At the risk of being pedantic, in addition to U+2714 (HEAVY CHECK MARK), I’d like to point out a few other check marks represented in Unicode that could be used as well:
Yeah, I think characters like that (such as the glyphs for the Emoticons Unicode block (U+1F600〜4F) that the font Symbola¹ uses) aren’t as legible on low DPI displays at font sizes like 12pt, which is even worse when you’re using them in plain text where everything has to be the same size. On 'HiDPI' or 'Retina' displays though, even in the situations mentioned above, they look razor sharp.
Here’s an example of how it looks on an iPad Air².
Ah, yeah. It actually shows up like that on my OS X v10.9 computer as well. This webpage’s stylesheet specifies that comments should use either Verdana, Geneva, or a sans-serif font. Since neither Verdana or Geneva have a glyph for U+2705 WHITE HEAVY CHECK MARK, the browser uses font substitution¹ to look for another font on the system that does have a glyph for that codepoint and use it instead. (Font substitution is pretty much necessary since it’s currently impossible for one font to hold Unicode’s repertoire of 110,000+ characters; even the OpenType format is limited to a maximum of 65,536 glyphs).
Both iOS 5+ and OS X v10.7+ include the font Apple Color Emoji, and that font does have a glyph for U+2705 (the same glyph you see in my screen shot)², so OS X and iOS text rendering systems use it. On your Windows computer, I’m guessing the font that was substituted for Verdana/Geneva there was Segoe UI Symbol³.
As an aside, I’m pretty interested on how OS X and Windows decide on which font to use when there are multiple fonts installed containing the required glyph. For example, I have two other fonts on my OS X system that have a glyph for U+2705 (Everson Mono and Symbola), but OS X always seems to consistently pick Apple Color Emoji’s glyph. Maybe OS X’s text rendering system goes through the fonts in alphabetical order and uses the first one it finds containing the required glyph? It would be great if end users could have a bit more control over the font substitution process. I know it’s possible to do in some text editors like Emacs⁴, but I believe that programs like that use their own text rendering systems instead of that supplied by the OS (could be wrong though).
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to add, as for having the glyph be a green box with a white inner check mark, The Unicode Consortium actually mentions how the glyphs should look for characters with BLACK or WHITE in the name⁵:
“Q: What about characters whose names include WHITE or BLACK?
A: Names of symbols such as BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE or WHITE MEDIUM SQUARE are not meant to indicate that the corresponding character must be presented in black or white, respectively; rather, the use of “black” and “white” in the names is generally just to contrast filled versus outline shapes, or a darker color fill versus a lighter color fill. Similarly, in other symbols such as the hands U+261A BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX and U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX, the words “white” and “black” also refer to outlined versus filled, and do not indicate skin color.”
As a frequent traveler, I regret replacing my 3-year-old 4GB + 128SSD with a 13" rMBP. I like the rMPB, but I should have kept my Air and gotten a quad-core 15" rMBP. The point? I'll pay a lot, in terms of cash and power, for portability and battery life.
I've been eager to move off of OSX for some years [1], but with this rumored laptop, they'll probably sink their teeth in me for another 3 years.
[1] If anyone knows of a laptop that is portable, that supports 16GB of RAM and works well with Linux, please let me know. Even the newly announced X1 and XPS13 are limited to 8GB (and I assume they get relatively poor battery life on Linux)
I was pretty disappointed with the X1, was getting RSI from the trackpoint, while its touchpad was unusable. I got an rMBP and can't be happier. Hopefully the precision touchpad in the new XPS 13 really works.
Got a Dell M3800 expecting a decent trackpad. It's a premium machine and even sub-$500 Acers bring precision trackpads now, right? Wrong, it's excruciatingly low-res and persistently jumps by unpredictable distances on clicking.
What didn't you like about the rMBP? I'm very pleased with mine. It's about as portable as could possibly be necessary - I carry it with me a lot during the day and it's way small and light enough. Of course, I would love a longer battery life, but I get about 8-10 hours which is ~ a day's work, and I'm always close enough to a power outlet.
Unless you're working with the laptop in one hand or using it regularly on journeys > 8 hours, I can't see much of a difference between Air and Pro.
I do like the rMBP, but I know I could use the 4 cores when I'm at home or just going to work, which is why I wish I had gotten the 15".
However, -1 lbs + smaller form factor + better battery is pretty significant when you're traveling abroad with a backpack for a week or two. I'll take less weight + more socks any day of the week. Also, I almost killed myself trying to get power from an outlet at Phnom Penh International Airport.
So, personally, I find the 13" a compromise I could have just spent my way out of.
It looks like the folks at Apple insist on misinterpreting the "less is more" principle. Apple is becoming more each day a dictatorship company who thinks that whatever product it launches, they will be loved as they were in 2000's.
> Apple is becoming more each day a dictatorship company
As the article notes, the original Air was very similar to the purported new Air. It had a micro-DVI, a single USB port and a headphone jack.
It didn't quite succeed, but I'd guess more because of its anemic performances (SSD was an expensive option to an already costly machine, the CPU wasn't exactly a performance star, and let's not talk about the GMA X3100) than its I/O limitations. And if anything things have gotten better since (more wireless and "cloud" with less physical connectivity required).
This is the biggest issue with this Air - that if you want to charge this laptop and use anything, even a USB mouse with it, you will need a usb adapter with power pass-through. It's just stupid. They should have left Magsafe 2 on it + USB-C, or at least 2 USB-C ports, so you can use one for charging and another for video/data.
Huh? That makes no sense. They barely made it through the late 90s and early 2000s intact and their products have never been better or more loved (if love = ££) than they are today.
They've always been an opinionated company producing opinionated products, right back to the launch of the very first Mac which was criticised for only being able to do what Steve Jobs wanted you to do. Or think of the original iMac - no floppy drive and USB-only connectivity before it had really taken off. Or the first iPhone launching with less features and connectivity than its competitors.
The times they tried to please everyone are when they did most poorly - remember the dreadful Performa range with loads of meaningless variations?
The whole point of this article is that the original MacBook Air had a principle (thinness above all) that the current one has moved away from, and that it wouldn't be surprising if they moved back.
It's a recurring pattern that Apple has to re-invent the entry level laptops every once in a while because they've become so powerful and versatile the target audience for the "pro" laptops starts to prefer them over the heavier, more expensive and overly powerful high-end alternatives.
Personally I have found myself continuously switching between the "pro" and "regular" offerings ever since the days of Powerbook and iBook, and if a 12" Air would be nothing more than a newer, better Air with a retina screen I would probably pick it over the 13" Pro I currently use.
Apple regularly moves the goalposts to avoid cannibalizing the high-end line.
This time around it's the opposite, the Pro line has been creeping towards the Air line (from TFA): "The 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro aren’t that different—$300 gets you an extra half a pound, a Retina display, and a processor that’s an awful lot faster."
Not having standard ports would be pretty annoying -- at most offices, there are lots of power adapters left in common areas (I think at CloudFlare it's all MagSafe w/ MagSafe2 adapters, or MagSafe 2, and I've tried to make sure they're all 85W; outside of tech, I've seen Lenovo 20V the same way).
Having HDMI out built-in on the rMBP15, vs. needing to carry a mdp/tb2 to whatever dongle all the time, is a plus too.
USB 3 A ports are probably a minimum for me.
If I wanted no ports at all, I'd just use the iPad.
I don't think I could deal with OS X 10.10 on less than 16GB, either.
Just out of curiosity, what do you do with 16GB of RAM? I'm running OS X 10.10 on 4GB Macbook Air and I have faced no issues whatsoever. My general usage includes Chrome with ~20 tabs open, a Vagrant VM, terminal and text editor.
When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves battery a LOT. Was able to run 11" Air with 19 tabs on Safari and with vim (on iTerm). 2hrs later still had 95% battery left.
> When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves battery a LOT.
Were you comparing Safari with 0 extensions vs. Chrome with 0 extensions? Or does each have a different extension load?
I will often fall back to Safari if a page doesn't render properly in Chrome, but that's because I installed a bunch of extensions on Chrome and have consciously left Safari pure as the driven snow. It's a different problem domain, but I know certain extensions can use resources in surprising ways.
It's not just that. I see nearly 2x better battery life using Safari over Chrome on a 15" rMBP, and I have plugins turned off (click to play). It just uses a lot less CPU, full stop. I don't know what the real difference is, but I suspect Safari just does a better job of idling than Chrome does.
When you click the battery dropdown on the top right, Chrome is consistently listed as an "Apps Using Significant Energy". On previous releases of OS X I also noticed that by default it would use my dedicated GPU at all times, whereas Safari would not (not sure if this is still true).
My semi-verified guess is that a lot of the difference is CPU usage when two-finger scrolling on large pages. I just tried it on this page with OSX 10.9 and a 15" Mac Pro, monitoring with Activity Monitor and Coconut Battery while bouncing rapidly up and down.
Chrome burns 90% of a CPU on one thread, and another 40% on another. Coconut reports about 32 Watts used. Safari maxes at about 12% plus 8%, and tops at about 15 Watts. Base usage on this machine with the current screen brightness and applications that happen to be open is 10-12 Watts. I get approximately the same results with Incognito mode, which suggests the problem is core Chrome rather than add-ons.
I found 8GB a bit pokey, 16GB much better. Generally have open Firefox, Chrome, Sublime, Photoshop, Illustrator, an IE testing VM, Terminal running a couple of web app servers, Spotify and maybe another Windows VM with Visual Studio and Firefox (recent project has involved some .NET). I recognise that my workflow would be a bit RAM heavy though.
I run on 16GB. The thing is, it always seems to use up the amount of RAM you have. I don't have much open (XCode, Sketch, Chrome), but it's still using 15.36GB. That's including 720MB XCode, and 325MB Sketch. It's storing 9GB for apps and 4.8GB for file storage.
Generally, this just makes things that bit faster. The more you can store in RAM (even trivial things), the better. I've never had any slow downs, and don't have to worry about opening Photoshop and Illustrator along with XCode, Sketch and 20 Chrome tabs.
I'm not too familiar with the internals of OSX, but I would be very surprised if that ram is actually really used. More than likely, it's just caching of things already on the harddrive. If you have a old fashioned mechanical drive it makes a lot of sense, but with modern SSDs, I doubt you'll feel it much.
Unless you're a true poweruser, no one really needs more than 8gb by todays standards. I have 32gb because I maintain and develop 4 different codebases each with their own setup in different VMs. If I didn't do that, I could manage with 8gb just fine.
Why? Genuinely curious why anyone would ever need that many tabs open. Why can't you use bookmarks/reading list? It doesn't seem possible that you would be actively using all of those regularly enough to need them all open.
It's not really work IMO, as another commenter claims (assuming he/she wasn't being sarcastic, which is entirely possible). If you have the pinboard.in extension, it's a simple ⌘-D to save.
Every now and then I carry out my own manual garbage collection of tabs: iterate through, copy URL of any I don't really need right now, collect the URLs in a text file somewhere. I usually end up losing the text file but no disaster ensues.
I'm currently running with 19 tabs open. Any more than that and it becomes too difficult to identify them. Ideally, I try to trim it down to about 10 when I can. How anyone can be even remotely productive with 300 open is beyond me.
I feel it's definitely the SSD. In the summer of 2012 I purchased a MacBook Air with SSD and it always felt a bit more snappy than a MacBook Pro purchased at work in the same summer. RAM was equal, so the difference was that the MacBook Pro was not packing an SSD.
Multiple VMs.
You use aboug 3G per VM, + the OSX kernel and RAM allocation quickly amounts to close to 3-4GB. I can't work with less than 8G, and 16G makes it about bearable.
But...why? I use an external display with my Air(through the built in display port), connect external storage through USB 3.0, have 8GB of ram.....and now they want to throw this away for what? To make it marginally thinner? And add the inconvenience of having the same port for charging/data/video?
I wouldn't buy rMBP13, purely because it's heavier, and if you walk a lot with your machine,then it adds up.
So, you can't charge this supposed new laptop while you are at a desk with it attached to an external monitor? What will Apple do, make you buy a special Apple monitor that allows you to connect more peripherals?
That sounds like an unnecessarily expensive way to go--I imagine that a specialized connector is more likely. The article makes a good point about this category of concerns:
> But just because it will be inconvenient for some users doesn’t mean that Apple won’t do it. In fact, you can almost hear the stage patter when the feature is unveiled: Most connectivity is wireless these days, we’ve made a great $49 accessory that adds all the ports you’d want, and the included power adapter—the most innovative power adapter ever—features a breakaway magnetic coupler and is itself a USB and Thunderbolt hub. I’m making the details up, but you’ve got to think there would be more to the story than, “Yeah, your power plug is also your USB plug, get used to it.”
One option would be to make the power adapter fancier. Instead of just being a box with a wall cable on one end and a MagSafe cable on the other end, what if it had USB and Thunderbolt ports? You would have the same amount of gear to carry around, but the actual laptop could be thinner.
What's stopping the monitor from charging the laptop? The spec affords such things.
How cool would it be if every monitor in the future used the exact same type of connector and also doubled as a power supply for anything connected to it? Same thing goes for ethernet.
There are things like USB passthrough connectors (for devices that only need to be powered up by the USB power lines, but do not use the signal lines):
For any of the Apple adverse, Samsung has already been showing off their 12.2" notebook at CES [0,1]. Dell also has an interesting small-bezel XPS 13 starting at $800, but I'm sure that will end up a bit thicker than the MBA 12" [2].
✓ Fanless.
✓ 700 nit low-glare 2560×1600 display.
✓ Ports (μHDMI and SD reader is better than nothing).
At times. From cracking plastic to less-than-stellar thermal performance with aluminium, MacBooks are just about as hit-and-miss as are any other laptops.
They are probably expecting their OS of choice (that is, Windows) to do it's job, since it is marketed as being usable on such combination. For the most part and by itself it probably is, but many desktop applications still have problems, or so I've heard to this date.
2560×1600 is not a bad choice, however, since at 200 % scaling it has 1280×800 logical pixels, which is perfectly normal for such a monitor. If only Windows could reliably tell which applications do NOT support higher DPI displays even though they say they do, they could be just doubled in size and still be perfectly usable, if a bit blurry (you don't get aliasing effects, though). I guess Microsoft'll just have to make yet another API for DPI-awareness to catch the rest of the offenders.
As a heavy vim user, I immediately thought "hopefully Apple would never do something so ridiculous as moving the power key to the upper left, right above the ESC key." Right?
I recommend retraining muscle memory to one of two things. Ctrl-[, which works a treat with capslocks mapped to control, and/or mapping kj or jj to escape (can cause problems in a few instances - pasting random text without `:set paste`, and the Dutch language).
Apple keyboard escape buttons have always been a bit harder to hit (imo), so I have trained up both of those shortcuts to good effect.
Personally I do the "remap caps lock to control" trick. That being said, I would hope the power button would be flush with the surface of the laptop, so you'd be more likely to hit the protruding escape key.
Something that hardly ever gets mentioned, yet makes a huge difference to how productive I can be on a given system, is whether it has proper cursor keys or not.
Nearly all PC laptops, even many otherwise high-end ones, have had this horrendous cursor key arrangement for a few years now: a compromised design for a lower cost, one-piece, rectangular keyboard. It's one of the reasons I switched.
I really hope this isn't the start of a trend for Apple. At the very least, I hope sensible key layout can be a differentiator for the Pro line.
Given the space required for proper cursor keys, I wouldn't expect to see them as much anymore except on external keyboards.
Also, given that Apple's wireless keyboard and all current laptops have the tiny "T" version, I wouldn't hold my breath for them to change course anytime soon.
What might be most interesting about the USB3 connector will be the opportunity for compromising such machines. People might be cautious about plugging in unknown or unexpected hardware and flash drives to their machines, etc, but they'll always recognise what looks like a charger and won't think for a minute that it might be doing anything other than supplying power.
Could be very interesting, especially in office locations where charger sharing goes on. Or even at home, how do you know that /your/ charger isn't the special version that not only powers the MacBook while also appearing as a bus device that's backdooring your machine and radiating your secrets back over your mains cables to an adversary?
As a former 12" Powerbook owner/lover and current 11" Macbook Air owner, I want my 4:3 aspect ratio back. Screen real estate is at a premium on a machine this small, so I want more pixels (more area). And carrying a elongated rectangle around is no easier than carrying a more squarish rectangle. (iPad and Chromebook figured this out.)
I'm actually looking to go the other way; I want a desktop replacement. I dont care about size or weight, I just want a big screen and a huge battery. My current 17" MBP is just about perfect. The only downside is that the screen is not Retina and they aren't making them anymore.
As the laptop offerings get smaller and smaller my frustration grows larger and larger. Sure, I can use my big monitor at work, but what about when I travel, or work from "home"? I'm willing to lug around a huge laptop if it means that I can see the screen and get actual work done.
It can be configured with a 12-core(24 thread) Xeon CPU + 2 GPUs + 4 hard drives. It needs TWO 300W power bricks to function, and is supposed to be used as a mobile server.
Wow, I think those are a bit more than I bargained for. :) I would still like to stay in the OS X family; the hardware/software combination is just too good to pass up. Thanks for the alternative view though.
I have a 2012 MBA. I find myself taking my iPad on my shorter trips, especially since I can work from Dropbox or Evernote. I do not see this new MBA as replacing my current one. I feel I have already won my chase for "thin and light."
92 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] thread√ retina display.
(In case you didn't notice – perhaps because of your font settings.)
☑ (U+2611 BALLOT BOX WITH CHECK)
✅ (U+2705 WHITE HEAVY CHECK MARK)
✓ (U+2713 CHECK MARK)
✓ (U+2713 CHECK MARK) <- winner
Here’s an example of how it looks on an iPad Air².
――――――
¹ — http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/
² — http://cl.ly/image/0r2d2x3F1P0F/U%2B2611.PNG
Both iOS 5+ and OS X v10.7+ include the font Apple Color Emoji, and that font does have a glyph for U+2705 (the same glyph you see in my screen shot)², so OS X and iOS text rendering systems use it. On your Windows computer, I’m guessing the font that was substituted for Verdana/Geneva there was Segoe UI Symbol³.
As an aside, I’m pretty interested on how OS X and Windows decide on which font to use when there are multiple fonts installed containing the required glyph. For example, I have two other fonts on my OS X system that have a glyph for U+2705 (Everson Mono and Symbola), but OS X always seems to consistently pick Apple Color Emoji’s glyph. Maybe OS X’s text rendering system goes through the fonts in alphabetical order and uses the first one it finds containing the required glyph? It would be great if end users could have a bit more control over the font substitution process. I know it’s possible to do in some text editors like Emacs⁴, but I believe that programs like that use their own text rendering systems instead of that supplied by the OS (could be wrong though).
EDIT: Oh, I forgot to add, as for having the glyph be a green box with a white inner check mark, The Unicode Consortium actually mentions how the glyphs should look for characters with BLACK or WHITE in the name⁵:
“Q: What about characters whose names include WHITE or BLACK?
A: Names of symbols such as BLACK MEDIUM SQUARE or WHITE MEDIUM SQUARE are not meant to indicate that the corresponding character must be presented in black or white, respectively; rather, the use of “black” and “white” in the names is generally just to contrast filled versus outline shapes, or a darker color fill versus a lighter color fill. Similarly, in other symbols such as the hands U+261A BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX and U+261C WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX, the words “white” and “black” also refer to outlined versus filled, and do not indicate skin color.”
――――――
¹ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_substitution
² — http://apps.timwhitlock.info/emoji/tables/unicode#block-2-di...
³ — http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2705/fontsuppor...
⁴ — http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6491202/overriding-emacs-...
⁵ — http://unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html#6
I've been eager to move off of OSX for some years [1], but with this rumored laptop, they'll probably sink their teeth in me for another 3 years.
[1] If anyone knows of a laptop that is portable, that supports 16GB of RAM and works well with Linux, please let me know. Even the newly announced X1 and XPS13 are limited to 8GB (and I assume they get relatively poor battery life on Linux)
They are all limited to 8GB. According to [2] the new X250 is, like the new X1, also a single DIMM.
[1] - http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/x-series/
[2] - http://www.anandtech.com/show/8822/lenovo-thinkpad-x250
X230 (Ivy Bridge, 2 years old) supports 16GB and has the good keyboard/trackpad.
Unless you're working with the laptop in one hand or using it regularly on journeys > 8 hours, I can't see much of a difference between Air and Pro.
However, -1 lbs + smaller form factor + better battery is pretty significant when you're traveling abroad with a backpack for a week or two. I'll take less weight + more socks any day of the week. Also, I almost killed myself trying to get power from an outlet at Phnom Penh International Airport.
So, personally, I find the 13" a compromise I could have just spent my way out of.
As the article notes, the original Air was very similar to the purported new Air. It had a micro-DVI, a single USB port and a headphone jack.
It didn't quite succeed, but I'd guess more because of its anemic performances (SSD was an expensive option to an already costly machine, the CPU wasn't exactly a performance star, and let's not talk about the GMA X3100) than its I/O limitations. And if anything things have gotten better since (more wireless and "cloud" with less physical connectivity required).
This is the biggest issue with this Air - that if you want to charge this laptop and use anything, even a USB mouse with it, you will need a usb adapter with power pass-through. It's just stupid. They should have left Magsafe 2 on it + USB-C, or at least 2 USB-C ports, so you can use one for charging and another for video/data.
They've always been an opinionated company producing opinionated products, right back to the launch of the very first Mac which was criticised for only being able to do what Steve Jobs wanted you to do. Or think of the original iMac - no floppy drive and USB-only connectivity before it had really taken off. Or the first iPhone launching with less features and connectivity than its competitors.
The times they tried to please everyone are when they did most poorly - remember the dreadful Performa range with loads of meaningless variations?
Personally I have found myself continuously switching between the "pro" and "regular" offerings ever since the days of Powerbook and iBook, and if a 12" Air would be nothing more than a newer, better Air with a retina screen I would probably pick it over the 13" Pro I currently use.
Apple regularly moves the goalposts to avoid cannibalizing the high-end line.
Having HDMI out built-in on the rMBP15, vs. needing to carry a mdp/tb2 to whatever dongle all the time, is a plus too.
USB 3 A ports are probably a minimum for me.
If I wanted no ports at all, I'd just use the iPad.
I don't think I could deal with OS X 10.10 on less than 16GB, either.
Were you comparing Safari with 0 extensions vs. Chrome with 0 extensions? Or does each have a different extension load?
I will often fall back to Safari if a page doesn't render properly in Chrome, but that's because I installed a bunch of extensions on Chrome and have consciously left Safari pure as the driven snow. It's a different problem domain, but I know certain extensions can use resources in surprising ways.
What's especially obnoxious about that behavior is that if you disable the dGPU, it works just fine. So what's the point?
Also, one would expect Chrome's own Web Store to work well in Chrome... but Google's attitude toward long-standing bugs is anything but exemplary.
Chrome burns 90% of a CPU on one thread, and another 40% on another. Coconut reports about 32 Watts used. Safari maxes at about 12% plus 8%, and tops at about 15 Watts. Base usage on this machine with the current screen brightness and applications that happen to be open is 10-12 Watts. I get approximately the same results with Incognito mode, which suggests the problem is core Chrome rather than add-ons.
Generally, this just makes things that bit faster. The more you can store in RAM (even trivial things), the better. I've never had any slow downs, and don't have to worry about opening Photoshop and Illustrator along with XCode, Sketch and 20 Chrome tabs.
Unless you're a true poweruser, no one really needs more than 8gb by todays standards. I have 32gb because I maintain and develop 4 different codebases each with their own setup in different VMs. If I didn't do that, I could manage with 8gb just fine.
Why? Genuinely curious why anyone would ever need that many tabs open. Why can't you use bookmarks/reading list? It doesn't seem possible that you would be actively using all of those regularly enough to need them all open.
I'm currently running with 19 tabs open. Any more than that and it becomes too difficult to identify them. Ideally, I try to trim it down to about 10 when I can. How anyone can be even remotely productive with 300 open is beyond me.
Now, 16GB, that's very good
If you need HDMI, USB 3 A, Gazillion RAM etc., there is a laptop for you/your company! E.g. rMBP13/15.
I wouldn't buy rMBP13, purely because it's heavier, and if you walk a lot with your machine,then it adds up.
Good thing it's USB-C then, a single standard for all uses. Now if this takes on (I'm positive it will) you can replace all cables with this one.
> But just because it will be inconvenient for some users doesn’t mean that Apple won’t do it. In fact, you can almost hear the stage patter when the feature is unveiled: Most connectivity is wireless these days, we’ve made a great $49 accessory that adds all the ports you’d want, and the included power adapter—the most innovative power adapter ever—features a breakaway magnetic coupler and is itself a USB and Thunderbolt hub. I’m making the details up, but you’ve got to think there would be more to the story than, “Yeah, your power plug is also your USB plug, get used to it.”
How cool would it be if every monitor in the future used the exact same type of connector and also doubled as a power supply for anything connected to it? Same thing goes for ethernet.
http://bit.ly/1KsyPoS
The power connector cable could be a variation on the concept.
✓ Fanless.
✓ 700 nit low-glare 2560×1600 display.
✓ Ports (μHDMI and SD reader is better than nothing).
✓ Apple-esque price tag.
[0]: http://www.samsung.com/us/news/24347
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ub2vYob7rzQ (Brad Linder's hands on)
[2]: http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/6/7501385/dell-xps-13-2015-ed...
What is Samsung doing to make sure that this resolution is usable at this size?
2560×1600 is not a bad choice, however, since at 200 % scaling it has 1280×800 logical pixels, which is perfectly normal for such a monitor. If only Windows could reliably tell which applications do NOT support higher DPI displays even though they say they do, they could be just doubled in size and still be perfectly usable, if a bit blurry (you don't get aliasing effects, though). I guess Microsoft'll just have to make yet another API for DPI-awareness to catch the rest of the offenders.
Apple keyboard escape buttons have always been a bit harder to hit (imo), so I have trained up both of those shortcuts to good effect.
Nearly all PC laptops, even many otherwise high-end ones, have had this horrendous cursor key arrangement for a few years now: a compromised design for a lower cost, one-piece, rectangular keyboard. It's one of the reasons I switched.
I really hope this isn't the start of a trend for Apple. At the very least, I hope sensible key layout can be a differentiator for the Pro line.
Also, given that Apple's wireless keyboard and all current laptops have the tiny "T" version, I wouldn't hold my breath for them to change course anytime soon.
Could be very interesting, especially in office locations where charger sharing goes on. Or even at home, how do you know that /your/ charger isn't the special version that not only powers the MacBook while also appearing as a bus device that's backdooring your machine and radiating your secrets back over your mains cables to an adversary?
Lots and lots of fun to be had there.
There's a big bug with both Firewall and TB that can bypass the security and infect the firmwares and so on.
TB3 allows for 100W power transmission. Your Thunderbolt Display can then plug into your laptop with a single cable, including charging needs.
Additionally, TB3 comes with a new connector - which is smaller vertically. Perfect for a new thinner MBA.
As the laptop offerings get smaller and smaller my frustration grows larger and larger. Sure, I can use my big monitor at work, but what about when I travel, or work from "home"? I'm willing to lug around a huge laptop if it means that I can see the screen and get actual work done.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/5/7495073/msi-mechanical-keyb...
This is a laptop with a full mechanical keyboard, 2x graphics cards and a 350W power brick.
But if that is not insane enough, there is a company called Eurocom, which will build you this monster: http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure%281,234,0%29ec
It can be configured with a 12-core(24 thread) Xeon CPU + 2 GPUs + 4 hard drives. It needs TWO 300W power bricks to function, and is supposed to be used as a mobile server.