Apple Gives the MacBook and MacBook Pros a Kaby Lake Refresh | Hacker News Reader

Apple Gives the MacBook and MacBook Pros a Kaby Lake Refresh

arstechnica.com

52 pointsTomte39 comments

Please just make a 15" model with a full keyboard! I can live with the rest of it but it's going to be miserable trying to program missing all those keys.

I had my fingers crossed for this as well. I don't want to have to choose between an Esc key and performance.

I was hoping for an announcement like this as well. Maybe next time?

I hope so as well. I live my older style 15 inch (the last pre touchbar model). Would love a function key option.

I don't want to have to switch ecosystems.

Half-height arrow keys should be banned. Especially given how often we use them. What a poor tradeoff of visual design over usability.

That would involve conceding they made a mistake.

How about just one single discussion thread "Apple WWDC news and announcements" rather than multiple ones?

A Kaby Lake refresh is hardly news when the rest of the industry is already preparing for Gemini Lake.

>How about just one single discussion thread "Apple WWDC news and announcements" rather than multiple ones?

How about people vote these pieces up? How about a single post will just be a cacophony of different tangents?

>A Kaby Lake refresh is hardly news when the rest of the industry is already preparing for Gemini Lake.

Tell news outlets that and you'd be surprised.

Gemini Lake is the low power SoC (Intel Core M etc.), Kabby Lake mobile will be replaced by Coffee Lake and Cannonlake.

Thanks for the clarification.

No mention (nor on macrumors) as to whether or not this means that the MBP would support >16GB of RAM (the previous claim, IIUC, is that Kaby Lake would handle this for the low-powered DIMMs Apple prefers).

No mention because nothing has changed - 16Gb is still the limit on MBPs :-( I heard a whimper about courage...

You won't see > 16GB till cannon lake, probably some time in 2018. Kaby lake nor coffee lack support LPDDR4 and LPDDR3 is limited to 16GB.

This is an Intel problem, not an Apple problem really, the only thing Apple could do about it is use DDR4L which would cut battery like quite a bit and require a whole new motherboard (and probably battery) design.

Ahh, I had missed that only the U variant of Kaby might do LPDDR4. Cannonlake it is.

Here's to hoping they were actually able to use the battery they intended to this time around, and that the battery life isn't garbage: https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/20/14024322/macbook-pro-bat...

I've been sitting on my 2012 original retina waiting for them to sort this out. I've heard of the 15in 2016 model getting as little as 3 hours of relatively idle use(ie liveblogging), and my 2012 still lasts 5~ with a bajillion cycles.

12 inch macbooks now have upto 16 gb memory https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook

I really wanna see some benchmarks/real world tests of this new version. it's starting to look like the semi-serious tiny machine i wanted it to be all along.

I am not so sure I will buy another MacBook no matter what processor they put in it.

I just got back from the Apple Store. My 2013 MacBook pro is hard crashing, no logs being written. Most likely a hardware defect. They tried formatting and re-installing a fresh copy of OSX. It crashed during the re-install. They tried booting it up in a special diagnostic mode and it crashed in that mode, which should not have happened.

I bought this in December 2013 so its almost 3.5 years old. The minimum it would cost me to fix it is $475 which to me is too much to pay given the age of the machine and the cost of a new machine.

I contrast this with a Dell laptop I bought in 2001 that is still running today in 2017.

The Apple care insurance they sell can at most get you 3 years total coverage. This would not have helped me in this case.

I am going to explore other computer brands at this point.

Doing the same - Dell 15" kitted out with 32Gb RAM for me.

The 'Pro' moniker is just a marketing gimmick these days.

I wonder why the down vote. my comment was totally on topic about the hardware and my experience with it.

Fanboy attack. Logic out the window.

whatever it is, it is not healthy for the community on here.

Maybe downvotes are because of your comparison of a 2013 MBP to a 2001 Dell laptop?

My personal experience is seeing Dell, HP, Fujitsu and other brand laptops completely disintegrate in a 3-year timespan, with Apple hardware easily outliving them - hardware issues eventually appear, but overall condition, specially mechanical, is not even in the same league.

I was simply comparing what hardware experience I have had. I also have a 2005 acer laptop and a 2011 asus netbook that are still running fine today.

There is something to be said about warranties that you learn in engineering school. The time period they cover is always calculated such that the majority of faults across the majority of customers will not occur inside of the window they cover.

Countering one anecdote with another doesn't really settle anything.

As someone looking to buy a 15-inch Macbook Pro with Touch Bar, is it worth waiting for this?

Does the faster GPU help with VR?

How much more battery life does it get?

They've also updated graphics cards to Radeon pro 500 series. The top model can have a Radeon pro 560 now

Count me disappointed until I can get my hands on a Macbook with a GTX 1050 Ti or equivalent.

Radeon Pro 560 is actually on par with 1050 performance wize

From what I've read, not quite at GTX 1050 Ti levels for mobile applications. Please provide links if you have other sources.

Just saw the prices in CAD. Yikes! $1,729 for both base models.

Blame the exchange rate, the CAD price is actually cheaper than the USD price converted

Store just updated. Still on 16GB of RAM.

Did they raise the prices in Europe? I recall at least the Macbook 12" base model being cheaper.

Anyone find a benchmark? I need to know if i should upgrade from the Nov 2016 macbook pro.

Is there a tell on the purchase page about them being kaby lakes? If so, I'm missing it.

Unfortunately, anyone who wants to fork over $5K for one of these gems has to consider how brittle Apple products have become. Who wants to spend that kind of scratch only to have it become a brick in a year.

Not sure what you mean. Anecdotally I have a 2009 MBP and a 2013, both still running strong...

The phones are another story, but it seems the macbooks are pretty solid.

Also I'd be hard pressed to find a $5K configuration for a new macbook. Seems like $3K tends to be top of the line.

4k for a 15" with 2tb.

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