> Too bad Apple no longer caters to my crowd
What is "your crowd"? Only thing I wish my rMBP had was more than 16GB of RAM for some of the dev I do. Other than that, I can't see switching anytime soon.
What is "your crowd"? Only thing I wish my rMBP had was more than 16GB of RAM for some of the dev I do. Other than that, I can't see switching anytime soon.
How has apple stopped catering this crowd? Let me give you my opinion.
The new macbook pro's main feature is one that is totally useless to professionals. The touch bar is an interesting idea for the casual user, but for anyone who uses any software professionally, it provides no value as it is much slower than keyboard shortcuts. Not to mention that the lack of tactile feedback means you need to look away from the monitor to use it.
The new design has force a redesign in the keyboard, giving it much lower travel, and it is now a lot more uncomfortable to use (this one in particular is quite subjective)
16GB is just not enough in the era of containers.
The price. It's just absurd and some of the most expensive features (TB) are just useless as I stated above.
All I was hoping for was this exact form factor with upgraded internals (faster CPU, faster GPU, 32GB), swapping the two existing Thunderbolt 2 ports for Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports. But no, apparently we all wanted lighter and thinner, no function keys and only poorly supported (so far) USB-C ports. Who knew?
By the way... TB is not useless. I use it everyday. I plug my rMBP into power and then plug a TB cable in from my computer to my LG Thunderbolt display with builtin USB-3 hub and TB passthrough.
Switching to the 9560 (from a MBP) wouldn't be as easy as one would hope. WSL is very very slow and awkward to use compared to the macOS terminal. Part of the performance problems are related to forking: on *nix forking is a lightweight operation and used a lot, especially in all of those convenient BASH tools that we use (like RVM) but on Windows it's a very expensive process--I'm rewriting GVM2 to speed it up for Go development on WSL. Then there's the whole deal of having to double up on your installs (e.g. installing ruby dependencies on both Windows and within WSL for code completion support, etc., from within VSCode) and not editing WSL files within Windows or risk corruption.
Then there's that single 2-lane Thunderbolt/USB-C port and the 9560's 130W power requirements...sadness. While an HP Zbook Studio G4 (also quad core i7, all the way up to Xeon) includes two 4-lane TB3 ports, it has older Quadro 1200m graphics and comes with a 150W power adapter (!): way way out of the max 100W USB-C spec. And yet the new rMBP still only draws something like 87W. In short, you can't charge any of these machines over USB-C unless they're idling.
It's like being stuck between a rock and hard place right now: Apple caters only to the mass consumer while everyone else is spread so thinly across all markets that they can't seem to focus and make a truly awesome MBP replacement for power users (engineers, creatives, scientists, gamers, etc). And I look at this 5-year old rMBP with its totally smooth underside, still incredible display, properly placed speakers and webcam, and wonder why Windows notebooks still can't compete with this Jobs-era design.