Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I grew up a stone’s throw from Yosemite National Park, namesake of OS X 10.10, and for the next few days I’ll be in the park with a whole bunch of Apple people at Yosemite by Cocoaconf.
So posts from me will be a little more sparse than normal this week, though Dan Moren is back from his journey to the Star Wars Celebration and will be peeking in from time to time as well.
I hope CocoaConf keeps this event going—next year, in whatever code name Apple sees fit to bestow upon us at WWDC!
WWDC is a huge deal in the Apple community, but it wasn’t always so. I’ve been going to WWDC since the mid-1990s, when it was a sleepy affair that took place at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose. Probably the most memorable moment of any of the San Jose-based WWDCs I attended was the last one. That was 2002, when Steve Jobs laid the classic Mac OS to rest—no, seriously, there was a coffin on stage.
With the death of Macworld Expo and Apple’s focus on invitation-only media events, WWDC is the most prominent Apple-focused event that’s open to the public. Yes, a ticket will cost you $1599 (plus a $99 developer membership, of course)—and you have to win a lottery to pay that price.
This week over at Macworld my More Color column is about a bunch of advanced stuff in Photos for OS X including Automator actions, merging libraries, geotagging photos, and uploading to iCloud.
Like so many other people, I have appreciated John’s reviews over the years and am really going to miss them. My perspective is a little bit different from most, in the sense that I was always writing my own stories about OS X at the same time. It was always fascinating to see John’s reviews and marvel at their depth and volume.
How long has John been reviewing OS X? So long that when he started, I was a features editor putting together Macworld’s OS X coverage, but not yet established enough to write them myself. While I largely rewrote the magazine’s OS X 10.0 feature story, it didn’t carry my byline. It wasn’t until OS X 10.1 that my name appeared on a Macworld OS X review.
So in one way, I feel like John and I went on this journey together. In another way, sometimes I feel as old as dirt and I’m reminded that John’s OS X reviews started when I was an anonymous Macworld features editor. That was a long time ago.
Regardless, the beautiful thing about John’s announcement is that we’re not losing John. Accidental Tech Podcast is a must-listen for me every week, and I’m also fortunate to talk with John regularly on The Incomparable. We also sometimes argue about robots.
Thanks for all the Simpsons references, John. The release of the next version of OS X won’t be the same without your gigantic article (and complaints about e-book production workflows).
My thanks to SnapPower for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
SnapPower’s latest product—currently backed by more than 15,000 people on Kickstarter!—is Charger, an an easy-to-install wall plate that adds USB charging to standard outlets. There are no wires and no wiring.
I’ve got a couple of SnapPower’s previous products, the Guidelight, in my house. They’re not kidding about them being easy to install. Now I’ve got a couple of outlets providing LED floor lighting in the middle of the night. I’m looking forward to trying the Charger models, too.
Dan is away so Lex and Moltz draft fellow Turning This Car Around (http://turningthiscararound.com) co-host Jon Armstrong to guest co-host.
And guess what we start off with. Guess. Go on. Guess. Hey, you were right! Apple Watch pre-ordering. They went pretty fast (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/10/apple-watch-sold-out-launch-day/).
Did people order a million of them? Probably. And more. But this survey is not to be taken seriously (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/04/13/slice-intelligence-apple-watch-orders).
Jon actually went to the store to check the Watch out (http://www.imore.com/apple-watch-retail-experience).
Lex has his new haptic MacBook and is loving the feedback (https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Display+Early+2015+Teardown/38300).
New emoji are here and Lex is furious (http://www.macworld.com/article/2907542/pump-up-your-messages-with-hundreds-of-new-emoji-in-ios-83-out-now.html).
iOS 8.4 has been released to developers and it includes a new Music app that Jon is disappointed with (http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/13/hands-on-ios-music-app/). In particular, he wants to hate on some of the images here: http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/13/apple-launches-ios-8-4-beta-with-revamped-music-service/.
None of us is going to WWDC, which was announced this week (https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/).
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
The Apple Watch is going to tap on your wrist to tell you to stand up and that you’ve got a text message and plenty of other stuff. But your iPhone can do some pretty clever tapping of its own, if you know how to set it up.
You probably know that you can set your iPhone to use unique sounds for every phone call and text message you receive from specific contacts1. But did you know that you can also use custom vibrations for each phone call and text message you receive on a per-contact basis?
To customize how your iPhone reacts to a specific contact, open the Phone app and tap Edit. You can set a custom ringtone and custom text tone, as well as custom vibrations for both ringing and texts.
Now here’s the fun part, especially if you fancy yourself a bit of a drummer. You can create custom vibrations right on your iPhone, using the touchscreen and the accelerometer. This is not new—iOS has supported the idea of custom vibrations for ages now. And yet it’s just not a well-known feature.
To record your own custom vibration patterns, edit a contact and tap on the selected Vibration for that contact (probably Default). You’ll see a menu of pre-cooked vibrations provided by Apple, but at the very bottom under the Custom divider, you’ll see the option to Create New Vibration.
The New Vibration screen lets you just start tapping in the center of your phone. You can tap hard or soft, short or long. Then tap on Stop when you’re done. The iPhone puts it all together as a vibration pattern, which is actually visible as a series of dots in the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Tap Play to play it back. If you like what you’ve created, tap Save and give it a name. Now it’ll be available as a custom vibration pattern for any contact you want.
It’s not earth shattering technology, I know, but since I keep my phone in silent mode most of the time, it’s nice to be able to tell when my wife is calling without even looking at my phone.
I use the “red alert” sound for all calls I receive from Apple. ↩
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
The other day, my wife and I went to Whole Foods in order to pick up some ingredients for dinner. While we were there, I stopped by the beer aisle, as I often do just to browse and look for interesting beers that might be available.
As we walked home, I realized that this sort of experience-going to a physical store and looking through a large selection of items in the hopes of finding something interesting-is something that I used to do all the time, but do extremely rarely these days.
This is my bookstore and record store behavior of old.
When I was in high school, I had mental lists of books and albums that I wanted to buy, but hadn’t ever had the chance. If I ever went to a bookstore or a record store—in the small town I grew up in, we had two bookstores but no record store—I would go up and down the aisles, hoping against hope that one of these items happened to be in stock.
I found Peter Gabriel’s second solo album on cassette in a record store in Ashland, Oregon in the fall of 1987. This was such a jackpot that I can remember all the details even now. I found Harlan Ellison’s “The Glass Teat” in a used bookstore in San Diego. Jackpot again.
But today, of course, if there’s an album or book you want to buy, you can find it on the Internet. Just type it in to Amazon, in most cases, and it will be delivered to your door in a matter of days.
Saying you miss the days when you couldn’t find anything is a bit like saying you miss the smell of books. Yeah, there’s nostalgia value there. I totally understand the power of nostalgia.
But… we’re trading not finding something for finding it. Yes, I was really excited when I found that Peter Gabriel cassette in 1987 after a year of searching. You know what would have been better? Finding it the moment I knew I wanted it.
Anyway, back to beer.
When I visit the Whole Foods beer section, I’m thrown back into that world. I have no idea what kind of stuff is going to be on display. Am I going to find an old, hard-to-come-by favorite? Is something new going to catch my eye? Is a much-rumored brand that I’ve never personally tried going to manifest itself? Will I be swayed by a colorful, shiny label? It’s a crap shoot every time.
(Which is my long way of saying, am I missing a great website that lets you order beer1 over the Internet? Because forget nostalgia—I am tired of living in the dark ages where I can’t just order what I want and get it shipped to me the next day.)
I assume that, sadly, interstate alcohol regulations and the requirement that a buyer be over 21 are the reasons why there’s no Amazon for beer yet. YET. ↩
What I found interesting about Hertzfeld’s take on the book is that it reinforces something that I discussed with John Siracusa on Upgrade: This feels very much like a book that has decided on a narrative and is committed to shoehorning historical events into that narrative. It’s a tale of Jobs having a disastrous beginning before finally learning how to become a success during his time away from Apple.
The authors hardly interviewed any Apple employees from the early days, so there’s no new reporting here to justify their negativity; they seem to be trashing Steve’s early career simply to accentuate the contrast with his later one… The agenda flips after Steve returns to Apple a few years later. Now it’s time to obscure problems instead of waxing lyrical about them. The main strategy is to simply ignore unpleasant episodes, or to sweep them into a single chapter near the end, entitled “Blind Spots, Grudges, and Sharp Elbows,” so they don’t have to tarnish the main chronological account.
In my opinion, their central thesis is simplistic and trite.
I’m not sure I buy the book’s thesis either, though I think it’s at least worth considering. And I agree with Hertzfeld that Becoming Steve Jobs is worth reading for the narrator’s personal interactions with Jobs and the tidbits from current and former Apple executives. I also don’t seem to be as high on the Isaacson biography as Hertzfeld is.
I do know this: I think I’ve read enough Steve Jobs biographies for a long time.
Apple has announced that the 2015 edition of its Worldwide Developers Conference will be June 8-12 in San Francisco. Developers can enter a lottery to be selected to purchase a $1599 ticket. Not the option to purchase it—if you win the lottery, your credit card will be charged.
WWDC isn’t just a developer event. (In fact, developers who don’t fly to San Francisco and pay $1599 to sit in crowded sessions can watch all the sessions on the Internet almost immediately afterward.) WWDC has become, especially with the evaporation of Macworld Expo, the place for the Apple developer and media community to get together once a year. People come for the week and don’t even buy a ticket, just focusing on the social aspects of the event.
It’s a lot of fun, but also a bit strange. I’ve been going to WWDC since the 90s (when it was held in San Jose, not San Francisco), and has it changed! In any event, I’m hoping there will be at least one meet-up for Relay FM and Six Colors type people, so if you’re coming to San Francisco the second week in June, I hope to see you!
Developer/podcaster Casey Liss has his own set of thoughts about trying on and ordering an Apple Watch. He is remarkably ambivalent:
Sitting here now, I’m on the edge of canceling my preorder. The only thing that’s stopping me is Apple’s 14-day return policy – why not just keep it and try it for a week or two? Furthermore, one could argue I have an obligation to try it for the show, if only for a little while.
A lot of us who write or talk about Apple are often asked, “But are you buying it?” The answer is almost always yes, but our priorities are not those of a regular consumer. I ordered an Apple Watch because I write about Apple technology. I never even considered not buying one. Would I buy one if I weren’t writing about this stuff? I have no idea.
I want to send out a big thanks to Aged and Distilled for sponsoring Six Colors this week with their app Napkin.
Napkin is the ideal image markup application for OS X. Designers, software developers, artists, educators, journalists, or anyone that needs to annotate images will love how painless and powerful Napkin is.
Use Napkin when you need to create an image that makes your point crystal clear. It’s the ultimate tool for visual communication. If you’re viewing this on the Six Colors home page, scroll down to the story just below this one to see a screen shot with call-out that I made (in less than a minute!) using Napkin.
(I honestly had forgotten that Napkin was the sponsor this week! It’s been a busy one. It’s accidental product placement at best, but still…)
Aged and Distilled just released Napkin 1.5, a massive update that features Yosemite style and vibrancy, support for Yosemite extensions, cropping, pixelating, blurring, and much more.
Napkin: Say it with a picture, skip the 1,000 words.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
I’ve been using Photos for Mac since day one of its beta release—have I mentioned lately that you should buy my book about it?—and on day one I encountered a problem that, surprisingly, seems to have gone unfixed throughout the entire beta process.
The first day I used Photos, I imported a substantial portion of my family photo collection—20,000 or so photos—into what Photos calls the System Photo Library. And set it to upload to iCloud.
The next day, my Internet connection seemed to die, or at least become sporadically inert. Traffic would sometimes squirt through, but after long delays. It was weird, and intermittent, and I was really sad.
Later that day I discovered something, though: Even though Photos wasn’t open, a background task was uploading my photo library to iCloud. All 20,000 photos. The process was using all the available bandwidth, saturating my outbound Internet connection and making it essentially unusable. (Was Comcast also throttling me due to a sudden explosion of uploading data? I don’t know, but the net result was the same. And the moment I paused the upload, all the problems went away.)
If you’re trying out Photos and wondering why your Internet is suddenly slow, now you know! Fortunately, Apple provides you with a way to pause the upload—a single button labeled “Pause for one day.” (Note that Photos needs to be using the System Photo Library for you to see this option, because that’s the only library that syncs with iCloud.)
What Apple needs to do to fix how Photos syncs with iCloud is take a tip from online backup services like CrashPlan and Backblaze. Yes, it’s good to upload things fast, especially when you’re doing your first backup. But these services combine some intelligence with user settings to not make the Internet unusable while they operate.
Perhaps photos could sense when someone’s using the computer and throttle back the upload speed. Or let users optionally choose hours when uploads should take place, and when they should be curtailed. Or let users choose how much bandwidth the backup can use. (Or, if you want to be all Appley about it, Photos could figure out how fast a user’s connection is and try to use a conscientious percentage of that bandwidth.)
Users with bandwidth caps should be able to somehow throttle the uploads so they don’t end up with bandwidth overages. And users should be able to pause iCloud uploads indefinitely, not just for one day. Bug me if I’m still paused after a few days, sure, but don’t force me to open Photos every day and pause the upload just so I can visit websites or make a Skype call. Pauses for shorter amounts of time—just this next hour when I’m FaceTiming—would also be welcome.
I understand that Apple doesn’t want to junk up the Photos interface. A commitment to simplicity is admirable. But in this case, what’s there is not enough. If Apple wants to commit to that simplicity, it can make this feature as hands-off and intelligent as it likes. Or it can punt and provide users with nerdy settings to control all of it like the online backup services do. Maybe it could even pick some nice middle ground between those two extremes.
What it shouldn’t do is abdicate all responsibility for what the initial iCloud photo backup does to an Internet connection. In version 1.0 of Photos, that’s what it feels like Apple has done. I don’t think it’s good enough.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Last night at midnight1 I opened the Apple Store app2 and ordered an Apple Watch. After much dithering I decided on the space gray Sport, for a couple of reasons.
One of them was that I decided I didn’t want to pay $700 for a watch when I’m only seven months out from leaving the world of full-time employment. Another was that I really liked the look of the space gray and the black band. It just felt more like me than a shinier stainless-steel watch, though I reserved the right to change my mind (and order) later.
Last night I also made an appointment to try on the Apple Watch at my local Apple Store this morning, and I’ve just returned from there3. I tried on the very Apple Watch model that I ordered last night, and you know what? It was really, really nice. It didn’t feel big, it didn’t feel heavy, and I really liked how the space gray aluminum and black watch face looked together. Even the black rubber—sorry, fluoroelastomer, my mistake—band felt soft and pliable, not rough and cheap like other watch bands I’ve worn. My late-night decision-making skills were validated!
Then I took the watch off and, even after only a couple of minutes of wearing it, I could feel the dampness of sweat on my wrist. Major ick factor for me. This is why I usually wear (and yes, wear out) leather watch bands: they breathe. So I tried on two leather bands, the classic buckle and the leather loop.
I don’t know what to think about the leather loop. By all rights it should be a more comfortable fit, since it doesn’t use anything as archaic as sticking a metal pin through loops—it adheres entirely by a magnet in the end of the band. And yet, it just didn’t work for me. It seemed hard to put on, and I didn’t like the bulkiness of the point where the band loops around itself.
But I was impressed by the look and feel of the classic buckle. Not only is it a basic leather strap—the kind I’ve used on almost every watch I’ve worn since I was in my early twenties—but it’s a nice leather strap. I especially appreciate the metal pin, which is flat and wide, giving it more surface area to grab on to the rectangular sizing holes punched into the strap. It’s a style I’m comfortable with. I’m probably going to buy this band.
If you live near an Apple Store that’s offering the Apple Watch try-on service, you should definitely check it out. I’d recommend going in with specific models and bands that you want to try on, because the appointments are quite short. But for a product like this, getting some actual try-on experience is absolutely worth it.
I’m fortunate to live in the Cupertino time zone, so I didn’t have to get up at a ridiculous hour. ↩
Pro tip: When Apple’s having a big online pre-order, always order via the iOS app. Last night the app was once again live before the web store went live, and with Apple Pay it’s even faster to place orders. Dangerously fast. ↩
I realize that, unlike most of you, I’ve tried the Apple Watch on twice before, at Apple media events. But the in-store experience was slightly less insane than the post-event press area. ↩
First, of course, we talked about the Apple Watch, because: Duh. Apple unveiled ten tour videos, but only released three. (http://www.apple.com/watch/guided-tours/) We smell a conspiracy. The buttons and the presses and the whatnot — it’s a lot to take in.
Dan’s still not ready to Periscope (http://periscope.tv), but John’s tried it and Lex can’t stop. But Dan promises that when he DOES finally Periscope, it will be epic. No pressure. We also ruminate on what’s next for Meerkat. Remember Meerkat?
Mrs. Moltz is not on Facebook. (Yet.)
Dan still doesn’t trust iCloud. Its invisible email filtering is barely legal at best.
And now, HBO Now is available now (http://order.hbonow.com). Lex tried Sling TV (http://sling.com); it was not terrible. But we’re worried that too many a la carte digital channels basically recreates today’s crappy cable climate.
We’re not sweating the Apple construction / felons controversy. Either because we’re jerks, or because we doubt Apple’s the company instituting the hiring policy for the new campus. (http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Apple-takes-heat-for-barring-former-felons-from-6182436.php)
Apple doesn’t want people to stand in line at the Apple Store anymore. (http://www.businessinsider.com/angela-ahrendts-says-a-significant-change-in-mindset-to-launching-apple-watch-online-2015-4) John and Dan gave it up in the iPhone 4 era. Lex never started.
Our thanks to Napkin from Aged & Distilled, and to A24, presenting Ex Machina, for sponsoring The Rebound.
Ex Machina opens this week in LA and New York, and will be in many more theaters soon. It’s a sci-fi thriller directed by the writer of Sunshine and 28 Days later. The Telegraph calls it BEWITCHINGLY SMART SCIENCE FICTION and The Daily Mirror declares it’s AN INSTANT CLASSIC. Starring Oscar Isaac, Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander.
Napkin 1.5 is available now, and it’s an awesome tool for image mark-up and annotation on OS X. It’s easy to use, and it’s great at lots of things; new features include pixelation and blur for redacting sensitive stuff, and a slick new interface perfectly at home on Yosemite. And with support for multiple images on one canvas, call-outs, and the delightfully named File Pip for easy drag-drop export — you’re going to love it. It’s in the Mac App Store or directly available at (http://nap.kn). Check out their video, too: http://media.aged-and-distilled.com.s3.amazonaws.com/napkin_1_5/video/Napkin_Product.mp4
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
As wary as I am about Apple’s integration with cloud services–and I am, well, rather wary–I sometimes feel like the company doesn’t take things far enough. So while you can, these days, get pretty far using the web-based iCloud interface to access a lot of your data no matter where you are, I’d love to see Apple take things a step further and offer cloud-based user accounts for OS X.
I can envision three scenarios in which this would be particularly useful. First, when you set up a new Mac, as Jason did with the MacBook, wouldn’t it be great if instead of having to tweak a bunch of settings and preferences you could simply log in–say with your iCloud username and password, a feature already supported by OS X–and have everything set up just to your liking?
You can already configure your OS X user account to let you log in with your iCloud username and password.
Second, for those of us who use multiple Macs on a regular basis, it would be great not to have to make the same changes in multiple places–say, keyboard shortcuts, or even something as banal as desktop pictures.
And third, it would be fantastic to be able to sit down at a friend or family member’s Mac, log in with one’s Apple ID and password, and have your account–or much of it–immediately accessible. (In that case, I think it would act like OS X’s guest account and basically nuke everything as soon as you log out, for security.)
Apple’s dabbled in this area: iCloud lets you sync the Keychain between devices, and some items–such as text shortcuts–actually do transfer transparently between Macs and iOS devices, but iCloud doesn’t explicitly handle preferences and settings. (The old .Mac/MobileMe version of the service actually used to support syncing of preferences, but the feature was removed in iCloud.) If you’ve ventured into the realm of OS X Server, Open Directory lets you create network-based accounts, but that’s overkill for most home users.
Obviously, there are limitations to such a feature. For one thing, you may not want all of your data stored in the cloud, whether for space or security reasons. Sometimes you want different settings on different machines, whether it be power management on your MacBook vs. your iMac, or network settings. Maybe providing a way for certain settings to “override” the cloud settings would be too complicated–or maybe there are simply a handful of preferences that aren’t synced between multiple Macs.
But for someone like me, whose files mainly live in Dropbox and iCloud, whose music resides largely in the cloud with iTunes Match, and whose photos and videos will soon probably soon follow suit, having an account bound to a single machine is starting to feel a bit antiquated.
What makes me hopeful about this idea is how simple and seamless Apple has made it in the past few years to transition between an old iOS device and a new one, thanks to backing up and restoring from iCloud. OS X, by comparison, sometimes feels left by the wayside. Granted, most of us probably don’t switch Macs as frequently as we switch iOS devices, and Time Machine and Migration Assistant have made somewhat of a dent there, but they’re still clunkier than the process on iOS.1
Letting users log in to their OS X accounts with their iCloud credentials is a step in the right direction (because we already have enough passwords to remember), and Apple’s increasingly encouraging users to trust more and more of their data to the cloud. Perhaps this all lays the seeds for a more machine-agnostic user account at some point in the future.
Much as I’d love to see Apple implement some form of iCloud Backup for Macs–Time Machine’s great, but not nearly automatic or simple enough–it’s probably going to have to wait for Apple to embrace cheaper storage. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
The new MacBook is here! I’ve been using the MacBook exclusively for most of the last week, and my massive full review of the MacBook is available now over at Macworld. (Seems like old times!)
After writing 3500 words about a laptop, you wouldn’t think there’d be much left on the cutting-room floor. Oh, but you’d be wrong! Here are a few brief hands-on notes about the MacBook that I’ve saved just for Six Colors readers…
iPad touches
The elevator pitch for the MacBook is probably, “It’s the laptop you’d expect the creators of the iPad to build.” From the shiny black Apple logo to the space gray and gold color options, this device is thoroughly embedded in Apple’s current design language. Making it smaller and lighter than any previous Apple laptop pushes it even closer to the iPad. And like the iPad, it’s got no fan and only a single port for access to peripherals or charging.
The iPad comparison even extends to the behavior of the device when it’s charging. If the charging adapter is already plugged into the wall, when you plug the other end of the USB-C cable into the MacBook you’ll hear a familiar chime—the same sound you hear when you plug in an iPad or iPhone. The USB-C plug itself is remarkably similar to the Lightning plug used on iOS devices, albeit slightly larger.
In fact, if the MacBook is turned off, when you plug in the charging cable, the screen will come on briefly and indicate how charged its battery currently is. That’s not behavior you’d expect—when a computer’s off, it’s off—but it’s something you’ll find in the MacBook.
What’s in the box is also very iPad like. There’s a power brick, a USB-C cable that can connect your MacBook to either the power brick or to other USB-C devices (should those exist), and that’s it.
That keyboard, though
I go into a lot more detail about this in the review, but in the end I’ve got to say that I’m not a fan of the new keyboard. Apple played the other enhancements that the keyboard offers, such as increased stability and wider keys, as attempts to offset some of the costs of the reduced key travel. That makes me hopeful that Apple sees this keyboard as what it is—a pretty serious compromise in order to get the computer thinner—rather than some breakthrough new keyboard that will be replicated on every other Apple keyboard in the next year or two.
If you don’t type a whole lot, or very fast, you may not care about the substantially reduced key travel. And you can get used to it. But it’s just a tiny step up from typing on flat touchscreen glass. I managed to score almost 120 words per minute on TypeRacer on the MacBook keyboard, but I didn’t enjoy it. If you’re someone who notices when a keyboard feels different or weird, you will notice this keyboard. If you’ve never really understood why people write about keyboards, you probably won’t care—but why are you even reading this section?
What do I use this adapter with?
In addition to the MacBook, Apple sent along the $19 Apple USB-C to USB-A adapter. It’s got a male USB-C plug on one end and a female USB-A (“standard USB”) plug on the other end. When I took the MacBook out of the box I wanted to migrate the contents of my MacBook Air to it, so I could have all my apps and stuff ready to use. I even booted the thing up with the T key held down, which put it in Target Disk Mode. A USB logo danced on the screen. I was ready to go.
Except. How do I connect it to anything? Even with the adapter, I’d need a USB-A-to-USB-A cable, which I have none of. (I’m not sure they exist—most USB cables are of the USB-A to USB-B variety, or are USB-A to Mini USB or Micro USB.) Regardless, I didn’t have one. So I decided to connect the MacBook to my Ethernet network, but then the realization dawned on me that my MacBook uses a Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet adapter. No Thunderbolt. No dice. I finally found, at the bottom of a bin of cables and adapters, my old Apple USB Ethernet Adapter, attached that to the USB-C adapter, and attached it to the MacBook. (Turns out Monoprice sells a cable that would’ve done the trick for $10.)
What I’m saying is, if you get a MacBook, be prepared for some adapter logistics and probably to buy some new cables. You’ll also need to keep a video adapter with you at all times if you ever attach to a projector or TV anywhere, because nobody’s going to have one that matches your computer for years.
After I double-adapted the MacBook onto my Ethernet network, I decided not to bother running Migration Assistant and just load things from the cloud as I needed them. That led to a whole lot of downloads, and entering serial numbers, and re-setting preferences, and two-factor authentication codes, and app-specific password generation pages. Ugh.
There’s got to be some middle ground. I don’t necessarily need to migrate everything on one computer to the next, but it would sure be nice if I could sync some small subset that would get me up and running more easily. I’d like to keep my app preferences and passwords and the like. If Apple could somehow solve this in a future version of OS X, that would be swell, because right now the two choices—migrate every damned thing and wait out a potentially long, slow migration, or don’t migrate anything and reassemble your digital life piecemeal—seem pretty extreme.
Retina display scaled by default
The MacBook’s retina display is physically 2304 by 1440 pixels. In standard “2x” retina mode, that means the 12-inch display should look like a non-Retina display at 1152 by 720 pixels. While that’s an option in the Display preference pane, by default the MacBook displays at a scaled resolution that’s the size of a 1280 by 800 pixel display, more or less the same amount of real estate as an 11-inch MacBook Air. That’s also the resolution that the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro displays at, but on that screen it’s the native 2x resolution—here, the MacBook is drawing a 2560 by 1600 pixel interface and then scaling it down to fit in 2304 by 1440 pixels.
It looks good, though I almost immediately flipped over into the More Space setting, which emulates a 1440 by 900 display—the equivalent of the 13-inch MacBook Air display. There’s more room to breathe, and text is still readable. And really, if your display is going to be a scaled resolution by default, why not eke out a little bit more room? The native 2x mode might be super crisp (though I couldn’t really tell the difference), but there’s very little space in that mode. I don’t recommend it—and neither does Apple!
11-inch Air, MacBook, and 13-inch Air.
Little bits
I played music at max volume out of the MacBook, next to my 11-inch MacBook Air doing the same thing, and I can declare that the MacBook’s speakers are louder and sound better. There’s good stereo separation, even. The noise comes out of a grille right above the keyboard.
My MacBook came with OS X 10.10.2 (14c2513) preloaded on board, and supported all the fancy trackpad stuff you’d expect. But yesterday OS X 10.10.3 shipped. This was sort of unavoidable—they had to start producing MacBooks weeks, if not months, ago, and OS X 10.10.3 just went final. What it does mean is that for some indeterminate amount of time, buyers of new MacBooks will immediately be prompted to install a software update.
