Some of you may recall that last spring, after a lot of thought and angst, I bought a brand new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar. It has a dual core i7 processor running at 3.3 GHz and 16 GB of RAM. The only option not maxed out was the SSD, since it’s got the 512 GB instead of the 1TB option.
Yesterday, Daniel Mickelsen, who sometimes posts here, emailed to ask me what I think of the machine because he’s thinking of buying one. Instead of just replying to him, I thought I’d post a little review for our small corner of the world. My previous laptop was a late 2008 unibody MacBook Pro, with a 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor running at about 2 GHz, maxed out with 8 GB of RAM and a 1TB spinning hard drive. The machine still runs well and, for the most part, it would still meet my needs. The only hardware changes I’ve made to it are a bigger hard drive, more RAM and a new battery. There’s never been a problem. In fact, it’s set up in the family room for me to do email, Web browsing and writing while watching baseball. The question is: Why upgrade? • A 2008 MacBook Pro won’t run Sierra, let alone High Sierra. It will be forever frozen in the El Capitan era. Some of the higher-end programs I use all the time are recommending at least Sierra. • It seemed to be the right time. I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the 2008 machine. • A bright and sparkly new toy is hard to resist. While shopping around, the biggest problem I had with the new MacBook Pro was the “Apple tax.” The new MacBook Pros with an i7 processor are in the $2000 range. Machines with comparable hardware from other manufacturers are usually priced considerably less than $1500. Although I prefer macOS, switching to Linux on a non-Apple laptop wouldn’t be a big deal. The newest Ubuntu Linux distributions have everything I need. They are drop-dead easy to install. The user interface isn’t quite as slick as the Mac, but certainly beats Windows. My new laptop was very nearly an Asus. Then I stumbled across a liquidation sale from a store going out of business and jumped on a great deal. Here are some good things about the new MacBook Pro. As we have grown to expect from Apple, the machine is gorgeous. Hacked out of two blocks of aluminum, it weighs only three pounds and is about as thin as the first iPads—0.6 inches. I carry it everywhere in my backpack. The MacBook has a really good display! It shows the newer P3 wide-gamut color space at 1680x1050. Side-by-side with older machines, there’s no comparison. If you do photo editing, you need a display at least as good as this one! (I think all the new Macs have wide-gamut displays.) If you buy an appropriate dongle, it’ll even run up to a 5120x2880 external display. (My wallet won’t let me test this one out.) I often run it with a second monitor at 1920x1080. And it is pretty fast. The performance of the SSD + i7 is sometimes startling in comparison to the machines I had been using at home for serious work: 2014 iMac, 2015 Mac mini and a home-brew pretty fast Linux machine. There are programs I’d previously run in Mathematica during which I’d go get a cup of tea while the thing was churning away. Now, I often can’t even get out of the room before it’s done; e.g., a million decimal places of π in 0.28 seconds. When I started shopping for a new computer, there was big news in the computer world because Consumer Reports claimed the MacBook Pros had terrible battery life. Apple was claiming ten hours with typical use and Consumer Reports was claiming less than five. It turned out that a bug in Safari was exacerbating a flawed testing method to make the battery drain too quickly. It seems Apple is correct with the ten hour estimate because I’ve gone beyond eight hours several times and still had juice left when I was done. And now the bad… You should know where I’m coming from on this one. My favorite keyboard is the old Apple Extended Keyboard II, a.k.a. “Enterprise” model, that was pretty standard in the late 1990s. Most of my typing in both my home and work offices is done on old Enterprise keyboards attached to Macs with ADB to USB dongles. These are huge keyboards—like the Enterprise aircraft carrier—with deep throws on the keys. The keyboard on the MacBook Pro is the opposite of the Enterprise. In his eternal quest for thinness, Sir Ive has reduced the depth of the keyboard and the keys hardly move. They have some resistance and a clicky feel to them. At first I had a lot of trouble getting up to speed on the new keyboard, but I guess I’m grudgingly getting used to it. Then there’s the touch bar… The touch bar seems at first blush like a pretty clever idea. It’sa 2170x60 touch screen display with a lot of the guts of an iPhone behind it. In many ways, the touch bar is a computer within a computer. It can be customized by any program to display icons and controls. It could be quite useful, or it could be a gimmick. The problem is very few programs take advantage of it. This is because relatively few Macs have a touch bar. Developers aren’t going to spend much time programming for a peripheral owned by only a few of their customers. Most of Apple’s mainline programs have touch bar controls that I don’t find very useful. Apple’s text editing routines are in contact with the touch bar and it’s constantly suggesting word completions, much like the iPhone and iPad. It also suggests emojis. Whenever I type “apple,” two little emojis of red and green apple’s appear and a tap can put either one into the text. 🍎 🍏 This stuff very useful to me because I look at the screen and not the keyboard as I type. The right end of the touch bar can be used to evoke Siri or Apple Pay. Unfortunately, the location to do this is right above the delete key, and because of this I’ve accidentally brought up Siri a hundred times more often than wanted. There are a few novelty programs for the touch bar. For example, early on a few developers managed to get the classic first person shooter, Doom, running on the bar. Amusing, but not very useful. I still feel the touch bar is a good idea waiting for the right program. The TextExpander people should be jumping all over it. Apple should come up with an interface for users to add their own features. Until I see that must-have touch bar program, it’s still just a gimmick. I really hope Apple figures out what to do with it before their bean counters convince them to abandon it. My bottom line is the MacBook Pro is a pretty good machine with high-end features that’s over-priced in comparison with other machines in its class. Despite the “Apple tax” I’m quite happy with it and expect it to be in my backpack for quite a while. --- Lee Larson [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software. — Arthur C. Clarke The Odyssey File
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