Vlad Savov, the tech reporter with the most awesome name in the industry, hits some nails on their heads:
Many of us have been talking our way around this issue for the past week without directly confronting it, so I feel like now’s as good a time to address it as any: Apple’s new MacBook Pro laptops are not designed for professional use.
This should come as no surprise to those who’ve long perceived the Mac platform as inward-looking, limited in compatibility, and generally worse value for money than comparable Windows alternatives. Pros are smart with their tools and their money, after all. But the change with Apple’s 2016 generation of MacBook Pros is that those downsides have been amped up – more expensive and less compatible than ever before – to an extreme that exposes the fallacy of the continued use of the Pro moniker. These are Apple’s premium laptops, its deluxe devices, but not in any meaningful way computers tailored for the pros. A MacBook Pro is now simply what you buy if you’re in the Apple ecosystem and have a higher budget and expectations than the MacBook can fulfill.
Basically exactly what I said last week.
So who is pro?
We’ve seen apple shift away with visible symptoms.. eg
* Poor testing leading to WiFi not working for 6 months+
* 4k monitors breaking with Sierra
* Keyboards becoming not suitable for moderate to intense use
* Ports relevant to today’s professional use (vs coffee shop emailing and bed time browsing)
* Loss of digital audio out
* less Transparency around known bugs and fixes
* announcements all about new emojis ….
Which supplier
* Uses high quality high performance components
* Actually designs the kit .. not throws it into a case
* has OS-hardware working together properly
…
Not dell not lenovo not hp …
And anyone smaller always seems a worry re sustainability
If I was leading apple my strategy would be to visibility target a demanding audience .. creatives… developers .. scientists … And let consumers buy into the high bar that sets if they want to…
That worked when computers were not commodities, and had a learning curve. But there’s already a generation of people out there that uses computing devices pervasively (laptops, tablets, phones, etc) on an hourly basis, and who have zero technical skills.
I assume Cook is mainly a supply chain/marketing guy. So he basically looks at the sales data and sees that for 1 apple device they sell to a techie, non tech literate consumers buy 99. So guess which sector of the market he’s going to target.
It’s a pity. I really liked their kit at some point. But Apple has consistently let me know I’m no longer a target for the past couple generations of their products, so my few dollars will go elsewhere. There’s little justification for me to buy a mac pro or a macbook pro, when I know damn well that I’m getting older processor tech for much higher prices than competitors. And although OSX is nice, my development flow works under linux just fine. And things like Ubuntu are at the “good enough” level, that I can simply get a nice specced thinkpad, and have a similar experience as with a macbook.
For me processor specs are important. But I do realize that I’m in the tiny minority of the market. And since I’m not vested in the apple ecosystem, they couldn’t care less about my type. The non tech savvy customer is far more attractive to apple; they’re seduced by the design more easily, they don’t have the skills to know how to move away from the apple ecosystems (appstore/itunes), and they’re prone to be a continuous stream of revenue in terms of apple care, and all sorts of support needs.
So I guess the reality distortion field has finally worn off? It’s about damn time.
It’s possible they just screwed up the sale – and certainly, Jobs could have done it better. For example, they have to know that convertibles like the Surface Book in the PC realm are attractive to customers, even pro customers. They could have highlighted their own vision for touch + traditional computing in the first half of the presentation instead of talking about Apple TV, a product for no one, which has no synergy with anything else announced at that event.
Every shot of the new laptop should have been shown at a workstation, connected to an Apple branded Monitor (I don’t care what it takes to get it done), and an iPad Pro setting next to the keyboard. They should have released a standalone keyboard with touch-bar next to the entire set up. Should have had software to share doodles quickly from the iPad Pro to the mac. Apple has a visionary answer for everything their competitors have to offer, even if it’s expensive, but they’d have to sell it, and they didn’t even show it.
Ah well. We’ve witnessed peak Apple I suppose. All the excitement now lies with Google Android. I can’t wait until we see a proper scaled up Android in a clamshell and mouse/touch pointer form factor. That’s going to be sweet!
Tim Cook sees our future on giant iPad Pro’s. This macbook “pro” will help us through for 5-7 years with occasional bumps. I think the macbook/imac lines as we know it will be killed off several years.
The evidence is playgrounds being launched on the iPad.
Really, is it scandal or evolution? Anyhow, as for pricing/ports. Apple has always been greedy and always looked to the future.
Edited 2016-11-07 19:51 UTC
Unless he’s planning to put OSX or similar on it, Tim Cook is an idiot.
He’s not stupid. IOS will have enough evolved software at that point to cut the mac loose. Perhaps even open source mac os with sync , siri and other apps as downloads.
Check the stats. Mac users represent about 5% of the market. That’s not hard to cut loose.
The Mac is profitable, and iOS even more so by being locked down. If you start allowing development on iOS, it will be unlocked, and opened to all sorts of third party competition, without the highly profitable Apple 30% on everything tax.
And then there’s the problem of developing on iOS.
Explain technically how it will be unlocked by being developed on iOS. Better have a good explanation cause I do this for a living.
Because anyone with a developer iOS device could run a ports system (or portage).
The way I see it is thatTim Cook is just following the footsteps of Steve Jobs… albeit his timing of execution is way off.
I didn’t believe they’d kill an entire product category, but they’ll almost certainly see declining sales in this segment due just to the price alone, let alone the rest of it. I can even sort of see where they are trying to go with this – efficient and fast computing (it charges off USB-C – that takes efficiency). But the price – it’s just too expensive for what you get, and the touch bar just looks like a gimmick. I mean, at least if they had offered a 15″ model without that stupid touchbar, that’d be something.
My only problem now is I can’t stand Windows, and key software I need doesn’t run on Linux. What am I supposed to do now? I suppose I can run hackintosh for a desktop with a reasonable price, but that’s not going to solve my laptop dilemma when it comes time to upgrade.
Cook is the next Balmer indeed.
First they came for the X-Serve and nobody complained. Then they came for the Desktop Pro and nobody complained. Now they are coming for the Macbook Pro and people are whining like the devil. Progress!
I wasn’t really paying attention the last times. It’s either that they can’t figure out how to make any margins on those products, so they are throwing spaghetti at the wall until they throw in the towel. Or they are just making legitimate mistakes, which manifest in the same way – adding features people really don’t need or want, getting rid of others they do want or need, and then thinking they’ve done something worthy of jacking up the price, which is of course counter productive. I’m not sure which it is, but it’s bad judgement in both cases.
They never said Pro meant “professional”. Maybe it meant “proprietary”. All makes sense now, right?
Profanity
Maybe it means Profit, which will make more sense even.
There’s always System 76…
Who do not design their own hw nor make much effort to tie software and hardware together coherently. I suppose Microsoft’s Surface is the closest thing to an integrated swhw laptop now, but it’s a poor second indeed.
I really like the Surface Book. It’s just that it runs Windows…
Indeed. Plus, I hate the stupid fn key toggle. Couple that with whoever thought putting mute on the F4 key and using alt+f4 ends up being a roulette wheel (I’d like to beat that person with their own keyboard)
Maybe we should write a letter to Tim Cook:
Dear Tim Cook,
If you dislike macOS, and don’t want to make actual professional hardware without gimmicks, please provide a legitimized way for us (or hardware vendors like nVidia) to write hardware drivers, so we may install macOS on real professional hardware like the Surface Book and Surface Studio.
Thanks,
Left out mac users.
I totally agree. I use OSX because it’s a great desktop *NIX platform (basically NeXTstep) with a GUI layer that is far better than X11. It also has a great library of pro desktop software which Linux/BSD are sorely lacking. Adobe CS, MS Office, Logic Pro, etc.
Windows these days is a steaming pile of crap and in many cases OSX is the only real alternative unless you enjoy running all non-native software through WINE or a VM.
If Apple doesn’t care about Mac users anymore, which is obvious, the least they can do is open it up a bit so we can install it on more capable and open hardware. They have left us real users out in the cold since they stopped selling mid-range machines with slots and started soldering RAM to motherboards in laptops that cost well over two grand.
Or Iron Rook Computing.
I have 50 odd engineers who would beg to differ with this hypothesis.
We give any engineer the choice of a MacBook Pro, ThinkPad, or a Razer ( for either Windows or Linux ). We added the Razer as an option to actually increase adoption of OSes other then Mac OS.
In the US every single engineer choose the MacBook Pro ( some of us have the Razer as a secondary device ). In Europe most chose the ThinkPad with a few going the MacBook Pro route.
I don’t what kind of ‘pro’s’ the MacBook Pro is not for but it’s certainly a great device for developer ( only a few of whom actually require it because their developing for Mac ).
Sure. There are 4 Macbook Pro’s in my house alone; one of them supplied by my employer, two of which I own, and the 4th for somebody else.
I’ve had Macbook Pro’s for the past three jobs, and bought one myself for contracting.
But none of these were the 2016 MBP, which is what these articles are talking about. In fact the point that is being made is that Apple are abandoning all of the very things that made pro’s such as the engineers you’re talking about like the MBP, and thus the latest Macbook Pro’s are not in fact aimed at those pro’s.
We happen to be hiring pretty aggressively and we also replace ‘old’ machines for engineers.
Since the new MBP came out all our new hires chose the new MBP and two of the people who were up for a new one also chose the new MBP, so we have 5 on order.
Next month two more machine will come up for renewal, and I understand both will also be replaced with the new MBP.
So just our company alone we’ve already committed to 7 MBP’s. Maybe were atypical, I can’t say, but I doubt it.
kristoph,
I think a windows-centric company has little use for macs, whereas macs fit in quite nicely in a unix/linux company. Your company probably does lots of unix/linux development, is this a good guess?
The macbooks have been pretty popular at the linux user group here on long island. But I’ve only been around macs one time in my professional career, and it was at a mac-only shop. Everywhere else it’s been dominated by windows. That’s been my anecdotal experience.
Edited 2016-11-08 01:59 UTC
Well we’re in NYC so same neck of the woods ( we do have offices elsewhere ). There is perhaps 10 other start-up’s in the same building with us and their all Mac. I do know a few companies with a Windows dev focus but their for sure in a minority.
PS. If you are developer we are hiring 🙂
You would be surprised how many Fortune 500 have sites running on Windows.
Specially companies whose main business isn’t selling software and IT is seen as a cost center.
moondevil,
In other news, the next POTUS still runs his company’s online presence on windows server 2003, which isn’t even considered secure by microsoft any more.
http://boingboing.net/2016/10/18/donald-trumps-mail-servers-a.html
The joke’s on us I guess.
Trump does that at the direction of Vladimir Putin — it makes it easier for Russian hackers to access the data.
Those engineers chose 2016 MacBook Pros? Please expound on this.
Very interesting to see the US=Mac, Europe=ThinkPad difference. Do you have any explanation for it? Price-difference after conversion? Advertisement/Image?
We buy the hardware for the engineers so price is not an issue for them.
I think the fact that there is more of a Windows interest in Europe stems from the fact that developers there have been using that their career and so their more comfortable with it ( indeed some had never touched a Mac before encountering it in our office ).
In the US most of the bootcamp type schools require you to have a Mac and it’s predominant in colleges and universities.
kristoph,
It is so weird how different our experiences are. I haven’t seen that many Macs out here. The market data says Mac’s have roughly a 10% market share, it makes me wonder if most of those macs are highly concentrated in affluent markets. This could explain why you see all macs everywhere while I see mostly windows.
Manhattan… yeah I’ve debated it, it makes sense to work where the money is. On the other hand my family would have to live in a closet, or I’d have to submit myself to 1000+ hours per year in commuter hell while becoming an estranged member of the family, haha. It’d be an easier choice if I were single.
Edited 2016-11-09 01:04 UTC
The thing about “pro” is that businesses need to see advantages and use cases to justify buying it for their employees, emoji bar that may or may not work with current software while also breaking it or slowing down workers means it goes to the back of the line for approval. Meanwhile the fact everything is a thunderbolt port instead if standard USB, requiring adapters and dongles means even more money, and less chance of being approved. As it stands this laptop could easily slow down anyone trying to do perfessional work since it’s missing the basics and replacing them with gimmicks and view that everyone should change to thunderbolt because Apple said so.
I don’t get this at all. Yes I will need a single dongle for a limited amount of time for doing my professional work (for my external screen). In a couple of years time, I will probably not need one anymore. The USB hardware I use (sound cards, MIDI controllers, etc) can simply be connected with USB-C to USB-B cables. No dongles needed for that.
The Pro moniker, for me, has nothing to do with this at all, though I am happy that I will get the current highest available performance on all ports, for the future. For me, Pro means that this is a computer I can carry around everywhere, use all day, has plenty of performance, and will last for several years. All while being light, sturdy, completely silent and feel as new now as it will feel in 4 years. I will probably never have to wipe it and reinstall anything, replace anything or feel left behind. (I know I haven’t on my current one which is 5 years old.) It runs what I feel is the absolutely best OS out there for software development and music production (which is what I do for a living). No other hardware/software combination even comes close to this.
Exactly.
“Pro” also means that the company understands that my time has value and that downtime has cost. If I have a MacBook Pro that suffers a failure, there are stocked, carry-in service counters at Apple stores all over the world. “Pro” means that the product is made to high mechanical standards with reliable, top-drawer components. There aren’t a lot of notebook computers that qualify as “pro,” which is probably why so many journalists rely on MacBook Pros.
Edited 2016-11-08 11:35 UTC
I think people are ignoring something that the less naive have known for… well years… decades even.
The Macbook Pro is a product line name. It’s no more or less “professional” than any other product that’s been named such or other like-terms.
Think about it. Define “pro”. A “pro” is a professional, that is, someone that gets paid for doing a particular job. A CEO that can barely turn his computer on in the morning is just as “pro” as a 20 year veteran coder writing code for an obscure piece of hardware that takes a JTAG interface to upload its firmware. It’s also just as much the person on the line rebuilding your car after you got it in the rear end last week.
Where am I going with this? Simple. A Macbook Pro isn’t designed for a “pro” any more than any other tool is entirely designed for an “amateur”. It’s designed to do a task with varying amounts of quality. What makes it “pro” is some marketing guy wants to draw a line between what we have in our mind of the professional craftsman laboring away building a quality product with many years of experience under his belt using quality tools. This is purely psychological.
If the Macbook Pro doesn’t fit the job you need it to do it’s no more “professional” in the way people outside of marketing think than if you try to use a 5 lb sledge to drive finishing nails. It’s also no less professional if it does the task you need it to do as well as the carpenter using a finishing hammer to drive finishing nails. “Right tool for the job at hand.”
In either case, the “Macbook Pro” is just a marketing name. The name has little bearing on being a suitable tool for the job at hand. The Macbook Pro could just as easily be called “Macbook Amateur”. It wouldn’t change its suitability or lack there of for a given task. Its sales figures would probably tank, however, because names matter for the unwashed masses because they do fall for the marketing gimmicks.
just bloody open source OS X and retire this clownshow..
Who cares about the OS – macOS is nothing more than a pretty Unix to me. Most everything I run is open source and cross-platform. The rest I run in a windows VM. I don’t use any of the builtin Apple apps.
The existing 2016 MBP will work well for journalists and web developers on the move. Good battery life and okay capacity.
Alongside that there should be an alternative 2016 MBP with, say, options upto 64GB RAM and 2TB SSHD with an 18″ screen. Basically a desktop capability dressed up as a laptop with limited battery life. This latter model will be great for video editing and other intensive workloads.
The two represent separate existing perceptions of what ‘pro’ means for a laptop. Arguably both are valid; and FWIW a second HDD would be cool now that DVD drives are external.
Edited 2016-11-07 22:50 UTC
I went to PAX Australia this past weekend. What I noticed was a ton of developers using Razerblade Stealth Laptops. They’ve overtaken the Macbooks. I noticed a similar phenomenon with Macbooks around 2010/2011 vs PC laptops where Apple was dominating at that time. People you don’t expect to see with these laptops who are developers, are jumping to this new hardware platform. I think Razer would be a good bet for investment. Compare their Razer Core product which allows an external GPU to connect to a laptop to all of their competitors equivalents. noone has an external GPU chassis that looks as nice, the industrial design is top notch and the features and functionality are there. Apple has nothing that can act as a workstation laptop, then dock in and become a powerhouse workstation/gaming system. The Razerblade Stealth + Core can connect to GPUs, but can also be used to connect to RAID controllers or any other PCI-E addin card. Apple has lost the plot. They’re no longer the best hardware, and without the hardware noone is going to buy their software.
Edited 2016-11-07 22:54 UTC
Cool! Does macOS run officially on a Razerblade Stealth? I ask because I’m have no intention of running Windows and I’d rather chop my own left nut off then go back to the pain of trying to make Linux work on a laptop (especially fixing everything that breaks/changes every six months or so).
You’ve hit the nail on the head here.
Most developers need a UNIX like platform. Windows just won’t cut it and Linux is, sad to say, a pain in the ass on the desktop ( and I say that even though we run several hundred Linux servers ).
I’m about to start playing with the Windows support for bash and ubuntu user space on windows 10.
I still am not keen on giving up a proper Unix environment, but if this works it might be an alternative to the issues that seem to be growing on OS X while still not having to go back to the hassle of linux on laptops.
That said, so far my Linux testing on laptops hasn’t been all that bad of late either. The only downside is no Adobe CC for Linux yet, so that requirement means I stay on mac or check out windows. :/
This is all very subjective, but I much prefer running my Debian Testing on the macbook pro that work gave me than Mac OS X. I am certainly more productive and happier not having to deal with old versions of Bash and the rest of the cli tools there.
Granted the webcam doesn’t work, though I haven’t really tried to get it to…
On the other hand, Debian on my Asus Zenbook is absolutely phenomenal. For those running away because of the new MBP, I would highly recommend the Zenbook (not the new 3, they tried really hard to copy the macbook air from what I could see.)
The Linux Subsystem for Windows actually works really well. My biggest gripe with it is that you can’t run windows programs from the bash prompt (meaning I can’t do “start .”) but otherwise everything works as if you were on a *nix machine.
I’m using a 2015 13″ MBP and 2011 15″ MBP daily. I’ve used Mac and OS X since 2009 professionally for web and application development and as my primary machine for managing servers and just about everything else. [I also have a Thinkpad T61p that still runs well, and a 17″ HP Envy something or other for keeping up with Windows.] As a good portion of that time was self-employed, billable time versus non-billable time was very important. Or, for employed people, think of it as productive versus non-productive. I also do graphics and video work with Adobe.
Productive time is time spent writing code, managing systems, getting things done. Non-productive time would be maintenance, dealing with crashes or things not working, fixing things after software updates, even installing software updates (hadn’t used a windows machine for about a year, spent 5 days installing updates, glad I didn’t need it right away – actual seat time was about 18 hours I think) is non-productive time.
For me, up until the last year or two, the Mac was open the lid and get to work. It just about never crashed, just worked, had stable networking, Software updates were minimal impact events and afterwords things usually worked. That all changed with Mavericks for me and has steadily been going down hill. I’m on El Capitan now, and it’s barely OK, but it’s sure has a lot of problems.
I can sum up the inherent instability of current Mac OS X with one thing:
– a large file transfer will cause PING to stop responding
You read that right. Start pinging the target machine from another host, start a large file transfer job (scp or DropBox) on the target machine, and the target machine will stop responding to ping.
I stopped running Linux as my primary desktop because I grew tired of software updates breaking things, spending one-half to three days fixing things after major updates, and various little idiosyncrasies with font rendering, printing, and other things that Linux does but doesn’t do quite as well as native Mac or Windows (at the time, pre 2009).
Three things have now happened to make me seriously look at non-Mac solutions for my next iteration, which given my main machine is a 2011 MBP is probably not that far off:
1. Adobe CC subscription allows or Mac or Windows use — with the pre-subscription CS, it was choose one or the other, Mac or Windows, and stick with it.
2. On-going instability and increasing minor issues within Mac OS X, and the iOSifying of OS X in general
3. Apple’s elimination of ports and SD slot, inclusion of the awful MacBook flat keyboard on the “pro” machines, and insistence on 16 gb max memory are all deal-killers. And, to a lesser degree, the lack of a touch screen. They’ve made my choice for me.
So, when it is time to purchase my next machine, I will be looking at either a 2015 MBP or more than likely a Razer or a Microsoft Surface Book or Studio. I bet a large file transfer on Windows 10 won’t kill ping (i need to check that….).
Edited 2016-11-07 23:46 UTC
When I upgraded to Sierra my USB reverse tethering solution stopped working and my external mouse scroll support became awfully choppy, so I came across horror stories about USB support in macOS Sierra, with undocumented under-the-hood changes breaking device support for many people.
https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/65232
One of my favorite quotes is “If con is the opposite of pro, does that mean congress is the opposite of progress?”
With that in mind, this is a Macbook Con 2016. Think about that for a moment.
Avoid OS X and Windows. Nothing beats Linux in productivity.
This made my day.
It was hilarious.
Based on what? If Linux, an OS distributed at no cost, gave businesses a cost or productivity advantage over their competitors, they’d be all over it like flies on fecal matter.
They actually did.
The companies that stopped buying UNIX workstations and used GNU/Linux POSIX’s compatibility to port their software from several $K workstations into commodity PCs.
The ones without money invested into UNIX code, not so much.
What does that have to do with OS X and Windows? I was replying to someone who wrote “Avoid OS X and Windows. Nothing beats Linux in productivity.”
You didn’t even show that Linux beat Unix workstations in productivity — just that you could run it on hardware that costs less.
Same old same old….
“macs aren’t good enough for anyone!”
“but pro’s sure do love the MacBook!”
“yeah those pro’s are idiots. not real pros because they use apples.”
“hey, i’m a ‘pro’ and i love my MacBook. but i haven’t gotten a new one yet so let’s complain about the new one.”
“see i told you apple is overrated”.
don’t worry, you’ll all own one within a year. no one turns down a new MacBook from work.
ezraz,
I wouldn’t turn down any new computer from work to be honest.
It will, unless things drastically change, be my next machine when it comes time despite its limitations. It’s still the only machine which satisfies all my requirements: a full *NIX environment, a usable GUI, low maintenance, access to certain commercial software, and superb battery life. Even with its limitations now, nothing else fits all of these needs nearly so well.
Of course, I’m hoping that in a few years time when my decision time comes around, that Apple will have gotten a bit more sensible. That said though, failing a major change in either Microsoft’s mentality or a change in the commercial software situation on Linux (even more unlikely), I’ll just have to deal with the dongles.