Apple’s new MacBook Pro is a hot seller, but nasty performance reviews for high-end applications will eventually cause sales to slow dramatically.
According to BGR.com, “You probably shouldn’t buy a new MacBook Pro right now,” because “Apple has completely abandoned its core base of creative professionals.”
Slice Intelligence, backed by supply-chain reports of increased component orders, reported that Apple’s new MacBook Pro line set an online sales records in its first five days by outselling every high-profile laptop on the market, including the Dell XPS 13 and 15 that have been available for ten months. It also sold 4 times as many units as Microsoft’s highly-acclaimed Surface Book introduced last year.
The MacBook Pro suffered 10 delays over 2 years before its November release featuring the Intel sixth-generation Skylake processor. High-end laptops from HP and others are already shipping products with Intel’s seventh-gen Kaby Lake that can support greater random access memory (RAM).
During the endless delays, Slice found that high-end power users showed a willingness to switch to Windows-powered machines. Among those who had purchased an Apple laptop in 2014, 40 percent bought another brand since. Slice based its statistics on the behavior of a panel of 4.4 million online shoppers that it continuously tracks.
Apple’s 2016 Worldwide Developer Conference in June was panned because the company did not announce any hardware enhancements for the type of high-end creative applications that have allowed Apple to charge premium prices across its entire product line. Apple’s marketing group reassured attendees that the new MacBook Pro delay was aimed at incorporating disruptive low power features to maximize battery life.
But the only reason the just released top-end MacBook Pro 15 inch model weighing 4 lbs. and selling for $1,799 gets a superior 10 hours of battery life, is that the product’s maximum RAM configuration is only 16 gigabytes (GB).
The real reason behind the inability to upgrade to a 32GB of RAM configuration, according to a tech tear-down thread shared on Reddit, is the MacBook Pro mobile proprietary currently interface does not support LPDDR4 (LP for low power) RAM.
Early MacBook Pro buyers are complaining that they can “eat 16GB in a few milliseconds” doing sophisticated design, architectural and financial simulations. With the lack of memory causing glitches and pauses, many users are being forced to close tabs and shut down their browsers to save up to 7GB of memory.
Despite the hype about the new “touch bar” on higher end MacBook Pro models that replace the physical function keys, Apple still refuses to make Mac OS with the type of touch screen applications that were introduced with Windows 8 in 2011.
Mac users unsure about whether or not to upgrade, should probably wait until mid-2017 when Apple will have lowered the price of its MacBook Pro line and incorporated Intel’s eighth-gen Cannonlake processor that are being designed to support for 32GB of RAM and use 15-25% less power consumption, according to MacRumors.
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