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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the renewed-interest-in-Compaq-Portable-computers dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

The pursuit of thinner, lighter laptops, a trend driven by Apple, means we have screwed ourselves out of performance.

Over the last few days we’ve seen outcry about Apple’s new MacBook Pro, which offers an optional top-end i9 processor, and how its performance is throttled to the point of parody as the laptop heats up over time.

Sparked by a video from YouTuber Dave Lee, who demonstrates that the only way to get Apple’s quoted performance from the MacBook Pro is by keeping it in a refrigerator, the outcry has been brutal.

Thousands of comments on the video say things like “Wow if it cant even maintain stock speeds that's pretty sad” and “Apple should offer a fridge that goes with the Macbook i9,” but the sobering reality is that this practice is normal across laptops—we’re just starting to see it more often.

[...] If Pro users really were Apple’s target market, the company could redesign these laptops to use the older, thicker MacBook Pro form factor from 2015. With that available space, and improvements in processor design, it would be able to better cool the same hardware and squeeze out more performance—but it’ll never happen. Thicker laptops would mean admitting failure.

Thinner and lighter is great, and if we’re honest, we’re all sucked in by the allure. The unfortunate reality for those of us that need these machines for work is that it’s just not good enough, and we’d welcome thicker machines in exchange for hardware that isn’t constrained by heat. Apple insists these new MacBooks are for ‘pro users,’ and while it has some of the best-in-class hardware design out there today, it simply doesn’t hold up if you push them hard enough.

The MacBook Pro isn’t designed for pro users at all, it’s a slick marketing machine designed to sell to the wealthy ‘prosumer’ that wouldn’t notice anyway. That much has been clear since the introduction of the Touch Bar and death of the SD slot—and it’s making a ton of money anyway.

Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kmkve/thinner-and-lighter-laptops-have-screwed-us-all


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:24PM (19 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:24PM (#712354)

    Apple finally got its founding wish: A walled garden.

    And, Apple proved that it's very profitable. Almost every other software firm and hardware firm as followed suit, closing off access to internals such that the only way to play is to pay and then do it their way. That is what has ruined computing.

    The advancement of FOSS halted in 2012, and no one really cares. There's too much money to be made selling junk to children.

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  • (Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:00PM (3 children)

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:00PM (#712397)

    Apple finally got its founding wish: A walled garden.

    I'm not sure it was a founding wish. Their first hit, the Apple II, had half a dozen expansion slots under the lid.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:21PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:21PM (#712409)

      Steve Jobs wanted 2 things: Your money, and your submission to his way.

      The Apple IIs were historical achievements, but that's not representative of Steve Jobs's Apple, but rather of Steve Wozniak's Apple. When people think of Apple, they think of the Macintosh and of iPods/iPhones/iPads, and Apple's heroic efforts to do its own, non-compatible thing.

      Whereas the PC industry famously erupted from the off-the-shelf IBM PC free-market frankenstein, Apple famously crushed the Macintosh clones [wikipedia.org]. According to Apple, there can be Only One.

      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:21PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:21PM (#712593)
        This

        The current Apple walled garden approach to computing is fully the fault of Job's desire to control every aspect of his users.

        Now that Jobs is gone, the corporate types won't let it go because they've discovered how much money there is by jailing users into their walled garden.

      • (Score: 1) by Acabatag on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:34AM

        by Acabatag (2885) on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:34AM (#712838)

        Apple has never wanted a dominant position in the PC (or consumer gadget, now) market. They want to control a small part of the larger market, with higher value/cost products.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:31PM (6 children)

    by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:31PM (#712417)

    Apple finally got its founding wish: A walled garden.

    Except - unlike iOS (and most Android devices unless you're tech-savvy enough to 'root' them or jump through complicated hoops to side-load apps) - the "walled garden" on Mac OS has a nice big gate that can be thrown open by unticking a checkbox, and its been that way for years now. Restricting it to only use the App Store is strictly optional (and useful if you're configuring a Mac for use by [insert ageist/sexist stereotype here].. By default, you have to jump through a minor hoop the first time you run an unsigned app. Install MacPorts or Brew and you've got all of the usual FOSS suspects available - or just spin up a VM and install what the hell OS you want in its own little sandbox.

    Making the damned things too thing for proper cooling or even a decent keyboard is a totally different blight and I'm not going to defend them for that ... although the worst of the i9 throttling looks like it was partly a straight-up bug that has been quickly fixed with a firmware update (have Dell fixed their i9 throttling problem yet?).

    • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:38PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @03:38PM (#712422)

      Mac OS X descends from the BSDs, and had to play very nicely at first because Apple was the underdog. I have watched the steady erosion of BSD/FOSS influence over Apple's software and community, and I've watched the rise of a complete lack of respect for the Unix philosophy.

      This large gate of which you speak is an artifact of a past civilization that is being forgotten.

      • (Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:51PM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:51PM (#712470) Journal

        This large gate of which you speak is an artifact of a past civilization that is being forgotten.

        A star gate? :-)

        --
        The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:33PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:33PM (#712502)

      you mean I can install any operating system I want into iphones because it's not boot locked?

      • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:42PM

        by RS3 (6367) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:42PM (#712510)

        I want to see you get GEOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system) [wikipedia.org] running on your iPhone. An x86 emulator / MS-DOS box should do it.

      • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:25PM

        by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @10:25PM (#712748)

        you mean I can install any operating system I want into iphones because it's not boot locked?

        Clue: we're talking about Macs not iPhones. They're different - and not nearly as locked-down. Apple even include a click-n-drool helper tool for installing Windows. Not sure if Linux has drivers for recent Macs but, frankly, though, the only reason for paying the Apple tax these days is if you want to run MacOS (which will happily run Linux/BSD in a VM and the majority of the major FOSS packages natively) and, come the day when you no longer want MacOS, flog the Mac to someone who does (they'll pay an inflated price for MacOS) and get some cheap generic hardware.

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:39PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @09:39PM (#712720)

      Side-loading Android apps consists of checking a box in settings. That's all.

  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:30PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:30PM (#712457)

    Apple finally got its founding wish: A walled garden.

    Not true. Apple was founded on the Apple II, a computer that was all about openness. It came with useful technical documentation. It encouraged third-parties to develop expansion cards to allow the computer to do all kinds of things that weren't possible out of the box. That was Woz's contribution. Jobs put it in a pretty (enough for the time) box and marketed it.

    You're thinking of the Macintosh. That was Jobs's baby. From day one, that thing was a closed box. Things relaxed a little when Jobs was ousted, but that quickly changed after his return. Once he died, marketing and design decided to screw us further, soldering in the RAM and storage and gluing things down, making it virtually impossible to even replace our own batteries.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:35PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:35PM (#712459)
      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:10PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @05:10PM (#712488)

        He posted about the Apple II, as in "2", which means it's supposed to be mentioned twice. He's just doing his part ... why aren't you?

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:06PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:06PM (#712629)

          Are you Jay Wilson?

    • (Score: 2) by Alfred on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:55PM

      by Alfred (4006) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:55PM (#712472) Journal
      Not true. Going back to my Mac 512k experience.

      The battery was replaced by opening a door on the back, AA battery inside.
      The floppy could be upgraded to double sided.
      There were ways to upgrade the processor, we went from 68000 to 68030. And you could revert to using the 68000 by holding the interrupt key at boot. This upgrade also let us install more RAM.
      We added a SCSI interface and booted from it.
      We added a second (still B&W) full page screen.

      Later on the battery was internalized.
      Mac II series brought back regular expansion slots
      iMac got the ball rolling on USB.
      Mac Pro became a trash can
      Yada yada, the Apple coaster is still a mess though.
    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:08PM (1 child)

      by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:08PM (#712580)

      You're thinking of the Macintosh. That was Jobs's baby From day one, that thing was a closed box

      Well, yes, not a bad idea considering the 20kV in the high tension circuits of the display, that hung around even when turned off and disconnected. Still, all you needed was a Torx bit welded to a long shaft... none of this modern heat pack, guitar pick, pizza-cutter and replacement set of double-sided sticky tape malarkey.

      Since then, during Jobs' later tenure, Apple released both sealed-shut "appliances" and pro machines like the G4 tower and the G5/Intel "Cheesegrater" that went the extra mile to hinge apart at a flip of a catch and were the easiest machines ever to work on... Looks to me that, in those days, someone understood "horses for courses".

      • (Score: 1) by Acabatag on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:43AM

        by Acabatag (2885) on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:43AM (#712850)

        All you really needed to open a dinkyscreen Mac was a long handled flat blade screwdriver of the right blade width. You could wedge it into the Torx hole, and pull the Torx screws to discard. They were replaced with phillips head screws of the same size which are commonly available. I still have four dinkyscreen Macs, three SE/30's and a plain SE. I, of course, retain the original torx screws for collector's value, but I never screw them back into place.

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:38PM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:38PM (#712663) Homepage Journal

      When my Mid 2012 MacBook Pro died, I managed to dig up a very small PCIe To USB3 enclosure so I could recover the data.

      Other World Computing sells compatible storage cards so you can get even faster storage then that which comes with the box.

      --
      Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]