Weirdly from your list software developers are the only ones the New MBP can serve. It's got plenty of power to run XCode or a web dev environment.

Engineers, CAD, musicians, 3D artists all need more power than it provides and increasingly need CUDA cores.

>..musicians,..

I'm running a Logic set up on my 2012 MBP, and I've never felt limited by its capabilities. I've been running Macs for music production for almost 20 years, and in my experience they have all at some point not had quite enough in the bag to let me do what I wanted of them. This is the first one (now fours years old) that has stayed ahead of my needs. I can run multiple copies of Massive, and rows of Waves plugins no problem.

I have hit limits with real-time 3D stuff, like gaming and Houdini, but music production is still well within its capabilities for me.

The people who make film/game soundtracks need a LOT of ram, and fast disks, because they're using terabytes of samples in each project. Also massive has pretty low requirements.

The main gripe musicians have with apple is the new OSX breaking their setup every year. The sandboxing in el capitan was particularly disastrous.

It sounds like you're basing this argument on hearsay and not personal experience (shocker.) I have various audio setups with different macs and interfaces and no OS update has broken anything with my setups since 10.6 era.

I don't think that's fair. Even major audio companies were warning customers not to upgrade to Sierra for months due to compatibility issues. Here's iZotope's page about compatibility with their audio plugins - if you bought it more than a couple of years ago, it won't work on Sierra:

https://www.izotope.com/en/community/blog/product-news/2016/...

Personally I had to spend a few hundred dollars upgrading my audio software that worked in Mountain Lion so it would run on El Capitan. I'm still running into a few glitches in places.

That page indicates what versions of those plugins are certified by the vendor to run on Sierra. That doesn't mean that older versions won't run, it just means they haven't been certified to do so.

I've been running software on Sierra that is only certified by the developer for Snow Leopard through Yosemite, and it still runs just fine for my needs. Apple puts a lot of effort into binary compatibility.

My personal experience disagrees with you. Waves, Native Instruments, and others, have had various issues over the years with OS X upgrades. I have projects spanning several years that forced me to wait a revision or two before upgrading to ensure they would continue to load and mix down as intended.

> because they're using terabytes of samples in each project.

This is beyond hyperbole.

Not true, I work with projects where each minute of video is 8 GB. Multiply that with 100 or 120 and you are pretty much at 1 TB.

Just a wild idea here, but maybe a laptop isnt the best solution for you?

That's fair. I definitely have done a lot of sample-based and multi-track audio work and again have never hit that limit (on this MBP). However I do agree that if you rely on 3rd-party plugins there is a crapshoot every year as to how long you have to wait before compatibility reaches 100% and you can upgrade your system without breaking previous mixes or set ups.

If you are an accountant even an underpowered PC is likely adequate.

Why do you assume that software developers don't need more power and/or CUDA cores, too? Development does not only consist of web development.

How many developers need more capacity than the new MacBook Pro but still less than the largest laptops offer? The few non-gamers I know who are still CPU/GPU-limited are using clusters of machines because no single machine is large enough and in most cases it's significantly cheaper to rent capacity for the few times when they need it rather than pay up-front for something which will be idle a fair percent of the year.

I'm not sure I'm understanding what you are suggesting here.

I see three potential groups of buyers:

1. People whose needs are satisfied by almost any laptop with an SSD and semi-recent CPU/GPU.

2. People who need the absolute top-end system but can fit their work on a single machine (e.g. if you had a model which uses 20GB of RAM, a 16GB machine is unsuitable but a 32GB machine is fine).

3. People who have so much data / computation that no normal computer can handle it.

My gut feeling is that #1 covers most of the market and the question is really how many people fall into group #2 but not group #3, especially in the context of laptops where the ceilings are smaller on both the Mac and PC side. I would further expect that a fair number of the people in the second group are not running those workloads 24x7 and thus have a practical, often cheaper, option of renting an hour of time on AWS/Google/Azure/etc. when they need to do something and get the results faster rather than leaving their laptop running for a day or two — even the best laptop GPUs are smaller capacity than what you can rent on a server.

"Web developers" should compile a browser(like Chromium) every so often, to provide themselves a reminder of the massive gap between what they do, and what "developers" do. Those CUDA cores and more CPU are very important to non-web-developers.

I've never needed a CUDA core at all, but then again I'm only a lowly kernel and network stack developer.

Pretty sure folks in the other professions mentioned are also lamenting over the missing successor to the Mac Pro, and the loss of not-yet-outdated ports on the MBP (especially since they probably have more peripheral devices than developers).

I'm not sure how you got that out of his post.

The mac users in science are also legion

Sometimes for reasons beyond my understanding: I've seen many people bent over a 15" MB playing with MRI images in matlab/spm/... It's hard imagining something with worse posture, less ergonomics and less efficient.

mac has word, osirix and freesurfer etc but I agree about posture

Not sure why you get downvoted for what is imo an ok reply? Only Osirix is strictly OSX and even though I haven't used it I'm pretty sure there are viable linux/windows alternatives for that and the other software you mention. Anyway, next time I see someone in a situation as I pictured I'll just ask why they chose the Macbook

Osirix is the only FDA approved software of its kind (MRI, 3D reconstruction, database), as far as I know.

Mac is the only platform where you can run freesurfer and word natively.

I didn't notice the downvotes..

I'm a developer and plan to get the new MacBook Pro. I just don't use function or escape keys that much. So, it seems like it's a subset of developers that are bothered by this.

I used Windows when I was young, then switched to Linux for 10 years professionally, and finally I switched to the Mac about 5 years ago. I find it much easier to use day-to-day than Linux. Especially using multiple displays in different offices.

The "oh I can live with this" moment for me with the new mac was remapping caps-lock to escape. It's not as bad as I expected it to be(the new keyboard layout). Not as good as I wanted, but not as horrible as HN and other places warned.