This week on The CultCast: Apple may be prepping the Mac Pro for its big reveal … don’t miss our WWDC 2019 hardware expectations! Plus: The pros and cons of the 2019 MacBook Pro … we discuss. And did you know all the best Get a Mac ads never actually aired? We’ll tell you the odd reason why. All that and soooo much more.
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Episode
#390 – New Mac Pro debuting at WWDC?
On the show this week
This week’s stories
Latest MacBook Pro blows away its predecessors
- The top-tier new MacBook Pro employs an Intel 9th-generation Core i9 processor, which just debuted. It’s clocked at 2.4GHz with Turbo Boost up to 5.0GHz. This is Apple’s first 8-core laptop, and the promotional materials promise “40 percent more performance than a 6-core MacBook Pro.”
- Geekbench benchmark scores are now confirming that this macOS laptop is around 30 percent speedier, depending on what the tests look at.
- The multi-core score for this device is around 29180. Last year’s speediest 6-core version of the MacBook Pro topped out at 22620, indicating that its successor is 29 percent faster.
- The single-core score for the new model is around 5900, up from about 5350 in the 2018 version. That’s almost a 10% improvement.
- One YouTuber reported the new MacBook Pro is beating his base iMac Pro in some tests!
- But the 8-core performance is still disappointing. Windows PCs using the same 8-core CPU have much better performance.
- The 2019 MacBook Pro is slowed my the same thermal issues of the 2018 MBP
- It also seems Apple has tuned the MBP to seek silence over performance, keeping the clock speed down so the fans don’t have to spin.
2019 MacBook Pro teardown reveals minimal keyboard changes
- Keyboard seems largely the same, though iFixit confirms that Apple changed some of the material used in the dome switch mechanism and keyboard condom.
Steve Jobs didn’t want the ‘Get a Mac’ ads to be too funny
- Justin Long was recently on an episode of People magazine’s TV show Couch Surfing reciting why all the best Get a Mac ads never aired.
- Though 66 ads aired, apparently they filmed more than 300!
- According to Long, Steve Jobs kept the best ads off the air because they were just too funny.
- “One, in particular, I remember Zach Galifianakis played a drunken Santa Claus and I was dying to see this one,” Long said on the episode, which aired Sunday. “Basically, Steve Jobs preferred when they weren’t super funny. It’s because he thought that would detract from the point of the commercial. He thought if people were too focused on humor, they would lose sight of the product.”
- But the commercials worked!
- Apple experienced a sales increase of 200,000 Macs after the first month of the campaign in May 2006. By July, Apple sold 1.3 million. And at the end of the fiscal year, there was a 39 percent increase from the previous year’s Mac sales.
