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2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

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Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#271

Post by Rezo »

Bud wrote: post #235
Rezo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2015 13" Pro has a 74.9-watt-hour battery. The 2016 13" non-Touch Bar Pro has a 54.5-watt-hour battery. The 2016 13" Touch Bar Pro has a 49.2-watt-hour-battery! The components in the 2016 models are more power efficient. But at some point you'll run into physics. Apple may claim the battery life is the same as before when watching a movie (probably entirely HW accelerator offloaded by now), but if you're compilin…

Don't be too sure; total power consumption of the new Skylake CPUs is much lower, as is power use by the display, etc.

It really isn't. Base configuration 13" MBP specs:

2015: 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz, with 3MB shared L3 cache: 28 W TDP [0]

2016 (Touch Bar): 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz, with 4MB shared L3 cache: 28 W TDP [1]

Both chips use the same 14nm process, and there's no free lunch. The "refined" 14nm process for the Skylake chip is put towards a tiny frequency bump.

[0] http://ark.intel.com/products/84985/Intel-Core-i5-5257U-Proc...

[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/91166/Intel-Core-i5-6267U-Proc...

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#272

Post by rasz_pl »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #166
Freestyler_3 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think the effect of constant charging will be on battery life in the long term?

There is no practical impact on modern batteries from being constantly connected to power.

this is not true, liion dont like being constantly kept at full.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#273

Post by ProZsolt »

compuguy wrote: post #107
lvh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Author here) The Dell P2515Q I have has both DisplayPort and mDP2 in and out (for chaining).

Do the new MacBook pros support display port chaining now?

Older Macbook Pros also supported chining, but not the OS. It's working under Windows.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#274

Post by Tom1971 »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #193
Veen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been told to remap the ESC to CAPS LOCK to vim usage, but I seem to be one of a rare breed who uses the latter the way it was intended to be, so that's a no go for me. Not really relevant, but when Vi was originally developed, the escape key was in a more convenient location — right where the tab key is now. It was never intended for users to have to reach that far to hit such an essential key. https://en.wiki…

> I seem to be one of a rare breed who uses the latter the way it was intended to be I am intrigued; what's your use case that requires so much uppercase text?

Work: a metric ton of #defines that are generated by our hardware register addressmap generator, as well as a very particular file naming convention, which has a heavy mix of uppercase.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#275

Post by Tom1971 »

aabajian wrote: post #139
Veen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been told to remap the ESC to CAPS LOCK to vim usage, but I seem to be one of a rare breed who uses the latter the way it was intended to be, so that's a no go for me. Not really relevant, but when Vi was originally developed, the escape key was in a more convenient location — right where the tab key is now. It was never intended for users to have to reach that far to hit such an essential key. https://en.wiki…

I actually think this is very relevant, just unknown! It's something I always wondered about Vi, the ESC key is just out of reach of the home row, making it a strange choice for a fundamental operation.

Yes, the old Apollo HP workstations (on which I initially learned vi before it became vim), ESC close to the left shift. Very convenient.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#276

Post by Tom1971 »

kaizensoze wrote: post #63
Tom1971 wrote: post #8

While, over time, a lot of today's annoyances with the new Macabook's will fade away, the lack of ESC key is a deal breaker for me. I tried it at the Apple Store and it's pretty much unusable. (It had the seen issue as the writer, apparently relying on the physical click to know whether or not I had pressed it. In addition, I also mistyped it a lot. Maybe hack to replace the whole touch bar as one single ESC key will…

I've always found Ctrl-[ to be more intuitive instead of ESC for vim. Strangely enough I have no idea where I saw that Ctrl-[ works as an alternative and I don't see any reference to it in my vimrc so it should work out of the box. Having to move your left hand all the way over to esc is just slow and cumbersome, meanwhile [ is just right there.

I tried that at the Apple Store.

It's an option.

But there are so many programs that require ESC, so it's only a half-way solution.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#277

Post by mconzen »

kaizensoze wrote: post #71
rocky1138 wrote: post #42

Wi-fi going down when you plug in an external device is completely unacceptable.

This isn't anything new. It's a well established fact that USB 3.0 interferes with 2.4 Ghz Wi-Fi. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2423604,00.asp https://www-ssl.intel.com/content/www/us/en/io/universal-ser...

The PC Mag link claims that this is alleviated on routers with shielded USB 3.0 ports while using shielded cables. Are the ports unshielded on the new Macbooks, or are the people reporting the issue using unshielded cables? Is Apple shipping these with unshielded cables?

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#278

Post by FireBeyond »

andrewpe wrote: post #240
lvh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Thunderbolt 3 cables should have the Thunderbolt logo on them.

The cables or ends should almost be colored blue. It might help if there was a color code to all the cables and ports

Kinda like how Apple's USB3 ports are not colored blue, for aesthetics... ?

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#279

Post by eridius »

kaypro wrote: post #265
eridius wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not being able to have a volume down button in the control strip makes reducing the volume more time consuming. Do you routinely change your volume by only one increment? Whenever I change my volume I have to tap up and down a few times to figure out the exact volume I want, and with the Touch Bar that's just one extra tap (tapping the < button gets you the volume up/down buttons).

No. I may be an outlier but for me its more fluid and faster to hit a physical tactile always visible down button 3-4 times then to tap and hold a non tactile icon and slide my finger down. I'd imagine I'd eventually get used to this if I really had to. It's arguable as to what makes more sense and I'm really not one to be set in my ways and consider myself easily adaptable but my gut tells me that a physical volume…

If you tap the < button to expand the control strip, you get the classic volume up / volume down buttons. Also, as I just discovered, if you tap the volume button to get the slider, you can actually tap the icons on either end of the slider which will act like the classic volume up / down buttons too (even though they don't look like buttons).

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#280

Post by snowwrestler »

otterley wrote: post #9

We bought a 15" 2016 Macbook Pro ("Retina" is redundant; there are no 2016 MBPs that lack a Retina display.) We also bought a LG 27UD88-W monitor to go with it. (It's one of the few that has a USB-C input.) I have to say, I'm really impressed by the single-cable solution. The monitor charges the laptop (57W maximum, which is less than the Apple charger, but "good enough"), and the laptop sends both video and USB peri…

With respect to #2, it seems ridiculous to me that in 2016 we still have to manually eject USB devices from Macs. How have they not figured this out yet? I hope it finally gets fixed next year with the new AFS.
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