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Comment by jclardy | Hacker News Reader

Makes sense with Apple's current terrible product line setup. Both the retina MacBook and 2016 MacBook Pro are much more niche than their last generation. Also much more confusing as the MacBook Air successor is $500 more than the 13" Air was (The non-touchbar MacBook Pro is the spiritual successor to the air.) The true 13" Pro for 2016 is also $500 more than the last gen.

The 12" MacBook is there...but it is a super niche product compared to the old Air or even the old Pro. It's performance is probably enough for most people, but at that point you could just buy a cheaper windows ultrabook and get similar or better performance for a much lower price.

A huge market for Apple used to be college students. Now in 2017 what Apple laptop do they buy? an underpowered MacBook, or an overpriced pro? The best solution for most is buying an older model, but part of the appeal of buying a Mac is having the "latest" thing.

Then you get to desktops...and there isn't much to say there. Apple just doesn't do them anymore.

This is coming from someone that has used a Mac for the past 10 years and is typing on a 2016 pro. It is nice, but connectivity wise it is too far ahead of its time. In 1-2 years it will be fine, but right now it is just in early adopter territory.

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The world still isn't ready for a machine with only USB-C/thunderbolt-3. The aren't docks good enough with the right features or port combinations. The myriad of USB-C adaptors is only barely in place, some positions in that market have only one or two options without the depth of a mature market. USB-C/thunderbolt-3 _could be_ great, it could be the greatest docking connector yet, but until the right dock exists I shouldn't get a new MBP because I have a dozen legacy devices on my desk to connect. And everyone should hold off on the 12" Macbook until the next revision when it gets thunderbolt-3.

How Apple can leave the Mac Pro and Mini in their old configuration this long is beyond reason. 1000 days since its debut. Apple should be ashamed of this. Yet this company is operating like the days before Steve returned except this time there is no Steve to right it

I expect the iMac to get a new chipset but I would like to see the Mac mini updated. Either update the Mac Pro or pull it.

They claim there's updates in the works. Here's hoping they push them out soon.

With apple's recent behavior, the updates may not be upgrades, but trade-offs.

Seriously. I hope the updates aren't adding more retina screens to more surfaces I don't look at.

I think they're having trouble finding their way in the post-PC world.

Jobs knew this day was coming, that the PC would take a back seat to other devices, and brought up the analogy of Apple as BMW: The German company started out building motorcycles and while car sales soon vastly eclipsed that, they continued making really good bikes. It was a point of pride for them.

If Apple goes back to that approach, of making Really Good Computers because they can, selling them not at a loss but at a respectable price for a respectable product, they might piss off fewer in their developer slash power user camp.

I'm not sure this is their current strategy. The "Pro" monicker seems to be a little diluted in terms of meaning these days.

It's not a post-PC world. It's a post-everyone-needs-a-PC world but definitely not a post-PC world.

Something something Steve Jobs "truck" analogy.

We're in a world where the masses don't need/want a PC (which is unfortunate, since that will arguably mean children will have less access to fully-functional computers in formative years when they may develop an interest in programming, but I digress). Apple, a company that claimed to grasp that concept just a few years ago, is completely failing on it right now. So, they make their money on phones and tablets, the devices for the "I don't need a real computer" people. Logically, that means the laptops should be targeted at the people who actually do need/want powerful and flexible computing devices...or they should drop them entirely if they don't wish to service that demographic any longer.

Instead, we have this bizarre situation where Apple is delivering underpowered and overpriced machines. They're expensive and overkill for people who want luxury Facebook/word processing machines, and they're expensive and underpowered for people who want to do real computing. It's very inconsistent and out of touch.

One thing that not enough people are bringing up: who in their right mind sells a "Pro" machine with 256GB of storage? In essence, every machine ships with half the storage they did five years ago. Yes, they're using NAND now, but the cost-per-gigabyte for raw NAND isn't that expensive. For a $2000 laptop, it should bloody well come with at least 512GB of internal storage, with a reasonably priced 1TB upgrade. I can forgive the 16GB limit on the RAM, but storage? On a machine that was marketed for video/photo/software professionals? You lose all of your mobility when you have to tote around an external drive to carry your footage/photos/VMs/builds/whatever.

> They're expensive and overkill for people who want luxury Facebook/word processing machines

They cost less than $2k. Amortized over 4+ years, they're extremely affordable for the middle class. People spend more on coffee.

The resale value on four year old coffee is also really low. Meanwhile a four year old MacBook Air sells for at least a few hundred.

> Instead, we have this bizarre situation where Apple is delivering underpowered and overpriced machines.

Underpowered for you. Overpriced for you.

Maybe they're not being made for you. Now perhaps this is Apple's mistake, but the fact is they're chasing after a market that's not you. It's people who don't care that the notebook is $2K, that the CPU isn't the best it could possibly be. They're buying more than just specs and a low price tag.

> They're ...overkill for people...

So are they underpowered or overpowered? Make up your mind, man! Is a Ferrari a better car than a Civic because it can go faster? Is a Ford F-150 terrible because it doesn't have low-profile tires and a rear engine?

Apple is just one vendor of many, we have options as consumers, and some people like their products.

A $2K notebook is not expensive, every vendor makes one at that price point and most have astonishingly terrible trackpads. A $3K notebook carries a premium, but it's a luxury product. It's not intended to be cheap.

Apple's mistake might be not differentiating their product line properly, for actually splitting out the actual "Pro" as in professional from "Pro" as in "Pro-sumer". Having to make one model that will sell in the millions of units does impose a lot of constraints.

Dell makes a bazillion different models of laptop, they can afford to take chances, but they also churn them over quickly. Apple doesn't roll that way, not today anyway. They prefer to focus on keeping the product line lean, and really get behind a few good models.

Maybe this is going to hurt them in the long run. We'll see.

>So are they underpowered or overpowered? Make up your mind, man!

Not sure if you have bad reading comprehension or if you're just omitting text to support your argument.

They're underpowered for me. They're underpowered for people who need a "real" computer. For the people they're aiming the new portable at, they're completely overkill and completely overpriced. They're the new MacBook Air, essentially.

For me, they're both underpowered and overpowered. I don't need or even want a touchbar or the flattest keys ever to be placed in a laptop. The high resolution displays are nice, though they've probably shot past the point I'd care enough more about to spend more on. On the other hand, I want more RAM and a nicer GPU than they offer. A larger hard drive would be nice, too.

Consequently, macs have become overpriced, overpowered and underpowered for me.

> We're in a world where the masses don't need/want a PC

Oh, I think many people still use a PC every day - at work. Office jobs are not going to disappear in the next decade. I wish Apple would try harder to capture this super boring market: With a better Mac Mini, by formalising its policy of supporting each OS for three years, with a focus on stability over gimmicks, etc.

You must not read HN much. AI is going to replace everyone in the next decade and we'll all be on UBI.

> It's a post-everyone-needs-a-PC world.

Yes, that's post-PC.

Just as post-mainframe meant mainframes were no longer in charge, it didn't mean mainframes didn't exist.

It's not a post-PC world. It's more like a Kaby Lake has the same performance as Sky Lake world and Intel is not able to figure out process technology beyond 14nm world. Apple could put an Nvidia 1080 and a Skylake i7 in the pro and an i5 in the mini. I guess and that would be a decent upgrade. Nothing super exciting, but decent. The next refresh is going to be even more depressing than this one if Intel doesn't figure out new process technology.

PCs aren't extinct, but they're not in charge. That's what "Post PC" means. Mainframes still exist, they're faster and more powerful than ever, but if you argued that because they are that they're somehow still dominant you'd be laughed out of the room.

Phones are the single most popular computing device and your average person spends more time on their phone than they do on their computer when excluding work.

And then you can wait another 1000 days for a refresh.

Intel isn't exactly rushing out compelling new chips every 180 days like they used to.

"If you want to write fast software, use a slow computer" - Dominic Tarr

The 12" Macbook is the best computer I've ever owned. Switched to it from a 2014 Macbook Pro, and found it very easy to adjust. The only time it struggles a little bit is when I run Windows in VMware, on occasion.

The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-smooth on other computers, which all have beefier CPUs and GPUs.

It's a good quote, but I feel it reflects a time when I didn't also need to run a stack of Redis, RabbitMQ, Postgres and webserver apps on my development box.

I run literally all of that, and a couple of virtual machines on my 2016 rMB. It works fine.

Sure, I can't play Doom 4. But if I need extra cycles for my development work, I spin up an ec2 instance.

Why local and not cloud/vps?

Why bother with a "pro" device at all, just get a chromebook and call it a day. Except there's a ton of premium stuff you can do more easily locally, and it's all stuff that hasn't been productized down to cheap web-office quality standards

Many of us have done just that...

We run Gitlab (Rails + Unicorn + Sidekiq + Nginx + Postgres + Redis) on a 3GB single-core VPS and it runs fine, without needing the swap. Is the stack really the problem?

It runs fine, but why not have, it runs "awesome" :)

Isn't that hugely dependent on the use-case? If you're working with significant volumes of data - which makes sense even in testing to validate that your application actually behaves sanely with data volumes approach real-world scenario - you might not have a lot of fun with 3GB. And optimizing for great on-disk performance during local development doesn't have much benefit if your production workload is all memory.

How many users on your Gitlab? I've had to add 2GB of ram every 3-6 months to my Gitlab server. We're at about 17 users and 300 projects right now. I think it's on a 4vcpu box right now.

8 users, 850 projects, 6GB+ of Git data.

As long as the data-sets are test-sized and you're not simulating thousands of simultaneous users, that stuff should be no problem even for very modest computers.

The performance issues come when you're running each of those in it's own virtual machine, and all the overhead and tooling that comes with that.

Slowness is a feature, not a bug.

"If you want to write yesterday's software, use a laptop" - me / paraphrase of Alan Kay I think?

I get why people are still blacksmiths making door handles and I think that's great. But I'd rather be in a giant machine shop making aircraft carriers.

I have no idea where this analogy is going.

I'd rather be on a mountain making sleds?

Don't be a douche, it was a good analogy.

Of course it wasn't. People on laptops and people on desktops are making the same thing, just desktop users are doing so with more horsepower.

Sure we're all making software which is just bits in memory, but I think that's an extreme simplification. Maybe you're thinking of how we're all just editing text to make programs? But then that doesn't account for what you do with the program you just wrote.

I think you're thinking of using more horsepower for strong scaling, which is a good use, but I'm more referring to weak scaling. You can work on bigger problems with more horsepower, not just solve the smaller ones faster.

And then when you try to deploy that carrier, find out that it's too big for the slipway?

"The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-smooth on other computers, which all have beefier CPUs and GPUs."

Really? Apple really has a great business model.

The software I'm developing is not the compiler I'm using. It's not a mobile device emulator I'm using. It's not a web browser I'm using. It's not an email client or a photo editing app I'm using. It's not the IDE I'm using.

well.... depends. Apple invests heavily into making sure SW runs lean on metal

Only on newer hardware. Trust me, you don't want to be caught running the latest OS on older Apple hardware because it will run like molasses. If your hardware is the "minimum supported model" or the next most recent, you're better off not upgrading at all.

MacOS Sierra runs superbly on my 2012 rMBP. It's only a couple months shy of 4 years old.

Mac OS Sierra slowed down my 2014 Mac Mini noticeably. I see a lot more beach volleyballs now when doing everyday tasks which were ran smoothly before the upgrade.

I think the difference in experiences is due to HD vs SSD. I've found Apple's latest OS's seem to do terrible with spinning disks. Thankfully all my machines are SSD, but I've seen a few Mac Minis with HDs that are really slow whereas the same machine with an SSD is fine.

Happy to finally hear someone that agrees with me.

The 12" Macbook replaced my triple-27" Windows desktop & Surface Pros (Windows user since Win3.1 here.) The high DPI screen makes all of the difference.

Just got the new Macbook Pro before Christmas to drive the LG 5k and I am still using the 12" Macbook half of the day and 100% while traveling.

If it's 'good enough' now, how will it be an OS update or two down the road?

Probably still fine. MacOS updates tend to get faster if anything.

Always seems rather silly. By all means, test everything on a slow computer. Make sure that it runs smooth, even on older computers. But there's no reason to make your developers wait through unnecessarily long compile times before testing.

Not all developers have long compile times. If you're doing database work a slow computer on an HDD is a great way to notice performance problems early.

Bought a base model 12 inch Macbook a few weeks ago and love it. Haven't had any issues with performance so far, although I haven't tried any IDEs yet, just been coding in iTerm2 and Vim.

I want my development environment as fast as possible.If I want to test for performance I would do it in a separate slow machine. Why cripple development needlessly?

By that logic, every developer should be handed out 486s, right?

There are too many things during development that doesn't happen on consumer's computer like compile, fast intellisense, real-time syntax check, multiple instances of IDEs and so on. Developers should have best performing machines money can buy because developer time is expensive and development should happen at speed of thought. Testing should be done in VM that can emulate average consumer hardware. Just because some developers are not good t following performance hygiene, every one shouldn't be working on weak machine to produce performant software.

But if we just forced web developers to use 486s with 32mbs of ram, imagine how fast the internet would become. No more linking to 15mbs of Javascript, CSS, and Web Fonts.

The mobile web would be amazing.

> The biggest benefit of the Macbook 12" is that if software runs well on your computer, you know it's guaranteed to run extra buttery-smooth on other computers, which all have beefier CPUs and GPUs.

Except for all the other computers that don’t in the $150 price range. Use one of those for development.

I used to work at a place that tested their apps on a ~7 year old computer with a <1Mbps dsl line. It was awesome. They knew how to makes stuff load fast and efficiently.

I hate that I have to tell devs this, but: Yes, your data-hungry app may work well in downtown SF, but try using it in a place like nowheresville, TN, and let me know how well it works out. /me glares at google maps

I've uttered the same sentiment myself (admittedly as an excuse for still running a 386sx in the mid-90's)

However this is only productive if you're not working with (a) compiled code, on a (b) project large enough that compile times are non-negligible

In some build environments, the difference in RAM or CPU is measurable in terms of (literally) hours of wasted time per day :(

When I bought my current MacBook Pro (2009), it was the cheapest available amongst the updated pro's and it cost me $1.000

Apple simply don't offer that price point anymore. What used to be their low-price line of laptops - the MacBook, now starts at $1.300

Macbook Airs start at $999.

Inflation adds about $120 to your $1k figure since 2009, too.

The cheapest macbook air is a pretty weak laptop. It's very light on specs, compared to similar products.

Yes - it's a good piece of kit - but maybe not worth the price.

To get decent specs you have to pay a lot for Apple and I think it's becoming a problem.

Yeah I suspect they're starting to overcharge for their greatest strength: their software (macOS/Apple suite of apps).

While I used to fawn over their minimal interface and simple UX, they've been adding a lot of unnecessary noise (siri, itunes forcing apple music, cluttering imessage with extensions) to their products. Definitely straying away from their status quo.

Couple this with the fact they purposely force non-compatibility with anything non-apple and you have them becoming the new Microsoft.

They're changing the things that make Apple great and it isn't worth the price anymore.

Yeah, the value prop for the older (expandable) models was higher, as you could buy a reasonably-priced configuration then upgrade the RAM/HDD later. Now I'd need to spend $2k to price out a MBP with the same RAM/HDD as my 6 year old Mac.

The Dell Alienware is so much better value. Amazing keyboard, run any game you like, super fast. I don't care about Win10 either way. It unlocks with facial recognition. It weighs more than my car (but I leave it on my desk 99% of the time)

I just couldn't justify buying an Apple, as much as I wanted one.

[edit] how the hell do I keep getting down voted for voicing my opinion? Lol. Nope. You're opinion is wrong, lose a point!

The flip side is that I needed a laptop to take with me to events, so I got a $750 dell xps13. If I were a college student, I'd be eyeing the $1200 version extremely hard versus an equivalent specced macbook pro at $1700

Or, the $750 version (which is what I have) versus a $1000 macbook that's significantly less powerful.

I just got myself a Dell precision 5510 with Ubuntu out of the box. A lot more capable than the most power full current macbook pro, weighs slightly less then the macbook pro from 2009 I am typing this on (moving files across to the new dell)

After 16 years of Mac use I don't regret the switch.

Is this a 15" laptop?

I recently realized that a modern 15" can be much more ergonomic yet almost as small and light as a 13" from a couple of years back.

I've seen the precision 5510 and while I wouldn't say it is beautiful, it is really small for a 15". At 2Kg (with the large battery), it is still heavy, though.

What is the battery life of the smaller-battery configuration?

I wouldn't care less about its beauty if it has a good keyboard, a good screen and not awful battery life...

With that said, you are the first one ive heard saying the new dell is not good looking.

It is 15" screen wise. Lighter than a 2009-2013 13" MacBookPro.

You can spend about $350 and get a high quality 13" IPS 1080p display Chromebook that weighs under 3 pounds if you're willing to spend 5 minutes putting in an SSD and installing Linux natively on it.

I've been using the above set up for half a year now roughly and it's great. I can do all of my development work, writing, browsing, etc. without feeling like I'm giving up much for those sorts of tasks and the price is very reasonable.

Details can be found at:

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromeboo...

Its physical profile is really small too. Perfect for putting into a backpack and doing some traveling with it.

I've switched out HDDs and installed Linux a few times and it's never taken me 5 minutes. Not even 50 minutes.

Sure, it's a one-time "cost" and nearly insignificant over the course of the lifetime of the machine, but please be honest about the time spent.

It's 5 minutes to unscrew a couple of screws, slide out the SSD card, put in the new SSD card and screw it back together.

The GalliumOS installer is also really straight forward. You pretty much run 2 commands and hit ok a few times. This part is more than 5 minutes, but it's mainly just twiddling your thumbs waiting for things to download and install.

Then you boot up and you're in.

From experience, it's just annoying to have to do things like that. It really is nice to have a machine that I can just use out of the box without tweaks and such, not worrying about updates breaking my drivers, things like that.

However at this point it's not worth paying Apple for that pleasure, when I can get a Windows machine from Microsoft that gives me all that. Hell, I can even get that Developer Edition Dell XPS with Linux.

Thanks for the update. That sounds pretty awesome actually.

I developed on one of those for a year. It was awesome for basic web development. I did a lot of react and ruby development on that thing.

However, my workload eventually evolved to require running several docker containers (micro-services), which really killed overall performance. React-native development was similarly painful. Ultimately, I was forced to upgrade to a thinkpad, but I will always have much love for that little chromebook.

Did you have the same exact model (down to the year and everything), because the earlier version of the one I linked was a lot worse.

I've ran some pretty heavy work loads on the one I linked without issues (and this is comparing it to a high powered i5 desktop).

For example in the blog post, I mention running this:

- Google Chrome with 6 tabs open

- Youtube playing back a video (streaming music is important!)

- Docker daemon

- Dockerized Rails app with 28 gems

- Dockerized Sidekiq background work

- Dockerized Action Cable server

- Dockerized Postgres and Redis

- Sublime Text 3 with about 30 plugins

- 2 terminal windows, one with 2 tabs and the other with 3

- 1 PDF open with the native PDF viewer

- A 2nd workspace with another Google Chrome window and 3 more tabs

And it took it like a champ. No severe slow downs or thinking "meh, I should be on my workstation, this sucks!".

There is an inarguable price premium for getting the arguably better operating system. The integration, the design, the support, the ecosystem... I'm willing to pay for that. Some people aren't, and more power to them.

I ran Linux on everything for almost 20 years. I'm done fiddling with my computer, and glad to pay for someone else investing a lot of engineering so I don't have to.

I've always kept a Windows partition for gaming. And now that I moved to a MBP, it's a whole separate machine. It's a Dell 730x monster, from just before they bought Alienware, that originally sold for $8,500. It's about 8 years old now, but, with a nVidia 760, it's still running most games just fine.

I've tried Windows 10 TWICE, and gone back to 7, and have it "pinned" with Never 10. I came back from a vacation, and nVidia forced a new driver on my Windows machine. This version turns ShadowPlay back on (which I turned off because of lousy performance on spinning hard drives). And now I find I have to create an account just to try to find the setting to turn it off! Like Razor, I have to log in to a cloud service to adjust my settings!? No sale! I threw the Razor keyboard away. In the case of the video card, I downgraded to a driver from before they introduced ShadowPlay, and it seems to be running fine.

You can say you're happy with Windows, and I believe you. You can tell me it's a better value. But I'm about to throw this glorified Xbox away, and buy a PS4, mods be damned.

My point is that Linux still takes a lot of babysitting, and Windows is turning my machine into a something which feels like something I rent, but don't own. I'm happy to pay for the premium of macOS at this point, and will continue to find SOME acceptable hardware in their lineup to avoid the other options.

This may or may not be a popular counterpoint. I hate that, like Reddit, the voting system here isn't used the way it's supposed to be.

I have a Retina MacBook next to my sofa in the living room and a 27-inch Retina iMac with 16GB RAM on the desk in my study. At work I have a four year-old 27-inch iMac with all SSD storage and 16GB of RAM. It's still going strong, and I never think it's too slow for anything, despite developing in Scala, which has a slow compiler, and using Intellij or Eclipse, which are resource hogs.

I love them all to death. It doesn't really matter to me whether I could have gotten something cheaper. If I did that, I'd have a little bit more money, and I'd be significantly less happy.

How do you deal with noise though? Scala and SBT can make the whole Apple product line noisy in my experience :)

You mean make the fans blast?

Well, they're not that loud. The building H/V airflow is usually a lot louder. And my Retina MacBook doesn't even have a fan. (Though I also don't do a lot of software development on it, I have done development on slower machines, and it wasn't terribly painful. Depending on what I was doing, of course.)

I still remember the days of programming in C++ using C-front, and a compile would take 20 minutes. Being a gdb wizard was essential. These days, even with Scala, compilation is fast enough on a four-core iMac that debugging via print statements is easier than using a debugger.

I guess I'm old enough that I just haven't gotten spoiled by expecting everything to be superfast. Though what does annoy me is how slow many websites are. Grrrrrr! When programming in fancy IDEs is faster than surfing the web, you know that something is wrong with the world....

Of course, the MacBook is passive :)

Incremental compilation makes my coworkers' gear loud enough I can hear it anywhere in the room. No HVAC over here. Maybe a MacPro would handle the load better, but that's completely overkill for our needs. The MBPr and iMac keep getting thinner, for no good reason in the iMac's case.

Personally I love the thinness and lightness of my Retina MacBook. I can easily hold it with one hand. Or even with a few fingers. I can toss it around with ease. Maybe it's gratuitous to be that thin. It's certainly not gratuitous to be that light.

I also loved the hell out of my MacBook Air. I recently gave that to my girlfriend. (Hence me now having a MacBook Retina.) It's four years old and still works as well as the day I got it. It's perfectly zippy. It's only downsides are that the screen isn't nearly as good as the MacBook Retina screen, and the speakers don't go loud enough.

Re iMac fans: well, I love the fact that my MacBook Retina makes no noise at all. But the noises made by my work and home iMacs are not loud enough to bother me in any way. They certainly handle their loads just fine, as long as you don't mind a bit of extra white noise.

But then again, I kind of miss the days when you could hear the disk drive in a computer chugging away. You could often tell what the computer was working on by the rhythm of the chugging.

People are missing that the Macbook line are still the best laptops on the market. PC manufacturers will never catch up until they wittle down their selections to 10 or less choices as Apple does. It's too easy to buy garbage from Dell/HP/Lenovo. Versus any MB(P) is going to be a slam dunk everytime.

Most people other than professionals or gamers care about desktops. I'd just build one but those who want macOS the Mac Pro will be updated soon.

I'm not an Apple guy, only own an iPhone but people who insist Apple has fallen off (and say so every single time there's a shred of slightly negative news) are delusional. I'm aware of the market to a fair degree and the only compelling alternative to a MBP is the X1 Yoga.

I just bought a new Macbook, and I can say that it's a great product.

Probably the best on the market.

The problem I had was cost - they are over-priced.

Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive.

My Mac has 200-ish G hard-drive which is f-ing retardedly small. They should all have 1T. But if you want those upgrades you have to pay massively more.

I fundamentally believe the issue is simply price.

If you could get a sub-$2K macbook with 16G RAM, good CPU and lots of disk-space - this conversation would never be had.

I really do think Apple has the best boxes, but they are barely worth it, and just not worth it in many cases.

> Yes, I've heard the argument that if you want 'x RAM with y CPU' etc it will 'cost just as much' - but this is just no longer true. The Macs with 16G memory are crazy expensive.

What boggles my mind is how many of them max out at 8G. I couldn't care less about CPU, and I'm flexible about storage, but 8G RAM is ridiculous. I'm currently using a couple of MS office apps and a web browser on my 2015 MBP and it's using 12G. I had a 2011 (or earlier, but I think it was the 2011) MBP that was happy to accept 16G. I'd gladly settle for a 12" MB for most work if I could just get >8G in one.

> but 8G RAM is ridiculous

8G RAM is not ridiculous. Statements like this just show how far out of touch people are. Many workloads benefit from more RAM. And for some it's a hard requirement (e.g. VMs), but web browsing and a bit of office is not one of them. This is why virtual memory/swap space is a thing - and with an SSD that's also not as horrible as it used to be.

Web browsing and a bit of office is offered as an example of the lightest imaginable load for someone actually using a computer. My daily needs are much heavier than that.

To offer a line of laptops with 8GB of RAM as the max in 2017 is ridiculous.

Ridiculous to sell them or ridiculous to buy them?

Well. I'm not buying, even though I like the form factor and would accept the other limitations of a 12" MB. And I do think it's ridiculous of Apple to not sell reasonable things I want, because right now it means I'm just sticking with an older laptop and waiting to see if maybe I will find something more to my liking from another brand after 15 years of buying Apple.

I have local "spin-up everything but pint-sized" dev environments for our developers to use and they far surpass 8gb even at the most minimal. I had my card out and was ready to buy the 2017 MBPr if it had 32gb to upgrade from my 2015 MBPr.

Some people do actually need a lot of ram. Specifically, I work on kubernetes and docker and it's a hard requirement. I'm severely limited in my work now and have to continue using aws+gke for full blown dev environments when if I had the proper amount of ram (what I've had on my desktop for years) I could have full blown testing on my laptop which is always plugged into monitors and a keyboard.

Sure, I'm %1 of the market but I will pay the money if it's available. Next year if I can't get an OSX laptop with 32gb of ram I'm going to wind up traveling down other roads.

Sure, which is why I mentioned VMs. But we're talking about the MacBook here, not even the MacBook Pro. Simply put the MB just isn't build for VM workloads. If the RAM weren't the bottleneck, the CPU or available storage space would be.

Besides, I don't buy it. I also use VMs. And the underlying host doesn't really matter, i.e. it doesn't really matter where the VM is run. So I don't quite understand why you'd spend $$$ on a beefy laptop instead of a nice laptop and a server. Maybe if your internet connection is really bad?

The host OS doesn't matter, the ram does greatly matter. The delay in development between having to spin up and down servers for testing on aws/gcp is MASSIVE vs. launching tests via minikube.

Evidently I missed that this was about the Macbook and not pro, I couldn't care less about the Macbook.

I'm on a fully loaded i7 2015 MBPr and need a new one stat, new as in more ram (limited to 16gb).

No I mean you can use the capex savings from "just" an average laptop to buy/build really beefy servers. In a professional setting this scales quite well. At home, you could also use that server as a NAS or gaming rig. That way, you can also upgrade the server separately from the laptop.

It's maybe not for everybody (e.g. photo/video editing), but pretty underrated IMO. Further advantages: RAID, easy to replace the laptop if you lose it or it gets damaged, server are easier to set up with fast, reliable connections (intra or internet) for pulling VM images. Disadvantages: More maintenance/admin?

> I'm currently using a couple of MS office apps and a web browser on my 2015 MBP and it's using 12G.

You can't take the RAM usage reported in Activity Monitor and extrapolate performance. If you were running the same apps on a recent Mac laptop with 8GB RAM, you'd see them taking 6GB of RAM and running just as fast as they do for you.

The only way to tell when you need more RAM is to load down a machine until it swaps too hard to keep up--then you know you need more RAM. And one of the things to keep in mind about new Mac laptops is that they have very fast SSD I/O, which also helps mitigate swap slowness.

There are probably some people out there still making the argument that macs aren't more expensive, but I think most people have stopped, because the facts have changed. I'm having trouble finding it, but if I recall correctly, Joanna Stern was on John Gruber's podcast and flatly said the prices weren't comparable. Gruber either agreed or was silent.

As recently as 2-3 years ago there were Macs out there that cost less than any comparable PC. Ultra light laptops with retina screens were cheaper from Apple than Asus or Dell. Any machine with a 27" retina screen was $1000 cheaper from Apple. For five years before that, any 27" screen at all was much cheaper from Apple.

For many years, a $2000 MacBook Air was cheaper than its competition because there was no competition.

But today the PC vendors charge less than Apple once again. The universe is back in order and Apple's tech lead is confined to mobile phones.

Oddly, it's a self-inflicted wound. The totally useless expense of wedging a long, narrow Apple Watch into every keyboard is driving Apple's prices way, way up.

> The totally useless expense of wedging a long, narrow Apple Watch into every keyboard is driving Apple's prices way, way up.

Not only that. Also Apple's anorexia, making a useless gigantic trackpad, providing a DCI-P3 screen which is useless for most people, etc.

I would really love to love Apple. But at this point, my eco conscience kicks in. Buying a laptop that cannot be upgraded in any way, be it RAM, SSD, or WIFI card... that's just too much. I have no idea how big the ecological footprint of a laptop is, but it has to be huge. Once my 2012 Macbook Air kicks the dust, I'll look at Lenovo laptops.

Apple does tout how recycleable it is though. And they have a recycling program. And they run a lot of their stuff (all?) from renewable energy. If you really cared about this from an environmental pov there is far more to it than is it upgradeable. The resale on the mac is much better and people are willing to buy them for way longer, too.

I'm seriously considering an x260... most of the components are replaceable/upgradable. Of course it's not as svelte as a MacBook, but you don't have to throw it away when you start hitting swap all the time...

I think the x270 is coming soon, you might want to wait a bit!

Macs generally maintain a lot of resale value, and are generally worth selling on even after 3 or 4 years— so, even if it doesn't meet your needs, it is unlikely to go into a landfill.

I wish the Macbook mini would get some love. It's GASP, actually upgradable. Swapping out the dimms, storage, or display is relatively straight forward.

Mostly you're straight on, but the latest iMacs are among the best desktop PCs ever built. And they're still a good deal.

As far as AIO's go they are great, especially with the 5k display, but the main issue is that Apple doesn't spec bump them. It has been 472 days since the last iMac update and it will likely be at least until spring before we hear about an update.

The main issue for me is that my laptop can now use Thunderbolt 3 accessories, but if I bought an iMac today I'd be stuck with thunderbolt 2 and no usb-c ports for the next 3 or so years that I would be using the machine.

Plus, I'm starting to be concerned with quality. Of the last 12 we've ordered 3 were DOA. They got replaced (one after over 2 months), but it wasn't a good experience.

They aren't the dumpster fire that HP turned into on the low end for a while, but it is concerning as we have had to send machines back for recalls and fixes. It made for an interesting discussion when we decided a new lab was going to be Intel NUCs with LG 21x9 monitors over buying the outdated Macs. I am hoping for some sign Apple gets it together in 2017.

They're desktop PCs with midrange mobile GPUs and mobile RAM in an aging design so thermally compromised for the sake of thinness that it throttles the CPU and GPU at the first sign of either one approaching load while the revving fan efficiently draws in dust from its environment and deposits it irremovably onto the inside of the LCD.

Fantastic display panel, though.

> Fantastic display panel, though.

That's why people buy them. It's not for the fastest CPU, it's definitely not for the GPU.

It's because it has a fast enough CPU, a good enough GPU and goes all-in on the display.

Aren't they all glossy though? It looks better, but it's less practical whenever you get some sunlight.

I don't know what the iMacs are like, but the Macbooks have gotten pretty good anti-reflective coating, and they have pretty bright backlight. I prefer my glossy 2015 Macbook Pro to my anti-glare matte 2009 Macbook Pro, even in difficult lighting.

If you're not used to it that can be jarring, but over time it's less of an issue.

It's not something I notice unless I'm in a really bad spot and there's tons of light coming in. Good thing civilization invented this thing called blinds.

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