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

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

#161

Post by wayneftw »

deergomoo wrote: post #109
losvedir wrote: post #69

I ordered mine on release day and am eagerly awaiting its delivery. Glad to hear that about the notch. I couldn't for the life of me think why it mattered. When the presentation showed it, I looked at the very display of the Mac laptop I was watching it on and sure enough, there was a gap in the menu bar where the notch would be, with the menu items on the left and the clock and all those little widget icons on the r…

> But then I saw all these comments about how it was horrible and a deal breaker [...] I thought either everyone had lost their collective mind, or I was missing something I think people dialled the outrage back again when they realised the area below the notch is a full 16:10 display—i.e. they added display where bezel used to be, rather than cutting into the display area.

It limits how many menus your apps can have or makes them draw around it. If you enable compatibility mode you'll be back to an even fatter bezel which looks like dog shit.

Rationalize that away.

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

#162

Post by Eric_WVGG »

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…

USB-C adoption mostly went fine, though. Or as fine as could be expected.

I think the past five years can be more easily explained with — ironically — a Steve Jobs quote:

> When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that's what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular … PCs are going to be like trucks. They're still going to be around, they're still going to have a lot of value, but they're going to be used by one out of X people.

And that's what the Mac team lost sight of; they tried to make Pro Macs that were sports cars. Maybe the Macbook Air is an affordable sports car of sorts (do they still make Mazda Miatas?), but the Macbook Pro is and should be a truck.

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

#163

Post by madeofpalk »

beaner wrote: post #90
bombcar wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's amusing about the "design purity" is this is basically (from an externals point of view) an upgraded PowerBook G4. Good design isn't limited to "make it look as much like a thin sheet of metal as possible".

Personally I dislike this bit. Thinness isn't everything, but it's something. I don't know that the new models really needed to look as brick-ish as they do, and the previous design was certainly sexier.

This is why you have a full product line, right? You can make one laptop that prioritises weight and thinness, and you can make another one that prioritises power, features, etc.

The problem with the previous Macbook product line was that all products had the same compromises. Design purity, and thinness over everything else. There was no choice for a "pro" machine that had a different set of tradeoffs to achieve pro features.

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

#164

Post by kitsunesoba »

Avernar wrote: post #152

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.

The big thing to look at here is perf-per-watt and heat output.

For a little bit I had a laptop with a Ryzen 5900HS and though its performance was great, utilizing that performance meant turning the laptop into a cooking surface with fans raging while being plugged into a barrel-style power brick that delivered more power than USB PD could handle. A laptop delivering that same performance without the crazy heat and fan noise while on battery while still delivering good battery life is a big deal.

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

#165

Post by aidenn0 »

Hamuko wrote: post #141
spicybright wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually like the throwback, personally. I'm guessing they did that to differentiate it in the market. What I have trouble getting over is the flipping notch to the top. Just why. The bezel on my 2019 macbook looks the same, if not skinnier. Do people really not watch fullscreen videos anymore or something?

> Do people really not watch fullscreen videos anymore or something? How many of the videos you watch are taller than 16:10? Are any of them even taller than 16:9?

... All 4:3 videos are taller than 16:9 certainly, and there's a non-trivial number of those.

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

#166

Post by r00fus »

wayneftw wrote: post #161
deergomoo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then I saw all these comments about how it was horrible and a deal breaker [...] I thought either everyone had lost their collective mind, or I was missing something I think people dialled the outrage back again when they realised the area below the notch is a full 16:10 display—i.e. they added display where bezel used to be, rather than cutting into the display area.

It limits how many menus your apps can have or makes them draw around it. If you enable compatibility mode you'll be back to an even fatter bezel which looks like dog shit. Rationalize that away.

Understand you may be that 5-10% of the market that the notch impacts. The vast vast majority aren't running Photoshop and will spend 90% of their time on a browser which likely complies with notch.

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

#167

Post by drcongo »

jeffbee wrote: post #24
moneywoes wrote: post #2

Do ARM compatibility issues still exist?

In my experience the main issue with the M1+macOS experience is not the ISA, it's the big-little thread scheduling. I'm not sure what they were thinking but there's some heuristic that schedules background or batch work on the little cores. This includes manually-triggered software updates which unfortunately can take forever on those little cores. I waited almost 4 hours for an Xcode update to complete. All four lit…

Doesn't an Xcode update _always_ take about 4 hours?

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

#168

Post by madeofpalk »

wayneftw wrote: post #161
deergomoo wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But then I saw all these comments about how it was horrible and a deal breaker [...] I thought either everyone had lost their collective mind, or I was missing something I think people dialled the outrage back again when they realised the area below the notch is a full 16:10 display—i.e. they added display where bezel used to be, rather than cutting into the display area.

It limits how many menus your apps can have or makes them draw around it. If you enable compatibility mode you'll be back to an even fatter bezel which looks like dog shit. Rationalize that away.

Enable compatibility mode and you'll be back to the same "dog shit" as the previous screens which people didn't seem to be that outraged by.

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

#169

Post by xattt »

spicybright wrote: post #135
beaner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I dislike this bit. Thinness isn't everything, but it's something. I don't know that the new models really needed to look as brick-ish as they do, and the previous design was certainly sexier.

I actually like the throwback, personally. I'm guessing they did that to differentiate it in the market. What I have trouble getting over is the flipping notch to the top. Just why. The bezel on my 2019 macbook looks the same, if not skinnier. Do people really not watch fullscreen videos anymore or something?

I’m wondering whether the notch was supposed to be for Face ID, but they couldn’t make it work due to current supply chain constraints, and that notched displays were already ordered.

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

#170

Post by spicybright »

aidenn0 wrote: post #165
Hamuko wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do people really not watch fullscreen videos anymore or something? How many of the videos you watch are taller than 16:10? Are any of them even taller than 16:9?

... All 4:3 videos are taller than 16:9 certainly, and there's a non-trivial number of those.

Absolutely. I run into this all the time with my phone's screen (likely a different ratio, but I almost never have it not cover video.

If there's a program that will literally add black padding until the notch goes away I'd probably use it, at least when watching media.

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