New ultrabook time

I got an XPS 13 a couple years ago and overall I’m quite happy with it. I think if I were rebuying a computer I would go with a Surface Pro. I like the idea of being able to easily switch to a tablet and read my PDF readings.

Apparently the ssd drives are blazing fast, with a copy speed 6x faster than anything else tested in the video below. Not sure how big of a deal in daily use, but they seemed rather impressed.

Not mentioned here, but it should also be noted that the keyboard has new silicone flaps under each key to (hopefully) help prevent debris getting in there. Seems to me using compressed air is going to be a bad idea.

The i9 MBP throttles hard, and cannot maintain base clock speed when rendering, according to Dave, who is one of the bigger tech reviewers on YouTube. The result is that it’s actually slower than the 2017 model unless you put it in a freezer.

That’s a pretty huge design oversight on Apple’s part.

The i9 model starts at $3,100 and can go up to $10K(!!!) depending on configuration, so, yeah, it’s absolutely ridiculous on Apple to do this.

The people who would actually buy this are serious professionals who need that power to do rendering or scientific tasks or what have you. But the chassis simply cannot dissipate the heat generated by the CPU at load. At which point, they might as well save their money and get the 2017 model or not upgrade.

The only people who this doesn’t affect are those with more money than sense and are buying the high-end as some kind of epeen thing so they can sit at Starbucks with their $3,100 laptop. And of course they’ll tout that there is no throttle issue, but they’re just surfing the web and updating twitter, which you can do on a laptop with a fraction of the power and price.

Apple’s obsession with thinness is directly competing with common sense at this point.

Not at all. Apple’s obsession with thinness beat out common sense when they introduced the latest revision of the iMac in 2014, where they compromised specs to make a DESKTOP COMPUTER a bit thinner.

They probably could have achieved the thinness, but would have had to put some kind of engineering into the case itself to leverage it as a more effective heat sink itself. Didn’t Microsoft do something like that with the most recent surface devices?

Possibly. The Surface Books do separate the CPU and GPU (CPU in the screen, GPU in the base) and that does a lot to mitigate heat build-up, but Microsoft also is pretty conservative on the CPUs, going for lower TDP models because they don’t want the heat/fan issue. It also helps on battery.

Also, customers and other sites are confirming the i9 throttling, and let us just say the Apple fansites are in meltdown themselves. It’s yet another reason to feel that Apple is screwing over professionals.

It seems like no one has been happy since the touchbar was introduced. And the removal of all but USB-C ports. Then it was the keyboard failures. And now it’s this.

Apple zealots were going crazy character assassinating Dave Lee is some kind of biased YouTuber trying to click-bait for hits, and then those notorious Apple haters Appleinsider weighed in.

I’d expect most workstation laptops to CPU-throttle eventually under heavy load. There’s a reason desktops are still a thing for workstations. That said, I agree this looks like a poor temperature / response curve and will probably need to be software updated. Not that many people even buy these things, but it will probably be made out to be the biggest news in tech of the century.

I don’t see how software patches can get you around such a large hardware issue.
David Long shows that the previous model of the Pro actually clocks faster, unless you put the new pro in a freezer.

The frustrating / maddening part is it is baffling how large Apple is and yet they seem to be spending effectively 0 effort at engineering. This shows they basically had little to no engineering effort at upgrading the performance of the CPU because their engineers were told to work with the same chassis as before. The lame plastic tape over the key caps is literally a bandaid for their keyboard durability problems.

I still think all the engineering they do have has been shunted to making their supply chain more efficient. They seem kind of paralyzed and/or terrified otherwise to make any changes at all. Sort of like that Onion article about the CEO of Radio Shack not having a clue why his stores were still open. I interpret this as Tim Cook wanting to maximize supply chains as long as possible even to the point of harming their product.

I think the stink over this will get them to change the default fan speeds in an update.

Or they just don’t care about Macbooks.

Well it seemed from the article that the CPU goes into overclock ‘burst mode’ or whatever its called, so maybe a new fan profile would keep it limited to better manage the thermals over a longer duration.

This seems to be a misfire, sure, but I’m not sure Apple really needs to completely redesign its laptops every year anymore.

They had some pretty major execution failures over the past couple of years. Nothing remotely comparable to the Galaxy Note 4, but very high failure rates with the keyboards on their entire laptop line is a pretty big deal. Also even if they worked, the keyboards themselves are objectively terrible, don’t argue against me, I will fight you on this.

Apple absolutely does need to redesign their laptops more frequently. They’re absurdly forward-looking; it’s now two years after the MBP redesign and the lack of USB-A and SDcard slots is still a huge bummer. They should have done a mea culpa and fixed that shit. Same deal with the touchbar, it sucks that you can’t buy a high-end MBP without it.

Apple is absurdly arrogant in their refusal to give customers what we explicitly tell them we want. What everybody really wanted was a Macbook Air with a retina screen. Apple refused to build that product, and now entire product segments are underserved and either sticking with old machines or switching to windows.

A Retina Air would have most likely cannabalized sales of the lower-end MBP, which is why Apple didn’t do it.

It’s the same reason that iPhone storage was 16/64/128 for so long. A low-end 32GB Model would have cannabalized the middle-tier model. 32 was just large enough to be comfortable for most people, whereas 16 requires a constant juggling of apps, photos, and videos to free up storage, especially for updates.

Looking at those scores, I think the SSDs on the comparison laptops are probably older Sata drives and the one on the Macbook is an NVMe drive, so that speed difference is not surprising. Put an NVMe drive in one of the other machines and you’ll get similar scores so that’s an unfair comparison.

Ok, maybe, but they said it was the fastest drive they had ever seen. Regardless, the overheating issue is a much bigger deal. I feel like Jobs never would have let that happen.

You mean Steve “you’re holding it wrong” Jobs?