Did we watch the same event? Microsoft introduced a $3,000 desktop PC in an era when nobody uses desktops anymore. It introduced a minor update to the Surface Book that starts at $2,300 with dual-core CPU, only 8GB of RAM, and last-gen graphics hardware.

For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen, twice the RAM, and a quad-core CPU, and it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park?!

No. Microsoft introduced an entirely new kind of tool for digital artists. I'm not one myself, but the Surface Studio makes me wish I were. And the people I know who are, are over the moon about it. They can't wait to get their hands on one.

Yes, it's Microsoft that hit it out of the park, and made Apple look amazingly weak by comparison. Today's event wouldn't have been particularly impressive even on its own. By comparison with yesterday's, it's just embarrassing.

First, this is a business for me. And I suspect it's a business for anyone that Apple or Microsoft expects to sell this stuff to. And having to pay $3000 for outdated hardware is a tough pill to swallow. The hardware in the Macbook "Pro" is simply inexcusable. (REALLY???? 16GB RAM MAX!?!?!?) But the hardware in the Surface Studio is equally galling. They give you an NVidia what? 965 for $3000??? And the BEST I could even POSSIBLY get would be a 980??? And for that magnanimous gesture on their part I would be obliged to pay a MINIMUM of $4100??? For LAST GENERATION graphics cards???? On a machine purportedly about graphics???? (A 1080 would run both faster AND cooler using LESS power Microsoft. And at this point in time, for a business investment 64GB of RAM should really be offered by anyone NOT trying to screw you. What's the deal Microsoft???)

I think to objective observers who were waiting for these presentations... both proved SEVERELY underwhelming considering the pent up expectations. I mean... OK... if you put a gun to my head, I'll probably buy the Surface Studio. But don't expect me to pretend that I don't know that both Microsoft and Apple are robbing me.

Sorry for the rant.

Let's call high-end graphics cards for what they really are: gaming console graphics hardware stuffed into PCs. Apart from a relatively small number of professionals who work with 3D rendering, high-end graphics cards are an even greater waste of money (unless of course you're buying the machine for gaming, which doesn't really fit the "digital artist" target of these machines).

Microsoft and Apple may still be pricing these products too high ("robbing you" as you say), but that's a separate discussion.

I can't help but notice that you are equating that 99% of "digital art" that can be handled by mobile graphics cards, to the 1% of "digital art" that anyone's going to actually PAY someone to produce. As I said, this is a business. If I could make the living I currently make retouching photos, then I'd gladly pay $3000 for an underpowered machine...

but I can't.

because no one is going to pay us that kind of money to retouch photos are they?

Look, these machines, to a business, are INVESTMENTS. You invest for the FUTURE, not to take advantage of the past. A 1070 or 1080 is not too much to ask considering Pascal's MANIFEST superiority in efficiency. Additionally, I was being kind, I think MS should OFFER 64GB in the Surface Studio, but a 128GB option would really be necessary to future proof this thing.

I'll tell you what MS and Apple are going for here... it's a money grab. And they are setting themselves up to come back to guys like me every 18 to 24 months for another mandatory money grab instead of just giving us a 60 month machine from the outset.

Offer me a 60 month Surface Studio at the $3000 price point and I'd update every workstation here. But that's not what they're offering is it?

Up until this year, I have never owned a machine with more than 8GB of RAM, and never a video card with more than 1GB of RAM until now either.

Are you perhaps talking about video editing or CGI rendering?

Yes. Video editing and CGI. The workflow normally requires the use of MASSIVE memory mapped files. Additionally, a given artist may do several "lo res" renders before shipping off to the farm. ("Lo res" being a relative word. Because in most cases we're talking about 2560x1440 or 1080p minimum.) I really don't see how your tech guys are able to get that to work for you on cards that have 1GB memory. But if they can, then you'd better NEVER let those guys go because they are worth their weight in gold. (Unless you don't do any CGI or video editing???)

Source: I was a system engineer for VFX and animation for a number of years.

Then again, with Chrome taking up >4GB of RAM, they probably could have gotten half that performance just by closing their browser or using Safari.

Can confirm. Got up to 15GB RAM usage today, before closing 30+ tabs to get back down to 7GB. Maybe it's ridiculous, but based on the information I'm needing from those tabs--100% text--it's infuriating.

Oh, and also sitting awfully comfortably in that 7GB area is Dropbox, which is doing who knows what with all of its RAM...I do like the Linux command line tool though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm probably an outlier though so can understand why it doesnt exist.

That's completely realistic for pro and semi-pro users.

The cost of making a laptop that could take 32GB or even 64GB of RAM must be tiny. No one would care if Apple only supplied 16GB but left a couple of slots free, or even if the stock overpriced 16GB could be swapped for 32GB.

Why cut corners and make "pro" machines that can't be used for professional work?

It's counterproductive. It may increase margins in the short term, but over time it alienates users and erodes the appeal of the brand.

It seems "Think Different" has become "Don't Expect Much."

I think people are imagining that a better computer will improve its performance, but it won't. There's a sleep statement in there or something. (Their blog post says something like "a cloud industry-leading innovation in picking-your-camera-out-of-a-list user experience story flow." Really? Just suck the files off my memory card in the background as soon as you detect one.)

I don't know if you saw this posted elsewhere in the thread but this is a pretty solid endorsement: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...

I think you're right that artists largely don't need what high end gaming PCs might require to play the newest steam titles at full graphics settings, but for what Microsoft is asking here, they do at least need enough GPU/CPU strength to have a very responsive UI when editing very large and complex graphical projects at 2560 x 1600 and beyond.

My worry about the Surface is simply that the minority report-style advertisement isn't really possible with a real-world PSD or 3dsmax scene.

High end graphics cards are usually much better than a gaming console, in that they offer much better frame-rates, and a lot more resolution, and at the same time even a single card can be more expensive than a complete gaming console.

So, yes, they are for gaming 99.9% of the time. But please don't compare them with consoles.

Look, I'm sorry - I'm with you for most of it, but you have this stick held by completely the wrong end. Gaming consoles are closer to APUs than discrete high-end GPUs.

As for having "outdated" cards, that is more a function of the production timeline. I am sure the Studio has been in the works for a while and those were probably the best in class cards around the time.

And the video is outdated, period, no air-quotes. There is simply no argument there. Making an excuse for it is nice and all, but it simply is a case of charging a premium for old tech.

Using the Surface as a tablet for drawing has been a huge use-case for visual artists from day 1. Just see this positive review of the original Surface Pro by Gabe from Penny Arcade: https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/22/the-ms-sur...

Most of those artists ended up buying iPad Pros to replace them with.

This is a weird complaint to me. So what if the display hardware is dated if it is perfectly up to the task it's presented with? Maxing out the specs on a machine for no other reason than to max out the specs seems to me to be nothing but a waist.

And even if it is perfectly suited the the rest of the hardware and any additional RAM/performance would be wasted[1], that's not a good excuse to overcharge for old commodity hardware.

[1] I would be extremely surprised if the rest of the system were designed around the video card. Actually, designed twice, since there are two video card options.

Not even just that, it's the last gen mobile cards, which means you have to spend 4.2k just to have 4GB of VRAM on something that, at the end of the day, is really a desktop. the 980 desktop version is ~$600 with 6GB VRAM.

you are paying for a digital drafting table.

As mentioned in another thread, purchasing the lcd panel itself ala-carte would cost more than the entire unit.

Maybe the thing you want to pay for is the screen, but there's no avoiding the outdated GPU tax that you have to pay to get it.

980M - 100W / 1060 ~ 80W / 1070 ~ 120W / 1080 ~ 150W

If they started out with the max TDP of 100W for the cooling system - upgrading it to 150W in that small space it sounds like too much of a change to meet their DL?

Clearly this does not excuse the reengineering but it might explain why they went this route.

The other was that they have already crossed over the "luxury" threshold from "just another PC" to "special hotness" sort of territory. So unless Nvidia is giving them a smoking deal on "old" GPU's it seems that from a marketing perspective you would want to check off all the boxes. Its reported that it would use less power and generate less heat, and Nvidia says it is 20% faster. That seems like it would be a "no brainer". But I clearly don't know.

That is why it surprised me when I read the high end Studio only had the GTX980 in it.

Really? First thing I thought when I saw it was how cool it would be for 3D sculpting. There are more uses for high end GPUs than gaming.

I wonder why ms didn't stick with AMD (like the xbox one) if they weren't going to use a 1080 (or 1070, might make more sense).

As someone that used to enjoy drawing/doodling but never made the leap from mouse to a digital pen - sketching and doodling on the surface 4 was eye-opening. Any number of programs paired with the pen/screen feels a lot like ink drawing without the mess and with multi-level undo.

The combination of a decent pen and great screen makes for a very satisfying and immediate drawing experience.

Edit: afaik the only moving part in the Surface Studio are the fans. Replacing a fan is an annoyance but at least it won't lead to data loss!

What counts is the time it takes to perform an operation like a Camera RAW import or a blur. If that goes down by a significant percentage, productivity goes up by a significant amount.

For drawing, good acceleration is the difference between a distracting experience that's laggy and unusable, and a smooth experience that gets out of the way of the work.

Besides, there are people with an interest in art and machine learning. Good luck with a 980M if that's your area of interest.

The machine is not "purportedly about graphics", it's about 2D artists, and they made that clear in pretty much every presentation I've seen on the device.

Not only that- it's a mobile processor, 980M, so it would lag some distance behind a 980. That is cutting serious corners for a desktop at that price point.

70% faster, they could just as well write "new recipe".

The Surface Studio may seem impressive, but as far as workflow goes, the Mac with tablet setup really is perfection.

I've never had the desire to look down on the tablet to draw, as the pointer always moves synchronously on screen.

In fact, I feel my hand would get in the way of drawing..

Right now it seems like the Apple products are refined perfection, while Microsoft is still trying to figure out its place.

"The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work." --Donald Knuth

It is worth spending the money, if you have it, to buy the tools you will enjoy working with.

Why would anyone need a desktop in this day and age? Moore's law means the things that desktops used to do 5 years ago, laptops do now.

The compute requirements for photo editing, for example, haven't changed in 5 years. But the processors and systems (IO, displays, etc..) keep getting faster. It's only natural that laptops would cannibalize desktops. And phones/tablets will cannibalize laptops in a few years.

Photo editing can be hugely resource intensive. Camera RAW files have been getting larger over time, and all but the simplest edits demand an SSD, a fast processor, and at least 32GB of memory. 128GB isn't unusual for commercial work.

You can get by with less, but sooner or later - usually sooner - you run out of RAM and your machine starts thrashing.

Many Photoshop features are hardware-accelerated, so having a good graphics card makes a significant difference to editing speed.

3D animation definitely needs a good graphics card. So does video editing.

Audio doesn't, but it needs as much raw processor power as possible. I know DJs/producers who are running dual 12-core Xeon systems for their mixes, and adding PCI DSP cards on top.

Surface Studio looks very nice, but it fails to tick most of these boxes. The reality is there's a significant market for creative power users willing to pay good money for multicore server-grade towers for their work.

Neither Apple nor MS are paying attention to this market. The Mac Pro is an underpowered curiosity now, and Surface Studio has - sadly - been hobbled by greed and penny pinching.

It can't be an effective interaction device and a server-level resource at the same time. Anyone who is enough of an enthusiast to require a dual Xeon workstation is clearly not who MS is targeting with a single product. Leave the multicore server-grade towers to HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc. because there's nothing to innovate there - you just throw hardware, bought at market price, into a box. What is MS supposed to innovate on there if all you care about is specs/$ and ignore the design and use-case?

I love to have just as much power I can. I'd love to have a multi-CPU POWER9 loaded with a couple terabytes of RAM and a couple flash cards attached to a fast bus, but I wouldn't know what to do with it.

Camera raw files haven't been increasing in size faster than Moore's law.

They can get by fine with a laptop. The Mac Pro is overpowered for them.

Moore's law has slowed down btw and is predicted to end in 4-6 years (2020 - 2022) as it would be physically impossible to shrink transistors any further /unless/ there is a change from the current silicon CMOS technology.

In fact, manufacturers are no longer even targeting the doubling of transistors anymore! Instead they are focusing speeding them up.

This is what I was responding to.

So we have Blizzard and Source engine, who am I missing?

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197998185123/games/?...

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition: Win

Team Fortress 2: Win/Mac/Lin

Factorio: Win/Mac/Lin

Rocket League: Win/Mac/Lin

Particle Fleet: Emergence: Win/Mac/Lin

SHENZHEN I/O: Win/Mac/Linux

Oil Rush: Win/Mac/Linux

Castle Crashers: Win/Mac

Tropico 5: Win/Mac/Linux

Literally every game I've played recently except ONE supports Mac

Obviously I'm not a "serious" gamer :)

I don't think you'd argue that a mac is a good gaming rig from a performance / $ perspective (or any other perspective really).

Both have their place - pen on screen or pen off. Working with your pen on a screen, especially a smaller screen, means you lose a good chunk of your visible space. Overall opinion -- it is great for artists that two major companies have made a significant effort on getting the pen on display right.

"Overwatch was fast and fun on medium settings. Civ VI is what I’ve played the most on the Studio and it looks and runs fantastic."

"When I first saw the device months ago in that secret room at MS, they asked me what I thought. I said, “Well I have no idea if anyone else will want it, but you have made my dream computer.”

Nothing about that is, I went out and paid my own money to buy this.

People spreading Viral Videos are often unpaid paid, even if they are a critical part of a marketing campaign. Hand someone some free hardware and they don't think is this worth X, just is X cool.

So, it's not surprising or questionable that his reviews are positive.

Also, pay is not limited to just cash.

Based on the article (he's been lent this device for the last week or so), I imagine the same thing may well happen if he's happy with it - which it sounds like he may be.

They haven't replaced my laptop with anything new. They just released a newer model. Similar to every yearly company announcement ever. Nobody cares about version 7 with nothing new, they care about version 1 of something innovative.

Microsoft just blew Wacom out of the water in a niche product market. Great. What does that have to do with new MBPs?

Hahahahahahahahaha

Wacom hasn't released an innovative product in 10 years, and much like Texas Instruments and their $130 monopoly on school calculators, everyone is still paying the same $2500 to Wacom that they did decades ago for Cintiq.

The lack of competition for Wacom is criminal and has allowed them to coast on last-decades product line for a very long time.

Hell, the most innovative thing Wacom has done in 10 years is rebrand Graphire into Bamboo. Ooooooh!

I imagine the day the Apple Pencil was announced was a very grim day in what ever is left of the Wacom R&D department.

Does Wacom have an entire suite of comparable products, or do they cater specifically to a niche market? Was their announcement yesterday? Life has context.

> What does that have to do with new MBPs?

I'll go ahead and quote the original comment you originally responded to: "This event was by far the most disappointing Mac event in the history". Apple had an event where they announced not much more than that we are now in late 2016. Nobody is saying MBP itself is bad, the event is comparatively lacking.

* I think you can reasonably make a case that Windows 95/98/NT were better than MacOS 7/8/9. (You could probably make a reasonable case for the opposite; I certainly wouldn't argue the point).

* The Zune was better than the iPod. Unfortunately for MS not better than the iPhone a few months later. The "Metro" design language it introduced was quite a bit better than Apple's at the time (and started the "flat design" trend that even Apple would end up aping, years later).

* Various areas where MS beat Apple by default, at least circa the 90s-00s, owing to Apple making no or a half-hearted effort. Office suites, gaming consoles, web browsers, the server, 3D graphics, yadda yadda.

* C# is a far better language than Objective-C, and Visual Studio is a far better IDE than Xcode.

* Edge is arguably a better browser than Safari. MS have also made some great tooling for webdev recently, VSCode and Typescript, while we haven't heard much from Apple.

* The Surface tablets have been arguably better than recent iPads, by virtue of running a full OS.

After that I've got nothing.

C# is a nicer language, and VS a better IDE when it comes to language integration but.. the platform APIs are far more productive on OS X than they are on Windows and the GUI toolkit was good from the get go, whereas MS never commits to a toolkit fully (MFC, WinForms, WPF, now UWP which is like a restricted, not fully compatible WPF). Why do you think there's so many great, lightweight alternatives to Photoshop with non destructive image editing on Mac OS X, like Affinity Photo, Acorn, Pixelmator, and none on Windows ? why is it that Apple can dogfood and write everything in their modern platform APIs, even rewrote their file browser Finder, in it, but Windows out of the box comes with exactly zero .net apps? Recently Windows 10 brought some .net stuff out of the box on the desktop, but they're all toy apps no one would want to use, and certainly no equivalent to Apple Mail, Photos, iMovie, Garageband etc. The UWP mail client is pitiful. C#/.net platform in general, on the desktop, as far as commercial, desktop apps sold to consumers come, is a dead wasteland. Whatever few .net apps I've seen as an enduser that made use of .net, I tend to associate with "slow, heavy, not featureful" particularly WPF apps. .net greatest success is the same as Java: on servers, or on the desktop for in-house business software where the well being of the enduser is not a priority and no one cares if the app feels sluggish or has terrible UI.

The lack of dogfooding has been a common complaint among windows developers for a long time, for example :

http://functionalflow.co.uk/blog/2011/09/27/microsoft-please...

> I understand deadlines and priorities, and I know that probably Microsoft just had to ship something at some point, but it really seems that there was a big lack of dogfooding in the WPF case.

> There’s a striking example of this: what was the number one complaint that developers had about WPF since 2006?… Blurry text and images. And when did Microsoft fix it?… Only in 2010, when they started using WPF for Visual Studio.

> Another issue that has been bugging me since I started using WPF was the airspace limitation. It seems that it’s finally going to be fixed in 4.5. Why do I think it’s being solved now? Because they probably needed some native WinRT component to play nice with WPF…

Microsoft still doesn't really use .net outside of dev tools and server apps. UWP apps are just toy apps. UWP OneNote isn't even close to the desktop OneNote. And so on. MS themselves don't really produce high quality desktop apps with C#. If they won't, then who will? Compare to Apple and how everything they make, makes heavy use of their platform APIs such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation etc. How could .net not be a barren wasteland for desktop apps?

Apple always had the better developer platform, dogfooded and thus battletested, and now they're also getting a nicer programming language to work with, with Swift. Their IDE is still no visual studio, but AppCode from IntelliJ fixes that.

Hence why I made no mention of APIs.

It isn't an entirely new tool, it is an HDR, higher res, larger version of a Cintiq, with a built in slow PC with last-generation mobile graphics. The hinge and stuff was definitely an improved industrial design.

Those screen improvements alone are probably enough for lots of professionals to switch from cintiq, even if they lose support for professional-tier desktop hardware, but what about the pen? As far as I can tell the pen doesn't even have tilt detection and from videos you have to use the dial/puck to simulate rotating or tilting the pen.

In spite of that, it was definitely more innovative than anything Apple showed.

I'd bet that one could make a revolutionary stats program with the new form factor/interface possibility.

SURE! Except, of course, you're not going to be allowed to code it in Python, R, or Octave. Instead, it will be Microsoft(TM) Visual(TM) R#(TM) with the new NetDNA/DCOM/.NET/CloudyMcCloudface Framework (TM)!! (now, with 40% more Cortana!(TM))

1: https://github.com/Microsoft/PTVS

2: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-de...

if they are serious about art creation, they should only use wacom technology and nobody else.

Actually I believe they introduced a competitor to the Wacom Cintiq that comes in a variety of sizes and does not require you to use a desktop or Windows 10.

Calling it 'an entirely new kind of tool' is really over stating it.

Have you used Surface before? Asking because when I picked one up about a month ago, I had an awful time with it. Makes me think their announcement won't really do anything but look interesting. I could be missing something, though.

Did you get to play with it at a store or friends house, or actually take it home and use it for some time. Everyone i've met that has a surface (book, 3, 4, etc) loves it.

Not really, you could buy a Wacom Cintiq since about forever. I'm glad they're giving wacom some competition though.

For the desktop, if you think people don't use desktops you're out of touch with reality. Microsoft introduced the Surface Studio primarily targeting what Apple has started to abandon, creatives & creative professionals.

A 27" Cintiq tablet costs $2800 on Amazon, and that's without the stand, which is an additional $600. This is what video editors, audio engineers and graphic artists use in their studios. The Surface Studio replaces all of that -and- it replaces the computer itself. What are you missing here?

Which means Microsoft has introduced a dual-core low-voltage part significantly less powerful than the one in the MBP. Let's not kid ourselves here, Apple was not going to use 15W LV KL in either MBP, and the 45W parts are will 4~6 months from release.

True. I wasn't talking about the red-headed step-child but you've got a point here. The hold-up there might have been that there's no Iris KL (incidentally I'm pissed that they've apparently gone with the non-iris pro on the 15", what the fuck)

I'm seriously considering getting a PC instead, even though I've written http://taoofmac.com for 14 years.

(I do happen to work for Microsoft, by the way, but would very much prefer to keep my home setup on a separate tech stack for the sake of keeping an open view. I'm now ogling the Skullcandy NUC and wondering how well it will run Elementary OS)

I would guess that just here on HN there are tens of thousands of us who could describe ourselves as "Unix-centric pros", who want powerful unixy client machines that match our unixy servers and who also want all the client-side stuff everyone needs (excellent video, audio, wifi, battery mgt., etc., drivers perfectly matched to hardware and working out of the box) plus a full range of apps. We can get the unixy client from Linux, BSD, or Mac. We can get the reliable, everything works consumer client stuff from Windows or Mac. The only overlap is Mac.

Unfortunately for us, this power user unix workstation stuff is just a historical accident for Apple, not a corporate objective. They're trying to get out of the computer business so they can focus on fashionable, high-margin, designer "lifestyle" products and services for the hip ones who consume stuff, not the old drudges in the back room who make stuff.

Microsoft holds their Windows legacy so dear that they'll slap more layers on the papier-mache balloon that is Windows but never put unix at its core, and all the nifty client-side Linux systems out there seem to have the motto "before you complain, realize that how much of it ends up working depends on how smart you are".

I would wish for Google to develop a line of powerful Linux-based workstations, but they would just spy on me until Google canceled the project altogether.

I wish Apple would create a wholly-owned subsidiary called "Apple Computer, Inc." that would have access to Apple's manufacturing expertise but would build a line of computers for power users who produce stuff--computers that weren't "thinner".

Look into it, Microsoft released it earlier this year specifically for unix developers.

Many that went Apple when they showed OS X to the world, never really understood Apple, or for that matter, NeXT culture.

The POSIX layer never mattered, what mattered were the Objective-C frameworks on top and a workflow based on Xerox PARC ideas, that Steve Jobs brought to Apple and NeXT.

The UNIX compatibility was there, because NeXT was competing against Sun and Irix workstations, so it needed to be compatible to a certain extent.

Later Apple trying to promote the same compatibility because after the Copland failure, they needed to sell computers or close shop, so the UNIX with nice GUI was a way of doing it.

For those of us that develop native applications, it never really mattered.

But they just did, with Bash on Windows.

I do appreciate that they are trying to do as much as they think they can without throwing away the thing that they believe is the most valuable corporate asset they have: the mountain of stuff built over the years for Windows. They have carefully preserved this asset by making huge efforts to ensure than anything that worked on Windows in the past will keep working forever.

The thing is, what I wish they would do for me (which might not be what they need to do for themselves) is to take the equivalent of my Linux server and wrap a Windows API around it, the way a Mac is like a Linux server inside with a Mac API wrapped around it for client software usefulness. I'd be just as happy with a Windows GUI/API as a Mac GUI/API, but what I want is for it to resemble my servers under the GUI, so I can leverage whatever unixy skills and tools I may have.

Having a simulation of a unix shell on top of an NT core makes Windows more useful than it would otherwise be, but it's not the same as a Windows shell on a Linux kernel.

No, Darwin is Mach with BSD welded to it; it is not a pure Unix design. Likewise, WSL is the NT kernel with the Linux syscall interface on top, via the Pico Process interface. The NT kernel was designed for portability; in fact, POSIX compatibility was a design goal from the early days, in contrast to Mach where the idea of mashing together Mach and BSD was never considered.

In many ways, WSL is a much cleaner design than Darwin is.

As long as you have no plans to play games, it's a wonderful machine for development. It's really fast for its small size, noticeably faster than the Macs I'd been using before. I spend most of my time with the NUC doing Ruby development in Fedora, with some Clojure and Node.js on the side. I've done some office type stuff with LibreOffice. I've dabbled in OpenSCAD while working on a 3D print. The NUC is more than enough power for all of that. I haven't played with Windows 10 too much, but it's also snappy when I need to boot into it.

It's a very quiet machine. On full blast, you might get a blowing sound similar to a stressed MBP. But usually in normal usage it's no more than a low hum; I can't even hear it unless I listen for it. You can throttle down the processors in the BIOS to make it nearly (totally?) silent if you like.

The most annoying thing about the NUC was installing the BIOS updates before getting started. The NUC6i5SYH had a lot of problems at launch that needed to be patched. Once I got beyond that, everything was smooth. The NUC is basically a laptop board shoved into a small box instead. If the things you want to do are possible on a laptop, they'll be possible on the NUC no problem.

I mostly access the NUC via SSH (and rsync my codebase between the two computers). The NUC is also connected to a monitor and I use the MacBook keyboard and mouse to drive both computers with Symless Synergy.

"a 28" desktop PC" is a bit of an understatement. It's a huge low-latency touch display which works like a drafting table.

> nobody uses desktops anymore

There's a desktop on most desks in our office. A Macbook is certainly an alternative option but not if you're looking for a large touchscreen display.

> For the same price as the new Surface Book i7, I can get an MBP 15" with bigger screen and quad-core CPU

If there was really a performance problem I think a lot more people would be upset with what was announced. Last gen means more stability and likely cooler temperature hardware. Also, does the 15" MBP have a detachable/touch screen? Does it come with Windows? These are real considerations for potential Surface adopters.

The Macbook is simply a laptop. There's no problem with that, but Surface is selling more than that, so a direct comparison on cost and performance isn't really fair. Or are you suggesting Apple is the only company capable of putting newer hardware into a computer?

The fraction of desktops vs. laptops shipped (~40%-~60%) has been holding steady for years. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

The target market for this is people who buy a $1,800 wacom cintiq and pair it with a $1,000 computer.

The price is reasonable for the people it targets.

[1]https://us-store.wacom.com/Catalog/Pen-Displays/Cintiq/Cinti...

> Tycho asked me to compare it to my Cintiq, and I told him that drawing on the Cintiq now felt like drawing on a piece of dirty plexiglass hovering over a CRT monitor from 1997.

A bit hyperbolic, but you get the idea. https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2016/10/26/the-surfac...

So for 1,100 you are getting half as much ram, half as much storage, and a lesser gpu.

I'm sure you could spec out something similar to the internals for a few hundred less with a little bit of work.

If they just push the specs up, increase battery life..."Apple isn't innovating anymore", "So what's new?", "It looks just like my old MBP" etc.

Now that they actually bring something innovative you'll get this kind of complains.

Now no matter if people liked this event or not I find it hard to believe anyone seriously though yesterdays MS event was any better. Overpriced useless last gen crap for insane price.

That perfectly fits my opinion of Apple. ;)

I jumped off the Apple band wagon years ago, but an important point here is: Apple events used to be exciting. They would announce something interesting and worthy at every event, which is why so many even started watching life streams.

The iPhone is still a really great phone, but iOS has been playing catchup with Android for years. And apart from mobile Apple hasn't done much that's innovative or interesting for quite some time.

That's why opinions are so harsh. People have come to expect more.

Apple products usually have top notch latest specs and are most powerful products out there. Both in laptops and in smartphones. So definitely not last gen crap.

Overpriced? Expensive maybe, but probably one of the least overpriced actually. Unlike most manufacturers who just throw in Windows or Android on top of their generic hardware, Apple design a lot of HW and SW and their integrations in-house and they actually have costs to cover. (I heard Silicon Valley engineers aren't exactly free)

I don't know what is "much that's innovative". I guess it's subjective. If we look at the last few years: 3D Touch, TouchID. That's not so bad.

If we look at the whole history of Android...eh...well...hmmm...Samsung Edge...maybe?

I agree that Apple isn't innovating as well as they used to back in the days of Jobs, but nobody else really didn't innovate back then and they sure as hell don't innovate now unless you see putting unnecessarily high specs on a smartphone as an innovation.

That Apple products have BIG margins can clearly be seen in their profits.

People are willing to pay the addition for the ego boost and great design (MacBook is still the nicest looking Laptop imo, iPhones always look great).

But it's not because they use the best, super expensive hardware.

You mean low-spec RAM? Slow SSD's? Obviously soldered in, lel...

A GPU that is apparently is on par with last, severely slower (compared to 1000 series nVidias), generation of GPU's? 2GB of VRAM, lel again

A CPU that is nothing to gawk at? (2.6~2.8 GHz nominal)

Crappy sound, crappy cooling, zero moisture resistance, all for ~2800 bucks

Meanwhile Lenovo I've got in order to work with Autodesk Inventor has the same CPU, 1TB 7200rpm HDD + 128GB SSD (replaceable), up to 32GB RAM (I've got 16GB in 2 slots out of 4), 960M with 4GB VRAM, SD card reader that is amazing to have, bitching sound that kinda surprised me, full size keyboard, all for a whopping ~1000$. (And I'm fairly certain it will not die to humid air - I'm guilty of sometimes using it with water dripping off my fingers even)

Sure, it only has a 1080 screen and I don't care about battery life (since I use it as a mobile workstation that is plugged 99% of the time) and it obviously comes with Windows 10 (THE HORROR)

The point is: stop spreading bullshit about how amazing Apple hardware is. For the price you are paying it is a joke.

I used to be Thinkpad hardcore too. I switched to Mac when my x200/x201 hybrid that I built died (fell off the top of a server rack) and work bought me an MBPr. I'm pretty firm in the Apple camp now. I used to be a hater and holy shit was I wrong.

Now that my workflow is mostly photography and 4k video editing I couldn't imagine being back on a Thinkpad with Arch/CentOS. Windows is dead to me and has been for years, I'd go back to Linux FAR before Windows, but the workflow on OSX is just so damn sweet that I'm not even thinking about it.

There's really no company that comes even close to Apple for my use case. That being said I wouldn't pay $2800 either. Let the suckers buy it and I buy lightly used for half the price. The new screen is really, really, tempting though.

Then you are not in Apple's market, period. For a lot of mobile users, wicked specs are pointless if you are tied to an outlet.

If they replaced function keys with the touch bar and left everything else alone (save for faster components), I don't think half as many people would be complaining.

I would lose HOURS of productivity per week if I were not on a dual screen set up. It's just better for what I do.

That being said, if I need to go mobile, which I normally don't I use my macbook. I think I've disconnected my macbook from my monitors probably 2 times in the last 2 years.

You're kind of proving his point... even the people who doesn't need a portable computer do get a portable computer instead of a desktop one nowadays. (By the way, I don't agree on desktop computers not being used anymore: I spent most of my day using a desktop computer. And a desktop telephone, another supossedly dissapearing technology.)

    > I would lose HOURS of productivity per week if I were
    > not on a dual screen set up.

Mind you, if you totalled up all the staff hours wasted this year with people wandering around searching and asking others for various dongles, we probably could have afforded another couple of MBPs.

Still cheaper than macbook pro btw, which I have that too but mostly use it for ios stuff only.

You cannot seriously expect anyone edit a 4k video on a laptop with 16 GB or RAM, no matter how hard Apple is pushing their ridiculous onstage demos.

You cannot seriously expect serious developers run multiple VMs, for example, on 16 GB RAM on a laptop.

The list goes on and on.

http://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/

Scala development, and some devs ops stuff that required spinning up VMs. I mean not a lot; like 6 ~ 8.

At work, I use a 16GB ram laptop, Scala development an no VMs (we do everything in Docker and deploy to Mesos/Marathon).

I do have a desktop at home now with 32GB of ram, but it honestly feels like overkill and I may scale down. There is a lot of dev work that does require a pretty beefy workstation, but I've been doing HD video editing, Photoshop/Lightroom and Scala/Java work on laptops for years.

Studies are consistent here.

Time you spend waiting? Distracts you from your tasks, overall focus drops -- you're dumber.

Less screen real-estate? More working memory dedicated to what's not on screen -- you're dumber.

A lot of people have desktops, myself included. I'm not really sure where you got such an impression.

Not just that... If nobody uses desktops, why would Apple waste so much engineering and design resources on something like the iMac if there's no market?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269044/worldwide-desktop...

Most people don't buy pickup trucks, but 1) people who buy them need them, and 2) it's a profitable market segment.

While they are alike in many respects, the Surface Book is an orange in comparison the the Macbook Pro in three important ways:

1 - It's a convertible

2 - It's got a touch screen

3 - It's got a pen digitizer

Overpriced Microsoft devices, although impressive. I am more worried about the silence from MS on MFC given the world's investment in it. We can't all just rewrite our apps in UWP overnight. The foundation classes were just that - a foundation, and we can't move the giant building built on top.

For the Mac, goodbye MagSafe and SD cards and optical audio in (or any audio line in, actually). What's the point of a super thin device if you have to carry it in a thick bag due to the bulkiness of the 24 adapters to make the device useful or connect it to anything? It beggars belief.

"We've made the thinnest car ever! Steering wheel is an optional extra".

I think we are reaching the pinnacle of computer hardware and software development. We may have even passed it.

In short, I'll stick with my current MacBook Pro for as long as I can. That new giant touchpad looks to make typing tricky.

It is in maintenance mode, only bug fixes are planned or little improvements like they did on VS 2015.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt270148.aspx

For C++ on WIndows the future is XAML, for legacy MFC applications there is Project Centennial.

Thanks in advance.

What I have bookmarked is for Windows Forms ones, where they state exactly that.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2014/04/WPF-QA

Maybe this is already worthy read for you, it also mentions C++.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2013/08/20/atl-and-m...

"MFC can't be used for for Windows Store apps because it uses too many APIs that are banned for store usage. In order to allow MFC usage in your scenario we would probably have to break MFC into multiple DLLs, which would be a prohibitive amount of work."

I don't think that the Surface Studio is where computers should go. It's not relevant for 95% of users.

Gee, I guess that confirms I'm nobody.

The sentiment on Designer News was positive, and most of the people over there are UI designers and front-end engineers. https://www.designernews.co/stories/75964-microsoft-surface-...

Loads of people still use desktops. If you were to say not many people/companies need that kind of machine then you would be right.

The laptop is fine for fooling around, or "working" from home on the couch, but I'd lose my mind trying to do anything that small a screen, that few pixels, and a cramped, irregular keyboard with no travel. Plus trackpads. Fuck trackpads.

That people get anything done at all on these little midget laptops is, quite frankly, amazing to me.

Simply lacking screen real estate reduces available working memory that would be used to focus on a coding task.

Given how this empirically impacts work quality, I'm pretty amazed how younger tech companies have pushed employees in this direction.

It's not all that different from the open office trend.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/251521/when_two_monitors_aren...

>"People dramatically overestimate their ability to manage their environment," Meyer says, adding that in some ways, using multiple monitors to keep all sorts of data visible is analogous to using a cell phone while driving.

I've got 6880x1440 worth of curved display on my desk, and obviously, watching Netflix, browsing Facebook, or otherwise distracting myself with one of them would be a net productivity loss.

Perhaps your employees aren't perfectly rational actors whose incentive is to maximize the utility of their tools while at the office?

For example, there seems to be correlation between 1) wanting to keep git work local to a workstation and not push anywhere with public visibility, and 2) wanting to use a laptop so you can bring that local repository state with you.

Neither desires are necessarily aligned with what benefits the company (or the quality of work), but they do drive a laptop preference.

Even just having a physically larger display that fills your FOV appears to improve spatial task and memory performance: http://research-srv.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/desney/pub...

From another study (http://pro.sagepub.com/content/56/1/1506.abstract) on actual satisfaction (not open access, so quoting some key bits):

First, they provide a good summary of previous findings:

"Previous research has demonstrated productivity increases for users performing tasks on larger or multiple screens. For instance, a 9% productivity increase was noted while using wider screens (15” flat panel vs. 46.5” curved screen) (Czerwinski, et al., 2003)."

"Similarly, a 3.1% increase was noted using dual screens over a single screen (Poder, Godbout, & Bellemare, 2007). Task success has been found to increase for tasks performed on 4 – 17” monitors vs. a single 17” monitor (Truemper, et al., 2008). Likewise, tasks were performed faster and with less workload while using 2 – 17” monitors over a single 17” monitor (Kang & Stasko, 2007)."

"Other studies have noted increased window interaction and open windows while using multi-monitor configurations (Hutchings, Smith, Meyers, Czerwinski, & Robertson, 2004)."

"Issues with single monitor use have been well documented. Generally, higher mental workload, more window switching, repositioning, resizing, inadvertent opening, and closing of files have been associated with single small monitor usage (Czerwinski, et al., 2003). Users generally perceive small single monitors as requiring more workload (Grudin, 2001; Hashizume, Kurosu, Kaneko, 2007)."

Second, their own findings:

"Participants felt more rushed, that they worked harder, and were more frustrated [with a single monitor configuration]."

"Participants spent more active time in the PDF reference document while completing tasks on the single monitor configurations"

"Participants were observed to leave the PDF reference document open and viewable (but not in focus) while working with other source documents when in the dual monitor configurations."

"Participants clicked less during tasks on the dual 22” monitors than the dual 17” monitors and single 17” and 22” monitors."

"Participants switched between windows more frequently during tasks on a single 17” and 22” monitors than the dual 22” monitors."

Given that they're using glossy-screened laptops — maybe they care more about looks and hipness than about getting the job done?

Why the hate against glossy screens? The colors pop more and unless you're sitting in a spot that's prone to glare, you're just as productive as anyone else. I've never had an issue with a Macbook's glossy screen affecting my ability to work.

Sure, that's valid. But everyone's eyes are different, which is why I don't get why there are a lot of glossy screen haters out there. I never had that problem sitting in front of my glossy screened MBP for 8+ hours a day for 3+ years (it died but not because it had a glossy screen).

>> If it is about having something pretty as a status symbol, then yeah glossy makes sense.

Aren't glossy haters mocking/judging people basically using matte screens as status symbols? i.e., you must be a hipster or shallow and not a real programmer/{insert other profession here}?

And honestly, MBP is not the best purchase for specs. You can get a cheaper Dell XPS 15.

?? What profession doesn't use -- doesn't absolutely rely on desktop PCs??

This is microsoft making a product that designers love.

The behemoth which everyone considered dead is finding ways to make inroads into apple's old stronghold, with design innovations.

Yeah its going to have to deal with Windows, but this is a huge turn for a creature with that kind of momentum to overcome.

With the internal stack re-orgnization (rationalization), and having to build their own reference PCs, and buying their own pen tech, they are doing what a good firm should do - work hard on improving.

They have far to go but theres lots of signs of them moving in the right direction.

Whereas in sharp contrast you have

the Ipad pro which still runs ios, and the touch bar. And lets not forget their moment of courage, where they decided that they will obsolete the entire world of headphones.

> nobody uses desktops anymore

That's just not true. Maybe you only use computers for social media and youtube but other people need things that can actually run resource intense programs.

Lots of people use desktops. And this is more than a desktop PC, the "studio" functionality makes that clear.

And last-gen/overpriced current hardware is what Apple has been doing for a long time, yet it's easy to see by their success that it's not pure specs but rather the actual experience that matters.

For general computing (e.g. web browsing), yes. But that doesn't cover all the possible uses of a computing device. Gamers, designers, scientists, video/media professionals are some of the people who use primarily desktops.

I'd argue that this isn't true, especially for high-end artists, developers, gamers, and... well, my anec-data (gathered in only the finest biased areas) shows that this is blatantly false.

Any data to support this?

Sent from my desktop PC.

Speak for yourself.

This is why every single company has giant marketing departments and this perception informs so many of our decisions both consciously and unconsciously.

This is the real danger that apple is in - that how it's perceived is changing even if its products continue to be superior.

I love that even in 2016-- with all the new companies and platforms and wars, and desktops arguably being the least important battleground-- we can still have an old-fashioned bitter Mac-vs-PC argument thread once in a while, with all the swearing and name-calling, just like when I was on Slashdot in 2003. I love it.

Today, the mainstream in tech circles is a mob of disgruntled Apple buyers that Cupertino spent decades courting and accumulating with bold moves (like the MBA and the MBPR), who now don't see a reason to stick around. It's a bad trend for Apple.

There is something about this topic that really gets the comments going, and I wonder what it is.

It's not just Apple vs. Microsoft. It is also Apple vs. what Apple should have done, or Microsoft vs. what its competitors are doing.

I propose that a simple A vs. B discussion isn't enough to provoke all this. Today's Apple announcement is being taken as a kind of indirect referendum on the future of nerd-friendly high-end computing hardware as a whole. As you point out, the waning significance of this question (with the rise of phones and tablets) has caused a lot of anxiety out there!

No iMac update.

No Mac Pro update.

Buyer's Guide on MacRumors now:

"iMac: Might as well buy. Nothing on the horizon."

"Mac Pro: Buy. If you like paying 2013 prices for 2013 hardware."

I was going to say you were wrong because it was stated "starts at 16GB" near the end of the event. Checked the store and sure enough, I see no way to increase the RAM.

That's just stupid.

Also no where does it says the speed and bandwidth they'll support, overall there isn't much performance difference between LPDDR3 or 4, or between DDR3 and 4 when the frequencies are off by only a few 100's of mhz.

That said I'm actually disappointed that the memory on the MBP especially the 15" is LPDDR, no reason to degrade memory performance on a machine which already has a pretty big battery, DDR4 is pretty darn power efficient as it is.

This to me looks more like another cost cutting decision set by Apple to simplify board design and the supply chain.

No 7th gen CPU's, low power memory for no reason, dumping of ports, and a pretty steep price hike.

I'm glad I bought my mid 2015 pretty fully upgraded MBP 15 with a dedicated GPU for 1480 GBP on sale last holiday season, this one is not even meh, it's a full on pass, the only feature I like is the touch ID, I still don't understand why Apple doesn't allow you to unlock your Mac with your phone, but now I know why.

As for the 7th gen CPU--there are no available quad cores. I don't think Apple wanted to release redesigned MBPs with the 15" flagship model having a CPU one-generation behind the 13" model.

I am ok with the LPDDR3 being used for the 13" one, but on the 15" they should've went with DDR4 tbh.

As for the chips yes no quad cores for KB yet, but then again I don't understand why they didn't just staggered the release like usual, MBP13 can come out with Kabby Lake Dual Cores and the 15 can come out later when the QC's are out which is December this year.

FWIW it looks like the only available option for 15" rMBP is 16GB. Personally it's more than I need, but it's still interesting that there's no room to adjust.

I was (against all odds), hoping for 64! If this is true, consider me disgusted. I had 16GB in my (long lost, loved) 17-inch Macbook Pro, in 2009! I really cannot fathom what this company is thinking. I'm bewildered, disappointed, angry, in equal measure. I've been waiting for a killer Macbook Pro for literally 18 months! Sorry. I'm going Lenovo/Dell or why not, Surface Studio. For the first time in 20 years. I'm going Windows. I will not support a company which insults me with this. If this is Jony Ive's work, if they are so self-confident in their "design" that they cannot put a decent hardware spec together, then these people need to be retired.

Or maybe I just haven't cottoned on? They just don't care about high end users? Or are they completely out of touch? I don't understand.

Now that ssds in macbooks are not user replaceable -- you have to buy as much disk as you want for 3 years all up front -- it's nearly $3k for the cheapest 15 inch macbook not even including applecare for 3 years. Ouch.

It just seems like something Apple would do.

The first example I came across, they did it after 8 months in 2011. Maybe you're right, maybe the Macbook Pro is just a beefier Macbook now. They didn't even splurge on the most up to date Intel chips, but the price went up?

This is so disappointing, after a long wait too.

Glad right now I timed my last Macbook pro purchase to have a year of applecare left on it, and it could easily last me another 2 years thanks to being maxed out when I bought it.

Apple is a company looking to maximize it profit as well as build good products. A lot of laptop manufacturers are starting to catch up on the hardware side (the new Zenbook).. it's just the MacOS experience that someone has left to create an equivalent to.

Apple dropped the ball, big time. I'll ride out my 2012 MBPr (which still works great), but at these conditions, my next laptop will not be from Cupertino.

Even the new Lenovo T460p's are sliding by. Asus Zenbook is slick too.

I am more of a 13" guy, although i've used the 15" MBP and windows laptop at one time.

I'm hoping by the time my applecare is up they will throw a massive parade for doing the obvious hardware upgrades.

One possible reason they haven't is getting performance and heat managed in the new slim form factor.

Had a few macbooks that ran hot in the past, so I hope it's just that and not much else. It sucked having 15" macbook pros that had faulty video cards due to poor heat management and died prematurely.

My girlfriend is a nursing student, not a programmer and has 8 gigs of ram on her laptop. She's constantly asking me to look at her laptop when it beachballs and slows to a crawl when she's doing homework and her memory is maxed. She only has chrome, Word, Excel and some online courses open.

I don't buy that figure one bit.

Of the approximately 100 million or so Macintosh Laptop users, it's entirely possible that a million of them are High End video editing or Developers/3D modeling and require more than 8GB, but I"m pretty confident that the vast majority of Macintosh Laptop Users will require less out of their system than I do - and, for better or worse, a lot of the high end scientific workstation/CAD-CAM/Servers/etc... have departed from the Macintosh Laptop Platform, and are now running on the MacPro, or, or, more likely, Linux/Windows.

And yes, I realize I've just argued myself into a corner, that those people have had to leave the Macintosh Laptop world because they need the horsepower/memory that they can only get on other platforms - but that's who is left on the MacLaptop community, and that's who Apple is targeting.

Unfortunately Chrome is absolutely terrible not just for power usage but also for RAM usage. For some reason Chrome loves memory, it gobbles it up. Safari is much better about it.

I switched from Chrome back to Safari recently and while it took some time adjusting, I have been seeing almost 2 - 3 hours longer battery life, and I have had way less issues with "beachballing".

"Don't do it then."

I can't believe I have to repeat this, in 2016: software workload naturally expands to use all available resources. Period. Nobody likes doing "memory optimization" work when developing.

Safari is leaking memory. Unless you reboot your machine daily, Safari is terrible option.

I use both constantly. Chrome crashes are non-existant, where Safari crashes at least weekly.

This seems very shortsighted. It is not like they are strapped for cash, and the prices still went up a few hundred dollars.

Macbook PROs are for PROfessionals. Multiple VMs. Big fast SSDs. Many cores. Better displays.

Haha, not anymore. For some time now, the PRO in Apple products is for PROsumers, or its possibly just a meaningless vestigial acronym now. See also: Final Cut X "Pro" which was obviously not targeted at professionals.

1. probably more likely to be in Apple's target demographic, 2. buy the machines with the highest margins.

Edit: for comparison, Lenovo T460p can be configured with quad-core i7, Nvidia GPU, 32GB RAM, 1 SSD + 1 HD/SSD, replaceable battery, 1.9mm key travel, base starts at $800 with many components user-replaceable, http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t460p...

My one year old MBP (which is really a "2013 MBP") has half the memory and storage of the ThinkPad. In fact, pretty much the only noticeable difference between it and the "new" one is the touch strip. :/

Spinning up a basic devstack instance (for example) take a minimum of 6GB and that's before you even deploy any test vms inside that infrastructure. Another example, if you're doing config management development you may need several VMs running which in turn may have (say) large java apps with heavy memory requirements even when fairly unladen. So, I guess the answer is, it depends on what you're doing and what the memory requirements of the thing you're running on VMs is.

Maybe it's not super common for games programming, but it's definitely common to not use ref counted pointers or anything that could help you here.

ml work commonly uses data that is 8g+ -- and regularly 32g+ -- just for the data itself. Yes you can work on remote servers but it's convenient to be able to work and develop locally.

As for the RAM in the rMBP. I'm only half disappointed compared to what I would have been 1 year ago. My workflow is pushing more and more stuff in the cloud, so instead of running a bunch of small VM locally I can have VM sized properly to the task at hand rather than limited to my laptop configuration.

Somebody reply with a link so I can be more upset, please.

Not everybody wants to have the weight on their back of a clock-ticking cost of doing their R&D online in the cloud. Many of us, including me, want a highly capable machine with an upfront, quantifiable cost, but that is professionally credible.

http://mos6581.com/pictures/5170-canvas/DCSF0009.jpg

The in-OS memory compression helps, but when I still had a 16GB Macbook Pro, the system always found a way to use up all of the RAM to the point that the compression would kick in to handle the overage over my physical memory.

My habits aren't any different in terms of extraneous windows/apps open on Windows, and I rarely hit 100% RAM utilization on my 16GB Windows machine.

Edit: even to the point of compressing pages, since it's faster to uncompress them than fetch from disk.

It's even worse than that, if you're in the UK: the price of the 2013 Mac Pro has gone up by £500. Yes yes, Brexit and currency adjustment, and if it were new hardware I'd clench my teeth and bear it. But a £500 increase for hardware that's almost three years old is highway robbery.

It's entirely Brexit.

This day last year, £1 was worth $1.527.

Today, £1 is worth $1.223.

(1.223-1.527)/1.527 = -20% almost exactly, and the Mac Pro has increased in price by 20%.

Since GBP is fluctuating a lot, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's prices include some extra leeway in case of further swings.

(And aren't I glad I emigrated from the UK last year...)

The newest Mac Pro used a Bloomfield CPU (2008) or a Westmere one (2010) and a circa 2009 GPU.

Installing OS X took only a little longer than on my native Macs. I just had to tick a few checkmarks in the Hackintosh post-install software to customize for my setup.

OS X 10.11 updates I could install as soon as they were available from Apple. No problems at all. (I of course checked the appropriate forums for compatibility notes but there never were any problems reported). Haven't installed 10.12 yet (as I'm not too thrilled by the OS on my MBP anyways) but I heard it works just fine on Hackintoshes.

Now the caveats: I disabled the onboard audio and attached external USB speakers instead. Because onboard audio seems to be more broken than not and USB audio "just works". I'm also connecting the machine via ethernet and don't have a WiFi adapter attached. Oh, and I got lucky in the first place by choosing OS X compatible hardware (Intel CPU, ASRock mainboard, AMD GPU).

Things that doen't work: Browser DRM with Safari. I can't watch Netflix on the machine. iMessage support is cumbersome. And I can't submit binaries to the app store from the machine.

But otherwise for work it's a beast (compile times are great compared to my MBP) :)

As long as you use Intel CPU/AMD GPU you're golden. Intel's HD GPUs work, too. Nvidia GPUs need 3rd party drivers from Nvidia.

edit: the key to a good experience seemed to be finding a working configuration then leaving it alone. If you want to update the OS regularly, you'll probably be unhappy.

Like I did myself back in the days, when I built my own PCs. But then in mass production?

It just feels lazy from Apple.

Adding expensive hardware (or as you call it, more powerful hardware) to your BOM will cut into your margins.

You can have 16 GB ram on a 2011 ThinkPad X220.

Just saying.

https://gist.github.com/icopp/29f225279a39ba9e3ea0d1f596e97c...

I'm getting serious shades of "IBM clone vendor throwing darts at a board to try to appeal to every possible price point" instead of coherent product lines here.

I think Apple would like to drop the MacBook Air in favour of a cheaper MacBook at some point, but they can't right now.

"Apple throwing darts at a board to try to appeal to every possible price point just before Steve Jobs returned"

I very rarely respond with such a glib comment, but: really? Isn't that slightly hyperbolic?

This is very emotive language to describe a completely reasonable and innovative update to a laptop. It was never going to satisfy everyone's needs or wants, especially when some of those wants are not currently physically realistic ("all day battery life" and "even thinner design"?).

For myself, as a 2012 rMBP owner, this is a really solid upgrade that I would be delighted to use.

I, personally, have been feeling like it's upgrade time for my 2013 Air for a year or two, but there hasn't been anything beyond tiny little CPU bumps that they didn't bother making any noise about. This was going to be NEW! MACBOOK! PROS! for the first time in ages.

Yeah, it was pretty disappointing. Especially when Microsoft sat down in front of every digital artist on the planet yesterday and looked them straight in the eyes with an expression Mac users haven't seen since like 1994 or something.

As for the Esc-button, they've added an option to macOS Sierra where you can map the modifier keys to Escape. Very useful to have Caps Lock mapped to Escape.

With phones it's a little less clear cut because phones getting faster is still worth paying for, but that will slow down at some point.

It seems to me that Apple has finally hit their post-Jobs point where the radical innovation is outpaced by the comfort of not changing much and just printing money. Of course it's quite possible that iPhone 7S will in fact hover and make coffee, and they are just having an off year, but somehow I am pessimistic about it.

A better announcement would have been "we've consolidated the Mac line and now all models will get their specs bumped regularly".

That's all I really want the same laptop or desktop but faster.

They announced a 5k monitor that they developed with LG which charges the MBP. You can attach devices to that and it's like a "hub".

I was hoping to get one that supported multiple 4k displays. With the title of "Mac Event" I was anticipating at least 2 Macs updated, not just the MBP.

That the first 25 minutes of the event were non-Mac preamble adds salt to that wound.

He was definitely the best part of the production. They should use him for a lot more in the future.

I don't recall either of them then going on to build on that with any product/feature announcements...

He wasn't just legally blind, he had absolutely no vision what so ever... but with the voiceover technology and the accessibility built in to OS X 10.4 at the time it was already amazing to him. Apple has worked very hard to make iOS and OS X accessible to not just those with perfect vision or perfect control, but also those with various disabilities.

Yup, I remember seeing a blind guy on the subway using voiceover on an iPhone 3g (that would be the second iPhone ever) - totally blew my mind at how adeptly he was able to use the thing.

    - Killed Macbook Air.

[1] http://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

You know, laptops with a pen input have been around for a long while. Even the convertible kind. I don't think that form factor is fully baked yet. In fact, I have a couple of HP tc1100s from the year 2000. You can still get good use out of them. But as a mass consumer device, they were not a runaway hit.

I suspect that Apple has a roadmap for conservatively rolling out more digitally configurable/reactive/touch interfaces on their laptop form factor. They will do this while working off the of strengths of each input device. My bet is that they will come out with e-ink keyboards and some kind of display built into the touchpad, perhaps with a stylus.

I would concur with you that this was a disappointing Mac event, however.

Any suggestions on fixing it? I feel like it might be a hairline crack in the board.

It has been written about many times (about Apple's TV business and a rumored Apple TV with an actual screen) that screens, whether monitor or TV are actually very dumb, it makes no sense whatsoever for today's Apple to be in the business of making dumb screens, while their main business is value-added products.

So, they passed on the opportunity to make the 'Apple monitor' to their main supplier of LCD screens, LG. Fair enough.

However, watching the presentation at times the touch bar felt like an elaborate workaround for a full-blown touchscreen. Especially during the dj demo.

And with the Microsoft Puck for the Surface Studio still in the back of your head, the touch bar for Photoshop or video editing looked a bit outdated.

   Apple said on Tuesday it saw a nearly 30 percent decline in its China revenue in the quarter ending September, the highest fall among all regions, due to tepid demand for its iconic iPhones.

LG makes a 2 lbs 15 inch. (Not saying I'd buy the LG. Only pointing out Apple has room to do better)

I agree it was a very disappointing announcement . Basically more of the same. Nothing new or innovative.

iMacs were refreshed in late 2015. It's typically ~3 years between new generations, often with a hardware refresh somewhere in between. Nothing new here.

> - No monitor announcement.

They partnered with LG (I think?) on a 5k monitor. Sounds like a reasonable replacement for the Thunderbolt Display.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac shows the days between releases in the past:

    147 May 2015
    215 Oct 2014
    387 Sep 2013
    298 Nov 2012
    577 May 2011
    280 Jul 2010

The solid industrial design, long service life, etc. are worth something but probably not 3-4 hardware generations, especially for the premium market Apple wants to be in. The PC market hasn't been completely stagnant and while nobody is buying a Mac for super hard-core gaming they really don't want to be in a position where someone drops a fair amount of cash and their new computer struggles with a game which came out a year or two back, 4K video playback, etc.

I was hoping it would be lighter weight and longer battery life.

Instead we have the discrete GPUs that undoubtedly will need more battery life than the Intel internal GPU.

I still cannot understand in this day and age why they cannot offer more memory than this.

And I want a 700hp car that does 80mpg.

Pick one.

Which is 1.6x increase ion battery life, that would be a 2x increase if you just kept the thickness as it was. That's. the. point.

Jesus, when people want to be dense...

It's called "bias"

Hmmm, you make it sound as if the Microsoft event was a home run - it wasn't. The Surface Studio was interesting, but it's clearly aimed for graphic professionals and its stratospheric pricing put it out of reach for a lot of people. As for the Surface Book, well, considering all of the issues they've had with the previous version I'm not sure people will be so inclined to even upgrade. And let's not even get into the ridiculous pricing for the Surface Book.

>Also, Panos Panay sounds like a genuine, authentic, passionate

You're right about that one. I've never seen anyone so passionate about creating documents and highlighting them.

Look I'm not exactly a fan of MS but $3000 isn't stratospheric in an era where 'budget' gaming builds are $1000 for just the tower and people are regularly spending $1500 - $2000 for a laptop. The equivalent artist setup with a MacBook Pro, a high end external 4k monitor, and a Wacom drawing tablet will easily set you back $3k.

i think it's pretty obvious the macbooks aren't the big money makers at apple. that lil apple pay button is there to subsidize and justify continued development of the mac.

apple probably wants to kill the mac. but some guy at apple's like what if we put a lil thumb scanner on it and apple pay then can we keep it pls and then the cfo was like sure okay fine the mac can stay only if you add an apply pay button.

also pretty sure all-day battery life isn't innovation and thus probably not what they're working on. how about eternal battery life wherein a solar panel so efficient is able to pull light even in the darkest of situations. how about remote charging.

i'm sick of charging shit. that's what's next, no charging.