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Apple News From WWDC and iPhone 5 Rumors
First time accepted submitter zer0point writes "Apple has just announced the next-generation Macbook Pro with a retina display. Starting today you can also order a MacBook Pro upgraded with Ivy Bridge CPUs, and Nvidia graphics. Mountain Lion got some various updates, and as expected iOS 6 was announced. In rumor news, KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo wrote in a note to investors, 'Based on the release schedule for iOS 6 GM, there is a very good chance iPhone 5 will start shipping also in early September.'"
or vagina.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
In 2013 the iPhone 6 will be released, and in 2014 the iPhone 7.
People do need bigger screens and have walk round with a laptop + display is a hard and you need to power that display as well.
People that already carry a ethernet wire are really not going to have a problem carrying a dongle too. I love wired , I jsut finished wiring up my house for ethernet, but this move makes sense for the people that arent us.
Good-bye
You mean a product that is released every year is going to be released again this year? This is very exciting and unexpected news.
Ethernet dongles (likely at added cost on $2k+) laptop.
Face it wifi is not all over the place and Ethernet is faster, has more security, work better in some places, ect.
I was just in a hotel with in room cable modems hooked to the tv system with Ethernet and Poor wifi in room.
Yes, added cost, but consider that you're buying with that extra cost a thinner laptop (because it didn't have to be included) and the option of NOT carrying it around. I've found that I almost never need either the display adapter or the ethernet adapter, so I don't have to carry them around if I don't need them (I have an Air). For me, the thinness is worth it. You could just as easily say that the base model, with no dongle, gives people who don't need the dongle(s) the opportunity to buy a slightly cheaper Macbook - thus, it is a price discount for them, rather than an extra cost for us.
Not everyone likes this, of course, but that's why you have the option of buying other notebooks.
I'll take an ethernet dongle and smile if it's attached to a 15.4" laptop with a 2880x1800 screen.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
I don't like the idea of having proprietary SSD chips built on the motherboard. It makes it impossible to upgrade. I prefer the 2009 vintage MacBook Pro that I'm using now. I can upgrade the RAM and/or HD (which I've done). I can take out the optical drive and put in an SSD for the OS and keep the other HD for files (which I've also done). Too bad I can't put more than 8GB of memory in it though. Not everyone will choose to do what I've done but the point is that you have the choice. The current generation of MacBooks take those options away from you. The good news is that my MBP is still running like a champ and probably won't have to be replaced any time soon. The bad new is that it's probably the last MBP that I'll buy. It's the same reason I switched from an iPhone to an Android. There is no way to expand the storage on the iPhone. With the Android I just pop in another SD card.
The MacBook Pro with a Retina Display of 220ppi sounds great, but I have a serious question.
Has Apple fixed the problem with the system font being sized in a fixed number of pixels? My parents' 17" MBP with hi-res display is almost unusable with my parent's aging eyes (or even my middle-aged eyes), and it doesn't have a ppi anywhere near 220. I'm incredulous that Apple has allowed this UI flaw to persist for so long -- my parents cannot be the only ones who would appreciate a larger system font.
Cyrano de Maniac
Someone is going to come across your comment a few years down the road, and the context of your joke will be completely lost. Dear future reader: sorry, but I'm not going to fill you in on this joke either. We'll just have to see how good your google skills are (is google still around?).
Better known as 318230.
Realistically though, I have a feeling that a Thunderbolt NIC dongle costs quite a bit more than it would cost to put the NIC on the motherboard.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Apple has abandoned Classic and Rosetta so now there is a tremendous amount of software, and the data accessed by said software, that can't run on the new machines. This means I can't upgrade all our machines as we still need access to our old data. Their hardware is plenty fast enough to perform the emulation. The only excuse for Apple's dropping Classic and Rosetta is greed. But the result is lost sales of Apple.
Your argument is flawed. The argument was that the added value of a thinner computer outweighs the value of the ethernet port and the cost of the adapter for a lot of users. Just because it doesn't fit your use-case perfectly doesn't mean it's useless.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Here, future reader. Although the link will probably be broken 10 minutes after this post.
Apple Defence Force, ASEEEMBLEEEE!!!!!
Somebody is going to come across this whole friggin web site, sit down and go
What the Holy Hell was exactly going on at that time?
No wonder the whole civilization collapsed.
So lighten up.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I mean, it's a bit expensive ($2199 in stock configuration), but how can you look at these five lines:
2880x1800 resolution screen (this is insane)
256 GB solid-state hard drive
2.3 GHz quad-core Intel i7
8 GiB memory
7-hour battery life
and not want one?
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Ethernet dongles (likely at added cost on $2k+) laptop.
Face it wifi is not all over the place and Ethernet is faster, has more security, work better in some places, ect.
I was just in a hotel with in room cable modems hooked to the tv system with Ethernet and Poor wifi in room.
I don't know too many frequent travelers that don't carry around an AirPort Express or other pocket-sized wi-fi device of their own for those hotels that either haven't or can't upgrade to pervasive wi-fi. Your hotel Ethernet is not going to be "faster, more secure, or work better" than if it was plugged into an AirPort Express anyway.
For lab use, you probably wouldn't get the dongle but rather the whole docking station and connect the monitors, ethernet, keyboard, mouse, everything via that one port.
E pluribus unum
Realistically though, I have a feeling that a Thunderbolt NIC dongle costs quite a bit more than it would cost to put the NIC on the motherboard.
What's worse is you'll probably want to buy two of them, one for that connection that you're always plugged into (i.e. work or home) then the second one for when you're oot and aboot somewhere.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Face it wifi is not all over the place and Ethernet is faster, has more security, work better in some places, ect.
I'm gonna go with more reliable.
So no in the strict sense, OS-X is still resolution dependent, it doesn't have true independent scaling like Windows 7 does. However yes in the sense of this device in that it uses the HiDPI pixel doubling trick of the iPad.
So this screen is precisely double a 1440x900 screen, which is a pretty normal mid-rez 15" screen. What happens is if apps are flagged as HiDPI aware, they get presented with the real resolution and can render things with more detail. If not, they are presented with quarter resolution and all pixels are doubled in each direction.
So it solves the problem in sort of a sidelong manner. It works since Apple maintains control over the hardware and thus can say "screens will be available in the following resolutions".
WiFi isn't everywhere. But it's at a hell of a lot more places than ethernet. Last time I used ethernet was 2009.
Are you saying that Laptop should be held up thickness wise, at the point where the body can accomodate an RJ45?
The minority of people that are still ufing ethernet for laptops need to carry an ethernet cable with them anyway. It's no hardship to them to take a cable with a dongle in instead. Meanwhile the majority who use WiFi now get a better laptop.
I'll be able to see it with my retina
or vagina
That is a LOT of features and behaviors. I don't feel prepared to understand and manage all of them. I feel like iOS is adding too damn much and is danger of becoming a Windows/Linux jumble of weird features in too many weird places. I want simple.
Anyone else getting the fear?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
all this talk about dongles and inches...
Who else on the market is doing that?
Let alone in the same form factor
and only 4.4 lbs?
The display beats my 27 inch iMac which has 2560x1440!
I am really curious how well that Nvidia chip can push 5 million plus pixels in a game because you know games will/have gone there.
I was fully expecting a 2499 entry price, the 2199 is an amazing price for what they have packaged.
Granted your going to be buying an external optical drive if you want for around a hundred, a three year warranty for at least 250 or 350 more... so it will quickly hit 3k
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
By looking at the other lines of
Geforce 650M
and
No Ethernet port.
For me, I wish to have higher end graphics since gaming is what I want my laptop for in a major way (it is mostly a mobile entertainment station for me when I go on vacation). Also, to the extent I use it for work, an Ethernet port is something I quite need. I'd rather not have to add that on as a dongle.
So I spent the same amount on a laptop, but got a bit different hardware, more to my liking.
I dont get the drooling over Retina Display. Unless you are a graphics professional, i just dont see the use-case for it.
Good-bye
Thunderbolt? Did I miss something? Is a USB dongle which you can buy new for $30 not fast enough?
"Granddad, why did western civilization collapse?"
"Well kid, let me tell you about kdawson..."
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
On the store now. $29.
That's hardly going to break the budget for a top of the line $2,199 laptop buyer.
640x480 is enough for anyone.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
they made the Optional 3.2 Quad-Core the base CPU and bumped the ram to 6gb. But why take 2 years to do that?
But
NO video card update (the ATI Radeon HD 5870 still costs $200 on top of base video card.) why not just make it the base video card??
NO thunderbolt
NO USB 3.0
By that argument, we'd all still be limited on laptop size by the volume of a 3.5" floppy drive. Even though few people use them any more.
The cost of an ethernet or display dongle and the cost of carrying around a built-in versions, pales in comparison to the cost of not having the port or dongle when you need it. We had a convention recently and one of the presenters forgot to bring his display dongle for his Mac. We spent a few minutes scrounging around for one while someone worked on copying his presentation over to a PC. 3 minutes * 150 guests = a cumulative 7.5 hours of wasted time. (And for you Mac fans who don't like how I'm counting time, it's how Steve Jobs thought of saving time.)
That's the problem. People are starting to think of laptops as fashion statements foremost, rather than as tools. It's fine to want good aesthetics (a good-looking laptop is nicer than a bad-looking one), but one should never give up functionality for the sole purpose of aesthetics. If you're never going to present or plug in, then there's no problem. Any costs associated with forgotten dongles or lack of ports are yours to bear alone. But if you do stuff which might ever externalize that cost, you need to factor that into your decision of functionality vs. aesthetics. (For our part, we're going to have to buy a Mac video dongle for the projector to make sure this doesn't happen again. We're paying for the Mac users' aesthetic tastes. But at least it's damn cheaper than making 150 people wait.)
You probably need to see a retina display alongside a standard one to appreciate it.
It certainly makes more sense than HDTV does.
The physical parts may cost less to put the NIC on the motherboard, but in something as space-tight as the MacBook Pro, the space savings probably outweigh it.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Except now you have more crap to lug around, which defeats the purpose of a thinner laptop. If this were some rarely used feature (COUGH FIREWIRE), then yea, dongle-ize it. Ethernet though? Youve got to be kidding.
Except that ethernet isnt rarely used. I get the impression that every one of my friends with a laptop has used ethernet at sometime or another (if not on a regular basis) because its more reliable than wifi, and it just works even if you know nothing about network config.
I hate to add this, but every once in a while I would like to have fax modem. More importantly a fax modem that could hook up to my cell phone. I need this much more that I need an ethernet port.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You're kind of a dick arent you. I already said i dont get it for my use case, but i could see the use case for it. To me its a nicety, but whatever. I gave up caring about monitor resolution when 1080p became de facto.
Good-bye
Thinner => Lighter / Smaller => More portable
Seems like a reasonable thing to want in a laptop. If I wanted a machine that did everything at any cost.. I'd get a desktop.
It'll force all the PC companies to quit bundling shitty displays with their laptops because they're "HD". I'm working on a Dell right now that has a 1366x768 display. It's 15.4". Before the "HD" craze my 17" Dell came with a 1900x1200 display. Now the 17" displays are all 1080p. Hell you can get a cheap 24" display that's only 1080p. Why the hell would I want a 24" display if it's only 1080p?
Just like as soon as Apple came out with the integrated webcam and back lit keyboards they magically started to appear on Dells and other PC laptops I bet within a few months Dell loudly starts rolling out their "SUPER MEGA PIXEL HD" Displays on their laptops.
I have a Macbook Air and I bought the USB-to-Ethernet dongle. I never used it. I can see it being essential for some people, but certainly not for everyone. Apple can't be everything to everyone.
I've been dying for one for years. No screen has had enough pixel height since CRTs went the way of the dinosaur, Now with one of these I can finally get all the toolbars and panels I need on the screen at the same time and still have room for the thing I'm actually working on.
To a lot of users wired networking is not a major feature, it's something that might be nice to have. These users will either not carry the dongle with them or they will keep it at the bottom of their bag (in which case the thinner form-factor and lower weight of the laptop can still be an advantage even when bringing the dongle along).
Personally I'd probably leave it plugged in at my desk in my home office or at work (or maybe one at either location), if I was anywhere else I'd just use wifi (or if I suspected there might not be wifi I could just bring the dongle).
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Though Apple traditionally does charge you a lot for RAM, $200 for 8GB more seems somewhat reasonable... It's also faster RAM than previous models.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ethernet is ubiquitous!
What? That's patently absurd. It may be available at the office or at home, but anywhere else you're at least as likely to have wireless, and in many, many places, it's your only option.
The hotel I stayed at last week only had wireless.
The restaurants I ate at had only wireless.
My local coffee shop only has wireless.
Remember, the common image of the Apple user is of the screenplay writer sitting at Starbucks. Ethernet does no good in that scenario.
I don't see why people are hung up on a dongle. You have to have a cable, so what's the deal with a dongle being an issue? You could just leave it on the cable you know!
The 27" monitor has an ethernet port on it as well, in case you use an external monitor at work or home...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have a 17" laptop, the resolution is 1900x1200. To me, pixels are real-estate, I'm strongly considering getting this 15" as a replacement (only the tantalizing thought of a 17" in the next six months with even MORE resolution holds me back).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think Macs tend to make a rather poor budgeting choice.
So Macs aren't the budget choice. And especially not the Pro range. If it's budget you want, there are plenty of other choices.
Similarly buy a Kia rather than a BMW when you buy a car.
Ethernet is ubiquitous!
No, WiFi is ubiquitous. Ethernet is becoming a legacy connections (like Serial, Parallel and all the other things no one puts on laptops anymore).
I've been using a Macbook Air for the last year as my primary machine, and I've never missed having an Ethernet port. That includes last week when I had to do a "factory reset" of my WiFi router.
A four and a half pound 15.4" laptop with a 2880x1800 screen.
The minority of people that are still ufing ethernet for laptops need to carry an ethernet cable with them anyway. It's no hardship to them to take a cable with a dongle in instead..
It's a problem, speaking as a macbook air owner since the machine was first released, if you only use ethernet occasionally, and forget to take your adapter with you when traveling to a wi-fi poor region like Japan...
A laptop with a screen like that isn't designed for real work.
Fuck Beta
"I already said i dont get it for my use case,"
That is NOT what you said. There was no "my" in your post, and your statement "unless you are a graphics professional..." implies you're talking about everyone who is not a graphics professional. Little revisionist history hey?
If you really did mean specifically for yourself... no offense, but nobody cares.
You can see more stuff on your screen at once. You won't have to scroll as frequently. No disrespect intended, but it sounds like you've only been exposed to 1080 displays. To people who remember, the value of CRTs was that you could run ridiculously-high resolutions-- 1080 sucks. I'm one of those people who has hated LCD displays because I'm sick of not being able to put two documents on the screen at once and see them side-by-side.
Retina for a desktop environment will be fantastic.
seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I don't know too many frequent travelers that don't carry around an AirPort Express
I dont know too many who know how or have the desire to use an AirPort Express, let alone own one. Ive never set one up, but presumably you have to configure it with an SSID and key, which is beyond many users. Ethernet "just works" in far more scenarios, far more reliably.
I have one for my Air. It fits in my pocket. Or the pocket of the case my air is in. It really is no big deal.
Are you saying that Laptop should be held up thickness wise, at the point where the body can accomodate an RJ45?
Oh come on, this isnt a difficult engineering problem. You have a springloaded pop-out RJ45 jack that is a rigid frame with 8 electrical connector pins. Ive seen it done on older laptops. It doesnt need to be terribly thick (just thick enough for rigidity), and doesnt require a dongle.
Your post reminded me of some stuff people were saying when the iMac came out and was missing features people claimed were essential at the time.
seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Count me as someone that never gets that "Apple is overpriced you can get a cheaper laptop...blah...blah...blah" argument.
Hey, Lexus is over priced. And honestly...it really is just a Toyota. So why not just buy a Toyota and save that money?
If the whole of civilization collapses (thanks to the Great Apple Riots of 2034 when the iPhone 61 was released for the low low price of 2 billion dollars each), I rather think that no one will be at home sitting on the internet browsing old tech sites while their granfathers work off that flab by pedalling for electric power.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/302078
Core i5 sandybridge with 4GB RAM ($30 upgrade to 8), 500GB drive; all for $479.
http://www.techbargains.com/news_displayItem.cfm/302125
Core i7 Ivy Bridge, 8GB RAM, 1TB drive. All for $799.
Please point me to a similar Mac that is less than double those prices.
There won't be an iPhone 5; they'll call it "the new iPhone".
Then all of the software will be numbered (iOS6, OS X 10.8, etc) and all of the hardware will referred to by build date (early 2007 iMac, 2011 Macbook Air, etc).
Was there any mention of a new version of iWork? All that I heard was that iWork would gain the ability to work with iCloud documents. Also, was there any mention of OpenGL or OpenCL or Core Animation or Xcode? It seemed that most of the software development announcements were related to connectivity plumbing.
When will the imacs, mini and mac pro get usb 3.0?? and newer video cards?
Why just update the laptops and not the desktops?
Can anyone confirm that these new Mac platforms are capable of loading and running Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)? We never released Lion to our environment at my company thanks to its issues with Active Directory. Thanks.
Thunderbolt? Did I miss something? Is a USB dongle which you can buy new for $30 not fast enough?
For me it's not an issue of speed, it's an issue of me not wanting to use up a USB port for it. The only thing for me that really eases the pain of the lack of ethernet is that they have TWO thunderbolt ports, I can use one of those for the ethernet instead.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I mostly use my laptop at home. I have wifi, which is fine for general web browsing. When I want to copy files, I dig out an Ethernet cable and plug it into one of the 20 jacks in my house so I can transfer at gigabit speeds. I have tons of Ethernet cables all over the place, including in the coffee table. I can't see purchasing more than one $30 adapter and keeping them everywhere. So it will be less convenient, but then again, I have no plans to purchase a $2200 laptop to surf the web on.
I don't know, but it works for me.
The thing is, other than the screen, the Macs tend to be worse spec-wise than that half-priced PC.
Bullshit.
They also tend on average to last 3 years, with the Macs lasting (if the propaganda being believed) 3-5. This means after 5 years, I have a much newer laptop with far superior specs at the same price as that one Mac
Pardon? You're trying to paint the longer useful life of Macs as a negative?
They also keep their value better, so whereas you'll be junking that 3 year old Wintel, you'll be getting a decent price on eBay for a 3 year old Mac.
not to mention not carrying around a gigantic thief-magnet.
Yeah. Were back to the Kia vs BMW again. Your recommendation seems to be buy something that's undesirable, so that no one will steal it. How can I say this. No. Things that are desirable are desirable for a reason. You can keep the crap.
Not sure why this should confuse you. Did you think you had Computer 95 when Windows 95 came out? Did your computer lose features when you went to Windows 7?
iOS versions are not the same as hardware versions. iOS version numbers would be very difficult to pin to the iPhone anyway, since iOS is now on the iPhone, iPod touch, Apple TV, and iPad. Apple TV is the most confusing, where iOS 5 actually gets listed as AppleTV software bundle 4.x
Typing this message on my more than 4-year old $1000 (cheapest model) MacBook with 440 full battery cycles and still decent (2-3h) battery live, I disagree.
I would like to see how that sub-$500 laptop is doing after 4 years...my bet is you'd probably need to retrieve it from a landfill first.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
If you've set an Airport Express up once, then it "just works" in any scenario in which a direct Ethernet connection "just works". It is bulkier to carry around, though, but means you can sit on the hotel balcony without needing a 10ft RJ45 cable. And, also, if you can't manage to set up an Airport Express using the utility it comes with, then you'll need to help to use a computer in any useful capacity at all.
Or the iPad 2 ran iOS 3, or the iPhone 3GS ran iPhoneOS 2...
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...iOS 4, rather.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
They damn well better start rolling them out. I've been waiting for a decent resolution like this at a decent price for ages, and I've almost lowered my values enough to buy a Mac. If I don't see other manufacturers coming out with them in the next year, it could happen.
What is your wireless router hooked to the modem with? Oh, thats right, ethernet. What connection will cheaply (~$200) support 48 simultaneous gigabit connections? Ethernet.
Good luck getting your small business to invest in a mesh of Wifi APs capable of that throughput for that many users.
I would also remark that if you dont have daily access to an ethernet port, you either dont have a job / go to school, or else are in the minority.
All throughout the industry, computer manufacturers charge high premiums for extras like RAM and a better CPU. Apple's no different (despite their "think different" motto from years past.)
You can get 16GB of RAM on this laptop--for $200 more. At least that's cheaper than what Dell charges to go from 8->16 on their Precision M4600 (the low-end of which only comes with 2GB of RAM, incidentally.)
Er, what? Your color blind friend can't see color (in nature?) but can see it on an iPad 3?
A laptop with a screen like that is almost required if you're running an IDE without a large external monitor (as in developing while away from the office).
So what happens when they issue a incremental upgrade to the "new iPhone"? Is it now the "new iPhone" and the previous one the "old iPhone?" Maybe they need to just to keep add the word "new" to the front for later versions. Then, you can count the number of times the word "new" appears in the product title to determine the version number.
IM THE ONLY ONE WHO MATTERS.
Nearly 400 years later, they are still disentangling Shakespeare's vulgar jokes. Some people need to grow up. Our English teacher (Newnham, Cambridge) took huge delight in showing that our school version of Merchant of Venice had removed a reference to incontinence but completely missed a vulva joke. I imagine that there will be future PhD theses on early Internet memes.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
When will the imacs, mini and mac pro get usb 3.0?? and newer video cards?
The Mac Pro: probably never, but since it's full of PCIe slots you can always slap in a USB3 card. I also guess a lot of Mac Pro customers will also be yanking out the stock video card and putting in an expensive specialist one. This is not a product with a long future ahead of it.
The iMacs and the Mini will probably get upgraded later.
The new MBP had to be announced at WWDC because, now the circus is over, its a developer conference and they want to talk to developers about support for the retina display.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
For me, and plenty of people I'm sure, ethernet is as rarely used a firewire. Maybe your situation is different, but that doesn't make it typical.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
because with it you can sell that two year old computer still covered by at least one year more. It goes a long way to making it easy to pass it to the next guy when the latest model catches your eye.
Been there, done that, through three iMacs and a Macbook Pro.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I cant comment as I've never seen one.
But really, it's a pointless discussion. Ethernet for laptops is almost dead. Laptops are made to be mobile.
It might not be dead for you, but then you present yourself as a budget computer buyer, so it's hardly surprising you're behind the times on technology. Very few real potential purchasers of a MBP are going to be put off by the lack of inbuilt ethernet. Any more than they were put off by the removal of floppy disks, RS232, Centronics printer ports, and VGA.
This is completely overboard.
On one end we have every laptop with a stupid 1366x768 resolution - and a few with 1440x900.
On the other end we have this $2200 thing with 2880x1800.
Can't we get something that's more middle of the line? 1920x1080 on a 14" laptop would be more than great. 1920x1200 on a 15" laptop would be spectacular. 2880x1800 on a 15" screen is just a idiotic. They've gone overboard. You don't even find 2880x1800 on 27" screens, on a 15" screen this is going to be too small to be of any use.
The thing is, other than the screen, the Macs tend to be worse spec-wise than that half-priced PC.
Bullshit.
Rather than retyping it, I will refer you to these two (rather short and sweet) posts.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2908871&cid=40288291
WHat you can get for $480 and 800 these days in the PC worlds.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2906441&cid=40279409
A look both now and a year ago at how you can get a better laptop at half the price.
And I would gladly beat the specs (excluding monitor) of ANY macbook you could throw at me, for half the price or less. If I were feeling daring I might even offer to let you choose what brand of laptop I have to use; its not like these are hard to find prices or anything.
The thing is, 8GB of ram is more and more becoming standard, where Apple still wants to charge you a $200 upgrade for that extra $40 stick of RAM. If you cant see how badly theyre gouging you, I really suggest you do a little more research.
I've been playing around on Apple's site in the last half hour and, frankly, it turns out to be dirt cheap.
Take any of the previous MBA or MBP, 13" or 15" as applicable, and then play around with the options. Boost its specs so it comes as close as you can get to a Retina MBP. ...
Back? Shockingly low, isn't it?
And, also, if you can't manage to set up an Airport Express using the utility it comes with, then you'll need to help to use a computer in any useful capacity at all.
You dont do IT for a living, do you? There are many users who could figure that out and would pop the CD in and begin configuring it; but there are at least as many who would immediately call their IT guy or geek friend because experience has led them to believe that if they try, and screw it up, it will much more difficult than if they had just called their techie friend to begin with.
My 3 year old 15" Dell M4400 has a really nice 1http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/06/11/1757240/apple-news-from-wwdc-and-iphone-5-rumors#900x1200 display, but looking at their lineup now I don't think you can get anything bigger than 1080p, which means you lose out on a fair bit of vertical resolution. 1366x768 in the same size really doesn't cut it.
A car is a long-term investment, and at least that lexus wont go badly out of date within 2 years-- its value will decline at something like 10-15% a year.
After 3 years, a laptop's value has plummeted to roughly $50, and it makes little difference whether its a mac or not. They make pretty terrible investments.
I would like to see how that sub-$500 laptop is doing after 4 years...my bet is you'd probably need to retrieve it from a landfill first.
Ill let you know in 3 more years how my HP Probook is doing. $500 and a year later, and the battery still handles like a champ (~3-5 hours depending on usage), and quite snappy.
New graduates never seem to worry about network speed because they have presumably never had to back up virtual machines or database images. I had one tell me with utter confidence only two months ago that only people stuck in the 1990s worried about network speeds. Well, for baby one page PHP applications with a few hundred records he was right.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
So, the SSDs in these things are a proprietary Apple part? I fail to see how that is more 'elegant' and 'efficient'.
You must have been living under a rock in recent months. Apple bought Anobit last December.
Them weaving the golden cage more and more tightly every day creeps me out just as much as the next geek, but you have to admit, these guys are fucking amazing.
Remember how shitty smartphones were before the iPhone?
SJ said: No Flash and no carrier software on the iPhone.
And thus endeth the era of Flash and crappy carrier scamware on phones.
Btw., as a Flashdev I'm actually reorienting myself because of exact same incident.
Remember how abysmally sad and sorry tablet computers were before the iPad?
Along came Apple and sold 14 million of them tablets in the first 3 quarters. 14 fucking million!
Thus endeth the era of Bill Gates half-assed vision of bizarly overpriced and unwieldy tablet computers.
And now this. ... Just wait for the MB Pro rippoffs poping up in about a year or so, just like the Ultrabook stuff.
Notice how these days every geek worth his salt is bickerin about stagnation and retreat in laptop display resolution? We had a story on this here just a week ago or so.
BAM! New MB Pro. Ahead of the pack at least 1,5 generations, hitting every other vendor on the planet on the back of their head with a Louisville Slugger Class cluestick in terms of laptop screen paradigms and a few other things.
Just plain awesome, I have to say.
Apple is burning more and more Karma with me each day, but they sure to make quite a bit of it up in spades at times. Today is such a time I'd say. Cudos to them, and respect.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And they're crappy build quality, break, have bad connections, and sacrifice horizontal depth space to save vertical space.
If you have one port that can do everything, why wouldn't you want to maximize that port type and rely on dongles instead? Do you also want dedicated keyboard and mouse ports back on your laptop instead of using USB?
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Porsche, now...
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Please tell me youre not claiming that Gigabit ethernet is going obsolete due to the mighty power of Wireless N.
See, with that iMac story, Apple was phasing it out because there were more widely used, better alternatives out there. There isnt, with GigE, because WIreless N has barely the same real-world bandwith of 100mbit ethernet.
Maybe if your entire day revolves around going to the coffee shop, ethernet is irrelevant; but for the vast majority of business use out there it is very much alive.
Maybe youre right when it comes to Mac users, but I have a feeling there will be droves of employees rushing out to buy one when they realize that in order to connect to corporate network on their Mac they need ethernet.
Er, what? Your color blind friend can't see color (in nature?) but can see it on an iPad 3?
They are a magical thing. I used to have herpes before I saw the iPad 3 display
Oh I know that nobody needs a 2880x1800 screen (myself included) and that most people are just fine with 1366x768. It's just that I have a laptop with a 1366x768 screen and I do real work on it and it's far too cramped. I make do with it because it's what I've got but if I had room in my budget for something with a screen resolution bigger than 1366x768 I'd buy it.
Fuck Beta
That is the best worst thing I've seen in a long time. I'm surprised they didn't sample Balmer yelling "Developers!"
Is it me or does it seem than Apple is upgrading their hardware every 2 years? No mini, iMac or MacBook improvements. It seams this year they upgraded the models which they skipped last year.
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
if they gave the macbook air a docking station i'd be fine, but how it is i'll stick to my x series lenovos to get work done.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I have no idea when it comes to Mac users, I don't own any Apple products. And I haven't seen a corporate network that required Ethernet either. But why are users using their own hardware on corporate networks anyway?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
"Typical users" can always buy a Dell, Sony or Toshiba with even a VGA port!
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
That's hardly going to break the budget for a top of the line $2,199 laptop buyer.
It has never really been about the price of the dongle. It is about the availability of functionality when I need it.
If I walk into an office that doesn't have wifi, they'll invariably point me to a wall jack and hand me an ethernet cable. They won't have a dongle. If I didn't bring mine, or forgot it, or lost it. Then I'm pretty much fucked.
A $2200 laptop where I have to carry around a separate bag of "parts" to restore the functionality that every other laptop has built in is a joke. The display adapters situation was bad enough.
Most of my corporate networks are wireless now. Just open the lid and get to work.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Regardless of what you're using, the possibility of not having the proper connector for a situation exists, unless you have a laptop with every known port.
What bandwidth is the 'vast majority of business use out there' demanding? I proffer that 99.9999% of business users are passing around documents and files that are less than 200 mb throughout the day. If they're working with larger files, then a USB dongle is acceptable in the workplace.
I work in an enterprise software firm. We have ethernet available, but the wifi seems to work just fine for all levels of the organization.
I'm not suggesting GigE is disappearing. I'm saying that the majority of users in the majority of situations aren't needing it, so there's no compelling argument to build it into the device when doing so carries a price on form factor.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Actually, I tend to find Macs make a rather excellent budget choice...
$500 laptop every year (roughly how long it takes for the owner to realise it has intel HD graphics that can't play WoW) that sells for $0 on ebay after that year;
$2200 laptop every 2 years that sells for $1900 on ebay after those 2 years...
I'll take the $150 a year proposition over the $500 a year one.
Yes, it makes quite a difference. Put my three-year old MacBook Pro next to a Dell and you will see the difference. The Dell will be missing at least one piece. You would be hard-pressed to tell that my MacBook Pro is not brand new. And it runs as fast as a new Dell.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Rather than retyping it, I will refer you to these two (rather short and sweet) posts.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2908871&cid=40288291
WHat you can get for $480 and 800 these days in the PC worlds.
Trouble is, even the best of the laptops you list there has a much worse spec than the new MBP. Slower CPU, same standard RAM, but yours not expandable beyond 8GB. Apple 512GB SSD vs your old 500GB HD. You do know what an SSD is don't you?
And thats only the very basics.
Thus your link proves that what you said was indeed bullshit.
Anyway, enough of this shit. There's always a cheapskate who has no sense of quality who tries these stupid comparison, every time Apple releases a new groundbreaking computer. And it's like whac-a-mole. Prove them wrong on one computer comparison, and they'll go away, and pop up later with yet another failed attempt. I've better things to do. The WWDC keynote video is up now. I'd rather watch that than waste time with this nonsense.
Except when you actually click through to the site, it's actually $1000 cheaper, not $1400... It's also got a screen less than half the resolution both vertically and horizontally (there's 1/5th the pixels on it!); with a screen that's TN, not IPS and hence has shit viewing angles; With a hard disk instead of an SSD; with a crap battery in comparison; with a touchpad that's crap in comparison; with a slower graphics chip; with no thunderbolt...
Basically, if you want a cheaper laptop, fair enough... But don't try to claim that it's somehow anywhere near an equivalent machine.
3 days ago, a slashdot article by MrSeb was asking: "Where Are All the High-Resolution Desktop Displays?".
IMHO the question is: do we ned high resolution displays for desktop computers?
It might be that I am really getting old, since I do not understand the need.
Cheers,
-S
The sub-500 laptop you linked is a turd.
The other laptop is $799. Now I'm no math major, but that's a fair bit more expensive than "sub-$500."
So you provide a link to a single piece of shit that's sub-500, as well as a link that is over 50% higher than your stated "awesome" price point, as your supporting evidence that "there are so many awesome sub-$500 laptops floating around."
I guess you've never heard of their refurbished systems. Any one of those would perform at least as well as the "Sub-500" turd you produced, and several of them will hold up quite well against the $800 (NORMALLY $1600, but steeply discounted for a short time, probably to sell off some excess inventory) laptop as well.
You dont do IT for a living, do you? There are many users who could figure that out and would pop the CD in and begin configuring it
Exactly... then you'll need help to use a computer in any useful capacity at all...
All of your calculations are meaningless without including the cost of OSX, which you cant define so to you its nil. You cannot compare a Mac to a PC without also comparing the attendant OS. Yes apple gouges on Ram, we all know this. Mercedes-Benz gouges on spare parts, we all know this too.
Good-bye
What about software? You're not going to buy a word processor, spreadsheet, photo software, music editing software, DVD burner and movie maker for your computer? All included with every new Mac.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
I've benched my laptop using wifi vs wired. For really high bandwidth stuff (dumping big files around) wired is far superior, even compared to double-channel 5GHz with line-of-site to the access point.
I'm a software guy. I would love to be able to run with a web browser, several files open (being coded), and several lab displays showing live status all visible simultaneously. I'm currently at 1920x1200, I would love to have more pixels available to play with. I've got good eyes, I can tolerate small fonts as long as they're detailed.
If they don't, then they're not serving their market that actually has functioning eyesight but would like more information density.
I use an HP Color LaserJet 2820 All-in-One Color Laser for faxing from my Mac. Works like a charm and works with wireless as well. By getting the fax modem, I saved $100 on the purchase price.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
You're kind of a dick arent you. I already said i dont get it for my use case, but i could see the use case for it. To me its a nicety, but whatever. I gave up caring about monitor resolution when 1080p became de facto.
For me > 1024 pixels vertical is the killer feature. Two things; 1) you can practically view an entire A4 document without paging; 2) you have more lines vertical in your editor than the average joe. If you are understanding someone else's code, you always want to have more lines on screen than he did since it lets you see more of the surrounding code more quickly. Remember it's much harder to add monitors above your current one than it is beside it.
Horizontal resolution is mostly needed for watching videos. That's a completely different issue (though having two A4 side by side and still being able to type in an editor is nice).
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Then buy a Dell or Thinkpad. Oops, except since those are 2-3x as thick as this new laptop, you'd have to carry 15 Ethernet dongles to match their thickness and weight.
It's not for everybody, but don't pretend that it's a "joke"
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I did a quick price comparison at Newegg (but for desktop components). I can't get the panel that small and keep the resolution, but everything else is comparable. The price comes out to $2450 before tax and shipping, and I'd still have to put it together and install the OS.
Sig is on vacation
And you can still buy a macbook pro with ethernet. Not sure why you think that's a problem.
My macbook air connects to ethernet as well, via by tbolt monitor. At home, it's on wireless. And I'll be getting a couple of the tbolt adapters, but I really don't use it that often.
just because you don't have the eyes for it, but I have 20/10 and 20/15 eyes, and even normal retina display is not good enough for me. I need something in the 400 dpi range before I don't see the dots, at 12" - 18" from the monitor.
And yes, my terminal.app runs at 6 point fontsize.
You really haven't been to ebay recently, have you? Recently like in the past 15 years or so?
I've never seen a 3 year old mac sell for $50. Unless it's broken.
I'm working on a Dell right now that has a 1366x768 display. It's 15.4".
Hear, Hear!!
That is very sad. And you know how many laptops in the 13.3-14" range are manufactured with better than 1366x768 resolution? Maybe 3 or 4 choices altogether, including the relatively high end ones.
When I did my research, I learned that HP Envy 14" model had advertised but (at the time, anyway) failed to deliver a higher-resolution screen and I saw many a post wondering when and how to get it.
Why is it so hard?
Then buy a Dell or Thinkpad.
They have an OSX option? No? Didn't think so. I have a macbook pro and for the most part i like it. I use the ethernet port pretty regularly for all sorts of things. Its not exactly a port i consider optional.
Oops, except since those are 2-3x as thick as this new laptop, you'd have to carry 15 Ethernet dongles to match their thickness and weight.
So I have to choose between running OSX and an ethernet port?
Yes, that's a "joke".
What is your wireless router hooked to the modem with? Oh, thats right, ethernet. What connection will cheaply (~$200) support 48 simultaneous gigabit connections? Ethernet.
Good luck getting your small business to invest in a mesh of Wifi APs capable of that throughput for that many users.
I would also remark that if you dont have daily access to an ethernet port, you either dont have a job / go to school, or else are in the minority.
None of that has any relevance for laptop users. And, every business I've dealt with in the last 10 years has had WiFi throughout their offices.
So, serious question here. Was the old Macbook Pro too thick? It seems like it's not really going to make an appreciable difference unless you really need space for one more magazine in your bag.
Congratulations, you just summed up the attitudes of Apple users everywhere
IM THE ONLY ONE WHO MATTERS.
Non-Apple users' opinions do not matter to Apple. Why should they? If you're not their customer and aren't going to become one, you're irrelevant.
This is true of every business, including whatever PC passes your furious anonymous trolling.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
The Thunderbolt to GigE adapter is $29 on the store right now.
http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD463ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA3Ng
This page lists the maximum operating altitude of the new MBPs as 10,000 feet. Does that mean you can't use them on airplanes? That seems silly... The only moving parts on there should be fans, right? No hard drive to crash. So why such a low service ceiling?
Program Intellivision!
If I didn't bring mine, or forgot it, or lost it. Then I'm pretty much fucked.
Simple solution: Glue the dongle into your laptop. Now it is "built-in" and you don't have to worry about it anymore.
Unless you are buying a classic, a car is not an investment either.
You do understand that the purpose of a laptop is to be portable, right? Adding a keyboard, mouse, and separate monitor makes it a lot less portable. That's as asinine as saying for the price of a laptop you can get a much powerful desktop that weighs only 10x as much.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The song is funny but the dancing sucks.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Seriously, 339 posts and no mention that Blizzard will make Diablo III "retina-capable"?
Since most web graphics are 72DPI, does anyone have any comment on how they look on the new 200DPI screens? Is this a non-issue or is every website going to have to transform everything to 200DPI, which is generally seen in magazine print.
Remember, the common image of the Apple user is of the screenplay writer sitting at Starbucks. Ethernet does no good in that scenario.
Well of course. What's the point of buying a Mac if no one sees that shinny apple on that back? :P
Fanboy Status: Apache Flex, C#, Eclipse, KDE, Pirate Party, Ron Paul, Slackware, Windows 7
Why are you so completely obsessed with what others buy? Counting your posts in this thread, I'd clearly call that "obsession". What business is it of yours?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
There's this concept of a "mobile workstation", which is a device that is portable, but doesn't compromise so much as to impede features that are actually important to one's work. MacBook Pro was such a thing. Not anymore.
You can see more stuff on your screen at once. You won't have to scroll as frequently.
Not if you keep using OS X on this. Remember that they've chosen the 2x resolution specifically so that they could keep all UI elements at the same physical size, just use more pixels drawing them (for sharper text and curves).
I dont get the drooling over Retina Display. Unless you are a graphics professional, i just dont see the use-case for it.
Ultra-sharp text everywhere without blurry antialiasing. I'd pay $2K for that.
You probably need to see a retina display alongside a standard one to appreciate it.
It certainly makes more sense than HDTV does.
Are you telling that going from 720x480 to 1920x1080 (6x the pixels) makes a smaller difference than going from 1680x1050 to 2880x1800 (2.93x the pixels)?
Especially since TVs are much larger, the increase in number of pixels make much more sense.
Thunderbolt? Did I miss something? Is a USB dongle which you can buy new for $30 not fast enough?
For me it's not an issue of speed, it's an issue of me not wanting to use up a USB port for it. The only thing for me that really eases the pain of the lack of ethernet is that they have TWO thunderbolt ports, I can use one of those for the ethernet instead.
When the Thunderbolt adapters appear, there will likely not be any for Ethernet, more likely Thunderbolt--> 2x superspeed USB3.... it's a 10Gigabyte/s connection... you'd be thick to waste it on an adapter that relegated it to a gigabit connection. Want more USB3? 2 Thunderbolt ports would provide 4 more at full speed.
The Admin and the Engineer
The physical parts may cost less to put the NIC on the motherboard, but in something as space-tight as the MacBook Pro, the space savings probably outweigh it.
This is where Ivy's design pisses me off. The previous revision was think enough and light enough an 8 year could carry around and not whine about the weight. To scale it down even more is nothing more than bragging rights in the form of mental masturbation. I don't give 2 shits that this laptop got thinner. It was already thin enough without compromising on GPGPU options. They couldn't put in high end options because of heat dissipation issues, but Ivy got his razor thin look. Wee ha!
Thinner => Lighter / Smaller => More portable
Seems like a reasonable thing to want in a laptop. If I wanted a machine that did everything at any cost.. I'd get a desktop.
Lift a dumbell larger than 10lbs. Do it routinely and you'll discover the previous version of the Macbook Pro was highly portable. They have now reached their theoretical thin limits and it's a waste of time.
That's why I lug around a 17 inch MacBook Pro. Good for the cardiovestubular system as well.
When you lightweights fall over due to heart failure because you've never picked up anything heavier than an latte and a MacBook Air I'm gonna run you over in my wheelchair.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Ethernet is ubiquitous!
What? That's patently absurd. It may be available at the office or at home, but anywhere else you're at least as likely to have wireless, and in many, many places, it's your only option.
The hotel I stayed at last week only had wireless.
The restaurants I ate at had only wireless.
My local coffee shop only has wireless.
Remember, the common image of the Apple user is of the screenplay writer sitting at Starbucks. Ethernet does no good in that scenario.
Most work on a laptop is done at work or at a home office, not sipping overpriced coffee chatting with friends remotely at some other coffee shop while you look cute around a bunch of strangers in the coffee shop you currently occupy. It was a bad design trade off that cut off GigE and better GPGPU options. Ivy needs to be reigned in.
$30 for Thunderbolt to Ethernet.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
People are starting to think of laptops as fashion statements foremost, rather than as tools. It's fine to want good aesthetics (a good-looking laptop is nicer than a bad-looking one), but one should never give up functionality for the sole purpose of aesthetics.
While I agree with you, it won't be long before this kind of powerhouse technology appears to us as no more than a pair of odd looking sunglasses. When that day comes, probably within the next 5-10 years, I will laugh at your stupid looking sunglasses/supercomputer that have put function over form.
The Admin and the Engineer
I'll take an ethernet dongle and smile if it's attached to a 15.4" laptop with a 2880x1800 screen.
I won't. I'd have bought one if they kept the former thickness, included upgrade options to AMD 7770M and 32GB of RAM with an HDD, instead of just a damn SSD drive only, not GigE and a heat dissipation ceiling limited Nvidia 650M.
WiFi isn't everywhere. But it's at a hell of a lot more places than ethernet. Last time I used ethernet was 2009.
Are you saying that Laptop should be held up thickness wise, at the point where the body can accomodate an RJ45?
The minority of people that are still ufing ethernet for laptops need to carry an ethernet cable with them anyway. It's no hardship to them to take a cable with a dongle in instead. Meanwhile the majority who use WiFi now get a better laptop.
2009? Then you must not work for any Corporation in the Globe.
Seriously, you need to go out and do some test drives... Audi A4, Mercedes C250, BMW 328i (the new F30s are SWEEEEET even if they're everywhere), Lexus, Infiniti G25. Don't knock it until you've tried it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
I have a Macbook Air and I bought the USB-to-Ethernet dongle. I never used it.
Just out of interest why would you buy something you don't have a use for?
Non-Apple users' opinions do not matter to Apple. Why should they?
Because at some stage everyone was a non-Apple user...duh!
What does "more portable" mean? Either you can carry it, or you can't.
I don't respond to AC's.
WiFi isn't everywhere. But it's at a hell of a lot more places than ethernet
Unless you run Linux... what a pain it is these days to get legacy computers wireless on linux. I love Linux... just saying... the only problem ever have with wifi is in Linux world, trying to get drivers (if they can be found) to recognize the interface. In Linux world, Ethernet "just works."
The Admin and the Engineer
I didn't get the drooling over retina display until I actually used one.
Are you telling that going from 720x480 to 1920x1080 (6x the pixels) makes a smaller difference than going from 1680x1050 to 2880x1800 (2.93x the pixels)?
No I said it made more sense. Sense is not measured in pixel deltas.
People tend to watch TV from the other side of the room, and they're watching a car chase, or sport, or the news or something. Many people can't tell the difference at all from normal viewing distance. And even for those that can, little is lost on standard def vs HDTV. I don't even bother recording movies in HDTV on the PVR any more. I go for standard def as they use less disk space.
With a laptop, you're working with text, and potentially smallish UI elements, from a much closer range. I've not seen the new MacBook yet, but going on the retina displays on the new iPad and iPhone, it makes a huge difference to clarity. Like printed text rather than the usual slightly blurry computer screen text we're used to.
Are you saying that Laptop should be held up thickness wise, at the point where the body can accomodate an RJ45?
Oh come on, this isnt a difficult engineering problem. You have a springloaded pop-out RJ45 jack that is a rigid frame with 8 electrical connector pins. Ive seen it done on older laptops. It doesnt need to be terribly thick (just thick enough for rigidity), and doesnt require a dongle.
Just curious... do you regularly use a computer that still has a 1.44mb floppy disc drive? You are my hero. fight the progress!
But seriously, Apple has always dropped technology that was still in common use, and introduced technology first that no one was yet using; their products are always in front of the bleeding edge and state-of-the-art. If all technology manufacturers were doing this, it would be a problem. But that isn't the case... it's only Apple. So it's not a big deal.
The Admin and the Engineer
I fully expected to use it. Turned out that I didn't need it (yet--maybe I will one day).
You've got it all wrong. For a machead the style is the substance.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If you work in programming or anything related to graphical design or the visual arts (video included) I would say yes.
For everyone else, maybe they can get by. The problem with our current displays is text is rendered like crap. The low resolution displays are the entire reason why sans-serif fonts (Arial, helvetica, etc) became popular. In print serifed fonts (Times New Roman) used to be popular because they had more DPI to work with. That meant fine details necessary for the font were actually printed nicely. On a low DPI (less than 100) serifs look like absolute junk. Yet a serif font in print is actually easier to read than a sans-serif font.
So if you read anything on an electronic device, you should want a high DPI display because it will actually be easier on your eyes. Furthermore things will start to scale naturally where as right now they just turn out to be this blurry mess because we need to apply antialiasing magic to make it look right at the expensive of being blurry.
Then buy a Dell or Thinkpad. Oops, except since those are 2-3x as thick as this new laptop, you'd have to carry 15 Ethernet dongles to match their thickness and weight.
It's not for everybody, but don't pretend that it's a "joke"
Sansung series 7 Chronos, Similar size as a Macbook pro, has an ethernet port. A laptop does not need to be thick to have an ethernet port. Someone's cutting corners to make their laptop cheaper and charge just as much as they ever did for the overpriced pos.
Disagreeing with you does not make me a troll.
Nope. $29 for the TB adapter. That's actually surprisingly cheap.
A presenter must always be prepared, validate their ability to deliver BEFORE getting up to present, and supply backup.
Truly spoken like someone who has never given a presentation. Here is a better platitude for the situation: whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Thanks, I stand corrected. I think this is nuts, though. If you're going to adapt Thunderbolt to Ethernet, at the very least have it be able to daisy chain more Thunderbolt devices, or give it two Ethernet ports... or... 100. This is a silly accessory... but I guess it is for a specific mobile purpose.
The Admin and the Engineer
the common image of the Apple user is of the screenplay writer sitting at Starbucks
That does not reflect reality. In fact, screenplay writers usually serve at Starbucks.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
and you don't have to worry about it anymore.
Right, I just have to worry about breaking the dongle and possibly the port now.
One of the things I like about my macbook pro (and that i actively look for in laptops) is that there is nothing sticking out of it to catch on things and break.
A dongle sticking out of a usb port 24x7 is just begging to get completely wrecked.
"Separate bag"? Your laptop bag doesn't have a pocket for extras such as a PSU? If you're carrying a PSU, an ethernet dongle isn't going to add much to size or weight. And what it does add is more than saved by the thinness and light-weight of the new MBP.
Apple has launched the word's most advanced laptop today. Retina display, SSD, 7hours battery life, and so very thin. And you think it's a joke because its too thin to house a built in RJ45? How moronic is that?
Right, but that 1600x1200 screen was 17" diameter, and there's nothing useful in that sort of size any more. I don't want to have to buy a monitor that big just to get the resolution I need. This thing is the answer to my prayers because it fits more vertical pixels than any other screen into an eminently portable package.
Fair enough. By volume, you still come out very far ahead with even a marginally thinner laptop. And this is a bit more than marginally thinner.
I think most people, including myself, use laptop bags of some sort or another. This is just something to toss in - again, by weight and volume, you still come out better with a thinner laptop + dongle.
I'm by no means a fanboi, but Apple has a funny habit of being about a year ahead of "obvious". They did it with floppy drives, serial ports, physical media with the Air, etc. I have a use for a laptop with a serial port (for embedded work), but I'm not about to pretend that a laptop without one plus a dongle isn't a big improvement. Ethernet is smaller than a serial port, but it's still thicker than they have room for. Even on my 2008 MBP, the GigE jack is only about 2mm shorter than the entire body. It's several mm larger than any other port, and when the entire laptop is less than 2cm, millimeters matter.
It's a basic heuristic - "make the common case best". It applies to algorithms, software, and even hardware. If most people don't use Ethernet most of the time, don't include it. Same goes for the DVDRW drive, Firewire, DVI, and microphone ports - which people seem much less up in arms over.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
That laptop has more pixels than my dual monitor setup!
No, WiFi is ubiquitous. Ethernet is becoming a legacy connections
Haha, is that an example of "thinking different"? WIFI is just a physical transport for Ethernet. Now, I would perceive it as a great limitation if I had no option to connect my tablet or other portable device to a wired network. Fortunately that is no problem with a USB dongle. Of course, Apple would never dream of leaving out the USB port. Oh wait...
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"Separate bag"?
Yes.
Your laptop bag doesn't have a pocket for extras such as a PSU?
It does. But I often don't take my laptop bag everywhere. Its 20lbs of cables, adapters, and tools.
Often, if I just need my laptop I just take my laptop. It even has a battery in it.
Apple has launched the word's most advanced laptop today. Retina display, SSD, 7hours battery life, and so very thin.
If I have to carry a 20lb laptop bag wherever I go for the laptop to connect to anything I'm likely to need, then why should I be excited that its super thin?
Hey, They could have shaved another 1/2mm off if they left out the keyboard too...
Thinking about it further... they already redid the magsafe adapter for the new laptop...they should have integrated the ethernet connection there, and then had the ethernet jack in the power brick. If you need a wired connection, having the psu plugged in isn't the end of the world.
I've often thought it would be handy if the power brick doubled as a usb hub as well, given the dearth of ports.
The Series 7 weighs half a pound more and is .25" thicker than the MBP we're talking about. It also does not have a retina display, 2 Thunderbolt ports, or 256GB of SSD for primary storage.
The Series 7 is $1,000 less and has about 45 minutes more battery life, a DVD-RW, a mini-HDMI port (in addition to the HDMI port), an additional USB port, and an Ethernet port.
Most importantly to me, if there's a hardware issue, I can't simply walk in to my local Apple Store, put it on the counter, and say "fix it."
What was the point you were trying to make, again?
Truck driver, plumber, Linux systems engineer.
If most people don't use Ethernet most of the time, don't include it.
Half the offices I work in don't have wireless, and everyone plugs in their laptops. I'm skeptical that a signficant majority of people using macbook pro's at work are wireless.
This isn't a toy / consumer device... this is the 'pro' tool.
. I have a use for a laptop with a serial port (for embedded work), but I'm not about to pretend that a laptop without one plus a dongle isn't a big improvement.
The cisco cables are still rj45 to serial too. I have one in my laptop bag, along with a usb-serial adapter.
Ethernet is smaller than a serial port, but it's still thicker than they have room for.
I don't at all object to the existence of a super thin laptop without ethernet. To me the joke is that one has to choose between high res screen -or- ethernet.
Apple's new line is about 20% thinner than that laptop, has a bigger screen, and weighs almost exactly the same despite the larger screen. Not to mention a substantially more powerful processor and a battery life of 7 hours. I don't know how long the battery life on that Samsung is, but they don't say it on the overview, features, or specs page. Oh I finally found it - the press release says 7.8hr, but I don't trust most manufacturer's stated battery life claims, though I meet or exceed Apple's
It's not the laptop for me, mostly because I have a home-built desktop running Linux for anything requiring computational power and I can't justify even half of the expense. But it's not worth pretending that it's not a very very good laptop.
Though that Samsung one does look nice.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Yeah, saving that few grams and the 0.1mm savings in profile height
Retina MBP: 2.02kg, 1.8cm. Non-Retina 15: MBP: 2.56kg, 2.41cm. Perhaps 540g is "a few" to you, but 2410-1800 != 0.1.
Apple fanbois: lack of a feature is a feature!
Rational people: lack of a feature that some particular person doesn't use much, in exchange for something they deem an improvement in other matters, is a net feature - e.g., the lighter weight might, for some people, reduce annoyance enough to more than compensate for what annoyance comes from the lack of an Ethernet port.
Now, some other person might use the Ethernet port all the time, and not care as much about the weight. They should, err, umm, buy the other model of MBP.
(But, hey, "some people might quite rationally find A better than B, and others might quite rationally find B better than A" isn't nearly as much fun as hotly and loudly arguing the total rulitude of {A, B} and the total suckitude of {B, A}....)
The new retina display macbook pro also has an asymmetrical fan blade to cut down on noise. You can check out the video for yourself if you wish at the Apple website. Thought I would highlight this to the community.
There's this concept of a "mobile workstation", which is a device that is portable, but doesn't compromise so much as to impede features that are actually important to one's work. MacBook Pro was such a thing. Not anymore.
Which features that are actually important to your work are missing from the 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros?
Also, note that "one", the fact that it's spelled and pronounced the same as the cardinality of a singleton set nonwithstanding, can have more than, err, umm, one referent. Not all "one"s work necessarily match your/em. work.)
I'll take an ethernet dongle and smile if it's attached to a 15.4" laptop with a 2880x1800 screen.
I would kick myself for spending over a thousand dollars for a latop without an ethernet port, whatever the screen size or resolution. I will tolerate the inconvenience in a tablet or phone where the RJ45 will not physically fit but not in a laptop.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I dont get the drooling over Retina Display. Unless you are a graphics professional, i just dont see the use-case for it.
The point of the Retina Display is, it was a way for Tim Cook to come up with a differentiating feature for the ipad 3 without possessing an ounce of creativity. Maybe next time he will manage to come up with something that doesn't require twice the power draw.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I have a Macbook Air and I bought the USB-to-Ethernet dongle. I never used it.
Just out of interest why would you buy something you don't have a use for?
"I never used it" != "I knew I had no use for it when I bought it". Perhaps he thought he might need it and wanted to make sure he had one on hand if he needed one Right Now, and later discovered that, in practice, that never happened.
Congratulations, you just summed up the attitudes of Apple users everywhere
IM THE ONLY ONE WHO MATTERS.
He also summed up the attitudes of the people who think that its a Horrible Error to offer laptops without Ethernet - "I use it every day, it's insane to leave it out!"
Maybe he listened to one of the other posters and thought that he would need one.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
They also depreciate less than - and are a bit more expensive than their similarly-configured - korean-made rivals. It's more of a Hyundai/Kia Vs Toyota, then you've got Alienware which is the kind of the HSV GTS, a bit ridiculous, probably not the best workmanship but certainly high performance.
No, you have to choose between the spiffy new thin MBP, or the newly revised regular MBP that still has an ethernet port and optical drive for people like you who insist that everything they need is inside the aluminum body.
This Cinema HD display I'm looking at right now is 2560 * 1600.
What does "more portable" mean? Either you can carry it, or you can't.
The size and weight are a factor in moving it around. That's a strange factor for a seemingly educated person to ignore.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You just effectively admitted that Apple lovers are motivated by emotions instead of a rational judgement.
The dude said that it's not a one-size-fits-all solution and your response was effectively "you're a fanboy". Are you really sure you want to claim he's the one not being rational?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
You have a springloaded pop-out RJ45 jack that is a rigid frame with 8 electrical connector pins.
Uh, yeah, I've worked with those and I'd rather just have the thunderbolt adapter, please.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
low resolution displays are the entire reason...helvetica...became popular.
I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume you simply experience the flow of time differently than corporeal beings.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
But I often don't take my laptop bag everywhere. Its 20lbs of cables, adapters, and tools.
Sounds like your problem is with your existing kit.
I travel all the time. I have not been to a hotel with a working ethernet port in years, the ones that do had no cable.
If you're at a friends house why would you not just use the wi-fi?
There are very few uses for wired internet anymore, most of them involve very large files... it's simply not a hardship to use or carry a dongle for the VERY rare occasion you might need one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Those rooms have projectors with cables already set up. They don't typically have apple convertor dongles.
Lots of conferences I have been to have Apple converters on all the projectors, because most speakers these days use MacBooks with display port.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can have smaller text on a high-resolution display. So you really can get more content in the same space.
To me pixels are more important than space (to a point).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm surprised they didn't sample Balmer yelling "Developers!"
Better take away all the chairs !!!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
17" is still a really useful size.
Also it's not like it's that odd it did not see an update today, the last round of updates for the 17" was a number of months behind the 15" updates.
They just don't want to create any confusion about what people should buy now...
The 17" adds more than bulk. The larger frame also allows for better battery life, and could even offer some kind of additional port (though the 15" is doing really well port-wise).
I think in six months or so we'll know if the 17" is going away or not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why just update the laptops and not the desktops?
Because almost all the developers use laptops and not desktops.
This was a more targeted set of updates around things that mattered most to developers. It's also why we saw no new iPhone hardware, that's a more general announcement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A $2200 laptop where I have to carry around a separate bag of "parts" to restore the functionality that every other laptop has built in is a joke. The display adapters situation was bad enough.
Roughly 10 years ago it was PC laptop users lugging around Ethernet adapters, either as a PCMIA card with bulging port housing that you couldn't safely leave in when in a carry bag, or a card that could remain in the laptop but came with a flimsy adapter cable. And many of these PCMIA cards cost more than $30 back then.
Meanwhile, Apple started including Ethernet ports on its laptops in 1994, almost 20 years ago.
So while I agree carrying dongles is a pain, I find it ironic and hilarious that people criticize Apple for requiring them (and specifically for Ethernet), since this is traditionally a hallmark of the PC laptop world.
And unlike Apple, which today has functional reasons for excluding ports (thinness/compactness of the Air and MBP Retina), PC laptop makers back then had no excuse for excluding Ethernet ports so late in the game, other than saving a few dollars per unit.
It's the in thing nowadays. BYO hardware.
Where I work though, this would be a major pain in the ass. Wireless LAN is next to nonexistent, and is an epic challenge to set up on a mac even where it is available nasty Cisco WPA2 Enterprise setup with enterprise PKI and stuff) thanks to health information protection regulation.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
And by doing so you waste space on the motherboard on a single-function port, instead of a multi-function port (Thunderbolt). And then people criticize Apple for introducing a "proprietary" port (unless you're referring to some multi-function, 8-pin standard that doesn't seem to have been very common).
In fact if you look at the ports on the MBP-Retina, other than SD and HDMI all ports are multi-function, even the audio in/out jack, allowing more space savings.
Which, case in point, Apple stopped selling a few years ago in favor of the smaller, lower-res 2560x1440 27" model.
Either way, neither seems so hot compared to a 2880 x 1800 display... on a laptop!
A laptop with a screen like that is almost required if you're running an IDE without a large external monitor (as in developing while away from the office).
Somebody PLEASE mod this guy up.
I'm a "software development supervisor", which means I'm both a developer and in charge of a small team of other developers. I just recently specced out some new laptops for my group and screen resolution was one of the most important criteria from EVERYONE (second to RAM; but above processor and graphics).
My team does most of the work in the office, attached to large external monitors (I also just upgraded those (except my own - I've already got an Apple Cinema Display)); but we do from time to time travel around a bit, and as such, screen real-estate on the laptops themselves is extremely important to let us actually do our jobs well.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
WTF! I didn't believe you so I went to Lenovo's site to get a fast example do rebut you. And they are all gone! All the beautiful X series units with high res panels are all gone. 1366x768 everywhere and no upgrade options. I pray mine doesn't break because I really wouldn't enjoy settling for the rubbish they are selling right now.
Guys, are you still selling Thinkpads or just generic Chinese crap? I won't pay Thinkpad prices for Acer specs.
Democrat delenda est
The size and weight are a factor in moving it around.
We're talking about modern laptops, right?. They range in weight from a few pounds up to about 10. Size and weight don't really factor in to this situation, as all non-handicapped, healthy human adults should be able to move a 10 lb item with the same ease of a 4-5 lb item. A 10 lb item is not "less portable" than a lighter item.
I don't respond to AC's.
Truly spoken like someone who has never given a presentation. Here is a better platitude for the situation: whatever can go wrong will go wrong, and at the worst possible time.
And that was spoken like someone who's computer is a cheap linux PC.
And that was spoken like someone who couldn't think of a retort. At least you Apple cultists keep me entertained, carry on.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Meanwhile, Apple started including Ethernet ports on its laptops in 1994, almost 20 years ago.
"Roughly 10"...is more like 14-15. Almost 20? What is that actually? 18? That 10 year spread between 10 and 20 is more like 3-4 years tops.
You are right that there was a few years 95/96/97 where a lot of laptops didn't have it -- but the low end consumers really didn't need it - most were still on dialup and that was it. And the busienss oriented stuff had it in the docking station.
It was only actually an issue when laptops purchased in 95-97 were still being used in 98-02, and those were the people with the add-ons. The PC manufacturerers didn't really drag there heels that badly at all -- consumer/home laptops didn't really need ethernet until they got broadband at home. And much of the US still doesn't even have access to that yet, now, in 2012.
And the state of networking 20 years ago ... 1992? Ethernet was pretty highend enterprise stuff and odds were if you had access to it, it was just in one place, and you had a docking station there. Even my hacker heaven home network ... in 1992... was still using coax cable and terminators. Remember what an ethernet hub cost back then?
...an all new macbook pro and it still lacks a DE9 serial port ? ;-)
European Linux user, living in Antwerp
That was spoken like someone who can't admit he's been beaten.
For what it's worth I have a Dell sitting around somewhere that's 15.4" and 1900x1200, so you didn't even have to go up to 17" for that previously.
I've not looked at the market in a while, presumably it's not improved and getting a 15" laptop with anything close to this resolution is still now impossible giving the appearance that the technology magically doesn't exist to squeeze this many pixels onto a laptop screen even though we used to have it?
So where's the 'retina' display or the 1680x1050 resolution? I'd love a super hi res display, but would like more work area than 1440 x 900.
Hmmmm, I have a Fujtsu-Siemens Pa 1510, bought on sale in January 2007[1] (Just before the Vista release, they tried to get rid of XP machines, as Vista was "the future" *grin*). Still works today. Now the battery, yes, it's dead... Bought a new one for 75€ at Duracelldirect. Works fine again. Sure, it's only a few hours charge and not 7.
Now, I agree that Mac laptops are good value if you buy high end, but plainly stating that PCs are crap and will "fall apart" or "need to be retrieved from the landfill", are greatly exaggerated. Mine has scratches on the lid, but that's about all one can say about it.
The main problem with my laptop is the graphics chipset. No more ATI support and the open source drivers on Linux are so slow, it's a pain to run... Windows XP runs perfectly fine though (fully updated) and if I want to play the odd Halflife 2 or Portal session, it will work just fine.
I must do something right with my laptops, most have long and happy productive lives (5 years++)... Don't get me started on my iBook G3 that only lasted 3 years and had a logic board failure, which was a known problem.... but of course, I found out only after warranty. *sigh*
[1] It cost 795€ on sale, but back then there were no 500€ laptops and this was pretty much the lowest price-point you could get at the time.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
When will we see a Thinkpad with a hi PPI display? I can't believe this display is news to anyone, especially other manufactures. When will we start seeing these displays in other laptops and even standalone LCD monitors?
$35 AU, when it really should be at most $30.00
Talk about greed. They make it, they dont buy it for $27 from a supplier.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
How in hell can you use skype or facetime without a mic?
mics are needed, take zero space.
Its like those lame ass windows laptops with a built in camera, but no mic, yet include skype + other interchat software that requires a mic.
Idiots.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
> I would like to see how that sub-$500 laptop is doing after 4 years...my bet is you'd probably need to retrieve it from a landfill first.
Get real.
I have a 7 yr old *consumer* Dell laptop, it does the job for email, web browsing, and ssh.
Look, I have no trouble with people being happy buying 'brand name' whatever. Unless you get a faulty item, if you take minimum care of your Apple / Thinkpad laptop, it will probably last you many years. Just don't delude yourself thinking that the same is also not true of a, say, consumer-level Dell laptop.
I think the key to doing a mac vs pc comparison is not just to look at the technical specs, but also the form factor. For some people, apple's systems have a superior form factor. They tend to be small computers (exception Mac Pro).
For me, the holy grail mac is a desktop Mac with real drive bays like a Mac Pro but with consumer intel processors and discrete graphics. I want a Mac to play games on and that I can upgrade. Apple doesn't make anything like that. A mac mini has a 2.5" drive bay so it's useless for my needs. I don't want 4 external hard drives on my desk. It ruins the point of a mac mini anyway. The only mac that can hold my iTunes collection and offer me an internal time machine backup disk is a Mac Pro. Thus I have to buy an expensive, outdated workstation. Even with the bump, the Mac Pro is running on a motherboard and design from 2010. It has last generation xeons on the old socket. Most vendors stopped selling workstations, and the ones that do have been selling them with lowend consumer CPUs often times. Apple still makes a somewhat unique, if dated, product. I'm stuck on a first gen mac pro waiting for an upgrade. I've ebay'd new xeons for it and bought a 5700 series radeon graphics card from apple for it. I've added drives and ram. It's been a great machine, but I was really hoping for an E5 and a modern radeon card. It just didn't happen. It IS possible to find a high end alternative to a Mac Pro such as a dell precision workstation or a alienware system that can compete with a mac pro on performance on price. Apple owns the laptop market on quality units, and they get props for the iMac even though the competition has started to heat up in the all in one space (no touch screens for apple), but they fail the lowend desktop and high end workstation race right now.
People who think apple is always the top of the pack fail just as much as the people who think the case, battery life or other elements of an apple laptop are not worth extra money over a consumer toshiba or something.
As for me, I have a tough decision to make on whether I can live with a computer that can house my iTunes collection or buying another antiquated mac pro.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
Actually, it is. You're not factoring in 'carry time'.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
*Shakes head*
I've been on this planet for 43 years and every time I thought humanity can't get any lower something like this happens.
-- Cheers!
Count me as someone that never gets that "Apple is overpriced you can get a cheaper laptop...blah...blah...blah" argument.
Hey, Lexus is over priced. And honestly...it really is just a Toyota. So why not just buy a Toyota and save that money?
In the metro in Paris is a big Ad campain for windows Laptops (don'T remember the brand, I guess it was Toshiba)
They are "high end" lap tops, prices between 2400â and 3k â ... I for my part consider those new Macs pretty cheap.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
768?!! You're shitting me. I can't live without 1600x1200 or better. You are probably one of those people who maximizes every single fucking window aren't you?
Well, other people know how to use a "window" or rather, multiple "windows", each showing enough data in the background while I work in the main "window".
Meanwhile, Apple started including Ethernet ports on its laptops in 1994, almost 20 years ago.
"Roughly 10"...is more like 14-15. Almost 20? What is that actually? 18? That 10 year spread between 10 and 20 is more like 3-4 years tops.
I don't know exactly when Ethernet became standard on PC laptops, hence the "roughly." I do know that when I started a job back in '03 they'd just bought a couple laptops that flat out didn't have RJ-45 ports and needed Ethernet PCMCIA cards. I don't remember brand or model (wasn't my responsibility), and they might not have been business-grade, but it's not like small businesses never buy consumer-level machines.
On further research, as late as mid-2001 not all IBM Thinkpads came with Ethernet built-in, but had them as options (A20M, T21, T22). So the spread is at least 7 years on business-level laptops, and 9 years on all PC laptops if you accept my anecdote; I'm not going to look up every brand and model.
You are right that there was a few years 95/96/97 where a lot of laptops didn't have it -- but the low end consumers really didn't need it - most were still on dialup and that was it. And the busienss oriented stuff had it in the docking station.
In your earlier comment you wrote "It is about the availability of functionality when I need it. They won't have a dongle. If I didn't bring mine, or forgot it, or lost it. Then I'm pretty much fucked." So a docking station back then doesn't count. You're even less likely to lug that around than a network dongle/card.
I'm not saying this isn't a minor shortcoming of the MB Air and MBP-Retina. I'm just amused at the irony of seasoned PC people criticizing Apple for requiring dongles.
I assume that's part of the reason for the 8GB RAM as standard - to avoid swapping and maybe mount temp files in a memory based filesystem. Even so, the life of the drive is likely to be an issue, surely?
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
As someone else pointed out, you should search for "mSata", which is a standard.
Apparently you don't understand how eyes work. That's fine. Go back and hide under your rock.
You make some good points. Nice to have some non-trolls on the thread at last. A couple of things:
The only mac that can hold my iTunes collection and offer me an internal time machine backup disk is a Mac Pro.
Internal time machine backup seems like a bad idea to me. When bad things happen is when you need a backup, and having the backup in the same box as the main drive seems to be inviting disaster in quite a lot of scenarios. I think WiFi is the perfect connection for Time Machine. It can be in a different room. And background backups don't have to be ultra fast. Nor does accessing music media files come to that.
I must admit though that I compromise with a USB time machine drive that I plug in to my laptop from time to time.
Like Ford, who has Wifi in every building that matters?
Why dont you link the Mac you are referencing? Because the stock Macs listed on the apple website @ 1799 and 2199 do NOT come with 8GB RAM standard (its a several hundred dollar upgrade, or at least was 2 days ago), nor do they come with SSDs, and they have an inferior video card.
You say youve proven what i said to be BS, but you havent even linked this Mac that youre talking about. Here, ill save you the effort and link direct to the bog-standard mac configs:
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD103LL/A?
$1799, with ONLY 4GB of ram, NO ssd, (only a 500GB 5400RP drive), and a core i7 (which until 2 days ago was a distinctly inferior Sandy Bridge)
If you want that 8GB (which you claim to be standard), you need to go up to their $2100 model:
http://store.apple.com/us/configure/MD104LL/A?
Except that they STILL dont include an SSD: That costs an extra $900, despite the availability of MUCH cheaper 512GB SSDs out there...
like the much esteemed Crucial M4 at only $414, which is once again 1/2 the price of the Mac hardware (despite it very likely being the same underlying hardware).
For the things you claim to be standard (SSD, 8GB RAM, Ivy Bridge), you would need to shell out $3199, while I could get a comparable laptop at $1400 or less EASILY. By slapping an SSD into the lenovo, I would have that laptop for $1100.
Compare to this other offering from MSI:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152349
Which not only comes with 8GB RAM, a 50% bigger drive stock, and an identical processor, but also has a substantially beefier video card (GTX 660 / 2GB vs the MBP's 650GT / 1GB).
Listen, you can argue that you get other benefits with the MBP like higher maximum ram (but even thats not true, I can easily find laptops with 16GB maximum) or a better resolution, but the more you try to tack onto the MBP the higher that markup will be. I will lay down a wager that ANY configuration of MBP you can come up with, I can match for 1/2 the price (except for screen resolution). Please dont bother disputing this unless you have a link to the Mac store to back your statements up.
You're not adding in the value of Win7: youre simply assuming OSX is more valuable, which isnt true to everyone. Myself, I think OSX has useful features and is cool, but I greatly prefer Win7 for a number of reasons. If we were to go by the vendor's own pricing, however, Win7 would be substantially more valuable at $150 vs the $30 for OSX. Not that that indicates anything at all, really.
The argument that everything about OSX is better stems from ignorance. Ive seen my share of issues on OSX, and my share of crummy native apps (like Mac Mail, which throws up and dies if you have stuff in your outbox when the SMTP server is unavailable). Its a choice of preference and need; there are some apps which you would be stupid to buy on Windows because all the prime development happens for the Mac version; conversely if your life is SMB shares and Outlook youd probably be foolish to go spend all that money on a Mac because youre just going to be a second class citizen.
And apparently not everyone DOES know that apple gouges on hardware, as evidenced by the poster above, and the fact that my post with links got modded troll while a responder with no links or evidence gets modded informative by the Mac Defenders Brigade.
I generally agree; the thing is though, when friends come to me and ask "should I buy a mac", unless they really need that extra 1/2 inch shaved off the form factor, to my mind it would be bad of me to recommend paying twice as much for mostly the same specs.
I think Ive recommended a Mac once or twice, but for most people unless they really want OSX and a slightly slimmer laptop with all custom parts, its just not worth it. Spend 1/2 as much and upgrade twice as often, if you really want the extra juice.
The first system is very highly rated, and folks I know using that series of Lenovo are very happy with them.
What about it makes it a turd, pray tell? The lack of the apple logo, or unibody?
I note that you havent come up with any system that compares for less than double the price from the mac store. WHen i search for refurb'd 15" MBPs,
(here), the cheapest machine there is a
Refurbished MacBook Pro 2.2GHz Quad-core Intel i7
4GB (2 x 2GB) of 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM
500GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
Intel HD Graphics 3000 and AMD Radeon HD 6750M
All for $1350, all which is handly trounced by the linked, brand new, $799 laptop I linked.
Pretty sure Word isnt included on a new MBP. And im pretty sure you can get Windows Live writer for free if you really want a free word processor, or any of the other free ones out there.
As for burning software... its kind of been built into Windows since XP or earlier, with ISO burning built into Vista and above. Movie maker? Been free for ages. Photo software? Paint.net, which kicks the crap out of whatever is included with Mac.
And what spreadsheet software is included with OSX, pray tell?
Link me a comparable MBP for less than double plz.
Also, all of the MBPs come with 500GB drives (5400 rpm) by default.
Finally,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152337
GTFO. 1TB drive, 1920x1080, 12GB RAM, GTX670.
Comparable Macbook? ~$800 more, and cant match the RAM or video card.
But Im sure there will be reasons youll find to argue with even that.
... especially since the web site usually doesn't show the first post, so I have no idea what it's referencing.
Incidentally, when you say "normally $1600", it is very common for them to inflate the "normal price". That laptop would never sell for $1600, because at that point its competing against things like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152337
Which incidentally absolutely dominates any sub $2000 Macbook.
They won't have a dongle
It's $29. Buy them one and expense it.
If I didn't bring mine, or forgot it, or lost it. Then I'm pretty much fucked.
Same holds true for your laptop, no? If you didn't bring it to $office, or forgot it, or lost it, you're fucked. Chances are that this applies to your clothing too.
But I often don't take my laptop bag everywhere. Its 20lbs of cables, adapters, and tools.
And those cables, adapters, and tools are permanently attached to your "laptop bag", which I suspect is in fact more like a backpack or piece of luggage? Is there a gun to your head preventing you from having -- *gasp* -- a small/light case or sleeve that you carry your laptop around in when you don't need the kitchen sink? Like this one? http://shop.millscanvas.com/LaptopCarryall.html Or would that be too much like being a grownup?
Often, if I just need my laptop I just take my laptop. It even has a battery in it.
Lucky you.
Apple has launched the word's most advanced laptop today. Retina display, SSD, 7hours battery life, and so very thin. If I have to carry a 20lb laptop bag wherever I go for the laptop to connect to anything I'm likely to need, then why should I be excited that its super thin?
Unless you are compelled by some exotic religion to carry a bag made out of iridium, I highly doubt that a bag and Apple's adapter will add up to 20 lbs.
Hey, They could have shaved another 1/2mm off if they left out the keyboard too...
That is available for people whose needs it meets. It's called an iPad. People don't buy it then complain that it doesn't have a physical keyboard or a dozen 3.5" SAS disk bays.
Thinking about it further... they already redid the magsafe adapter for the new laptop...they should have integrated the ethernet connection there, and then had the ethernet jack in the power brick
Totally, because there have *never* been issues with running data millimeters away from power and transformers.
If you need a wired connection, having the psu plugged in isn't the end of the world.
I've often thought it would be handy if the power brick doubled as a usb hub as well, given the dearth of ports.
Most USB devices have downstream ports, and the need for multiple ports conflicts with your obsession with not plugging anything into the laptop.
I bet you have a mirror over your bed in an earthquake zone.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I find it odd that a midrange (between the Mini and the Pro models) system is being ignored by Apple. I've heard many complaints similar to yours. Heck, if they made a midrange I might buy one. They could probably pull it off in a form factor of a Mini x 3.
Maybe the new bosses will add a midrange to the lineup.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
These young whippersnappers; only 4 years? Pashaw, us geezers are working on 6 year old models, though I did have to replace my function key once (don't drop textbooks on your keyboard, kiddies).
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Thinner => Lighter / Smaller => More portable
Seems like a reasonable thing to want in a laptop. If I wanted a machine that did everything at any cost.. I'd get a desktop.
Is Apple playing to your esthetic wishes, along with your desire to own and drive a Lamborghini? I am not an airline traveler, so weight is secondary for me and my Samsung Laptop. Since I can't afford a Lamborghini, owning an APPLE device is the next best thing.
My laptop is not heavy, but because the case is in plastic, it is slightly heavier than an aluminum cased system.
I code, watch movies, browse the net, respond to Slashdot comments, and enjoy the fact that it does all that I ask of a conventional laptop. Why, if it is stolen, I wont cry. It was less than a quarter of the price of the APPLE unit. And I touchtype and I believe that I cannot type faster on my device or the Apple.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Just because floppy drives seem archaic NOW doesn't automatically make that a good move at the time. They were a year or two too early in dropping the floppy drive, without replacing it with a practical (this is the important part) alternative.
USB keys were expensive and low capacity(not that floppies were better on that front), and optical wasn't a drop in replacement.
It just felt like a whole lot of form over function.
(Note, I remember floppies fondly, but I'm not forgetting how horribly unreliable they where.)
That sounds more like a problem with Linux than with wireless.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
... APPLE device ...
... APPLE unit ...
Apple isn't an acronym.
Also, you seem to be assuming Apple users are the only ones who are willing to trade features for a smaller laptop. This is not the case.
So I guess that when your laptop is asleep there is part of it that is still awake and talking to the mothership.
1 - Does that mean we will have to put these in "airplane mode" when boarding a plane?
2 - Does it only connect over known networks, or is it going to be constantly touching every public wi-fi ap it finds as you drive around town?
3 - Does whatever OS is running during sleep have its own network stack that may be buggy or get out of date with regard to security certificates or DNS entries?
4 - Can other processes besides PowerNap run during sleep like this? Is there a ceiling on resource usage to prevent a runaway process from draining the battery?
I'm sure this is one of those things where details will emerge over time and with penetration testing, and I'm equally sure that paranoid folks like me will be able to turn it off. But I do worry that the average user won't have any idea that the changed nature of sleep and get into trouble because of it.
You probably just want to stop posting shit till you know what you are talking about. All the links to Apple that you provide are to the non-Retina display models.
There are two retina display models. ($2199 & $2799). Both come with 8GB memory, configurable to 16GB. Both come with SSD (i.e. flash drives) as standard. And the more expensive one has 512GB in that SSD.
http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/
In your earlier comment you wrote "It is about the availability of functionality when I need it.
Fair enough but the in the mid 90 the average user was unlikely to get access via ethernet.
I do know that when I started a job back in '03 they'd just bought a couple laptops that flat out didn't have RJ-45 ports and needed Ethernet PCMCIA cards.
I'm not going to deny that there were laptops available that didn't have them that late. The thing about PCs is that there are lots of options, including some terrible ones.
I'm just amused at the irony of seasoned PC people criticizing Apple for requiring dongles.
That's the difference right there "requiring".
If you want a high resolution OSX laptop you get no ethernet. With PC, for better or for worse, there were tons of options, if you "required a dongle" after 1997 its because you didn't buy the right laptop.
In 2012, if you want OSX you have to choose between a high resolution screen and ethernet. I have no issue with there being thin laptops with good screens and no ethernet for people who want that. But to not have a pro model with both features... even if its a bit thicker and heavier?
iMacs are not desktops -- they're laptops with smaller keyboards and larger screens. At least component-wise.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
It's $29. Buy them one and expense it.
Buy it where? Just step outside and the hot dog vendor has them? Or do I have to drive halfway accross town to the one place that has 2 left in stock... and that's this year. 2 years from now its a special order part from another state.
Totally, because there have *never* been issues with running data millimeters away from power and transformers.
Are you suggesting it can't work?
Because Lenovo already made an ac adapter with a usb hub. One of the usb ports could eveb be used to charge a usb device without being plugged into the laptop. Great little item.
Most USB devices have downstream ports, and the need for multiple ports conflicts with your obsession with not plugging anything into the laptop.
a) Most usb devices do not have ports.
b) I don't have an obsession with not plugging things into the laptop. I have an obsession with not plugging things into other things that then themselves plug into the laptop, and having to carry these other things around with me everywhere I go, when i should be able to just plug things directly into the laptop.
It's $29. Buy them one and expense it.
Buy it where? Just step outside and the hot dog vendor has them? Or do I have to drive halfway accross town to the one place that has 2 left in stock... and that's this year. 2 years from now its a special order part from another state.
What bad thing would happen if you ordered it from http://www.apple.com/ like I did this morning? I strongly suspect that Earth's axis would not shift were that to transpire. Mine will be in my
b) I don't have an obsession with not plugging things into the laptop. I have an obsession with not plugging things into other things that then themselves plug into the laptop, and having to carry these other things around with me everywhere I go, when i should be able to just plug things directly into the laptop.
Do you *really* have a need to use wired ethernet *everywhere* you go? And those places number in the thousands? When I leave the house I somehow remember to put on underwear and shoes, and if I need to take my laptop, I generally remember to take that too. The dongle attached to it will be no different. I generally take the power cable/brick too, which neither curves my spine nor loses the war for the Allies.
I remember the days of old, running 640x480 on a 21" NEC Multisync just so we can see 24bit colour in Windows 3.1.......
What bad thing would happen if you ordered it from http://www.apple.com/ like I did this morning?
If I forgot it or misplaced it it would be a significant inconvenience. If I show up at a tradeshow, it will be over before the replacement dongle arrives.
The last time something like that happened to a coworker -- where he forgot some stupid video adapter dongle (mini-dvi is a pretty useless port to have on a laptop too), he ended up buying a new laptop, because at least he could get THAT the same afternoon, rather than wait 2 days for some special order rinky-dink dongle.
Do you *really* have a need to use wired ethernet *everywhere* you go?
No. If it was everywhere it would actually be easier to remember, albeit even stupider to have to carry around. But I move from client office to client office. Some have wifi, some don't. Sometimes the wifi is a more isolated "guest" network and I need wired to reach servers etc.
Also "Internet Sharing" in OSX works really well. I often make my macbook pro into an access point for other wifi devices. And I regularly go the other way too... to connect a wired desktop to the mac via ethernet to get it on the wifi.
I also use ethernet for large transfers and backups. Sure it works over wifi, but it works a LOT faster over the gigabit switch.
So while I don't use ethernet on my laptop every day, I do use it regularly.
When I leave the house I somehow remember to put on underwear and shoes, and if I need to take my laptop, I generally remember to take that too.
I love this silly argument that you've made a couple times now. You are saying that because its easy to remember to put shoes on before you go somewhere its therefore easy to remember some small occasionally used dongle that one may or may not need. Do you REALLY think that this is a valid line of reasoning?
I'm sure you've met countless people who have forgotten to bring something or other somewhere. Now compare that with how often someone has shown up naked having forgotten to get dressed.
Maybe just maybe some things are much easier to remember than other things.
and if I need to take my laptop, I generally remember to take that too. The dongle attached to it will be no different.
Why would the dongle be attached to it when i'm packing up to leave? What if I haven't used it for 3 days and its still dangling off the ethernet cable at the office? Out of sight. Out of mind. Unlike the laptop itself... or my shoes.
Don't bother pretending they are the same. They aren't.
Thinking about it further... they already redid the magsafe adapter for the new laptop...they should have integrated the ethernet connection there, and then had the ethernet jack in the power brick.
But then they wouldn't be able to sell you a $30 dongle that cost all of $2 to make.
The wired connection you use at the hotel is by no means secure.
Not, it's not. That dongle negotiates at most a 100 Mbps connection, which makes sense as it's USB 2.0 which maxes at 480 Mbps. The Thunderbolt dongle can handle a gigabit connection.
Yes, sometimes you just have to use FAX. But it doesn't have to be on your phone. Consider a service such as efax.com or faxzero.com.
In computers you can always get half the functionality for 1/4 the price.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
Oh I like that comment. I like it a lot. I may well steal it. erm... I mean quote you. :-)
Well said. My first really portable laptop had an 'external optical drive'. I had the laptop for about 5 years, and I plugged it in about 15 times. Old tech.
Although I must admit, when the wifi goes down, it has been great to just plug a cable in, to get access to the internet again to work out how to fix your wifi!
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
I hadn't seen this before. Best thing done at Microsoft in a while. I laughed pretty much continuously.
People can find it unfunny if they want, but the phrase "PR disaster" just shows how unwilling people are to see anything the slightest bit different.
--
Actually, it looks like you can't get the optical drive in any of them...