Apple updates MacBooks

Pretty good for me so far.

Only power-related weirdness I experienced was a couple of times when the light didn't turn on when plugging it in (but it worked as expected) – though having used a lot of laptops in my time, pretty much every one gets confused now and then. Not easy to know if this has fixed such an intermittent issue, really.

I had the trackpad problem, but the fix was released within a week of my purchase. I sometimes think I get a double-tap registering when I've only tapped once, but I do suffer from Fat Finger Syndrome so it could easily just be me.

Not had any of the graphics issues, so either I don't push it enough (played some Battlefield 2042, which certainly sounded like I was hammering it) – or I was fortunate enough to get one of nVidia's few good chips. Either way, it is the Usain Bolt to Intel's Barry Chuckle of graphical offerings.

It's quieter, cooler, astoundingly faster and much sexier than my white MacBook. Recommended!

Again?

Does it seem like every new laptop that Apple releases has an eventual firmware fix a couple months later? Either the fan doesn't run enough and the thing over heats, the battery life is deteriorated, or something along those lines. For such nice hardware, it seems like Apple just doesn't test these things enough before they're released to the general population. I mean it should be pretty easy to notice that 30% of your products overheat during normal use, and fix the firmware before they hit the streets.

Then again, maybe there is some reason for it that I can't grasp, because it sure seems to be a trend for nearly all of their laptops since they switched to Intel. Ah for the good old days of a 12 inch iBook G4... The only issues it had was that tendency to turn urine-yellow after a year or so.

@nexox enigma

"Then again, maybe there is some reason for it that I can't grasp..." To be honest, I think the reason is that other notebook manufacturers simply don't fix such problems. They don't sell enough of individual models for there to be a loud noise about any issues, and Windows gets the blame for any strange behaviour.

@Andy 11:06

Agree with you that no other supplier will ever sell as much per model as Apple, but that is the main difference between PCs where the consumer has choice of what they want vs Apple where the consumer gets what Apple gives them. However, some products' manufacturing have been noted as problematic in the PC world too, such as Sony's famous exploding batteries!

I would also say that the flip side of your argument is that with Apple controlling both software and hardware in a tightly integrated package, I would expect problems like this to be cleaned up and fixed before product release! This is especially true for a premium product with that premium price tag on it - a £400 PC can be a bit sub-par as it is so cheap, but a £1000 Mac I'd expect to ooze quality as much as a £1000 PC...

Of course, the other reason may be that since PCs have to be tested against so many variations of software and possible hardware to plug in with the world of choice out there, maybe PC vendors do test their kit more and catch these possible problems. It's a bit like evolution and the advantages of genetic variation that allowed some organisms to thrive when less adaptable creatures became extinct...

Quality control & development.

" I mean it should be pretty easy to notice that 30% of your products overheat during normal use, and fix the firmware before they hit the streets."

Apple -- like many others -- perform development and testing on prototypes built in-house or built in small batches by their chosen partners. It's hard to tell if a problem is due to a statistical QA issue in the production process or simply because someone forgot to solder a wire properly at this stage.

In *theory*, the full production line, once up and running, will be cranking out machines of identical quality, but if one of your own key suppliers -- in this case, NVidia -- isn't being open and honest with you about their own QA, there's not much you can do. Apple aren't the only ones to have been caught up in NVidia's recent shenanigans.

Similarly, Apple tend to add new technologies to their new models every so often. In such cases, there are often teething troubles when the production line is first started up; problems that affect only 30% of the units coming off the line wouldn't necessarily show up in prototyping. (Especially if those problems are caused by bad batches of components getting through the system.)

QA is an *ongoing process*, not something you do once, prior to production. The more complex the product, the more likely it is that problems will be discovered in production. Even the likes of Ford and Volvo have had to recall products. It's not just laptops.

@AC 12:11

Yes, a Windows lappy certainly does ooze summat.

RE: Seanie Ryan

"profitable company with big cash pile.. seems to be working... my original point was that you can run everything on a mac that you can on a pc, so the Mac is not a closed hardware..."

My two arguments here are:

1. "seems to be working" - you've pointed out the advantages of fewer production lines and one company controlling it all, which I would think highlights the fact that it should be easier to release products to market without faults compared to a highly diversified product portfolio each with differing tolerances and testing, which is the point of the article itself.

2. "not a closed hardware" - mac can run anything a pc can (no one start naming games or software that doesn't work please as I'm generalizing here!) but a pc can't run much of mac software. Therefore a mac is the universal recipient and the pc is the universal donor. Consider this (from wiki): "Under Perens' definition, open source describes a broad general type of software license that makes source code available to the general public with relaxed or non-existent copyright restrictions." Forgetting the specific mention of source code, the mere portability of software from pc to mac and lack of return portability from mac to pc shows the mac to be a closed system! The mac taketh, but the mac don't giveth back... this, combined with the hardware control, is why they produce such sweet running systems that just work, somewhat analogous to the whole gaming console vs gaming pc argument that rages here every now and again.

re: AC 15.35

"This lack of choice annoys us as we believe in user choice, especially for $1000+!"

Well use your user choice and buy something else, then. Sheesh...

RE: Seanie Ryan

Errr... I think I got confused halfway through!

Point 2: you can argue that any hardware can run any os so the whole hardware argument kinda is irrelevant! I see what you mean, but I can get an EFI chip and run OSX on any Intel platform now, apart from the company asking the consumer to not do that, so I guess it is subjective that I think that they are more restrictive than other companies. who are into letting any kind of software running on their kit as long as it is able to (or not if it's "Vista Ready"). I apologize as I never knew Mac ran Windows natively - I'd always assumed you needed Boot Camp or Parallels, but in that case you can argue that Windows is more "open" than OSX if it can load on EFI as well as BIOS... ;o)