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2018 MacBook Pro Review

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Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#411

Post by Kurtz79 »

sophistication wrote: post #213
twblalock wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's almost as if Apple aren't even basing their hardware strategy on what developers are complaining about on Hacker News. I’m imagining someone who went into a fallout shelter about 10 years ago, somehow only had HN as a source of news, and suddenly re-entered the world. What would such a person be suprised to learn? I suspect Apple still being a successful company would come as a huge shock to such a person. So…

Who doubted Apple would be successful in ~2008? The iPhone and the MacBook Air were phenomenal products.

The first Macbook Air was a seriously limited device, style over substance. Expensive, weak CPU, mechanical hard drive, low battery life.

It was with the second generation (2011) that they knocked it out of the park, where they added fast Core i5/i7 CPUs, SSD, greatly improved battery life, two (!) USB ports, choice between 11' and 13' models.

And most of all they sold it at an entry level price (for Apple standards). Considered that the competition at the time were bulky Sony Vaio, HP and Dell "bricks", it was like a laptop from the future.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#412

Post by ballooney »

egypturnash wrote: post #404
ballooney wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such as all the adaptors and dongles you need to turn it back into a functional laptop.

What do you need adapters and dongles for if your goal is to go out to a cafe or a park and work with the computer? Do you, like, need a 7tb media drive with you at all times or something? Are you constantly plugging it into different monitors? Not like you wouldn’t need adaptors for that unless you exclusively live around DisplayPort screens anyway. Do you carry around a wallet full of DVDs and an external drive for…

Strawman - most people are not working in a cafe or park, but an office where you have to plug your laptop into actual things - projectors and so on. And almost all the projectors I use at my work, my customers' work, or the last few conferences I've been at, are HDMI - which is cool because I have an HDMI port right there on the side of my [2014, may-it-last-forever] macbook pro. It's next to the SD card slot where I can put in the SD cards from my rather nice digital camera, so I can edit photos when travelling. I earn money from photography, so as someone who is technically therefore pro, both of these connectors are useful for pro work, that isn't just typing things in cafés.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#413

Post by coldtea »

microtonal wrote: post #390
coldtea wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a very unfair comparison. You need to compare the relative price against comparable laptops produced today. Well, first spec them comparatively though. Which includes things like same CPUs and GPUs, and the quality of the screen, the touchpad, and the casing. High-end MS Surface laptops, for example, cost just as much (15 inch Intel Core i7-8650U CPU clocked at 1.9 GHz, a discrete Nvidia 1060 GPU with 6GB of…

The MacBook was a low spec machine for students and such. The MacBook Aluminium was everything but a low spec machine (in fact, they sold it a year later as 'MacBook Pro') and I bought it for 1050 Euro new in 2009. The plastic MacBooks were ok, but definitely not so cramped at the time as a MacBook Pro base model today. I know it's a hard disk, but the 2008 model had more storage than today's base model MacBook Pro (…

>At the time, macOS worked well on spinning platters, while having an SSD is pretty much a necessity now.

Is it? Or just what we're used to? If you go to SSD speeds, you can't easily go back.

I don't think OS X / macOS needs an SSD any more than it used to (if you boot as HFS+ volume). It will be faster with the SSD (of course) but it wont be slower with an HD than it would be back in time, just because it's HD.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#414

Post by saagarjha »

spike021 wrote: post #276
bla2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consistent UI, simple and fast built-in apps for common tasks, good unix subsystem, fast file system, pretty text rendering, system libraries that make it fairly easy to write good native apps, etc. macOS has all this, but it had all this for a while. There are so many good things in it. Preview.app is great -- it even lets you do simple PDF editing, while being fast, reliable, and easy to use. CoreGraphics does beau…

>Consistent UI I feel like UI is one of the things that shouldn't really be complained so much about. If you're talking about apps, then it's sort of hard to have a consistent UI when everybody's doing Electron apps or using other frameworks like it.

Almost all of the apps I use are consistent, largely because I stay away from Electron. This is feasible on macOS because there are almost always native alternatives for things.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#415

Post by vostok »

Kurtz79 wrote: post #411
sophistication wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who doubted Apple would be successful in ~2008? The iPhone and the MacBook Air were phenomenal products.

The first Macbook Air was a seriously limited device, style over substance. Expensive, weak CPU, mechanical hard drive, low battery life. It was with the second generation (2011) that they knocked it out of the park, where they added fast Core i5/i7 CPUs, SSD, greatly improved battery life, two (!) USB ports, choice between 11' and 13' models. And most of all they sold it at an entry level price (for Apple standards)…

The Apple's MBA11 was a fantastic device, but they stopped improving it and Dell came out with the XPS13. It is a similar form factor, has a bigger display, and runs Linux.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#416

Post by Yizahi »

derefr wrote: post #224
Stratoscope wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately I've been working at a company that uses YubiKeys for 2FA. You can use a traditional YubiKey, but the YubiKey Nano is especially popular because you can put it in your laptop and leave it there. It barely sticks out at all, just enough that you can touch it and activate the touch sensor. [1] I started noticing people in meetings with their new MacBook Pros and six inch cords sticking out the side, and on close…

That's even more funny, because the MBP's touch-bar is essentially the same type of device as the YubiKey—an isolated offboard CPU with its own TPM that can be unlocked with a fingerprint and then asked to encrypt secrets for the host/parent PC. The touch-bar just has more screen. I'm surprised nobody's hacked the YubiKey app into making use of the touch-bar as the YubiKey "device."

How would you change your fingerprint if it is compromised? Yubikey can be swapped at any time.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#417

Post by acqq »

stickfigure wrote: post #406
batiudrami wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2008 the iPhone was a $500 subsidised device (at a time when other phones were "free" or up to $200) which really didn't do anything. It didn't do MMS, third party apps didn't exist, google maps didn't have turn-by-turn. I'm sure the user experience of a reasonable sized capacitive touch screen was great compared to the alternatives - but I never even saw one in real life and on paper it was very expensive and did…

This is absolutely silly. I am not an apple fanboy, but I had a couple generations of Danger products (by far the most modern at the time) prior to the release of the iPhone and owned a few generations of iPhone from the start. The 1st generation iPhone was revolutionary and deserves every last bit of credit it gets. The 3G was a yawner, like adding leather seats to a flying car. Yeah 3G is nice... but seriously, the…

Exactly. The iPhone had the revolutionary UI and the revolutionary functionality (functioning web browser that worked with the most pages not specially made for phones) at the moment it appeared.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#418

Post by lclarkmichalek »

manigandham wrote: post #200
lclarkmichalek wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I go to meetings and work from home sometimes. Only thing I'd use a standard USB for would be charging, which isn't really something I do in meetings, and I have plenty of chargers at home.

You didn't answer the question. It doesn't need to be so dysfunctionally thin and light to travel between work and home sometimes. Nobody is going to suffer from an extra pound of weight.

I cycle, and if I'm cycling while carrying around a 15" piece of metal, I'd rather it was a thin and light 15" piece of metal :)

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#419

Post by RugnirViking »

sbenj wrote: post #279

Am I the only person on here who is bothered by the specs of the base models? For $2400 you get a 2.2 Ghz machine with a 256 GB ssd and 16 GB of Ram. That was seriously overpriced and it hasn't budged in this new release. Seems like you've got to spend well north of 3K to get a reasonable machine. That is way over the market. The model in the review is fully loaded. Apple will charge you a cool $3200 to upgrade to th…

Yep. I have a $1400 laptop and it's 4k with a 7th gen i7, 512gb ssd and the same 16gb ram. It's also 15" but relatively light. The only thing that bothers me is the single USB port meaning I need to get an extender if I want to use a mouse and anything else but then even that is an improvement over 0.

Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review

#420

Post by icemelt8 »

vostok wrote: post #415
Kurtz79 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first Macbook Air was a seriously limited device, style over substance. Expensive, weak CPU, mechanical hard drive, low battery life. It was with the second generation (2011) that they knocked it out of the park, where they added fast Core i5/i7 CPUs, SSD, greatly improved battery life, two (!) USB ports, choice between 11' and 13' models. And most of all they sold it at an entry level price (for Apple standards)…

The Apple's MBA11 was a fantastic device, but they stopped improving it and Dell came out with the XPS13. It is a similar form factor, has a bigger display, and runs Linux.

no one buys XPS13
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