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2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

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Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#291

Post by nilkn »

eridius wrote: post #262
scottlamb wrote: post #256

Here are my caveats: 1. The keyboard. Not the Touch Bar; the rest of the keyboard. There isn't much travel and I'm afraid it will aggravate my RSI. I've tried pressing the keys more gently, but sometimes I'm too gentle and miss keystrokes. Pressing the right side of the caps lock key is unreliable even when I press it fairly firmly. And the right shift key has gotten stuck once already. I'll give it some more time to…

#5 is Intel's fault. Apple going 32GiB would have a really hugely negative impact on battery life.

To be fair, they probably could've just made the laptop a bit thicker and put in a bigger battery, achieving no net decrease in battery life.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#292

Post by thadk »

I got my 15" MBP 2016 as one of the first as well. An important caveat when setting up your system is not to clone 10.12.1 from another system and expect no hiccups. I used an app called SuperDuper but this probably applies to CarbonCopyCloner as well. Essentially the image that is on the new Macs seems to have slightly custom drivers which did not make it into the 10.12.1 release.

Either use the official (and somewhat slow) Migration Assistant/Time Machine or after you clone your drive from the old machine, make sure to use Recovery Mode/Cmd-R and reinstall the operating system from the recovery partition. For me, though it took several hours to install, it quietly retained all my data and resolved all issues I had been seeing with stock macOS 10.12.1.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#293

Post by otterley »

Bud wrote: post #228
eruditely wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I have to say, I'm really impressed by the single-cable solution. The monitor charges the laptop" Is this a new feature? I've never heard of monitors charging laptops before.

It's part of the benefits of Thunderbolt (and now, USB-C). The Apple Thunderbolt Display also charged Mac laptops via its built-in MagSafe cable.

The last revision of the Thunderbolt Cinema Display used two separate cables. USB-C is the first single-cable solution I'm aware of.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#294

Post by timdierks »

eridius wrote: post #282
falcolas wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the only time I've seen charge-only USB cables is when they are permanently attached to a charging brick.

I'm pretty sure I have a charge-only Mini USB cable lying around in a drawer somewhere that came with an old mouse years ago.

Charge-only Mini USB connectors are a different question. They're possible to build, but non-compliant. Charge-only USB C cables are part of the standard. The difference is that you can only blame cable confusion problems on the standard in the latter case.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#295

Post by kaypro »

eridius wrote: post #279
kaypro wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Good tip... thanks.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#296

Post by kaypro »

nilkn wrote: post #290
kaypro wrote: post #180

I just got back from returning my 15" 2.6 i7 with Radeon 450. First time I've returned an Apple product ever. The build quality of the machine is superb. TouchID, display, keyboard and SSD are fantastic. There's something going on with the GPU's... I'm putting my money on the Intel HD but the framerate is extremely slow. Just scrolling a simple web page in Safari stutters considerably. I tried using gfxCardStatus to…

The stuttering that you describe when scrolling sounds very similar to an issue I discovered recently where the automatic brightness adjustment feature occasionally causes all multitouch gestures to be very choppy (including scrolling, but also swiping between desktops, activating mission control, etc. -- all of it). I understand you returned it so you can't exactly test this, but it would've been interesting to see…

I actually did hear about this tip prior to returning it and tried it out with no luck :(

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#297

Post by baobrain »

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.

Idle power usage is lower. When it comes to a CPU on load there really isn't much difference between the two.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#298

Post by benguild »

abakker wrote: post #39
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…

3 sounds like a doozy. Is there any way that the average person can learn to tell these apart once they are out of the packaging, or is it really just a guess and check?

2 and 3 are both doozies. #2 makes that setup basically unusable.

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#299

Post by schoen »

revelation wrote: post #68
illumin8 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's for charging only. This seems to be a huge disadvantage to USB-c... you have to buy different cables for different purposes, even though they have the same physical connector. Can you imagine if AC power had the same plug for both 110V and 220V? And you just had to "guess" which one was the right one?

They do? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320 That's a common problem with power supplies that require setting a hard switch to choose between 110V and 220V.

For the socket side of the same problem, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mains_electricity_by_country and search for "Power cords with type A or B plugs which are rated at only 125 V may present a safety hazard" (each of the seven occurrences reflects a country that always or sometimes uses U.S.-style sockets with a higher voltage such as 240 V).

Re: 2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

#300

Post by jedberg »

freehunter wrote: post #252
jedberg wrote: post #110

The fact that I need a 3rd party adapter to connect my Apple branded monitor to my Apple branded laptop is patently ridiculous.

But I need an adapter to plug my Apple branded hockey puck mouse to my Apple branded laptop, too... we're talking two different hardware generations. Likely the reason they discontinued the Apple monitors is because they wouldn't work with the new MacBook.

There's a big difference between breaking compatability with a $39 mouse vs a $1600 monitor that you could have bought a few months ago.
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