I definitely care! My system is primarily for 3D work, secondarily for gaming. An octo-core chip would halve my render times! (I say as I queue up a 50 hour render.)
Desktop NVMe is definitely nice
if you go Ryzen, the 1700X and 1800X don’t come with coolers and the 1700 can overclock to 95% of their performance most of the time anyway (the X variants are likely just better binned chips), so go save you 70 bucks. or more, if you have a Microcenter nearby where they’re selling them for 50 bucks off with a mobo. take that 50 bucks, drop in a better cooler, OC some and get a cheap workstation that can also game mostly well.
So I bit the bullet and got a touchbar Macbook Pro. With heavy ambivalence, but my previous main work laptop (2012 MBP)'s battery was on the verge of death. I’ve ruled out Windows and Linux laptops on the basis of general crumminess, I considered a Chromebook but as usual there is the one thing I need to do that it doesn’t support. I even considered just getting another previous-generation Macbook, but that would just be delaying the inevitable.
I ordered about 250$ of USB-C accessories to go with it. Among those was a basic USB-C to 3 USB-A hub. I also have an MSI 17" Windows laptop I recently got for Windows development, and noticed it has a USB-C port and plugged the hub in to see how it does (my USB A-to-A hub is a bit flaky). 10 seconds after plugging it in, Windows bluescreened and then thereafter bluescreened-on-boot even with the hub disconnected. I needed to reinstall Windows (which at least was pretty smooth and automatic). Presumably it triggered install of some driver-of-death.
Anyway, I advise staying away from USB-C on Windows for the next couple of years until the support situation isn’t an utter pig’s breakfast. I was terrified of getting a bad charging cable that would light my computer on fire, but this one I didn’t see coming. Probably it will take 5 years or so to get to sanity.
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I just bought a 2015 one and felt a little sore about it, but this post makes me feel better. Thanks.
I’m so irritated that it’s the non touchbar models that have 15w iris and the touchbar models that have 28w iris
I’m waiting until LPDDR4 to get one, but I have my doubts that’ll have changed by then
I’ve actually found that Windows 10, for all it does well, often puts itself in dire need of being mounted and fsck’ed when it gets stuck in bad boot loops. something about the EFI integration is really brittle.
Yeah, it’s not much of an upgrade, so far. I kind of hate the new immobile haptic touchpad, the false clickiness has this slightly sickening uncanny valley effect, particularly on drag-and-drop (it does feel like it went down, but then when you release the pressure, nothing releases under you). The touchbar is fine but just a gimmick. The USB-C switch is truly annoying at the moment, but I think I’ll start to appreciate it when it’s the only charging type I need to carry and I get the right monitor for single-plug docking. It’s a bit thinner and lighter, but not revelatorily so. Best upgrade about it so far is that the internal speakers are way louder and clearer, so it’s more reasonable to use it to play music without headphones.
I’m so irritated that it’s the non touchbar models that have 15w iris and the touchbar models that have 28w iris
For me it’s the one-sided USB-C ports that made me not consider the non-touchbar. It’s just the lower-end model from Apple’s POV, like the non-retina MBP used to be. The newest OS X does have remapping caps-lock-to-escape built in without needing a hacky tool to do so, so it’s not so bad. Being able to swipe brightness and volume directly on touchbar is pretty nice.
It’s not so much the USB-A to USB-C that bugged me, but rather the loss of HDMI/DisplayPort/SDXC. All of this IO is not going to be replaced with USB-C!
I am generally value conscious enough, when it comes to apple, to only be willing to buy their lower-end model (and usually refurbished), which also entails waiting for the cycle when the lower-end model is pretty good
that and I’m not giving up my god damned function keys
I will miss the SD card slot because it was pretty easy to add flush-with-edge bulk storage if you got a half-width microSD adapter: https://www.amazon.com/CY-Adaptor-Storage-Macbook-Retina/dp/B00S6GK6KE/ref=sr_1_17?ie=UTF8&qid=1492055078&sr=8-17&keywords=macbook+air+SD
anyway my 2013 haswell dell already charges off of microUSB and has way nicer speakers than my wife’s 2013 macbook but it does have a Y series CPU and I never want to deal with thermal thresholds ever again
yeah!
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You don’t really lose Displayport and Thunderbolt for what it’s worth, the Apple USB-C ports include that and you just need a passive cable.
Of my USB-C accessories the one I’m most pleased with is this battery: https://www.amazon.com/10000mAh-eeco-Portable-Charger-Products/dp/B01NCJUM6K/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492058252&sr=8-1&keywords=eeco+usb+c+battery . It’s about the size and weight of a phablet, and it can charge my laptop, my phone or the Switch. It’s supposed to have about 50% laptop charge worth of juice (haven’t tried a full discharge yet). A battery like this wasn’t possible before. I’ll probably never be desperate for a power outlet again.
How am I seeing this for the first time now? This is a must-have for anyone working in Premiere/After Effects/DAWs. 128GB of fast-enough storage for $50 total is useful.
these have been a mainstay as long as there have been 64gb+ microsd cards, lots of different companies make them
I just put all my games and media on there
they solved this in 2006 by making certain function keys default to this behaviour; at no point in the past ten years have I wanted to adjust them in finer-than-6.25% increments at the expense of all my function keys
The cool new thing is the swiping. It’s like an old-school radio slider. We’ve lost the tactility and scalability to both tiny and large magnitudes of those sliders and dials in the move to digital, and this is bringing some of it back. It’s similar to why mouse control in an FPS is much better than Wolfenstein 3d hold-arrow-key turning.
Personally I don’t understand the appeal of function keys. They’re further and harder to hit than a key combination lower in the keyboard. I’ve barely used them in years. I press Ctrl-R instead of F5 to refresh, for instance. Good riddance
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I miss volume dials for this reason. Digital controls aren’t the best solution, though storing presets is a nice sop.
I wonder if they have a prototype that just got rid of the no man’s land of F5-F10, I’d have been OK with that
I’d probably be happy with a keyboard the just removed F1
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