Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

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>To everyone surprised by the news, just remember: you are not Apple's target audience anymore. The developers did an amazing job of advertising the Macbook to the general public and making it seem like the cool, sexy thing that professionals use, but it's no longer just for professionals.

Two things:

They were never "just for professionals" -- they were the "computer for the rest of us". Marketing wise at least.

They also were never about raw power. They were never the ultimate number crunching machines nor gaming laptops.

And the CEO of a company, executives, journalists, doctors, managers, etc -- people who don't need the latest Nvidia card or 32GB RAM -- are also professionals.

For videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, the MBPr 15" is one of the most popular, and well speced machines out there. Individual PC laptops can have this or that spec better, but rarely the all around package (weight, size, sturdiness, touchpad, screen quality, SSD speed, battery, etc) -- and in those rare cases, the price is very close.

> videographers, musicians, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers

I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day. A lot of people in the audio industry went nuts when Apple stopped letting you add RAM because you could hardly have a serious production machine without maxing it out. After Effects, C4D, Blender, etc. will be rendering for a week straight (if at all). Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers. Ever sat there watching a progress bar for a minute or two just to crop an image? That's what you're proposing as "well spec'd".

Your point about non creative professionals does hold water, though - that's the main audience IMO, the tech clueless types who are nevertheless obsessed with being involved with a "premium" brand. And yep, if you just want a couple spreadsheets, some social media, and maybe some reports, they're spec'd phenomenally for that kind of thing.

>I've worked in or with at least three of those. 8GB and integrated GPU is not going to cut it for a decent load on any of the basic apps.. Pro Tools will eat 8GB easily on a basic mix, Ableton will have you track freezing on and off all day.

While 32GB would have been nice (especially for video) I've used NLEs professionally and DAWs semi-professionally for years, and it was already 4-5 years ago that DAWs could run almost everything you threw at them in a normal session. 100s of audio tracks and tons of effects. And we still have freeze etc. Tons of pro musicians still use 3-5 year old laptops or iMacs with 8GB or less just fine. Most pro studios don't even have latest or maxed out Macs (or PCs for that matter) unless the owner is technophile. And for stuff like notation, tracking, mastering etc (as opposed to mixing) cpu power / ram is not even needed.

>Photoshop will grind to a halt trying to work on anything of reasonably high res, especially with more than a few layers.

Where was that ever an issue and on what jobs? Pro designers did the most complex composites and layouts, for print media and billboards, 5 and 10 and 15 years ago. It's not like resolutions have gone up since then (the high dpi computer screens are nothing much compared to high quality large sized print jobs people did in Photoshop even 10 or 20 years ago).

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