48 thoughts on “Apple MacBook Pro Gets Faster, Less Annoying”

1. The beginning of the keynote. Hold on is that logic pro everywhere… cool I see a recording studio!…This is going to be EPIC… maybe logic on ipad finally… wait for it here it comes… a 5,- music siri music subscription.

   ^&#^# you Apple. You did that just to troll us.

   1. Sorry but I don’t think there are too many people looking for logic on an ipad

      It’s just too big and complicated an app to be well adapted to ipad

      1. there are many people looking for login on ipad! ableton too! even a stripped back version that you could then take to desktop would be awesome.

         1. A stripped-down version of Logic on an iPad, that you can then take files to the desktop, hm? That already exists, and it’s free with the iPad. It’s called GarageBand.

      2. But Mainstage on the IPad would be pretty brilliant….

2. Apple: We’ve added a revolutionary power connector that allows you to plug your computer into the wall without using a USB port. Oh, and an HDMI port. It’s magic.

   Good design doesn’t cripple your computer.

3. I don’t blame them, Logic Pro is already ultra cheap for its capabilities. $200 bucks. I bought it years ago and keep getting great updates for free. For sure id buy it on an ipad for $50 bucks but I dont think Apple wants to step on their own foot.
   As for the macbook pro, gots me one! I’m really excited to check out the performance boost with Unity 3d, Blender, Adobe software, Logic Pro, Ableton and VCV rack.

   1. Unity on M1 is rough. I gave up on it. Hopefully the newer hardware will manage it better. Blender, on the other hand, flies. Now that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund and submitted a Metal for Cycles GPU render on MacOS patch it looks to get much better.

      1. What kind of issues did you see with Unity. I need to be able to have a stable pipeline with Logic, Wwise and Unity for game music composing and was looking at moving to the new hardware.

4. dvd drive on next macbook pro? :))

5. This is honestly exactly what most musicians wanted – keep the best features from older MacBook Pros and add a turbocharged CPU.

   I think ‘innovations’ like the Touch Bar really were Apple struggling to differentiate the MacBook from copycats because Intel CPUs were going nowhere fast.

   The M1 is proving to be a screamer, and these CPUs look like they’ll be a minimum of 50% faster, with lots of tasks much faster than even that.

6. I’ve kept with a 2011 iMac with old OS’s for the longest because i just wasn’t seeing the point in most of what Apple has been doing with the Macs for the last 7 years or so, and tried my best just not to pay much attention. But today, thanks to my bank account, I bought the hell out of one of these things today. Can’t help but feel like there will be a brief slide in my movie here where it says “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” when this thing shows up at my doorstep.

7. I finally ordered a new MacBook Pro after years waiting because I did not like the models they released.
   The M1 had just not enough ports for my studio use for instance and the absence of magsafe and a better screen made me wait.

   I own a 2013 MacBook Pro that is more inline with the amount of ports they offer now.
   It never could handle my two Echo – Audio Fire 12 interfaces offering a total of 12 stereo inputs however. I hope this one can handle a setup like that.

   I think the notch in the screen is a bit stupid looking and I would have preferred 4 Thunderbolt ports but it is close enough to be perfect for what i wanted.

8. I am going to push back on the “less annoying” claim in the headline.

   I have both 2016 and 2019 MacBook Pros. The 2019 keyboard is a huge improvement over the 2016. 2019 also has a real esc key.

   The Touch Bar is actually pretty cool and can be customized with a cheap app called BetterTouchTool. I will miss it, but not that much. I mainly use it instead of a menu bar app to show music playback controls and song/artist info…Apple failed to really promote and educate about the Touch Bar’s potential and not many apps really took advantage of it in a meaningful way.

   The return of Magsafe Power is welcome, but adding an HDMI port and an SD card slot seems like a step backward. HDMI to USB-C cables and adapters are common and SD cards are certainly not something that most people use every day, or are they? I would trade them both for a 4th Thunderbolt port.

   Still, these look like great machines, but will we ever get a touchscreen Mac?

   1. SD cards are used by the masses and HDMI is a big welcome for those that don’t like Apple TV or wanna use the Google crap. Donon gle’s and hubs are terrible, specially on Apple devices.

      It could’ve still had more i/o. Apple choose not to. My 17″ MBP from 10 years ago had more connectivity. Apple is just greedy and want to sell us overpriced and unrepairable laptops with limited i/o. Apple made the 16″ twice as expensive than the 17″ from 10 years ago when you do some decent upgrades. Pathetic for a company with so much power.

      I want Tim Cook deleted as CEO asap. He has no real vision for Apple.

      1. Hold on you are comparing apples to kiwis! A 17” MacBook Pro had nowhere as much power, bandwith, memory, big superfast storage or a really good screen. Neither did it have as fast connectors or as flexible and fast wireless functions etc. etc.
         The new MBPs are not overpriced compared to its competition, neither are they unrepairable even if it is trickier than before to do so.
         Dongles and hubs generally works well on macs.

         1. That didn’t make any sense.

         2. At the time the 17″ Macbook Pro was one of the best laptops you could buy so it’s clearly apples vs apples.

            In 2011 I got the 17″ which included:

            – Gigabit Ethernet port
            – FireWire 800 port,
            – Three USB 2.0 ports
            – Thunderbolt port
            – ExpressCard/34 slot
            – Mini jack i/o
            – Superdrive
            – Kensington lock

            Today you get:

            – Three USB-C ports
            – HMDI port
            – Mini jack i/o
            – SD slot

            I’m not saying we need all the other stuff back but it clearly shows the new MBP’s aren’t offering that much flexability without needing the hated dongles, hub whatever which again would cost more money. It had a resolution of 1920×1200 and looked great from most angles. In 2011 this laptop was almost perfect. (and perfect doesn’t exist.)

            I was able to upgrade years later with more RAM as I did (from 4GB to 16GB). I also upgraded the slow 5400 rpm SATA drive with a much faster SSD. Could’ve installed a second drive by removing the Superdrive as well.

            And the other cool thing.. No Apple tax for the upgrades means more money for synths. I payed 2500,- plus 500,- on upgrades over the years. (sold it for 400,- 10 years later). Today I would need to pay close to 4200,-. I don’t know about you but more than 4k for a laptop is just way too much for me personally.

            Repairs today on all new Apple devices are a disaster from every angle you look at it. It’s crazy how easy some are letting Apple getting away with this planned obsolescense bs. It’s so wrong on so many levels.

            The amount of waste this company is creating and marketing itself as a green company is just completely bizarre and not much more than hardcore propaganda to gain more profits. The fact is that laws are changing on a global scale, Apple knows this and that’s why they’re shifting a bit.

            We live in 2021 so surely everything is more powerful these days but that doesn’t mean things have to be this more expensive do they? Especially when Apple has almost total control over every part including chips which they didn’t have a decade ago. Today I would pay about 500,- more for a stock laptop with no repairablity or ways to upgrade. How is this a better deal?

            Apple just can’t stop the greed and some harcore Apple fans will always defend the company by any means possible.

            1. It is a better deal as your money today is worth a lot less than ten years ago and you get a superior computer, and if you had opted for an SSD in your 17” MBP it would have cost far more than 2500 at that time. As for repairability Apple makes very high quality computers which seldom needs repairs and with most things soldered on reliability increases. As for Apple not being green it is partly true but they are probably the greenest large computer c9mpany around with users that actually uses their macs longer than most PC users do.
               Why do you feel you need to spend 4200? The base models gets you a long way. As for Apple being greedy you are missing out that Apple makes both hard and software which works really well together and lots of really good software is included in the price including free updates so the value is better than you make it out to be,
               And as for connections, Apple Thunderbolt are daisy chainable which means you have far better connection options on the new ones than on your old MBP.

               1. I knew I should’ve included that inflation isn’t an excuse for the high prices either. I actually wrote that but deleted that part as it was getting too long.

                  High end components can break as well, especially when there’s a design issue. Don’t claim this can’t happen with Apple as there are decades to proof you’re completely wrong.

                  The base model doesn’t get me far at all. In 2011 The stock model came with 750GB. 10 years later the stock model is 512GB. That’s downsizing by 33% !!! Yes the SSD is faster but speed doesn’t matter if you don’t have the storage to begin with.

                  If I install Logic Pro and NI Komplete CE my only option would be the 2TB upgrade. You can’t choose which SSD you wan’t to use and Apple only offers the most expensive solution + their Apple tax with zero change to upgrade in the future or repair when it fails.

                  Being forced to throw away a 4200,- laptop because I can’t replace the storage is insane and anything but Pro. Sure you can go to Apple and replace the storage which means I’m gonna pay a rediculous amount of money for a repair and all data will be 100% lost forever when no backup is made.

                  Most people don’t use Thunderbolt. Most people still use USB A connectors which Apple replaced with USB-C only forcing everyone to use dongles making things more complicated in real actual use. And please don’t compare this with Apple deleting the floppy and diskdrive. They’re not the same thing as USB ports take up a fraction compared to those things and I explained the 2011 model had way more going on than the 2021 model.

                  Also this claim: “As for Apple being greedy you are missing out that Apple makes both hard and software which works really well together and lots of really good software is included in the price including free updates so the value is better than you make it out to be.”

                  First connection those two while they have nothing to do with each other is overreaching. Second more profit for Apple, less choices for the end user and that’s a good thing?

                  I think the most important reason most of us still use Macs is the software. I like MacOS more than Windows but if I could run Logic Pro on other platforms again I would ditch Apple for music production in a heartbeat.

                  1. I am not even close to being proven wrong regarding the fact that Apple makes very reliable computers. Because thats what they have been doing for a very long time. Granted they have had some bad apples now and then but generally they make good stuff!
                     As for Apple making both hard and software that s a giant pluspoint for the whole platform and the value of included software should not be seen as zero as you seem to do!

                     As for your claim that kost people use USB A nowadays, that might be true still but not for very long! USB-C and thunderbolt is becoming more and more popular day by day.

                     You seem to be hooked on the idea that you must have large storage onboard, but you can buy cheap external disks you know?

                     A base model 14 inch plus morw memory and 1 TB disk is far cheaper than 4200

                     And finally if you want to talk about value of course you have to count in what your money gets you today compared to ten years ago and how much more money you make today!

                     1. My claim is that they can break and also can include terrible design choices that cause trouble. My 17″ MBP had to go back after a few years because it had a design problem in the motherboard. We had years of crappy keybeds in the Macbooks, why are people looking away from all this? It wasn’t a small issue. Display cables breaking, overheating issues and I could continue with a very long list just on the laptops alone.

                        I’m not claiming other companies do better but I am saying Apple can do much better and that it will benefit us all if they did.

                        Apple offers 1 year warranty in the States. I read you can get the Apple Care+ for 400,- for 3 years extra care of being ripped off. If something breaks you still have to pay a lot of extra money. A liquid spill will set you back another 300,-. That’s a freaking 700,- . And because Apple wants total control you can be sure this will only get more expensive in the future as past has already proven this. It’s crazy and should not be supported at all. At least in Europe Apple can’t get away with this nonsense so easily.

                        Having control over hw and sw can workout wonderful but that doesn’t mean sofware can’t run on multiple OS’s. Being able to run Logic Pro on Windows or Linux could be a great great thing as well. Just think of what people will built if that was possible. 🙂 Let’s see what happens when Apple is forced to allow other stores on the IOS platfrom giving developers more freedom. I’ll bet people will realize that they’ve been fooled by Apple for a very long time and that Apple doesn’t always knows best or even tries their best to protect their costomers.

                        Next as I said before faster storage means zero when you don’t have enough storage to begin with. That means some of us are being forced to upgrade at premium costs if the base model doesn’t offer enough. Going from 750gb to 500gb is a 33% downgrade in storage. The amount of storage needed has only been going up over the last 10 years not down. The prices that Apple offers for upgrades on storage are huge and not because it has to be but because Apple choose to. Do we benefit from that? How? Do you really need all that speed anyway or would a cheaper SSD work just as well for 99% of us at way lower cost?

                        Being forced to use external drives on a portable devices also means a downgrade on portability in a lot of situations. It’s only a solution for a problem that Apple created. Start at the root of the problem so you don’t have to deal with the symptoms.

                        USB-A will still be used by the masses for at least another 5 years so no good reason to kill it now. It doesn’t take up much space and can fit on small portable devices such as laptops. Like everyone else I’m hoping for the day that everything is done wireless but for now we have to deal with the fact that we’re not there yet. 3 USB-C ports may look cool but in every day use most of us would benefit more from at least 1 USB-A port.

                        Take a few steps back and look at what’s really given by Apple and what we’ve lost over a few decades using their products. Red flags everywhere and it turned Apple into something you do not wish to be dominating your life in more ways than they’re already doing. There’s clearly need for more laws that protects us customer, the envoirment etc.

                  2. Champ

                     Usually I agree with a lot of your comments, but you seem wrong across the board on these new macs.

                     You say that a 500mb SSD drive is a downgrade compared to the hard drive in the 2011 macs. If you only look at the drive size, you might think that, but you’re missing two things.

                     First, modern SSDs make everything on your computer amazingly fast. I actually replaced my 2011 17″ MacBook Pro hard drive with an SSD years ago and it was the best upgrade I’ve ever made. Just booting one of those old hard drive computers takes a minute. Now it’s almost instantaneous.

                     The other thing you’re not taking into account is that macOS now intelligently offloads things that you don’t use very often. I went from a TB SSD on my 2011 laptop to a 512MB drive and it’s working fine.

                     For cheap bulk storage, external hard drives are the way to go, because you can get a La Cie rugged 4TB drive for about $150.

                     You’re completely wrong about USB-A ports being preferable to USB-C, too.

                     USB-A was popularized by the iMac, which was introduced in 1998. That’s 25 year old technology! The floppy drive is dead. The tube display is dead. USB-A should be dead.

                     USB-A doesn’t make sense to support anymore, because it’s slow, it can be inserted wrong and it requires your computer to be thicker.

                     And nobody needs dongles. If you’ve got an older device that came with a USB-A cable, get a USB-C cable for it for $8 on Amazon and never look back.

                     And if you’re using Logic Pro, you’ve got even less to complain about because we’ve been getting free upgrades for Logic Pro for 8 years straight. Before Apple bought Emagic, Logic was $700, upgrades were $200, and if you wanted a virtual instrument, they were $100-200 a pop.

                     Most concerning is your comment “All data will be 100% lost forever when no backup is made.”

                     How can it be that, n 2021, you are not doing automatic backups of your data?

                     Time Machine has been built into macOS for nearly 15 years. IMHO it’s irresponsible not to be automatically backing up your data.

                     Throw one of those $150 4TB hard drives on your router and start doing automatic wireless backups. It costs almost nothing, it’s automatic, and it will cover your butt if your computer dies. I use one drive to back up three computers, so it’s the cheapest insurance you’ll ever get.

   2. I’m glad you found a use for your touchbar. I am looking forward to the day when I can turn down the volume or brightness without having to look at the keyboard.

   3. “Will we ever get a touchscreen Mac”

      Probably not, but you can connect an iPad and use it as a touchscreen/graphics tablet/secondary display via Sidecar.

9. The only “problem” for music makers with this absolute monster is that it runs macOS Monterey, released next Monday 25 October, which of course audio software makers won’t care to support until 2023 or something 🙂

   But shhhhh.. let’s not wake them up : they usually discover the new macOS 2-3 weeks after it’s released, at which point they frantically send us emails like “OMG there’s this new thing that we never saw coming, please don’t upgrade yet !! We’ll take a look soon, maybe. It’s not like we could have started testing it since June, right ?”

   😛

   1. You can blame Apple for that, not so much developers. Any idea how much it costs for these small companies when Apple destroys your application with every new update and they have to fix it? Software has to be sold as cheap as possible while Apple asking jackpot for everything they sell. Apple just doesn’t care.

      1. iOS does seem terrible for backward compatibility, with yearly updates breaking everything. It’s as if Apple offloaded a huge maintenance cost onto every single developer – multiplicative pain of yearly breakage instead of multiplicative benefit of backward compatibility. So many of my iOS apps are simply dead because they were killed by an iOS update and never updated. The reasons I can imagine are that Apple wants to rapidly evolve the platform and drive adoption of new features, while saving on Apple’s own maintenance costs and cutting fat from the OS, but it seems harmful to users and developers alike.

         On macOS, however, my impression is that there is somewhat less API churn (with some exceptions like the the 32-bit apocalypse, which orphaned many audio plug-ins as well as games and other apps.) Mac apps are usually more expensive than iOS apps, so perhaps that helps with development costs. My experience is also that fanatically following Apple’s developer/API guidelines usually pays off. However I don’t have a lot of experience working on Audio Units or with Core Audio, etc., so it’s possible that they have a lot more bugs and API churn compared to other frameworks.

         Perhaps some Mac audio/music developers can weigh in on why their apps are so fragile and break every year, while non-audio apps seem more robust to OS changes and either work out of the box or with minor updates.

   2. You have absolutely no idea how much work audio software companies do beta testing apple’s utterly broken betas. It would be interesting to see how stillborn their yearly releases would be if the audio companies went on strike and did not provide free beta testing and bug reporting work to Apple every single year.

      1. Maybe your company does, but many in the audio space certainly seem not to bother looking at the betas at all, and only start seriously working on compatibility once the OS is generally available.

         Some years I’ve had literally had responses from tech support like “this thing doesn’t even *exist*, so we don’t know anything about compatibility” when I asked in late September !

         It sounds reasonable to hold off until release date for final QA when it comes to *bugs*.
         But if we’re talking about an API that’s been clearly announced at WWDC as removed / deprecated in favor of a new one, it’s stupid to believe it might be reinstated in the final release : there’s no reason not to start working on it asap, from June !

         Companies that don’t, AND have the nerve to move the burden of their inaction to users (“we warned you NOT to upgrade”) are just being disrespectful and may lose my business.

         It may sound harsh but AFAICT this is nearly unique to the audio industry, and I suspect they think they can get away with it only thanks to their customer base’s legendary conservativeness when it comes to Mac upgrades.

         For most other apps I use, over the summer there are plenty of updates with changelogs like “preliminary support for this or that in [upcoming OS]”. They are the kind of developers that I want to get behind.

      2. That’s great if your company does, but many do clearly wait until the OS is GA to look into not just bugs, but even officially announced API deprecations.
         Then they try to shift the blame to Apple in front of customers, when they’ve been given a 4 months opportunity to get a headstart, and didn’t bother taking it.

   3. Don’t blame software makers for Apple’s secrecy and tendency to break things like USB and core audio. My company’s experience with Apple is that things mysteriously break, our complaints drop into a black hole and then the problem is magically fixed in 2 or 3 months by an OS update. In the meantime, our users blame us and accuse us of being slow and unresponsive.

      1. I wonder how Logic Pro survives these breakages?

         1. You assume Logic Pro versions work with new macOS versions. This assumes too much. At best, their ‘newest’ versions work.

            When Apple break the USB stack, nothing works.

            Logic also have access to XCode & OS API changes far in advance of the beta mess every June.

            This is a competitive advantage for Logic, though I am also assured it is no picnic internally at such a huge organisation like Apple.

            You seem to think that it’s just the Core Audio and Audio Unit changes that affect music software developers. Music software developers are also affected by many other breaking API changes too, far beyond the 32bit change you cite.

            Can you count how many more API changes you’ve seen on MacOS compared to Windows over the last 20 to 25 years?

      2. Fair enough for bugs that get solved between betas, but not starting work immediately on officially announced deprecations, and waiting for the OS to be GA to even look at it, is just asking for trouble.

         See my other answer above.

         This behavior is almost unique to the audio industry amongst all of the software I use, including some that arguably have many more low level touch points with the OS than a plugin does.

         I like to give “CleanMyMac” as an example : the many security model/volume layout changes in recent macOS releases must have given these guys hell, yet they keep churning out betas from late June/July each year, and they’re always ready on day one.

         In particular, I have zero sympathy for all these audio devs who tried to shift the blame of the Catalina 32-bit apocalypse to Apple in front of customers, when in reality they were given 2 years notice and 64-bit had been a thing on OS X for ELEVEN f***ing years !

         1. from your last outing:

            Now, if you’re telling me you :
            1. Watch WWDC every year
            2. Make note of any *announced API changes that are not gonna magically disappear between now and release day* and start working on what may impact you straight away.
            3. Have at least tried a build on the new OS by July to find any low hanging fruit that’s easy to fix right now, and plan the rest.
            Then great, I take everything back.

            that’s exactly what happens at every company I’ve been at and I know people at.

            you are discounting the amount of stuff that is flat out broken with no possibility to migrate (short of a total rewrite). it either gets fixed by apple or left to die.

         2. As per last time, getting CleanMyMac out the door is, although I assume challenging, most likely much easier than getting huge audio software projects out the door on a new ISA. I actually can’t believe you are here more than a year later still thinking that’s a valid analogy. At the time you kept reiterating that changing DSP to target a different ISA was just the same level of difficulty as that and would be completed in the same amount of time. In fact the amount of times you denied insinuating things like that and then later went on to say them directly was astounding.

            Almost unique, the audio industry? So how long did it take adobe products to show up for example?

            I suggested last time you check out VCV rack and how long it takes them to get M1 support done. No sign of it. Maybe VCV rack 2 will sometime. I now suggest you check out the VCV rack source from whatever state it was at ~18 months ago and get to porting it to M1 – then you might begin to understand the many things to be done, before we get into the question of annually broken betas. Multiply your progress by the number of developers at the companies you have beef with, and consider also that they usually ship more than one binary.

            As to what a single tech support person told you from a single company or as to clinging on to the 32bit thing as if it was the only issue, and previously misrepresenting Audio Dev’s complaints about Apple then:

            I believe that you will not take anyone else’s word for it so having a crack at VCVrack project is your best chance at grokking it.

10. Ordered a maxed out 14” yesterday. I’ve been waiting a few years to upgrade my 2012 15” which has been valiantly been trudging along all these years. Smaller size works for me as I am usually plugged into my large monitor and peripherals when doing music or photo editing. The specs look amazing.

11. I thought the price they charged for memory was the annoying thing, has that been sorted? (I know the way the memory is etc blah blah blah but it’s still annoying)

12. Very pleased with this revision. They have listened to their customers by removing the TouchBar, restoring Magsafe and SD card and a quality keyboard, and not being so obsessed with making everything lighter and thinner. The result is a powerful machine with 2x the battery life of any previous Mac laptop. The dearth of ports is typical but the headphone jack remains. This is Apple’s hardware design team operating without Jony Ive and it seems like they are on the right track. The notch is a bit annoying but it disappears in full screen mode with a black false bezel at the top of the screen, not an awful workaround.

13. If this chip is anything like they claim, ports/ dont care, what they used to have and got rid of then brought back/ dont care, whining/ dont care, performance/ care a lot. We’ve already spent the money buying adapters and External SSD’s to avoid paying waaay too much for storage, thats in the past. Whats in the future is a potentially fast ass laptop with better cooling and longer battery life.
    Only the internet would complain about all of their previous faults and ignore what we usually look for in a computer first, speed and relaibility. This isnt even a techie blog, its synthtopia for music makers and enthusiast so Its strange to hear complaints about the lack of an HDMI port on an old machine versus running like 20 plugins at once or hundreds of tracks and lightning speed.
    Remember, music making, good stuff right.

14. The notch is *more* annoying (though I understand that the area below the notch is 16×9 and the same as on the last model, and that the notch occupies a generally unused part of the menu bar that is largely invisible in dark mode…) But I expect the notch to propagate everywhere just as it did on phones.

    I also thought the touchbar was cool for audio apps, but given its low uptake it probably wasn’t worth losing physical keys for. Though a half-height function key row below the touchbar would have been fine with me…

    I assume it will still be possible to charge over USB C so that the UltraFine 5K (and 4K) monitors will still provide power and you will also be able to charge from either the left or right side, a feature which I have found to be surprisingly convenient.

15. I may be showing my age here but where is the USB? I use USB memory sticks. You kids with your laserbeam whizzbangs maybe wouldn’t understand.

    1. There are cheap adapters and hubs and there are also cheap USB-C memorysticks available.

    2. It has 3 USB-C/Thunderbolt ports.

    3. USB-A is from 1996. It’s a 25-year old standard that’s very slow, clumsy to use and has an unnecessarily huge connector. It should go the way of the floppy.

       If you’re using USB-A with your computer for literally anything except connecting a keyboard, it’s slowing you down.

       1. It’s a connection, the features and speed have improved by a lot. Just because it’s from 1996 doesn’t say much other than it being a great succes. Many products released today that come with USB-C connectors could work with USB-A as well so I don’t understand the rest of your claim either.

          People’s houses, offices etc. are filled with fixed USB-A connectors and we have those cables laying around in every corner of the room. We don’t need to pretend that using USB-A is a horror show as it clearly isn’t. Why create more waste when it’s not necessary?

16. My first mac 🙂