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16-Inch MacBook Pro With All-New Design Expected in 2019, 13-Inch Model May Gain 32GB RAM
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I can pretty much bet $100 that won't happen. First all the TDP numbers, MB is a Fanless design and you can't do 10+W on that. Newest Retina MBA is Fan Assisted Design which sadly barely do 15W.
There is no way Apple is going back to Ethernet Port, especially on Laptop. 802.11ax ( WiFi 6 ) will likely fix most of our needs. If they stick to 3x3 design that is ~2.25Gbps, in real world with all the efficiency improvement you could easily break the 1Gbps barrier. And if you do need 10Gbps Networking, there is TB3 Adaptor for that.
The Kaby G was too power hungry, nothing something Apple would consider with their current mentality.
If Apple has determined that the current butterfly keyboard mechanism really is the problem that it appears to be, this is their graceful way of fixing it while not really admitting that it was an issue.
My preference would be for Apple to incorporate the current Magic Keyboard (w/Numeric Keypad) scissors mechanism into the new design as this seems to have the best balance between the short key travel of the butterfly mechanism and the wobbly, mushy keyboard of the 2012-2015 Retina MacBook Pro.
It would be interesting to be able to use the Apple Pencil 2 with the Force Touch trackpad. I hate writing my signature with my finger. However, this still seems very edge case for Apple to actually implement and offer as a feature.
I hope Apple continues to offer the TouchBar, but they need to revamp it a bit to increase its usefulness to everyone. I use it and I like it, but any additional cost should be nominal at this point.
Apple just released a USB-C to SD-Card Reader for $39.00 USD that seems to be quite good. I use a Transcend TS-RDF9K ($16.80) with a USB-C to USB Micro-B Male cable ($7.99; Amazon Basics) which works fine for me. I get UHS II SD Card, microSD, CF and Memory Stick. If a photographer is using XQD, CF or CFast, I imagine they could care less about a built-in SD Card slot. The SD-Card slot in a MacBook Pro is simply one more ingress point for dust, dirt and liquids to get inside the computer or render the slot inoperative.
I get along quite well with 256GB of Flash Storage in my 2016 15" MacBook Pro and so do many, many others. The pricing to go from 256GB to 512GB is not horrible, nor is the 512GB to 1TB (although everyone would welcome any savings. The upgrade pricing for the 2TB and 4TB models, however, is completely insane, but has more to do with the expense of higher density NAND to create those storage tiers. I hope that we will see significant reductions in those two BTO items in the near term, or at least in the next gen. There are many professionals who want and need at least the 2TB option, even if the 4TB stays on the exotic side.
Effective cooling, better thermals, better thermal paste and truly functional heatsink would be wonderful, even if that means that the chassis is made a bit thicker. It would also be great if Intel could provide Apple and other PC OEMs with 6- and 8-core mobile CPUs that do not need a 2" thick chassis to run at their full potential, but I digress. Perhaps Sunny Cove 10nm CPUs will deliver, although the proof will be in the pudding.
I think a BTO option with cellular is a non-starter for most users anyways. I simply use my iPhone or a cellular iPad as a mobile hotspot which has not been an issue. The extra $129 Apple would charge would probably not see that many takers and would simply take away space on the motherboard for other things along with the extra heat generated and antennas needed. Is the potential additional cost of tethering more or less than adding an LTE data plan for the MacBook Pro?
Improved Quality Control is always nice, but what are you referring to specifically? Better endurance testing in the lab to insure that the new MacBook Pro meets more rigorous standards? If so, what standards? Mil-Spec? Some sort of national standards, which do not seem to exist as far as I can tell.
I presume all these ports will be Thunderbolt 3, not simply USB-C.
I completely agree here. I would rather have 2 more Thunderbolt 3 ports than 1 USB 3.1 Gen 2 and 1 HDMI port. I would rather have the extra flexibility that more Thunderbolt 3 ports would give me.
On my desk at home and at my office, I have Akitio Thunderbolt 3 Pro docks all connected into my local ecosystems. Gives me 10Gb/s, Cfast, SD, eSATA, power and displays with a single cable. When needed I can connect to a PCIe chassis to add support for other PCIe cards I need.
Baseprice, plus $500 in dongles so you can plug anything into it and $400 for Apple Care, because of the keyboard and everything being soldered or glued in.
I realize ethernet is unlikely, but it is still offered by other OEMs, so that is why I listed it as a suggestion and not a prediction.
As to my other suggestions, I realize the current MB is fanless but it also uses Intel’s vastly underpowered Y-series when it could use the more powerful U-series with similar TDP. A fan would allow for better performance, I.e. higher frequency for longer periods of time.
The new MBA is sad indeed, but we are talking about redesigns. My TDP suggestions are based on a possible redesign, not current production.
There would be room for a fanless portable in my suggested lineup, but I think that is better served by tablets and ARM SOCs.
Again this would be my suggestion if indeed new designs are coming. I would like to see better cooling, which likely means thicker chassis. I realize this likely will not happen, but this would be logical—not the way of Apple under Tim Cook.
Perhaps I should have said this is my wish list. I will wait to see what Apple does with this new design but in the meantime I am planning my exit from the Mac.
I can’t even begin to imagine the thought process behind this post.
If you think that the newest generation of iPad Pros are toys, you have not used them.
The current MacBook Pro uses 45w TDP Core i7 and i9 CPUs right now...you are not suggesting Apple use the 65w TDP Core i5-8500B and Core i7-8700B CPUs in a new MacBook Pro, right? Heat is already an issue in the current chassis and even the older chassis could not accommodate a 65w CPU, much less a 95w TDP CPU.
Current MacBook Pros already have an iGPU and a dGPU...what is your point?
64GB of DDR4 DRAM is not an unreasonable request, but I think it has more to do with space constraints and battery life tradeoffs. I would rather Apple wait to implement a 64GB option once Sunny Cove CPUs with official LPDDR4 DRAM support are released to PC OEMs than Apple use DDR4 again.
Ethernet port? Seriously? Just go buy a dongle, which is what 2012-2015 Retina MacBook Pro users have been doing for the past 7 years. I have a dongle and I have a Thunderbolt Dock.
Four (4) Thunderbolt Ports...Apple already offers this in the 2016-2018 MacBook Pros, so this is nothing new.
Again...thick enough to adequately cool the current i9-8950HK to keep it cool and not throttle heavily is going to be close to 30mm thick, by my reckoning, which means double the thickness of the current 2016-2018 MacBook Pros. No thanks! And I will not be the only one to say the same thing. Anything thicker than the Early 2011 15" MacBook Pro is too much of a regression.
Again, buy a dongle and move on. Wired Ethernet is non-essential and has not been on a release MacBook Pro in the past seven years. It would be one thing if there were no solutions, but there are plenty of options and this is not a new issue that has suddenly popped up with no solutions.
Kaby Lake-G is either 65w or 100w TDP and although Intel has plenty of SKUs, I do not think they were very serious about keeping that product line going once they begin shipping their own discrete GPUs. I expect that you will see them quietly disappear from the ARK later this year as it seems like no one is using these parts outside of Intel's own NUCs. I suspect Apple did not feel they were flexible enough for their use, nor would they have a very long shelf life. Just my 2¢.
Yeah, it would be great to see another large MBP again, let's hope it happens. On the downside, for professionals, might be Apple's continued trend of non-upgradability and the end-user need for vast quantities of reasonably-priced storage. Most of the professional photographers in my area, for example, continue to rely on their old "thick" MBP models because they were so easily able to stick workstation-quantities of storage internally; either through an SSD + Optical Bay HDD replacement, or via. multiple HDDs or SSHDs in RAID configurations, again utilizing the optical bay with adaptor. It's pretty inexpensive to get vast quantities of storage in the older machines, and absurdly expensive to get a fraction of that storage in Apple's newer designs. That's a big problem:
For example, put a 6TB BYO Fusion drive in an older MacBook Pro, utilizing a 2TB Samsung SSD (currently $300 on Amazon) and a 4TB HDD (currently $100 on Amazon) for a grand total of about $500 - and that's including paying someone to put in the parts (about $100). Wait, need more and faster storage than that? How about 2x4TB SSDs from Samsung in RAID 0? That'll cost you about $1400 for parts (drives are currently $700 on Amazon) plus about $100 to put the parts in. So 8TB of super-fast storage for about $1500. Try putting 6TB or 8TB of storage inside a new MBP. You can't. But you can, if you want, pay Apple $3200 for 4TB of storage!!!!! It's downright absurd.
Even if Apple insists on the "extreme thinness" on a new large model, it would be a boon if they included the ability for the end-user to expand storage internally in some reasonable way.
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If Dell offered something that wasn't the awful 16x9 screen factor, that would be great. The 4x3 offered by Microsoft is fantastic. The 16x10 from Apple is better than 16x9, but not quite as good as the 4x3. Vertical screen space is wonderful.
Well ahead of the last Roadmap I saw with a Late 2019/Early 2020 release date, Intel is detailing a few 9th Gen 45w TDP H-Series CPUs destined to be heating up laps all around the world - https://www.anandtech.com/show/13969/intel-details-new-9th-gen-cpus-for-notebooks-9980hk-9300h
This is not a formal announcement by Intel and everything is subject to change. If Intel actually delivers in Q2/2019, things will get very interesting, very quickly. A cursory search on 14nm production issues netted me zero updated news, while production constraints were predicted to last throughout the first half of 2019.
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I believe all of Microsoft's computers (Surface Pro, Surface Laptop 2 and Surface Studio) are using a 3:2 aspect ratio. We can discuss Apple releasing something with a 3:2 aspect ratio, I do not ever want to see a 4:3 screen on a laptop ever again.
This is not a formal announcement by Intel and everything is subject to change. If Intel actually delivers in Q2/2019, things will get very interesting, very quickly. A cursory search on 14nm production issues netted me zero updated news, while production constraints were predicted to last throughout the first half of 2019.
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I believe all of Microsoft's computers (Surface Pro, Surface Laptop 2 and Surface Studio) are using a 3:2 aspect ratio. We can discuss Apple releasing something with a 3:2 aspect ratio, I do not ever want to see a 4:3 screen on a laptop ever again.
Almost everywhere I go that I want to use a wired network I also want to you a second (or second and third display) and other things. A Thunderbolt 3 dock or micro-dock means I only need to attach one cable. A much nicer solution. The beauty of Thunderbolt 3 is that these docks are no longer proprietary and can be used by both Macs and Windows machines.
Many of the shared/hot desk locations I go, now provide docks to make life much easier. I do not want to move the other direction.
AMEN, Brother!
I've been shouting from the rooftops on this very subject since November 2016. Amazing that there are still people who can't fathom that a new USB cable or a simple $2 Passive Adapter is all that is necessary to accommodatel their legacy USB-A stuff...
I don't see Apple changing the Macbook Pro design too much, it's already thin and they have removed most of the ports. Personally i think they may reduce bezels in the 15" to get it to 16" just like they have done with the war on bezels in other devices (Apple Watch, iPhone and iPad Pro).
I think it's possible we will see a forth gen of the keyboard OR a completely new keyboard. Apple do hold pattens for a glass keyboard, that would be very interesting.
I think it's possible we will see a forth gen of the keyboard OR a completely new keyboard. Apple do hold pattens for a glass keyboard, that would be very interesting.
Realistically, I think the following are likely.
- 16" or 16.5", 3360x2100 (1680x105@2x), 240-247 PPI, P3, True Tone, no 120Hz/Pro Motion
- Core i7 and i9, 9th Generation (i7-9750H, i7-9850H, i9-9880H and i9-9980HK)
- 16GB or 32GB DDR4. The 9th Generation still will not support LPDDR4, so I do not see 64GB until Sunny Cove.
- 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB SSD options
- Vega 16 and Vega 20 standard (4GB /8GB, unless an RX successor for mobile is released before launch
- 4 TB3 ports, headphone jack (hopefully on the LEFT SIDE this time, Apple)
- 802.11AX Wi-Fi (if Intel bakes into its CPUs)
- Bluetooth 5.1 (if Intel bakes into its CPUs)
- Slightly thicker chassis at 17mm, slightly larger, but not as large as the 2015 15" MacBook Pro.
- 10 hour battery life, 85.0-watt-hour battery
- Touch Bar/Face ID w/1080p FaceTime HD camera
- Titan Ridge TB3 with support for a single 8K display.
- 16" or 16.5", 3360x2100 (1680x105@2x), 240-247 PPI, P3, True Tone, no 120Hz/Pro Motion
- Core i7 and i9, 9th Generation (i7-9750H, i7-9850H, i9-9880H and i9-9980HK)
- 16GB or 32GB DDR4. The 9th Generation still will not support LPDDR4, so I do not see 64GB until Sunny Cove.
- 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB SSD options
- Vega 16 and Vega 20 standard (4GB /8GB, unless an RX successor for mobile is released before launch
- 4 TB3 ports, headphone jack (hopefully on the LEFT SIDE this time, Apple)
- 802.11AX Wi-Fi (if Intel bakes into its CPUs)
- Bluetooth 5.1 (if Intel bakes into its CPUs)
- Slightly thicker chassis at 17mm, slightly larger, but not as large as the 2015 15" MacBook Pro.
- 10 hour battery life, 85.0-watt-hour battery
- Touch Bar/Face ID w/1080p FaceTime HD camera
- Titan Ridge TB3 with support for a single 8K display.
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