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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
(Score: 3, Insightful) by theluggage on Wednesday July 25 2018, @07:08PM (1 child)
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
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.