Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

sixcolors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 244 posts

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#151

Post by dkonofalski »

neonscribe wrote: post #124
prepend wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I don’t purposefully keep A and C devices. I’m switching everything over to C and have dongles to do that. Supporting both wastes the space for when I’ve moved to C. I’m more likely to have an A->C dongle than an SD card reader.

We may live in the future, but many of us still work with people who live in the past. I know Apple always tries hard to be forward-thinking, but USB-A is one of those ubiquitous standards that won't disappear for quite some time.

That's why they went with USB-C. USB-C is backwards compatible, USB-A is not forwards compatible.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#152

Post by Avernar »

I think it's pretty cool that video is getting such a performance boost, however there are more developers than video editors out there that could have used few more general purpose cores on the silicon. If you look at compile times, the M1 MAX is just slightly better than AMD mobile CPUs produced on an inferior process node. Nothing to write home about.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#153

Post by mthoms »

toisanji wrote: post #22

which is the right one to get, 14 or 16?

One (small) consideration is weight. Both version weigh more than previously - so if the previous 16" was already pushing what you find comfortable to carry, then the 14' might be a better choice.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#154

Post by edot »

Thorncorona wrote: post #82

Can someone tell me whether their 14in gives enough real estate when debugging in VS code with the terminal open? A screenshot would be greatly apprecoated, thanks.

I almost never work without an external monitor (or two), so the laptop screen is really just for chat and email for me. Honestly anything below 20 inches is too small to be usable for serious work in my opinion. Hunched over a little screen is unergonomic and tiring. The 16” is only $200 more than the 14”, I think, for comparable hardware setups, so probably just go with the 16”.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#155

Post by [deleted] »

mrtksn wrote: post #143
reilly3000 wrote: post #39

Much has already been said about this, but this achievement of shipping a MBP that pro users seem to love is a triumph of user feedback over design purity. I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. I suspect it will be a breakout success and I aspire to contribute to their sales figures some day. Of all of Apple’s revenue streams I know their pro products are now merely an afterthought, but they…

My guess is that Apple bet on something that did not materialise, it wasn't about Jony Ive not caring about user feedback. What was the bet you say? I think they bet that the shift to USB-C/Thunderbolt/Wireless will happen quickly and they can help with the push and increase their margins. IMHO It wasn't a design decision but a business one and I think the removal of mag-safe is a giveaway. Every little thing that th…

[deleted]

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#156

Post by anamexis »

Hamuko wrote: post #106
mortenjorck wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really good news. 140W charging on the 16" had me worried that Apple was using a proprietary/non-conforming extension to USB-C, just like Nintendo did for the Switch. The reports of bricked Switches from standard USB-C chargers was an unfortunate demonstration of why this is a bad idea, and why it's important that Apple is using a standard (even if it's very new) method of increasing power delivery.

I really doubt that Apple would have gone out of their way to invent their own power profiles for the 16-inch MacBook Pro if one didn't already exist. The 16-inch MacBook Pro certainly doesn't need 140 W to run. The Intel i9 MacBook Pro comes with a "measly" 96 W charger and it tops up just fine. The 140 W is there for fast charging and if they had to stick to 100 W, they could've made a professional machine just fin…

Well, Apple did go out of their way to invent the new power profiles - they just did it via the USB-IF.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#158

Post by piva00 »

mrtksn wrote: post #143
reilly3000 wrote: post #39

Much has already been said about this, but this achievement of shipping a MBP that pro users seem to love is a triumph of user feedback over design purity. I suspect that Jony Ives’ departure may have facilitated this. I suspect it will be a breakout success and I aspire to contribute to their sales figures some day. Of all of Apple’s revenue streams I know their pro products are now merely an afterthought, but they…

My guess is that Apple bet on something that did not materialise, it wasn't about Jony Ive not caring about user feedback. What was the bet you say? I think they bet that the shift to USB-C/Thunderbolt/Wireless will happen quickly and they can help with the push and increase their margins. IMHO It wasn't a design decision but a business one and I think the removal of mag-safe is a giveaway. Every little thing that th…

> IMHO It wasn't a design decision but a business one and I think the removal of mag-safe is a giveaway. Every little thing that they add makes the thing more complicated to manufacture, thus more expensive. Every non-off-the-shelf piece puts multiple teams in to work in multiple continents and this costs money. I think they aimed for the simplicity at management level and not at design level. They did some calculation based on how well people are locked in and how many will buy a new mac and went with the most profitable option up until the time for the great transition comes.

The touch bar invalidates a lot of these assumptions.

My personal opinion is that Ive's vision for Apple's design future was of ever slimmer and slicker pieces of hardware, USB-C helped a lot this vision to simplify design lines, streamline the ports layout and so on. The simplicity take goes away when you consider that supporting 4 USB-C ports that behave differently due to limitations on power envelope and Thunderbolt chipset doesn't really simplify the design for cost-cutting.

Re: 14-inch MacBook Pro review: A Mac Pro in your backpack

#159

Post by _xnmw »

The most striking benchmark for me as a developer is the disk read/write speed. Wonder why Apple didn't highlight that. Nearly 2x as fast as last year's M1 Air or Intel macs - that sounds amazing to me. As a simple web dev, I thought I would never use any of the extra power available in an M1 Pro/Max, as I never do anything GPU-intensive. However, disk speed is a noticeable factor in day-to-day workloads, even when I'm running an IDE like IntelliJ and indexing a large repo.

Interesting because Apple chose to focus on the 200 vs. 400 "memory bandwidth" figure in their marketing to differentiate between the M1 Pro and Max, but as this review suggests, the 400 GB/s rate cannot be reached even in theoretical workloads, so it might as well be meaningless. Disk speed seems more important. Can anyone comment?

1) https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

Post reply on HN