling point/feature for a lot of people on Apple products, but the compromises made in exchange for thinness cause problems for people who don't value thinness over other things.

Having said that, it's important to note that CR did not give the Macbook Pro a Recommended badge (think of it as the equivalent to "Editor's Choice"), it doesn't mean they're telling people not to buy them either. The headlines are somewhat misleading about this.

Personally, even though I've left Macs because I don't like the direction Apple has taken, I'm still hard pressed to say that the current crop of Macs are horrible just because they don't cater to my specific needs. For the vast majority of people looking for a higher end laptop, they're perfectly fine (albeit pricy). I've gotten over the fact that "Pro" in Apple speak no longer means "Workstation Class" (or something close to it).

If you work at Apple there are likely chargers all over the place so you don't realize that some people actually do care about battery life.

Raw battery specs are meaningless when the underlying hardware and software is different. Battery specs on iPhones look pretty bad too compared to a lot of Android phones, real world performance is a different thing.

Intel has been working on more power efficient CPU's more than faster CPU's the last years. Same goes for RAM. I guess Apple did the same on the software side.

I still think something isn't completely like the engineers wanted it to be if I look at the way the batteries are fitted inside the chassis. And I am happy I am in a position to skip this year's version because I expect there will be an improved model that will deal with a lot of these smaller issues that weren't fixed in time before Christmas.

But I don't think there's a dramatic decrease in real world performance at all. Just that with a better battery design it would clearly improve instead.

Apple claims a 10 hour battery life on the 2016, and 9 hours on the 2013 for both the wireless web and iTunes playback tests. Judging by the Comsumer Reports tests though, they would get a shift of 6+ hours from test to test on the 2016 model.

Apple appears to be banking on software efficiency gains offsetting the reduction in battery capacity. They've done this with various iPhone and iPad releases several times.

But the trouble with trying the same thing for the Mac is the wider variety of software people run on macOS. Third-party software may not have got any more efficient, meaning the battery doesn't last as long.

But if you stick to Mail.app and Safari then, in theory, you'll get the expected battery life.

We all know that the webpage content, when the ads are presented, actually changed since 2013. Has anybody measured the resource stress of the pages used for tests in 2013 compared to these used for the tests now?

Is it apples to apples?

iTunes test is less controversial.

But "the 13-inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third" seems to dramatic to be due to hardware -- here it seems something kept some CPU's at 100% in the last case or something like that?

Just speaking for myself, I'd want a 15" MBP with a 99 or 100 Wh battery even if it meant a slightly larger laptop (I'd be perfectly happy with the old unibody 15" chassis size).

For those looking for alternatives here's a short video [1] that looks at some Windows based competitors in the same class. List below.

Dell XPS 15 - http://amzn.to/2hZjqpT

Asus UX501 - http://amzn.to/2hLG9VW

MSI GS63 - http://amzn.to/2ik00Zf

Gigabyte Aero14 - http://amzn.to/2ijMxk6

Razer Blade - http://amzn.to/2hvyGHj

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLsDn59fxdQ

None of which, ironically, can match the new MBP in battery life.

I think it might have more to do with OSX than it does with the hardware itself. OSX is really really good at managing power consumption. Windows, not so much.

Things would get very interesting if MS could figure out this battery thing.

True, but you can get double the performance for half the price of the 2016 MBPro, a 4x perf/dollar improvement. Obviously you pay for this increase with half the battery life.

I would add the HP Spectre x360 (w0XX models) for a 13" equivalent, I just replaced my MacBook with it after growing wary of Apple's direction.

http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/Laptops/hp-spectre-x360---13-w...

Battery life holds up to Apple.

The Specter was excluded because it doesn't have a 4C (8T) CPU.

Bummer to see Razer and Dell go with the half-height arrow keys.

> For instance, in a series of three consecutive tests, the 13- inch model with the Touch Bar ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third. The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next. And the numbers for the 15-inch laptop ranged from 18.5 down to 8 hours.

What could possibly the reason for such drastic variations in the same laptop, over a short period of time, when the testing conditions remain consistent?

When they say: "ran for 16 hours in the first trial, 12.75 hours in the second, and just 3.75 hours in the third" they don't mean that each of the three trials consists of the same load.

The mechanism sounds highly random too: "Consumer Reports tests battery life using a real-world test: They turn on the laptop's screen and surf webpages using Chrome. It's not a test based on benchmarking software or watching video that wouldn't require internet access, and the publication said that even recent software updates did not help the problem."

Such tests should be repeatable, with same webpages, durations of visit, etc to have any meaning (and to be able to actually indicate issues with different battery life, and not merely different load).

From their website:

"Consumer Reports tests hundreds of laptops each year, using identical procedures in highly controlled conditions.

For the battery test, we download a series of 10 web pages sequentially, starting with the battery fully charged, and ending when the laptop shuts down. The web pages are stored on a server in our lab, and transmitted over a WiFi network set up specifically for this purpose. We conduct our battery tests using the computer’s default browser—Safari, in the case of the MacBook Pro laptops.

During the tests, we set each laptop screen to remain on. We use an external meter to set the display brightness to 100 nits—a typical level you might use indoors or out. And, we turn off any automatic brightness adjustment in the laptop’s settings."

While not explicit, it does seem to imply that they conduct the same test multiple times.

OK, now that I've read more than the derivative post, it seems that there's a software glitch in Safari.

They say at the end of the test they use Safari, but got much better results with Chrome:

"Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs. That’s not enough data for us to draw a conclusion, and in any case a test using Chrome wouldn’t affect our ratings, since we only use the default browser to calculate our scores for all laptops. But it’s something that a MacBook Pro owner might choose to try."

This actually bodes well for battery life once Safari is cleaned up. Safari is a much better energy consumption citizen than Chrome on other Mac laptops, and it's very unlikely something about this new hardware will reverse that relationship.

First off, the standard test uses the default stock browser, aka Safari, not Chrome. They switched to Chrome as an additional test and found the battery times to be far more consistent. Sounds more like a software issue to me than a hardware one.

That's a crazy high level of variation to blame on relatively small differences in tests.

It sounds like a bug in Safari causing the cpu to kill the battery. Possibly a race condition since it's random. Guessing this will be fixed in an OS X update shortly.

Tests like this are always a choice between two problems, either it is artificial, can be gamed and doesn't represent real world usage, or it's not repeatable and insufficiently controlled. At least one of those criticisms always apply.

Doesn't seem fair to base a test on using Chrome when Apple bundles a more power efficient browser with the OS.

This is where it gets more bizarre. They did not use Chrome. According to their website: "We conduct our battery tests using the computer’s default browser—Safari, in the case of the MacBook Pro laptops."

They proceed to find serious aberrations with battery life under Safari.

Then they say, "Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and found battery life to be consistently high on all six runs."

Chrome giving much better battery results than Safari? That is unheard of. It's not a software issue either. I can confirm that with the latest Chrome my Air runs for about a third of the time that it runs with the latest Safari(I have the most recent Sierra).

So this makes very little sense.

Read from the orginal source[1]. They do their laptop tests with default browser, Safari, and got those highly variable results. They then did tests with Chrome and got more consistent results (but still lower than Apple's promised estimates)

[1] http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-...

Background processes and vastly different webpages visited. That's all I can come up with.

Frankly, I'm not sure either is a valid excuse for such a huge deviation.

If they have some automated setup for doing this web browsing (maybe a selenium that visits websites for 10 hours?)

They should be consistent after a restart and I bet they charge them to full before conducting the next test.

Saw a 15" in the store the other day. It's the future, just not this particular iteration. The form factor is awesome--my 15" rMBP is like a boat in comparison. Make carrying a 15" as a daily driver much more practical (and the extra screen space is a big step up from 13-14" for getting work done).

The battery life will get fixed in successive iterations, I think. There is a ton more space in there for bigger batteries: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/cBFfrfQPrPBFgV1s. Compare to how packed the old 15" is: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/Jxqp6l2cEQn4olWQ.h....

Good thing they removed the battery time remaining indicator. People will never notice. /s

In macOS 10.12 sierra you can option-click on the battery indicator and click on "show percentage".

Now the fact that they are trying to obfuscate how low you are on juice is really damning

It's not the percentage they removed but the 'time remaining' indicator.

Show percentage is insufficient. If something in my behavior will cause the battery to drop from 50% to 0% in one hour instead of six, I want to know that.

Oddly the underlying calls in the power api are all still there (so you can just write a quick app to query it) so I have absolutely no idea why in the world they have removed it, other than to completely irritate you.

It's infuriating.

You can still, by the way, get the remaining time estimate in Activity Monitor. They only removed it from the status bar widget, everything else is still in place.

I really found that time-remaining to be very unpredictable in the past (unpredictable workloads) and I never relied on it.

Has it been useful for any folks here?

I was getting the MBP 2016 13" a couple of days ago; best equipment you can buy in 13", 3300 EUR brutto.

Before (or still) I have a MBPR 13" Late 2015, also with max RAM, max CPU; 2400 brutto until 2 months ago. That is still running on El Capitan, the new one Sierra of course. System was migrated, so simlilar software stack (besides the OS version).

My typical application list looks like: Pycharm, PHPStorm (~3 projects open at a time), Vagrant, Virtualbox, Chrome with many tabs, Firefox with less tabs, minor stuff like Sublime, Terminal windows, iTunes etc.

Besides the critics on keyboard (especially the arrows issue), connection ports (try to buy a good usb c - displayport cable), which i would all consider as "managable".. To me this laptop is a bad joke if I see the battery time and performance.

Given my usage profile, which I think should be handled by the super expensive top model of a "premium company", this laptop does only a minimum (if at all) better performance. The base cpu usage on my older one, having all open and doing nothing ist at 9%. Same thing for the newer one is 13%. There is nothing that works obviously faster, general "snappyness" when working is subjectively worse due to wakeup delays from the OS power optimisation magic.

About the battery time I can only say, that 4hours is max for me at ~80% brightness. I'm also sure that the new MBP drains battery faster, meaning has less runtime (though i cannot provide exact measurements).

As a good thing to say: the display is fantastic and of course it looks nice.

After less than a week this device is not worth its money and does nothing more for me than what I have for roughly 1/3 less money and more than a year old.

It is sent back.

It is the JetBrain software. I use IntelliJ with various language plugins. It does a lot of work in the background to provide advanced features like completion, even for dynamic languages like Python.

The problem, of course, is that the new CPUs are optimized to provide better battery life under typical usage. If you've got something running in the background that is constantly re-indexing your source code, then the CPU optimizations aren't going to help you and a smaller battery is still a smaller battery.

Also, a lot of that indexing can take advantage of multiple cores, so the jump to a quad-core proc as in the 15" helps more than the minor boost in clock speed is going to. I'm usually fine with a dual-core processor unless I'm either trying to do big compilations (especially in Scala) or using JetBrains IDEs. God help me if I'm trying to do both.

The Skylake processor consumes less power than the Broadwell that was in the previous model. This is particularly true on idle, but even when doing medium tasks it is about 25% - 35% more efficient.

Near the bottom of this detailed review you can see some power consumption tables for various laptops. http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-Late-2016-...

Good.

The error of the MacBook Pro is the 'Pro' part. It's supposedly being marketed to professionals, but optimizing for one thing only, which is thinness. I don't think anyone ever asked for the "old" MacBook Pro to be thinner. Maybe a beefier CPU, maybe a GPU worth something, maybe more battery life. Or more ports. But thinner? They used to have a very good product for that, and that's the Air, which is now neglected.

Apple's product lineup is a mess. Like the time after Steve got kicked out.

Disclaimer: typing this on a 2015 15" MacBook Pro.

I'm so sick of exactly this. I can deal with a few tradeoffs for thin-ness, with the idea that maybe it's Good For Me indirectly by moving the industry to adapt to a thinner, more mobile vision.

But compromising on literally everything else about the computer just to get a bit thinner (worse keyboard, smaller battery, worse graphics, less memory -- things I actually care about) is infuriating.

Mine is 15", 16GB, 512G, 455 model. I'm a student and use it for programming, checking emails and browsing sites. I program in Java using Eclipse and in Python using Jupyter Notebook. I browse using Safari and keep tabs of time estimates in the Activity Monitor Energy tab.

First 2-3 days I was getting 5 hour estimates. Since then it increased to 8-10 and now has increased to 14.5 hours. I keep it unplugged for 6 hours regularly and the estimates have been consistent thus far with the 14.5. I haven't kept it unplugged more than 6-7 hours but I am not afraid of it running out of juice while I'm out and about. Suits my needs as a student.

I had one for about 10 days, and do java dev (intellij/jetbrains stuff).

I got 5-6 hours, then did the 10.12.2 update, and initially battery estimate went up a lot (15-16 hours initially) but it would ramp down sharply when real work was being done. I was seeing ~10% of the battery drain in an hour, meaning I probably could have done 9.5 hours of moderate work. Heavy duty dev (java/compiling, etc) I probably would have got at least 6 hours, maybe a bit more.... but I took mine back. Nice as it was, the price was just a bit hard to swallow relative to performance - was not really expecting 1% diff from 2015 model. I have a 2012 model, so it was faster than mine, but I'm looking at getting a 2015 and saving $1000.

I'm doing to do more intensive programming on mine in the coming days after Christmas and see what hours I get. If dissatisfied I'll return it by Jan 8th for a full refund. I need an all day programming machine for school. Thanks for your input on the 2015 model.

There were some refurb 2015 models I wanted last night for about 4 hours, but I wasn't in a position to order right at that moment (driving, in meetings, etc). Got home, and they're gone! :/ Will keep looking, and ebay/CL generally have some decent ones now and then too.

Benchmarks between 2015 and 2016 were within 1% on geekbench for most tests, and 2016 was often the slower one. Hard to justify $1000+ more for... not much more in the day to day benefit (but as you know, the 2016 is a pretty slick feeling machine, no doubt).

Oh, and 6 hours on battery for heavy use is pretty good - I currently get 2-3 now, on a 2012 battery that is 1200+ cycles in.

I may still go back to 2016 - we'll see. Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! I hope you get a refurb 2015 soon, sounds like they are selling out rather quickly! I have a fully spec'd out 2013 MBP 15" and the battery last at most 3 hours under an intensive programming load. The cycle count is nearing 1,000. I thought about saving money altogether by replacing the battery / backing up the data on an external hard drive and resetting it to factory. I do like the sleek design on the 2016 model and how light it is. It makes it much easier to throw in my book bag along with my other notes / books.

Had one for about 10 days, returned it for a variety of factors, but overall, it was a nice machine. But for my workload, I think I'll move to a 2015 if I can get the config I want - should be ~ $1000 cheaper for about 95% of the benefit (some weight, some speed, retina screen, etc). $3700 ($3500 + tax) ended up feeling just a bit too much for the speed/value. Apparently, though, if I wait a bit longer, we might see a 32g model next year?

> we might see a 32g model next year?

Wasn't this year supposed to be when 32GB landed?

Would have been if Intel had released a 32GB capable mobile chip that's not slower than the last generation.

Probably it got delayed after the overall shape and size were set in stone, so Apple had to go with the previous gen and work a miracle.

Or it was a conscious decision since this shape/size will be the base of all laptops for the next few processor generations and will be supported for the next 10 years or so.

And it would have landed, if Apple had not decided to arbitrarily shrink their batteries, hence requiring low-power options for their components (in this case, RAM) that are not available yet.

3700 in what currency? I'm seeing 2900 USD fully specced (though definitely still absurd)

edit: I was looking at the 13, oops

The new 15 inch max specced is $4,299 + tax in the US.

USD. 1TB 15" maxed out (well, except 1TB vs 2TB).

I really hope so. The 16gb ram limit is what's keeping me from pulling the trigger on one.

I'm in the same boat. My current MBP is a 2012 model, yet it has 16GB of RAM already. The biggest boost I would hope to see in a new MBP would come from increasing the RAM (I do a lot of work with large data sets and ETL, plus I run VMs concurrently with MacOS).

There are now enough competitors (Dell and Lenovo for sure) with 32GB that I was among those who were genuinely surprised that Apple kept the cap at 16GB.

32g next year? This is the first I've heard of that. Do you have any references?

http://mashable.com/2016/11/01/macbook-pro-2017-32-gb/

https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/31/2017-macbook-pro-rumors/

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

"updates" say that "cannonlake" just won't be out, and there's no plans from apple on this, but this was the rumor mill a month ago. I not necessarily ruling any of this out, and we'll see in 6 months.

I'm pretty disappointed by the new mbp and the state of Mac in general for several reasons. I've made pretty significant investments in the Mac ecosystem. I bought a semi pro sound card(uad Apollo 8) tons of software audio related plugins and logic and I don't have a lot of confidence that when it's time to replace my 2014 mbp that there will be a viable Mac option to replace it with. That immediately makes my sound card useless (thunderbolt connection) and unless there's a Windows version of the plugins (most do have this) then I'm out that money as well. I'm already looking at having a dongle if I want to use the new mbp with a thunderbolt connection which feels like a hack. Maybe this seems like first world problems but I bought into Mac on the promise that they truly supported the "pro" community. It's looking more and more like Tim Cook and company have forgotten that.

I think you probably mean Thunderbolt, or maybe Firewire, and not Lightning, yes? Lightning is the connector found on iPhones.

I don't remember people complaining this much about adapters when the Firewire 800 port was a different form factor than the Firewire 400 port that came before it - most of the equipment that plugged into it was "pro" level hardware like you mention.

Yes thank you for the correction. I will edit the parent.

Sorry to hear that. It's when it hits the fan when abstract words like "closed", "locked" or "proprietary" suddenly get meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in

Wait, can't you just buy a dongle to convert from USB-c to Thunderbolt 2 and continue to use your nice (I'm jealous, personally) UAD Apollo 8 with a 2016+ MBP?

I totally could and definitely would do so if the port changes stick and I decided to stay Mac. I'm more just irritated that I bought a Mac specific interface and they changed the port less than 1 year later.

I'm calling it the MacBook Vista.

Ouch.

After seeing the touch bar, I think it's really not all that useful. I would much rather have seen more battery, RAM, faster CPU options, traditional USB and HDMI, magsafe, and more SSD. Basically take the 2014-2015 MacBook Pro and beef it up and I will be very happy.

People say it's selling. Of course it is. Mac still has a near-monopoly on "Unix with good UI." But if they keep doing this, it will erode. Windows is becoming nicer in many ways, MS and other PC hardware is getting better, Linux desktop is steadily improving, etc. The ecosystem never stands still.

> Windows is becoming nicer in many ways, MS and other PC hardware is getting better, Linux desktop is steadily improving, etc.

Since moving to the NT kernel the underlying technology keeps getting better. But personally, I don't think the Windows UI is getting better, and the ecosystem sucks (app store, package manager, permissions system, etc).

Linux desktop is awesome, but laptop is tricky. Battery life can be abysmal without tinkering, although blaming Linux for shoddy drivers isn't exactly fair.

Non-Apple hardware+software always seems like a compromise, and we've been spoiled by Apple by having our cake and eating it. The most frustrating thing is that everything is a compromise now. Ironically, even though Apple is accused of not innovating anymore, I think many people would have preferred less innovation and more iteration.

I really hope that better "Unix with good UI" laptops will exist in the future. Right now, I'd rather buy a 2015 MBP than any of those "Dev Edition" machines.

Over a decade of crawling on its belly at the bottom end of the market has really taken a toll on PC hardware and the whole PC ecosystem. The bundling of actual malware with PCs marks what I think is the low point. Dell's XPS machines are starting to climb out of that hole, but it'll take some resolve.

I went to a store in order to try one out. I wanted what was in 15" model in a 13" form, but ok - I went out to at least check out the 15" model. Even though I knew it was too big for my needs. What really surprised me was how bad the keyboard was on new models. What's up with that? It feels like a cheap plastic mockup of a keyboard. That turned me off completely. I hope they get their act together within a year and push out new models which are better. I'd buy a 13" version if it had what 15" has inside, but it doesn't. Other laptops look like crap too. Razer (14) is either unavailable in Europe or reading about it and looking at videos makes it look like not suitable for anything - bad battery life and crappy vents (makes for screaming noise and heat down the road). Shame, what would otherwise be a great laptop. Microsoft's Book thing is also semi-unavailable, can't buy it (asked Microsoft, they've said it's not really supported (retail) in Europe - wtf?), with Dell I had nothing but bad experiences so it's a no-go from the start... situation is kind of dire.

I agree, I don't want a new MacBook and competition is shit.

I wish the Asus Zenbook 15" models didn't have a number pad.

Vaio models look pretty nice, I'd seriously consider the Vaio Z over a 13" MBP.

I've been looking at different manufacturers. GIGABYTE Aero 14 seems to be nice in sub 15" range. It even has Nvidia 1060 in it and a large battery.

I'm still happy with the high-end Lenovo ThinkPads (currently using a W541) - not as awesome as in the early 2000s but still very solid, well-built, great keyboards, matte screens (but check if you mind this, I'm not sure if every model has them) and with trackpoint, which becomes a must when you get used to it.

I'm glad you've found something that works for you. I've had to use the W520, W530, W540, and W541. And sorry to be so negative, but they all suck. At least the W541 doesn't have chipset errors like e.g. W520 (x2APIC). But for 2016, I find the W541 behind times. So just a heads up to others on HN thinking of buying.

It's a huge, bulky machine that still manage to feel like cheap plastic. The trackpad is awful. It has all the obsolete ports you'd ever want, but no HDMI. The screen is okay, but 1080p. It's so heavy and unnecessarily large. The big battery pack sticks out of the back and means it won't fit into many laptop bags. And they're shockingly expensive.

Finally pulling the trigger on a 17" System76 Oryx Pro today with baseline specs aside from the screen and graphics card. It's got so much room for expansion that I'm comfortable looking at it as a 10 year investment. Going up to 64GB and room for 4 HDs, makes it a very comfortable futureproof purchase.

Check out the Asus Zenbook Pro. We have a few in the office. Great value for the price. I use a Dell XPS 15 and it has been great.

> The 13-inch model without the Touch Bar worked for 19.5 hours in one trial but only 4.5 hours in the next.

It worked for nearly twenty hours, when advertised for just "up to 10"?

Presumably whatever bugs led to 4.5 hours can be fixed in software updates (occasionally I find my Mac running at full-CPU due to some boneheaded OSX process).

But if my new laptop has a best-case scenario of nearly 20 hours (and not "minimal brightness while not running anything")... then that's the best recommendation I've heard yet.

This is great news. Value for money is declining and someone needed to send a loud and clear message to Cupertino.

I have one. It has usb c. My google pixel has usb c. They don't talk, only charge. I don't understand, USB C is now a bag of hurt. Especially when there are three types of usb c cables.

A co-worker who upgraded last week to a 2016 MacBook Pro from a 2013 is complaining about battery life, too. He used to get 10+ hours and now he's lucky to get six.

Having owned MacBooks/PowerBooks/iBooks in various configurations over the past 15 or so years, what models were getting real-life 10 hour lifetimes, and while doing what? I've never seen anything near that on anything I've owned before.

Likewise, I've owned a huge number of mac laptops since the titanium PowerBook and I don't think I ever managed to get more than 4-5hr of real work use (adobe suite etc) I've always been confused by these 10hr claims and have never expected more than 4-5

It depends what model you have. I had a 2015 15" rMBP with discrete GPU, and I typically got 5-6 hours with my usage pattern (Chrome, Outlook, Terminal, Sublime Text, doing most of my development locally but running code on cloud servers in AWS).

At my new job, I only got a 2015 13" rMBP without discrete GPU, and I now get 8-10 hours with the same workload. It's because I don't have to power as big of a screen and a discrete GPU.

Workload matters, but discrete GPU and larger screen also matter, a lot.

How could this happen? Did each test follow the same process?

Source minus the ads ads ads ads Business Insider ads ads ads ads regurgitation:

http://www.consumerreports.org/laptops/macbook-pros-fail-to-...

I just got my new Macbook Pro 15" a few days ago. Keyboard will take some time getting used to, but I'm still able to average 130 WPM on 10fastfingers.com.

The trackpad is probably going to take the longest for me to adapt to. Not the palm rejection, that works fine for me. Rather the tactile feedback of it is so different from my 2012 Macbook Pro. It's very shallow and I feel like it should be used more like a touchscreen click (single tap to left click) rather than placing my finger on it and pressing into it, as the shallowness is weird to me. I have it on medium-depth click right.

Battery life isn't too concerning to me since I'm mostly plugged in, but I will test it this weekend when I'm on the road and hope it's at least 6 hours.

Also, why are all media outlets reporting on what Consumer Reports has to say? Why is Consumer Reports regarded so highly? Media outlets don't report on what CNET or ArsTechnica have to say about the new MacBook Pro. It reminds me of media outlets reporting on what the BBB.org has to say.

I have lost faith in Apple engineering.

My iPhone 6s is sketchy (e.g., lockups, shutdowns) whereas my iPhone 4s was bulletproof. And it seems the new MPBs are lame.

I just bought a Samsung 9 to hold me over for a year while I wait to see if Apple can get its act together.

Just a random and wild thought: I wonder if the inconsistency in battery life might be related to variances in ambient noise levels in the test environment. Could it be Siri listening to stuff when it shouldn't be by way of a bug or something else?

I have a maxed out 15 TB MBPro and the battery seems just fine and in line with what I expect. I love it: keyboard, screen, build quality, performance. I have literally worked with every single previous generation of the Pro and this one feels the best. Happy customer here.

R.I.P. Safari for Mac. Nobody is going to use you after this. ;-)

Could the problem with the battery life be that Apple has the same power management issues for the Skylake processor (which is used on recent MacBook Pros) under OS X that plagued Microsoft for its Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 and also causes/caused trouble under Linux (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/41713.html)?

BTW: Is this problem finally fixed under Linux?

I have a 13" macbook pro touchbar (~2500 bucks with warranty!). I've had it for about 4.5-5 weeks or so.

I LOVE my Apple laptops, and have NO problem paying a premium for them. They have been excellent, and every member of my family is outfitted wth an Apple computer. The IT distraction time since I switched everyone has been pretty much NIL.

I took it on a trip that was 16 days, or I would have returned it (14 day return policy). Now I'm thinking about dumping it on eBay.

Here is why:

* The battery life for a developer is terrible. I consistently get between 3-4 hours of battery life when developing, at best. It's probably 2 hours less than my old 2013 Macbook Pro 15.

* The touchbar is not an improvement. I'm constantly hitting back in browsers as my hand is large and brushes against the bar. It has also crashed on me multiple times when watching long videos, which means I can't mute or adjust the volume when someone calls (that's when I find out it's dusted itself). My experience is that it does a lot of accidental stuff because it exposes a lot of functionality that normally requires explicit input as casual input, so zooming around youtube videos and losing your spot, triggering Siri (yes, I turn it off eventually), accidentally muting with a simple touch, etc, are all super easy mistakes to make. I preferred it when my machine's behavior was predictable. The major issue is that thus far there is no upside for this downside — there are no killer features for the bar (even the volume, rather than giving you more granular controls, uses the old sound register stop points rather than moving to a 99% scale as would be obviously intuitive given the interface — just plain dumb design from Apple honestly). Similar to my experiences with Siri, it's not making my life better.

* It's not faster in practical applications, and in fact takes a while to recover compared to my old laptop (a lot of waiting to type on the login screen), though it's not particular noticeable.

* The arrow keys are utterly terrible. For a developer, they are a fail. Why Apple needed to kill those essential buttons (for games, dev, etc) is beyond my comprehension. The keyboard is definitely better, but the arrow key situation is a mess. * I have to keep my phone plugged in all the time, which means I have a dongle on my laptop pretty much permanently. This is dumb.

* The loss of the magsafe adapter has already caused my laptop to scoot right off the couch twice when animals and kids are around. Why? Why would you kill this and especially go back to a port than can be damaged with basic use? This just violates common sense.

What is better:

* The screen is sweet. I absolutely love it.

* The keyboard is awesome for touch typists.

* The touch pad is really the best I've ever used.

* The dark grey color is attractive.

I've also heard rumors that Apple has merged their macOS team into their main engineering / iOS teams or some such. Not what I wanted to hear, and totally not the direction that would keep me loyal to the company.

Overall, it's worse. And the features that have been added do not redeem the laptop (which is totally what almost every Apple device has done for me — I was stunned). This is the first time it's genuinely a step in the wrong direction. Though I haven't seen any discussion of it, I believe Apple made many of the mistakes it has made with the Apple watch on the Macbook Pro, but that may be because Apple added an Apple Watch to the Macbook Pro. It's solving problems I don't have, and therefore providing me with products that don't possess essential utility and therefore don't meaningfully improve my life or provide me with a "sense of better being," which is what graduated design at it's best can do. This is a big, big mistake, and exactly how Apple lost it's way the first time around.

> I have to keep my phone plugged in all the time, which means I have a dongle on my laptop pretty much permanently. This is dumb.

I don't understand what you mean with this point? Why does your phone have to be plugged in permanently? Why wasn't it necessary with your previous MacBook?

For people who want to improve their TouchBar experience, BetterTouchTool allows you to add custom buttons to your touch bar, accessible globally. I've been using it for weeks with great success. You can even change the buttons that show up when you have alt depressed, etc.

The new MacBooks have still outsold all other competitors, apparently:

https://intelligence.slice.com/apples-macbook-pro-launch/

I dunno who Slice is, but Phil Schiller claims "our online store has had more orders for the new MacBook Pro than any other pro notebook before."

http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/02/phil-schiller-new-...

No more MBPs for me unless Apple makes a significant U-turn. The unupgradability was the final straw.

MBP 13" non-Retina mid-2012, 2x 960 GiB SSD, 16 GiB RAM

Do any MacBook Pro users like the ability to charge their machines with an external battery?

I would love it. Unfortunately, when I talked to Apple about it at the Apple Store they said "be careful, it can void your warranty and there are a lot of poorly made batteries out there."

Let's not forget when Consumer Reports attacked the iPhone 4 because of the antenna issue. That model went on to set sales records. If we're looking for a signal about the MacBook Pro's success, sales numbers may be a better indicator.

> ...the iPhone 4 because of the antenna issue. That model went on to set sales records.

Apple also conceded the issue and gave all iPhone 4 users a free case.

Mine works fine. I love it.

I might as well shovel on my very negative experience, I want to switch but no one can make hardware like this... PLEASE someone prove me wrong with a link.

GOOD: - screen is amazingly bright and fantastic.

- sound noticeably better, even using the same headphones which does not make any sense, so I think that has got to be placebo?

The Horribleness: - the mouse touch pad is so big on my 15" that my new default hand position on home has to hover and hands angled down and in. i'm resting like a few inches below my wrist on the edge of the machine, which is actually pretty sharp. If I go back to a better more relaxed home position my palms touch the touch pad randomly and when typing it jumps and clicks all around.

- I think Apple's dedication to security is mostly to blame.

1) went to apple store, they didn't have cases when the announced at end of Oct right?

2) had to get a usb c to usb female to use my external drives. The store only had usb 2.0 not 2.1, so my hd is half as fast as 3 year old laptop

3) - For instance did OS look at the machine? To turn down sound, I have to touch bar. In some apps it has the normal three sounds buttons. In finder it doesn't and I've found some other times when I'm working and listening to music and need to turn it down it sucks: the touchbar might not even be lit, so that's one touch. Then you can either touch mute or what looks like lower volume, which actually opens a slider two inches to the left. The slider seems to be 0-100 but on screen it's the same old sound overlay with 15 clicks or whatever, and I can definitely move volume in between the clicks. Also while I was type that sentence both numbers accidentally hit the touch bar and did weird shit.

4) could go on and on, ESP the iphone thing. I get wireless is the future but come on...

5) I will never enable siri or the finger print. i was able to remove siri on finder, but it still pops up in the right for most other apps who haven't made integrations yet.

6) os seems to sleep or hibernate but then when logging in it refreshes all the apps? like all 20 chrome tabs reload? maybe there's some setting I don't have but that has never happened and is very annoying. And 1/10 times I miss backspace it hits siri or whatever shit is on the bar.

7) no space above up and down key is the WORST. gamers are fucked. even my career using photoshop and writing shit is slowed down until I get muscle memory.

In the past everything has been so seamless, ready to go. But I think Apple is more concerned about a leak about the new millimeter they shaved off than get everyone working on the same team and actually using this product, with os, with iphone.

(plus these keys are really loud when you type somewhat fast, to the annoyance of my boyfriend trying to sleep next to me).

I can't WAIT until we get fast enough reliable internet everywhere so I can just stream a VPC in Amazon. Spin up a few Teslas when crunching a huge ML dataset or video project, no need to upgrade. AND Apple could do away with everything! So thin! Or quadruple the battery! That's the future I want, even if Apple controls the DC and my VPC.

This very thorough review: See under "Battery Runtime"

"Even though the battery capacity was reduced by almost 25 % compared to the predecessor, Apple still managed to improve the overall runtimes with the 76-Wh battery. Our WiFi test determines an advantage of 130 minutes, so little more than two hours." [1]

If you read actual users of the 2016 rMBP in this thread as well as reports on macrumors forum you'll see that there are a number of people who report good battery times and even exceeding those of the 2015 machine.

I would question the Consumer Reports review process given the review cited above, the reports in this thread and that in the macrumors forum.

[1] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-MacBook-Pro-15-Late-2016-...

Does Apple sell a 2016 laptop without a dedicated GPU?

IIRC, the 13" models don't have one

Nope, 15" one has Radeon graphics.

I can't believe it. Have they lost their minds? I was trying to buy one yesterday but I couldn't find one so I gave up and got a 2015 model with integrated graphics.

I believe this is due to the desire to have 5k display support across all the new Pros, and none of the integrated graphics chips available now can wing it.

Seems likely that the 2017 models will drop in price a bit and have integrated graphics for the baseline models.

what a load of bollocks

Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13245862 and marked it off-topic.

Because you can't cheat people forever.

Your account has a long history of posting uncivil and unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. Please don't do that. We're looking for thoughtful discussion, which I'm sure you can contribute to if you want to. If you don't want to, that's fine, but then please don't post at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

I'm not a fan of what Apple has been doing for the past 5 years or so, but positioning products to be in the premium/luxury market isn't cheating people.

I never felt cheated for these 15 years, how I am an (happy) Apple user. (but I haven't tried new MBP)

I've been a happy Mac user since 2006, it's been great. Cypher was right. He should have taken the Blue pill!

I'm not an apple fan but I don't think that is the problem. It just seems their competitors are able to deliver similar value at prices that are much more attractive.

Or that they are willing to sell at considerably lower margins.

Why the heck would anyone listen to Consumer Reports for this sort of thing?

Who else has done similar testing? This is the first article I've seen mentioning the issue -- are there others?

I'm not really a fan of Mac's, but I don't think too much weight should be put on this. Everything that Apple delivers is greeted with negative reports, and yet it turns out to be successful.

Also... i've never even heard of "Consumer Reports" before.. but the name is pretty subjective.

Consumer Reports has been around since 1936, worth checking out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Reports

Consumer Reports is a widely-respected nonprofit. They make their money from selling subscriptions (most of their information is behind a paywall), and do not sell advertising. Their board is elected by their membership. All products that they review are purchased at retail—in fact, they even make their purchases discretely, to make sure that they don't get preferential treatment.

Your summary is totally correct.

But, it must be noted that CR has a history of inventing ad hoc tests, and basing overall product ratings on the ratings in a single-point test. There have been errors in the past, with the rollover test of the Suzuki Samurai, and some infant car seat tests. See their wiki page. Their audio equipment reviews (don't know if they still do them) have been useless. Often their reviews may be useful for a general consumer, but not for a specialist.

(I'm a former subscriber, but don't buy enough of that kind of stuff to make it worthwhile to still subscribe.)

Most large product companies are going to be met with some people not liking the choices, or some backlash. You make it sound like all their products receive 2/10 across the board or something, when that's simply not true. One can't please everybody, but most of the phones have been well received. I think the worst issue was the iPhone 4 models having some cell reception problems ("You're holding it wrong"). Most of the products they put out are generally liked by reviewers, with usually fair criticism as well.

That said, I think the recent years of there just being more earlier on bugs is worrying. I hope apple ups their quality control in the coming year.

god, you must be young :-)

or not American

Rate me down... but do you disagree that despite this, the MBP will be a success?

Or am I being rated down for not knowing of a US Centric organisation?

Talking about whether it will be a success is changing the topic.

Downplaying the article just because you haven't heard of the group yourself is not interesting.

That's why you get downvotes.

And sure, it probably will be a success, in large part because this seems to be a fixable software problem.

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