[rusk]

It's not that the new MBP isn't "fine" - it's just that the gap with competitors has closed a lot. People asking me which laptop to buy used always be a very simple answer ("Buy a Macbook"). They were head and shoulders better than anything else. But it's down to mere inches now and the additional drawbacks which I won't go into here since as you rightly say they've been covered ad nauseum - are far more glaring now than they would have been a few years ago.

[jug]

Yeah, PC laptops have much better touchpads than they used to and even often use better materials than plastic. That while still offering often far better connectivity and repairability and better prices. I'm sure Apple can remain competitive but it may take a more aggressive trajectory and more innovative features than watching this happen and introduce a touch bar for shortcut keys as response.

[timemachiner]

That's Apples problem. Hopefully Apple gets the message that consumers want actual pro laptops. What I'm suggesting is let's discuss something more important on HN at this point.

[rusk]

Well with respect, you brought it up ...

[Noseshine]

Then why did you click to come to this discussion thread instead of ignoring it like you doubtlessly do for 90%+ of all topics that come up on HN?

How about this: You don't upvote stories you don't like, and every person has (only) one vote to upvote what they do like to be seen and/or discussed. Incidentally, that's exactly how it already works... If you want to be the one with veto power there also is a way: You can create your own subreddit on reddit.

[astrodust]

Consumers don't want actual pro laptops. Hacker News wants actual pro laptops.

The problem is more the "Pro" label, which has become dated and inappropriate, than anything else.

We've come full circle to where like the SoundBlaster Pro, the "Pro" term has become so meaningless you ended up with things like the SoundBlaster Pro Gold.

[rusk]

Just want something that does the work with a minimum of fuss. For a while Apple was the best for that. Now there's plenty of other options. Thanks!

[astrodust]

Options aren't a bad thing, and an abundance of options can't be construed as Apple's fault here.

Back when the first Mac Pro launched there wasn't a huge difference between their machine and the theoretical best machine. A quad core Xeon system was pretty good by the standards of the time, and if you needed more horsepower you didn't have many options.

Now you can get a workstation with 36 physical cores if you can afford it. Apple cannot possibly hope to cater to that extreme end of the market, very few vendors even try. Dell only seems to offer dual 8-core workstations, HP offers dual 18-core...if you have $12K sitting around to buy one and the patience to configure the system properly.

As the theoretical high end keeps getting higher and completely detaching from what everyday professionals need, the most demanding of that group will find more and more reasons to complain about Apple's line-up.

[true_religion]

Whilst this is all true, the current thread and article are about the laptop Macbook Pro and not the Desktop Mac Pro.

Laptop theoretical maximums haven't changed too much since 2006 when the Macbook Pro was first introduced. I know of many people who have 6 year old Macbook pro's and are still happy with the performance.

To me the real issue is a death by a hundred cuts because:

1. The hardware is not improving at a steady clip; nor is it simply 'the best' in any category

2. OSX hasn't seen enough improvement to continue justifying the Mac premium

3. Other manufactures have caught up as the hardware market stabilised, and Windows is tugging on developer heart strings with its Linux subsystem layer.

If Windows supports Linux in a reasonable performant way, I'd switch immediately. I'm waiting a year to see how the wind blows.

[astrodust]

1. Intel's focusing more on power efficiency than they are brute power, especially for notebook chips. They're also struggling with their 10nm process, so everything is in severe disarray. Apart from a few vendors wrangling high-end GPUs into laptops, the rest of the market is pretty much spinning its wheels. Maybe now that AMD's back in the game they'll shake things up and give Intel a reason to knuckle down and make some progress here rather than continue to focus on squeezing money out of the enterprise market.

2. macOS has improved substantially over the last six years even though most of those changes haven't been earth-shattering or visible. HFS+ is finally going away, the scheduler is more battery friendly, API improvements continue that make writing apps easier. It's a mature operating system, though, and like Windows, which basically slapped on a new coat of paint and threw in a new version of DirectX, and decided to get crazy and bundle Linux support, it's hard to make exponential leaps forward. What is macOS crying out for these days?

3. Windows is still extremely hostile to developers even with the Linux subsystem. That's a massive improvement over Cygwin, but it's still a veneer on top of what's an extraordinarily ugly OS when it comes to internals. Drive letters, the Registry, entire continents of compatibility junk. If you're not writing games, you probably never write apps for Windows native. It's just not worth it.

Now it's nice that Microsoft is at least trying to give Windows some decent tools, the Linux/GNU suite is vastly better than the feeble garbage that comes with Windows, but it's still the first step in a long road towards being as POSIX friendly as a true Linux or BSD system actually is.