In loving memory of the mid-2015 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro: 5/19/2015 - 7/12/2018
Today, Apple announced a big update to its Macbook Pro line of computers. The company really souped-up the specs of the latest Macbook Pro model, the one that debuted in 2016 with the controversial butterfly keyboard, 4 sole USB-C ports, and Touch Bar in place of the function keys.
Jul 12, 2018 With the launch of the new 2018 Touch Bar Macbook Pro, Apple discontinues its popular mid-2015 Macbook Pro, widely considered 'the best laptop ever made.'
As Apple updated its website with the newest additions to the Macbook Pro family, something just as noteworthy came to light. Apple removed the mid-2015 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro model from its online store, officially killing off what some consider to be the best laptop ever made.
Wait... Did Apple just announce they discontinued the 2015 15' MacBook? It's the best version they've made. I would pay money to put 32 gigs of ram in it...
— Nemoy Rau (@NRaush) July 12, 2018
My 2015 baseline MacBook Pro has honestly been killing it, definitely think the '15 models are the best on the market right now (I wouldn't work with the 16-17 dongle models...)
Exporting 1080p 60fps video, hours of photoshop maintaining 80% battery etc.
— Andrew Falchook (@falchook) November 26, 2017
On the wrong side of things, the 15’’ 2015 MacBook Pro ( @marcoarment ‘s favourite) isn’t available anymore.
— Alessandro (@alsoknownasale) July 12, 2018
In November of last year, Marco Arment, the co-founder of Tumblr and developer behind popular apps like Instapaper and Overcast, wrote a post that spread like wildfire, expressing how many Macbook Pro users felt when Apple announced the new Touch Bar model with its 2016 Macbook Pro refresh. Arment argued that the entire 2012-2015 Retina Macbook Pro model was the best laptop Apple ever created, with the mid-2015 one being its peak. The sentiments shared in his post about the 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro model – titled “The best laptop ever made” – were echoedacrossthe web.
Before Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, he was involved in the design of the Retina Macbook Pro line of Apple computers that came out 8 months later in June of 2012. This model was continuously updated and upgraded with the latest specs until May 2015 with the mid-2015 model. This Macbook Pro model was heralded for its sleek design, light weight, fast processing power, its array of ports ranging from HDMI to two Thunderbolt ports, and MagSafe power adapter among other things. Even what the Retina Macbook Pro was missing, an internal CD/DVD Superdrive for example, was a well-timed move in response to where the industry was in terms of the lifecycle of that specific technology.
Even with last year’s 2017 Touch Bar Macbook Pro roll out replacing the original 2016 Touch Bar model, Apple kept the mid-2015 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro in stock to satiate those who believed it to be the last great Macbook Pro model. Up until yesterday, you could purchase a brand new mid-2015 15-inch Macbook Pro, with fully maxed out specs (note that in the past year Apple removed the option to add a dedicated AMD Radeon R9 M370X GPU to the mid-2015 Macbook Pro), for just a little more than the low-end base model of the 2017 Touch Bars.
Unfortunately, with the launch of the 2018 Macbook pro model, you can no longer purchase a brand new 2015 15-inch Retina Macbook Pro from Apple. If you really want “the best laptop ever,” you’ll have to try your luck with used or refurbished models on eBay.
For those who hate the newest – and now only – Macbook Pro line, thanks to its lack of ports, annoying and flawed butterfly keyboard, and gimmicky Touch Bar; this discontinuation of the 2015 model is Apple’s way of saying too bad, this is just the way things are now.
UPDATE: July 12, 2018, 2:56 p.m. EDT: Apple appears to have moved the 2015 Macbook Pro to the Apple store clearance page. This may be your last chance to snag a brand new one, so get them while they last!
What do we do on the Ars Orbiting HQ to while away the lonely holiday hours? Play board games, of course. And the last 18 months were high-water marks for the hobby, throwing out innovative, beautiful titles on a near-monthly basis.
Here, we've rounded up a few of our favorites from 2015 (with a few late 2014 titles sneaking in for good measure). These are the new games that we most enjoyed this year—and we hope you'll find something new to try, too.
Mission: Red Planet (Second Edition)
Designers: Bruno Cathala, Bruno Faidutti, and Steven Kimball
Publisher: Fantasy Flight Games
Players: 2-6
Price: $36.90
Admit it: you would secretly love to launch a private army to Mars. Mission: Red Planet lets you do so, along the way sabotaging the rockets carrying other fighters and explorers, redirecting opponents' ships to unimportant patches of Martian soil, taking over Phobos, and just generally running riot in your quest to exploit the Red Planet's hidden resources.
Fantasy Flight's 2015 reboot of Mission: Red Planet streamlines play and reimagines the artwork to tremendous effect (rather than wooden cubes, your astronauts are plastic spacemen, each carrying your flag, while the 'board' that makes up Mars is a huge four-piece circle). Played over 10 rounds, the game's hour-long playtime flies by thanks to a mix of role selection and area control mechanics.
On each turn, you select one of the roles in your hand and perform its action—filling up a ship on Earth, redirecting an in-flight rocket, sending troops from Phobos down to Mars, fighting, researching the planet, etc. You won't be able to use that role again, though, until you play the 'Recruiter' role, which burns one of your 10 rounds each time you use it. The key is playing the right role at the right time in order to benefit most from the three different resource acquisition rounds interspersed throughout the game. Terrific fun for everyone from advanced kid players up to gamers, though perhaps slightly too heavy for total gaming newbs.
-Nate Anderson
Splendor
Designers: Marc André
Publisher: Space Cowboys/Asmodee
Players: 2-4
Price: $39
Most Euro-style board games operate on the idea of players building an “economic engine.” You start with nothing and by collecting resources, you buy items that give you more resources, which lets you buy better things, which gives you even more resources—until you’re running an unstoppable point-generating machine. Splendor takes this immensely gratifying gameplay loop and pares it down to something even your grandmother can enjoy.
On your turn, you’ll collect gems from a common supply in order to buy cards from a central market. (The gems are represented by heavy poker-style chips that are absurdly satisfying to hold and play with.) The cards give you permanent gems that act as discounts on future purchases. You’ll work your way up through three tiers of ever-more-expensive cards to buy cards worth more and more points. The first person to 15 points triggers the end of the game.
Of all the smash-hit tabletop games released in 2014, Splendor is probably the one with the most staying power. It’s dead simple to teach, but it has enough strategy that seasoned gamers can happily play alongside noobs. It takes about 30 minutes to play, but it’s as fulfilling as many longer games. When I introduced the game to my Friday night game group, we didn’t play anything else for about two months. Splendor is an instant modern classic.
-Aaron Zimmerman
Roll for the Galaxy
Designers: Wei-Hwa Huang and Tom Lehmann
Publisher: Rio Grande Game
Players: 2-5
Price:$44
Man, I love dice. They represent one of the great joys of board games: tactility. Scooping the little cubes up, tumbling them in your hand, sending them clacking across the table—dice are just fun to play with. But dice can be problematic in strategy games due to their inherent randomness. That's why I love Roll for the Galaxy; the game does dice right.
Roll for the Galaxy is essentially a streamlined, dice-game version of the modern classic card game Race for the Galaxy, but it’s decidedly not Race for the Galaxy: The Dice Game. That is, it’s not a dumbed-down snoozer or Yahtzee-aping cash-in like some dice-game versions of other board games tend to be. It's also a much easier game to teach to newcomers than the notoriously arcane Race (although it’s not what I’d call a “gateway game,” and you may have a bad time if you try to introduce it to non-gamers).
Roll’s mechanics are a bit too complicated to fully explain here, but the game essentially has you collecting dice and laying tiles to create the best civilization in the galaxy. A hidden action selection mechanic (similar in many ways to Race, Puerto Rico, and San Juan) drives the gameplay, and you need to pay attention to what your opponents are doing to make the most of your turns.
And here’s the best part: your dice, which represent workers in your empire, provide you with flexible options and a fun mini-puzzle to solve every round. There are always ways to mitigate the luck of the roll and bend the dice to your will. If you play well, the dice nudge you and give you constraints; they don’t hamstring you with “better luck next time” disappointments.
Roll for the Galaxy is highly replayable, fiendishly addictive, and very quick to play once everyone knows what they’re doing. And it comes with 111 colorful custom dice and rocketship-themed dice cups to roll them in. Buy this game.
-Aaron Zimmerman
T.I.M.E Stories
Designers: Manuel Rozoy
Publisher: Space Cowboys/Asmodee
Players: 2-4
Price: $42
When people talk about 2015 being a banner year for board games that seek to transcend 'board gaming,' they usually point to T.I.M.E Stories and to Pandemic: Legacy. Here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, we've got our copy of Pandemic: Legacy but are waiting until the New Year to really dig in. (It is... a serious time commitment.) But we did get T.I.M.E Stories to the table—and are glad we did so.
T.I.M.E Stories combines role-playing with lavishly illustrated cards to let teams of adventurers puzzle and fight their way through wildly varying stories. The included first module, Asylum, involves a 1920's 'mental health facility' in France, deranged doctors, mythical beasts, cannibalism, drugs, abominations of nature, and temporal rifts. It's a 'one and done' affair; after beating Asylum in three or four hours, you won't go back again soon.
But those three to four hours make for some great group gaming. It's not perfect—see our full review for the flaws—but there's no need for a dungeon master, the artwork is fantastic, and the card-based 'location' system provides unique information to different party members as they explore the grounds (and caverns beneath the grounds). And when you've solved the main puzzle, you'll feel like you accomplished something.
With more story modules in development (and one already for sale), T.I.M.E Stories looks like the launch of a successful new gaming system that could be influential for some time to come.
-Nate Anderson
La Granja
Designer: Michael Keller and Andreas Odendahl
Publisher: Spielworxx/Stronghold Games
Players: 1-4
Price:$40
La Granja is an exceptionally Euro-y Eurogame, with all the requisite trimmings—an inoffensive farming theme, unflashy art design, sensible wooden bits, tons of hieroglyphic-laden tokens, and a non-confrontational take on player interaction. If you’re itching to slay dragons or shoot down Star Destroyers, look elsewhere. But if you, like me, get unreasonably fired up about pushing around cubes and building efficient economic engines, stick around—I’ve got a game for you.
Many board games can best be described as “Game X, but with pieces of Game Y and maybe a bit of Game Z.” Board game designers, like creators of all stripes, are constantly iterating on each other’s ideas. La Granja proudly wears its influences on its sleeves, even calling out its predecessors on the last page of the rulebook: industry giants like Stefan Feld and Uwe Rosenberg, and other games like Carl Chudyk’s classic card game Glory to Rome. All these elements come together to create a tight, cohesive experience.
The gameplay centers on La Granja’s 66 multi-use cards. Your personal player board has cutouts for you to slot the cards into, and the cards do different things depending on where you put them. Take the card to the right, for example. If you slot it into the left side of your board, you’ll produce grapes. Slot it into the right and you’ll expand your farm, giving you more income and cards at the beginning of the round. Slotting it into the top will give you a resource goal to work toward, and slotting it into the bottom will give you a special power. Each option is great, making every decision wonderfully excruciating. You start the game with four cards, which essentially amounts to 16 different options you have to weigh against each other.
There’s a lot more to the game, including a cool dice-based resource selection phase and an area majority battle that players wage on the main board. But it all comes back to those cards. La Granja is a puzzle in the best of ways, and I absolutely love it. It also plays well solo—and don’t let anyone tell you that playing a board game by yourself is sad.
-Aaron Zimmerman