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Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

businessinsider.com

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Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#271

Post by grandalf »

gumby wrote: post #249
grandalf wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the alternate modes are required for proper operation? Or will it fall back to a standard mode and still work?

That's not how alternate modes work -- there isn't really a "standard" mode. When you plug in a Type C cable the two devices negotiate (via a combination of passives and some active negotiation) what protocols you want to use. Yes protocols with an "s." Power and, say USB 3.1 v2, or power and TB3 or HDMI or whatever. Among the problems is you can have a cable that can't support a particular alternate modes, or can't…

Interesting. Sounds like they prioritized standardizing the connector but not the rest of the details.

Perhaps in the scope of large scale manufacturing, having multiple (redundant) connector styles is a low hanging fruit for cost reduction.

But it seems that there would be increased user confusion and technical support required. Very strange.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#272

Post by saurik »

aljones wrote: post #230
spilk wrote: post #135

Honestly to me the worst thing about the new MacBook Pro isn't that there are no legacy ports on it or that the battery may be smaller, it's that the new all-things-for-all-people ports it has are confusing. The ports are all Thunderbolt 3 ports, which I believe by definition means they are USB 3.1 ports as well. But some devices out in the world have USB-C ports that are not Thunderbolt 3 compatible. No longer can y…

USB 1, 2, and 3 all used the USB A plug.

Yeah; and I have a special camera which works over USB 3 but simply does not function when plugged into a USB 2 port (as there is not enough bandwidth to transfer its information). The power differences among various USB-C ports is also not special: I have tons of USB-A power adapters which are capable of providing different amounts of power, and computers are also sometimes different in what they are willing to provide.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#273

Post by izacus »

Bud wrote: post #184
0x09 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten myself into a stupid situation where I have purchased something like 4 adapters that don't accomplish what I thought they would when I bought them. USB-C to DisplayPort -> DisplayPort to HDMI -> Monitor - doesn't work USB-C to DisplayPort -> DisplayPort to DVI-D -> Monitor - doesn't work USB-C to Ethernet - doesn't work I'm actually planning to just go to Best Buy today and try to find anything that will…

You can't expect an off-brand USB-C adapter to be able to fully support DisplayPort. USB-C does not natively contain DisplayPort. Also, don't daisy-chain adapters when you don't have to. Use a USB-C to HDMI adapter. Such as this one: http://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJ1K2AM/A/usb-c-digital-av...

There is NO first party official Apple DisplayPort adapter. There actually is no first party adapter that would support 4k@60Hz officialy. It gets even more annoying since most 4K monitors made in last year will support 4k@60Hz only over DP, not HDMI.

I went through 2 adapters before I got one that actually worked with the new 2016 MacBook. Which was incredibly annoying.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#274

Post by manmal »

mmjaa wrote: post #262
davidf18 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO, this is a "bug" because if you are running on battery, the indexing is a problem and it is also a problem if you are using spotlight. Is there an option to ensure that the spotlight cache is not deleted?

Spotlight has given me so many headaches in the last few weeks that I'm seriously considering investing the time to understand it well enough to build an app to wrestle it to the ground and beat it over the head with a big stick. If only there'd be a reason to do it other than "gain control over my life again" ..

Well, I'd buy that tool. Spotlight watchdog.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#275

Post by Philipp__ »

visakanv wrote: post #257
Philipp__ wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! Thing is that situation with ports and adapters has never been worse, but Apple came there, wanted to be first again that will pull the plug on old technology and embrace the new one! But their execution was a miss. But anyway, my predictions are that from 2017. every Apple machine, wether it's computer or iPhone or iPad, will go down the USB-C route. Most probably next iPhone would use USB-C. And I just hope 2…

> Apple came there, wanted to be first again Interesting point. Got me thinking about how the iPod was not the first MP3 player, and how the iPhone was not the first smartphone. I believe the philosophy was "don't be the first; be the first to get it right." It's a little disappointing that they haven't been so magical lately.

It is, but you know, magic couldn't last forever, and we all knew it, since Jobds left us. It was just the matter of year. But I believe that these new MBP will be amazing and beautiful machines in next iteration. Some bad decision and bad timing led to disappointments but as long as they learn something from it, it's all good.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#276

Post by toyg »

Bud wrote: post #195
toyg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it would have landed, if Apple had not decided to arbitrarily shrink their batteries, hence requiring low-power options for their components (in this case, RAM) that are not available yet.

No, it wouldn't. And no, the slightly smaller battery was not "arbitrary". And thirdly, no, it's not that LPDDR isn't available; it's that this generation of Intel CPUs usable in a laptop don't support the current generation of LPDDR yet. In other words, it's Intel's fault, not Apple's, as posted above.

> this generation of Intel CPUs usable in a laptop

Dell XPS says hi. I don't care if it doesn't have much battery life - give me the choice, dammit. If I wanted ultraportability and umpteen hours on battery, I would have bought an Air.

> the slightly smaller battery was not "arbitrary"

I must have missed the day a tank threatened to blow up Cupertino unless they reduced the battery size. Again, nobody asked them to have an MBP as thin as an Air. It was an arbitrary choice, and (IMHO, of course) a bad one.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#277

Post by illumin8 »

S_A_P wrote: post #106

I'm pretty disappointed by the new mbp and the state of Mac in general for several reasons. I've made pretty significant investments in the Mac ecosystem. I bought a semi pro sound card(uad Apollo 8) tons of software audio related plugins and logic and I don't have a lot of confidence that when it's time to replace my 2014 mbp that there will be a viable Mac option to replace it with. That immediately makes my sound…

Wait, can't you just buy a dongle to convert from USB-c to Thunderbolt 2 and continue to use your nice (I'm jealous, personally) UAD Apollo 8 with a 2016+ MBP?

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#278

Post by spilk »

0x09 wrote: post #155
spilk wrote: post #135

Honestly to me the worst thing about the new MacBook Pro isn't that there are no legacy ports on it or that the battery may be smaller, it's that the new all-things-for-all-people ports it has are confusing. The ports are all Thunderbolt 3 ports, which I believe by definition means they are USB 3.1 ports as well. But some devices out in the world have USB-C ports that are not Thunderbolt 3 compatible. No longer can y…

I've gotten myself into a stupid situation where I have purchased something like 4 adapters that don't accomplish what I thought they would when I bought them. USB-C to DisplayPort -> DisplayPort to HDMI -> Monitor - doesn't work USB-C to DisplayPort -> DisplayPort to DVI-D -> Monitor - doesn't work USB-C to Ethernet - doesn't work I'm actually planning to just go to Best Buy today and try to find anything that will…

I think the main source of the confusion is that the connector is called USB-C, but devices that use the connector may not be USB devices at all, since they can fully expect to only be used with devices that support a specific alternate mode (e.g. Thunderbolt). Yes, they all have to support USB at some level to negotiate the alternate mode (i'm not sure if for USB-C this is a passive signaling like sense resistors or something active like an authentication chip), but devices don't have to fall back to USB data modes at all if they don't want to.

If they had called the connector something distinct, like for example "Omnibus", then you could additionally specify the signalling required to make it work. So you could sell a device as being "USB via Omnibus plug", or "Displayport via Omnibus plug". Maybe even come up with little icons for each mode and place them on the host computers and peripherals to help people figure out what is going to work. Really just anything more than what they've done currently would be useful.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#279

Post by illumin8 »

spilk wrote: post #115
symfoniq wrote: post #47

A co-worker who upgraded last week to a 2016 MacBook Pro from a 2013 is complaining about battery life, too. He used to get 10+ hours and now he's lucky to get six.

Having owned MacBooks/PowerBooks/iBooks in various configurations over the past 15 or so years, what models were getting real-life 10 hour lifetimes, and while doing what? I've never seen anything near that on anything I've owned before.

It depends what model you have. I had a 2015 15" rMBP with discrete GPU, and I typically got 5-6 hours with my usage pattern (Chrome, Outlook, Terminal, Sublime Text, doing most of my development locally but running code on cloud servers in AWS).

At my new job, I only got a 2015 13" rMBP without discrete GPU, and I now get 8-10 hours with the same workload. It's because I don't have to power as big of a screen and a discrete GPU.

Workload matters, but discrete GPU and larger screen also matter, a lot.

Re: Newest MacBook Pro is the first MacBook not recommended by Consumer Reports

#280

Post by el_benhameen »

duggan wrote: post #33

This is an article that (incompletely) summarizes the Consumer Reports article[1]. The reason for the wildly varying performance appears to be due to a bug (presumably) in Safari. They had consistent results with Chrome: > Once our official testing was done, we experimented by conducting the same battery tests using a Chrome browser, rather than Safari. For this exercise, we ran two trials on each of the laptops, and…

Wow, I decided to make the switch to Safari when I got my new mbp to optimize for battery life. I guess this is the end of that experiment. Safari devtools are terrible anyway.
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