AppleInsider podcast talks MacBook Pro and Bluetooth headphones

gemmahentsch said:

Apple themselves stated it was a battery life issue, NOT a tech issue limitation on the lack of 32gb. I don't really care about battery life, if I get an hour or two (on a good day, when the weather is clement I get 3 hours from an "all day battery") I care about a machine that's as powerful as it needs to be, and that I can use it for an hour or two away from power, but if apple said, here's our so called "all day battery" but if you want 32gb RAM, then you wont have as good battery life, that would be a perfectly simple trade off that apple couldn't force on people. I'm frustrated at the paternalistic attitudes apple applies, I bought the top of the range 2012 13" MBP, and it was quite clearly anemic, dual core is still a limitation for being a developer, and as a gamer, the graphics card is useless. I still own the last 13" discrete graphics card macbook from 2008-2009. My next laptop, will be a 15" because apple has made the 13" unbuyable for me. Yes I'll certainly enjoy the larger screen, but for portability, I'd prefer a 13" machine, but I cannot trade off unreasonably anemic, for a smaller form factor. TBH I could live with an anemic graphics card, but I cannot survive dual core... I get that I'm a high end developer, but I'm meant to be looking at pro machines, for power users.... not machines designed around consumer needs. Personally its kinda shitty to up the price and not include any dongles in the box, particularly given that its 50 GBP for the thunderbolt 3 to thunderbolt 2 adaptor, but otherwise its all good for me, and I can live with that problem. That said having bandwidth limitations on one side of the case's ports, is amateurish...

The RAM choice would affect all users, not just the ones wanting 32GB. I don't think the impact would have been all that big, probably not even 1W so maybe an hour less battery life but if the benefit was for <5% of their buyers, not all of whom would pay the extra, it's understandable why they'd leave it out until they didn't impact everyone else. Memory compression can provide as much as 50% extra RAM as long as it's not a single process using the RAM at once. When DDR4 is more mainstream, 32GB will be easier for them to offer.

People often say they are holding onto old machines because the new ones aren't good enough but the 2008-2009 discrete GPU was the NVidia 9400M. The Iris 550 in the new 13" MBP isn't that far off an NVidia 750M (2013):

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Iris-Graphics-550.149937.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-750M.90245.0.html

There isn't even comparison games with the 9400M because it's so low down, there's some here between the 650M:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9400M-G.11949.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-650M.71887.0.html

WoW is 11FPS on high on the 9400M and 90FPS on the 650M so the new 13" is easily over 5x the old 2008/2009 Macbook GPU. The 15" GPU is going to be another 2x or more but it doesn't make sense to have an old GPU just because it's a dedicated GPU.

The dual-core CPU is 4-thread so it behaves like a 4-core CPU, it's not the same as an old dual-core. There are numbers here, click on the multi-tab:

https://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

The old Macbooks are right at the bottom and the 2016 MBP is about 3.5x faster, not far off the 2011 quad-i7 MBP. Again the 15" is near double this but the 2016 13" is still a very capable laptop with a 2011 MBP quad-core i7 CPU and a 2013 MBP dGPU.

Could they have done it with DDR3L/4? Yes, with an impact of about 10W to do so, given the need for an alternative controller and the chips themselves needing more power. Could they have done it with LPDDR3? No.

Thanks for podcast, I enjoyed your technical knowledge and your discussions. However I was surprised you repeated the Apple argument that they got rid of the 3.5mm headphone socket on iPhone 7 because bluetooth headphones are the future but keep it on the MBP because of pro audio users. I don't think this is logical as pro audio users will be using a myriad of devices, mostly USB, to get the audio out, not the mini headphone jack socket. In addition they are generally not keen on another unnecessary dongle / connection to break, get lost, interrupt the signal flow. Plus I can't afford to change all my additional gear just because Apple have changed their connector. And I had to chuckle when you talked about the need for a universal connector standard...Universal Serial Bus works sufficiently for all of my music / audio gear (amassed over the past 15 years). 

So I'm not knocking you guys at all but I am disappointed with these latest choices by Apple.