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Instead of buying dongles, just buy some new USB-C cables. There are plenty of varieties available now to connect your existing devices (iPhone, USB 3.0 Mobile drives, card readers, etc). Except for HDMI, projectors or Thunderbolt 2.0 devices.

So pretty much the exact devices that he is talking about?

As for flash drives, the reason people use them is for sharing files between two devices, and more than 90% of the time the "other device" he is sharing with is going to be a USB-A port. So he can buy special double-ended drives for when he the source for the files, but half the time the issue is going to be the other person handing him a drive to plug in... and chances are slim it's going to be a USB-C flash drive.
 
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I'm not compelled to get a new MBP until ram goes up to 32gb.
Especially on the quad core 15".
Also the .2ghz bump is pretty weak.
Only thing I'm excited about at Apple are space gray keyboard and mouse.
 
An iPad pro would not work for me or my firm. The MacBook Air might work but I'd rather have the premium screen and nicer body

Fair enough. Hmmm if my cash limited me to the 128GB MacBookPro, I'd sooner buy the 256GB MacBook for the same price honestly. I had a 128GB Air a few years back and it was a fantastic machine but 128GB was just too small - I fill it with photos in a month.
 
I just wanted rid of the touchbar most of all. I returned my 2016 in January as my late 2013 was just better in every Dept - yes I even managed to put up with that shocking extra millimeter of thickness when carrying it around the preceding 4 years - imagine that! But honestly they need to admit defeat on the touch bar - it's never going to be right if you cannot feel what you are pressing (Esc is especially weird) and if it's buggy and occasionally launching things when interacting with the numeric keys. It's a nice idea ruined by a lack of UX honesty and discipline in my view. I would have far rather seen customisable individual keys like we saw on that transformer keyboard that priced itself out of the market a few years ago - apple is already charging insane fees for tech so why not bring back that concept. Imagine having custom key combos assigned to single keys! That would save a ton of time when working professionally as this device is intended.


It's okay to not like the Touchbar and everything. But claiming your Late-2013 rMPB is superior to the Late-2016 rMBP wit Touchbar in every department is just false. It has a better display, it has faster storage, it has improved RAM speeds, it has higher IPC, better integrated graphics etc..
 
Anyone with a new 15" MBP with Radeon 560 GPU, please let me know what your GPU benchmark scores are for Geekbench OpenCL and Cinebench R15. I am getting around 42K max for Geekbench OpenCL, and 93fps max for Cinebench. The Cinebench scores seems fine, but the Geekbench OpenCL scores are about 33% off. Even the last generation Radeon 455 is outscoring my 560. I might try to go back to the Apple Store for an exchange. Thanks to anyone in advance for your help!

Screen Shot 2017-06-08 at 11.34.12 PM.png
 
128gb storage = embarrassing.
Apple are the biggest cons in the world they buy CPUs when there about to be phased out then put them in their lines and charge extortion prices. These laptops should of had kabylake in the previous model but nope they wanted to be cheap and con you consumers and now they update to kabylake why? Because coffeelake is round the corner a six core cpu which is gonna become the standard it's due in august but might be pushed back to early 2018. Plus why are they still with ddr3 it ridiculous they are really milking it.
 
Can users easily upgrade the SSD in the MacBook Pro after purchase?
 
128gb storage = embarrassing.

Specially when it was re-introduced to the bottom-of-the-range 13" model to give the illusion of an actual price drop. Bump storage up to the previous bottom-of-the-range capacity of 256 GB and you're back to the $1500 asking price of the previous lineup.
 
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Lucky Americans, the prices are the same for you guys. In EU, the "15 inch MacBook prices increased by another €150 (~$170). It also take 3-4 weeks to ship!!!

For me it's actually cheaper to buy a ticked to New York, buy a MacBook and go back home on the same day...

Not if you pay taxes (21%) entering The Netherlands, you know you have to declare anything above *X* amount on arrival to customs, but I guess you didn't take that into account.
You could also fly from Belgium, they can't have you paying tax on arrival as a Dutch citizen.

* X = €430

For the $2399 MBP this would be ($2399/€1,11=€2145+21X€21,45)€2595 incl. taxes, you pay €2799 when you buy it here, can you fly up and down for €204?
Guess not.
 
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Apple are the biggest cons in the world they buy CPUs when there about to be phased out then put them in their lines and charge extortion prices. These laptops should of had kabylake in the previous model but nope they wanted to be cheap and con you consumers and now they update to kabylake why? Because coffeelake is round the corner a six core cpu which is gonna become the standard it's due in august but might be pushed back to early 2018. Plus why are they still with ddr3 it ridiculous they are really milking it.

Coffee Lake was never scheduled to be release in August... The roadmap has always been Q1 2018. It was only a stupid rumour from a unknown source that got picked up by WCCFTech that told us August might be a thing.

And at the time Apple released the new MacBook Pro, there was no SKU's currently available for Apple to use. So they did in-fact use the latest and greatest. Unless you wanted Apple to go one set lower on all their SKU's and start offering the ships that offers the lowest end iGPU's? The only machine that could have gotten Kaby Lake at the time was the MacBook 12-inch. Quad-Core SKU's for the 15-inch didn't exist at all and Dual-Core SKU's for the 13-inch existed in very limited quantities and was not currently being offered in the line-ups that Apple uses which are the ones with better cache and iGPU's.


And you keep making a fool out of yourself when you talk about RAM. Apple uses LPDDR3, low-power DDR3 which are more expensive than regular DDR3 and DDR4. They are far from milking it, they just don't want to go for the slightly faster, but higher voltage DDR4 which will result in additional heat and battery strain while only provide a very slight performance increase.

As neither Skylake or Kaby Lake offers support for LPDDR4 Apple has to choose to whether they want to go for low-power DDR3, or higher power DDR4 with a tiny increase in frequencies. This has nothing to do with "milking" anything. Why post about stuff you obviously have no clue about?
 
Also, still provides the same:
  • 0 USB ports
  • 0 HDMI ports
  • 0 Ethernet ports (would it even fit?)
  • 0 SD card slots
  • 0 MagSafe

A slightly better graphics card is slightly less insulting but Alienware, Asus, MSI, Razer, Sager... offer Nvidia 1060+ graphics cards (my 2014 MBP is the last to offer Nvidia). And, guess what? They're all pretty much the same size and weight, and they even offer ANTI-GLARE screens.

Meanwhile, I noticed that none of the refreshed computers at the WWDC announcement added that ridiculous Touch Bar.

The MacBook Prosumer is a great machine for prosumers but it can't handle pro tasks like 3D rendering without running out of memory.

The reality is:
  • Macbook = Macbook Air
  • Macbook Pro = Macbook
  • (nonexistent) = Macbook Pro
Could you link to the Laptops you mention? I have my doubts...
 
No kidding. You cant even get an ipad mini 4 with less storage than that. And these are 'pro' computers.
It would be another thing if the ssd was upgradeable, but nope.

My January 2016 built Asus computer came w/ 1TB & 16GB RAM & only cost $525.

Yes, it's a Windows machine (peanut gallery boos/hisses), cheap plastic build, non-retina, etc. etc.

So the trade off on a better chasis MBP is somewhat mitigated when you look at piddly hard drive & RAM, when you consider its premium pricing. I didn't even cite my ASUS has HDMI out, 2 USB-3, 1 USB-2, card reader!

If I win $10,000 in the lottery to drop $3,000 [Canadian] for a minimum spec 15" 2017 TB MBP, I'd need the rest for a nestegg to feel I wasn't frivolous in my purchase. That's a sad fact of the state of Apple specs/pricing.
 
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Not nearly as embarrassing as the iMacs that are still shipping with 5400 rpm hard drives.
Doesn't matter as much as you'd think. The Fusion Drive (hurray marketing buzzword!) is pretty smart about speeding things up by keeping the most-read blocks on the SSD. I bet you wouldn't notice it.
 
So what about the 50% boost of the ssd? Is that a fact?, i have the 2016 version (1T) now.....
 
That's exactly the biggest shortcoming of the 2016/2017 MBPs. TB3/USB-C exclusive might be understandable to configure a computers 5 years from now. At present, it cannot even be considered "survivable".
Because buying and carrying a handful of dongles and/or new cables is such a huge burden. I cannot imagine how you managed to 'survive' using Mac laptops without VGA ports for the last 15 years.
 
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What I complain about is they charge way too damn much for storage! A 1TB SSD drive costs around $350. Apple is essentially charging you ~$800 for one when you figure on the trade-in value for what it comes with.
Please show me a 1 TB SSD drive that hits speeds of 3 GB/s for $350.

And have you ever custom-ordered a car? Just selecting a different colour can cost you hundreds of Dollars. It is not uncommon for car makers to make no or almost no profit on the base model (at least for smaller cars), in a sense the base model is their loss leader. Now, it is highly unlikely that Apple actually makes a loss on their base models (a much larger fraction of their buyers buy the base model than it is the case with cars), but you have to stop to see the storage increase prices only as a cost. It is rather the other way around, the price of the base model represents a discount.
Meanwhile, 128GB isn't enough for anyone outside little old ladies looking at Facebook pages! On a "PRO" notebook!!!
Oh, a "PRO" notebook. So, if Apple had sold the function-key MBP without the pro label under the MBA label (whose 13" entry-level model comes with 128 GB to this day, and whose 11" model was offered with 64 GB for several years), everything would be hunky-dory? Are we really faulting Apple now for its product naming? Do people really buy products because of the naming and not because of features and price?
I thought Apple claimed they improved their graphics performance 3x faster with these updates? I'm not seeing it. Or is that with the external graphics card for Thunderbolt III?
I don't remember such a claim. If there is any device Apple is likely to claim such huge increases, it is usually their A-series chipsets (but I think even the new iPad Pros 'only' have a 40% increase). The only device where Apple might have made such a claim, could probably only be the new iMac Pro when comparing it to the four-year old Mac Pro.
 
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And I'm 20% just as likely to not recommend this MacBook "Pro" to anyone. It's only managed to make my work-life miserable as long as I've had it.
 
I wonder if the 2017 13" models fix the issue where the throughput on the Thunderbolt 3 ports is reduced on the right side?
Does anyone have an answer to this. I havent seen it addressed anywhere yet.
Do the Kaby Lake processors offer more PCIe lanes than the Skylake ones? Because that is the reason for the slower speed on the right TB3 ports. The U-series, TDP 28 W, dual-core processors used in the 13" MBP w/ Touchbar simply don't have enough PCIe lanes to feed four TB3 ports (or rather two TB3 controllers) at full speed.
 
Releasing anything, especially a premium laptop with 128GB of storage in 2017, should be considered a crime.

I've had 512GB (2x256 RAID0 SSD) in 2011, and 1TB SSD ever since 2012. ... reading about a brand new PREMIUM notebook featuring 128GB in 2017 is so LOL i still can't believe Apple is really doing this and thinking they are getting away with it. Quite a few people in my environment have swichted to Linux instead. People who i would have never have thought they would be switching to Linux (like: graphic artists using Blender and such). But who am i to believe anything, ... the world turned crazy in 2016 ...
 
I think people are commenting on the fact that your internal storage is non-upgradable and you will have 128GB as your storage size for as long as you own this computer. When you are buying hardware of this price you would hope to use it for a while. 128GB is not that much storage, and if you do anything with HD or 4K Video your space will be gone before you know it. Also the OS and Programs get larger and larger every year. Next year 128gb will feel totally small as you try to install more applications and use them properly. IMHO 128GB is a joke and shouldn't be even a baseline option for a "high end" laptop. 256GB should be the Minimum.

I have a 2015 MacBook with a 500Gb SSD in it. I've used 20Gb of that. Everything is in the cloud. As ever, it entirely depends on your usecase. If you need the space, get a bigger machine. If I could've knocked off a few ££ to have a smaller SSD on that MacBook I would have (but I needed the extra speed that came with that option). My day-job MacBook Pro is also fairly empty, about 200Gb of 500Gb free. All my work is stored on GitHub/iCloud/work servers.
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So here's one guy who'd spend $1299 on a Pro machine just for "e-mail/Internet". o_O

Writers. Journalists. I assume students? Apple stuck 128Gb in the iPhone 7 Plus and mine has 80Gb free after a year. Everything's up in a cloud (iCloud, BackBlaze & my home server). Local space just isn't that important to a lot of folks now.
 
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