When you actually can remove the drive and place it in another machine, there is no OS that supports it better than OSX. I've done it many times, and you never have to do anything, all the drivers are there, and it always works perfectly.
Of course, you can't do that with the new macbooks, and it feels kinda like we had something taken away from us. But consider, the only reason that hard-disks were separate components was that they were large physical objects with moving parts, inside sealed containers. Flash storage isn't like that at all, and so it doesn't make any kind of engineering sense to continue to use a removable container for your storage. You can more closely match the performance of the flash storage, with the expectations of the rest of the hardware - and of course the whole thing gets cheaper. Not that you'd notice with the price of the new macbooks, but they really are in a class of their own when it comes to their actual physical quality.
Laptops haven't had replaceable graphics cards for a long time - and yes I'm sure you can get some giant Dell Alienware thing that's only barely portable that contradicts me - and maybe this is the future for all portable devices? No-one gets all irritated about their phones not having upgradable RAM.... Ok, ok, people do, but you know what I mean.
Looks like I'm slightly wrong. Some technology companies do make things in the U.S, although it's likely that the components are made overseas, who really knows?
You are aware that literally every piece of technology manufactured today is made overseas, right?
The decision to do this was made by consumers - if consumers refused to buy products made in China, even though those products are cheaper, then this would not have occurred. What kind of phone to you own? Where do you think it was made? How about your TV, your stereo, your home router, etc,etc?
I don't like non-upgradable storage, but not for the reason you suggest. These days I just assume that all the data in the laptop itself is effectively temporary, and I use both Time Machine, and Dropbox to store everything on the machine. Well, I only put the home folder in Dropbox, but you get the idea.
You're right that if your mainboard fails, your data is safe. But that's probably a fairly rare situation, whereas laptop lost / stolen / got all wet / HDD dies, are all far more likely, and you'll be wanting separate backups in all those cases.
If you don't back up your data, then you don't care about it. The day when you wish you had backed it all up, will surely come.
The chance of something failing that is soldered in...
...is quite low. Lower than the change of something that's connected via a header, anyway. Not that I'm into not being able to upgrade my RAM & HD, but the only thing that's ever failed in my macbook pro was the SATA cable.
States aren't people. People are people. If there are fewer people in a state, why should their vote be magnified to compensate?
The other issue with the college, which used to be a democratic institution in its own right, that was voted for, rather than a weird pass-through system - is that it erases large victories in one state, and puts them on an equal footing to tiny victories in another. Win by one vote in a state, and you get all the college votes. Win by an immense landslide - same number of votes.
I don't understand this point of view at all. Is your suggestion that people voted for Trump, and felt safe in the knowledge that even though almost all his policies are deplorable, it's ok because he won't be able to action them? Even though he gets to appoint the supreme court guy?
Not everybody who's a republican is a bigoted monster
This is because Trump vs. Clinton isn't really about Republican vs. Democrat. Trump isn't a Republican, any more than Clinton is left-wing. He's a demagogue, a mad, egotistical, racist, bigoted, unprincipled and all-round dangerous human being.
Trump's policies are precisely the sort of thing that should be protested against. And if he tries to push through even half of what he's promised, you can look forwards to those protests getting nasty. Do you think trying to deport every single Illegal immigrant from your great country will pass off without protest?
Do you see reactions like that when Obama wins?
I'm pretty sure that there were reactions like that when Obama won. They didn't last long, but he didn't try to build a wall in Mexico. When (if?) Trump tries to do that, things might start to get real, really fast.
Roe vs. Wade... it's NOT going to happen.
Trump has publicly stated that he would punish women who get an abortion. So, either he's simply making things up as he goes along, or he has no principles, or he intends to make that a reality. None of those possibilities are terribly reassuring.
The world is better, and simpler, if we can all agree on the units for measurement. The US is the last large hold-out on the old imperial measurements, and it should just move on.
You're right that imperial units normally have more factors, but that's pretty much irrelevant now. As mentioned below, 8 is a factor of a thousand, so your example fails for liters. A twelfth of a mile is six hundred and sixty feet, but it doesn't divide evenly if you need your answers in feet (Imperial feet! Not US Survery feet, but that's a whole other story!) and who cares anyway? In any case, there are factors that cause headaches with imperial too. A seventh of a foot! An ninth of a foot!
It's a very interesting argument. There are, for example, three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle, some factors of which are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12. But you still can't divide it evenly by 7, and in any case, it's not at all clear that these properties matter at all. Besides which, the proper measure for the magnitude of an angle is radians, and if we wish to express this divided into parts, we just write the fraction out in full, and pronounce it pi-over-seven, or whatever.
It's interesting. I have older magsafe connectors that haven't frayed, and newer ones that have. On the ones that have, they are failing along the length of the cable too, and splitting in various spots. It seems to me that it's not strain relief that's missing so much, but that the material the lead is made from has changed.
I totally agree that leaving out a USB adapter is incredibly stingy.
Well, that seems pretty annoying. I will say though then when I run Logic to record audio, I don't experience any problems with fan noise, and updating Xcode doesn't seem to cause a problem either. But on the other hand, I don't have one of those super-thin ones, so maybe that's the reason?
Seconded. There's an interesting feature in an application called BetterTouchTool that shows you what the trackpad picks up. It can easily tell the difference between a three-finger drag (for example), and the palm of your hand. It's impressive. Added to which you can even have the thing learn new gestures.
Lots of fair points, to which the following counterpoints are possible.
The magsafe was great, and has saved my laptop countless times, but they don't last very well, and often end up "not charging" for whatever reason. I could probably clean the contacts with steel wool, but I'm awfully afraid of leaving tiny bits of metal stuck to those magnets...
USB-C is very much technically superior to any other port. Each port can do anything, no need to figure out where to plug a device in, just shove it in one of the holes. I'm even going to assume that you can charge the device from any of those ports (I can't find information the confirms or denies this). At this point, USB is ubiqutous, but it's also shit. It's impossible to figure out which way around it goes in first try, except you normally find out it was right first time, meaning you need three shots to get the bloody things plugged in. Today we're stuck with adaptors, in the future USB-C will be everywhere. Apple devices have always looked to the future.
My macbook pro has 8Gig in it, and no matter how hard I try, it never feels slow. With even faster SSD, time spent paging in and out of that RAM becomes borderline negligible. It does seem a little bit stingy, but I'd be very interested in how much difference that additional 8Gig might make. And hey, maybe one day they'll make USB-C RAM...:)
The third problem is the lack of an included 3-prong extension cable
That sucks. I'm not going to attempt to defend it. You can use a regular radio-style cord still though, right?
I didn't say that the macbook case doesn't dent. It's made of metal, and it does if you hit it hard enough. However, it doesn't break, and it can stand up to much more abuse than plastic-bodies machines can. The thinkpad is a pretty sturdy machine, but it's trackpad does suck compared to the macbooks.
However, you do have some fair points about xcode. I don't have a 4:3 monitor, but I do use BetterTouchTool to help me resize windows to full screen by dragging them to the top of the display. You should give that a try, if you haven't already. Double-clicking on a file opening in a window is pretty annoying, I agree, but I was talking about OSX's APIs, and the design and architecture of the system. Xcode is the best free IDE that I know of, but it's no Visual Studio. Although, interface builder is fairly great - provided you don't mind dragging and dropping alot.
If it's a macbook pro with an HDD, put a third-party SSD in it today. Buy a cheap USB to SATA adaptor, use "Carbon Copy Cloner" to copy your entire system into the SSD (this takes several hours, obviously, but it works perfectly), swap the drives over, and you're done. Mine has a 1TB SSD in it, and there's no greater or more dramatic upgrade possible for any computer. You won't regret it.
Why is that trackpad offset to the left of the machine? I see this alot on Windows laptops. What's up with it? It just makes no sense whatsoever.
Anyway. The trackpad looks shit. It is multitouch? Can I scroll any window using a two finger gesture even if that window doesn't currently have focus? Can I drag with three fingers? Show the desktop with four? Right click with a (silent) two finger tap?.
No. Of course not. Because even if that trackpad did support multi-touch properly, Windows itself doesn't, and neither does Linux, making the support pointless.
It's 2016. Linux people. Make something that's not a UI disaster area. And Windows people... maybe just give up.
metal case versus plastic case, fans that reduce noise, these are all cheap gimmicks
They're not cheap, and they're not gimmicks. Having a quiet machine matters if you're using it to record music for instance. Having a metal case significantly improves heat dissipation, again reducing noise, and is also far more robust. Macbook's machined aluminium cases do not break.
But the real point of difference that macs have is that they run an entirely different operation system to everyone else. One that's most certainly not free to build, and is in my opinion light-years ahead of what either Linux of Windows have to offer. And that's not just from the point of view of the end-user either, under the hood OSX has a far, far better designed API then any competitor. Writing code to interact with the system is a joy. Not having to hunt down libraries to perform basic tasks like open image files, decode audio and video, connect to network services, etcetera etcetera, makes a developers life so much easier. Support for animation of UI elements makes building usable interfaces almost trivial.
I know you probably don't like UI animation, and believe it to be a "cheap" gimmick. But it's certainly not cheap, building those APIs cost time and money, and there's no question that even very subtle and fast animations help enormously with usability.
You don't want to pay for it. That's completely fine. Personally I'd be happier with removable and upgradable components, but on the other hand, my existing macbook pro is pretty heavy....
Humans have bodies, a physical existence in the world. That physical existence has needs, such as food and water. We also need other things that you might identify as un-necassary, such as friendships, creative outlets, self-expression, talking, listening, tasting, being accepted for who we are, being forgiven our wrongdoings if we make amends, love, time to ourselves, time with others, etcetera etcetera. None of these things are needs. it's quite possible to be alive, and never experience any of those things. But a poor existence it would be. Sex is like those things, but it's even more. it's also a biological imperative, something our bodies are very much programmed to want very much indeed.
Telling young people to just not do it will fail. Coupling that with also not telling them how to do it safely, is, and always has been, demonstrably disastrous.
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When you actually can remove the drive and place it in another machine, there is no OS that supports it better than OSX. I've done it many times, and you never have to do anything, all the drivers are there, and it always works perfectly.
Of course, you can't do that with the new macbooks, and it feels kinda like we had something taken away from us. But consider, the only reason that hard-disks were separate components was that they were large physical objects with moving parts, inside sealed containers. Flash storage isn't like that at all, and so it doesn't make any kind of engineering sense to continue to use a removable container for your storage. You can more closely match the performance of the flash storage, with the expectations of the rest of the hardware - and of course the whole thing gets cheaper. Not that you'd notice with the price of the new macbooks, but they really are in a class of their own when it comes to their actual physical quality.
Laptops haven't had replaceable graphics cards for a long time - and yes I'm sure you can get some giant Dell Alienware thing that's only barely portable that contradicts me - and maybe this is the future for all portable devices? No-one gets all irritated about their phones not having upgradable RAM.... Ok, ok, people do, but you know what I mean.
Looks like I'm slightly wrong. Some technology companies do make things in the U.S, although it's likely that the components are made overseas, who really knows?
Who is manufacturing in America?. Note that there aren't any consumer electronics manufacturers on the list.
You are aware that literally every piece of technology manufactured today is made overseas, right?
The decision to do this was made by consumers - if consumers refused to buy products made in China, even though those products are cheaper, then this would not have occurred. What kind of phone to you own? Where do you think it was made? How about your TV, your stereo, your home router, etc ,etc?
I don't like non-upgradable storage, but not for the reason you suggest. These days I just assume that all the data in the laptop itself is effectively temporary, and I use both Time Machine, and Dropbox to store everything on the machine. Well, I only put the home folder in Dropbox, but you get the idea.
You're right that if your mainboard fails, your data is safe. But that's probably a fairly rare situation, whereas laptop lost / stolen / got all wet / HDD dies, are all far more likely, and you'll be wanting separate backups in all those cases.
If you don't back up your data, then you don't care about it. The day when you wish you had backed it all up, will surely come.
Decades. I'm from the future.
The chance of something failing that is soldered in...
...is quite low. Lower than the change of something that's connected via a header, anyway. Not that I'm into not being able to upgrade my RAM & HD, but the only thing that's ever failed in my macbook pro was the SATA cable.
States aren't people. People are people. If there are fewer people in a state, why should their vote be magnified to compensate?
The other issue with the college, which used to be a democratic institution in its own right, that was voted for, rather than a weird pass-through system - is that it erases large victories in one state, and puts them on an equal footing to tiny victories in another. Win by one vote in a state, and you get all the college votes. Win by an immense landslide - same number of votes.
I don't understand this point of view at all. Is your suggestion that people voted for Trump, and felt safe in the knowledge that even though almost all his policies are deplorable, it's ok because he won't be able to action them? Even though he gets to appoint the supreme court guy?
Not everybody who's a republican is a bigoted monster
Maybe not. But they voted for one.
This is because Trump vs. Clinton isn't really about Republican vs. Democrat. Trump isn't a Republican, any more than Clinton is left-wing. He's a demagogue, a mad, egotistical, racist, bigoted, unprincipled and all-round dangerous human being.
Trump's policies are precisely the sort of thing that should be protested against. And if he tries to push through even half of what he's promised, you can look forwards to those protests getting nasty. Do you think trying to deport every single Illegal immigrant from your great country will pass off without protest?
Do you see reactions like that when Obama wins?
I'm pretty sure that there were reactions like that when Obama won. They didn't last long, but he didn't try to build a wall in Mexico. When (if?) Trump tries to do that, things might start to get real, really fast.
Roe vs. Wade ... it's NOT going to happen.
Trump has publicly stated that he would punish women who get an abortion. So, either he's simply making things up as he goes along, or he has no principles, or he intends to make that a reality. None of those possibilities are terribly reassuring.
The world is better, and simpler, if we can all agree on the units for measurement. The US is the last large hold-out on the old imperial measurements, and it should just move on.
You're right that imperial units normally have more factors, but that's pretty much irrelevant now. As mentioned below, 8 is a factor of a thousand, so your example fails for liters. A twelfth of a mile is six hundred and sixty feet, but it doesn't divide evenly if you need your answers in feet (Imperial feet! Not US Survery feet, but that's a whole other story!) and who cares anyway? In any case, there are factors that cause headaches with imperial too. A seventh of a foot! An ninth of a foot!
It's a very interesting argument. There are, for example, three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle, some factors of which are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12. But you still can't divide it evenly by 7, and in any case, it's not at all clear that these properties matter at all. Besides which, the proper measure for the magnitude of an angle is radians, and if we wish to express this divided into parts, we just write the fraction out in full, and pronounce it pi-over-seven, or whatever.
Perhaps he accidentally tried to eat it.
It's interesting. I have older magsafe connectors that haven't frayed, and newer ones that have. On the ones that have, they are failing along the length of the cable too, and splitting in various spots. It seems to me that it's not strain relief that's missing so much, but that the material the lead is made from has changed.
I totally agree that leaving out a USB adapter is incredibly stingy.
Well, that seems pretty annoying. I will say though then when I run Logic to record audio, I don't experience any problems with fan noise, and updating Xcode doesn't seem to cause a problem either. But on the other hand, I don't have one of those super-thin ones, so maybe that's the reason?
Have you considered the possibility that you're running your mouth off without a single fucking clue what you're talking about
Well.. not until now... no...
That's awesome. I'm glad Windows caught up finally. How about Linux, was I at least right about that part?
Seconded. There's an interesting feature in an application called BetterTouchTool that shows you what the trackpad picks up. It can easily tell the difference between a three-finger drag (for example), and the palm of your hand. It's impressive. Added to which you can even have the thing learn new gestures.
Lots of fair points, to which the following counterpoints are possible.
The magsafe was great, and has saved my laptop countless times, but they don't last very well, and often end up "not charging" for whatever reason. I could probably clean the contacts with steel wool, but I'm awfully afraid of leaving tiny bits of metal stuck to those magnets...
USB-C is very much technically superior to any other port. Each port can do anything, no need to figure out where to plug a device in, just shove it in one of the holes. I'm even going to assume that you can charge the device from any of those ports (I can't find information the confirms or denies this). At this point, USB is ubiqutous, but it's also shit. It's impossible to figure out which way around it goes in first try, except you normally find out it was right first time, meaning you need three shots to get the bloody things plugged in. Today we're stuck with adaptors, in the future USB-C will be everywhere. Apple devices have always looked to the future.
My macbook pro has 8Gig in it, and no matter how hard I try, it never feels slow. With even faster SSD, time spent paging in and out of that RAM becomes borderline negligible. It does seem a little bit stingy, but I'd be very interested in how much difference that additional 8Gig might make. And hey, maybe one day they'll make USB-C RAM... :)
The third problem is the lack of an included 3-prong extension cable
That sucks. I'm not going to attempt to defend it. You can use a regular radio-style cord still though, right?
I bet you've never used it though.
You could plug this in. You'll need a USB-C to USB adapter though, but you'll get tactile feedback.
That's a good one. Read about them here. They not obscure when designing for print.
Unless, you know, you'd like to make any money by doing professional work. In which case, the cost of the Adobe suite is almost negligible.
I didn't say that the macbook case doesn't dent. It's made of metal, and it does if you hit it hard enough. However, it doesn't break, and it can stand up to much more abuse than plastic-bodies machines can. The thinkpad is a pretty sturdy machine, but it's trackpad does suck compared to the macbooks.
However, you do have some fair points about xcode. I don't have a 4:3 monitor, but I do use BetterTouchTool to help me resize windows to full screen by dragging them to the top of the display. You should give that a try, if you haven't already. Double-clicking on a file opening in a window is pretty annoying, I agree, but I was talking about OSX's APIs, and the design and architecture of the system. Xcode is the best free IDE that I know of, but it's no Visual Studio. Although, interface builder is fairly great - provided you don't mind dragging and dropping alot.
disk now seems glacial compared to an SSD
If it's a macbook pro with an HDD, put a third-party SSD in it today. Buy a cheap USB to SATA adaptor, use "Carbon Copy Cloner" to copy your entire system into the SSD (this takes several hours, obviously, but it works perfectly), swap the drives over, and you're done. Mine has a 1TB SSD in it, and there's no greater or more dramatic upgrade possible for any computer. You won't regret it.
Why is that trackpad offset to the left of the machine? I see this alot on Windows laptops. What's up with it? It just makes no sense whatsoever.
Anyway. The trackpad looks shit. It is multitouch? Can I scroll any window using a two finger gesture even if that window doesn't currently have focus? Can I drag with three fingers? Show the desktop with four? Right click with a (silent) two finger tap?.
No. Of course not. Because even if that trackpad did support multi-touch properly, Windows itself doesn't, and neither does Linux, making the support pointless.
It's 2016. Linux people. Make something that's not a UI disaster area. And Windows people... maybe just give up.
metal case versus plastic case, fans that reduce noise, these are all cheap gimmicks
They're not cheap, and they're not gimmicks. Having a quiet machine matters if you're using it to record music for instance. Having a metal case significantly improves heat dissipation, again reducing noise, and is also far more robust. Macbook's machined aluminium cases do not break.
But the real point of difference that macs have is that they run an entirely different operation system to everyone else. One that's most certainly not free to build, and is in my opinion light-years ahead of what either Linux of Windows have to offer. And that's not just from the point of view of the end-user either, under the hood OSX has a far, far better designed API then any competitor. Writing code to interact with the system is a joy. Not having to hunt down libraries to perform basic tasks like open image files, decode audio and video, connect to network services, etcetera etcetera, makes a developers life so much easier. Support for animation of UI elements makes building usable interfaces almost trivial.
I know you probably don't like UI animation, and believe it to be a "cheap" gimmick. But it's certainly not cheap, building those APIs cost time and money, and there's no question that even very subtle and fast animations help enormously with usability.
You don't want to pay for it. That's completely fine. Personally I'd be happier with removable and upgradable components, but on the other hand, my existing macbook pro is pretty heavy....
Humans have bodies, a physical existence in the world. That physical existence has needs, such as food and water. We also need other things that you might identify as un-necassary, such as friendships, creative outlets, self-expression, talking, listening, tasting, being accepted for who we are, being forgiven our wrongdoings if we make amends, love, time to ourselves, time with others, etcetera etcetera. None of these things are needs. it's quite possible to be alive, and never experience any of those things. But a poor existence it would be. Sex is like those things, but it's even more. it's also a biological imperative, something our bodies are very much programmed to want very much indeed.
Telling young people to just not do it will fail. Coupling that with also not telling them how to do it safely, is, and always has been, demonstrably disastrous.