The battery in my Lenovo Y700-14ISK is finally getting to the point that it's holding me back. I might get 60-70 minutes out of it just with casual programming. That's not crazy. It's a gaming laptop, and it's obviously meant to stay plugged in. It also has a pretty phat processor for a laptop (an i7-7700HQ) that made it an attractive programmer's box two years ago.

But two years later, the battery's ready to go.

I've been waiting for a MacBook that was worth buying, and that I dodged buying two years ago with this Lenovo, and I remain hopeful yet again that this will be the year to get back to portable macOSing.

I want portable Windows with battery life, but I don't want to break the bank to buy a ThinkPad, since I'm planning to grab a Mac this buying cycle as my "real" work box.

I've purchased stuff like the cheap IdeaPads before, and they're more computer than you've paid for. Great battery, decent keyboard, and almost able to keep up with server and javascript work. But, ultimately, not fast enough for real production.

Acer Inspire: Where has this been?

Then I ran into the Acer Inspire while looking at cheapy laptop comparisons on Amazon. Wow. Look at these two...

• Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575-33BM for $350!
  • 15.6-Inch
  • Intel Core i3-7100U 7th Generation
  • 4GB DDR4
  • 1TB 5400RPM HD
  • Intel HD Graphics 620
  • Windows 10 Home
  • Looks like a real 9-10 hours of battery !?!!

That's not bad, but the real kicker is that it seems like this laptop was made for people willing to upgrade. Look inside this thing:

One panel and you've got your SATA drive, RAM, and an m.2 slot accessible. It's like they expected you to swap and/or upgrade this box! Insane!

But once you start adding up RAM and an SSD, well, you're pushing up to around $550. Which almost exactly where the Inspire's next step up lives:

• Acer Aspire E 15 E5-576G-5762 for $600
  • 15.6" Full HD,
  • 8th Gen Intel Core i5-8250U
  • GeForce MX150
  • 8GB RAM Memory
  • 256GB SSD
  • Same 9-10 hours of battery life.

Well, hello. This is getting close to too much to pay for making Windows portable, but isn't the better processor worth an extra $100? Here are some ballparks from cpubenchmark.net -- this first is the i3 in the cheap Inspire, then the i5 in the $600 version, then the one I got in my Lenovo:

Now, for $250 over the cheap Inspire, we get an SSD (though not the one I'd've purchased, and we lose the TB of spinning platter space) and just enough RAM to squeeze by for a while -- and the chance to upgrade to 32! That's nice. Eat 32 gigs, MacBook Pro.

And the processor? Those numbers are close enough to my old i7, I could probably trade it in and not feel it too badly.

It's bigger than I'd like. I don't need the DVD drive. It's still got VGA, which even I finally removed from my desk setup recently. The Inspire is a dinosaur.

But it's an easily upgradeable dinosaur with a good drive & the latest processor for $600. That, my friends, is a proverbially impressive piece of kit.

Do I worry about the cheap keyboard? Yes. Yes and no.

Six hundred simoleons is a bit more than I wanted to spend for the equivalent of a new battery. I always think, "If you could have $X off of your next laptop by not buying now, what could you the afford to get?" And $600 would be nice to put towards a MacBook Pro with its own nice battery.

But any way you slice it, if you want a nice Windows box for some work, and don't mind not having Pro, the Acer Inspire looks like it should be your value baseline.

Labels: apple, bargain, hardware, laptop, lenovo, truck

I've said before that I'd essentially given up on having a MacBook (Pro or otherwise) as my main development rig. I think that's smart. The Lenovo Y700 I bagged in April has the same processor as the entry-level 15" MacBook Pro, and that MacBook is both a little large and way too expensive -- $2400 minimum buy-in for the 15", where I spent $850 for the same processor, same SSD size, more RAM, and maybe even a better graphics card. I got worse size, battery, keyboard, and trackpad, but I also have $1550.

Yet my Lenovo 100S, a cheapo plastic ultrabook, still gets more use than I would've thought, usually as "the laptop I carry when I'm not carrying a laptop". I bought it sort of on a lark when it was on sale for $150. Horribly underpowered, only two gigs of RAM, 32 bit processor, horrible keyboard, 32 gig "hard drive".

But it does have two great things:

1. Great battery life -- 8 hours or more
2. It's extremely small

As I've said before, it's my knock-off MacBook Air -- or, more recently, 12" MacBook. It's great to have a light computer that doesn't feel like it needs a laptop bag to comfortable schleping around.

Now look, it's crazy to think about comparing the 100S to a computer nine times as expensive. I agree. Mostly. But check this out:

The MacBook is almost half an inch less "skinnier", has two-tenths-inch less depth, is .15" shorter at its tallest, and weighs around 80g less.

That is to say, the 12" MacBook is smaller, has a better battery, keyboard, trackpad, screen, and processor -- surprisingly, it has faster single core performance than my 2012 Mac mini does on Geekbench, iirc. Again, not sure that makes it worth 9x the other, but that's, as the English say, an impressive piece of kit.

If the MacBook gets a boost in March, give or take, and at least holds its price (Touch Bar or no), it's going to be harder to resist.

Labels: hardware, lenovo, macbook, macbook pro, truck, ultrabook

Seems some of the blowback against the new MacBook Pros gets caught with the 16 gig RAM limit. That's a good place to start. I get sort of tired of the lumping Gruber does to work himself out of RAM being a problem.

From Daring Fireball: Baldur Bjarnason: 'The Downside of Believing in Apple':

Most of us, if given the choice between making compromises to our productivity and compromises to the battery life of the machines we buy, would choose a shorter battery life every time.

This is the nut of the argument against the new MacBook Pros. If the 16 GB RAM limit in the previous MacBook Pros was a limiting factor for your productivity, the new ones are no help at all. And I’m sure Bjarnason is correct that those people would gladly trade battery life for the ability to install 32 GB of RAM.

But that’s not most MacBook Pro users. Most MacBook Pro users will do just fine with 16 GB of RAM (in fact, most will do just fine with the 13-inch models’ default configuration of 8 GB). For most MacBook Pro users, Apple is right to prioritize battery life over the maximum RAM configuration. That is, if they’re only going to offer one lineup of “pro” notebooks — which is how they’ve done it for at least 15 years.

...

Because we’ve bought into Apple’s design myth, we are forced to come to one and only one conclusion:

Apple really, really doesn’t care about its professional Mac users.

I disagree with that conclusion. If your priority is the display, the new displays are brighter (500 nits) and offer wide color gamut. The new MacBook Pro SSDs offer industry-leading read and write performance, years ahead of the competition. The 15-inch MacBook Pro offers a quad-core i7 with speeds up to 3.8 GHz. For many demanding use cases, these are professional machines. Just not all professions.

A less punchy, but more accurate title for Bjarnason’s piece would be “The Downsides of Depending Upon a Company With a Relatively Sparse Product Lineup When Your Personal Needs Are Outside the Mainstream”.[highlighted emphasis mine -mfn]

I'm sighing just reading back through this.

1. Not only did Apple only make one line for pros (why the quotes, John?), they said one version of the MacBook Pro was their intended replacement for a consumer box. rly?
2. Web developers are not outside of the mainstream when it comes to pros using laptops.
   • If anything, web developers are archetypal.
   • (Not a majority, but representative.)
3. It's not a zero-sum game between battery and RAM.
   • Why not make the 15" 2mm taller? Who'd care short of Apple design?
   • Why are we so obsessed with thin and 10 hours of battery life?
4. Can Stephen King make a living writing books on a MacBook Pro? Sure. That doesn't make it a professional laptop.
   • We're starting to lose the meaning of the word professional.

But let's take a quick second to see what Baldur talked about. Does he really need 16 gigs of RAM today? Remember when we used to do fine with 4 megs? ;^)

From The downside of believing in Apple – Baldur Bjarnason:

I’m writing this on a fairly high spec 2015 13’ Macbook Pro with 16GB of RAM and that amount of RAM wasn’t enough even on the day I bought it. Since then the memory requirements of basic web development work has only increased:

• Most web developers now use VMs and Docker for server-side code because it’s much more reliable. It also consumes much more RAM than just using node.js on its own.
• Browsers have, if anything, increased their memory use over the past couple of years and web developers need to run several of them at a time.
• Some of those browser have to be run in their own VMs because they don’t run natively on the Mac.
• Having a test environment in a VM on your machine is also much more productive than always going to your test machine (which you should also have).
• The dominant web development IDEs are now built using browser tech (Electron/Chromium) and have much higher memory requirements than good old BBEdit. If you use TypeScript, you pretty much have to be using Visual Studio Code. If you use Flow, you pretty much have to be using Atom. Switching to a code editor with a more reasonable memory requirement means making workflow compromises.

That’s without getting into the graphics programs we use (a surprising amount of web work involves working with images). And if you’re a native app developer you have all of the above problems (VMs for testing earlier OS versions instead of browser versions) plus a need for fast compilation times.

We're really down to one reason -- VMs. If your developer box is used to host multiple boxes' worth of power, well, you do need more than one box worth of hardware. And Baldur, my man, why in the world do you have your production environment mirrored on your laptop?

But I agree with Bjarnason on the general point. If your laptop for pros is below state of the art for specs and you're charging beyond state of the art prices, well, you've screwed up. If you don't have too much battery life or RAM or CPU (to be clear, having too much should be your goal with a pro box) so that you can make your laptop thin and svelte, that's a problem. In two years, it'll hurt to use this MacBook Pro for VM based development, whether web or native, and that's a disservice from Apple when there's no obvious hardware to fill that gap for professionals. The 5k iMac is the closest, I suppose, but even that's over a year old now (415 days right now).

So Grubes, come on, let's stop pretending that because Apple has a box with a 2.9GHz i7 for OMGWTFBBQ!1! an entry price of $2700 that we've got pros covered. That's not competitive for many developers, who only "need" Macs to test out Safari -- or to host Windows in VMware to code native apps. These developers have other, much more useful, efficient, and affordable options. Apple's failed them, and Bjarnason's conclusion, that, "Apple really, really doesn’t care about its [software developing] Mac users," isn't that far off the mark after all.

Labels: apple, gruber, macbook pro, truck

Marco Arment botched his last blog post, when he suggested Apple should have kept USB-A ports on the new MacBook Pro.

Today's post shows he's thought about the issue a little more. From A world without the Mac Pro – Marco.org:

Pros wouldn’t be as angry about the limitations of the new MacBook Pro line if there was an alternative that solved their needs.

That's the sentiment that powered my earlier critique of the new line of MacBook Pros when I said that they Built the Wrong Truck. Underneath that was the regret that they'd only built one new model of trucks.

In that post, I included a tweet...

Would I trade the TouchBar etc in #NewMacBook redesign for proc/mobo updates across the entire line, keeping same designs? Yes, yes I would.

Implicit was also that I'd've taken (vs "traded") the new MBP if they'd also given me updated hardware with old designs everywhere else. If the Mac mini had a new processor and wasn't RAM hamstrung, I would've preferred a truck-ier MBP, but I would've considered biting -- I think I've owned three or four minis, and still use one as a build box at times. Three grand is probably too much for me to go Pro, but two grand and updated internals (and maybe only one graphics card to save them some cash) would've been attractive, and cut the MBP sting a little. And for non-crossplatform devs in boats otherwise similar to mine, I've got to think an updated, less expensive Pro would've been a near no-brainer.

I want a new Mac truck. Right now, I only have one model with three trim levels to choose from. The rest of the stable might as well all be certified used.

Of course, I've also always said that if you've got a few cheapskates complaining about price, you're probably pretty close to the right mark. So Marco's new $3k Pro is probably close to the money. I was surprised to see that he said "The existing iMac is great, but it isn’t enough."

He had a Pro, swapped to a [nearly maxed out?] iMac for the screen, but now wants to come back and use an external screen that's as nice. If I were an Apple-only dev, I would too...

And can you do a better job selling a Mac Pro than Marco does at the end?

From marco.org:

It’s the only pro-grade, workstation-class operating system that has ever been easy to use and nice enough that we wanted to spend more time at our workstations.

And hidden behind our pro apps and terminal windows are the shared photo streams we made last night, showing pictures of our children to their grandparents, who are running the exact same operating system.

One random final comment:

From marco.org again:

Linux can solve some pro needs, but not most. It’s a fantastic server OS but a miserable desktop one, and that will probably never change.

Oh, come on. Really? What's missing, other than, say, Messages? Linux is great. It's missing an iOS simulator, which I'd have to think is the real problem for Marco.

Labels: apple, macbook pro, marco, truck

Apple built the wrong truck

From macworld.com:

PCs are like trucks: While talking about the iPad and whether tablet devices are bound to replace the laptop, Jobs resorted to an analogy involving motor vehicles. “PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them… This transformation is going to make some people uneasy. The PC has taken us a long way.”

From mashable.com:

“I think if you’re looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore," Cook said. Granted, he's promoting the iPad Pro, which, with its all-new smart keyboard and pencil, is a laptop replacement in many cases. But one has to wonder what that means for Apple's Mac and MacBook categories, with which the company had good success in the last two years.

Cook doesn't really care much, as long as Apple is stealing from itself. Speaking about the iPad mini, he said it "clearly created some cannibalization" but, as long as the company cannibalizes itself, it's "fine."

You see exactly where I'm going with this. Did Apple build a truck? Do they even care about trucks any more?

I think the quick answer is no. Let's check out the tech specs of the 13"...

To overextend the metaphor, none of these have a great engine or are rated for much payload in the bed. The engines start at 2.0 GHz dual-cores. That stinks. And it's $200 to get to 16 gigs of RAM. No, really. $200 for an additional 8 gigs of RAM! My new Lenovo ran me $64 to add 16.

Want 16 gigs of RAM and a 3.3 GHz (dual-core [sic]) processor? Minimum drop is $2300.

Want 16 gigs of RAM and a 2.9 GHz quad-core? Minimum drop is $2700.

Stretching the limits of a truck

Okay, fine. Apple wanted to build a really slick truck, price be damned. Let's look to the truck market for an analog. There have been some neat trucks that are more worried with going fast than carrying a load.

The 1978 Dodge "L'il Red Express" is one. From cheatsheet.com:

10. 1978-’79 Dodge L’il Red Express

By the late ’70s, the feds had all but broken up the party for muscle cars. But most of the new safety and emissions laws on the books were for “passenger vehicles under 6,000 GVR,” and with that, Chrysler found a glorious loophole. Introduced in 1978 as part of Mopar’s “Adult Toys” lineup (hey, it was the ’70s…), the Li’l Red Express was a stripped-down Sportsman pickup with massive side pipes, garish gold accents, an oak-accented step-side bed, and a free-breathing 360 cubic-inch V8 that could take the full-size pickup from zero to 60 in under seven seconds, and run the quarter mile in 14.7 seconds. It wasn’t just the fastest American vehicle to 100 miles per hour back in ’78 – Car and Driver had it out-accelerating the Porsche 928, 911 and Ferrari 308 too.

That's cool. It's a truck whose straight-ahead speed puts it into Porsche & Ferrari's class. Imagine taking off at a stop light in one of these with some idiot acting like they own the strip with their 308 or 911. (The Ferrari 308 is what Magnum drove, fwiw.)

Yet this isn't really a truck, is it? This Dodge is a muscle car in a truck skin. It exists only because, as CheatSheet.com pointed out elegantly, a "glorious loophole" existed. Detroit had cornered the market on go-fast, but also on gas guzzling and emissions madness. I drove an old 60s Olds 442 around a little, and you could watch the gas needle move noticeably downwards as you drove. Smells great, goes fast, but wow. Not OPEC-independence friendly. When the government discovered emissions control was important, where could that go-fast knowlege go?

Dodge was great at muscle cars, so great that it got to the point it couldn't stop making them. It took a truck off the assembly line and turned it into something else. Okay, I'm stretching the metaphor waaay too far, but you get where I'm going.

If you want to buy a truck for your landscaping business, these are insanely overpriced, and spend a lot of money doing things you don't need them to do. The Dodge isn't a failure because it actually goes fast. But it's no longer doing the job of a truck. More to the point, this Dodge is for muscle car buyers, not truck buyers.

But don't she look good?!

I can kind of hear Schiller now claiming that the new MacBook Pro is so small. Look, it's thinner and weighs the same as a MacBook Air. Um, wow. I never had much trouble lugging around my PowerBook 150. Why do I care?

And you know what else looked cool when it was released?

From time.com's list of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time:

The 50 Worst Cars of All Time

 

As the North American International Auto Show kicks off in Detroit, TIME and Dan Neil, Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive critic and syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times, look at the greatest lemons of the automotive industry

2004 Chevy SSR

It's surprising, considering that Chrysler and GM are in the same town, that GM didn't learn from the Plymouth Prowler episode. When GM decided to kick up some custom retro mojo, it commissioned the Chevy SSR, an awesome-looking hotrod pickup truck with composite body panels and a slick convertible top. Alas, the chassis and mechanicals for the SSR were borrowed from GM's corporate midsize SUV program, making the putative performance machine heavy, underpowered and unforgivably lazy...

Here's a better look if that's not ringing any bells:

From Road and Track

And Wikipedia:

The SSR is a lot closer to what I see in the new MacBook Pro. It's not a truck at all, dang it, and what's more, it never was.* It might be svelte. But programmers and professionals, though they can be swayed by svelte (and have; look at all the Macs at press and professional conferences), still need to put payload in the back of their trucks. Like the SSR that, iirc, couldn't tow but 2500 lbs off of the lot, and couldn't carry that horribly much either.

The Chevy SSR was a truck for truck designers who wished they were designing sports cars. Now you've really gone meta. And gutted your potential market.

What a truck looks like...

If you've been reading for a while, you know I bought a Lenovo 14" Y700 back in April. And my initial review was fairly positive.

Pros:

• An i7-6700HQ
  • CpuBenchmark: 8030 multi, 1791 single
  • That's 15" MacBook Pro territory
• User upgradeable RAM and drives
  • Includes an m.2 slot for dual drives
  • +16 gigs from Crucial is $65
• Max 32 gigs.
  • Sorry, MacBook Pro.
• A 1920x1080 screen

For $850 out the door, I got...

• MacBook Pro 15" class quad-core i7
• 24 Gigs of RAM
• 128 gigs of SSD + 1 TB of spinning platter storage
• 1080p screen

The keyboard I kinda fixed like this (it's an external keyboard -- see the USB cable coming out of the top):

That's a truck, folks.

Apple's not dumb, is it?

Of course, I should add a disclaimer: Perhaps this simply means I'm not in Apple's audience any more. I've been buying Macs because they were better at what I wanted to do since the LC. Maybe now, as a web and applications developer, I'm better off with a fast WinPC and a slow Mac, relegated mainly to iOS-compilation duty.

But let's at least admit this -- with the Touch Bar MacBook Pro, we've left Jobs' truck metaphor.

* Okay, okay, the SSR did have an SUV platform -- the Trailblazer. But the Trailblazer wasn't exactly a truck either.

Labels: apple, design, macbook, truck