Ah yes you heard the latest episode of ATP as well. Maybe if Marco repeats it enough everyone will believe it, which is kind of funny since this story [1] is on the front page right now.

I basically feel like I'm being gaslighted after reading all these hot takes about Apple and Macs.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161026-how-liars-create-th...

Either way, we can choose to see this update positively or we can be negative about it and stew on the fact that we feel ignored by Apple - the later always works out well.

I think it's pretty clear from the WWDC Gruber interview panel that the execs who love the Mac are Schiller and Federighi but you're right that it's speculation. Either way, we can be negative and whinge or take this update as a glimmer of hope - because whatever we choose to do Apple aren't paying us any attention on HN!

There's definitely a camp inside the company who believe windows should take the pros back as they were burned by the whole Final Cut Pro rewrite fiasco. There's also a camp who want to see the MacPro continue on and understand brand mindshare is the most important thing for Apple.

We professional users didn't want to lose the SD card slot. We didn't want that awful butterfly fake keyboard. We didn't want to lose MagSafe.

Apple tends to lead from the front and force change, and that's fine. Sometimes you have to pull the floppy drives out of our clutches. But when this many people are telling you you're on the wrong path... You may in fact be on the wrong path.

Did you mean one Apple camp doesn't want "pros", as defined by video editing? Is that because those users have already left, or are not worth keeping?

The usual opener to me was why I was carting around a Mac (subtext left unsaid was why was I different than other vendors). I replied that it was the only out-of-the-box Unix CLI laptop that "Just Worked". That wasn't what got my clients to sit up and take notice; they only nodded and murmured that it made sense, and I got some tech cred out of that bit. What got them to sit up was when I ticked off the hardware specs, showed my demo environment in VMWare Fusion, and some would out loud exclaim what was going through everyone's head: holy crap, this Mac has more RAM than some of our smaller servers, and could actually run some of the smaller server loads under emulation, while in the native OS X I could have Microsoft Office, X11, and native Bash and a Mac GUI-friendly Emacs.

Then some of them jumped onto the ordering pages for their corporate laptop fleet's vendor and figured out that a comparably-equipped laptop from that vendor fully-tricked out like my MacBook Pro not only was priced like a CAD workstation (when it was even available, for a short period of time MacBook Pros were one of the very few laptops at all that could have its max RAM), but the non-Apple laptop ended up much heavier, bigger and in some cases more expensive...

Instant. Lust.

Every single client technical staff member I had this conversation with would have traded in their current corporate setup with what I had in an instant, switching costs of learning a new OS and applications be damned. Were it not for corporate policies and budgets preventing swapping bottom-of-the-barrel corporate fleet laptops with this techno-lust magnet, there would have been a stampede out of the conference room every time I had this conversation. The ability to model a small-scale version of a small slice of your work infrastructure directly onto your laptop was incredibly appealing to these IT technical staff, for obvious reasons.

This went on for several more generations, but the retirement of the 17-inch model put a stop to that reaction in the field. Going back through some of Jobs' keynotes for those generations of MacBook Pros, one might get a sense of how proud he was of just how singular an achievement it was back then to unobtrusively combine all those specs (hardware and software) in a beautifully-delivered package. He didn't harp upon it, but for anyone who was using it back then, you grokked it in an instant. It was Jobs' current iteration of a bicycle for the mind at that time.

I suspect a lot of the negative reaction your friends are seeing is the grief of stepping down from that pinnacle for the small, vocal group of users who were used to residing in that lofty perch, and actively used those capabilities. Withdrawal symptoms.

Not for me to say whether or not this is "right"; no one outside of Cook's inner circle are privy to Apple's go forward strategy, and only they know how this most recent generation release fits into that.

An off-the-cuff example of how this might in retrospect suddenly seem "right": next year, Apple releases an OS X that seamlessly checkpoint restarts any OS X application from a MacBook/Pro to any server in the cloud, optionally splitting the canvas drawing to the laptop as mostly-vectorized compressed streaming opcodes and all other operations run on the server. As long as you can reach a web page, and hit an Apple server or a proxy that you run, you can connect. The population of people who really need a tricked-out MacBook Pro with 32/64/128 GB RAM gets a lot smaller over the years with that available.

Myself, I buy my high-RAM workstation-class "luggable" elsewhere, and no longer hope for Apple to return to those days I described. I'll stick with an Apple laptop for macOS as my daily driver; the luggable mostly operates in headless mode.

I want to think this, but after years they release a TouchBar and I still can't get 32GB of ram. /sigh

I think that people get too caught up in wanting revolutionary changes. Many would have been much happier with new MBPs being released regularly with Intel's updates and standard more/better RAM, screen, battery life.

And this thing comes with regular usb ports and an hdmi port instead of usb-c nonsense so I don't have to immediately drop $250 in dongles just to keep the capabilities I already have.

My problem with a macbook is because you simply can't upgrade anything, you have to prepay for all the disk you want to use for the next 3-4 years. Add them screwing us on magsafe, and I would need $400 plus in extra chargers and dongles (hdmi/dvi/vga so I can connect to whatever random projector / tv I run into), etc. As some snark on twitter said, we should call our new giant kit of cables to make macbooks usable a courage of cables.

I just can't believe these people have the giant balls to roll out a $3k+ laptop that you can't connect an iphone 7 or iphone 7 headphones to without purchasing $50 in adapters.

I'm sitting here hoping linux gets usable fast enough that I'll have something to transition to. I need a unix-ish box that was working power management/audio/the ability to plug into whatever random projector or tv I encounter and assume it will work.

edit: just to be clear, my complaint really isn't about pricing of macbooks. I mean, cheaper is better, but I'm comfortable spending $3k on a laptop. I just need a laptop that has 32g or more of ram, and that connects to my peripherals without hundreds of dollars of dongles that I have to carry around. That laptop better last 3-4 years though. If Dell can profitably sell the above for $2400, apple should be able to very profitably sell the same specs for $3200.

Edit: Googled for "Dell XPS 15 9550 battery life". Results do not look good.

Seems clear the 16GB limit is an Intel limitation. In order to achieve 32GB (like in the Dell XPS 15) they had to use DDR4, which is not as energy efficient as LPDDR3. Skylake only supports LPDDR3 at a max of 16GB. Kaby Lake only supports LPDDR4 in their ultra-low power chips. Comparable products (Surface Book, Dell XPS 13) also max out at 16GB.

In order to get 32GB of ram in the ultrabook category we're going to have to wait until Intel adds LPDDR4 support to their mobile-class processors (Cannonlake? Icelake?).

And the macbook pro battery life tests are a joke -- 10 hours as claimed, as long as you don't use your computer. Under actual use beyond light web browsing, it's 4-5 hours. Eg watch a youtube video or run intellij or run even one core at 100%.

https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=48867

If that's the only software I use that has problems I can probably deal with that though.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB

Just to clarify for the readers: it's got two regular USB 3.0 ports and a USB-C port, so it's got current compatibility and future proofing.

Ironically enough, if you have a Dell XPS 15 and an Android phone and you travel a lot, you should get an Apple Macbook Pro charger, because said charger would allow you to charge both items.

I lend little credence to that idea, given that what people are asking for is at most an optional upgrade for some minority fraction of customers that prioritize 32gb RAM over other considerations.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13460496/apple-macbook-pr...

I'm just curious as to what brought you to that conclusion? Was something said?

The last few years I've been sitting around kicking dirt waiting for an OSX convertible type of machine, I know there's never been any talk of it, but I figured if anyone could make it correctly it'd be Apple.

I've given up at this point. It almost feels like I was suffering from Stockholm syndrome looking back at it.

One is overshadowed by multi-touch while the other is needed by professionals among others.