Where the hell are the new MacBooks?(gizmodo.com)
gizmodo.com
Where the hell are the new MacBooks?
http://gizmodo.com/where-the-hell-are-the-new-macbooks-1781910047
56 comments
If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users.
Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life, and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed.
Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major deficiencies in one or more of the above areas.
If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop.
If you are a Linux user you take on the task of making sure your bleeding edge hardware works with linux. This is no small task and in many cases it's over a year after release that linux support for new technology becomes anything approaching reliable.
A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.
I suppose if you are a gamer there is a case to be made for running Windows on bleeding edge hardware, but such gamers are a very small percentage of laptop users.
Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life, and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed.
Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major deficiencies in one or more of the above areas.
If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop.
If you are a Linux user you take on the task of making sure your bleeding edge hardware works with linux. This is no small task and in many cases it's over a year after release that linux support for new technology becomes anything approaching reliable.
A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.
I suppose if you are a gamer there is a case to be made for running Windows on bleeding edge hardware, but such gamers are a very small percentage of laptop users.
> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users.
Yeah, I think they call those people developers.
> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.
Except MacBooks max out at 8GB of memory. At this point 16GB doesn't cut it anymore for my development, so MacBook Pros and iMacs are out too. I have entertained the idea of getting a Mac Pro, except they are even more woefully out of date at this point.
Yeah, I think they call those people developers.
> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work.
Except MacBooks max out at 8GB of memory. At this point 16GB doesn't cut it anymore for my development, so MacBook Pros and iMacs are out too. I have entertained the idea of getting a Mac Pro, except they are even more woefully out of date at this point.
I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that a developer needs some kind of massive AV workhorse with 32 GB of RAM.
Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor?
How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases?
I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a big clear screen and a port to connect another big, clear screen when I'm at my desk. Since my work products are largely text files, I don't even need a large hard drive. A fast CPU helps build large codebases but since I have incremental compilation in my C/C++ toolchain, it's not like these days I spend a large part of my time compiling.
Genuinely curious -- what kind of a developer needs more than 16 GB of RAM to make a machine viable for development?
I have a Mac Pro with four hard drives and a big screen too, but I use that for audio and video production where it is helpful.
Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor?
How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases?
I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a big clear screen and a port to connect another big, clear screen when I'm at my desk. Since my work products are largely text files, I don't even need a large hard drive. A fast CPU helps build large codebases but since I have incremental compilation in my C/C++ toolchain, it's not like these days I spend a large part of my time compiling.
Genuinely curious -- what kind of a developer needs more than 16 GB of RAM to make a machine viable for development?
I have a Mac Pro with four hard drives and a big screen too, but I use that for audio and video production where it is helpful.
I am building a next generation database product. With debugging symbols enabled, the running database can easily take up 8GB in some of our unit tests. Then there is a web services layer written in Java above that. And then there is my IDE. And a web browser that leaks abysmally on Google Apps. And a bloated chat application for communicating with all my remote colleagues. At that point the OS starts spending a lot of time trying to compress pages.
I have also experimented with doing building and testing on a remote server, but the overhead of having to synchronize local changes to the remote server, rebuild, etc. tends to overwhelm the cost of debugging and iterating on individual tests.
I have also experimented with doing building and testing on a remote server, but the overhead of having to synchronize local changes to the remote server, rebuild, etc. tends to overwhelm the cost of debugging and iterating on individual tests.
Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.
For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept running overnight and crashing. These days it could easily fit in RAM without hitting VM and I'm not sure it would even make the fans speed up. (Hmmm, I think I might have the old data set and source; I should give it a try!)
Once in a while I have to do something horrific, like build an embedded Linux kernel with customizations on a VM... and that is punishing, so I do try to run that on a desktop box with some Xeons...
For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept running overnight and crashing. These days it could easily fit in RAM without hitting VM and I'm not sure it would even make the fans speed up. (Hmmm, I think I might have the old data set and source; I should give it a try!)
Once in a while I have to do something horrific, like build an embedded Linux kernel with customizations on a VM... and that is punishing, so I do try to run that on a desktop box with some Xeons...
Oh, I definitely recognize the absurdity of the amounts of memory modern software consumes. Twenty years ago I used Linux with 256MB RAM and had pretty much the same sorts of applications running.
I'm a C++ developer working in games dev, my machine has 64GB of ram and that's absolutely definitely not enough. I've got a 12-threaded Xeon and just compiling the whole project would take nearly 2 hours on a single PC, distributed it takes 20 minutes(and uses most of RAM). If I need to run my own game servers I'm running from swap constantly(the usage hovers around 90-110GB just for the server + client), we had SSDs installed specifically because of that - but I think IT is already putting together PCs just for programmers with 192 or 256GB of ram.
But even working in Unity on a small project, 16GB is bare minimum.
I work with a set of database, API and front end services for which I have a collection of VMs, each based in the same vagrant/puppet specs as the production hosts.
Spinning up a dev environment requires two Linux VMs and a Windows VM for the web service. Then the Visual Studio for C# development kills everything.
I would prefer to spend a bit of extra money for 32GB of RAM rather than a Windows laptop for the VS development.
Spinning up a dev environment requires two Linux VMs and a Windows VM for the web service. Then the Visual Studio for C# development kills everything.
I would prefer to spend a bit of extra money for 32GB of RAM rather than a Windows laptop for the VS development.
I guess Apple doesn't care about developers like you with above-average requirements.
They have no incentive to provide more RAM when the average IOS mobile dev only needs an existing MBP or Air. As long as every new mobile app developer is still buying a macbook, why should they bother? Maybe when people start showing up to conferences with non-apple laptops they'll start to think about upgrading!
They have no incentive to provide more RAM when the average IOS mobile dev only needs an existing MBP or Air. As long as every new mobile app developer is still buying a macbook, why should they bother? Maybe when people start showing up to conferences with non-apple laptops they'll start to think about upgrading!
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Depends on how much of the operational environment you need to run on your machine and how you're partitioning that environment. It's not unreasonable to have 3 VMs running - data tier, web tier and client tier. That's just normal app development and you can easily chew through 16 GB.
If you get into the realm of developing big data analytics solutions, machine learning algorithms or VR applications, well, 32 GB is the practical starting point and 64 GB is sounding less insane. At this point though you'll start to be inhibited by Apple's relatively anemic GPU horsepower as well as the lack of RAM.
Like anything it all depends on what you're doing.
If you get into the realm of developing big data analytics solutions, machine learning algorithms or VR applications, well, 32 GB is the practical starting point and 64 GB is sounding less insane. At this point though you'll start to be inhibited by Apple's relatively anemic GPU horsepower as well as the lack of RAM.
Like anything it all depends on what you're doing.
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> If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop.
I've had more problems with hardware not working on OS X than Windows.
I've never had a problem with malware in 20 years of using Windows. The only virus I ever got was the NY Boot Virus and that came on a floppy disk.
People on HN keep talking about how "Windows is adware"...I don't see it. At all! I have been running Windows 10 on my entertainment machines since it has been released and on my workstations for the past 6 months. What exactly are you talking about?
> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well.
My Surface Pro (first version) and my Dell Venue Pro 8 both just work and extremely well. My desktop workstation just works too and it's extremely fast compared to my Mid-2012 Mac Pro that I paid twice as much for. (Although even running Windows on my Mac Pro is faster than OS X.) Also, my Surface Pro battery is lasting longer than my Early 2008 Macbook Pro battery did (although at least I could replace the latter) and my Surface Pro never shocked me in the winter time like my MBP (which froze a few times after such an occurrence).
I've also had plenty of PC laptops that have outlasted, outperformed and "just worked" better than my Mac laptops. So, your viewpoint sounds way off to me and I am suspicious as to whether you've actually used Windows for any length of time.
I've had more problems with hardware not working on OS X than Windows.
I've never had a problem with malware in 20 years of using Windows. The only virus I ever got was the NY Boot Virus and that came on a floppy disk.
People on HN keep talking about how "Windows is adware"...I don't see it. At all! I have been running Windows 10 on my entertainment machines since it has been released and on my workstations for the past 6 months. What exactly are you talking about?
> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well.
My Surface Pro (first version) and my Dell Venue Pro 8 both just work and extremely well. My desktop workstation just works too and it's extremely fast compared to my Mid-2012 Mac Pro that I paid twice as much for. (Although even running Windows on my Mac Pro is faster than OS X.) Also, my Surface Pro battery is lasting longer than my Early 2008 Macbook Pro battery did (although at least I could replace the latter) and my Surface Pro never shocked me in the winter time like my MBP (which froze a few times after such an occurrence).
I've also had plenty of PC laptops that have outlasted, outperformed and "just worked" better than my Mac laptops. So, your viewpoint sounds way off to me and I am suspicious as to whether you've actually used Windows for any length of time.
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Logically, you're right.
However, when people spend a lot of money, they want to feel that they're getting a good deal, and they want to feel that they it will be useful for long enough to get their "money's worth".
It's these two mostly psychological factors that are coming into play here.
However, when people spend a lot of money, they want to feel that they're getting a good deal, and they want to feel that they it will be useful for long enough to get their "money's worth".
It's these two mostly psychological factors that are coming into play here.
> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users.
This argument works reasonably well for the "MacBook" side of the equation, but it doesn't fare so finely on the "Pro" side.
This argument works reasonably well for the "MacBook" side of the equation, but it doesn't fare so finely on the "Pro" side.
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The real question is where the hell are the new Mac Pro towers? There are people outside of Mom and Dad that require something more than a laptop integrated into a monitor.
It's crazy that they undertook such a radical redesign effort and then appeared to drop it. I'm typing this reply on one right now. I do love the machine, but the fact that there still isn't an official source for SSD upgrades is baffling. Apple has a helpful page on how to swap the SSD, but won't sell you one at any price. You can get OEM parts that "fell off a truck" on eBay, or you can get expensive OWC parts that lack TRIM support.
It seemed like the video cards would be upgradeable too, but nope. And no Crossfire support in macOS is really sad. Under Windows, these are actually fairly capable gaming machines.
It seemed like the video cards would be upgradeable too, but nope. And no Crossfire support in macOS is really sad. Under Windows, these are actually fairly capable gaming machines.
Yeh a radical compact design, that no one asked for in that market space. I'll grant them the iMac crowd, but for everyone else, giving us the ability to easily swap some common components shouldn't have been effectively taken away. I'm not sure how much longer my 2008 MacPro is going to live, and it sucks because I don't have anything to replace it with. Hackintosh might be my ONLY option.
You mean that little trash can looking thing? The Cheesegrater is dead. Long live the Mac Pro. I sympathize. I dreamed of owning a Mac Pro tower but, alas, it will never be.
I feel you, but iMacs are certainly more than a laptop integrated into a monitor (and a 5k monitor at that!).
No, they are exactly a laptop integrated into the monitor. Can I add a video card, or full size RAM, or internal disks?
You can't do video cards or an internal disk on the Mac Pro so not sure this argument makes sense
Yes I can, my 2008/09 MacPro has had just about every part besides the motherboard upgrading since, and it's still running strong. That's my point about the new "trashcan" ones, and no new MacPro TOWERS replacing them.
No, but the iMac is significantly more powerful than a laptop. I cede you the video card, but there isn't a real advantage to full size RAM or internal drives.
I'm still breathing life into my 17" MBP from 2010 holding out for Apple to finally make another one.
same here. Mine is 2012 and if they don't offer something decent this fall, I will just add in an SSD to replace the HDD. That ought to hold the perf for a while longer.
I've done that twice (a 500GB then a 1TB). The 8GB of RAM wasn't getting it done without it.
I don't just want new MacBooks. I want new MacBooks that I can fix myself, and have someone other than Apple to fix it. I'm hanging on to my 2012 Pro model as best I can, and see no reason to spend the money on a product that isn't really mine.
> by omission it’s made something startlingly clear: your next laptop won’t be an Apple one.
not if you're an attendee of WWDC or anyone else developing for iOS or macOS....
I agree with @morley... it's just a lame rant.
not if you're an attendee of WWDC or anyone else developing for iOS or macOS....
I agree with @morley... it's just a lame rant.
If the primary reason someone's next laptop is going to be an Apple one is that they're developing for iOS (or OS X for that matter), that reinforces the article's point rather than counters it.
kind of wild there was no mention in the article of the new macbook, which IMO is an objectively better overall machine than either the air or the pro.
Objectively better in what respect? It's thinner and lighter, yes, but it's also slower, has extremely limited connectivity to external devices (only one USB-C port and no Thunderbolt), and has a nontraditional low-travel keyboard design that would be most politely described as "polarizing".
Better for some use cases, yes-- it's a great machine if you need something small and light for travel and don't need to do particularly intensive computing on the road. But it (intentionally) makes enough compromises that you can't make a blanket statement that it's "objectively better" for everyone.
Better for some use cases, yes-- it's a great machine if you need something small and light for travel and don't need to do particularly intensive computing on the road. But it (intentionally) makes enough compromises that you can't make a blanket statement that it's "objectively better" for everyone.
To meet the "objectively better overall" bar, they're going to need a LOT more horsepower. I love the form factor but they're almost unusable for any kind of real work, and after an entire year they got a tiny speed bump that just takes some of the edge off the performance problems.
Seems perfectly reasonable, they just updated it two months ago.
What a whiny article.
My 2013 MBP is still working great, and I'm in no hurry for new ones to come out. I use mine mostly for my photography (RAW editing, catalog management, etc.) and it handles the 36 megapixel images from my camera just fine - I drag sliders and the changes show up in real time. I keep all of my RAW files on an external HD, so if I really needed things faster my first step would be to buy a faster one (SSD).
I also occasionally use it for development, and I don't have any problems there, either.
The most true statement in the article is that my next laptop may not be an Apple, but that has a lot more to do with Apple's crappy software quality lately, and the fact the photo software I use also works on Windows.
My 2013 MBP is still working great, and I'm in no hurry for new ones to come out. I use mine mostly for my photography (RAW editing, catalog management, etc.) and it handles the 36 megapixel images from my camera just fine - I drag sliders and the changes show up in real time. I keep all of my RAW files on an external HD, so if I really needed things faster my first step would be to buy a faster one (SSD).
I also occasionally use it for development, and I don't have any problems there, either.
The most true statement in the article is that my next laptop may not be an Apple, but that has a lot more to do with Apple's crappy software quality lately, and the fact the photo software I use also works on Windows.
I just wonder if we're seeing Apple try to slowly move away from being a "devices" company and identify itself in terms of "general computing", so including software and services.
So yeah, everyone has this super-strong connotation of "Apple = awesome devices", and they still wait in anticipation for new, beautiful hardware. But it sure seems like Apple is trying to drive a different identity.
I'll truly believe this is happening when iMessage hits Android, which I didn't hear any mention of, despite the rumors.
So yeah, everyone has this super-strong connotation of "Apple = awesome devices", and they still wait in anticipation for new, beautiful hardware. But it sure seems like Apple is trying to drive a different identity.
I'll truly believe this is happening when iMessage hits Android, which I didn't hear any mention of, despite the rumors.
If you look at just how painful the Skylake launch was on Windows and Linux, I figure they're waiting on hardware/drivers that actually work as intended.
Macbook air is somewhat in apple terms an old technology(it's the best value for money imo). So there is a great chance that we won't see a refresh for macbook air. Pro 13 gets thinner and lighter taking over the air.
I stopped holding my breath after hearing that the function keys in a "Pro" laptop might be replaced by a touch sensitive strip like Lenovo tried on the X1 Carbon.
They'll hold off on hardware announcements until they can ship them with macOS 12 already on them. Why would they announce new hardware that you'd have to do a full OS upgrade on in a few months?
They've done that numerous times in the past.
The truth is they had plenty to announce, so it's not too surprising that they didn't include hardware. I imagine there will be an update later, perhaps at the usual Back to Mac event.
The truth is they had plenty to announce, so it's not too surprising that they didn't include hardware. I imagine there will be an update later, perhaps at the usual Back to Mac event.
I've bought my 2014 rMBP with Mavericks and immediately upgraded it to the beta of Yosemite.
The fact that journalists still expect Apple to announce hardware at a software engineering conference amazes me.
That expectation might have something to do with the fact that apple almost always announces new hardware at their WWDC keynote. For both google and apple's developer conferences, the developer conference part of it happens in the sessions after the keynote, and the keynote is mostly just a press event.
No hardware announcements at 2014 or 2015. Perhaps a new trend.
Lol. Yesterday's event was a software event, a jam packed incredibly long one at that. It was so packed they didn't even have time to talk about all the changes to the app store, which is why Apple disclosed that info ahead of time. Not sure when you would expect them to all also announce new hardware.
Just download iOS10 and open the new Breathe app, and Breathe. New Macbooks, iPhones, Macbook Pros, and Apple Watches will all come in time in future events.
Just download iOS10 and open the new Breathe app, and Breathe. New Macbooks, iPhones, Macbook Pros, and Apple Watches will all come in time in future events.
It was also incredibly boring as a software event. Extended discussion of emoji, but nothing about Apple's brand-new copy-on-write file system. At a "developers" conference!
Being able to link apps into iMessage is probably a lot more interesting to most developers than APFS is. Very few developers will make a dollar off APFS.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/06/08/new-macbook-air-pro-june...