MacBook Pro 13 Inch Retina First Impressions

 

I guess it’s fair to say that I love tech. A quick rummage through my cupboards would betray my enthusiasm (some might say obsession) with boxes full of old Psions, Palms, Newtons and laptops - even a couple of Sony micro PC’s. But whilst its is true to say I love tech, there are actually only very few individual products that I love. There are many that I enjoy using, admire, respect but to love a device, for me, it has to have 2 unique attributes; firstly it has to constantly exceed my expectations in it’s daily use and secondly, it has to have a design that stirs certain feelings when you cast your eyes on it or when it sits in your hand.

That perfect combination of function and form.

For this reason, even though I think they are brilliant devices, I don’t love my iPhone or iPad. They pretty much nail the form part of the equation but don’t exceed my expectations every day because of the compromises they make. Just today, for example, my iPad let me down  when someone sent me a zip file I couldn’t open and even after all this time I’m still mad with it for not having a file system and for changing every lower case i to an upper case I without asking me! And the phone, well the audio quality always disappoints me when I listen to it - which I do every day. I’m prepared to live with the compromises - I just don’t love them.

If I had to name three devices that I love. My top three would be: The Linn Sondek LP12 turntable, my Sony Walkman pro  cassette player and my Apple 11” MacBook Air. I don’t even use those first two items every day (in the Sony’s case - ever) but like old girlfriends, they will always have a special place in my heart.

I bought my 11” MacBook Air in Vegas whilst attending CES 2010. It was replacing one of the first generation Airs, which whilst a masterpiece of thin design was pretty much unusable for anything other than a bit of email. Even a few minutes of flash video from the web made the original Air hotter than a fox in a forest fire so I didn’t have high expectations for the 11” but I was prepared to try the compromise as it was a brilliant design and unbelievably light.

From the moment I turned it on, it exceeded my expectations. This was my first SSD experience and despite it’s modest processor and RAM specs, it was the fastest computer I had ever used including the big clunking Mac pro computer on the desk in my office, which at that time was still using spinning drives. The way I’d define fast is a little different from the benchmark specs about how fast a computer can render in photoshop, It’s about the every day speed of the little things - changing a wifi network, launching iPhoto, how many tabs can load sensibly in Safari and in this respect the modest 11” Air rocked. It’s display was a higher res than anything I’d had before and I was thrilled with how usable the small screen was.

A couple on months in, I found myself on a plane between the UK and the USA doing radical last minute changes to a presentation I was due to give when I got off. I was simultaneously rendering new titles & overlaying new audio into video in iMovie, embedding the the results into Powerpoint along with images from a USB stick and the humble Air just did it. No failing batteries, no spinning beach balls, no overheating, no hysteria. This became a device I loved. I take it everywhere when I travel and when I’m not at my desk at home, more often than not I’m carrying around with me like small magazine. I prefer it to the iPad for everything except reading newspapers and books.

The machine I had was the absolutely lowest spec, memory & storage and for about a year I have been looking to upgrade it. (Every time I download a movie - I get the dreaded your startup disk is almost full message) Minded to the Mac release cycle, I decided to wait until the summer of this year when I planned to buy a maxed out 11” and that’s when the 15” Retina spoiled my plans. I spent serious time in the Apple store with a 15” Retina in one hand and the an 11” Air in the other and came to the tough decision that neither would now do. The 15” was just two big to travel 2/3 days a week and I knew that having a non-retina display was too much to give up so I made the very grown up decision to wait for a 13” Retina to come along. 4 months latter it did. I got mine today - the mid point 256GB i5 - and here are a few first impressions.

The punchline - It’s not a 13” Retina MacBook Pro it’s a 13” Retina MacBook Air.

I don’t mean this in a pejorative way. I don’t need my mobile machine to be a pro machine so I’m cool with it. I just think it’s a function of Apple’s naming conventions that they’ve ended up in a funny place here. If you look at the specs and say to yourself what would I change if I was making a 13” retina machine that had decent battery life, that was the thinnest we could make it and had the minimum specs to still work - you would end up with this machine. It’s not an Air because of the physics of the battery requirements but to all intents and purposes - it is. Conversely, Apple could have made this machine a lot more “Pro” - Quad core processors, discrete GPU, 16/32 GB of Ram could all have been included, but haven’t been. These things are in the 15” model with better value for money than the 13”.

For power/business users - If you want one machine that can replace a desk top and be used in different locations around the home and occasionally travel then the 15” is the no-brainer option but if you want a machine that can be genuinely mobile and perhaps be used in combination with a big machine at home then I think there is a real choice between which compromise suits you best:

An 11” Air which gives you super light weight at the cost of display.

A 13” Retina which gives you super display at the cost of weight and bulk.

After 1 day I can report that the display is bloody brilliant. It works fine at the top scaled spec of 1680 by 1050 and for the first time I can use two major apps side by side without tabbing which is much more productive for me. There is an ominous warning - “Using scaled resolution may affect performance” on the settings screen which pertains to that written above about how far away this really is from a Pro machine.

It’s also a lot heavier to my hands than the 11” Air. It feels like a computer again. The best way I can describe it - I wouldn’t think twice, if I was standing a metre away from the sofa about tossing my Air onto it like a magazine, it feels light enough that it will never come to any harm but I’d never toss this machine, it feels heavy enough to bounce off and make a hole in floor.

How these two compromises will trade off over time - I have no idea. It will take a month or two to know and least one go of that long run between terminals at O’Hare with my case hanging off my shoulder.

In terms of speed and heat, so far so good. I have had chance to run some HD video with no noticeable warming. Battery life is loads better than my 11” Air. Speed is a bit more difficult to judge as I have been doing all those set up jobs you do on a new laptop and that’s a reminder of one of Apple’s two present deadly sins - more stuff being modal in it’s operation. (The other being skeuomorphism  of course)

As I set up 10 or 15 email accounts in preferences, I just want to bang in the SMTP and IMAP server settings and move on. I don’t want to have to wait whilst each one is tested over a slow internet connection watching a spinning beach ball. This OSX not iOS - use a background process not a modal process. It used to be that the only app that gave me the beach ball of death was MS Office suite but actually the latest version is almost faultless. Now it’s only Apple settings apps (which all seem to keep you on hold whilst the app communicates with the server), Safari and iTunes giving me the dreaded ball - in iTunes’ case for about half of my total use time. Hopefully this is about to be fixed but I digress.

It generally feels pretty snappy, faster than my Air and about the same as my New/old Mac Pro which runs a 500GB SSD. The first time I opened iPhoto it took 25 seconds to launch but subsequent times it’s about 1.5 seconds.

One other thought - When switching from reading this draft which I typed on the Retina to my desk top to post it. Suddenly the 27” cinema display looks really rough. I’d never noticed this before but today I can see all the flaws in the text.

Much more to report after a few weeks use rather than a few hours but to the question of will I ever love this device? We’ll see, I doubt it - I can already foresee a 10/11” retina device, weighing less than a kilo and sexier than Keira Knightley landing somewhere in 2014 and I think that will probably be the next love.

Charmer - Aimee Mann - A Review

In the sprit of all proficient reviewers - I first should declare an interest. Aimee Mann has been an important part of my life for the best part of twenty years or more accurately, her music has. 

Like many, I discovered Aimee Mann through her, ‘4th of July’ single and the accompanying album, ‘Whatever’. The music from this and the follow up album, ‘I’m with Stupid’ was essentially a key part of the sound track to my twenties. I have lost count of the number of people I introduced to these two works, explaining that they were quite simply the work of the best female singer song writer around. 

Most folk agreed. Occasionally, someone didn’t, which meant they didn’t have enough taste to remain a good friend.

Mann’s early work had a quality that’s almost impossible to describe, a balance of melody and energy combined with a poignancy of lyrics, delivered with a lightness of touch that allows instant accessibility but  with an impact that gets deeper, more fascinating and more captivating the more you listen. Others achieve this, Bernard Butler, Van Morrison, Mike Scott and of course, Lennon & McCartney but 99 % of artists don’t. Or at least don’t consistently.

The albums that followed, Bachelor No2 & Lost in space continued this brilliant evolution, delivering songs that stand the test of time and still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, even after the 1000th listen. If you want to fill yourself with energy listen to ‘Longshot’, if you want to make yourself smile listen to ‘Ghost World’ or ‘Stupid Thing’ and if you want to take a moment to dwell on the raw reality of human relationships listen to ‘Par for the course’ or ‘Wise up’

‘I’ve Had It’ is my permanent sound track for New York. I have never travelled in from JFK without this piping from my phone to my headphones or back in the day, ….my Walkman.

Lately though, Aimee and I have grown apart a little. Her two most recent works prior to ‘Charmer’, ‘Smilers’ and ‘The forgotten Arm’ just did not have the same impact. They are both proficient works and ones you should have in your collection but there were two things that kept them off my frequent play list; The style of the melody moved a little from California pop to a more country feel and the songs themselves became a little too heavy or bleak in their lyrical content. I can admire a story about a drug addict loser, with dissipating health and a tendency to beat his wife but I don’t enjoy listening to it every day in my daily commute. 

So, it was with more than a little apprehension that I pressed play on ‘Charmer’, Mann’s latest release. I’d seen the fantastic video release of ‘Labrador’ and dared to hope that this album could be a return to her brilliant best. It’s better than that. It filled my heart with joy at the thought of the pleasure most of the simple tracks of ‘Charmer’ will bring in years to come.

There are some instant dazzlers in addition to ‘Labrador’. ‘Disappeared’ has a chorus that falls right in with Mann’s best work and a retro synth line that’s mesmerizing and ‘Crazy Town’ is another of her super pop works that would crack a smile on the face of the coolest hipster. It’s worth getting the iTunes version for the bonus track, ‘Brothers’ Keeper’ which is delivered in the vaudeville style of the best of the 90’s work.

The standard of musicianship on all of Mann’s work has always been incredibly high and 'Charmer’ is no exception. What makes it so enchanting is that it’s delivered with a tone of understatement - you just never feel anyone has to try - and it’s all the better for it.

It isn’t perfect, ‘Slip and Roll’ recalls some of the issues I described about ‘Forgotten Arm’ and ‘Gumby’ is a little one paced but this is all relative. ‘Charmer’ will easily be one of the best albums you could buy this year.

If you are familiar with Mann’s work and maybe have just drifted away from it. Buy Charmer, it will remind you why she is one of the most important song writers around. 

If you are not familiar with Mann’s work then I envy you. You must buy “Whatever’, ‘I’m with Stupid’ and ‘Charmer’ at once. Today. You’ll open a window into music that will change the quality of your life. Trust me, it will.

Charing Cross Road

 

In the late eighties, I was in my early twenties and living in London for the first time in my life. I arrived in London aged 23, having grown up in a large city in Northern England and having spent my early working life in provincial towns. My employer transferred me to London from Scunthorpe. I was working in Hampstead and quickly bought a place by the river in Wapping.

I’d travelled quite extensively in the UK but living in London was different. Being in London was quite simply, a fucking revelation.

I’d always been a reader, a bit of a book worm. Before London, it felt like I had two different forms of consciousness; one where I escaped to my literature, the worlds of Le-Carre or Amis or Waugh and one where I plodded into work, dealt with small people, doing inconsequential things, in incidental towns. These people were nice, safe - they were people like me, I guess, but they were 1 million miles away from the exciting folks that inhabited the world of the books that I read, the music I heard and the films I watched.

On arrival in London these two worlds were smashed together with colossal force - they became one. It felt like I had stepped from the audience onto the stage. Real life was happening all around me and I could take part, participate and shape it. It became instantly obvious to me that London was where I was always meant to be. It was destiny, home, where the grown ups were, the real people. It made me giddy, cynical, experimental, more than occasionally unbearable but most of all, it inspired and excited me. It gave me a sense of potential and ambition. It made me realise that I could shape, even perhaps define events, rather than just read about them.

My days off work during those early years in London were marvellous. My girlfriend and I would wake early to the sounds of the river, stagger out to buy our first coffee to wash away the excess of the previous night and then (and this was the most delightful thing) we would wander. Wander without destination or without a plan. We’d set off on the south bank of the river, walking and talking and we would see where the city took us. Maybe to the Jazz of the Barbican, maybe to the second hand books of the South Bank centre, to the dodgy pubs of Soho, the landscapes of Turner at the Tate or to an impromptu music gig at the Worlds end in Finsbury Park.

The absolute luxury of this, it’s intoxication, was the abandon and intrigue of following your nose, letting one thing lead to another, watching the crowd, following the crowd and discovering, time after time, new experiences - art, sounds, tastes - Life. Not always good of course, some times a little scary or unpleasant but always exciting and often thrilling.

I’m older now. Living in the sticks with a couple of kids and big house in country. I still get a tiny whiff of the euphoric feeling when I pitch up in London for work but I get it more now in another place and that’s when I’m wandering through the almost infinite halls, corridors and possibilities of the web. I love having the time to lazily click from place to place, looking for the new, the innovative, the cool, the challenging, the inspiration. 

It’s not quite Charring Cross road of 1989, you have make do without the smells and tastes. It’s not in 3D but occasionally - in fact, actually, most days, you come across something that’s really quite cool, that maybe changes just slightly, the way you think about stuff or the way you look at the world.

Occasionally, you come across something really cool. Like this  -  Theresa Couchman

What Google should have done

Over the last week a small storm has broken out over the fact that Google has admitted to circumventing the security settings when Apple computer and iPhone users browsed the internet using Apple’s web browser, Safari. 

The original story broke here in the Wall Street Journal. John Gruber, who authors one of the web’s most admired blogs, summarises the issue in this blog post before going on to explore how wrong Google’s actions were and whether any of the blame should actually lay with Apple - which is the defence being mounted by some Google supporters.

Mr Gruber writes:

What the WSJ discovered is that Google (and a few other ad networks) found a way to store third-party cookies in Safari and Mobile Safari even when the option was set only to accept cookies from visited websites, as it is by default.

No one is criticizing Google for using third-party tracking cookies in general. No one. What’s being criticized is Google devising and implementing a method to store third-party cookies in web browsers which are set not to accept third-party cookies. It didn’t happen by accident. Google wrote code specifically to circumvent this setting in Safari.

There is no doubt that what Google did was wrong. How wrong? Imagine this: 

Your local supermarket, Tesco or Walmart or whomever, runs a long term promotion where customers that sign up to their loyalty card get a 5% discount. In exchange for giving them your details and allowing them to track your shopping behaviour, they lower the price and they fund this discount through selling your data to advertisers and suppliers. Now imagine, that without telling anyone, they started giving the same discount to those that had opted to keep their data private and not to join the loyalty card. For these customers they then follow them home, secretly collect their details, capture their habits and sell this data to suppliers. Imagine that they did this in a routine and systematic way, for every customer that said they would rather not be in the loyalty scheme, every time they shopped.

If this hypothetical scenario happened at any major retailer, there would be an enormous outcry followed by prosecutions and recriminations. People would be fired and people would probably go to jail. 

What Google did was the e-commerce equivalent and there are two reasons why the outcry has been so much more muted. Firstly and mainly, because the majority of people don’t yet conceptualise the issues as clearly as they can for traditional physical retailers. Secondly, our sense of the rights, wrongs and value of privacy in the web space is much more under developed than it is for the physical world.

There is no doubt that what Google did was wrong but an equally interesting question is what should Google have done?

When they discovered that Apple’s default security settings prevented them from tracking customer behaviour in a way that allowed them to sell that data most efficiently, they shouldn’t have secretly written code to get around it. They should have done this.

The first time a person tried to conduct a Google search on an Apple computer, a dialogue box should appear that says:

Your web searches are free because we sell your data to advertisers to subsidise the cost of this service. Your computer presently has settings that prevent us from doing this most effectively. Do you wish to:

(A) Turn off these privacy settings, allow us to track your behaviour and give you free web searches.

(B) Keep your privacy settings on and subscribe at $10 a month to use our search service.

Google (and others) sense of overwhelming entailment to user data is driven by what they give in return. We have quickly lost sight of just how valuable it is to have an index of the entire worlds knowledge at our finger tips. 30 years ago, the same access to that data, at the same speed and accuracy, would have cost each user millions of dollars each time. Now we expect it for free but in reality it costs and it costs a lot.

It will remain free at the point of access but it’s time for the Google’s of this world to have a more upfront and honest conversation about what the real cost is to each of us.

SD