Updated MacBook Pros
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I have an ancient 2011 15" MBP, which was also the last user-upgradeable Apple laptop ever, but I remain hesitant to buy a new model. There is just not enough storage in the new ones, or in models that come close to my old one (1TB+) it's prohibitively expensive.
At some point soon, my old MBP will probably disintegrate or get stolen, and it has features I'm not going to get back. I'm used to having my music, my ebooks, my documents, my photos, and my code with me at all times. It's really convenient.
Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.
Once I learned to live with a 64GB macbook air, I realized that 90% of the data I was keeping around was not useful.
It's very liberating.
Yes, I realize 64GB of data is huge, but not for modern machines.
How does lugging around an extra piece of equipment that is inconvenient to handle equate to being less of a packrat? No. Inventing time-consuming and frustrating coping strategies just because newer tech is more limited than the old stuff? That's not a path I'm going to embark on. There is nothing liberating about it.
The restrictions Apple currently imposes on us do not exist because they believe we should throw away our data as a matter of Zen. They exist because SSDs have not caught up yet, though at some point they will.
> Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.
What does breakage even mean in this context? My laptop right now has an SSD for fast system things and an HDD for bulk data. If one of them breaks, the laptop will still be usable and I just put in a spare part. If the laptop is completely destroyed, chances are an external HDD in my backpack will also be.
It's not like carrying an external backup HDD is impossible just because my laptop has adequate onboard storage - it's obviously a false dichotomy.
> It's very liberating.
I absolutely get that shedding ballast is a liberating experience, but it pertains to physical things. I have gotten rid of many, many things in my life that didn't have any real value anymore - including almost all of my books, CDs, and DVDs. The books and CDs are still with me in digital form, which is kind of the point here (the DVDs are, too, but on my home server).
The neat thing about digital possessions is that they can scale very well without encumbering you.
They're responding to a different philosophy.
Take music: The main case is generally "I want to listen to music that I like" or "I want to listen to (specific) music from (artist)" of some sort. I have 150GB of music, but neither of those cases require most of it as most of it is only accessed very rarely. The music file storage can stay somewhere else, for occasional reference if I want to pull something esoteric from the collection. "Cloud" or an external drive are great for this.
Wash, rinse, repeat for photos, movies, old software, etc.
And when it "breaks", i.e. that single-point-of-failure HDD fails, as they do often catastrophically without warning, the files aren't lost. It's like keeping your will, the deed to your house, baby photos, etc. in the briefcase/backpack you carry around all day. Fine way to protect them until something happens to that briefcase.
It's liberating dropping 3 pounds from your shoulder, as well.
Sure, but that's not the same every day. I don't want to shuffle my music collection around constantly; I'd rather just have it, so if on a trip I'm reminded of $bandname and want to listen to an album, I don't have to futz with downloading it on hotel wifi. To me the cognitive overhead of manually operating some kind of caching scheme, where I purge rarely used files to the archive and then have to page-fault them back in again, is not worth it.
It's simply the philosophy that most of the stuff we keep with us on our TB hard drive laptops isn't actually stuff we need to keep with us.
Obviously Apple considers your philosophy to be an edge case to their intended business model and would rather not offer you moderately priced options to upgrade, which is certainly a shame.
Whilst I love the 10" form factor and the light weight of the Surface there are times where I need something obscure and rarely accessed, and don't have my drive with me. This is frustrating beyond description.
Also not sure about the data loss argument, as I back up regularly.
There's many options for providing yourself access to the desktop at home from a mobile location, at which point you can access those obscure files.
It does seem that the tablet isn't a great product vehicle at the moment for a Tb portable desktop.
>Bonus: now you have your data around even if your laptop breaks.
External drives are pretty unreliable. It's more probable the external drive will die before the laptops internal one.
Citation needed.
There's no reason for the external drive to "die before the laptops internal one".
Not only that: you can actually buy the very same drives that are in your laptop for external use if you like.
Nowadays the external drives of course contain 3.5" or 2.5" hard drives. But the inbuilt hard discs come with little or no warrenty, are "eco"-drives that are meant to be used only occasionally (not 24x7) and spin with only 5400 rpm.
Internal hard drives for personal/business (desktop, notebook) come with up to 4 or 5 years warrenty and spin with 7200 or 11000 rpm and have a better internal cache.
And that contrary to what you said, tons of personal/business laptops come with 5400 HDs. Not much quality HD on a €400 euro laptop or even some Apple models.
I am just slowly starting to consider getting another laptop in 2015, but the fact that the new line of MBP adhere to the soldered-on-and-force-obsolescence philosophy is really putting me off this purchase.
If I need to go on a trip where I won't have good internet, there's more than enough storage for a dozen movies or tv shows or whatever and hundreds of hours of music. I just load it up and delete it when I get back.
It sucks in some ways to set up, and it's a lot of work, but it really does payoff later. And having all my media self-hosted somewhere I can get to from my laptop, my desktop, the web, my phone, my tablet, and chromecast to my tv is actually better than lugging all that around.
A disadvantage of this approach is that unsynced folders are not in Time Machine backups.
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Isn't the SSD soldered to the board now? Do the new models even have SATA connectors? Do normal drives even fit in that slim enclosure? I'm not even certain if the RAM is upgradeable anymore, are you sure about this?
* RAM is soldered to the board
It is, although of course the downside is sheer heft. Compared to the new models, that thing is a huge and heavy aluminum brick. But yeah, I can cope with that in exchange for the convenience of more storage and upgradeability.
> What kind of work do you do that would cause it to break?
I'm just carrying it with me 24x7, basically. This laptop has seen the world, and it shows.
> It's like owning a vintage car. Everybody will be envious.
Doubtful but it's an interesting take ;)
Perhaps it's time to declutter your digital life?
I would like to use the notebook outside too. Using the iPad outside on a sunny day strains the eyes.
Because it was not of very high demand, plus it's awful for color accuracy and deep blacks, not to mention that it destroys a lot of the niceties of having a retina screen -- it's literary adding a diffusion material over your screen, that besides reducing glare also makes it more blurry.
Plus, the solution to glare is quite easy: turn the display away from a light source. It being a portable computer, that's quite easy.
Working outside in nature (country side) or on a train/bus (next to a window), a glare display doesn't work well.
I like to work outside under the shadow of trees and the wind constantly blows through the leaves and shake them around.
A business notebook with mate display works fine in such conditions and the colors are good and not blurry at all (one can always attach a high quality monitor).
I don't think that describes much of the population. But if it does describe you, just avoid having the sun on your screen. Either find a shade around noon, or keep the display against the sun at other times.
Once you can't see the pixels, the display becomes infinitely flexible.
The biggest limitation for me is the single thunderbolt port. If I want to connect to ethernet, a display, or other thunderbolt devices (like an audio interface I have), I can only connect to one. Even on the 13" MBP, I can connect all three since there are two thunderbolt connections plus HDMI. The other biggest limitation has been video performance and CPU performance. I've ran into performance issues with virtualized boxes for local development and also with connecting an external display.
As far as retina, I could care less. It's nice, but not a necessity for me. Also, you get more battery life without it. That said, I'll still be moving to a MBP.
I'm impressed with the the 15inch retina starting specification. All the 15inch models come with 16GB of RAM for a starting price of £1,600. I always tell everybody if your doing graphical work or video production, get a desktop setup. The Intel isis pro GPU is more than enough for the work I do. extra £300 an average discrete mobile GPU on a laptop is not worth it.
http://i.imgur.com/1RgQSOc.png
http://blog.gatunka.com/2009/11/03/japanese-computers-still-...
This is your wife. We need to have a serious chat tonight.
I went from an 11in Macbook Air to the 13 MBP retina and I've not regretted it once. I carry my laptop around all day and I've not noticed the extra weight.
(The one thunderbolt on the Air means no Ethernet + Display at the same time, unless you're using a USB adapter... for which there are only two ports)
I like it, but it does get hot, and is quite heavy compared to the airs. I'm happy with it but I think they're missing a trick!
My wife was in a car crash about two years ago and, while the car was totalled, her MBP survived with exactly one scratch.
The fact my wife left the vehicle angry but without even a scratch is a testament to the engineers who designed all cabin safety features. As for the poor laptop in the trunk, well... That's entirely thanks to Apple's design and engineering team. That thing is indestructible.
EDIT: thanks all, yes I remember asking the return policy is 14 days. I will do that.
You came to the conclusion that you "were right when you decided to ditch Apple" because they just put out newer, better models that the one you just bought?
Sure makes sense...
The way they achieve that is by releasing stuff that's already obsolete on day of launch, but you can't argue with the ethics!
Apple won't catch up to that until they can lock down the supply chain.
So Philip K Dick was right after all, the future is a dystopia?
I think Apple has brought us closer to dystopia than anyone with their hardware + software lockin monoculture. At least I can move to other hardware vendors if I don't like Microsoft's hardware. If I want to run OSX I have to buy Apple's hardware (and I do when I have to, but I certainly don't enjoy it).
In addition to all the Windows software that I run on it, I also have a small Ubuntu Server VM within the included hypervisor. Can't wait until the Surface Pro 4 comes out, that's when I'll probably jump to the Surface Pro 3 to get the larger screen and SSD size.
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To some extent its why I don't want to upgrade just for that either - battery technology hasn't fundamentally improved enough, so really it's all clever power saving tricks. Give me an ultabook padded out to an inch thickness with a solid sheet of NiMH batteries that can be charged to a couple hours of runtime in a few minutes.
Only thing I can see is a faster cpu, is there anything else?
The real update has to wait because Intel's Broadwell CPUs are delayed until 2015, so they're releasing a minor spec dump today to keep customers happy.
/opinion
The NX500 looks like it might be the one -- but I'm probably filling in the information gaps with hopes and dreams.
The new notebooks feature faster versions of Intel's Haswell processors, as all 13-inch models now come with 8GB of RAM standard while all 15-inch models now feature 16GB of RAM. The high end 15-inch model also received a $100 price cut, going from $2599 to $2499.
and this analysis:
Today's minor refresh is primarily a stopgap measure until Apple can launch a more significant update to its Retina MacBook Pro line once Intel's next-generation Broadwell processors hit the market.
If I'm going to buy a state of the art computer, I want it to have state of the art specs, know what I'm saying? I think it's inevitable that 32 GB RAM on a MacBook will be a thing, so that's what I'm waiting for.
Obviously, applications that need the data space (as opposed to executable), will greatly benefit (Oracle, Scientific Apps, Analytics, etc...) - but my 2010 MacBook Air continues to be a rock solid performer with an average of 20 Apps running. I will certainly benefit from the greatly increased SSD storage performance, but I'm not really that interested in a 16GB system anymore.
I used to say I was going to hold out for a 16 GB MacBook air to upgrade, but, the reality is 8GB is sufficient for my reasonably power-user-intensive ways.
The new base model has double the RAM and a .2ghz bump for the same price.
I can't believe when people tell me my macbook pro 2009 with 2GB of ram is a "little too cheap" for mavericks or xcode 5. I can't even install windows on it because the superdrive is busted. I managed to install ubuntu, but there's ALWAYS a wifi/touchpad/heating issue.
Not to mention the hardship getting some C++ project working on xcode. (like ogre for instance). Making games on it seems to be a pain since you need to find a way to move around the displaylink.
I won't try to get a mac again. If a computer cannot be nice enough to build C++ projects with, I won't use it. You all are working on web based apps, but I'm clearly not a customer of this.
preference:
1. windows laptop 2. linux laptop 3. mac laptop
It's a shame because the hardware is great, but since apple force feeds you with itunes and doesn't really want you using windows, I'll pass. Their hardware is dedicated to their OSX thingy, and I don't want it.
Also windows can be installed from USB nearly as easily as ubuntu.
if the native IDE is not adequate, I don't think I'll find anything else. Most native apple things are cocoa-centric.
also the last version of Ogre3D engine is not even available, because of XCode and how apple builds its stuff. I hate hacking through galaxies of makefiles. I've lost patience :) It's just exhausting to rebuild everything everytime there's a xcode or OSX upgrade. I'm done. Microsoft supports backward compatility much better.
"Their hardware [being] dedicated to their OSX thingy" is actually a great thing for every day use. Their software (OS as well as other pieces) can be testing against very specific hardware and think that is a big part of why it is pretty reliable. That and being unix-based is a big win over windows IMO.
For instance, in Windows and Gnome I can hunt through menus with the keyboard by simply press ALT and then the underlined letter of a menu (then use the arrow keys to look around and press ENTER or SPACE to pick one). This is consistent throughout those environments but on OS X you can't navigate like that, you have to memorize 2,000 hot-key combinations. Microsoft kind of ruined that nice feature with the "Ribbon" but the new keyboard navigation system for the ribbon is still more logical and consistent than what I've seen with OS X.
That's why I like to just put my Unix dev environment in a VM on Windows. I get the best desktop experience (for me) and when I need it, I have Unix.
But to be truly objective, there'd have to be some argument about ease of learning a system, or even ease of adjusting as the system changes. By that measure, Windows' switch to the 'ribbon' has disrupted a large community accustomed to menu interation etc. I'd call it a big step backward.
I decided to advance my vim skills recently though and I'm certainly glad that it got evangelized so much around here because it's pretty awesome for people who like the keyboard.
On Mac, everything starts with Cmd. And it's like the Windows key, in that it doesn't conflict with anything in your terminal or elsewhere. (On that note, the Windows key is the most underused key ever.)
Danger: Cynical, heavy stereotyping and biasing comment following...
I can work with OSX, nix and Win boxes, no problem, but OSX' interface isn't optimized for simple tasks like cutting and pasting various folders form one to another, where some of them will be overwritten, as there is no merge option and no CTRL+X short cut. Are they nuts? Yeah, I can write a shell script to do it, or I can install XtraFinder and also have Folders on top of Files in lists. But wtf? Is that system designed for idiots and grandmothers? Oh yeah and I love to pay a shtload of money for kinda outdated hardware components... Still some things are cool on OSX. It's snappy, fast and it has a decent shell. The retina display is even usable, when installing the 5$ pupil.io to natively switch resolutions for non-idiots (Actually seeing the resolution as xxx X xxx value instead of Small, Middle, Large)
Enough OS bashing for today.
PS.: Windows sux and *nix as well.
Something not conforming to your personal preferences does not mean that it's only suitable for the hard of thinking.