Hardware comparison time...

So, I have one of the new MBPs on order, because I pretty much need Mac OS X, but I am not super pleased with the hardware. And I also have a Windows laptop, for gaming reasons, and that one was about four years old, so I got a newer one, and I want to compare the specs on the machines, because I think this is a really good example of a machine which I would think of as a "pro" model. I recognize that not all pros need/want the same things.

The machine's an ASUS GL502VS-DB71.

Size: 4.8 pounds, 0.94 inches thick. Absolutely quite a bit larger. It's a largeish 15" laptop, and that's fine by me. I've carried around much heavier machines and not minded, and I like the resulting improvement in cooling.

CPU: Some quad-core i7. "6700HQ". Base frequency 2.6GHz. Slightly slower Skylake CPU.
GPU: GeForce 1070, 8GB memory
RAM: 16GB, upgradeable to 32. (Two DIMM slots, one populated with a 16GB DIMM)

CPU/GPU wise... GPU's clearly gonna run rings around my MBP, CPU's going to be slightly slower. Extra memory would be a really nice thing; if I were running Unix on it, I'd get the memory. Nice thing is, I have the option of doing it later. So if two years from now, 16GB is feeling cramped, I can upgrade.

Weight: 4.8 pounds
Thickness: 0.94 inches

MBP's definitely ahead on this. I don't care, personally. This is definitely a lot smaller than the machine it's replacing (a G55).

Display: 1920x1080 anti-glare IPS panel

So, for me, this is mostly better than the MBP display. I hate the fuzziness I get if I do 1920x resolutions on my current rMBP (admittedly a 13"). 1920x1080 isn't ideal -- I'd rather have x1200 -- but it's basically exactly the resolution I want to run the machine at. Text is beautiful and clear. It's not quite as perfectly sharp as rMBP text, but it's identical to what I get on my 30" 2560x1600 display, just less real estate. And anti-glare is a HUGE win for me compared to the glossy screens, which give me headaches.

I wouldn't blame other people for preferring the Retina display, but if Apple offered this as an option, I'd have taken it instead of Retina.

Keyboard: Full keyboard (including number pad) with reasonably normal scissor keys. For me, this is way better; it's more comfortable to type on. I'd be fine without the keypad, but some people love them. I don't know whether I'll miss the touch bar once I've gotten used to it, but I know that I'll be glad to have the full function key row.

Power: Rated at 180W. Yes, 180. Over twice the power draw of the MBP. I don't care much.
Battery life: I have no idea, and don't care much. I don't use machines off of power very often or for very long. A major consideration for some people, but not for me.

Storage: PCIe SSD slot and 2.5" HDD slot. Comes with 256GB SSD, 1TB moving-parts drive. Both are user-replaceable. (I swapped in a 512GB SSD which cost me $130.) This is one of the areas where the ASUS absolutely dominates Apple's offerings for my purposes.

Ports: Here's where ASUS wins hugely. The biggest weakness this machine had compared to previous MBPs was MagSafe. Now that Apple's dropped MagSafe, that's no longer an advantage for Apple.

This machine has HDMI, MiniDisplayPort, gigabit Ethernet, one USB Type-C port, 4 USB Type-A ports, and an SD card reader. (Both have headphone jacks.)

The new MBP has 4 type-C USB ports. If I don't use hubs or adapters, my upper limit on devices plugged in is three total devices. It's arguably convenient that the ports are all interchangeable, but there's simply not enough of them, and they don't match my existing devices. To use my MBP with an external monitor, I need an adapter. To connect it to Ethernet, I need an adapter. To connect it to any wired keyboard or mouse I own, I need an adapter. To connect it to any wireless keyboard or mouse I own which uses a USB dongle, I need an adapter. And if I want to use keyboard, mouse, ethernet, display, and power... That's five things, and now I need at least one adapter that's providing multiple ports or something.

Price: As-configured, $1700. I spent $130 extra on a 512GB SSD upgrade. If I wanted to mail-order, I could get a 1TB using the standard M.2 SSD drive spec. B&H will sell me a SanDisk 1TB for $289.95. The 1TB upgrade from Apple is $400, and that's an upgrade; it doesn't give me a spare SSD I can repurpose or sell.

So, my shiny new MBP with 1TB of disk runs something like $3,499 with 2GHz processor and 1TB disk upgrades, and a 4GB Radeon 460. This machine, with the 1TB drive upgrade, would be a bit under $1,999. It would have a slightly slower processor. It would have more storage, be user-upgradeable to even more storage or 32GB of memory at any point in the future. Better keyboard, much better ports, display that fits my needs better, and so on. It is unequivocally completely superior, for me personally.

If I bought this machine, and then bought a $2,000 Mac OS X license, I would be spending $500 more than I am on my MBP... And I would be happier.

That is why people are complaining about the state of Apple's hardware. The only thing the rMBP has that I want is Mac OS X. That's it. The other "advantages" it has are not things I need or want, while it has crippling disadvantages that make it a pain to deal with. And I'm not even factoring in the cost of dongles, docks, or whatever. Since I don't know what the final cost will be, since the products I'd need aren't actually available yet.

EDIT: Also the gaming laptop was $300 off, putting it at $1400 instead of $1700. Which also helps.

 

I haven't loaded up this machine yet, but my older ASUS gaming laptop, the fan noise was much quieter than my recent MBPs. Because, while there's a lot more heat to deal with, they also have about 20x the heat sink surface area to do it with. The MBP's gotta push its air through a tiny little vent, and has no space for larger fins. So the MBP makes a high-pitched whine under heavy load, and the gaming machine makes a relatively quiet whoosh.

--- Post Merged, Nov 11, 2016 ---

There's no reason I didn't do that, because I did do it. That's the entire point of my observation that I would happily have spent $1,500 on a Mac OS license to run on the superior hardware.

There is no special "matching" going on. MacOS X isn't only good on tiny notebooks. It would run amazingly well on the gaming laptop. If they supported it.

Talk to people who run Hackintosh. MacOS X is an amazing operating system.

I am aware of this, although people who pay more attention to Windows tell me it's not as severe now as it was in Windows 7.

Okay, so there's two possibilities here.

One is that you think MacOS would somehow become worse on that hardware. The other is that you have entirely missed the point of my post.

My point is: MacOS is amazing, it's worth a ton of money to me, and I would absolutely love to be able to run MacOS on higher-end hardware. Yes, I agree, MacOS works better than Windows on comparable hardware. But that doesn't mean "therefore, I should be permanently restricted to lower-end hardware to keep MacOS from being too amazing". It means "it really sucks that the hardware gap is so very large".

And I'm not remotely kidding. If it were an option, I would spend $1,500 on a MacOS license for that gaming laptop. I'd prefer that to the laptop running Windows, for reasons I think you can probably imagine. I would also prefer it to any machine Apple is currently willing to sell me.

Basically, thought experiment for you: Take that 2013 i7 with the 750M, and run bootcamp on it, and run Windows on that. Now compare the 750M to the 980M. Compare the top of the line i7 to the three-year-old chip. Notice how much better it is.

Now think about what would happen if you could get that same performance improvement on top of how well the 750M machine runs with MacOS.

Wouldn't that be neat? Wouldn't that be an awesome machine?

 

Yes, I'm aware of that.

One of them targets a population willing to spend $1500 extra to get a weaker machine as long as it's thin and/or has MacOS.

The MBP costs what it does because MacOS is good, not because the hardware would be worth that money without MacOS.

 

The SSD is not actually SATA3, the specs are clearly busted. It's an M.2 PCIe slot SSD. ASUS spec sheets are sometimes a bit cut-and-pasted. It is a tragic shortcoming.

Yes, it's DDR4 instead of DDR3. I believe that's faster, and it's certainly not slower. LPDDR3 is power-efficient. That's it. It's not faster. If you want battery life no matter what it costs, LPDDR3 is better. But what if you would prefer higher performance? Then DDR4 is a better choice. And, in many cases, cheaper for comparable performance. The LPDDR3 supported by skylake is 1866MHz; DDR4 starts at 2133MHz. So the ASUS has noticably faster memory, and in benchmarks of memory-bound things, it does make a pretty measurable difference.

Also... Honestly, the "closed system" thing does not make much of a performance difference. Look at the Hackintosh users; OS X doesn't suddenly stop working well on slightly more diverse hardware, if you can find drivers at all. The closed system thing sort of works for console hardware where there's exactly one version of the hardware. Once you have as large a set as Apple does (AMD, Intel, and nVidia graphics hardware to support, for instance), the benefits are gone.

I can see some appeal to not having "unnecessary" slots... But the tradeoff is that a system can only have "no unnecessary slots" for the lowest common denominator. If it's going to meet the needs of anyone else, it's going to have some slots that some people don't need.

I can't usefully directly compare the CPUs, because Apple's specs don't give an actual part number. I can tell that the ASUS is using an i7 6700HQ. I don't know what part is in the MBP. (I'll find out in maybe two weeks.)

--- Post Merged, Nov 11, 2016 ---

Except... This isn't actually true. Not even a little. The components aren't "more expensive". The Intel CPUs are all from the exact same family the ASUS uses. The AMD 460 is a less expensive component than the nVidia 1070. I'll grant that the LPDDR3 memory may cost more than the DDR4 memory, but it's slower; it's expensive because it's low-power.

In what way, exactly, is the MBP more "techonologically advanced"? It can't be the Intel Skylake CPUs which both of them use. It can't be the LPDDR3 memory, which is all standard. The closest we get is Thunderbolt 3, really. (I guess you could make a case for the display, maybe?)

I think that's what frustrates me most about this; people trying to justify the prices by appealing to "better technology" when the entire point of Apple's shift to x86 was to get access to commodity hardware so they could build machines using 100% standard off-the-shelf components. Which is what they do for most of the guts of the system.

The cooling and case are sorta fancy, but 100% of every technological advance there is going only into making the machine thinner, not into making it more powerful.

If I were gonna do a car comparison, I'd compare this to contrasting the 2000-era Honda Insight with a sports car. The Insight was a really incredible bit of engineering, I had one and loved it, but... It couldn't pull a trailer, and if you wanted a feature other than 70mpg, it was not a good choice.

Apple is only building laptops for one feature these days: Thin. That's it. If you want thin, these are amazing machines. If you want other things, even a little, Apple isn't really interested in selling you laptops anymore.

And that's why I'm struggling to get used to Windows 10, even though I hate it; because I can't justify continuing to spend $1500+ extra on laptops just for MacOS. (... especially now that Windows has preliminary support for Unix utilities and such, which makes life a lot easier for me.)

 

Did someone on macrumors seriously just tell me they can't imagine why anyone would want Mac OS X instead of Windows?

--- Post Merged, Nov 12, 2016 ---

This is an upgrade from my old G55, and yes, I looked at the cooling, and I think this one will do okay. I haven't been able to make it explode into flames yet, anyway. Looks like they put a lot more thought into heat sink behavior and cooling fans than they did in the model from four years ago.

Sure I would. My coworkers are all techies. I point out "hey, this has a PCIe SSD slot and a 2.5" bay for a large storage drive", and they're sold.

You can buy a more powerful PC, but you can't carry it over to a friend's house for gaming very easily.

Yeah, I'm 44, I still play games sometimes, and I still use computers professionally. Not everyone fits nicely into one tiny little stereotype.