I was down at my favourite place to buy servers paying them money [“disassemble laptop. Clean. Reassemble laptop.”] when the tech asked if the son (his laptop) was being used on a bed because it is full of gunge. Well he does not: unlike me he does not work well on a bed but tends to use a table. However, he does visit a dusty environment regularly, and his mum shoved it in a worn bag — and HP make laptops that suck air in from the side, with no easy way of getting at the filters without very specailized tools we don’t have. Despite the fact we build desktops at times.
So I got an extra cooling base — for me. So that my laptop is cool and raised off the bed. Because I do work best on top of the bed, where, despite the fact I do clean the place, dust will exist.
But while we were there we discussed something my son has been mocking. The new macbook: which the tech called a glorified Ipad, and the son won’t get because “Asus make something, thinner, lighter and with better input/output”. (The son managed to acquire a gaming laptop over the christmas break. That we had just picked up). I looked at the specs and — it does not give me confidence.
Which worries me. My work machine needs to run Stata: and at times Word for Mac — and lightroom is a good product. But I need macs that are more than capable. I don’t want pretty: I want number crunching and mass processing of photos.
A swathe of consumers feel betrayed by the stark design of the new MacBook. Our original post on the topic was shared over 25,000 times. It’s a polarizing design.
The new MacBook thinks different. It has more in common with a tablet than most laptops. Think of it as an iPad that has a keyboard and runs OS X. And like the iPad, it only has one port, which is the cause of the outcry.
Most computers have several ports scattered around the frame. There’s usually one for charging, a couple USB ports for various tasks, and some sort of port to output video. The new MacBook combines all three into a single USB-C port. This means users will not be able to, say, charge the laptop and an iPhone at the same time or input data from a flash drive while outputting video to an external monitor. Sure you’re going to have some nice accessories to do all these things down the line but this barebones approach is a pretty hard sell in a world where some laptops still have a serial port.
This is Apple’s world and we just live in it.
To Apple’s credit, the company must see a market for such a computer. The low-power Intel chipset that powers the computer likely doesn’t provide enough oomph to play computer games but it should render GIFs just fine. This is a couch computer. It’s a Facebook and Twitter machine. It even looks like a great programming computer. Watch the Apple event yesterday. The company didn’t demonstrate any of its new software on the new MacBook including the Photos app. Simply put, the new MacBook isn’t for photo editing. It’s for Facebooking.
It’s hard to say for sure without using the laptop more, which we’ll do as soon as possible, but for the moment the new MacBook feels a bit like the Apple Watch: it’s beautiful, a status symbol I’d be desperate to show to everyone I know and kind of already want to frame. It’s a clear indication that Apple values form and beauty first and foremost. But it’s expensive—the oddest moment of the event was when Phil Schiller announced the $1,299 starting price, and the room just deflated. It’s also a little underpowered for such an expensive machine. But good lord is it beautiful.
It’s beautiful. But It cannot process anything. You cannot connect a standard USB drive to it — which is what you need to take into academic meetings. Looking at the specs, you may be better off getting a chromebook
I don’t do beauty that well when it comes to these things. I don’t. In fact, I worry about the laptop I have because it is not plain black and ugly. The more generic the machine looks, the more I like it: the more likely it is to be able to run Linux without difficulties, and the less its market value will be once it is broken or taken or stolen.
Which brings me to another couple of things that are important, particularly when travelling. Install dropbox. Take a USB stick (or buy one) when you land — because hotel wifi is generally awful, and the charges add up. (In Europe, T-mobile works generally OK: in Canada I tend to use Rogers — and I get a stick when I land). If you are travelling to NZ and Australia, what I have said applies twice as much. If possible, get a stick where you can change sim cards — so get an unlocked one.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/81ShjYCtAYL._SL1500_.jpg
I may be a Luddite, but I prefer having something that I can use to fix numbers. Like today, when I realized the spreadsheet I had copied into a presentation had an error in it. Like when processing photos from RAW.
I would rather carry 2 competent kilos than 800g of pretty. But then, I’m a geek. Apple used to like people like me, but now they would rather leave us to Debian and Fedora. Which, BTW, both run well on my home laptop. And I keep the work mac somewhere safe and away from all nasties, because I am afraid the next pro will be lobotomized for to be a pretty barbie lappie.
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Update.
It has been released in NZ. For $1999. At that price, It would be better to get a laptop from System 76 and buy Stata for Linux myself. I’d have something more powerful and it would be cheaper.
