Riccardo Mori

A bigger modern MacBook

September 8, 2018

Some days ago, John Gruber wrote a very interesting piece speculating about the possible low-cost laptop to replace the current MacBook Air, the subject being raised by a report from Mark Gurman and Debby Wu at Bloomberg. Gruber hypothesises three possible scenarios:

A mostly unchanged MacBook Air, but with a Retina display.
A new, slightly bigger version of the 12-inch MacBook.
The 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar drops to $999.

Regarding scenario 2, Gruber writes:

Apple could replace the Air with a new, slightly bigger version of the 12-inch MacBook. A 13- or 14-inch display, ultra thin and light, two USB‑C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, the new post-2015 butterfly-switch keyboard. That could be a very appealing machine — I’m sure many people would love a bigger portable display without paying 15-inch MacBook Pro prices. One problem with my years-long “Someday the 12-inch MacBook will drop to $999 and replace the Air” theory is that I suspect a lot of people think the 12-inch MacBook is too small. But a 13- or 14-inch big brother to the 12-inch MacBook would presumably cost more, not less, which would contradict Gurman’s description of it as a “new low-cost laptop to succeed MacBook Air”. Something like the 12-inch MacBook but bigger sounds to me like something Apple would do, but nothing like what Gurman has reported.

Of all the 3 scenarios outlined by Gruber, I tend to favour this one. And I also think Apple could manage to produce such a MacBook in a way that would make it cost less than the current 12-inch retina MacBook.

What makes a MacBook expensive? The first things off the top of my head are:

The Retina display
The building materials
Some specific internal components and/or design choices (e.g. a high-quality SSD or a peculiar battery design)

So, what I’m thinking is that Apple could equip this purported low-cost MacBook Air successor with a ‘good enough’ Retina display, maybe a high-density display that’s not as full-featured as the one in the MacBook Pro line; it could lack wide colour gamut support, for example.

Or, Apple could produce a MacBook using less premium materials, while maintaining the thin-and-light design. I’m insisting on this aspect because, firstly, I see a lot of competitors manufacture decent laptops that feel nice, are affordable, and retain a certain design quality without necessarily being assembled with costly materials. Secondly, looking at the current MacBook Air, which has a mediocre display but a good-quality aluminium unibody chassis, it clearly is the former what’s keeping the machine affordable.

Therefore, a new laptop with a better display at a similar price point must skimp on something else, and building materials is the first thing coming to mind. It could also feature a lesser-quality SSD or a simpler battery design, but I don’t think Apple would want to introduce a MacBook Air successor with a shorter battery life (although, if it has a Retina display, it’s going to be hard to feature an equally long-lasting battery as the one in the current MacBook Air).

Another aspect Apple can adjust about this theoretical laptop to keep the price down is ports: maybe if this laptop is considered to be the rugged entry-level that can be targeted at students, Apple could retain the MagSafe port and give the laptop two additional USB‑C ports — like Gruber speculated — but without Thunderbolt support, and a regular HDMI port for video. (Again, I’m just brainstorming here, considering different angles.)

Should we keep treating Retina displays as a premium feature?

With Apple removing subpixel antialiasing from Mac OS 10.14 Mojave, it’s clear that Apple is reaching a ‘Retina everywhere’ point. Retina displays in Macs are six years old; in technology, that’s enough old for a feature to be less expensive to implement than it was at its inception. I honestly don’t know anything about the process and the costs involved in manufacturing Retina displays, and I don’t know anything about the agreements Apple has with their main suppliers (Samsung and LG), but I’m wondering — what if Apple has found a way to make a Retina display a less costly feature for the customer? When basically every Apple product has a Retina display today, it’s getting a bit hard to consider it a stand-out, premium feature.

‘Low cost’ — it’s all relative

Perhaps it’s just me, but Cook’s Apple looks a bit more self-conscious than Jobs’s Apple when it comes to company image and prestige. Under Jobs, Apple seemed to have less of a problem releasing truly affordable products, or trimming prices a bit for a certain product after a couple of iterations. Maybe for today’s Apple, a ‘low-cost’ MacBook means something like $1,199 or hopefully $1,099, so yes, we could end up with a new laptop that costs less than a base MacBook Pro model but eeeh not that much less. (By the way, if the rumours about the new Mac mini being aimed at ‘more pro’ users are true, it’s safe to expect another rise in prices for what once was a good, truly affordable desktop Mac.)

The bold move, I think, should be…

Getting rid of the 12-inch MacBook. Don’t jump at my throat just yet. The hypothetically affordable MacBook Air successor should reprise the role of the polycarbonate MacBook of eight years ago as the entry-level versatile Mac laptop for those who can’t afford or don’t need the performance of a MacBook Pro, but don’t want a laptop so petite as the current 12-inch MacBook either. The position left open by the discontinuation of the 12-inch MacBook could be filled (and it would be about time, I think) by the next-generation 12.9‑inch iPad Pro, which I daresay could potentially be a more versatile device than the 12-inch MacBook. Meanwhile, the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines would become a bit more streamlined with regard to models and pricing. There would be this new affordable entry-level 13-inch MacBook, then the 13-inch MacBook Pro without Touch Bar, then the 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros with Touch Bar. With a bit of fine-tuning, this hypothetical line-up should satisfy a wider range of customers.

An unusual tech travel kit

August 20, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Tech travel kit

This first half of August I was away from home, visiting my mother in Italy. Knowing I would have little time for work, I brought with me a lighter tech travel kit; now you’re looking at the photo and smiling at the words ‘lighter travel kit’. Lighter doesn’t necessarily mean minimal. I’m through with minimalism. I have tried, repeatedly, to embrace a more minimal tech lifestyle, but I ultimately realised it just brought disappointment and friction. Yes, friction. I realised it was like wanting to have a different body shape. While I can lose weight and achieve a fitter look with some effort, I cannot change my body shape, the thickness and structure of my bones… I’m digressing.

I looked up the definition of maximalist, but heh heh it turns out it doesn’t mean the opposite of minimalist. Noun: (especially in politics) a person who holds extreme views and is not prepared to compromise. Adjective: of or denoting an extreme opinion. Maybe I could use terms like byzantine or baroque to denote my opposing direction to minimalism, and to characterise my tech setups. But I like to use maximalist — tongue in cheek, obviously.

Some days ago I tweeted:

I forgot [to talk] about my current tech travel kit. It comes in twos.

2 iPads

2 iPhones

2 Nokia phones

And one Bluetooth keyboard.

Oldest device is from 2006. Newest from 2014. I can’t do my main job, but I can manage everything else.

Tim replied: I am pretty curious what the uses are for the devices. I am always interested in how people use their tools!

I promised a post. Here it is.

The devices are:

A first-generation iPad. 2010. 16 GB. iOS 5.1.1
A third-generation iPad. 2012. 32 GB. iOS 9.3.5
An iPhone 4. 2010. 16 GB. iOS 7.1.2
An iPhone 5. 2012. 32 GB. iOS 10.3.3
A Nokia E61. 2006. 2 GB (micro SD). Wikipedia says its OS is S60 platform third edition on Symbian OS.
A Nokia Lumia 830. 2014. 16 GB + 16 GB (micro SD). Windows 10 Mobile.
A Logitech iPad Keyboard and Stand Combo Bluetooth keyboard.

You might be wondering why such a redundant setup. As a ‘maximalist’, instead of concentrating functionality in the fewest possible devices, I have the tendency to do the opposite — i.e. to distribute tasks across multiple devices. The iPad 1 has been my daily driver for a few months now, and it was indeed the one I used the most during my stay and while travelling. I had ripped a few episodes of some TV series I’m following, and watched them with VLC. The 8‑year-old iPad had no problems playing them and VLC could even handle subtitles when needed. I also used the iPad 1 to write the draft of this post. And to check a bunch of secondary email accounts. And to quickly jot down a few notes in Evernote Penultimate (the old version with the good design). And much more. The iPad 3 was my backup, and I resorted to it when I needed to use more modern apps.

The iPhone 5 is (still) my main phone, and the one I used the most. But when I go to Italy I usually bring another phone with my old Italian SIM card, and the Nokia E61 was the only working phone that supports a regular-size SIM card among the phones I own. In the past my choice was the good old iPhone 3G, but lately its battery life has been noticeably shortening. It took a bit to get accustomed to the physical keyboard again, but in the end it was rather pleasant to type text messages on it.

When I visit Italy, I also keep an additional data-only SIM card with an advantageous data plan I can reactivate by simply buying enough credit. And that’s what the iPhone 4 is for: I put this data-only SIM card in it, activate Personal Hotspot, and all the other devices can connect to the Internet.

Finally, the main reason I also brought the Nokia Lumia 830 with me is that this phone has the best camera (10 MP) of all these vintage devices. Its lens is also wide-angle, so it’s really great for the kind of photography I like to do with a smartphone. I also like using Windows Phone, and there are a few apps I still enjoy using, so there’s that too.

The Logitech Bluetooth keyboard was really a worthy addition to the kit. It’s lightweight enough, sturdy enough, and its case transforms into a stand (as you can see on Amazon), which has proven quite handy in a few occasions. I used it mainly with the iPad 1, but it would have been just as easy to pair it with the other iPad or one of the phones if necessary.

As I said in the original tweet, I can’t do my main job with this setup. For that I need a Mac — it’s a matter of software and screen real estate. But this perhaps unusual travel kit took good care of every other need, without taking up too much space. All the phones, cables and chargers went into my Adept travel pouch, and with the two iPads and the keyboard in my backpack it was like carrying around a couple of books.

Yes, it may be a byzantine, a baroque, a convoluted setup, but it really worked for me. Once again, I put older devices to good use and they, in turn, did not let me down.

Another approach to designing professional laptops

July 31, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

Yesterday I read one of the best reviews of the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro, written by Brendan Nystedt for Wired. It’s a detailed, balanced review: the author, in my opinion, has managed to explain very well what’s good about it, as well as to point out what’s not so great about it. The tone of the article, in particular, feels neutral; and that’s good in my book. Too many times I’ve read reviews that revolved around an originating opinion (e.g. I think this device is bad, I don’t like it at all) and I could easily read the author’s distaste for the device between the lines, and any possible redeeming quality of such device was simply overwhelmed by the negative bias as a result. (The same, of course, is true when the author of the review has an overwhelmingly positive opinion on a device, accessory, etc.).

Nystedt and I seem to come from a similar place: I, too, have used Macs for quite a long time, and between the models in my collection, and others I have used but not owned, I’ve had my hands on at least twenty different Apple laptops, from the recent MacBook Pros, and going back as far as 1991. It’s natural that his review started resonating with me since the very first paragraphs:

However, the more recent MacBooks I’ve used have been a mixed bag. Not only are Apple’s last couple MacBook iterations unrepairable and non-upgradeable, but I find that the computing experience has been compromised in some key areas. Apple’s laptops used to be so competitive that I’d recommend them just for use with Windows. But then PC manufacturers started upping their game, and since late 2016, it’s been extremely hard to recommend the Pros. How did we get to this place?

If you’ve been reading this blog and/or followed me on Twitter for a while, you know I have a profound dislike for the redesigned keyboard with the butterfly mechanism, introduced in 2015 with the 12-inch MacBook, then extended to the MacBook Pro line. Nystedt is of the same opinion, and I really like the way he expresses it in these bits I’ve excerpted:

Personally, I feel that in swapping the Pro keyboard for the shallow butterfly-style version, Apple severely damaged its MacBook Pro line.

[…]

These new 2018 MacBook Pros have a similar butterfly keyboard mechanism. The choice is bound to be similarly controversial, even though Apple’s touting its improved switch design. […] But, for me, this is still a sub-par keyboard. I shouldn’t have to “get used to” a keyboard on a multi-thousand-dollar computer, and it shouldn’t make my hands hurt doing what it was designed to do. The older keyboards were better, and Mac users deserve a better typing experience for what they’re paying.

Other examples of what I feel are spot-on observations come from the Dongle Chaos section of the review:

People in hell want ice water, and creative pros in dongle hell want USB‑A and an SD card reader. The ability to plug any device into any port, in any orientation is one thing. But diminished utility is another. For my day-to-day routine, fishing a USB‑A to USB‑C adapter out of my backpack just so I can occasionally authenticate using my YubiKey is vexing. I can only imagine what it’s like for working professionals to have to juggle adapters for hard drives, external displays, SD card readers, and other requisite peripherals. […]

Does USB‑C simplify the MacBook Pro? Yes. But it can put the burden on the user, something a truly elegant solution should never do.

In the Price and Compromises section, there’s another gem:

It used to be that when you bought a MacBook Pro, you got the best hardware around, along with the best operating system. Increasingly, these MacBooks feel like they beat up on the Mac faithful for favoring that ecosystem.

In his conclusion, Nystedt writes:

Apple’s made a lot of noise lately about taking the needs of pros seriously. But I’ve used this finished product for a while and have to wonder about that. Because, if you let creative professionals design the 2018 MacBook Pro, I think it’d look a whole lot different than it does right now. I think it would be more modular, have a higher-res screen, a normal keyboard without a superfluous Touch Bar, and a wider array of useful ports.

Exactly.

And this is the part when my article takes an unexpected turn — I’d like to talk a bit about one of my secondary laptops. A Windows PC. A Lenovo ThinkPad T400 from 2008.

I’ve always liked the ThinkPad line of notebooks originally introduced by IBM in 1992, then passed on to Lenovo when the company acquired IBM’s PC business (and the ThinkPad brand) in 2005. ThinkPads were designed for businessmen, and prioritised durability, dependability, and upgradability — although their austere, angular look was really distinctive as well.

The reason I want to share a few observations on my T400 is because one of the first things that struck me when I started using it (and the T61 before it) is that it feels like a laptop made by professionals for professionals. I’ll leave my experience with Windows 8.1 and 10 for another article and I’ll just focus on the hardware and the design for now.

It’s a diametrically opposite approach to Apple’s pro laptops: pretty much everything in this machine (and in many other ThinkPad models produced over the years) is repairable or upgradable. By removing just a few screws you have quick access to the RAM slots. The optical drive is removable (it’s located in what’s called a Serial Ultrabay Slim) and can be easily swapped for a more feature-rich drive: if your ThinkPad came with just a CD-ROM drive, you could easily replace it with a CD/DVD burner, and even a Blu-Ray burner. For a laptop that came out ten years ago!

You want to change the hard drive? You remove one screw, then pull out the drive sitting in its caddy, and you can very easily swap it for a bigger, faster hard drive, or for an SSD. You want a battery that lasts longer? Just get a bigger, compatible one, and replace the one you’re using. The battery attaches externally on the back and bottom of the case. You don’t need to open panels or remove the bottom case to access it. Just like on the older PowerBooks and MacBooks.

With a little bit of effort and patience, you can even upgrade the ThinkPad’s display. Even the main CPU is not soldered on the motherboard. You have to do your homework to find what specific types of Intel chips you can use to make your ThinkPad faster, but it can be done, and I’ve seen many geeks upgrade their ThinkPads to a point that 7–8 year-old machines have better performance than current consumer laptops.

Also, the keyboard on this T400 — and even more the one on the T61 — is a joy to type on. And a trivial affair to replace in case it breaks.

And what about ports? It has a generous assortment of connections. Even compared with a MacBook or MacBook Pro from 2008, this laptop offers a bit more versatility. My model has:

Three USB 2.0 ports
Network: Modem, Gigabit Ethernet, Wireless 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth, and a SIM card slot for cellular connectivity
VGA video out
A PCMCIA slot and what I think is an ExpressCard/54 slot
A FireWire 400 port
Separate microphone and headphones jacks
Integrated fingerprint reader
Not really a port, but it also has a physical switch to turn off all wireless connections

All this in a package that is clearly thicker than a current MacBook Pro, but slightly thinner than a MacBook Pro of the same age. Also, I don’t find the overall volume to be particularly bulky. Here’s a photo of my ThinkPad T400 and my 12-inch PowerBook G4 (The T400 has a widescreen 14-inch display):

T400 & 12-inch PowerBook G4

The ThinkPad weighs around 2.3 kg, so it’s about 200 grams heavier than the PowerBook. It easily fits in a backpack where I usually struggle to put my 2009 15-inch MacBook Pro or my 15-inch Titanium PowerBook G4s. Despite being a modular machine, the T400 doesn’t feel creaky and it doesn’t feel as if you’re carrying around an assembly of parts. Nothing rattles, and the display assembly remains well secured to the rest of the laptop via two latches.

Performance-wise, it’s a solid machine for a 2008 notebook. My model has a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, an integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD graphics card, 4 GB of RAM (upgradable to 8 GB), and a 200 GB hard drive. My 2009 MacBook Pro is faster (though it has the advantage of 8 GB of RAM and an SSD as startup disk), but the ThinkPad T400 feels snappier than a 2008 MacBook.

But the performance of this specific machine doesn’t matter for the purpose of what I’m writing here. What matters is that I’ve learnt to appreciate this kind of design approach for what is supposed to be a professional laptop. Which is more or less the same approach Apple used to have before the MacBook Air, or maybe more specifically before the retina MacBook Pros.

Sure, ThinkPads have been getting less modular and less serviceable with time, and it’s a pity. But this design remains, in my opinion, the most suitable for professionals. Lots of I/O versatility, and easily swappable components, especially in case of an emergency. You could travel with a spare hard drive or SSD, and if the one in your laptop stops working, you just remove a screw and make the swap in just a couple of minutes. A RAM stick fails, you change it. A soldered SSD or RAM chip fails? Good luck getting back to work right away. You purchased a MacBook Pro with 512 GB of internal storage and now you need more? The quickest solution is to rely on an external drive, but you’ll always have to bring it with you, and perhaps with the appropriate dongle. Otherwise you’ll have to bring it to an Apple Store for an upgrade and, I guess, leave it there for a few days — something that’s difficult to stomach for a certain kind of professional who needs constant access to their machine and contents.

Some days I imagine a MacBook Pro that marries Apple’s excellent use of materials and design cleanness with the modularity of this type of ThinkPad. With a design that, in places, is unafraid of exposing removable panels and accessible screws; that doesn’t compromise an entire keyboard — or the full potential of a high-performing 6‑core CPU — to shave 1.5 mm off the chassis’ thickness.

Wishful thinking. I wonder what’s the next step, though. Virtual keyboards with haptic feedback? Even fewer ports (due to insufficient device thickness)? Impenetrable hardware? Wireless charging for laptops? If this is Apple’s direction in hardware design, I worry things are going to become more and more aseptic and not always functional. Integration between hardware and software also means that both should remain user-friendly, no?

Not all laptops are created thin and light

July 26, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Handpicked

Nick Heer, closing his commentary of Owen Williams’ article, Thinner and Lighter Laptops Have Screwed Us All:

Williams’ article also, as usual, blames Apple for the industry’s broader woes:

The pursuit of thinner, lighter laptops, a trend driven by Apple, coinciding with laptops replacing desktops as our primary devices means we have screwed ourselves out of performance — and it’s not going to get better anytime soon.

Apple may prioritize thin and light in their portable products, but that doesn’t make a trend. The industry following their lead does make a trend, but that’s the fault of those companies. If they thought that they would be constrained by the thermal envelope of thinner notebooks or that Apple was making a mistake in their priorities, they could have released different products.

The thing is — they have. At least some of them.

I follow Dave Lee on YouTube (one of the first to show the 2018 MacBook Pro’s severe CPU throttling just a few days ago), and Dave reviews a lot of laptops. Most are gaming-oriented machines, but in his balanced reviews Dave usually points out whether a particular laptop can also be suitable for creatives and creators. There are a few interesting candidates in his recent videos — all laptops which have clearly been designed to put performance first, but which are also decent in the looks department. Okay, they don’t have the Intel Core i9 of the high-end 2018 MacBook Pro — they all feature the 8th-generation Intel Core i7-8750H with 6 cores, they’re all 15-inch laptops, and with regard to the GPU they all feature the NVIDIA GTX 1070 (Max‑Q). They are:

Gigabyte Aero 15X
MSI GS65
Razer Blade 15-inch
Dell XPS 15 9570

(The Dell in Dave’s review featured an NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti GPU, and is also available with an i9 CPU.)

Now here’s an interesting comparison:

Laptop	Thickness	Weight
Gigabyte Aero 15X	18.9 mm	2 kg
MSI GS65	17.5 mm	1.88 kg
Razer Blade 15-inch	16.8 mm	2.07 kg
Dell XPS 15 9570	17 mm	1.93 kg
MacBook Pro (15-inch)	15.5 mm	1.83 kg

All these laptops are thicker and heavier than the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro. All of them — at least according to Dave Lee’s tests — feature minimal to no throttling. In fairness, when it comes to i9 configurations, the only competitor here is the Dell XPS 15, but Dave notes that it, too, throttles the CPU under heavy, sustained load. The only other laptop with an i9 CPU that offers an astounding, unbridled performance, is the Acer Predator Helios 500, which is a true monster of a machine. And yes, it’s a gaming laptop with the trite, angular ‘badass gamer look’; yes, it weighs 4 kg — but it’s also a 17-inch laptop, with a generous array of ports; the RAM is upgradable (it has four RAM slots, two easily accessible) and supports a maximum of 64 GB; it has three drive bays (two NVMe, one SATA); performance and thermal design are excellent (again, according to Dave Lee, who has tested it); and, from what I understand, it costs less than a fully-specced MacBook Pro.

My point here isn’t that Apple should start making monster laptops like the Helios 500. Although if they wanted to produce a truly powerful, uncompromising pro laptop, I think they should favour an appropriate thermal design, more port diversification, and internal expandability over thinness at all costs and their ‘upgrade now or never’ approach at time of purchase.

My point is that, from what I can see, the competition has not blindly followed Apple and the company’s insistence with thinness and lightness no matter what. A lot of thin and light machines from PC manufacturers seem to clearly target the consumer and prosumer audience, and they are positioned more as good all-round machines than pro-oriented computers making promises they might not be able to keep. And when the competition really wants to put performance first, they’re willing to sacrifice sleekness and — in extreme cases such as the Helios 500 — even portability.

Another interesting detail about what the competition is doing differently is in the I/O ports they choose to provide. When back in the late 1990s Apple pushed the USB as a versatile, forward-thinking connection, everyone followed suit. Today, I’ve yet to see a laptop from another PC manufacturer that only offers USB‑C connections. Even the Huawei Matebook X Pro, whose visual design is the one that most closely resembles the MacBook Pro, and which is actually thinner than the MacBook Pro, comes equipped with one USB‑A port.

In other words, I think we’re past the race to the thinnest laptop. Now that the competition has shown they’re capable of building thin- and light-enough machines, my impression is that they’re focussing on ways to differentiate their products by trying to offer features that could appeal to frustrated Mac users in an attempt to win them over.

[Edited to clarify: Nick Heer does mention gaming laptops too. I chose to append my commentary to an earlier point in his piece because it provided me with a better way to introduce my point; I’m more in disagreement with Williams and I apologise if that wasn’t clear enough. Also: despite having cited several gaming laptops as an example, not all PC manufacturers offering thicker laptops than the MacBook Pro are necessarily offering game-oriented machines; so my point still stands.]

How I chose the 21.5‑inch iMac with Retina 4K display, and first impressions

July 20, 2018

by Riccardo Mori

Tech Life

#alttext#

I have been busier than usual, lately, and the heat and humidity here where I live haven’t helped. I’m all for taking things slowly and going against the frantic pace life seems to impose us nowadays, but heat slows me down in an especially uncomfortable way. Not everything has been great, but one thing I’m truly happy about is that I’ve finally had the opportunity to upgrade my main Mac.

Exceptional service

I’m speaking of course of the Mac I’ve been using until now: a mid-2009 15-inch MacBook Pro, with a 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 8 GB of RAM (upgraded from the original 4 GB), a 240 GB SSD + 500 GB hard drive (upgraded from the original 320 GB hard drive and optical drive). Purchased new exactly nine years ago, this laptop has worked really well ever since. I’ve been progressively upgrading it as needs dictated (which is what every machine worth a ‘pro’ moniker should allow); first by adding more RAM, then a bigger hard drive, then a solid-state drive while using the bigger hard drive as secondary internal storage after getting rid of the optical drive. The optical drive has been the only disappointing feature of this MacBook Pro: it stopped working after about two years. Battery performance, instead, has been exceptional. At the beginning of 2017 the MacBook Pro could still last a bit more than three hours with moderate usage; most astounding, considering that it was still its original battery, and that this machine has rarely been turned off in nine years of use.

However, in the last twelve months or so, the MacBook Pro started displaying signs of old age: first it started refusing to switch to the dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT graphics card; then some of the thermal sensors stopped reporting information (I could tell thanks to the excellent iStat Menus 6), leading to the fans erratically activating at full speed, and leading me to search and install a utility to manually control them (the one that has done its job very well is Macs Fan Control, very reliable and easy to use). The last scare happened in March, when the battery suddenly died, and I thought it killed the SSD in the process because on reboot it didn’t mount and the Mac wasn’t recognising it (thankfully everything was back to normal after leaving the Mac turned off and connected to the AC adapter for a few hours).

But really, apart from these recent ailments, I only have positive things to say about this 2009 MacBook Pro — a true workhorse, a true pro machine built to last.

A new Mac was needed — but which one?

It was time to upgrade, not only due to the MacBook Pro’s hardware-related issues, but also because it could not be updated past Mac OS X 10.11.6^[1], and since for work reasons I needed to test and localise Mac applications that require 10.12 Sierra or 10.13 High Sierra — and in some cases even better hardware — continuing with this 2009 machine in 2018 wasn’t feasible. (Note, however, that for many other tasks, this MacBook Pro is still quite capable).

But which Mac to upgrade to? For what I do, I don’t need an extraordinarily powerful Mac. Yet, since I don’t change Macs that frequently, choosing a more powerful machine is a way to make it last longer for me. This time the choice was difficult. Considering my limited budget, my options were as follows:

MacBook (base model) — Pros: very lightweight, portable, retina display. Cons: underpowered, dreadful keyboard, impossible to upgrade it in the future, only one port, inability to connect it to anything I currently have without purchasing a bagful of dongles.
MacBook Air (1.8 GHz model with 256 GB SSD) — Pros: great battery life, great keyboard, good array of useful ports (including MagSafe). Cons: no retina display, older-generation Broadwell CPU.
MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2 Thunderbolt ports, base model) — Pros: lightweight, portable, retina display, powerful enough for my needs. Cons: dreadful keyboard, impossible to upgrade the RAM later on (and choosing 16 GB at purchase time would exceed my budget), only 128 GB of storage, too few ports, inability to connect it to anything I currently have without purchasing a bagful of dongles.
Mac mini (high-end model) — Pros: affordable, small footprint. Cons: — old, old, old, old…
iMac (21.5‑inch, retina 4K display, base 3 GHz model, enough budget for one configuration upgrade) — Pros: enough powerful to last me a while, retina display, good array of useful ports (four USB 3, two Thunderbolt 3, Gigabit Ethernet, SD card slot), ample storage. Cons: well, being a desktop Mac is not a con, per se, but a laptop can be more versatile; the base model still has a mechanical 5,400rpm hard drive as internal storage (more on this below).

My dilemma is that I was really in the market for a new laptop, but Apple’s redesign of the MacBook Pro in 2016 has turned it into a machine that’s just not for me. While I can appreciate the overall design in an abstract sort of way, that damned keyboard is the main deal-breaker for me. Apart from the actual issues we all know too well now, I really find it uncomfortable for long typing sessions, and I find that such keyboard redesign was absolutely unnecessary, a fix for something that wasn’t broken at all.

And the ports, in the MacBook Pro I could have afforded, would have been too few and… too new. When setting it up to be used in a desktop configuration, I would have needed a dongle to connect it to an external display, another to connect it to my wired mechanical keyboard, and… well, at this point I would have had to look for a whole USB hub or mini-dock of some sort, because what can you do when one USB‑C port is in use by the AC adapter, the other is used to connect to the external display, and you still have to connect the wired keyboard, maybe a Time Machine drive, maybe the occasional USB flash drive to transfer some files, and the CompactFlash card reader to copy the photos from the DSLR?

The only possible choice in Apple’s laptop line would have been the MacBook Air… but I wasn’t too thrilled by the display and the CPU.

And the moment I opted for a desktop Mac, the choice was obvious. The iMac with Retina 4K display had three main attractive factors: decent specs with regard to CPU and GPU, a retina display, and an array of ports that comfortably met my needs. The benefits clearly outweighed the reduced versatility due to it not being a laptop. I thought, Well, when I need a laptop, I’ll just use the old MacBook Pro. I’ll have to take care of its ailments, but it’s still a viable solution. So the first dilemma was solved. As for the second…

Customise your iMac

As I said above, my budget was enough for one configuration upgrade. Thanks to Apple still putting mechanical hard drives in their desktop Macs in 2018, and not making the RAM in the 21.5‑inch iMacs user-upgradable (in the 27-inch models the RAM is accessible by opening a panel on the back), I was torn between two choices:

Leave the RAM at the base 8 GB, and choose a 256 GB SSD as internal storage.
Leave the mechanical hard drive as internal storage, and choose to have 16 GB of RAM installed.

After a bit of internal debate, I chose option №2. While it’s hard going back to a mechanical hard drive once you get accustomed to the speed of an SSD, I thought that if I wanted a more future-proof machine, 8 GB of RAM weren’t enough. Further, it may seem like an inelegant solution, but I can always add an external SSD connected via Thunderbolt 3 and use it as a startup disk. Transfer speeds should be pretty decent.

First impressions

Those who follow me on Twitter have already had a taste, but here’s a bulleted list of very first impressions after a few days of use.

I forgot Apple has removed the startup chime in recent Macs. This iMac is mute at boot and upon restart, and for a long-time Mac user like me it feels weird. The familiar ‘bong’ at boot was not just a nice, charming touch; it was also useful feedback, as it signalled that the RAM was okay and that the machine POSTed correctly, while a series of different beeps could mean different hardware errors.
Another missing element — and after a few exchanges on Twitter I realised it has been removed since iMacs went from polycarbonate white to aluminium — is the pulsating sleep light. When you look at the iMac with the display turned off, you can’t tell whether the machine is switched off, sleeping, or with the display turned off after a period of no user activity. Again, I think the pulsating sleep light provides useful feedback. Intel Macs take longer to enter sleep than PowerPC Macs; when you finally see the sleep light ‘breathing’ off and on, you know that the Mac has successfully entered sleep mode. Without a light, you don’t know; there might be a rogue process preventing sleep after the Mac has turned off the display; in some instances you may not be able to wake back the display, and there’s little you can do except forcefully shutting the Mac down and boot it up again.
The retina display is astounding. This is hardly surprising, it’s not my first retina display; but it’s the first one this big. The biggest one I had seen before was on 15-inch MacBook Pros. It is literally a sight for sore eyes. I can read small text without struggling. It’s like having new prescription glasses. The colours are also gorgeous. As corny as it may sound, this display gives me a moment of happiness every time I wake the iMac. It’s also a path with no return, as now every other screen looks worse, and it takes me a few moments to readjust.
The iMac is very quiet. Perhaps it’s because I’m coming from an exhausted, overworked MacBook Pro with a lot of fan activity, therefore the contrast is starker, but in normal operation, and keeping the iMac at a normal distance, I can’t hear any noise coming from it. Its fan also has a lower minimum speed than the ones in the MacBook Pro (1200rpm vs. 2000rpm). I’ve tried to do a stress test with a couple of graphic-intensive games, but evidently they weren’t intensive enough, because the iMac stayed quiet all the time. For comparison, these games would make my MacBook Pro fans spin up to at least 4500–5500rpm, making the machine hot and loud.
I honestly expected a worse performance from the internal mechanical drive. Coming from an SSD, I was concerned things would start feeling sluggish pretty soon, but overall I can’t complain. Yes, this iMac is slower to cold-boot compared to the SSD-powered MacBook Pro, and yes, it does look silly that a more powerful, eight-year younger machine would take more time to boot, but once boot is completed, the iMac performs very well in normal operations. I guess that the more powerful CPU and the 16 GB of RAM compensate for the slower physical speed of the hard drive. In case you’re curious, here’s an informal comparison of cold-boot times (measured from the appearance of the Apple logo to the Mac desktop fully loaded):
- 2009 MacBook Pro (8 GB RAM), when it used to boot from the 500 GB mechanical hard drive: 3 minutes, 46 seconds.
- 2009 MacBook Pro (8 GB RAM), booting from the 240 GB solid-state drive: 37 seconds.
- 2017 iMac Retina 4K (16 GB RAM), booting from the 1 TB mechanical hard drive: 1 minute, 41 seconds.
The time difference between the two hard drives must be due to the SATA interface, which is 3 Gbps for the MacBook Pro, and 6 Gbps for the iMac. And if you compare the difference between the boot time of the MacBook Pro with SSD and the iMac, the iMac is basically just one minute slower. It’s entirely tolerable.
The Magic Keyboard is better than I feared, giving its similarity with the keyboards in the current MacBook and MacBook Pro. Key travel is still somewhat disappointing (too short for my taste), but at least I don’t have the sensation of banging my fingers on a hard surface, like I had when I tried using a MacBook’s keyboard. It’s a non-issue, anyway, since I’m going to keep using this other magic keyboard with the iMac.
Another detail that left me positively impressed are the iMac’s internal speakers. My very first impression is that they’re pleasantly loud and clear, with a decent punch when reproducing bass and drums in a song. A bit surprising considering the iMac’s thinness where the speakers are located.

Data migration

Migration Assistant did its usual great job at transferring my data and preferences from the MacBook Pro, but I still think this utility should be just a little more granular in letting you choose what exactly you want to transfer. In my case, I connected the MacBook Pro’s external Time Machine drive, and since it backs up both the SSD and the hard drive of the MacBook Pro, I first had to choose which volume I wanted to migrate data from. Having set up the SSD and hard drive in a sort of ‘fusion drive’ configuration (system, apps, and frequently-accessed projects on the SSD; photos, movies, large documents, some games and other miscellaneous stuff on the hard drive), I first migrated the contents of the SSD. When it was time to migrate the data from the hard drive, and I reached this screen in Migration Assistant…

Macos high sierra migration assistant select items
(This is the sample image taken from Apple Support’s page)

…my “Other files and folders” entry was more than 280 GB of materials, and I didn’t have the option to pick exactly what I wanted to import from this “Other files and folders” cauldron (for instance, I wanted to import all my library of photos and photography-related manuals and documents, but not all the movies and games). I ended up cancelling the migration and copying my selection of stuff manually. Not a huge deal, granted, but this made the whole process a little less smooth.

The right decision

Everyone rationalises and justifies their purchases — it comes naturally — but in the end my disappointment for having to go with a desktop Mac instead of a laptop pretty much vanished after spending a few hours with this iMac. It’s a powerful Mac and it should serve me well for a few years. It’s not a controversial machine as the MacBook Pro; it’s not an underpowered machine like the 12-inch MacBook; I have a selection of I/O ports I can immediately take advantage of without resorting to external adapters; and most importantly (given that I type a lot) I can choose the keyboard I want, and if something breaks, I can use another keyboard. Instead of putting the MacBook Pro to rest and leave it like it is now — with thermal issues, one unresponsive GPU, and a dead battery — as I had originally planned, I’ll try to fix it up properly and use it when I need to do something work-related on the go that requires an Intel Mac.

When I was thinking aloud on Twitter about considering the purchase of this iMac, someone wrote to me privately asking, Aren’t you concerned that there may be an iMac refresh round the corner (these iMacs were introduced a year ago), and that you could be buying a machine that’ll get old sooner rather than later?

This thought crossed my mind, of course, but 1) I couldn’t afford to wait more; I couldn’t afford to keep working on a MacBook Pro that is unfortunately less reliable than it once was and needs constant babysitting. And 2) better to get it now than facing the possible scenario of refreshed iMacs equipped with just USB‑C ports and nothing else. USB‑C may be the future, but this train is moving much more slowly than anticipated, and my needs right now involve ‘legacy’ ports. So no, if new iMacs were introduced at the end of July or in September, I wouldn’t regret buying now. The only possible exception would regard the hard drive, since it’s obvious that the next iMacs will have a fusion drive as base option. Anyway.

In the end, truth be told, the iMac with 4K Retina display was the only really attractive proposition among the choices I could afford, and definitely the best option in the price-to-performance ratio department. I’m left with the feeling I have invested my very-hard-earned money wisely. And now excuse me while I check how many applications are still 32-bit…

1. I know that there are hacks to allow the installation of Mac OS 10.12 and 10.13, but although they’re advertised as safe, I really didn’t want to take the risk on my main work machine; plus I’ve found El Capitan to be really stable and reliable on this MacBook Pro. ↩︎