CultCast #345 - 2018 MacBook Pro: The good, the great, the UGLY.

The 2018 MacBook Pro is both a beauty AND a beast.  In fact, it's one of the most exciting MBP refreshes in years.  The benchmarks are in and they’re impressive. 

A popular tech reviewer warns that the i9 processor upgrade in the MBP has a major flaw, and his video proof is compelling.  We’ll fill you in.

We also bring back Matthew Taylor, creator of the very popular butterfly keyboard recall petition, now with over 32,000 signatures,  to have a frank discussion on the state of the 2018 MBP keyboard.  Has Apple fixed the issues plaguing their butterfly key design?  

And stay tuned for a strange new HomeKit controller and the best insulated water bottle on the market in an all-new Under Review!

The 15- and 13-inch MacBook Pro models launching this week boast significantly faster processors. Tests with the Geekbench benchmarking tool show speed increases as high as 86 percent.

The improvements come from faster Turbo Burst frequencies and more processor cores.

“For the 15-inch models, single-core performance is up 12-15%, and multi-core performance is up 39-46%

“For the 13-inch models, single-core performance is up 3%-11%, and multi-core performance is up 81%-86%

Majorly faster CPU

Much faster SSDs

Faster DD4 RAM

CPU:

SSD

TrueTone:

TechCrunch: “I have two 15-inch MacBooks in front of me right now (that’s just how I roll), and it’s like night and day. You’ve got no idea how blue the screen you’ve been staring at is until you see it up against another True Tone-enabled display.”

The most expensive laps Apple’s ever made.

Apple made potential buyers of the new MacBook Pro models very nervous when it said no effort had been made to fix the problems plaguing the keyboards in earlier versions.

They even told the Verge that, though it made the Keyboard quieter, the keyboard was constructed to address the myriad issues they say are affecting only “a tiny" fraction of users.

But, IFIXIT took apart they keyboard of the new 2018 MacBook Pro, and discovered  “Apple has cocooned their butterfly switches in a thin, silicone barrier”

And as it turns out, Apple has a patent for just this kind of debris cover...

No good deed goes unpunished

Early tests have revealed that the i9 chip in Apple’s new MBP suffers severe thermal throttling under heavy loads, which dramatically reduces its clock speed and performance.

Dave Lee from Youtube has tests illustrating the issue.

He did a render in Adobe Premiere that took the MBP 39 minutes to complete.  In that test he monitored the CPU speed temp and saw that the chip was being throttled to BELOW base clock speed just to stay cool.

In his tests, Lee found that it averaged at around 2.2GHz with a temperature of 90°C.

So he tried the test again, this time with his MacBook Pro in... the freezer.

This time, the same test, which took 39 minutes before, took only 27 minutes.  That’s a 44% improvement…

Not just Apple’s fault

Unfortunately for existing MacBook and MacBook Pro owners, Apple won’t fit its newer 3rd gen butterfly keyboard into older machines — not even if yours is in need of repair.

Earlier machines will be repaired with the same keyboard components they originally shipped with. Apple does not offer the option to upgrade for a fee, either. Only the 2018 MacBook Pro will get the new design if a repair is required.