PROs can work with anything, not matter how bad, and get results done.

However, that not mean we are so STUPID to not know when a tool is made for us or not.

Is about a specific spec? NO!.

Is about the trend that Apple have in the whole ecosystem.

Just now, after years waiting for a refresh, what is given is a stronger confirmation that the trend not only is unstoppable but the trade-off is not good enough.

I picture this being written on a Commodore 64.

A 2016 MBP... I can't see it holding up. The cap on RAM I'm already butting up against it...

Photoshop, VMs, site crawls, loading large spreadsheets and trying to crunch the numbers... 16 GB taxes my current system.

I've sort of just given up, I have a gaming desktop I built myself a year or so back with 64 GB of RAM. I just use that when I want to do "work" now... everything loads faster. Freakin' hate that I can't just buy a new MBP for that stuff, but... it's not top of the line, isn't built to last like previous generations were.

I'll keep my 2013 MBP until it gives out on me I guess... running out of Apple Care on it and the battery cycles are high... also not wild about trusting work to a 3-year-old SSD... but cross my fingers I guess.

My sister still uses my old MBP from 2008 or so -- it holds up for most of her needs after a replacement battery and SSD, it's still a solid computer. I don't see these new MBPs holding up like that at all.

Not going to say the new MBPs are shit, but they aren't built to be light-years ahead like they once were. That's what I think everyone is upset about.

This is virtually unprecedented in the history of computing, and the last time these kinds of shenanigans happened was at the tail end of the 8-bit era, and all of those companies, even ones who had a virtual monopoly on the market, don't exist anymore.

It sucks but IMO the memory line of argument is probably the weakest in this whole discussion.

It seems however though, and this is an assumption I can only base on personal experience of what I see, that people like all the 'stuff' during their work that eats battery and memory and cycles.

All the animations and things that go on in the popular wms and OSs and browsers that deliver no 'direct value' to me (like said; this is I personal thing I believe) seem a must for most people even though they are devving.

Why would one use the incredibly heavy and animated WMs over something fast and simple which even works faster (for me!). When I use Unity (latest) my laptop has 5 hrs battery; switch to i3 and plop 10+ hours more.

Do people like that so much or am I just completely wrong?

(one other reason I see with colleagues is very heavy IDEs but let us not go onto that)

For example, I'm working on a Macbook, but inside a Linux VM. It was running at 3-4 GB RAM for a long time, but I had to bump it up to 6 GB when I was working on an interconnected set of Rails applications. (Ruby and Rails are notoriously memory-inefficient.)

Another example: In 2010, I had to upgrade my notebook from 1 GB to 2 GB of RAM, not because of KDE 4 (which was considered absurdly resource-intensive at the time), but because of Git. (Git is designed to use the filesystem cache extensively, and will become absurdly slow when the cache is too small.)

I was responding to many people who 'cannot work' because they have less than 16gb, the latest discrete gpu and cpu. Which is where all the mb pro whining now revolves around. You are playing to 'if you have more you spend more?' human condition right? If you have more money, memory, speed whatever, you will find some way to use it fully; that is true. But you do not /need it/. I was the same a few years ago until I dropped Mac OS in favor of Debian and bought a stack of old (2011) laptops. After tweaking everything but the stuff I do not need on it, it works as well /for te dev I need it for/ as the last (2015) MB pro I touched for a fraction of the price and i3 does make me more productive.

Anyway; I am not trying to convince or sway anyone, just saying that, imho, it is nonsense that most (by very far margins) really need that kind of metal. But sure, if you can get them, then get them. In my slightly older age I try to get back to simpler and more optimal. The cyclewaste/bitwaste is getting annoying to me (IF it is waste; I do deep learning and play/fiddle with games on heavy metal).

As it is, i've just spent £1400 on a XPS 13 fully loaded and instead of a iMac i'll be buying a Surface Tablet. The missus after having each iPhone since the first is going to be buying a Pixel.

Apple have lost the plot and are taking the piss out of their users. We are voting with our wallets.

Of course, it's still Windows underneath. Sooner or later, I'd get tripped up by the pathetic reality of 8.3 case-insensitive filenames buried in a not-deep-enough grave.

Slow hardware helps one write good software after-all..

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dareobasanjo/2004/08/25/the...

Is this ever avoidable once you gain a large swath of market share, but are still under pressure to grow even more?

You can disagree with the reasons, and certainly many do, but it's just silliness to allege that moving to USB-C was done for "no good reason".

It's the exact same silliness that surfaced in the griping about removing 9-pin serial ports, and optical drives, and Ethernet ports in laptops, and FireWire in favor of something more than an order of magnitude faster, and every other innovation by Apple.

It's always for a good reason.

But let's take it as an example: adding USB-C was a great idea.

Removing every other kind of port, including the fantastic Magsafe, on the other hand, was a bad idea. Many people try to justify it by saying that it had to be done so that we can "make progress". Well I'm fine with progress, but I don't want to be held hostage. And it certainly feels like it: if I buy the new Macbook, I will be able to connect exactly ZERO of my devices to it.

But — what I actually meant was things like magsafe, charging light on magsafe, function keys, Esc key, little wire organizers on the charger, keyboard key travel, or the headphone jack on the iPhone. You could easily make the same case for battery life (I'd happily trade 2mm of thickness for longer battery life) and ports: I really don't care that much about thickness, so don't sacrifice ports to make my machine 2mm thinner. Again: we lose good functionality for no good reason.

If your answer is power delivery, remember that not all cables and not all devices support power delivery on USB-C so it's nothing that couldn't have been done with "USB4" utilising the same plug we've always had.

* HDMI and DP alt modes make laptop docks a lot cheaper and more universal

* Don't need an OTG cable to use a Type-C device on my Type-C phone

* Potential Thunderbolt 3 port reuse

Losing the ethernet jack on Pro laptops is also pretty bad. The reason is thinness, I dunno if that's good or not. WiFi is sufficient for most people, but it sure as hell isn't better when you need high bandwidth and consistent low latency.

I suspect there was a point. This is part of Apple's standard MO.

It's a way to wean people onto wireless (BT). Apple's expensive BT headphones point the way to cheap third party BT headphones that aren't painful to connect (right now bluetooth infrastructure is pretty sucky).

Once people are comfortable without the headphone wires they will have inductive charging like the watch and have a water resistant device like the new watch.

I wouldn't touch MacOS for it. It's nowhere comparable in productivity for me to something like current KDE Plasma 5 on Linux. Not sure if you ever used it, but Linux is nowhere limited to Ubuntu's Unity.

BTW, Windows 10 is slightly better, but not by much. The major difference being that one can predictably get a signal on both monitors, I guess, which is good, but then the HiDPI story is still pretty bad.

To name a simple example, pressing CMD + Shift + -> moves an application to the next monitor, with macOS you should pay for a window manager to get a similar functionality, or give up the keyboard and embrace a touchpad-centric gimmick like Expose, which I perceive as distracting with these animations.

It is certainly an example of YMMV.

Meanwhile, multi-monitor support in Plasma 5 has worked for me for years without any trouble whatsoever.

* https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=365455

* https://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2016/07/multi-screen-...

This also was rather annoying and took a long time for distros to catch up: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-42985

Since Plasma 5.8.x, it's much much better.

For different DPI on each monitor you'd need to use Wayland though.

mjg59 wrote a number of comments on this subject.