Why I think the 2019 MacBook Pro is a Recommended Wait - Hear Me Out.

[Queen6]

I'll be in the states in early 2019, so we'll see. I have an issue with impulse buys, you never know.

Let's be straight that's one of your primary drivers. If I go for the 2018 I'll just pick one up in Hong Kong, being tax free.

I still have issue with the feel of the keyboard and port solution. Touchbar I'm indifferent about at this point in time. This all said I want to see some realistic performance figures, not just some snapshots of a 10 second benchmark that serves little more than bragging rights.

I won't drop my current W10 notebook as it's simply more performant with a far greater level of usability, equally I would welcome a MBP back in the rotation.

In house upgrade pricing remains to be little more than an opportunity for Apple to deeply gouge the customer. My notebooks are workhorses, so ultimately someone else is going to be footing that bill.

High tier 15" 32Gb a must, CPU totally depends the sensible performance reviews, SSD 512/1TB, and if HK store only has the 2TB in stock I'd likely spring for one, although generally on the CTO models they stock 1TB is max.

Q-6

 

[vaugha]

I'll be in the states in early 2019, so we'll see. I have an issue with impulse buys, you never know.

Again, agreed w/ this. Getting caught up in the hype and following the masses is not usually wise. "Wow, a new product from apple is released. It is so cool. Let's go buy it!!" This is what usually the average do. I'm not here to start a flame war but I remember how much the media made a fuss about the 2016 mbp when it was first announced. People were raving how good the new space grey mbp w/ touch bar looks like and lo and behold, fast-forward 2 years to 2018, people are still complaining about the keyboards and how much of an epic fail they are from a company w/ such reputation. If that wasn't enough, I've read numerous reports that space grey mbps' anodizing coatings wear off and scratches are more visible than the silver variants especially around the ports and the edges over time, not to mention random popping noises coming from the laptops during use. These are quite significant issues for laptops that are just 2 years out. Gaussian distribution can be applied here to predict the average behaviours of the masses and it is no different this time around.

 

[Mr. Dee]

Do you think we will see Ice Lake processors and LPDDR4 memmory in 2019 MBPs?

Nope! Intel is likely to stretch out Canonlake for a couple years with 10 NM+ and even if and when Icelake gets here, its just gonna be on the same 10 NM lithography before we see another major jump. I suspect even the Tigerlake is gonna be a 10 NM product. Intel will just keep saying, improved performance.

So it looks like this:
2019: Canonlake 10
2020: Canonlake 10+
2021: Icelake 10++
2022: Tigerlake 10+++

2023: 7 NM

I probably should hold out until 2022. Going by the fact some of us in here are just upgrading 2009 MBP's, I probably should hold out until the 2027 MacBook Pro.

 

[Kevinfinity]

As a content creator, I really need a Mac that has the new generation of configuration to provide me the smooth work flow capability. In my position, I cannot use a computer that’s out dated and I always tracing for the fastest machine I can get. People who saying something like 2013 MacBook Pro still work very fine and could still finish the job with no issue and suggest to wait one more year is just nonsense for me. So before giving such suggestion, please also clarify what you use the MacBook Pro for and how fast you can get your job done by using it. 2018 model is what I am looking for in the past three years and I ordered 15” with highest specs with no hesitation. Like what I said in the first page of this thread, I will using the 2018 15” Model and patiently waiting for the 2020 or 2021 version to be released if they have a big jump again.

 

[ofarlig]

I am happy I stopped updating every year and now waited 2 years since I bought my 12" Macbook before updating, thats enough restraint for me.

If I was using my Mac for work I would update it yearly as any improvement would be worth it.

 

[Ethosik]

As a content creator, I really need a Mac that has the new generation of configuration to provide me the smooth work flow capability. In my position, I cannot use a computer that’s out dated and I always tracing for the fastest machine I can get. People who saying something like 2013 MacBook Pro still work very fine and could still finish the job with no issue and suggest to wait one moreyear is just nonsense for me. So before giving such suggestion, please also clarify what you use the MacBook Pro for and how fast you can get your job done by using it. 2018 model is what I am looking for in the past three years and I ordered 15” with highest specs with no hesitation. Like what I said in the first page of this thread, I will using the 2018 15” Model and patiently waiting for the 2020 or 2021 version to be released if they have a big jump again.

Last year I sold my 2013 rMBP that was a mid-specced system. I was able to get $900 from it. I could probably have gotten more if I was more picky. The 2018 model at the top of the line will probably sell for a good amount when you upgrade to a 2021 model!

 

[Mr. Dee]

Let's be straight that's one of your primary drivers. If I go for the 2018 I'll just pick one up in Hong Kong, being tax free.

I still have issue with the feel of the keyboard and port solution. Touchbar I'm indifferent about at this point in time. This all said I want to see some realistic performance figures, not just some snapshots of a 10 second benchmark that serves little more than bragging rights.

I won't drop my current W10 notebook as it's simply more performant with a far greater level of usability, equally I would welcome a MBP back in the rotation.

In house upgrade pricing remains to be little more than an opportunity for Apple to deeply gouge the customer. My notebooks are workhorses, so ultimately someone else is going to be footing that bill.

High tier 15" 32Gb a must, CPU totally depends the sensible performance reviews, SSD 512/1TB, and if HK store only has the 2TB in stock I'd likely spring for one, although generally on the CTO models they stock 1TB is max.

Q-6

My Surface Pro 3 is starting to slow down, so I might pick up a Surface Book too. Although, I understand Microsoft won't be releasing a new one until late 2019 and I am not gonna be a guinea pig for it.

 

[Queen6]

My Surface Pro 3 is starting to slow down, so I might pick up a Surface Book too. Although, I understand Microsoft won't be releasing a new one until late 2019 and I am not gonna be a guinea pig for it.

Yes and no, as one can do more with performant hardware paying for itself faster, and reaping the benifit.

Current Surface Book is very decent notebook and it's throttling tendancy can be mitigated with ThrottleStop with ease. I owned a 1st Gen Surface Book with zero issue, now passed to my daughter as she is a talented digital artist getting far more beinifit from the Touch & Pen interface.

Q-6

 

[jerwin]

You have posted these since the 2016 release. I guarantee you we will be seeing this same post in 2019.

If you need one now, get one now

What I find so hilarious about these "too expensive" or "wait" posts, is that other people come in mentioning that they are using ~2010 laptops to get their work done. Did the 2010 laptop have 64GB of RAM? Did it have 8GB+ of GPU? Did it have more than 6 cores? If not, how are you possibly getting work done but demand that 64GB of RAM is needed for your work yet you mention I am still using 2010-2013 laptops?

"In order to see myself through the next x years, I need a computer that's y times faster and more capacious than the one I have now."

On the other hand, apple doesn't make computers with room to grow, so if you think that 32 GB might be useful in the next couple of years, this belief will end up costing you dearly.

When a new supercomputer comes on line, the benefit to the community isn't necessarily that the supercomputer can do the same jobs 100 times faster. No, it's that the models themselves can be many times more precise, or that the old models can be combined using a monte carlo method to reduce uncertainty.

Less exotically, one can move from producing 1080p "content" to producing 4k "content"-- instantly, your computational requirements quadruple. Because that often implies upgrading a lot of other equipment besides the computer, it can make sense to wait until the ideal computer exists, at the right price point.

 

[doitdada]

Last time they added cores to a MacBook Pro model was early 2011, and that is over seven years ago, so please appreciate the new cores, as they have always been at the "core" of more performance for the last decade. No more Ghz race. After 2000 it has been been about adding cores. 2006 was Intels move to dual core from single core in laptops, the same year Apple moved to Intel chipsets.

 

[Falhófnir]

Do you think we will see Ice Lake processors and LPDDR4 memmory in 2019 MBPs?

Ice lake is more or less a guaranteed no at this point as Intel have pushed back production of 10nm (again) into 2019, and there’s no guarantee it won’t be pushed back even further. Even if it’s not, Ice Lake is meant to be on the second gen 10nm+ process, which requires they get cannonlake 10nm working first. I think Whiskey Lake which will be a further refinement of Coffee Lake is the next on Intel’s list. Whether LPDDR4 support is one of the refinements is anyone’s guess at this point, but as Apple have just updated the machines to work with regular DDR4 I’d say the likelihood they would switch is quite slim anyway

 

[Glockworkorange]

This is from someone that just discovered a keyboard issue (my period key) over the past few months on my 2017 RMBP...

I am not happy that Apple is still using butterfly keyboards on the 2018 model, but I am buying it anyway.

They are offering a 4-year replacement. So, with that kind of guarantee, nobody should be worried. You will get it fixed for free if there are any issues.

Not offering the 4 year replacement on the 2018. I asked.

 

[cfdlab]

I am on the highest spec 2013 15" inch macbook pro which still seems working fine. I hate the current models due to lack of ports, crappy keyboard, useless touchbar, massive trackpad. But none of these will be fixed to my satisfaction in 2019, so I dont see the point of waiting for me. I will probably buy the 2018 15" and stick to it for 5 years and also start switch to linux. But will these new macbooks last for 5 years considering how problematic the hardware has been ?

 

[Gata]

MacWorld's take:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3289507/macs/macbook-pro-apple-custom-processor.html

This article honestly annoyed me. Getting into the points that they outlined here:

• What has Lenovo done to add to the laptop conversation, even? MS has the Surface, but there are more than a few who don't need touch screen capacity. It's packing a low-voltage quad core in tandem with a GTX 1060, and it tops out at 16 GB LPDDR3. For a number of people buying the MBP (chiefly, those who are going to be hitting the CPU or memory hard), it's not going to suffice.
  
• The A10x Fusion processor is certainly impressive, but Simon is conflating enhanced performance with specialized hardware that's meant to carry out specific tasks. Apple isn't making chips that can't do what other chips are doing - it's just that by designing the chips from the ground up, they can tailor those chips to the people who want them.
• Simon keeps contrasting the MBP with other laptops that are innovating, blaming the Intel processors on the reason for the MBP's innovation or lack thereof. This is despite the fact that his other examples of innovation don't involve internal hardware improvements (citing things like slim bezels or spill-proof keyboards), and those other elements are using the same Intel CPUs.
• He talks about how it's another option for the fact that people want to use MacOS, but that's because other OEMs have realized that there's a nontrivial demand for powerful and premium thin-and-lights, and have been moving into that turf, which doesn't make the MBP stand out nearly as much.

There are a few strange or otherwise outlandish claims that he makes regarding what could happen if Apple takes the internals of the MBP into their own hands:

• All-day battery life: We're already kind of here. The iPhone can pull off the battery life that it has because Apple is designing the entire hardware/software stack, meaning that they can design future hardware developments of the iPhone in tandem with desired new features with iOS in order to ensure the sort of performance that they get. But Apple's IPC doesn't seem to be better than Samsung's. With some quick math, the iPhone 8's performance is ~1.24x that of the Galaxy's, despite being clocked ~1.33x faster. Better power management in iOS seems a far more likely explanation to me for the iPhone's performance and battery numbers, than the claim that Apple is somehow way ahead of the game when it comes to process or architecture improvements.
  
• Going toe-to-toe with gaming laptops: In the CPU department, the MBPs already do. The weakness of the MBP is not in the CPU, but in the GPU, in that department. But Apple already offers a solid answer to this in the form of eGPU solutions, in that they enable you to get solid gaming performance when you would best take advantage of it (e.g. at a desk, on an external monitor), while retaining the mobile aspects of the MBP. But I don't see Apple being able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Nvidia or AMD. Again, Apple doesn't seem to be doing anything crazy in terms of making the hardware way better than the competition, and certainly nothing that would let them get GTX 1070 performance at the 35W heat dissipation target that the author seems to be imagining.

There are a few reasons for my skepticism regarding Apple's ability to develop chips that can rival or otherwise exceed CPUs/GPUs from Intel/AMD/Nvidia.

• The laptop/desktop processor market is generally more mature: We've been working with the same architecture and/or software frameworks (e.g. x86, CUDA, OpenCL, OpenGL, newly-added, Vulkan) for years. Breaking with these standards means that programs and/or operating systems that are based on these standards also won't work. Critically, this means that Apple adopting its own architecture kills its ability to also run Windows and/or Linux. But this also means that companies like Intel and AMD have been hammering away at and optimizing these architectures for these very use cases for a while now, and Apple's going to have to play catch-up, unless they move to something like ARM.
  
• Hardware companies have built extensive software ecosystems: When I refer to this, I particularly mean that, for some compute tasks, such as Numpy or Theano, there are acceleration libraries that are unique to Intel or Nvidia/AMD processors, which are generally available across platforms. Macs not being able to run these in any capacity almost certainly adversely affects your ability to do so. But I think this is also reflective of another important trend: industry is trending towards things being cross-platform and open source (hence, the push for things like Vulkan). Apple making their own proprietary chips would present devs interested in cross-platform development with additional overhead, which in turn would force more devs to make the choice between developing for OSX or not. And I don't think that's a decision that Apple should try to force on devs interested in developing local apps across platforms.

So then what?

I think the rumored shift makes the most sense for something like the Macbook, or the Air - where Apple could essentially make something like a Chromebook, but one that was capable of leveraging both the iOS and the macOS ecosystems.

But for users where working in a cross-platform environment is important (e.g. those doing VM work, or those who need apps that counterparts in the Windows or Linux worlds also use), staying with x86 not only makes sense, but is an important choice to make.

 

[Paapaa]

I didn't read the first post as this is a lot easier issue: if you need a laptop now, buy it now. If you can wait, you'll always get a better laptop by waiting the next model. Really. That's all there is.

 

[jerwin]

some times apple releases groundbreaking computers.

sometimes apple releases speedbumps.

If you plan to buy a computer and keep it for 4-5 years, it it better to buy the speedbumped model, or to buy the groundbreaking stuff?

 

[The Mercurian]

some times apple releases groundbreaking computers.

sometimes apple releases speedbumps.

If you plan to buy a computer and keep it for 4-5 years, it it better to buy the speedbumped model, or to buy the groundbreaking stuff?

Which do you consider this to be ? I would say never get the groundbreakers - there is always some reliability problem. Get the model after the groundbreaker - they've usually fixed the main problems

 

[jerwin]

6 cores-- groundbreaking

 

[gadgetfreaky]

- The year 2019 will be the last of this revision before Apple embarks on a redesign. This itself would make it worth the wait. The 2015 was the last revision of the MBP introduced in 2012 and so far it has been a reliable purchase. I think if you want to avoid 2016 all over again, the 2019 would be the best way to save yourself from the disadvantages of early adopter syndrome.

So I have the most trouble with this theory on the redesign being 2020
You think Apple is going to keep the bezels this size and this out dates for this long? ? What about FaceID ? Keep that off?

I would say if the Touch Bar had been a huge success then sure- 2020 it is. But reducing bezels could make for much smaller computers or bigger screens and replacing touchID with FaceID are all nice upgrades I'd expect next year.

Also next year AMD will have discreet Vega mobile chips ready which would mean we are not getting the same exact GPU for the last 3 years.

Lastly- I wouldn't be too sure Cannonlake is coming next year. I sure hope so but Intel is a mess right now.

 

[Mr. Dee]

So I have the most trouble with this theory on the redesign being 2020
You think Apple is going to keep the bezels this size and this out dates for this long? ? What about FaceID ? Keep that off?

I would say if the Touch Bar had been a huge success then sure- 2020 it is. But reducing bezels could make for much smaller computers or bigger screens and replacing touchID with FaceID are all nice upgrades I'd expect next year.

Also next year AMD will have discreet Vega mobile chips ready which would mean we are not getting the same exact GPU for the last 3 years.

Lastly- I wouldn't be too sure Cannonlake is coming next year. I sure hope so but Intel is a mess right now.

Redesigns require a lot of time and engineering. Also, Apple is not gonna include a significant technology technology like Face ID just yet. Reasons include, its likely to require a lot of work; maybe including a A11 Bionic chip to supply that functionality; Apple might want to make Face ID an exclusive up sell for the 2020.

Reducing bezels doesn't seem to be much a priority for Apple, but with iPhone X seeming to influencing the design of other apple products, we might see a near infinity display ala based on the mockups of the suggested 2018 iPad Pro.

As I mentioned, the AMD Vega/Intel is likely to be mature by next year. Between now and July 2019 and Apple could push this out to even late July.

Canonlake is already in production, but its mostly Core i3 yields. As I said, between now and July 2019 is a long time, thats 1 whole year away. Intel will certainly have it ready. Apple could mix things up and push out the launch to October 2019.

 

[cool11]

Mr. Dee do you really believe that Apple would make a price drop in mbp 2019?
If the price seems really high for American customers, for European ones is out of this world.
So any price drop would really help to remain in Apple's ecosystem.

 

[Mr. Dee]

Mr. Dee do you really believe that Apple would make a price drop in mbp 2019?
If the price seems really high for American customers, for European ones is out of this world.
So any price drop would really help to remain in Apple's ecosystem.

Possibly $100, by Rev D, they are likely to recoup the R&D on this generation to incentive passing some value to customer. Of course, this is all wishful thinking.

 

[nordique]

As a content creator, I really need a Mac that has the new generation of configuration to provide me the smooth work flow capability. In my position, I cannot use a computer that’s out dated and I always tracing for the fastest machine I can get. People who saying something like 2013 MacBook Pro still work very fine and could still finish the job with no issue and suggest to wait one more year is just nonsense for me. So before giving such suggestion, please also clarify what you use the MacBook Pro for and how fast you can get your job done by using it. 2018 model is what I am looking for in the past three years and I ordered 15” with highest specs with no hesitation. Like what I said in the first page of this thread, I will using the 2018 15” Model and patiently waiting for the 2020 or 2021 version to be released if they have a big jump again.

You raise an important point, that one's uses are integral to upgrade value

2013 is fine for my uses, but I dont do content creation. Just office suite, typing is important, and a few key programs that dont require high end processing power
[doublepost=1531756488][/doublepost]

Redesigns require a lot of time and engineering. Also, Apple is not gonna include a significant technology technology like Face ID just yet. Reasons include, its likely to require a lot of work; maybe including a A11 Bionic chip to supply that functionality; Apple might want to make Face ID an exclusive up sell for the 2020.

Reducing bezels doesn't seem to be much a priority for Apple, but with iPhone X seeming to influencing the design of other apple products, we might see a near infinity display ala based on the mockups of the suggested 2018 iPad Pro.

As I mentioned, the AMD Vega/Intel is likely to be mature by next year. Between now and July 2019 and Apple could push this out to even late July.

Canonlake is already in production, but its mostly Core i3 yields. As I said, between now and July 2019 is a long time, thats 1 whole year away. Intel will certainly have it ready. Apple could mix things up and push out the launch to October 2019.

You make a lot of good, sensible points

Although redesigns do take a lot of effort, they have happened every 4 years since 2008 with respect to MBPs and I think people are using that as the benchmark. Then again, Apple did skip the redesign for their 2016 iPhones and only redesigned the MBA once

 

[maflynn]

Possibly $100, by Rev D, they are likely to recoup the R&D on this generation to incentive passing some value to customer. Of course, this is all wishful thinking.

I think I'll be able to get at least 100 dollars worth of usage out of my MBP by buying the 2018 over waiting and hoping for the 2019.

 

[Nozuka]

We might see a bigger GPU upgrade next year, but i think the CPU will be a smaller jump in speed. This year was an exception.

But the CPU will likely use less power, if Intel gets their 10nm **** together. Unless Apple skips next years update and won't update the Macbooks until 2020. Which would not surprise me.

I also expect the redesign in 2020, looking at past product cycles. This will likely also bring us a higher screen resolution (maybe even with ProMotion), smaller bezels, better camera and FaceID. And possibly a reworked Touch Bar and wireless charging.

Long story short: Be prepared to wait till 2020, instead of just 2019.

Personally i didn't want to wait, because my Macbook is from 2012 and i will likely skip the 1st Gen of the next Redesign. Which means i would have waited till 2021 at least.