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Apple Tested Larger Battery and Gold Color Option on MacBook Pro, Lightning Port on MacBook
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And some more to add to that list...
Macbook Advanced Pro
Macbook Pro Plus
Macbook Pro Ultimate
I'm not sure I understand your reply. If the computer allows you to open it up and change graphics cards, then you can upgrade. Same for adding a board that allows some future connectivity such as Thunderbolt 4.
I get it. I really do.
I also remember when you could change disk drive platters and heads without replacing the whole drive. They were the size of a refrigerator, but they were serviceable. The same for each CPU on its own board, and arithmetic co-processors that could be upgraded independently.
The thing is this stuff required regular maintenance and upgrades. It failed on a statistically predictable regularity. Integrated circuits were improving by orders of magnitude not a few percent.
You may think my example extreme. Its not. I've heard the same litany repeatedly with every leap in integration. With each major improvement in technology engineers do actual engineering studies of the tradeoffs between increased performance and reliability of the integrated solution vs. the discreet component solution. Very often better thermal management is a key benefit. The the new soldered SSDs [and everything else] are solid state. They are ready. They are better because of it. Not only are they extremely unlikely to fail, the failure mode is not a catastrophic mechanical failure. They are over provisioned and designed to continue working with a few bad bits. The benefits far outweigh the detriments.
Your all soldered, non-upgradeable laptop/iMac is more powerful, orders of magnitude more reliable, and more affordable than a room filling multi $billion super computer of just a couple decades ago for exactly this approach. When the CPU, RAM, "DISK", and display are one unrepairable block of optronic-nanotech-glass I will be first in line.
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Your argument was that having Thunderbolt 3 is not future proof because if/when Thunderbolt 4 comes out it will be useless.
So nothing is EVER future proof with your argument. Even if Thunderbolt 4 came out today with 1 Tb/s speeds, what about Thunderbolt 5? Thunderbolt 4 is not future proof either. Neither is Thunderbolt 5.
I believe it will be the MacBook Pro Plus, or PP for short. It will likely come with two round dongles hanging of the sides
This is where the full power and flexibility of the USB_C/Thunderbolt 3 isn't being appreciated. People can't seem to see past having to replace their thumb drive and buy a couple of usb-c to usb-a cables, to see the power of 40 GB/s I/O bandwidth per port [160 GB/s total on the 15"].
If you need a more powerful graphics card run a T3 cable to a PCIe expansion with a real desk top class GPU. Or buy a display with a GPU built in. Or go dual or quad GPU. Each one of those T3 ports = an expansion slot. No mobile class replaceable GPU can compete with that.
Each T3 port has a dedicated PCIe channel on the mother board. One T3 run to a PCI expansion gives one PCIe slot. How is some future Thunderbolt 4 going to make better use of that PCIe channel unless integrated with a new faster motherboard?
In an another perspective....
They put a 5400rpm hard drive in their iMac. = not an improvement = cheap = increased profits.
The current iMac and Mac Mini (both outdated) perform slower than their previous counter-parts while increasing the price. = increased profits.
Using non-upgrade-able ram and hard drive = increased profits.
Yep, I totally see how they improved their profits. Remember to wear Rose Gold glasses when Apple releases anything new. Don't want to skew your view.
People (the majority) like BIG numbers. 5400 RPM is so cheap you can get a LOT of storage on it. SSDs are not THAT cheap yet. Having the base iMac come with a 256GB SSD does not look good compared to a 1TB 5400 RPM drive.
We know these things. We gladly sacrifice space for MASSIVE performance, but the general public doesn't care. I upgraded someones 5400 RPM drive to a SSD which made their boot times go from 5-10 minutes to under a minute. I checked in with them and asked how the performance was, they just said "meh it is okay". These people generally do not care that these SSDs are MASSIVE boost in performance.
Yeah, but a 7200RPM drive is not that expensive in comparison to a 5400RPM drive, but it's a good bit quicker. No reason for Apple to still use 5400RPM drives in 20" iMacs.
They generate less heat. Lower RPM means less moving parts at faster speeds means lower heat means the iMac will be a few degrees cooler.
there's only about 3-5W difference between a 5400RPM drive and a 7200RPM drive. If that is enough to tip an iMac over the edge in terms of cooling, then Apple really have a lot of work to do on their cooling solution.
Ok, thanks. I didn't know that.
But (and you knew this was coming) - if Apple is providing less in their computers (e.g. no PCIe slot, no legacy ports, no MagSafe) and requiring the user to provide more outside of it (adapters, "dongles," expansion boxes), and if Apple is forcing you to decide once and for all on RAM and hard drive capacity at the time of purchase, then the prices are less justified ($200 for 8 GB of RAM, etc.).
Many of us actually use and welcome USB-C despite the accessory issue.
It doesn't matter on the watt requirements. It is the heat. Having it spin faster produces more heat. I have had 7200 RPM drives that are WAY too hot to the touch, even for a second.
For example, a 400 watt required video card is not 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
I doubt terraced battery design would have provided much larger battery capacity, unless the laptop would have had larger external volume - which again would probably have required complete redesign which you seriously don't pull off in couple months. My educated guess is that improvement with a terraced design would have been around 10%. You can go yourself to measure how much free space there is inside the new MBP; there is some, but relative to physical volume of the batteries inside, not that much.
This wouldn't have compensated for reduction of battery capacity from earlier models for those people that think primary feature of laptops is to run as long as possible with all components under red hot load, but at the same time I must say that despite the battery on my laptop has 20% lower capacity than the previous model I used (and actually with a fresh battery), I get significantly more work time with it. But hey, I don't have badly enough behaving applications to be worthy of being taken seriously as a "pro" laptop user...
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For extreme users going from 76 to 99.5 Wh (as it used to be) that battery increase buys maybe half an hour of extra computing time, but at the same time for relatively low average CPU/GPU load users would increase battery life to levels which are completely unnecessary. On light use (mostly dominated by display brightness, which in my case is most of the year pretty low, I admit) I seem to be able to get relatively typical 14+(!) hours of use on 76 Wh battery. I sincerely don't need more than that, I don't sit on front of my untethered laptop all my waking hours. (And if I would be doing heavy computing all the time, benefit would anyway be measured more in minutes than hours.)
Increasing battery size to 99.5 Wh would both cost Apple money and probably make a very sizeable segment of potential customers complain on lack of progress on the thinness front, since competition would definitely take advantage of this not-so-small niche. I believe majority of MBP customers don't actually do anything heavier than web browsing or document processing for most of their time, and this shapes market realities to an extent. If those applications suck on power saving friendliness (like avoiding unnecessary wakeups), it's really a software, not a hardware problem.
This wouldn't have compensated for reduction of battery capacity from earlier models for those people that think primary feature of laptops is to run as long as possible with all components under red hot load, but at the same time I must say that despite the battery on my laptop has 20% lower capacity than the previous model I used (and actually with a fresh battery), I get significantly more work time with it. But hey, I don't have badly enough behaving applications to be worthy of being taken seriously as a "pro" laptop user...
[doublepost=1482480713][/doublepost]
For extreme users going from 76 to 99.5 Wh (as it used to be) that battery increase buys maybe half an hour of extra computing time, but at the same time for relatively low average CPU/GPU load users would increase battery life to levels which are completely unnecessary. On light use (mostly dominated by display brightness, which in my case is most of the year pretty low, I admit) I seem to be able to get relatively typical 14+(!) hours of use on 76 Wh battery. I sincerely don't need more than that, I don't sit on front of my untethered laptop all my waking hours. (And if I would be doing heavy computing all the time, benefit would anyway be measured more in minutes than hours.)
Increasing battery size to 99.5 Wh would both cost Apple money and probably make a very sizeable segment of potential customers complain on lack of progress on the thinness front, since competition would definitely take advantage of this not-so-small niche. I believe majority of MBP customers don't actually do anything heavier than web browsing or document processing for most of their time, and this shapes market realities to an extent. If those applications suck on power saving friendliness (like avoiding unnecessary wakeups), it's really a software, not a hardware problem.
Well, that's just my point. Apple isn't a new start-up company without brand recognition or loyalty. They are the most valuable company in the world with one of the most recognizable brands. So, Apple is behaving like the company that they are, not the company that they once were.
I am not saying this is a good thing, and I imagine there are folks in Apple's leadership that yearn for the good old days. Tim Cook might even want to keep some of the old innovative risk taking culture around....can't really say. But, it is very hard to be both nimble and huge.....like using an offensive lineman as a wide-receiver.
As for dongles, They are bummer without a doubt. That said; I suspect we will see USB-C become the new standard, and most MacBook Pro users will migrate to peripheral devices that do not require adaptors.
Not having ports is a big deal for me and I'm sure I'm not alone. IMO there is no logic whatsoever in making a laptop that MIGHT work better at some point in the future. That's like saying I'm going to buy a lawnmower, even though I live in an apartment because I MIGHT buy a house with a yard someday. Loss of MagSafe was also a deal-breaker for me. It's one of the things that sold me on Mac's in the first place.
This is not poor company that has to scrimp & save to grind out a profit. There is no sound reason to blow off Mac customers - even if they do only generate 10% of profits. It's still a PROFIT!
But these DO have ports. A LOT of them actually. You can get a dock or a simple USB-C to a few USB-A port adapter for VERY CHEAP.
Geez people, I priced all my adapters out. It would be around $50. For a $4,000 computer, another $50 is nothing.
I will wait a year or 2. I bet the MBP eventually gets the better battery, and a more modern processor. I learned with the core 2 duo MacBook Air to never buy the first version of a apple laptop.