For about the last year I've been thinking about a replacement for my 2005 model 12" PowerBook G4, so I was eagerly awaiting Apple's notebook announcement on 14th October. Hoping an irresistible new Apple laptop would come along that was a worthy successor to my 12" PowerBook, the hard drive of which is rapidly filling with photos and video, and the battery now only lasts a few minutes.Unfortunately Apple put the cat among the pigeons with the new Aluminium 13" MacBook. While it is undoubtedly a sexy looking piece of kit (although I have yet to see it in the flesh - or more accurately, in the aluminium and glass), I have a number of concerns that make me a bit apprehensive over the potential purchase.
First the good things...
Apple are touting the video chipset in the new MacBook as being 5x faster than that in the plastic MacBooks. Mac OS X always has been, and no doubt will continue to be, taxing of graphics hardware. The more juice there is there the better. (And if there's any chance of hardware assisted video decoding, that would be nice too).
Replacing the hard drive in the new MacBook looks like it will be supremely easy. Having read the disassembly instructions required to replace the HDD in the PowerBook I've been put off replacing it myself.
The unit certainly looks nicely built. Machining the entire case out of a single piece of aluminium is supposed to give the case more rigidity. And as a side-effect makes the machine look like it's just beamed down from an alien space station.
The weight of the new MacBook (2.04kg) is almost the same as the 12" PowerBook (2.07kg), and is 10% lighter than the previous MacBook (2.27kg).
Now the not so good things...
The most obvious drawback is the omission of the FireWire port that was present on previous MacBooks. I have FireWire on my PowerBook, and I do use it on occasion. Mostly to do DVD burning - the PowerBook only has a combo drive, so I have a external disk enclosure with a DVD-Everything writer in that I use when I need to burn a DVD. The new MacBook comes with a internal SuperDrive, so DVD burning shouldn't be a problem. Even so, the enclosure I bought has both USB and FireWire interfaces, so I should be able to continue to use it anyway. We also have a 500GB external drive - mostly connected to Caroline's iMac by FireWire - but that also has a USB connection, so that should work OK. (Although I always liked the idea of having a separate bus for an external drive that was receiving serious use). The only peripheral I have that is FireWire or nothing is my DV camcorder. Although I don't use it much, I have knocked up the odd video in iMovie, and being able to do the whole thing on the PowerBook was very neat. In the future I'm more likely to make the odd little film assembled from clips captured on my digital camera. I am very unlikely to follow Steve Jobs (reported) compassionate advice and just buy a new camcorder.
The loss of the FireWire port does make me feel uneasy though. One of the pleasant things about the PowerBook has been the connectivity it has. Most things (with the notable exception of a couple of SCSI devices I have) just plug in and work. And when I have done audio recording on it with an external drive both the USB ports and the FireWire port have been in use, and the captured audio (on the USB bus) has no impact on the disk activity (on the FireWire bus). I wonder if an entirely USB solution will work as well. (There may be separate USB busses, but I would have to put a hub onto one of the USB ports to be able to connect everything - overall the new model has fewer ports).
As I have said, the connectivity of the PowerBook has been very useful. When I got the PowerBook it came with VGA and DVI adapters (both of which I have used), but I had to buy a separate composite video adapter (which was another story). The new MacBook comes with none of these. The VGA and DVI adapters are £20 each, and there doesn't seem to be a composite video adapter, so I fear that it may not be possible to connect this machine to an analog TV (or video mixer), which would mean I wouldn't be able to use it as a PVR in the way I use the PowerBook. Unless I buy a new TV of course (which I have been meaning to do for some years, but never quite get around to doing).
I always thought the white acrylic iBook G4 was a rather fetching machine, and I even owned one very briefly (the 14" model) before trading up to a 12" PowerBook G4 (which always seemed to fit better at the top of the iBook line than the bottom of the PowerBook line). The new MacBook is machined out of a single block of aluminium, with a glossy glass display. It certainly looks sexy in the pictures, but I wonder if the WiFi reception is as good as the plastic MacBooks, and how viewable the glossy screen is. (Certainly I would like a wider viewing angle for the display than my current PowerBook can manage).
Another big disappointment is the price. Before the announcement I had specced out one of the white MacBooks (2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD) for £829, plus £100 to upgrade the RAM to 4GB from Crucial. The closest equivalent for the new MacBook (2.0GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD) is £949, again you can upgrade the RAM to 4GB for £100 from Crucial. That's £120 more for a computer with 20% slower CPU, no FireWire and no composite video out. If you add in the cost of extra video connectors the price is almost the same as I paid for the PowerBook more than 3 years ago. (And this is without the additional cost of buying a new (non-FireWire) camcorder, and a new (HDMI) TV that Apple seem to think you need to do).
So as yet I am undecided. It might just be that Apple has got the balance between form and functionality a little too much in favour of the former for my liking.
7 comments:
This article [link] suggests the viewing angle on the new MacBook isn't great. :-(
Yes, it's a bit of a curious revamp. I completely agree with basically everything you've posted here. After giving it a bit of thought, I figure they're deliberately trying to reposition the macbook back down in the entry levels - it seems to me as Apple navigated through a bit of a dodgy patch as they transitioned hardware platforms away from powerpc the iBook/macbook gently scaled up to meet the 'pro' end.
If you consider the relative specs of a G3-era iBook against the then current titanium powerbook, progressing towards last years macbook / macbook pro the macbooks have really closed the gap.
Last time I felt the need to upgrade, I couldn't really see the benefit in the macbook pro for the extra money, for me and my usage. So I wonder if they're trying to address that. If I needed an upgrade currently, I'd have to go 'pro' again, and I guess I'm what they want to be a pro user :-/
I'm sorry to see it, but I'm not surprised by the firewire disappearing - after the iPod, and the air dropped it, it's really increasingly a niche format. you're dead right about it's scalability for random access IO and chains ( although in my experience, limited mostly to iPod syncing, the USB on intel macs seems to be less choky than the powerpc models I've owned. ) So I was expecting that to happen. It does rule out a macbook for anyone with firewire kit they want to keep though - I've got quite a few storage enclosures, and it's much better than USB for unbuffered A/V.
There's a bunch of things about the powerbook changes I'm not wild about either. Moving the ports to all down one side seems like a regression, and having the battery lights on the side of the laptop is a good fix for one usage pattern, but breaks the existing handy one of shuffling though a few batteries to find the one with the most charge for swapping in The dual GPU seems like a wasted feature - you need to reboot the window server to move between them, it's a strict A / B option per login session.
The display port thing is another weird jump. They seem to be in a bit of a funny transition stage really - e.g. you can still buy a mac mini with firewire and DVI, they've got screens that won't work with half their computer range etc. It all seems a bit half-arsed and mismanaged. I do like the all in one giant trackpad and 'unibody' encasing. And I'm a giant fan of the new giant calculator style keyboard mechanism they're employing everywhere.
So I'm quite happy sticking where I am, I should be grateful for the opportunity not to waste my money :-). I think I'll wait for the next OS release, see if there's any compelling architectural benefits to the newer models that comes with the revamp - e.g. those fancy multinode GPUs might be interesting coupled with all the OpenCL LLVM stuff they've been working on, and maybe they'll finally ship QuartzGL and scalable vector UI.
They're still selling a white macbook model as the entry level of course. And I've been eyeing the refurb store :-)
Also, it looks like my self-hosted openID works, it's the first time I've used it. I should have done a "First Post!"
I've just been up to Cribb's Causeway, and the 2.4GHz White MacBook is still available in John Lewis (and other retailers). Although it's not been reduced (yet?).
I also had a go on the new Aluminium MacBook. Very nice piece of kit. Although the viewing angle of the screen is not great (and the MacBook Pro screen is better). The trackpad is big (although it needs to be if you're trying to do four fingered gestures on it), and the buttonless clicking is surprisingly good - in fact I was doing it before I realised. It also seems amazingly light, until you realise that there are no batteries in the display models at JL.
But having said that I think I'm pretty much leaning towards getting the old model before stocks run out. Although not as sexy as the NewBook, it is still pretty sexy, and will play nicely with the kit already have.
Its scary that you find things like that "sexy".
I got John Lewis to send me one of the 2.4GHz white MacBook's from their High Wycombe branch. It arrived yesterday.
I can see that having beefed up the video on the MacBook line there is little differentiation on the Pro line (other than larger screens), so removing the high speed bus for audio/video applications really means Apple have decided that the "consumer" is more interested in playing games than making films or music. I'm not so interested in playing games, so I stuck with the older (and cheaper) option.
Ooh, I didn't notice you'd got a macbook, hope that's working out well for you. Most of the time I think mine's the best Mac I've ever had, although my right hand shift key stopped working yesterday, and the construction of those keyboards doesn't bode well for it being a DIY fix. At least I've got another shift key.
I just popped back to say - here's another 'interesting' change in the new line
I've been dabbling with watching iTunes video on mine lately, mostly because it looks very good on an external digital display. Interesting that Apple seem hell-bent on persuading me out of buying any more laptops or any more videos from them :-)
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