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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) by takyon on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:40PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:40PM (#712374) Journal

    Voltage and power consumption are supposed to decline while performance increases from node to node. But we are reaching the limits. Within 10-15 years, we'll need to transition to something new if we want any further performance increases. If we want vertically layered transistors with many cores operating at the same time, heat needs to come down a lot. Today's 35W+ desktop and 10W+ laptop CPU TDPs may end up as a complete anachronism.

    Apple may have painted themselves in a corner for now but the users picked an ecosystem that doesn't pay attention to its options for power users and has been pursuing thinner and thinner designs for years. If the thermal throttling is really a problem for you, then you shouldn't be buying from Apple anymore.

    Alongside the thermal issues, the thinner laptops also tend to have less ports (and no optical drive, haha) and be more expensive. You may be much better off finding a machine in the $400-750 range that has a decent CPU and a discrete GPU. If you need more performance, get a thick gaming laptop, or a desktop. There are other systems using the same high-end parts as Mac, such as Dell (mentioned in TFA). If you don't like lugging around a heavy system, plant one in your home or office, and/or do your work remotely.

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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:57PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 25 2018, @02:57PM (#712393) Journal

    You may be much better off finding a machine in the $400-750 range that has a decent CPU and a discrete GPU.

    Or a computer in a much more expensive casing, something like steampunk-style brass enclosure with baroque style ornamentation.
    True, it will be more in the transportable than in the portable class, but the geeks today can use some physical exercise and with a brass case the heat will cease to be a problem.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:33PM (1 child)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:33PM (#712458)

    the users picked an ecosystem that doesn't pay attention to its options for power users and has been pursuing thinner and thinner designs for years. If the thermal throttling is really a problem for you, then you shouldn't be buying from Apple anymore.

    This is the fundamental truth underlying everything here. The users aren't being screwed by Apple, they're screwing themselves due to their own stupidity. If you don't want all the performance problems that come from having an ultra-thin laptop, then don't buy one. It's really that simple. You can get non-thin high-performance laptops elsewhere, like Lenovo and Dell. "B...b...b...but I need the Apple ecosystem!!" Too f'in bad: if you're stupid enough to lock yourself into that, then you're getting exactly what you deserve.

    Honestly, I'm really sick of all these articles the past couple years about how awful the new Mac laptops are for power users, and these people bemoaning how they're being "forced" to put up with these not-fit-for-purpose machines. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Apple is not a monopoly.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:46PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 25 2018, @04:46PM (#712466)

      At my company, the choice a couple years ago was between decently specced Macbook Pros (16gb RAM, i7) and mediocre HP (8 gb RAM, i5). That wasn't a very hard choice for me, MacOS may not be great but it is a lot easier to pop open a terminal and get something mostly familiar (coming from Linux) than it is on Windows.