In the same generation that the size decrease happened, Phil Schiller unironically argued that adding DDR4 would decrease battery life.
The issue isn't that the battery isn't as big as it could be, it's that the battery decision reflects Apple's current design philosophy on the MBP, which is to move down the road of being less concerned with functionality in order to further pursue refinements in form.
To put this another way: say we had a plot of laptops, where our X axis is portability and our Y axis is power.
Ideally, Apple should be going up and to the right (more power/thinner). However, they seem committed to going left, even if it means that they're forced to go down a bit relative to the competition.
This is false. Laptops that start at ~$1400-1500 are offering the same CPUs that Apple puts in the 15 inch Macbook Pros.
In my own experience owning a 2010 MBP, and also from a cursory google search regarding this topic in current models, this is also incorrect.
And their decision not to pursue more performant options in this category is also frankly questionable. A plethora of modern applications, from machine learning models (that Apple themselves is pushing via Core ML) to the Adobe Suite take advantage of GPU acceleration to yield meaningful increases in performance.
Modern creative professional applications get huge speedups from the parallel compute performance that GPUs offer, and there are meaningful speedups to be had from both sides in exchange for another ~10 watts of heat dissipation. Who exactly is Apple supposed to be targeting at this point?
A lot of the MBP page is dedicated to talking about performance, battery life, and color gamut accuracy, so it seems to me like they're still aiming at the "creative pro".
I believe that Q6 was referring to the regular Macbook in this case.
The "X percent faster" claim is something Apple likes to keep throwing out because they can't win on actual performance numbers. Year over year, there are meaningful improvements in performance relative to previous GPUs, but they still aren't impressive, performance-wise, relative to what the competition is putting out. The 1050, 1050Ti, and 1060 are all found in laptops of a similar form factor to the MBP (with a 1060 in the Blade, a 14" laptop as thin as the 2015 MBP). If Apple can pull off a Vega chip that gets that level of performance in the MBP, that'd be great, but given their commitment to converting a performance notebook into "ultrabook with good CPU", I'm not holding my breath.
Another design decision that was, again, pretty unfortunate. Apple's removal of the magsafe limited the TDP of the laptop to 100 watts while simultaneously removing one of the best and most iconic elements of the MBP's design (Magsafe).
With the increasing ubiquity of NVME SSDs in laptops, I wouldn't really count the MBP's storage performance as a meaningful step up over the competition at this point.
I don't think there was anyone who was arguing that the 2015 MBP was, in any way, not a portable machine. The argument that you're making here moreover is that "most people" want a thinner laptop, and don't care about performance, but how is that a good justification for design decisions for a pro/performance laptop lineup?
If 16 GB was indeed sufficient for most people, and thinness was the goal, they would be better off getting a Macbook.
This is definitely not true, especially on account of the fact that we're transitioning from 4 to 6 cores. Baseline OS usage (maybe with a few apps open) is going to get you to ~2 GB of memory usage, which leaves you with ~2.3 GB of RAM per
physical (not even virtual) cores. If you think that a single core can't make good use of more than 2.3 GB of memory, then you have no idea what you're talking about.
This is
literally the problem that we're trying to avoid by having more memory. Thrashing occurs when you're forced to page to disk, because RAM is typically at least an order of magnitude faster than disk access.
...which is the point of RAM. To act as a faster-than-disk buffer for programs.
Or you're working with a nontrivial amount of data, be it for data science or machine learning or high-resolution video editing, or high-resolution 3D design/rendering, you know,
the tasks that Apple advertises the Macbook Pro for.
At this point I'm starting to wonder why you're buying the MBP over something like the Macbook or the Air if you're so adamant that it doesn't need to be powerful.
I think the issue here is that Apple's actual marketing for the MBP's uses (e.g. as a performance lightweight laptop capable of pulling off solid performance in various tasks such as 3D rendering and the like) say one thing, and their actual design decisions (which seem to be catering to a more casual audience by choosing to be
even thinner over offering more competitive performance) say another.
The 2015-2016 MBP transition was particularly offensive in this regard, because they had the opportunity to offer something that was really high performance in the same, light, highly functional package, and instead began compromising on things like offering solid memory capacity, the keyboard, and basic I/O in order to make that happen, and continuing to offer very meh GPU performance as more and more MBP-relevant applications are taking advantage of GPU acceleration. That being said, getting into certain tasks that they seem to be turning their back on:
- Machine learning/data science. I'm not necessarily talking about doing something crazy like super deep convolutional networks, but most tasks are heavily parallelized, benefiting from both highly parallelized computation (on both the CPU and GPU fronts), and heavy memory usage
- 3D rendering performance, once again relying heavily on the CPU, GPU, and memory fronts
- High-end video rendering
Again these are all things that are doable on the current MBPs, but laptops at comparable price points and solid battery/portability positions are able to execute them meaningfully better.
The argument isn't against laptops becoming thinner, it's against the MBP committing to being mediocre in important hardware departments (namely, memory capacity/performance and GPU performance) in order to make that happen.
Also, from the 2014-2015 design to the 2016-2017 design, the MBP dropped 0.45 lbs, and became 0.1 inches thinner. The 2017 model is certainly impressively thin/light, but the 2014 model by comparison definitely does not qualify as a clunky/heavy machine.
Except for the fact that there exist comparable portable laptops that can adequately perform those tasks. Were it not for OSX being Apple-exclusive, I wouldn't be having this conversation, but the stability and feature set of OSX make it super appealing.
Apple's own page for the MBP certainly does not suggest that it's aimed at business professionals, and one must wonder why a business laptop would skimp on things like important/common I/O and potential additional battery life, given that business applications are often not terribly computationally rigorous.
Also, again, looking at the competition, the MBP is marginally more portable than competitors (being ~0.5 lbs or less lighter), and those competitors certainly pack more performance punch.
Carbon fiber (which a good amount of the Dell's chassis is made of) is more expensive than aluminum, by a fair margin, and the more powerful internals presumably also cost as much, if not mroe. However, the "Apple tax" includes the store network and the convenience of Applecare, which is something that definitely has value.
It's also:
- Faster
- Has higher PPI
- Has a touch screen
- Is a 2-in-1
- Has a better webcam
- Has both USB 3 and USB-C
- Has the option for a better GPU
It moreover outperforms the MBP by a fair amount at every comparable price point. The $2899 Surface Book 2 has all of these features, matching comparable specs, and is packing a GTX 1060 with 6 GB of GDDR5, to boot.
This is just paging, but with the assumption that the programmer can definitively anticipate which data blocks the user will want to use next and which can be safely expunged from memory. That's not an assumption that coders can make when designing software. It's something that
you, as a user, feel is predictable, because you have a logical workflow and a series of steps that make sense to you. But it's not something that someone who's writing code can magically assume beforehand, unless we just eat the I/O cost of loading data into memory. This just leaves us back at square one regarding loading data into memory.
Again, anything in ML/data science, along with any sort of programming at scale. Video editing.
Even if you're not doing intensive computation locally, it'll often be in your interest to inspect/load a dataset, and then use that information to inform you setting up code to run on a cloud server, and that application, in and of itself, can definitely require an intensive amount of memory.
Irrespective of this being the case or not, Apple's MBP is (at least nominally) being aimed at a demographic of users that are far, far, far more likely to encounter this situation than most people. The fact that this isn't an option,
three years after laptops were offering 32 GB of RAM in a laptop, in a laptop where performance is a key selling point of the machine, is unfortunate at best.
Whose favor is it really in? People who currently buy the MBP are getting a watered-down specs at a high-end price point in a machine with premium build quality, because the MBP is steering away from "mobile portable performance solution" and towards "ultrabook with a good CPU".
I imagine there will be quite a few who will.
