In my own (possibly and probably inaccurate) opinion, I feel as though "hackers" aren't the people who need professional gear to do professional (or daily) tasks. They're the ones who can make the most out of as little equipment as possible.
"See that toaster over there? It's been reprogrammed to automatically deposit my cat's food every fourth hour and have it warm as well."
"That 2009 dinosaur of a smartphone sitting in the corner? It's an IP surveillance camera."
"That first generation Xbox, it's powering the zoom feature of the Hubble Telescope."
That last one might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but my point is that something isn't great because it's the latest. Something is great because someone increased it's value after using it or created something of higher value than the equipment used to create it.
> Hackers do not benefit from a closed box with non-expandable performance.
To address this point... some might. But not all will. And I certainly think that fewer will than the generations before. I really hope USB-C will be as great as these companies say it will, but until then I'll happily use my different ports that work as they are expected to.
All professionals need professional gear to do professional work. That's kind of the definition of a professional - someone who can afford the right tools, and knows how to use them to get a job done quickly and competently.
Turning a toaster into a cat feeder is tinkering, not professional hacking. There's nothing wrong with tinkering. But it's the difference between wiring up a Raspberry Pi as a heating controller, and building a company that sells fully licensed and certified heating controllers all over the world with support infrastructure.
One is hobby project, the other... isn't.
A useful definition of a professional tool is one that lets you forget you're using it because it's so transparently intuitive you never have to think about its needs.
I don't think the 2016 MBP does that. The ports are (literally) a side issue. The problem is more that Apple are thoughtlessly losing their reputation among professionals, because Cook, Schiller and co don't seem to be thinking hard enough what they're doing, and don't appear to have an understanding of what their professional customers are looking for.
...Which is not something super-thin for the sake of it, or with a gimmicky touch bar. It's something expandable with ports that "just work", no physical or metaphorical rough edges, with the option to have decent memory (i.e. 32GB) and a reasonable processor speed bump.
This shouldn't be hard or controversial, but for some reason it seems to be beyond Apple's understanding.
I'm hardly a hater. I bought the 12.9" iPad Pro last week, and I'm loving it. But the laptop format is challenging because you either stay conservative, or you go full experimental with (say) a dual-display clamshell. or even a touch panel instead of the trackpad.
Half-hearted innovations like the touch bar glued onto an ungenerous spec look like gimmicks for the sake of it, not serious attempts to improve professional productivity.
Don't get me wrong, but professionals are those who deploy Win3.11 machines running on embedded i386 cores for big money today. It's more about meeting some specs, getting certifications and providing reliability than it is about technical details.
Your definition is more bleeding-edge-users who are constantly limited by technology and could justify to pay a couple thousand for a 10% increase in performance. This group overlaps but is not equal to the professional users.
Many real professionals will love the new MBP lineup while many more will hate it.
I still don't understand this seemingly rigid idea of what a "pro" needs in a computer. (High performance, who cares about the battery life or form factor.) Surely it depends what your line of work is.
I'm a programmer, mostly web based apps and related servers. For my usage, I need an SSD (~512gb) and a recent cpu with 16gb+ ram. The touchpad has been what kept me on the mbp... Looking at the Razer Blade Pro, love the keyboard layout, but its totally overkill for my needs.
An integrated gpu, with a higher end i5, with a big ssd and lots of ram for half the price would be more appealing to me.. even bringing a lower rez screen would be okay for my needs... love the for factor though.
I didn't say an integrated gpu and 32gb are taxed... I said I needed an SSD greater than 256gb (512), and at least 16gb of ram. However, in many corp environments if you need those, you get a hefty machine.
If it's being taxed, it's probably because some idiot spec'd an HDD that pulls resources too slowly For modern JS dev, you really need an SSD more than anything else. Mainly because the build/watch process is tracking many thousands of small files which is significantly worse on hdd. 60+ seconds vs. under a second for any change to take effect in the browser. This can be as much as an hour a day wasted. The 5 hours of wasted time in a few weeks are more costly than the upgrade to ssd.
-- edit
As to 512gb, it's because after all the software, that can take 100gb... creative assets well over that depending on the projects... it's easy to hit 240gb between the OS, software, projects, and assets.
Beyond that, show me off-the shelf hardware that can be configured with 16+gb ram and a 512gb SSD that doesn't have the other stuff I don't need?
>The problem is more that Apple are thoughtlessly losing their reputation among professionals, because Cook, Schiller and co don't seem to be thinking hard enough what they're doing, and don't appear to have an understanding of what their professional customers are looking for.
I just wanna know what cable they use when they need to plug their iPhone into their MacBook. I don't seem to recall Apple selling a usb-c to lightning cable.
Well said. A hacker can get by with a Rasberry Pi with wires hanging off it, while the self proclaimed "pros" whine about memory and performance whilst demanding the latest slick design.
I find it weirder that people whining about that are usually not impaired by it for their dayjobs? I hear people shouting about wanting gpus and multicores and 16 gb and then that they are doing React dev on it as professional. What do you need that monster for when doing that dev? When I do 3d game dev, ML or image processing/recog I need something heavy (although... I really only need that locally for the first from that list). The rest I can do on mostly anything after 2009... Including React dev.
For me (closer to react guy), I want an SSD and plenty of ram... a high end core i5 with integrated gpu will do... but in many corp environments there are only a handful of build options, so you get the uber machine or 8gb ram with spinning rust drive.
I mean, I can "get by" on anything - an iPod Touch that runs Emacs 23, just to pick an example off my desk. When the chips are down, I'll get the job done with it. When the chips aren't down, and I have something more closely approaching my druthers with regard to the tools I use, I'm not going to go for the iPod.
The hacker as reverse engineer benefits a lot from low-level access.
I agree that USB-C might be helpful in that respect, but it totally depends on the drivers. If there is a device that I can make hiccup through timing attacks it depends on what liberties I have in the driver.
For Bluetooth for example you have Ubertooth. If the Bluetooth radio on my laptop would be accessible on a low enough level there would be no need to use other hardware to execute attacks.
I'm just a hobbyist with a jtag programmer, some digital analysis, nothing fancy. A professional reverse engineer is another beast with microscopes, etc.
A hacker in the form of someone exploiting vulnerabilities in web applications does benefit not from a single computer, but from many. I don't think he/she would care about the specs too much.
> They're the ones who can make the most out of as little equipment as possible
... like a $4k laptop?
It's not like Apple is the only company to support USB-C on laptops... in fact, as far as I can tell, every major manufacturer has it on their most recently-released laptops.
> To address this point... some might. But not all will.
How, exactly, would someone... anyone... BENEFIT from closed-box performance? Just because someone might not benefit from a laptop you can upgrade doesn't mean the converse... that they somehow benefit from having one that you can't upgrade.
(side note: I can think of ways... decreased cost, decreased size... but the laptops certainly don't cost less, and any difference in size w/ a 15" laptop is negligible)
Actually, it was a 8192 processor MasPar at the University of Central Florida that did the image correction for the Hubble Telescope before corrective lenses were installed.
The MasPars were fun to play with. ;) So you're not that far off on your XBox comment!
By this version of what a hacker is, it makes it sound like Apple is saying "This is a sub-par piece of equipment but you'll make the most of it because you're a hacker who's more productive with less!"
I agree with the definition on it's own merit.
"See that toaster over there? It's been reprogrammed to automatically deposit my cat's food every fourth hour and have it warm as well."
"That 2009 dinosaur of a smartphone sitting in the corner? It's an IP surveillance camera."
"That first generation Xbox, it's powering the zoom feature of the Hubble Telescope."
That last one might have been a bit of an exaggeration, but my point is that something isn't great because it's the latest. Something is great because someone increased it's value after using it or created something of higher value than the equipment used to create it.
> Hackers do not benefit from a closed box with non-expandable performance.
To address this point... some might. But not all will. And I certainly think that fewer will than the generations before. I really hope USB-C will be as great as these companies say it will, but until then I'll happily use my different ports that work as they are expected to.