Norm and Jeremy record a duocast to catch up on this past week in technology news. It’s been a busy week, from Tesla’s autopilot announcement to Nintendo’s new console, not to mention the big two unveils from Microsoft and Apple. We chat about Surface Studio, the new MacBooks, and our hopes and fears for each. Plus, did we mention we’re putting on a live show this weekend?
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How does the new MacBook Pro touch bar not conflict with Apple’s new push for accessibility?
Guys, Xiaomi’s pronunciation is approximately “shao-mee”. Are you guys going to test it?
Kinda saddened by Apple’s approach to the new MBP. As a professional musician in the music industry who has used Apple laptops for years I am sad to see they keep pushing for more backward dongles or USB-C Converters.
Without proper USB 2 or 3 ports 99% of my gear is rendered useless unless I pony up cash for expensive dongles or USB->USB-C which works with only certain devices that can support it properly. This imo is ludicrous and totally backwards to Apple’s original philosophy of performance & ease of use. I can see USB-C being adopted more in the near future but they should still make it accessible to as many devices they can, heck even a single USB-A would have been enough.
Let’s face it, they’ll still sell a lot of these things because it’s a cool new updated Apple product but for a time I see industry professionals sticking with older setups or just avoiding the new MBP for awhile.
On that note, any good recommendations for a PC laptop with great performance for live applications and studio work, and can also stand up to the rigors of travel and has plenty of USB slots?
RE: why Apple hasn’t built touchscreen Macs yet: Steve Jobs said on stage back in the day that their user research had shown that people tire of reaching out to touch a vertical surface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TcJ45Y2z30
It was a big deal at the time because as far as anyone knew Apple never user researched anything—products blossomed from Steve Jobs’ and Jony Ive’s minds full-formed.
I would give anything to hear Gary’s take on this touchbar thing.
re apple‘s not offering touch, khoi vinh tweeted this article earlier today: https://sixcolors.com/post/2016/10/perpendicular-philosophy/
re the surface studio as a monitor only: i don’t think that’s going to happen. the device exudes a certain sexiness. that sexiness is going to drive people to the microsoft platform. letting people use this on a mac or linux defeats its purpose. i agree with jeremy, though: that’s the approach you’d expect from apple rather than ms.
nintendo switch nintendo hasn’t been playing in direct competition to sony/ms since the wii, so i don’t think norm’s point regarding it not replacing either is new, or even reasonably expectable course of action for nintendo. (and why would they even do that? why put yet another platform on the market that does exactly the same as the ps4/xbone, and that is heavily encroached upon by the gaming pc?)
star trek discovery why should fuller even consider dropping american gods to work on a star trek show? from a personal point of view, he’s worked on a few of those before already. from a general point of view: american gods vs star trek? no contest.
FYI Jeremy, that Microsoft scanning demo was also fake. A Pre recorded video they played. I’m curious to see what their software is actually capable of, but I’m not expecting quality above 123DCatch, with an easier user interface.
Reinventing the labtop? The touch bar is so ’90s. At this point in time I would expect gesture recognition and better voice command integration to interact with software. Invoking the introduction of the MAC? Ridiculous. The touch bar is only trouble for users that have to worry about compatibility and costs for software upgrades.
Prices are above pain level as Apple has to compensate for lost sales. Minimal RAM, SSD and Ghz starting configs. To end up with a useful laptop it is another $500-700. Also I would need new set of adaptors for another probably $250, USB, HDMI, VGA, DVI, Displayport, Thunderbolt, SD card reader and the lightening connector for iPhone 7 head phone that does not even exist yet. The new Macbook pros don’t fit into my infrastructure at all. Indeed I have nothing I could use to hook up monitors, cameras and 20TB of visuals and backups. On the good side I am not tempted to upgrade my old Macbook Pro. I think good old avarice maybe taking over at Apple.
Oh Jeremy, you are so adorable in that little Apple bubble you live in. 🙂 Half the world does not use Macs. I don’t know a single friend or family member that owns a Mac. Mac market share is somewhere between 4-8%. The last time I used a Mac was in college, and it was horrible.
Well my teenagers love the iPhone stuff and MacbookPros. I am one of the Apple customers Apple does’t care about anymore and who had to switch to PC for economical and sanity reasons. Screwing up FCP than dumping Aperture and forcing iCloud BS was annoying. A mac constantly bothers now if you have not put in your iCloud password or you credit card info is off. I build in 2014 a PC 4-core 4Ghz, 16 GB DDR3 Ram 4GB video ram for $1700 USB3, thunderbolt 2x512MB SSDs basically close to the specs of the current Mac Pro 3.7GHz 4 core 16GB RAM 1TB SSD 3GB graphic memory for which you pay today $4099. Bubble indeed.
Timestamps, better late than never:
http://pastebin.com/zVgbXHJF
Apple stuff is fine if all your stuff is Apple stuff. If not, things can get very painful. They don’t put much effort into interoperability, because it’s a hard problem and they can just tell their minions that if there’s any pain in the equation, it must be because all the non-Apple stuff sucks.
I do like apple products, nad back in 2011 i did have a several Macs and an iPhone, but things have gotten way out of hand at. Charging the Apple pen into a iPad is just awful (why not a female charger instead of male?). The removal of the iPhone headphone jack. And now, Pros that cant charge the phone without an adapter. Jeremy, you are stuck 5 years back, when Apple actually was good.
Apple COULD have used usb type-c on the iPhone in the first place. Then you would have one charger for phone and computer. But they did not do that.
Are there external GPUs that work with macOS yet, or do they only work with Windows?