2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats

Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by MitjaBezensek on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @12:57PM (#13015939)

A few other problems I came across:

1. Battery life is much lower than specified: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/battery-life-for-13-and-...

2. Some users report graphic card problems: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/pool-do-you-have-graphic...

Here is how it looks like: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/graphic-card-freaks-out-...

3. TouchBar graphics sometimes display on the screen instead of on the TouchBar: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/5eap94/someones_touc...

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by Rezo on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @01:31PM (#13016245)

The 2015 13" Pro has a 74.9-watt-hour battery.

The 2016 13" non-Touch Bar Pro has a 54.5-watt-hour battery.

The 2016 13" Touch Bar Pro has a 49.2-watt-hour-battery!

The components in the 2016 models are more power efficient. But at some point you'll run into physics.

Apple may claim the battery life is the same as before when watching a movie (probably entirely HW accelerator offloaded by now), but if you're compiling code all day I wouldn't expect the new laptop to match the previous battery life based on the raw numbers alone.

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by Bud on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @04:00PM (#13017605)

Don't be too sure; total power consumption of the new Skylake CPUs is much lower, as is power use by the display, etc.

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by Rezo on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @05:34PM (#13018282)

It really isn't. Base configuration 13" MBP specs:

2015: 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.1GHz, with 3MB shared L3 cache: 28 W TDP [0]

2016 (Touch Bar): 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz, with 4MB shared L3 cache: 28 W TDP [1]

Both chips use the same 14nm process, and there's no free lunch. The "refined" 14nm process for the Skylake chip is put towards a tiny frequency bump.

[0] http://ark.intel.com/products/84985/Intel-Core-i5-5257U-Proc...

[1] http://ark.intel.com/products/91166/Intel-Core-i5-6267U-Proc...

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by baobrain on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @09:25PM (#13019463)

Idle power usage is lower. When it comes to a CPU on load there really isn't much difference between the two.

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by rayiner on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @01:03PM (#13015983)

I wonder how much of the battery life issue is that the new one has a much brighter backlight. Half brightness should get you about 250 nits on the new one, versus 150 nits on the old one. Tests that calibrate to an actual brightness level rather than a given brightness setting don't seem to show worse battery life.

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by MitjaBezensek on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @01:14PM (#13016088)

The users used the same settings brightness settings as Apple on their benchmarks (75% brightness) just to be sure. But the observed battery life was often half that of the official one.

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by rayiner on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @01:18PM (#13016133)

75% brightness on a 500 nit display is insane. Did the previous generation specify 75% brightness setting for the wireless web test? Typical indoor tests are conducted at 100-200 nits.

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Re:2016 Retina MacBook Pro Caveats by matt4077 on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @07:27PM (#13018926)

Battery life may be an effect of all the stuff that goes on when setting up a new Mac, mostly the spotlight indexing.

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