notebook review up.."Apple MacBook Pro Review (2016): Touch of Class and Not Much Else"

[sziehr]

Unlike Apple Dell doesn't foolishly solder in their memory on their xps 15
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820236067
Works perfectly fine on the xps 15 for less than greedy Apple charges to upgrade a rmbp 13 to 16 gb!

I am sure I can add it. I think the point is they claim it can get X hour of battery life as you get it. I go and add more power hungry ram that time will go down how drastically will be debated but over all it will go down. The point is they could offer me a machine with 32 gigs of ram for a pricey upgrade but for some reason they don't.

 

[magbarn]

I am sure I can add it. I think the point is they claim it can get X hour of battery life as you get it. I go and add more power hungry ram that time will go down how drastically will be debated but over all it will go down. The point is they could offer me a machine with 32 gigs of ram for a pricey upgrade but for some reason they don't.

I'll have to go research and see if anyone has compared the battery life loss between 8,gb 16gb, and 32gb on the xps 15. I don't think the battery life loss is not as bad some are reporting it to be. Of course to be fair, the comparison should improve a workload that exceeds 16gb of ram and compare it to the 32gb model, I have a feeling having to swap memory into the SSD to act as a swap disk will consume more power than having more RAM. Flash memory is pretty power hungry during writes.

 

[sziehr]

I'll have to go research and see if anyone has compared the battery life loss between 8,gb 16gb, and 32gb on the xps 15. I don't think the battery life loss is not as bad some are reporting it to be. Of course to be fair, the comparison should improve a workload that exceeds 16gb of ram and compare it to the 32gb model, I have a feeling having to swap memory into the SSD to act as a swap disk will consume more power than having more RAM. Flash memory is pretty power hungry during writes.

This gets into the weeds on ram management. I suspect your right under load DDR4 might be better suited. The issue comes when we are in a lower power state with say email and web or iTunes etc. Then we are sapping vast amounts of power for nothing. I get there design. I just wished intel and ram makers would finish the DDR 4 Low power spec. I can not see Low power DDR4 till intel decides to grace us with the chipset.

I just found it interesting that with all this uproar about DDR4 I can not find a single machine that will ship with more ram than 8 gigs on a single stick. I have no idea why. Dell normally lets me toss parts in to upgrade till I am tired of giving them money. They are very firm on this ram thing and the CPU. I wonder if it has to do with the move to Kabby for them.

 

[inhalexhale1]

For those who are happy for the new rMBP, the macbook AIR was perfect for your uses. Apple should've made these new MBP the new Air line and kept a separate Pro line . Now that Apple has decided to give us a new Macbook Air with higher MBP prices, they've essentially taken away that choice if we want to continue using MacOS.

I'm not happy with the direction of the new MBP. But to say it's somehow on the level of a MBA? You lose all credibility.

 

[Marshall73]

I'm loving my new 15" pro. I use my MacBook daily for a variety of tasks and run a couple of VM's and this matching is superb. Even with running VM's I'm clocking between 6 and 8 hours of battery.

Also this thing charges damn quick, an hour of charging takes it up over 60% even when you are working on it and running VMWare.

The trackpad is fantastic, I use the Magic Trackpad with the iMac and love the bigger trackpad on the MacBook. Also, the keyboard is ace. It is totally solid and much better than the squidgy old one. Took a couple of mins to get used to it and now I type faster than ever before.

I bought 2 USB-C to USB-A adaptors (For my USB lan adapter and anything else that isn't USB C) for 5 quid a pair and replaced my external drive cables with USB-C versions for 4 pounds. I also got a couple of dual USB-C / A flash drives for 10 pounds each just for general data transfer. I also bought a smaller bag as I no longer need my backpack to cart around the big old 2012 non retina MacBook Pro.

Anyone comparing this to an Air model has not used the new pros or is just plain trolling.

 

[Wackery]

Anyone comparing this to an Air model has not used the new pros or is just plain trolling.

yeah, the air is much more practical

 

[Marshall73]

yeah, the air is much more practical

Who sucked the jam out of your donut? Looking at your posts it would appear that Apple came round to your house and took a **** in your coffee. The forums are for discussion and not a place for you to grind yer axe.

 

[Rafterman]

If it wasn't for McOS, I would definitely go Dell XPS:

Macbook-like build quality
Quad Core i7
32GB RAM
2TB SSD (Once Samsung comes out with their 2TB m.2 card in January)
Full array of ports, including s USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port
It might even be upgradable to Bluetooth 5, as the wifi/bt card id replaceable, as is the RAM and SSD
$3,600 (vs $4,300 for maxed out Macbook, with only 16GB RAM, and only $2,300 if you want only 1TB SSD in thr XPS)

But, as I said, MacOS is still the biggest, most important feature of Macbook Pros.

 

[therealseebs]

What a nonsense! It's really impressive how easy it is to manipulate people with unobjective garbage information like this. Please open your eyes and make yourself your own opinion. Go to the next Apple store or take a look at the benchmarks of the new Macbook Pro 15". If these benchmarks belong to family-notebooks, then I would like to see a professional notebook.

"Professional" isn't about synthetic benchmark scores, sometimes.

Things I'm getting from my Dell that I can't get from a Macbook:

• Docking station. Yes, I care. I like to have a setup with a bunch of stuff plugged in. That theoretically next year sometime there might be a TB3 dock on the market that can do most of it eventually with a cable is neat, but it's not a real replacement.
• Non-glossy screen.
• SD card reader and various ports I actually care about. Just Works with the things I want to connect it to.
  
• Function keys, key travel, and numeric keypad. (I admit, I could live without the keypad. I can't live without the function key row and the key travel.)
  
• Enough memory to run large VMs, which I sometimes want. (Has 32, upgrades to 64.)
• Can have two storage devices. (Currently two SSDs. Both user-upgradeable, so next year when SSD prices drop, I can upgrade further if I want to.)

The benchmark doesn't cover things like "can I have 4TB of internal storage", or "how does it do at running two VMs, each of which has 16GB of memory, simultaneously".

And yes, I've actually had the 2016. Several of my Mac-user coworkers have too. The net result is that company policy has changed, and we won't buy any more 2016s unless Apple fixes stuff. Mac users are going to be getting 2015s. And the people who got the 2016s all agree that this is a good decision.

This machine is sorta crap.

 

[magbarn]

If it wasn't for McOS, I would definitely go Dell XPS:

Macbook-like build quality
Quad Core i7
32GB RAM
2TB SSD (Once Samsung comes out with their 2TB m.2 card in January)
Full array of ports, including s USB-C Thunderbolt 3 port
It might even be upgradable to Bluetooth 5, as the wifi/bt card id replaceable, as is the RAM and SSD
$3,600 (vs $4,300 for maxed out Macbook, with only 16GB RAM, and only $2,300 if you want only 1TB SSD in thr XPS)

But, as I said, MacOS is still the biggest, most important feature of Macbook Pros.

Handoff and continuity is another big plus.
Unfortunately the trackpad still isn't as good on the xps15. Also Apple is the only game in town with a much more useful 16:10 screen. If the trackpad would be fixed I'd have a xps15 right now. The industry standard m2 ssd means you can drop in 4TB ssd in the next 2-3 years. The 32 gb of ram also is a good insurance against obsolescence. I might go back to windows though after a decade of macOS with the Kaby lake /pascal refresh of the xps 15.

 

[therealseebs]

Function keys are better? Since when? I haven't seen an app use a function key since the 1990s.

You must never have used a Mac, then, because MacOS has a number of internal functions bound to function keys even now, even on the brand new 2016 rMBP. Go look through system preferences in the couple of different places that keybindings are set up.

Admittedly, about 80% of my use of that row is the escape key, but there's often functions attached to F1-F12 in various programs, and sometimes I care about those functions.

 

[dark_mark]

The net result is that company policy has changed, and we won't buy any more 2016s unless Apple fixes stuff. Mac users are going to be getting 2015s. And the people who got the 2016s all agree that this is a good decision.

Same with my company. I work as a software engineer for a large media corporation. We have decided that new MacBooks Pros don't meet our needs. In fact we will no longer be buying any macs whatsoever.

Price have little to do with our decision. It's mostly the fact that the business world lives in the present and we have absolutely no accessories that use USB C.

The only people who live in the future are the users on this forum

 

[Naimfan]

Price have little to do with our decision. It's mostly the fact that the real world lives in the present and we have absolutely no accessories that use USB C.

The only people who live in the future are the users on this forum

Ha!

Exactly correct.

And I hope you don't mind my slight edit.

 

[mac_in_tosh]

USB-C/TB-3 is the future. Right now people are going through the growing pains that comes with any new technology. But in a year or two people will wonder what the fuss was all about.

My 2011 MB Pro has the usual ports plus one Thunderbolt port. I thought that to be a good balance between the present and the future, and including the usual ports and a couple of USB-C/TB-3 ports for the 2016 model would have kept a lot more people happy. For me, the "future" never really materialized as every time I checked, there were few Thunderbolt devices available and what was available had high price tags. So only time will tell about USB-C/TB3. The fact that Apple is pushing this does not have the tech world clout some may think it has. Firewire anyone?

 

[poorcody]

Price have little to do with our decision. It's mostly the fact that the business world lives in the present and we have absolutely no accessories that use USB C.

All your accessories can use USB-C. It is backward compatible with USB. USB-C is the future, and the present. You need new cables, not new accessories.

 

[Wackery]

My 2011 MB Pro has the usual ports plus one Thunderbolt port. I thought that to be a good balance between the present and the future, and including the usual ports and a couple of USB-C/TB-3 ports for the 2016 model would have kept a lot more people happy. For me, the "future" never really materialized as every time I checked, there were few Thunderbolt devices available and what was available had high price tags. So only time will tell about USB-C/TB3. The fact that Apple is pushing this does not have the tech world clout some may think it has. Firewire anyone?

"Professional" isn't about synthetic benchmark scores, sometimes.

Things I'm getting from my Dell that I can't get from a Macbook:

• Docking station. Yes, I care. I like to have a setup with a bunch of stuff plugged in. That theoretically next year sometime there might be a TB3 dock on the market that can do most of it eventually with a cable is neat, but it's not a real replacement.
• Non-glossy screen.
• SD card reader and various ports I actually care about. Just Works with the things I want to connect it to.
  
• Function keys, key travel, and numeric keypad. (I admit, I could live without the keypad. I can't live without the function key row and the key travel.)
  
• Enough memory to run large VMs, which I sometimes want. (Has 32, upgrades to 64.)
• Can have two storage devices. (Currently two SSDs. Both user-upgradeable, so next year when SSD prices drop, I can upgrade further if I want to.)

The benchmark doesn't cover things like "can I have 4TB of internal storage", or "how does it do at running two VMs, each of which has 16GB of memory, simultaneously".

And yes, I've actually had the 2016. Several of my Mac-user coworkers have too. The net result is that company policy has changed, and we won't buy any more 2016s unless Apple fixes stuff. Mac users are going to be getting 2015s. And the people who got the 2016s all agree that this is a good decision.

This machine is sorta crap.

Same with my company. I work as a software engineer for a large media corporation. We have decided that new MacBooks Pros don't meet our needs. In fact we will no longer be buying any macs whatsoever.

Price have little to do with our decision. It's mostly the fact that the business world lives in the present and we have absolutely no accessories that use USB C.

The only people who live in the future are the users on this forum

yeah, all of the more one looks at the mcbook "pro", the more one sees a device in an early time would have been an all firewire macbook pro. and people would defend it as being the "future" of computers