Thinking about the new MacBook Pro

▼ Unless something extremely unexpected happens, on the 27th, Apple will be announcing new MacBook Pros. These are long overdue, the last update was a year and a half ago. The rumors and leaks point towards the following:

• Slightly smaller and lighter
• All the existing ports are gone except for the 3.5 mm audio jack
• The machine gains four USB-C ports, which are used for:
  • Charging
  • USB
  • Thunderbolt 3
  • External screens using USB-C to DisplayPort or HDMI cables or adapters
  • External screens using a VGA adapter
• The esc, power and function keys are replaced with a touch screen at the top of the keyboard
• There's a TouchID fingerprint reader

There's a lot of gnashing of teeth about much of this. But not all of it is is necessarily well-founded. Let's have a look at the possible issues that such a machine may have.

Power / MagSafe

I think it was with the Intel-based MacBook (Pros) that Apple introduced the MagSafe connector for power. The MagSafe connector attaches to the laptop magnetically, so if you trip over the power cord, it simply detaches and nothing bad happens. I once tripped over my PowerBook's power cable and sent it flying through the room. MagSafe is definitely very useful.

On the other hand, there are some advantages to charging over USB-C, too. USB-C can deliver as much as 100 Watts over a very small connector. But a USB-C charger is still compatible with older USB power delivery specifications, so you should be able to charge other devices that take power over USB with it, too. Including bluetooth headphones, mice and iPhones. And with USB-C it's possible to handle data, video and power over a single cable. So in the future I could hook up my computer to an external screen with just one cable rather than two or three.

And USB-C is an open standard, so it'll get much easier/cheaper to find power supplies.

It would have been nice to keep MagSafe, but with laptops getting smaller it's getting harder to make MagSafe work well. Also, with 10 hours of battery life, you can simply connect to power when the computer is on a desk or another place where it's unlikely the power cable will be snagged and then use it on battery power elsewhere.

I do wonder about the power key/button, though. You do need a hardware key to power on the machine, and power it off when it hangs. But there doesn't seem to be one in the leaked photos...?

The SD card slot

I'm really going to miss this one. Now I have to carry an extra cable to connect to my cameras. Of course they both have different ones and they plug into a USB type A port, so I also need an adapter. Using the cable drains the camera's battery and is slower than reading photos off of the SD card directly. Or get a card reader. Again, with a USB-A to USB-C adapter or wait / pay extra of a fast USB-C one.

Also, you can use the SD card slot to add some semi-internal storage to your computer.

Losing all of this really sucks.

External screens

Currently, adapters to DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA go for about $/€ 45. That's pretty expensive. Hopefully the price will come down in the not too distant future.

Removing the HDMI port together with the miniDisplayPort / Thunderbolt ports is really annoying, because now you have to carry some kind of adapter to connect to an external screen or projector just as HDMI was becoming the lingua franca of external video.

Again, this sucks, certainly for business / conference stuff. But once the adapters/cables come down in price, connecting an external screen on a disk using a USB-C port shouldn't be a big deal.

USB

We've all had 20 years to collect numerous USB devices that use the USB type A connector. So moving to USB type C requires adapters. It would have been much easier if Apple just wouldn't be so Apple-y and just give us some old ports along with the new ones.

But it's not a huge deal. With one adapter you can hook up an individual USB device or a USB hub and attach old USB stuff. And within a year or two nearly everything will be USB-C.

Thunderbolt and networking

I assume the new MacBook Pros will be using the latest USB 3.1 gen 2 so they can reach 10 Gbps over USB. Thunderbolt still beats that handily at no less than 40 Gbps for Thunderbolt 3. Conveniently, Thunderbolt 3 also uses the USB-C port. If you have a fully wired USB-C cable (which doesn't include the one that comes with the current USB-C MacBook, this one tops out at the 480 Mbps USB 2 rate), you should be able to run Thunderbolt over it as well as USB.

However, Thunderbolt 1 and 2 use the miniDisplayPort plug/connector. So in order to keep using your existing Thunderbolt stuff, you'll need an adapter or cable. Hopefully Apple will sell these, but I expect them to be expensive.

I think I'll get one, because this is the only way to connect my old MBP to a new one at speeds that can keep up with the SSD in my current machine.

It would be nice to be able to keep using my Thunderbolt Gigabit Ethernet adapter, but what I really want is 5 / 2.5 Gbps Ethernet. Hopefully that will be coming soon at a reasonable price. So I'm probably not going to get a new USB-C to GE adapter. Then again, if I want to be able to use 2.5 or 5 Gbps Ethernet, I need at least two of these adapters... Networking over Thunderbolt is probably faster and easier, although in the past the speeds were inconsistent.

I haven't heard about Wi-Fi improvements beyond the 1.3 Gbps that my late 2013 MacBook Pro supports. And even if the Wi-Fi gets faster, it's unlikely to surpass wired Gigabit Ethernet.

The function keys

The new touchscreen strip is really interesting. Although Steve Jobs made a big thing about the software keyboard on the iPhone, Apple has always refused to add touch capability to their laptop screens. This seems to be a way to square the circle: give you (some) touch screen ability on your laptop without the "gorilla arm" phenomenon that occurs when you have to lift your arms to touch the screen.

Of course it all depends on how the new abilities are used, but it seems obvious that Apple and third party developers could do something useful with this strip, by displaying context aware options.

The trouble, of course, is that now the function keys are gone. I don't think very many people use the actual function keys (F1 - F10) regularly, and certainly not without looking at the keys. I can kinda-sorta touch type numbers through the number row, but I can't use most of the function keys without looking. However, I can use the volume keys on the right side without looking.

I'm thinking that if you press the fn key in the lower left corner of the keyboard, the strip will show F1 - F10 / F12. And you can probably still set up the system so it uses the function keys if you don't press the fn key. If they align those keys with the number keys on the keyboard, you can use those to position your finger and then tap the touch screen strip. So it should still be possible to use the function keys without looking.

(Some people have suggested having a keyboard with e-ink mini-displays on all keys. Nice idea, but it's not going to work. Real typists don't look at the keys and thus the keys can't change and thus they don't need a display.)

I wonder where the power button went. But obviously it must still be there in some form.

The biggest issue I have with the new touch screen strip is that we lose the escape key. Hopefully, you can still hit the location of the escape key to trigger the escape function, so this shouldn't be too terrible, but I'm sure I'm going to miss the actual key. (Yes, I'll admit it, I'm a vi user.)

Verdict: color me intrigued. The touch screen strip could be great or it could be a dud. I'll survive the removal of the function keys and probably even the escape key.

Conclusion

I haven't talked about the TouchID fingerprint reader because it doesn't take away any current functionality. It's probably going to be very useful, but if you don't want to use it, don't and you lose nothing.

As so often with Apple, the future arrives before we're really ready for it. I'm sure that in 2019, this is going to be a great laptop. But it just doesn't fit into the 2016 or 2017 computing ecosystem all that well.

I'm probably going to get one, but I'm also going to hang on to my old computer so I don't have to buy a crapload of adapters and cables in order to use my existing peripherals.

Permalink - posted 2016-10-26

Hue white ambiance dims all the way to 1%!

▼ I got my Philips Hue starter kit two or three years ago. For those of you who have been living under a rock: Hue is a lighting system. The original Hue lights are power-efficient LED lights that can display a large range of colors: deep red, blue and purple as well as not-so-deep green and all the colors in between, which includes both cool and warm white light. There's a phone app to control the color and brightness of the lights. Unfortunately, the minimum brightness of the colored Hue lights is 5%, which is still relatively bright. This is especially annoying when you tell the lights to come on or go off slowly. The jump from off to minimum or minimum to off is somewhat jarring.

The colored Hue lights are relatively expensive, 60 euros a piece, if I remember correctly. (You also need a bridge that connects to your network and talks to the lights.) The colors are a nice gimmick, but I rarely use that feature, opting for warm white most of the time. More recently, Philips introduced the Hue lux / Hue white lights, which are fairly neutral white and don't change color. But you can still control their brightness from your phone or a computer. The Hue white lights are much more affordable at about 20 euros a piece.

And now there's the Hue white ambiance bulbs, costing about 35 euros. These split the difference between the "Hue white and color ambiance" bulbs (i.e., the colored ones) and the white ones: the ambiance bulbs can change from warm white (2000k) to cool white (6500K). But an interesting additional feature is that their minimum brightness is only 1%. Let me show you, full brightness on the left and minimum brightness on the right:

Hue white and color ambiance:

Hue white:

Hue white ambiance:

As you can see, the white lights are the brightest, but they actually go down a bit lower than the colored ones. The white ambiance ones are the dimmest both at full and minimum brightness. (The red color of the minimum brightness photo doesn't reflect how it really looks, though.)

Looking at the specs, there are some interesting differences between the three lights:

	Hue white and color ambiance	Hue white	Hue white ambiance
Power	10W	9.5W	10W
Nominal lifetime	25000 hours	25000 hours	25000 hours
Lumens ~2100K	342	-	400
Lumens 2700K	570	800	570
Lumens 4000K	800	-	800
Lumens 6500K	550	-	480
Lumens/W	80 (4000K)	84 (2700K)	80 (4000K)

Philips doesn't specify how many lumens per Watt the two types of ambiance bulbs produce at color temperatures different from 4000K, but it's safe to assume it's less than 80. And it's unlikely that you'll want to set them to 4000K, which is fairly cool white. So bang for your buck wise, the Hue white lights can't be beat: they're cheaper and they produce more light.

But the white ambiance ones are perfect for in a bedroom where you may want to have the light come on slowly in the morning or go out slowly at night, or set them to a low setting as a night light. And don't forget to get a wireless dimmer switch for 25 euros to save yourself from fiddling with your phone when you want to turn the lights on or off.

Permalink - posted 2016-07-14

How many USB-C ports will the first USB-C equipped MacBook Pro have?

▼ Earlier this year I already talked about the switch to USB-C. But I have more to say about the subject, especially regarding the MacBook Pro. This was also posted on the Ars Technica forums.

Apple currently sells almost 20 million Macs each year, four times as many as a decade ago. So they must be doing something right. So I'm going to assume they'll want to build a new MacBook Pro that is a lot like the current ones, except that they want to start the transition to USB-C as that's the connector for Thunderbolt 3 and it nicely consolidates a whole lot of different stuff AND IT'S SMALLER!!!.

I'm going to assume the HDMI and SD card slots aren't going anywhere. They were added fairly recently and their usefulness has not declined since. (I haven't needed my mDP-to-VGA adapter yet this year as HDMI has finally pervaded meeting rooms, hallelujah!) I hear there are still a few people that use the 3.5 mm audio port, too. (Did you know that it also provides optical TOSlink digital audio out?)

So that leaves one MagSafe, two Thunderbolt/miniDisplayPort and two USB type A ports that may be replaced by USB-C ports.

MagSafe

As the owner of a now defunct PowerBook that I still have to figure out how to recycle properly, I can tell you that MagSafe is a very useful feature. I tripped over the PowerBook power cord, it went flying through the room, landed on a corner and I had to bend the corner back so DVDs would go into the drive again.

So going from MS to USB-C for power has a big, big downside. On the other hand, one power port to rule power them all (iPhones, iPads, MacBooks) is extremely attractive, as would be the ability to plug in power on either side of the laptop.

An interesting option would be to keep the MagSafe charger, but provide a MS-to-USB-C adapter. This allows the user to plug power into any USB-C port but still enjoy the safety of mag. (On the MacBook [nothing] this adapter could also have a 3.5 mm audio jack so that wouldn't have to be in the computer and then you could have two USB-C ports.)

However, the problem with this approach is that you use up a valuable USB-C port for the mundane task of delivering power.

Verdict: keep MagSafe for now, but if possible, also allow charging through the USB-C ports so a new 5k display could be connected using a single cable. Also, users who feel strongly about charging the computer using a port on the other side get what they want and Apple gets to see how well USB-C charging works without having to take the blame if it leads to cable tripping issues.

Thunderbolt

As soon as Intel has Thunderbolt 3 chipsets, this is a no-brainer, as USB-C is the official connector for TB3. The question is: how hard is it to have more than two TB ports? The Mac Pro has six powered by three TB buses. So perhaps the MBP could have four TB ports powered by two buses. Or maybe that would require too much extra logic. Also, routing these insanely high bandwidth signals to the other side of the device could be problematic.

This could mean that the MBP remains limited to two TB ports. So then the old TB ports are gone. Not too big of a problem, as most Thunderbolt and DisplayPort devices use a separate cable which could be replaced without too much trouble. Notable exceptions are Apple's TB Gigabit Ethernet adapter, but that one can be replaced with a USB 3 one, and the Thunderbolt Display. I guess if Apple cares about backward compatibility (and they obviously don't as the TBD doesn't have any other inputs than TB so you can't connect anything to it other than a TB-equipped Mac) they can sell an adapter.

USB

Oh right, there's also this quaint little protocol called USB that runs over the USB-C connector. If routing TB to more than two USB-C ports is not a problem, then a new MacBook Pro could be fitted with four USB-C ports, so you can still hook up a combination of two displays or TB devices as well as two USB devices.

But if there can only be two TB-equipped ports, then having four (or more?) USB-C ports would mean that there's two types of USB-C ports: the ones that can also power TB devices and displays, and the ones that can only do USB. That's not The Apple Way™: all ports must be fully functional. So this seems unlikely.

Verdict: we keep the existing USB type A USB 3 ports. Not only does that sidestep the same port / different capabilities issue, it also makes the transition easier because all your existing USB crap can be plugged into these ports and Apple doesn't have to start selling USB-C-to-lightning cables.

So we end up with a machine that has all the same ports as today, except that the Thunderbolt 2 / miniDisplayPort ports are replaced with USB-C ports, which will take power, run TB 3, DisplayPort and USB. Extra credit: migrate these ports to the other side of the computer by swapping them with the SD card slot so that it becomes possible to power the computer from either side. Or if routing the signals isn't an issue, have one USB-C port on each side of the computer.

Also note that now all the ports are (somewhat) smaller than USB-A so it should be possible to give the MBP a wedge shape without too much difficulty.

Permalink - posted 2015-12-06