MBP 13" (2016) As A Tide-Me-Over

[bmustaf]

I have been patiently waiting a couple years to replace my 2013 rMBP (it was getting long in tooth about late 2014), but the battery now lasts 30 minutes and it's just, well, frankly, a giant POS.

With a Nov 17-25 delivery on my new 15" I simply cannot wait any longer with the battery finally falling off a cliff so I picked up a low end 13" MBP (no-TB) at an Apple Store as a stop-gap (it will either go back or go to into the employee fleet when the 15" TB'ed machine comes).

Incredibly disappointed. I understand I went from an i7 w/16GB RAM to an i5 w/8GB but even with no major apps open, just some App Store downloads and file copies, the system is pretty sluggish.

I'd expect that from a MacBook, but make no mistake, this thing is *NOT* a Pro. There's not even a load on it yet and it's sluggish on just migrating a few things (no major copies, not restoring from a TM backup, just some file copies and app installs).

I hope the 15"ers represent a bit more bang for the buck, because the low end 13" model doesn't deserve the Pro moniker, frankly.

 

[tubeexperience]

You should help a poor student out by sending your POS to her (me).

 

[New_Mac_Smell]

30 minutes battery life? Sluggish copying files? Me thinks either a troll or you're not doing something right...

 

[thekev]

Eh... I think you're being overly dramatic in every possible way. Your machine was close to new a couple years ago. If the battery lasts 30 minutes, it's nearing failure. The stop gap idea is ridiculous. No one needs a stop gap for a couple weeks. Just plug it in whenever you use it.

Now regarding lag, that isn't cpu bound lag. It has nothing to do with 13" or 15" models. Even i5 vs i7 is meaningless here. If your app has a cpu bound set of installer scripts, it might be faster on a 15". That can allocate a couple cores solely to app installation while keeping the others free, but no one actually needs that. Walk away and make coffee while the damn thing installs.

 

[bmustaf]

30 minutes battery life? Sluggish copying files? Me thinks either a troll or you're not doing something right...

Methinks you can't read. Re-read the post, the OLD mac had 30 minute battery life, thus necessitating the hold-me-over new Mac.
[doublepost=1478310432][/doublepost]

Eh... I think you're being overly dramatic in every possible way. Your machine was close to new a couple years ago. If the battery lasts 30 minutes, it's nearing failure. The stop gap idea is ridiculous. No one needs a stop gap for a couple weeks. Just plug it in whenever you use it.

Now regarding lag, that isn't cpu bound lag. It has nothing to do with 13" or 15" models. Even i5 vs i7 is meaningless here. If your app has a cpu bound set of installer scripts, it might be faster on a 15". That can allocate a couple cores solely to app installation while keeping the others free, but no one actually needs that. Walk away and make coffee while the damn thing installs.

Newark-Hong Kong = 16 hours and United's In-Seat Power is notoriously unreliable on their 772, even in Business

7 days in Hong Kong running between meetings w/o power

Hong Kong-Newark = 15.5 hrs and again United's In-Seat Power is notoriously unreliable on their 772, even in Business

Yup, this isn't CPU bound lag, which makes it all-the-more disappointing b/c the promise of "faster SSD" and "faster memory" sounded great, but, uh, hasn't materialized into a better user experience.

 

[thekev]

Newark-Hong Kong = 16 hours

7 days in Hong Kong running between meetings w/o power

Hong Kong-Newark = 15.5 hrs

Yup, this isn't CPU bound lag, which makes it all-the-more disappointing b/c the promise of "faster SSD" and "faster memory" sounded great, but, uh, hasn't materialized into a better user experience.

Okay fair enough, I certainly don't envy that flight or the lack of power between meetings. It sounds pretty terrible.

The only significant difference between the 13" and 15" for the kind of stuff you describe should be storage bound. I imagine they're reporting speeds based on sustained transfer. If the machine is new, it's probably going through that stupid spotlight indexing, in which adding your directories to the spotlight privacy system preference pane should alleviate the temporary lag.

Obviously I'm not there to diagnose your machine, but this is a pretty common source of similar problems. Way back in the power pc days, it was much worse. Spotlight would try to index Adobe's scratchdisk files. This had a couple particular race conditions, which could result in application crashes. The easiest way around it was to disable indexing on those directories.

 

[bmustaf]

Okay fair enough, I certainly don't envy that flight or the lack of power between meetings. It sounds pretty terrible.

The only significant difference between the 13" and 15" for the kind of stuff you describe should be storage bound. I imagine they're reporting speeds based on sustained transfer. If the machine is new, it's probably going through that stupid spotlight indexing, in which adding your directories to the spotlight privacy system preference pane should alleviate the temporary lag.

Obviously I'm not there to diagnose your machine, but this is a pretty common source of similar problems. Way back in the power pc days, it was much worse. Spotlight would try to index Adobe's scratchdisk files. This had a couple particular race conditions, which could result in application crashes. The easiest way around it was to disable indexing on those directories.

Yeah, the flights aren't short! One of the things I like about the USB-C MBP is the ability to recharge it from a battery, though. I have an Anker USB-C capable battery and while it won't charge it as fast as the machine (can) deplete the battery, it will slow it quite a bit or recharge it when you're not using it. Huge boon for running between meetings when it's in my pack, can just get plugged in and pick up 500mahs or whatever while moving between meetings.

I disabled Spotlight indexing out of the box, and it did help (and I'll reenable it before bed and let it run overnight).

This really is about setting expectations and customer expectations, I think. Put an "Air" label on this thing and I'd be all smiles (even at this price, maybe, it's only a $1,500 machine), but I really feel like the machine can't (and shouldn't) wear the Pro name.

 

[riggieri]

I completely disagree. I picked up the non touch version of the 13" Monday night, coming from a 2011 Air. We also have at our office, a 2015 2.8 MBPR, a 2011 Mac mini, a 2015 iMac 4.0 and a couple 2012 Mac Pros. I have probably used every MBP since 2007.

This is not sluggish at all. The read speed of the SSD is 2700MB/s. The internal graphics cards is faster than last years internal. I don't do heavy lifting on this obviously because I have access to a couple 2012 MacPro's but seriously, sluggish. There is not LAG was so ever.

My issues are though, yea the keyboard is a little lick, but I bang on the keys. I can type faster on this then the older keyboard though.

I wish they would have made a 45W charger, but this thing charges super fast.

I wish they just made it the same size as last years and gave me a bigger screen. The screen in gorgeous. Was nicer than our 15 MBPR.

 

[thekev]

I disabled Spotlight indexing out of the box, and it did help (and I'll reenable it before bed and let it run overnight).

That particular issue has been around virtually forever, and a faster SSD doesn't help very much. It's because you're accessing so many files. Calls to disk are many orders of magnitude slower than cache or even ram.

This really is about setting expectations and customer expectations, I think. Put an "Air" label on this thing and I'd be all smiles (even at this price, maybe, it's only a $1,500 machine), but I really feel like the machine can't (and shouldn't) wear the Pro name.

I don't know that this is much different from previous releases. There are always some complaints, some of which were really bad. The 2012s had image persistence issues, and people reported screen de-lamination after months of use. They also experienced gpu failures at a higher than normal rate, although nowhere near as bad as the 2011s.

I think Apple's going to regret the price hike. They currently sell last year's 15" model for $2k, just like last year. A 20% increase was pretty steep for that stupid LED bar, and they implemented exchange rate adjustments at the same time.

This is not sluggish at all. The read speed of the SSD is 2700MB/s. The internal graphics cards is faster than last years internal. I don't do heavy lifting on this obviously because I have access to a couple 2012 MacPro's but seriously, sluggish. There is not LAG was so ever.

The speed of these things is most helpful when you're accessing contiguous data. If you have to retrieve a bunch of files or headers or whatever, it can still be a bottleneck. This isn't the same as just transferring several hundred GB in one long buffered stream. Granted I am speculating a little on how they index these things.

 

[Mcdevidr]

I don't buy it. The new non touch bar 13 is not sluggish at all. I've been using mine for this whole week. The battery life is amazing doing doing normal day to day task. It runs games and I can swipe out of them and do other things without it slowing down.

 

[Ghost31]

Is it possible your MacBook is still spotlight indexing and that's what's causing sluggishness?