Gadgetory

alright we are here with our editor extraordinaire dan ackerman who covers basically all things mac all things laptop across the industry and also the author of the tetris effect mr. dan ackerman thanks for coming in great to be here and that that plug for your book was was delivered and we'll talk about that a little later but what everyone wants to talk about really is the new MacBook Pros with the touch bars and I guess also without you've had a chance to spend extensive time on it and we really want to just get your in-depth you know feel review what what is what is the overall take on these guys first of all I mean these are brand new macbook pros you know I admit they may look very similar to the ones that were placing but when we first got our exclusive early hands-on access to them several days before they were actually announced the thing that struck me the most when we when they first pull the little cloth off them at apples Cupertino headquarters was that they're much more different than I expected literally everything about them is different the actual size of them the keyboard is different the screen is a little bit different the touchpad is very different the connections are different and obviously the fact that yet this touch bar is different and the components are different is it different for good or you've been with it now again your first impression are these differences better or is it take a step back or maybe in different areas they work to its advantage and disadvantage in general it's a pretty sizable step forward if in part because the macbook pro line hasn't really had a serious redesign in about four years so bringing them up to modern standards duh duh does feel like a big jump now there are a couple of areas uh where is it's awesome the touch bar is really cool the giant trackpad that you know the time the pads on them are twice as big as they were on the previous models that's awesome screens brighter obviously thinner lighter those are all pluses there are a couple of changes that you may have more mixed feelings about the primary one of course being they got rid of every port except for these USB type-c port switch are now for power for everything uh you know so no more mac safe even you have to just use USB see for that did keep the headphone jack that survived this round of cuts see what happens next I've apple doesn't hate headphone jacks and everything just in in the phones uh and the other thing that's a little more subtle is they've changed the keyboard it's much closer to the very flat keyboard on the 12 inch macbook they call that a butterfly found mechanism because if that's how the keys go down is like a butterfly under people that people that are listening and can't see you I'm just gonna pretend that his hands moved into butterfly make like a butterfly like a fly in the sky so it's not quite as it's not quite as flat as the one on the 12 inch macbook but it takes some getting used to and frankly if you're like an all-day everyday type is you may never love it so Dan I want to kind of break down some of those individual things you talked about because they're there is really a lot to talk about the touch bar when I first saw it I was like I think I'll use it for some things not for everything and I really don't know how people are going to use it you are no matter what going to be forced to use it because it has some of those you know mein general functions like volume and and brightness on it just from a day-to-day thing but what was really your overall take on the touch bar yeah I'll show to you real fast right here I've got the 15 inch right here and here's the touch bar and you can see it right above the keyboard so it's sort of like in in this case it's monochromatic so it doesn't really jump out at you it replaces the function keys and frankly the function keys were replaced many many years ago and made you know brightness and contrast and muting and and reloading and things like that rather than what they originally for which was basically some terminal commands that nobody uses them for so why would we keep these old keys label f1 f2 and you know that doesn't even mean anything uh so I get that by default it does a lot of the same thing so you can tap on the volume button and the brightness button um and things like that you don't get that tactile feedback you get from clicking the button so it's more of a look than to do it by feel at least until maybe you memorize exactly where on on the keyboard it is but the thing that it does really nicely is it adapts to what you're doing so if you launch Safari you get a different set of buttons on there if you launch itunes or photos or messages or any other apple app you get a different set of buttons right now it's it's apple apps later Photoshop will come in other apps for now it's all apple stuff so if we don't use those it's not going to be as useful but I do like how it adapts like if I'm in safari and I have a bunch of tabs open it shows me little tiny thumbnails of all the tabs and I can just tap on them to switch between them instead of mousing up and clicking on the tabs in the browser on my screen did you find it made overall did it make the experience more efficient less efficient or sometimes better sometimes not helpful what did you find out I think you've nailed it exactly right there it's about efficiency it's not gonna like knock your socks off and change your life it shaves a couple of keystrokes off here and there and frankly that actually counts for a lot sometimes like if you want to open if you want to go to the address bar in Safari what do you command l and then then you type it in here in the touch bar you just tap the touch bar and then you're right in the address bar so you went from two taps to one that may not sound like a lot but I started doing that immediately and I never look back tinctly you pick up a couple of these little shortcuts and you go oh that's awesome and then you just you're just doing it like that and then that's kind of what we've seen in the past from Apple right it's it's really that's why I was curious about your experience it's it's coming down to changing your behavior and is the experience good enough to change your behavior and from what you're telling me it is I think any time you give somebody you know a set of keyboard commands or a set of mouse clicks and you can find a way to shave a couple off that you're going to naturally your brain will gravitate towards the easier way to do it and this fun fun fun stuff too like in messages which everybody uses because it ties into the messages on your phone there's just a big control strip of emojis so I know you like that San Ackerman oh you like the load is Dan junior likes that because he sends me dozens or hundreds of freaking emojis every day on his mother's phone is INF and daddy emojis I can never get anything done they just keep popping up on my screen just like no words just emojis guns i think that sounds like all of our lives quite honestly whether you have children or not it's our favorite form of nonverbal communication now better than ever also the trackpad is you seem to point that out specifically because of its larger size how did that make using the macbook better for you or if we're there any drawbacks as well I'd like to hear both sides of the coin yeah according to Apple at least what they want you to do is rather than having a touchscreen on the on the screen itself where your hand could cover it up and get in the way that's how they feel windows touchscreen laptops work your hand is always in the way they have the touch bar on top and they have the big touchpad below it and they envision you sort of combining those two to form a sort of you know secondary screen experienced it's not a touchscreen but is kind of close because that's what this really is it's a whole it's a second display built into your laptop it's just a really skinny one I will say it's an OLED display which is that kind of screen we find in the you know highest NTV so it looks pretty awesome does the actual OLED touch bar quality-wise actually look better than the actual screen like does it shine bright like what do you think it's bright it's it's when it has colors on it the colors really pop it doesn't do enough graphically for you to really say oh I'd watch a movie on this if it was a little bit bigger but the screen itself the screen itself is perfectly fine it's it's the same resolution as a previous macbook pro which is the retina higher res not quite 4k but better than full HD however it's apple sense of 25% brighter and it is definitely brighter and they say it has a wider color range on that's again playing catch-up because so many windows a high-end Windows computers are now adding higher resolution screens up to 4k and a lot of them were doing you know p 3 color and srgb and just these wider color gamuts so in some sense it's catch up but in another sense it's the macbook is such is so predominant especially including the creative industries it's almost like the entry isn't really there until Apple does it um you hit upon two things that I wanted to follow up with that you touch you touched upon the touchscreen that what is your take we know what apple says and what Apple wants to do you've pinnix you been around surface devices from the beginning do you wish Apple actually incorporates on this and I know it requires them to actually have a different OS to support this but does it still feel like they're a little behind or it's okay it's a weird philosophical question and you're exactly right when when you say is this Mac OS need a touchscreen as it is or do they need a new operating system that is a touchscreen one I feel on a Windows computer it kind of do need a touch screen at least to get like a really good smooth experience but is that because we've trained ourselves to be touched people with phones and tablets and other devices so we just naturally want to touch everything or is it because um Windows is just so naturally clunky especially in Windows 8 which we just replaced that you just needed that touchscreen to just swipe stuff in easily without going through you know all the different windows menus uh that's an interesting philosophical question I'm not sure we have an answer to it apple says they don't see combining you know the touchscreen stuff the phones of the tablets with the computer stuff anytime in the near to medium future which i think they call out is you have 10 15 20 years for them at least for now those are resolute Lee separate this is however one way of adding touchscreen to a laptop without making it a touchscreen laptop but what do you think personally like what do you what do you cuz look you have kids right I have nieces and nephews they touch everything it's like ingrained in just how we're interacting with anything with a screen so I'm just curious what do you think personally like do you do you want to see something like that or is it important or is it not important I mean that's exactly right and it is about your I say it's all about the children which I'm just completely true every little kid I know they see a macbook they run up and they start touching the screen right away I occasionally find myself just going oh yeah we scroll down this object doesn't work uh you know dinosaurs like myself we can still handle a non-touch computer but once once my generation has has passed from the earth the young people will demand touching everything and and they won't be wrong you'll be too busy talking in emojis only a no actual language so we won't be able to understand them but they will demand touch in some picture picture pictogram form yeah again we'll see how it plays out and it is really a philosophical thing and I think even our viewers and listeners and tech fans some lean on one side versus the other as well you hear a lot of people lean towards oh just give me a Mac touchscreen I mean I feel that way because I only can imagine oh if you give me this windows experience but with the Mac flavor that oh man that would just be like amazing but we'll see how that happens you also touch upon creatives and this is one of those debates that initially came out the macbook pro isn't really more for a consumer we know creatives will still stick with the mac platform for now but a lot of creatives were bemoaning the lack of the ports now we gotta go dongle we gotta go full dongle now where it may not necessarily be the most powerful you know raw power machine this the solid state drives are extremely fast but as a creative are they kind of is could this be a point where they're actually at least considering transitioning to a different platform not yet doing it but seriously considering it based on what they've seen oh well you're right Brian you you never go full dongle everybody knows never go full never never uh you always hear complaints about every new you know Mac line or Mac product especially from the creative people who make up such a huge chunk of that audience and you know what they're the ones paying these very high prices for these devices so you know you should definitely listen to what they have to say that said I had an artist in here the other day demoing some other hardware and he said you know this windows thing I'm trying out this is really cool but I've been so invested in in in the mat in the Mac ecosystem for you know ten plus years I'm not just gonna switch just because something else has a cool feature that this doesn't have it's more of a it's more of a holistic approach uh so I don't think they're gonna lose those guys uh you know in the near future the USBC and down low thing is annoying I really find myself plugging anything into a laptop anymore they did lower the price on those dongles it's not an excuse but it's something it's a six bucks dan save six bucks that's right that's right and they want you to plug into like these special USBC connected monitors from LG that are very expensive uh it's i'll give him credit for one thing it's not proprietary you know USB seasoning you seen a lot of new high-end Windows laptops as well at least they didn't go some weird proprietary plug that only they can make okay another practical question we know that the iphone can sync wirelessly to your computer but is it just curious that you can't basically unless you have a dongle connect your phone to your actual laptop I know people still do that not everyone but there's still a good amount of people that just do that add that that wasn't that that's true and i think i have a a lightning to USB see dongle sitting around somewhere because maybe those will become more commonplace I I personally don't do the phone to computer connection it just doesn't you know and anything for me and iTunes just gets all weird as it does you know for everyone yep people are going to complain about this for a long time and people are going to complain about not having a headphone jack in the iphone 7 you know for a long time maybe they'll retrench maybe they'll add a a regular USB back but that USB type a that everybody uses it's it's a great it was a great invention 20 years ago I think it's literally just about at its 20th anniversary I asked last year for cnet magazine I wrote a story about us bc and its evolution and I asked Ajay Bhatt from Intel who is one of the inventors of the USB spec 20 years ago I said when you take that plug and you plug it in what is your lifetime percentage mr. inventor of USB unplugging that plug in the right way and not having to go oh I got to turn it over and and go like this and he said to me all earnestly says she said well I guess about fifty percent and I said that cannot be true I have a 0% lifetime batting average of this therefore no one even gets close to fifty percent there's something about it every time it just goes it just goes the wrong way god bless us bc there was no wrong way there is there is no wrong way with USB see it so overall how do you / how do you view this laptop you know we note that the reviews are out now what's your kind of closing statement about it who's it for and who it will appeal to I mean they're awesome laptops they're definitely a big step forward in terms of design in terms of power the touch bar is very cool it's a one it's not I have I think a lot of people are going to go for this guy have right here in my hand the 13 a 13-inch model without the touch bar so it still got the traditional function kero and that is the entry level model in a sense that is 1499 which is still kind of expensive it's basically the previous entry level 13 inch pro with double the hard drive storage so that that's why it's 1499 if you want that touch bar then that jumps up to seventeen ninety nine which is bonkers for through concertinas lots of nice but I you know Wow and then this 15 inch guy this is awesome don't get me wrong it's got every 15 inch now has discrete AMD graphics in it it's got that huge screen again it they all have the touch bar they all have quad-core 16 Intel Core I processors so you know awesome stuff all around that 15 inch starts at 2399 V and look I know you're saying this right you know what what is competitive from a price point in the mark in the landscape of the market you personally are you able to comment on what would you actually whether you're in the market to upgrade or not would you personally buy this macbook right now or is the price a little like you know the thing that really makes people invest more of these macbooks and i totally understand this is if i buy this you know aluminum unibody 1500 our macbook i could actually get away with using it for 45 years and it'll still pretty much work it's tough to say that about even other brand premium laptops that you're going to be able to use it as your work machine for five or more years so I so I understand that especially because if you need it serviced the apple store you know what they do a pretty good job especially if you have applecare they're very they're not gonna leave you're totally in the lurch I i I've had very good experiences they are just walking and cold when you have a premium laptop from another company you may pay 700 hours less for go back in three years and try to get them to service it and like we don't even make these anymore what is that you know I think that's a great point that people don't think about just the longevity of the machine sometimes because also some people are in that brain that mind space of like I'll just buy it for a year or two and then I'll sell it on eBay when the next one comes out right we're around that that quote unquote tech person is kind of like that but not everyone is like that right this is a machine that they want three four or five years so that's a great point also one thing that stuck out when I saw the new macbook pros I honestly you know when we watched the keynote we couldn't really tell but there they're really thin you know compared to they just look so much thinner do you so do you feel that Apple really kind of made more of our priority to make this a thinner machine as like as one of those top three flagship tentpole you know these are the three things that we want to bring the new macbook pro I feel like just making it thinner was one of those things because they're so they're so in love with the idea of making everything as thin as possible of of course they are in design is such a huge choice because a laptop in particular such a personal choice you take it with you places you're seen in public with it you work on it it's probably the device you may use most you know often during the day in terms of actual man-hours on it now that said I'm going to disagree with you a tiny bit Brian please this dinner these are thinner but they are not the thinnest the 13-inch is still I think 14.9 millimeters that's very thin don't get me wrong but there are a ton of new windows oh yeah in 14 inch laptops that get down to you know 12 millimeters 11 do they get down under 10 millimeters uh ace who's got the swift seven that's a 13 inch really nice premium 13-inch laptop you know a roughly comparable to the to the macbook uh and it's nine point nine eight millimeters thick that's insane damn so these things are you know the thin but you're not going like oh this is the thinnest laptop ever and they're still you know 34 pounds so they still feel kinda they feel kind of dense but at the same time that means you feel like you know though they'll take a beating and that's the one thing macbooks have always done well as you can throw them in your bag and knock them around you make it a little scratch or dent uh but i I've never beaten one up in 10 plus years enough that it stops working yeah overall All Things Considered where would you rank the new macbook pro let's say 15 inch amongst other laptop like do you still feel there's a certain one or two that are better than it or they're pretty even like where do you where do you put in the pecking order because you look at everything yeah I mean it's still it's still the top of the game but is a very expensive top of the game if you don't want to spend that much there's other things you can look at dale's XPS line is very good their XPS 15 is pretty much a macbook pro clone uh there are a lot of other you know cool 13 inch super thin laptops out there but they're there they're filler but they're not quite as powerful I think what does really well that everyone else has a hard time getting there wrapping their hands around is that integration of the hardware and the operating system and the software and the user input that magical trackpad that no one else can get that feel on that flick your fingers around it kind of feel the touch bar it's a nice bonus I I wouldn't I wouldn't go to too far out of my way for it but as long as you're getting one of these it comes with it that's cool and you'll find it fun you'll find a couple of you know efficiencies and cool things to do with it but I think people by macbooks primarily for the ease of use and that trackpad and nobody else does that that's a great point and then before we wrap up Dan if you could just talk a little bit about the tetris effect we want to show you some love with just you know some of the other things that you're doing as well but thank you Brian I wish I had a copy here I could hold that is my photoshop it in bro it is the it is the true life non fiction story of the secret Cold War history of the most important video game ever created Tetris created in the Soviet Union in the 80s and stolen by western companies Cold War spy high jinks for real ensue well there you go I mean you can't tease any better than that I guess ur and and featured in the upcoming issue have seen at magazine excerpt in the winter issue of scenic sprint magazine keep the plugs come into Ching to Ching alright Dan hey we just appreciate your time and your insight and thank you so much and we will talk to you soon my friend my pleasure is always alright thanks