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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 MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:41PM (3 children)

    by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Wednesday July 25 2018, @08:41PM (#712665) Homepage Journal

    My other box is a Quad Core Xeon with Linux Mint.

    I use it only rarely, for the most part to archive things like software installers that I never delete.

    The single most important reason that I develop for Apple products - since 1986 - is that if I have to stare at a screen all day, I far prefer to spend my days staring at Mac screens.

    --
    Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:23AM (2 children)

    Code monkey != power user necessarily. Power users want complete control over whatever hardwae/software environment they're working from. It's not about horsepower (which would disqualify all laptop users) but about the ability and desire to customize their environment to suit themselves rather than accepting what someone else dictates to them.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:56AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @01:56AM (#712860)

      Oh man I just responded to you and down here you have the mostly correct definition. Yes people with Macs can be power users, the fact that you believe otherwise shows your ignorance. Probably because you disdain Apple so much that you really have zero clue what you're talking about.

    • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday July 26 2018, @03:32AM

      by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Thursday July 26 2018, @03:32AM (#712898) Homepage Journal

      $ hostname
      Michaels-Mac-mini.local

      $ uname -a
      Darwin Michaels-Mac-mini.local 16.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 16.6.0: Fri Apr 14 16:21:16 PDT 2017; root:xnu-3789.60.24~6/RELEASE_X86_64 x86_64

      $ man bash
      BASH(1) BASH(1)

      NAME
                    bash - GNU Bourne-Again SHell

      SYNOPSIS
                    bash [options] [file]

      COPYRIGHT
                    Bash is Copyright (C) 1989-2005 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.

      DESCRIPTION
                    Bash is an sh-compatible command language interpreter that executes commands read
                    from the standard input or from a file. Bash also incorporates useful features
                    from the Korn and C shells (ksh and csh).

                    Bash is intended to be a conformant implementation of the Shell and Utilities por-
                    tion of the IEEE POSIX specification (IEEE Standard 1003.1). Bash can be config-
                    ured to be POSIX-conformant by default.
      ...

      The kernel and most of the device drivers are open source under the Apple Public Source License version 2.

      Sometimes I build the kernel as well as those of Apple's drivers that interact with the driver I'm writing for a client.

      I use vi quite a lot more than I use either Xcode or BBEdit.

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