Ah, got it. I could have sworn I just hit reply but maybe I had multiple quote selected or something. Sorry for the misquote.
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MacBook Pro today: barely better than one released 4 years ago
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One is a notebook that can be a tablet, one is a tablet that can be a notebook, Apple offers neither, both Surface Book & Surface Pro will continue to evolve, nor are they very difficult use, for your description you have used neither. To me the Yoga is good implementation as it offers a lots and removes little. If the keys concern, the Thinkpad version is the one to look at as the keyboard deck raises and locks in place, when the display is rotated. I get that some have no interest in a convertible or 2 in 1 Mac, yet that should not preclude those that do.
As such the Windows convertibles and 2 in 1`s are now viable systems to be a daily driver, offering a dynamic that no Mac can. Ironically should Apple offer such a notebook, the reversal across the forum would be significant to say the very least,. The primary reason such notebooks are written off de facto on the forum is that Apple does not produce one, with people focusing on the negatives, same can be applied to all including the Mac...
A quick look around the forums illustrates that stability has decreased with later releases of the desktop OS, with 10.11 still being problematic for some. Current desktop release is driven by sales & marketing this results the OS being released with a significant number of bugs, which may or may not interrupt the users workflow/usage. I wish Appel would fix the issues before moving on, not just moving on for the sake of it and generating more problems. As for social media WWDC said it all, it`s a huge focus for Apple, equally I would prefer that the native mail client worked out on the day of release not months later than more bells & whistles and emoji`s.
Q-6
I have had a Surface 3 for about a year now, as a backup to my 2011 MacBook Pro and as a replacement for my Nexus 7. I would recommend a Surface for someone who wanted a computer that also allows drawing and note taking. It's fine as a computer and if you are OS agnostic, compares well against a MacBook Air, especially in price. As a tablet, it lags both Android and iOS in apps. If you don't use apps heavily, it won't matter. But if you want the same apps on your tablet as are on your Android or iOS phone, you will probably be disappointed. In my opinion, for one device, you get a good computer, but a marginal tablet, for a great price. The true test for Apple will come once Microsoft puts Thunderbolt 3 in their Surface line. Then they will be able to brag of having a powerful workstation (Surface plus TB3 powered dock capable of adding an external GPU and running 4K/60Hz monitors), a laptop, and a tablet all in one, for the price of a mid-ranged MacBook Pro.
As for dynamics, I can't think of any ecosystem better than that offered by Apple. Your watch talks to your phone, which talks to your tablet, which talks to your computer, which talks to your TV, which soon will talk to you Internet of Things devices. Is it a potentially expensive ecosystem? Yes. But, if you can afford the admitted luxury of living in Apple's world, it is a very pleasant and smooth experience.
Stability. As I said in an earlier post, I'm using a 2011 MacBook Pro. We just fixed my wife's old 2012 MacBook Air. Both of them are fine. I've been using Apple computers since 2001 and while I've experienced instabilities in the past, except for the normal issues that every new update brings (from Apple, Google, or Microsoft), everything currently is pretty stable.
Lastly, the social aspects Apple has been promoting. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it necessary? Also yes. They are reacting to the pressure that an app centric world brings. It is not a coincidence that Google I/O's Keynote had much the same emphasis on social. We now have third party apps that are so powerful, you can practically stay in them for all your social needs. You can communicate with your friends, using text, voice, or video. You can post photos and home videos. You can buy services. The apps are becoming more important than the OS. And ultimately, both Google and Apple need us using their OS. Microsoft is re-adjusting as their mobile operations are a mess right now, but they will also need to get into the social world.
I agree, barely better but with some minor upgrades that make some people jump jump. Look at the geek bench scores from the last 4 years..not a lot has changed...
The vast majority of macbook pro users I know have no interest in a touch screen macbook, they don't want a detachable screen. They would alienate more people than they would please with the pointless "upgrades" you are talking about. I look at all the best machines from other manufacturers and they still have poor touch pads, rubbish design and they all run windows which is a big part of owning a macbook pro. The only machine I have seen that I really like the look of is the chromebook pixel and that still isn't as nice looking or a better machine.
I think you underestimate what most people use their MacBooks for in a professional capacity. You seem to want something that either doesn't exist or you want something that does a lot of things averagely rather than something that is still the best general work laptop.
I think you underestimate what most people use their MacBooks for in a professional capacity. You seem to want something that either doesn't exist or you want something that does a lot of things averagely rather than something that is still the best general work laptop.
Something tells me that if Timmy released a macbook with a touch screen you and your friends would be gushing over it and talking about how much better it is.
I would say that you would call it 'Magical and Revolutionary' but that is as outdated a saying as the cpu is on the macbook pro
BA DUM TISH
You should look harder. The new machines have nice touch pads, the Xps machines are very nice
Subjective
And apparently part of owning a Macbook Pro is also owning buggy as hell software as Apple has really let their quality control slide.
Averagely? Is that why someone can get a far more powerful quad core dell xps 15, and then upgrade the ram, the sata hdd to a sata ssd, AND the pci-e 32 gb ssd to a 256 or 512 pci-e samsung 950?
I think going from 2012 to 2015 would be a very noticeable upgrade. Less so from 2013 on. 2013 seems to be the sweet spot for both MBP and MBA in terms of bang for your buck.
I much prefers apple approach to the problem. Sure in theory it sounds great to have everything in one machine but in pratice, I have found it ends up being a compromise.
When I use my Macbook, I have the full power of it along with the ease of use and multiple ports. It is a workstation, with which the surface cant compete.
When I pick up my iPad, I have a full fledge tablet OS with apps that no ecosystem can compete with. I have all my documents from my Mac accessible through iCloud, it is almost seamless. I have all of my safari history, open tabs etc. Even most apps take advantage of iCloud allowing you to seamlessly move from your laptop to tablet. You get the benefits of an all in one device without compromise.
Other than the processor what is so dated spec wise? And Skylake processors are barely faster than the Haswell and Broadwell processors. I have desktop versions of Haswell and Skylake in my office and in real world day-to-day usage they are hard to tell apart. The fastest is maybe 8-9% faster than the slowest on my long running Machine Learning or video encoding tasks.
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Radeon R9 M370X is actually from the Radeon HD 7700 series which was launched back in 2012.
And how many people is that? Apple sold over four million Macs last quarter. The amount of people you know is so insignificant as to be worthless from a statistical point of view. People said the same thing about using a stylus until Apple released the Pencil or a tablet smaller than 10" until they released the iPad Mini.
Same thing with you claiming the word "professional" as though it's a catch all for anyone who uses the computer for work. There are a lot of ways to use a Macbook in a "professional capacity" that involve having a touch screen.
I wouldn't say it's been incremental by any means, if you come from Windows then yeah you might think that because they don't change the body style, but the truth is when you look at the speed transfer onboard SSDs and of peripheral devices with the clock speeds of the CPU, RAM, and GPU, not to mention the displays, Apple has been doing significant upgrades.
With that being said, Apple is also limited by their design specifications and what hardware manufacturers can supply to fit those specifications. If you want power, spend 2000 on an Alienware PC that's almost 3" thick and as heavy as a cinderblock and quit complaining about Apple, photographers and graphic design artists will gladly pay that much for the display alone because it's near perfect.
With that being said, Apple is also limited by their design specifications and what hardware manufacturers can supply to fit those specifications. If you want power, spend 2000 on an Alienware PC that's almost 3" thick and as heavy as a cinderblock and quit complaining about Apple, photographers and graphic design artists will gladly pay that much for the display alone because it's near perfect.
Apple is trying to maintain a distinction between iOS and the Mac, which means no touchscreen/tablet-ish Macs... It would be hard to use a touchscreen on a big machine like the MacBook Pro (we don't see many PC hybrids with quad cores, terabyte SSDs and 15" screens, either). The MacBook, on the other hand, could easily have been a hybrid, and that seems to have been intentional on Apple's part.
As for the parts getting old, it's more a matter of the sealed design than that there are really better parts that would fit this type of machine. Even when we get Skylake, we'll see a ho-hum 10% speed boost. They do choose slow graphics cards to get long battery life - the gaming notebooks that use something noticeably better get an hour or two on battery. Most workstation-class notebooks use the workstation versions (important on Windows due to drivers, but not on Mac where Apple is writing the driver) of cards very similar to what Apple uses - the exceptions are 17" and close to 10 lbs with the power brick, or they have very short battery lives (sometimes both). Polaris may offer us real hope there - the new low-power card is supposed to be 2-3x as fast as what we have.
Where Apple has really fallen behind is in memory and drive capacity. There isn't another quad-core workstation type notebook out there that won't take 32 GB of RAM, and most have some provision for greater than 1 TB of drive capacity (and for getting to 1TB in some way other than a single, very expensive terabyte SSD). Some of the smaller and lighter ones use only "blade" SSDs like Apple does, but will take two of them. Many offer a "blade" slot and a 2.5" bay.
They have also fallen behind in display quality, after years of dominance. Most direct competitors to the 15" MacBook Pro offer a 4K display, a few of which are wide-gamut. To Apple's credit, the display is consistent across their MacBook Pro line (apart from the old SuperDrive model). PCs often come standard with a 1080p display, including some awful ones on expensive machines, but offer 4K, wide-gamut, etc. as an upgrade. The $1999 15" Retina MBP has the same display as the $3199 model.
I'm interested to see what the new one will bring... Skylake isn't a huge upgrade - maybe a 10% speed bump. Polaris may well be a major upgrade on the most expensive model. Will we see an upgrade to the 16 GB/1 TB limits? A 4K display, which I'm almost sure would be wide-gamut if Apple went that way? They have been using a lot of wide-gamut displays lately, and macOS is far better at handling them than Windows.
My concern is that we'll see a machine that's still limited at 16 GB/1TB, still with the same display, and that loses all the ports except for a passel of USB-C ports that require dongles. I'd give up Polaris (which, in this scenario, is the big upgrade) for standard ports and an SD reader. I'm not sure I'd give up a 32 GB/2TB 4K MacBook Pro with Polaris to avoid dongles - as a matter of fact, I wouldn't - but if the real upgrade was Polaris alone???
As for the parts getting old, it's more a matter of the sealed design than that there are really better parts that would fit this type of machine. Even when we get Skylake, we'll see a ho-hum 10% speed boost. They do choose slow graphics cards to get long battery life - the gaming notebooks that use something noticeably better get an hour or two on battery. Most workstation-class notebooks use the workstation versions (important on Windows due to drivers, but not on Mac where Apple is writing the driver) of cards very similar to what Apple uses - the exceptions are 17" and close to 10 lbs with the power brick, or they have very short battery lives (sometimes both). Polaris may offer us real hope there - the new low-power card is supposed to be 2-3x as fast as what we have.
Where Apple has really fallen behind is in memory and drive capacity. There isn't another quad-core workstation type notebook out there that won't take 32 GB of RAM, and most have some provision for greater than 1 TB of drive capacity (and for getting to 1TB in some way other than a single, very expensive terabyte SSD). Some of the smaller and lighter ones use only "blade" SSDs like Apple does, but will take two of them. Many offer a "blade" slot and a 2.5" bay.
They have also fallen behind in display quality, after years of dominance. Most direct competitors to the 15" MacBook Pro offer a 4K display, a few of which are wide-gamut. To Apple's credit, the display is consistent across their MacBook Pro line (apart from the old SuperDrive model). PCs often come standard with a 1080p display, including some awful ones on expensive machines, but offer 4K, wide-gamut, etc. as an upgrade. The $1999 15" Retina MBP has the same display as the $3199 model.
I'm interested to see what the new one will bring... Skylake isn't a huge upgrade - maybe a 10% speed bump. Polaris may well be a major upgrade on the most expensive model. Will we see an upgrade to the 16 GB/1 TB limits? A 4K display, which I'm almost sure would be wide-gamut if Apple went that way? They have been using a lot of wide-gamut displays lately, and macOS is far better at handling them than Windows.
My concern is that we'll see a machine that's still limited at 16 GB/1TB, still with the same display, and that loses all the ports except for a passel of USB-C ports that require dongles. I'd give up Polaris (which, in this scenario, is the big upgrade) for standard ports and an SD reader. I'm not sure I'd give up a 32 GB/2TB 4K MacBook Pro with Polaris to avoid dongles - as a matter of fact, I wouldn't - but if the real upgrade was Polaris alone???
Still 70% faster than the previous Nvidia if you believe Apple. Independent review say its a 30% performance increase. And it is a mobile part so low power consumption is required. That takes considerable engineering effort.
This is not true of the 15-inch model. For the most part, the focus has been on power efficiency. Any perceived differences in day-to-day performance are largely due to faster SSD speeds and OS improvements over time.
Geekbench scores for the base / upgraded 15" model since 2012:
Mid 2012: 10900 / 11660
Early 2013: 11214 / 12023
Late 2013: 11365 / 12527
Mid 2014: 12052 / 12985
Mid 2015: 12313 / 13231
From 2012-2015, you're looking at a ~13% benchmark improvement for both the base and upgraded models.
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Funny how you would use "by a large margin" in the same sentence as "objectively" since "by a large margin" is quite a subjective term.
The actual percentage point increase may not be considered "a large margin" by all...but then again, who's going to disagree that a nearly 300% speed increase in SSD performance is not a large margin? The point was to say that "the 15" rMBP has barely improved in 4 years" is nonsensical, even though I'm technically wrong - it's still subjective (and I admitted that). I can fight nonsense with nonsense, can't I?
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Significantly faster CPU?? Not according to results
https://browser.primatelabs.com
Ridiculous SSD? no, moving from Hdd to ssd is a ridiculous improvement, most will not notice a 2012 ssd v 2016 ssd for everyday use .
The improvement is in the GPU and battery, and it's not huge, but welcome.
Frankly while many might think it's worthwhile to upgrade , there are many that think the cost does not warrant the upgrade. I own a 2012 rMBP, and I see no significant upgrade , battery is my only issue, and I would upgrade for TB3, and I want to use an external egpu, the 2016 rMBP would be a waste of many in my opinion , waiting for the update.
Though much better than the case of the 2016 Mac mini. While it's got significatly faster GPU and ssd, it's junk compared for the 2012 mini.
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The actual percentage point increase may not be considered "a large margin" by all...but then again, who's going to disagree that a nearly 300% speed increase in SSD performance is not a large margin? The point was to say that "the 15" rMBP has barely improved in 4 years" is nonsensical, even though I'm technically wrong - it's still subjective (and I admitted that). I can fight nonsense with nonsense, can't I?
The question is, from day to day use can you notice 300% increase
spec sheets can be meaningless, when one takes into account all the bottlenecks in a PC architecture. Objectively one can do the same task on a 2012 and 2016 machine, and not notice a difference, or it be so small that they would claim it's barely improved.
Was in a store the other day and played a bit with the 15" machine. Some may have design quibbles but functionally with that new SSD they put in, most 95% of people will be pleased with its performance.
The Intel lineup is not making monumental but more incremental steps and the rest of the machine is solid with battery life a clear winner. Most people here are looking to see the most tricked out Macbook Pro we can get so it's understandable the desire to see all the toys maxed out.
But for the real world of users on the whole, there's little doubt the Intel chips arriving in 2008 provide to this day a decent level of performance and capability. Overlooked too is the OS updates. El Capitan runs beautifully on this early 2008 Penryn.
With the maxed out 6GB RAM and a 500GB SSD here, the irony is the early 2008 Penryn Macbook Pro runs better then when it was originally released.
Some of course don't want to invest the Apple prices for a machine with an upgrade close at hand (October). Others see the architecture as solid and reliable and prefer that over a year one introduction even with SkyLake.
Much of this comes down to personal usage and a little perspective. We're a bit lacking on the latter here as people have worked themselves into a frenzy anticipating a release that ain't.
Right now, Apple has a screen replacement program for the retina MacBooks as a result of "StainGate" -- the anti-reflective coating flaking off of retina panels.
Can you imagine how many -more- incidents of the coating coming off we'd have if users were touching the display all the time?
Prediction:
We're not going to see any "touch-screen" MacBooks from Apple any time soon...
Can you imagine how many -more- incidents of the coating coming off we'd have if users were touching the display all the time?
Prediction:
We're not going to see any "touch-screen" MacBooks from Apple any time soon...
do u think the 2016 15" would be an improvement performance wise over the curret 2015 one?
Honestly guys, we are at the point where even going from my 2010 Mac Pro to my 2015 custom build PC with a GTX 980 has little performance difference. The ONLY difference I notice is gaming, and that is due to the graphics card, not the CPU. Encoding is also a bit faster due to CUDA.
CPUs now are at the point where it is mostly down to power efficiency, and onboard graphics improvements.
Would people please stop treating the Skylake processors like they are a 300% performance increase? Ever since SSDs came out, we have pretty much reached the limit on our computers (CPU performance and overall perceived performance with SSDs). GPUs (1080) are still decently upgrades - even from the previous generation. But that is mostly for gaming, and higher end graphics (even on mobile) require more power and will destroy battery life.
CPUs now are at the point where it is mostly down to power efficiency, and onboard graphics improvements.
Would people please stop treating the Skylake processors like they are a 300% performance increase? Ever since SSDs came out, we have pretty much reached the limit on our computers (CPU performance and overall perceived performance with SSDs). GPUs (1080) are still decently upgrades - even from the previous generation. But that is mostly for gaming, and higher end graphics (even on mobile) require more power and will destroy battery life.