Shall we invest heavily on the MBP 16" 2019? What SSD size do you choose?

[hajime]

Hi, as a long term Apple user since Apple II, I am not happy with the MBP 2016-2019. With the MBP 16", Apple is now making a descent machine. In the past, I changed laptops every 2-3 years. My last MBP is 2010 17". I am going to order a built-to-order MBP 16". Given all the components are soldered and if something goes wrong after the warranty, it may be expensive to have it repaired. Any experience from 2016-2019 users? I wonder if we should invest heavily on the MBP 16" 2019 with a plan of keeping it for 5-7 years. How likely will Apple increase the thickness of the next MBP a bit to have better performance and user upgradable components? With the current thin chassis, even they have faster CPU and GPU within the next three years, performance is likely to be limited and fan noise is going to be loud. So, the next version worth upgrading may be 3-5 years later?

How is the situation with user/Apple recoverable data from the SSD if something goes wrong?

I plan to get i9 2.4G?Hz, 64GB RAM, 8GB GU. Given that there might be a possibility to install Linux natively with the new Linux Kernel 5.4, I may need larger disk space when this becomes possible. I am debating if I should get a 2TB or 4TB SSD.

 

[maflynn]

I am debating if I should get a 2TB or 4TB SSD.

Jut determine your storage needs, if you're using near a terabyte of storage now, then get the 2TB, if you're closer to 2 and you see a large potential for storage growth, then move up to the next larger one. If you're only consuming 500GB, then its probably a waste to buy the 4TB.

 

[hajime]

Jut determine your storage needs, if you're using near a terabyte of storage now, then get the 2TB, if you're closer to 2 and you see a large potential for storage growth, then move up to the next larger one. If you're only consuming 500GB, then its probably a waste to buy the 4TB.

I will need 2TB for sure. Whether to get 4TB or not depends heavily on whether or not somebody found a way to install Linux natively on the MBP. From what I have read, it looks like people can disable security boot and reading/writing the SSD functions seem to be going well. I read some posts about the Linux Kernel 5.4 (released few days ago) could provide drivers for the MBP keyboard and trackpad. So I guess with time, it could be possible to make a triple boot MBP again even with the T2 chip. The question is when.

I tried Parallels with Linux and it is quite good. However, if the performance could be better, why not go for a higher performance path?

I guess we need to wait for users who ordered a MBP 16" with 4TB drive to know its performance compared with the 2TB's.

 

[Ifti]

Bear in mind the TB3 interface is so fast now that it would be cheaper to pick up external drives, like the Samsung X5, for instance and still have super fast performance.

Since I have a high capacity NAS on my 10GBe network at home, and have an OWC ThunderBlade V4 as my editing drive, with various external portable SSDs, I no longer find a need for large amounts of on board storage. So it all comes down to whether you actually need dedicated on board storage, or whether you are OK with external SSDs.....

On the hand, if you are spending so much on a system now, makes sense to make it last longer and avoid the dreaded 'What if...' or 'I wish I.....' statements later down the line!

 

[hajime]

Bear in mind the TB3 interface is so fast now that it would be cheaper to pick up external drives, like the Samsung X5, for instance and still have super fast performance.

Since I have a high capacity NAS on my 10GBe network at home, and have an OWC ThunderBlade V4 as my editing drive, with various external portable SSDs, I no longer find a need for large amounts of on board storage. So it all comes down to whether you actually need dedicated on board storage, or whether you are OK with external SSDs.....

On the hand, if you are spending so much on a system now, makes sense to make it last longer and avoid the dreaded 'What if...' or 'I wish I.....' statements later down the line!

I haven't used TB3 device before.

Yes, I checked the price of the Samsung X5. It is more expensive to buy a MBP 16" with 2TB SSD + Samsung X5 than MBP 16" with 4TB SSD.

I wonder if an internal 4TB SSD consumes noticeably more power than an internal 2TB SSD.

 

[BoycottCookApple]

Apple could have given you an option to upgrade the internal SSD down the road. Expect to replace the whole thing if something goes wrong to the soldered storage+RAM or forced to pay more through Apple if out of warranty.

 

[hajime]

Apple could have given you an option to upgrade the internal SSD down the road. Expect to replace the whole thing if something goes wrong to the soldered storage+RAM or forced to pay more through Apple if out of warranty.

That worries me to invest over $5K on a laptop.

 

[mightyjabba]

My feeling is that 2TB is probably the most the average person should get, even for "future-proofing" purposes. Some professionals do need as much onboard storage as possible, but for people who are just doing typical computing tasks and not on-site video editing, etc., I think the extra storage is probably unnecessary and/or should be handled with external devices.

 

[hajime]

Can we turn the extra ssd space into memory under Mac OS and Windows? How is the performance?

 

[brdeveloper]

If you work with audio or video production, 2TB is a minimum. I think of tons of audio sample libraries and 4K video editing. With 2TB I think you can work on a couple of 4K projects at the same time. After that, you move them to the external storage, perhaps a redundant array of HDDs. If you're a software developer, 1TB would be fine for the next 6-8 years.

 

[hajime]

If you work with audio or video production, 2TB is a minimum. I think of tons of audio sample libraries and 4K video editing. With 2TB I think you can work on a couple of 4K projects at the same time. After that, you move them to the external storage, perhaps a redundant array of HDDs. If you're a software developer, 1TB would be fine for the next 6-8 years.

Thanks. What about people working in Data Science?

 

[shardey]

Can we turn the extra ssd space into memory under Mac OS and Windows? How is the performance?

No you cannot do that.

 

[brdeveloper]

Thanks. What about people working in Data Science?

For testing bigdata concepts, comparing methods etc., I don't think a Macbook Pro would be suitable for handling more than a dozen of gigabytes, but I can be outdated from the state-of-the-art. When I dealt with data science around 2013-2014, the test corpora were of about 300MB at maximum. With gigabyte-sized samples, I'd have to work with sparse array methods (e.g., R-language) or some way of segmenting processing into multiple data chunks... or perhaps have an octa-core CPU with 64GB of RAM ... but I'm talking of a couple of gigabytes of data. Perhaps with R you can go way further... anyway, I can't imagine how would you need more than 1TB of internal storage... 50GB of data seems pretty massive for processing on a Macbook... but I'm curious of what do you think about it since I'm out of bigdata analysis field for years.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

I just work stuff directly from the Samsung T5 lol

 

[hajime]

I used over 150 UNIX workstations to do my work 20 years ago. Also, don't know how things are like these days.

Workstation laptops have one or a combination of issues like: noisy fan noise, heaviness, less good after sales services compared with Apple, etc. Perhaps just get the base model and use it as a light and big-screen X-terminal?
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For testing bigdata concepts, comparing methods etc., I don't think a Macbook Pro would be suitable for handling more than a dozen of gigabytes,..

Do you mean in terms so processing power or storage size?

 

[brdeveloper]

I used over 150 UNIX workstations to do my work 20 years ago. Also, don't know how things are like these days.

Workstation laptops have one or a combination of issues like: noisy fan noise, heaviness, less good after sales services compared with Apple, etc. Perhaps just get the base model and use it as a light and big-screen X-terminal?
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Do you mean in terms so processing power or storage size?

Processing power and RAM. Although the overall power from an octa-core CPU like this seems pretty good, you need to divide your data into chunks to distribute work to the cores. Well, no big deal here, since it's the practice on most applications. The problem here seems to be RAM. Depending on your data structure, 1GB of raw data becomes 10-16GB of structured data, unless you work in a sparse way like on the R language approach. Of course, a commercial solution can take advantage of all of that processing power and RAM, but I worked for academic purposes, so I've implemented most of the algorithms for comparing techniques, which wasn't very efficient.

At the time I've worked with data science, there were people working with Hadoop for distributed processing and scalability. Once you could adapt your algorithm in a way that Hadoop could distribute workload, you're fine. This way it doesn't even matter if you're using a Macbook Air or a high-end Pro one.

 

[Ifti]

If you work with audio or video production, 2TB is a minimum. I think of tons of audio sample libraries and 4K video editing. With 2TB I think you can work on a couple of 4K projects at the same time. After that, you move them to the external storage, perhaps a redundant array of HDDs. If you're a software developer, 1TB would be fine for the next 6-8 years.

Isn't it better to edit off of an external drive? Leave the internal drive to run the application and for rendering etc. This is why I use an external TB3 SSD array to store my files/projects. With the fast speeds available the data transfer is seamless.

 

[brdeveloper]

Isn't it better to edit off of an external drive? Leave the internal drive to run the application and for rendering etc. This is why I use an external TB3 SSD array to store my files/projects. With the fast speeds available the data transfer is seamless.

I agree with you. Don't know how are the prices for external drives with equivalent speeds. I've seen 1TB external TB3 SSDs for about $300. But it tends to be way less expensive in a couple of years.

 

[x3sphere]

I do software dev and just went with the base (512GB). Thought about stepping up to 1TB, since it was only $200 extra or so, but I also got the 32GB RAM upgrade so that would've been like $600 extra combined.

Really not using much space with all my apps installed + VMs, have about 350GB free. I would be fine with offloading the VM files to an external eventually, so I'm going to go that route. In a few years I think the external TB3 NVMe drives will be much cheaper, prices on flash memory just keep plummeting.

 

[Macshroomer]

4TB.
I carry a couple of 1TB TB3 externals for diversified backup while doing big jobs on the road. I also like a minimum of 25% of internal storage headroom.

In the grand scheme of things it is not that expensive and is a much needed tax deduction so why not double it from my usual 2TB to 4TB?

I can and do use as much power and storage as I can get.