FWIW, I have a 15", 2.9GHz machine on order.
I’m going to buy a few USB-C adapters from eBay to have when it arrives.
It may be the reason that it fell to Microsoft itself to design an innovative PC laptop (I say that knowing about the Lenovo Yoga) in the Surface Pro line.
But the Lenovo Yoga is the thing I hated and returned for a Macbook.
I follow TwiSpark’s point, though. My husband has a pretty old but once very fancy PC gaming laptop he is in the market to replace, and most of his options suck. He isn’t so much married to a gaming machine anymore, but he needs something effective for work. There has been such an emphasis on portability and simplification that the people who need laptops for more intense/complicated stuff are SOL.
I was once a 17" user, and I’m a huge fan of only having one machine for everything, I agree. But I don’t do anything CPU or GPU intensive, so for me the best solution is to have a single slimline lightweight machine (I will be ordering one of the new ones to upgrade my Air), and to combine it with a large screen to work at home. In fact, I think I’m now going to get a *huge *screen, that I will sit on my desk, big enough that I can sit in the armchair near my desk to work on it if I want. And the new ones have 500Gb SSD at a reasonable price.
The only thing that might tempt me back to PC’s is if I decide to have a go at playing games one day. I’ve never been too interested, but having seen how amazing some games are now on friends’ setups, I may take the plunge.
I do have a PC desktop, for exactly this reason. It’s an Alienware and it’s baller.
How many cycles does your battery have? You can find it in the System info. That matters a lot more than age.
My 3+ year old Air has like 1200 cycles (yes, I ran through the entire battery almost every day, on average) since I routinely use it without it being plugged in. I’m lucky if I get 3 hours on it doing relatively basic stuff. I can easily churn through the entire battery in < 1 hour by playing a… not particularly taxing game.
According to the system, my battery is down to 70% capacity. In my actual use, I’m getting less than 50% of the runtime I got when it was new.
I’m really impressed you get 12 hours, though. I never got that even new. Maybe 8 or 9 if I was lucky (and I was pretty happy with that).
675 cycles.
But I’m worried maybe I’m exaggerating now. I did time it carefully when it was brand new, and I was amazed that I got the full 12 hours per the specs then. And I know it had something left after a 10-hour trip recently where I was reading/writing on it pretty much the whole time, but “pretty much the whole time” is not continuously. I’ll do a proper test tomorrow, I should be working on it most of the day.
722 for me. Hmm. Now I’m curious.
Hint: Replacing the battery on an Air is extremely easy.
I don’t agree with people that say USB-C is a great idea. There was just not a good reason not to keep the USB form factor while expanding it, ala ESATA. That way, you could actually connect existing USB into it, or get special USB-C plugs. Maybe even the USB-C would be the only ones that were reversible.
And, yeah, charging with USB-C instead of a magnetic device is dumb. It was one of the few things Apple did that didn’t seem like a money grab. You didn’t wind up losing your computer because someone stepped on the chord.
No, a lot of those are actually thought for business users, who don’t really need to store a lot of documents (and in fact, often shouldn’t - documents should be in the shared repositories as soon as possible), don’t need fancy graphics, don’t need… but travel a lot.
Note that the business users who do need good graphics, such as engineers and graphics designers, are considered a different segment. For starters they’re less likely to use a laptop, and more likely to threaten with dismembering the IT guy who just changed their monitor without permission.
Nope USB-C is absolutely a good thing. Look at this with all the varieties of USB 2.0 and 3.0 connectors:
Total mess. USB-C is one port and one cable type, all cables are the same both ends, reversible and can be inserted both ways up. And it can carry 100 watts of power. The transition is going to be a little messy but when it’s done you’ll only ever need one type of cable to connect a HD, Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse or virtually anything.
As usual Apple is 12 months ahead of the industry, but I’m totally with them on this one and I’m buying a new mac book pro with touch bar ASAP. Then I’ll buy one TB3 dock to leave at my office hooked up to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, gigabit ethernet and external HD. When I go mobile I just unplug the one single USB-C cable that goes from my laptop to the dock and go. Much better than plugging and unplugging 6 cables everytime I need to take my laptop out.
When I’m out of the office I usually don’t need much connected, but I can carry a small adaptor with USB3.0, HDMI and power pass through and I’m sorted. USB Thumb Drives with USB-C on one end and USB3 on the other are already available, so that takes care of that, and once I also buy an external HD with a USB-C interface I’ll almost never need to use the adaptor when I’m on the road.
Plugging USB3.0 devices into USB-C just requires a different cable, and you’re carrying a bunch of those for your current devices anyway, see the image above. USB-C - USB3.0 cables will be cheap and everywhere within six months, you don’t need to use Apple ones. Wait until monoprice has them, by a few and problem solved.
I’m not sure what they think they’re doing, but the effect is that they have yet again released a product I have no interest in buying. All I really want is an updated version of my 2011 MacBook Pro–an updated CPU, replaceable RAM and ROM, a better discrete graphics card, a matte display, an optical drive, and most of the ports it currently has (sure, replace the FireWire and one of the USB-As with USB-C, but keep the Ethernet, SD card, and MagSafe.) And I don’t want some crazy contextual bar. I don’t think I’m asking for that crazy of a product here.
I also don’t see the point in upgrading the OS past El Capitan. I don’t use Apple Pay, don’t have an iPhone, have no interest in Siri, and am definitely not putting everything into iCloud.
So buy yourself a 2015 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro. They’ll be on special now that the new ones are out.
https://support.apple.com/kb/SP719?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Ok it doesn’t have an optical drive but seriously, you still use that? I haven’t used one in over 3 years. You’ll need one single adaptor for Thunderbolt to Ethernet, not perfect but as good as you are going to get. The 2015 MacPro’s will run El capitan and you can leave it running that as long as you want. And um, replaceable ROM? No mac laptop has ever had that.
PS, I played with a new mac book pro at the conference I’m at in Cupertino, the touch bar is actually very cool and useful, I think when people try it in person at an Apple store they’ll be impressed.
This year’s new Wonder Port is always superior to last year’s Wonder Port.
Of course, this always implies that there isn’t going to be an even better Wonder Port next year.
FireWire is obviously the One True Port.
I do get your point but there has never before been one port that does everything that USB C can do, we had USB 3, hdmi and a million different power connectors, they’ve been merged into one and This time it really is one port to rule them all. It will get faster of course but that’s already possible by using Thunderbolt 3 with the same connector type, it’s likely the form factor will stick around for quite a while.
But I want a matte display. Retina is super-glossy. And yes, I use the optical drive from time to time. And I don’t want to carry around a bunch of additional adapters for the next new wonder port. And yes, I was sloppy with using ROM. What I meant was that I want a replaceable hard disk, and not something soldered directly onto the motherboard like the current offerings.
Look, they simply aren’t going to make what I want. So when I finally give up and replace my current laptop, it’s not going to be an Apple.
Sure you’ll get the matte screen and the ports you want but good luck. MY windows 10 using friends tell me horror stories of windows insisting on installing updates that take 40 minutes to install while they’re trying to work, plus of course windows 10 spies on everything you do and that “feature” can’t be completely disabled.
There’s currently a pit thread about Microsoft, which leads me to suspect dissatisfaction with technology is not specific to Apple users.
I dual-boot Win10 on the thing right now. Somehow I don’t have the issues your friends do.
I love how a company makes something I don’t want to buy and somehow I’m in the wrong for not wanting to buy it.