Linux Tests Of The New 2016 MacBook Pro With Touchbar Are Coming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux Tests Of The New 2016 MacBook Pro With Touchbar Are Coming

Just in case anyone is thinking about the new (late-2016) MacBook Pro recently announced by Apple, I found out this morning we'll be receiving one for Phoronix Test Suite Linux benchmarking in the next week or two and should be interesting to see how this (expensive/over-priced) modern laptop runs with Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=2016-MacBook-Pro-Linux-Coming

[eydee]

Apple sending out samples? Surprising, but very nice.

[89c51]

I think that the keyboard and the trackpad won't work. At least those two weren't working on the 12 inch one. But things might have changed with latest kernels.

[GreenByte]

I think that the keyboard and the trackpad won't work. At least those two weren't working on the 12 inch one. But things might have changed with latest kernels.

ForceTouch trackpad works just fine on my 15 inch macbook pro, but I only used it with libinput on arch. All basic features seem to work with libinput. Keyboard for this one will be a question. I believe touch bar will just work but only just work. It must be in that "other OS mode" where it only has basic functionality (only F keys with escape) like the trackpad.

[rhysk]

Michael, I'd be very interested to see a macOS vs. Linux stack graphics comparison on that hardware when received.

[hugo8621]

very nice! Also like to see what OpenGL version macOS exposes for the internal and discrete GPU, as well as which WiFi chipset... And after all how the mobile Radeon 450 holds up against the higher TDP desktop variants, using Mesa in linux and in comparison to macOS!

[jagerman]

..., 16GB of DDR4-2133MHz memory, ...

Nope: the new MacBook Pros use LPDDR3, which is why they are limited to 16GB.

[schmidtbag]

Apple sending out samples? Surprising, but very nice.

Yes this is pretty weird, considering how poorly Mac seems to fare on Phoronix. But, this hardware is pretty unusual so it will probably feel more polished and feature-complete compared to Linux (or Windows for that matter) so it still works as good advertising.

[hugo8621]

Apple sending out samples? Surprising, but very nice.

I doubt it was Apple sending it out, or was it???

[AndyChow]

Nope: the new MacBook Pros use LPDDR3, which is why they are limited to 16GB.

Seems to be right, it's 2133 MHz PC3-17000 LPDDR3 SDRAM, according to wiki.

I'm curious what the touchbar will display (if anything), and if you'll be able to use the graphic card, since it has auto-switching technology, and that's often a bust with linux.