I am not telling you to not complain for something like the fw thing, I am telling you don't do so in an irrate way when apple is already offering you some options that IMHO are good enough.
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Apple Releases New 15" MacBook Pro, Updates 17" MacBook Pro
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I am not telling you to not complain for something like the fw thing, I am telling you don't do so in an irrate way when apple is already offering you some options that IMHO are good enough.
Oh come now, telling someone to get a life on a forum is a bit childish because you don't agree with their opinions, and I read some of his posts and most appear to be valid criticisms (albeit maybe quite vocal), whereas it could be said that a few of your post could, and I reiterate as to avoid any ill feeling, could be deemed as fanboyish, especially using the term "anti apple".
But peace, I don't wanna cause no flaming here
Here they are side by side... neither fits in your pocket.just a question - have you ever tried travelling with the 17" for a while or you just assuming? i have a 15" original MBP and it is perfect! its not heavy, not bulky, not anything apart from a delight. i cant see an extra 2 inches being annoying, and it probably weighs about the same as what i have now anyway! (dont get me started on the difference in power and battery life
The 1440x900 res on the 15" is the dealbreaker for me. Even if the 17" was twice as thick as the 15", I'd still take the 17" as long as it's got 1920x1200.
Oh come now, telling someone to get a life on a forum is a bit childish because you don't agree with their opinions, and I read some of his posts and most appear to be valid criticisms (albeit maybe quite vocal), whereas it could be said that a few of your post could, and I reiterate as to avoid any ill feeling, could be deemed as fanboyish, especially using the term "anti apple".
But peace, I don't wanna cause no flaming here
Me neither peace. (he did so though in a repeated way, every other page, and on every other way, apple trash this, apple trash that, it gets really tiring, really soon. )
Here they are side by side... neither fits in your pocket.
The 1440x900 res on the 15" is the dealbreaker for me. Even if the 17" was twice as thick as the 15", I'd still take the 17" as long as it's got 1920x1200.
haha of course they wouldnt fit in ur pocket!
the difference between the two is negligible now that you provided them side by side! thanks
Yeah, it's nothing compared to the difference between the good old 12" and 17" PowerBooks...haha of course they wouldnt fit in ur pocket!
the difference between the two is negligible now that you provided them side by side! thanks
Yeah, it's nothing compared to the difference between the good old 12" and 17" PowerBooks...
HAHA oh no, i wanted one of them SO bad!!!
Completely agree. It's now $300 NZ more than the previous entry level and you get a minor HDD bump and 2GB more ram (both these parts have had big aftermarket price drops since January anyway).
ExpressCard
Lots of folk are saying "oh boo hoo, you can just lug the 17"er around if you need matte or expresscard". That argument doesnt stack up at all. Most folk I know who use MBPs for editing or "pro" work use the 15" model largely because it works as a portable machine when not at the desk. When at the desk, they can connect it to external hardware e.g. displays, recording tools, mixers and whatnot - the lack of ExpressCard there is almost certainly a dealbreaker for the majority of them that I know. The 17" machines aren't an option for two reasons: 1) Size - they're just too big and can't be used well as portable machines outside the office. 2) Cost - they're a lot more expensive than the 15" machines, especially considering that at the desk the 17" screen makes little to no difference over the 15.
9400G Integrated on Base 15"
One word guys - RESALE. It's going to drop in value just like the old 14" iBook G4 did. Faster than the smaller-screened bretheren. Epic fail.
I'm really disappointed with these updates. I wouldn't be so disappointed if I lived in the USA where prices have dropped, but down here in NZ prices have either stayed the same or increased from Apple's already-high January Pricing. And my 'back-up' 13" unibody option (in case the 15" was shafted, which it was) has now had it's AppleCare cost increase by a cool 50%.
I still use one of those 12" 1GHz G4 powerbooks! Admittedly not as a main machine[1], but it still has its uses. It is fairly scratched and "re-contoured" from the years I spent working on ships but the only thing to have gone wrong with it was a hard drive failure. I am on my 3rd battery in those 6 years and now sitting at about half an hour lifespan. If a new 13inch pro will give me similar longevity thats pretty decent value for money.
[1] It never was a main machine, I just like my portable kit to be truly portable yet powerful enough to be of real use.
Dang! If only I had my mbp replaced now instead of three weeks ago! Nice upgrade for the 17... at least I have the 500gb drive already (installed myself), would have liked a 2.8 proc instead of my 2.6, but hey mine was replaced for free.... shouldn't complain to much
It's one inch wider and less than one inch deeper, but just as thin. Can someone please explain to me how this tethers it to a desk forever? Look at the comparison picture for crying out loud. What magic barrier does it break by being an inch wider? Are doorways really that narrow in NZ?
Now there's an actual argument. Yes, it's more expensive.
Same here in Sweden... the price on the MBP 17" remained exactly the same as before, even though it dropped $300 in the US. I have no idea why Apple are still using the March pricing... the dollar peaked briefly in March, the same week as MP/iMac/Mini were released, but now it's back to the same value as in November '08 when the unibodies were originally released. It's as if they're so emboldened by the fact that the USD has crawled out of the hole it was in during the last two years of Bush, they think the sky is the limit and they can gouge anything out of foreigners...
Thank you. I've tested the 17" in the Apple store and the difference in weight is negligible compared to my 15". And of course the size is good because the screen is bigger and has a higher resolution. So bigger = better. I don't get what people's hang up with the supposedly HUGE difference.
Pictured:
Loss of I/O bandwidth
The number of pros that use 15" Apple notebooks is very high, and they have just seriously pissed us off.
Why on earth did they replace the high-bandwidth ExpressCard slot with a bloody SD card reader??? Anyone reading SD cards already has a high-performance reader that is probably much faster on USB, firewire, or expresscard than this new built-in reader (unless they did their homework and OEMed a Sandisk E4 unit or similar), and doesn't mind carrying it around.
When you're working with a tethered video camera, you want your cam on one firewire bus and your storage on the other. Now, if they had replaced expresscard with eSATA that wouldn't have been too bad (as long as we still had a FW800 bus as well), but an SD reader in place of real performance expansion options in a $2k laptop is just boneheaded.
Is this the result of the cocktail hour scheduled before the focus group meeting instead of afterwards? I can't imagine any Apple pro user going "oh, yeah, I never used that expresscard slot; what I really need is a built-in card reader!". At least give me a BTO option where I can put it back.
Do they really think everyone is doing their media editing on networked volumes? If so, give me 10GE or full support for TCP offload or something to compensate.
The number of pros that use 15" Apple notebooks is very high, and they have just seriously pissed us off.
Why on earth did they replace the high-bandwidth ExpressCard slot with a bloody SD card reader??? Anyone reading SD cards already has a high-performance reader that is probably much faster on USB, firewire, or expresscard than this new built-in reader (unless they did their homework and OEMed a Sandisk E4 unit or similar), and doesn't mind carrying it around.
When you're working with a tethered video camera, you want your cam on one firewire bus and your storage on the other. Now, if they had replaced expresscard with eSATA that wouldn't have been too bad (as long as we still had a FW800 bus as well), but an SD reader in place of real performance expansion options in a $2k laptop is just boneheaded.
Is this the result of the cocktail hour scheduled before the focus group meeting instead of afterwards? I can't imagine any Apple pro user going "oh, yeah, I never used that expresscard slot; what I really need is a built-in card reader!". At least give me a BTO option where I can put it back.
Do they really think everyone is doing their media editing on networked volumes? If so, give me 10GE or full support for TCP offload or something to compensate.
I'd consider it more portable than my current 15" PC notebook, since it's thinner and weighs a tad less. The idea with a 17" is to use it as a desktop replacement, after all, it's a compromise and certain tradeoffs come with the territory, but it *is* portable. If it wasn't, Apple would put a desktop stand on it and call it the iMac 17". The MBP 17" is one of the most, if not the most portable 17" notebook on the market. You should see some of the PC alternatives... here's the new Alienware m17x:Thank you. I've tested the 17" in the Apple store and the difference in weight is negligible compared to my 15". And of course the size is good because the screen is bigger and has a higher resolution. So bigger = better. I don't get what people's hang up with the supposedly HUGE difference.
It's over 2 inches thick and starts at 12 pounds... like two MBP 17" stacked.
Gamers consider this deliciously portable.
My guess: It was cheaper. Apple are always looking for ways to cut corners. You'd have to pry their extreme profit margin from their dead hands. They've put in a better screen on the 15" but they haven't jacked up the price, so they take away something else. They probably found a garbage container outside some SD reader factory and said "wohoo, jackpot!". God knows what they did to the MBP 17" in order to cut the price by $300 without removing features, but I guess I'll find out when mine arrives in a week or so. Maybe they put in refurbished screens or replaced the 8-hour battery with a bunch of AA batteries gaffa-taped together.
I'm wondering: anyone who's read the "Steve Jobs on Lack of FireWire in MacBooks" thread is probably familiar with the complaint that Apple allegedly cripples FireWire performance on ExpressCard buses. I read a few posts where users said something like, "Apple uses the Agere 1394 chipsets in its notebooks, which are notorious for causing interference, audio "blips" and static, while TI chipsets work fine. However, even if you use a TI-1394 bus in the EC slot, it does the same thing under OS X, but when one boots into Windows, it works fine."
True or false? Does this really happen, or happen every time?
True or false? Does this really happen, or happen every time?
Don't know... it's all a bit of a mystery.I'm wondering: anyone who's read the "Steve Jobs on Lack of FireWire in MacBooks" thread is probably familiar with the complaint that Apple allegedly cripples FireWire performance on ExpressCard buses. I read a few posts where users said something like, "Apple uses the Agere 1394 chipsets in its notebooks, which are notorious for causing interference, audio "blips" and static, while TI chipsets work fine. However, even if you use a TI-1394 bus in the EC slot, it does the same thing under OS X, but when one boots into Windows, it works fine."
True or false? Does this really happen, or happen every time?
My iMac has the dreaded Agere chipset and I tried out the audio performance with a couple of external boxes... no glitches whatsoever in OS X, but the performance in Windows was abysmal, worst I ever heard. Much worse than a "normal" laptop PC with the Agere chipset. I'm not sure how Apple managed to make the firewire work ten times worse under Windows than it would on a similar spec PC, but they sure did. It's been suggested that the culprit is Apple's BootCamp driver for the keyboard, it's a source of rampant DPC spikes that strangle firewire like some crazy DoS attack, and if you disable the keyboard driver it runs much better. I haven't tried it.
There's a lot of conflicting info surrounding Agere... some say the problem is only with certain revisions, and that the better revisions are fine for audio. Some say that Apple's decision to switch to Agere on MBPs has nothing to do with cheaping out, but rather that the TI chipset is "too big"(?!?).
Easy. Portability. I stick a 24" monitor onto it if I want the extra screen space. The difference between 15" and 17" screen size really doesn't make a difference to me, but the size of the computer does. The 15" is cheaper, too.
It's the little things: Like fitting it on small coffee tables. Balancing it on your lap. Getting it to fit properly in an aeroplane seat, getting it in a briefcase or backpack and still being comfortable. I've never really worked the unibodies, but the 15" PBG4 was certainly a LOT more portable than the 17"er.
I'm starting to think that Apple funded the US price drops by a) AppleCare, and b) Gouging international customers... Is there a country other than the US that actually saw a price drop?!
It is far from "silly" to desire risk mitigation steps to verify your equipment is working while still in the field.
Its also far from "silly" to desire that one's field equipment isn't unnecessarily big, bulky, etc.
For some, it not about saving money. Its about saving weight in your carry-on bag, etc.
Of course, since some jobs and workflows are not unusual for the post-processing to literally take a couple of man-weeks. Do you really want to thus be limited by even a mere 17" screen?
The 12" PowerBook never did, but it did have Firewire, which the 13" MBP just finally got. Since my dSLRs all use CF cards, the SD slot is utterly useless to me...and also too for my next planned dSLR purchase.
The EC was part of what differentiated the MBP product line, with the obvious exception of the lobotomized-seven-ways-to-Sunday 13" version. Personally, I suspect that Apple wanted to ditch the WhiteBook, but consumers rankled by both the price and lack of FW on the 13" unibody prompted them to keep it around rather than EOL it.
The MBP 13", since MBA lacks firewire, so with it, I'd have to suffer from USB-speed card transfers. I've not tried to figure out how many days(?) it would take for a 16GB CF card to download across USB.
Exactly my point; thanks.
FWIW, when I really have to travel light & remote, even the 12" PB gets left behind as too much weight: a Hyperdrive HD80 digital wallet is 0.5kg (~1lb), so a pair of them is 1/2 the weight of the 12"...and that includes enough onboard power to backup over 60GB of data, while also adding data redundancy.
BTW, I finally got around to dropping off the iMac for repairs.
...
I handed it over to an Apple Premium Reseller on May 20th. Mailed them last Wednesday, after 2 weeks, and wondered politely what the hell is going on... they said they were expecting parts "any day now, probably Friday". That was one week ago, still nothing. 10 more days and it's a full month!
Egads, that's lame.
I'd recommend forwarding their email to the Mothership and ask for an "Executive Review" of their service standards and if this is actually considered acceptable...and if not, what are they going to do about it.
-hh
Right. Well, I guess I don't use mine that way. I have my office at home and do most of my work on the desktop computer. My laptop is my satellite desktop, the one I work on when I can't be arsed to sit at the desk after spending 8 hours in a chair... so I head over to the couch or the bed and keep working a bit while watching TV or whatever. I use this thing...
...the Logitech Comfort lapdesk, it's wide enough for a 17" (the chick in the picture has an MBP 15" and there's like 2-3 inches free space left). Weight and size don't matter, but if I don't have the screen real estate to accomodate stuff like Flash, Photoshop, Cubase etc, I can't really work at all. Since I'm used to 4960x1600 res at the desk (one 30" screen, two 20" screens in portrait mode), 1920x1200 is about as low as I can go before scrolling, resizing and various other help-I-can't-fit-all-this-on-the-screen chores start to take up half my work time.
None that I know of. NZ, Sweden and UK have reported in so far but they/we are not seeing the price drop at all. No price hike either, it's simply the same prices as the previous MBPs. The combination of a price drop and the USD being worth more than last year resulted in status quo, basically.
Sigh...
Here's the thing...
Just because *you* didn't use the ExpressCard Slot *does NOT* mean that no one used it, or that people that see the lack of the ExpressCard Slot as a serious *downgrade* to the MacBook "Pro" 15" are "whiners" or "should just buy a 17""
I'm truly sick and tired of the people trolling this thread acting like the way *they* use a MBP is the *only* way to use the MBP..
Just because *you* use a Pro laptop more like a consumer than a *professional* does not make professionals that actually care about a specific feature whiners that should just buy the 17" or shut up. Maybe Apple should make an additional consumer MacBook and ya'll should buy that or shut up?
For the love of God, stop trolling this thread, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. I'm sure all of you that think a "pro" laptop should play BR movies but not be able to use ExpressCards that add eSATA, 3G wireless, or additional FireWire busses can start your own discussion and pat each other on your backs about how stupid people that actually are trying to make a living with our Macs are.
Here's the thing...
Just because *you* didn't use the ExpressCard Slot *does NOT* mean that no one used it, or that people that see the lack of the ExpressCard Slot as a serious *downgrade* to the MacBook "Pro" 15" are "whiners" or "should just buy a 17""
I'm truly sick and tired of the people trolling this thread acting like the way *they* use a MBP is the *only* way to use the MBP..
Just because *you* use a Pro laptop more like a consumer than a *professional* does not make professionals that actually care about a specific feature whiners that should just buy the 17" or shut up. Maybe Apple should make an additional consumer MacBook and ya'll should buy that or shut up?
For the love of God, stop trolling this thread, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. I'm sure all of you that think a "pro" laptop should play BR movies but not be able to use ExpressCards that add eSATA, 3G wireless, or additional FireWire busses can start your own discussion and pat each other on your backs about how stupid people that actually are trying to make a living with our Macs are.
I'm happy that Apple labeled all their aluminum notebooks to "Pro" simply to avoid confusion with the cheap white plastic macbook. I believe that anything aluminum Apple create should be considered "Pro" because of it's legit look.
"Pro" = Luxurious
"Pro" = Luxurious
