Via Waxy.
Category: Design
My Review of the 13-inch MacBook Pro
My work notebook was recently was upgraded to a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Here are my thoughts on the machine, in no particular order.
Construction
This notebook is the sturdiest I’ve ever used. The whole thing feels like one, solid chunk of awesome. Apple’s unibody construction makes the black MacBook I was using feel like a toy. Since there aren’t any seams on the top case, the edges and corners are very slick. The PowerBooks and MacBook Pros used to have rubber gasket around the edges which could chip and bend. Nothing like that here — the whole thing is one slab of metal.
On 10.6 Packaging
Only the Mac community could have enough to say to fill over 18 pages with comments about a leaked photo of an upcoming OS release’s packaging.
Adobe Going Intel-only
It’ll probably come as no surprise that Adobe is following Apple’s lead & going Intel-only with the next generation of the Creative Suite. That is, CS4 is the last version that’ll run on PowerPC-based Macs. You can read the details in the FAQ on Adobe.com.
By the time the next version of the Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They’re still great systems, but if you haven’t upgraded your workstation in four years, you’re probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either. Bottom line: Time & resources are finite, and with big transitions underway (going 64-bit-native, switching from Carbon to Cocoa), you want Adobe building for the future, not for the past.
Over-the-Air Syncing Coming to Things?
From the creators of Things, a wonderful to-do manager for the Mac and iPhone:
Believe it or not, we have been working on over-the-air sync since the beginning of this year. In the meantime, our goal changed from “something that works” (check out our competition if you want to know what we mean by that) to “a really sweet solution”. The tough challenge here is to develop a highly performance-oriented solution that works for everybody. In particular, we wanted it to work for Mac and iPhone users alike, without requiring a MobileMe account (or any WebDAV disk for that matter).
Matte Display an Option for 15-inch MacBook Pros Again
We’d heard just under a month ago that Apple was mulling the possibility of adding matte display options to more than just its flagship 17-inch MacBook Pro, and lo and behold, it seems the anti-glare revolution has begun. Starting now (like, right now), those in the market for a new unibody 15-inch MacBook Pro can order one directly from Apple with an anti-glare widescreen display, packing 1,440 x 900 pixels and a LED backlight. Sadly, the privilege will run you an extra $50 over the traditional (mirrored) glossy panel, and it will replace that svelte borderless look present on glossy MBPs with a silver frame bezel. A brief look around Apple’s international sites also shows it available elsewhere in the world for similar amounts, though we’re still curious as to what machine will be next in line for the upgrade, er, “option.”
Ice-T, The Apple Technician
The iTab Mini
I stumbled across this set on Flickr today of a tablet Mac created from remnants of a 12-inch PowerBook and a MacBook. It’s pretty impressive.
On the Apple Tablet and Snow Leopard
Cult of Mac has published an interesting article discussing the rumored Apple tablet:
The tablet is Apple’s answer to the exploding netbook market, but it won’t be a piece-of-junk netbook. The last thing Apple will do is glom a touchscreen onto a low-cost laptop. It won’t even put a touchscreen on a regular desktop like an iMac. It makes little sense to touch an iMac’s screen when it is sitting upright. But drop the iMac into your lap, and touching objects on the screen makes perfect sense, and seems perfectly natural.
Apple Tablet to Re-Invent the Album?
The “Cocktail” project would see a further evolution of such ideas. “It’s all about recreating the heyday of the album when you would sit around with your friends looking at the artwork, while you listened to the music,” one executive familiar with the plans told Financial Times. The problem is that most of today’s digital music audience has little or no recollection of the album’s heyday.
“It’s not just a bunch of PDFs,” said one executive. “There’s real engagement with the ancillary stuff.” One reported feature is that songs can be played directly from these interactive booklets without going into iTunes to play the tracks—though it’s not clear if iTunes must be running for the magic to work.
The Death of Handwriting
Time:
Cursive started to lose its clout back in the 1920s, when educators theorized that because children learned to read by looking at books printed in manuscript rather than cursive, they should learn to write the same way. By World War II, manuscript, or print writing, was in standard use across the U.S. Today schoolchildren typically learn print in kindergarten, cursive in third grade. But they don’t master either one. Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes to 15.
Tech Ink
PC World has posted a gallery of tech-related tattoos people have gotten over the years. I felt I compelled to show mine:
