Review: Touch Bar MacBook Pros give an expensive glimpse at the Mac’s future
People bitch about dongles but if you think about it, who would make this progress if Apple doesn't?
Apple is probably the only consumer tech hardware company out there that can do this. I almost think it's their responsibility to push the boundary.
People make fun of the term "Courage" and I thought that was funny at first too. But the more I think about it the more I get what he's trying to say. Right now NO ONE other than Apple has the "courage" to make this decision. Do you think Dell would do it? Samsung? Only Apple has enough influence in the industry to be able to do something like this and NOT lose all their users. If Samsung got rid of all their ports, people would probably ditch them and buy a Lenovo or something. So Samsung cant' do it. Coming back to Apple, I'm an apple user and I have to buy it because it's just much better for me as a developer. And honestly speaking, I don't care about all these dongles arguments and "it's not for a pro" arguments. I'm not buying a device whose primary purpose is to stick in my USB cable. And pros don't complain about their tools.
Anyway Apple knows that if nobody makes this decision, laptops will just stay as some stagnant genre of devices that are only able to do things that people used to do in the 2000s.
In other words, if Apple didn't do this, I think the entire laptop category will just stagnate and be cannibalized by other platforms. See TV as an example.
Many of us just want the 15" display preferring longer battery life and smaller size/weight to using a discrete GPU. I am at a university and the 15" rMBPs are popular with students as well as researchers. I currently have the 2015 rMBP 15".
Thus, it is disappointing that there is not replacement for the version that uses only the integrated graphics. Also, the Intel 530 graphics of the 2016 rMBP 15" appears to be lower performing than the 2015 rMBP 15" integrated graphics. While there were benchmarks for the battery life of the iGPU, there were no performance benchmarks comparing the rMBP 15" 2016 iGPU vs. the 2015 iGPU.
I've looked online and it appears that the 530 is about 20% slower than the 2015 rMBP 15" iGPU.
EDIT: Source for Iris Pro 5200 vs. HD 530: 5200 about 20% faster than 530 for same resolution.
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Iris-Pro-HD-5200-...
They also reviewed the new Lenovo Yoga 910, which seems to be a good alternative for people that don't rely on MacOS:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/11/lenovo-yoga-910-revie...
It even has a 4K touch-enabled display.
Does Xcode come with touch bar support? Custom debugging controls could be cool.
The comment "15-inch Pros have enough thermal headroom to fit in quad-core Skylake processors..."
is interesting.
While the current offerings don't meet expectations set for the MBP... maybe this is a long play by Apple?
How quickly will the disappointment be forgotten when 32 gig / quadcore / nvidia GPU's are released?
Weird that I can't find a review anywhere that compares the battery life of the 2013 macbook air with the new $1499 macbook pro. Anyone know of one?
Classic Cunningham...
> I use 13-inch laptops almost exclusively these days
Stopped reading the review at this point.