From macrumors.com:

The M1 chip, which belongs to a ‌MacBook Air‌ with 8GB RAM, features a single-core score of 1687 and a multi-core score of 7433.

...

In comparison to Macs, the single-core performance is better than any other available Mac, and the multi-core performance beats out all of the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro models, including the 10th-generation high-end 2.4GHz Intel Core i9 model. That high-end 16-inch MacBook Pro earned a single-core score of 1096 and a multi-core score of 6870.

From anandtech.com:

The performance numbers of the A14 on this chart is relatively mind-boggling. If I were to release this data with the label of the A14 hidden, one would guess that the data-points came from some other x86 SKU from either AMD or Intel. The fact that the A14 currently competes with the very best top-performance designs that the x86 vendors have on the market today is just an astonishing feat.

Looking into the detailed scores, what again amazes me is the fact that the A14 not only keeps up, but actually beats both these competitors in memory-latency sensitive workloads such as 429.mcf and 471.omnetpp, even though they either have the same memory (i7-1185G7 with LPDDR4X-4266), or desktop-grade memory (5950X with DDR-3200). [emphasis mine]

The most important thing to remember when you read these benchmarks is that, with the exception of one GPU core, every new Mac has exactly the same CPU. It's just clothed in three different skins.

• One is inexpensive.
• One has much better cooling and a bigger battery.
• The last is a desktop.

You really don't get the sort of performance step up you'd normally expect going from one tier to another. They've removed the reason you had to use a different class of processor in the Air -- reducing the wattage required -- by moving everything to the same low-powered chip. You no longer "unlock" a better class of processor when you go Pro. You "just" keep it cooler.

This is why I bagged a new Air.

The only reason I need macOS now is for Xamarin and iOS development. I bought a MacBook Air two years ago, and though it's nice with the upgraded SSD [sic], the processor is really getting long in the tooth. Insanely slow.

The M1's performance jump combined with the Air's price (and, admittedly, combined with the end of the butterfly keyboard) finally makes it make sense to buy a Mac again. And now that I've slowly added USB-C docks and monitors (including a nice Lenovo monitor that sends power with the video) around the house, two USB ports is plenty.

I'm looking forward to seeing how important the fan in the Pro is if you're compiling a decent amount. I may have made a mistake, and saving $300 over the Pro was penny wise & pound foolish, but I doubt it. If I could get by at all on the old Air (though it was getting close to unusable), this is going to be wonderful.

I'm also concerned about Rosetta 2 performance. So far, it appears things are running reasonably fast. If Visual Studio is happy, I'm happy. If World of Warcraft runs... well, without a fan, I bet it doesn't impress, but that'd be a nice bonus. I'm not too concerned about the rest of my app suite...

1. Visual Studio/Xamarin and the iPhone Simulator
2. Thunderbird (some concern; it's a bloated app)
3. Chrome (it's gotta work or Apple failed. That doesn't mean I'm putting money on it working)
4. Sublime
5. VS Code (already insanely fast)
6. ReadKit (though I can finally run NetNewsWire in Big Sur)
7. iStat (not hugely important)
8. Amazon Music?
9. MacVim

That's about it. Aside from maybe Thunderbird, I don't see an issue even if they don't go native soon. (I have played with Panic's Nova a little. It'll be native, so no issues there either.)

I'm looking forward to benchmarking some next weekend.

There are certainly other use cases that might steer you away from an Air. If you wanted to do video, maybe you skip the 7 GPU Air for the 8 core GPU upgraded Air or MacBook Pro.

If you need a brighter screen, the Pro is [100 nits iirc] brighter.

If you're Joe Cieplinski, and it's all about the battery, maybe you get a Pro.

• My battery life [with the M1 Pro] is likely to be close to double what I’m currently getting.

That said, USB-C has made it easy to pop a power bank in your bag and keep plugging away... and, as I've joked, I'm a Hodgman when it comes to battery power myself.

If you love the Touch Bar, which is actually pretty neat, maybe you grab a Pro.

If you never leave your desk or you're running a computer lab, maybe you grab the mini?

But I usually figure out what the floor for entry is for a platform and see if and when it's worth entering, and the bottom line is that using macOS seems like it's going to be worth it again with new M1-powered Macs.

Labels: apple, laptop, macbook, macbook pro

Going to try and keep this short…

I’ve seen some stuff, including this from Niley Patel, saying that the XR is a strange, mismash of a phone.

It’s not. We can see its precedents in the 5c, new MacBook Pro, and the iPhone SE.

• The SE showed Apple that it could put top of the line internals in a compromised phone and have it sell like mad.
  • Recall that the SE had the 6S flagship’s processor and phone
  • But combined with the two-year old screen and selfie camera of the 5S
• The 5c showed Apple that if you take an old phone and give it colors, you can give an inferior phone a sales bump.
• The two flavors of the 2016 MacBook Pro shows us Apple is starting to give design teams overlapping, but flexible constraints.
  • That is, we’ve got two completely different computers (same link), one cheap, slow, with two ports, and one top of the line, expensive, with four, in exactly the same case.
  • For the XR, we flip the script, and have two completely different shells with the same internals.
  • That’s essentially what we had with the SE. Point here is that this “shared design constraint” model is increasingly prevalent at Apple

I think we add one more point to this list…

• Apple was surprised by SE sales, and wishes they’d charged more.

What needs to happen to charge more for a cheaper version of the same internals? Well, first, you can’t pitch it as a spiritual remake of a four year-old design. You have to pitch it as a new phone.

So we have…

• Top of the line internals but in a cheaper phone (SE)
• An excuse to charge more by using an updated design (MBP)
• A purely aesthetic appeal for dollars with frivolous colors (5c)

It’s not a perfect parallel, but I think you see how Apple’s past clearly births this new .

EDIT: Though Stratechery says I’m wrong about the 5c:

Still, I for one thought it would sell very well; all indications are that Apple agreed, but it quickly became apparent that customers overwhelmingly preferred the iPhone 5S. Apple struggled to keep the latter in stock, having produced far too many 5Cs, and the model was quietly discontinued two years later….

The 5C’s failure, such that it was, showed that the iPhone had three distinct markets:

• Customers who wanted the best possible phone. They bought the 5S.
• Customers who wanted the prestige of owning the highest-status phone on the market. Heavily concentrated in China, they bought the gold 5S.
• Customers who aspire to owning a top-of-the-line iPhone, but couldn’t afford one. They bought the 4S instead of the 5C.

I guess I’m wrongly biased from seeing tons of kids enjoy the 5c, sometimes even over a 5 or 5S. I’d guess the 5c failed largely because of the craptastic 8 gig storage on the lowest-end 5c. That’s simply not a useable phone.

But the argument that people want what I’d call “aspirational luxury” from their iPhone is an important point.

As I said about the SE, above – “Well, first, you can’t pitch it as a spiritual remake of a four year-old design.” – is exactly what we're saying here.

If colors didn’t sell, the XR wouldn’t use them. Though maybe I should’ve substituted iMac for 5c?!

More interesting in the most recent Stratechery update is the XR explanation, however:

There is, of course, the question of cannibalism: if the XR is so great, why spend $250 more on an XS, or $350 more for the giant XS Max?

This is where the iPhone X lesson matters. Last year’s iPhone 8 was a great phone too, with the same A11 processor as the iPhone X, a high quality LCD screen like the iPhone XR, and a premium aluminum-and-glass case (and 3D Touch!). It also had Touch ID and a more familiar interface, both arguably advantages in their own right, and the Plus size that so many people preferred.

It didn’t matter: [For] Apple’s best customers... price is a secondary concern.

Labels: apple, business, design, iphone, macbook pro

You can thank me for the MacBook Pro update, since I bought an Air on June 14th. It was too difficult to keep waiting, and most of my “if only” excuses were essentially removed during the Air’s 2017 update. The entry level got a slightly faster processor and 8 gigs of RAM on the bottom end, just enough to get by. And look at all the ways it’s better than a MacBook Pro…

• USB-A ports.
• SDXC card for cameras
• Magsafe
• DisplayPort
• A reliable keyboard

The last sticking point for me was the price. At $1000, it’s too steep. But Best Buy had a sale June 14th for the bottom of the line Air for $700 plus tax. You can’t beat that. That’s competitive.

I’d been holding out for a new MacBook for literally years now, having gotten a Lenovo gaming laptop to use as my programming rig back in 2016 when I thought Apple had created a MacBook that wasn’t really for Pros with this new generation of MacBooks. Phil Schiller said as much, when he claimed the new 13“ Pro could replace the Air, and Walt Mossberg agreed, saying that ”if these new MacBooks simply didn’t carry the Pro label, we’d all have a lot less to complain about". Wow. This is a consumer laptop.

You might recall my comparison of bottom of the line MacBook processors. Even after last month’s update, nothing’s changed there, at the low end. The MacBook Pro “Escape” 13“ still has a crappy i5–7360U, with a top-end only about 80% higher than the Air. The 12” MacBook is only 6% faster. None of these are speed demons. You’ve got to pay $1799 to get to the new processors in the latest refresh.

Neither step up from the Air are worth the price. The calculus said that I’m much better off spending $770 after tax on an Air, and putting the difference between the Air and Pro (even when the Escape was on sale at B&H for $1200 (which was tempting)), towards a new desktop or a future MacBook. In a sense, I can get an Air to bide me over now, and bank over $400 of my budget to put towards my next MacBook.

Marco agrees

Heard a lot of my reasoning coming out of Marco Arment’s mouth on the most recent episode of The Talk Show. He basically said that laptops are optimized to run [predominantly] at a nice, low clock speed that sips power. You can get this low-power mode from an Air or the most powerful 15" Pro. Your compilations will suffer, but as I said when I talked about my $100 Lenovo S100, small computers with great battery life are a lot more useful than you’d think. Work on headless tasks in console apps (rather, make your tasks into many headless programming tasks), and you’ll be surprised how much you can get done.

Laptops – all laptops – are made for low power tasks. If you want as much power as you can carry, sure, max something out. But unless you’re okay with a “tall” gamer laptop (Marco actually talks about this) with the requisite fans and sorry battery life (hello, Lenovo Y700!), you’re not going to be able to cool your proc, no matter who you are.

You really want power? Stay at home and get a desktop.

At some point, I’d settle for a quality mini upgrade, which sounds like it could happen soon, but I’m hopeful the new Mac Pro will have an entry level that’s worth a look.

But you get the point. If I want portable macOS, the answer was and, I think, remains the Air on sale. It’s cheap, convenient, and reliable. Even after the update, it’s not worth paying $300 more for a 8250U i5 8210Y (4141 score) and a Retina screen. Instead, I’ll pocket that cash and hope for something that makes sense later.

To date, the only thing I really dislike is that HDMI out (via DisplayPort adapter) is limited to 1920x1080. You have to use DisplayPort input on your monitor if you want higher resolution. This has been a Mac hardware limitation for a while that I’ve never really understood.

Labels: apple, bargain, benchmarks, best buy, hardware, lenovo, mac pro, macbook, macbook pro, marco

About a week and a half ago, I compared the CPU Mark scores for three inexpensive programmers' laptops. Just for my own benefit, and so I stop looking it up over and over myself, here's what the current "entry level" MacBooks give you:

So compared to my cheap-o Windows laptops, not great, though the "Escape" is probably workable. Here, again, are the Acer Aspire with i3, i5, and what I have now (the i7-7700HQ).

I was wondering if I'd bite on a Mac Pro if one dropped in time for WWDC, since I've been considering a prebuilt tower, but now that we know there's no Mac Pro until 2019, that's not an option either.

It kinda stinks. I've got an excuse to upgrade -- my Windows laptop's battery's age and dated Mac laptop -- but nothing good enough to let me turn that excuse into a true reason to buy. Wish there was a MacBook that was "close enough" to justify the Mac tax.

Which leaves me back at the completely uninspiring but insanely practical & affordable Aspire 15 I mentioned last time or wait and see if we can't get a summer speed bump for the Escape.

Labels: benchmarks, laptop, macbook, macbook pro

I've said before that I'd essentially given up on having a MacBook (Pro or otherwise) as my main development rig. I think that's smart. The Lenovo Y700 I bagged in April has the same processor as the entry-level 15" MacBook Pro, and that MacBook is both a little large and way too expensive -- $2400 minimum buy-in for the 15", where I spent $850 for the same processor, same SSD size, more RAM, and maybe even a better graphics card. I got worse size, battery, keyboard, and trackpad, but I also have $1550.

Yet my Lenovo 100S, a cheapo plastic ultrabook, still gets more use than I would've thought, usually as "the laptop I carry when I'm not carrying a laptop". I bought it sort of on a lark when it was on sale for $150. Horribly underpowered, only two gigs of RAM, 32 bit processor, horrible keyboard, 32 gig "hard drive".

But it does have two great things:

1. Great battery life -- 8 hours or more
2. It's extremely small

As I've said before, it's my knock-off MacBook Air -- or, more recently, 12" MacBook. It's great to have a light computer that doesn't feel like it needs a laptop bag to comfortable schleping around.

Now look, it's crazy to think about comparing the 100S to a computer nine times as expensive. I agree. Mostly. But check this out:

The MacBook is almost half an inch less "skinnier", has two-tenths-inch less depth, is .15" shorter at its tallest, and weighs around 80g less.

That is to say, the 12" MacBook is smaller, has a better battery, keyboard, trackpad, screen, and processor -- surprisingly, it has faster single core performance than my 2012 Mac mini does on Geekbench, iirc. Again, not sure that makes it worth 9x the other, but that's, as the English say, an impressive piece of kit.

If the MacBook gets a boost in March, give or take, and at least holds its price (Touch Bar or no), it's going to be harder to resist.

Labels: hardware, lenovo, macbook, macbook pro, truck, ultrabook

One thing I don't think I quite realized until I looked through the the iFixit teardowns for the "Escape" MacBook Pro (has a physical escape key) and Touch Bar MacBook Pro (virtual escape; has Touch ID) is that these are two completely different boxes.

• The battery is bigger in the Escape/less expensive
• They have different motherboards entirely
• For the Touch Id, "Hanging off each end of the logic board, we find a small, modular USB-C board."
  • The Escape has the USB-C ports attached to the mobo.

Here are some comparison pictures of the mobo in and out of the chassis.

I can't tell which would be worse, designing two completely different sets of innards for the same chassis, or simply neutering the cheaper one of two USB ports.

I mean, wouldn't've been cheaper to design one and remove one daughterboard (and whatever chips the Escape isn't using)? Guess not. Or the new MBP was a bigger design cluster than you'd've expected.

Labels: apple, macbook pro

Seems some of the blowback against the new MacBook Pros gets caught with the 16 gig RAM limit. That's a good place to start. I get sort of tired of the lumping Gruber does to work himself out of RAM being a problem.

From Daring Fireball: Baldur Bjarnason: 'The Downside of Believing in Apple':

Most of us, if given the choice between making compromises to our productivity and compromises to the battery life of the machines we buy, would choose a shorter battery life every time.

This is the nut of the argument against the new MacBook Pros. If the 16 GB RAM limit in the previous MacBook Pros was a limiting factor for your productivity, the new ones are no help at all. And I’m sure Bjarnason is correct that those people would gladly trade battery life for the ability to install 32 GB of RAM.

But that’s not most MacBook Pro users. Most MacBook Pro users will do just fine with 16 GB of RAM (in fact, most will do just fine with the 13-inch models’ default configuration of 8 GB). For most MacBook Pro users, Apple is right to prioritize battery life over the maximum RAM configuration. That is, if they’re only going to offer one lineup of “pro” notebooks — which is how they’ve done it for at least 15 years.

...

Because we’ve bought into Apple’s design myth, we are forced to come to one and only one conclusion:

Apple really, really doesn’t care about its professional Mac users.

I disagree with that conclusion. If your priority is the display, the new displays are brighter (500 nits) and offer wide color gamut. The new MacBook Pro SSDs offer industry-leading read and write performance, years ahead of the competition. The 15-inch MacBook Pro offers a quad-core i7 with speeds up to 3.8 GHz. For many demanding use cases, these are professional machines. Just not all professions.

A less punchy, but more accurate title for Bjarnason’s piece would be “The Downsides of Depending Upon a Company With a Relatively Sparse Product Lineup When Your Personal Needs Are Outside the Mainstream”.[highlighted emphasis mine -mfn]

I'm sighing just reading back through this.

1. Not only did Apple only make one line for pros (why the quotes, John?), they said one version of the MacBook Pro was their intended replacement for a consumer box. rly?
2. Web developers are not outside of the mainstream when it comes to pros using laptops.
   • If anything, web developers are archetypal.
   • (Not a majority, but representative.)
3. It's not a zero-sum game between battery and RAM.
   • Why not make the 15" 2mm taller? Who'd care short of Apple design?
   • Why are we so obsessed with thin and 10 hours of battery life?
4. Can Stephen King make a living writing books on a MacBook Pro? Sure. That doesn't make it a professional laptop.
   • We're starting to lose the meaning of the word professional.

But let's take a quick second to see what Baldur talked about. Does he really need 16 gigs of RAM today? Remember when we used to do fine with 4 megs? ;^)

From The downside of believing in Apple – Baldur Bjarnason:

I’m writing this on a fairly high spec 2015 13’ Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and that amount of RAM wasn’t enough even on the day I bought it. Since then the memory requirements of basic web development work has only increased:

• Most web developers now use VMs and Docker for server-side code because it’s much more reliable. It also consumes much more RAM than just using node.js on its own.
• Browsers have, if anything, increased their memory use over the past couple of years and web developers need to run several of them at a time.
• Some of those browser have to be run in their own VMs because they don’t run natively on the Mac.
• Having a test environment in a VM on your machine is also much more productive than always going to your test machine (which you should also have).
• The dominant web development IDEs are now built using browser tech (Electron/Chromium) and have much higher memory requirements than good old BBEdit. If you use TypeScript, you pretty much have to be using Visual Studio Code. If you use Flow, you pretty much have to be using Atom. Switching to a code editor with a more reasonable memory requirement means making workflow compromises.

That’s without getting into the graphics programs we use (a surprising amount of web work involves working with images). And if you’re a native app developer you have all of the above problems (VMs for testing earlier OS versions instead of browser versions) plus a need for fast compilation times.

We're really down to one reason -- VMs. If your developer box is used to host multiple boxes' worth of power, well, you do need more than one box worth of hardware. And Baldur, my man, why in the world do you have your production environment mirrored on your laptop?

But I agree with Bjarnason on the general point. If your laptop for pros is below state of the art for specs and you're charging beyond state of the art prices, well, you've screwed up. If you don't have too much battery life or RAM or CPU (to be clear, having too much should be your goal with a pro box) so that you can make your laptop thin and svelte, that's a problem. In two years, it'll hurt to use this MacBook Pro for VM based development, whether web or native, and that's a disservice from Apple when there's no obvious hardware to fill that gap for professionals. The 5k iMac is the closest, I suppose, but even that's over a year old now (415 days right now).

So Grubes, come on, let's stop pretending that because Apple has a box with a 2.9GHz i7 for OMGWTFBBQ!1! an entry price of $2700 that we've got pros covered. That's not competitive for many developers, who only "need" Macs to test out Safari -- or to host Windows in VMware to code native apps. These developers have other, much more useful, efficient, and affordable options. Apple's failed them, and Bjarnason's conclusion, that, "Apple really, really doesn’t care about its [software developing] Mac users," isn't that far off the mark after all.

Labels: apple, gruber, macbook pro, truck

Recently I bristled at a fellow who implied that we needed to "touch" a MacBook Pro before critiquing it. Today I did. They're very nice. Very light, well made, great screen.

Here are some fimp-ish comments:

The Touch Bar is an extended replacement for right-click. I like it.

With the Touch Bar, most of what'd be in a context menu is already open, full color, waiting on you. On Windows, I hit shift-F10 to open a context menu. With Touch Bar, it's already open.

Like check this out... I downloaded MacVim, hoping I could try it out with the crazy escape key. When I clicked on the dmg file so that it was selected in the Finder, I got this:

That's pretty cool. I can get info, share, or tag it. When I selected "share", I got this share sheet:

Mail, Messages, Airdrop, Notes, and the ever-present "More". Neat!

I can dig it.

When I tried Mail, I caught this Touch Bar menu (which, again, I'm arguing is essentially a mouse-free, gesture-aware context menu):

Honestly, that's beautiful. SO much easier than making your user remember lots of keyboard shortcuts if they don't live in your app. And if they live in your app, you could potentially let them set up whatever items they want.

And of course this is better than a context-menu, because you can gesture with it as well.

Seems small, but Touch Bar isn't just a good idea waiting for programmers to do something with it, as I've heard it described. It's a good idea now, and well integreated into OS and first party apps.

Escape is odd. (I'm a VIm user.)

I wasn't able to get MacVim installed, as it was an app from the dreaded "unidentified developer" and I haven't been made privvy to the Apple Store admin login and password, but I could open vi in the Terminal and test drive a little.

Escape is odd.

If you don't know vi, it's a text editor that has two modes: Command Mode, where you give vi commands to perform on the text, and Insert Mode, where you're essentially just typing away like Notepad or TextEdit. And vi isn't the only editor that supports it. Sublime Text has a vi like mode built in, and WebStorm has a nice plugin, for instance.

How do you get from Insert to Command mode? Escape.

Escape is now on the Touch Bar, and is just a virtual, not a "real", key. That's not great, but it's not horrible.

Here's the weird part -- it's not where it's supposed to be. See that dead space to its left? If I could trade that for a real, dedicated ESC key, I would in a heartbeat. It's hard to "feel", and since it's to the right of where I expect it to be, it's not natural. For someone who hits ESC scores of times a day, well, that stinks.

Enough. Fringe case.

One interesting tidbit...

But one thing I learned while playing around in the Terminal... See that greyed out button to the right of the ESC and color wheel? It says man page. That's really pretty cool. I wouldn't use it much, but it's context sensitive, and lights up when you type in a *NIX command.

I manned grep. Here it is:

Again, not a big deal, but nice. Makes me optimistic that the Touch Bar will slowly become second nature. Apple seems to be fairly interested in integrating it.

The track pad drives me batty. I couldn't single-click to save my life.

I kept force-clicking or having nothing happen. After switching to tap-to-click, I was okay again. But somehow, I've unlearned clicking. And I didn't have this trouble on the MacBook or early MacBook Pros with Force Trackpads.

(I think I might have been accidentally alt-clicking sometimes; it's a case of having the whole trackpad clickable)

Click-drag drove me crazy too. Windows has a tap, tap-drag gesture I'm used to now, perhaps. But keeping my initial click down is more painful, again, possibily because I was right-clicking at times.

Btw, three-finger drag is really well hidden now. But once I found it, instant happiness.

The keyboard is louder than it used to be. Like most sensible folk, I couldn't care much less.

Aside from my esc issues, above, I've got to say that it's a nice keyboard. I could use it easily when I'm mobile/out of the office/away from my "real" keyboard.

USB-C ports are really small. I get it.

If this is the trade off to get a smaller laptop, I'm all in. USB-C never bothered me. You need replacement cables for some peripherals, but otherwise, you just need a dock.

The new ports (and removal of the old ones) never bothered me.

Buying?

There are two great times to buy Mac hardware to get your money's worth:

1. When it's initially released.
2. When it's sold refurb for the first time.

Both of those maximize your cash, I think. The refurb discount is pretty good.

I'd convinced myself to wait on the 2017 MacBook, and rather than buy a truck, I'd just buy a real computer for my mobile slot. Right now, I carry around a Lenovo 100S for those times that I "don't carry a computer". It's a crap computer for specs, but has great battery life.

The MacBook is nearly the same size, and would actually run rings around the 100S.

But now I wonder. That Touch Bar is a nice addition. If that's a $300 mark-up addition like it is on the MacBook Pro, I'll probably wait for a 2017 "F12" MacBook (one without a Touch Bar) to hit the refurb rack. But now, having "touched" one, I think a refurb 13" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar might be an option I'll consider too. It's not as fast as much Y700, but it's a great mobile laptop. Having touched one, I get what the MacBook Pro is trying to be a little better.

The new MacBook Pro is still not a truck. Walt Mossberg at The Verge nails this on the head...

Neither will unseat my "truck" on the laptop stand in the home office, but either Mac would mean the Y700 stays on the stand a lot more regularly when I leave the house.

I also spent a little time with the iPhone 7. Heeeeeello, nurse. Great feeling phone. You know, I like that home "button" better than the one on my SE. I played around with the settings, and "2" feels great.

Labels: hardware, iphone, lenovo, macbook pro, touch bar

The MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review embargo is apparently over. From Review: Apple's late-2016 15" MacBook Pro with Touch Bar:

The 15 inch model has two base configurations: the first ($2399) using a 2.6 GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 Skylake (6700HQ) with 6MB shared L3 cache...

If that's right, and I'm a little surprised to see it, the $2400 entry-level 15" MacBook Pro has exactly the same processor my $850 Lenovo Y700 has.

Wow. I got 15" MacBook Pro internals over half a year earlier for a third of the price. Okay, okay, my battery life STINKS and the keyboard & trackpad aren't nearly as nice as the MBP's likely are, but wow. The Touch Bar & Force Trackpad simply aren't worth $1500 to me.

YMMV, of course.

<rant>But this is why I hate articles like this one that ended up on DaringFireball:

On the 27th October Apple unveiled their new line of MacBook Pros. Since then half of what I read online seems to be “Professionals” (those guys), telling me it’s not Pro at all, not Pro enough or not the right kind of Pro. How many of these people have even touched the new devices?

Very few.

I’ve been using the new 15” MacBook Pro (with Touch Bar) for the last week or so for actual work, so here’s my “Professional” opinion.

Oh, like I have to touch it to know it's really worth an extra $1500. (Even more ironic now that we know I've been using the MBP 15"'s processor for six months.) Or that fact that it works great today means that it's a good deal and well spec'd out. Would you rather buy a brand new box in two years and still have spent $700+ less than you would have buying a MBP today, or would you rather be stuck with something that's already debatably underspec'd for the next three or four years?

So what is he doing?

From co.uk:

I’m an editor at Trim Editing in London, where we cut high end commercials, music videos and films. We’re a small company and choose individually what we want to edit with. I happen to use Final Cut Pro X (If you’d like to debate with me endlessly about the Pro’ness of FCP X, you can do that here) So I’m in a good position to try out the new devices and see what they are/aren’t capable of.

Oh, oh good. Video editing. With Final Cut Pro. Yes, I'll readily admit the MacBook Pro is a better box for FCP users than a Windows box. /sigh

I understand that if money's no object (and nowhere does that review mention "price" or "$"), this is a great computer. Would I like my Lenovo to have a great keyboard, insanely great trackpad, more battery life, and a fancy function key replacement bar? Yes, yes I would. But I do worry about price. We all should. Heck, imagine the amorphous "good" you could do donating $1500 somewhere. If you have to use Final Cut Pro, well, there's no conversation to have. But FPC !== Pro, kk?

Or this...

From Daring Fireball:

MacRumors forum member, in the first comment after the announcement of new MacBook Pros:

Well, I’m sure I’ll be attacked for this, but I’m gonna say it anyway:

Tiny harddrive, barely enough RAM (and not upgradable to the “enough” level), no dedicated graphics, only dual-core processors. It certainly isn’t bad, but Apple just took the “pro” out of the 13-inch line. And come on - it’s freaking expensive. […]

The 13” is NOT a pro device in my opinion. It’s more like a beefed-up and slightly heavier MacBook Air. For that, it just costs way too much.

This isn’t a new comment. This was posted 4 years ago, in response to the last major MacBook Pro redesign. Déjà vu. (Via.)

Clever. Sooooo the reaction's been the same for two generations (at least) of MBP. As if that made the overall lack of Mac updates bearable. If anything, it just reminds me that the Mac Tax returned earlier than I gave it credit for. Why am I waiting years to get a new processor in a mini or Pro again?

Look, if you need macOS to do your work, I get it. This $2400 beast is your new laptop. If your work is OS agnostic, the chasm just keeps growing. Stick with Windows or Linux and enjoy your fat wallet.</rant>

Labels: business, gruber, hats of money, macbook pro

Marco Arment botched his last blog post, when he suggested Apple should have kept USB-A ports on the new MacBook Pro.

Today's post shows he's thought about the issue a little more. From A world without the Mac Pro – Marco.org:

Pros wouldn’t be as angry about the limitations of the new MacBook Pro line if there was an alternative that solved their needs.

That's the sentiment that powered my earlier critique of the new line of MacBook Pros when I said that they Built the Wrong Truck. Underneath that was the regret that they'd only built one new model of trucks.

In that post, I included a tweet...

Would I trade the TouchBar etc in #NewMacBook redesign for proc/mobo updates across the entire line, keeping same designs? Yes, yes I would.

Implicit was also that I'd've taken (vs "traded") the new MBP if they'd also given me updated hardware with old designs everywhere else. If the Mac mini had a new processor and wasn't RAM hamstrung, I would've preferred a truck-ier MBP, but I would've considered biting -- I think I've owned three or four minis, and still use one as a build box at times. Three grand is probably too much for me to go Pro, but two grand and updated internals (and maybe only one graphics card to save them some cash) would've been attractive, and cut the MBP sting a little. And for non-crossplatform devs in boats otherwise similar to mine, I've got to think an updated, less expensive Pro would've been a near no-brainer.

I want a new Mac truck. Right now, I only have one model with three trim levels to choose from. The rest of the stable might as well all be certified used.

Of course, I've also always said that if you've got a few cheapskates complaining about price, you're probably pretty close to the right mark. So Marco's new $3k Pro is probably close to the money. I was surprised to see that he said "The existing iMac is great, but it isn’t enough."

He had a Pro, swapped to a [nearly maxed out?] iMac for the screen, but now wants to come back and use an external screen that's as nice. If I were an Apple-only dev, I would too...

And can you do a better job selling a Mac Pro than Marco does at the end?

From marco.org:

It’s the only pro-grade, workstation-class operating system that has ever been easy to use and nice enough that we wanted to spend more time at our workstations.

And hidden behind our pro apps and terminal windows are the shared photo streams we made last night, showing pictures of our children to their grandparents, who are running the exact same operating system.

One random final comment:

From marco.org again:

Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change.

Oh, come on. Really? What's missing, other than, say, Messages? Linux is great. It's missing an iOS simulator, which I'd have to think is the real problem for Marco.

Labels: apple, macbook pro, marco, truck

I like John Gruber a lot, but his reactions to the new MacBook Pro have been wildly off the mark.

When Tim says "P-C" you say, "Now also inclu-udes MacBooks"!

From Daring Fireball: Translation From Apple Lingo to English of Tim Cook's Year-Ago 'Why Would You Buy a PC Anymore?' Comment:

People are pointing to this as proof that Tim Cook doesn’t care about the Mac, because he thinks everybody should just switch to an iPad Pro. But here’s the thing, in Apple lingo, the Mac is not a “PC”. A “PC” is a personal computer that runs Windows or Linux or whatever. I’m not splitting hairs here — this is how people inside Apple talk. It’s right there in the opening lines of the years-long “Get a Mac” ad campaign (66 ads!) — “I’m a Mac…”, “… and I’m a PC.”

No, Gruber's just plain wrong. I thought I remembered Cook using "PC" to mean Mac and WinPC, and, after a little Googling, found I was right:

@gruber Cook *has* said PC to mean Mac. https://t.co/bq0eG0eIjj pic.twitter.com/3vYWU6bx7f

— Ruffin (@r_ffin) November 1, 2016

Here it is in context (this is a transcript of Cook talking to Goldman Sachs):

If we had a meeting today in this hotel and we invited everybody that’s working on the coolest PC apps to come to the meeting–you might not find anybody in the meeting! But if you did that same thing for iOS or that other operating system, and said everybody that’s working on this come, you couldn’t get everybody in [this?] hotel. You’d have somebody covering every square inch here. That’s where the innovation [is;?] here. That doesn’t mean the PC is going to die; I love the Mac! And the Mac is still growing, and I think it can still grow.

Sorry, man. Tim Cook uses "PC" to mean "anyone's PC".

I know Jobs didn't. Cook always has. Used to sound incongruous when he did it, but now that Windows is sort of a lesser beast, it makes some sense to stop with the Mac/PC dichotomy. Macs sell like mad [in the limited market which is Cook's PC]. Macs & other PCs makers are equals at worst. Calling them all PC manufacturers allows Apple to be one of the best of the breed.

Slow your horses, DF

Anyhow, just plain wrong on this one. What worries me is that we're skirting fanboy territory in Daring Fireball recently. Gruber is usually pretty measured in his comments about Apple. Don't get me wrong; his aesthetic so closely parallels Apple's that you do have to wonder how much is "his" and how much has been internalized from watching Apple so closely all these years. But wherever the aesthetic comes from (and I think it's predominantly his own), I think John does a great job letting Apple know when they've missed their own mark, so to speak. That's what keeps you from becoming a fanboy.

But here, well, there's a segment of traditional Mac users that weren't served by the light at the end of the MacBook Pro upgrade tunnel. After waiting years to buy a new Mac, we get overpriced, underpowered, underspecced boxes. I tried to explain why we're disappointed, using expectations set by Steve Jobs. These aren't the trucks we were looking for.

And it's not because the only way to deliver was to make ugly boxes. That is, "nice" vs "well spec'd" isn't a zero sum game, which is nearly what Gruber argued yesterday when stumbling over a comparison of MBPs to System76 Linux laptops:

(I will add that the Oryx is ugly as sin, and doesn’t have a retina-resolution display. Here I am slamming it.)

But the price you pay for the MacBook Pro isn’t about the sum of the components. It’s about getting them into that sleek, lightweight form factor, too. In a word, Apple is optimizing the MacBook lineup for niceness. That’s frustrating — in some cases, downright angering — for people who want a notebook optimized for performance.

Perfect rebuttal? Look to this post, quoted on Michael Tsai's excellent roundup, New MacBook Pros and the State of the Mac:*

David Owens II:

To me, Thursday’s event signaled one thing for me, and maybe I’m completely wrong, but the Mac is officially over.

[…]

Apple, the MacBook Pro is not a pro-level computer. It’s simply not.

You want to see what a pro-level laptop looks like? Look at the Razer lineup. They are crushing it on terms of performance and style in hardware design.

You can shoot down System76 for making chunky Linux boxes. You can't say this about Razer. Small, "nice", fast, and fairly well priced. Maybe my Lenovo truck is ugly (it largely is), but the Razer isn't.

And, as David Owens rightly says, the MBP "is not a pro-level computer". The MBP isn't a "Pro" computer to the point that Schiller himself during the laptop roll-out suggested that the "professional" but entry level MBP was a replacement for the consumer MacBook Air. As I emailed Gruber this morning, "When you slot a MBP into the consumer half of the product grid, we've got a problem [with meeting past expectations, at least]." ^{(Note: I just added "meeting".)}

* Speaking of Tsai's roundup, it also included my earlier post -- wow. Lots of clicks from Tsai, but then another HUGE bump once Daring Fireball linked to him. So 4x Tsai clicks just from being grand-fireballed!

Labels: apple, cook, gruber, hardware, linux, macbook pro, windows

Here are some quick benchmarks for my $700 Lenovo Y700 vs. the $1500 "low-end" MacBook Pro I talked about Friday:

Remember, for $850, you've got 24 gigs of RAM and 128 Gigs of SSD (plus a terabyte of spinning platter storage) on that Lenovo.

I just don't get it. The Mac Tax is Back. Maybe the more expensive version will outperform at single-core tests, and I could rationalize banking one, but at $1800, $2000 for the 16 gigs of RAM, ewww. I guess I'm destined for Xamarin on PC for the foreseeable future, and will simply hold out for a new mini (ha).

Labels: apple, business, hats of money, mac tax, macbook, macbook pro