[Selfcommit]

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?

[headcanon]

Apple's definitely playing the long game here. When the retinas came out, the absence of an ethernet port was a bit inconvenient for me, but now I don't miss it at all. It's possible that in a few years, when this model matures and goes down in price, the touch bar gets more wide support, and everything uses USB-C, then it will make a lot more sense to get one.

[BinaryIdiot]

Yeah I'm very convinced this is going to happen. At the same time, at least for me, I can't afford to wait for this utopia of single-connectors. I need to be able to plug in my daily cords and the last time I had to deal with dongles I lost them all over the place.

I do think it was a big misstep that their flagship, brand new phone can't connect to their flagship, brand new laptop without an adapter that has to be bought separately. I also think they could have done it in a more phased approach without losing anything. But ultimately it will turn out to be a good decision.

[on_and_off]

Kinda weird that the last nexus & pixel fit more naturally with the last macbook pro :)

[thefalcon]

When was the last time you plugged your iPhone in to your computer? I don't think I've ever plugged my current phone in to my computer since syncs and backs up to the cloud anyway for me.

[BinaryIdiot]

I haven't in years but everyone who isn't technically savvy in my family still does. I don't know if that's indicative of anything larger than my anecdote but I work with people who are very involved with technology who still sync all of their stuff, with a cord, using iTunes and their iPhone 6s / 7.

No idea how common this is but I feel like it's common enough that it should have been handled better.

[grzm]

And who knows? Maybe USB-C will be the last port ever? The step before everything is radio^H^H^H^H^H^H wireless!

[threeseed]

Two predictions from me. (1) They sell out and it is the most popular MBP model to date, (2) They don't reduce the price in the future.

Apple is awfully good at knowing just when to extract that little bit more from their customers. And I suspect that similar to the USB-C MacBook the concern over ports will just be from a vocal but tiny minority.

[Eric_WVGG]

I have to disagree on that. Unlike the more vertically oriented iOS devices with their A series processors, Mac pricing has always been highly volatile, and new form factors always start at high prices which quickly degrade as Apple perfects the manufacturing processes. Macbook Airs, for example, started out as premium-priced devices, before settling into the entry-level.

I can't find hard numbers for MBPs, but here's a list of prices over years for Mac Pros; from a consumer perspective, the changes are essentially random.

https://marco.org/2013/12/22/mac-pro-pricing-over-time

[johansch]

They have gone too far this time. This is far beyond the usual expensive inconvenience dongle cost etc that we're used to seeing from them. They just want to game us. It's basically financial domination at this time.

How hard could it really be to make a basic Linux desktop environment work sorta close enough to OS X to make enough people switch to finance further development? My quick and dirty estimate is that 50 good people could pull off a great first release in 18 months.

(I do have relevant consumer UX software design management experience and feel that I can do reasonable quick estimates based on that.)

[ianai]

I think that could be good as well. If I were to spearhead it I'd have us hone in on one or two laptop models. Then spend the rest of the engineering time on making the install, upgrade, and user experience as smooth as possible.

[desipenguin]

Deepin Desktop Environment

[jeromeparadis]

I don't know what's the fuss about 32GB and OS X/MacOS but I upgraded my iMac to 32GB (from 8) and when booting, it still prefers to swap than to use the memory it has access to. For the next hour, it slowly starts using more memory and will use even more than 16GB. I suspect the OS isn't optimized to efficiently use more than 16GB.

[brigade]

?? The comment is based on the fact that they're equipped with quad core Skylake processors, therefore they probably have enough thermal headroom to handle what they actually have.

[snowwrestler]

It's a long play because engineering those cases (including thermal) is very difficult. So Apple typically uses the same case through several revisions of the internals, to defray the costs.

What this means is that the very first model released with a new case is usually underpowered, because the chips are not quite as powerful and power efficient as the (upcoming) chips the case was optimized for.

For this and other reasons I tend to not buy the first version of a new Apple product.

[ssijak]

it have quadcores currently. 32gig will come with kaby lake refresh. nvidia, maybe, maybe not, certainly welcome.

[threeseed]

According to Macrumors, there is a compatibility issue which means Nvidia might be out of the picture for a while. Nvidia is only capable of driving dual 5K displays with the Polaris GPUs with DisplayPort 1.3 which is not supported with Thunderbolt 3.

http://www.macrumors.com/2016/11/14/late-2016-mbp-amd-gpus-s...

[registered99]

there's the possibility of GPUs in the display, though

[akvadrako]

That makes a lot of sense, but I haven't seen any hints that it's coming soon. Keep in mind, you really need an upgradable GPU for that, since these $1000 5K displays have a long life cycle.

And it would probably require rewrites of high-performance apps and games to be something closer to client/server setups to manage communication between the CPU/memory and GPU.

There is really no difference for anything but the most demanding applications though.

[rbanffy]

5K displays won't cost $1000 for much longer. Right now they are premium products but soon they'll be the norm. By then, adding a good enough GPU to the screen will make sense (because your laptop doesn't need to carry - and feed - more brains than needed to push pixels to the built-in display) and, if the user wants more, they'll use whatever is installed in their computers.

[smitherfield]

He may have meant in the 13-inch model.

[MatekCopatek]

Isn't this the norm? Most 15" top-range models (e.g. Dell XPS 15) are available with quad core CPUs.