Several weeks ago I posted some thoughts on my plans to buy a new laptop. At the time I was pretty down on the new MacBook Pros for a number of reasons. Since then I’ve tried many of the alternatives, visiting Fry’s in Indianapolis and the Micro Center in Cincinnati to actually lay my sweaty hands on a bunch of them. I even went so far as to bring along a Flash drive containing an Ubuntu Linux boot image so I didn’t have to try them with Windows.
I narrowed the field down to a high-end Asus ZenBook and a MacBook Pro. I ended up with the MacBook Pro, mostly because I know it runs the software I need without any fuss and because the touchpad software on the ZenBook sucks under both Linux and Windows. (Palm recognition is really flakey.) To be specific, I bought a 13-inch, i7, MacBook Pro with 16 GB of RAM, Touch Bar and a 512 GB SSD. It was a little more expensive, but I found a good deal via an open-box sale. It has the standard one-year Apple warranty and came with the additional two years of AppleCare coverage. After a week of use, here’s my take on the criticisms I had > • They no longer have the MagSafe power connection. This has saved my machine > many times. I still think this is a dumb decision by Apple. > • The “breathing” light on the front is no longer there. Without it, it’s > hard to tell if the machine is really asleep when the lid is closed. Also, > the glowing Apple logo on the case is gone. This isn’t a big deal, but it was > a nice distinctive feature in these days when all laptops look pretty much > the same. I really do miss the “breathing” light. I used it for several things. Most often, with a spinning hard drive, I’d wait for the breathing to start after shutting the lid because that was the only way to know the hard drive was finally in a shut-down state. When the breathing started, it was safe to move the machine. That’s not necessary with the SSD, but there’s one other reason to use the breathing light. I use a little program called Caffeine <http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/> to keep my Mac from going to sleep when I’m talking in front of an audience. It puts a little coffee cup in the menu bar you can click to keep the machine awake until you click it again. Sometimes I’d forget the second click and it kept the screen from darkening even when the lid was closed. When this happened, the breathing wouldn’t start. Without the breathing indicator, we’re back to a refrigerator light conundrum—is the light really off when the door is closed? > • I don’t care for the new low-depth clicky keyboard. Its key travel is > really short in order to make the whole machine thinner. I don’t know of > anyone who has “thinner” as a high priority, except, apparently, Jony Ive. > I’d trade a millimeter or two of thin for more battery and a keyboard with > more throw. This is still a problem, but I’ll adjust. > • They’ve fallen behind the industry by using the older Intel Skylake series > of processors instead of the Kaby Lake series. This was no doubt a trade-off > because Intel couldn’t manufacture the volume they needed, but Dell, HP and > Asus somehow use the newer chips. Turns out there's not that much difference in the speed in a laptop because they can’t really ramp up the new chips without bigger batteries. > • You can’t get more than 16 GB of RAM — ever — for the machine. And it’s > $200 to jump from 8 GB to 16 GB. I want some future-proofing. I’m often > running memory-hungry programs like Sage and Mathematica. Right now, 16 GB is > plenty, but the handwriting is on the wall. Still think this could be a problem. > • The $400 to go from a 512 GB SSD to a 1T SSD is ridiculous. If you buy a > machine with a 512 GB SSD you can never, ever upgrade it as SSD prices fall. Yup. > • There’s no external video port. I use my laptop connected to a projector a > lot. Apple has made sure I'd have to buy one more $40 dongle for the USB > C/Thunderbolt ports. Of course, I’d leave it in whatever room I was using it > and would have to buy another… There’s nothing but four USB-C/Thunderbolt connectors on the machine. The first thing I did after ordering the new box was hie on over to Amazon for dongles. I bought dongles for VGA and HDMI video because you never know what kind of projector might be in the room. I also picked up dongles for Ethernet and USB-A. I’ve already used all of them, except the HDMI connector. > • I haven’t decided if the Touch Bar is really useful or just a gimmick. None > of the software I use has been upgraded to support it yet, but I do use the > function keys and escape a lot. They’re now buried in the Touch Bar which > makes we touch-typists look at the keyboard. This is still up in the air. Mail and Safari are the only programs I regularly use that are touch bar aware. Perhaps it’s just habit, but I find that I just don’t look at it. Typing suggestions are worthless because my eyes are on the screen. The fingerprint sensor is really nice for quickly unlocking the machine. Of course, someone's got Doom <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GD0L46y3IqI> running on the touch bar. L^2 PS/ Is it just me, or is Migration Assistant pretty worthless? My first crack at setting up the new machine was to directly connect it to the old one over a gigabit Ethernet connection. It was supposed to move about 200 GB of stuff and told me it would take 30 hours! I tried the same thing off a network Time Machine backup and it said it would take 26 hours. I finally set up the new machine by hand—which I really should have done in the first place—and it only too a couple of hours. PPS/ In the process, I discovered how much better DropBox is than iCloud for transferring files between machines. At first, I tried iCloud to sync bunches of files. There were many missing after iCloud claimed to be done. DropBox did thousands of files almost instantaneously without dropping a byte. Apple ought to buy DropBox. --- Lee Larson [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> One day Donald Trump will discover that he is owned by Lutheran Brotherhood and must re negotiate his debt load with a committee of silent Norwegians who don't understand why anyone would pay more than $120.00 for a suit. — Garrison Keillor,
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