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Pricing courage
Apple has also introduced some significant price cuts to the 4K and 5K LG UltraFine Displays that were announced at its October 27 Mac event.
Dan Moren at SixColors
Friday afternoon: the place where news goes to die. Apple dropped a statement to a number of outlets that it’s discounting USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 adapters and peripherals in its stores—both those of its own manufacture as well as those made by partners through the end of the year.
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So, it’s easy to read this as purely being a response to complaints over the new MacBook Pro’s reliance on USB-C/Thunderbolt 3…and, yeah, that’s pretty much what’s happening here. Dropping the news on a late Friday afternoon suggests that Apple doesn’t want to garner a lot of attention about the fact it needs to make this move.Meanwhile, Phil Schiller at the Independent
And we are proud to tell you that so far our online store has had more orders for the new MacBook Pro than any other pro notebook before. So there certainly are a lot of people as excited as we are about it.
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Commit DB version 1.1
A new version of my iOS MySQL client has been released in the App Store.
New features include:
- Fullscreen view of a record by tapping the line number in a resultset
- JSON export of a resultset
- Color setting for your connections
And of course, multiple bug fixes !
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Out of luck (again)
In an email response to a customer question concerning the 16GB memory cap on Apple’s new MacBook Pro lineup, a longstanding ceiling for the notebook series, SVP of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller said the design decision stems from a need to prolong battery life.
Apple’s LG partnership seems to indicate that Apple may have shelved plans to build a new display, something that’s been confirmed by The Verge’s Nilay Patel. According to Patel, Apple told him it is out of the standalone display business.
Jason Snell at SixColors:
Well, it’s my sad duty to report that the MacBook Pro keyboard has the same key travel as the MacBook. Apple says the stainless steel dome switch beneath each key has been honed to give you a more responsive feel, but to me it feels just like the MacBook’s keyboard. (To be fair, I don’t have a MacBook available to test directly. It’s possible that this keyboard does indeed feel more responsive than the MacBook, but I would never mistake it for the old MacBook Pro or MacBook Air keyboards or even the Magic Keyboard.
BGR:
Since the cards are brand-new, we don’t have a sense for how they’ll perform in the real world quite yet. But just by comparing some basic specs, we know that performance should be similar to or a little worse than the GTX 965m graphics card, as found in the new Surface Book and other portable laptops.
Things get worse when you compare the $2,000+ laptop to other 15-inch Windows laptops, most of which tend to be designed for performance. A quick search throws up numerous 15-inch laptops around the $1,500 mark, which have much more powerful graphics cards, and more RAM and storage to boot. For a little extra weight, you can even get laptops with desktop-level GTX 1070 or 1080 cards, which are hilariously better than the Radeon Pro 400s in the MacBook Pros.
Don’t get me wrong, the new MacBooks look like very good laptops. My concern is that the Macs are more and more like iOS devices: they’re all designed with the same constraints in mind.
They’re for people who travel/move a lot (small, light machines) and are power corporate users (not that much powerfull machines in the grand scheme of things but that last a long time to go from meeting to meeting all day long).
It’s fine for Apple to target mainly that demographic but if you have needs outside of these, what is Apple offering you ? Certainly not a laptop. If you need a powerfull graphic card, well sorry, Apple has absolutely nothing for you in store. If you need a retina external display at least you can go to LG for now. But for how long ?
And If you need more than 16 Go of memory to run big VMs, you have to look for a desktop …
From MacRumors Mac Buyers Guide:
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Surface Studio follow-up
Brent Simmons, speaking about the Surface Studio:
Except — and this part shouldn’t be underestimated — many of these Mac developers are here because Macs are the computer for creative professionals and artists. That’s what attracted us to Macs in the first place.
It’s more than a niche. It’s our identity as Mac developers: we write apps for people who make things. But what if the Surface Studio takes over as the computer for people who make things? And what if we could bring over some of our investment (such as learning Swift) with us?
I never thought to even consider that as a possible future.
You don’t find much more hardcore mac developper than Simmons. The fact he’s even thinking about the faintest possibility of jumping ship shows two things
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that Microsoft has desgined a very audacious and interresting product
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that Apple has so much neglected its core audience of old that the cracks are starting to show
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Microsoft Surface Studio, the new Mac Pro ?
Interresting concept from Microsoft, the new Surface Studio.
It’s squarely aimed at creative professionals, a demographic that has always been the bread and butter of Apple pro hardware.
Seems a little light specswise compared to a Mac Pro (I mean, compared to what could be a Mac Pro today if it had been updated less than three years ago).
I hope it will succeed to shame Apple into caring more about its pro line.
However, it is clearly not for me. For one, I couldn’t draw anything to save my life so I wouldn’t use it for that purpose. But it seems to be a really clever use of touch for a desktop computer.
The big drawback: the smudges it will create on the screen. I’m already mad at the rare finger traces on my non-touch iMac screen, it would positively drive me crazy !
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