Before I continue, I want to say thank you back. This is a great reply.
So ok, are there plenty of PC laptops that can do performance multithreaded programming? (I'm actually not sure what that is). Putting aside whining about ports and keyboards, do Apple's MBP's really not handle 3D Graphics, CAD, and the other points you mentioned as well as PC equivalents? That's kind of rhetorical. I'm pretty sure Apple's laptops handle that stuff from a performance perspective as well as any PC laptops, right?
Well, there's al ot of things mixed up here.
In laptop land, in CPU land, the Mac is completely fine. It's a little bit slow because of its thinness and the accompanying overheating, but it's fine.
On the GPU side, however, we run into problems almost immediately. Firstly, forget about CUDA. There is no NVIDIA web driver at all for 10.14 as of this writing, so forgoet about eGPU's, too. That's a huge deal because it locks me out of using cuBLAS.
Now, Apple have equivalents, but they're based on Metal, so now it'll only run on Apple products, and NVIDIA GPU's are faster than any GPU you can currently connect to a Mac, and so that's just a bad choice.
Second, the GPU's from AMD have been lagging significantly behind NVIDIA's offerings for a while now. Vega is the first exception to this, but there is no Vega anything to be found anywhere in the portable Mac line-up, which is bizarre. Intel released the G series early this year, and it performs about twice as well as the GPU's that are actually in the new MacBook Pro. These chips unfortuantely only have 4 cores though, down from 6, but personally I'd rather have had the G series than the H series that we got, especially because the G series came out so long before, and the machine was due an update soon.
Now, GPU's are much more multithreaded than CPU's, so if you wanna do something really fast in parallel, the GPU's your friend. Most highly parallel processes are now done on the GPU, because it just makes sense to do so. Modern GPU's have thousands of threads. CPU's? A handful.
Remember when Apple did bi-yearly updates? MacBook Pro Early 2011, MacBook Pro Late 2011, MacBook Pro Ultimo 2011 for example? That would've been a pretty good opportunity.
It's unreasonable to compare your Windows desktop to a Mac laptop. You accept the iMac Pro compares to your Windows desktop. (Although for the record, looking at Geekbench at least, the current i9 MBP is only marginally behind the iMP in some of the tests). So that's Apples to Apples so to speak. If you want a laptop, then what PC laptops have the hardware to do what you want, better than Apple's hardware?
Obviously.
And honestly, the PC world has laptops that are basically the exact same as the MacBook Pro but with a better keyboard (in my opinion) but a worse trackpad that has a more appropriate size. But the real deal about them is that they tend to cost about ~6000kr less here in Denmark, which is very significant.
They cost so much less because of the lack of a touch bar and having usually 1-2 TB3 ports and an assortment of other ports, just like the older generation of MacBook Pro. This was 100% absolutely fine, and it still is.
But note how we're now talking about 2 products in a line-up of 7 different products? Yeah, the other 5 are actually objectively crap right now. These two particular products are a little better, but a few bad choices hold them back and makes them very expensive.
For instance, the iMac Pro has workstation hardware. That's great, some people need that. However, if you were to create an iMac with equivalent non-pro specs (non-ECC memory, equivalent core i9) you could shave a metric ****ton off the price and still cover almost all the usecases. That doesn't mean the Xeon W and ECC combo is useless, but it means its even more niche.
Question is then, why didn't it happen? Why didn't the iMac get updated? Hell if I know. xD
Fair enough, if you just don't like the keyboard, then that does suck for you personally (and for others with the same opinion, and admittedly, I don't love the keyboard, but I still like it more than the older ones. Obviously, it's subjective.) But it's unreasonable for all these whiners on here saying everyone hates the lack of ports, the non-upgradeability, etc. and even the keyboard (which your initial rant I replied to went on about), when some of us like these developments and consider them the future.
Well, my rant is obviously my opinion, but I believe my opinion is more than just my opinion at this point. I feel that a great number of people share this opinion, which makes it relevant to the discussion that Apple are losing on massive amounts of potential sales, which is what the article is about.
My question really is: how does the MBP not meet your actual needs, that a comparative PC laptop does? What do you need HDMI, USB-A, whatever else for, if you do (such that you can't bring your peripherals into the same decade as your new $5K+ laptop)? Aside from the keyboard, and putting aside just general whining about what everyone here wants to whine about for the sake of whining (ports, soldering, etc.) what is wrong with the MBP that doesn't meet your actual needs?
Mainly it's too expensive and the graphics are not powerful enough, and a lot of the extra cost that's been added goes into things I don't care about, or actually plain dislike.
If I had one, I would say that I could probably get most of my work done if I really wanted to, but at that kind of price point, that's not good enough. I should have a best-in-class experience at that pricepoint, and I know I won't, and that just makes me not want to make the investment. Right now I've got a workplace desktop tower and a home desktop tower, and I wanna do some work or gaming on the go, at my parents', on my holidays, etc. I'm just screwed.
