Posts about Mac

About six weeks ago, I put in an order for a customized 12” MacBook to replace my aging 2012 MacBook Pro. I wanted to see if I could get away with using the 12” laptop on a daily basis.

As a graphic and digital designer (and front-end web developer), my needs aren’t insane. But I do spend a bit of time in and out of some power-hungry apps every day.

I use Photoshop to edit images, Illustrator for logo mockups and vector work, and InDesign for print design. I’m also going back and forth between Adobe XD and Sketch for digital design.

I spend most of day hanging out with files around 250mb in Sketch. These files have a couple dozen artboards in them, a ton of pages, and quite a few images. To manipulate the images, I’m usually running Photoshop in the background and exporting updated images as I go.

Most of the time, I’m also running a couple browsers, streaming music, and working in a couple text editors. But none of that requires too much power.

And for most people, I’d guess that this laptop has more than enough power — especially for anybody running Office, working on documents in the cloud, or browsing the web.

In other words, for many people — millions of people — the 12” MacBook is powerful enough.

And for the record, if I was willing, I could make it work too.

But let’s say you want to keep everything running in the background all the time. I do this every day. Photoshop is almost always going in the background, and it almost always uses up a ton of CPU without me realizing it.

These little MacBooks don’t have fans. So at some point, the laptop needs to cool down — because Photoshop is warming it up. And to cool down, it simply throttles the speeds of the laptop. So the mouse gets laggy and Sketch gets a lot harder to use.

Now, I could quit Photoshop, but all of this is a bad omen for use as a daily driver.

Let me repeat that: this isn’t the MacBook for you if you plan on using it as a daily driver. It won’t end well.

However, this MacBook shines as a laptop.

This is where Apple got it right. This is a gorgeous, paper-thin, tiny, featherweight of a laptop. It weights practically nothing in my bag and feels like carrying around an iPad, but it’s so much more capable. And if my primary machine was a desktop, I’d absolutely want to carry around this 12” laptop. Because it’s very capable.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that you could probably do just about anything on it for a few hours at a time.

But after a few hours, it starts to get noticeably slower (in my use case). Maybe I had a bum machine, but I didn’t feel like swapping it out for a new one.

Instead, I just ordered a new laptop. One of those 13” MacBook Pros with a Touch Bar. It’s not that I need all that power, but I do think I need a fan.

If you’re a designer, or a developer, and you’re wondering if you should get the 12” laptops, I do have some advice for you. Get the 12” MacBook only if you plan on using it primarily as a laptop away from your powerful desk machine. This can’t do both, and it can’t be a primary laptop. Not yet. Maybe in a year or two (in fact, I’d be surprised if it took longer than that), but not yet.

If you’re not a creative professional, or a demanding computer user (a video editor, computer scientist, audio engineer, or the like), you should honestly pick up a 12” MacBook. It’s got all the computer you need in a tiny, lovable little body. It’s quiet, thin, and sleek as heck. I fell in love with mine. I was sad to return it.

About two weeks ago, I ordered a specced-out 12” MacBook. I had a good feeling that there’d be new MacBook Pros before the end of the month, and knew I could return the 12” within 14 days if I didn’t like it (or didn’t think it was powerful enough for my work).

This is going to be a little self-indulgent and very long, but buying an Apple laptop is a lot more complicated than it used to be.

To set this up a bit, I should explain a bit of what I do every day. I spend about 50% of the day plugged into a display, and 50% working with the laptop on my lap. Usually, I’m running iTunes, Mail, Codekit, Sketch, Coda, Safari, Chrome, TextWrangler, MAMP, iA Writer, and Transmit. At any given time, I might also be running a good chunk of Adobe’s apps: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or Experience Design. OS X, or macOS as it is now called, is integral to my workflow.

I need to replace my aging 2012 15” MacBook Pro. It was the first generation with Retina display, and at this point, it’s got a few issues of its own:

• My display was one of the ones that suffered with the burn-in problem. I’m using my laptop more and more as a laptop these days, instead of solely plugging it into an external monitor, so that’s becoming a huge annoyance.
• It’s really heavy and bulky at 4.5 pounds. This was great when I used it as a desktop that could become a portable if need be, but now that I use the machine as a portable that occasionally becomes a desktop (and I carry the laptop in my bag a lot), it’s way too heavy.
• The video card is dying on the laptop. It’s getting really quirky, especially when it runs Adobe apps. The screen will go black randomly. Sometimes, when I boot the machine up, the screen is black until I reboot it (again). It’s frustrating. As a result, I’m never buying a computer with an independent graphics card again (unless I can easily replace it).
• The battery is dead. If I’m writing, like I am right now, I can get about five or six hours out of it. If I’m doing any design work or coding, I get about two and a half — at most. I could pay Apple a few hundred bucks to fix this, but why bother? I can’t get them to easily swap out the video card, so it’d be more of a bandaid than a real problem.

Replacing the MacBook Pro meant it was time to look around. Last time I bought a computer, I knew immediately which one was rihgt for me. These days, I’m not so sure.

My first inclination was that 12” MacBook. It’s an amazing little machine. Unlike most people, I love the keyboard on it. (I’m thrilled the keyboard is making its way to the new MacBook Pros.) But even at its top-end spec (which was over $2,000 in Canada!), it only comes with a 1.3ghz CPU.

I don’t really understand what all these numbers mean, although like anybody else, I understand the gist that higher is better. I suspected, with my limited knowledge of these things, that the 12” MacBook would be fine for most tasks. And it is, actually. I’ve read a lot of reviews and reports saying the machine is under-powered, but those are largely overblown.

But when things get bad, they get really bad.

Let me give you the quick five-step method to slow down the frame rate on a 12” MacBook:

1. Run a code compiler in the background that automatically refreshes your development environment every time you make a change to the site’s code. (Codekit.)
2. Have a local server running on your MacBook with something like MAMP.
3. Open a 250mb Sketch file and get to work while you code.
4. Open Photoshop to do some lightweight image editing and create assets for your website design. Leave Photoshop running in the background.
5. Now use the computer as you normally would for a couple hours, leaving all this running. Things are fine. But suddenly, the computer slows down to about 12fps. This is called ​“thermal throttling,” and it’s an issue I encountered on day three of using the MacBook as a daily driver.

Thermal throttling occurs on the 12” model because it doesn’t have a fan. So while the laptop can do some tasks pretty quick for a brief period of time, it has no way to cool down when it starts to heat up. Which means that it has to slow down.

Anyway, the 12” MacBook was a no go for me. It’d be great if I had a desktop and only used it on the road, but it won’t work as a daily driver.

So back to square one.

On Thursday, Apple announced the new MacBook Pros. They’re more or less what I wanted: thinner, lighter, still packing more than enough power to do what I want every day.

But I’m a little confused by my options.

Here are your options if you want to get work done on an Apple laptop these days:

• The 12” Macbook. In Canada, it starts at $1,649. This price has gone up since I purchased it two weeks ago, actually, by $100. Ouch. Unless you’re an office worker or just need a laptop for use on the go when you’re away from your main machine, it’s sadly a little underpowered.
• The 13” MacBook Air. In Canada, it starts at $1,199. Expensive, somewhat powerful — good enough for just about everybody, I think. I could make do with it. But it has a low-resolution screen. I wish Apple would axe this and lower the cost of the 12” MacBook.
• The old MacBook Pros. Pass. Too heavy, too bulky, and definitely not the new hotness. If I wanted one of these, I would have bought one two weeks ago. Oh, and their price hasn’t gone down in the wake of the new laptops. They’re even more expensive than before. So why bother?
• The 13” MacBook Pro, without a Touch Bar. In Canada, it starts at a poop-your-pants price of $1,899. It’s supposed to be the Air replacement (it has a smaller footprint and weighs more or less the same). It’s less powerful than the MacBook Pro with the Touch Bar, and once you spec it up to comparable-ish levels, the prices are on par. So, this seems like an oddly-positioned tweener device. I thought about order this, but when I can pay the same amount for the MacBook Pro with the new Touch Bar and upgraded RAM, why wouldn’t I?
• The 13” and 15” MacBook Pro, with a Touch Bar. This is the new hotness. In Canada, the 13” starts at a ​“sell-your-kidney” $2,299. I got the ​“my-wallet-is-bleeding” mid-tier model with 512GB of storage and 16GB of RAM (a necessity in design these days). The 13” version is, again, smaller than a MacBook Air — and they weigh the same amount.

Of course, I could always go Windows. I actually walked down to the Microsoft Store yesterday and tried out the Surface Book (the Surface Studio wasn’t available for demo yet). It’s a very nice laptop, but I don’t like the way the stylus feels in my hand. I also don’t like the space between the screen and the keyboard, even when the laptop is closed — that hinge is so weird! I’d spend most of my days cleaning dirt, dust, and hair out of the keyboard as a result. Plus, I still hate Windows. So I’m skipping this too.

Am I happy with the options? Mostly. Oddly, it seems to me that laptop prices are climbing — particularly the prices for professional machines. If the prices hadn’t changed from one generation to the next, I think we’d have a great set of new laptops from Apple.

Consider this: you can buy a decent Chromebook for a couple hundred bucks, but top-of-the-line computers from both Apple and Microsoft are climbing towards $3,000 and above. I don’t get it.

I remember balking at the price for my 15” MacBook Pro in 2012. The price then, with the extra storage space I got in my model, was just over $3,000. The laptop I’m getting now is nearly the same price, and has arguably fewer features: I’m not getting a video card, there are fewer ports, and MagSafe isn’t a thing anymore.

I don’t think Apple has lost its direction. I think Microsoft is finding their mojo, and everybody’s competing to make a really great laptop for pro users, instead of a laptop that delivers exclusively on specs. For the old guard of PC users, this all seems confusing and gimmicky. To me, it’s just plain old expensive.

But I need a new laptop. So here I am.