“The beauty of the MagSafe connector was that Apple had found precisely the right balance between attachment and detachment. Strong enough to hold the connector in place, weak enough to detach if it gets yanked.
The MagSafe 2 connector fails that balance test. Badly. The magnet is too weak. It’s so weak, it keeps falling out. It falls out if you brush it. It falls out if you tip the laptop slightly. It falls out if you look at it funny. It’s a huge, huge pain.”
The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, Unhackable, Untenable
“Every time we buy a locked down product containing a non-replaceable battery with a finite cycle count, we’re voicing our opinion on how long our things should last. But is it an informed decision? When you buy something, how often do you really step back and ask how long it should last? If we want long-lasting products that retain their value, we have to support products that do so.
Today, we choose. If we choose the Retina display over the existing MacBook Pro, the next generation of Mac laptops will likely be less repairable still. When that happens, we won’t be able to blame Apple. We’ll have to blame ourselves.”
Happy 1000 Anniversary Old Friend
1000 battery charge cycles and counting. One month before “he” actually turns 3 years old. My faithful work tool, entertainer and “companion” if such a term can be used for a machine. But it endures with me, on my ramblings on the state of the world, of tech, of my country. It allows my work pursuits, my social chatting with distant friends and the satisfaction of my endless curiosity.
It truly is a “bicycle for the mind“
A purchase from which i have absolutely no regrets. As a gift “he” received last week a RAM upgrade. It is now carrying 8 GB due to the “unofficial” firmware upgrade from Apple and no problem whatsoever. Only wish SSD drives would be more affordable, but then again, i’ve been wishing that since i’ve purchased this little fellow.
Quality assurance
There’s something wrong with the copying manufacturing factories at Samsung. I mean they seriously need to check closely with their Quality Assurance inspectors.
I mean, didn’t they noticed that the trackpad wasn’t centered regarding the opening indentation?
And that they forgot to put the glowing apple logo on the top lid of this “macbook”?
And that the Magsafe port is rectangular instead of round?
These small details could just make someone think that they were looking on a cheap rip-off homage PC instead of a full quality Apple Macbook manufactured by Apple’s biggest supplier, Samsung of course.
I guess the clean large trackpad was obvious that it was coming to every computer, as it just makes more sense and is insanely superior compared with the previous ones. In fact i long for one every time i have to use a standard notebook. But that they even reproduced the indentation for opening the lid exactly as Apple’s Macbooks was shameless and unnecessary.
In the end i’m just curious how much did Samsung spend to have their “designers” and engineers trying to copy the outside of Apples products, resulting of course in this half-breed that strikes to look beautiful as it’s competitors but in the end just fails because of all of its incongruences and corner-cutting, instead of doing it’s own design from the ground up and ending up with a product of their own that would probably look better and would be inherently more original. And i guess it would probably have some other industrial strengths in either cost, internal space, or physical resistance.
Photos from PC World’s article
8 GB in a Late 2008 Macbook
And this is why i like Apple products!
I’ve just discovered that my Late 2008 Aluminium Unibody Macbook is actually able to have 8 GB of RAM memory instead of the 4 previously announced. So, a 2008 laptop is able to be upgrade from 2 to 4 and now to 8 GB of RAM.
If only SSD drives would become more affordable and with larger capacities this “baby” would be all equipped and a hell of a machine. And deadly silent as well. Even if just a whisper as the Macbook has, I hate ventilation noise. It removes most of the pleasure of being quietly in a silent room working.
Now show me a 2008 equivalent “PC” laptop, with equivalent cost at the time, that has this expansibility and can be upgraded to the this kind of “contemporary” levels. Most of them in 2008 could only deal with 3 GB of RAM.
It annoys me that i have these frequent argument with friends or co-workers about why I have decided to buy a Mac. I have come to a point where i gave up trying to explain the perceived qualities and just blankly ask if they ever worked with any other system besides Windows. And won’t argue anything else if the answer is “none”.
It is not that Windows is a bad system. It’s just that any other current option is better. Linux is amazingly fast, stable,and secure. And the Mac is all that and neatly integrated, with an amazing attention to detail. Which unfortunately lacks in many Linux distros. And is pretty much absent in Redmond products.
So, yes. It is for this kind of surprises and reliability that i have bought a Mac. That 2,5 years passed it still rocks, it still has great look and no cheap hardware failure as ink-less keys. It still works perfectly, without any specific maintenance. I only formatted it once because i decided to upgrade OS and hardware at the same time (more disk space and 2 to 4 GB RAM), although theoretically even that wasn’t necessary. And when I formatted it, I could just import my user settings from Time Machine and everything was just as before. My bookmarks, my mail, my configs. Out of the box. Without extra costly software. And without extra hassles.
And now i can just buy 8 GB and slap it in. And run my baby even faster and nimbler than it is. Yep. Now tell me that doesn’t justify the “Apple tax” i keep hear talking. I compared back then and the Mac was actually the cheapest with feature-to-feature comparison. Now it still is. Even more.
Thunderbolt & SSD
If Thunderbolt port has data flowing at 10 Gigabit per second and the current Serial ATA interface only outputs at 6 Gigabit per second, doesn’t that mean that is actually better to have my data on a external disk with Thunderbolt? ((granted that that hard disk has a Thunderbolt connector inside and not SATA->Thunderbolt converter))
So the better solution for the current Macbooks is to have a small SSD drive inside (64 or 128 GB) for system and apps and a larger standard disk outside for everything else?
It appears that by doing so you completely eliminate the hard disk bottleneck.
And can the next Macbooks generation come with Thunderbolt connector for everything inside?
Happy Birthday Steve
Yep, definitely today ((Rumor is that they are launched specifically today as it is Steve Jobs birthday. But as all Apple related rumors, there is no actual base of information to say that. )) that the new Macbook Pro are launched. The Apple Store is already down. So let’s see what this “Thunderbolt” port can do!
Vertical Stand Macbook
Besides Twelve South Bookarc, is there any others vertical stands for a Macbook (unibody late 2008) in clamshell mode? I’m setting up my office “desktop replacement” environment and want to put the mac vertically to save space. ((although terribly afraid of hitting it with my elbow or other and dropping it.))