All professionals need professional gear to do professional work. That's kind of the definition of a professional - someone who can afford the right tools, and knows how to use them to get a job done quickly and competently.
Turning a toaster into a cat feeder is tinkering, not professional hacking. There's nothing wrong with tinkering. But it's the difference between wiring up a Raspberry Pi as a heating controller, and building a company that sells fully licensed and certified heating controllers all over the world with support infrastructure.
One is hobby project, the other... isn't.
A useful definition of a professional tool is one that lets you forget you're using it because it's so transparently intuitive you never have to think about its needs.
I don't think the 2016 MBP does that. The ports are (literally) a side issue. The problem is more that Apple are thoughtlessly losing their reputation among professionals, because Cook, Schiller and co don't seem to be thinking hard enough what they're doing, and don't appear to have an understanding of what their professional customers are looking for.
...Which is not something super-thin for the sake of it, or with a gimmicky touch bar. It's something expandable with ports that "just work", no physical or metaphorical rough edges, with the option to have decent memory (i.e. 32GB) and a reasonable processor speed bump.
This shouldn't be hard or controversial, but for some reason it seems to be beyond Apple's understanding.
I'm hardly a hater. I bought the 12.9" iPad Pro last week, and I'm loving it. But the laptop format is challenging because you either stay conservative, or you go full experimental with (say) a dual-display clamshell. or even a touch panel instead of the trackpad.
Half-hearted innovations like the touch bar glued onto an ungenerous spec look like gimmicks for the sake of it, not serious attempts to improve professional productivity.
Don't get me wrong, but professionals are those who deploy Win3.11 machines running on embedded i386 cores for big money today. It's more about meeting some specs, getting certifications and providing reliability than it is about technical details.
Your definition is more bleeding-edge-users who are constantly limited by technology and could justify to pay a couple thousand for a 10% increase in performance. This group overlaps but is not equal to the professional users.
Many real professionals will love the new MBP lineup while many more will hate it.
I still don't understand this seemingly rigid idea of what a "pro" needs in a computer. (High performance, who cares about the battery life or form factor.) Surely it depends what your line of work is.
I'm a programmer, mostly web based apps and related servers. For my usage, I need an SSD (~512gb) and a recent cpu with 16gb+ ram. The touchpad has been what kept me on the mbp... Looking at the Razer Blade Pro, love the keyboard layout, but its totally overkill for my needs.
An integrated gpu, with a higher end i5, with a big ssd and lots of ram for half the price would be more appealing to me.. even bringing a lower rez screen would be okay for my needs... love the for factor though.
I didn't say an integrated gpu and 32gb are taxed... I said I needed an SSD greater than 256gb (512), and at least 16gb of ram. However, in many corp environments if you need those, you get a hefty machine.
If it's being taxed, it's probably because some idiot spec'd an HDD that pulls resources too slowly For modern JS dev, you really need an SSD more than anything else. Mainly because the build/watch process is tracking many thousands of small files which is significantly worse on hdd. 60+ seconds vs. under a second for any change to take effect in the browser. This can be as much as an hour a day wasted. The 5 hours of wasted time in a few weeks are more costly than the upgrade to ssd.
-- edit
As to 512gb, it's because after all the software, that can take 100gb... creative assets well over that depending on the projects... it's easy to hit 240gb between the OS, software, projects, and assets.
Beyond that, show me off-the shelf hardware that can be configured with 16+gb ram and a 512gb SSD that doesn't have the other stuff I don't need?
>The problem is more that Apple are thoughtlessly losing their reputation among professionals, because Cook, Schiller and co don't seem to be thinking hard enough what they're doing, and don't appear to have an understanding of what their professional customers are looking for.
I just wanna know what cable they use when they need to plug their iPhone into their MacBook. I don't seem to recall Apple selling a usb-c to lightning cable.
Turning a toaster into a cat feeder is tinkering, not professional hacking. There's nothing wrong with tinkering. But it's the difference between wiring up a Raspberry Pi as a heating controller, and building a company that sells fully licensed and certified heating controllers all over the world with support infrastructure.
One is hobby project, the other... isn't.
A useful definition of a professional tool is one that lets you forget you're using it because it's so transparently intuitive you never have to think about its needs.
I don't think the 2016 MBP does that. The ports are (literally) a side issue. The problem is more that Apple are thoughtlessly losing their reputation among professionals, because Cook, Schiller and co don't seem to be thinking hard enough what they're doing, and don't appear to have an understanding of what their professional customers are looking for.
...Which is not something super-thin for the sake of it, or with a gimmicky touch bar. It's something expandable with ports that "just work", no physical or metaphorical rough edges, with the option to have decent memory (i.e. 32GB) and a reasonable processor speed bump.
This shouldn't be hard or controversial, but for some reason it seems to be beyond Apple's understanding.
I'm hardly a hater. I bought the 12.9" iPad Pro last week, and I'm loving it. But the laptop format is challenging because you either stay conservative, or you go full experimental with (say) a dual-display clamshell. or even a touch panel instead of the trackpad.
Half-hearted innovations like the touch bar glued onto an ungenerous spec look like gimmicks for the sake of it, not serious attempts to improve professional productivity.