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Comment by ubernostrum | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, a "pro" user who's actually used the new Macbook Pro weighs in:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/thomas-grove-carter/one-prof...

Spoiler alert: he doesn't agree with the assessment of HN users who haven't actually used it.

That article is a typical example of "If it suits me, it must suit everybody." and your post is a good example for the no-true-Scotsman-fallacy of "Noone who _really_ used it dislikes it."

All I really know about this is how I feel about it and I must admit that I am going to go back to the PC world when the time comes to replace my current MBP. The offerings in the PC world are not perfect for me but they suit me better. I bought my MBP because at the time it was actually the cheapest machine offering all those features at a high build quality. I didn't get into a dependency on OSX and am pretty confident that I can just migrate fully to Linux. So I guess I'm not _really_ a professional Mac user.

At least it is a refreshing counterpoint to the "if it doesn't suit me, it can't suit anybody" sentiment that I've seen a lot of.

Agreed, I love my Macbook Pro (2015 edition), however if I have to replace it in a few years I'm not buying the current Macbook Pro, instead I'll look for a comparable Windows laptop and put Linux on it. (If only there was a real Macbook competitor out there)

Something like the DELL XPS line or the Clevo P650RE may serve you well, the Clevo can fit up to 64G DDR4 RAM, GTX 1070 and a 4K screen.

The only thing it doesn't have is the battery life of the MBP, but if you want raw power, you may be plugged in most of the time anyway.

No way apple doesn't have a 32GB option the next cycle.

That article is a typical example of "If it suits me, it must suit everybody."

99.9%+ of criticism of the new MBP has been of the form "Without ever interacting with one, I can tell it is unsuitable for me and therefore is unsuitable for anyone, anywhere, in any professional purpose, ever".

no-true-Scotsman-fallacy of "Noone who _really_ used it dislikes it."

More like "people are pre-emptively concluding, without ever having so much as been in the same room as a new MBP, that it is the antithesis of everything they need from a computer".

Which is, to put it bluntly, idiotic. I've suggested in the past that this feels less like "I have legitimate criticism of this product" and more like "I hate the manufacturer, always have hated and always will hate the manufacturer, and see this as a convenient cover for venting my hatred of the manufacturer". Notice how much of the criticism veers quickly away from specific aspects of the product and into "this is classic Apple", "this is how Apple treats users", "this is what's wrong with Apple", "Apple abandoning a key segment again", etc.

I don't care about the touch bar and while I'm miffed about the magsafe I can deal with shelling out extra for accidental damage insurance. Personally my disappointment is with the specs which no time with the machine will change.

The mac I'm currently using was purchased 3 years with 16GB of RAM and if I replace it I will be stuck with the same capacity. I imagine there are a lot of "Pro" market segments that are well served by 16GB or less though. I'm hoping the next revision gets a >16GB capacity and it's released before I need to replace this one.

The ram you were using 3 years ago is a lot slower than the ram they have put into the new MacBook pros. So there is that benefit at least.

32 GB is a lot of ram. What do you do where you need that much ram in a laptop? Is that the limiting factor in performance for you versus another component? Have you considered a desktop/tablet combo or anything like that?

To be fair I don't bump up against it daily so this isn't some kind of deal breaker. Just disappointing.

Mostly virtualization (server and/or desktop operating systems) but sometimes decent sized datasets (which really aren't too bad from SSD) and occasionally those things combined with software that is... written poorly. I used to use both a desktop and laptop but it was more trouble than it was worth. I might have to revisit but I'll miss having those workloads local.

I have no doubt I'm an outlier and I certainly don't expect Apple to change anything. I'm not really resentful, just disappointed.

I see.

I was really just curious because for the longest time I got by with just 4gb on a MacBook Air until I switched to the MacBook and 8gb. I run VMs and other software on it but never really ran into a RAM issue.

I think there is hope though. They'll put 32gb of ram in eventually. The explanation was that 32 uses too much power, and of course the rebuttal is "stop making it so thin", which I sympathize with. On the other hand, I do like thin and light computers.

IIRC the explanation is really "this is what Intel's stuff is supporting, and we're stuck with what Intel supports", and it would've been potentially another year or more of no MBP refresh if they waited for Intel to get there.

> IIRC the explanation is really "this is what Intel's stuff is supporting, and we're stuck with what Intel supports"

All of the available CPUs support 32 GB; the i7s in the 15" model even support 64 GB.

[0] http://ark.intel.com/products/91156/Intel-Core-i5-6360U-Proc... [1] http://ark.intel.com/products/88967/Intel-Core-i7-6700HQ-Pro...

They support > 16GB if you use DDR4. LPDDR3 is limited to 16GB.

Given that Apple maximises for long battery life/power efficiency/thin-ness (where heat = bad), I think they made the right decision.

There are very few people who genuinely need more than 16GB of RAM in a laptop computer.

Would I get 32GB if it was available? Yes. It would make my work a little easier (multiple VM environments), but it's hardly the end of the world on 16GB.

Yeah. I mean look, they could design a laptop for the vast majority of their users, or they could design one that is best for <1% if their users. It's a clear choice.

I'm sure part of the problem is I grow into my available RAM and storage like a goldfish. I'm sure some attention to optimization or constraints would make things less limiting but it's nice not having to think about it and just do stuff.

I like thin and light computers too. I have a MacBook Air I use to browse the web and I love it. Sometimes I pine after a career in web dev since it would handle it like a champ.

There are a lot of use-cases for >16GB of RAM, but I'll share mine specifically. I develop network appliances for a "medium-to-large" enterprise. Specifically, these network appliances provide BGP, stateful packet filtering, and the other network services provided by our company's products.

When working on these appliances, I tend to spawn hundreds(close to 1000, but not more on my laptop due to RAM) of VM's, and each VM has between 4 and 48 virtual networks. Then all the appliances begin working, advertising and responding to BGP updates, setting up and tearing down VPN tunnels, and other test scenarios.

Right now, when I want to do this for network spec'd above size <N>, I can't use my laptop. I end up having to provision hosts in one of our data centers just to get my work done. If my MBP had 20, 24, or 32GB(best!) of RAM, that wouldn't be the case. Maybe in 4 or 5 years, 32GB wont' be enough either, but right now I'm only concerned with the immediate. If the MBP's had grown in maximum memory(like other laptop vendor's models), this would have been a great improvement to my workflow, and allowed me to keep it local.

There are probably tons of more common use-cases for wanting all that RAM out there, but that one in particular is mine.

Yeah I can see that (though keep in mind that this is a very fringe case). But on the other hand I'm not complaining that my MacBook can't run any game available at 60 fps.

If I want to do that, I get a desktop. I think that has been a common theme for a long time. Power - desktop. Portability - laptop. We're asking Apple to make laptops as powerful as desktops. It just won't happen, unfortunately.

Lately, my main machine has been a mid-2014 mbp with 16GB of RAM and I recently purchased the new mbp with 8GB of RAM.

Comparing them side by side is a very strange experience. _Technically_ it should be slower but it doesn't "feel" slower. However, at times, there is a bit of shutter that I can't put my finger on - am I just looking for an excuse to say its slow or was the loading time on opening this project always so slow?

In the end, I believe the 8GB variant is suitable for most folks while I myself will upgrade the the 16GB version. However, I've opened up plenty of large projects on the new laptop and have tested speed comparison of every day tasks: transcoding videos, opening million (maybe an over exaggeration) row excel docs and web dev work with 2 VMs running. Overall, performance is fairly up to par with my old machine.

All of that being said, I do believe the machine is a touch expensive. I ordered mine from Amazon when they had some ridiculous pricing and won out so I don't feel bad offloading on craigslist to get the 16GB version.

Thanks, that's a helpful review. It has me wondering if it might benefit from the hardware improvements enough that swapping would be noticeably faster.

I'm thinking along the same lines. If you're interested in other tests/simulations and I can run them side by side and report back. Today I've ran 2 VMs, about 20 tabs, a large project loaded into an IDE and two shell sessions without any noticeable slowdown.

I appreciate the offer, thanks. If you have a desktop VM (Windows or OS X) laying around I'd be interested in how responsive they are with enough of them running to make things interesting. They tend to be the most demanding/least tolerant VMs I have to deal with. But don't bother unless you're really into it.

Should be fun.

I have a MS Win 7 VM for I.E. testing. It's downloaded from MS so there wouldn't be any variance. I'll run a few of them today and get back to you.

My hypothesis was that the computer "runs" better because of faster RAM and processor but because the system has 8GB, it can't be pushed __too__ much.

Testing: 1x headless Linux w/ 1 CPU core and 512MB RAM 2x MS Windows 7 with display, 2/ 1CPU core and 512MB RAM each. IDE consuming ~987MB RAM 6x Chrome Tabs open 3x Safari Tabs open Apple Mail.app Other misc software running in the background.

Physical Memory 8GB Memory Used: 5.96GB Cached Files: 2.03GB

Each VM being added increased SWAP. With one headless, SWAP was at ~50MB. Adding WIN7 VM with display brought it up to 251MB, adding a third VM with display brought it to 550MB.

CPU Usage peaked at ~70% when adding VMs with some delays in response when browsing simultaneously.

All VMs running, mocking around a VM and running minor tasks in background (comprising and decompressing junk data) brought usage to about 30%, CPU usage never peaked past 50% without additional load.

Conclusion: I'm actually really happy with the laptop. The whole dongle hell really doesn't exist, in fact I was able to remove cables from my desk. Before, I had to plug in 1 power cable, one thunderbolt/DP, one USB...now all three are going into a single dongle and one cable to computer.

For external HD, I've been using the Samsung SSD USB3 to USB-C for about a year so that made life easier.

Prior, I had to carry an ethernet adapter for remote work, which was replaced by an ethernet adapter of a different kind.

General USBs, thumb drives, etc are plugged into my monitor (which has a hub) just as before, no difference.

If this laptop started at $200 less, I'd say this is a very adequate laptop for work purposes, including running VMs.

I've spent the last 4 years doing development from a 2012 macbook air with 8 gigs of ram. Its been totally fine, except when I've got a million chrome tabs open. (Declaring bankrupcy and closing them all at once feels great though.)

The posted article is about a mac version of visual studio. Coincidentally, visual studio only runs in 32 bit mode and hence can only make use of 4 gigs of ram total: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/2015/12/29/revisiting...

The article is worth reading. They (correctly) have kept asking "why does VS need more ram than that?" and just optimize the code when the footprint grows bigger.

And I'm genuinely confused by all these people complaining about 16 gigs of ram not being enough. If you have a laptop today with 16 gigs of ram, have a look. Do you actually run out of ram while working? (And if so, what on earth are you running?). It looks like its genuinely hard to fill 16 gigs without chrome or slack running. Look at all the stuff you can fit in that much ram: https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=6355

I'm also a big fan of pushing app developers to fix their cruft. Maybe in 2016 its not ok to have apps that suck up as much ram as possible. Maybe app developers shouldn't write super inefficient software just because next year we'll have bigger computers anyway. Maybe if you're writing software (any kind of software) that really does need more than 16 gigs of ram to work effectively you should fix your shitty code instead of demanding everyone buy new computers. The atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM, and played all sorts of cool games. The original X-Box had 64MB of ram and ran Halo. Maybe its not apple's fault that your fancy 3d graphics program can't work properly in 'only' 16 gigabytes of ram. (Especially given there's 2 gigabytes/second of SSD bandwidth available on those new machines. Yummy!)

I love the fact that the new machines are small and portable. The hardware is more than capable of doing everything I need it to do. The only barrier to all day battery life now is crappy software.

I, too, miss the good old days of splitting bytes into nibbles. Sometimes I program a microcontroller just to feel the walls moving in.

Software today is designed the way it is because developer time matters more than hardware specs. Getting the software to run and onto market is much more important than memory footprint. Very few companies worry about hiring an assembly programmer to quench out 10% performance. They don't even use C/C++ because it's that irrelevant. Before those programmers even finish the market has moved on and the product is obsolete.

People want the RAM because it is cheap and they can put it to good use for their data mining, video editing, virtual machines or whatever.

Talking about VS for Windows, that's the maximum footprint of the VS main process. If you use one of the WP8/W10M/Android emulators, then you need an additional 1/2/3 GB for the VM (plus overhead). Throw in some browser tabs, git (in VS15 it will be in its own process instead of eating up the main process' memory), some .NET Native/LLVM, the OS itself and you'll find that having 16 GB will give you quite some comfort

I can't say I can really disagree with anything you've said. Good points all around. I mentioned how I use it elsewhere but I also mentioned that it may in part be a goldfish effect where I'm just being sloppy and using whatever is there and more.

Speaking of Chrome... I know of at least one browser that can avoid keeping every tab active and running but despite the cost, those tradeoffs Chrome makes lead to (in my opinion) a snappier experience.

On a related note, I know using Safari can dramatically improve battery life and may have some improved resource usage/performance characteristics but I've never been able get fully used to it without getting frustrated. It feels like death by a thousand cuts. For example, I can't tell if the dev tools are much worse or I'm just not understanding them the way I do Chrome's and Firefox's.

The atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM, and played all sorts of cool games.

I assumed first that this must be a typo for "128 kilobytes". But no, you are completely correct: 128 bytes. Wow!

Atari 2600 Teardown: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Atari+2600+Teardown/3541

VM's! We need the memory for VM's! Not all developers are "web developers", some of us make real things that those web devs take for granted.

> 99.9%+ of criticism of the new MBP has been of the form "Without ever interacting with one, I can tell it is unsuitable for me and therefore is unsuitable for anyone, anywhere, in any professional purpose, ever".

While this some truth in it, it is not what I took away from the discussion. Most people complain about the following:

* "I expected more."

* "I expected the price for the same specs to drop or at least stay constant but not to rise."

* "I cannot use this machine to do the work in the way I do it currently. This and that port is missing."

While there is a great deal of hate towards Apple, the comments I've read here are not driven by hate but by disappointment. The old MBP lineup was very good for these people. They like them very much. Some love Apple, some don't care but they all agree that the old hardware is very solid for a reasonable price.

I really do think that the new MBPs are good machines for >90% of the current MBP users. A bit more expensive but not too unreasonable given that most are locked into the Apple ecosystem. Some may need some adapters for things like digital cameras, projectors, monitors, USB sticks, keyboards etc. but that doesn't really matter to a true Apple customer. Most of the time the machine is used without those devices.

What Apple should worry a bit about, though, is, that the top 1-3% users are now looking for other hardware. But who am I to worry about Apples strategy. Probably they don't need those few powerusers anyways in their future business model. I don't even hold Apple stock currently. My old MBP runs fine still and I'm not locked into their ecosystem. I can move onto the greener lawn at any time.

I interacted with one last week. That interaction confirmed everything I said earlier about the MBP (horrible keyboard, bad choices about ports, etc.).

I've been around the consumer tech industry a long time. I've shipped a considerable amount of consumer computing gear and am very familiar with the design process and the many tradeoffs that happen when you take something from a cool idea to heavy in someone's hands. One of the places I did this was Apple, in fact.

Apple seems to have decided to shift the market for the MBP by making tradeoffs that don't target any of the professionals I know.

I also know that (a) my predictions about the hardware were correct, and (b) none of the professionals I know plan to buy one, beyond the one or two samples we're getting into our group just to make sure we're making the right decision.

And now we're looking at Linux laptops in a serious way.

Professionals, yup.

anecdotally i know that i and most of my friends would never buy one at this price point for just the basic model. but we'd be fine with it if our workplaces bought it for us and paid for all the expensive cords to make a multi monitor setup possible

The keyboard is missing keys I use and the specs are unimpressive. I dont need to sit down with it to know this.

> More like "people are pre-emptively concluding, without ever having so much as been in the same room as a new MBP, that it is the antithesis of everything they need from a computer".

Many of the complaints are about plain old hardware specs, especially RAM and the USB-C connectors. You don't need to hold a MacBook in your hands to understand how much RAM it has and how many dongles you'll need to buy. Same for complaints about the price.

I am in a similar situation... I bought my current MBP and will use it until it dies more than likely, but not sure if I'd buy another Mac. The touchpad on the MBP is second to none, which is what kept me this time but there's a massive premium there.

I use Mac, windows and Linux daily... And honestly the Mac is the most odd ui of the three for me. Having bash is pretty nice as is homebrew...

I'm really hoping MS puts similar effort into a Linux version, since I know I'm not the only one going that direction... Been considering it on my mbp...

I just bought a Magic Trackpad 2 and am using it with Windows 7. It requires the purchase of a $10 utility to get all the fancy stuff (scrolling, right click), but it's not bad.

Got a link to said utility? I'd love to have one at work (windows)... Currently using a mouse, the apple trackpad is so good though, only device I don't miss a mouse with.

Except he's coming at it with a strong bias:

    No matter what you think the specs say, the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated
      it tears strips off "superior spec'd" Windows counterparts in the real world.
    This has always been true of Macs.

Having used both lines of machines for many years, if I want raw power and 'specs' I use the PC.

I've also had the feeling he was strongly biased throughout the whole article

If you still feel the bias, you're not _really_ an Apple customer.

I think you conflated customers with disciples

His argument falls short the second you want to use non optimized software - he even touches upon this, but "I understand people need to use programs from other developers, but at some point they need to play catch up". This is rather difficult to take seriously. So you can efficiently do what Apple say you can do, but nothing else? That might work in his line of work, but it doesn't for the rest of the world.

For his use case there is a pairing of software and hardware optimized to work with each other.

In "professional" situations this is not, as I understand it, particularly unusual. And yet the unsuitability of the new MBP for "professional" use cases has been widely assumed on HN. It's interesting to see someone who actually has one of those use cases and has actually used the new MBP, weighing in to say "it works, and here's why". Not least because the level of hardware/software cooperation Apple can muster is a selling point for him, but has been ignored by all the "I'm a touch typist whose workflow consists exclusively of function keys, the touch bar makes this a worthless toy to me" noise coming from HN.

While it is not unusual, it's not what Macbook Pro has been known for since their transition to Intel CPUs. So it fits some specific use cases, at the expense of every other. And if they did make the hardware faster, all usecases would benefit.

All those people with a different usecase, are right to be annoyed by that. But just as this piece completely lacks unbiased opinion, so does the noise coming from HN (and the tech community in general).

I bought a MBP in April this year. It was my first Mac. I am quite happy with it, the retina screen & touchpad are really good, but I don't think my next one will be a MBP. Windows has now the Windows Linux Subsystem and it is actually quite good for Linux development on Windows. (I manually updated it to 16.04). I don't need Cygwin anymore and it compiles to ELF format. I don't know if Microsoft will keep it but if the goal is to attract developers who deploy on Linux, it might attract all the ones that cannot migrate to Linux due to proprietary apps or don't want to tweak their system. I recently tried to use Linux (Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10) as my primary desktop (once again I think I tried every year since year 2000) but still failed having 2 screens supported with 2 graphic cards, bluetooth headset being connected and sound through HDMI. There's no killer app for me on the Mac (I don't use GarageBand or final cut pro), maybe I miss the viewer that is nice for pdf pages re-ordering or pdf merging (could not find free equivalent on Windows).

>I’m an editor at Trim Editing in London, where we cut high end commercials, music videos and films.

So not a programmer, and not someone who was using the function keys in the first place based on that article. Furthermore he claims it's "faster than editing on any windows system" because Final Cut Pro X is integrated so well with the hardware he doesn't need more memory or CPU. Sorry, of all the applications he could've chosen, claiming that a Windows box with more memory and a better CPU would be slower is... asinine. Fanboy alert.

> "A 'Professional' should be defined by the work they deliver and the value they bring, not their gear."

This is absolutely silly. A professional blacksmith can't work without a proper anvil. There really is something to be said about having proper tools for the job. You can't drive in a nail with a shoe, you'll need a legit hammer.

this seems suspicious

No matter what you think the specs say, the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated it tears strips off “superior spec’d” Windows counterparts in the real world.

could the statement be any broader? what are the "superior spec'd windows counterparts in real world" he's compared it to? Also he's using Final Cut Pro which happens to be an Apple product so if that's faster due to integration how does that help anyone using non apple development software which I presume is majority of macbook pro users. I edit a lot of photos and I don't use any Apple software for it

As I understand, the new Macbook Pro has not been generally delivered yet. Is he has had one for a week, it must be through some special Apple program. So of course he likes it, otherwise he wouldn't have received one.

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