Some users irate over new 15-inch MacBook Pro, 27-inch iMac offerings

The good news is that Apple released its new 15-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro along with a new US$1,999 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display this week, the 15-inch MacBook Pro gaining expected features like a Force Touch trackpad, faster flash storage, longer battery life, and better graphics. The new MacBook Pro comes in 2.2GHz and 2.5GHz configurations for US$1,999 and US$2,499 respectively. Both configurations come with a quad-core Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB memory, and Intel Iris Pro Graphics cards, with the higher-end 2.5GHz model gaining expected boosts in flash storage and memory.

The bad news is that Apple has included older technologies within the new notebook as well as the new iMac. In the case of the new 15-inch Retina Display MacBook Pro as well as the new 27-inch iMac, the machines still ship with Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell processors as opposed to Broadwell or next-generation Skylake processors and a fair number of Mac users have expressed disappointment with these configurations.

In the case of the new iMac, the shortcomings seem more egregious, the new desktop arriving with 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive and a hampered AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics card. In spite of a bump in the processing power, the previous model 27-inch iMac offered an NVIDIA graphics card supported CUDA, a form of GPU acceleration used by Adobe, though this appears to be of limited benefit for most operations.

A comparison of the performance of the two cards does appear to show some cases where the NVIDIA card offers better performance, like coping with significantly more audio tracks in Logic Pro X, but these comparisons were run with the older Retina iMacs, and there were still only a minority of cases where the non-Retina machine came out ahead.

User comments to the new configurations have expressed disappointment with the 15-inch MacBook Pro’s processor as well as the new iMac’s graphics card, continued use of a conventional spinning hard drive and no means of upgrading the processor.

Ericinboston offered the following comments:

1)it still comes with 8GB ram (2 4GB chips!!!)
2)a non-SSD drive. Oh, but for an extra $500 you can get a 512GB flash drive (not sure if it’s SSD or PCIe or other) when you can pick them up anywhere for $180 at RETAIL prices.
3)Oh, but wait…there’s more!….they don’t even tell you what i5 chip you are getting.
4)And there’s no i7 option for people that, you know, spend $2000 and actually want some killer performance to somewhat future proof their investment.

Keysofanxiety had the following to offer on the situation:

Yeah, these whole lower-cost, worse-spec alternatives are frankly getting ridiculous. Consumers who don’t know better are going to buy these, on the assumption — no, the lie — that ‘Apple makes the decisions for the consumer’, that ‘we don’t ship junk’, that ‘every product is carefully crafted for the best user experience’.

Let’s see how great that experience is with stuttering animations on an underpowered graphics card, or expensive machines that still have standard HDDs rather than Fusion/SSDs.

It’s such a bitter irony that the more money companies make, and the more money they have to potentially expand their lineup and make the bottom benchmark absolutely incredible (pure SSD for instance), they seem to do moves like this which smack to me as only thinking of profits. The consumer will not get experiences or a computer performance synonymous with a £1000 machine. Fact.

The greedy get greedier.

Others felt the changes were more justified, as noted by user koyoot:

The hate is AMAZING.

I see that Retina iMac got cheaper for the same that it offered before. But people still focus on the base model that has been added to lineup that has a bit less than higher spec model, that got smaller price.

Second is the MBP. People moan about the fact that Apple not upgraded the CPU and Memory, because Intel did not brought new CPUs, but no, its ****ing Apple’s fault. They brought faster and more efficient GPU from AMD. “OH NO, I LIKE NVIDIA MORE, WHAT HAVE YOU APPLE DONE?!!!!!”.

They have given more for the same amount of money.

How the ***** can be that a bad thing?

The price has dropped in some cases, but the specs are in question.

Please let us know what you think of this situation in the comments.

Via 9to5Mac and AppleInsider