Mac

The new MacBook Pro is kind of great for hackers

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Adam Geitgey:

I’m not here to change your mind about the MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s probably too expensive and more RAM is better than less RAM. But everyone posting complaints without actually using a MBP for a few weeks is missing out on all the clever things you can do because it is built on USB-C. Over the past week or two with a new MacBook Pro (15in, 2.9ghz, TouchBar), I’ve been constantly surprised with how USB-C makes new things possible. It’s a kind of a hacker’s dream.

Great article. Part of it focuses on the fact that the author’s phone is a Google Pixel and has a USB-C port, so he can use a single charger to charge his phone and his Mac. But there’s more to the piece than that.

For example:

If you get any of the new USB-C compatible monitors (pretty much every vendor has at least one now), you only need to plug one single cable into your MBP.

You can then plug all your other devices into your monitor and everything flows over one USB-C to your laptop — power, video, data and even sound. Your monitor is now your docking station and breakout box!

I’m wondering if USB-C to lightning cable will be all you need to plug your phone and your Mac into the same charger. Next best thing to a USB-C port on your iPhone.

Best Mac and iPhone repair tools

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This is a pretty solid article. Some excellent holiday gift ideas for the techie on your list.

Personally, I swear by this iFixit Tool kit. I’ve owned it for years, done tons of Mac/iPhone and non-Apple repairs with it and it’s never let me down.

Two Touch Bar apps that let you switch between and launch apps

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Tim Hardwick, Mac Rumors:

One limitation of the Touch Bar discovered by TouchSwitcher’s developer is that only one non-system control can be displayed in the right-hand strip, meaning other Apple apps compete for the same space.

Both apps are pushing the boundaries a bit, but I applaud the Touch Bar experimentation.

Looking forward to Touch Bar becoming the standard across the entire Mac product line. How about an external Touch Bar keyboard?

Jason Snell: All the Ways I Automate

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Jason Snell, writing for iMore:

Scripting and automation have been in the conversation lately, owing to Apple’s reported disbanding of the macOS team responsible for them and the departure of scripting advocate Sal Soghoian from the company last month.

They sounds like arcane, abstract concepts. And to be sure, scripting and automation are the sort of feature that’s used by more like 5% of users rather than 50%. But in pondering Apple’s possible shift in automation strategy, I began to consider all the ways I use it in my working life.

It’s amazing how many opportunities there are to add automation to your day-to-day workflow. I use Keyboard Maestro for most of my automation, typically creating a hot key that launches an application, or wrapping a specific sequence of clicks/drags/typing into a macro I can launch with a single hot key.

Read the article, even if you don’t think about automation. The post is well written, relatively short, and does a great job conveying the value of automation.

Ars Technica MacBook Pro Touch Bar review

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One of the best technical MacBook Pro Touch Bar reviews I’ve yet read. Lots of detail, pictures, along with the Touch Bar video embedded in the main post.

Nice job by Andrew Cunningham. Lots of little details, especially useful if you are comparing 13″ and 15″ or Touch Bar, non-Touch Bar models.

John Gruber’s take on the new MacBook Pro and the overall state of the Mac

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This is a bit of a long post, too multi-faceted to do it justice with a few call outs. But this one paragraph resonates big time:

To me, an iPad in notebook mode — connected to a keyboard cover — is so much less nice than a real notebook. And the difference is more stark when compared to a great notebook, like these MacBook Pros. There are advantages to the tablet form factor, but no tablet will ever be as nice as a notebook as these MacBook Pros. I also prefer MacOS over iOS for, well, “doing work”. I think I’m more productive on a Mac than I am on an iPad. I can’t prove it, but even if I’m wrong, the fact that I feel like it’s true matters. I always feel slightly hamstrung working on an iPad. I never do on a Mac (at least once I’ve got it configured with all the apps and little shortcuts, scripts, and utilities I use).

I love the idea of the Touch Bar, happy to have more functionality on my Mac. But the key element that keeps me on my Mac is the idea of a pointer I can leave in place. I move my mouse cursor to a spot and it stays there, marking time, at that exact same location, until I move it. Selecting and manipulating, copying and pasting text is another element I find superior in macOS.

I love my iPhone and iPad, use both every day, but for creating content, nothing compares to sitting down at my Mac.

MacBook Pro 13″ Touch Bar teardown

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This is one of my favorite iFixit teardowns. More humor, and more surprises (like step 13, where we learn something interesting about the speaker grills, no doubt a basic difference between the 13″ and 15″ models).

Phil Schiller on the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar

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Steven Levy, Editor of Backchannel:

Fortunately, I do not have to make guesses at what’s going on in Apple’s mind. Perhaps motivated by the grumbling in rainbow-fruit land, Apple’s SVP of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller came to the phone last week to decode the company’s motivations, and stridently counter the cavils of the doubters.

And, from Phil Schiller:

“If we were to do Multi-Touch on the screen of the notebook, that wouldn’t be enough — then the desktop wouldn’t work that way.” And touch on the desktop, he says, would be a disaster. “Can you imagine a 27-inch iMac where you have to reach over the air to try to touch and do things? That becomes absurd.” He also explains that such a move would mean totally redesigning the menu bar for fingers, in a way that would ruin the experience for those using pointer devices like the touch or mouse. “You can’t optimize for both,” he says. “It’s the lowest common denominator thinking.”

And:

“This notebook design has been with us for 25 years and that fills a need for many people,” he says. “Having an interactive place where your hands are down on the keyboard is celebrating what makes a notebook a great notebook.”

And:

Another key variable is whether web services will be able make use of the bar. Schiller says only, “There is opportunity for that.” As for now, the Touch Bar pushes you to use Apple’s own browser, Safari. Writing this review now on the Medium online platform, I get word suggestions when using Safari, but not on Chrome.

And, to sum up, from Steven:

I am still not totally convinced that this innovation — and yes, I will call it that — is really transformative, and not just a cool way to save a few seconds here and there.

Lots more to this, a great read.

Jason Snell’s MacBook Pro with Touch Bar review

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[VIDEO]: Jason Snell, Six Colors:

To balance out the design, the Touch Bar’s OLED screen doesn’t extend all the way to the left edge of the glass. As a result, the Touch Bar always appears inset from the rest of the keyboard. It’s a bit weird. Fortunately, it appears that touch sensitivity extends a bit past the end of the display itself—when I tapped the corner of the Touch Bar, reflexively reaching for the Escape key, my touch would still trigger that key—even though my finger wasn’t actually touching the part of the Touch Bar displaying the virtual Escape key.

(It took me a few days to get used to the presence of the Touch Bar. Until then, I found that my pinky would slide off the carat key and make contact with the Touch Bar, triggering the virtual Escape key. I’ve trained myself not to let my finger stray up into the Touch Bar accidentally, but it was an adaptation.)

And:

The Touch Bar is an animated interface through and through. Items don’t just fade in and out, but also slide smoothly back and forth. The arrow pointing from the Touch Bar to the Touch ID sensor during a request for an unlock grows and shrinks, practically begging you to put your finger down. There’s a lot more personality here than I expected.

This is a good read, with lots of pictures and the video embedded in the main post. A review worth reading.

Mossberg: New MacBook Pro is a fast, slim tweener

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Walt Mossberg, The Verge, reviewing a 13-inch Touch Bar MacBook Pro:

Apple is realigning its familiar laptop line, dramatically reshaping and in some ways merging the favorite options for both heavy-duty “pro” users and everyday customers. And the poster child for this more muddled future is the pricey new MacBook Pro

And:

The Pro, once mainly aimed straight at people who do especially taxing work like professional video editing or serious design, is now being stretched to suit a much larger audience.

Thus the term “tweener”.

Walt noted that the MacBook Pro’s battery life was wildly inconsistent:

On my rigorous test, which I’ve used for years, the machine actually exceeded Apple’s claim of up to 10 hours of battery life. The test involves setting the screen at 100 percent, keeping it on and undimmed constantly, playing an endless loop of music, and leaving Wi-Fi on to collect email, tweets, and Facebook posts in the background. Result: 11 hours and 38 minutes.

But then:

I ran a second test with all of Apple’s default energy-saving settings on, the screen at 75 percent and a perfectly normal (for me) mix of tasks like web browsing, email, a few short videos, Twitter, Facebook, some light writing, and Slack. The Pro died at 8 hours and 22 minutes.

To make things worse, Apple’s built-in prediction of how much time the battery had left before dying fluctuated a lot and was mostly wrong (Apple says this is a known problem caused by the fact that modern processors can power up and down rapidly over a much wider range than in the past, making estimates much more difficult.)

Interesting. Hopefully, this will get better over time as Apple collects usage data, gets their arms around the problem.

The macOS Social widget

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Take a look at this post from David Chartier, entitled macOS: How to send iMessages without the Messages app open.

The post itself is interesting, worth a read even if you have no interest in sending a message in this sidebar approach. The value is in learning about widgets (if they are new to you) and, specifically, the Social widget. Lots of nuance here:

  • Two finger drag from the right side of the trackpad to bring up the Notifications/Today sidebar.
  • Look through the widgets, learn to add/delete them from the list.
  • Play with the Social widget, click the info button to customize.

Good stuff.

MacBook Pro Touch Bar sliders in action

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Thomas Grove Carter, the video editor whose review of the MacBook Pro was highlighted in this previous post, tweeted this animated GIF showing off the Touch Bar sliders interacting with Final Cut Pro X.

The video first shows a volume slider, so make sure your sound is on. The second half shows the insertion of key frames in a video sequence. As you watch that part, keep in mind that his left hand is on the track pad, moving the mouse cursor, while he uses his right hand on the Touch Bar slider to adjust the key frame.

As Carter said in his review, the whole interaction is “buttery smooth”.

Video editor’s hands-on review of new 15″ Touch Bar MacBook Pro

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Thomas Grove Carter, video editor at Trim Editing in London:

On the 27th October Apple unveiled their new line of MacBook Pros. Since then half of what I read online seems to be “Professionals” (those guys), telling me it’s not Pro at all, not Pro enough or not the right kind of Pro. How many of these people have even touched the new devices?

Very few.

I’ve been using the new 15” MacBook Pro (with Touch Bar) for the last week or so for actual work, so here’s my “Professional” opinion.

And:

First off, It’s really fast. I’ve been using the MacBook Pro with the new version of FCP X and cutting 5k ProRes material all week, it’s buttery smooth. No matter what you think the specs say, the fact is the software and hardware are so well integrated it tears strips off “superior spec’d” Windows counterparts in the real world.

And:

The version I’ve been using is powerful enough on the graphics front to power two 5K displays, which is an insane number of pixels.

And:

I was very skeptical about the addition of the Touch Bar. It looked like the result of an incestuous fling between a keyboard and an iPad mini (with Retina display). But I also felt skeptical about insert tech you use all the time now originally too. Once you begin to use it, you’ll see. Your cold heart will soften.

The first revelation for me was the potential of sliders. Gradual, precise and fast inputs.

Clearly, Carter loves his new MacBook Pro, appreciates the Touch Bar functionality and, most importantly, sees the new MacBook Pro as a technological step forward.

I’m looking forward to the coming wave of videos showing the Touch Bar in action.

Jason Snell: Buttons and keys, your days are numbered

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Jason Snell, writing for Macworld:

I can’t imagine a future Mac laptop with an iPad where the keyboard should be, but with a few additional bits of technology, it seems a lot less wild an idea.

As someone who enjoys typing on a physical keyboard, I’m vaguely nauseated by the idea of a keyboard that’s just a sheet of glass–but the travel on the MacBook Pro keyboard is so small already, would it be that different to remove it altogether?

And:

You can’t operate a touch-screen keyboard by feel, because the act of feeling it causes it to react.

Unless you built in pressure sensitivity that would allow that surface to react differently to hard typing taps.

By a long, long shot, I prefer a physical keyboard to one presented on a sheet of glass. As Jason says, it’s all about feel. Is it possible to use taptic feedback to improve a touch keyboard to the point where it approaches the feel of a physical keyboard?

Interesting read.

A world without the Mac Pro

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Marco Arment lays out a list of the kinds of things that only a Mac Pro can deliver. The list is well thought out, highlighting the holes in the current Mac lineup. One in particular struck me as central:

The brand-new MacBook Pro maxes out at 16 GB and the iMac maxes out at 32 GB. The three-year-old Mac Pro can go to 64 GB from Apple or 128 GB aftermarket. Some pro workloads simply need more RAM than the consumer and mobile chips support.

And there’s also this:

If Apple doesn’t address someone’s hardware needs, there’s no alternative. We can’t just buy hideous Xeon workstations from Dell and install macOS on them. If we can’t do what we need on Mac hardware, our only choice is to leave the entire Mac platform.

But the competition isn’t even close.

My hope is that Apple has a new, upgradeable Mac Pro in the works. My worry is that they don’t.

Apple’s Craig Federighi video shows off Touch Bar, new MacBook Pro

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[VIDEO] In this video, Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, talks about the new MacBook Pro, with a deep dive look at the Touch Bar and the reason Macs don’t have a touch screen.

Take a the time to watch this video. It’s not too long, and Craig does a terrific job conveying his passion for this new interface.

Review: On the road with the 13-inch MacBook Pro

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Jason Snell, writing for Six Colors:

In the end, the low-end 13-inch MacBook Pro turned out to be a pretty fine traveling companion for the past ten days. As a loyal Air user, it’s been a delight to bring a Retina display with me and have the ability to pack a single brick (plus one cable) to charge my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I’ve just had to remember to keep my adapters close by—it’s always smart to be prepared.

Would I choose this model over the new MacBook Pro models with the Touch Bar and Touch ID? If money was no object, probably not. But if you’re a MacBook Air user (or were considering buying a MacBook Air), money will probably be relevant.

If you are considering one of the new Macs, this post is worth your time.

Why 2016 is such a terrible year for the Mac

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Jason Snell, writing for Macworld:

The Mac Pro and Mac mini have languished for several years with nary an update. And MacBook Pro users were hungry for a new model—and fueled by constant rumors all year of brand-new laptops that were just over the horizon.

Then we finally got the new MacBook Pro, and it’s loaded with a lot of cool stuff, but…the reaction wasn’t quite what Apple might have expected from the hungry crowd of Mac users.

And:

Apple’s Phil Schiller told the Independent that he was surprised by the negative reaction to the announcements. Maybe Schiller wasn’t aware of the undercurrent of concern and anger among Mac users who feel that Apple has deprioritized the Mac, and that the lack of updates to the Mac Pro becomes more frustrating with every passing day.

And:

Some of that concern and anger is reasonable, and some of it isn’t. But even the less reasonable reactions are Apple’s fault for letting it get to this point. The longer you go without Mac updates, the more time customers have to combine their anger and frustration with wishcasting about the product that will solve all their problems and make everything better.

First, this is a great read. Definitely resonated with me, felt like Jason really captured the feeling of the community as a whole.

Second, at the heart of this is managing expectations. No matter your reaction to the new MacBook Pro or your particular need for a Mac Pro, Apple let this pot simmer way too long. I do think Apple has ignored the needs of developers by not keeping up with the Mac Pro. I’m curious what their in-house developers are using to build iOS, macOS, Xcode, Swift, and all the other tools used to create the Apple ecosystem. Are they living with the Mac Pro of yesteryear? Are they using MacBook Pros? Some skunkworks machine?

The MacBook Pro that ships to the public is one thing. But the tools that create the rest of the tools are fundamental to Apple’s success. I’ve never understood Apple not keeping developers in the fastest gear possible.

Explaining Thunderbolt 3, USB-C, and everything in between

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Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS, does an excellent job walking through the various standards that ultimately connect to the new MacBook Pro via USB-C. Bookmark the link, pass it along.

One point worth highlighting:

This may all seem confusing initially, but it should pass quickly because everything on the market for USB and DisplayPort over USB-C today should work with Thunderbolt 3. The main group that will be disappointed are those who buy Thunderbolt 3 peripherals and expect them to work with a 12-inch MacBook, which doesn’t extend USB-C support to Thunderbolt. We can hope that Apple makes Thunderbolt 3 standard across the entire Mac line.

In addition, there appears to be a compatibility issue with support for older Thunderbolt 3 peripherals. Read about it in this post.

Thunderbolt 3/USB-C adapters, cables, and hubs for new MacBook Pro

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Joe Rossignol did a great job pulling together this list of USB-C dongles and hubs. Bookmark the link, pass it along.

Before you buy, read this caveat. In a nutshell, make sure any hub or adapter you buy is compatible with the new MacBook Pro.

Also, at the high end, OWC has announced this monster 13-port USB-C hub, shipping in February. If you’ve got the need, and the $279 to spend, you can preorder the dock here.

New MacBook Pros will not work with some older Thunderbolt 3 chips

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Pluggable:

The version of OS X on the new MacBook Pros (late 2016) will not work with existing Certified Thunderbolt 3 docks and adapters (released prior to November 2016). These existing devices use Intel’s Thunderbolt 3 chipset (Alpine Ridge) in combination with the first generation of TI USB-C chipset (TPS65982). Apple requires the 2nd generation TPS65983 chipset for peripherals to be compatible.

It’s not clear to me if this impacts all older docks/adapters, but before I made a purchase, I would verify that the dock or adapter in question is compatible with the new MacBook Pros. Even if you don’t have a 2016 MacBook Pro on order, you might order one at some point. Consider it an effort at future-proofing.

Wherefore art thou Macintosh?

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Horace Dediu, on some remarkable business achievements of the Mac over time:

  • The product is in its 32nd year of market presence. A longevity that in unmatched by any other PC maker.

  • Apple reached a top five position in the ranking of PC vendors. This was achieved for the first time only this year, far along in the evolution of the market.

  • With about $23 billion in revenues per year, Apple places among the top four PC vendors in terms of revenue.

  • With an estimated $5.5 billion in operating margin Apple is the most profitable PC vendor, capturing over 60% of the available PC hardware profits.

  • The product has retained an average selling price of over $1200 for at least a decade. At the same time the average pricing of Personal Computers has more than halved.

Then, following some charts to lay out his thesis, Dediu gets to the heart of the matter:

Mobile has been foreseeable as a disruption to computing a decade ago–at least to some of us.

And so what do you with the Mac?

To answer this we have to ask what exactly is the purpose of the Mac in the age of the Mobile device?

And:

The same way keyboard shortcuts are hard to learn but pay off with productivity, touchbar interactions are fiddly but will pay off with a two-handed interaction model. They are not something you “get” right away. They require practice and persistence for a delayed payoff. But, again, that effort is what professionals are accustomed to investing.

This is a leap forward and a big deal. For 32 years the UX model of the Mac has been two-handed typing with one handed gesturing. Now we have the option of two-handed indirect manipulation: one hand on the touchbar and one hand on the touchpad. Imagine you’ve been playing guitar with one hand for years and then someone lets you use your left hand. Holy cow.

This is a great read. Be sure to look at that third chart, the one that contrasts Mac, Windows, and iPhone sales.

Marco Arment on the new MacBook Pro’s four USB-C ports

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Marco Arment:

Having four USB-C ports is awesome.

Having only four USB-C ports is going to hurt the versatility requirement of pro gear, because there’s a very real chance that you won’t have the right dongle when you need it.

This is going to happen a lot, because even though USB-C is the future, it’s definitely not the present. We’ve had the standard USB plug (USB-A) in widespread use for 18 years, and it’s going to take a few more years for USB-C to become so ubiquitous that we can get away without USB-A ports most of the time.

A pro laptop released today should definitely have USB-C ports — mostly USB-C ports, even — but it should also have at least one USB-A port.

I currently have dongles to plug in my existing Time Machine drive (USB-C to USB-B, picture here) and another to plug my Cinema Display into my new MacBook Pro (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 to Mini Display Port/Thunderbolt 2, picture here). Tap both pics to embiggen.

Will I need more dongles? Undoubtedly. Marco is arguing that the MacBook Pro is too forward thinking and should have been designed for the present. My machine will arrive in a few weeks. I’ll stew in the soup, have a better sense of things once I live in the brave new dongular world for a while.

Jony Ive talks about the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar

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From the beautifully laid out CNET interview:

“Doing something that’s different is actually relatively easy and relatively fast, and that’s tempting,” says the man who’s had a hand in every major Apple product design — from the colorful iMac and iBook to the iPod, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch.

“We don’t limit ourselves in how we will push — if it’s to a better place. What we won’t do is just do something different that’s no better,” Ive said in an interview earlier this week to explain the design of the MacBook Pro, a major reboot of Apple’s most powerful laptop line.

And:

Our starting point, from the design team’s point of view, was recognizing the value with both input methodologies. But also there are so many inputs from a traditional keyboard that are buried a couple of layers in. We have that ability to accommodate complex inputs, mainly out of habit and familiarity.

So our point of departure was to see if there was a way of designing a new input that really could be the best of both of those different worlds. To be able to have something that was contextually specific and adaptable, and also something that was mechanical and fixed, because there’s truly value in also having a predictable and complete set of fixed input mechanisms.

Read the interview. Some great insights into the birth of Touch Bar and Jony’s way of thinking. Kudos to the CNET team that pulled this together.

Apple’s new MacBook Pro may be the world’s fastest stock laptop

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At the core of the article is Apple’s choice to adopt the speedy PCIe SSD bus technology along with the NVM Express device interface.

By adopting the PCIe/NVMe standard, Apple has been able to deliver higher performance in terms of read/write speeds and latency when compared to traditional SATA-based PC designs.

And:

It’s not a surprise, Handy said, that Apple settled on PCIe, as the price for the controllers are already approaching those of SATA controllers.

“If they both cost the same, then why use SATA?” [industry analyst Jim] Handy said in an email reply to Computerworld.

Interesting.

How Apple could have avoided much of the controversy

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Chuq Von Rospach, writing on his blog:

Here’s a basic reality: criticizing and second-guessing Apple is a hobby for many of us, and a profession for more than is probably healthy for the Apple ecosystem. That is a basic reality that isn’t going to change any time soon.

And:

A lot of it boils down to this concept: We demand Apple innovate, but we insist they don’t change anything.

And:

I think these computers are taking some valid criticism, but much of that criticism is ignoring a lot of the positives that these new computers have, including nice improvements in CPU and GPU speed and faster RAM, all indicating nice bumps in overall performance.

But having said that, the fact that so much of the Mac product line is such a cluster and Apple didn’t acknowledge that makes the criticism understandable and deserved. What we got from Apple was good; what we needed from Apple was that and more — and it didn’t happen.

This is a long read. Chuq captures a lot of the thoughts that have been flying around in response to the new MacBook Pro reveal. Thoughtful, and well worth the read. Great job, Chuq.

MacBook Pro reviews: The flip side of the coin

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On Friday, we ran a post titled There’s all kinds of love for the new MacBook Pro.

To balance that out, spend some time reading Machael Tsai’s blog post, which gathers a long list of negative comments about the new MacBook Pro and Apple’s Mac direction in general.

If this were simply a bunch of curmudgeonly complaints, we’d have skipped the post entirely. But there are a lot of fair complaints in this list, insights that are worth paying attention to.