What’s interesting about the new Apple products? (And is Tim Cook the new Steve Ballmer?)

by philg

Who has followed Apple’s product announcements today? Should I get a Mac as a travel laptop? If so, which one? This is mostly to run Microsoft Office (whose demise I confidently predicted in 1993; a browser-based editor would supplant it), Dropbox, and Chrome. Also to upload pictures on the go by pulling the SD card from the camera and, ideally, plugging it into the SD slot on the laptop.

Separately, “Why Tim Cook is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple” (Harvard Business Review article expanded) is an interesting look at Microsoft’s profitable growth into irrelevance.

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20 thoughts on “What’s interesting about the new Apple products? (And is Tim Cook the new Steve Ballmer?)”

  1. The old-style 13″ and 15″ MBP’s have MiniSD card readers built in, and are still available on the site. Unfortunately, they haven’t been reduced in price. The 13″ is plenty for doing light office work.

    My family’s been needing another laptop, and I’ve been waiting on this announcement. If Apple had announced (as some speculation had suggested) an external display with an integrated GPU (that would have been decent for gaming), it would have been an immediate purchase for me, along with a new MBP, and I would handed down my current laptop. I couldn’t care less about the TouchBar, and that was the biggest part of the announcement. So I just placed an order for a refurbished MacBook Air for my kids. For me, it means at least a couple more years of having a space heater under the desk for gaming.

  2. The lack of comments is worrisome. Can it be that there is in fact nothing interesting about these products? Apple doesn’t have anything to compete with Lenovo’s Yoga, do they? And the new MacBooks are not even equipped with the latest Kaby Lake CPUs, right? So they are one generation behind the Dell XPS 13?

  3. I have a Macbook Air at home, and a Macbook Pro at work. Love ’em both. Fast and extremely stable. Main difference for me is the screen size, with corresponding weight implications. Don’t know your needs well enough to recommend any particular one, sorry.

  4. You could mix it up a little, get an iPad Pro, maybe with SIM slot, and an Eyefi card for the camera. It fits your parameters.

  5. There are no comments because, with the exception of a really really great screen, the computer would not meet the needs that you expressed (SD slot & Kaby Lake). Cheers!

  6. The half-pound of weight shed is welcome, as is the Touch ID, and touch bar is a neat gimmick, but as you say they are underwhelming. Losing a physical Escape key is going to be painful for UNIX nerds.

    I own a 2013 vintage 15″ Retina MacBook Pro, a 2015 12″ Retina MacBook and just received a Kaby Lake i7-7500U HP Spectre 13t. The latter will be running Linux: El Crapitan code quality was absolutely terrible (mean time between hard crashes on my brand-new 27″ 5K iMac at work: 3 days with El Crapitan, solved with Sierra) and I need to start hedging my bets. Starting on a laptop which will only be a secondary machine to my Mac Pro desktop makes for an easier transition.

    If you want a high-end machine, the Razer Blade Pro is priced the same as the MacBook Pro 15 and includes a nVidia GTX 1080.

  8. To be fair, reporters who have actually seen it say the DCI-P3 wide-gamut screen is phenomenal, so it’s probably a good machine for photographers and videographers, but calibration will be a concern.

  9. I second what Lem said. I have no pro Apple/ pro PC bias but your use case sounds like a Chromebook to me. HPs newish 13 inch one looks pretty nice.

  10. The future is a 2nd display comprising the entire keyboard, with some kind of 2 cent vibrator or as they say in Cupertino, a “$1 billion haptic engine”. The emoji bar is just the beginning. The Macbook is the standard, at least on the west coast, so they can abandon USB connectors. Thunderbolt connectors bought a little horizontal space. Suspect completely wireless charging will make all connectors disappear.

  11. TimB: I don’t think that a Chromebook works because I want to keep about 200 GB of Dropbox data synced and I want it all to work when offline. My experience traveling in the U.S. has been that this is the land of incompetence when it comes to building WiFi networks.

  12. (In the wake of them killing Picasa, but not open-sourcing it, I’m also wary of any Google product other than Search or Ads. Why would I want to invest in learning to use a Chromebook and then watch Google decide that isn’t profitable enough to bother with? Microsoft at least is actually in the operating system business. MacOS is not core for Apple anymore, but it is a bigger percentage of Apple than Chrome OS is for Google!)

  13. 200GB storage aside (which is fair enough):

    a. ChromeOS laptops have been in the top 10 sellers on Amazon for years now, you’d be surprised at hone many of them are out there in the wild (and pervasive in schools now too). Unending support can never be guaranteed, but unlikely to ‘end’ any time soon…

    b. There is *very little* time/effort investment required in going ChromeOS. It’s mostly Chrome which means all your software and files are (or should be) cloud based. It does support offline (depending on file types etc – Google Docs has great offline support, for example). You could throw your $400 Chromebook in the ocean and start using a $3000 MacBook without too much stress (apart from the mental overhead of setting up a MacBook for the first time, which is not insignificant)….

  14. Having been looking to upgrade my 11” MacBook Air, I was disappointed that Apple didn’t release a 12” MacBook Pro. On the models they did release TouchID looks like it could be convenient, and the Touch Bar looks interesting, if developers take good advantage of it. But my Air is almost always connected to displays, so these things wouldn’t be ofmuch use to me personally. Apart from that, core capabilities seem like evolutionary bumps, rather than what I was expecting after, what, a couple of years since the last major update?

    Phil, on the topic of Dropbox, in case you haven’t seen it, BitTorrent Sync is a do-it-yourself alternative that I’ve been running without issue for a couple of years now. Don’t know if it’d be useful for your context, but it could be worth a look.

  15. Some chromebooks do have upgradeable SSDs, so your need for 200GB of local storage can be satisfied. But if you really need MS Office, you’ll be disappointed.

    The new MBPs strike me as overpriced, especially if you want to upgrade the RAM and SSD. Plus you’ll need adapters for SD cards, HDMI, etc. I’ve been using Macs for 15+ years, but I’m about ready to jump ship. I’d go to ChomeOS if it weren’t for Office.

  16. Phil. As a prof I think you need to start/work on a big investigation at MIT about improving Laptops and their user interfaces in general. The touch pads are just poor and get in the way when you type for many of us. Same issue with auto correct word guessing when I type. My phone works better. Why?

    Regarding the Mac I have similar yawing issues with the “new” HP Spectre laptop. They made “improvements” that make the machine less useable IMO. They took away the USB type 2 ports and the mini card slot and the HDMI connector and replaced them with some USB type 3s. So now you have a slightly lighter laptop but a bunch of plugs and gadgets to carry and that weigh more. So a total mess IMO. So now I am trying to buy a year old laptop for my wife. A real mess.

  17. Couldn’t you keep your 200gb of storage for your chromebook on a thumb drive or SD card? A 256gb thumb drive is now $50 – we live in the age of miracles.

  18. 200 GB of storage is easy, Jackie, but I need the running Dropbox application to keep those 200 GB continuously sync’d. Dropbox says “Sync files across all your devices, whether you use a PC, Mac, Android, iPad, iPhone, or Windows Phone.”

  19. A HP Envy 13 with Kaby Lake, a QHD+ display (touchscreen at no cost if you want it) and 16gb RAM / 512gb of flash costs only $1500 and has a superior keyboard to any recent Mac laptop. You can also get onsite service for less than the cost of Apple Care.

    I don’t think a Chromebook would be rational, given that you likely need to work on Word documents while offline.

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