This is a beautiful machine. Once again, Apple excels at hardware.
But what the living hell is going wrong with Apple's desktop software? OS X and Apple's applications suite have been getting steadily worse with every release. Look at the App store: the latest releases of OS X, iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, and Numbers are (in stark contrast to earlier versins) all rated at 2.5/5 stars, with the plurality being 1-star reviews. People are LIVID -- and not just for trivial NOOB reasons, either: the quality of the work is frankly shoddy. Who's steering that part of the ship???
Because you can't really tell how well software is working when looking at the device edge-on, and that's apparently the way Apple looks at them most of the time.
I mean this more metaphorically than literally, but I'm so tired of complaints about the ridiculously primitive Finder being met with, "the edge of the iMac now appears even thinner, now that we've repositioned formerly convenient connectors and such into a bulge behind the screen. Surely you agree that the appearance of a thin edge is more important than usability of Finder or connectors."
Or a yearning for more battery life, or even just a swappable battery? "The bottom of our laptop looks better than the top of theirs!" Or, why is the text on my iPhone suddenly so low contrast and hard to read? "Surely you agree that having a fresh look matters more than readability! Look, the icons are flat. Don't you realize how critically important that is?"
Or, the apps get worse, not better, over time, and you always have to ask yourself whether each free OS upgrade is worth the risk of unreliable WiFi. Can't you work on this, Apple? "Thinner!"
Apple used to emphasize software quality and usability. Now, it's all about the style, about how the edges look in fashion magazines. And yet the rest of the industry is so fragmented that they don't do any better in terms of usability. The frustration is that unlike them, Apple could do so much better, but ever since the candy-colored iMacs, they've decided that Fernando (Billy Crystal's old SNL character) was right. When it comes to look and feel, "It's better to look good than to feel good!"
Curious - what do Finder complainers consider the gold standard of file browsers that Finder should aspire to be?
I do most of my file management at the command line so I don't experience the pain of Finder very often, and I've generally been able to get Finder to do what I want without much fuss. Windows Explorer is, to me, a painful experience (but its 1980s DOS command line is so much worse)
I've found the various Linux desktop file browsers I've dabbled with clunky but serviceable, but again, I'm a command line guy. Just wondering what is out there that the Finder haters would prefer.
I'm a big fan of the Finder of System 7. It seemed to hit the sweet spot where you could do just about everything you needed to easily (it had collapsible tree views, folders, computed folder sizes, drag & drop, copy & paste, labels, etc.), but it didn't try to hide things from you or restrict what you could do, it didn't get too fancy and guess at your common tasks, it actually showed your filesystem instead of Apple's prescribed guess at what your filesystem should do, and it was still simple enough that you could wrap your head around exactly how it worked.
There seems to be this phenomenom where good products seems to get better right up until they get mainstream adoption, and then they steadily get worse. It's like up till then you have room to improve, and then suddenly you've hit the pinnacle of product design in your category, but rather than hold it there, you have to make random changes so your employees have something to do and don't quit.
(To be fair, the one company that's tried the "great, let's make a great product, kill off the competition, and then hold it there and reassign all the people" was Microsoft with IE6, and that worked fine up until Firefox and Chrome came around and then completely screwed them over.)
I'm also a huge fan of the spatial Finder concept, but memory has a way of rendering the past in better lighting.
System 7 (or 8, 9 for that matter), didn't have copy & paste.
You could copy file names into SimpleText, for example, but you couldn't use it to manage files. Also, clicking anywhere outside a window would deselect every file you had carefully chosen, so dragging and dropping was a Zen exercise.
And there were invisible files, plenty actually. Like, the desktop for instance? An invisible folder. Or every single custom icon? An invisible "Icon\r" resource fork file. We inherited the invisible attribute in HFS+ from those days.
We did have a much simpler file system structure, and I miss that as well. I welcomed the column view, but the spatial Finder is indeed missed, though it still lives in a sense in iOS's springboard.
The latest software has several deficiencies, but this isn't one of them.
Copy, then hold down the Option key while pasting, by keyboard or menu. In the Edit menu, "Paste Item" will change to "Move Item Here".
Even though it's not as discoverable as it should be, this is a well-reasoned UI move on Apple's part. Even on Windows, cut & paste has different semantics for files than for text, and this solution sidesteps the weird "cut-in-progress" mode and inability to paste again.
A thousand times this. I loved the "spatial Finder" of System 7. It was such a 1:1 mapping onto the filesystem that even my DOS-using friends realised that this wasn't a GUI abstraction over something cruder, this was the Mac and this was how it worked.
23 years later and I still can't consistently switch off "browser view" in the OS X Finder. Cmd-option-T works for windows on my local disks, but then I'll insert a USB stick or similar, and they appear as standard in browser view. Ah well.
It's not quite the same. The old Mac OS had a one to one mapping of open windows to directories in the filesystem. As I recall, you couldn't open two windows of the same directory, it would just bring the existing one to focus. Hence the term spatial, opening a folder wouldn't create duplicate windows, there is only ever one in existence.
1. It preserves the metaphor of your desktop being a place where you can directly manipulate your files and folders. On early Mac versions, the Finder "was" your files, it wasn't just "a browser for" your files. That metaphorical consistency is very important for building a good UI, but products these days have gotten so complex that most of them lose it.
2. It prevents you from getting into a situation where you've opened up a bunch of Finder windows, navigated through them, and then find that they're all pointing at your home directory again. Ironically, the reason Steve Jobs gave for the new MacOS X finder was that the old one popped open a bunch of windows that you'd have to manually "garbage collect", but I feel like I'm garbage-collecting a lot more on MacOS X than on System 7. The reason is because on System 7, the Finder window I had open was a natural extension of my current task and I just closed it when I was done with the task, while in MacOS X, I just usually have one or two windows open and then periodically feel like they're a distraction that's getting in my way.
Another benefit of the mapping is that the window's properties such as height, width, display style (list or grid) remained the same even after closing, they are properties of the directory, not of a specific file browser instance.
But that requires opening each subfolder in its own window, right? I can say ever since Win95 I've been setting that stupid Folder Options > 'Open each folder in the same window' setting because I could never stand having the next level down appear someone random on the screen and just clutter up the entire desktop.
Usually, I'd navigate to a folder and then have the content in list view (which was really useful, like windows' "detailed" view, only better) and then drill down to the subfolders via the collapsible tree.
So, yeah I miss the spatial finder too, but after 10+ years, I have gotten over it. People blow this out of proportion.
They're both the real file. The file does exist only once. Are you saying in the spatial Finder you can't have duplicate views of a particular directory open?
Or are you referring to the files themselves? So if you open up somephoto.jpg in Preview, you couldn't open it up a second time?
The behavior you're describing is the behavior of a browser. The parent post was talking about maintaining the desktop metaphor; my actual desk has one drawer with pens and sticky notes in it. I can't open another drawer that also has the exact same pens and sticky notes in it.
I'm not necessarily siding with the parent post, but I think the point was fairly clear.
Now I've seen the video below, I understand the point. It's been a long, long time since I used earlier versions of MacOS and I was never a regular Mac user back then. I'm not sure if that was a better or less convenient method of browsing files. I can see the benefits of both Finders to be honest.
Sorry, but this doesn't really answer the question for me.
As far as I can tell, the current Finder has all of the things you list as desirable features.
I don't understand what is confusing about the filesystem as it is presented. It is exactly as it appears on disk, with some system folders hidden. Which can be unhidden easily. That's it.
>it didn't get too fancy and guess at your common tasks
I have no idea what this means.
>it was still simple enough that you could wrap your head around exactly how it worked
What one earth, _specifically_, is confusing about the new Finder?
All of the complaints I hear about it are so incredibly vague, like the ones above.
The fact that you have to install XtraFinder to get Finger - sorry, Finder - to do something basic like auto-size columns doesn't say much for Apple's diligence.
There is a clear and obvious problem with the quality of Apple's desktop software. Someone in charge is making very bad decisions about the competence of Apple users and their requirements.
The software has always been questionable - not least iTunes, which is a horrible example of how not to make a clean and elegant UI.
But lately it's been getting worse. The cosmetics are - possibly - improving. But usability and features are suffering.
If you're finding your system is unstable, it's probably due to using XtraFinder. That hack does various unsavory things that can cause stability issues.
> it didn't get too fancy and guess at your common tasks
When does the current Finder try to guess your common tasks? Sure, by default it shows all the files in your home directory but this can be turned off easy as pie.
I'm not really sure what your problem with Finder is. The defaults are there for those who have little/no experience of OS X but all of these can be easily overridden if you've got the more than the very basics of OS X skills.
Like one of the commenters below, I'm finding you're being rather vague in what your problem is with it.
I'd have comments on other points as well but if there is one thing KDE apps generally aren't then they consistently aren't pretty. I know, eye of beholder, but it's almost as bad as TK. In the link you provided there are:
- grooved borders between every second UI element.
- icons are way too colorful with gradients everywhere.
- underscore hints on menus are ugly.
- places panel takes up way too much space and eats away at the tree view panel.
That said, I use Dolphin, but only because other file browsers on Linux are for various reasons bigger catastrophes.
Most of those complaints seem to be down to fashion, rather than usability. In five years, people will be moaning about icons being "too monochrome" or "undifferentiated".
If you care deeply about the latest fashions and what the new black of UI design is this season, then KDE is definitely not for you. If you just want something that works then it can be fine. I don't find any of those things to hinder my actual use of KDE, quite the opposite.
The bad design isn't of this trivial sort. If you think of stereotypical web pages from 90's you don't think that their design isn't current, you think that that their design is intrinsically bad.
> the latest fashions
KDE's analogue in clothing fashion is wearing potato sack. That is - this isn't even a mater of fashion. This isn't like ror, node or react.
> rather than usability
Nobody denies potato sacks can have nonzero usability. Visual clutter affects usability. That they completely fucked UI, even if usability were perfect, doesn't give users needed confidence that other areas were done competently either.
I did that. It's still the wrong default.™ That's why I use KDE/Dolphin, you can beat it into something usable but you still have to eat the ugly which bothers me more than it should.
I am picky about file managers. Since switching to Linux on my primary desktop a few years ago, a file manager remains the only thing I miss from Windows. I used Directory Opus. It wasn't perfect, but was damn close for me (admittedly a power user as far as file management tasks is concerned). The one key feature that I have been unable to find in any Linux file manager is extensibility. I also dislike the lack of a queueing mechanism. I shouldn't have to sit around and wait for a 40GB copy to move from one network location to another before I can start another bit of data movement. And I should definitely be able to create a custom button that launches tools or performs certain common operations like flattening a directory tree or creating an ISO from a VIDEO_TS folder. In Linux I rely on the commandline, and don't mind that terribly, but if I had the time I would create a file manager that was easily extensible with Python taking design cues from something like Sublime Text. Should anyone do this I am certain it would be a successful product. I paid something like $95 for Directory Opus, and Opus is a fairly successful product despite its high price (a good bit of that high price comes from the company being based in Australia). I contacted them when I switched, telling them that a Linux port would be profitable for them, but they are not interested.
> I shouldn't have to sit around and wait for a 40GB copy to move from one network location to another before I can start another bit of data movement.
KDE and Dolphin send the transfer into the background immediately. You can track the progress in the system tray. Meanwhile, you can begin your next operation.
I think what he means is that transfers wouldn't be concurrent but sequential - quable. For example - you start transfer from A to B (in KDE and Dolphin it goes to background), then you would like to do a transfer from C to B - in reality they would be transferred simultaneously, but what the author above wants is queue - that transfer from C to B would start automatically AFTER A to B finishes.
Yes, that is precisely what I mean. I should have been clearer. Ideally if a copy operation involved busy devices that would be the only time they would queue, but I would settle for a background processing queue that prevented long-running operations from running concurrently. I've never seen anything smart enough to base 'concurrent or not' off of what device a piece of the filesystem is on though, so I'll give that a pass. I'd also really like a file manager that had a little daemon (or interacted with an rsync daemon or such already running) on boxes over the network so when I say 'copy from network share A to share B' the data never has to transit my desktop but goes directly from A to B. I think about file manager a lot. I have a long wishlist...
> integrated command line whose PWD matches the directory shown in the graphic view. This is killer.
This does sound good. I have a keyboard shortcut which launches a terminal in the current directory so that is kind of a workaround.
>- automatic numbering if you rename a bunch of files.
>- a tab-completeable navigation bar.
>- integrated context menu items (e.g. send via email, compress, encrypt, convert file type).
>- pretty, Apple-style image previews.
The fundamental problem with the Mac OS X Finder is that it tried to combine the NeXTSTEP File Viewer with the classic Mac OS Finder, but the designs are complete opposites of each other, so the combination doesn't really work.
In NeXTSTEP, as well as in Norton Commander and its clones, the view properties are associated with the window. You create a window, set the window size, adjust the sort order, set some filter and so on – and then you can visit any number of folders with those view settings applied. Another window can offer a different view of the same folder at the same time. This is the "browser" approach.
In the classic Finder, and in the OS/2 Workplace Shell, the view properties are associated with the folder. A folder can only be open in one window – the window is the folder. Other folders open in other windows. Any particular folder will always open its window in the same position and the same size (and in OS/2 have the same window background and various other properties). This makes it easier to find things (for reasonable amounts of files) because they stay where you put them and have the appearance you give them. This is the "spatial" approach.
If these very different approaches are combined they break down. If you try to use it as a browser, individual folders can suddenly override your view configuration. If you try to use it as a spatial file manager, folders will have their settings mangled any time you accidentally open two views of the same thing.
I also think the Finder interface is just fine because there are so many other ways to navigate around. From the command line of course, spotlight works great as well, and usually files and folders will also be better browsed from the application managing them (e.g.A text editor's file panel, or photo management software, vlc or itunes, etc.)
But, what iritates me is very poor handling of network shares. Those are critical to me, and it just won't work perfectly. On a previous job there was a windows share that could be browsed in command line but Finder wouldn't open the folder.
Or the credentials would get messed up every once in a while, with old values filled in when I logged in with the new credentials so many times already.
Or the Finder would go beachballing and stop responding when an nfs share is disconnected while navigating it in the Finder.
Or the list view refresh on a dropbox share while renaming a file, which can result in a partially typed file name getting commited automatically.
I hated windows, but I have to concede Explorer was rock solid and basically bug free in comparison.
Interestingly, all these things, screwed up credentials, weird refresh issues when editing network file names, hang-ups, all happen to me on Windows 7, too.
My biggest issue with my Mac was eventually working out that my Ethernet over Power bricks don't actually forward any mac networking info, so networking only works properly over wifi for me at home!
Despite no arguments or valid reasons in your post, Windows 3.11 that I used actually had a really good file manager, FileMan.exe which sadly disappeared after Windows 95 some time I think? Or was it 98?
It was really fast. As would be popular these days, it was WHITE everywhere and everything was FLAT.
That was the point finder is still not as good as the first good filemanger windows had let alone the Amigas.
I would cite regular frustrations with finder I wish I had been more assertive and suggested a move to windows server and stopping buying any macs at my curret place would make my job a lot easier and save money!
I think Explorer has gone downhill too though, so looks like we'll have to revert to Midnight Commander or Total Commander or some equivalent to get stuff done.
Fairly new OSX user and I kind of hate finder. My first gripe is of course the feeling that no one cares about these basic conveniences @apple.
Some of these are also found from other people's comment but I want to highlight that they also matter for me.
1. The fact that most file browser has editable auto-complete location field.
2. That it doesn't show the size of the selected files in status bar.
3. That when you try to fix it by opening the info menu on the selection it does the most idiotic thing possible (in my judgement) and open a separate info window for each file. As far as I know I have no way in finder to find the size of a selection (to guess the time for a copy operation or space needed).
4. That the most basic operation in a file manager getting inside a folder or getting back requires a two key action (cmd+enter, cmd+delete). Seriously?
5. That opening a file is not the default but renaming is. Again seriously?
6. No cut-paste.
7. No compact view. Without it browsing a large selection of files quickly and organise cut/paste don't really work for me.
8. Zero find ability without index. Am I suppose to index all my portables?
I have been using xtraFinder so I don't know if I remember all the problem correctly. But I was almost ready to rip my hair off when I first moved to OSX specially when it felt like most people were happy with finder. It feels to me that for apple finder is kind of a file viewer in a limited sense and you are suppose to only organise files through the respective programs iPhoto, iMovie etc. I will shy away from calling finder a 'File Manager'. The way I try to manage/organise my files, finder is a nightmare.
The gold standard for me right now is Nemo. Handles all the above case and as a bonus (for me)
Just start typing and the cursor moves through sub selection starting with that prefix. Very helpful with a quick find or selection.
Having moved to OSX at work last August, I tried to approach it as openly as possible, and to learn how to use it the way everyone else in my company uses it. Finder is terrible. Window management is terrible. Installing uBar helped a bit with Window management. I'm going to be working in OSX for a long time, but for file and window management, give me Windows 8.1 any day of the week. Or Windows 10, which is purring along nicely on my six year old Dell laptop.
XtraFinder solves a few of the problems for me like enter/backspace for navigation. But thanks for chipping in with some of the solutions.
7 - Essentially is the default view of Windows Explorer, files are listed from top to bottom and wrapping around to next column. This is the most compact way to browse a lot of files when you are not worried about their size/type and only interested in the names.
But even if some of the problems can be fixed by installing extra software or obscure shortcut the fact remains finder is simply painful to use as is to manage or work with files. It can't even find files unless someone provides an index and it's named finder.
Apple and OSX has a lot to love from build quality to universal copy-paste (a sore issue in linux). But I find in some failures/limitations apple is by far the worst player around.
I think the main criticism the Finder receives is due to it being very different from Windows Explorer (and the many midnight commander's heir) and worse than the classic Finder in a few but important ways.
But to me, it is still far better than any of the alternatives. I like the way it protects the user from doing potentially dangerous actions by hitting a single key and I'm not bothered by command-o, command-delete at all.
It finds files on unindexed disks for me, it just takes longer (as expected).
You might have a permission problem or using an unsupported format (like NTFS, through FUSE)
> But to me, it is still far better than any of the alternatives. I like the way it protects the user from doing potentially dangerous actions by hitting a single key and I'm not bothered by command-o, command-delete at all.
What danger is finder saving a user from that other file managers aren't?
Its great for you that you don't mind command-o for open and return for rename. But please don't ask me not to think that making the most used file browser operation to be multi-key shortcut isn't beyond insane. This is exactly the thing that I hate most about this ... 'you are holding it wrong' is the kind of feedback I get from most OSX users.
I'm honestly not sure whats the point of this. I don't want to fit many files just for the sake of it. I want it to be useful like this http://imgur.com/EqB1drO
What danger is finder saving a user from that other file managers aren't?
Accidentally deleting a file by pressing a single key
But please don't ask me not to think that making the most used file browser operation to be multi-key shortcut isn't beyond insane.
What do you think is more likely: that other people have different trade-offs and are perfectly happy with the way things are or that they are all beyond insane?
This is exactly the thing that I hate most about this ... 'you are holding it wrong' is the kind of feedback I get from most OSX users.
Some things can be objectively measured, others can't. The funny thing about the 'you are holding it wrong' comment is the absurdity of thinking that there is a right way to hold it. There isn't (or there shouldn't be).
for your issue 3 about not being able to check the size of multiple files:
In the right click menu (where you'd normally go to "get info"), hold option/alt. You'll see "get info" (cmd+i) change to "show inspector" (cmd+opt+i).
Couldn't agree more that it's dumb, but there's your multi-file properties window.
How about showing the actual filesystem? Instead of some restricted fictional view? For example, how the hell do you get to /tmp from the Finder?
What's with the stupid column per directory level? This is an extremely bad use of display space.
Haven't used Windows in a long time, and the equivalent in Linux is useless. (Or, more precisely, I don't use it.) But there are a number of irritations that have been there for a long, long time.
I only realized recently after switching to a new Mac just how much the default Finder sucks. If you switch that option on, switch off almost everything in the left hand pane except common folders and ~ / then it becomes bearable.
Other options are here, I wish I remembered all those I had changed because I still haven't gotten by Finder back to how I had it:
In Open and Save dialogue boxes, you can also start typing with a / to open up a "go to path" dialogue box that lets you enter the unix path (with tab completion).
To be fair the average user doesn't ever need to see hidden folders. Who cares what the defaults are, set your Mac up however you want, I'm sure everyone here is plenty capable.
Also, people will spend days customizing their Linux systems, but think OS X needs to be exactly the way they want it out of the box. Why is that? I agree the software quality has declined over the past few years, but many people here seem to be nitpicking.
"dude", yes, I know. Once found, nothing is hard to find.
But it's shitty UX. You can navigate to folders, except this arbitrary list of them that you can't control, in which case you go somewhere else to navigate to them.
And the 3 or 4 ways to view the folders, in (at least) one of them you can't create a new folder, but others you can. Brilliant.
I usually just use the Terminal, but when I need to open the current directory in the Finder I just type `open .`, one of the most useful (and unknown) shortcut of OSX.
Keeps getting hidden and you have to set a preference option via the command line to show it... only for it get hidden on the next OS update. Very frustrating!
Hiding in plain sight. There is so much crud, in so many menus, you tend to not read them after a while. I still have no fucking clue what Services are for, yet it's in the first menu of every application, and has been for years. (Probably something useful.)
Nobody is claiming a gold standard. With that said, I prefer windows explorer because you can simply type a path into the address bar (with tab completion if you need it) and navigate to a place on the filesystem. That's all. If finder added this one feature I'd be overjoyed. Instead, I find myself opening up menus to get to so many locations on the machine. For example, if you want to simply go to your home directory you have to use the 'GO' menu, which is just too much work for something so simple and common.
Shift+Command+G doesn't seem particularly strenuous. Admittedly, you need to work to learn the shortcut, but like all shortcuts, once you've got it it costs nothing.
[edit] it's Shift+Command+H for the home directory, which you were targeting specifically, Shift+Command+G lets you type in the path to any directory (with tab completion)
Yes, I use that a lot but something I miss from Windows Explorer is that i can actually copy the path. The widespread suggestion is that you can drag and drop the icon in the title but I prefer the other thing.
Iirc you used to be able to have the path visible at the bottom of the finder window but like so many things in OSX you have to set it to visible in the View or settings menu. I'm at work on a Winbox right now, anyone want to confirm this?
why do you need to use the go menu? command+shift+h takes you home. The keyboard shortcuts are listed right in the go menu you refer to. It's also a default in the Favorites pane on the left side of all Finder windows.
I agree Finder could use some work, but I find your criticisms odd. If anyone is fantastic at consistent, system-wide keyboard shortcuts, it's Apple.
I don't think Home is in the favorites pane anymore as of Yosemite (just created a new user to test ... it's not).
What's worse is that choosing something known to be under the home, like Desktop or Documents, yields a bare window with no way of seeing what's above it, in any of the view modes.
Eventually users will discover "Go" menu (yeah I guess Home is someplace I might want to "Go" - but I assumed that's where I already am and that it was just a view issue). Go menu seemss a pretty odd place to stash such an important location.
Not going to bite on the subject of requiring a three-finger solute just to go home ...
The "three finger salute" has a lot of utility, as cmnd+shift+a/d/f/h/o all take you to useful places and only Documents ended up with a second rate key (as D goes to desktop). cmnd-h is hide, and is hide in all apps so does have more utility than going home, so does deserve the shorter command IMO. I still strongly stand by that Apple's key commands are the best around, most consistent and better return on investment than any other desktop environment.
Seems a lot of people don't know about holding command then clicking on the folder in the title bar to view the hierarchy. I'm not sure what I think of that because I think once it's learned it's a pretty decent solution to the problem. Discovery is an issue though.
In the end I still say the Finder isn't perfect, but I find most complaints against it are from people that haven't learned it very thoroughly.
Yeah I agree that for power users who use OS X a lot this is not really an issue for long, but it is an annoyance and an unnecessary one at that.
For more typical users it's a bigger problem I think, because they never learn to organize their files. I've seen the results of this with users having a Documents folder containing just a huge list of files with no organization whatsoever - just grouping some related files to send to someone else was a big chore. Theoretically, tagging is superior to a folder hierarchy, but most people just don't "get it" with tagging and never will. Tagging is not even very good for power users, because they will often use software that doesn't see the tags (cross platform editors/IDEs).
I don't disagree that Apple has done a good and thorough job with their keyboard shortcuts. I never felt motivated to learn these myself though because I spend a lot of times on various other platforms, where that muscle memory would be actually detrimental. This is as opposed to e.g. IDE/emacs/vi muscle memory which caries over pretty well across platforms.
But I just think Apple has taken a big step backwards by hiding home in favor of "All My Files". If you have a couple of repos under your home, or anything else with a lot of files that get updated from time to time, then "All My Files!" becomes pretty useless. I think they've pushed too far towards the tablet mentality and that it doesn't suit desktops and laptops very well for the way they are actually used.
They even removed the little dropdown widget that used to show the folder hierarchy (looking for that thing is what wasted my time and annoyed me before finding home under "go" menu). And the status bar at the bottom that shows the used/free space on the machine is also gone (you can turn it back on under the view menu but why make busy people go fumbling around to find these basic things?). Ask most Mac users now how much space they have left on their drive, and watch them fumble around for several minutes...
3) Selecting a bunch of files and having it tell me how big the selection is so I know if they're going to fit on my 4gig USB stick BEFORE I try to copy them
4) Letting me sort thumbnails by newest modified. Finder's version of this seems to be completely broken IMO. It makes endless rows grouped
5) Letting me print photos with all kinds of options without any special software. 1up, 2up, 4up, etc.. (not that I need to print anymore :P)
6) Letting me use pretty much ALL features of windows explorer from any open/save dialog vs OSX where only some features are available.
Selecting a bunch of files and having it tell me how big the selection is
This one does have a solution: Select your multiple items, then use Command-Option-I instead of Command-I. If you're not careful to include Option in this chord, you'll be highly displeased with the results, especially with many items selected.
With the File menu open in the Finder, holding Option reveals that this feature is called "Show Inspector". And since it does follow an "inspector" metaphor, it's a persistent window that will remain in place and update its display as you continue changing your selection. Useful.
I'm a former Windows user and now an all Mac user and I find that Finder is sub-par compared to Explorer.
Even silly things like wanting to create a new folder and instinctively right clicking to look for a "New Folder" option. Nope, gotta go to the top menu and do it from there!
Agreed, those things suck. But as someone moving in the other direction (Finder -> Explorer), let me share a few of my Explorer grievances. Hopefully I'm missing a hidden option, but more cynically I expect that I'm in basically the same situation you are: stuck putting up with the persistent mediocrity in big-name graphical file navigators.
0) Good trackpad gestures.
1) Explorer can't sort alphabetically by name. WTH? No matter what I do, the closest I can get is "sort by folder/file status, THEN sort alphabetically by name." This really sucks for the common use cases of navigating the file tree by keyboard or unzipping into a crowded directory.
2) The retarded file open dialogs. I don't mean to say that all file open dialogs in Windows suck (although none of them allow drag-to-jump-to-file which is a minor PITA), I am referring specifically to a subset of file open dialogs which seem to be developmentally impaired by a few decades. They display the entire file hierarchy in a tree view that you have to scroll downwards vs the usual click-to-change-directory + breadcrumbs view. Ctrl+L to jump to a path doesn't work, they don't remember your location between invocations, they don't display common locations (desktop, docs, etc), jump-to-first-letter is broken, and they don't allow easy use of the down arrow to scroll because the next item is invariably hidden beneath the fold. These things are straight from the pits of UX hell, yet for some unknown reason they seem to constitute about ~20% of file selection dialogs on Windows. Ugh.
3) There are no consistent "jump to file" semantics (you know the "Open Enclosing Folder" contextual menu? Like that, but more universal). On OSX, this is the command key. Command click a document's icon in the header to jump to open an enclosing folder. Command click a search result or dock icon to jump to its location in the filesystem. Very handy. Very frustrating to find missing.
4) Hot corners to turn off the screen. Some screen/laptop manufacturers have a physical button, but some don't. Finder provides a built-in workaround. Explorer doesn't. In order to solve this issue I have to navigate the fake-download-button gauntlet and crapware-installer gauntlet twice before writing a line of code to emulate this feature with a keystroke. Yuck!
Funny thing about 1), when I switched to OSX i hated that it did not put folders on top. I actually have something installed to allow finder to do that, because I absolutely hate the way finder does the sort.
I haven't used Windows in a while so maybe these are fixed but the two biggest annoyances for me were the lack of spring-loaded folders and the lack of Details view being able to show the size of directories. #1 on your list was also really annoying. I'm also a big fan of disclosure triangles which Windows doesn't do.
Explorer does disclosure triangles (well, pluses in Windows's case) in the Folder tree side panel. It works better than incorporating it in the main view, IMO, but your mileage may vary.
True but I'm not sure how that would work as in the details view you're showing the files available in a particular directory. How would it sort by path? How does it work in Windows?
It does show resolutions, but it's terribly inconsistent. A little more than half the time it didn't show the resolutions for me, for files that definitely would have resolutions shown in Windows Explorer.
I came here to say this as well. There is nothing this software (+ plugins) cannot do.
want to open an avi as a series of frames and extract individual images? Want to open MSIs and extract individual files from the installer? ISOs? Floppy images? DEB files?
Want to copy files from a website in explorer view? An ssh server? Dropbox/GDrive/Onedrive? Ext2/3/4, ReiserFS, HFS/HFS+ partitions?
There are also integrated viewers for everything from DBF files to SWF files, and the ability to add almost any file metadata as a sortable column in the file view. Having regex everywhere is also killer.
I can't overstate how much more productive I am with this tool. I wish the native file managers were anywhere near this good so I could have a high-quality experience on any given machine without having to install additional software.
I use http://doublecmd.sourceforge.net/ on linux, which is pretty-much a clone of total commander. I still like total commander better.
As for open source - this one is, but it's written in delphi (pascal?) which makes it hard to contribute. Then again, it works well, so not sure what to contribute anyway.
Looks like truly handy software. but my god that website. I mean, if you have have a counter that old, I wouldn't touch it either, but the rest... oiy. I want keybindings for browsing through screenshots, damnit!
I agree. The product itself is not updated as regularly as I would like, yet it's still way ahead in many areas - multi-rename tool, search, FTP client, plugins, customizability to name a few.
Since nobody else mentioned it: Directory Opus. Looks big and clunky at first look but it's actually very fast and 100% customizable. You could strip it down to a dual list view and operate it purely by keyboard shortcuts. Buttons are defined in a copy pasteable xml format, are scriptable, come in various forms and let you bind events for left/right/middle click. The only caveat is: windows only. I would kill for a Linux version.
My brother! Seriously though, Directory Opus is a magnificent tool. Its interface could use a lot of work, but its extensibility isn't matched by anything in the Linux world. I know, I've looked and looked. I couldn't even find a decent open source project I could dive into with the goal of making it as flexible as DOpus. I emailed the DOpus guys and they definitely won't create a Linux port. And as I'm sure you already know, it doesn't play well with Wine. If I were creating a comparable application for Linux I'd make it extensible via Python rather than the custom scripting language they use, and I'd take a good long look at things like Sublime Text for UI cues (how to present a massively customizable and extensible system and maintain a very 'clean' interface). It would be a big project, but if I had the time I would gladly sink those hours into such a thing if only so I could use it at the end...
Path finder on OSX comes close. DO on the Amiga circa 1992 is still superior with the commands down the middle, kinda like Midnight Commander but better.
I'm also curious - what about Windows Explorer makes it a painful experience? I learned how to use computers using DOS/Windows and it's what my idea of "correct" is. I'm curious about the other perspective.
Yeah, but in Windows it's usually supported officially (and documented) and you know they won't completely pull the rug out from under you on the next release. Apple on the other hand will break the API without even telling anyone. How could you depend on such a company?
The worst thing of new versions of WinExplorer in my opinion is that you can't position files at the location you want (with the exception of the desktop). I have some folders in my Mac that I organize strictly by location, and that is impossible to do in recent versions of Windows.
For me? Lack of tabs and lack of right-click open-in-terminal. I don't use Windows much anymore, but I remember those, so I guess they're the worst ones. But nevermind the file manager, it's the Windows terminal that really sucks.
I'm sure it's not the gold standard, but the best file manager I've ever used is Windows Explorer from the XP era, with the blue left pane replaced with the hierarchical filesystem view.
1) somewhere to copy the file path without opening a "get info" dialog
2) tree-based view instead of the HORRIBLE thin columns that never auto-size to display filenames in a way you can view
3) ability to open command line from whatever folder you're in
I could go on and on - these are all trivial to implement and they never ever happen. number 2 is one of the most irritating of all.
When I ctrl-click (two-finger tap on a trackpad) on a file in Finder, I get a popup menu with several options, one of which is "copy". If I do this and paste in to a terminal window, I get the full pathname.
Alternatively, if I hilite the file in Finder, and press standard command-C (copy), then again the full pathname is pasted into the terminal window.
I used to be a Path Finder guy but since I moved almost all my file management to the terminal I haven't even installed Path Finder since I switched to a Retina MacBook Pro in late 2013. But I could definitely agree as a power- or semi poweruser Path Finder seems much more sensible but to be honest my mother understands Finder so much better than Path Finder and The Explorer on Windows. For me OS X probably peaked around Snow Leopard but there's probably a lot of novice users that like the new features and iOS-users that switched to OS X probably likes the similarities in App Store, Launchpad, etc. Sadly it feels that Apple is giving us powerusers less and less love.
I agree in general, but I think there are simple things that even non power users should have. The column interface is one that could drive anyone crazy, especially with the unintelligent defaults for sizing the windows and columns. It's damn near impossible to get around a filesystem with finder as is.
It seems as though apple is pushing non power users away from the finder altogether via apps that hide any notion of a filesystem from the user. Just try copying a movie project file from Final Cut - it's maddening. If they're going to continue down this road, then why not provide some additional features in finder for people who could use them (like breadcrumbs and the ability to type a file path like in windows, any IDE, etc).
I know, but why should this have to be a tack-on. These are things that can drive anyone crazy and have for the last six versions of OS X. They're willing to completely overhaul interfaces elsewhere (iTunes, iOS), why not add some unambiguously useful features here?
I'm not saying it's the gold standard, but it's serviceable enough: at the very least it has these two features I terribly miss in Finder:
- Having a foldable tree structure of the system on the left, and the list of the current directory on the right
- Having the full path of the current directory on the top (and being able to click on any subdirectory of the path, or being able to select the full path).
In Finder you have the choice of different views, none of which has the same practical use in my opinion. In any of those I'm always missing something.
You won't get any argument from me about the command line, though.
I thought the excellent standard of GUI file management was XP's Explorer - since then it has gone downhill with:
1. additional shortcut areas (instead of just a file tree; now we've got Favourites and Libraries)
2. big display areas (that irritating bar that sits above the status bar, repeating all the data found in the status bar)
3. a keyboard navigable top-of-list bar in list view (which stops you being able to tab between tree view, address bar and main pane)
4. a file tree that doesn't by default update the main pane on the right so you can quickly have no idea where the main pane actually "is" on the hard disk, or which part of your hard disk it is displaying because the treeview on the left can have an entirely different directory highlighted
5. inconsistent placement of menubar and toolbar / jigsaw-puzzle-designed ribbon bar (does the menu bar go ABOVE the toolbar or below? What does Windows' guidelines say? Load a few Windows apps [even under Windows 10] and spot the difference: Control Panel, Explorer, Internet Explorer, MMC, Notepad, MSPaint - none of them look the same; in fact under Windows 10 see how many different folder icons you can see: about 10 - is it flat, at a jaunty angle, at the opposite jaunty angle, bright or dark yellow: see https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7Ia9kxBln51WTF0ekVWWjZCVnc for all the inconsistent icons and window layouts, non-themable notebook pages, with the View and Search pages in that notebook being white but the general page having an older window toolkit panel on it which ignore theming)
6. an additional bar to organize/uninstall and other things that are part of system management NOT file management, with this bar being on its own bar instead of the toolbar.
In short, it's a befuddled mess.
Finder's design means you have to use the mouse for most things. Using the keyboard, try moving a file from one place to another if you're in the List view: if you've got a directory expanded and are under a child node (with that child node highlighted), where does the file get pasted?
It forces you to open loads of new windows to move files. Admittedly this is easy if you're new to computers but it's frustratingly slow compared to the Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V.
I used to love the physical cabinet I had in the fifties. The sound of it opening, the actual rustle of the paper under your fingers - these _were_ your files, with real letters written on real paper, not some representation of them in a window on a screen. They don't make finders like that any more....
Windows Explorer is, by no means, perfect, but it is miles ahead from finder. I use both regularly and find myself cussing at Apple far more than at Microsoft. Applications too. Get rid of "Save As". Now you have a doubly useless menu on top if each monitor instead of on the app window, where it belongs. They are trying to stick to an interface that worked fine on a single screen 9 in mac in the dark ages. Well, it sucks. Don't believe what I say, go run a Mac with three 30 inch monitors and have a dozen apps open. Do the same on a PC. Even if you go back to Windows XP it is FAR more usable. No contest. All if our machines have 2 to 3 large monitors so these grievances are a source of daily frustration and productivity hits in the real world.
I am mostly on Ubuntu and only use a Mac occasionally, was really surprised that there is no quick way to copy the current folder path in Finder ( Something like Ctrl + L in Ubuntu ). Agreed its a pretty minor issue but still an annoyance.
I consider the gold standard of file browsers to be the one the pro-NeXT+Cocoa/anti-Carbon camp swore on Jesus' grave that would vastly exceed and suck less than the Carbon one once Apple finally rewrote it entirely in Cocoa. Well that happened and yet there's been essentially no change. It still hangs and spins a beachball when a network is disconnected, it's still gets confused what icons to use, and duplicate app icons in contextual launch menus, on and on, it's like - yeah it's not a Cocoa vs Carbon thing, can we admit that now?
What bothers me most is the fact that tabs aren't as useful as they should be - I want folders to always open in tabs, resulting in just ONE finder window unless I explicitly say otherwise. Instead whenever I trigger an action that shows something in finder I'm presented with a new window. In my typical use case I'll end up with several finder windows unless I manually merge them.
Finder tabs should behave like browser tabs, where opening in a new tab is the default action unless the user really wants a new window. Total Finder, a third party app, did this better.
I don't know about perfection, but I know this; Explorer is, imo, more usable. Seriously. I can Windows+D, start typing, tab to autocomplete, and be in the folder I want in a couple of seconds. I can set focus in the window and start typing to quickly get to the file/directory I want, press enter, repeat. In finder I can type to filter... but I have to press the arrow button to move the next... column (column? WTF?).
I can't even configure Finder to show the damn full path at the top at all times.
> Curious - what do Finder complainers consider the gold standard of file browsers that Finder should aspire to be?
I'm a big fan of the approach Directory Opus used on the Amiga. On Linux I'm pretty much a full time midnight commander user, on OSX I use forklift. The latter's not as full featured as DOpus but it gets the basics right.
Personally, I use mc since I grew up with Windows and mc is a great little curses Commander clone.
Path Finder is a good Finder alternative but despite its nifty use case features I can't justify a license for it. Especially when i'm already using mc or CLI-fu.
I haven't had used any file explorer that perfectly fits my usage pattern because usually it does not matter that much, but Finder is plainly horrible. I cannot open /tmp without using the terminal, there is no "cut" command (I know you can copy then press Alt for "Move to here", but that is non-intuitive and illogical) and the "enter" command renames rather than opens (which one is the more common operation?). These are just on the top of my head.
Basically, Finder never lets me do my work without thinking. I am always tripped one way or another, so usually I just use the terminal instead.
I wish I was able to right click a folder and get an option "open terminal here" and then terminal opens and directory changes to the current selected folder. Is this available currently that I'm not aware of ?
Else, make it easy to copy the path.... Just like the windows explorer does.
your comment highlights that we all perceive "risk" now to upgrading. I used to not worry about this, but it seems that new OS X releases are broken enough to warrant not upgrading
You can drag the file or folder (from the title bar or file list) icon icon into a terminal window and the path of that file/folder will be written to the command line. Not quite the same, but very useful (and a feature I often miss in Windows).
edit: I was mistaken about dragging files/folders into the Windows CLI, I was thinking about something else.
I'm a DOS guy not even PowerShell and I usually drag the folders icons to the CLI to browse directly to the location and complete the operation from the terminal ...
What could your problem with Windows Explorer possibly be? It is generally considered to be the gold standard as far as I know.
It's far better more robust than Finder, it's got a much more powerful plugin environment and the keyboard acceleration actually makes sense, unlike Finder.
Personally I hate it, I use NexusFile whenever I can. It may just be personal preference but I think Explorer is hard to use, doesn't preview anything like Finder does (and the Enlightenment File Browser also does on Linux). I think a lot of my dislike actually stems from the Windows file system, I just don't like the way in which files are organised (in comparison ti unix-like systems).
Adds a pane in Windows Explorer that shows a preview of the file. I believe it was on by default back in the XP days, but since then it's just defaulted off.
EDIT: Huh. I knew it was there, but I never turned it on. It...actually looks pretty awesome. You can read an entire PDF in the preview pane.
I don't have access to a Macbook right now, can you elaborate how that works? Do you basically select a file, press space, and a preview comes up over the screen or something?
FWIW the Windows Explorer preview is much improved compared to what it used to be - it's not a little box, it's the entire right side of the Windows Explorer window. There's ample space to actually read a PDF, you have pagination controls, you can read spreadsheets, etc. I wasn't sure it even still existed until this thread, so thanks for that. :)
Finder lets you highlight a file then by pressing space it will show images in 100% size, play movies of certain file types, show PDFs in 100% size and let you scroll through them. It basically pops up a window much like a jQuery lightbox plugin overlay. In columns view you can also see something similar to the windows explorer preview.
>what do Finder complainers consider the gold standard of file browsers that Finder should aspire to be?
When bash is more useful than finder, there's probably an issue.
Case in point: not being able to open a specific path (unless I bookmark it)
Case in point: when I open my home directory in finder, I don't necessarily want the directory tree that was last expanded to still be expanded. For directories with a large item count, this can take a _long time_, even on a retina imac.
Renaming a file is always an exercise in "did I click it in just the right way? Oh, crap, no, don't launch it to edit it."
Hopefully most of us already know these tips and tricks, but for a new user Shift + Command + G is something that they will probably never discover. Even click and enter to rename is excessively complicated compared to adding a rename option to the context menu like Windows.
⇧ ⌘ G is right under the [Go] menu item in the Finder. Never discover ... if they don't poke around in the finder menu for 5 minutes. One needs to learn their tools or find a better tool. Suffering in a fog of dis-edumacatedness is a fools <noun verbular>.
Most computer users don't understand or give a damn about managing their file system. It seems like many HN users do, yet clicking on the "go" menu to see options and keyboard shortcuts available when they want to go to a folder is too confusing for them.
Apple's slowly becoming a fashion company. I'm being only slightly facetious.
I'm not an Apple hater despite saying that. If anything, I usually prefer Apple products over the competitors, and I've used iMacs or Macbooks for years now. But, between the $17k gold Apple Watch and the recent updates to the Macbook Air and iPad lines, it seems clear to me where Tim Cook is taking the company. And I don't think Apple as a fashion company is even a bad thing, it's just a transformation that some will like and others will resent.
Ditto, pretty much. Though I think it's not so much "fashion," with all of it's pure aesthetic implications, as I think it is an emphasis on visual polish, visceral satisfaction, vertical integration, and novelty - all at the expense of many things "power user" oriented. It's a path to expansion, buy-in, and pundit-fodder, and apparently a tremendous market cap. I've known for about 5 years that I have some variety of Linux in my future, it's just a matter of time. Though I will likely always have need for Adobe products professionally.
I agree - I'd love to see them re-think Finder. I just don't grok Finder... I do most of my work in the terminal and occasionally midnight commander or nerdtree inside vim. I tried free ones like muCommander but don't like the overhead of starting a java app... Similarly I don't want the overhead of running an X server so I can use an X based file manager. And I don't want to buy some 3rd party File Manager. We should get a great File Manager OOTB with OS X. I don't see why Apple can't implement a modern File Manager... At least give us something comparable to Windows Explorer... or take the time to make a video to convince us Finder is actually good for those who may not grok it.
And a swappable battery would be wonderful but I can live without it.
I think the problem is that file management does not fit Apple's vision for the future. It is simply too abstract a task with too many use cases to really design something simple and elegant in the spirit of how Apple normally approaches problems. There are obviously a million ways to make the Finder better than what it is, but what Apple really wants to do is kill it entirely. Of course they're nowhere near being able to kill it, so instead they hold it at arm's length as a necessary evil.
In the meantime, if, like me, you are stuck on OS X because it's the best GUI for a *nix now and in the foreseeable future, I suggest buying PathFinder (http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/) to bridge the gap. It's certainly a much better tool than Finder or Windows Explorer.
I think you are probably the most correct of all the posts here. Apple wants a system where you can't access the filesystem period, at least not by default. Seeing that there is a filesystem underneath the system is, to their eye, as appealing as those devices popular in the 90s with transparent shells that let you see the electronics. Their ideal future is basically the iPhone. They even said as much in their unveiling of the new Macbook. They said the phone/tablet will be your primary computing device and a laptop or desktop will just be an accessory (eventually literally, as mobile chips get more powerful and Intel continues to nerf desktop offerings).
In my experience, trying to replace core OS apps with 3rd-party replacements just never quite works 100% in all situations. My preference is more toward apps that augment/improve the core OS apps. Xtrafinder is of this type, adding additional functionality to Finder, rather than being a wholly separate app like TotalFinder.
Have used TotalFinder for a couple of years, just tried XtraFinder. Found that the side-by-side view and shortcuts for sliding in the pinnable Finder just didn't work, even after a couple of uninstall/reboot/install/reboot cycles. Has some nice features and seems like it should cover what I want from TotalFinder, but just isn't there yet.
I also don't understand your sentiment for preferring it over TotalFinder... they both feel and act like augmentations. I got the impression that XtraFinder would work alongside the normal finder, but that's not the case.
I find the complete opposite. Xtrafinder side-by-side view and everything else advertised by xtrafinder does seem to work great for me. Totalfinder might still be better as I have not tried it yet. They both look like fine augmentations of finder in general. What else are you looking for?
Right in so many points:
"Now, it's all about the style": that's right, it's an accessory, it's the long awaited iPad pro + keyboard, a glorified browser for your social network, check photos and look chick and trending.
Why are we here? People have decided with their pockets, Apple is now the biggest company in the history of humanity.
Don't get me wrong, Apple has done a lot of stuff right, the amount of design and engineering behind the original iPhone it's incredible, and yes maybe a lot of the technology already existed but they polished the combined products until they got something that worked in such a nice fashion; that's the "magic" behind their products but from there is downhill.
iPad: bigger iphone.
iPad mini: mini- bigger iphone.
MacBook Air: let's trade some some performance and take away the capability of upgrade the machine in a pursuit of a more thinner machine.
MacBook: let's take the least powerful CPU from Intel (the reason behind the no-fan design"), cripple the typing experience, take away all upgrade-ability, cripple the semantics of touch from the track pad, take away all the ports.... WTF.. charge for the hub... and make it more expensive.....
But I think the problem is not Apple but the people buying their products and how they use them. It's a super glorified version of "I belong to the better group" psychology.
now that I type all this... it could make some sense to start looking all this not as a computer... or apple as a computer and software company but a boutique selling accessories.
I would love to tell you that thinkpads still make sense but the "no leds" and "screw keyboard" may prove me wrong.
Who needs to upgrade to the next device? More likely, you'll upgrade every N devices, where N depends on your personal needs.
This, incidentally, is almost certainly the purchasing behavior of the vast majority of computer owners. RAM and disk upgrades (particularly on laptops) are performed by a fairly tiny minority of consumers. Yet it seems disproportionately cited when shopping, likely due to an illusion of control or the laughable (in computing terms) myth of "future-proofing".
I'm speaking from experience. I'd really like to be able to add more RAM to my MacBook Air. 4GB isn't working out as well as I had hoped. I knew about the RAM being soldered to the MB when I bought it, but I figured I'd be financially able to upgrade by the time the amount of RAM it had became a problem. Unfortunately, I'm not able to do that. I cannot afford to upgrade.
Also, I do upgrade every N devices. I'm not someone that buys the new model everytime they release one. I guess I should have phrased it "because not everyone can afford to upgrade to a new device".
Doubling the RAM, replacing the disk, or buying new batteries are all much cheaper than acquiring a new laptop. Not everybody can treat a US$1299 device as disposable.
Besides, when I pay a premium price for a product I expect it to be useful for more than a couple of years.
From what I can see apple laptops have a longer working life than other higher end laptops, there must be a reason 2010 macbook airs are still selling on ebay for $400+.
Sure they do. My mother is still using my MacBook white 2008, which I upgraded from 1GB to 4GB RAM and replaced the battery. I also expect to get at least two more years from my MacBook Pro 2012 after upgrading my disk to a SSD and the RAM to 16GB.
I was specifically replying to this comment:
> Why is hardware upgradeability so important? What's the harm in just upgrading to the next device?
Not everybody has the money to buy the next device, so upgrading is a great option to get a couple more years of work from a little old but otherwise solid laptop.
Apple laptops have their share of woes (see the video issues on earlier Macbook Pros).
But, whatever the reason, Apple hardware tend to hold on to its value longer, without doubt.
I recently sold my 2010 13' Macbook Air, dented and with a cracked screen a for 300$ on ebay (and I expected more based on similar auctions), about 1/4 the price of a new model for a broken 4.5 years old model.
Technically you could just upgrade every year and recoup at least 60%-70% of the original price.
WiFi... every upgrade I've done since Lion has caused me pain. Upgrade, and WiFi stops working reliably. Last time was on a virtually new MacBook Pro, upgrading to Mavericks, and it took me two weeks to get it working again.
So I'm kind of wary of the 'wireless everything', which would be great if the wireless was working solidly in the first place.
I believe there is distinction between Apple as a hardware company and Apple as a software company. First part works extremely well while latter one - not so much. I would not mix them together.
Yup. The MacBook Pro I use today is likely to be my last Apple machine - I've been using their kit for decades - but they've stopped being about software, or hardware.
They're all about brand. This was ok when they had technically excellent products to talk about, but their products are today mediocre, arrogant, and speak of a new, stupider, wealthier target audience.
Random story from last week, and my experience with Apple software. I don't use Apple products too often, but I was downloading some apps for a family members ipod touch 4g (latest model being 5g). The 4g only supports up to iOS 6, and nearly every app I tried downloading on the device gave an error saying it required iOS 7 and it couldn't be installed.
I thought that was strange, I used most of these apps before on older devices, why does everything no longer work on a device that's relatively new? According to those error messages the device is basically useful, it can't install apps any more, which is the heart of the ipod touch.
I searched around online and there's an official solution. I had to install itunes on a computer and login to the same account as the Apple account on the device. Then I had to download the incorrect iOS 7 version of the free app I wanted. That would assign it as a purchase to the Apple account. Then I could delete that download. Then, I had to open up the Apple store on the device like I was doing previously, find the free app on there again, and click download. After doing all that, it wouldn't give an error saying the device wasn't supported, but now ask if I wanted to install the last compatible version.
My mind was blown. How could such popular software provide such an awful user experience? The ipod touch said the app isn't supported for the device, but then I 'buy' the free app on itunes, and magically it is supported and I can download a compatible release.
The 4G was launched in 2010. It s not what I'd call 'relatively new'.
The reason for the block on just automatically downloading an old version is that it is not the version advertised on the App Store. Advertising a product with features you won't actually get is generally frowned on. The reason the hack works is that it tricks the App Store into thinking you must have 'bought' an earlier version of the software, so supplying a previous version is fine.
Bear in mind governments take advertising accuracy very seriously. You casualy talk about free apps, but there's no such thing on the App Store now because the EU doesn't consider apps provided at no initial cost, but which might be add supported or have in app purchases as being free.
The 4g ipod touch was discontinued May 30, 2013. So, they've been selling it to customers as a new product on store shelves until less than two years go.
I think the ideal scenario would be to show the App Store description and screenshots from the last available version. This way, it would be the version last advertised on the App Store.
Because they are trying to nudge you into upgrading. Lets face it, the fact that Apple ruthlessly kills hardware after 3-4 years is both a benefit to Apple (sells more hardware) and developers (don't have to support old versions of the OS). Though, as a consumer sometimes it makes it difficult to know if you're buying a dud (iPod Touch 4th gen) vs something that'll have a long happy life (iPad 2nd Gen)
It's awful for consumers, though. And for developers, it's not great, either, because you end up having to support a customer on an old version of OS X, for example, which means keeping a suitably old environment around just so you can keep your builds compatible, or jump through all kinds of hoops.
I don't feel like this is a good thing to encourage in an industry that already has more than enough churn as it is.
I've never run into that issue, ~90% of our users are on iOS8 or above. With iOS you can safely support the current version and last version while only pissing off 2-3% of the customers which is exceptional compared to most platforms. I also do Android development, Don't even get me started on what a mess that is, complete opposite..
holly hell ! How can this be an official solution ?
Ok, Android devices upgrade cycle could use improvements, but as far as back compatibility goes, it gets it right. You can publish different versions of your app, so even if you drop an old OS version with 1% of marketshare, you can still let users download the last version of the app for their OS.
From an user point of view, it is transparent, you click install and get the last compatible version, period.
Eh, well, the alternative is perhaps that you buy a "new" app, install it on your device, and find that it's never updated anymore. Their current workflow allows you to get the last available version of an app you already own, which is what you want. You don't probably want to newly buy an app to find that the last version released that actually works on your device is years old.
What year did this happen? Mashable reported in 2013 Sept that Apple implemented "legacy app" downloads [0]. Did it lose that functionality? (Not an iOS user, so a genuine question)
That's a very good point - Apple's desktop software is definitely not a highlight in the last few years.
What's not clear is: (i) how much it matters - the core desktop experience is very solid, and between web browsers and MS Office it's not clear how much the iLife(?) apps actually get run.
And (ii) whether it's a symptom of some deeper malaise - Apple still seems to be killing it in other areas so perhaps it's just a weak or resource-starved group within the company.
Even $100B is not a reason to dump money mindlessly. I generally don't trust moves that seem purely driven by money (e.g. facebook's VR hiring spree), and which don't have a clear goal in mind, and a strategy along the way. Given Apple's high aspirations, they probably don't know what to do with the desktop. Ive's expectations seem way beyond what native apps can fulfill ... perhaps the Windows way was the right approach after all, and the complexity of "other" operating systems was just right for the high complexity of daily tasks after all ... and maybe the Apple way of thinking is more apt for mobile use where the computer interface doesn't have the user's full attention.
Personally, in my last years of using OS X, all I had open was the PDF reader app, a browser and a terminal. I don't know if that was my personal interpretation of the Cloud age, but suddenly I was completely OS agnostic. Incidentally, this led me away from buying Macs, as the operating system didn't do anything for me anymore. I don't know about the desktop experience. Either it seems to be "power user web crawling", for which the cloud is the best fit, or it's about spending the whole day in a random Pro App with its very own user experience.
I'm looking forward for their cars and watches, but I don't care much about their desktop computers. It seems they don't, either.
While I agree with regards to iLife, the software overall just seems to have gone down in quality. Since upgrading to Yosemite I've had a ton of issues with Apple Mail (which is a staple for me) and wifi in general. Having to toggle your wifi on & off throughout the day gets pretty old pretty fast.
Still a tough sell to go outside apple simply due to the hardware quality & resale value, but at least we have some contenders today where a few years back there were none.
I have constant crashes/freezes when waking up on Yosemite, and something about having iCloud disabled makes every iLife application show unrelated dialogs (usually "This will overwrite the existing file on iCloud" warnings, despite the file not existing at all, nor having iCloud), the EULA box randomly shows up in System Preferences and gets stuck in an infinite loop of showing me the terms even when I press cancel, yada yada. I agree with the word "shoddy". I can work around all this, but it's like nobody bothered to test it. I'm part of the Appleseed program and send in every bug I find, but apparently they're all minor enough to not be patched. Frustrating.
I agree. The Mail client is constantly beach ballin and freezes at times. The issue is resolved by deleting the account and recreating it again. Surely not as intended. Especially for an app that virtually everyone on a Mac uses on a daily basis. I keep sending my crash reports but Mail client software updates seems to never come...
Also, another really annoying bug is when screensaver goes on and locks the screen. Sometimes, if I try and wake it up to fast it will freeze with a black screen for 60-120 seconds before I can unlock it again.
Yup. The iconic lack of care on software side can be seen since forever when ejecting an usb. What used to become an eject icon with an eject label it's an eject icon with a trash label
That is just the smallest of thing, but is so easy to spot and fix and really his square against the level of detail the hardware side gets.
With Apple I think the problem most comes from their aspiration for a mobile-only world. But they might just be suffering the same problem many (if not most) software packages face: The software gets near perfection.... but the organization does not have the capability to process this. They've got a team of developers, and developing on that particular piece of software is what they DO. There are managers of that team, and their career depends much more on keeping their team busy and working on some new thing far more than it relies upon the quality of the software itself. It doesn't look very good if your career seems to 'plateau' and your teams activity is just bugfixes and polishing a stable, usable product. The guy on another team who 'took risks' and radically redesigned the interface or jammed in a few new features that changed the target audience of their application will fare far better, even if their existing target audience has abandoned the application in droves (though they probably won't, as lockin is real).
I've never heard of a company which had an endgame - what to do when the software is DONE. I have certainly suffered through many different applications which reached an apex of near-perfection and simply changed direction and went rapidly downhill though.
Yesterday was the first time this year I was able to open pages from youtube on the first try instead of over a 20 - 40 minute process of refreshing, resetting wifi, resetting router etc trying to get complete page loads with playing video. I had entire days where Skype text messages was the only internet access I had. Apple's forums have ten thousands of posts on people's wifi being ruined like this for this entire year and counting.
Without a doubt, some people have issues, but I don't think you can gage the overall reliability of a product based solely on a support forum. No one is going there just to post that their system is running properly.
If it is some percent unreliable the other percent doesn't change that. It's not just OS X, it's also iOS, Maps, iCloud etc, some of this stuff was famously bad. There's been a lot of discussion about this recently with many notable Apple enthusiasts chiming in - https://www.google.com/search?q=apple+software+quality.
Such beautiful machines to run iTerm2 and Vim. I almost feel guilty for having the latest 15 MBP Retina and 80% of my time is spent in a terminal coding.
In case anyone's thinking about buying a Mac and was put off by this comment:
I find OS X Yosemite to be fantastic. It works well, it's very stable. I run it on four different macs of different ages. The UX has definitely improved as a result of the redesign.
I'm not sure about the aforementioned apps. Keynote is fantastic, but I don't use those listed very much. iPhoto has always been a basic photo management tool; I use Lightroom.
There are times when a Linux box is preferable. I just run Linux in VirtualBox in those situations.
Agree about bugginess of Software. It seems that Apple shifted focus from overall flawlessness and coherence of UX to craftsmanship and advanced technological processes in hardware. And since we started to see all those weird "Connect phone to iTunes to receive push notifications" popups, etc. If we will have products, whose surface was polished by zirconium particles but that are always buggy and unreliable, it will be not the Apple we all loved. Not "advanced features" but "lack of annoyances and irritation" is what made Apple what it is now, in my opinion.
My guess is that somewhere deep in the basement they have an OS that unites iOS and OS X into a single system that will run on future devices. That OS will run both OS X apps in legacy mode and iOS apps. Apple is funding teams for the iOS versions of the apps because that is where they see the future.
Well they have an OS already which unites them, the API layer above is the heterogeneous bit, which they might unify with something like UXKit. Long term it would make sense, and as you say it would explain the move towards mobile paradigms on desktop and the relative neglect of the desktop software. Of course the other explanation is that there is just so much more money to be made in consumer electronics than in computers - that won't change.
I expect Apple under Cook to be far more predictable in this way and take the steps to maximise revenue that Jobs might have shunned in favour of something revolutionary and unproven.
At the end of the presentation, I was half expecting Tim Cook to pop the screen off the MacBook and say, "And by the way, we united iOS and OSX, so the MacBook can aslo be a fully-functional iPad."
The one area where apple really exels though, in both hardware and software is the touchpad. I cannot stand using the touchpad on any windows laptop I used, the touchpad is 99% the reason I still use a mac/osx.
Near perfect gestures integration, and the touchpad behaves very consistently and reliably system wide (osx has system wide smooth/responsive scrolling for example), and the touchpad hardware itself is just very nice and pleasant to use.
Windows touchpads are usually all over the place in my experience, mostly due to drivers/windows' poor touchpad support. super basic stuff like 2 finger scrolling is often very janky and unreliable on the windows laptops I've used. I had actually ended up switching from windows to linux on my previous laptops because the touchpad even worked better under ubuntu than it did under windows.
I love windows on my desktop PC, but I cannot stand on using windows on a laptop
If one has never used computers like my Lenovo Ideapad y510p ore previously my Asus laptop and had to wrestle with the Synaptic/eLan drivers but rather only ever used a Macbook their entire lives, they would not realize how terribly bad touchpads can be.
Yosemite is moderately buggy, and iOS 8 is buggy as shit. Meanwhile, I've been using Outlook 15 and now the Office 2016 Preview, and I have to say I'm really impressed. Thanks to Microsoft, and despite Apple, I'm really loving my Mac right now.
I gave up on my Windows Phone Nokia because it was buggy as hell, but they definitely have Apple beat in terms of design. The Metro UI is gorgeous and more usable than anything Google or Apple have put out
It's because the last few versions of OS X and Apple's applications have seen bigger changes than previous versions. And a lot of the more hardcore Apple fans tend to dislike change. A lot of Apple's more long-term fans hated OS X when it first came out, too.
I'm not trying to bash Apple fans when I say this - I'm an OS X user too, and admittedly I only finally moved on from Snow Leopard last year (I actually like a lot of the changes, and most of the ones I don't like are ones that are easy to ignore). This phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to Apple fans either - just look at how many people still refuse to upgrade to Windows 8.
6 of 1, half a dozen of the other? I agree there are things about the new software that are not as good as the old. OTH, it's really hard to maintain feature-parity on launching a new rewrite. I think a lot of this stuff will eventually get there. For the most part I'm liking the new Photos app.
Also, OS X has only been getting better IMO. They just need to do a release cycle where they work on polish, which I believe they intend to do.
I have been using Ubuntu 14.04 since it came out. Anyone who calls Yosemite buggy should try running Ubuntu as their primary system and see what buggy really looks like. YMMV, of course.
Yeah, I think Unity is the most productive desktop environment in existence and I especially like how good it is at handling huge amounts of windows but I manually installed the newest nvidia drivers and now it can't be started. KDE and GNOME Shell work just fine. Installing drivers is not a fringe use case. GNOME Shell is close in usability, except for its clumsy multi-monitor support. Also any Ubuntu update can break your computer. Happened to me. It actually makes me want to get a Mac.
Linux in general has problems with graphics, Wi-Fi and printers. I know this is not Linux's fault, but that doesn't fix it.
If a company came out and made a dedicated Linux distro for its own brand of computers a la Apple, took care of the video and WiFi drivers while keeping them up to date and also sold me a printer I would be all over it.
I guess the closest thing to a problem-free Linux experience would be the Dell developer edition laptops or maybe the Thinkpads, as Lenovo usually Ubuntu certifies them.
No, they sell it with Ubuntu. It works when you get it, but Canonical doesn't test new updates on System76 machines. Which means it will break. Because that's how much Ubuntu regresses.
I want the hardware and the software manufacturer to be the same company. I think that's the only way an open source OS could get sufficient funds and a sufficiently narrow group of hardware to support.
Gonna have to agree with you, I used desktop linux for years (even on one system76 laptop that had ubuntu pre-installed), and it felt like I was spending more time reporting bugs, working around bugs, and distro-hopping than actually using my computer. OSX has its issues but I've been a lot happier with it.
I'll also add to this what might still be the biggest burden of Macos: its file-system. It's amazing that they can get away still providing this horror in 2015!
Apple planned to replace its very old HFS(+) filesystem with ZFS, there were even dev beta releases and demonstration to the media. But OSX 10.5(?) didn't ship with ZFS. So OSX is stuck with an decades old filesystem almost as basic and bad as FAT32, where Windows has NTFS (and ReFS, ExFAT), Linux has Btrfs/XFS/extfs4 and *BSD/Solaris has ZFS.
But it's a big difference, if it's an optional driver or the default one. Currently, on OSX and iOS most users are simply using the default installation and are stuck with HDF+.
One can install optional filesystems on every OS. Like NTFS on Linux and OSX. ZFS on Linux, Ext4 on Windows.
Apple only supports a subset of OpenGL 4.1 last time I checked.
iOS8 supports WebGL. iOS4 already supported WebGL but exclusive to iAds. There is the new iOS only metal graphics API to compete with OpenGl/WebGL in AppStore.
That's an interesting effect. If it were just the apps that were previously for "pro-am" work (iMovie et al), I'd get it, but—what happened with Pages and Numbers? I used them years ago, I use them now, and they honestly don't seem like they've changed much.
They also removed a bunch of Pages features used by Powerusers. It used to be a reasonable substitute for Word.
I'm still on Pages 09 because I had a bunch of manuscripts made in that program. They don't format well in Pages 13. I'm going to keep using Pages 09 until Apple forces its obsolesence.
Probably will look at Word instead since they seem committed to stability and the ability to actually do real work on a computer.
For me osX was the reason to switch, yes, nice battery life (at the time, 2011) was nice but having iMovie for family movies, a pro-Photo-suite for 60$ (Aperture!) and being able to call family (who all have iPads) over facetime were most compelling.
Finder is indeed horrible, it never reconnects my Samba share, it never opens the way I left it and always in a window that I find too small, when browsing to a network share it may sometimes switch from icon view to tree view and the mapping of the folders in home is strange, in the terminal the folders are called differently in my language. And where is sshfs, ftp etc. Really, I have to download Cyberduck?!
I just had one of my first exposures to OS X, helping a friend get rid of particularly nasty adware called Downlite. It was nastier than anything I've ever seen since Windows 98, and obviously I've never seen anything like it on Linux. Stunning, really. I'm still considering getting my first Macbook though after this announcement, so I do hope they'll build a better security model.
For it to be nasty and hard to get rid of, your friend must have given it admin access when he installed it? No security model that I'm aware of can stop that; OS X out of the box stops you from being able to run unsigned code, which would've stopped that entirely.
Windows also prevents untrusted code from running as an admin user by default. As you say, the user clicked "Allow"; there's nothing that could prevent that except changing the mindset of the general end user.
Actually that user probably did more than "Allow". Apps non signed by Apple are prevented to launch entirely on the default config. You have to go disable that protection in system preferences or right shift to launch the app, to go around this. So you really need an extra step and also need to know what you're doing
I dual boot my old MacBook Air between OS X and Ubuntu - really nice because some software development tasks are just easier on Linux.
(Off topic, but a good tip: buy a 64gig memory card and always keep it in the memory slot with a file system friendly to both Linux and OS X - there are cards designed to fit in flush on MacBook Airs. This lets my old 128gig MBA comfortably support dual boot, and the shared file system on the card is handy.)
I'm curious which tasks you find easier? I was a hardcode Linux user before I got Mac, so I had to try it. Four months later, and I never boot into Ubuntu anymore because everything works equal or better on OSX.
Good question. There is quite a lot of software (dev tools) that are trivially installed with aptget, but not so easy (if possible) with homebrew.
I am mostly retired now, but I am working on a commercial product, and still write the occasional book, and advise consulting customers - that is my excuse for experimenting with LOTS of open source projects. If it is easier to check something out on Linux, then I take the minute to reboot.
That said, when developing I mostly "live" in IntelliJ (mostly for Clojure and ClojureScript, a little for Java and Javascript) and running IntelliJ on OS X (or even Windows 8.1) is nicer than on Ubuntu(because of trackpad issues).
I found that using brew to install GNU tools and replace Apple's FreeBSD tools really made my transition a lot easier. Now build tools don't randomly break because of some unusual command line incompatibility between OSX and Linux.
Annoyingly at the end of the day, I just want a Unix OS with working drivers, and that can run photoshop. Linux doesn't quite cut it (no matter how much I love it).
Hm. Which tools aren't easy to install with homebrew? I find it has pretty broad coverage of most of the command line tools I need, and it's reasonably easy to compile other packages from source if you need them.
Of course your needs are different from mine. Just curious.
OS X doesn't support Valgrind or GProf. That's enough for me to keep a Linux VM around. Additionally, I've found that software is often easier to build under Linux.
Must be a resource issue on their end. Would be interesting to know how many engineers were working on Watchkit/Apple Watch instead of e.g. iOS8. Now THAT is one buggy release. Especially considering how long it has been live already.
Hardware brings the $, hardware gets budget increased. Typical corporate strategy. The only way someone in power could adjust the focus is if, say, the company failed while they were on leave or something.
That machine wouldn't be viable if it wasn't for software. The force touch trackpad, which allows the MacBook to be thinner, desperately need the software to make the illusion work.
Because Apple is systematically downvoting negative comments. Most tech companies do some form of damage control on HN because they know a prominent portion of their userbase comes here frequently.
iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, and Numbers were never any good. They were afterthoughts, always have been.
I've been an Apple user for about 15 years, never used any of Apple's own software besides the OS, Keynote, the Mail app, and I've regularly replaced the latter for long periods.
The notion that Apple's application software was ever on par with their hardware and OS is a myth. Keynote is pretty much the only exception.
For ten years people have been posting this BS about Apple application software going downhill, while in reality it was always mediocre to start with.
Have to take issue with you on Pages, I have always thought it to be far easier to use than Word. Many a time I have started out with a Word doc and after half an hour just scrapped it and used Pages or, more recently, LibreOffice instead.
USB-C as the "one connector to rule them all" is the big news. That's the end of MagSafe and the exploding era of USB-C docking stations that work for multiple devices.
I think we'll start to see an era of expandable computing coming up soon: USB-C is a perfect connector to push your data and state into a larger desktop experience. Why not carry around your laptop in tablet form when you are mobile? [1]
The Surface Pro's come with only one USB port on the device, they make it up for it with having one on the power brick which I think is an awesome idea.
Well, the official Apple mouse does not require a dongle, their logic must be something along the lines of "that's what you get for using third party mice".
You are ignoring the obvious answer that Apple even said in the announcement: wireless everything.
This is exactly like the removal of the DVD drive in MacBook Airs. "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO USE MY DVDs?!?!?" The answer is: don't. Download things over the network instead.
"Waiting to upload 336 files at 3.6kb/s. Estimated time to complete 3 weeks."
Seen such messages right when I NEEDED those files. Also - remember epic KDE failure? When they had corrupted repository and it was perfectly mirrored to 1500+ other repos? And they had to search offline PC with a uncorrupted snapshot?
In general "all cloud" tech is at most 50% ready for use by everyone.
So the whole world (my office, friends, family, clients, colleagues) should change to suit my laptop?
For a disruptive product to be successful it should not be behind its time (where others are already there) it should not be too far ahead of its time (The technology might not be ready, the people might not be ready to understand the product, etc), It has to be just ahead of its time. I am sorry but I maintain that Apple has overshot with this product. This is not like removing DVD support or even removing flash support, because a lot of the world is still wired. Except for those who are fortunate to live in their own Apple bubble, many of the people who buy this will have to frequently face the frustration of owning such a device with practically no reward (apart from shaving of a few inches and grams off their laptop).
And a Mini Display port. External monitor(s) on the one and USB hub the other. Surface can drive 1 4k or 2 1080p monitors from that port. Will be interesting to see if you can get the daisy-chain of monitors off that AND have a spot to set up a hub or charge another device.
I don't get it. So you spend $1400 on a computer but a missing port adapter not everyone needs is deal breaker? I strongly believe you were never in the market for a Mac anyways, just using the opportunity to hate a bit.
I own a macbook right now (it's one of the best laptops I've owned) and I will use this one until it dies because I dislike what they are doing with the new one. If it stays this way, I will likely go back to a windows machine. I agree with the above comment. It's ridiculous. Actually it's not. It's pretty typical of Apple.
I'm surprised it isn't. My ASUS Ultrabook came with a USB-Ethernet and MiniDP-DVI adapters in the box, despite coming with the usual 2xUSB3, MiniDP & Micro HDMI ports.
Though I guess it's not that surprising. Back in the day, my Gen4 iPod came with a power brick, a USB cable and a Firewire cable. Now you get a single USB cable.
With Bluetooth, the cloud and AirPlay, who even needs those ports? People are up in arms every time Apple changes/deletes ports and are almost always wrong.
Show up to give a presentation anywhere in the world. Standard plug-in? VGA. Maybe HDMI. You can't count on an AirPlay connection being present and I wouldn't want to rely on wireless video for important presentations with 20 seconds set up time anyway.
That is an atypical scenario unless your job requires frequent presentation. Even then, you are used to having an adapter in your bag or pocket.
To me, this is a great tradeoff: I get a lighter and thinner laptop for 100% of my computing, the downside being an adapter when I return the the dark ages of VGA connectors.
In fact, for my MacBook Pro, I will have fewer connections. Instead of power and Thunderbolt, I will just get one of the connectors that bridges power, external monitor and USB peripherals and plug in a single thing when I "dock" my laptop.
I will take that any day over the awkward Dell and Thinkpad docking stations I see my coworkers use.
> That is an a typical scenario unless your job requires frequent presentation.
I completely agree with this assessment. Even here on HN the majority of users are not giving presentations or even screen sharing. When it does matter, there is often a third party device they have to present from anway.
I'll take the adapter not being in the box, as for most users they won't be using it enough to warrant the extra cost.
I agree completely. The top comment in this thread was about wireless connections making wired connections redundant. I want wired video output as I trust it more than wireless. VGA is an inelegant but working solution. Dongle is no problem.
Your right, we have much better standard in HDMI, because every laptop has that now. Oh wait, except the Macbook Air which has display port. So HDMI and displayport, oh wait, USB type C. So that's it just three connections to replace VGA.
Oh, forgot about iPads, 2 different ones for that, and android phones at least 2 MHL connectors and whatever google does in their phones. We haven't even got onto mini and micro HDMI.
At least 10 different connectors on recent devices then? Don't you just love standards?
I dunno. In my personal experience having worked with a lot of projectors, televisions, monitors I find HDMI to be an incredibly buggy experience. VGA always just works.
The only problem of VGA (and other newer digital standards) when compared to HDMI is the lack of audio support, and also i guess VGA support is declining compared to HDMI.
The thing is, it doesn't. It requires the device to be able to do a Digital to Analog conversion. In modern graphics chipsets, that capability is only needed for legacy compatibility with CRTs and old projectors. If you speak VGA to a projector or any flat panel monitor, you're really just feeding an Analog to Digital converter. It's nuts.
VGA has lower quality at high resolutions than something like DVI, DisplayPort, or HDMI. Then again, if the place still has a VGA connector, it's unlikely the projector is high-resolution.
That particular use case is apparently not expected by Apple to be a common use case for the target market of this particular device. Fortunately, other devices with different features focused on different usage patterns are available for purchase from Apple and other manufacturers. It's strange that this is at all controversial.
If it was expected to be a common use case, it would be included as a core feature. Furthermore, the number of people for whom "show[ing] up to give a presentation anywhere in the world" is a common use case is likely very small. I would go so far as to speculate that people in that category are greatly outnumbered by people across all demographics who use their laptops for sending emails, browsing the web, using productivity software, organizing media, and doing other software-centric tasks.
Not to nitpick, but for a long time, to use a Mac with VGA you had to buy an adapter. Same for HDMI. There is a case that can be made on including this accessory in the box, but VGA cannot be part of that argument. Not for a Mac user.
Instead of buying mini DVI to VGA or Lightening to HDMI adapter, just buy this?
Idea. ChromeCast like device that can pump out HDMI, DVI, display port and VGA, attach to it over wifi, it has a fallback where it can run the presentation off an SD card while itself acts as a wifi base station. The ChromeCast of presentation hardware.
Yep, happy with that. I was responding to the parent comment that said roughly "with wireless everything, who needs wired ports?".
Wireless is usually OK in my living room but I would not count on wireless video working reliably in a conference room with 500 people on their laptop/phone. Shudder.
It may not be the purest usage mode but even a permanently inserted YubiKey protects you when your password got sniffed on the network or by a keylogger.
Moreover the YubiKey also acts as a PGP smartcard, giving you a private key (for e.g. SSH) that an attacker can't extract even if they obtain root on your laptop.
As much as I would like a "Retina MBA", the lack of a separate USB port is a dealbreaker for me too.
As long as the machine is on, can't the attacker ask the YubiKey to generate signatures on their behalf?
This is similar to standard SSH agent forwarding attacks. A sysadmin connects to a malicious server via SSH. If the sysadmin turns on agent forwarding, then "malicious root" can remotely ask the sysadmin's agent (running on the sysadmin's laptop) to authenticate to any other machine that accepts the sysadmin's public key. The malicious root can log in to any other server the sysadmin has access to, as long as the sysadmin still stays connected.
As long as the machine is on, can't the attacker ask the YubiKey to generate signatures on their behalf?
For the 2FA OTP portion: No. The button needs to be physically touched.
For the PGP (ssh) portion: Yes. (but again, the attacker can not obtain a copy of the private key, that's the critical difference to your scenario)
That's why (at least for critical servers) you should combine the two. That way an attacker can at most piggyback your connections. He can not initiate his own because he can not touch the button.
No, the yubikey can not be activated from the OS, just from the touch capacitive sensor embedded in it. It can be re-programmed, but I've not seen a way to trigger a generation, even from the re-programmer.
In defense of the parent: Apple sells more than just the 12" MacBook, and if its specs aren't to your liking then you're not the intended demographic. Some people DO want an extremely thin/light Mac and don't need more than a charging cable & audio jack, enough people that Apple decided it was worth going to this extreme. Want more ports/power/etc? get a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, or Mac Pro - each with a variety of configurations.
Maybe it's just not set up correctly, but my company has airplay in every conference room and we very rarely use it because its so fickle whether or not it'll acknowledge your MacBook. Maybe Yosemite fixed these problems but that's just trading one set of bugs/problems for another.
I'm still waiting for AirPlay to actually work in corporate environments. We have a mix of wired and wireless, which I believe live on different subnets. Bonjour just won't work with it.
Then it would be sold $1480...
At some point I had 5 Nokia phone and 4 Dell laptop ones, power adapter.
Why having an adaptor for VGA/HDMI/DVI/Display Port/USB/Ethernet/... shipped with all machines when all users probably won't need all but just one. This is a waste...
So they should increase the price of the laptop by $80 for everyone so that you don't feel nickel and dimed? Why do you care if your receipt has that $80 listed a separate item or not?
Think about it. Eighty dollars just to get less than you had before (with the 11-inch Air). And you're already paying the Apple tax, plus that ugly adapter defeats the purpose of the whole making-it-pretty thing. All in the pursuit of a few millimeters.
I easily expect monitors to start supporting Type C input, where they feed the host machine power and do USB passthrough to a classic USB interface hub with maybe a daisychained type C port on there as well.
Its temporary. In five years everything will have these ports and adapters will not be necessary. In the same way today you can get a DP to VGA adapter instead of having a bulky analog video output, even if it costs $15.
Yes and yet I am still lugging adaptors
- DP to VGA
- DP to HDMI
- DP to DVI
Because I never know what I'll have when I present and you know what, I nearly always have to revert back to VGA, its not like HDMI is new !
I have a nice integrated laptop but I have all these parts around in my bag that I sometimes lose or forget connected to a projector somewhere. What may have seem like a simpler solution really wasn't in the end.
It isn't meant to be a simpler solution, but staying on analog video was never an answer. The only reason VGA projectors are still in use because they still work because we have all these passthrough options. Without them businesses would have replaced them as soon as VGA was going out of style, aka, 2002.
Replaced them with what? HDMI, which needs an adapter and can't be fed from VGA sources? DP/MiniDP, which again needs an adapter and can't be fed from VGA or HDMI sources? Maybe USB-C, which doesn't need an adapter if you bought an Apple laptop within the last few hours and don't need to put it on charge? (Otherwise it requires an adapter in order to interface with DisplayPort - but hey, at least it has that backwards compatibility!)
VGA's popular because it's the only option that actually works for everyone, and it's not for a lack of newer alternatives - in fact, the plethora of newer alternatives is the problem here.
I feel your pain because I also have to make presentations—and thus carry display adapters in my bag.
But the vast majority of people never have to make presentations or hook up to legacy projectors and monitors. So bulking up the machine itself to accommodate that does not really make sense.
Can we stop with this meme? There's no tax. There's a price for a product. Buy it or don't. I have followed the laptop market quite closely for very many years and I'm consistently disappointed in my attempts to find non-Apple laptops that are of comparable quality and specs at similar price points. And let's stop pretending that "specs" are simply "cpu/ram/harddrive", as those are a small subset of the factors that matter to consumers.
Next they should trim the keyboard, monitor, battery, touchpad, and everything else except the Apple logo, since that's really all that matters anyway. Then you'll be able to travel really light.
I am all for portability but there comes a point where you start trimming essential functions. I'm not saying every laptop needs to have a SCSI port, but ONE connector?! I thought Apple was bad before with two USB slots and mini-DP. My Thinkpad Yoga, which I bought specifically for portability, manages to have 2 USB connectors, HDMI, built-in SD card reader, and other useful peripherals onboard, and yes, I do actually use these.
I think MacBooks are cool but I always find myself unable to use them for serious work. If I was a casual computer user that just needed to update Facebook once in a while, they'd probably be fine, but every time I've tried something more serious than that with one, I've ended up on a non-Apple product because why torture myself over fashion?
I suppose it depends on how you define "essential", or perhaps "serious work".
Granted, most of what I do with my MBP is modern full-stack stuff, which I gather doesn't qualify as "serious" even if it does make me a good living. But I don't see how the type and number of ports on my laptop would make much difference if I were, say, writing Linux kernel modules for hardware nobody uses, or building a window manager in Haskell, or whatever the current definition of "serious" is among those who put so much weight on the term. I need to plug in a real keyboard; all else is commentary. (And who does embedded away from home, anyway? There's too much you need besides the computer, unless you're targeting an emulator, in which case what need have you of physical ports?)
But, hey, it's always easier to feel superior than it is to see the other guy's point of view.
I have a wireless mouse that works via a USB dongle, and I use a USB headset for my Skype calls with my business team. I also charge my cellphone from a USB port, especially when travelling, as it's far more convenient to have one plug adaptor and my Macbook Pro power supply than carrying a plug adaptor and a multi-box everywhere.
At the moment, the two USB ports I have on my MBP are pretty much bare minimum but every now and then I find myself juggling peripherals.
You might consider the same cheat I use for charging, which is to keep a small but reasonably capacious USB battery [1] in my bag, and top it up via USB whenever I happen to have a port free. Since it's specified to fully charge an iPad twice, it can charge my phone several times before running flat, and a fully powered USB port can charge the battery itself in a matter of a few hours -- an overnight charge is ample. (And, hey, the only thing I ever plug in my phone for anyway is power, so it's not like I'm losing anything by not plugging into a port on my laptop.)
Another trick worth considering is, instead of using a USB headset, instead to use one which connects via the headphone jack proper. Mine is a Sennheiser HD558 with an aftermarket cable incorporating an Apple-style mic/remote module, but you don't have to get that elaborate, especially since the HD558 isn't designed to travel and does not do so well; for simple VoIP purposes, anything halfway decent will do, and serve the purpose of freeing up a USB port for things that a headphone jack can't do.
Why should one go to all this trouble just so he can use a Mac? There are many decent competitors out there that don't require these types of hacks (and for the record, I carry two USB batteries in my bag since there are occasions when I'm in the field for extended periods of time (24 hours+), but I certainly wouldn't be charitable to the idea of draining that backup power because Apple thought I needed to save 2mm of vertical space more than I needed the ability to transfer battery power from my laptop to my phone). That's the gist of the thing here. Apple people take using Apple products seriously and will go to lengths to make it work. Other people take their work seriously and will use the tool that best suits their needs. It's hard for me to imagine a MacBook ever best suiting the needs of a user that's more advanced than the casual Facebook browser just because so many sacrifices are made for aesthetics, and honestly even that market is a dubious target for the MacBook since the emergence of the tablet (for lighter casual users) and the ultrabook (for heavier casual users).
Do we care more about having the sexiest laptop in the airport or getting more productive time in? That's the dilemma one goes through when choosing PC v. Mac.
Well, I'm not going to all that trouble specifically to use a Mac; both the headset and the USB battery long predate the MBP. (And USB headsets have never made much sense to me in the first place, regardless of the machine with which they're used.) These are just the expedients I currently use, of the sort which I've found all portable machines to require.
The sine qua non of a computer's usefulness to me is its ability to support Emacs. While my experience has been that, all else equal, any portable machine is inferior for this purpose to any desktop, I have yet to find a better portable Emacs machine than the 15" rMBP. When I do find one, I'll use it instead.
If your "all Apple users are fashion-obsessed lightweights" proposition is susceptible to the white raven's disproof, this should amply suffice. (When was the last time you ran across an Emacs user who was either "fashion-obsessed" or "lightweight"?) But I suspect you'll prefer to explain away a white raven, than to reconsider your apparent confusion of reality with an "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ad.
When I sit down to work on a laptop, unless I'm just stopping to check something for a couple of minutes, I usually want to plug in at least my phone (since publicly-available WiFi is not really a thing, often I have to USB tether to get usable connectivity (I could wifi tether if I had to, but this kills the phone's battery)), mouse, headphones, and AC adapter. I'll pretty frequently want to use an external storage device like an SD card or USB hard disk and if I'm in a real office, I'll usually want to plug in to the physical network (even non-Apple portables don't include this port usually anymore, so that's another USB port occupied) and use an external keyboard.
That's just me. A few of those things could be transferred to wireless peripherals, but not all of them, and wireless peripherals usually suck pretty bad. I have a Bluetooth headset that I try to use in the field occasionally and it's a nightmare switching between A2DP and telephony modes. I could switch to a wireless mouse, but then that's batteries and many of these take up a USB port anyway with a proprietary dongle. I don't usually carry a full keyboard around with me so I just gotta use what they have in the office, which again, even if it's wireless, often occupies a USB port.
To me, this is serious. I don't think I'm doing anything super special; I'm definitely not writing custom firmware for esoteric embedded devices from Starbucks or anything like that. Just your everyday developer and sysadmin.
Now, if I put a lot of effort into it and decided I was going to live on a MBP and therefore needed to keep my usage restrained to one or two USB ports max, I may be able to come up with an arrangement that works, but it's by no means the default; I most recently tried to live off a MBP for 5 months in the first half of 2013, and it didn't work out (the lack of ports was a constant annoyance, but not the impetus behind the change). I swapped it for a Thinkpad and was much happier. I find this happens to me every time I try to live off an MBP. The most successful run I had was 2006-2008 where an MBP was my sole laptop and I did a lot of remote work, but it was not really pleasant and I had a desktop that I used to supplement.
To be clear, I have bought 3 Apple laptops over the years of my own free will and used a few more that were owned by employers. It's not that I hate them (in fact I continue to be astonished by Retina displays, which I was sure was just going to be hype before I saw it in person, and wish PC makers would catch up), but I just don't think they're good workhorse machines for people who do real work. I think they're mostly a fashion thing that people force themselves to live with. I'd love to have one around the house as a casual computing machine, but it's hard to justify dropping $2k for the setup, when again, there is real work that would be better served by the same investment going to actually useful equipment or to labor.
I just don't really see a reason to force myself to heed Apple's insistence that while I think I may want more than two ports, I really don't. Even the way I use Apple hardware usually pisses off Mac devotees -- back in 2006 I made some permanent enemies out of a few acquaintances that were stunned I would be voluntarily using Fedora on a MacBook Pro. They kept repeating that they'd totally understand if it was a PC, but if I had to use Linux on a Mac, I was most likely just a retard who couldn't grasp the beauty gifted to earth by Humanity's Eminent Genius Steve Jobs. They continued this hostility every other time I saw them. Pretty bizarre.
When I sit down to work on a laptop, I want to open my laptop and start working. I don't even think about a charger until three or four hours have gone by. Your farrago of impedimenta is alien to me, but no doubt if I had something like it, the MBP's relative paucity of ports would annoy me, too.
I'm not so sure. I find most such persons will put some money into a phone or tablet, but if they have a laptop, they usually buy a cheap one from Wal-Mart for under $300.
As far as I can tell, the market for Apple's laptops are normal hipsters, hipster devs that can't stop talking about how you can build a blog in only two hours with Ruby on Rails, video and photo editors clinging to the meme from the 80s that editing software is somehow superior on a Mac, and college students that don't want the embarrassment of using an "old person's computer".
But no Thunderbolt to USB-C. So those sexy $1000 displays you just got because Thunderbolt is the new black and integrated seamlessly with your MacBooks? GFYS, they're deprecated, no more Thunderbolt. Two years is a long time for a Retina 27" monitor anyway, time to upgrade.
Thanks for posting that. I think when the rumour was spreading about USB-C/loss of Magsafe everyone was asking if Apple was going to do something like that, or even if it was feasible to both charge AND provide back out USB/Mini-Displayport ports.
I hope IFixIt guys takes those things apart, I bet they have their own little OS and processor just like we've seen in previous Apple "adapters."
That's fine for portability...except that it's a whopping $79.
What we also want is a hub into which we can plug our monitors and additional storage. For desktop use, this should have a longer cord, of course. (There are such hubs for USB 3, which can already be bought for ~$79 t0 ~$250 depending on what you want out of video compatibility.
Neat tidbit, Type-C connectors also support analog audio mode. In this mode it can do stereo audio out, mic in, and 5V@500mA power in. Obviously the chipset would have to support this, but the connector spec allows it in any case.
It also looks like (finally) the complete modularisation of the power supply. You should be able to have a localised wall cable, power brick and separate USB cable to the computer. In principle this should mean an end to ridiculously overpriced power supplies (currently north of £60). It's even more galling given that they realised the cables were so poorly made that US customers have a special return program for fraying while the rest of the world doesn't - hooray for litigation culture?
The new 29W brick currently costs £40 and the 2m USB-C cable £25. Typically it's not the brick that fails, it's the poor strain relief on the laptop cable. Being able to replace just the cable with (probably) an aftermarket product is a massive step up.
As a guy with small children, the loss of MagSafe is actually a huge downgrade for me. The number of times MagSafe has saved my laptop and/or power cable from damage after a child blitzed through the living room and tripped over the power cable is not insignificant.
Before I got a Mac my first child knocked my old laptop over and the power cord ripped the power socket apart. I will not buy anything other than a child proof power connector. Sadly, nobody makes a serviceable laptop with one with easily replaceable/upgradeable battery, RAM and HDD anymore so I am using my old MBP until it dies.
I understand there is a market for these paper thin, disposable machines but Apple has lost the sensible buyer who wants a solid upgradable dev machine.
Lenovo makes (well, made) a Thinkpad t430u, an ultrabook with a detatchable plate on the bottom. I think you can remove the battery, HD, and RAM. It opens with a latch -- no screws needed.
Yeah, no kidding. And not just children. I've had adults walk through it too. I hope this doesn't ever make it to the pro line. It's fine I suppose if you really only plug the device in to charge it once a day, like a phone, but I don't expect the battery to last all day if I'm doing really processor-intensive things, which I often do.
I thought this was really odd. A lot of engineering went into getting 30% more battery storage inside the laptop, but then you trap all the heat in there! You'll easily lose that 30% extra storage to loss of battery performance due to the latent heat.
On the flip side, I understand this processor has a slower clock speed than any other hardware that Apple currently offers. Perhaps that explains both design decisions? Hopefully it balances out.
I have doubts about that. Sure, you possibly could drag the laptop by the MagSafe without it disconnecting if you drag carefully. But I feel like when you really yank on it, like you would when tripping over the cord, that even a 2 pound laptop would disconnect from the MagSafe without flying off the table.
Possibly. I think this is why they switched from the angled magsafe to the straight-on magsafe2. My Air took a flying leap off the kitchen table because the combination of angled magsafe and light weight meant it wouldn't disconnect.
Fortunately, the thing was closed, landed on the lid, bounced off the hardwood floor, did a flip, and was no worse for the wear. If it had been onto concrete or tile, or the lid had been open, it probably would have turned out worse.
My 2012 MBP retina has this infernal magsafe2 connector that disconnects every time I try to use it on my lap, but at least it'll disconnect if you trip on the cord. Or if you try to use one of the 5 magsafe1->magsafe2 adapters I've bought that consistently fail after a few months.
Students and teachers are the target audience. Salespeople are. Business people are. These people all have serious computing needs that are better met by an ultraportable device with long battery life than by anything that has more horsepower or more ports.
Casual Facebook users are not a target audience for anything, because almost everybody is a casual facebook user, including people who do 3D animation or need to compile huge codebases.
The grandparent post was talking about all-day battery life, not about horsepower or ports.
But I don't see that being realistic, yet, because (a) the new MacBook has less battery life than the 13" Air, (b) OS X is messier than iOS (system daemons love to run at 100% CPU once in a while), (c) as you said, almost everyone is a casual Facebook user and runs terrible crap like Flash. (iOS is at an advantage here again)
But yeah, it is a great device for people who only open their laptops occasionally and can recharge at night.
With the limited number of charge-discharge cycles that even LiPo batteries have (typically estimated at ~500), that means you'd be replacing the machine within its depreciation lifetime if you fully — or even mostly — discharged it daily.
Macbook batteries are rated at 80% after 1,000 cycles. And battery replacement on an MBA is a $129 ($199 for an MBP) service that they can do at the Apple Store while you wait. Lenovo wants $139 for a replacement battery for a T4xx of similar capacity.
I don't understand the problem, really. Apple WILL replace your battery. It's not like you have to throw away the laptop once the battery is dead. It costs £99 in the Apple Store, which is actually less money than a new battery for some Dell laptops costs.
I'm seeing reports of Apple laptop batteries barely lasting an hour after 400 cycles, having 75% of their rated capacity after 900, and having 50% after 1100.
I think usage pattern probably matters far more than the strict cycle count. Specifically, "all-day" usage appears to correlate strongly with battery capacity falling off more sharply as cycle count increases — admittedly, based on user-reported behavior that I could find on the web with as much time as I can spare this afternoon to faff about on the matter.
I mean there's nothing saying you can't have a break-away cable even now. Look at the Xbox, the controllers are USB and they break near the system if the cable is tripped on. It's perfectly possible to have USB type C and MagSafe at the same time.
In fact, you could probably have a USB-C-to-MagSafe-to-USB-C adapter. Knock your laptop and the cable comes loose, with the adapter left plugged into the port.
Battery life is long enough such that MagSafe isn't as necessary as it used to be. Back when you had to haul your power cord to meetings, coffeeshops, and the like, cord tripping was a serious problem. Now? Far less so.
Have kids and/or pets run around in the same area where your computer is plugged in. Sooner or later one is going to tear on the cord - heck, even I do manage from time to time. And the connector looks so flimsy I'm afraid one time is all it's going to take. Nah, macsafe was the best invention ever in terms of charging.
so I have a reduced chance of incident occurrence, but if it does, it's probably fatal vs. a high chance of non-fatal incident. Bad trade if you ask me.
Judging by the coffee shop I'm in at the moment where about 1/3 of people have their machines plugged in, I don't think plugs are dead yet (not to mention at home or in offices, of course). Part of the problem is that the battery life is not yet at the level of phones. My 11" 2015 Macbook Air advertises a battery life of "up to" 9 hours web-browsing or 10 watching videos, but in practice I've found it closer to 6-7 while working actively, if I've got several apps open, wifi on, and screen brightness up. Maybe switching from Firefox to Safari would help, dunno (but I'm pretty tied to Firefox at the moment). I can get 10+ hrs on planes, but there I have the screen brightness turned down, wifi off, and am mostly working in a terminal vim.
Counter-point: As not-the-primary-computer, my MBA is plugged in 80% of the time and gets moved from place to place as my crowded workspace dictates. I can't count the number of times I've accidentally yanked the Magsafe connector out trying to move it just out of cable reach because I needed to get at something underneath.
Granted, a lot of that is learned behavior because I know I can yank the Magsafe out without incurring a $500 repair.
I leave my laptop on the charger as much as possible to avoid cycles on the batteries. And even if the charger is connected for 5 minutes the possibility of it getting yanked out is present. The lighter the attached platform is the worse the risk, since without the breakaway connector you can yank the whole laptop onto the floor.
Couldn't you simply build an adapter to get that magnetic ability? I'm envisioning a standard connector to laptop, bit of cord, proprietary connector with built-in magnetics but maintaing USB 3.1 compliance out to a female USB-C connector.
If USB-C becomes the go-to port for charging, I can't imagine something like this not being far behind.
Considering the new MacBook is just 2 pounds, I guess they'd have to put a really weak magnet in there to actually keep your Mac safe. I assume the threshold where the plug should "let go" is pretty close to the force required to keep the cable plugged during regular use.
Related: Can you still open the lid with one finger without lifting the bottom case up with it?
"But 1 port is sad, because now you have to choose between a lot of things (charging, using hdmi, whatever)"
No, USB Type-C allows multiple concurrent uses, such as: charging and using HDMI at the same time. See http://www.anandtech.com/show/8518/hands-on-with-usb-type-c-... : "This opens up the possibility for a dock scenario where a single cable to the monitor can charge a laptop and also mirror the laptop's display onto the external monitor, and the external monitor would also be able to serve as a USB hub for a keyboard, mouse, headsets, flash drives, and other USB peripherals."
Edit: @rakoo: I agree that in scenarios where you do not have a hub, it is annoying to have only 1 port. Even if the power brick integrates a USB hub it would be weird to have to plug a USB drive in the brick... I guess this opens a market opportunity: sell a tiny USB hub with 3 ports (type-C power in, type-C power out, type-A generic port) that is meant to be left almost permanently attached to the laptop or to the end of the power cord.
Theoretically, yes. But I'm not obsoleting my new 4K 60" screen to add a port. So if I want to output display to a monitor/projector and I'm low on battery, I better have a powered USB hub handy...
It may come with a 1-port USB plus power adapter in place of the standard power cable though?
On my desk I have two monitors, keyboard, mouse, microphone, webcam, laptop and an Antec USB charger which charges my phone, bluetooth headset, kindle and vita.
My laptop is connected to the power via magsafe and the monitors with HDMI and USB. Keyboard/mouse/webcam/microphone are connected to the monitors.
With the new USB-C plug I guess I'll be able to buy the hypothetical Antec "Super USB Charging Media Hub", which all my devices connect to. My laptop then only needs to plug into one thing.
I would really like PC manufacturers to standardize on this; it would make using laptops as nice as using non-Apple telephones/tablets/ereaders is now.
The decision to not include a single USB port is of course mind-boggling, especially given Apple's market. How are you supposed to share large files? No USB drives, no memory cards etc on the go.
I'd think the opposite since his peripherals are fixed: type C is the logical extension of the thunderbolt display, with a single cable end to plug in when you reach your desk with your laptop.
I'm in a somewhat similar situation, when I reach home I plug in power, network, external display and USB devices, but these things don't move with me, they're fixed desk accessories. I've got a separate set of them at work.
With regards to sharing of files: it's a natural progression for Apple. They are moving everything to iCloud. In Mavericks, for example, they disabled syncing of notes/calendar/address book through the cable with iTunes. It feels like this is just one step further.
Needless to say, I'm not very happy about no USB just as I wasn't happy about syncing.
Hey thanks for this. I tested it out on Mavericks, and the only thing that doesn't sync anymore is the notes. Maybe I just can't find the setting in iTunes to sync that as well...
Too bad they can't fit 29W into the smaller cube form factor which charges my phone. That would be incredible powering a laptop off of that.
Someone needs to create a much sleeker implementaion of a in-line 1-port hub. So basically something that looks like USB-C on both ends, but 4" from one side of the cable there's a quarter-sized circle of hard plastic that has the USB-C cable going through it, with another USB-C port available on the side.
I hope we will see USB-C to HDMI and USB-C to DisplayPort "cables" which are not big fat massive dongles but really function more like just a cable.
Not every device needs to fill every use case. Apple apparently has reason to believe that use cases that require simultaneously using the port for multiple purposes are rare enough among potential users of the MacBook that they don't need to support those use cases. If this particular product doesn't provide all of the features you need, there are other products available from Apple and other manufacturers with additional features.
I completely agree that my needs may not be the needs of everyone and actually, when we're talking about Apple, they tend to be changing ways of usage rather than following them.
Another perspective I've seen recently about this is that this new Macbook will probably make people change their habit towards something traditionally only for smartphones: you'll see people keep their computer untethered for the larger part of the day, and only plug it for energy during the night. So, basically, mobile first instead of plugged first. You then have a port constantly available for whatever you want to plug on the go.
It just means we're going to stay stuck in dongle hell.
When I'm on the road the minimalism of a Mac is nice, but at my desk, hooked up to everything I really need for heavy work, my desktop is a cluster-f of cables and adapters and wires.
This seems like the fix for dongle hell to me. You plug everything into your monitor, tucking your cables away nicely, and then you have a single cable going from your monitor into your laptop.
Small sample size and all, but I find USB microphones to be rather susceptible to electrical noise from stuff like USB hubs. I have to plug them directly into my machines to get a clean signal.
To be fair, it's at least a single standard dongle hell. And now with USB-C you can have thunderbolt-style docks that give you a near-universal docking experience (ie: DVI/HDMI/dozens of USB ports/DVD drive/power) with a single cable when you're at your desk.
I agree, that is the theory. However we might be at least a year from such hubs being affordable.
I guess what I am saying is, I wouldn't want to be queued outside the Apple store for one of these. The supporting accessories aren't there yet (yes, even with Apple's two hubs/adapters).
However when they do the refresh on this line, one or two years from now, the supporting hubs, wires, and so on will be available and it will be a very fun experience.
What does the USB-C equivalent of this [1] look like on a laptop with only one port? Apple basically killed the always-plugged-in peripheral with this revision, there's no way you could create something small enough that it wouldn't break in a bag that still provided pass-through for charging or other devices.
Do all monitors/printers/hard drives/etc provide pass through so you can charge? Or do you have to unplug your laptop from the power to get to your hard drive if you lose your dongle?
Not to mention the fact that every single mac apple peripheral you've ever owned is now worthless.
If they threw USB-C on as the charger alongside a USB and Thunderbolt I'd be stoked that mac is embracing new technology. If they put two or three USB-C ports and nothing else I'd be impressed with their commitment. With just one port, I'm left wondering what the hell they're thinking people use their laptops for.
I'm not sure why you'd want to use such a wireless mouse receiver with a computer that has bluetooth built in?
Also, I haven't plugged in a printer in years. Many printers have Wifi built in, and if not, you can always attach it to an Airport base station.
External storage? Use Apple's Time Capsule or any other NAS to back up your data wirelessly.
I've even seen companies use Apple TVs connected to a projector for wireless presentations.
Sure, a USB thumb drive is invaluable when you need to copy some files to your uncles 10 year old laptop with broken wifi; but you can get pretty far without wires if you want.
Want a legit answer? They lack power isolation. I had a device surge/short while attached to a USB hub (it was a branded one), and everything else attached died: Keyboard, Mouse, motherboard, and a phone.
This was back pre-USB 3, and the power limit of USB has only increased since then (USB 3, USB-C, etc). This means the wires get hotter, the hub gets hotter, and any short/surge will have an even more dramatic effect (e.g. fire?).
Honestly USB hubs should be up to the same spec as a surge-protector/multi-tap, but they aren't, even though they carry enough electricity to kill someone.
Nothing is wrong with hubs, but now there is yet one more thing you have to have available (at least until they become more prolific in external devices)
I'm concerned about the feasibility of USB-powered hard drives with this setup. On my Macbook Pro, if I plug more than one of them into a hub (as opposed to separate USB ports), they start flaking out on account of lack of power, even if the hub is powered.
Then your hub is not doing a good job of providing the 500 mA that it supposed to give to devices, or your USB powered hard drive actually requires more than 500 mA to do its thing.
Make sure the power brick that your powered hub came with is capable of powering the N+ devices you have at the same time. Most of the 4 port hubs come with 2A power supplies, however sometimes they skimp on actually being able to deliver that power.
Apple laptops have been limited by a lack of docking ports, which is my favorite use case for having a work and home workstation. Now, instead of hooking up a power cable, monitor cable and USB hub, you slide one connector in. How is that bad?
It would not be bad, but the adapter that gives me two ports will be a part of my trip.
At airports for example I'm carrying only my MacBook and usually put in there charger and the my phone, now I have to also carry an adapter to do that.
In the current era of ubiquitous saas/cloud services, abstracted file systems, multiple device types, large internal storage options, dropbox, box, drive, and icloud, there are many, many people who haven't used a USB drive in years (or ever) and have no use for one.
This is one of the great things about buying an Apple Cinema Display. My Displayport model provides audio/video over one cable, camera/microphone over another, and a third MagSafe connector. The Thunderbolt design allows for audio/video/camera/microphone/ethernet/firewire/even more thunderbolt, plus a magsafe connector.
I think we'll see a lot of small USB hubs with a USB-C connector to your laptop and all your USB/audio/Displayport/ethernet out, so that getting back to your desk is one cable to plug in and not a half-dozen.
Other than cost (which is certainly a factor) I guess I've never understood why people schlep around a laptop and use the same laptop for their desktop by plugging in cables. I know people do this who could easily afford an additional more powerful desktop.
I use a MacPro driving 3 27' displays and also have a few portables as well. It's just a matter of synching info. I can't imagine having to deal with hooking up a portable.
Plugging my 2013 Air into my desk when I come home isn't a big hassle - I plug in the speaker cable, the power cable, the video cable, and the USB hub. It takes me ten seconds[1] to do unless one of the cables falls; they're normally sitting right where I put the Mac. It sits on a lower shelf and runs closed; there's a Bluetooth keyboard and a Wacom tablet on my desk. (I'm an artist.)
It'd be nice to have the single connector I guess. Once I got an adapter[2] and plugged everything into that I'd save all of, I dunno, five seconds?
I'm also not driving three displays. I have never liked multiple displays. They don't work well with a Wacom tablet, and I go crazy from constantly seeing slight color differences; when I'm at a cafe, I use the laptop screen; when I'm at home, I use the external monitor.
Now you have one person's explanation of why she schleps around a single laptop that she also uses for her desktop.
1: Literally; I just timed it. 6.6s to leisurely unplug it, 10.3s to casually reconnect it.
To their credit, it seems Apple is at least trying to solve this problem with their recent foray into 'live' document dragging between iOS/Yosemite. Though it's hardly the ubiquitous solution we want, it is a first step.
Not to denigrate their work, but this happened very very late in the type-C game.
(Look at who attended what meetings, and where it was proposed, how far it was along when it was proposed, and then when apple started showing up. It looks like they saw the writing on the wall, and joined in to make sure they weren't going to get left behind)
Probably realized that they needed to go with USB-C because of cars, European regulations, etc. Finally, everyone is using one connector. PC, Mac, Android, and iOS?
Another view is that there was a moment when they saw/realised what USB-C could do for Apple and a radically new laptop, and then became a lot more invested then.
Actually, i have real facts, but i can't state them here, so i'm pointing you at enough data to draw your own conclusions. But sure, if you'd rather just believe whatever you like, you are welcome to :)
I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that you are deceiving yourself if you think you aren't denigrating them. That is clearly your intention, and you think the facts bear you out. Why not just be honest about it?
I will guarantee you that their charger will have a port on it to pass through. Still awkward, but I can't imagine that they'd force users to choose between data and power on that one port.
I just hope the passthrough is up near the part that plugs into the laptop, or it's going to be awfully inconvenient for a lot of different kinds of peripherals.
Thank god. The magsafe adapter is cool, but has some serious flaws to it. Namely: it's magnetic, so any sort of [ferrous] metal dust will accumulate inside of it, preventing you from getting a good seal on the connector.
If you work in any environment other than a sterile coffee shop, this will be a huge problem for you. I spend almost all of my time working in a hackerspace, and fiddling with my power connector on my less than 1 year old laptop is a constant annoyance.
I've had three MBPs over the course of a few years and never had this issue. Though, I have noticed a very small dust build up but it definitely hasn't compromised the magnetic seal. Is it an older version? I don't plug/unplug a whole lot so that may also be contributing.
I took a bag to the beach, then put my laptop in that bag a few weeks later. The leftover sand (because sand is basically glitter) had some magnetic bits, which clogged the magsafe connector. I had to spent like 20 minutes with a toothpick to get enough out to charge, and it was never quite back to normal.
Strong adhesives are often a good way to defeat magnets. (I've used this principle, but not in the specific context of removing magnetic crud from inside a magsafe plug.) A properly designed magsafe power plug would have a way of either easily replacing the plug or removing/defeating the magnet.
Metal dust is a problem in "any environment other than a sterile coffee shop"?
It's a bit of a dubious rhetorical move to cast anybody who works in an environment that doesn't contain a lot of ferrous dust as some sort of freakish outlier. You might be ever so slightly guilty of overgeneralizing your experience...
I use my Air and used my old Macbook (the white plastic one) in my workshop, where we make shoes by hand. So I have lots of nails (and thus, lots of tiny metal scraps from the nail boxes, as well as nail pieces when we need to cut some down) lying around and lots of knife-sharpening dust around our (unplugged, since we usually keep the computer away when hammering/sharpening, but we just leave the connector in his usual place) Magsafes and have seen no problem in the connector.
I am a bit on the fence about them seemingly jettisoning the lighting connector? Why go with a plug that has a delicate prong in the center rather than a plug with the contacts around the perimeter?
Does anyone know if there was any emphasis put on making USB-C less flimsy and delicate?
Quite a lot of work went into it. It is designed for 10k insertion cycles. 2x stronger to wrenching forces than micro, and it is designed so the cables fail, not the machine side connector (because once factories get up to speed have similar costs to USB micro cables now at least for dumb cables). Have a slide deck as a pdf if you want more details:
Current USB connectors have prongs in the middle of the female side as well, but I've never ever seen one break off before, and that's with people (including myself) trying to force plugs in the wrong orientation. Is there a reason to worry about these new connectors' prong strength?
Maybe it depends on who builds your devices, but I have had several usb prongs break off on me even when I was careful. This happened on one desktop and several gaming consoles.
I'll add another question: Does USB-C have a spec for requesting additional wattage?
Example: I have a USB-C Printer/Hard drive/or otherwise, and plug in my MacBook Air, will it charge my MacBook or will I need an intermediate like a specialty hub to charge?
This seems egregious if every device needs to provide power for the potential of charging device in question...
There's actually a supplemental spec, USB-PD(Power Delivery) which now accopmanies USB 3.0 and addresses this. It is carried over the USB physical layer but does not rely on the data layer for communication.
To answer more specifically; yes— not only is every node in the bus network addressable for power needs and capabilities, even each of the two ends of a cable is a separately addressable node (mostly used to figure out which way a swappable cable is oriented, I think).
Another way to look at it is that the pins (which are really the fragile bit prone to scratching, oxidization etc) aren't exposed that way, they're protected inside the metal wrapper.
>I am a bit on the fence about them seemingly jettisoning the lighting connector? Why go with a plug that has a delicate prong in the center rather than a plug with the contacts around the perimeter?
My biggest gripe about the USB-C, and a big fuck up on the part of the standards committee, IMO
> Why not carry around your laptop in tablet form when you are mobile?
For me I prefer a laptop because its workable on the lap and small surfaces. I have seriously considered a Surface Pro but using a kick stand doesn't work on a bus/train/lounge which are common usages for me when on the move. And given tablets are about the same size as an ultrabook I may as well get the additional usage benefit.
If I did want the mobile tablet form I would prefer a larger size phone that docks and become my desktop when at home/work.
You're getting too tied up in brand identity and going too far in the other direction. What we call "Thunderbolt" is effectively an evolution of the DisplayPort PHY (which already supported graphics streaming of course, and also encapsulated USB transfers) with protocol extensions to do more PCI-like transactions.
And the USB 3.1 "SuperSpeed+" PHY is a 10Gbps thing that is very comparable to Thunderbolt electrically and would be expected to evolve similarly.
You're right that USB lacks the PCI framework (which many of us view as a feature). But DP/Thunderbolt similarly lacks a cabling standard with the sophistication of USB: no charging, not reversible connectors, no OTG-style switching of host/guest mode.
Apple had a choice of supporting both connectors, or giving up "PCI madness" or "nice cables" to get just one. They picked USB.
That's all well and good, but the question was whether it supported actual Thunderbolt, to which the answer given was "yes" but the actual answer appears to be "no."
Supporting something like Thunderbolt is nice, but not exactly the same. It's not about "brand identity," it's about "does this equipment I have work with this machine?"
Just to clear up the FUD, the Type-C connector supports 'Alternate Modes.' This allows manufactures to implement chips that can MUX different signal types onto the USB cable SS lanes. There are 4 SS lanes that can be reassigned and either 2 or 5 additional wires that can also be used depending on if it's a cable or dock connection.
So, can the Type-C connector support Thunderbolt? Yes.
Does the Type-C connector currently support Thunderbolt? No.
Will someone add Thunderbolt over Type-C? Maybe.
I've only heard of PCIe over Type-C (via the spec docs) and DP over Type-C (from the VESA guys).
It certainly sounds like an excellent connector. If Apple can shoehorn Thunderbolt into that, it would be great. If they can't, it sounds like it's well worth it anyway.
That's hardly unique to this situation though. It doesn't support Firewire or eSATA or VGA or ethernet or AppleTalk or Centronics parallel either. Life moves on, and this is hardly a company gripped by concerns for backwards compatibility.
You seem to have confused "Is this the end of Thunderbolt as well?" with "I hate Apple forever for changing things." It's a simple question with a simple answer. (Yes.)
No, there is no access to PCI address spaces over the USB 3 port. At least not yet, with existing hardware. As mentioned elsewhere in the thread it's not an impossibility to see an evolved (but compatible) standard in future USB 3 hardware.
So, in alternate mode all 4 SS lanes can be reassigned. Each lane is doing 10Gbps right now from what the specs say. You could do PCIe over this and they even use PCIe as an example in the Type-C spec documents.
I've not read those docs (sorry) but what if I want to run DisplayPort for my monitor and simultaneously plug in an external USB drive? Can a single line switch between protocols?
Just to clarify what you said, Alternate Mode allows two directly connected devices to negotiate what the SS lanes and a few other wires are used for. The signaling that happens over the wires after negotiation is totally outside of the USB spec as the signals are simply MUXed onto the wires. In theory you could MUX anything over the wires as long as the signaling parameter fell within the specs defines for the cabling.
I have two thunderbolt displays daisy chained into the single thunderbolt port on my 2013 MacBook Air. Each display is basically also a dock, with other peripheral ports in the back. It works very well because as I understand it thunderbolt is 10gbps transfer.
What cases do you have? I looked into these before, but anything with a decent size seemed too heavy to take on aircraft (assuming a 30kg checked in limit).
The DP over Type-C stuff (Alternate Mode) is not hub traversable.
So, you could talk to a single DP device, but that DP device could be a DP MST splitter. This could allow it to act as a DP hub for you to daisy chain a second monitor.
I am not too happy about that. HP already has USB charger for laptop, and it had bunch of problems, including fire hazard. That was just ARM chromebook, not sure how it will on 'full' mac.
EDIT: there are physical limitations how electric current is transferred. USB contacts do not have good shape and will probably deteriorate more quickly.
In the old days, HP had a high standard of quality. More recently, almost coinciding with the introduction of inkjet printers, HP quality standards have slipped to a new dismal low. I'm not surprised to hear of fires.
I just purchased a little HP 11" Stream, and the build quality is pretty good - I was pleasantly surprised, especially for a $199 laptop that includes $125 in free software coupons. (Pro-tip: if you need a Windows laptop, but it directly from Microsoft so you don't get any crap-ware loaded on it.)
That said, I am kind of looking forward to my (about) 4 year old MacBook Air eventually dying and then I will buy the new model that was announced today :-) MacBooks are beautiful.
My first inkjet was one of DeskJet 500 series in the early nineties. And HP had inkjets since 1984 apparently. That's "more recently" for you? You are right about HP standards slipping but coincidencing with inkjet printers they are not :)
That is not going to happen.
Apple licenses out the use of its connectors for docking stations and other accessory usage. If they just drop the lightening connector on the iphone this soon after implementing it, I dont think manufacturers of these accessories would very happy about that.
Apple has a long history of completely disregarding the needs or desires of accessory manufacturers, and only started the MFi program after years of categorically responding with cease-and-desist letters. The program is primarily in serving Apple's interests in a level of reliability in the accessory ecosystem; it's an absolutely insignificant revenue stream.
Is this really the case? They certainly seemed to stick with the 30 pin connector for far longer than they had any reason to other than the massive third party accessory/dock/speaker market.
Because they are the ones that support Apple's products and pay a license to do so.
If you change standards every Monday morning then these manufacturer would have to retool their products which would no doubt cost them.
Cool article. Seems like you need to have managed source code to transplant an application from one type of processor to another.
Java, .NET, Dalvik, etc all fit this category.
I wonder if we'll start seeing fat binaries for native code that ship with LLVM IR so that even C and C++ code can be transplanted from your phone's ARM processor to your desktop's Intel.
I think their idea is you should use a wireless mouse. Notice that the "Fully equipped for a wireless world" heading appears above the mention of USB-3. Indeed, putting only one port forces the issue, because I imagine a significant amount of the time, if you're using a mouse, you're also plugged in to power, and now you can't do both without a hub of some sort.
Reasonable people can disagree wrt whether a wireless mouse is acceptable for their use case, of course. Just like reasonable people could disagree when Apple stopped shipping devices with floppy drives and (later) optical drives.
I still use a wired mouse and a wired keyboard for my laptop (since I prefer the size and of a standard keyboard to the little rubber chiclets HP calls a keyboard.) It has literally all the advantages of a wireless setup, without ever having to worry about batteries.
This trend in laptop design towards providing fewer ports for what seems to be little more than aesthetics seems a bit backwards.
How often do you put a wireless mouse or keyboard somewhere you wouldn't also put a wired mouse or keyboard? It seems to me the ergonomics are likely to be the same for most cases.
Fair enough if you think wireless is advantageous in this case but I personally don't. Or if it is, it doesn't outweigh the disadvantage of having a mouse that can run out of juice.
I don't understand why anyone uses a wireless mouse. You have a device that's utterly useless except in close proximity to its parent, why wouldn't you just plug it in and never have to charge it?
> You have a device that's utterly useless except in close proximity to its parent, why wouldn't you just plug it in and never have to charge it?
Wireless mice aren't convenient to keep plugged in with many laptops in many carrying cases/bags/etc, and having to plug it in increases the set up time before useful interaction. So, for laptops typically used on-the-go, I see them as a negative.
And, mice can be useful fairly distant from a CPU; they usually aren't useful far from the keyboard (which can also be wireless) and, depending on the display size, may need to be close to the display.
I mean, its not like we live in the era when most computer use involves switching disks or other similar activities that require physical interaction with the CPU case, so there's no particular requirement that the CPU needs to be that close to the keyboard/mouse for the setup to be useful.
That's a good point w/r/t desktops, you could easily have the CPU case hidden away down behind the desk or something, but the parent comment said "especially on a laptop" where the monitor/keyboard/cpu are somewhat bound together.
I guess you're right about the setup time, but that seems like an extremely minor irritation to me, compared to the moderate irritation of swapping out or recharging dead batteries. Ultimately, I suppose it's a personal preference: Do you prefer a tiny annoyance every day, or greater annoyance (still negligible, in the grand scheme) every few months.
I do I started to get aching mouse hands after using the wireless touch mouse and I like not having the cursor zoom all over the place if i accidentally nudge the mouse
Man... the folks at Dell are just terrible at marketing. Look at that page the OP linked and the apple macbook page. There is absolutely no comparison. I had to make an effort to find pictures of their product. Even then, the pictures are completely distracting because of those ugly award logos they put on it.
If I was Dell, I would just sit down my entire design and marketing team and make a plan for redesigning and rebranding. Their website look exactly like it did 10 years ago when Dell computers were cool.
Also: No, actually, I don't want to "chat with a Dell expert." GTFO the page I'm trying to read.
The one thing that could change my mind about patent trolls is if one of them were to pop up and banish those unsolicited floating chat windows by suing everyone who uses them.
The prevalence of "chat with us!" and "take a quick survey?" website popups encapsulates everything that is wrong with non-Apple computer hardware manufacturers.
Really? My experience in their bricks and mortar stores is that I can barely get someone to talk to me when I I want to buy something. Kind of the opposite problem, but almost as frustrating.
I guess it depends on how busy they are. The one time I've recently set foot in an Apple store, it was swarming with employees (probably 2:1 employee:customer ratio). This was a small mall location, though—it felt claustrophobic to begin with.
Word. The freakin top end laptop is out of view and requires a click to even see it. I almost bailed because I didn't see an i7 option. I was browsing on my 27" with the browser full screen too... hard FAIL, Dell.
I have a M3800 and am not unhappy with it, although the touchpad is too touchy and the fan is too fanny. Somebody needs to get their shit together and actually push Apple.
I followed the link hoping I could point out how wrong you are. Nope, that's a pretty beautiful laptop. Thin, light, great screen, etc...
In the end, you can look at the 12 inch MacBook as being a new notebook for people who care about running Mac OS/don't want to switch to Windows. It's a big deal because the Dell isn't an option most people want to consider :)
I have to admit that, even as a "no Windows" person at this point, I'm a little on the fence about this vs. waiting for the Ubuntu version of the New XPS 13. So Dell's got at least that much going for them.
I had no idea they were still doing that. The last time I purchased a laptop for personal use was the ~2007 Inspiron 1420n Ubuntu Edition. I generally prefer to work on desktops, but having the option for portability is nice.
I still actually used that laptop until recently. Now I'm in the market and have been eying the XPS 13 and waiting for details about the Macbook Air.
Any idea/rumors about when the Ubuntu edition will launch?
I'd really like to spend less than a thousand bucks, because I just want something light that I can carry in addition to my work Macbook Pro. I like to use my commute-time on the train for side projects, but I'm concerned about using my work machine for various reasons.
The new offerings from Apple today are certainly appealing, but I'm still on the fence. I don't draw arbitrary allegiances with corporations, so I have no blind brand loyalty...
I was told by a Dell person (via the chat thing, naturally) that it would be released in about a week.
If I bought either the Windows model or the official Linux one I'd wipe it and install Debian or Arch or Mint, but I'd still prefer to wait for the Linux one so that I don't contribute money and a +1 sales statistic to Microsoft for something I don't want.
Thanks for chiming in with that info. I wasn't able to get a date from Dell, but they did send me to the same blog that yohui pointed out.
I'm definitely waiting for the developer edition, precisely for the reason you mentioned, to do my part in signalling to Dell and the industry that Windows vs OS X is a false dilemma.
Disregarding for the moment subjective issues like design and operating system, I would ask two important questions. How is the battery life, and how is the build quality? That's usually where Windows PCs quickly lose any desirability (to me) compared to Macs.
Also, I notice that this XPS is 0.6-0.8 pounds heavier than the new MacBook, and as far as I can tell the XPS has a fan.
Battery life is supposed to be excellent[1]. TL;DR 15+ hours of light usage for the 1080p screen (tested and confirmed by Anandtech), supposedly 11+ hours light usage for the QHD+ screen with an i7.
I have a maxxed out XPS 13 and its a love-hate relationship. The screen and build quality is great, the keyboard ok and the touchpad as well. There's very little to match it in that form factor right now
It's noisy as hell though, I can't say that battery life is great and I have some weird problems with music stuttering when I compile, also Visual Studio ocassionally locks up on deploy for some reason.
If I could have a Zenbook with the same screen thought I'd take that any day.
This seems to be what I hear about getting the maxed out version of this laptop. Does anyone know if the fan is still really loud on the more moderate version (i5, touchscreen,256GB SSD)?
If you're looking purely at specs, Windows laptops always were the better deal. But only when you use those alternatives do you realize how much further ahead Apple is.
And specs don't capture the OS UX differences (do you love metro on a non-touch device?), bloatware/spyware/adware pre-installed, activation headaches, app ecosystem...
It's like comparing the value of two watches using the slag value of melting them down. If that's how you shop, the device isn't for you.
Until you pick them up, use them, have them break, and try to get support. I used to be the guy pointing out how there are Windows laptops that are just as good as Macs. It wasn't until about 2 years ago that I just completely gave up on the Windows market and just converted fully to Apple's ecosystem. Couldn't be happier. The Windows market is in a constant state of "almost as good as Apple."
The trackpad on my thinkpad broke. I spent 10 minutes on the phone with technical support that actually knew what I was talking about and they mailed me a whole new part. I replaced it and went on my way as happy as could be.
In contrast:
By friend who owns a mac tried to set up a appointment because her hard drive was making the sound of a grinder. They told her that they could not make an appointment on the phone, she needed to use the iPhone app to do that. Well, she doesn't have an iPhone so the only option she had was to stand in line at the apple store 40 minutes away and wait. She spend two days doing this since it closed before they got to her on the first day and then the took her hard drive and replaced it while erasing all her personal data. It's a good thing I made a backup first.
Great Customer Service for sure almost as good as Comcast.
Sure, every once in a while I'm sure someone has a bad experience with their support but I feel it's a well-accepted notion that Apple has the best support in the consumer tech industry. A few sources I found in a couple minutes of searching:
I've dealt with Dell, Microsoft, Acer, Asus, and HP in the past on multiple occasions for each, and it was always a headache. With Apple, it was always as simple as walking into the store and walking out with my issues resolved. I've even had them fix a keyboard that broke due to my fault on an out of warranty machine for just the cost of parts. The fact that you can go to a physical location and get service puts them on a different level.
I have to fly or take a ferry to get to an Apple Store. There isn't one on Vancouver Island. So it's great when you can get to one, but if you can't the support is not so good.
What country are you in? When I had some "user serviceable" part on ThinkPad break (in the UK), I had to send it off for a month(!), after spending 45 minutes on the phone trying to convince them to send me the replacement part.
I have a macbook and an xps. I like the xps better for several reasons.
It is difficult if not impossible to output a macbook to a tv over hdmi and also send audio. Also the dongle that does hdmi conversion breaks all the time. Our office has gone through like 4-5 of them.
It is/was very difficult to disable your laptop display when plugged into a monitor in MacOS(I doubt they have fixed this issue). Also the macbook is crazily overpriced.
I'm guessing you're using the Air? I've had the Air with the Display Port to HDMI dongle and now have the Pro with HDMI built in, neither had issues with outputting HDMI sound. Just plug it in, and make sure the audio output is set to the TV in the Sound settings in System Preferences.
Never tried that second part, but the multi monitor support in the last couple releases of MacOS have been amazing.
> It is/was very difficult to disable your laptop display when plugged into a monitor in MacOS(I doubt they have fixed this issue). Also the macbook is crazily overpriced.
Can't you just do clamshell mode? I haven't had any issues with that with my Macbook Air.
This is always true for a given version of "as good as." Heck, it would be true for the correctly chosen "better." The truly tricky part is knowing what "as good as" or "better" will actually play well in the market.
Actually, the dell seems to be stuck with a tiny HDD even on the 1300$ model. 128GB in 2015 on a 1,000+$ laptop is ridiculous you can get phones with that much disk space. Sure, they bump it on the $1,600$ model, but by then not having ~512 seems silly.
PS: You can get a 512GB desktop SSD drive for under 180$ so cost wise it's a non issue. And 30$ micro SD cards are at 64GB so 512GB would not be a space issue.
According to anandtech, they are offering 512 GB at some point, and they have pricing. It's in the spec breakdown on the first page of their review[1]. It's not cheap to upgrade the drive, which is fairly standard with Dell.
Anyway, you will also note they did not actually send the i7 versions off for testing as the battery life would tank. IMO, there are three basic classes of laptop ultra-portable trade power for awesome battery life and light weight, desktop replacements which are meant to be used on a desk, and gaming machines. You can dump a large SSD into an ultra-portable without issue but dells approach of bumping RAM, CPU, HDD, etc. in lockstep just means their ultra-portables are stuck with tiny disks for little reason.
512GB? Not yet. 256GB? Yes. I'm not sure why you are asking though. Do you think they aren't going to provide it for some reason?
You might want to read that whole review if you haven't already. They found that the XPs 13 had excellent battery life, to the point that they tested it and it was exactly what was advertised. That is, for the low-end screen (1080p) they got over 15 hours of light usage. Dell provides battery life estimates for different configurations (visible in the review[1]), so it's not inconceivable that i7 light usage might get over 11 hours as Dell claims.
There is a lot of fishy things about those numbers. Most notably HD video which I generally use as light usage benchmark was the 'worst case' actually given numbers. If that i5 dell is equal to a 2013 i5 mackbook air for similar useage patterns then actual heavy use-sage should clock around 6 hours for an brand new i5 from full charge to zero.
And an i7 would drop down to around 4.5 brand new under heavy usage. And around 2 before you start looking for a charger once the battery ages a little.
PS: The only reason I bring this up is their base numbers are rather low and they don't seem to have a way to configure the systems before checkout. Overall the i5 version seems like a real mackbook competitor, but their low end model seems to be designed more for halo effect (battery life, and price) vs an actual reasonable choice.
The XPS is using the new Broadwell-U Intel processor, which is a die-shrink, and lower power usage is expected from this.
I'm not sure why you think it's fishy. As long as Anandtech has kept their benchmark tests consistent across different units tested, it should be fine. I'm not sure how you got HD video viewing as a light benchmark test, I've never heard of that before. Generally, decoding a highly compressed chunk of data and using it to constantly update the display seems close to a worst case scenario to me, unless you are doing serious data crunching (e.g. encoding) which while more common than it used to be, I wouldn't consider common enough to include as a regular benchmark in a general purpose review.
According to Anandtech's article, the 13-inch Macbook Air has a 54 Wh battery and the Dell has a 52 Wh battery, so the XPS battery is slightly smaller. The hardware drawing power from the battery is different through (Broadwell-U @ 14 nm vs Haswell @ 22nm), so extrapolating numbers in that way is not likely to yield very accurate results.
HD video decoding is a fixed workload so higher end CPU's spend less time working and get to down clock. There are plenty of games for example where they simply max the CPU so it's a good idea for your heavy load useage to scale.
Anandtech then just displayed numbers for useage levels vs hours:minutes.
HD video decoding is a fixed workload so higher end CPU's spend less time working and get to down clock. There are plenty of games for example where they simply max the CPU so it's a good idea for your heavy load useage to scale.
Anandtech then just displayed numbers for useage levels vs hms.
> Can you find any way to order that on their site?
Yeah, the "Choose Options" menu under the "Hard Drive" section. Currently, the $999.99 and $1299.99 models can upgrade from a 128GB to a 256GB SSD for +$100, and the high end $1599.99 model can upgrade from a 256GB SSD to a 512GB SSD for +$300. Available options may vary at times.
Though I'd rather just replace the SSD myself, especially for the 512GB upgrade. Looks very easy to do do, based on YouTube videos.
The intended audience doesn't consider the Dell anywhere near comparable.
Personally I would love to have a Linux laptop with the same design and build quality as the MacBooks, and I'm pretty sure plenty of fashion conscious folks would like something more exclusive now that Macs are everywhere.
The fact that the XPS 13 is the only machine that comes anywhere close is kinda sad.
I sense some resentment. The thing about Apple (I have no bias) is that you don't have to worry about competition. Even if there is a machine that approaches the performance and specs of a Mac, the thing Apple fans don't have to worry about is which machine to get because even the worst Apple device is miles ahead of the non Apple alternatives.
The thing about Apple is that you don't have to worry about it, you can focus on the task and purpose of the tool rather than the hardware or it's specs.
Given Apple's nature of maximizing profits of their product line, there's still room for the next major update of MBP line to include the same kinds of edge-less screen, and people will collectively loose their minds over it. Are people going to be satisfied with just another incremental upgrade of specs and inclusion of the same technologies as the Mac? I think they will have to put some bling in their flagship devices.
> the thing Apple fans don't have to worry about is which machine to get because even the worst Apple device is miles ahead of the non Apple alternatives
This is very subjective to define. It's true, if you like apple, and all you are going to choose is stuff from apple, then you don't have to worry about examining choices in depth because there aren't very many. But quality is a subjective thing.
I personally find almost every computer that exists today horrifically boring, compared to when I was growing up. The jump from no computer to computer has been much more exciting than each iteration of slightly better computer. That's really what I call 'miles ahead'.
Smartphones with unlimited data were slightly revolutionary for me, in a "I can listen to music and walk anywhere I want without getting lost" kind of thing, but honestly, I haven't felt anything close to the feelings I used to feel as a kid. Trying to figure out how the entire internet is structured and comparing that to a giant computer is slightly more exciting. Comparing data models to the human brain is slightly exciting. But miles ahead sounds like we're making leaps when we aren't. And you can go ahead and argue that every leap is made up of tiny steps, but when you fade in and out of technology enough, even then, some things really feel like leaps, and other things really feel like steps. And I think that's subjective, so I'm biased, but I find it very hard to have opinions without bias, if not impossible.
The notion that Apple is "miles ahead" seems cute to me as I read these comments on my hybrid touchscreen which runs a full general purpose OS on a battery that lasts me well over 10 hours and still fits in my pocket. It's so nice to be able to run full Chrome with Adblock and other extensions on a touch device which also allows me to write a quick VBA function in Excel, run reports using legacy native business tools or spin up a small Linux VM.
Apple simply doesn't offer a device that can compete with this, so not only are they not miles ahead, I can't even see them in my rear-view.
I love the dell venue 8 pro (5000), but I really wish dell would stop fucking around and go all out with it. Give us a proper display output, let us charge and dock at the same time, give us a 4GB option, get USB 3.1 with type-C connector on it, put some properly fast storage on it, give us the beautiful OLED 'infinity' display that you're offering on your android tablet for the windows version too. THAT would be a device worth raving about. The CPU, the battery life, all the technology is there.
Instead what Dell do is release a 3000 model, with no digitizer and 1GB of ram. I have to assume that Dell are far too afraid of cannibalising their mid-range laptops to produce something truly great in the small tablet space, a very foolish and short-sighted position I think.
I don't think you get to trumpet 'fits in your pocket' if it's 8 inches. I don't doubt that in principle, you could persuade one to fit in your pocket (unless you're female) but I don't think it fits most peoples definitions of that.
Sorry to disappoint you, but it absolutely does fit in my pants pockets and all of my jackets pockets.
UPDATE: Here's an image gallery that I just made showing it in the jacket I'm wearing today, in the pants I'm wearing today and again in a pair of pants that I grabbed out my laundry pile - http://imgur.com/a/hFeDo
Not only does it fit in my pockets, but there's room to spare. Maybe it won't fit in some skinny jeans, but I don't wear tight pants because I'd rather be comfortable. In any case, whether it fits in your pocket or not isn't the point - it is true that Apple doesn't offer a highly portable device that runs a full OS for over 10 hours
> Even if there is a machine that approaches the performance and specs of a Mac, the thing Apple fans don't have to worry about is which machine to get because even the worst Apple device is miles ahead of the non Apple alternatives.
I love my retina MBP but that statement is pretty biased. There are plenty of PCs more powerful than any mac, often for less money. Even Windows 10 isn't so bad, i think that OSX Yosemite is pretty flawed as well.
Apple is still superior when it comes to the whole package, most importantly trackpad, battery life and overall experience, but if you don't fall exactly into Apples demographic you are pretty much out of luck.
Doesn't run Mac OS, so it's not going to be much fun if you're upgrading from a previous Mac. It's also probably going to be a bit more of a pain to keep it working (there were lots of things I didn't like about Mac OS X but one thing it was pretty good at was being plug'n'play and generally not fucking up - the latter being something Windows is not so good at).
Agreed on both counts, the reason that iSheep like me don't look at competitors I'd say is ultimately what you pointed out (at least for me that's more than half the reason - no maintenance!); and I agree on not being offended by the word iSheep which I had never heard of before and I think it's funny.
I bet you (skrowl) were downvoted just for using that word. It's short and sweet and conveys the necessary disdain you wanted to convey. I don't see what's wrong with it.
When I had a Windows machine I had to keep up with spyware and know all sorts of arcane things about the OS just to keep it chugging. I had HijackThis on a thumbdrive at all times. Nowadays I use my Mac as if I were punishing a computer, and it keeps on working without a hitch, no drivers gone wrong, no registry crap to worry about. That's why I'm an iSheep.
I got a new fully specced XPS 13" from work. More than being small it's one of the worst computers I ever had. Battery life suck, fans constantly spinning in idle. The only thing I like is the charger and screen. The keyboard is somewhat nice. Other than that, totally crappy PC.
Ouch that sounds harsh, but thats what take from it and for 999-1200usd you can find so much better.
What would you recommend as an alternative? I have no particular interest in Apple products, but I would love a windows PC with a similar form factor and battery life as the Macbook Air.
The GP comment compares devices based on a couple of specs (e.g., bezel size). The isolate-on-a-couple-of-specs approach has been proven to (a) not capture where the market will go, and (b) not capture how well the device works.
It also tends to (c) come off as a justification for the speaker's own past purchases, or alternatively, a justification to view a new device as not quite worth purchasing yet.
It sucks that, 20 years on, the same retort ("... Lame.") is just as relevant as a critique of the specmanship game practiced in these forums.
Yes, that is exactly the point. Apple make superior products, period. Even if they fall short on this or that spec, when it comes to the user experience, fit and finish, build quality, and design innovation, the safe bet is that Apple is leagues ahead of the competition. Apple is driving most of the major advances in personal computing: since the 90s virtually every laptop has been a clone of the 1992 PowerBook -- until recently when a market developed for MacBook Air clones. PDAs were off-brand Newtons, and so were smartphones until the iPhone came out. There wasn't an appreciable tablet market until the iPad. When it comes to personal computing, it's Apple's field and everyone else just plays in it.
This. I was really hoping they would drop that bezel to make the new Mac absolutely awesome looking. Honestly I would have rather they done that than everything else they did.
I was also hoping for a touch screen. While I don't use it a ton on my Windows machines with a touch screen I constantly finding myself to use it for scrolling.
Not really; the keyboard in the new MacBook is larger than their previous one. They could have kept it about the same and been fine. Alternatively bump the display up to 13" and drop the bezel.
I recently bought one of these from the Microsoft store. Zero complaints. $1300 for the 3200x1800(double 1600x900) touch, 256gb ssd, and 8gb of ram. The dell has a 15w cpu instead of the 5w in the new Mac but it weighs about a pound more. Having a headphone w mic port and 2 usb 3 ports is more useful than a type C port for me.
What's strange to me is that Apple used to have extremely thin bezels. The Titanium Powerbooks barely had any bezel and the display was just as thin (though, this was before LED backlights).
Except the new XPS 13 is made out of aluminium and carbon fibre. And the $1299 model has a 13" screen with touch and a higher resolution. And it has an i5 processor versus a Core M.
It will be interesting to see how much RAM the base configuration of the new Macbook will ship with, because the XPS 13 at $1299 comes with 8 GB.
Aluminum is not best material either, it bends too easily.
EDIT: aluminium bends too easily compared to other material. It does not have best structural integrity for its weight. Magnesium alloy, carbon fiber reinforced plastic or titanium composite usually has better parameters for weight.
But I am not saying that polished aluminium is bad or looks bad.
I just tossed my Macbook Pro across the room the other day by accident (didn't check that my backpack was closed...). It did indeed bend the metal a bit, and the display cracked in the corner, but having seen plastic machines make the same tumble I think it would have fared significantly worse if it weren't aluminum. The force that bent the metal would have surely cracked the plastic into pieces and the display would have taken more of the shock and cracked way worse than it did.
When I lived in college dorms a few years back, my thinkpad would fall ~6ft out of my bed onto tile a few times a week. Occasionally I had to pop the battery back in.
Plastic can flex to absorb the stress without permanently deforming, aluminum not so much. Even the panasonic toughbooks are plastic, and those are probably the most durable laptops I know of by a large margin.
Interestingly enough destroying a Panasonic Toughbook is easy. Stand on it with high-heels... The Panasonic rep had just been stomping on it, and then this smallish woman asks if she could try.
It didn't boot or do much of anything after she had traipsed all over it.
That being said, I am not saying the MB would fare much better, but those Toughbooks are not as tough as they are advertised.
Several years ago while walking outdoors during the winter carrying my thinkpad in my hands, I slipped on a manhole cover that was covered in ice. The thinkpad fell about 4 to 5 feet straight onto the manhole cover, landing on it's corner (left-side palm rest corner).
The corner itself was obliterated, leaving a small hole where it used to be, but that was the only damage the laptop sustained.
Unibody metal laptops are nice, but I think the structural advantage of them is heavily oversold. Plastic laptops with metal frames can be amazingly durable.
a) that marketing page compares against a processor that is 4 years old, i.e. the processor in the 2011 MBA?
b) Intel has made new core i5's in the last 4 years (or even 3 years, 2 years, last year...)
c) we're not at a point where physics allows us to make hardware that consumes < 1/3 the power, but performs better, using the same manufacturing processes.
It does, but it's at the bottom right of the screen. It's actually a pretty neat design and I didn't notice much difference from the youtube video I saw.
Looks like apple has finally introduced a netbook or iPad with a keyboard. Frankly, I'm disappointed with this macbook as I was expecting a full scale retina macbook air. After seeing the Dell XPS 13, I was hoping apple will take the retinafy the regular air. Ah well, the wait continues. Let's see --
1. Resolution of 2304x1440 which means at Retina this is 1152x720!. This is worse than the 11 inch air, much less the 13 inch 1440x900. I don't think people realize how cramped this will seem if you start doing work on this laptop.
2. single port might be cool, but I suspect everyone will have to pony up for a usb multi-port dongle to make this work. everyone is saying single port will suffice -- battery will last 9 hours but try driving a monitor and doing some work. Don't be surprised if you get 3-4 hours. Then what do you do. Plug it off and wait for 1 hour to recharge? What if you need to do development, how do you plug your device. Yeah the usb dongle will be needed which kind of defeats the point of having a single port.
This is where I stand as well. I have the 2011 MacBook Air 13" and I just wanted a version of my current computer with a retina screen (plus the latest processor). I don't want anything smaller/lighter and certainly nothing less powerful.
With this update, we effectively have three choices:
1) Low powered, nice screen. (MB)
2) Medium powered, regular screen. (MBA)
3) High powered, nice screen. (MBP)
> Resolution of 2304x1440 which means at Retina this is 1152x720!. This is worse than the 11 inch air, much less the 13 inch 1440x900. I don't think people realize how cramped this will seem if you start doing work on this laptop
You can still scale the screen resolution and get a higher resolution than the Air's 1440x900.
yeah, i know you can scale it. Will it look good though? In addition, it has a pretty weak processor, so we will have to see how the performance works out if you scale it. Especially if you drive a monitor.
Yes, I scale my 15'' rMBP all the time according to what I currently need and the quality difference is hardly noticeable.
> performance
That one I'm also curious about. My takeaway from this new MB however is that it's pretty much unusable as a business laptop anyways. For a serious laptop I still need power, display, ethernet and at least one USB port available at the same time as an absolute minimum, plus connectivity to both HDMI and VGA when needed. Even if they offered all the dongles for that, it would still be a mess to work with on a daily basis. So, really, even if the performance were good, it wouldn't change anything for me. I'm curious how version 2 of that machine will be - didn't we already have a similar situation with the first macbook air and then they readded more ports later, because you know, they'd also actually like to sell these things rather than just having Jony talk about them in a soothing voice?
One thing to keep in mind though is that you can comfortably read text that is quite a bit smaller on retina, so you can work at a higher application zoom level, which gives you back some space. Not sure whether the interface elements are too big for this display size, but intuitively the resolution sounds about right, it's about the same as the old (beloved) Powerbook 12'' as far as I remember.
Yes, I'm concerned about performance too but. Scaling on my 15" rMBP from 2012 definitely looks good, I usually keep it at one step lower (more screen space) than reccomended. If your eyes can take it, you won't loose quality.
Regarding number of ports, consider this: Apple already has a fairly well-tested theory undergirding this in the Apple Display + Macbook combination.
The Apple Display pushes power to the notebook via magsafe and interfaces its host of ports (Ethernet, Firewire, Thunderbolt, USB) through a single Thunderbolt cable.
In this new model, there will be only one cable necessary … and most users, while mobile, don't need more than one port at a time. And when plugged in, thanks to the new USB standard, the display its tethered to will push power and connectivity to it.
The Macbook Air took it partially there, and now they're fully closing that loop.
> 1. Resolution of 2304x1440 which means at Retina this is 1152x720!. This is worse than the 11 inch air, much less the 13 inch 1440x900. I don't think people realize how cramped this will seem if you start doing work on this laptop.
For this reason, it seems clear they won't run it at 2x by default. This is perfectly okay with a Retina screen, as you can't tell the difference. I believe the iPhone 6+ is run at non-integer scaling, and it looks great.
> try driving a monitor and doing some work. Don't be surprised if you get 3-4 hours. Then what do you do. Plug it off and wait for 1 hour to recharge? What if you need to do development, how do you plug your device. Yeah the usb dongle will be needed which kind of defeats the point of having a single port.
I imagine they will release a Cinema Display that provides power, display, and USB hub all over USB-C.
> Resolution of 2304x1440 which means at Retina this is 1152x720!. This is worse than the 11 inch air, much less the 13 inch 1440x900. I don't think people realize how cramped this will seem if you start doing work on this laptop.
I've been using a retina Macbook Pro with the '1680 x 1050' scaling option for a couple of years; works very nicely. I wouldn't see this as a major worry.
> I was hoping apple will... retinafy the regular air
I doubt that's happening soon. With this new macbook on the market, the only use Apple has for the Air is as a budget option. The new macbook is smaller and lighter, the only advantage of the air is its 12 hour battery life compared to this thing's 8, but that's to be expected considering how gutless the Air is.
I'm actually quite unhappy with this obsession with "thinner and lighter" mantra which throws away features at the expense of saving 0.01mm of thickness. These new computers don't have interfaces like Ethernet, DVD player, common interfaces for video. All of these is supposed to be outdated while it is very clearly not. You can't even do trivial upgrades like RAM let alone putting in new bigger SSD. These things are way too expensive to be entirely replaced just because you need 8GB of more RAM.
When you travelling and wireless is painfully slow in places like hotels, wired Ethernet connection is truly a life saver. I hate to carry so many dongles and even worse, they are so easy to lose which can be devastating when traveling. I hate even more carryieng external DVD players because running Netflix is too choppy. When I'm presenting, I hate to carry dongles for VGA, DVI, HDMI etc to connect to projectors. Just few years ago, all of these were built-in to laptops and I used to carry zero dongles. Most people carry laptops in backpack which are often heavier and combined with the weight of all dongles it diminishes any weight reduction done on these devices. So these whole obsession looks pretty stupid to me and detrimental to getting work done for users.
I once felt the same way as you did, but I'm coming to appreciate the allure of minimalism. Come on. Join us. Look at the shiny laptop. Pretty, isn't it? You don't need ports, or reliably functioning software. Drink the Apple cider.
I can't believe the new MacBook has no internal fans.
[0] Fanless architecture
The new MacBook is the first Mac notebook ever without a fan. Since the Intel Core M chip draws only 5 watts of power and therefore generates less heat, no fan or heat pipe is required. Instead, the logic board is seated on top of an anisotropic graphite sheet, which helps disperse any heat that is generated out to the sides, all while your Mac stays virtually silent.
I've had issues in the past with macbook pro fans failing, so it's great to remove that potential mechanical failure. But I've also had issues with my macbook pro outputting an unreasonable amount of heat. I'm curious if they've solved that issue, especially now with no internal fans.
Exactly. My daily driver is still a mid-2009 macbook air whose CPU actually actually hit its TJMAX for the first time ever last week.
I've asked Apple in the past to clean out the hardware with compressed air and re-apply the thermal paste, but I don't think they did, and they told me that they can't re-apply the thermal paste because they don't have the tool to do it anymore [Bethesda, Maryland store]. I've never had an Apple product that hasn't had overheating issues at some point in its lifecycle, and this new no-fan architecture honestly has me worried for this product in the long run.
> they can't re-apply the thermal paste because they don't have the tool to do it anymore
They don't have the same screwdriver they use on the latest MacBook Airs, some alcohol wipes, and the same thermal grease they use on everything except today's MacBook? Try an Apple Authorized Service Provider – i.e. an independent shop that repairs Macs – they should be able to help you out.
On the bright side, passive cooling generally can't fail, unless you physically snap something in two or separate the heatsink from the die. Notice that laptops generally have cooling problems as they age- I'm sure some of this is due to the processor degrading over time, but most is going to be due to gradual failure of the cooling system as the fan dies and the fins fill with dust. Neither is usually a problem with passive systems.
The CPU dissipates a maximum of 5W, there's no discrete GPU, and the power dissipation of the other logic board components is minimal (maybe a watt or two at most). That's barely enough to warm the machine up, let alone to make it hot.
I wonder with an SDD and no fan if that means there are no moving parts at all anymore. I can't think of anything else that would have a motor. I guess the vibration in the touchpad?
Accidentally clipping the power cable is something I definitely got used to not worrying about anymore. I'm loving the single mother-of-all ports USB-C will provide but I highly appreciated the magnet component of MagSafe..
I wonder if someone can come up with a "mag-breakaway" adaptor for USB-C? It's a "null" adaptor -- it has USB-C female and USB-C male -- but it splits down the center and is held together by magnets. You can just put one on the end of your USB power adaptor. There you go: you have your Magsafe back again.
Off the top of my head the only concern is: How do you turn on/off the flow as the magnets lose contact? Last thing you want is arching as it comes apart.
All connections arc as they come apart, it's just that the arc size is a function of the dielectric medium (air?), potential difference (voltage) and current. You design for "number of disconnects" and choose materials and power design so that the connector will survive as long as specified.
Apple MagSafe connectors are on the same voltage (20V) as these new Type C connectors, although Type C seems rated for a higher current (5A).
Looking at the pinout, the GND and VBUS are a bit longer, so will disconnect last upon removal. This may be to allow for the voltage to be dropped in anticipation of a disconnect, but you'd need enough intelligence at the power supply end to notice that. Lowering the voltage prior to disconnect would reduce the arc size.
Was clipping the power cable a big problem? I've never done that with a laptop, but have found the brittle MagSafe connection to be an almost daily annoyance since it was introduced.
I think it probably speaks to how 'mobile' you are with your laptop, either walking around in an office or even just actual traveling etc. I liked that it was easily detachable without any thought. Now I'll have to worry about whether or not the port will get loose over time if I aggressively pull it out at angle, etc.
Is the world really as obsessed with smallness as Apple thinks it is? From what I keep hearing (and this is anecdotal, of course), it seems that most people would prefer to (reasonably) maximize the battery life with the downside of adding a bit more heft.
Of course, there's always a balance that has to be stricken, but it seems like Apple always pushes much more to the side of size over battery vs. what seems to be the desired balance (leaning more towards improved battery life).
I see this more as an evolutionary step. They size the whole package down with lower battery life and lower performance, then as the technology catches up they will up the battery life and performance once it's possible. Same thing they did with the original Air and Pro. When the original Air came out people mocked it for giving up ports and optical drives for size, now it's the standard laptop that's recommended for most use cases.
This is one product at a specific price point. Hardware wise, this thing is a cell phone with a really nice screen, a full size keyboard and a gigantic battery. Could they have made the battery a little bit bigger? Probably, but I'm sure they have detailed metrics on how often people charge their laptops. Apple doesn't strike me as the type of company to make arbitrary design decisions. Hate them all you want, but they don't do things without research.
And Apple laptops already give really good battery life: my 2014 retina MBP gets 6+ hours on a full charge -- and that's while running VMWare Fusion with 2-3 VMs. I have yet to see a Windows laptop give anywhere close to that battery life under that type of load without a bulbous battery pack protruding from the back.
> this thing is a cell phone with a really nice screen
Man, at $1299 I hope that's not the case. It was amusing how the "logic board" was really mentioned as kind of an afterthought in the design video, and then only to point out how small it was.
I would love a bigger battery for a slightly bigger device but this isn't what Apple is aiming for.
Apple design the hardware to work with what they want it to look like not design a device around the hardware.
I used to think that was stupid but it clearly works for Apple. Their business is not making the best device spec wise but the "best" device design wise (in their view obviously).
This makes sense, but when designing the new MacBook, they still have to take battery life into account. For example, if Apple truly wanted the best device design at any expense of hardware, it would be even thinner with only 1 hour battery life.
But they knew customers would want more battery life than 1 hour. So rather than make it as thin as possible, they figure out: what is the best battery life:heft ratio?
That is what I was questioning in my OP: is this ratio, in the eyes of Apple, out of sync with this ratio in the eyes of the consumers?
Obviously, Apple knows how to build products. But it would be naive to assume that Apple always strikes this balance perfectly. I'm just suggesting that they may be pushing slightly more towards design over function.
The "best" device is also one that is hard for their competitors to manufacture. The strategy is to dump a huge amount of money into a competitive advantage that's not easy to duplicate. Charge a huge premium by being out in front, then the rest of the industry falls in line eventually (such as with Intel's Ultrabook initiative). The followers pay somewhat less, but they also don't see a premium. It almost doesn't matter what they do as long as it's hard for a competitor to match cheaply.
Is the new battery life still not good enough for you?
Also please all saying this is only "design". This is design made from user problems. Apple is a master at solving actual user problems, and that's why they are so successful. As a side product, their hardware look handsome. But that's actually the less important side.
Real users don't care about 10% more processor or 20% more storage. They care that they can wear their laptop everywhere (and in their purse, many Apple customers are women), that they can type fast and not be bumed by the noise of the computer.
Call it design, I call this utility, and I'm glad Apple tackle those issues. They really care about the whole and are not just assembling off the shelf pieces together.
I would agree with your comment if not for the fact that Apple invented a whole new terraced battery design (watch the keynote) in order to pack the thing full of batteries, and the thing has 9 hours battery life. The laptop is basically a keyboard, a screen, a tiny logic board and a huge battery.
I work at coffee shops and airplanes. Having 24 hours battery life so I don't even have to carry the power adapter is my dream. You could easily trade the weight of the charger with more batteries in the laptop (You will end up carrying the same weight in your bag) I want to charge my laptop the same way I charge my phone: while I'm sleeping.
At university I move around a lot, and often there isn't a power plug because tables are out in the middle of rooms or something. I could try and sit next to a wall or something, but why bother when battery isn't a concern.
Do I understand right that it's got one port, which can be used for either power or USB, but not both at once? Man, that's the future? I was hoping they'd give it two USB ports, if it was supposed to serve as the new full powered macbook. It never occured to me they'd actually take away a port, and give you charging or USB peripheral but not both at once. Bah humbug.
If this is true, it's a complete deal breaker. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I couldn't even use the laptop in clamshell mode with a monitor, which I do sometimes.
You can you just need externals which means an extra $50-150 depending on what you need, and it puts into perspective the notion of this MB being the most portable device in the Mac lineup.
I kind of see the MB as very solid upgrade to anyone using the 11 inch MBA for non-dev stuff (e.g. school) and is rich enough to be willing to pay 30-40% extra, despite it being hard to figure this type of user to really need 8gb of ram for example.
For anyone on the 13 inch lineup, it feels like a step back either in performance, battery, ports, price, screen size.
I mean, 13' MBA? Cheaper, bigger screen, better ports, better battery. Not many people will really care that the MB is a tiny bit lighter/compact to the extent they're willing to give up all these things, except if they cared so much to have gotten the 11', hence how I see the MB as being an upgrade to the 11' MBA.
Unless you really wanted a retina display and want to give up screen space, a few hours of battery, pay a premium and have to get a bunch of peripherals.
The VGA / HDMI adapters include both USB & charging ports as well. So you could use it perfectly well in clamshell on your desk. And now you don't need a separate charging / thunderbolt cable as well.
"Do I understand right that it's got one port, which can be used for either power or USB, but not both at once? Man, that's the future?"
Within 18-24 months there will be a refresh that has two USB ports. It's already in the works and ready to manufacture.
Apple knows that people are using macbooks, successfully, for 4+ and even 5+ years, and they also know that a LOT of people will both buy the new macbook and buy a new one to get the "at long last" second USB port, which somewhat alleviates the "problem" of macbooks being too long-lived.
"Seriously? Couldn't they have put _two_ ports in it so you can plug something in while it's being charged without lugging around a usb hub?"
I have been a macbook air user since 2008 (6 years with a 13 and 1+ with an 11) and I love them.
I will not buy one that has zero ports available while I am charging. No hard feelings - I just can't do it.
I am not a feature wizard and I don't need to address every possible use case, but I absolutely need to have the ability to charge my laptop while using a cellular dongle. It's an absolute requirement.
The current MBA design with a port on each side is sensible and highly usable, and is vastly superior to a design that limits you to zero ports while you are charging.
Let's not even discuss hub use while traveling. It's a clownish suggestion.
They'll likely release a series of peripherals that have one intended focus and an additional port, similar to iPad peripherals. The iPad HDMI adapter[1] has two inputs, one for HDMI and one for power, so you can charge and play at the same time
Here at Microsoft all our meeting rooms are supporting wireless display tech - apple air play included. This seems to be in line with apple's history - ditch technology that is approaching its end of life and force the newer tech to take over. There's still the ability to do wired external displays, but it's at the same convenience the usb cd drives were when apple phased them out.
As someone who likes to have a second monitor when I can, where are my wireless display tech for monitors? It would be awesome if all I had to do was turn on my monitor and not have to deal with cables, but currently that is reality.
Seriously though, I'm looking forward to cable-less future when it come to monitors.
Well, it never really took off outside the Mac world. This may be an improvement. I look at my Mac Mini that currently has power, Thunderbolt display, 3 disks, USB hub with 30-pin and Lightning, and DVD, though, and wonder WTF they are thinking about 1 port. IF the daisy chaining works and I can still charge my iPad, it could be really nice.
That's the stopgap solution, I think. Looking at the larger picture, it's silly that a projector only looks for video-in, instead of video-in/power-out, considering it's already plugged to a wall outlet.
You think the end game is "We'll improve the hardwire connection to the project so it can backfeed power" rather than "We'll just get rid of the wire"?
It looks like you connected a device from an untrusted Vendor ID which is enumerating as both a [display|power source|input device] and a [USB Mass Storage device]. Do you want to allow this?
Couldn't you then be using the monitor's power source to charge the laptop? Presumably the monitor is plugged into the wall and can transmit power to the laptop while the laptop transmits data to it.
The USB 3.1 spec has separate pinouts for power out and power in, so this should be possible. Anyone who wants to use the USB for peripherals regularly will just need a hub.
Not that weird; I'm guessing the 720p camera module just couldn't fit. Lots of emphasis for this laptop went into "thin" engineering, and as should be clear with current smartphones, making thin but high quality cameras is a very difficult endeavor. (The iPhone 6 has the camera module jutting out of the case...)
It's what, 9 hours? If you want to compile some code, you probably get 8 hours. That's fine, but that's a cycle or more every day, and that has an effect on the battery life. If you want to plug it in to a screen you ideally want to charge it, too, instead of degrading the battery. Your screen is in a socket, your MB should, too.
Given it's USB-C there'll be plenty of hubs, docks etc... but it'd have been nice to get it out of the box (charger being a hub), or at least having two ports.
1 port is just ridiculous, it's basically 'we force you to make big tradeoffs, like an external screen or charging, unless you want to buy and carry with you various externals for what is supposed to be the most portable device in our Mac lineup'.
Lack of an SD card is another one of those things. Not as big of a problem but would 2 ports have really been that difficult?
Apple make plenty of higher-end products for people that want to compile code all day and have multiple ports.
This one is a "MacBook" and the other one is a "MacBook Pro". I think it's clear which one fits your needs better.
Happily, there are millions of people that don't want to code all day, and have probably never plugged anything into their laptop other that power. So this device is for them, not you.
Two ports would be nice in case one became unreliable... which seems pretty likely since everything plugs into it and it doesn't have a magsafe-like disconnect if someone trips over a cord...
Apple is primarily a profit-driven company. They front noble reasons for "optimizing" down to 1 port for everything, but the reality is they're mandating that you buy their $79 adapter.
Apple are obviously very concerned about aesthetics and having as little ports breaking the smooth lines of the design hinder that.
However personally I would of thought having an additional type c connector on the opposite side would actually improve the ascetic design by providing more symmetry.
If they added another and let you charge the device from either side, it would also improve usability, I know I get annoyed when my wall charger is on one side and I have to stretch the cable around to the other side of the laptop.
Doesn't look like it, but of course it's entirely possible. With USB-C not being an Apple thing, I fully expect elegant chargers, hubs and docks to solve this.
But it'd have been nice to get it out of the box, as it's an additional $50-150 depending on how fancy/slim/functional you want your new charger to be, at which point choosing it over the MBA with 8gb/256gb with a few hours extra battery life and an extra inch seems even less interesting.
Eventual Windows competitors will have more than one port, but they won't be identical. Only a single port will be able to be used for charging, the others will be data-only.
That's too inelegant a solution for Apple, they'd rather just have a single port than have two ports that look like they should be identical but aren't.
A port that supports 100W power input requires a significant amount of external components. Switching that between locations is also a significant challenge (IOW, it costs significant money and space). Just switching between the wall and the battery is hard enough, adding a third location will add a significant amount of space and $.
It will also add significant protection costs: what if somebody plugs 2 chargers into the laptop? They'll be at almost but not the same voltage, and amperage levels will be high enough that significant damage could result. Obviously the laptop will only do the upgrade voltage & amperage handshake with one of the chargers, but I imagine that redundant hardware protection will also be required.
My Dell Venue 8 Pro comes with a single micro USB port that is used for both charging and data.
I don't really consider it to be a competitor though because Apple doesn't offer anything that can compete with a touchscreen device that can be used as a tablet and also a full general purpose computer.
This is always so interesting to me, because as a person without dogs or children, the magsafe adapter has only ever been annoying. It seems like the world is divided into people with small creatures who love the magsafe, and people without who don't get it.
Having been a long time laptop user, I've had several incidents where one of my large dogs get wrapped up in a cord and runs off with either my computer crashing to the floor or me hanging onto it while the charging pin breaks or bends. It is a big annoyance when that happens with magsafe still, I'll have to get up and fetch the cord again.. but i'd trade that annoyance with the alternative any day.
This new MacBook has nice battery life and if I had one I can see using it without needing to plug it in while i'm on the couch or something.
What worries me though is a precedent being set. I am not in the market for a MacBook or MacBook Air, however I do buy MacBook Pros. I do everything on them from software dev, video editing, playing games. Much of that use is not battery friendly so I will _need_ to plug those in while i'm on the couch or in a high traffic area. I love the idea of USB-C I just hope Apple keeps MagSafe around for form factors they are not trying to reduce to sheets of paper thickness.
Clearly what is needed is a Type-C to magsafe-style thingy and back. You stick a short pigtale Type-C -> magthing into the Macbook, then another magthing -> Type C onto that, so that you effectively have a magnetic safety catch in the middle of your Type-C cable. Or maybe the magnetic end would connect directly to a hub, since with just one USB port, you'll probably be using a hub a lot.
I agree but here is some idle speculation: perhaps this laptop is so light that the force needed to effectively hold the magsafe onto the laptop is large enough that it wouldn't really release without pulling the laptop over anyhow.
I don't think magsafe is totally ruled out. They could simply have the new USB connector, a short wire to the brick, and magsafe off the other side of that to the wall. The brick would also act as a device hub.
Apple's laptop battery life estimates have historically been pretty on-point -- I've found that they often hit, or even exceed, the estimates in real-life usage. I see no reason to imagine their latest laptop is any different.
I've seen a lot of people disappointed by this, but - correct me if I'm wrong - If you were to trip over a micro USB cord it would simply disconnect as well, similar to MagSafe, right? I mean, it's not as elegant as magsafe but it certainly wouldn't drag your whole laptop off the table, would it?
Try pulling directly down on a cord connected in a usb port. It won't just pull out. The magsafe would just disconnect after a little bit of resistance.
Probably depends on the direction of the force and other conditions but I'd imagine the male part of the connector would break or bend in some scenarios.
The obvious end game for USB 3.1 type C is replacing your laptop with a phone. USB 3.1 type C is the "universal docking station", providing power, data & display over a single cable. Obviously useful for a laptop, but even more useful to a phone. Apple obviously could merge OSX & iOS into a single OS, but I have real difficulty seeing them doing that. (It also seems unlikely that they'll replace Lightning with USB 3.1 type C). It seems much more likely that Ubuntu, Microsoft and possibly Google are going to go there first. By pushing USB 3.1 type C, Apple really seems to be opening doors for their competitors...
Is this laptop aimed for the high-end Macbook Pro users, or is it poised as the spiritual successor to the Macbook Air?
According to the tech specs, this has the slowest processor (1.1 Ghz Intel Core M) of all of their models and the oldest graphics card (Intel HD Graphics 5300).
Granted -- I know I shouldn't commit the cardinal sin of "The number is lower so it's worse." My words aren't meaningful. I guess I'm just confused about who this product is aimed for.
EDIT: After looking around, this machine seems less powerful than the Air. I'm guessing it's aimed for those who want something more stylish with pizzazz at the expense of higher specs. The target user wants to own a machine that feels futuristic and magical. This machine is just certainly not targeted toward my needs.
In terms of specs, it's This machine < Air < MBP.
In terms of style, it's this machine > Air > MBP (?).
In terms of price, it's Air < this machine < MBP.
It seems clear the Air is doomed, although it'll take another couple of years. It'll be this for most users, MBP for those that really need more RAM, more ports, etc.
I have a work laptop (chunky ass dell from 2010 '1366x768') and a gaming rig at home (built early 2012 '1920x1080'). Both are on windows 7.
There are a few things:
* I've had iPhones since they came out, love them, but nothing has compelled me to go to the Mac. (also have retina ipad mini)
* I don't want to upgrade one of my main machines to retina if my other machines don't have it. It's bad enough switching back from the phone/tablet.
* I've also just recently gotten into photography and video editing.
I've been waiting for a laptop to be 'good enough'. The retina macbook pros are excellent machines, but if I upgraded I really wanted it to be to an air-like device. My main tasks for the laptop are using the web, using skype and using email. (& I might add, carrying it ALL THE TIME)
As my main 'need' for my desktop has essentially transitioned from gaming into photography / video.. the 5K iMac is just.. i mean.. have you seen the screen in person? Goddam its nice. The games I would play will run on it at 1440 with no problem whatsoever. I have seen the scaling issues on windows at 4K and am just not interested in dealing with that crap these days.
OSX Pre-Yosemite just never appealed to me. (although I had used macs previously at various jobs) It feels like the OS and the Hardware have each now hit their point where the effort of switching is going to pay off much sooner than any time prior.
I have a feeling the mac market is going to continue growing, as there will be more and more people in a similar position (main PCs need an upgrade, etc) that will finally be saying 'time for a mac'
>Is this laptop aimed for the high-end Macbook Pro users, or is it poised as the spiritual successor to the Macbook Air?
I think it's clearly the latter. They're pushing the boundaries of portability on a machine with a full sized keyboard. The port decision is clearly the future, but as with the original MBA, the market isn't quite ready to make the leap re: the tradeoffs. It's incredibly thin, light, and amazing looking machine with no compromises where it truly matters most, -the keyboard and the screen. The basic premise is in place. It feels to me like the Air will yield to this once the difference in value from the remaining tradeoffs (battery life, price, etc) shrinks a bit.
It befuddles the mind that you would develop a laptop that defeats the entire point of being a thin laptop, by ensuring you must carry a bag full of adapters and dongles.
The MacBook Air may fit in envelope, but does all it's cables and adapters fit in that envelope with it?
I feel silly defending apple, but if it really does have a 8 hour battery life and your workflow doesn't directly involve peripherals - what would you need to lug around?
I don't understand people who complain about dongles. What is the difference between carrying around a corded peripheral, and a corded peripheral with a two-inch extension that solves your legacy connector problems?
To me the biggest case is going places where I might have an unexpected peripheral need. For instance, it's not uncommon for someone to need to transfer me some files with a flash drive.
If I were to buy this thing, I'd have to carry a USB Type-A dongle all the time, just in case. Rather than have say... an extra millimeter of thickness, and the USB port just built right in.
How long until everyone you know (include non technical people) upgrade to them? I personally don't carry flash drives around, but I occasionally need to get files from non technical friends who do, and many of them are still using old 128mb or less USB 1.1 flash drives.
Why would they go out and buy new ones to fit in certain models of laptop if the limited capacity and slow speed hasn't already gotten them to replace it?
Sure, but what will be the adoption rate? Do people have to have both or drives with both ports? For how long will you be more likely to see standard USB flash drives than USB-C ones? What will the cost of USB-C flash drives be compared to standard USB ones?
All important questions to answer before you walk out the door without a dongle.
Are there things here where Apple is significantly further ahead than the competition? Innovating on keyboards, trackpad, battery life, power usage and form factor - there just seem to be innovating simultaneously on more levels than the competition.
Another thing - that vibrating trackpad gizmo feels like a couple of innovations away from true touch feedback on an iPhone? Any thoughts?
Apple's role here is often to be more opinionated, or braver, than others. They were the first to adopt USB, first to stop shipping floppy drives, first to ditch optical drives, first to make high-DPI ('retina') displays a standard feature... they are willing to be the one who goes out there and says 'we all know this is where things are going - so let's quit pussy-footing around and just do it'.
This new MacBook announcement was just item after item of taking things to the next logical step, and it's setting a new bar which every other laptop manufacturer out there will now have to meet.
I said first to ditch optical drives, not first to add them. The MBA was, at the time of its launch, controversial for its lack of a DVD drive. The 'air' referred to the fact it got all its software over the network - which was wireless, because it also lacked ethernet (also controversial).
Macbook Air - announced January 2008.
Netbook - well, okay, I'll give you that the Eee PC came out in October 2007 (Asus have always been the outlier in experimental PC form factors) - but other manufacturers weren't seriously playing in the netbook space before the Eee sales numbers came in, so I don't think you can say 'everybody' had legacy-free optical-driveless netbooks out before the MBA.
But more to the point, a netbook was optical-drive-free because you weren't expected to use it for more than just web browsing; you weren't going to need to load software onto it. The MBA was optical-drive free in spite of it being intended to be a fully-functional notebook computer. You would install software onto it over wi-fi. And you wouldn't need to rip CDs because you would buy all your music from the iTunes store. In 2008 that was still a bold idea.
The Air came out at a time when optical disks were actually pretty necessary. In fact, Apple released the air with the ability to use the optical drive on a desktop or laptop connected to your network.
Apple's abandoning of the optical drive played a huge role in ensuring everyone provided a non optical disk way of getting their software or media content.
There were a number of high-performance < 3 Pound laptops without CD drives prior to the MacBook Air, so Apple wasn't the first one. I don't recall it being controversial that they didn't have a CD drive in the MBA.
Where they were first (to the best of my knowledge), and were a bit controversial, was removing them as an option for their Desktops. That raised a few eyebrows.
Apple were about the first to drop them in consumer stuff; most previous companies to drop them did so in ultra-expensive (think those $4,000 Vaios Sony used to do) ultra-portables only.
Strictly speaking, Apple has not dropped optical drives across the line; you can actually still buy a 13" non-retina Macbook with one. Though given that it's worse in practically every way than the Air, and more expensive, I doubt that anyone does.
I mean first to make it an explicit part of their product strategy that the only peripheral connection standard they would support was USB. Now, to be fair, Apple had been in a ghetto of their own making for peripherals with their DIN serial ports and ADB keyboards, but the iMac's total switch to USB happened when PC makers were still mixing USB with parallel and serial ports (and I still have PS/2 and 9-pin DIN ports on most of my windows machines). I don't think it's controversial to say Apple were the first to make a 'legacy-free' computer with the iMac.
Ok I see, good point. Made me thinking: how did Apple got into this position where they could pull such tricks without customers going completely mental but sometimes even rather the opposite: craving for the newer device? I mean, imagine it's the year 2000 and a company like Dell or HP says: 'we drop the parallel port'. Hell would brake loose.
Well, those were dark days for Apple. They were sort-of circling the drain in danger of going out of business. Their market had been whittled down to die-hard Apple fans. So they could do things like drop floppy drives from the iMac when the only alternative to was buy an external USB floppy drive or an external CDRW which cost about $400 at the time. Many of their customers would happily just throw out their old peripherals or jump through the dongle/adapter hoops when Apple would EOL some tech.
You get diminishing returns on "innovation" when working inside an existing paradigm. Companies are rarely significantly further ahead of their competitors unless they invent or popularize a new class of product.
They still have competitors that are doing interesting things. I think apple just talks about it as part of their keynote, while their competitors might not have keynotes going into the manufacturing details and innovations that they have done.
For example, the NEC LaVie Z HZ550 is 1.75lbs and the case is made out of a magnesium-lithium alloy. The keyboard is integrated into the case. It uses a processor that consumes more power (an i5), but they will probably release a new one in a while that will use the same 5W core M and get similar battery life. The laptop is a whole 3mm thicker than the new air, but you get ports as a result.
I'd say they're more progressive than innovative. A solitary USB-C port is kinda ugly. Now your charger shares the same port as everything else. For business use this can be annoying especially for those who give presentations or just need an easy to to plug in USB thumb drive port. Or a dongle for a third-party mouse or trackball.
Also, do we consider price anymore? I tend to buy machines at most $500. An $800-1200 Mac really isn't an option for me. I don't care to spend that much, nor understand why I should. I guess a Mercedes is better than my Jeep, but that doesn't mean Jeep can't innovate. Its just they have to hit a certain price points and deliver certain things at that price point. The Mercedes can have auto-assist driving and rich Corinthian leather, but I don't really need those things.
Apple considers price. If you want a $500 laptops there is a wide range of competing options and there is no need for them to involve themselves with that.
> that vibrating trackpad gizmo feels like a couple of innovations away from true touch feedback on an iPhone?
I could see this being a new setting in iOS. There's a "Vibrate on touch" setting in Android (Settings > Sound > Vibrate on Touch), the device vibrates very slightly when typing and when you press navigation bar buttons.
I don't think anyone else has done a terraced battery. Apple was also one of the first companies to move to moldable Li-Po cells to fit more capacity in smaller form factors.
A search against the comments returns no results: 2304×1440 resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio?
Showing a few co-workers and a quick suggests what I thought: a bit of amazement at 16:10. Does anyone have any insight into why they didn't go with a 16:9 ratio?
16:10 is better than 16:9 for anything but watching movies because the screen would be as wide anyway, so the 16:9 turns into a reduced height display. Furthermore watching movies with a little black stripes above and below the video is not so bad.
Do you need research to appreciate vertical screen real-estate? I have two 16:10 monitors and love the extra space. I loved it enough that I then flipped one of my 16:10s into portrait.
It's occasionally problematic in that pages I make sometimes pack the perfect amount in on my display, and get cut off on 16:9s.
I don't disagree with you but your argument seems to promote the idea that 4:3 would be even more ideal for the same screen size because it has more vertical screen real-estate. I don't think you answered the question at all.
ThinkPad loyalists would kill for a modern ThinkPad with a high-res 4:3 display. This is how they used to be sold, and the extra vertical screen real estate (16:12) was great for work.
> PC vendors have almost zero say in this change. We simply have to adapt. As much as I would like it to be so, 4:3 is not coming back.
Apple has since gone on to sell hundreds of millions of 4:3 iPads, so this argument doesn't hold much water. Where there's a will, there's a way. Further dilution of the ThinkPad from a pure "business" machine.
Obviously it's subjective, but I'd prefer a machine with a 4:3 display, because when I'm coding or reading I need vertical real estate much more than horizontal.
I always assumed that the move to 16:9 for computers was driven mostly by either manufacturing economies of scale or the coolness factor of HDTV's.
Personally I've transitioned into splitting windows in half when I'm writing code or reading anything substantial. At 16:9 this is more than effective.
I mean, the only thing I can see in favor of this is that 16:10 is better for working because it has more resolution, but that's not arguing for that aspect, only for more resolution.
Would you take a screen that was 1728*1080?
If not, then standardize on 16:9, get a higher resolution screen.
Going from 1920x1080 (16:9) to 1920x1200 (16:10) is better because you get more vertical estate. But you seem to suggest that 1728x1080 (16:10) is also better. Aspect ratio does not automatically make a resolution better lol.
Aspect ratio has nothing to do with resolution. 16:10 is much closer to the golden ratio, which allows to split the screen vertically in half and give two vertical screens with roughly the same ratio again.
16:10 has proportionally more vertical screen space, which is much more important given that most our documents/sources are oriented vertically. Not to mention wasted vertical space that cannot be removed (toolbars/menus/etc). Having more horizontal space is useless if you're mostly working/viewing with a single document at a time. If you physically rotate the screen, the 10:16 ratio is again better at fitting a piece of a A4 paper.
The 16:9 ratio was driven by consumer demand, but no professional user I ever met liked it for working. There's a lot of unused horizontal space in just about every scenario. I personally stuck on 4:3 as long as I could, then switched to 16:10. Admittedly, 16:10 is "good enough" for me that I wouldn't necessarily go back to 4:3 now.
I'm not a Mac person at all, but I greatly envy this, uh, aspect of their computers. The code I work with is vertical, not horizontal, so having more vertical space is good.
It might be fun to take a cardboard box or something and make a "vertical" stand for your macbook. You could keep it constantly rotated 90 degrees for code reading. :)
It's a serious question. It's basically a "mega-tablet," a high-end mobile device with a "real OS." It's designed for doing serious work in an ultra-portable fashion.
I can tether to my phone of course, but this seems like an option they should have considered.
> I can tether to my phone of course, but this seems like an option they should have considered.
I think you just answered your own question. It seems to make more sense to have one channel to the mobile data world (that being your phone) and reduce costs/complexity of including a mobile interface on the device itself.
I wouldn't be too surprised if Apple removes this for iPads as well at some point.
I'm gonna brag: here in France I pay 10€/months for unlimited calls, unlimited texts, unlimited internet (5Gb of "fair use"). I can do whatever I want with the internet, be it VOIP or hotspot station. And I can cancel my plan whenever I want.
This is what you get in countries where good infrastructure isn't considered a communist conspiracy and where one of the major political parties is not overtly anti-infrastructure. France, Germany, etc. also have public transit in most places.
But here we have venteprivee.com where like 3 or 4 times a year, operators put an offer for a lower price for their service. Every year, if you look around summer holidays, you can get internet for 2€/month instead of 20€/month and sometimes phone plans too for a very low price.
It usually only last for a year and then you go back to normal price. If you are like me and you don't care about keeping your phone number, then you can just cancel your plan whenever there is a better plan or at the end of the offer :)
In UK Three has a truly unlimited plan with truly unlimited tethering. I have friends who just tether through their phones to desktop PCs instead of getting broadband at home.
Their branding has become very confusing. In particular when some people are still buying the old Macbook Pro because they prefer it over the latest one, so really one of the highest end laptops they sell is "last years" model of the MBP.
Yes, but I think it will go away pretty soon. It doesn't have much reason to exist with the introduction of this new machine. Long term I would say it's this new Macbook + MBP.
I can think of a couple of reasons to keep the Airs. Firstly some people may feel the need for usb sockets etc. And secondly they may well keep them as a low cost option the way they usually keep the previous years iPhone on sale. The Air 11 is $899 now. Guess that'll drop to $799 or so when the new one's out. It'd help get the budget conscious to go Mac rather than Windows.
That's not an uncommon practice. I believe there was a non-Retina Macbook Pro in the product line for quite a while after the introduction of the Retina Macbook Pro.
The non-retina MBP is still available. Or at least it was up to a few minutes ago; they've just taken the store page down for updating, I wouldn't be surprised if the old MBP is gone when it returns. Although you'll probably still be able to buy one until the stock runs out.
There's still one left (I just got one). The pricing model of the Retina MBPs is just craziness to me. To get larger storage sizes you have to jump entire model lines to get it, you can't just upgrade storage on them.
Just for the older Retina models. Copied from the link you provided: "Specifically, the "Mid-2012" and "Early 2013" models use a 6 Gb/s SATA-based SSD whereas the "Late 2013" and "Mid-2014" models use a PCIe 2.0-based SSD. These SSD modules are neither interchangeable nor backwards compatible."
The reason for the sentence you quote is to explain that PCIe chips are different than the proprietary-pinout m-SATA port in 2012-2013 Retina MacBooks. They are strikingly similar and if you're not paying attention, you might try to move one into an incompatible machine.
You can still swap a drive in newer models, just with a PCIe card instead of an mSATA drive.
Simply put: Newer generation of hardware = newer storage interface.
Here is a replacement guide for a 2014 model Retina MacBook Pro:
I was thinking long and hard about maybe getting a refurbished 15.6in MBP. I ended up with a HP Omen gaming laptop instead, because I could get it with a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM for $1700, instead of about $2500. I'm giving up battery life of course, and then there's the issue that it runs Windows...
However, I've been pleased so far. The keyboard takes a little getting used to (because it is in the exact center of the laptop), but is good for typing overall. Good feel, no flex. The display is good too, with a wide viewing angle.
It seems Apple has settled on the same corporate colour scheme for everything except watch straps and budget iPhones - champagne, space gray, and white.
From a design POV, I'd have loved to see this in more cheerful colours.
I don't think it would have disappointed the target market, either.
I know, but I'm just saying that Apple is has a substantial markup on the gold watch so why not for it's gold colored laptop. Not unless their gold watch actually contains 8.3 ounces of gold, at the current price of gold ((10000 - 350) / 1163.14). Perhaps Apple's gold watch is much larger and much more heavy than the standard version.
The retina screen is definitely better, but the Air can be upgraded to 8GB of RAM. The overall design of the new MacBook is revolutionary, but I can't believe they chose a CPU that is considerably less powerful and charge a premium price. If you can stand 1.5 lbs more, you can have a MacBook Pro for the same price which is considerably more powerful (also with a retina display).
I disagree. As someone who used an Air and then MacBook Pro Retina 13", the weight difference is small but definitely noticeable for the worse. If you walk a lot it makes a difference.
What's interesting to me as well is that they don't seem to have announced any sort of dock or usb hub or even really mentioned what the charging brick looks like right? That seems like a really important thing to cover when announcing you have 1 port for all peripherals now.
Apple most likely will release a new Thunderbolt Display (probably with name change, Apply Display?) that can act as USB-C hub. It is not ready I guess, this new MacBook also is available about one month later.
1.2Ghz processor seems like a dealbreaker for professional applications (Coding, Video editing) but for applications the Air was used before it actually seems okay.
This is the new laptop for the casual user who's browsing Facebook, maybe typing something up in Word/Pages, and listening to iTunes. I was pretty interested until I saw that it's a Core M, and won't replace my I7 anytime soon for web development with multiple virtualmachines and light video editing.
I don't do a lot that stresses the i7 in my 2011 Air, but I don't have a sense of how much slower a Core M is and what that'll mean day to day.
Edit: chased down some benchmarks, and it's quite a bit slower than any current i-series combo, though the turbo makes up for it some (probably at steep cost to battery life).
What a bummer, I was seriously hoping to replace my 2012 MBA, but now... apparently the Core M processor will unfortunately be a good deal slower, than the one used 3 years ago. Which means I'll probably have to go with a Windows based laptop or wait for the MBP update.
Just fyi: Notebook Check is very reliable. They're arguably the leading laptop review site and have been for quite a few years. They're located in Austria and are ad funded, but I've always found their editorials and reviews to be pretty darn good.
Yeah, I'm coming from a 2011 MBA with an i7 2677M.
The Core M *71 isn't that far off--3DMark is notably lower, but most others are pretty close.
But what concerns me is that reviews of other systems with the chip mention that it throttles itself pretty aggressively when hot. I have no idea how much that would or wouldn't hit these benchmarks. This might be best-case performance on a cool day, for the first 30 minutes.
The 1.2 GHz Core M has a maximum frequency of 2.9 GHz with turbo boost. The 1.1 GHz model will spool up to 2.6 GHz.
Further, both processors are dual cores with hyperthreading. It'll be about 5% less performant than the previous Macbook Air while using vastly less energy (4.5 watts vs 15 watts).
I have a 1.7GHz 2012 MBA, and have used the more recent 1.3GHz Haswell version, which is a little faster (clock speed is not everything). It's fine for programming, though it does perhaps push Scala compile times into annoying territory.
Now, that said, this is a Core M; it may end up a little slower than the current Macbook Air.
This is my worry. Can the 1.2GHz version run IntelliJ and SBT comfortably "for the most part" (I don't really mind if a clean compile takes ~30% longer) or will I wish I'd bought the 13" i7 MBA?
I wish I knew how to find compiler benchmarks for these CPUs. Or even better how it would compare to the i7 3770 in my iMac...
I understand the benefits of a single connector, but,
Isn't this a security nightmare?
Today you can avoid plugging an usb drive as a security measure, but with a single connector you're exposing your laptop when charging or when connecting a proyector in a conference room.
Say what you will about the logic behind a single port for everything (as far as I know this is the first computer to do this so there's nothing to compare it to), this Air is a pretty drastic change from what we're all used to when it comes to laptops. We're basically hitting the limits of thinness at this point right?
I'd hate to have to worry that I'll cut myself on my laptop.
Is there anyone that's super-excited about a thinner Air? My preference is always for greater battery life. I'm curious if there are people that wish their already thin laptop were even thinner, and if so, why?
The combo of thinner/lighter/no fan is pretty awesome in my opinion. These aren't for peopled doing hardcore computing, they're for people doing hardcore commuting really.
Do you have a source for the "no fan" bit? If the Core M processor can deliver the same performance as a Haswell ultrabook processor (i.e. the previous Air) without requiring a fan or getting unreasonably hot, I think that's a pretty nice feature.
For my needs I would say the Core M is a good compromise between performance and energy efficiency. E.g., the Dell XPS 13 some have mentioned this thread as alternative has a faster processor than I need.
Also, the fan is a big issue for me. You're not likely to see fanless systems with Haswell or the more powerful Broadwell processors. With Core M Broadwell, though, I expect fanless will be the norm. I expect I'll be getting the relatively new Asus UX305 soon; for me it compares favorably to new Macbook but is only $699. It's a little heavier (2.6 lbs), but has larger 13.3" 1080p screen, runs Windows and/or Linux well, quality aluminum build, same 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, etc. I suppose I'd prefer the new Macbook, but I'm not an OS X guy and the Asus is barely half the cost.
How well does the Asus UX305 run Linux? I have a Macbook Air at the moment, but it has a couple of annoyances that I'd like to be rid of. However, I do like the build quality and the trackpad especially.
Amazon has temporarily inflated prices for this low-availability item. I'm waiting for NewEgg to get them back in stock.
Trackpad does seem to be one of the lowpoints of ux305fa. esp. if that's something that's important to you. I tend to adapt to trackpads and like whatever I use most.
I have a different Asus machine, the super-cheap X205, which I got for $180 at a Microsoft Store. It's plastic, but surprisingly well made. 2.2 lbs and fanless is great experience. Main problem is it's a pretty slow processor and has just 2 GB RAM, 32GB flash drive, basically tablet specs in a laptop form. I've extended it with 64GB microSDHC. I do find myself using more powerful machines at home (Lenovo X200 and X220) but even there I'm enjoying the X205 quite a bit.
Personally I've tried laptop computing on public transportation, and I just can't do it with people sitting so close to me potentially looking over my shoulder.
A phone I don't feel so claustrophobic, but anything tablet sized and up just makes me feel awkward.
The "thinner" is a thing that tempts me to upgrade.
Thinner means lighter: I live in the middle of a very walkable area. So I walk a lot. It is great to be able to throw my computer into my bag and go out to work in the middle of a park or wherever; my computer plus my drawing tablet is only slightly more weight to haul then a hardbound sketchbook. I think the new machine would cut it down to about as much weight. It is pretty cool to go out carrying everything I need to do my job and only carry about six pounds of stuff on my shoulder. And that's including the bag I keep the laptop in, plus wallet and suchlike.
Thinner means style: In general, things that are slim are also things people see as "elegant". Back around 2000 I carried a Handspring Visor Edge in my pocket rather than a clunky plastic Palm Pilot, not because it was any more powerful, but because it was a sleek little piece of shiny metal that made me happy to hold in my hand.
There's a point where there is Enough Battery. I can take my 2013 Air out for a day of rambling around the city and drawing wherever I feel like stopping, and not worry about it running out of power as long as I charged it last night. I think the new Macbook has a lower estimated battery life than my current machine, so that's a downside of it.
I'd prefer a thicker laptop with better battery life myself. I ended up buying a batterybox to extend the life of my current device when I'm mobile. I suppose that being thinner and dying sooner gives us the option to just throw-and-go without much weight if you don't require a long period of computing.
The thing about Apple's lineup is that they offer both main lines: the MacBook Pro caters to users who want thin with great battery life, while the Air caters to those who prefer a lighter laptop while still maintaining good battery life.
Airs are for people who need a full keyboard but don't need a lot of power, and do a lot of commuting/running around (possibly with a bag already packed with other stuff).
Come to think, it's probably great for most students. Plenty fast enough to browse and write papers, and it doesn't add to the volume or burden of your already-overstuffed bookbag.
Yep. I've been doing development work on a 2013 Air with an i7. It's not quite as good as my 2012 i7 Mac Mini with 16GB RAM for development (as that's quad-core), but it's still an excellent machine.
I think that it targets a lot of students. Most people want to carry around something that is light, I think this targets a lot of college students. In all of my business classes that I am currently in more than 90% of the class uses Mac's, they bring their chargers with them to class so they are set.
And as much as I love the idea of thinness, I'm in the awkward state of shopping for a small laptop that is everything except thin. I want a keyboard with depth/action to the keypresses! It's becoming extremely hard to find. I'm not convinced that I'll love the typing experience on this Air; I've been very disappointed by recent Dell and Lenovo (yoga) keyboards.
I don't mind a bit of thickness as long as it's small in the other dimensions, and light as anything.
That's what I love about my Thinkpad X200s. It is small, it is light, and it isn't absurdly thin so it can have that classic Thinkpad keyboard. Unfortunately, Lenovo is moving into the super-thin form factor and they've lost my trust entirely since Superfish so I don't know where I'll be able to get this kind of laptop again.
> We're basically hitting the limits of thinness at this point right?
And for what? A razor thin laptop with just one port seems to be really pushing towards one extreme side of the function/form continuum. I thought giving up ethernet was bad enough with the Retina Macbooks.
It's very pretty, but it seems more like a toy than a serious computer. Maybe that's what Apple wants, but that's never something I would have said about the last few years of Macbook Airs.
> It's very pretty, but it seems more like a toy than a serious computer.
I really must disagree. I do Infrastructure by day (not just AWS, but physical colo as well), and quite a bit of microcontroller/CNC/robotics on the side/as a hobby. Nothing in the new Macbook stops me from doing this. I'll just move to using Bluetooth for my interfaces when I can, and when I can't, serial interfaces over USB-C.
What do most notebook users do that requires anything more than this? It's not a do-all end-all product, it's for the hardcore commuter who specifically won't be plugging things in much at all and doesn't need sustained computational power. The MB Pro gives all your ports and lots more power in a not much bigger package, with desktop models available for serious horsepower and connectivity. I kept thinking thru the presentation "now begins the refrain 'if you're complaining about its specs, you're not the intended audience - there's another Mac model for you.'"
For people interested in typography: It seems like the Apple Watch UI font (San Francisco) replaced VAG Rounded as keyboard font. This is interesting because it would be the first time (AFAICT) that Apple uses the same font for keyboard and UI.
I'm confused: did someone dislike MagSafe? It's gotta be one of my favorite parts of my MacBook. I hear the guys complaining about iron build-up in the port, but they've gotta be in the minority, and a far smaller demographic than, say, parents.
Somebody should make a low profile magsafe charger adapter. That would solve both problems: easy to replace the rare-earth magnet and preserves the utility of magsafe. If you want to charge and use multiple ports, stick the adapter in.
Frankly, I think the one-port decision was wrong, but I doubt Ive and company care.
I'm just supremely disappointed in the Macbook itself- I have a 3 year old Macbook Air, that is more powerful than this Retina. That's just absurd, that it's that much of a step back in terms of raw CPU.
Luckily however, the new 13inch MBP is actually perfect. I'm rather excited about it.
Where are you getting those specs? AFAIK the 2014 MacBook Air doesn't come out of the box with an i7 4650U, but rather an 4260U, which has a Passmark score of 3617. Also note that the Apple presentation noted a Turbo Boost top of 2.9GHz, not the 2.6GHz of the Core M 5Y70 that you linked.
It's the difference between horsepower and 0-60. There are other factors involved. (This is largely academic, though, because I doubt anybody who owns one is going to really care.)
For the new Macbook you are right that Apple appears to use a slightly faster variant of the 5Y70 that doesn't seem to have a benchmark on cpubenchmark.net yet (at least I couldn't find it).
I'd be surprised if these 300MHz made a significant difference, though.
I'm currently looking for a new laptop, which will probably be a Mac, given I'm not familiar with using Linux nor have I liked using Windows lately. Looking at the pricing for this, I can't see much of a reason for why I'd get this over a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro w/ Retina.
Using Australian prices -
This - $1799
11" Air - $1249
13" Air - $1399
13" Retina - $1799 (I've seen $1599 in authorised reseller stores)
13" Pro - $1549
Is a retina display and losing a third of a pound worth paying $400-$550 for? Nope. Paying the same price for less ports (if you're getting a Macbook Pro, ports are likely important) and and less speed? Nope.
I think Apple must be hoping this new Macbook is going to eat into 13' Macbook Pro sales (just as the 13" Pro ate into the old Macbook sales), because I can't see it eating into Macbook Air sales.
In the U.S. the cheapest Mac Air with 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD is the 11", which sells for $1,199. That's compared to the new Macbook's $1,299. That they barely differ in price is precisely the thing that struck me most.
Why does Apple keep making their new products worse -- less features but subjectively more "beautiful" -- than the ones before? Somewhere in the attic at One Infinite Loop, is there a painting of Steve Jobs that slowly gets younger as time passes?
I think one subtle change is the Apple icon will no longer glow, it's been chromed like it is on all the iDevices. No need to cut a plastic translucent Apple logo => fewer parts? (Furthermore, how will I know what computers people are using in a dark room now?)
They actually introduced a new line of laptops called the MacBook (so the title is technically incorrect). The existing MacBook Airs and 13" MacBook Pro got minor refreshes. Interestingly no refreshes on the 15" Pros.
Something that doesn't seem to get mentioned in the comments is the placing of the trackpad; so near the keyboard. This was one the first things I recognised as a potential err.
I once had a ASUS notebook which had a similar design. The problem was that my tip of one or both thumbs or part of it, often touched the touchpad in a fashion that it selected text if working in a editor. This would happen so fast that my typing replaced the text. Very annoying, so annoying that I bought a new notebook of different brand.
I imagine something similar could happen on the Macbook Notebook.
If i was to buy a new MacBook today it would definitely be the 13" Air or Pro. It's a cool device, but not for anyone doing serious dev work.
The DO-IT-ALL-USB-C might be a neat idea, but it practice it means that i have to carry a ton of (expensive!) adapters around with me for the next few years. And then there is performance. I can live with 1,5GHz /w Turbo or whatever.... but 1,1GHz? That is painful.
OS X is pretty good about sharing memory, so 8 GB is fine. I routinely run about 15-20 Apps on my MacBook Air, including a VMware instance with Windows XP, Aperture, Google Earth, Excel/Word/Powerpoint/Outlook/Mail.app.
The only people who require more than 8 GB on OS X are those who have Apps that specially require a lot of memory to perform - Image Processing, Databases, etc...
I used to be in the "Buy as much memory as you can afford" - but I really would never buy more than 8 GB on a Mac (with the caveat about memory hungry apps above)
It got a lot better in Mavericks with compression and better subsystems, but I'm sorry, I still push the limits with 16GB. 8 isn't enough for OSX at this point.
Ironically - I'm still on 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) - My system is rock solid, no longer kernel faults, and I rarely have to reboot it more than once every two-three weeks because of a system hang.
Only specialists, or people with massive, massive data sets require more than 8 GB on OS X - I push my system really, really hard, and I rarely (if ever?) come close to maxing out memory.
This isn't to say there isn't a subset of people who can make do with more than 8 GB - but 95%+ of the average knowledge worker running the Office Apps, Google Earth, Safari, etc... will be fine for several years with that much memory.
Correct, 95% of the average knowledge worker will be fine with 8GB, but only 5% of the skilled knowledge workers who run specialized software, development stacks, VMs, etc.
In a software company I wouldn't stick anyone with an 8GB mac. But then, that is a specialist application technically.
I just bought a 32GB iMac because my Air with 8GB was sluggish with Unity3d and Flash (needed for work). I'm glad I did. This is the best system I've ever owned.
Buy as much as you can afford. If you expect to be using this laptop in 4-5 years time, the OSX and applications of that era will probably only perform well on >8GB RAM.
That used to be the theory - but four years now, and I've been fine with 8 GB, more than fine. I wouldn't recommend purchasing more right now - Unless you have special requirements (Running Oracle, or some intense image management/CAD system/Development platform) - Wait for the next round of upgrades in 5 years to see if more than 8 GB is needed - I'm guessing it probably won't be even then.
Thanks for the comment. Looking to buy 8gb soon, but it's disheartening to hear people call it sluggish or saying they're pushing 16gb let alone 8.
Hell I don't know how the people with 4 do it! In any case it's always useful to hear what people are actually doing. Can't imagine pushing 16gb when doing some basic front end work for example.
4 GB was fine on my previous 2011 MacBook air except when I started up my VMware Windows XP machine - then I had to shut down a few other applications. Other than that - the basic 20 apps that I usually have running, including Word, Excel, Power Point, Outlook, Mail.app, Safari, Google Earth, and even a few custom ones, like GNS3/Dynamips, a Cisco Router Hypervisor/Simulator that I would run networks with 8-10 Cisco 7206 routers on, all ran just fine on 4 GB - and, once again, I have never, under any scenario, had memory pressure on my Mid 2013 8 GB MacBook Air.
What I've noticed, is that some apps, when left on my Windows 7 system, Like google earth, seem to eat a lot of memory, and then when I come back to them - I'm either getting a "Low memory warning", or I have to wait for everything to swap back in. For whatever reason, under OS X 10.8.x, this has never been an issue.
Honestly though - a lot (most?) of it probably has to do with flash drives - they make everything feel just so much more nimble.
I've been considering upgrading from an Air to a Pro for the retina display and was waiting for this update. Now this has me a bit confused because the new MacBook has a retina display.
It seems like Pro may yet be the best choice for anyone doing demanding work, because the processor is 2x+ faster. While the 13" Pro may be a brick compared to this new MacBook, it's still incredibly light.
It's looking like this new MBAir will actually perform 20% worse than the current-gen Airs due to the Core M processor. If performance is at all a factor in what you do I don't think it's even worth considering.
It's hard for me to believe that somebody actually likes the no-ports philosophy. In some offices where I worked it seemed like every 10 minutes somebody would run around asking for some dongle for their macbook.
And again, not to sound to grumpy-cynical, the whole thing to me looks like a fad. A lot of inconvenience just to shave off a few grams and look sexy.
So in switching from thunderbolt to usb-c, I'm wondering about the technical reasons. They went from 20-40g/s of thunderbolt to 5 in this version of usb-c, which is quite a reduction by itself. My understanding of previous USB specs is that USB is poll (and thus creates a lot of CPU load), versus firewire which was push. Is USB 3.1 now finally push?
They weren't delivering power over Thunderbolt (though technically possible I think).
By moving to USB-C they are now on tech the rest of the world is likely to pickup.
It's also pretty likely that it's more power-efficient than Thunderbolt and less complicated. (The Intel Thunderbolt controller is a mean looking IC that gets pretty hot)
Noooo! See the cursor-arrow keys? They dont leave out the two bits over the left and right keys anymore. I've always hated keyboard maker to do that (many laptop keyboards do this), as you will not have a tangible cue on where the cursor keys start.
Well, I guess that since they are so much on the edge of the device you can simply use the corner of the device as a cue...
I see a lot of people hating much on the one port. Arguably, I wouldn't have minded just one on each side, but to be honest, I operate all most all of my connected things wirelessly. Bluetooth mouse, bluetooth keyboard, wifi sync of iOS devices etc.
If I had the use for more things connected, I'm either sitting down and connecting an external screen, in the same place always or I'm not doing it for long enough time for power to be an issue. Thus, a dock or dongle at that place would be natural (hell, I use one atm just to convert from HDMI to mini-DVI).
I see this as a good and pleasant move to pressure more things to go wireless. Still waiting for Airtame[0] to get out, so I can get rid of that annoying cable from monitors to my Air :)
The one gripe I do have, is the rather low GHz on those CPUs :( Max of 1.3GHz? Ugh...
Yeah, it looks pretty. I'm way more interested in news about the 15" Macbook Pro. It really is the only developer laptop I'd consider at this point. Given the fresh reviews about the new Macbook and the trackpad update to the 13" model, I'm a little worried they're going to do something screwy with the 15" model. Haptic feedback? Do I want this? I think it would be rather frustrating to have wikipedia entries popping up when I'm trying to highlight my code.
Touch pressure is such an individual thing. I tend to pound on my keys and trackpad. It's the way I am. This Force click business (while reminding me of Force Push and Force Pull) seems very different from a binary "click" vs "no click." Even if you can adjust the sensitivity, it doesn't help when someone else has to use your laptop.
The Intel M chip at 1.1gh certainly doesn't beat the air's 1.6 gh i5. Nor does the HD 5300 beat the HD 6000. Let alone if you max out both, it'll be 1.3gh vs 2.2gh for the MB and Air respectively.
Sure the MB starts with more mem/ssd. But you can configure the air to have just as much without spending more.
With the air 13' having an extra inch, 3 hours more battery, more ports, better performance, the only thing the MB has going for it is resolution. And that doesn't seem to override all its cons and put it ahead of the air in my opinion. (11' is a different story, but even that has better CPU/Graphics)
Thank you! It is hard for me to believe that macbooks (that receive all the attention) are always getting the royal treatment, when macbook pros are more expensive, and are (regularly) paid for by a business. Furthermore, my niece in college does not need a new macbook as often as I (as a professional) need a new macbook pro!
I found it telling that nothing about iCloud has changed. It seems that Apple has decided to be a hardware company, and frankly they are damn good at it.
I wish that they would own that and unlock the iDrive so we can all interface with their amazing hardware.
Give it time. For one this isn't WWDC, this was a special event for specific products. iCloud has been getting better over time for users and devs and gaining new features, I'm sure it will continue to do so.
And while Apple continues to make money from hardware, they are not just a hardware operation, they provide an entire platform and ecosystem which iCloud is part of.
Very interesting device overall, might replace my Air.
The resolution seems quite low though. 2304x1440 at 226 ppi might sound not too bad, but straight pixel doubling would yield a pretty small screen real estate of 1152x720 in terms of logical pixels.
I'm not sure if I'm an old fart or something (I'm 31) but this has to be the daftest MacBook I've ever seen. I have a 2012 MacBook non-retina, with DVD writer and all the ports I need (MagSafe, Gigabit ethernet, FireWire, ThunderBolt (also Mini DisplayPort so I don't need fiddly adapters to connect to TVs), 2 USB ports, an SD card slot, as well as headphone output, and line input (both switchable to digital optical S/PDIF), and a decent sized screen with plenty of space to rest my hands on the device. I truly believe I have the last decent model! The RAM is upgradable and the battery and hard disk replaceable (but it's impossible to plug in two USB dongles next to each other, silly or what).
This new MacBook is firstly tiny (nowhere to rest my hands), a screen size that is the same as a Samsung Note (the big 12" one), everything is along the edges, and THERE IS ONE PORT. Do I now need to carry along a hub in addition to all of the adapters???? It's so stupid I am struggling to comprehend who their target audience is? They mention the USB-C and that you can plug screens, power and devices into it - but the big question is: can I do all three things at the same time?? Or would I need to eject my USB stick just to power my device? Even my monochrome 386SX Amstrad laptop from 1991 had more ports (only 4MB of RAM mind you).
My first monitor that I could get was a 10" IBM CGA screen which was tiny - this is competing for the most ridiculous sized screen on a daily use machine. Perhaps they are converging with the Apple Watch?
When I saw it I thought it was a funny joke and then I realised that it was actually true and on Apple's site; I realised that Apple in their pursuit of extreme thinness have abandoned all the reasons why people bought a laptop in the first place (a portable computer, you know, with ports that you can use). I frequently use a MacBook Air at work and it makes me angry pretty quickly - tiny screen, no ports. I have to wander around with a bunch of dongles to use it with other devices (I need ethernet for AVB audio and sometime must demonstrate on a TV). This new MacBook looks like the plasticy bendy laptops you see in the budget range of PC shops - not a good look to be going for.
I was saddened to see that the ordinary applications that are part of the OS are labelled "apps" at the bottom of the screen, and truly hope this isn't a move towards the merging of OSX and iOS as has been feared for some time, starting with the merging of styles. I develop software for OSX as my day job on a Mac Pro (the ones you could drive over) and this saddens me.
This is truly the daftest thing I've seen, and I'm an Apple fan and OSX/iOS developer with a stash of Apple gear, a daily Mac OSX development job and sideline OSX job too. Disclaimer: I thought I'd best add that because there is a sad tendency here on HN to behave like "slashdot" and ridicule other people for having opinions.
And about Force Touch: I would prefer Force Invisibility or Force Persuasion, like in Jedi Knight please.
EDIT: Just noticed they're still doing the MacBook Pro and I have engaged in much confusion, but still it's a crazy device that won't be able to compete with ordinary PC laptops with ports, methinks.
I don't honestly know whether the new MacBook is something that I'd want -- but I do know that for my purposes my late-2013 MacBook Pro kicks your MBP's butt. It's lighter, much faster, has a much better screen, and I don't really care much about the fact that I can't replace the battery. I'm still regularly getting eight hours offline.
And realistically, when I'm traveling with my laptop it's rare that I'm plugging anything into it besides a power cable. When it's "docked" it has the power cable, a Thunderbolt cable, and an audio out cable because I'm kind of a nerd and want to use my own speakers. That's all I need: the external hard drive and (non-wifi) printer hang off the monitor's built-in hub, as does external Ethernet. What would I lose with this new weirdo laptop? I'd plug one less cable in docked.
"But if you're traveling with it you'd need to bring a hub with you!" Well, if I was traveling and I expected to need to plug in USB stuff on the road, yes. But it's very clear that they're treating that as an edge case, making the assumption that many users can go almost entirely wireless, or will be able to in short order. And they're probably right. Maybe it'll be "daft" for you, but Apple has a history of doing daft things that more often than not drag the industry forward. (And keep pundits employed.)
Hey, mine's a quad core 2.6GHz i7 with 16GB of RAM; it isn't a slouch and isn't anywhere near needing replacing - that's why the user-replacable battery means that this isn't a throwaway item after a few years. If I bought a car with a battery in it that I couldn't replace, it'd be stupid, but the same is being accepted on laptops.
Admittedly the disk is a major slowdown on this but I have a LOT of data to cart around (VMs, dev environments, and recorded audio and video).
I can take this thing all over the world and not worry about a bag of cables and adapters. It replaced my desktop machine and still fits that need, which is a good thing I think.
Another post covered the battery thing. $130 battery replacement on Air and $199 replacement on MBP, in Apple store, while you wait. Granted, who knows how long they'll provide that service.. for a 3 year old laptop? 5? 7?
I've got a 2012 Retina MBP and 2011 Air and battery life is not something I even think about. These things last ages these days.
You're right about the battery - I expect it to last for ages, but it'd be nice to be able to replace it without much hassle. The same cannot be said for the ones with built in batteries, or even my phone (which is irritating as the constant drain / recharge cycle has destroyed its ability to hold charge).
I'm a forty-something lady who is almost but not quite on the edge of replacing her 2013 Air with this.
My current machine has two USB ports, power, Mini Displayport, audio, and an SD card. I do not think I have ever plugged an SD card into this computer. I think I may have plugged one into one of my computers once. I was happy to ditch a DVD drive a few years ago when I bought my first Air; I think I used one of those maybe twice in five years. I've never felt the lack of Ethernet or Firewire.
I used to say that I'd never want a laptop smaller than a 15", but the higher DPI of the Airs changed my tune. I love my 13" now. Would a Retina 12" screen work for me? I dunno. It might, it might not.
When I'm on the road, the most things I've ever had to plug in to my computer are three: my Wacom tablet, a power brick, and a video adapter. That last only happens when I'm giving a presentation at a con; most of the time I just go out to a cafe with the drawing tablet and no other accessories.
And yes, there are adaptors to plug video/power/USB into that single USB-C connector at the same time.
The Air makes you angry, and this is an expression of the same ideas that drove the Air: small, light, and minimalist. It's no surprise you dislike this one too.
It's a different target audience then. We can safely say my obscure needs are not their target :-)
Thanks for the info about the USB-C connector; I still find it odd that other similarly sized devices fit more ports on without the need for external adapters; it almost seems that they've put the port on just because they can.
Edit: having looked again at it, I was amazed by the tiny innards! The space metal grey looks good; perhaps I was too harsh.
Well to be fair it's a Macbook, not a Macbook Pro. If you need multiple ports and are doing "productive" things then you still have the Pro.
This is meant to be a sleek, fun machine that's portable and powerful.
Side note, what line of work are you in where you need so many ports? I could see if you're a photographer, where you have a camera, the charging cable, an SD card, and an external, but I can't really think of too many other use cases where you'd need multiple ports at once.
Just noticed you program OSX apps. Why do you need so many ports?
I work in the audio industry where I route audio over ethernet and also use USB devices in development to flash devices (like putting firmware on USB stick and then taking said USB device to the audio hardware).
I also use my FireWire for running external mic preamps; it's really useful to have a rack mounted 8 channel mic preamp on FireWire and to turn up and record a practice / gig with just your laptop, particularly as the ADCs in the external hardware will be significantly better than the ones in the MacBook.
I use the ThunderBolt / Mini DisplayPort for hooking up to an external screen when I take the laptop home and want to game in Windows after rebooting; it is useful to have a device that will do all of that without external hardware, and I don't feel the extra pain of having a laptop half a centimetre thicker than a Retina model :-)
And the SD? For my ancient camera!
And the DVD writer is useful for giving CDs to other band members who don't like MP3s for odd reasons, or to play CDs in the car (yes my "ancient" 2008 Golf TDi supports MP3 CDs but the iPod interface for it is severely inadequate).
You're right about the Pro though - it's probably the thing I'd buy again.
Different strokes, different folks. I love my MB Air and this looks even better; I almost never plug anything into it, just my iPhone or a HD occasionally.
It does seem a little insane to not be able to e.g., run a harddrive to backup the computer while it's plugged in...
Yes I could have worded that better. I meant to say that it will encourage you to embrace the fulfilling yet utilitarian spectacle of TimeCapsule, emancipating you from the shackles of corded drudgery whilst you transfer files and data with a new reimagined, refreshing perception of the underlying science; TimeMachine: astonishing, complicated yet captivatingly simple in operation, alluring efficacy in motion.
Think they did a great job but I think they are pointing to a slightly more general public leaving out developers, musicians where they use plenty of peripherals working in parallel without being dependent on a multipurpose adapter which by the large amount of workload this has little duration of life for the multiple use is given much is to connect power, monitor, external sound plate, mechanical keyboard, etc ... all this to make it flatter slopes of implementing the USB-C
Really hoping this can at least be bumped to 16gb of RAM. Processing power seems diminutive to say the least. I guess this will just be a good looking, fancy SSH machine for me.
So someone had it nearly exactly right with those renders that were floating around, except the power and escape key are not reversed. Glad that turned out not to be the case.
This actually looks to me like a huge win for Intel. A full fast Intel CPU, with no fan! The ability to be passively cooled was previously one of ARMs serious advantages.
Still it's massively useful. It means more space for the battery and it also indirectly means that if you need no fan, you probably generate very little heat, which means you have a crazy efficient CPU meaning even more battery.
Which is how they can do the same amount of battery life as the 11', despite having a bigger screen and a retina display.
And a big part of that equation is probably the fanless chip. But it's true it's not like users were complaining about e.g. the MBA lineup being so noisy.
Yes - and what they've achieved is a CPU that's much closer to the ARM state of the art, and has a much more ARM-like power profile, and would generally be easier to replace with ARM a couple of years down the line.
This coincides with being fanless.
Had Apple made this (say) the same thickness as the MacBook air, they'd have increased their volume by a measurable amount, they'd have been able to have a much more powerful processor, and no one would be able to say that ARM is a good proposition for them for the foreseeable future.
Now they have a fairly weakly performing computer, with an ARM-sized logic board, which is going to be bought by people who don't care about bottom line performance.
This is going to be the slowest Mac in a number of years - and if it's a success then making the next-slowest Mac be ARM wouldn't be such a jump.
I agree it's a definite possibility. They did it before with the iPad lineup when everyone thought they'd bring a decent chip to the table, and went with low-end phone chips. Of course very good low-end chips, running highly optimized software, but still.
I just don't really follow their path here. First they make the MB more expensive than the air, but run slower. They also make it lighter, smaller, thinner and quieter than the air (air having light-as-a-feather connotations).
I mean, what's the deal in 2 years? If it's the lowest powered device, it'll probably be the thinnest and lightest etc, too. So what about the Air? Will they just throw that powerful brand name out of the window?
Will they expect people to buy 12' and not the 13' MBA with a bigger screen, 3 hours more battery, more ports and a bunch more (20-30%) powerful yet equally less expensive?
In short, it's a bit of a strange lineup. And while I agree with you that it obviously is, and may likely remain the slowest Macbook (slowest Mac period, the Mini notwithstanding), I don't necessarily see how that means ARM as opposed to continuing with refreshed Intel Ms, or hell even an updated Atom lineup. Is there any indication they want to move away from Intel again? I mean, weak performance is one thing, but this is OS X we're talking about, for a device that costs beyond $1k, which probably has good enough profit margins on an Intel M, would they really underpower it even more with a weaker chip?
I'm not very familiar with CPUs though, would love some more of your thoughts on this. It's definitely true that it's now very feasible, and so it all comes down to who can deliver the best low-power CPU the next few years.
Not really. This processor will be far slower than what they've got in the current-gen MacBook Airs.
Provided that this is a success then (which it will be) it'll make the barrier for success for an ARM MacBook far lower.
One thing I'd love to see Apple do is waterproof their laptops. There are coatings available, such as liquipel, that can make laptops highly water resistant, so why doesn't Apple use such a coating? A coffee spill is probably the most likely cause of early death for a laptop, and all Apple has done is put water sensors inside their laptops so they can deny warranty coverage.
I'm disappointed that this has only one port. I shouldn't have to choose between charging my laptop and using my USB port for something.
Having said that, battery power is my number 1 priority when buying a laptop. My 2013 Macbook Air is great in this regard, it charges to full in 40 minutes and lasts for a long ass time. If this new model has even better battery tech, I'm all for it.
The port sucks but usually anything you want to plug in for longer periods of time are not a problem.
i.e., a USB stick? Take out charger, plug in, transfer files, put charger back in. No problem.
A mouse or keyboard or monitor? Well you're probably at home or work, so you buy a usb hub and stick it on your desk. Problem solved.
It sucks as the new MB is supposed to be the lightest most portable Mac in the lineup, dedicated hubs don't fit that story. And it's another $50-150 depending on if you need 1 or 2, or a fancy slick one.
Me I'm just gonna go with the refreshed 2015 MBA 13'. Better battery, 1 inch bigger screen, a lot cheaper with all the ports I need and hey, a better processor, too (1.6gh instead of 1.4 and HD 6000 instead of HD 5000 on the new 2015 version versus the older 2014 one).
That is odd. I wonder if we'll see something like USB Type-C octopus connectors protruding from there that might let you charge and connect other things?
Specs are interesting - 8gb ram,256 gb flash drive,1.1/2.4 turbo ghz, but 1300$ ? way too expensive,as it cost as much as the mb pro.A price under 1000$ would have made way more sense for a macbook. But I guess they have the data that show people are ready to pay that price for that item. Still , the pricing strategy between mb,mb air and mb pro is a bit confusing.
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True, but you had a radically improved form factor that was actually light and had a nice battery, while the performance was fine for the type of users it marketed to.
Meanwhile this thing takes away ports from your 13 inch MBA, takes away 1 inch of screen, takes away 3 hours of battery, takes away CPU performance, and it gives back? It's not like the MBA is heavy, thick or noisy. The retina screen is really nice but to me it doesn't really look like a good deal.
Not saying it won't be popular, I think it'll be very. Just don't see it being so interesting right now myself even if I had $100m to spend, there's some big tradeoffs with this new MB.
Strangest thing to me wasn't really the pricing fit, I think I would've done the same. But that we ended up with an 'Air' line that's heavier, bigger, thicker and noisier, and hell better performing, than the regular MB line. At least it's still got better battery life, well the 13' that is!
I think the naming points to the future. In a couple of years, the changes that seem daring and unforgivable in this version will seem bland and expected and there will be no reason to hold on to the current MBA line with its fans and obsolete connectors. Then it quietly disappears and we are back to two lines, the MB and MBP.
Definite possibility but it feels like the 'air' name is like 'Pro'. Something that's building up a lot of brand value, awareness, understanding, culture, a segment is forming around it etc. They've adopted it now for the ipad lineup, too, I think it's here to stay. The air has been a massive success at capturing teenagers and college age adults who also have an iPhone, literally a new generation of Apple users. For them the Air is a big brand.
Don't forget Regular vs Pro might not be as powerful as Air vs Pro, as Air doesn't just differentiate it from Apple's Pro, but also from competitors 'normal' laptops. i.e. a consumer might reason: even if I don't get Apple's pro product, I still want to get their Air, as that's better than the competitor's 'regular', as air means lighter, more battery, more portable.
That sounds really simplistic and silly, but I think these processes are a genuine part of people's buying decisions in the non-professional sector that the regular/air line caters to.
Which is why it surprised me a bit that they didn't go for naming it the 12' Air, especially it being the lighest and most portable and quiet. Of course that would've been a very tricky lineup as some Airs are on the Intel M chip and fanless and expensive and retina, while others are not, and with just 1 inch difference between them it'd have been too busy.
But yeah I agree, definite possibility. Had kind of expected the Air not to get a refresh, and for the Air 12' to be the Macbook Air Retina, and that in 2 years the 11 and 13 would be discontinued while the 12 kept getting updated, reduced in price and with 10h battery and decent performance for anything not professional. Would make a very simple lineup. 12' air, 13'/15' Pro, and iMac/Pro/Mini for any bigger form factors.
I'm also looking forward to 2016's. I wonder if they might be able to make the trackpad thinner, so they have space to fit batteries under it (and thus improve the battery life).
I don't think so, Apple has made Macs in multiple colors before. Once the iMac and iBook were available in four or more colors, but that was way back in 2000.
Less ports is not what I want in a laptop. At all.
Dongles and whatnot are a plague on portability, and take up more space then whatever gains are made in the hardware usually.
The laptop I want? One which has it's entire power supply, and the 110/240VAC cable and plug able to coil up inside it so I can literally just carry "the laptop" and not have to worry about chargers.
I'd want one that uses an USB for charging. Same charger as phone. Charging from a USB plug in an airplane.
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I guess this is actually it. Except it needs more than one connector.
No (standard) USB port. Weird. I wonder if it'll ship with a USB cable?
To be honest, the one USB device that I use the most is my mouse, and I suppose Apple expects me to get a wireless one, and that is fine. But what about stuff like USB drives? I am not looking forward to not being able to just give somebody a file on a USB drive because they forgot their OTG cable.
USB Type C to USB Standard A Receptacle adapters are supported by the USB specification.
As I understand things, the desire from the USB-IF is to basically have USB Type A and Type B start to disappear.
Until we get to that critical mass point... Yeah. It'll be annoying. But hopefully we will get to enjoy this standard for at least a few years before it is replaced.
I remember in collage (2000's) when everyone just started to get laptop and before magsafe macbooks the broken power ports were THE cause for people breaking their laptops. Sometimes repair shops could fix this but usually the motherboard was damaged and you just had to get a new machine. Sad to see it go, it was a brilliant idea.
OEMs (generally) eventually started making the power ports a replaceable part to make it a cheaply resolvable issue. Hopefully they will apply that wisdom to USB-3c ports on devices that use it exclusively for their power connection.
Apple's product lineup keeps on growing and growing. Wonder if this is a good direction? Now there are five different iPad models, five different laptops and three desktops.
Sometimes choice is good, sometimes not. It used to be that buying an Apple did not require too much thinking because there were not that many to choose from.
I wonder if it would be possible to build a USB-C charger where the tip is connected to the rest of the cord with magnets. I don't see why we would need to give up the disconnect-when-tripping-on-the-cord just because the final connector now becomes more solidly connected to the laptop?
I really wish someone made a Windows notebook with this kind of hardware build quality. I realize mobile is the new sexiness, but people still buy notebooks. There were a few hundred million PCs sold last year.
I have to believe Dell could at least come close. I have an XPS13 and it just doesn't.
Are there any performance benchmarks of the Intel Core M (Macbook) vs 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (MacBook Pro). The new keyboard, new touchpad, new design, improved battery are awesome, but for nearly the same price, you can get a MacBook Pro.
Eh well the M isn't even as performing as the MBA lineup, let alone the MBP lineup. I wouldn't expect the MB to be anything near a powerhouse.
And the MBP 13' has better battery life by 1-2 hour than the MB. (not the non-retina MBP, which is 2 hours worse), but the retina (which is priced the same as the MB. (although you'd need to add 128gb storage to make it equal which increases the price a bit).
The keyboard doesn't actually seem any better. Yes it's backlit by individual button and yes the buttons are a bit bigger than normal with a new system. Is that better? I'd say it looks like they did a good job of not making the keyboard suck more. After all, they have less space for the keyboard as it's 12' big, less travel for the keyboard as it's thinner. But less travel is generally worse, less space between keys (more mistakes) is generally worse, keys right next to the touchpad is generally worse.
So I'd prefer the MBP keyboard and battery, the MBP screen, CPU and Graphics, magsafe charger and ports.
The MB's pros is the touchpad (will have to try it first, looks interesting but I doubt the 3rd click will see much software support the first year anyway, beyond that it's nothing new). And the fact it comes with 256gb at the same price. But it doesn't make up for a shitty CPU and graphics, tight keyboard with little travel, 1 port requiring externals, 1-2 hours less battery and 1 inch less screen.
If I wanted the smaller form factor I'd still go for the MBA 13'. 3 hours more battery, extra inch, a lot cheaper, better performance.
Sorry couldn't answer your specific question, haven't seen benchmarks, just know the M sits between their low-power low-performance chips and the i5/i7 core chips. The fact it draws 5 watt and is fanless tells you enough :P
I think the single port is a deal breaker for me-I really like the 12 inch form factor (finally!) but this is too. But at least it starts out with 8GB of RAM-I wouldn't have put it past Apple to put only 4 in the base model.
No MagSafe, a single port for USB, more expensive than an Air with worse specs. If I wanted a simple machine just for browsing the web, I'd use my iPad. I don't know who this laptop is aimed at.
I'm curious if this machine will be able to drive a 5k monitor when Apple makes one. The tech spec says the USB-C port will support DisplayPort 1.2 (not 1.3), so it doesn't seem promising :(
I think this is the most important announcement from the event. Sadly all the click bait news will be about how expensive the Gold Watch will be. This laptop is extremely light and has good specs.
I know that at least AT&T isn't charging for this right now. In fact, my bill went DOWN when I switched from a 250mb/450minute/limited texts plan to a 1gb/unlimited talk/texts plan that included tethering. The tethering isn't a separate item on the bill. But it's possible that older plans won't "support" it - I think that was the case with mine.
The MB is far from cheap, especially for such an underpowered device.
Comparing it to the 11' MBA, I see the MB as being better in virtually every way. But the MBA 11 is the cheapest in the macbook lineup, the price difference with the 12' is so big that its niche is essentially catering to a lower-end price segment.
For the 13' the price difference is still there, but not as big. But the 13' has 3 hours more battery, better ports and an extra 1 inch, while again being cheaper.
Add to that the fact that the MB is actually quite underpowered (1.1ghz, HD 5300), the MBA 1.6 Ghz, HD 6000 is a significant step up. Meaning for any dev work for which you don't need a MBP (probably the majority of web stuff both front/back end, and a fair bit of development outside of that), you're going to want to more powerful MBA.
The MB to me feels like a replacement for the 11' for rich peeps who want a slick device for school, entertainment, office work (e.g. PR, marketing, management), while the MBA 11' is in the cheap macbook niche and the MBA 13' is in the 'all-day aspiring workhorse that's not quite as powerful as a MBP, but very affordable' niche. The new MB is certainly not in the cheap niche, and it's not quite all-day or an aspiring workhorse.
Longer-term though, I have no clue. It's a confusing lineup for sure. MB is less powerful than the air. What? Air is thicker, bigger, noisier than the MB, what? The Air/Pro was a great lineup, the new MB is a weird one in the story.
This is not a real laptop, as they claim it is. 2 core 1.2Ghz no discrete video, it has only ONE extension port. Really, u cannot connect at the same time mouse, screen and external drive, WTF?
It is not suitable for most of professional tasks, it is like an iPad with keyboard and multitasking, thats all.
This comment is ridiculous. What is it about "laptop" that makes you think "professional tasks with a mouse and external drive"?? That's not how most people use their laptops.
Given that it runs OS X and not iOS it seems more comparable to the Surface than to Androids-tablets-with-keyboards, so I'm not sure why you'd say this is more like an iPad+keyboard than simply a low-power mac laptop.
OT but, on Chrome and Firefox on FreeBSD, all the images and most of the text have the opacity of the images set to zero in their CSS and I can only see a couple of headlines. I presume their javascript is not detecting something correctly and not doing this right. Interesting. I've never seen that before.
EDIT: I just now noticed that the link above goes to /macbook/ but, if you go to the Apple site and click on Mac, the pathname is /mac/ and now I can see and read everything. Also interesting.
EDIT2: Ah but the Macbook link still doesn't show everything.
Is there a USB-C to thunderbolt adapter/hub that would work with existing Cinema displays as well as power the laptop? Or a similar adapter/hub for HDMI?
The specs list 8gb as the only option which is a bit of a disappointment. I was hoping they would offer 16gb and up the rMPBs to 32gb. Otherwise it looks fantastic. I can't wait to try it.
It has the worst CPU in the entire Mac lineup as far as I know, worse than the 11 inch MBA (which is such a confusing brand message. The MB Air is heavier and more noisy than the regular MB, but the MB isn't as powerful as the Air, bit strange right?)
In any case, it doesn't really scream '32gb' to me. i.e. what could you possibly need 32gb of ram for where you won't get bottle-necked to hell and back by a processor more often used in tablets and small 2-in-1s than laptops.
Let me know what you were planning to use the memory for, genuinely curious!
I was hoping it could replace the Air as an all-purpose laptop. 32gb might be a bit overkill, but 16gb is not unheard of, especially considering a life of 5-8 years. If it is roughly as fast as a 2012 Air (which some sites compare it to), it's plenty fast enough for everyday tasks as well as work where I need to run a few VMs. Thus the memory. Still, I'm more interested to see if there will be a DisplayPort dongle and if it could output 4k @ 60hz. If not, the new Air / Retina upgrades are much more interesting.
Threads and threads of comments and this one was most attractive. I'm over the fashion show and though I appreciate Apple pushing the industry by ignoring the standards I'm tired of collecting adapters. As far as software is concerned, I spend more time working around it than with it. I've been holding out, with envy, glancing at my coworkers deving on their new Surface Pro 3s, waiting for my chance at the MacBook/iPad Air combo.
But it's Apple. They are obviously doing plenty of things right and at this point they have terminal nerds arguing and soccer moms stocking up.
How does Linux run on the SP3? I'm considering moving from Apple one my rMBP bites the dust - is the SP3 fully Linux-compatible, do you know by chance?
I didn't even know there was a show today. From a long time Apple fanboy, I think that says a lot about what this company has left in free marketing from the internet channels.
I would say the free ride is over for Apple and they're now just another company doing things in the mosh pit.
Looking at the number of comments left on news article sites. It used to be in the 500's within an hour, now it's around 10-30. That's what I'm basing my judgement on...Again, maybe I'm wrong.
You and me both. But to be honest, I'm not that interested in Apple news unless I'm planning to make a purchase. I've got my iMac and Macbook Pro which will both see me good for at least another two years, I have no interest in buying an iPhone or iPad so why would I take an interest in what Apple is pimping now? I'll come back in a couple of years time when I need an upgrade.
They messed up the resolution. No more "4x the resolution" as "retina" anymore for Apple devices, it seems. It's the end of that, as we've seen with the new iPhones.
So now developers will have to target those resolutions exactly as they are. No more "elegant scaling" and whatnot.
> So now developers will have to target those resolutions exactly as they are.
People writing MacOS software do not typically target a particular number of pixels; it's a windowed operating system. One point will be 2x2 pixels, as on the retina MBP and iMac, and on all retina iOS devices except the big iPhone (where one point is 3x3 pixels).
But what the living hell is going wrong with Apple's desktop software? OS X and Apple's applications suite have been getting steadily worse with every release. Look at the App store: the latest releases of OS X, iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, and Numbers are (in stark contrast to earlier versins) all rated at 2.5/5 stars, with the plurality being 1-star reviews. People are LIVID -- and not just for trivial NOOB reasons, either: the quality of the work is frankly shoddy. Who's steering that part of the ship???