Well, that’s because it is BADLY DONE. I totally agree: having the off key next to the sound key or the F11 replacement is just idiotic, as are many other Touchbar layout decisions. If it were fully customizable, e.g. with customizable sizes and application-specific keys, it would be the best thing since sliced bread. I never got it how Apple fucked up a brilliant idea so badly.
Most MacBooks in the past few years have worked fine closed (we have loads of folks using them closed in the office), but it does (generally) require being connected to AC power. They normally will not wake from sleep, when closed but some 3rd party apps (like Amphetamine) will enable this.
If you watch many films made before about 1990 they were made in Academy ratio of 1:1.375. I think the notch might then spoil the experience.
There is one feature people have forgotten! If you buy the 14" 10 core cpu at an extra $200 you also get the 96 watt charger as opposed to the 67 watt charger with the base model. This provides “super fast” charging. That alone could be a game changer if using it on the road. Unfortunately I’m in the UK and that spec means I’d have to wait until December 1st.
Or you just add the 96W charger for an extra $20.
Er… yes! I thought that the base model had circuitry inside that was different from the others. I guess not in that case.
Gruber’s review at Daring Fireball is out. He likes it.
So does Jason Snell at Six Colors:
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After now seeing so many reviews on these awesome new MBPs, I have two observations.
• Although it now appears that everybody is in agreement about how much of an improvement these new MBPs present considering some of the previous MBP design’s blunders, but back when those MBPs came out, people criticizing their shortcomings (eg. TouchBar, overly thin and hence thermally over-constrained design, crap KB, etc.), were labeled luddites, anti-progress, anti-Apple, and accused of unnecessarily spreading negativity. Well, look here.
• Every new Mac should be the greatest Mac ever. It’s trivial. And it’s tiresome to keep hearing people regurgitate Apple PR’s drumbeat of how “these are the best Macs we’ve ever made”. Well duh, they better be! You had 12+ months to improve. News would be if a $2.5T company after one full year were no smarter than before.
I get a sense too many “reviewers” are shills. It’s a shame when it comes to hardware reviews, there’s not more people that—without fear of being misunderstood—just stick to raw unadulterated facts in simple Howard Oakley style, refusing to call a spade anything but a spade.
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I’ve made this point with iPhones in particular, where the changes from one to the next are almost always in a positive direction. Same with the iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV.
As with all new iPhones, there’s no question that these are the best iPhones Apple has ever made.
With Macs, though, I think it’s easier for Apple to fail at making sure that every new model is better than every previous model in nearly every way because the engineers are walking a fine line between tradition and innovation. The desire to have the MacBook Pro be thinner and lighter, for Thunderbolt 3 to be the one port to rule them all, to evolve past function keys to the Touch Bar (and answer the people who want a touch-screen Mac), and to have the super-thin butterfly keyboard—none of these desires were crazy, they just flew in the face of what customers actually wanted. (Which was battery life, ports, MagSafe, function keys, and a good, reliable keyboard, in a package with a lot more processing power, and which was largely what we got this time around.)
Steve Jobs was a great believer in not asking people what they wanted, and the last five years of the MacBook Pro was the apotheosis of that attitude, dragged down by multiple factions at Apple not understanding how people really used their Macs. Yes, Apple listened to users and addressed the problems, but it took way too long.
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And yet an entire industry of “reviewers” touted them all as a great step into the future meanwhile branding all those who dared complain about these changes (as solutions in search of a problem) as anti-Apple spreaders of negativity. But now that Apple has finally come around—after 6 long years—these writers and vloggers are tripping over themselves, trying to outdo each other in shouting from the rooftops about how future-facing these changes are and how welcome they will be after these many misguided steps of the past. It’s times like these when the whole group think is really on full display. Some people need to take a good long look at what they’re writing now and compare to what they wrote back then. Then maybe ask themselves if they really want to write for a living or just be part of a cult.
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I agree, and I think that part of the problem is that Steve Jobs set Apple on a path of releasing products without real world market testing. Validating that there will be a demand for a new feature, whether it’s a replacement for a current one or a whole new shebang, can help determine whether new features will generate sales.
Speaking as someone who’s often in the position of having to comment on products after relatively little time, I have some more sympathy than you do. Most of the time these days, reviews are written after just a week or two of use at most, which may provide time to get a sense of a feature, but certainly not enough to see how it fares in real-world usage over time. For instance:
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Touch Bar: When Apple introduced it, the lack of the Esc key was clearly problematic, but I don’t think the overall idea was bad. I think we even said at the time that Apple was going to have to put a Touch Bar in standalone keyboards too so it was a common feature across all Macs. So it was reasonable to be positive about the possibility early on.
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Size and weight: With a laptop, if there’s no obvious tradeoff, thinner and lighter seems reasonable. What’s perhaps not obvious in early usage is that battery life could have improved rather than staying roughly the same.
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Thunderbolt 3: Apple has made big port shifts in the past, such as from ADB and serial to USB, so it wasn’t inherently clear right away that the industry wasn’t going to follow. FireWire was an example of a similar misstep on Apple’s part, but with USB-C, there was hope that things might switch more quickly than they did.
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Butterfly keyboard: I can’t remember the reviews, but I certainly heard enough people complaining about what it felt like early on, so I think it was cursed from the start.
So I’m willing to cut some slack if early reviews are off, though such reviewers should have acknowledged their naïveté later on.
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My concern is not so much people being wrong initially (there’s no shame in that as long as you admit to it), but rather how people who question such early judgement are commonly dismissed. And still are. The positivity police is stronger than ever.
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This is true, and Mac has a very limited product line. Apple has just a few models that have to appeal to a large number of varied market segments. It’s a whole different strategy than Dell, Lenovo, etc.
Yep…and Cook is apparently more willing to let user complaints and requests influence company actions. Add in the Ive belief in thin and light and really spiffy design that may or may not make sense for users but was done because Jony said so…and when the Apple silicon for Macs started and 2-3 year lead time for a redesign…and some delay in improving things becomes obvious…especially seeing as how long Jony has been gone. Maybe the loss of that veto power was part of why he left.
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I think the problem with the the dismissal of questions of early judgment is that many critics end up complaining about every change and thus lose all credibility as thoughtful commentators. It’s a variant on the boy who cried wolf—when every change, or even every action, is treated as negative or worthless, legitimate criticisms are drowned out and it’s difficult even to have constructive conversation.
It’s not like there’s any lack of negativity in the world. But I see far less constructive criticism and acknowledgement that there are multiple tensions in every technical decision. No product can be perfect for all users while still being economically feasible to build and market.
But we digress, so let’s refocus on issues related to the new MacBook Pros.
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I didn’t get this part of the Six Colors review:
“Apple’s actually offering two different variants of its new pro-level chips, each with its own set of configurations, so there’s a spread of performance options available. Put this down to the vagaries of chip manufacturing, in which some chips are manufactured with minor flaws. Rather than waste those chips, chipmakers lock out the flawed portions and sell those “binned” chips at lower prices.”
Sorry if I am misunderstanding, but is he saying that the lower-end MBP’s have the same chips as the higher-end ones but they have flaws in them?
These flaws are not something any user will ever notice. The flawed core is deactivated in hardware. And so a formerly destined to be 10-core M1 Pro becomes an 8-core M1 Pro. Nothing about the latter is defective. But it makes it a lot cheaper than if they had to throw out every die with a defect. Common practice in this industry. Same thing BTW as last year with the MBA and its 7-core GPU M1 vs. 8-core GPU M1.
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“Binning” is a common chipmaking practice. Since not all chips are perfect and you don’t want to waste material, you disable parts that fail tests and sell the rest (which works fine) as a chip with less capability.
For instance, what’s probably going on here is that TSMC only manufactures 10-core chips (because it’s more efficient to manufacture one design instead of two). The 8-core ones have two of the cores disabled at some point in the manufacturing process.
During testing, a chip where one or two cores fail testing will be destined for release as an 8-core chip, with the failed cores being the ones that will be disabled. If there aren’t enough chips with failed cores to satisfy the demand for 8-core processors (which will probably be the case, especially as the manufacturing process matures), then additional chips (with no flaws) will have two cores disabled in order to keep up with demand.
This is nothing new. Chipmakers have been doing this for decades and there’s nothing wrong or unusual about it. If you buy a computer with an 8-core processor, the chip is not defective - the 8 cores you paid for are fully functional and have no flaws. There may be silicon for two more (disabled) cores, and that silicon may have flaws, but that will have no impact on the rest of the chip or the computer that is using it.
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Yep…you’re still getting n M1 Pro but when testing shows that a core doesn’t work right it gets locked out somehow and the part used in a lower spec unit…better than tossing the less than perfect chips. China makers have been doing that for clock speed for decades probably.
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