The Mac Pro needs 10 Gigabit Ethernet

▼ AnandTech has a great review of the new Mac Pro. The past decade every new model looked virtually identical to the previous one, even when Apple migrated from PowerPC to x86 CPUs. Apple seems to be overcompensating for that stagnation now. The old Mac Pro was the only machine that was still expandable internally: it had tons of room for many drives and PCIe cards. With the new one, you'll have to use the external Thunderbolt and USB ports instead. I think that's not unreasonable for the most part, but the way I see it, the new Mac Pro really needs an internal 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) interface.

Yes, without PCIe slots you can't put any HDMI capture cards and the like in a new Mac Pro. That's annoying right now, but this problem will go away fairly quickly as these applications move to Thunderbolt and/or USB 3. This is a much bigger market anyway, because all of Apple's computers now have Thunderbolt and USB 3.

I can see why Apple wanted to get rid of the drive bays. Those take up a lot of room. Perhaps moving to 2.5" drives rather than the traditional 3.5" ones would have helped, but 3.5" drives are still cheaper for the same capacity, and I assume also faster. Only having two 3.5" drive bays or only 2.5" drive bays would have meant that many Mac Pro users would have had to use some external enclosure for big, fast storage anyway, and this way Apple gets to build a super small system, which seems to be their goal in life.

The AnandTech review shows that using USB 3 for external storage isn't great, as the bandwidth to the USB busses is limited. And of course Thunderbolt is 10 or 20 Gbps while USB 3 is only 5 Gbps. A Thunderbolt-connected RAID array is great if you only have a single Mac Pro, but what if you're a business that has a number of them? Having separate RAID arrays for each Mac Pro is not a great solution: it would be much better to use network-attached storage. But that's not really an option over the Mac Pro's built-in Gigabit Ethernet ports. These only provide 10% of the bandwidth that Thunderbolt provides.

With the older Mac Pros, you'd simply put in a 10GE card. With the new Mac Pro, you have to use one of those cards with a TB-PCIe converter or a TB-10GE adapter. Both solutions require and additional (beefy) power supply.

10GE cards aren't cheap. Perhaps Apple didn't want to increase the cost of the Mac Pro. But as it is right now, it's a typical v1.0 product: amazing in many ways, but lacking one or two crucial features. I hope that in the next iteration, Apple puts in 10 Gigabit Ethernet. A good way to do this would be with an SFP+ interface. Currently, there are many different fiber SFP+ modules, and hopefully there will be UTP SFP+ modules in the future.

Permalink - posted 2014-01-03

About that third-party lightning cable for my iPhone

▼ Last month I posted a picture of the lightning cable I got for € 6.29 at my local super market—a third of what Apple charges.

At first, it seemed to work well except for this warning that pops up when I connect it to my iPhone 5:

Then Apple released an iOS update and after that, I thought the cable didn't work anymore: when I connected the iPhone to the computer using the cable, nothing would happen. Fortunately, it wasn't quite that bad: retrying a few times, especially when switching USB ports, will eventually make the charging and syncing work. Although sometimes the charging just stops after some time.

So it looked like I had a just-barely-functional cable on my hands. But then I used it with a non-Apple USB charger every day for a week, without any issues at all. So it looks like using a third-party lightning cable with a third-party USB charger works a lot better than using the cable with a computer. Just so you know.

Permalink - posted 2013-12-16

Late 2013 MacBook Pro review: audio

▼ No more bottlenecks: the late 2013 MacBook Pro reviewed

Over the next few days, I'll publish my review of the new 13" MacBook Pro here in several installments. This is the fourth one, looking at the MacBook Pro's audio capabilities. Also see the earlier instalments about battery life, CPU performance and ports and networking

Don't worry, I'll be discussing the high-resolution screen soon enough. But first let's listen to the audio. The late 2013 13" MacBook Pro has three slits along both sides, starting at the front and reaching about two thirds towards the back. The slits are somewhat hidden where the side and bottom meet. I assume they're mostly there to suck in air, that is then directed out the back under the hinge. But they also let most of the sound out from the two speakers that sit right along those slits. The built-in speakers provide clear, bright audio with a modest, but workable amount of bass—more than what the MacBook Air can muster. The maximum volume is also a few ticks higher. It's certainly good enough for some casual listening at your desk.

When the optical drive was excised from the MacBook Pro line, it took the audio line in port with it. Arguably, this was a fairly useless port anyway, as you couldn't use it to connect a microphone. The headphone port on the other hand, does support microphones though the a fourth signal line, just like the iPhone. But it has another trick up its sleeve: optical audio out. With a special plug that connects to a TOSlink cable you can transmit digital sound to an amplifier with a digital input. This is how we played back DVDs with surround sound back in the day—the DVD Player application can send the digitally encoded 5.1 surround signal over the optical cable, and the receiver decodes it.

However, these days the sound is typically transmitted alongside video through an HDMI cable. The new MacBook Pro has an HDMI port and can also connect to HDMI with the right cable over its Thunderbolt/miniDisplayPort ports. You can change audio settings, including audio output over HDMI, in the Audio MIDI Setup program.

Like an optical TOSlink connection, HDMI can carry compressed/encoded digital surround sound. But unlike an optical TOSlink connection, HDMI can also carry 5.1 or even 7.1 channel uncompressed, decoded audio. If you have a receiver/amplifier or TV that can accept this many channels. You'll encounter video with 5.1 (rarely 7.1) surround sound in two main flavors: Dolby Digital AC3 and MPEG4 AAC. There's also DTS and a few higher end Dolby/DTS variants. It's also possible for video files to have multiple audio tracks. For instance, many TV shows from the iTunes store have an AC3 surround track and a AAC stereo track.

For playing back videos with AC3 and DTS surround audio tracks, your best bet is to use VLC and tell it to use HDMI (encoded output) as the audio device. This way, the audio data is sent to the surround receiver as-is, and all the channels will go to the right speakers. When I let VLC decode the audio itself and just use "HDMI" as the audio device, the audio gets sent to the wrong speakers.

Alternatively, use an Apple TV to play them. This also works for videos from the iTunes Store, which VLC can't play because they're protected. You can of course play those in iTunes, but then you once again get audio sent to the wrong speakers or you only get stereo audio.

Interestingly, iTunes can decode videos with 5.1 surround sound in AAC format, and both iTunes and VLC send the channels to the right speakers. But for AAC you can't use encoded audio output, even though I'm pretty sure modern surround receivers have no problem decoding it. The Apple TV, on the other hand, will decode AAC surround sound, but then send the result to a receiver or TV as stereo, defeating the purpose of having 5.1 audio.

• Battery life
• CPU performance
• Ports and networking
• Audio
• General impression and the screen(s)

Permalink - posted 2013-11-08