New MacBook Pros

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Over-voltage protection means less thin.... so it was cut

 

Reviews are out for the touchbar... Good reviews especially the first one who dives in deeper on the RAM.

 

When did you place your order? I put mine through on 4th Nov. Delivers 8 - 13 Dec. Hasn't been pushed back yet.

 

Mine was put in the day after the event.

Is a maxed 15".

I have had two notification so far saying there has been an unexpected delay and pushing back the ship date. Current estimate is 20 Dec.

 

Free ram upgrade for the delay ??

should be a good Xmas present man

 

Initial reports suggest non-removable SSD soldered onto the "logic board" ("motherboard", for English speakers).

http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/does-the-macbook-pro-with-touch-bar-have-removable-ssd.2014953/

 

I put my order through on Oct 29th and expected shipping date is between 24/11 - 1/12. I hope I get it before I leave for holiday trip overseas on 3/12 or i'm gonna be so pissed off.

 

Everything soldered is inevitable, it saves a lot of space and eliminates a source of potential issues.

The whole 'repairability' thing is bullshit. In practice, MacBooks are 100% repairable. You take it back to Apple and they fix it or give you a new one.

 

I find the only people who agree with that are those who see the laptop and tablet merging into a single device. That's something I personally hope doesn't happen, and they stay separate product lines for all vendors.

It's also something you and others in this thread told me *wouldn't* happen with Apple. So I hope you don't backflip on that statement too.

As someone who strongly believes in an individual's right to repair, I fundamentally disagree with this statement. And that's something I've believed in strongly for decades (even before the Mac product line existed).

That goes well beyond any specific manufacturer. I'm happy to void my warranty upon opening the case, that's fine. But I need to be able to repair anything I purchase (or take it to an unofficial third party who can on my behalf), and refuse to purchase things I can't.

I have no interest in buying things that have the potential to die on me after warranty and be a brick.

Upgrades are the same. Extending the life of an old device by putting in more/faster RAM, storage or whatever is important to me. Buying a new $4k laptop when I could spend $500 upgrading an old one to get better performance is not only financially wasteful, it's environmentally wasteful too.

Replace != repair. (Similar to how reuse beats recycle).

As above, past warranty deadline, I want to be able to repair it myself or take it to a third party who can. Throwing away these devices because a singe part is dead is not only financially wasteful, but environmentally awful.

Apple are already under heavy environmental criticism already for the processes they take to mill their aluminium "unibody" cases, and the waste it produces. And standard electronics is bad enough for any vendor on top of that (harmful chemicals used in the process of making electronics). Add to this the "disposable toy" thinking of soldering everything in and preventing repair and upgrade, and it's very disappointing in 2016 that a company would think this way. Not very progressive at all, considering all the marketing Apple do on their site about their solar use and carbon footprint, and their "California hippy" heritage of being a company that was proud to once care about these things.

 

Personally I think it is an odd design decision but my guess is that like the iPhones and iPads... the onboard storage is encrypted to the touchID system which cant be swapped out either which is why it cant be removed to ensure maximum security. It is the only reason they would really do it compared to the 13" base which is removable.

It would have been nice to be able to move it to a new unit if needed but honestly it is not an issue for me with iCloud and Timemachine and I am willing to give it up if it means no one is breaking into the filesystem.

Saying that Apple did it purely so you buy a higher model is BS as far as I am concerned. Apple is actually pretty reasonable when it comes to the SSD prices and their 2TB is actually cheaper than PC.

It is what it is really, only an idiot would be surprised that Apple are closing things off more and more, their products have been barely serviceable for years now. If you want an Apple device, get Apple care if you expect it to last 3-5 years and be done it with.

Repairing laptops is going the way of the dinosaur, rarely does storage or ram fail. It usually the mainboard / screen which are never viable repairs out of warranty anyway.

 

I made this point earlier in the thread, that Macbook+macOS was heading towards iPhone+iOS in design goals. It got universally shot down, yet here we're seeing another example of it (and the two people who shot the idea down doing a backflip, and agreeing with it suddenly).

There's no extra security soldering the storage on. What matters is how the data is stored on the storage, and how the keys to the data are protected from brute forcing.

You can still find tap points on the board to peer at the data moving around. That doesn't gain any magical security benefits from soldered-on storage. If the data is encrypted, then it's secure, and tapping won't help regardless of physical connections.

The iPhone6 and iPhone7 "secure enclave" is quite an amazing design (very well thought out, very well implemented), and that's the bit that keeps them secure. How the storage (which receives data encrypted by keys kept secret by the enclave) is physically attached makes no difference to that security model. It could be standard MicroSD, compact flash, SATA/SAS, removable or soldered on - none of that makes a difference to the security model.

I don't know if Apple are doing a similar "secure enclave" device in the MBP or not. It would be an excellent addition in today's climate. But again, how the storage physically connects to this has no impact to the security.

That's not the point. In 3 years from now, 2 cycles of Moore's law suggests we'll have 8TB SSDs that will be several times faster than today's best SSDs. Regardless of how well Apple price top-of-the-line components today, they can't give me options for future hardware now (not their fault, they can't time travel). Being forced to buy a whole new laptop then because I just want to bump my internal storage sucks in general (and would suck regardless of the vendor or product).

Ignoring the childish insult entirely, I'm not surprised at all. But I am disappointed that it's continuing.

Despite all this recent silliness, I don't yet dislike Apple, and I hold a high level of nostalgic love for them. I've been a Mac user for a long, long time (probably longer than most people on this forum have been alive), and always deeply admired how they did things a little differently to everyone else, whether I agreed with their methods or not. Sometimes they stumbled on a product here or there, but they always recovered and kept offering people what they wanted (often before people knew they even wanted it, which is the real story of their success).

2016 Apple is a different Apple. Indeed, 2016 Apple is starting to feel a lot like mid 90s Apple, where they lost Jobs, lost direction, and ultimately lost money. I genuinely hope I'm wrong, but they've gone from being a company I admired for pushing the technology market forwards, to being a company that have stopped believing in their own products as devices for change, and only consider the shallow, short term benefits.

And the same patterns are emerging today as they did in the mid 90s too. Indeed, this thread could teleport back in time and not be out of place. Replace "iPad" with "Newton", replace "MacBook" with "Quadra", and you've have the same fanaticism from a small percentage of people defending the design choices with religious zeal, while everyone else bailed ship and went looking elsewhere.

 

Soldering hardware on makes a massive difference, if the module is removable, it streamlines the possibility of building a piece of hardware that you simply plug it into and attempt to brute force the encryption. Extracting the memory chips and hardware encryption IC's is no small feat by comparison and despite how easy Louis might make it seem (why do you think he kills so many SMC's), reflowing hardware has a VERY high probability of killing it with the heat required to remove it. In fact some hardware is engineered that way to ensure higher security and will only tolerate being heated to those temperatures once.

If the touch ID and memory are keyed and swapping either is not possible then making the SSD storage removable is a pointless engineering exercise.

LOL childish insult, if you choose to take everything as a personal go at you then go for it. I am referring to anyone in general who is actually surprised that Apple are locking things down more and more. Maintaining tight control is what has allowed them to get to the levels of security we take for granted these days. I welcome the change to be honest. I want iPhone levels of security in my Macbook Pro.

and yes you are correct we are heading towards a Macbook powered by Apple processors, they are so close to doing it that its not funny anymore.

As for the storage argument, well it depends on the usage case. I rarely see a Windows laptop last long enough to get a storage upgrade. Macbooks seem to last well into retirement for the most part (mine usually see 5yrs). While this is great, from a business point of view, it doesn't suit Apple and their desire to sell you new hardware (like every other company out there...).

 

I do 4 or 5 a month and I'm barely casual in the IT industry these days. Your fanboi is stronger than any of my clients'.

I'm not talking ROG and MSI etc either, low end Toshibas and HPs are standard fare. Not only that, but a new battery is plug and play, and you can do a RAM upgrade by removing a single cover on those lower end models.

This idea of Apple being super reliable is bullshit too, pretty sure there is a standard index of warranty returned units per 1000, and Apple were stuck on third behind ASUS and Toshiba for years.

 

I don't care what you think. I have had a good run with them and so have my clients who I recommend get them. I will keep using them because they work for me and I look after my hardware.

Toshiba make the shittest laptops in the industry hands down. ASUS aren't far behind them as Louis will attest to and so will people I know who still repair them.

As for Apple warranties well let's just say people take advantage of them...I know a few people who just make up BS about their iPhones, MacBooks etc to get a new unit constantly either to sell or because it has scratches on it.

 

Its also nothing but cost saving, which has obviously been passed onto the consumer here....

Toshiba satellite Pro opening for service is crazy good. Pull back off and everything is on one layer.

 

The school I work at is an apple school, year 10 and up have macbooks. Everyday one comes in, harddrive dead, flex cable faulty, kernal panic, needs a pram/smc reset for some reason, charger port broken, screen is stage lighting along the bottom.

If they aren't modular in some aspect it will be hard for us to recommend them going forward as parents or the school will need to pay for a whole machine or logic board.

 

Hey! My Toshiba lasted 7 years and saw a HDD upgrade (250GB to 1TB), 2 RAM upgrades and a battery replacement. Eventually the screen died and I thought it was time to upgrade rather than replace

Agreed! To do all the upgrades I mentioned before required removing 4 screws. Apple Care my arse!

 

Yes because kids are known to take care of their equipment... and for every Mac that came in, how many are still working?

I have had 1 Macbook Pro have an issue out of 5, it was a loose battery internally and they gave me a brand new unit.

Let me tell you the lifecycle for an average consumer laptop... Within a year it will be running like shit because of Windows, I will get a call out to fix it and they will think its time to upgrade but in reality it just has to be wiped, but hey sell them a new one. Thats if the laptop runs fast in the first place, they have so much bloatware these days.

Toshiba are shit, floppy screens, keyboard flex, failure modes galore, plastic housings. I have seen so many of those dam things fail. I don't care if its all layed out neatly inside, if you have to open it then its already failed at its job.

End of the day, I don't care, I am not going to switch to a Windows laptop because you say so, or because I am classed as an Apple fanboi, you can go jump off a very tall building as far as I'm concerned.

Like I said... the sooner Apple becomes a niche' again the better, I am so sick of the constant bashing, Apple hate etc, people seem to think Apple owe something to them personally and get outraged because a company does what they want to do.

 

They all work since we have the parts on hand to fix them with. Which might not be possible going forward.