It's interesting to me that they've widened the gap between the 13" and 15" -- it looks like the 15 has been updated to use DDR4 while the 13 is still on LPDDR3. I get where they're coming from in that the 15 has notably more battery to work with, but it seems surprising that they'd widen that gap between devices.
At this point (assuming no issues with gen3-keyboard) I think a lot of people will find the 15" to be a great pro laptop and the 13" will still be rather disappointing to many. Here's hoping some reviewers do a meaningful comparison between the two.
Apple really doesn't seem to grok that small doesn't necessarily equal low-end in customers' minds. People want small laptops and small phones for reasons other than spending less money. They keep making this mistake with the iPhone SE too.
The iPhone SE was just as fast as the flagship phone (6S) when it was released. It didn't have the faster TouchID or 3D Touch, but neither did my iPad Pro, so I don't think they were trying to hold the phone back.
I'm not sure it's an issue with them not understanding, but rather straight up physics. It's an engineering marvel to get the components into the 15" as they do. Now try cramming that same tech into 77% of the space. There are going to be compromises. I would guess it's a similar story with the iPhone.
They could probably do it with the iPhone if they didn't insist on also making the phone inexpensive. After all, the SE is significantly thicker than the current generation phones.
And they could probably do the same with a variant of the 13" MBP if they were willing to sacrifice a bit of battery life or just go back to the thickness of the 2015 models.
That's really sad, the 13" would be the best machine for my case if it had parity on the memory side (dealing with a lot of VMs, it really makes a difference)
That was my discovery. I was about to suck it up and deal with a cement keyboard to upgrade my 2012 Air that i still use as a daily dev machine. Instead i am presented with:
- no 32GB on 13" models
- no touchbar-less 15" models
At what point did developers at apple cave to this quality of life hit. I am seriously curious about this. How do people code without literal Esc and F-Keys?
You and parent are right - the performance isn't like miles apart or anything. Best comparison I can find is here[1] (it's not testing low-power specifically though) showing basically that there's a small but measurable performance benefit from DDR4.
I'd suspect the biggest difference is the base clock boost that DDR4 provides (2400 vs 2133).
My point was simply that the number of differences between the two seem to be widening. It feels more like the 15" is the real Macbook Pro, the 13" is the standard-Macbook, and the 12" is the Macbook Air.
Apple's naming choices in the laptop lineup have been strange for years - but the widening gap between the Pro linup is interesting.
https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/15-inch https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/13-inch
It's interesting to me that they've widened the gap between the 13" and 15" -- it looks like the 15 has been updated to use DDR4 while the 13 is still on LPDDR3. I get where they're coming from in that the 15 has notably more battery to work with, but it seems surprising that they'd widen that gap between devices.
At this point (assuming no issues with gen3-keyboard) I think a lot of people will find the 15" to be a great pro laptop and the 13" will still be rather disappointing to many. Here's hoping some reviewers do a meaningful comparison between the two.