I'm prewriting several posts just before the start of November, for purposes of NaNoWriMo. Fortunately, a fair amount of interesting tech news has just come out. As a follow-up to my post about the Surface Studio, I'm going to write about Macs now!
Further - this post was supposed to be posted a few weeks ago, but I forgot to, and so here it is now!
Apple announced its first new MacBook Pros in several years. Some of the "outgoing" models were three years old, having been originally announced in mid-2013, only refreshed with a newer GPU in about 2015. Most of those models are, because of reasons, still on sale.
The basic facts are that the 11-inch MacBook Air, as well as the MD101LL/A are discontinued. The discontinuation of the MD101LL/A means that the Mac Plus still holds the title for the longest running Mac model. At a bit over five years, I'm not sure that even the Mac Pro will be able to beat the record.
Then, there are the new machines: There are three new MacBook Pro models. One is a 13-inch MacBook Pro with two ports and no touch strip, and a 13- and 15-inch machine, each with a touch strip and four ports. The ports on all of these models are USB Type C connectors that are also enabled for Thunderbolt.
The systems have faster solid state disks, Skylake processors, newer graphics hardware, an updated keyboard, and two of the three models have the touch strip. The machines also all have DCI-P3 capable displays, for better color when working with photos shot on the newest iPhones and iPads, professional cameras, professional video cameras, and better fidelity when creating or doing things such as color correction. The memory capacities and types stayed the same, mostly so Apple could use low power memory. The systems are also a little thinner.
In some of my circles, the reaction to the discontinuation of the MD101LL/A and the fact that the new systems ditch several "legacy" ports (except, oddly, the headphone jack) and the fact that most (if not all) of the systems have everything soldered on their boards has been swift and furious. Most are now convinced that "Apple doesn't care about the Mac" and that Apple's target market is obviously hipsters and (paraphrased) dumb millennials
This sort of angers me for some reasons and just confuses me for some others. The first and perhaps most important thing to me is that I consider it insanely condescending that people watched the demo of the touch strip and the biggest thing they got out of it was that you can use it to browse and select emoji. I think there's a real but unfortunate group of people who thinks that "normal people" shouldn't have access to computing at all. It's basically the same crowd who is angry that the majority of computer users no longer know how to program, and the different but equally reactive crowd who thinks it's a shame that computers are being used by people who aren't running content creation and scientific or technical computing software all the time, and the (yet again) different but just as loud crowd who think that accessible, pocketable computers that are always on a network and can be used for communications (smartphones) are ruining society.
To be honest, I'm just about completely done with listening to people rail against modern computers because their Aesthetic Preferences™ suggest that this shouldn't be what computing is, or what having affordable computers does to society. At the same time, this crowd often talks about computers being too expensive anyway. Ironically, they might get what they want.
The other crowd has what I'd call legitimate technical concerns about the machines or the platform. For example, with everything soldered, there are no aftermarket upgrades and no replacements of failed components. The switch to USB Type C is an overall positive from the perspective of being able to charge up the device in emergency situations, and for better choice. Right now, Apple has the only above-60-watt Type C power delivery adapter on the market, but that should change relatively shortly, and even in an emergency situation, a Type A to Type C power cord or a lower wattage Type C adapter could mean the difference between productivity and being dead in the water.
Consider the following would-be apocalypse scenario for a Mac user who travels for whatever reason to a place like Las Vegas, NM. The cord on their MagSafe adapter fails. It is either a safety problem to use it or it simply won't charge at all. This is a pretty small town. There's no Best Buy, no Staples, their college doesn't have an Apple Campus store, and the people they are visiting all use Windows PCs. Their MacBook Pro will be dead in a few hours, there's nothing they can do to stop it, and the closest towns with Macintosh hardware on sale are hours away.
For the user of the 2016/2016 MacBook, or a new 2016 MacBook Pro, you can at least hop into the local cell phone store or Walmart and pick up something like Google's 18-watt adapter for the Pixel phone, which should provide a reasonably useful charge overnight, and keep the machine topped up enough throughout the day for a pretty normal usage pattern. We don't yet know if there is any provision for running the machine from more than one charger, but if there is, you'll be able to more usefully run and charge the machine. Targus also sells a 45W Type C laptop charger.
For the user of an older MacBook Pro, the solution would be to either do without the computer, drive a few hours, or buy a cheap Windows or ChromeBook computer at the local Walmart, hoping that your data is on some sort of storage media outside of the computer. The most common Dell and HP laptops sold for the past ten to twelve years all use the same two power connectors (each) and those adapters are usually available at Walmart.
The other thing we've seen with USB Type C has been the ability to power bigger peripherals directly off the bus. Things like the Seagate Innov8 hard disk let you run a big external hard disk off of bus power. On the desktop side of things, I'm hoping that this means big powered Type C hubs, or future desktops with several Type C ports allow for several of these disks to run without external power. It could be valuable for a laptop to be able to do that with a bigger disk, to reduce the amount of stuff that a person will need to carry with them, as they're using that machine and disk.
The fact that Apple is now on Thunderbolt 3 may provide some other interesting benefits in terms of things like being able to run external GPUs (or fast storage arrays) on Macs. Although it could be dangerous, politically(1) for Apple to support this, I really hope they do on Macs that get TB3. This could be a big boon, especially to iMacs and MacBook Pros, for docking as well as acceleration. There are a fair number of Mac applications at the moment that now support OpenCL, and it's possible more cuild be built. There's no reason that a neatly packaged Thunderbolt 3 accelerator like a Xeon Phi(2) couldn't be built, if Intel thinks that it can use that to better effect for OpenCL acceleration.
I think the biggest legitimate complaints about the machines so far are the removal of the escape key, and the fact that the new models are appreciably more expensive than the machines they replace. (There is also a new hole at the $899 tier, left by the old MacBook Air 11.6-inch.) In addition, in true Apple fashion, its first party power adapters and cables are not only more expensive than the previous generation of MagSafe adapters, but are, as with the 29W adapter for the MacBook, packaged separately. You can save money if you only need to replace the Type C charge cord, but it costs a lot more than before to buy a new charger to, say, leave at work, or semi-permanently leave attached to a particularly hard-to-get outlet. There's also the concern for people who regularly use a lot of USB, Firewire, and Thunderbolt or Mini DisplayPort peripherals. This isn't new to Apple, but there will be much consternation while people spend a fair amount of time accumulating enough new cables and adapters to feel comfortable.
One thing I wish Apple had done with its power adapters, something Intel did with the power adapter to the Core M3/M5 version of the Compute Stick, is to add USB 3.0 type A ports to the charger. This could have helped assuage certain doubts about USB Type C, and also function as a rudimentary dock. Plug your printer and an external hard disk into the power brick, and you get printing and you get a one-cable connection to a few important things. Perhaps even sleep mode Time Machine backups when you're plugged into that particular brick. With three ports in some combination, you could get an external hard disk, a printer, and something like an Ethernet adapter. I'm waiting, third parties.
- I think the biggest trouble is that this would allow a software vendor such as Adobe to sidestep the need to port GPGPU functions from CUDA to OpenCL. When the original Mac Pro was released and then reviewed in 2013 and 2014, Thunderbolt 2 was not officially supported for external GPUs, so Adobe wasn't allowed to tell users complaining about OpenCL to go buy an nVidia GPU, put it in a box, and plug it into their Mac to get CUDA.
- It's no big secret that I love the idea of cabled outboard accelerators for media and technical-scientific acceleration. They're a good idea for laptops and mini-desktops, but I've got an appreciation for the idea when used in conjunction with all-in-one desktops and compact workstations like the Mac Pro, as well.