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Huh. They could offer better specs. It just seems they focussed all their energy on making the laptop thinner, as if this in any way a meaningful/useful attribute for a laptop (compared to say, weight).

This focus may also be the reason they're so 'brave' to provide a small set of ports which is completely disjoint from the previous model? Thinness is probably also the reason they're not offering 32GB of ram?

In a way, Apple doesn't seem to agree with you that innovation has plateaued. I'd like them to improve the specs, maybe make the laptop fanless, reduce the reflectivity -- i.e., evolve the platform to make it better and remove issues. Instead they are trying so hard to revolutionize (touch bar...) that they don't bother improving the laptop.

The touch bar is hardly revolutionary. As others have pointed out there have been plenty of (barely working) implementations before.

Really the touch bar is a UI element (a toolbar) made available elsewhere. I like it, but..

This is kind of the point: sustaining innovation over radical change. Incremental improvements will continue.

>The touch bar is hardly revolutionary.

Well...

>there have been plenty of (barely working) implementations before.

...but that's the key point, isn't it? That the existing implementations don't really work. Just like there were plenty of "non-lame" MP3 players and plenty of smart phones and plenty of tablets...that all didn't really do the job.

Making something work great that already kinda exists, that people have tried and failed to really make great, isn't that exactly Apple's MO?

I certainly have an immediate application for the TouchBar for interactions that (a) have the potential to be really valuable but (b) have so far been too fiddly to do well. And that was only the immediately obvious one, my guess there are a lot more.

So while I had the same immediate reaction (yawn, gimmicky, ...), I have revised that opinion. I think it has the potential of being more useful than a full touch screen would be, in a laptop setting, and that's despite the fact that I think a touch screen might be useful in addition, for example swipe for "casual" scrolling.

In terms of hardware being not that amazingly more powerful (a point made elsewhere). Yes. That's what the end of Moore's Law looks like. What faster Intel CPUs was Apple to have used? Kaby Lake? Apparently not available yet in the configurations/quantities required, and also not really all that much faster And yes, the geek in me is always m/sad about the 13" not having a nice high-perf GPU to play with, but the actual user in me has never really needed it.

Instead of seeking to be saved by faster hardware, we now have a lot more to gain from optimising the software side, and we're currently leaving that on the table. Hmm..."leaving on the table" is not really strong enough, more like pushing away with maximum force.

As a small example the Swift compiler is tremendously slower than the clang based Objective-C/C compiler is. And that in turn is a lot slower than it should be, with a big part being LLVM (see Jonathan Blow's video on Jai compiler performance[1]).

His goal is to compile a medium sized program in well under a second, and a larger one in a couple of seconds. Sound ridiculous? Really the only thing that's ridiculous is that we don't have that level of performance generally available, our machines are fast enough for it. For example, I tried tcc[2], and it compiled a (synthetic) 300KLOC C program in 0.269 seconds. Swift took 96.6 seconds, for a factor 359 difference. And that was purposely avoiding the various constructs that make the Swift compiler run into the weeds.

In my upcoming book [3] I talk about various simple examples that get order(s) of magnitude difference from a bit of tuning love. One example went from 20 minutes using the "standard" accepted techniques to slightly under 1 second...all without any heroic optimisations, just straightforward tuning.

So coming back to the MacBook Pros: yes, they're probably not going to get appreciably faster, that's the new reality. But maybe they don't really need to get appreciably faster, we just have to get off our collective derrieres.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJ7-j1nK9gk

[2] http://bellard.org/tcc/

[3] http://www.pearsoned.co.nz/9780321842848

...but that's the key point, isn't it? That the existing implementations don't really work. Just like there were plenty of "non-lame" MP3 players and plenty of smart phones and plenty of tablets...that all didn't really do the job.

Making something work great that already kinda exists, that people have tried and failed to really make great, isn't that exactly Apple's MO?

I think we agree entirely. Incremental innovation - fixing things that are broken.

The performance of Swift doesn't matter much to Apple. Swift is a demand-pull thing: Developers care about iOS, and will pay the horrible performance tax. The developer experience for iOS developers has always been horrible but it has one thing that matters more than that: users.

>Incremental innovation - fixing things that are broken.

Yes and no. Yes in that it is incremental in a way. No in that all of Apple's "revolutionary innovations" have been of this sort, not that I am saying the Touch Bar is necessarily of that scope.

> The developer experience for iOS developers has always been horrible

Do you think there might be a point in making it less horrible?

>Instead of seeking to be saved by faster hardware

We're moving into the era of data led computing and software. More ram and cuda support is a necessity for any ambitious dev

We're moving into a post-code world.

Development ten years from now will be all about training ML/AI systems and chaining them together in interesting ways.

That's going to need lots and lots of cycles and RAM. If Apple can't see that and wants to carry on selling jewellery with a keyboard and screen, Apple is going to be steamrollered by competitors who can.

> The touch bar is hardly revolutionary

But Apple claims it is

Did you expect them to come out and say "The Touchbar is just ok. You might like it" ?

No. If you go further up int he discussion, you'll not that I expected Apple to improve specs and evolve their 'pro' computer, instead they're trying desperately to appear like they're revolutionizing.

I'd like to see improvement too, but the problem is everytime Apple tries to improve a product, everyone talks how Apple have lost their way and haven't put out any revolutionary products in X years (admittedly, sometimes Apple's marketing department doesn't help).

Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

So the alternative is to ship gimmicks? Honestly all I wanted was a mbp with 64gb ram. I would have settled for 32gb but now I'll just continue waiting. Can't justify that money for old limited tech.

But try to put yourself in Apple's shoes - they know exactly who their customers are and what products sell how well. I'd argue that >90% of MBP sold never even come close to being fully utilized.

I can't imagine the market of people needings 64gb RAM being significant enough to warrant its own product category.

The only way to offer this would be the f1 racing / supercar comparison made in a different article's comments on HN today. I think the new Mac Pro was an attempt at that and apparently failed.

I think it is dangerous to look at sales only as the driving value of their brand. Apple became what it is today because they made amazing tools for artists and creators in general. This has a major impact on how their brand is perceived. By ignoring the product categories that cater to their core minority they risk destroying their whole brand. So what if their mac pros and their top tier macbook pros only sell a few million? It's a worthwhile investment to ensure that they remain the makers choice and by proxy remain perceived as not only superficially trendy but also actually top notch. The situation reminds me a little of neighborhoods made trendy by artists who are then pushed out by gentrification.

Apple don't need to offer 64GB of RAM - especially not at their RAM prices.

But they should at least offer the option of 64GB RAM. Or 32GB as a minimum.

Basic specs are going to convince a lot more people than a mm or two of thinness. 16GB means a lot of work literally can't be done on that machine.

As for the Mac Pro - Apple made the usual mistake of building a form-over-function machine.

Mac Pro users actually need a tower with PCI slots, so that it's possible to swap in specialised hardware for DSP, graphics, machine learning, and so on. The only way to do this on the Black Bin Pro is to buy a PCI expansion cage that costs more than some of the Mac Pro models do.

The Mac Pro format would have been brilliant as a new Mac Mini, but it doesn't fit the needs of a significant number of pro users at all.

Its a design problem, as they intentionally made their "Pro" machines non-upgradable.

In the race towards ultimate and unnecessary thinness, the elimination of sockets for RAM and SSD dictate separate SKUs for every configuration they want to sell.

No I think you're right, they shouldn't ship gimmicks (though personally I think the Touch Bar is interesting) - they should improve the damn specs. However, I still think they'd receive the same level of criticism if that's what they did (hence, damned if you do...).

The ram is more that skylake doesn't support the right lpddr3 ram thus maxed out at 16gb.

Thinness is part of it, but only due to energy use and chipset support.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/09/skylake-for-laptops-f...

If its lpddr3, all we'll ever get is 16gb. I think the kaby lake mobiles will do lpddr4 which will allow for 32.

Not entirely true. The fact is they could have used SODIMM DDR4 which is 1.2v and has a power usage close to LPDDR3 (also 1.2v). But they would have to redesign and they would lose a very few mm in thinness.

DDR4 uses about 30% more energy in general though, hence the thickness bit as to get a 10 hour lifetime means more battery.

Presumably Apple means that lpddr is the only choice they care about for a laptop. Which while I would love more ram, understand. And that explains why if you see laptops with more than 16g of ram they generally have giant batteries and are using desktop ram.

>This focus may also be the reason they're so 'brave' to provide a small set of ports which is completely disjoint from the previous model?

By the time USB C is widely used they will move on to a different standard which means the hassle of dealing with adapters has been for nothing. USB D will probably out by then. I look forward to the day I can power a kettle with a laptop. Since the MBP only supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3 users will be fed up with being constrained to only 8 4k displays. Heck, even if they keep USB C for the next MPB and support display port 1.4 it can only drive a 8k display at 60hz per port. But what about the power users with their 16k display? Sure, they could get away with using all 4 ports but that is a hacky solution. Apple is clearly not thinking ahead.

I don't see the problem with dealing with adapters. In the current status quo you already have to deal with adapters. The only way is to add a native port which is going to make the device larger and it still may have the wrong port. There are only three choices. Support all ports (DVI, VGA, HDM, DP) or support only port X with an active adapter to the other ports. The former is clearly not desirable and the latter is what is already happening anyway. USB C with Thunderbolt 3 and DP 1.4 is probably going to be the last physical port we will ever need unless we suddenly have a need to go beyond 8k.

"I look forward to the day I can power a kettle with a laptop"

Unless you cheat physics, I don't see that happening ever. Your average kettle(in EU) is 2500-3000W. Even at 220V, that's about 10-15Amps, which requires a seriously thick cable. Now I don't know about you, but I can't imagine portable devices having ports that can support 10 or more amps, purely because such ports would be very heavy and completely unnecessary. Not to mention having a power supply that could provide that much power, or a battery which can discharge that quickly without overheating and/or damaging itself.

The kettle part was a joke I guess, however USB Power Delivery already does 5A @ 20V. Now increasing either with that kind of connector would not be practical and/or safe, so I guess (the order of) 100W will be the max we will get on that kind of plug.

You can get less amps if you go high voltage ;)

Well, yes, you could go for 3000V and 1amp I guess, but I wouldn't want to stand anywhere close that cable ;-)

By the time USB C is widely used they will move on to a different standard

This appears to be an argument for never adopting any new connector, ever. You think we should have stuck with RS232?

They are going to get to a point where it will be laptop will be useful for chefs to cut onions or for developers living in rough areas to use them as a weapon.

I should be working on a mobile terminal device (like a Chromebook.. or an iPad Pro) and using my 400 core cluster with 1.5TB of RAM.

The cloud just isn't all that useful for pro users because it's in a datacenter far, far away and shared with an unknown number of other simultaneous users.

What good is 1.5TB of working memory when my data is local, for example video? At typical network speeds, it would take me months just to upload that 1.5TB of data.

I am exactly that professional user (not that video use case, but I deal with multi-TB datasets frequently).

Professional use is all about sharing stuff. Cloud video editing is a better model than local.

Yes, latency and bandwidth both suck, but downsampling video for scrubbing works, and caching small amounts of high-res locally works too.

It's not here for everyone yet, but it's clearly coming. Non-pro tools already work that way, and thing like the Avid Cloud Composer show pro tools are moving that way too.

I'm not a video editor, but I do work a lot with big files. The suckiness depends on your internet connection. If you've got a steady 50Mbps upload speed, it's just about OK. If you've got < 2Mbps, it's totally unworkable.

And sometimes your internet connection is not under your control - if you travel a lot, you're contracting in an office without good internet, etc. Even frequent uploads of small files make for a painful experience when internet is bad.

Right. This is an even better argument for what I'm saying.

Work is clearly moving towards a place where files are kept online by default, and where software is optimized for working with them there, instead of moving them up and down.

It still feels like it's years away. Earlier this year, I worked in an office that couldn't hold a steady internet connection for more than an hour. Even if it was only submitting deltas, the frequency of failures made working on a remote server unfeasible.

Sure. But I bet you weren't doing pro video work from there. Reliable internet is already required in that work.

I work with 5 TB of data over 3 millions files, half a million of those are media files that need processing. That's a tiny minor internal application, bigger applications have at least 1 order of magnitude more data, 2 order for our flagship products.

The data is best left in the datacenter, moving it even within the datacenter require careful consideration.

There is "that kind" of professional too. My need for memory and speed actually went down over the years since the cloud become more and more practical. As a professional machine the MBP is actually ok, except USB-C is a bit annoying, but just a bit since the world is full of dongle already.

As a personal machine I'm a bit nervous to be stuck for 5-6 years (at least) with only 16GB. However, USB-C each with TB3 is actually quite a future proof move.

I agree with the idea that using a client device as a window into a cloud machine with an arbitrary level of resources on demand is something we will and should move toward.

I strongly disagree with any suggestion that there is no point currently in building a more powerful Mac. Gamers are the best illustration of the phenomenon I'm referring to. Serious gaming is a large market of people who are poorly served by the Mac market and well served by the Windows market, and the difference is NOT that Windows (OS) is inherently better for gaming than Mac (OS) but entirely due to the fact that Apple won't build hardware configured to meet the needs of serious gamers and, worse, refuses to allow anyone else to build good gaming Macs, either. You can get bulky Windows laptops that are much better for gamers (yet no more expensive) than fashionably anorexic Mac laptops, and you can get even better gaming machines for no more money if you buy even bulkier (less-compact) desktops instead of laptops. Relaxing the tight size constraints allows you to provide much more power for the same price. Some people would rather pay for the power than the thinness.

Many developers are in an analogous situation: MacOS itself meets our needs better than alternatives, and Apple can clearly deliver high-end hardware build quality worth paying extra for, but they build hardware optimized for things that don't matter as much to many of us (thinness, elimination of unsightly "lines", minimal connectors, etc.) at the expense of things that matter a lot more. If they doubled the thickness, for example, they could give us more battery life and would have more room for less-compact, cheaper, previous-generation components, giving us more RAM and SSD for the same price.

I believe that thinness is extremely important for some products, such as a tablet (should be large enough for easy reading yet light enough to hand hold for long reading sessions), and a type of laptop for working on the go with a laptop always at your fingertips (frequent business travelers, college students). A MacBook (with more connectors!) would be great for that.

BUT, thinness above all else does not have to be the design ethos for EVERY product line. The MacBook PRO line could use the same OS, high-quality screens, battery mgt., wifi, etc., but be optimized for how much screen (offer a 17" again), battery (replaceable), RAM and SSD (large and upgradeable), and so on, while still being "thin enough". Although various business objectives (ex: wanting to be associated with wealthy, fashionable partiers, not workaday drudges) may make it not useful for Apple, the general idea that there is "no point" in machines optimized for power instead of thinness is wrong.

Why would Apple put resources into gaming on MacOS, when instead they could put those resources towards gaming on iOS?

If they chose, improving gaming on iOS/AppleTV could be a big win for them. But there is no evidence that Apple cares about gaming at all.

This is the "toner-head" argument that Steve Jobs railed against as the reason that Xerox never successfully marketed a GUI based machine.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h1orCiYdwyo

No, no no!!

The toner-head argument is basically that decisions are being made by sales and financial teams who don't understand what they are selling.

I'm making multiple arguments here, but none are the toner-head argument:

Argument 1: iOS is a better platform to move into gaming on.

Argument 2: The compromises needed to make Macs good gaming machines are completely different to the direction Apple thinks is good for the Mac.

Argument 3: Apple has never cared about gaming.

While Apple hasn't made gaming a priority on MacOS in a long time, the original Apple machines were the place a lot of very big titles got their start and it took Windows a long time to catch up with them in that department.

Really, this is a very long and complex discussion, but I just wanted to point out that Argument 3 was not really accurate.

> were the place a lot of very big titles got their start and it took Windows a long time to catch up with them in that department.

Other than Prince of Persian, I don't remember a single one.

Then again, in Portugal outside the university campus there were no Macs to be seen.

Yet we had Amigas, Ataris and PC everywhere.

I'm addressing the argument that there is no point making more powerful Macs--presumably there is no good use for them as long as we have better cloud viewers. I'm not suggesting Apple get more into gaming, I'm using the situation with gaming as a demonstration there there exist sizable markets for which 1) MacOS is fine (maybe even best in some cases), 2) Apple's refusal to build these "pointless" more powerful Macs is the only cause of the problem, and 3) better iCloud service would not solve it for the next few years, but more powerful hardware would. (Whether they WANT to solve it or don't care about it enough to solve it is a different question.)

Therefore, there IS a point in building more powerful Macs: serving markets that are only unserved because the hardware isn't powerful enough.

Gaming isn't the point. My interest is in developer machines, but illustrating that more powerful hardware is NOT pointless is more easily done with the gaming market example.

Oh, right. We agree then.

Apple doesn't want to serve these markets. There will always be some people who can find a use for more power, but they aren't Apple's market. For one thing they usually care about price/performance, and Apple refuses to play that game.

However this developer label is too broad.

For those developers that only care about WWDC, and their main income is programming macOS, iOS, tvOS, watchOS applications, the only requirement is being fast enough to handle XCode.

For those scenarios most Macs are already quite good and these are the developers Apple wants to keep happy, not those that buy Macs as an UNIX with a pretty GUI.

> The thing is - I know perfectly well that fixing this isn't just more CPU and more memory

Just because Apple choose not release a version with gen 7cpu /32GB/1TB at this time?

Will you "know perfectly well" otherwise if such a machine does become available in say six months? What if it turns out (just a thought experiment here) that you can upgrade the memory and ssd yourself?

Personally I think if you're doing heavy-duty work you should get a desktop machine; laptops are fine (and I use one for my day-to-day work), and they should be strong enough for most applications (so far they are). But for heavy-duty work - which in my case was iOS development, since the Swift compiler could make the thing sweat, and for others is stuff like rendering - you'd be better off with a fixed machine where size and energy usage isn't a constraint.

Which is why I'm a bit disappointed that Apple yet again didn't announce an update to the Mac Pro. They could do a lot more with that. Volumes are probably way too low for it to be viable though.

I've asked my boss if I could get a Mac Pro or iMac instead, but, no dice. I'd like the 17 inch Macbook to make a return too, but also not likely to happen. Alas.

There's no point in buying them then either?