New Macbooks, Snow Leopard, iPhone 3.0, and the iPhone 3GS.

(starting the thread now for all the likely inbound comments)

Looks like the days of having a Macbook Pro with a removable battery are long gone, and my chances for getting an order for one through our purchasing system before they're sold out are virtually nil.

Screw you, Apple.

My first thought is on Snow Leopard. It's a minor step up for consumers until new apps come out for it, and thankfully Apple is pricing it as such. $29 for an upgrade copy. Microsoft should take note and make a very cheep/free upgrade version of Windows 7 for Vista owners.

Out of curiosity, how often do you swap out batteries? This came up at lunch today, and pretty much everyone at the table realized they have no real use for replaceable batteries, except for when they wear out. I had 2 for my PowerBook G4 later in it's life, and only swapped them once for more runtime.

My thought is that the companies that make the external battery packs are going to see a rise in business now, for the relatively small number of people who do need extra power on the go. The advantage these have is that they can be used on multiple different systems as well.

Any plane ride lasting longer than a couple of hours requires a battery swap. I don't care how much they say battery life has imporved -- there's no substitute for having a second charged battery available.

There are plenty of other times when plugging in is inconvenient/impossible for long periods of time, especially when you consider charging takes an hour or two, and you might not be in one place for tht

To directly answer your question, I've probably *had* to swap batteries dozens of times, and done it voluntarily (where plugging in was possible but not convenient) hundreds of times.

The external battery packs don't help unless Apple licenses MagSafe, which they haven't. I heard there's a company out there recycling old Apple power supplies with MagSafe and putting external batteries on them, but I don't really trust that.

The writing was on the wall with regard to the battery (though I didn't imagine it'd happen quite this fast) but I didn't have time to prepare myself to lose the express card slot. I needed an SD reader recently and picked up a $10 express card reader. My unibody MBP now has a SD slot and a removable battery.

I also kind of expected that the loss of the battery would come at the same time or after that the matte screen option trickled down. No such luck, it seems.

The new iPhone looks fine, though the upgrade lacks wow factor.

ExpressCard slot's still there on the 17, it seems.

Yeah, the lack of matte is another "Apple knows best" move that irks me. If you're in the sizeable minority of users who prefer matte screens and removable batteries, you're screwed.

For my flights in the past year, I've just skipped having my laptop out on the plane completely and used my iPhone for video, audio, and gaming to keep me occupied. I suppose if you had to work on a plane I could see needing more power, but don't most flights that are longer then a few hours have power at nearly every seat now?

Deep down, Apple's evil plan is to hope people just buy two laptops now, and swap them when the battery dies. :-)

I just wish they would have put 4GB ram in the Air. If they did, I would have replaced my gen 1 MacBook Pro with one.

A couple modest surprises, to me anyway:

- SD slot on the 13" and 15" MacBooks. About time! Given how most cameras these days have standardized on SD, from tiny point-and-shoots up to some of the D-SLRs, it's just an obvious feature that's been missing forever. This also means that people will be able to add assorted gadgets via the SD slot (e.g., a cellular modem). Hey, if they can do the Eye-Fi, they should be able to do all sorts of other things.

- Firewire 800, standard. Seems like the rumors of FW's death have been somewhat exaggerated.

- Tom Tom on the iPhone -- I wouldn't count on it being available before I'm heading to attend a wedding in France in July, but this will definitely have an impact on the portable GPS market.

- Otherwise, the new iPhone doesn't really scream that it's all that much of an upgrade over the current iPhone beyond the improvements in battery life. At least, it's unclear that I'd ever notice a difference in my daily life if my 3G were to be replaced with a 3GS. Of course, I'm not exactly a power user.

(The single best thing Apple could do to improve my life with my iPhone is to do caching properly with the browser, such that when you open a new pane, do some surfing, and come back, it doesn't have to re-render the page from scratch. This could certainly be done without requiring new hardware.)

- Interesting that Apple now supports remote wipe and other such "enterprise" features that Blackberry people have always taken for granted. It will be interesting to see whether you can do this without requiring a MobileMe subscription. Presumably, the iPhone wakes up once in a while and pings a server with its serial number to ask "gee, anything I need to know here?" You should be able to configure any old web server to serve that purpose.

(Evil thought: go to a conference, hook into the public Wi-Fi, and watch for these phone-home messages. If you see one, what are the odds they did the crypto properly? If they screwed it up, then you could respond with the kill signal. You could cause a whole lot of grief.)

- Any one of the changes to Snow Leopard would be no big deal, but the sum of all of them is definitely a big deal. One notable feature is that you can run your machine as a file server but have it stay asleep until it actually gets a request. I've been pondering doing Wake-on-LAN from my iPhone or something, but this will make it painless.

- ZFS seems to have disappeared from the Snow Leopard Server pages. Old text: New text: completely absent.

Not with the new MacBook Pro machines. At least not until you've watched two movies. I can get over 7 hours of battery life on my 17" MBP. Using the higher power discrete graphics chip is going to shorten battery life, as will doing something more intensive like 3D gaming.

The removable battery user group is some 1% of notebook owners - this isn't my stat, but I can't recall where I grabbed it from. Some of that 1% will be taken care of by the much longer run times with the new batteries.

I call bullshit on the 7 hour figure, if only because that's Apple's "ideal conditions" number, and there's no way you're getting that if you're actually using the machine. None.

To be fair, Apple claimed, what 3 or 3.5 hours on the MacBook Air, and that's precisely what I've been able to get out of mine, playing videos non-stop while on a plane.

Apple's claim for the Air was 5 hours.

Apple also claims 8+ hours on the 17 inch Macbook Pro, not 7.

Saying that a machine that you haven't used won't last more than a couple of hours is what then?

I was under the impression they claimed 8+ hours. I was happy to get 7. Whether anyone else believes this isn't relevant (to me) since I'm not the one selling machines.

Unlike older PowerBooks, this thing also lasts a LOT longer while asleep. I'm pretty sure it's consuming less power when asleep, in addition of course to the much higher capacity battery.

BTW, I wasn't saying that you can play movies for 7 hours. I said 2 movies. 7 hours is while predominantly using the browser, but with other apps open and doing their thing in the background, such as Mail, Path Finder and Evernote.

Okay, it is 8 hours on the 17", my bad. Still, I haven't seen anyone getting anywhere near the official number around work. I believe 3 or 3.5 on an Air, but 7 on a 17" MBP must mean *very* light usage (cf.)

Anyway, when I said "couple of hours" I was talking about my current MBP, not the new models. I'm sure the new 15" unibody can get through 3 or 4 hours of typical usage, and that's great, but that doesn't mean having swappable batteries wouldn't help a lot of folks out. It just isn't the "typical" use case, and Apple is legendary for over-optimizing for the typical use case (see also glossy screens, the on-again off-again love affair with Firewire, ExpressCard, etc.)

The stats in that link concur with what I wrote. Approximately 7 hours doing work online and over 4 hours playing movies (the 2 movie figure I mentioned). Maybe it's my anti-glare screen giving me better battery life. I mean, producing the glare on those other screens must use up some juice.

I suppose that the batteries in the new 13 and 15" machines are of a lesser capacity so may not run as long given the same usage.



I completely agree (with you, not Apple).

Did they say whether this was for all iPhones, or just the newest model announced today?

re: (TomTom's GPS software and mounting solution)

It's for the iPhone 3G and newer. It was announced before the new iPhone.

I just picked up an interesting tidbit from the specs for the 3GS display:



Need to see that one in person, because the regular iPhone and iPod Touch are fingerprint swine.

Yeah, I was very curious about this spec. I hope it works and other companies start incorporating that. With touchscreen devices this becomes a huge problem.

I've become quite adept at finding just the right ways to swipe my fingers across my G1 to wipe away the smudges but not leave a smear of oil behind

Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating

Did they put this on the touch2's?

If so I'll tell you, when the skin oil beads up, what you get is a smear of tiny lenses that are perfect for magnifying odd pixels.

It does require new hardware - the memory that the old page was rendered in has been reused by the new browser tab; when more memory is required stuff gets turfed out forcing the re-render. More memory helps this, obviously

The phone home stuff is very likely to be the (already documented) XMPP jabber session that is used for mobileme/yahoo/notification pushes, which is encrypted. Not speaking from a position of knowing anything here, just from a position of thinking that the wheel is unlikely to have been reinvented.

There was already remote wipe for exchange users, which uses the exchange persistent connection stuff.

Hugo

As evidence that at least a few folks out there love swappable batteries, (and I promise this will be my last gripe about it), I submit the following.

Right after the Apple store opened up yesterday, I checked the refurbished section of the store, and there were prior-gen 15" and 17" MBPs in seven or eight configurations, still with the glass trackpad and glossy screen, but with the removable battery. Within two hours, they were all gone.

Now, I don't know how many were there, and Apple is usually good about ramping down production before their updates, but with prior refreshes, I've always seen the previous gen laptops hang around for at least a few days on the refurb store.

This is anecdotal evidence, of course, but I think this impacts more than just 1% of Mac users. If I wasn't completely broke from my upcoming wedding, I would have snatched one of them up. As it is, I guess I"ll have to adjust to life under the new regime. After all my griping about the Macbook Pro battery, it's not like I'm going anywhere else for my next laptop.

I will say that the Snow Leopard upgrade pricing is great, (been waiting for Exchange support for awhile) and the iPhone improvements, while somewhat incremental, are certainly nice. I did expect more out of the iPhone updates (multitasking, A2DP, and tethering on A2DP would be enough to make me consider the 3GS) but all in all, not a bad show.

Oh, Hugo, nice offices they have you working in these days.

Presumably, they could also swap browser state out to unused Flash memory (not just cached files, but internal data structures). I guess that would increase the wear load on the Flash, but it might be worth it.

So... any information about ZFS's noticeable no-show?

How about making the browser more efficient so pages don't take up close to the full 128MB of available memory? That's probably where I'd start with improvements to Mobile Safari.

While a move to 256MB of memory would be welcomed over 128MB, I'm sure most people would be a lot happier with 512MB or 1GB, judging by the current performance bottlenecks. If Safari on the desktop is any indication, it's one very unforgiving and memory hogging application.

Tonyc,

when you saw the old MacBook Pros on the website, how much were they going for?

It varied based on configuration. The one I was hoping for (assuming work would have paid for it) was the 15" 2.6 GHz with 4GB RAM and 128GB SSD HD. I think it was going for $1,999, which is just $300 or so less than what a similarly-configured machine is going for now. Not a huge price break (especially for a refurb), so I think folks were motivated by the removable battery (and possibly the ExpressCard slot as well, maybe Compact Flash SLR users?) In any event, that's definitely the fastest I've seen the prior-generation MBP's fly away.

I've got nothing new here; I just think this is worth reiterating:

As it stands now, there is no real, non-hack, option for having an external battery pack for a MacBook. If you are one of the people for whom a single battery is not enough, you have no recourse at all. Other than not buying a Mac laptop.