Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro (2016)
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The joke is that this was released in 2016 when the new MBP with the touch bar came out, and was reviewing the _previous_ version as an improvement over the new one.
I feel like people are missing the joke here for lots of reasons, but the addition of 2022 to the title here contributes.
So, the fictional review is set in 2022 or later.
Edit: I should watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button :)
I realize that this isn't how Benjamin Button works. It's not the perfect concept. I can't believe I'm actually spending time typing this explaining how this kinda cheap joke someone else wrote works and acknowledging the weaknesses of it, but here we are.
Pity he didn't mention the pandemic. Could have been a useful warning to everyone.
I can't really find any criticism of the machines themselves. Negative comments are directed at Apple for pre-existing customer-hostile behavior like their repair policies.
The pitch in the event was basically "we're giving pros what they want".
> Evans Hankey, vice president of Industrial Design, and Alan Dye, vice president of Human Interface Design, will report to Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer
(From Apple’s website about Jony Ive).
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgBDdDdSqNE
I really like this MacBook Pro but at $2000 I may wait for the next Air. I really don't need the Pro features, HDMI, SD card, that many GPUs, ..., and my 2017 Air is just fine for now.
Apple wanted to be "bold" and forced a lot of their users into a pipeline that didn't last. And now they are listening to the demands of their users and backtracking.
Users that stuck with them are now being punished for their brand loyalty.
Apple: "If you want to connect to HDMI, you have to buy a dongle now. Also TOUCHBAR! Woot."
User: "Ugh...fine"
Apple: "So... now that you own that dongle that you didn't need, but we decided to make you need. Well, we decided not to make you need it anymore! It's built in. Also, no more touchbar! See! We listen!"
User: "Ugh......."
I'm not here to harp on Apple, but I understand why some people are a little put off by their decisions.
Hell, you can now buy monitors that work only with USB-C. It’s clearly the way everything is going, Apple just moved a bit too fast.
- 4x Thunderbolt 4 (1x with power supply) - 3x USB-A 3.2 - 1x USB-A 2.0 (with power supply) - 1x Gigabit Ethernet - 1x UHS-II SDXC - 1x Audio
Actually, it looks like this same hub is sold by both Sonnettech and Kensington.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/echo11-thunderbolt4-dock/...
https://www.kensington.com/p/products/device-docking-connect...
That you have to drag with you if you want those ports away from your desk. Plug into a TV or projector and you need a dongle. No thanks. Ports are fine by me and I don't care if that adds 0.5mm or some stupid aesthetics nonsense.
For SD cards, the majority of people don’t use SD cards (even customers for the pro line). It’s a concession to an important niche, but forcing that niche to have a USBC adapter that is built into the SD card (maybe not possible?), having a separate SD card reader dongle, or having the camera itself be the SD card reader all seem like better choices than forcing all laptops to have an SD reader.
What’s the compelling story for why SD card or HDMI strictly need to be built in for all customers? The story for HDMI is kind of the strongest because the HDMI market is much more common day-to-day and USB-C as a display technology hasn’t yet permeated standalone TVs and projectors.
I'm a photographer, so the SD card slot is nice for me personally, but it really doesn't make sense to build it into the laptop. It must be used by a tiny percentage of people.
As it stands, I still have an analog audio out because I've procrastinated on getting a usb digital in/out, and I also have a ethernet <-> thunderbolt connector because I only got about 400Mb/s when going via the monitor instead of 950+ when going direct.
3 small connectors all on 1 side isn't that bad.
That being said, I welcome the HDMI addition mostly for older conference rooms which aren't equipped with Apple TV / Webex Proximity / etc.
Just the other day, I had to buy an HDMI cable for my screen. That could be a USB-C. But screen makers and graphic card makers are not going to change overnight. No one is strong enough to push the standard too. If anyone can do it, it's Apple. This is, in my opinion, a step backward.
If every cable looks the same but one is suited for 240W of juice but doesn’t do data and the other vice versa, maybe we would be worse off…
Oh yeah, and also, unrelated to the above, I now inspect the tiny grey-on-black voltage information whenever I'm about to plug in a USB-C cable for providing power.
Oh yeah, and also, each USB-C cable has its own special purpose, since they aren't actually interchangeable, as it turns out.
USB-C somehow managed to find the worst intersection of "Universally pluggable" without being a universal standard.
Someone needs to be the pedant and say this every time it comes up: It wasn't the Nintendo device that didn't respect the spec, it was knock-off docks and chargers that didn't respect the spec and damaged the Nintendo device [0]. I happen to think that Nintendo's engineers should have designed against some shenanigans by third parties (I do with my USB-C devices), but they weren't strictly wrong.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/heres-why-nintendo-sw...
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/19/16-inch-macbook-pro-fas...
USB-C seems to be fine perfectly straight on with no strain at all but use it in anything less than ideal situations and it wears out surprisingly fast. The connectors tend to be longer than they are wide, which is always bad for robustness and they have 0 built in strain relief.
I think it performs well and they got the reversible design right but its just a little too wimply for the way people really use their devices.
Obviously YMMV but when you manage a device fleet you start to see more clearly how "average users" treat things and how designs hold up.
How is anyone being punished ?
As for sticking with them - macbooks have to be the most recognized laptop brand out there
The new Macbook Pro doesn’t affect your current macbook’s operation
Your dialogue creates a straw-user out there that somehow adopts Apple design decisions as dogma - it’s just a machine
If you think this is bad, you should have been around after Jobs left in the 90's and the icky product line after Mac IIfx. No one liked the PowerMacs and PCs were so incredibly cheap that only art departments had macs.
But even when Jobs returned, remember when everyone lost their shit when Jobs removed the disk drive from the iMac?
Maybe the iPhone 3 was the last universally rejoiced Apple product.
(But that notch tho. It really tweaks my obsessive nature. I'm still on an iPhone 6 so I haven't encountered the notch anywhere yet.)
Apple stopped including USB power bricks because everyone on the planet is drowning in them by now, and there are many choices like multi-port AC adapters, ones with different combinations of USB A and C meaning you probably want to pick the adapter you want anyway. But people screamed blue-bloody-murder. And then not long after Apple does it, Samsung quietly follows suit and nobody says a fucking word.
Apple dropped floppy drives and the world screamed about how stupid they were. At the time software had long since stopped coming on floppy, USB thumb drives were out, ethernet was everywhere and wifi was going mainstream. Apple helped put the nail in the coffin, pushing many people to USB thumb drives, network file shares, wifi, etc.
Apple dropped optical drives, same thing. Software was coming digitally; I worked for a company that offered a digital download in 1999 and we were a dinky little niche company. By the time Apple stopped including optical drives on their laptops, CDs were largely dead for software, everyone was using MP3s, etc. That room freed up space for stuff like bigger batteries.
Apple pushed hard on digital display interconnects when much of the PC world was still chugging along on VGA which worked poorly with actual raster displays that were rapidly becoming the norm and PC hardware companies just couldn't seem to figure out how the fuck to communicate "here are the resolutions and refresh rates I can do", something Macs had been doing for a decade. Kids these days don't remember the pains of having to do geometric adjustments on a digital display for a supposedly raster signal.
Dropping headphone connectors on their phones, people screamed blue bloody murder. A pair of pretty decent wireless headphones with 8 hours of battery life were not hard to find for $30ish, now they're commonplace for cheaper, and damn near every car comes with a bluetooth audio function in its stereo, even work vans. And if you want hardwired headphones, a dongle is a $5-20 affair, with Apple's audio adapter scoring very good marks in audio DAC tests...
I explain such behavior to myself by keeping in mind that the internet is many people with many opinions. If one sees an inconsistent response to a topic, one is likely seeing disjoint groups of people that separately have consistent opinions, rather than a cohesive group that can't make up its mind. I find it easy to miss that when I'm not paying attention to who said what.
> Despite the many improvements, Apple is actually dropping the price on its flagship 15" MacBook Pro by $400
I would have been happy if the price had stayed the same or even gone up a bit. But the jump to $2k (which is $2,500 including AppleCare and tax) is a bridge too far.
I'll keep suffering with my butterfly keyboard until amazing futuristic features like HDMI and SD trickle down into the more affordable machines. /s
That thing's transistor count is insane
It's $2500 for the 15".
The real problem is, it became normal to have “padding: 300px” in webapps.
The 13" I have now is adequate, but I miss the extra screen real-estate I had with the 15/16". The 16", especially, was really a treat.
You shouldn't have to upgrade past the base Pro machine — and shell out an extra $800 — to get more than one spare port (and 'fancy' stuff like HDMI and SD).
I see it as a celebration. It's essentially an acknowledgement that they were wrong about all that, and they've built a heavier and "uglier" machine that people actually want/need.
As SJ said, design is how it works. Dongletown + bad keyboards was a bad design, and now they're back to prioritizing usability.
If I had room to protest, I would.
Also, I won't buy another 16:9 screen, I was forced in the past, but there are options now.
But here's a 14" with as many ports as the VAIO, a 3:2 display, a hot-swappable second battery, and more: https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/products/fv1f/
Ports: https://panasonic.jp/cns/pc/products/fv1f/spec.html#interfac...
(not generally for sale in the U.S. though; some truly innovative products are only in the East!)
lol
Even with jump in M1 performance at lower power envelopes, top of the line deskop chips will easily beat it. Apple has only reduced the gap in the performance between high power draw and lower power draw machines, they have not surpassed it.
You(I) may not see the value of that increased performance[2] and will be unwilling to pay the premium (assuming there is no use for other features like expansion cards), however there is decent market who do value that 2.5x more than the 5-10x price difference it costs.
[1] Roughly 2.5x in multi core performance. https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks
[2] The power draw is also considerably more for the Mac pro ~ 1180W compared to 150W for the Mini, so not 1:1 comparison technically, however if you are only looking at non portable compute as the only value prop then it shouldn't matter.
The new USB-Cs allow you to transmit power and data. The fingerprint reader gives you an extra layer of security and saves you from constantly typing in new passwords. The one complaint is the [some peripheral that goes bad]
The joke is they go around in a cycle and everyone notes with a mix of praise and nostalgia how things have changed.
IMHO, this is the biggest hurdle for x86 emulation on ARM.
my understanding is that when you're on intel, vms are accelerated with this vt-x hardware support stuff that essentially runs the machine code in the vm on bare metal. before vt-x, vms were dog slow and involved running the code in a full software emulation of the target cpu which is slow because there's a whole layer of indirection that adds loads of instructions for every target instruction executed and breaks all the caching and branch prediction and such.
the rosetta thing seems cool in that they essentially jit and cache translations of intel binaries that are executed under darwin, translating them once and caching the result, and it turns out they tweaked their chips to be intel like to make this translation lightweight... so you can run intel binaries from the darwin shell and after the first run, they're quite fast...
but... the question is, are there effectively two layers of emulation that break each other's acceleration? the vm emulation and then the x86 processor emulation? can you run x86 vms in a vt-x like way, while taking advantage of rosetta's jit translation (and the caching of those results)? it seems really hard as the host machine would not have any knowledge of when a child vm is even launching a process, let alone its identity, and if it doesn't know these things, how would it know to jit that executable and save the result?
seems you would need some sort of special hardware emulation support, but i'm just speculating...
edit: it seems you could also do something by adding support in the guest os, but i have doubts as to how the maintainers would feel about such a thing!
For all intents and purposes, they are. None of Apple's SoCs since the A6 (2012) have been based on ARM's Cortex-A cores; the CPU design is fully in-house at this point.
Yes, but the M1 is nothing like a new product. As you indicated, Apple's first custom SoC was released in 2010, 11 years ago. They have >10 years of experience shipping SoCs for Apple products. The M1 family can be viewed, to some extent, as an extension of the work on the Ax chips, which likely builds on their experience customizing chips for the iPod family.
As you say, they've been iterating on this design since 2012.
Apple has been deeply involved with ARM almost since the beginning. Allegedly, the acronym "ARM" was changed from "Acorn RISC Machine" to "Advanced RISC Machine" at the behest of Apple, and their engineers seem to have been involved soon after the first ARM chip was created for internal use in Acorn's computers, making modifications to the chip and ISA to make it suitable for the Newton, their combined efforts creating the first commercially released ARM chip, the ARM6.
More recently, Apple has done a lot of work with LLVM. They weren't the original authors, but they've effectively created a lot of their own tooling.
All this to say, while they did license ARM, and they did start with someone else's tooling, they were so deeply involved in the origin/growth of both I think you may be underselling their involvement/work. If they didn't already have such deep historical ties to ARM, I suspect they would have seriously considered making their own architecture.
It's almost as if you meant to post this comment a year ago.
You could probably work out its likely benchmark results on paper within some small margin of error.
Apple knocked it out of the park, that much is clear by now.
The second part is where I say that even if Apple has worked on ARM chips for their phones for quite some time tuning it, macs are still significant product and even if the chips are in house its still a gamble to completely shift a product from what was basically an x86 monopoly. What I meant is that the way Apple pulled it off is rare in the business.