Graphing the Evolution of Smaller & Lighter Mac Laptops

Jason Snell, writing on the Six Colors blog:

The trend in laptop design, since the very beginning, has been toward lighter and thinner laptops. In 2001 Steve Jobs boasted about the mind-blowing one-inch thickness of the Titanium PowerBook G4; 19 years later the average Mac laptop is half that thickness.

But it’s one thing to know that laptops trend toward thinness and lightness. It’s another to see a chart that lets you visualize it. So I dug through the specs of past Mac systems at EveryMac.comand averaged the weight and thickness of the Mac laptop product line for every year since the first Mac laptop, the hilariously heavy Mac Portable, hit the scene.

Fascinating graphs. The dive in 2008 in both the graphs is my favorite.

May 30, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Shahid Kamal Ahmad has a Few Things to Say about his MacBook Pro

Shahid Kamal Ahmad — best known for his work at Sony’s PlayStation division, has a few words to say about his MacBook Pro in his post titled, “MacBook Pro? No“.

Let me count the way my latest MacBook Pro is not suitable for professional use, but before I do that, you should know that I’ve been buying and recommending Macs since 2001. I’ve spent a fortune on them. I love them, but I only like my latest MacBook Pro (a 2016 model with the Radeon Pro 460). I write this with a heavy heart and a malfunctioning keyboard.  This is a story about unrequited hardware love.

and

You know that a design has failed when you’re forced into using it. The Touch Bar is Apple’s Clippy. An embarrassment.

I currently use a Mid-2011 iMac as my desktop computer and a Mid-2013 MacBook Air as my notebook. Both these Macs are now old, slow and I’m looking to replace them with better & faster Macs. The iMac will probably be replaced by a 27-inch 5K iMac, largely because I cannot afford the iMac Pro at ₹4,15,000 here in India. The MacBook Air on the other hand, or just in general for that matter, won’t be replaced with another notebook — at least in the near future, for one very simple reason.

Apple does not currently make a better & faster notebook computer.

The current MacBook Pro lineup raises more questions than it solves, and Shahid outlines many of them perfectly. I’d have loved to replace both my Macs with a single MacBook Pro machine, but today’s lineup is anything but a “Pro”.

There are so many incredible things that Apple brought to the table in the past years, but decided to throw them away for no good reason.

  • I want a MacBook Pro that’s actually powerful.
  • I want a MacBook Pro with a keyboard keys that doesn’t stop working in a few months.
  • I want a MacBook Pro with a decent number of ports
  • I want a MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar — or at least one where the Touch Bar doesn’t take away functionality. Move it to the bottom of the screen if you want to.
  • I want a MacBook Pro where I can upgrade the default RAM. Apple doesn’t offer BTO options in India.
  • I want a charger with an indicator light at the end to tell me the charging status.
  • Heck, I want a charger that ships with a goddamn cable.

I absolutely loved my 2008-era 15-inch MacBook Pro and I’d love to use a MacBook Pro as my primary machine, but as it stands today, I just can’t.

January 11, 2018 ✚ Permalink

App Store Sees Record-Breaking Numbers

Apple has announced that its App Store had a fantastic run in 2017, especially during the holiday season leading up to the new year.

App Store customers around the world made apps and games a bigger part of their holiday season in 2017 than ever before, culminating in $300 million in purchases made on New Year’s Day 2018. During the week starting on Christmas Eve, a record number of customers made purchases or downloaded apps from the App Store, spending over $890 million in that seven-day period.

Apple says that it paid out $26.5 Billion to iOS developers, an increase of over 30 percent compared to 2016. Since its launch in 2008, the App Store has made $86 Billion for iOS developers around the world.

The new App Store introduced in iOS 11 got a lot of things right, and Apple knocked it out of the park with their approach. I’m loving the curation on the US App Store — I just wish I had landed that App Store Editor job I had applied for at Apple India.

January 5, 2018 ✚ Permalink

A Look at What the T2 Chip Does in the iMac Pro

The new iMac Pro that went on sale last month includes a new custom chip built by Apple that the company is calling the T2. Jason Snell, writing for Macworld, has an interesting look at all the various functions and responsibilities that the custom T2 Chip handles in the iMac Pro.

[…] this new Mac is completely different from all past Mac models.

The iMac Pro may be an outlier today, but in the future we’ll probably look back on it as the start of a new era for the Mac, all because of the Apple-built T2 chip it carries inside.

January 4, 2018 ✚ Permalink

Major zero-day exploit found in iOS & OS X

The security flaw itself sounds scary, but the following bit from the article is far more scarier

The Register says the team reported the flaws to Apple in October of last year. At that time, Apple said that it understood the seriousness of the flaws and asked the researchers to give it six months to address them before the exploit was made public. In February, Apple requested an advance copy of the paper, yet the flaws remain present in the latest versions of both operating systems

June 17, 2015 ✚ Permalink

New 2014 Mac Mini Has Soldered RAM, Not User Replaceable

Juli Clover writing on Mac Rumors:

Many have speculated that the Mac mini also includes soldered RAM, which has now been confirmed by Macminicolo’s Brian Stucki. According to Stucki, the RAM in the Mac mini is “not user accessible,” which means those who purchase Mac minis are limited to 16GB of RAM that must be upgraded when purchasing the machine from Apple.

All three Mac mini models can be upgraded to a maximum of 16GB of RAM, with the upgrade priced at $300 for the base model and $200 for the mid and high-end models.

The Mac mini was not only an excellent choice as an entry-level desktop Mac, but it also worked as a great upgrade-later machine. I’ve recommended the Mac mini to many of my friends who bought it as their first Mac and went on to upgrade the RAM & HDD after purchase.

Now, not only can you not do any upgrades after purchase, but you can’t even order configurable options in India, so you’re stuck with the three standard models as your choices.

October 18, 2014 ✚ Permalink

Two Weeks with the Vu SuperMac TV

Back in January, I wrote about the Vu SuperMac TV by Vu Technologies. The company claims it to be the first “Apple based TV” in the world and rightly so — it’s a TV with an actual Mac mini inside it. When you power it on, the Mac boots into OS X and is available as one of the sources. You can use it as a standard Mac. Technically, it’s a giant screen attached to a Mac mini. However, Vu Technologies actually bundle and integrate the insides of the Mac mini into the back of the TV, so the TV is as slim as it can be.

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May 30, 2014 ✚ Permalink

Reeder 2 for Mac Public Beta

Silvio has just made the public beta of Reeder 2 for Mac available on the website. Reeder was the reigning RSS app for Mac a few years ago and I used to love the app, but lack of updates or any communication from him meant that people started moving onto other apps. Right now, I’m very content with ReadKit for Mac, but looking at this beta, I’m definitely intrigued.

April 12, 2014 ✚ Permalink