[inawarminister]

your scenario was about a couple watching movies in bed, though...

To be honest, I really love my rMBP 2014 hardware, it was basically perfect. Great speaker, as you say, good enough keyboard, BEST display, etc.

If Apple releases another MBP based on 2015 I'll take a quite good look again.

[4ad]

I only use my laptop when I am traveling. At home, I have no need for it. I am not traveling with speakers. I doubt I am alone.

[sumedh]

Are you really going to carry around a bluetooth speaker in everyroom though, if someone wants to watch it on the couch?

[allannienhuis]

How many rooms in a house do people really watch movies in? A couple of bluetooth speakers covers the 95% case, and just using the crappy laptop speakers or use earbuds or headphones for the 5% case.

Of course it would be nicer if the laptop had better speakers in it, but there are always trade-offs to be made on cost vs benefit, and fairly cheap bluetooth speakers are a pretty good workaround for a lot of people.

[sumedh]

Not sure why you call the macbooks speakers crappy, i would imagine most people would consider them good enough and be happy with then instead of dealing with external Bluetooth speakers and carrying them around with the laptop.

[allannienhuis]

My comment wasn't meant to be macbook specific. Most laptop speakers don't sound as nice as a reasonable set of bluetooth speakers or headphones. The main point of my comment was to counter the (strawman) idea that the only option for someone who didn't like the laptop speaker was to carry around a bluetooth speaker with them from room to room, which is of course not very practical. But having a couple of them strategically placed in the house is affordable and practical for most cases.

[sumedh]

Now instead of a room think about a house or a office, is your idea of carrying a speaker everywhere still practical or do you think adding a speakers on laptop is more practical?

[allannienhuis]

I think you've misread/misunderstood my comment. I'm trying to say that carrying around a bluetooth speaker IS impractical (and the initial criticism of it a type of strawman argument because it's obviously impractical). I'm not suggesting in any way that carrying around a speaker everywhere is a good idea (it's not).

What I'm trying to say is that if really good audio quality is important to you, then having a couple of sets of bluetooth speakers in your house strategically placed in the places where you'd regularly watch movies or consume other high-quality audio is a reasonable workaround for a lot of people. OF COURSE having better speakers (equivalent in sound quality to the bluetooth workaround) in your laptop would be better if you care a lot about audio quality. But that would add to the cost of the laptop for every user, even the ones that don't care about having really high-quality audio on their laptop. I'm saying that it's not unreasonable for a manufacturer to make some tradeoffs like that when there are workarounds that work fairly well.

Over time the costs of adding higher-end features like this drop, and things like audio quality improve to the point that the workarounds aren't needed (the audio quality of my phone speaker is actually pretty amazing).

[dahfizz]

Do people not have TVs?

[ucosty]

By a strange coincidence I'm also in the group of people using their Macbook Pro while sitting on the sofa, due to not having a tv. I wouldn't use a dedicated TV enough to justify having one.

[sumedh]

I dont know about others but I dont have a TV.