Friday, October 28

Geek

Apple Takes Away, And Apple Takes Away

But mostly, they take away.

Samsung has been in the news recently for inadvertently setting fire to their customers, but Apple has its share of screwups as well.

With their new iPhone 7, Apple did away with the perfectly functional 1/8" headphone jack, and instead announced a proprietary Lightning adaptor and brand new bluetooth ear buds called AirPods.

Which are (a) ludicrously expensive and (b) quote not ready for customers unquote.

And their long awaited new Mac announcement consisted of two new Macbook Pro models, where the signature feature is that there are no function keys.  There's a touch strip instead.  And...  Nope, that's about it.

No, wait, they have DCI-P3 wide gamut displays.  That's a great feature; my iMac has the same and it looks amazing.  You don't realise what you're missing (unless you're looking at a screen with a severely restricted gamut, like the 2012 Nexus 7) until you see one in person, and realise that you're seeing colours that you've never seen on an LCD display before.  And if you work with video it's fast becoming an absolute necessity.

(And also Thunderbolt 3 - a year after everyone else.)

But it's a pretty underwhelming release overall.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, stodgy old Microsoft, has released their first desktop computer, and it's a thing of beauty.


The Surface Studio is the best desktop computer available today and you shouldn't buy one.  If you work in digital design your company should probably buy one for you, but that stunning screen is attached to hardware that is slightly dated and already needs a refresh.

Critically, it lacks Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3.1 support.  In an expensive all-in-one system you need the best connectivity you can possibly get to make sure that it lasts, because the alternative is buying a whole new machine.  Which, starting at $2999, is not an option for most of us.

My iMac lacks Thunderbolt 3, but it came out almost exactly a year ago, when Thunderbolt 3 was brand new.  The Surface Studio is a niche product that has obviously been in the works for some time - and it fills that niche beautifully - but if you're not in that niche yourself you're best off waiting for the Studio 2 or even 3.

Well, I'm hoping there's going to be a Studio 2 and 3.  Because I want one, even if there's no chance I'm going to buy one just yet.

(Back during the .com bubble days I would have pre-ordered mine buy now; expensive as it is, the sticker shock pales in comparison to the Sun Ultra 5 or the SGI O2 that now occupy the top shelf in my closet.  But unfortunately, fiscal sanity has taken its toll since then.)

I think this is one of the counter-intuitive benefits of the end of Moore's Law (or rather the end of Dennard Scaling; Moore's Law will survive for a few years yet).  When processor speeds where doubling every couple of years, you just shoved the parts in a plastic box and shipped it out.  It made no sense to carefully refine the industrial design and mechanical components of something that would only be around for a limited time.

Now that it takes five years for the core components of a desktop computer to start getting dated, it makes sense to make everything around those components beautiful.  The iMac is a very nice piece of engineering, and the Studio is even better.  I'm hoping to see this trend trickle downwards, because I want these things, but I'm not made of money any more.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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