new goodies from Apple

The biggie so far is the new 15" MacBook Pro. As rumored, there's no optical drive any more. 2880x1800 pixel screen. Up to 16GB of RAM, 768GB SSD. Two thunderbolt ports, HDMI. (Dongles for Firewire 800 and GigE that hang off the Thunderbolt ports.). SD slot. USB 3.0. FaceTime HD, dual-microphones, new stereo speakers. 4.46 pounds. $2200 for the base model.

Surprisingly, they haven't introduced comparably amazing screen pixel densities into other laptop models.

Also curious is a "power nap" feature in OS X 10.8 where your laptop, when shut, is still doing work like fetching your email. I'm not entirely sure what I think about that. I'll bet airlines get unhappy about these laptops.

Apple: There's a Dongle For That (tm)

Ethernet is legacy now? Are you fucking kidding me?

The only time ethernet has been plugged into my work laptop has been when it's also docked to the monitor, where the ethernet port lives. I'm fine with moving it to a Thunderbolt or USB 3 based dongle.

On the MB Air, Ethernet is already a legacy dongle via USB. They can't fit a full-size Ethernet connector into the case, and it's probably the same issue on the new MB Pro 15". I figure, for people who really care, they'll buy a desktop base station of some sort, either integrated with a monitor like the Mac 27", or in a separate box, like Matrox, Belkin, and others are offering.

What I find modestly surprising is that the new machine is only supporting 802.11n, not the newer 802.11ac. I guess that chipset isn't quite ready yet.

I'm just surprised that SD was chosen to be built in over ethernet. Does the SD port really take less room and is considered more important? Personally, I cannot use a laptop with no ethernet, so I'd have to carry that dongle around everywhere. But really, I wouldn't mind as much if the dongles weren't absurdly priced. Will this one ship with the laptop?

Other than that, pretty nice computers. I'm guessing there was no resolution bump in the Air due to battery life. Did they say anything about battery life in the 15" MacBook Pro? If it's not reduced I have to imagine there's a bigger battery in there...

*edit*
And I'll admit, the fact that I can't have a laptop without ethernet is something that will not apply to the majority of consumers. Still, it's a little annoying...

I think claimed battery life on the 15" is 7 hours. That's fantastic.

SD is skinny. An Ethernet jack isn't.

I wasn't trying to say it would have bad battery life, I was just wondering how it compared to the rating for the previous model, and if that rating were better, whether that meant there was a bigger battery in there.


That's true. Even looking at the retina/non-retina models they have in the store right now, you can see that the space for ports on the side of the retina model is about as tall as a thunderbolt port, which is clearly shorter than the ethernet port.

Still, $30 for a dongle as simple as an ethernet adapter is kind of unreasonable to me. Hopefully there will be third party options available for cheaper...

Yeah, this is totally the 2012 version of my annual rant against the latest thing Apple did that matches what 90+% of customers want but completely screws me. I'll have to get a base station and then a dongle for when I need to plug in somewhere other than at my desk (and hope I don't lose / forget the dongle.)

I understand that most people don't work in an environment where wi-fi isn't allowed, and thus I'm in a very small minority here, but the "case is too small" argument is really weak. The new MBP is only 0.05" thinner than the previous unibody, and there's much more than 0.05" of case around the ethernetj jack. On the Macbook Air, I get that there's really no room, and I understand the tradeoff, but this is supposed to be the "pro" machine, and some pros like to have a real ethernet jack.

I'm also really surprised they didn't do anything to alleviate the confusion of "Macbook Pro" versus "Macbook Pro with Retina Display", which might as well be an entirely new product line (different dispaly, SSD instead of spinning disk, etc.) Why not just call the non-retina ones "Macbooks" and the retina ones "Macbook Pros?"

My "base station" for my Air at the previous job was just a Dell monitor with a USB hub, and the 10/100 USB ethernet adaptor. Though I know people's issues here with having to plug in two cables to a laptop instead of one.


0.95 - 0.71 = 0.24 inches thinner.

It's not just an issue where "wi-fi isn't allowed". 1000Mbps is a lot faster than the speeds you (realistically) get from 802.11n, and a lot of places still haven't upgraded from 802.11g.

What it comes down to is that Apple continues to, apparently intentionally, ignore corporate users. I'm sure that they have made that decision on purpose, but it feels like they're moving from being uninterested in the market (which is reasonable, given their track record there) to being antagonistic.

iOS 6 looks pretty good. I'm curious to see the new maps in action. Passbook will be a daily use item for me, as I tend to wander over to Starbucks and use the mobile app daily.

The new additions on the phone side should be useful too, especially the do not disturb setting. I've had a few junk calls wake me up over the past few months.

The new Siri features seem to be bringing back some features of the pre Apple Siri, so thats good to see.

And some fill in the gaps features I know some here are interested in, Mail is adding yet another way to add images, easier now from directly in the compose window. And Safari is adding the ability to upload photos to websites including this board.

For Thunderbolt->Gigabit ethernet, $30 is actually pretty reasonable. This is a full PCIe class NIC (so no huge CPU hit like a USB based one). What is unknown is if it supports jumbo frames, and sadly you still can't be sure these days, considering our 2011 Dell workstations still lack this feature. In any case, NewEgg is showing gigabit PCIe cards at the low end of $14. Any reputable one I'd want to put in my machine is at least $25.

The way you'd measure how Apple thinks about the corporate market would be how well they muscle into Blackberry's Enterprise Server universe, or whether they try to release an alternative to Exchange. They seem to be doing a credible job of supplanting Microsoft's client-side stuff.

As to hardware features being pro or anti-corporate, I don't see the issue. If I was working for a company with the big bucks, I'd just have them buy me a 27" Thunderbolt monitor along with my shiny laptop, and I'd plug the GigE into the monitor. They do need to update the monitor with USB 3.0.

Eh, what's that all about?
There's no particular reason I know of for a USB-based NIC/SATA/whatever to be a CPU hog in any way.

USB gizmos are packet-based DMA devices on a fairly high-speed (USB3) bus. "Register" accesses can be expensive time-wise, but not CPU-wise, and there's generally no need for those "on the fly" anyway.

I've got some $10 GigE USB2 NICs here that work very well (30+MBytes/sec throughput) with older machines lacking internal GigE ports.

-ml

I'm bummed to hear new Maps has no transit directions. I probably use that as much as the car directions.

Honestly, what corporate user wants/needs the resolution of the new MBP? It's a machine for power customers, not corporate "users" who get told how to think by their employers.

I'd much prefer ethernet without a dongle as well, but it's simply impossible to fit the connector with the new form factor without something like a slide-out top-plugging connector - which is very fragile. More on this below.

That said, the announcements at WWDC were a total snore-fest besides a few tiny highlights.

The resolution on this new model is great, but software support won't be there from third parties for a little bit. Adobe software is going to be next to unusable on the built-in monitors. I'm disappointed they're calling it the "next generation" - sorry, if it's out now, it's the CURRENT generation. I'm sad to see they haven't changed over the entire line to retina displays and this new form factor. Especially sad to see the 17" model missing - I hope that's temporary, because I didn't think I would ever buy another 15" machine. I don't even care if a 17" comes out in a newer thinner shell, I just want the new screen and updated internals. Besides, in losing an optical drive, I'd like to continue being able to use a platter-based HD along with an SSD.

iOS news was worse than boring. The only highlight, IMO, OS-wise is the new and long overdue Do-Not-Disturb feature. I say long-overdue because it's really a 1.0 software item like pretty much every other low-hanging feature they've been adding over the past 5 years. Maps? Passbook? Those are apps, not an OS core features. And again they're using software to try and obsolete hardware sooner than it needs to be. Not as bad as the other OS vendors, but still sad to see the cut-offs.

It's old news, but I'm not happy about the new Mac OS 1-year schedule either. IMO, that's far too aggressive and is likely to lead to more problems than it could ever solve.

....but still not as good as a real NIC that just follows or creates packet chains in main memory; USB2 is still splitting everything into 512 byte packets, still not able to send asynchronously (has to wait for the next IN token to send a packet) etc.

$30 for a thunderbolt NIC is pretty amazing, and I was just about to buy one to go with the new macbook but then realized I don't use wired ethernet either at home or the office... I suppose I'm going to regret that the instant I want to migrate my old macbook over to the new one, as it doesn't have firewire. WiFi will be painful.

That's all dealt with in the host controller silicon, though. A USB NCM (though not ECM) ethernet driver pretty much does just assemble or pick up packet chains from memory DMA'd by the host controller.

Peter

I may be confusing a few things together, especially with server NICs. TOE support is pretty handy for reducing CPU usage by moving a few calculations out of the network drivers and onboard the NIC. USB vs PCIe, I was under the (possibly false) impression that USB was a polling only protocol, at least for USB1 and 2. That, and doing some searches, it looks like some faulty USB drivers in some Windows versions were leading to higher then normal CPU usage for audio and NIC devices, something I ran into with my old CarPC setup.

Offered the choice between two similar priced products, I do believe a Thunderbolt (PCIe) NIC would still be the better choice over a USB one. Especially when the USB choice is USB2.

It doesn't have transit directions built in, but the Maps app has hooks for 3rd party programs to integrate to provide the directions. I see 3 apps in the store for Austin, so hopefully at least one is updated to support this.

The other notable loss in Maps switching away from Google is street view. Nothing was said about this, so I'm guessing Apple has no solution ready for replacing this functionality at this time.

I'd agree, though the notion of "similarly priced" can be a slippery one. In the UK, the Apple Thunderbolt NIC costs £25. The Apple USB NIC also costs £25. But USB NICs that do not have Macintosh drivers cost a tenth of that.

This is one reason why Apple have a larger market capitalisation than Boeing. If you buy a first-class seat on a Boeing, you get to swank around in a nice lounge where people make you cups of coffee. If you buy a first-class seat in front of a Macbook Air, they still Easyjet you on the accessories.

Peter

This I completely approve of, though. You wait ages for a laptop that has even two digital video outputs, and then three come along at once. Displaylink made essentially all their revenue from laptop makers not realising that they needed to do this.

Peter

How many digital video outputs can the new machines drive, either together with the built-in display or without it?

I'm also happy to see IR receivers going away on the thinner machines. Additional business opportunity for me.

Errrr, yes, but that's for a 10/100 adaptor. Try looking for USB2 gigabit adaptors (eg here, and you'll find that (a) the apple price is actually pretty good and (b) obviously the USB2 ones are going to come up short on bandwidth, especially as USB isn't full duplex.

Apple are obviously making out like a bandit on their old USB-ethernet (though less than you'd imagine, as I'm 100% sure they will be CNC machining that plastic after it's moulded to make it more aesthetically pleasing), but I wouldn't be surprised if they are only just breaking even on the thunderbolt-gigabit one. There are likely at least two ARM processors in that cable, plus gigabit magnetics, MAC/PHY, and probably a thunderbolt<>PCIe bridge chip... all packed onto a very small board that'll be expensive to make.

As for "easyjetting", Apple worked out that most people don't use wired ethernet these days, and so dropped it - just as they dropped optical drives. I admit to still ripping CDs every few months, but I only use ethernet for some rather specialised use cases, like bridging a USB LTE adaptor to an external wifi router.

I'd honestly be amazed if 2% of MBP customers used ethernet once a week or more.

I'd believe your 2% number for MacBook Air users. I'm less sure about MacBook Pro. Among other groups, the MBP is very popular with professional photographers. When you've got tens of gigabytes from a shoot that you want to move from your laptop to your file server, or whatever else, no 802.11n WiFi will come close to the speed of wired GigE. Okay, maybe 802.11ac, but Apple hasn't adopted that yet.

Not just photographers. It's also popular in the film/video world, too. Wired ethernet is still king, when your application space requires large amounts of bandwidth.

Neither photographers nor film editors are likely to mind using an adapter for ethernet, since the processes described, unloading content back to their central servers, is probably going to be done from their workstation - where they can easily dock their machines. And where they can leave the adapters eternally plugged in.

Not to mention that many of these folks will not use ethernet at all and will instead use directly-connected Thunderbolt arrays.

I think this is pretty much a non-issue. If you want to bring up issues with the new machine then let's talk about the inability to update the internal storage or memory. For that matter the battery and LCD are also glued in place making repair/replacement a tough proposition. I've never minded the lack of hot-swapable batteries in recent MBP models and iPhones. Their cases have been trivial to open and battery replacement a simple plug and play operation.

IMO, some of these moves on Apple's part were not critical to achieving the design goals of the finished product.

I have wanted and still want, my next MBP to be a 17" model without an optical drive, but with two 2.5" drive capacity, outfitted from Apple with either 1 or 2 drives (some combination of SSD and HDD). I want replaceable memory modules, 2 is enough and I want a retina-level display with the ability to drive at least 2 external displays of the same, but preferably greater, resolution. The battery life should be longer than the previous generation of 17" MBP, due to process and potential for larger battery by component size reduction and elimination. All USB ports USB3. I don't care whether the machine is super-thin. The above are the priorities. I'd probably use the Thunderbolt ports for Ethernet making it a simpler docking affair.

That was my whole point about losing the ethernet port. It's true that most people don't regularly use wired networking anymore, but many do, and of those who don't, a lot of them will have to use it at some point in a pinch -- maybe they want to directly connect to their wireless router if the wifi flakes out, maybe they want to transfer a bunch of files faster than 802.11n speeds, maybe they spend a night in a hotel and the wifi signal is shitty... whatever.

It's precisely for those people who have a sporadic need for wired ethernet that this decision is the worst, because though their need for it doesn't cross the "spend $30 for a dongle and carry it around with them" threshold, it's still nonzero. I rather like the idea of using a dock rather than having to plug in my power, display, ethernet, and USB jacks every morning and unplug them every evening, and having to use a dongle when I'm occasionally at a customer site isn't the worst thing in the world. But if I were in the plug in every month or two category, this would be infuriating.

While gluing batteries and soldering ram may not be necessary to achieve the thickness of the new machine, eliminating the traditional RJ45 jack was unfortunately. I can't think of a way around it other than the flimsy sliding mini-jack used in old PCMCIA cards. And that is something far too fragile to include, IMO.

Apple have also been disappointing with every subsequent OS release, especially in relation to older machines, but I suppose that can be a thread of its own. Lion remains the worst OS ever released by Apple even after 4 updates. A machine from mid-2004 (running 10.5) is pretty much useless today for even simple web browsing and email. "pretty much useless" means just shy of completely unusable in speed and function - lots of spinning beach balls in Safari (no Flash either).

As I mentioned before, the new MBP is only 0.05" thinner. There's no way that's the difference between port and no port.

Yeah, 10.7 is a step backward.

The problem isn't the thickness at the middle of the laptop, it's that it's all chamfered at the edges, which significantly reduces the thickness there, and makes an ethernet port unable to fit. It's the physical industrial design that's the problem. Apple didn't use to have this problem of function following form.

My unibody MBP has a similar bevel to it, and it fits an ethernet port just fine. It looks like maybe the jack would have to extend down a tiny bit into the beveled area on the new design. What an unthinkable tragedy that would be!


Oh, I dunno about that...



Look at all the ports they left off that thing to showcase the sexy woodgrain finish! I don't even see a USB on there!

I'll speak in defense of wired ports... I spent an hour today working with a client's wireless printer (hp p1102w), trying to move it between two networks and troubleshoot why a vendor's citrix implementation wouldn't work with it. Port forwarding was working fine (the printer would politely decline and reset itself whenever he sent a job).

But a Godawful pain in the backside switching subnets - you can't manually change both a static IP and an SSID at the same time on it. So change the SSID, find the IP, redirect the port forwarding. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Grr.

Turns out to be on a list of printers citrix doesn't like. Something about HP dropping PCL for "Host-based printing" - a tech where pages are built on the computer and sent raster. Unfortunately, the vendor didn't know this, thought "any hp printer should work", and was just firing off old HP drivers, albeit methodically. Sigh.

-jk

0.05" thinner then what? I already corrected this once, it's 0.24" thinner then the normal MacBook Pro. Total height, including the bottom cover, and the LCD is 0.71". The old MBP is 0.95" If you were talking the difference between the full height of the laptop and an ethernet jack (0.65"), I'm calculating that to be 0.06", including the PCB mounting referencing this. I haven't seen a measurement on how thick the LCD is, but I'm guessing it's thicker then the 0.06" difference.

And a majority of the curved bottom is the bottom cover piece, and not the main unibody much like the current MacBook Pros. There is no usable space there for larger ports on the side. At best, they have some wiggle room there to increase battery capacity with the battery likely directly touching the bottom panel. The electronics would need a little gap for airflow.

90% of an RJ45 jack is mechanical. Assuming that the body is still billet aluminum, they could have milled the clip part into the body very easily. And nothing about the jack itself needs any cooling/airflow. The only electronic parts that need to be near the jack are some simple passive electronic components.

Note that if this was any other company, I wouldn't even begin to make that argument. However, I hold Apple to an admittedly higher standard, and it's not as if many, if any, components they use are off-the-shelf anyway.

What we really need is the measurement of the LCD. I'd measure my MBP, but the newer LCD is slightly thinner. There is no way from what I've seen that the body, including the bottom case would be thick enough to support the port without creating a bulge. Or widening the bottom case to not match the LCD to allow for a bulge on the top.

Anyhow, I think I've spent more then $29 worth of effort discussing something that doesn't personally bother me.

Having seen the system in person, I will say the screen is quite amazing. While I've seen the same clarity on the iPhone and iPad, what really impressed me was the scaling. By default the resolution is the standard pixel doubling of the old normal resolution of 1440x900. It however offers options that act like 1680x1050 (the old hi-res option), or 1920x1200. I was expecting the kinda fuzzyness you get on a normal screen when running with a non native resolution, but the image remained pretty clear and sharp at the non optimal settings. Seems Apple is running all resolutions at double width and height, then scaling back down to the display. Running it in the fake 1680x1050 mode all the time would be quite usable.

Anand wrote up a good article covering the screen here:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5998/macbook-pro-retina-display-analysis

Now to hope GPUs can somehow make a good enough leap to allow games to run better at higher resolutions. It's still challenging to run games at full quality on the desktop 27/30 inch displays without constantly upgrading the graphics card in a desktop.

Largely irrelevant. Full-duplex at GigE speeds matters only for servers for the most part, and those aren't the machines that will be using USB NICs.

Nearly everyone with an Apple notebook is going to be limited by their internet connection (5-30mbit/sec for most), not by the ~250mbits/sec Real-Life performance of a USB2 NIC.

Cheers

If the internet is the only thing you use, sure. But I have a build system at work I use frequently to pull large ISOs (25GB) down at a solid 90MB/s (with the gigabit ethernet in the monitor). And I did stay at a hotel recently where the internet bandwidth was 700mbit down. That speed seems amazing to us stuck here in North America, but many parts of Asia have gigabit internet for cheaper then most of us are paying for 5-30mbit. Apple sells these systems worldwide, including increasingly in China. Really a shame how far behind internet access is here.

Yeah, sorry about that -- I goofed when I looked up the dimensions of the new model before, and missed your earlier correction. It probably is the case that it wouldn't fit in a body that thin, so I guess I'll just learn to love the new design and hope I don't forget the dongle when I need it for my next sponsor visit.

Not irrelevant - the only time I'd consider using wired would be to talk to my NAS box, and the thunderbolt gigE would give a useful bump over USB - after all, if I'm going to all the hassle of plugging in, I'm obviously in a hurry.

If I'm just doing external network stuff then WiFi will do me fine. It's showing as 135Mbit where I'm sitting right now, but gets up to 300 nearer the router (though you can obviously halve those numbers for actual throughput, it's still significantly above what Comcast will supply me).

That "135mbit/sec" (actually about 70mbit/sec) is slower than the internet downlink many of my neighbours here have (75mbit/sec).

Not that it's useful to them having that speed, because this particular ISP charges through the roof for actually moving bits over that connection.

But so long as we're talking Apple notebooks -- not the typical corporate machine -- they do have USB3 as well, so they still can use industry standard NICs as well as the newfangled Thunderbolt gear.

Cheers

Perhaps for photographers, and ultra-small VFX/film studios, where those directly-connected arrays contain the life of the studio. But that's certainly not going to be true for mid- to large scale studios, where storage is measured in racks of Isilon and/or Blue Arc servers (and even small studios frequently have at least one). Those directly-connected arrays will be used for work-in-progress but how does that work-in-progress data get to and from those big, honking servers to that directly-connected array? Ah, that's right... the network.

And big studios like that will have dedicated workstations which can easily be equipped with the adapters, making the lack of an ethernet port on the actual machine not much of an issue at all.

I think Tony (and others) had the best scenario for when this turns into a potential issue. For those that need wired connectivity "in a pinch." The unplanned or infrequent necessity. That's when an adapter is inconvenient at best and missing at worst.

New MBP Retina actually supports 3 external displays (plus the built-in LCD). The HDMI port can function independently and in addition to the Thunderbolt ports. Wow.

The Displayport 1.2 ports the system has can run 2 monitors off one plug via chaining. Would be interesting to see someone test that, to see if the total goes up to 5.

I wonder whether the GPU will run out of oomph before you run out of pixels. I suspect, if you want to do this for real, you'd want to have an offboard GPU.

Oooh, how would you even cable that? Does the first monitor need some sort of Displayport pass-through?

Peter

Yep. I haven't seen a Displayport only 1.2 monitor with passthrough yet, but the Apple Thunderbolt monitors do support daisy chaining.

And looking back, it's up to 2 running at 2560x1600, or 4 running at 1900x1200 off a single port.

http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/displ...-more-20100118/

My expectation is that you can probably do 2 off one port, but not 2 off of EACH port at the same time. The graphics chip has to support the interfaces and I can't believe it supports more than 3 external.

For the metadata maybe, but the data itself is likely to by flying over Infiniband or Fiber Channel on that sort of setup.