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by tannhaeuser
3088 days ago
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A friend of mine holds on to an even older MBP. Due to Apple's generous replacement policy, he's recently got all parts save for the chassis replaced for free or for relatively little money, so sits in front of a brand-new 2012 MBP. But surely it would be appreciated if Apple could get over their design fixation. For me, there's nothing "Pro" with the MBP. "Pro" doesn't mean "bad-ass", but having (display, keyboard) options for me, a characteristic the MBP lost years ago when the current MBP line was introduced, with the design/aesthetics of the unibody chassis only working with a glare screen. The Touch Bar thingy, and it's mandatory-ness on higher end MBPs is as non-Pro as it gets. It can't be in Apple's interest that real pro users long for the days of old MacBooks/PowerBooks/Snow Leopard, can it? The 16gb limitation is something the MBPs suffer from as well, and is dictated by Intel chipsets, isn't it? |
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I still have a late 2011 17 inch MBP equipped with quad core i7 and upgraded to 16GB RAM plus a 1TB SSD. I still use it fairly regularly, in particular for Ableton Live. It's really the last MBP you could plug enough peripherals into without needing a separate hub and, key point, still has Firewire, which I need for my audio interface (USB always sucked for this because it chews CPU, whereas Firewire doesn't).
Honestly, as a machine to tote around all the time, I prefer the 15 inch form factor, but the 17-incher is great for working with a lot of tracks simultaneously, and it has all those wonderful ports:
- 3 or 4 USB ports - 1 Firewire port - 1 Mini display/Thunderbolt port (two would be nice, but I'll live) - Line out AND line in (something sadly missing from newer models) - Digital audio out and (I believe) in (using same ports as line out/in)
For the use cases I needed and still need it's a much more useful system than the current line-up. And, of course, OSX has much more capable audio handling built in than Windows (no messing around with ASIO, no app exclusivity over access to audio hardware).