Apple engineer talks through the design of the new Macbook - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2015, 11:27:29 pm
content: http://youtu.be/KHZ8ek-6ccc

author: PeterFW
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2015, 11:37:02 pm
content: I had to watch the whole video, that is amazing!

author: Hydrawerk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2015, 11:37:33 pm
content: Funny as hell.

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 13, 2015, 11:44:28 pm
content: Yeh sounds like Apple.

author: EPLan
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: March 13, 2015, 11:50:19 pm
content: I'm selling my Mac Pro 2008 next week(hopefully), replaced by a Kickstarter funded Z77MX-QUO-AOS motherboard I got cheap. No wonder they dropped the computer from Apple Computer.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2015, 02:46:16 pm
content: Mr. Hilter (Monty Python reference) wasn't happy about this...

author: LabSpokane
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2015, 03:03:28 pm
content: They need to fire Jony Ive. Let's list the product bombs of late:- iPhone 5C- the trash bin-inspired Mac Pro with no room for internal storage (needs dongles)- the iPod shuffle with the controls on the headphone cord (needs dongles)- a watch that needs an extension cord (more dongles)- the MacBook with one port that needs dongles to be usefulApple sees its future in artfully-designed dongles apparently. The new Macbook looks like nothing more than an ad for the new MacBookPro, but oh yeah that doesn't have a single USB-C port...

author: PeterFW
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2015, 03:10:55 pm
content: Quote from: LabSpokane on March 16, 2015, 03:03:28 pmYou got a bit wrong. You do not buy the product, you buy the brand.You buy the social status marker to some extend.The brand is established, they have to to something perticular bad to alienate the target group that is constantly growing/changeing.Dongles are great, the company can make more money, they sell what the customer wants not what it needs. Because the customer does not need annything they sell.I love apple, i would never buy a product from them but they have it figured out.They are the modern time equivalent of the traveling salesman selling snake oil.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2015, 04:15:01 pm
content: they bet on people losing dongles : repeat sales !

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2015, 04:23:53 pm
content: Quote from: LabSpokane on March 16, 2015, 03:03:28 pmMaybe it will almost ruin them like the Mac did? Then they can fire him after almost ruining the company, let him run some more businesses into the ground, then rehire him when he's got more experience and is really good at stealing prior art as his own. He'd be the second coming of Stevey J Christ...

author: German_EE
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2015, 05:20:07 pm
content: Hitler reacts to the new MacbookWait until he finds out that the watch will only work for eighteen hours

author: mrflibble
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 16, 2015, 06:10:37 pm
content: Quote from: Stonent on March 16, 2015, 02:46:16 pmWell obviously. Without USB port he wouldn't have had much fun in Stalingrad.

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 03:56:58 am
content: Quote from: mrflibble on March 16, 2015, 06:10:37 pm

author: Stonent
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 04:15:26 am
content: Quote from: 3roomlab on March 17, 2015, 04:08:33 amWell DP + PCIe + power all in one.

author: sacherjj
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 12:40:30 pm
content: I had a 2013 Mab Book Retina, maxed out. Only ran windows on it. Hated it. Delete key that backspaces.Unless you hold down Fn. Oh, and Fn is where Ctrl should be, so you always Fn + C instead of Ctrl + C. It was a solid machine, but I hated using it.Moved up to an HP ZBook. Yes, the power supply is massive. But so is the GPU. Doesn't stutter on 8-10 layer Altium designs anymore. And it doesn't have the Thunderbolt port with zero retention force. (Actually it has a Thunderbolt 2 port, I just don't use it.)And it has a docking station. I no longer plug in 3 cables, every time I sit at my desk. Now if they will come out with a 60 mm M.2 drive, so I can boot off of a 1.2 GB/s device, I'll be really happy.

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 09:05:08 pm
content: Still relevant:

author: ConKbot
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 11:00:35 pm
content: So can I edit videos on it? Macs are good at editing videos, right?

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 11:02:18 pm
content: It's a glorified iPad that runs Mac OS X and has a keyboard. They even call the programs "Apps".It has a 5W processor. TDP. Good luck doing any serious productivity work (photo, video edit, etc.)Any who pays £1,300 for this is an idiot and eh... why do I care. Let it be. It obviously makes them happy.

author: Unknown
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 11:10:00 pm
content: Quote from: ConKbot on March 17, 2015, 11:00:35 pmSure, if you're the type of person who shoots in Quicktime on their Apple iPhone or iPad. For the professionals, PC has beentheplatform for serious video production and CGI work for many years.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 17, 2015, 11:18:04 pm
content: Quote from: Halon on March 17, 2015, 11:10:00 pmQuote

author: sacherjj
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2015, 05:24:10 pm
content: Quote from: Halon on March 17, 2015, 09:05:08 pmI remember when that was posted by one of the members of a Sony Vegas forum. (I'm thinking Creative Cow.) That takes me back a few years.

author: Muxr
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 19, 2015, 07:25:21 pm
content: No ports is obviously pretty dumb. This laptop is targeting people who are on the go and who don't plug stuff into their laptops. It's like some tablet laptop hybrid. Still though even with travel you occasionally need a USB port to charge your phone or what not. Extra dongles as a requirement are idiotic.I use a (haswell) 2013 Mac Air for work travel and it's by far the best laptop I ever owned. 10 hour battery is killer and the computer is plenty capable for everything I do. 2 years of heavy travel (2-3 weeks out of a month), I have had zero problems with it. Runs as good as when it was new.I don't use it when I am at home, so I rarely plug anything into it, but still I couldn't live without ports.I've switched to OS X 10 years ago and never looked back. Never had to "reinstall the OS" since. Used to be a giant pain every year or so when the Windows registry would get bloated. Time Machine alone is the reason I would never go back to a PC.So it pains me to say if I was in a market for a new laptop I would still give it a consideration on all the other merits it does right.

author: 3roomlab
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 05:19:49 am
content: Quote from: Muxr on March 19, 2015, 07:25:21 pm1 of my friends bought his macbook exactly due to the time machine feature. i myself think it is greatbut i found a similar "time machine app" and have been using it for many years. it is linux based REDO. it boots itself from a bootable CD/DVD drive stand alone, and you rip up the contents into a folder of sorts which can be copied and stored elsewhere.http://sourceforge.net/projects/redobackup/?source=typ_redirectthe other option of virtually endless automatic self backup is "SNAPRAID", however this works more in situations of very large arrays. it is a hybrid of RAID + scheduled server backups. i would imagine this option to apply to your personal "micro backblaze"these 2 GPL/GNU wares are something that will make even windows xp users very happyon the issue of new laptops, i find the new UEFI to be a pain. i would try to look for hardware w/o UEFI. or even used laptops that runs on XP.

author: Mechanical Menace
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 10:37:36 am
content: Quote from: Muxr on March 19, 2015, 07:25:21 pmMy first job with an Apple machine is to install a flavour of Ubuntu and a version of Windows. I just can't do everything I need or want to on only one OS. And I've got to say OS's in general have come along a lot since you moved over to OSX. OSX doesn't lock up or crash as much, Linux distros are easy to install and get hardware working with (well if you don't purposely chose a distro that isn't), Windows is actually quite stable and can be secure now.One place they have either gotten worse or not moved forward enough is guis though. I think it's a bit bad when Unity is the least horrible...Quote from: 3roomlab on March 20, 2015, 05:19:49 amI just set up my home directories as SVN repos, have done for more than a decade, used CVS before that, and still haven't come across a better incremental backup solution than source control systems. And it's brilliant for keeping things synced between machines.I know, I should probably move over to git

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 11:18:51 am
content: About three years ago I attempted to move to OSX as the base OS and use Windows and Linux within VMWare Fusion. Dual booting for me is just painful as I tend to have dozens of things open at the same time. One of the features of Fusion was that you could use the Boot Camp Windows partition as a VM, so it seemed to tick a lot of boxes, and I'd be able run those non-OSX applications.The problem was threefold.Firstly, backups. Finding a reasonable single integrated non-obtrusive online backup solution proved to be impossible.Secondly, on the odd occasions I needed to switch to natively running the Boot Camp Windows partition, the MAC addresses got changed as the virtual and physical NICs were automatically switched in and out, and that broke a number of copy protection schemes, including my Windows backup solution (Shadow Protect), all Microchip's XC compilers, my cross platform mobile dev platform (Marmalade).Thirdly, as an edge case, Microsoft's cross platform development environment emulators require their own VMs incompatible with Fusion.Within a couple of days, I found myself running Windows natively 24x7.Since then other things have happened with OSX, most notably 4K support broke about six months ago on certain Apple devices that previously worked. It works fine in Windows, just not in OSX. I did notice last week when I briefly switched to OSX that that had apparently been fixed in an OS update, but I don't trust them not to remove something else out of the OS.So no, it doesn't "just work".Although I am sure USB 3.1 and USB C connectors will become ubiquitous in the fullness of time, their new Macbook will only be purchased by the fashionistas, the more I look at it the more it appears, as others have reasonably said, to be a non-touch tablet with a keyboard. And a $1,400 one at that.

author: mrflibble
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 11:57:41 am
content: Quote from: 3roomlab on March 20, 2015, 05:19:49 amIf you like those two and are on linux, you might want to take a look atrsnapshot. Depending on your distro you don't even have to read that website but just doapt-get install rsnapshot, configure and off you go. Been using it for a few years now and so far it's done it's job nicely.

author: BradC
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 02:05:55 pm
content: Quote from: Howardlong on March 20, 2015, 11:18:51 amFor you. For some people does just fine. Life is about choices.

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 20, 2015, 11:54:59 pm
content: Quote from: BradC on March 20, 2015, 02:05:55 pmAbsolutely right, if you're happy for an outfit to control both your hardware and software choices then you have to accept that on occasion, either deliberately or through their negligence, you will have to compromise and they will cripple their hardware offering and push you to unnecessarily buy some more.Don't get me wrong, I actually rate their hardware very highly, I just object to the level of control they wield over it for OSX with their, and in some cases third party software. The same goes for IOS in an even more extreme way. Of you have ever tried to develop anything for IOS you will understand where I am coming from.If you are happy with that ecosystem, then great, but I find it all a bit unnecessary and disappointing that they can be so ambivalent and dictatorial about it. Considering the bad rap Microsoft get over controlling just the software side of things, I find it somewhat absurd that Apple seem to get a relatively untainted sheet: Apple, after all, get to control not only the software but also the hardware, and are even prepared to unnecessarily cripple their own hardware with their software to encourage you to buy more.

author: Richard Crowley
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2015, 02:22:45 am
content: Here is a DIFFERENT story with the same video:https://youtu.be/NHbUROGAGYQ"Sound Mixer's Story" about a production sound guy who gets the typical offer of a "job" at near-zero wages.

author: Muxr
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2015, 02:42:48 am
content: Quote from: Howardlong on March 20, 2015, 11:54:59 pmThe reason Microsoft got a bad rap in the 90s (they seem to be getting better about this), is the vendor lock in, which they were able to pull off due to their desktop monopoly. I mean they are convicted monopoly abusers on multiple continents.Apple doesn't have a monopoly in any of the markets (perhaps tablets) so they can't really do it even if they tried. But they also tend to be better about using open standards. For as much as everyone moaned about Apple not allowing Flash in their iOS devices, it was actually a good thing as it gave HTML5 a boost it needed to garner wider adoption.I will give you a recent example of things Microsoft does that absolutely drive me nuts. Company I work for uses MS Exchange for their email. It's a large corporation and getting to your mail is a major PITA. 2fa and all that. They do however offer ActiveSync without 2fa. But because ActiveSync is a proprietary protocol there is nothing you can do to actually check your email using the ActiveSync on a computer. Those who have tried have been slapped with DMCA notices.Microsoft has released ActiveSync clients only on mobile devices. And the one company which offered a solution was actually purchased by them and shut down. Now I am not a Microsoft user. I don't run any of the Microsoft software, but I am affected by their vendor lock in. Because they like to push proprietary protocols in markets they have a monopoly.I have never heard of a reverse case. If you're not an Apple user you can completely avoid Apple in your life. But with Microsoft it is impossible to avoid. That's just a recent example. But there a plenty of other examples of Microsoft's vendor lock in.- File sharing with thumb drives and the 4Gb file limit. (proprietary FAT32) Because Windows doesn't out of the box support a common open standard file system everyone is stuck using an antiquated file system in order to have cross platform compatibility.- IE6: Not an issue anymore really, but if you've done web dev in your past you will know how quality of life impacting this was.- DirectX. Gaming industry is trying to release open platforms, things like Valve's Steam Machine. But one of the main reasons gaming is predominantly a Windows thing is because DirectX is a closed standard that only runs on Windows.So while Apple has it's problems with OS X hardware lock ins and such. At least they aren't propagating them to non customers. The thing is with Microsoft, even if you aren't in their ecosystem you are still affected by their crap which is way worse imo.

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 21, 2015, 12:04:47 pm
content: Quote from: Muxr on March 21, 2015, 02:42:48 amI have tried to avoid doing browser based development since I first did some back around 1996/7 on NT 4.0 Server with an OS/2 database backend, and IE3.Luckily I have managed to stay out of Web UI development most of my career, but the last time was a JEE JSF and Ajax based system back in 2010 that I accidentally got involved with that had some really nasty organically developed CSS behind it.I fully agree, IE has and had its own problems, but it is also the open standards themselves which are too open to interpretation. Having to hack stuff to make it work across several browsers and versions of browsers must be one of the most soul destroying jobs I ever did.Never say never, but web devs can keep their jobs as far as I am concerned!When Microsoft decided to make IE4 integrated into the OS'S desktop (Active Desktop), that was when the rot really started setting in, and that was about 1997 or so. I remember uninstalling IE4 it because it was just so resource intensive.