New Macbook Pro released

[Ampera]

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/

Hurry up and drop poor specs like a madman.

I mean holy balls, for 2800 USD you get:

2880x1800 16:10 Non 4K display

A quad core laptop i7

16 GB of DDR3

512GB PCIe based SSD

Radeon Pro 455 with 2GB of GDDR5

Four USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 3 support

The rest of the specs are pretty unimportant, 802.11 AC, etc etc.

But for almost three grand, That's it?

Really?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16834154337

Same bloody price, similar i7, but you now have 4k and a decent GPU, Granted you go from a 512GB SSD to 1TB HDD, but you can fix that yourself for around 100-150 USD.

You can shift the specs around like get a slightly lesser GTX 1070, or even go previous gen for kickass specs, but

What the hell? I don't get the logic behind this.

EDIT: MSI might have been a poor example, I also found this, (copied from another post below for people to see)

The MSI laptop was a quick and dirty example off Newegg.

Take this laptop: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G3UK2514

Good battery life, a .2 KG (not much) weight boost, and better specs in every department, just with a 1080p screen

And it's 400 dollars cheaper.
And it has DDR4 memory
And it's got twice the VRAM
And it's got an NVidia chip (go team green)
And it's got a workstation grade Xeon in it
And it's got etc.. etc...

Did I mention it comes with a Windows 7 downgrade? Woo!

And I found this after a 5 minutes of searching WITH this MSI one. I didn't feel the need to mention it at the moment, but here you go. I bet if you dig even deeper, go with different sites and price hunt for a couple hours, you could get something like that for a couple grand or so.

[kripton2035]

one is 4 kg, the other less than 2kg ... you want to carry it ?

[RGB255_0_0]

The best product released the past 2 days is the Surface Studio. But it seems $3K is the target price for these gadgets. 

[wraper]

IMO those heavy, thick and hot laptops are very niche products and not many sane people will find a good reason to carry such a thing daily. IMO if you do need such hardware, buy a desktop instead.

For both, Apple claims ten hours of battery life.

Good luck going anywhere off-grid with that MSI.
BTW
I'm long time apple hater actually. But I see reasons why someone would buy those specs at such inflated price.

[wraper]

and wanting 4K @ <=15" is insanity. Won't provide anything except additional GPU load.

[JPortici]

my 2 cents: specs are not everything, the most important thing they've added is thunderbolt 3 over usb C.
and remember it's a god damn laptop.
you need more ports? it's a laptop, not a desktop replacement. use a dock (or an external monitor with integrated dock. cone cable to connect them all)

anyway, how long do you think the touch bar will last before burn in or failure? oled, constantly on with same image, directly over the main ventilation airflow. i give it six months, a year at most. samsung in store phones units wouldn't last more

[setq]

This is just an industry facepalm about to go down.

Besides the fact my sweat is like Alien blood and dissolves MacBooks in a few months, the one I had that caught fire spectacularly, the bent crooked finger-printless hands you get from using the touchpad and the pile of incinerated lightning/USB cables, the sheer destruction that HFS+ brought down on an £80k contract I was in the middle of, and the perpetual crummy chiclet keyboard that fell to bits twice I wish Apple would remove this from the market immediately for one other reason:

This is the start of the degeneration of a workstation class machine into a fondle grubby poke-fest greasy gunk magnet with the introduction of a touch screen on the keyboard. All the other manufacturers who sell business class and workstation class laptops, not overpriced starbucks wankfest shit will start going "me too" like the cult following personality they are and the next thing we'll have is funny shaped bendy thinkpads with keyboards made of shiny poo or something.

It's all going to break and fuck up.

Now the stalwart I am, I sold that 2010 inferno model of the MBP's burned corpse (for £200 on ebay what the hell were they thinking?) and bought a 2010 ThinkPad X201 which I'm STILL sitting in front of now, having just replaced the battery yesterday and nothing else. I still get 9 hours and I can still make more money in less time than I can with an MBP with a shiny touch doohickey with this old crate. And that's what matters. Not how pretty or whizzy it is.

Edit: oh and the key combinations on MacOS are harder than Street Fighter special moves, and I use vim on a daily basis.

[Ampera]

The MSI laptop was a quick and dirty example off Newegg.

Take this laptop: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G3UK2514

Good battery life, a .2 KG (not much) weight boost, and better specs in every department, just with a 1080p screen

And it's 400 dollars cheaper.
And it has DDR4 memory
And it's got twice the VRAM
And it's got an NVidia chip (go team green)
And it's got a workstation grade Xeon in it
And it's got etc.. etc...

Did I mention it comes with a Windows 7 downgrade? Woo!

And I found this after a 5 minutes of searching WITH this MSI one. I didn't feel the need to mention it at the moment, but here you go. I bet if you dig even deeper, go with different sites and price hunt for a couple hours, you could get something like that for a couple grand or so.

[wraper]

The MSI laptop was a quick and dirty example off Newegg.

Take this laptop: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G3UK2514

Good battery life, a .2 KG (not much) weight boost, and better specs in every department, just with a 1080p screen

And it's 400 dollars cheaper.
And it has DDR4 memory
And it's got twice the VRAM
And it's got an NVidia chip (go team green)
And it's got a workstation grade Xeon in it
And it's got etc.. etc...

Did I mention it comes with a Windows 7 downgrade? Woo!

And I found this after a 5 minutes of searching WITH this MSI one. I didn't feel the need to mention it at the moment, but here you go. I bet if you dig even deeper, go with different sites and price hunt for a couple hours, you could get something like that for a couple grand or so.

And it is not better at specs, actually worse.

And it's got an NVidia chip (go team green)
And it's got twice the VRAM

And what the point if that GPU is worse regardless of VRAM amount. It's on par with GTX 950M. EDIT: actually on par even with GTX 850M in my EUR 700, 2.2 KG acer laptop from 2014.

And it has DDR4 memory

And Apple has it too

And it's got etc.. etc...

BANG & OLUFSEN marketing gimmick. It's a good laptop, but really not a killer of that macbook pro, and actually sucks at that price.

[Bud]

MSI laptops are very poorly construced mechanically. Plastic is VERY thin and soft like paper, screen is not locked to the body when folded, other laptops have motherboard and screen attached to the casing, MSI has casing attached to motherboard and screen. It does not have rigidness at all, and is too delicate for carrying around. Also, just after 6 months the fan went loud, and the bloody replacement fan is 40 bucks on Alexpress,  bloody hell freaking laptop fan. No more MSI  thank you very much.

[Ampera]

The MSI laptop was a quick and dirty example off Newegg.

Take this laptop: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G3UK2514

Good battery life, a .2 KG (not much) weight boost, and better specs in every department, just with a 1080p screen

And it's 400 dollars cheaper.
And it has DDR4 memory
And it's got twice the VRAM
And it's got an NVidia chip (go team green)
And it's got a workstation grade Xeon in it
And it's got etc.. etc...

Did I mention it comes with a Windows 7 downgrade? Woo!

And I found this after a 5 minutes of searching WITH this MSI one. I didn't feel the need to mention it at the moment, but here you go. I bet if you dig even deeper, go with different sites and price hunt for a couple hours, you could get something like that for a couple grand or so.

And it is not better at specs, actually worse.

And it's got an NVidia chip (go team green)
And it's got twice the VRAM

And what the point if that GPU is worse regardless of VRAM amount. It's on par with GTX 950M. EDIT: actually on par even with GTX 850M in my EUR 700, 2.2 KG acer laptop from 2014.

And it has DDR4 memory

And Apple has it too

And it's got etc.. etc...

BANG & OLUFSEN marketing gimmick. It's a good laptop, but really not a killer of that macbook pro, and actually sucks at that price.

At the moment there doesn't seem to be any specs or benches for the Pro 455, but the laptop does have 4GB of VRAM.

The Macbook doesn't have DDR4 memory, it has DDR3

And I never mentioned the speakers, I could care less about them as long as the bleep out what one wants, but it has the same SSD, a better CPU, a GPU with twice the VRAM (No benching for the Radeon card, but it's a macbook so), and about 3/4ths the screen size.

And the exact sample isn't the point. While it is comparable, there are better ones out there, I just found that one in five minutes on Newegg, and you could probably cut a few bucks off that using Amazon.

The macbook pro is very unimpressive compared to what we already have.

[mtdoc]

IMHO this is a major fail. Steve is rolling in his grave.

I say this as someone who considers himself neutral in the OS wars:

I've been using both Macs and Windows machines for 30 years - both at home and work.  My home currently has 4 Macs and 5 Windows (3 XP, 2 W7) boxes (and 1 Linux) in service.

Previous MBPs had IMO a justified price premium based on build quality and ability to run OSX.  Not this one.

My daily use machines are a 9 year old MBP  and the 3 yr old HPlaptop I'm typing this on.  The W7 laptop is used for work and electronics hobby purposes while photos, home media etc is kept on the Mac.

I'm ready to replace the Windows laptop already (and have one of these on the way now).  But the 9 yr old MPB with RAM and SDD upgrades is still very usable -  though  I'll probably replace it with a previous gen MBP soon - that will last for another 10 years I suspect.

Even the Mac fan websites/forums are mostly bashing this new MBP release.  Even if Apple is mostly a phone/tablet company these days, they need to keep their computer business relevant IMO - otherwise they will wither..

[Ampera]

MSI laptops are very poorly construced mechanically. Plastic is VERY thin and soft like paper, screen is not locked to the body when folded, other laptops have motherboard and screen attached to the casing, MSI has casing attached to motherboard and screen. It does not have rigidness at all, and is too delicate for carrying around. Also, just after 6 months the fan went loud, and the bloody replacement fan is 40 bucks on Alexpress,  bloody hell freaking laptop fan. No more MSI  thank you very much.

I've never used an MSI laptop, so I wouldn't know. There is a HP example a bit farther up that suits the bill. I looked for a laptop for five minutes and got a couple examples, the MSI one seemed neat so I choose that one first.

[wraper]

The Macbook doesn't have DDR4 memory, it has DDR3

And where you took this info from?

[Ampera]

IMHO this is a major fail. Steve is rolling in his grave.

I say this as someone who considers himself neutral in the OS wars:

I've been using both Macs and Windows machines for 30 years - both at home and work.  My home currently has 4 Macs and 5 Windows (3 XP, 2 W7) boxes (and 1 Linux) in service.

Previous MBPs had IMO a justified price premium based on build quality and ability to run OSX.  Not this one.

My daily use machines are a 9 year old MBP  and the 3 yr old HPlaptop I'm typing this on.  The W7 laptop is used for work and electronics hobby purposes while photos, home media etc is kept on the Mac.

I'm ready to replace the Windows laptop already (and have one of these on the way now).  But the 9 yr old MPB with RAM and SDD upgrades is still very usable -  though  I'll probably replace it with a previous gen MBP soon - that will last for another 10 years I suspect.

Even the Mac fan websites/forums are mostly bashing this new MBP release.  Even if Apple is mostly a phone/tablet company these days, they need to keep their computer business relevant IMO - otherwise they will wither..

Their phones are pretty piss too. They are still dual core phones, just with a couple more bolted on as gimmicks. We already have 8 core Android phones that are pissing all over Apple. Their hardware isn't BAD, it's just woefully overpriced. There used to be a time where PCs were genuinely hard to use for most people, but once Windows 95 came along, that wavered, and at the point of XP, Apple had no leg to stand on in that department.

I have an iMac G3 Summer 2000 DV+ model in sage colour I was given by a neighbor, and it's awesome. It's a great games machine, able to run most MacOS9 PPC games and 68k games, with a decent 3D accelerator, but now I would never buy a Mac, nor any current Apple device, The last thing I bought was a second hand iPhone 3G to slap Whited00r on.

[Ampera]

The Macbook doesn't have DDR4 memory, it has DDR3

And where you took this info from?

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

Looking at the top of the range 15" model, we can see it saying DDR3 memory. Which brings into question the CPU, we currently don't know the exact CPU, but it has a chance of being a last gen i7.

[RGB255_0_0]

Skylake supports both DDR3 and 4but I'd rofl if it was Broadwell...

Apple doesn't care for their laptop and desktop segments anymore. Just look at the Mac Pro.

[wraper]

The Macbook doesn't have DDR4 memory, it has DDR3

And where you took this info from?

http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/

Looking at the top of the range 15" model, we can see it saying DDR3 memory. Which brings into question the CPU, we currently don't know the exact CPU, but it has a chance of being a last gen i7.

it also has:

Configurable to Radeon Pro 460 with 4GB of GDDR5 memory

[Ampera]

Skylake supports both DDR3 and 4but I'd rofl if it was Broadwell...

Apple doesn't care for their laptop and desktop segments anymore. Just look at the Mac Pro.

I'm still rocking an i7-4790k. I got it because it was 300 dollars and the boards were using memory I already had and cheap. Not a bad processor though, gets the job done.

[RGB255_0_0]

Skylake supports both DDR3 and 4but I'd rofl if it was Broadwell...

Apple doesn't care for their laptop and desktop segments anymore. Just look at the Mac Pro.

I'm still rocking an i7-4790k. I got it because it was 300 dollars and the boards were using memory I already had and cheap. Not a bad processor though, gets the job done.

Devil's Canyon was nice. Skylake is a pretty big increase in some areas.

The thing is, for the money, you should expect top end, or near top end. DDR4 has been mainstream for over a year and in production for over 2 years.

[senso]

MSI laptops are very poorly construced mechanically. Plastic is VERY thin and soft like paper, screen is not locked to the body when folded, other laptops have motherboard and screen attached to the casing, MSI has casing attached to motherboard and screen. It does not have rigidness at all, and is too delicate for carrying around. Also, just after 6 months the fan went loud, and the bloody replacement fan is 40 bucks on Alexpress,  bloody hell freaking laptop fan. No more MSI  thank you very much.

And what model MSI is that?
Having seen and touched every MSI model as launched so far, and taken a couple dozens apart, that sounds like a gigantic load of FUD..
You have warranty, use it, MSI will happily change your fan.
In Europe MSI is honoring international warranty for 2 years, you can open your laptop, repaste it, change HDD/SSD's, WiFi cards, RAM's, and your warranty will not be void..
Now, that MSI model is a bad example, thats more of a gamer/high perf laptop..

You mention noise, I smell you had an old model GP60, that chassis was over used, and MSI had a problem where half the Foxconn made heatpipes where baddly soldered and almost all of the laptops would have one heatpipe broken from the finned part of the heatsink..

What is the thing with a laptop i7 is BAD or if someone needs an i7 better get a desktop?
I'm using a second hand Toshiba P50, after a repaste, a 480GB BX200 SSD and 16GB of DDR3L its a work-horse, it weights 2.44Kg and I find that its light, I wont break an arm if I need to carry a 4Kg laptop, my bag as way more than 4Kg inside it and I can happily carry it all day?

For better examples, think Dell XPS's, its the only thing that comes close in specs/battery.
Or  [sorry] the Razer Blades, they are basically a Mac in black..
There is also the more profissional oriented line of MSI, and some Zenbook's.
The thing about battery duration is that almost only Apple makes a laptop with one single M.2 SSD and dedicate half the chassis to a battery..


16GB of 2133MHz memory 2133Mhz is DDR4 for sure....

[rrinker]

 Those multi-core phones aren't all that. Android NEEDS more resources to run, I guess no one understands that. I have no issues with the mere 1Gb RAM in my 4th gen iPad, it works just fine. And those dual core Apple SOCs are out benchmarking those fancy power eating (and battery exploding?) 8 core ones - yes, they have 8 cores but they have 4 halfway decent ones and then 4 crappy ones that are supposed to increase battery life when the demand is low.

 Until someone comes up with a true new breakthrough, everyone's next model will be disappointing to those expecting the world every time there is a new version. Maybe instead of being disappointed, people will hang on to the older models since they work just fine - see again, 4th gen iPad and the iPhone 5S I am using. Zero issues, Zero reason to spend money and get the latest ones just to have the latest. There's no real massive changes because it seems everyone has run out of ideas, so we get incremental updates that really only appeals to that crowd who MUST have the latest and greatest, screw the price. Me, I keep using things I buy until they no longer work or cannot do the basic tasks I need them for.

[senso]

Dont even get me started on the pile of crap that is Android...
I have an Xperia Z5(came from an Xperia M2), I love the design, the form factor and everything else about the Sony's, at least they have software updates, my M2 received Android 6.0, the Z5 will see 7.0 in the future..
But Android is a fractured mess of millions of versions from each vendor, and the resource usage...
The Z5 uses 1.5GB of RAM with zero extra programs installed, just the baseline OS, even my Win8.1 laptop uses less than that(at startup) with a ton of programs installed, not much crap in the startup, but none the less..

[Ampera]

Those multi-core phones aren't all that. Android NEEDS more resources to run, I guess no one understands that. I have no issues with the mere 1Gb RAM in my 4th gen iPad, it works just fine. And those dual core Apple SOCs are out benchmarking those fancy power eating (and battery exploding?) 8 core ones - yes, they have 8 cores but they have 4 halfway decent ones and then 4 crappy ones that are supposed to increase battery life when the demand is low.

 Until someone comes up with a true new breakthrough, everyone's next model will be disappointing to those expecting the world every time there is a new version. Maybe instead of being disappointed, people will hang on to the older models since they work just fine - see again, 4th gen iPad and the iPhone 5S I am using. Zero issues, Zero reason to spend money and get the latest ones just to have the latest. There's no real massive changes because it seems everyone has run out of ideas, so we get incremental updates that really only appeals to that crowd who MUST have the latest and greatest, screw the price. Me, I keep using things I buy until they no longer work or cannot do the basic tasks I need them for.

Android is a strange case by case basis deal. First off you have 1 option for apps in iOS. One. You can't install external apps and if the app store doesn't have what you want, you are SooL. Android allows free installation of any apps you want in the form of APKs and is less slave driving than Apple in terms of app developers. This is not counting jailbreaking or rooting. Adding those for Apple you get a barely visible file system and the ability to actually RUN the apps you want.

With a rooted Android system you can do LITERALLY whatever the hardware can do. You can install something other than Android altogether with minimal difficulty.

Android can take up more resources, but it can also do a whole lot more like run emulators unrooted. Did I mention Mobdro? (look it up)

And the 8 core thing is the same thing Apple does with their new chips, but that isn't what the ACTUAL 8 core chips do. Take the Pixel C with it's Tegra X1. It has 8 cores, and a 256 core Maxwell GPU.

I do have to Admit, single and dual core performance is pretty good, but with an operating system that can't DO anything I want it to, why would I bother? And we also have to take into consideration the use of this power? When would you need power like that on a phone? There are few apps that can take advantage of that tech, and the ones that can, are on Android (Especially NVidia's proprietary offerings). iDevices are specs and no function. Sure they may bench harder, but they can't use it since they don't have worthwhile apps in my case anyways. The main things that will use the advanced power are games and emulators. Emulators are Android only (not counting jailbreak) and the most impressive games take home in the NVidia shield store.

There is also the matter of custom roms that can cut the crap that Android has and give it snappier performance.

[crispy_tofu]

No love for iPod nano, iPod touch, iPod shuffle, iPad, MacBook Air, MacBook, iMac, Mac Mini or the Mac Pro.