Yep. I actually looked around for alternatives, something that I haven't done in years, but I haven't seen anything else more compelling. If you want a laptop with 16 GB of RAM, HiDPI screen, a discrete GPU and 10 hours of battery life, then there really aren't very many choices. So yeah, the new MacBook Pro still looks like a pretty good options for developers.

I am surprised about them dumping MagSafe, because it's a superior power option to USB-C. And it's also surprising that they didn't include at least one USB-A port for compatibility, but that's a minor issue in the grand scheme of things. The touch bar I am actually excited about for what it's worth. There's a lot of developers out there that still use the mouse for a lot of actions in their editor / IDE because they can't be bothered to learn the keyboard shortcuts. When those IDEs start to embrace the TouchBar it will make a lot of their lives easier by surfacing actions like stepping through a debugger, refactoring, etc.

So on the whole I really don't see that Apple is abandoning developers. I just look at what Microsoft is doing with the Surface line and I wish that Apple was investing more heavily in the same direction.

> If you want a laptop with 16 GB of RAM, HiDPI screen, a discrete GPU and 10 hours of battery life, then there really aren't very many choices.

Off the top of my head:

Dell XPS 15 has up to 17 hours of battery life, a 4k screen (that can be upgraded to a touchscreen), dedicated Nvidia GPU and up to 32 gigs of Ram

The Razor Blade and perpetually on the horizon Razor Blade Pro have QHD or better touchscreens, 16 gigs or more of RAM, and the best line up of dedicated graphics cards you're going to find in a laptop. Oh, and they did reactive/programable touch keyboards without removing core functionality from the device. Can't find specs on battery life at the moment. Plus, mechanical keyboard and glowy lights!

And there's the ThinkPad line up which has basically everything under the sun now.

Not to mention the Surface Book, which claims 12 hours of battery life, meets your dedicated GPU and RAM needs, and has a killer scree, that supports a some rather interesting input devices. And it can connect to an iPhone 7 without a dongle.

There are options out there.

>Dell XPS 15 has up to 17 hours of battery life, a 4k screen (that can be upgraded to a touchscreen), dedicated Nvidia GPU and up to 32 gigs of Ram

Every report I've seen from owners of the 15 says that even the 1080 version struggles to get 6 hours so where did you get 17 hours from?

Dell's own self reporting on their website, I presume. I got an XPS15 a couple of months ago and I have no idea what crack Dell smoked to get that number. I don't have a problem with the battery life personally since I'm coming off a very old laptop which has about a 6 minute lifetime, so the 4-5 hours I can get is a breath of fresh air, plus I tweaked the battery to the "mostly plugged in all the time" setting which I think works by lowering the max charge limit to 80%, so most people will probably get more than I do (at least at first). But if you're used to getting 10 hours from an existing system you may be disappointed.

Are you guys seeing 15" MBPs with discrete GPUs really get 10 hours of battery life? I've got one at home and one at work, and moderate usage manages to kill them both in 4 or so hours a lot. Big difference from the 13", which consistently lasts longer for me. That GPU likes to switch on, and that screen is a big hog too.

What are you using that causes the discrete GPU to turn on? Install Gfxcardstatus to find out.

I get about 8 hours on my 2 year old 15 rMBP with Safari. Less than 4 hours with Chrome.

Interesting, haven't tried Safari. Chrome and Firefox are both big big culprits for flipping the GPU on for me.

Chrome and Firefox drain batteries really fast. When I use Chrome on my MBP, I have 2 to 4 hours less battery life compared to Safari. Google / the Blink developers really don’t care about draining the battery. It is infuriating because Opera, Vivaldi and other browsers using the Blink engine suffer from the same problem. Safari has come a long way, both in terms of battery savings and usability. I use Safari Technology Preview[1], which is the most up-to-date version of Safari. Apple releases an update every two to four weeks.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/

Safari has improved dramatically in the past couple years. Give it a shot.

No, I don't even think 6-7 hours is bad unless I'm flying and even then most seats have plugs these days it's just a pain to have the cables all out. I just noticed the huge disconnect from the 17 hour claim.

Between Chrome and Photoshop my GPU seems to be on pretty much all the time on my MBP. I get probably 5-6 hours on it working unplugged(my power cable is usually at my standing desk and some days I'm lazier than normal so I get close to this before standing up again).

Not in European planes.

>Are you guys seeing 15" MBPs with discrete GPUs really get 10 hours of battery life?

I get close to 8 hours with a late 2013 MBPr 15".

Pulled it from their website. Should have said 'claims up to' like I did with the Surface Book.

>Dell XPS 15 has up to 17 hours of battery life, a 4k screen (that can be upgraded to a touchscreen), dedicated Nvidia GPU and up to 32 gigs of Ram

I don't see any 32Gig update, either as standard (16GB) or even as a customization option.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-15-9550-laptop/pd

As for the battery life, LaptopMag gives: 10:26 for the 1080p XPS 15 and a meagre 6:36 for the 4K screen.

I also think the SSD is quite slower, single thunderbolt port (it has 2 USB 3 ports and HDMI), and the touchpad is worse. So there's also that.

The fact that the Razor Blade doesn't even advertise the battery life tells me everything I need to know about what I should expect from that line.

Also, dell battery life is only decent with the 1080p screen. Everything I heard about the higher resolution touch screen is that it eats battery life (and the 16 GB of RAM on the XPS 13 only comes with the touch screen).

Thank you for the list, but how is this an alternative? None of those run macOS (not Hackintosh). I'm not being fastidious, but I have an nontrivial software investment in macOS and Windows Any Version is not an alternative.

Yes, the new MBP wasn't all we could have hoped for, but I had held out for a very long time and it's the best option I have.

EDIT: A actually do also have an XPS 15 w/Ubuntu, but that combination isn't quite a replacement for an MBP.

There is one line of laptops I definitely prefer and highly recommend: the previous generation of the MacBook Pro.

The current generation of MacBook Air, with Five (5) Ports (Power, 2xUSB, 1xTB, 1xSD), not including the mic is pretty good value as well for a certain group of people who use a lot of connected devices in the field. I have zero reservations about recommending the i5 1.6Ghz w/8GB to anybody but the most demanding professional, who probably already knows they want something different.

It's funny that this whole "controversy" about the new MBP had me take a closer look at my mid-2014 MBP, which is my daily workhorse. I honestly had no idea that it even had an HDMI socket. I've never once used either of the Thunderbolt sockets. I routinely forget about the second USB plug. So I basically need a single USB socket to allow me to run apps on my phone for testing. I sometimes use the SD card slot to pull images off my camera, but I could easily use a dedicated USB-C interface for that.

So am I a "pro" user? I make iPhone and web apps with lots of users that generate many millions of dollars per year, so I'm at least "prosumer", which is probably more in line with Apple's target market for MBP than someone who makes 3D games or does VFX or motion graphics, etc.

Lol...I used my 2014 MBP as my daily for about a year with an external screen running off a DisplayPort to HDMI dongle before I realized it had an HDMI port built-in. (The only reason I even noticed is because I tried to use it as a USB port...I just never looked closely at the ports on that side.)

I bought my 2015 15" refurb the day of the MBP Apple Event from the Apple Store. A couple of days ago all of the 15" models were sold out, but I think they have since replenished with a new batch. They seem to be selling well.

I don't think most developers make use of the discrete GPU. Does forgoing this open up alternative options?

I think the new MBP seem expensive like everyone else, it I species out a Lenovo Carbon X1. There was a rebate available at the time. But otherwise the price was pretty much the same ... as usual.

It's definitely a bit more expensive, especially if you opt for the 1TB SSD. But the X1 Carbon doesn't have a discrete GPU.

> Most professional developers I talked to are perfectly fine with the changes. They just weren't interested in taking part in the online drama.

You just described my reaction to every single MBP thread I've seen since the announcement. Not only did I not want to participate in the drama, I have a feeling that a fair number of people who did will turn around and buy an MBP anyway. People are risk-averse and howl indiscriminately when things change. Let's hear about some real experiences of developers having problems using it, then it may be legitimate to revisit the issue

I bought one. The dongle situation will be annoying for a while, and I don't know what my hybrid options will be when I get my first USB-C monitor. Hopefully it will have a thunderbolt 2 port for my older computers that I'm at Apple's mercy with (the Mac Pro being the primary example, but also the iMac).

Otherwise, it looks like a solid upgrade. I don't need the battery life and would prefer to trade it for 32GB, but I understand why they made that decision.

I'm not enthused about the touchbar and price increase, but I'll reluctantly buy one anyway because macos is still the best OS available, and the touchpad and gestures actually work. I could give two shits about thinness, dongles, and slick-looking aluminum bodies. If Windows ever gets good gesture support, working virtual screens, non-wonky hiDpi support, and a comparable trackpad, I'll switch immediately.

Most professional developers have simply no choice if they don't work with Windows. I've been investigating a current Linux laptop that is not too heavy and supports external 4k monitors over dp 1.2 - no luck. Most modern models (e.g. dell xps 13 and 15) struggle with the USB-C alternate mode for displayport, and DP-provided models (e.g. xps 9343) are not on sale anymore.

Not to say that external monitor support in Linux, especially Ubuntu, is terrible: try using a 4k monitor along with a non-4k monitor. It will simply create so many issues that, in the end, you'll open your wallet and get a Macbook Pro. I've just bought a 2015 15-inch.

Running Linux. I don't have a 4k monitor, but multiple monitors are trivial to set up and automate with XRANDR. In addition, window managers like I3 allow for fully customizable, keyboard-driven navigation between screens and windows. Not saying there are no problems, but once you figure things out the setup is much more extensible than what I was experiencing on Windows previously (former Windows dev here).

Mixed HiDPI with regular resolutions are horrible in Linux, I use it daily and probably tried most DE's and WM's, problem is that it will either look bad on the HiDPI-monitors or the standard ones. The resolution to dot independence in OS X is probably one of the strongest features today, especially paired with quick resolution switchers.

I guess you tried it with Unity then. Monitor support and how it feels strongly depends on the Desktop environment used. I never had a issue with Gnome Shell or even Fluxbox, it is even way less of a pain than the crazy bugs OSX seems to have with multi monitor setups.

Was it even developers? Or was it people attempting to create relevant content/build a brand online?

I know there is some overlap, but I'm shocked at how credulous HN seems to be in the face of the Internet Outrage Cycle.

Every newsworthy event generates a hoard of people that try to cultivate outrage to drive traffic to their site or to gain some recognition. A lot of this is natural, people aren't even cynical about it.

But it's useless to pay attention to it.

I think they always said "creators"

I would be surprised if most of the vocal ones didn't still go out and buy one...

As someone who has been on MBP's for the last 7 years I recently jumped ship for 15" Dell XPS with Windows 10 and I am happy I did. However, that is because to me Win10 is now way more appealing than OSX. I hadn't updated OSX since Mavericks because there were exactly 0 new features that interested me. I don't have an iPhone/iPad/iEtc and I don't use the built-in OSX apps and it honestly seems like those two thing are all that Apple has cared about with OSX in recent years.

It wasn't easy to find a laptop with hardware that is acceptable coming from an MBP, it was a short list. But OS wise, Windows 10.1607 is, for me, way better than OSX at this point. IMO OSX feels dated, and toy-like compared to what Win10 has become. I was a heavy terminal user in OSX, like many dev's it was the *nix part of OSX that got me. But now with both the updated command prompt and WSL I don't miss the terminal, period. Also, Win10 virtual desktops already work better than OSX!

One month ago I bought gaming PC with Windows 10 for my son and I helped him to install some programs and games. After 3 years of exclusive usage of OS X, my first impression of modern Windows 10 was "hm, it looks great even on 4K monitor (UI scaled well), takes few seconds to load and works fine - maybe I should try it again". Only annoying thing I found is extreme level of espionage in OS and fact that sometimes Windows will install updates and reboot even if I don't want it.

Exactly. I am very happy with the new changes and with the direction Apple is going, but I simply have no interest in arguing with people who are unhappy. Vote with your money, I will buy the new MacBook Pro.

I think that's the thing, there's a bunch of us that have already been getting less happy with Mac OS updates over the years, so MBP was a crystallisation point of that. My next Laptop wont be a Mac in all likelihood, but the MBP changes have little to do with that.

I agree. I'm actually totally fine with the changes. The only thing I need to do is get a USB-C to lighting connecter so I can build code on the go and I'll be fine. I do feel this is a transition, but Apple has always been out in front willing to make the tough decision to force it's customers to move.

Probably the easiest lighting solution is to use the existing cable with USB C to USB A adapter (couple $ on Amazon)

Yeah. I just bought an iMac earlier this year - Top CPU specs updated to 64GB of ram so I mostly just develop on that and it's got 4 USB-A ports. I'll probably stick with that until the spring version of the rMBP is released.

"The best deal available" isn't necessarily "the best possible deal".

This! I mean, it's not full of every feature and every performance optimization, but you know what? It is still the best tool for the job.