Turning a toaster into a cat feeder is tinkering, not professional hacking. There's nothing wrong with tinkering. But it's the difference between wiring up a Raspberry Pi as a heating controller, and building a company that sells fully licensed and certified heating controllers all over the world with support infrastructure.
One is hobby project, the other... isn't.
A useful definition of a professional tool is one that lets you forget you're using it because it's so transparently intuitive you never have to think about its needs.
I don't think the 2016 MBP does that. The ports are (literally) a side issue. The problem is more that Apple are thoughtlessly losing their reputation among professionals, because Cook, Schiller and co don't seem to be thinking hard enough what they're doing, and don't appear to have an understanding of what their professional customers are looking for.
...Which is not something super-thin for the sake of it, or with a gimmicky touch bar. It's something expandable with ports that "just work", no physical or metaphorical rough edges, with the option to have decent memory (i.e. 32GB) and a reasonable processor speed bump.
This shouldn't be hard or controversial, but for some reason it seems to be beyond Apple's understanding.
I'm hardly a hater. I bought the 12.9" iPad Pro last week, and I'm loving it. But the laptop format is challenging because you either stay conservative, or you go full experimental with (say) a dual-display clamshell. or even a touch panel instead of the trackpad.
Half-hearted innovations like the touch bar glued onto an ungenerous spec look like gimmicks for the sake of it, not serious attempts to improve professional productivity.
Your definition is more bleeding-edge-users who are constantly limited by technology and could justify to pay a couple thousand for a 10% increase in performance. This group overlaps but is not equal to the professional users.
Many real professionals will love the new MBP lineup while many more will hate it.
An integrated gpu, with a higher end i5, with a big ssd and lots of ram for half the price would be more appealing to me.. even bringing a lower rez screen would be okay for my needs... love the for factor though.
Everyone has different needs, as you said.
Can you expand on that? I've seen this with folks in the movie/production industry but for webdev it seems like that's more of a want.
What's your daily task load, where integrated GPU and 32GB of ram are tasked?
If it's being taxed, it's probably because some idiot spec'd an HDD that pulls resources too slowly For modern JS dev, you really need an SSD more than anything else. Mainly because the build/watch process is tracking many thousands of small files which is significantly worse on hdd. 60+ seconds vs. under a second for any change to take effect in the browser. This can be as much as an hour a day wasted. The 5 hours of wasted time in a few weeks are more costly than the upgrade to ssd.
-- edit
As to 512gb, it's because after all the software, that can take 100gb... creative assets well over that depending on the projects... it's easy to hit 240gb between the OS, software, projects, and assets.
Beyond that, show me off-the shelf hardware that can be configured with 16+gb ram and a 512gb SSD that doesn't have the other stuff I don't need?
I just wanna know what cable they use when they need to plug their iPhone into their MacBook. I don't seem to recall Apple selling a usb-c to lightning cable.
I agree that USB-C might be helpful in that respect, but it totally depends on the drivers. If there is a device that I can make hiccup through timing attacks it depends on what liberties I have in the driver.
For Bluetooth for example you have Ubertooth. If the Bluetooth radio on my laptop would be accessible on a low enough level there would be no need to use other hardware to execute attacks.
I'm just a hobbyist with a jtag programmer, some digital analysis, nothing fancy. A professional reverse engineer is another beast with microscopes, etc.
A hacker in the form of someone exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications does benefit not from a single computer, but from many. I don't think he/she would care about the specs too much.
... like a $4k laptop?
It's not like Apple is the only company to support USB-C on laptops... in fact, as far as I can tell, every major manufacturer has it on their most recently-released laptops.
> To address this point... some might. But not all will.
How, exactly, would someone... anyone... BENEFIT from closed-box performance? Just because someone might not benefit from a laptop you can upgrade doesn't mean the converse... that they somehow benefit from having one that you can't upgrade.
(side note: I can think of ways... decreased cost, decreased size... but the laptops certainly don't cost less, and any difference in size w/ a 15" laptop is negligible)
The MasPars were fun to play with. ;) So you're not that far off on your XBox comment!
"See that toaster over there? It's been reprogrammed to automatically deposit my cat's food every fourth hour and have it warm as well."
"That 2009 dinosaur of a smartphone sitting in the corner? It's an IP surveillance camera."
"That first generation Xbox, it's powering the zoom feature of the Hubble Telescope."
That last one might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but my point is that something isn't great because it's the latest. Something is great because someone increased it's value after using it or created something of higher value than the equipment used to create it.
> Hackers do not benefit from a closed box with non-expandable performance.
To address this point... some might. But not all will. And I certainly think that fewer will than the generations before. I really hope USB-C will be as great as these companies say it will, but until then I'll happily use my different ports that work as they are expected to.