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Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

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Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#41

Post by paulrpotts »

trurl wrote: post #32
grandalf wrote: post #24

If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users. Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life, and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed. Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major deficiencies in one or…

> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users. Yeah, I think they call those people developers. > A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work. Except MacBooks max out at 8GB…

I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that a developer needs some kind of massive AV workhorse with 32 GB of RAM.

Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor?

How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases?

I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a big clear screen and a port to connect another big, clear screen when I'm at my desk. Since my work products are largely text files, I don't even need a large hard drive. A fast CPU helps build large codebases but since I have incremental compilation in my C/C++ toolchain, it's not like these days I spend a large part of my time compiling.

Genuinely curious -- what kind of a developer needs more than 16 GB of RAM to make a machine viable for development?

I have a Mac Pro with four hard drives and a big screen too, but I use that for audio and video production where it is helpful.

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#42

Post by WayneBro »

grandalf wrote: post #24

If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users. Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life, and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed. Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major deficiencies in one or…

> If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop.

I've had more problems with hardware not working on OS X than Windows.

I've never had a problem with malware in 20 years of using Windows. The only virus I ever got was the NY Boot Virus and that came on a floppy disk.

People on HN keep talking about how "Windows is adware"...I don't see it. At all! I have been running Windows 10 on my entertainment machines since it has been released and on my workstations for the past 6 months. What exactly are you talking about?

> A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well.

My Surface Pro (first version) and my Dell Venue Pro 8 both just work and extremely well. My desktop workstation just works too and it's extremely fast compared to my Mid-2012 Mac Pro that I paid twice as much for. (Although even running Windows on my Mac Pro is faster than OS X.) Also, my Surface Pro battery is lasting longer than my Early 2008 Macbook Pro battery did (although at least I could replace the latter) and my Surface Pro never shocked me in the winter time like my MBP (which froze a few times after such an occurrence).

I've also had plenty of PC laptops that have outlasted, outperformed and "just worked" better than my Mac laptops. So, your viewpoint sounds way off to me and I am suspicious as to whether you've actually used Windows for any length of time.

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#43

Post by taylodl »

paulrpotts wrote: post #41
trurl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users. Yeah, I think they call those people developers. > A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work. Except MacBooks max out at 8GB…

I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that a developer needs some kind of massive AV workhorse with 32 GB of RAM. Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor? How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases? I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a bi…

Depends on how much of the operational environment you need to run on your machine and how you're partitioning that environment. It's not unreasonable to have 3 VMs running - data tier, web tier and client tier. That's just normal app development and you can easily chew through 16 GB.

If you get into the realm of developing big data analytics solutions, machine learning algorithms or VR applications, well, 32 GB is the practical starting point and 64 GB is sounding less insane. At this point though you'll start to be inhibited by Apple's relatively anemic GPU horsepower as well as the lack of RAM.

Like anything it all depends on what you're doing.

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#44

Post by trurl »

taylodl wrote: post #37
trurl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users. Yeah, I think they call those people developers. > A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work. Except MacBooks max out at 8GB…

Technically the Retina iMac w/27" display now support 32GB of memory, but it's not cheap.

Thanks, somehow I had missed that when looking at the tech specs.

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#45

Post by [deleted] »

WayneBro wrote: post #42
grandalf wrote: post #24

If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users. Most people want their laptop to be reasonably fast, get solid battery life, and have a nice display and ergonomics. Also important is power saving technology (sleep, hibernate, etc.) and storage size/speed. Most commodity laptops that are competing in the raw specs wars have major deficiencies in one or…

> If you are a Windows user, you have taken on the task of dealing with a broken, polluted driver ecosystem and lots of malware, as well as an OS that shows you ads on the desktop. I've had more problems with hardware not working on OS X than Windows. I've never had a problem with malware in 20 years of using Windows. The only virus I ever got was the NY Boot Virus and that came on a floppy disk. People on HN keep ta…

[deleted]

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#46

Post by trurl »

paulrpotts wrote: post #41
trurl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you buy a laptop based only on raw specs, you are in a different market than the vast majority of laptop users. Yeah, I think they call those people developers. > A Macbook, on the other hand, just works, and works extremely well. It is a reliable work horse that does its job without complaining. The hardware and ergonomics fade into the background and you just focus on your work. Except MacBooks max out at 8GB…

I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that a developer needs some kind of massive AV workhorse with 32 GB of RAM. Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor? How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases? I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a bi…

I am building a next generation database product. With debugging symbols enabled, the running database can easily take up 8GB in some of our unit tests. Then there is a web services layer written in Java above that. And then there is my IDE. And a web browser that leaks abysmally on Google Apps. And a bloated chat application for communicating with all my remote colleagues. At that point the OS starts spending a lot of time trying to compress pages.

I have also experimented with doing building and testing on a remote server, but the overhead of having to synchronize local changes to the remote server, rebuild, etc. tends to overwhelm the cost of debugging and iterating on individual tests.

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#47

Post by paulrpotts »

trurl wrote: post #46
paulrpotts wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having a hard time understanding the idea that a developer needs some kind of massive AV workhorse with 32 GB of RAM. Do you mean animator, graphic artist, or video editor? How much RAM does a compiler, debugger, IDE, and database need? If you are a web developer, are you running a clone of your whole server stack on your laptop, including databases? I'm a developer, and what I want from a laptop is, mostly, a bi…

I am building a next generation database product. With debugging symbols enabled, the running database can easily take up 8GB in some of our unit tests. Then there is a web services layer written in Java above that. And then there is my IDE. And a web browser that leaks abysmally on Google Apps. And a bloated chat application for communicating with all my remote colleagues. At that point the OS starts spending a lot…

Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense.

For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept running overnight and crashing. These days it could easily fit in RAM without hitting VM and I'm not sure it would even make the fans speed up. (Hmmm, I think I might have the old data set and source; I should give it a try!)

Once in a while I have to do something horrific, like build an embedded Linux kernel with customizations on a VM... and that is punishing, so I do try to run that on a desktop box with some Xeons...

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#48

Post by brightball »

pbhowmic wrote: post #40
brightball wrote: post #17

I'm still breathing life into my 17" MBP from 2010 holding out for Apple to finally make another one.

same here. Mine is 2012 and if they don't offer something decent this fall, I will just add in an SSD to replace the HDD. That ought to hold the perf for a while longer.

I've done that twice (a 500GB then a 1TB). The 8GB of RAM wasn't getting it done without it.

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#49

Post by trurl »

paulrpotts wrote: post #47
trurl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am building a next generation database product. With debugging symbols enabled, the running database can easily take up 8GB in some of our unit tests. Then there is a web services layer written in Java above that. And then there is my IDE. And a web browser that leaks abysmally on Google Apps. And a bloated chat application for communicating with all my remote colleagues. At that point the OS starts spending a lot…

Ah, thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. For what I do, which these days is mostly embedded programming, I've gotten used to the fact that even a wimpy laptop's CPU and RAM far outstrip what I had on my desktop a few years ago. I was just looking at some e-mails I sent in 1993 where I was talking about building a compressed trie structure for a database to go on CD-ROM, on a Pentium machine, and how it kept…

Oh, I definitely recognize the absurdity of the amounts of memory modern software consumes. Twenty years ago I used Linux with 256MB RAM and had pretty much the same sorts of applications running.

Re: Where the hell are the new MacBooks?

#50

Post by Artemis2 »

cmaggard wrote: post #4

They'll hold off on hardware announcements until they can ship them with macOS 12 already on them. Why would they announce new hardware that you'd have to do a full OS upgrade on in a few months?

I've bought my 2014 rMBP with Mavericks and immediately upgraded it to the beta of Yosemite.
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