Apple Releases new MacBook Pros with Force Touch Trackpad | Hacker News Reader

Apple Releases new MacBook Pros with Force Touch Trackpad

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91 pointsglobuous125 comments

For anyone else who was confused by this, it's a bump on the 15" Macbook Pro. The 13" model was updated at the same time as the Macbook launch.

I'm a little disappointed Apple, the new MBP doesn't have a top of the line graphics card, and it's still stuck to 16GB of ram. This is hardly a pro option.

I wonder if I need a #hackentosh if I want 32GB of RAM, and an nVidia 950M or better.

Do you really need >16GB to be considered 'pro' these days?

You can have 64GB on a MacPro. Hope that's 'pro' enough.

128GB if you use slower ram.

I run several VMs at once on mine, and 16gb is constraining. Put me in the "the Pro is no longer so Pro" camp.

I regularly have six to eight virtual machines in flight at any given time and never feel constrained. Are you sizing them appropriately for their tasks?

Did the Macbook Pros just get a whole lot more expensive in Europe (or specifically Germany?)? I don't remember the 15" MBP with a discrete graphics card being 2800€. Or have they adjusted their prices to the weak Euro a while back?

The last gen MBP was also the same price in Germany a few months back, so it wasn't changed just now.

I would think the latter [0] if you are seeing around 20% appreciation in price.

0: http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=2Y

It might have occured when the Retina screen was no more optionnal.

Yeah, they adjusted for the weak Euro. The Apple developer program also went up in price last year in Europe.

Interesting that they're shifting towards AMD GPUs. Was actually hoping for a major update of the MBPR with the availability of NVIDIA's new maxwell architecture and broadwell based quad cores.

Anyone knows why AMD? Is it a margin/profitibility or performance thing?

Apple has never tied themselves to one GPU vendor- they have gone back and forth more times in the past ten years or so that I have been watching Apple than I care to count.

give it 18 months and the new top-of-the-line will have nVidia in it again, assuming they don't move completely to integrated.

The shift towards AMD GPUs actually makes me very, very wary of getting any new Mac hardware for a while. Every time I've tried an AMD/Radeon GPU in a PC, it's done nothing but crash over and over and over again (even after several returns).

I don't ever want an AMD/Radeon GPU in any system I own ever again. Intel and NVidia GPUs just work.

AMD user. Not my experience.

How long ago was it?

Well over a dozen times from ~1998--2010.

I own a 2014 MBPr with the Nvidia chip and I'm thinking the AMD chip would be a big improvement. I see major visual artifacts whenever the GPU switches, it locks up frequently, and external monitors rarely work. Maybe a bad chip, actually, but it works fine in Windows.

There's an extended warranty repair program for video issues https://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/

Unfortunately, even though my MBPr exhibits exactly those issues, it is a Late 2013 model so it doesn't qualify.

I've had the same experience on desktop & mobile. The desktop issues with Radeon are from quite some time ago, but the driver problems on both Windows & Linux back then were extremely frustrating: random framerate slowdowns, no working linux drivers, bad support in some games, ...

And the only time a Laptop has died on me was when its AMD GPU decided to go crazy, resulting in artifacts and full system shutdown within a few seconds/minutes, if you were lucky enough to get it booting at all.

I know that this is anecdotal and most likely just coincidence, but I haven't had such problems with nvidia, so that I'm willing to pay the small premium price whenever I need a new GPU.

I haven't had any real issues with AMD, so take it nots universal. Especially on my mac, the windows ones have been fine as well, but a little less stable since those drivers are more cutting edge.

I'm not sure how relevant Windows / Linux experience is. Apple is responsible for the graphics driver on OSX. AMD may write much of the code, but it doesn't go out the door until Apple is happy with it.

Go back 10+ years and they're always changing GPU vendors back and forth.

It's also a shame for Linux users, since AMD doesn't work as well on Linux.

Mac is generally considered "the safe choice", when picking high end notebook for Linux.

Presumably this means there won't be a major refresh to the 15" model announced at WWDC and available immediately or shortly, something Apple likes to do. I guess this is no surprise due to the lack of high-end Broadwell... Personally, I'm still hoping for a slightly higher resolution screen eventually.

Does this mean MBPs with 5th gen Intel Boradwell chips won't be available till next year?

They probably jump straight to Skylake. Maybe in Q4.

I think they're waiting for Skylake. Wireless charging, 4K/5K external displays at 60hz, better battery, etc.

Skylake is the "major refresh" everyone that knows anything is waiting for.

Any good single source you'd recommend to encapsulate all that makes Skylake the obvious next hardware upgrade to the MBP line? I've been waiting for the right time to upgrade and I'd love something to read about the future. This is the first I've seen it mentioned.

Sorry I don't know of a single source. The Wikipedia page for Skylake is a good start, as well as the section for Thunderbolt 3.0. You'll get a good sense of what capabilities this is going to unlock.

Only Cannonlake will get AVX-512 performance boost. That doubles SIMD processing power. Skylake Xeons will have AVX-512, though.

So having a brand new Broadwell laptop, my next one shall have a Cannonlake (or better) CPU.

85W wireless charging? I don't even want to imagine the losses on that...

I was hoping they would come out with a USB-C port.

This was a minor bump, I'm holding out for something bigger once Skylake is ready. Hopefully that will include USB-C.

32GB of ram?!

New standards take time to gain traction. Apple putting at least one USB-C on each "new" device would go a long way towards helping USB-C gain adoption.

I think they should have 'burned the boats' and gone all in with USB-C on everything they have updated so far (I.e. MBP 13/15, iMac). Throw a solitary adapter in the box, charge a nice Apple margin on additional ones.

I have a new Google's Pixel LS with 2 USB Type-C ports (at this point the only one in the world to have 2 as far as I know) and it's amazing. I can plug the USB Type-C charger from either side of the laptop. When was the last time you were able to do that?

I'm surprised the macbook didn't go the USB Type-C on each side route. How much bulk could that really add? It makes it way more flexible. The Pixel update looks really good to me compared it these updates.

New pixel has 2 USB Type-C's as well as 2 USB Type-A's. Slapped on Ubuntu and now I have a full blown ultra portable development machine with probably the best laptop screen you can find at the moment and running Broadwell core i7.

Only if they didn't sacrifice the mag safe in favor of it like they did on the 13 inch.

The mag safe was one of the best inventions for MacBooks ever and it is sad to see how nonchalantly they retired it on the 13 inch. And I doubt the rumor it was because it is too light now. The mag safe is for when you trip over the cable with your leg. Doing that, you will always do so very abruptly. And so the weight of the MacBook cannot be that big a factor. Other wise, comparable things like the tablecloth trick would never work. The glasses and plates also do not weigh a lot. But tug on the tablecloth abruptly enough and away it goes with the glasses and everything still on the table. Same thing happens with a mag safe connector.

New graphics card also? It says AMD Radeon R9 M370X with 2GB GDDR5 memory on the page

Edit: I think it was an Nvidia 750 before

That's basically the same graphics card. AMD recently did an "OEM refresh", which didn't do much more than put new numbers on the old cards. They fiddled with frequencies, but they're basically the same old cards. Manufacturers demand this, and unlike Intel & nVidia, AMD doesn't have the clout to say no to stupid requests like this.

Significantly, they didn't refresh their retail range of cards, so there is still some hope that AMD has a significant refresh coming soon; AMD still doesn't have an answer for nVidia Maxwell, which was first released over a year ago.

Pretty sure NVIDIA has done the same on occasion, for example the 800m GTX series, doesn't have an 800 GTX desktop counterpart. Many of the 800m cards used the same chips as 700m series, just with small changes. Apparently they were originally planning on releasing Maxwell as 800 series, but due to Laptop manufacturer pressure ended up deferring it after releasing Kepler 800m cards.

Yep, on the other hand the previous 750M was essentually the same chip as 650M (+ a few Mhz) as well, so the discrete GPUs in rMBPs are kinda dissapointing for a few generations now :/

Apple claims 12.5% longer life (from 8 to 9 hours) with only a 4.7% larger battery (95 Wh to 99.5 Wh), and without moving to Broadwell processors like in the 13" rMBP which we know are a big part of its battery life improvement.

So is this 15" rMBP battery life improvement software-driven or new hardware throttling or just wishful thinking? The video card and SSD have changed, but doesn't a full hour of battery life improvement seem optimistic? I guess reviews will expose the truth soon enough...

"Rather than 4.7% more capacity being responsible for a 12.5% increase in stated battery life, efficiency gains in the tested OS and software also likely contributed, since last year’s test was with Mavericks and an older version of Safari. Fortunately, those efficiency gains benefit old Macs, too."

Source: http://www.marco.org/2015/05/19/mistake-one (footnote2, at the bottom of the page)

From Appleinsider:

"Notably, the chips are not Intel's latest-generation 'Broadwell' processors, which remain unavailable in quad-core configurations. As a result, Apple is still utilizing the previous-generation 'Haswell' architecture, albeit at faster speeds."

Faster speeds? It's the same:

New rMBP: http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/

Old rMBP: https://web.archive.org/web/20150424183842/http://www.apple....

Yeah, the i7-4980HQ (the most high-end option they offer) has been for more than a year the fastest Intel processor you can find in a laptop.

http://ark.intel.com/products/83503/Intel-Core-i7-4980HQ-Pro...

Really don't like the force touch trackpad for some reason... it feels a lot like the old macbook pro trackpad after years of use - kinda damp and spongey. There is nothing like the 'pop' of a new Mac trackpad, but I guess those days are over... ha.

I can't be part of THAT small a minority that needs to use CUDA and/or more than 16gigs of RAM.

From my perspective, these mbp are very little marginal benefit for computational work than a small air. (You'll just run everything on AWS/GCE/etc anyways)

Newbie here. Someone that had tryed the Force Touch Trackpad could you share impressions?

Yeah, it's pretty incredible.

I preferred to disable the two-level click in System Prefs, then it just felt like a normal macbook air trackpad.

It feels so real I turned off the unit in the store just to double check that there was no feedback with the power off (there wasn't)

It's nice. Adjustable click sound in trackpad preferences, so no more CLICK! at night when you use laptop near someone else. Force feedback makes it feel like you're really pressing a button.

But nothing I couldn't live without.

> so no more CLICK! at night when you use laptop near someone else

> But nothing I couldn't live without.

Hmm, less grumbling from the wife when I play Minecraft in bed? "It's not for me, hon--it's for us."

I have the 13" MBP with Force Touch. Hands down the best trackpad I've ever used. Apple continues to dominate in this space.

The "Taptic Engine" part of the Force Touch system is imperceptible from hardware "clicks". The ability to have a second level click seems interesting. Turning of the computer and pressing on the trackpad is like a magic trick.

While not many apps (and not many portions of the OS, even) are using the "pressure granularity" system of Force Touch, I will reserve judgement on its benefits and usefulness, but it is incredibly well-engineered.

Overall, I can see Apple including this across their entire product line, if technically feasible. It is as good as Touch ID.

Valve almost beat them to it with the steam controller's haptic touchpads. Was there some public research or something in this area that got everyone working on it at once?

I'd assume for Apple it was the watch that got them into it.

Oh right.. weirdly Valve were also planning a bunch of biometric sensors for the Steam controller at first too..

I have only tried it in stores, but I find that even the highest "click" setting feels too shallow to me, and not as satisfying as the old trackpad. I also was not a fan of the very short travel distance on the new Macbook keyboard.

That said, I have heard generally uniformly good reviews, so I imagine it's one of those things that after a few weeks you get used to and perhaps even start to prefer.

> but I find that even the highest "click" setting feels too shallow to me

Oh, that's what I thought at first as well. And then grew to like it.

Another notable rMBP 2015 13" feature is pretty nice battery life. I often get 12-15 hours on a single charge, for ssh/remote desktop + browsing use.

Unless you use Chrome, of course. I generally get around 6-8 while using Chrome, Skype, Spotify, and Atom.

That's always been the case, it's a great reason to avoid Chrome on OS X.

Not much of a choice, though. Firefox is stuttery on its best day and Safari lacks stuff like pinned and locked tabs that I can't do without.

Which does not make me happy. Google can do better.

The biggest selling point for it in my view isn't Force Click but the uniformity of the trackpad. You can press anywhere on the trackpad and it takes exactly the same amount of force to make a click. On the previous mechanical glass trackpads the amount of force required to make a click goes up the closer to the keyboard you press the trackpad. I'm now happy to use my thumb to click the trackpad because I can click it just under the spacebar easily.

It's very obvious when going back to the trackpad on my 2013 rMBP, which feels (and sounds) like junk in comparison.

On the 2013 rMBP I use the "Tap to click" setting so I don't have to press the awful button. On the 2012 MacBook I don't; it's just not necessary.

I was really hoping to see 5th gen Intel Broadwell chips with the update. When are they expected? Intel said mid-year, but when will Apple incorporate them in?

I can't fathom how they can keep releasing iMac updates yet the Thunderbolt display is four years old.

If they released a new external display, it would have to be retina quality. That makes me think that Apple isn't yet confident in MacBook/MacBook Pro GPUs to drive multiple external retina quality screens like you can do now with the Thunderbolt displays. Maybe the top-of-the-line machines with the Nvidia/Radeon GPUs, but it doesn't seem very Apple like for them to release a new display with a disclaimer: only works with Nvidia/Radeon GPU equipped Macs.

Retina quality 27" displays need to wait for the next Thunderbolt or similar speed bump. The display requires > 20Gbps to feed. That means waiting for Intel to pop out ThunderBolt 3 with the newly announced DisplayPort 1.3 38Gbps connection.

Too many pixels, too little time.

As far as GPU processing power, I wonder how much more GPU it takes for two displays. I use two, but I don't do heavy updates on both at once. I suppose you could imagine some video game wanting to use both, but for professional work it seems mostly about real estate, peripheral awareness, and context switching with a head turn. It probably wants more RAM for compositing, but that seems ample already.

Force touch user here! Contrary to what many people here seem to believe, the 13 inch retina MBPR has had force touch since its release in early 2015, when it was first announced. They have only just put them into the 15 inch, and I imagine they left the "big announcement" until all MBPR users could get it so they didn't waste all the novelty before it was ripe for media excitement.

There's a good list of things you can do with force touch here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204352

Some personal opinions about force touch:

My favourite thing about it is that the trackpad is automatically more clickable. The clickable surface area is larger than on my previous Mac (13" Air late 2013), and since I turned off right click (opting for two-finger click instead) I am far more causal about clicking things. This was really, really noticeable when going back to my Air briefly while I was giving it some TLC, and finding I couldn't use the top-left corner to click.

About the "force" aspect of it though... the sensation of pressing it down and watching some on-screen element change in size (which is the case for the dictionary lookup feature) is pretty fun. That's one of my favourite things to show people. It's like watching people use an analogue stick for the first time. At first it's confusing and hard to get the balance of, but soon you become quite proficient with it.

Unfortunately support outside of stock OSX applications is quite limited at the moment. The features that are supported in Safari have not yet made their way to Chrome, and features in Quicktime (changing fast forward speed, mainly) are not in VLC. Stuff like that. Having buttons on the screen which act differently depending on how hard you click them could be quite powerful.

With time, however, I think we'll see developers doing more interesting things with this. It could be quite useful in artistic applications for instance, doing exactly what Wacom tablets (and their ilk) have been doing to simulate the pressure of a brush or pen.

Another good use is as a replacement for right click or CTRL+click, i.e. to open a context menu. This is how it works on the dock, and it's quite nice to use too.

One thing I find wrong with it is that all of a sudden, holding onto a draggable element while scrolling with two fingers (e.g., try moving a playlist around in Spotify when you have lots of playlists) appears to not longer be possible. This might be a software issue with whomever is responsible for the software in question, though.

Finally, the myth that the trackpad doesn't move at all is not true. It moves a little, and if you press hard (as one Apple store employee did when I took it in to get looked at last week, insisting that it "wasn't force touch") it will move down noticeably - so don't overdo it.

This, IMO, is the killer feature of the new MBPR.

It allows 5K monitors? Does that mean it's HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort 1.3? Both?

  Support for up to 5120 by 2160 resolution at 60Hz on a single external display (model with AMD Radeon R9 M370X only)

is listed under "Thunderbolt digital video output" & HDMI max output is

  Support for 4096-by-2160 resolution at 24Hz.

So it must be DP 1.3?

Nope - it's two mini-DP cables

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/05/28/15-mbp-supports-dell-5k-...

Why do they use images for everything? That text on that landing page.. an image?

Presumably they've measured latency with images and webfonts and found images load faster. There's nothing more frustrating than a webfont that takes 10 seconds to load.

I've understood they use images mainly for typographical control across translations.

Can somebody tell me how they deal with all the heat generated by these powerful cpus/gpus in a laptop? Do you just put it on a desk all the time?

It's not been my experience that things are getting worse in that respect; in fact, I'd say heat-wise things are significantly better than previous generations. Intel has put a lot of effort into making its chips more energy efficient, which has a side effect of generating much less heat. I'd guess that, combined with better chassis design, accounts for the improvement.

Whenever my laptop is on my "lap" or in my bed at home it's actually on one of these. This also raises it to a more ergonomic level for me. http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60240587/

cool. thanks.

At least they didn't update the power port...again.

They also cut the price on the iMac Retina by $200.

And there's a new lower-end retina iMac starting at $1999. That's an impressively low price point for something with that display.

You can buy IPS 4k display for $599 or less. Not 5k, but not that far off either.

Edit: Downvotes, seriously? Have you seen these side by side? When it comes to resolution, at least I can't tell a difference anymore at a reasonable viewing distance. Display tech simply good enough now.

5K is almost twice as many pixels as 4K.

5k is almost double the pixel count (75%-ish more). It's pretty substantial... also, more to the point with Apple products, I think at the 27" size, 5k is necessary for the pixel-doubling high-DPI option to look good. At 4k, everything looks either tiny or huge, depending on whether you have it turned off or on.

I tried the new Force touch at retail. Single click is perfect, and double click...had a ton of latency. Anyone else think so?

What in the hell is wrong with buttons? They are easy to understand and work one hundred percent of the time. I have to use one at work, and I'll never buy one of these crappy button-less trackpads for personal use. Click-and-drag is a mind-melting experience.

That's my feeling with the current generation of Android devices which got rid of the 3 buttons below the screen.

Tip:

System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Mouse & Trackpad -> Trackpad options -> Enable dragging without drag lock

i personally love it... dragging by tapping - so without needing to push or click

Is anyone else here mad that Apple has time for these gimicks but can't get their software fixed? Lion to Yosemite was a big regression and I don't mean the UI.

I see these "OS X is getting worse" posts from time to time but it doesn't match my experience. Care to elaborate?

Unreliable Standby mode. Upon waking up, peripherals won't work until reboot, the Dock is unresponsive, applications crash and more.

Overall stability. I've never had so many system freezes and crashes than with Yosemite. It started with the upgrade progress that crashed on me and even a fresh reinstall didn't help.

On Lion, I let my machine run for serveral weeks without any problem. Now I have to reboot at least once a week because the kernel is working on something that seems like bitcoin mining from the looks of the cpu load.

Rebooting shows a black screen for 2 minutes and I often thought thank god I have a backup because my filesystem got screwed up (it didn't but apparently that's also a problem for some people).

Applications not quitting, Dock locking up, Finder unresponsive, drives not showing up in Diskutil.

WiFi not working or working extremely slow. This even happens when I'm connected via cable and I turn WiFi on. Suddenly I have a really slow network connection. The WiFi issues even occur on iOS devices (not mine, but some of my family members)

These are not minor annoyances. This stuff keeps me from working and gives me an extremely poor user experience. In fact it's the first time in years I'm looking forward to a Windows release.

And of course there are some smaller things like Removing features from applications, for example the whole scripting part of iWorks. From the hostname, it seems like I run a few thousand Macs in my network.

Yikes, that does sound terrible -- makes me wish you had a more positive experience since it really should all work. I wonder if it's CPU/hardware specific?

Data point re: Wi-Fi, though: I've seen friends experience Wi-fi issues on their Airs as of one recent update, but never have them myself on my 2011 Air (that I use heavily for coding and graphics work.)

It might be hardware specific, because I don't experience the bootup problems and WiFi issues on my Mac Mini.

People get mad when there's a "stability" release because there's no new features. People get mad when there's a release full of new features and it's not stable.

Rumour is that this will be a stability release for iOS 9 (presumably OS X as well?) [1]. I guess now everyone will be mad that there's no new features.

[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2015/02/09/ios-9-stability-optimiza...

People only get mad about paying for a stability release (Snow Leopard cost $30, Mountain Lion $20)

I get frustrated by the bugs too, but honestly, the last (fairly) bug-free Mac OS was pre-X (and obviously, that was way simpler).

Try going back and reading early Daring Fireball. It's all complaining about how everything is broken and Apple quality has fallen off a cliff.

I think pretty much most (all?) user-facing software nowadays is buggy and broken.

Hopefully it'll slowly improve as features settle into place, and maybe we figure out better languages and processes...

Yosemite and Mavericks really are a major regression. I' confident that I'm onto something if even known Mac enthusiasts like the ATP people report on the quality fall.

Still no 10-point touchscreen?

That would require a massive UI overhaul to make every app touch friendly. Not something that Apple is going to take on lightly.

Well what are they waiting for? It's not like touchscreens on laptops are exactly a new feature.

> Well what are they waiting for?

A good reason to do it?

Apple has clearly decided that the tradeoff for making a UI both touch and mouse friendly is too great. Given the reaction people have had to Windows 8+ I'm inclined to agree with them.

Given I want a 10-point touchscreen on a laptop, I use Windows 8, and I find the touch interactions delightful, I clearly disagree.

You realize that more people use Windows 8+ than OS X, right?

The reaction that I see is that all sorts of workers are now walking around touching Windows on tablets and laptops. I've seen them in restaurants, supermarkets, service centers, stores, in my house, in my yard.

You're thinking about the tech blog/news people's reaction to Windows 8+. Plenty of actual people are using the product because it offers something that no other system does - and that is a full operating system with touch, not a locked down rental unit.

Plenty of actual people are using the product because it offers something that no other system does

Workers are not making those decisions -- large companies that employ them (or consultancies employed by those companies) are doing so, probably for the same reasons that companies have been choosing Windows for 20 years, which have nothing to do with touchscreens.

I know it's difficult to believe, but people do willingly choose to use Windows.

In general, Windows has a vastly higher market share than OS X, so yeah I think a lot of people do choose to use it.

And it has everything to do with touchscreens because touchscreens are just another example in the long history of Microsoft offering features that OS X simply doesn't have. I bet you'll be singing the praises of touch screens on OS X when Apple finally catches up.

You're getting killed here, but you're right.

They've been around for a few months, I type this on one...

Nope :

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2015/05/19Apple-Introduces-1...

They have. This is for the 15 inch.

The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which was announced on March 9th and released on April 10th. Unless you have access to Apple's prerelease testing hardware, you haven't been using a Force Touch trackpad for a few months.

>> The first available Force Touch trackpad shipped on the new MacBook which was announced on March 9th and released on April 10th.

Wrong. It first shipped on the 13" Macbook Pro. I know because I bought one at the start of April (before the release of the new Macbook).

You're right. That was March 9th. Still can't be "a few months" yet.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/few?s=t

"not many but more than one."

Yup, I've had my 13 inch MacBook Pro for a month now and it has the force touch touchpad, although, I'm not entirely convinced it's revolutionary. I'm having issue with it when I drop and drag. It will loose the finger pressure info and un-click which typically leaves me searching for where my file landed.

Missed May the 4th by a mere two weeks? I can't believe how sloppy Apple is getting!

It's incredibly obnoxious that they tie the hard drive size to the processor. There's no technical reason for it whatsoever. Now because I need 512GB or more, I'm forced to spend hundreds more to buy a laptop more powerful than what I need.

I just carry a couple flash drives around. You can get a 256 GB one for < $100.

I don't think that's correct. You can get the base $1999 model and upgrade to 512GB for $300. Not cheap, but doesn't include the processor upgrade.

The post is about the updated 13" models, which have non-configurable drives in all but the priciest option:

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF839L...

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MF840L...

Did Apple really just enable a "smash the button" interaction? I can't wait to see what kind of damage people start inflicting.

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