Ask HN: What's your experience with the new macbook?
I'm about to buy the new 12 inch macbook, primarily for webdev work while traveling. Would be interested in any experiences with this device.
Compared to my MBPR it feels just as fast if not occasionally faster. However, streaming video to the TV over airplay hasn't been as nice. If you do video heavy things like gaming or video production, its not for you. But as a programmer, I'm really, really happy.
Note: I would recommend the 1.2 GHz configuration or the 1.3 - I have the 1.2 and a lot the the reviews are saying that there is a noticeable difference between the 1.1 and 1.2 in terms of computing power.
Edit: fixed spelling and grammar.
As far as actual use, well that depends on who is using it. The role that this laptop fits really well IMO is use as a secondary device for consistently mid-level computing tasks (with some burst activity) in an environment where mobility is important. "webdev work while traveling" is exactly this role so as long as you are OK with the form factor then you will like this laptop. If the form factor is an issue, you should consider the Air. If power is an issue, you should consider the Pro. If price is an issue, look at other manufacturers (new Surface and new XPS are both great machines, for example, though neither are really that cheap).
The reviews on this device have been mixed but I think a lot of reviews are acting on the premise that it's a one-stop machine, but it's not. It's not perfect. It's a bit pricey. You aren't going to be running a new game at max settings on it. The one port thing is odd and you will need to wait for the adapter market to catch up for some of this oddness/clumsiness to disappear. 8 gig ram isn't quite enough if you are expecting to be running big VMs on it a lot. The CPU is relatively underpowered (though, honestly, I think this is overrated and the 1.3 in particular is quite good... even with the 1.1 you will likely never even notice).
For me, this device is replacing a 13" 2011 Air and so far I consider it to be superior in just about every way and my experience has been great. If I need to sit down and do some "serious" computing for a decent stretch of time (new game at max settings for a couple hours, large data crunching, long programming stretch where I really need a desk and several monitors) then, well, that's what my desktop is for (or a powerful, bulky, docked laptop which amounts to the same thing).
In other words, what you are buying when you buy this machine over something else is this: the keyboard, the trackpad, the screen, the efficiency of the CPU, the battery form factor, the fanless design, and the entire form factor to bring this all together in such a tiny laptop. In return, the tradeoff is slightly less RAM, slightly less CPU power, and a lack of extension ports.
My machine handles a Windows8.1 in VirtualBox easily. I use it for Visual Studio 2013 daily and it's fine although it's not perfect. It's slow at times but not enough to make me dualboot.
I hope that someone chimes in with Win VM on the real MacBook because I'm interested in it but I think it'll be just fine.
[1] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-i3-2310M-Notebook-Pr... [2] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Core-M-5Y71-SoC.129324.0....
FYI the new version of Office for Mac will be out soon (preview is available now for free) if that's what you're referring to when you say "bad OSX experience."
Plus, once you have a chip that efficient, it simplifies your heat dissipation... a lot of times you'll have people put chips that really aren't made for laptops in because they are relying on the air flow to cool it to compensate, but air flow can be very unreliable. And that is the exact situation you have with some of the more notorious heat problems of other laptops. If however you have a good chip, and know it can't exceed X heat generation, and its low enough you can passively cool it, that's actually much more reliable... there's nothing mysterious about how much heat can be transferred from a chip to the piece of metal touching it, and the rate at which it transfers (note sturdiness and looks is not the only reason the case is metal). So in a lot of ways this device is actually far more thermally dependable than most actively cooled laptops, even though it'd seem to be the opposite at first glance.
As an aside, have you tried Win 8 for your VM? If you can deal with the UI, Win 8 is about 20% more efficient than 7 due to changes made for tablet support in 8. If you're running 8 in a VM and the VM is on a laptop and you're having heat issues, switching might be particularly beneficial. Also, consider VMWare Fusion or Parallels... I use VirtualBox myself but there's no question that the native Mac versions of the 2 main commercial VMs are going to be more efficient and give you less heat problems on day to day tasks.
I just can't get used to Win 8 interface. My wife uses Win 8 desktop. Anytime she asks me to troubleshoot issues on her desktop, I just cringe and become frustrated. I used Parallels and VMware Fusion before switching to VirtualBox. VMware asked for more money for compatible version with Yosemite. So, I finally gave up and switched to VirtualBox. I don't use Windows/other VMs often enough so VirtualBox is good enough.
My pleasure.
I was in a similar situation, using the 2011 13.3 Air for years as a secondary device (being what I guess others would consider a "power user" I have always kept available a bitching desktop and/or (now) a bunch of cloud VMs, depending on the task), super happy with it (my Air is the best laptop I've ever owned, having started in about 1998), but wanting to upgrade, and watching the last Apple keynote in anticipation of a Retina Air. And I'm very happy with the new MB. It's not quite what I was expecting but if the form factor and power suits your needs, it's great.
Whew. That a was quite the run-on sentence.
Anyway, regarding Win8, I have to use it at work a lot and I feel your pain, it's pretty damned awkward at times. My experience so far is that the best way to navigate it is to a) use the search facility on the Start Screen to access your usual stuff (similar to OSX searchlight, so, Windows key to get to the Start Screen and then just start typing out the application or file name... its kind of awesome when it works) and b) set the OS to default to the desktop view on boot, in which case it's almost exactly the same as 7. The best way to look at it IMO is that Win8 = a more efficient Win 7 kernel + a mobile/tablet/metro API + a new UI start screen. Once you get past that it's surprisingly good.
But yeah, I feel your pain.
For the work that a Macbook is going to be doing, I would think that 8 GB is more than enough.
The thing that will kill me - lack of USB ports when I'm out in the field. I really need the two USB ports - and the MBair is a life saver their. Hopefully a cheap USB-C --> 2 USB port converter will come out soon.
As soon as the second generation of macbooks is out I will be upgrading!
I waited for second generation for the iPhone and iPad, both far more radical steps than this little Macbook, but the first gen products were spectacular.
(edit: My most disappointing Apple product in the past 15 years has been my iPhone 6. Jobs wouldn't let them make it wider due to handling issues. Without his restraint, they made it wider. Now I have to have a case and drop the darn thing all the time. Never had that problem with other iPhones.)
First gen iPhone was a big deal because they put all resources into providing the one or two things all the others sucked at: a smoother and more user-friendly interface and a more pleasant mobile web browser.
But it wasn't until the second or third gen that people coming over from previous smartphones could really get most of those things we took for granted already. If you were coming from a flip phone you were just adding some cool stuff. But if you had become accustomed to the typical features of a smart phone, you had to choose between smooth scrolling and pinch/zoom on a nice capacitive screen and being able to install software, stream music (in the background no less), get live navigation in the car, and operate on the latest high(er) speed networks.
I don't think the new Macbook has nearly as far to go as the first iPhone did. They'll iterate with faster processors, a better GPU, and maybe an extra port next round.
The Model T, released today, would be a joke. But a century ago, the idea of an automobile rather than horses was a tremendous advance.
I mean, the state of the art in smart phones in the US at the time was an HTC 2125...
The first generation retina macbooks had screens that ghosted, and it took several months before lots of kinks were worked out
The Macbook for example was $1800, with a $1300 additional cost if you wanted a 64gb SSD. It had a few hours of battery life and very weak performance.
Was it spectacular? Absolutely. But not necessarily amazing value. It eventually turned into a damn powerful little laptop that people bought instead of a MBP for dev work and even lightweight photo/video editing, with 12+ hours of battery life and still really thin.
The rMB kind of feels like that. It's not necessarily the best value right now. A rMBP or MBA is fine, and if you're OS agnostic, the Dell XPS or Asus Zenbook are interesting choices, too. In a few years the MBA won't have gotten any updates and the rMB gets sourced with a faster chip, drops $100 in price and adds some battery life, and probably comes out with a beefier 14" version. Then it'll be an interesting buy.
As an example, Apple had been making white iBooks for a long time before their Intel transition. But the 1st gen MacBook used a different white plastic that could absorb oils from your hands and turn a nice shade of orange/brown. http://appleinsider.com/articles/06/07/26/apple_recognizes_w...
With a brand new design, you risk problems like that slipping through the cracks. Maybe it turns out that the new keyboard mechanism starts missing presses once the usual crud falls in between the keys, or maybe the USB-C connector isn't durable enough and stops charging reliably a few months in. If the new models have any issues like that, waiting for the second version would save you some headaches.
Edit: Found it [1]. A couple of salient quotes:
"I ran the usual Verge battery test on Apple’s new machine. [...] Safari made the new Retina machine look good: 13 hours and 18 minutes. Google’s Chrome, on the other hand, forced the laptop to tap out at 9 hours and 45 minutes."
"The widely used SunSpider browser benchmark clocks the MacBook Pro in at 203ms when using Chrome. Safari scores 30 percent better with a time of 144ms."
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/10/8381447/chrome-macbook-bat...
It allows you to set the resolution to the 'true' resolution of your retina screen. This way you have more screen, but it also fixes the performance issues when playing video, virtualbox virtualisation, etc. Truly recommend.
My experience hasn't been very positive with the MacBook. It doesn't support non-Apple hardware well. The software quality is not that great, there are various bugs and issues. I'll sometimes do a bit lightweight gaming, and to my surprise wine works better on Linux than native games on the Mac OS X I've played. There are "known issues" that many MacBook owners have with various games but these are seemingly ignored.
With Arch there were issues, but almost always they could be manually fixed with a bit of command line magic. With Apple the usual solution is to either pay around 20 to 30 dollars to buy some random software which should fix the issue or just deal with the problem. Just as an example, even basic stuff like an external mouse with scroll wheel doesn't work well due to inadjustable scrolling acceleration.
And whenever anything is sent to the service depot, they wipe the goddamn hard drive. No matter what. And you guys know the pain of re-downloading XCode, re-installing everything with homebrew, re-cloning all of your git repos, re-configuring all of your git-remotes, re-installing virtual machines for IE8, etc. It takes like 2-3 days. And it's not an issue that employers with deadlines are sympathetic about.
The stupid thing is that every time I get it back I think, "everything will be different this time". It's like a sick abusive relationship.
I just got it back like 4 days ago from the latest trip to the depot, and now there's a harsh buzzing sound that I've never heard before. So now I have to weigh the severity of this stupid issue against the headache of re-installing everything again and rolling the dice with another trip to the depot.
I guess what I'm saying is that you really should beware of 1st gen apple hardware.
it really depends on your needs though. I use it as my portable machine and it goes wherever I go when I'm on the go, which I previously had an 11 inch air for. Coming from that it's an enormous upgrade.
The battery lasted me 7 hours yesterday of constant use, and the screen is the best screen of any laptop I have personally used. it's not really a widescreen anymore which helps with my terminal experience greatly.
My normal workload includes 50% terminal.app, 30% Xcode and the rest is split up between instant messaging and emailing. so I don't desire or need to run things like video editing or VMware. I use an iMac for that stuff, infrequently.
so for an OS X based machine that is ultra portable and runs terminal well, I'm not sure why you would be better off waiting. it's a great product.
The comment is nothing to do with scaling and all to do with viewing angle. Ideally the monitor should be placed with its center at the same height as your head. This is impossible on laptops and worst on the smallest.
Increasing the resolution actually helped with this a little bit, I found. The non-integer scaling is pretty unnoticeable, thanks to the ridiculous panel resolution, so you can select the fake 1680x1050 without fear of everything turning into a blotchy funny-pixelled mess.
Though the ergonomics overall still aren't all that great, because you need to be pretty close to the screen if you want to actually use the keyboard...
And is it really that different than the MacBook Air 13" - which has a huge screen - large enough that I haven't bothered plugging a monitor into in the last 3+ years (even though I have a perfectly serviceable 24" monitor sitting on my desk).
If this actually works, it's a pretty killer feature over the MBA/Pro.
Right now the 13" rMBP seems like the better purchase in every way right now. I wouldn't buy a current MBA either as they are really showing their age. Their screen is the worst in Apple's line up by a long shot.
I would love, also, to hear from people who have been using it. Thinking about purchasing it for my personal system to go along with my work computer which I travel with, so I can keep email, photos, all personal stuff off the corporate system. Portability is key - would love to know if anyone is using it in that fashion.
I ultimately didn't buy anything because I already have a 15-in Retina pro, and on further reflection, it didn't seem that much thicker than the Air...so I just replaced my stolen iPad instead.
I use an air as a development machine, and it works great.