Underwhelmed with new macbook

[paulears]

My 2013 macbook pro died. Motherboard fault, and it came a day after I dropped it, so can't really blame the computer. trouble is, it has quite a few mac only things on it, and I needed it tonight, working and available. I'd retro-fitted a 1.3Tb SSD into it a year back, and I discovered that the new ones are really not a replacement at all! No connections to the outside world bar 2 USB-C sockets and one of them is used for the charger! No kensington socket to deter people borrowing it, and the upgrade for the supplied 128Gb drive to 256 adds two hundred quid. Adding a big drive increases the price by nearly a grand! It seems to do nothing my old one did, apart from NOT having things. No DVD, no SD slot, no USBs, no thunderbolt to connect a monitor and onl;y the 15" has the new menue strip. I backed the old one up yesterday, but of course I cannot do a proper migrate as the drive size is paltry at 256Gb! The Apple girl said people don't need local storage they use the cloud - I asked how the 1Tb of video files sitting on it will get to the cloud, and how do I stream that to edit? No clue. They say how good they are for video - editing 4K - that's a laugh with 256Gb of storage. I can buy an external gizmo that will give me HDMI and some USBs for external drives - but it would have been cheaper to buy a non-laptop if they cannot work without add ons.

 

So I have it, and what a faff. I cannot think of any other expensive purchase I've made that has unexcited me so much!

[andy_s]

Information Technology GCSE Paper 1 question 1.

Apple Macintosh - fashion accessory or work tool? Discuss.

Using your experience of the real world and your knowledge of the history of information technology from Babbage to the present day, demonstrate the progress of technology for the benefit of Personkind.

[gyro_gearloose]

Mac laptops have long been more about looks than performance. There are stories of Steve Jobs on his knees pleading with his engineers to make the laptops silent. They had to explain that work creates heat, which in turn requires a fan for cooling. Thermal throttling is a problem for anyone who wants their Mac to do processor intensive work. This is why I'm typing this on an HP Hackintosh laptop :)

[Jivemaster]

Lots of people seem to think of cloud as their storage, lots of users buy a device simply by the battery life -they get long life by taking things off the mobo. As it died of injury perhaps Morgan computers or the local computer fair will have one identical to your old one model and year.

[Stuart91]

I'm now on my third Late-2011 MacBook Pro. I like the 17" screen, and upgradeability - I've maxed the RAM and have created a Fusion drive with a 1Tb SSD and 2Tb spinning drive (replacing the internal DVD drive, which was broken anyway).

 

When this one dies, I will probably end up buying another one. Like Paul, I've looked at newer models, and I'd need to spend close to £3k to get equivalent RAM and less storage.

 

Unfortunately, I'm now finding myself in the same place with phones, too. Bought a refurbished iPhone 6+ recently, rather than upgrade, because I don't want to lose the headphone jack. I've had a play with an iPhone X, and certainly liked it, but it's a struggle to justify the outlay when the improvements are largely incremental. Sure, facial recognition is nicer than having to type a four digit pin umpteen times a day, but I'm not sure I'd pay hundreds of pounds for the convenience.

[cedd]

Apple's biggest problem (for us anyway) - they became fashionable.

I have a late 2012 15" Macbook Pro which has served me really well. It feels and is spec'd like a machine for a professional in our line of work.

I've seen nothing in the last couple of years from them which would make we want to upgrade, and if ever mine dies I'll simply do what others above have said and buy a used one.

 

Sadly Apple's shareholders and execs don't make their millions from the likes of us any more, they make them from people who'll camp overnight to get the latest iphone just because it's the latest iphone, or rich folk who'll buy their child a new macbook when they go to uni. I own an iPhone 6s and genuinely like it, but again I'll not look at another because of the 3.5mm jack issue. Also, I simply don't want to be labelled an apple sheep!

[Stuart91]

I'm reasonably impressed by the look of the new iMac Pro. Yes it's a premium product, but it's actually a professional device, suitable for high end video editing etc. with decent internal capabilities and plenty of connectivity.

 

I'd be hopeful that they'll come up with something for a portable machine. A new Macbook Pro line would fill a niche nicely, and there has to be decent margins at this end of the market. Yes it's small fry compared to selling iPhones by the million, but it's definitely still worthwhile.

[gyro_gearloose]

The sad reality is that you will always be able to buy off the shelf components and build yourself a Hackintosh for considerably less than an identically specced Mac. You pay a sizable premium just to have Apple build the system for you.

[sleah]

I wouldn't mind betting the vast majority of new mac book users are just using them for Instagram, Twitter and Pintrest. Oh, and heavily-in-debt university students because there is obviously nothing else in existence that is up to the job of typing out a text document...... :** laughs out loud **:

[Stuart91]

heavily-in-debt university students because there is obviously nothing else in existence that is up to the job of typing out a text document...... <img src='http://www.blue-room.org.uk/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/laugh.gif' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':** laughs out loud **:' />

 

At the risk of really showing my age... I was the first person (out of a class of 200+) to use a computer to take lecture notes. I did it on one of these:

 

 

 

I was very popular for a short while (as people realised that they could get copies of notes from me when they missed lectures). However they soon realised how useless my notes actually were, and stopped asking after a while.

[paulears]

Putting things back is so long winded when you have to pick bits and pieces! All actually working - all the Adobe stuff, but ms office refuses to work after bringing it back from time machine - it was quicker to redownload adobe cc. However - my user name and password that works on BT mail on every other computer won't work - a known problem according to Google!

Now I have a gizmo haning off it, I can actually connect it to things!

[paulears]

I found a bizarre post on an Internet forum saying that the motherboard fault was possibly curable with a new disk drive cable and a small chip. I found somebody advertising a kit for ten quid - so ordered it and it arrived. With a jewellers glass and a pin I removed the old drive cable and then found the tiny little pcb with a crazy little 3mm square slide in connector for a tiny plastic ribbon. A small pair of tweezers, and another pin to close the compression joint - and IT WORKS!

 

So I now have two Macs - damn. I did find one thing better with the new one - it's got much better sound, and it's louder too!

[the kid]

I found a bizarre post on an Internet forum saying that the motherboard fault was possibly curable with a new disk drive cable and a small chip. I found somebody advertising a kit for ten quid - so ordered it and it arrived. With a jewellers glass and a pin I removed the old drive cable and then found the tiny little pcb with a crazy little 3mm square slide in connector for a tiny plastic ribbon. A small pair of tweezers, and another pin to close the compression joint - and IT WORKS!

 

So I now have two Macs - damn. I did find one thing better with the new one - it's got much better sound, and it's louder too!

 

100% intrigued, we have one that the motherboard/logicboard has/keeps failing no one seems to be sure why,but if its as simple as that.

 

link?

[paulears]

He trades on Ebay mainly - Z Rahim Computrading Limited 430 Church Road Northolt Middlesex ub5 5as His Ebay name is discount-checkout

 

He seems to have loads of Mac parts for all age kit - apparently, this cable assembly is more fragile than it looks and brings back doom and gloom results on Apple's fault systems. I got pointed to hime and he sent the but next day - for a tenner it was well worth it.

[andy_s]

So now you have one mac to pose with in the hipster coffee bars, and one to do the actual work with! Win - win, surely?