? Isn’t that a MacBook Pro?
A maxed out Macbook Pro has 16GB of non-upgradeable, non-ECC RAM and a GPU with 4GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 3,553.
Lenovo will sell me a machine with 64GB of socketed ECC RAM and a Quadro P5000 with 16GB of vRAM and a Passmark score of 10,281.
The Macbook Pro doesn't have built-in LTE. It has a non-removable battery. It throttles badly under sustained loads. It has chronic issues with display calibration. If you want a useful selection of ports, you'll need a bag full of fragile and easy to lose dongles. They've only just rolled out eGPU support and there's still no official support for Nvidia GPUs. There's no 17" option. It has that damnable butterfly keyboard.
Yes, the Macbook Pro is very thin and lightweight, but Apple have made a lot of performance and usability tradeoffs to get there. That doesn't sound very "pro" to me.
Apple doesn’t make a mobile workstation. They make a Pro version of the MacBook.
Take a MacBook, give it some more power, and you mostly have a MacBook Pro.
If the complaint is why doesn’t Apple make a high-end mobile workstation I'm guessing because the market isn’t there for it? At least not at the scale for Apple to touch it?
A lot of professionals end up being serviced just fine by a “Pro MacBook”. I don’t get this obsession with acting like Apple is doing something wrong by making the MacBook Pro a pro version of the MacBook instead of something like a Dell Precision, they’re two very different things with two very different markets.
It had gigabit ethernet, FW800, three USB ports, 1 thunderbolt port, ExpressCard/34 slot, audio in, audio out.
With the exact same form factor and updated ports, Apple could offer a hell of a Pro Macbook Pro. Just give it a 4k screen and an option for a second SSD in the space formerly used by a DVD drive.
If Apple honestly say "we couldn't care less about professional users, we're making money hand over fist anyway", then at least we all know where we stand. Apple haven't taken that approach - they keep making grand overtures about how much they care about professional users. They keep making grand promises about how the perfect professional machine is just around the corner, how they're not updating the current machine because the next big thing is so incredible, amazing, awesome.
There are a lot of very loyal Mac users who have kept Apple in business through thick and thin, but their patience has been tested to breaking point. Those users have been a key part of Apple's marketing; Apple make computers for dreamers, visionaries, artists, the cultural elite.
I don't know anyone who is genuinely happy about being a Mac user, but I know a lot of people who grimly tolerate giving Apple their money. They know what to expect from next year's Macs - they'll be thinner, lighter and subtly worse in a lot of important ways.
What happens to the Mac brand if those users leave? What happens if the resentment felt towards Apple by photographers, video editors, 3D artists and recording engineers turns into a full-scale revolt? What happens if owning a Mac marks you out not as a sophisticated member of the cultural elite, but a nerd who wants a slick *nix experience or a sucker who paid $2000 for a Facebook machine?
Apple are playing a dangerous game. Apple don't need to care at the moment because the iPhone is so gratuitously profitable, but they should know better than anyone that the market is incredibly fickle. They're burning decades of goodwill for no obvious reason.
It wouldn't be particularly expensive to make the majority of pro users happy. Bring back the old cheesegrater Mac Pro and stuff it with the latest commodity components. Bring back a previous-generation MBP chassis and fill the extra space with an i9 or a Xeon E3, four SODIMM slots and a GTX 1070 Max Q or a Quadro P5000.
They don't have to promote these machines, they don't have to display them in Apple stores if they're ashamed of making a functional computer, they just need to make them and promise to keep making them to secure the continued loyalty of their most loyal customers. Apple won't do it, for reasons known only to them. In the long term, that could prove to be a very expensive oversight.
My monitor does video, charging, and USB 3 with full size ports with one cable.
And the keyboard is subjective, I got used to it pretty easily. I actually feel like it’s more tactile than the old one
That is not the most ringing endorsement for a very expensive and supposedly premium laptop.
My Lenovo X1 Yoga also does everything via one Thunderbolt cable, but it also has a full selection of normal ports on the notebook itself rather than only on the docking station. It also has a 1440p touch screen and a nice keyboard, and still costs 1000 € less than a Macbook Pro ^W Deluxe.
I’d rather pay the difference in AppleCare. Most developers on this site are making large sums of money with their machines, 1000$ or even 2000$ is hardly going to make a measurable difference on the ROI of my laptop.
If the $2k isn't that significant, and minimal downtime is so important; may as well keep a slightly older refurb model on-site as a hot-spare ready to go just in case there's a problem... A policy that would work, whatever your OS / brand preference.
The endorsement was tempered by the fact that around these parts endorsing the new MBP is apparently treason. I’m getting my comments downvoted for implying the MacBook Pro is a fine machine.
Needed keyboard repair twice in that time, and was horrible to type on. Useless touchbar, and an over-large trackpad that was constantly activating when typing. The last was odd as I regularly touch the old size trackpad with thumbs when typing but never had an issue. Add in the occasional freeze and crash and I feel it was a complete lemon.
I'm very happy with my 2015 and get longer battery times than I did with the newer model. I have no idea what I'll do when it needs replacing.
IMO best all around monitor being produced today. 38” 1600p ultrawide (equivalent density to a 1440p 34” ultrawide), 75hz which is high enough for gaming without going into gamer aesthetic/retail markup territory, Freesync.
I can’t recommend it enough tbh
The keyboard is subjective.
The feel of the keyboard is indeed subjective (I happen to like the feel of the keyboard on the new MacBook Pro), but in this case Apple genuinely built a buggy keyboard, so much so that people are writing songs about it [1].
Largest reason for return: G key. 30% of the time = two Gs. 50% = 1 G. Remaining 20% = 0 Gs/no keydown whatsoever. Hah.
Yeah, I think if the keyboard didn't break from a spec of dust it would be fine.
With my work my swap usage is 10-20GB at a time, between my IDE, app, tests, and browser tabs. 16GB is utterly painful but it’s the most you can buy.
It's also more than two times slower on my 2013 Dell Precision Xeon workstation.
But that comparison is not really fair, a MacBook Pro has to use a mobile CPU or it won't be able to dissipate the heat. Also, depending on ambient temperature, possible airflow, the MacBook's CPU probably throttles fairly early to prevent overheating.
A desktop CPU can larger power envelopes, typically throttles less and most virtualization has gotten so good that for CPU-bound workloads the difference between running on bare hardware or on a VM is barely noticeable.
to the point where I'd work more efficiently running remote desktop on a $200 chromebook.
Maybe it depends on the field I am working in, but I can't really run stuff on any laptop or desktop unless it is a > 5000 Euro workstation with plenty of RAM, storage, and a beefy GPU. The value that the Mac platform provides for me are the many applications that Chromebooks/Linux don't have good substitutes for, such as OmniGraffle, Deckset, Things, Microsoft Office, Little Snitch, Pixelmator, Acorn, Lightroom, and Affinity Designer. So, it's not just an expensive terminal ;).
But the memory is noticeable. For general performance, but also for running lots of vms and stuff in different configurations.
Still situations where its convenient to spin stuff up locally rather than cloud.