Year 2018, price 2000euros, specifications: 8gb RAM (non-upgradable) and just 256GB of SSD. Most smartphones have higher specifications. That is just a rip-off, imo. Shame on you, Apple!
2018 MacBook Pro Review
431–440 of 528 posts
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd go further and say that Apple isn't basing their hardware strategy on the needs of any real person. It's a laptop with only USB-C ports (and the 13-inch only has two of them). You can't even plug a USB stick into it. The only people who asked for a laptop like that are working at Apple.
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." -- Henry Ford Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector. I don't know if Apple have made the right calls here (on either the USB-C ports or the keyboard), but they do have some history in making eventually-winning calls on at least some of these things.…
> Nobody asked for USB ports when they had serial/parallel ports, or for the floppy drive to disappear, or to lose the VGA connector.
I remember all of these technologies, and they all had major pain points. Serial and parallel ports were slow and needed tuning to work with IRQ/DMA (don't quote me on this), floppies were slow and unreliable and VGA was blurry on LCD monitors.
There's no current replacement for USB that does the job better. Nothing for HDMI. Same for SD cards. Nobody was asking to get rid of these ports so that they could use the next big thing. Apple had Thunderbolt 2 co-existing with USB on their older laptops, they could do the same with the newer ones. In fact, USB-C charging is limited to 100W, so 15" MacBook Pros run at their limit could power-throttle or lose charge when running intensive workloads.
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#433Earlier quoted context omitted.
and yet the complainers are still buying them
Not me :( I want a new one so bad, but I will not buy a TouchBar ever. Also, the reason for thumbprint readers on phones is that passcodes are difficult to quickly type on phones. On a notebook keyboard it’s easy. I don’t want a thumbprint reader on my notebook.
> I don’t want a thumbprint reader on my notebook.
Have you used a thumbprint reader on a notebook. It so convenient that its hard going back to a notebook without one.
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed and perhaps the height of absurdity - if you were to go buy a brand new iPhone 8 today, the cable that comes with the phone has a USB 3.0 connector not an USB-C connector at the far end. So you can't even plug a brand new iPhone 8 directly into a brand new Macbook Pro without buying a cable as a separate purchase.
Except you don’t need to, generally. Setting up a phone doesn’t require a computer connection and, since USB-A phone chargers are ubiquitous, it doesn’t make much sense to go Thunderbolt 3 on iPhone’s default cable yet because the days of the iTunes setup process are long gone. The primary use of that cable that comes with iPhone is for charging — and it does include a charger. Unless you are the .025% of iPhone owne…
Remember your words when Apple introduces a USB-C to Lightning cable with the next iPhone.
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting the keyboard fixed isn't dependant on Apple Care. They have a 4 year program to fix any issues, outside of warranty.
I wonder what happens if you have a keyboard issue AND your logic board dies at the same time after the first year? Will they replace the logic board for free, given that the keyboard was malfunctioning?
If they can't boot up the machine they won't fix the keyboard since they can't test it.
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple has always commanded a premium for their laptops. Yes there’s competing specs out there for less but there always have been. I paid $3k for my Retina MBP in 2012 and it still works great for me today. It was a good buy for me. If the MBPs available don’t seem worthwhile to you, no need to get upset about it, just don’t buy one.
I for one welcome Apple's premium on hardware in general. It seems to make for a company that keeps its business model based on just their hardware. This is off topic so I apologise, but I've become rather disillusioned with how many better priced companies seem to be surreptitiously inserting constant tracking into their software and hardware.
Apple is not doing you any favors by charging more.
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#437I don't begrudge Apple their quest for thin and light. All else being equal, of course everyone wants that. But they have three portable product lines: the MB, and Air and the Pro. Surely the point of that is to allow them to differentiate? It seems strange that "thin and light" is the priority above all others, for all three. I'd happily sacrifice a couple of millimetres and a few ounces of my 2016 MBP to a return t…
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Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#438Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I pay that extra amount without hesitation. Thinking of the times when I constantly had to fiddle around with my Windows ThinkPad or my Ubuntu ThinkPad, time is more expensive for me, so the extra 700 Euros means nothing for me. - But yes, you are right. They have gotten expensive in the past several years.
In my experience, the people who choose Wintel vs. Mac computers based primarily on price and not on whether it's the best tool for the task at hand are people whose time isn't very valuable. I'm not trying to be insulting. But if you're using the computer for work and you can save eight or ten or twelve hours over the course of a month, when you multiply that by your hourly rate and then again by the number of month…
Horses for courses. I've used Mac, Linux and Windows. Multiple generations of each. Getting work done is not a problem, unless it's something like not having an app be available for the platform at all. Which affects Linux the most, and Windows the least.
After getting used to the cross-platform OpenShot video editor I miss my MacBook Pro even less.
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#439Finally adding 32GB gets a big thumbs-up from me, somebody at Apple is finally listening. I'll have to check the keyboard, however I don't expect any improvement - maybe it'll get stuck a bit less, but I bet travel will still be atrocious. The MBPr was released in 2012 and redesigned in 2016, so I guess we might expect the next big iteration to come in 2020 or so; then it will take a year or two to work out the bugs,…
> "Finally adding 32GB gets a big from me, somebody at Apple is finally listening." More accurately, Intel released chips that supported 32GB of memory with the power and heat requirements Apple wanted. https://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/28/new-macbook-pros-no-32g...
That's not the case - the 32gb config in these machines is regular DDR4, not Low-Power DDR4 as the lower-spec ones. This possibility was already there two years ago. Apparently they just ship a bigger battery to compensate for higher power requirements - something that was suggested when the 2016 model came out (and promptly dismissed by the Apple faithful as wishful thinking).
Intel only shipped their first LPDDR4 big-ram chips last May [1], and they are not the type Apple would use (not powerful enough). It's possible that Apple decided to go ahead with this configuration as a temporary solution, and will eventually swap-in "real" LPDDR4 chips when they land.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-makes-its-firs...
Re: 2018 MacBook Pro Review
#440Earlier 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)…
You're bitching that it had a "mechanical hard drive" 10 years ago?
Get over yourself.
By the way: SSDs wear out, or hadn't you heard?