Long ago, I was a Mac user. I was that particular kind of Mac user who had a fun way to talk about Windows and Microsoft and who preferred at all cost to avoid Windows if I could. I frequently used Microsoft Office, but preferred other things where it was practical. For a high school student, it was frequently easy to have it be practical not to use Microsoft Office, because you weren't often expected to collaborate with other people, or turn in digital copies of assignments.
At the end of high school, it was painfully obvious that the laptop I had (which was a PowerBook G4) was no longer sufficient for some of my daily computing needs, which included such complicated tasks as viewing JPEGs. The machine I had, which was built in 2003, wasn't appreciably faster than some of the used machines I bought, which had been built in 1999. The PowerBook G4 also suffered an unusual number of
Upon starting at the university, I brought a pair of old but functional systems, both running appropriate versions of Mac OS 9 and X as necessary. Later on, still unwilling to trust Mac laptops and having an excuse to learn Windows Vista, I bought a ThinkPad.
That particular ThinkPad wasn't a particularly great model within the overall product stack, but it did impressively well compared to the iMac I eventually got. When it came time to get a newer laptop, what I ended up going for was the ThinkPad T400, which I have and use to this day, which is both a testament to how good Intel-based hardware is, and a testament to Windows NT 6 (Vista, 7, 8, and 8.1/8.1U1) has been for my needs in particular.
But, everything changes, and probably one of the best examples of that is the fact that even though I have my ThinkPad, its spiritual successors (the T440p and the will-eventually-come out T450p in particular) are at the bottom of my shopping list. When I got it, it was to be not only my main computer, but possibly my only one, and I shopped for it thusly. I got almost every option for it, including some we almost never see today, such as built in WWAN and expansion slots in the form of both classic PCMCIA/Cardbus and ExpressCard/54.
The machine, while smaller than many of the laptops I had before, is simply too huge for me to carry on a daily basis. (Or, a better way to phrase it is that it's more computer, physically, than I want to carry around these days.)
Some of my preference s haven't changed, and part of why I selected the particular system I did was because I wanted totally insane battery life. The ThinkPad I got could get about 14 hours of run-time if I hypermiled it. I eventually stopped hypermiling it and settled in with about 7-9 hours of run-time, just depending on the particular circumstances. I continue to like long battery life and it's one of the reasons I continue to use my Suface RT today, even though it's not the best available option outside a few pretty specific tasks.
Today, I value both physical size and battery life, but am looking for something that's a bit more functional as a "regular" (desktop-experience) computer. To make everything more complicated, I have a specific bag I'd like my on-the-go computer to fit in.
Which brings me to the MacBook announcement. I wanted to talk about it in two ways:
- Mac OS X
- The MacBook itself
As I alluded to in my last post, one of the biggest problems for me using a Mac full-time is some pretty specific functions I rely on that exist in Office for Windows, but not Office for Mac. That doesn't mean I couldn't use one at all, but it wouldn't be my only computer. The good news is that in reality, I very rarely actually post blog entries from the mobile system.
Mac OS X has myriad problems, and Apple has a poor-but-improving track record of supporting it on old hardware for a very long time. I still want to write about January's Apple Software Quality blow-out, but simply haven't had the time lately to put into that type of post, but suffice it to say that I have a problem spending a lot of money on a system that has the problems managing memory that Mac OS X does, and that's using the woefully ancient and failure-prone HFS+ as the only file system you can choose to run the system. I have a Mac, but I have the cheapest one from a few years ago, for the purposes of keeping up with the platform, and very rarely find myself using it for "productivity."
Apple has done a very good job mitigating some of Mac OS X's shortcomings with better hardware (in particular, improved storage subsystems, so when you inevitably run out of your 8 or 16 gigabytes of memory, swapping is faster.) This is, however, quite different from Microsoft's strategy, which has been to make Windows run better on all computers by making the whole thing more efficient.
The MacBook has been talked about a lot so far. Even though this article is really late and you'll likely have seen this before. The MacBook is essentially what has been floating around as rumors for a few months. It is a 12-inch notebook with a Retina-class display at 2304x1440 pixels, (1152x720 points at "optimal" scaling factor) a 1.1 or 1.2GHz Intel Core M processor (which is approximately a 5W chip), 8GB of ram and 256 or 512 gigabytes of PCI Express based solid state storage. It has a headphone jack and a single USB Type-C port for charging, video output, and actual USB connections for data-focused peripherals.
The primary commentary on this has essentially been that a single USB port isn't enough for anybody, and that it's made worse by the fact that it's a single port providing combined power, USB, and video connectivity, along with $80's USB Type C to charge/USB/video (HDMI, VGA) dongles. The commentary is typical of power users who are talking about Macs. Their own use cases aren't always very well met by anything Apple makes, let alone a system such as the MacBook, whose clear purpose is to push the envelope in terms of advancing wireless connectivity for video and peripherals and be an even smaller form factor for people who demand that kind of thing. I agree with the assessment of both Thom Holwerda of OSNews and Peter Cohen of iMore that power users need to shut up about some issues.
The fact is that as I've alluded to previously, the number of "power users" on the Mac platform is realistically very small, and they're all on all the same web sites and in the comments sections on the same place, and it seems very vast because, well, it's an echo chamber. You think that there must be a lot of people who think this way because you see 20 different names on each web site you visit, not being aware that 15-17 of them are on all the web sites, possibly under different names. The Mac platform is bigger today than it was in 1996 when it was imminently practical to buy a six-slot monster with fifteen or more ports on the back of it – and the environment in which the Mac exists is very different.
Today, if I had to make a guess based on what I've seen everybody I know do with their laptop, the average Mac user has a MacBook or MacBook Pro and almost nothing aside from their charger and headphones is ever plugged into it. Mac users have been using wireless networks for a very long time, Apple-centric homes and organizations often have Apple TV units everywhere for displaying content to other users.
There are definitely situations where having a lot of ports is useful, but even on an old fully featured notebook such as my ThinkPad T400 with three USB ports, you're going to need a hub if you need more ports than what Lenovo built in. Does that make the system insufficient for my needs as a power user, or is it a justification for the purchase of a docking station or USB hub?
I think the biggest problem is uncertainty about what is or will be available for the platform. In fact, right now, there's a lot of mis-information about this topic. For example, most people aren't aware that in addition to the two video adapters for $79 apiece, Apple has a $19 USB-C to USB Adapter and Google sells one for about $13.
Apple also sells separate USB C to USB C cables (it calls this the "charge cable") and 29-watt power adapter for the system. Google has a conventional charging cablefor available, as well as a 60 watt power adapter with a USB Type C connector. Google sells separate USB Type C to DisplayPort and mini-HDMI adapters, but those are more relevant to the Chromebook Pixel, because it has two USB Type C ports.
So far, that's it. It's a brand new ecosystem, so right now the cheapest thing you can do is buy one or two really useful adapters, and then continue using your existing cables. It doesn't necessarily make sense to buy a Type-C to Micro-USB 3.0 Type B cable today, for example, if only because you might not want to restrict yourself just to Samsung phones and some external hard disks while at the same time not having the ability to power the system from the wall. The MacBook has enough battery life to fill a USB 3.0 hard disk from Wi-Fi within a charge, but things will get better when some hubs and other types of cables appear, and when the costs go down.
I think the type of peripheral that will really help is when somebody builds a USB Type C power adapter that also has a USB hub built in. This would be the ultimate form of the docking station. A single cable that powers the notebook, pulls data out of it, and accepts video signals. The great thing is that hypothetically any vendor can build USB Type C peripherals with any number of things built in, using any number of the USB Type C modes, including power delivery and DisplayPort, at the same time as carrying regular USB signals (at, eventually, speeds up to ten gigabits.)
The other thing I think we may eventually see with USB Type C connectors is external peripherals (such as hard disks) that can themselves function as a hub and provide power delivery. An ideal peripheral might be something like a Western Digital MyBook Duo with three or four Type C ports that can power the laptop and other disks.
The other oft-cited weakness of the system is the 1.1 or 1.2GHz Intel Core M CPU. I intentionally left out the turbo boost speeds earlier, but they are impressive at up to 2.4 or 2.6GHz, and on the MacBook, you're likely to be using them pretty frequently. At about 5 watts TDP, there will almost certainly be throttling, but no formal reviews of the system have come out yet. In reviews of other systems using these chips, they come out at about 75% of the performance of the CPUs in the Haswell MacBook Airs (which Apple replaced with Broadwell models.) This is frequently cited as being "really slow" but it's worth noting that in just the past five years, the smallest systems Apple could make have increased at least four-fold in overall speed. A slight reduction in CPU speed (coupled with the existing increase in disk performance) is what I'd consider an acceptable trade-off for the fact that Apple was able to build such a small system with such impressive battery life.
The spec I'm surprised people aren't talking about is the display. 2304 by 1440 sounds impressive on paper, and it would make a beautiful display at about 20-24 inches, but the typical configuration of Apple's retina displays is that you use them at approximately 2x scaling. What this means is that you're getting about 1152 by 720 pixels of work space. This is more than the 800x600 in the original iBooks from 1999, but it's less than anything else Apple has built since then, including the 11.6-inch MacBook Airs, which used a then-unprecedentedly low resolution of 1366x768. So far, to my knowledge nobody knows exactly what Mac OS X is like at such low resolutions.
It is an option to change the scaling factor to give you more work space, but this has the ability to make things slightly less pretty, and on the first MacBook Pros with Retina displays, this also reduced performance. It's said, however, that this has been resolved for at least one hardware generation, even with Intel's HD-series graphics.
For me, personally, the biggest remaining question probably pertains to whether or not Microsoft or any relevant PC vendor can come up with anything obviously better in the near future. Even though I would love one, I am not going to buy a Mac if a smaller Surface product or if some kind of Let's Note RZ4 for the North American market.
From a generic perspective, I think that with its small size, sufficient battery life, and ample memory and storage sizes, the new MacBook will the very popular, leaving the MacBook Air as the budget computer until (years down the line) the MacBook ultimately gets discontinued a few years down the line. As with the MacBook Air when it was introduced, I think that the MacBook today represents the needs of "most people" today. Fewer people keep things like scanners and printers connected to their computers full-time, and when they do, they're often networked (sometimes wireless) devices. Even storage is moving toward networked devices, services on the Internet, and application-specific silos. Plus, many people are starting to use streaming services such as Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, and Spotify to enjoy media on their computers. Among people who aren't using those services, network servers and storage appliances are becoming common as a way to make media available on all of their local computers.
I think people who "need more" really fall into two categories. The first is people who either have or should have a desktop anyway, and the second is people who would probably be fine with a MacBook as their only computer, but this one time three years ago they burned a DVD and used two USB peripherals at the same time, and they now think they always need this functionality with them, and that buying a three-year-old system with a DVD burner is an acceptable trade-off for a system with a worn out battery, a graphics chip that's about to fail, and a slow old hard disk.
There's a really good chance I won't buy one, but I do like it nevertheless, and I think it will be a very popular product among Mac users, most of whom probably understand that they haven't used a very large number of USB devices in a while anyway, and are okay with just using a hub. Even my own usage of my dockable 14-inch widescreen, ultra-expandable business notebook has changed in the six years I've had it. When I first got this system, the idea was that it might be my only computer for a very long time, and although I wanted it to be faster than the desktop and other laptop it replaced, in the grand scheme of things, it's only very marginally faster than they were, and it's a total slug compared to anything I can buy today, even sub-$1000 options from Apple, Dell, and Lenovo. On the other hand, given that most of my on-the-go computing these days happens on the Surface RT, the question that I need to ask, both myself and other computer buyers, is what your mobile habits are really like.
No longer do I need to do WoW raiding or hardcore photo processing and video editing on the go, and having a system that's capable of those things tends to reduce the things that are important for how I actually use mobile computers these days, long writing sessions and full days away from home. The MacBook (or even a MacBook Air) would be good for those things, and the decision point between those two systems (or those two classes of systems) is whether you need or want something that's lighter, because it'll be in your bag all day or week, or you want something with slightly more capability, because you'll end up using it with peripherals or to move a lot of data around between USB devices, SD cards, etc, or because you're willing to sacrifice size and weight for the battery life of a 13-inch MacBook Air or the Dell XPS 13.
Just because a system doesn't meet your personal preferences doesn't make it a bad system, it just means that there's probably something out there that's better. Maybe one day the Mac power users will get this, but it's been a decade or so since I started paying attention to them and they have yet to do so, so I don't have too much hope.