My first Apple Watch Sport, in all its Space Black glory.
After kvetching about its purpose, my need for one, and its place in the personal computing ecosystem, I recognized that having an Apple Watch could serve a very important purpose: it would free me from retrieving my iPhone in specific situations, such as when riding a bicycle. Like other commenters, I saw its primary function as the computer-you-have-on-you so you can stay off your computer.
The smartphone exploded because, like its built-in camera, it was always with you, and because it was always there, you used even more than a computer and in ways you never used a personal computer. The watch isn’t there yet, and who knows if it will ever approach that level of utility. But in the last four weeks, I’ve really appreciated some of the things Apple Watch does that a smartphone, such as my iPhone, does not do.
The following are not revolutionary differences, but instead are minor tweaks to my own personal computing.
Google Classroom labels this teacher a “hero,” presumably because it will take a superuser to restore students’ deleted work.
Starting a year ago this month, Google offered its Apps for Education clients Google Classroom, a free-to-use, stripped-down learning management system. I became intrigued with the offering, especially after both Queens College and Fordham adopted it and began offering workshops to train faculty on how to use it. I adopted it in the middle of this current spring semester, and it did what I wanted…except when it deleted all of my Fordham students’ work.
LMS No More
After teaching university-level classes for more than a decade, I’ve had it with bloated Learning Management Systems. A couple of years ago, I swore off Blackboard and Moodle because, as an adjunct professor, it was too much work to manage three or four courses on multiple learning management platforms. It was much easier to launch a static, public-facing website that all my students could find with an easy-to-remember URL or a web search. They could get a particular week’s readings, for example, in as little as two clicks and usually without ever entering a password.
However, going with a static web site instead of an LMS meant I would lose two key features: a gradebook and a platform to collect assignments electronically.
Rolling-Your-Own Gradebook
The gradebooks on Moodle and Blackboard both suck. Even when I used an LMS, I resorted to recording and calculating my grades on a spreadsheet: first Excel, then Numbers, and now Google Sheets. The added benefit of using a spreadsheet program is that I can upload grades with a tab-delimited or comma-separated values (CSV) file. It not only cuts down on the tedium of inputting grades using slow-responding pull-down menus, it also cuts down on errors.1
Collecting Assignments
Collecting assignments, on the other hand, remained tricky and offered no perfect solution. Having students email me resulted in an alphabet soup of attachments—PDF, RTF, DOCX, ODT, you name it—that I would have to convert, organize, and maybe even print to grade. Google Drive seemed to offer a better solution: students could compose or upload their assignment and then share the document with me. But then I would end up with a ton of files in my own Drive that I would have to organize, too. I also would get annoying email notifications for each student alerting me that I have been invited to view, comment, or edit someone’s document. And, at Queens College, students would have to share their document with jmonroy@qc.cuny.edu but not my more official email address of juan.monroy@qc.cuny.edu. That’s because QC doesn’t use Google Mail, and Google Apps doesn’t know that jmonroy@qc.cuny.edu is the same user as juan.monroy@qc.cuny.edu.
The most basic solution appeared to be having students bring paper copies to class. But as Steve Jobs said about using a stylus for smartphones, nobody wants that: “You have to get them and put them away, and then you lose them.”
Yuck, indeed!
The same goes for hard copies. Students inevitably have printer issues, forget or neglect to staple their pages, or simply don’t bring their assignment to class and then ask, “can I bring it to your mailbox?” For an adjunct who comes to campus only once a week, that’s not practical. I’ve also had it with shuttling student papers from one place to another and organizing them into piles across the floor of my home office. There has to be a better way!
Google Does Homework
Because they each use Google Apps for Education, Google Classroom is available at Queens College and at Fordham University. The platform offers two compelling features. First, it allows you to post announcements to your students, and second, it allows you collect assignments—nicely organized into a Classroom folder in my Google Drive—and respond to each student’s work. I could care less for the announcements feature, but the assignments function seemed to address my quibbles over using Google Drive. Students submit their assignments and they go to a folder in my Google Drive. I can grade an assignment for each student, comment on their document, and “return” it with feedback.
When I went to grade an assignment, I noticed that a particular student, let’s call her Allison, had attached a file from her Drive. When I followed the link, labelled “Drive File,” I got a Not Found: 404 Error message.
I see that Allison attached a “Drive File.”
But following the “Drive File” link yields this 404-error page.
That was odd. I wrote Allison and explained that she must have done something wrong to improperly submit her assignment. I proceeded to grade the next student’s assignment. Brandon also had a “Drive File” link and following it took me to the same 404-error page. The same thing happened for Charlene, for Dmitri, for Evelyn, and for Federico.
Dammit! All the work was gone.
A few panicked web searches led me to a Google Classroom support forum. Having not found a topic relevant to my problem, I started a new one. A tech support forum moderator promptly responded and suggested a puzzling course of action: that we check our Trash. It was basically a case of Classroom moving our files to my Trash, and I should expect to find them there.
I reflexively like to keep my Trash empty because I’m old and remember when hard drive storage was a scarce resource. Keeping the trash empty ensured you had liberated some drive sectors for more important files.
Apparently, because the student’s work ended up mysteriously in my Trash, all the student files were now gone because I emptied the Trash on my Google Drive. Moreover, when I asked a few students to resubmit their assignments, they told me that they couldn’t find their documents. Not only did Classroom delete the files from my Drive, it also deleted it from their Drives too.
I reported that this “new information had come to light,” and the same support forum moderator suggested that we do some workaround to recover our work. Despite suspecting that this workaround didn’t apply to our situation, I had the students try it anyway: unsubmitting and resubmitting their assignments didn’t work. The files were still gone!
And That’s Why We Back Up Our Work
After realizing that the Google support staff could not help us, I called the support staff at Fordham. The Google Apps administrators there were able to restore the Classroom files from a backup and bring back my students’ work.
Compared to other learning management systems, Google Classroom is really limited, but it touts one worthwhile feature that I liked: collecting and grading student work. But after deleting my students’ assignments, it looks like I will have to revert to collecting papers in class. I simply can’t trust Google Classroom to do the one thing it was supposed to do.
It was also a wake up to my students: the cloud is not a backup.
My colleagues at CUNY have warned me to submit my grades on time, otherwise I would have to fill out grade changes for each student on multiple slips of paper. I joked that I would rather do that, using a mail merge or something similar, than deal with those slow-responding pull-down menus on CUNY First. ↩
Almost immediately after the Apple Event on March 9, I had formed two basic opinions about the two most noteworthy products introduced that day. First, I was ready to jettison my trusty old 2009 MacBook Pro for the new 12-inch Macbook with Retina display. Second, now that Apple had announced more details about the Watch, including pricing, I was intrigued but not convinced I could use one. I was also interested by the third big announcement, regarding HBO Now as a standalone product, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be the runaway hit some had predicted it could be. However, in the two months since the Apple event, I have almost completely reversed my thinking on all these fronts.
The Apple Watch now seems like a must-have device
Many of my Apple-obsessed friends listed having a “Dick Tracy watch” as their primary reason for wanting an Apple Watch. They might be disappointed as some early reviews judge the sound quality as, shall we say, suboptimal. But as I wrote a few weeks ago, I realized the utility of the Apple Watch after taking a bike ride. It will save me from having to fetch my phone from my pocket or bag: something we do, according to David Pogue, over a hundred times a day.
The new MacBook seems like an overpriced and underpowered device
I have to admit that, despite keeping up with iOS devices and knowing a bit their specs and performance metrics, I am relatively uninformed about recent Mac desktops and portables. Sure, I know that these things were getting thinner and lighter. Yes, I knew that Apple had banished the optical drive and spinning hard disk from most of their notebooks. And, of course, I was absolutely convinced that a Retina display would be a must-have feature for my next computer.
However, I didn’t know exactly how much had changed since 2009. RAM has not only become more capacious, but also a lot faster. Apple has ditched SATA for a much faster PCI Express bus with multiple “lanes” for increased throughput. And for all that performance, it is now common to get through ten hours of work on a single battery charge, compared to four hours with my 2009 MacBook Pro. All of the reasons I liked the new MacBook were already available in a more powerful device: a Retina MacBook Pro. However, the most compelling reasons for getting a MacBook— the remarkable thinness, the lightweight two-pound frame, and fanless design—all come with a stiff performance penalty.
Despite sacrificing performance for portability, the pricing is not all that different between a new MacBook and a Retina MacBook Pro. Consider that the new MacBook retails for $1299 for 8 GB of RAM and a paltry 256 GB drive of storage. For $300 more, you get a more reasonable 512 GB of solid-state storage with a slightly faster processor. I would have only considered the latter model because that small storage can’t be upgraded.
On the other hand, the top-of-the-line 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, with a much faster processor, similar battery life, 8 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage, and lots of ports, retails for $1799. But a lifetime of computer ownership has taught me to get as much RAM. Because Apple solders the RAM to the logic board, you are either stuck with 8 GB or you have to shell out another $200 to “future-proof” your computer with 16 GB of RAM. Upgrading to 16 GB of RAM is not possible on a new MacBook.
if you want better battery life and don’t mind the screen, go with the 13-inch Air. If you want a nice screen and don’t mind the weight, go with a 13-inch Pro. If you want a Mac on a (relative) budget, try the 11-inch Air. If you want the size, weight, and screen and can live with the dongles, performance, and battery life, that’s when the MacBook becomes a viable option.
I fell into the second camp: the user who really wants a nice screen and doesn’t think 3.5 pounds qualifies as heavy. And, although I do have an elegant solution, I hate carrying dongles!
Yet, the most compelling reason for going with the Retina MacBook Pro instead of the new MacBook is that Apple quietly updated the 13″ MacBook Pro on March 9. Not only does the Early-2015 13″ MacBook Pro come with a faster Intel Broadwell U processor, faster RAM, and an improved PCI Express bus for speedier solid state storage, it also comes with that intriguing Force Touchpad. It’s hard not to get excited about this first-generation MacBook, but at this stage, I’d prefer a more mature product over a completely new one with a lot of promise.
Or at least I do prefer that with computers. I already ordered an Apple Watch, and I’m running through the first-month trial of HBO Now.
For the last few years, I’ve been using Square Cash for small transactions between friends. Since its introduction, it’s been dead simple to send money: you send your friend an email, copy cash@square.com, and enter the dollar amount in the subject line. I’ve preferred it to Paypal, which most everyone else I know uses, for several reasons:
Having occasionally sold things on eBay, I’ve watched a lot of my sales earnings evaporate with Paypal fees. That left a bad taste in my mouth.
Speaking of fees, Paypal insists on having my ABA bank routing and account numbers to send money in order to avoid the recipient incurring a transaction fee. Square, on the other hand, uses a debit card number, which comes with fraud protection and allows you to dispute fishy transactions. It’s difficult to do that with ABA transfers.
Today, I noticed that the Square Cash iPhone app was updated to include support for a few new features:
They have a dedicated domain name for the service at https://cash.me.
Users may now have custom web address to receive payments, which they cleverly call “$cashtags.” For example, you can send me money—all kinds of money—at https://cash.me/$juanmonroy.
They also introduced something called Cash Pro which provides businesses with a simple Cash-style payments for a 1.5% transaction fee.
That last bit is interesting mostly because it explains how this Cash service makes money. It was a bit of a hard sell when I would recommend the service to friends. Each would invariably ask how Square can transfer money with no fees. My response of “they make it up in volume” never seemed satisfactory.
A market research firm based in New York sent an email soliciting participants for a focus group on consumer electronics. To adorn their communique, the author of the message included an illustration of a notebook computer, a tablet, and a smartphone, suggesting that this workshop would be on personal computing devices.
Way to Keep it Real Fake.
The image, however, looks really cheap for a few reasons. In fact, the image offended me to the point that I did not even sign up for the focus group and have taken to write this post.
First, the devices in the photo are pretty obvious knockoffs of Apple devices. The notebook looks a lot like a MacBook Pro, complete with the silver aluminum unibody case, the off-color trackpad, the black keycaps, and the black bezel surrounding the display. The mobile devices look different enough from an iPad and iPhone, mostly because they each bear three marked buttons below the display, whereas Apple mobile devices stubbornly have only one slightly recessed button.
iPad has only one button.
Second, the desktop backgrounds of each of these devices bear a pretty striking resemblance to an old version of iOS. The scattered water droplets look a lot like what Apple used to market iOS 5, back in 2011.
iOS 5 was cutting edge in 2011. Way to keep it current, guys!
Third, the watermark identifying the stock photo agency on the illustration made the email communique look even more cheap and ugly than the knockoff devices depicted therein. The image is available for purchase from Dreamstime. Had this market-research firm paid the photo agency for the image, which seems like a justifiable business expense, the image would not have had the watermark, and it would have been of higher resolution. In short, it would have looked less ugly.
Despite being overly educated in film, I would hardly call myself an aesthete, but this solicitation offended me to the point where I felt compelled to shame the author. I regularly encounter this with students who don’t give much thought to the look of their papers. Why do they all have to be written in Times New Roman or Calibri (you know, the Times New Roman of Google Docs)? Why not take a few minutes and make your paper look nice and distinct from the others? The same goes for stock art. It’s bad enough when generic looking stock images infiltrate emails, newsletters, or webpages because rather than enhancing the work, the stock images taint the message with corporate blandness. And in the case of this particular email, it also looks sloppy because the author apparently just did a quick Google Image search, ripped the image off the web, and stuck it in the email composer.1
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the linked survey is done in a garish orange and blue color combination, accented with lime-green buttons. This medley of colors shouldn’t be a legal combination in HTML and CSS: browsers should instead render the colors in black and white.
I wonder if this is what the kids today mean by Internet Ugly. Or is just ugly?
I have no way to prove this, of course, but it appears that this was likely the artist’s workflow. ↩
Remember how I seemed pretty cool to the whole Apple Watch thing? As certain as I was that this new piece of technology would be expertly designed, well-constructed, and very user-friendly, I could not figure out what function it would serve that my iPhone wasn’t already doing. After all, the wonderful thing about a smartphone is that it is the computer you always have with you. Reaching for it, I reasoned, will always be easy.
Or so I thought before going on a bike ride today.
Last Saturday, I had planned to ride to the Panera Bread in Northvale, New Jersey with the cycle club.1 But, bitterly cold temperatures, icy roads, and the closure of the George Washington Bridge pedestrian/bicycle path kept me off the bike for the entire weekend. Feeling restless, I rode to my various jobs this entire week, which I had not been able to do since mid-December, and, today, I scheduled a makeup ride to Northvale to eat that long-awaited soup–and–half-sandwich combo.
A “Bicycle for the Mind” for the Bicycle
It was on today’s ride through Bergen and Rockland counties that I recognized the utility of a smartwatch. I could care less about monitoring my heart rate, my speed/cadence, and elevation gain during a ride. At one time, that mattered to me, but in the last few years, I don’t consider it as important. No, as someone who likes to explore new routes and brewery tap rooms, it’s really important to not end up horribly lost. An Apple Watch would actually be really helpful as a navigation aid because, even on group rides, we often have to stop to find directions.
Decades ago, Steve Jobs called the computer a “bicycle for our minds” because he saw it as a tool that can elevate the human mind above its natural ability. Similarly, applications elevate the computer from a machine to a tool. What made iPhone different from all other smartphones and PDAs before it were all the apps developed for it. Although I never had a smartphone before getting an iPhone 3G in 2008, I did have a series of Palm PDAs. Those were useful personal organizers and decent notetakers. However, each one was really limited—not because it had a crummy screen or required a stylus to use, but because it simply didn’t do very much. Today, I have about 200 apps loaded on my iPhone, including task managers, an array of readers and writing apps, and apps for dozens of other functions. I may not regularly use all 200+ apps, but having them gives my iPhone purpose, especially compared to the PDAs and smartphones of yore.
For the past two cycling seasons, I’ve been using a Garmin Edge 200 on my long bike rides. I can track my speed, my distance pedaled, the time of day, and if I load my course before heading out on the road, which I almost always do, I can follow a route. I know I could use my iPhone with some app, such as Strava or Ride with GPS, to function like my Garmin, but there are a lot of drawbacks to this. On a warm day, the battery can power my Garmin for over 12 hours; the battery inside my iPhone might not. If I get caught in a rainstorm, my Garmin is water-resistant, whereas soaking my iPhone would be devastating. And, the plastic-and-rubber Garmin sits on my handlebars taking various shocks and shakes from our bumpy potholed roads: I’m not certain my glass-and-metal iPhone would fare as well.
The Garmin is only useful because of the various websites that communicate with the device. The stock Garmin Connect is fine for beginners, but the third-party apps are much, much better. For example, Strava is for those who obsess over every esoteric metric imaginable, and Ride with GPS is for those who love to plan routes, as I do. In due time, I can see the latter two making apps for the Apple Watch, just as they do for iPhone and other smartphones. Their smartwatch apps could communicate with an iPhone, securely stored in a Ziploc bag and safely tucked away in a jersey pockets. In fact, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that both of these companies have at least considered developing for the Apple Watch. Sorry, Garmin.
Free to Escape
The great thing about going on a long bike ride is to escape life for a few hours, which is why I rode a lot during the latter half of 2014. Though I keep my phone stashed away in my pocket during a ride, I can still hear it dinging and feel it buzzing whenever I get a new message, phone call, or some other notification. Today, I heard a series of alerts as I pedaled through the relatively quiet suburban streets of Bergen County, New Jersey. I tried to put those distractions out of my mind, but as a product of the digital age, I simply could not. As soon as I encountered a red traffic signal, I hurriedly pulled out my phone to check who had been messaging and calling me. Fortunately, none of the callers had anything pressing to tell me, but right there, I recognized the value of having a smartwatch. Instead of kvetching about "who could be trying to reach me right now," I could have just glanced at my watch, saw that it was a doting relative, and continued on my way.
Part of me is bothered that I have cannot have a few hours on a bike without being interrupted, but I realized today that a smartwatch is a piece of technology that allows me to do what I want without being disconnected. Twenty years ago, when mobile phones started to become a thing, one of my mentors said that she would never carry a cell phone because she wanted to preserve the freedom from always being reachable. It was a sensible argument at the time. A few years later, after I got some Nokia candy-bar phone, I realized that the mobile phone didn’t tether me to work or other obligations, as I had feared. Instead, it allowed me to do whatever I wanted—and to go wherever I wanted. I didn’t have to sit by the phone waiting for someone to call me or, worse even, to keep calling my answering machine at home checking for any incoming messages.2 With a cell phone, I gained a new freedom from my landline telephone.
Maybe that’s what this new piece of technology—the Apple Watch with its plethora of apps and seamless connection to an iPhone—is supposed to do: ever-so-slightly liberate us from our older devices, even if one of those devices is only about eight years old.
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It’s something we did last year, and I thought it was funny that we were biking all that way just to eat at a ubiquitous bakery chain. ↩
Kids today—who probably never use voicemail—must presumably consider the practice of calling your home answering machine to retrieve messages a positively antediluvian ritual. ↩
Monday’s Apple event wasn’t just about an ultralight notebook computer that I really want and a watch that I don’t. There were also two announcements regarding television that were quite interesting.1
The price for the current Apple TV dropped to $69. This third-generation model has been on the market since 2012 and was available for $99 as recently as this past weekend. I imagine that this is an intermediate move on Apple’s part. There are clearly better options for OTT streaming devices, even for die-hard Apple nerds, and I would hope Apple plans to release an improved version in the near future for the $70 same price. (Or not… what do I know?)
HBO Now will launch exclusively on Apple devices for $15 per month. In some ways, this move is big because it marks the first time HBO is available without a multichannel TV subscription and could be a threat to multichannel TV as we know it. Consumers begged HBO to offer something like this, and now we know that it will be a full-featured service, not a crippled version that only the pay TV subscribers get.
In my most recent New Media class, I addressed the second announcement as an example of a technology adapting to our needs. We were discussing how social network sites were great for, you know, networking socially. Facebook has been great for sharing with your nearby friends, distant classmates, and obsessively doting relatives. After a while, though, we learned that our unsavory activities, such as our party pics, can be found by a potential employer, a college recruiter, or that human you are trying to date. The sharing aspect of Facebook is great, but the permanence is not. So, we now have something like Snapchat, and that is where we share indiscriminately because of its evanescence. We found a technology that better suited a particular need.
HBO Now is intended to provide stream HBO to those without pay TV subscriptions. But a lot of people I know already stream HBO programming with HBO Go. They just use someone else’s credentials to access it. As intrepid cord cutters, we already figured out how to get the product we need without HBO offering it. I’m not going to guess whether HBO Now is going to succeed. It could be a decade-long lifeline as iTunes was for the music industry or it could be as negligible as News Corp making an iPad-native Daily newsmagazine.
The Technology We Deserve
Net Neutrality plays an important role with this OTT service. Chris Morran at Consumerist speculates about the power of an ISP without net neutrality rules, where one could theoretically “throttle HBO Now while still allowing HBO Go to get through at full speed, effectively saying that the only way to get a decent HBO streaming service is if you have a cable package.” But with net neutrality rules, the two services should operate at the same level of performance. I won’t need to have my TV polluted with reality TV shows and shitty reruns in order to watch The Wire in 1080p.
The only not-neutral thing about the HBO Now service is that it will initially launch on only Apple devices, such as Apple TV, iPad, and iPhone. Roku, Amazon Fire, and Chromecast users will have to miss out on Game of Thrones until midsummer. Perhaps Mark Cuban was right when he said that we shouldn’t worry about the power of ISPs and that instead we should “worry about Google and Apple” because they make the operating systems of our mobile devices.
The Technology We Don’t Need
A few years ago, only the most devoted Internet libertarians were cognizant of that an ISP could potentially throttle or block a service it didn’t “like.” Today, even casual Internet users are skeptical about the control their ISP could potentially wield. For example, after the HBO Now announcement, Comcast subscribers were unable to access the http://hbonow.com website. It turns out that it was a technical problem caused by a DNS issue on HBO’s part, not some sinister shenanigans at the hands of Comcast. But because everyone hates their cable companies and because Comcast is as big as a cable company gets, the Internet reflexively blamed Comcast.
It’s hard to shed a tear for Comcast though. As I mentioned earlier, when a technology fails to meet our needs or desires, we move on to something else. Cable television as we know it evolved from two converging technologies: Community Antenna TV and satellite cable.2 CATV was a demand-side technology. Starting in the 1940s, CATV operators piped TV signals to TV set owners living in areas where an over-the-air signal wasn’t available. CATV was almost a necessity for people living in a valley, such as in rural Pennsylvania, or in densely populated and overbuilt area, such as Manhattan, because the terrain blocked the radio signals necessary for TV reception. Satellite cable, on the other hand, was a supply-side technology. Beginning in the 1970s, it allowed national distribution for emerging television channels, such as Ted Turner’s WTBS-TV in Atlanta and the Manhattan-based Home Box Office. In both cases, CATV and satellite cable—eventually merging as the modern cable TV industry—enabled TV viewers to get what the broadcasters were failing to provide them. Today, however, the cable companies are the ones failing to provide us what we want, and that’s why we’ve migrated to something that does.
And, I’m sorry, Apple. As of right now, I still can’t figure out why I need a smartwatch.
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As a bonafide Apple nerd and someone who spends no fewer than five hours a day tapping away at a computer, I’ve been surprisingly passive in upgrading computers over the last decade. My current MacBook Pro is from mid-2009, replacing a late-2004 Powerbook G4 that measured 15 inches, weighed nearly five pounds, and was the object of ridicule from an undergraduate student. In the course of a decade, I’ve had only two Mac portables. That really would have surprised the twenty-year–old version of me.1
My Mid-2009 MacBook Pro still gets it done six years after hitting the market.
The 2009 MacBook Pro was the first 13-inch notebook in the Unibody design, and it has aged well. It not only looks like a recent computer, it preforms reasonably well. It’s responsive, and I almost never get those dreaded spinning beachballs. Undoubtedly, upgrading the RAM to eight gigabytes and replacing the spinning-disk hard drive with a solid-state drive have forestalled its obsolesce.
As I’ve chronicled here, this computer has taken some lumps over the years, and I constantly dread its inevitable demise. I’ve not only spent quite a bit of time and money upgrading this computer, I’ve also sacrificed dollars and hours repairing it, including soldering the fan to the logic board and replacing the keyboard. I’ve stubbornly continued to do so because I knew someday Apple would release something fundamentally different to my six-year–old MacBook Pro.
Yesterday, along with a cheaper AppleTV and the new HBO Now streaming service, Apple announced the new MacBook. I am almost certain it will be my next computer. It has everything I would want in a portable. It is light and thin, it has a Retina display, and it promises all-day battery life.
So svelte!
Of course, there are some sacrifices to making something so light and thin.
The display is an inch smaller than my current 13-inch MacBook Pro and, in 2x mode, will have fewer pixels than my current 1280 x 800 resolution,
There is no SD card slot, which I regularly use to import photos from my DSLR and mirrorless camera,
There is only one USB-C port,
The only other connector is an audio port,
The Intel Core M processor is not an i5 or i7,
The maximum storage is 512 GB, and maximum RAM is 8 GB.
These are not deal breakers, though. I rarely work with anything connected to my Mac other than the power supply and maybe a pair of headphones. Aside from connecting my cameras or SD cards to import photos, I usually only plug-in a VGA adapter for work and my Garmin Edge GPS for play. I’m sure that in due time I will find a cheap USB 2.0–USB-C adpater to upload and import my bike ride data and photos. And as for presentations, I can go back to presenting from my iPhone or iPad until Monoprice releases the requisite VGA/HDMI adapters.
I look forward to getting my hands on a MacBook on April 10, because, unlike the Apple Watch that also ships next month, this new MacBook makes sense to me.
Or maybe I should see what they do with the MacBook Pros later this year…
Update: If you’re looking to sell your old MacBook Pro, Gazelle is offering a $20 bonus on any MacBook Pro valued at $50 or more. As an affiliate, I get a commission on your transaction.
The above links to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy something through those links, I will earn a commission fee.
I also bought an iMac in 2009 that I sold in aftermath of my “divorce”. ↩
Last night, I came home after a long day and found that my MacBook Pro would not wake from sleep after I took it out of my backpack. This is an occasional problem with my aging notebook, but after a reboot, it usually operates as it should. But this time, after I rebooted the machine, the fan spun to full speed, making that disconcerting whirring sound, despite the fact that the computer was not running any applications and was cool to the touch.
I opened up the computer and found that the outermost RAM DIMM had popped out of the slot. That would explain why, after letting it boot earlier, it reported only 4 GB of RAM. After reseating the RAM and securing each connection, I rebooted the machine again, but the fan kept spinning at maximum speed. Fuck!
This computer has been through a lot. I not only spilled seltzer on it, followed by black coffee. Eventually, the liquids damaged the keyboard, which I had to replace. And, let’s not forget about the time I had to solder the cable connecting the fan to the logic board. I suspected that whatever dislodged my RAM must have damaged the temperature sensor, and I dreaded that it would finally be beyond repair.
But then I noticed that MagSafe Power adapter, which was connected to my computer, was not illuminated—whereas it is always either green or amber. Moreover, the battery status lights also did not illuminate to show the charge level. Those additional symptoms led me to the underlying problem. The System Management Controller was corrupted, and I needed to reset it.
Resetting the SMC is the new Zapping the PRAM. Image from Chickaboo Designs.
I’m old enough now to remember when our Macs would develop unexplainable problems, someone would advise us to zap the PRAM. In my over twenty years of working with Macs, zapping the PRAM never once fixed any mysterious problems. Would resetting the SMC do any good?
The Apple Support page outlines the steps for resetting the SMC for particular kinds of computer, such as portables with removable batteries, portables with sealed batteries, and desktop computers. In my case, I needed to shut down the computer, hold down Shift–Control–Option with my left hand and depress the power button with my right hand at the same time. Once I did that, the lights on the MagSafe adapter came on.
Once again, I rebooted up the computer with baited breath. This time, as it had done countless other times, the fan came on at the normal speed.
While zapping the PRAM was for me pretty ineffective, resetting the SMC had a different result. It did indeed fix something!
