Posts by Dave 126

Re: Apples and Lemons?

You can set the function keys to be always on. This might not help the people who are used to finding them by touch, but I dare say their finger will be fall pretty close to the right area of the bar - you hands will already know where they are from typing on the conventional keyboard. That's some users.

Another set of users will find the touchstrip a far more versatile HID device than a row of F keys. For many tasks - such as adjusting volume, or some other variable - it will be faster than using keys and consume less attention.

I'm a Windows CAD user. Your argument does seem to be that because the touchbar might detract from your work flow, those people it benefits don't do 'real work'. No, they are not idiots, they just use their computer for different tasks to you, often audio, video and photo editing work long associated with Macs.

>Does nobody in Apple's "design" group use Adobe Creative Suite anymore?

Adobe showed off their support for the touchstrip at its release. During much of the Adobe presentation, the virtual Esc was present in the normal place, and only disappeared when the touchstrip was being used as a slider. It appears that the virtual Esc key returned when the demonstrator tapped the touchbar. The video is here:

http://www.digitaltrends.com/photography/adobe-photoshop-touch-bar-update-apple-macbook-pro/

Re: You really do get the feeling

Product Design is what Ive does, and as a discipline it is concerned with how things are used - function. The 'use' of a laptop doesn't just cover the times it is being typed on, but also how it feels to carry around, what you do when it goes wrong, everything. Cook was never an arbiter of product design, but was very competent at managing supply chains.

Product design, like engineering, is about compromise. More battery means more weight. It doesn't follow that there is one 'correct' balance of battery and weight. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

The Macbooks are good screens and keyboards in a lightweight package (the reason for a laptop's existence) with good enough CPU/GPUs for most tasks. They also expose their PCIe lanes to any bit of kit you want to plug into them. It's not an unreasonable approach, given they'd never be able to produce a variant which suits every user 'out of the box'.

You might remember how adamant Jobs was about not including BluRay support on any Mac. His logic was that Joe Punter would soon be streaming movies (or watching BluRay on a big TV through a games console), and the smaller group of people who really needed to burn Blu-ray discs would just attach their own drive.

Re: Worth $300 /400 extra?

>Is the touch bar that much of an advantage over physical function keys considering it how much it adds onto the cost of the device?

It really depends upon the application. On my desk now I have all manner of human input devices - a camera with scroll wheel (relative), D-pad, two jog switches (relative), four absolute dials or sliders, a two-level shutter button.

A mouse with many buttons and a scrollwheel which also moves left and right.

A joystick I found second hand but haven't found a use for yet - 3 analogue axis, analogue throttle, little hat and many buttons. Tempted to waste a few hours making it control my laptop's volume and media.

My car stereo has a proper knob for the volume. When I encounter car stereos which use two buttons for volume control, it makes me want to seek out the person responsible and shout at them.

A cheap Wacom digitiser, gathering dust. Tried to turn it into a MIDI controller, but Windows had other ideas. A friend has a bigger, pricier one, and swears by it for CAD work.

Re: Flawed Market Analysis

Apple's bottom line suggests they are smarter than you give them credit for. Do not mistake what they say in public (which is always well stage-managed) for the inevitable conversations that Apple have had internally.

You say that 'no one is liking the new Macs', but at the moment their pre-orders are high. Now, you and I might both suspect that is in part because of the long over-due CPU upgrades. In addition, I suspect that Apple have waited until now to bump the specs because they want to maximise adoption of USB-C over USB A, DisplayPort, HDMI etc, and adoption of the touch strip. Both the port selection and touchstrip will be better in the long run with 3rd party support, so it is a good strategic decision for Apple to draw people in with the long-awaited CPU/GPU upgrades and thus create a larger pool (a critical mass) of touchstrip/USB users. This interpretation might be incorrect, but it is plausible.

Make no mistake - Apple employ a lot of very bright analysts, and supply them with expensive-to-aquire data to work on.

>Someone somewhere is going to have to make a usable, affordable PC class computer.

That's never been Apple's game, yet here they still are. Windows laptops have come ion leaps and bounds in the last decade. A £300 laptop only feels cheap and slow in comparison with its pricier peers - taken on its own merits, it does all the simple tasks without much fuss.

Re: It's not JUST the toolbar

I have a Dell with a barrel connector for power - I've seen friend's Dells fail in this area.

Magsafe is nice, but its benefits aren't as useful as they used to be - simply because batteries last longer, people are less likely to be charging their laptops as they use them. I'm not saying this doesn't happen - it just doesn't happen as much as it used to.

Re: Hopefully Apple will listen...

once their sales collapse so hard that they carve a hole in their basement.>

They enjoying a lot of pre-orders, though much of that must be ascribed to the over-due CPU upgrades. However, I really don't think their sales will collapse. Let's agree to disagree until this time next year, Lisa :)

Re: Reminds me

>The "We've tried it before and couldn't make it work, so nobody can"-comment is so absurd and so overused, that you can hardly believe anybody making it these days.

Aye. I'm tempted to go through the Reg forum archives and see who here thought the iPad would be a flop upon its release - there were quite a few commentards who said it would. It would be even more fun if this process could be automated and suitable icons placed next to our handles!

In addition to better software support, the Apple touchbar has more capable hardware - it has ten points of multi-touch, and can be used as a slider or video scrubber. To compare it to Lenovo's virtual buttons is like comparing a scroll wheel to cursor keys.

Re: Been there, done that, didn't work.

>To be fair though, if it's implemented properly by the software manufacturers, rather than by the hardware manufacturer, it could work.

It seems Apple have got a few devs on board - Adobe, representing photoediting, Da Vinci representing video work and some music software. This is on top of the software Apple themselves make for internet, office tasks, photos, email etc

>However, so much software makes use of function keys, it seems arbitrary to change something just for a niche of users with MacBooks.

Here's the thing: by default, Apple's function keys haven't been function keys for years. They perform the functions that on a Windows PC normally require the 'Fn' button to be held down, such as screen brightness, volume, mute, media controls. They can be made function keys, but that is not the default OSX behaviour.

>Touch bar - pointless gimmick, I'm one of life's ESC users,

Fair enough, that's your use-case. Will you concede that Photoshop users can benefit from context-sensitive virtual sliders? Not only Photoshop, but many an application in video, photo and music.

I'm not a Mac user, so I'll keep on using keys or extra mouse buttons to modify the scroll wheel. I hear that some more modern Windows PCs actually have decent trackpads, but mine dates from the era when PC trackpads are just horrible - barely good enough to get you by when you've forgotten to pack your Logitech mouse.

Yep, like you I find my ageing laptop still up to the task! :)

Re: Worth $300 /400 extra?

I remember flight simulators that came with a cardboard keyboard template! These days you can get gaming keyboards with programmable RGB back-lighting - as well as gaming keypads and complicated-looking joysticks.

>Apple apparently forgot to make the screen touch.

They didn't forget - they just reckoned nobody wanted to be holding their arms out in front of them.

Where Apple do make a touchscreen computer, they think its more important that it be light than it is able to run applications designed for mouse and keyboard - hence the iPad.

Adobe make iPad apps that provide tool palettes for Photoshop on OSX - so hybrid touch interfaces for OSX do exist if a productivity application will benefit from it. This is on top of established support for Wacom stylus tablets.

Obviously, this requires you buy both a Mac and an iPad, but Apple don't mind that.

Re: Apples and Lemons?

Yep, Lenovo didn't have control over the OS as Apple do, they didn't have a suite of their own applications, and they didn't have enough market share to interest 3rd party developers.

All of the above were factors against Lenovo, before we even consider whether their hardware implementation was any good or not.

Re: Why?

>Isn't this the same argument that would have someone spend £10+/metre on speaker cable and bi-wiring / bi-amping? ]

I have had laptops and phones in which I can clearly hear interference from the rest of the system though - 'goblin chatter' when I move the cursor, for example. Separating the analogue stage from sources of interference is a common-sense approach. It's the inverse-square law.

>The audiophile "market" is utterly full of crap.

I agree -my amp and speakers are from the 1980s. However, can all agree that a modestly priced amplifier and speakers usually sound better than speaker docks, which in turn sound better than laptop speakers? That I wouldn't use my phone's speaker for music doesn't make me an 'audiophile' - it makes me someone who likes music.

Re: Why?

>So having a generic little D-to-A converter plus power amplifier built into the headphones will sound better than a half-descent D-to-A and PA?

Why would you assume the DAC in the headphones would be 'generic' whilst the DAC in the phone would be 'half decent'?

Headphones are sold on sound quality. Phone are sold on a myriad factors.

Re: more headphones with their own DAC and amp will be available

>Which given space, cost, battery will generally be inferior than built in DAC & Amp in a phone, tablet, laptop, which will have a DAC and Amp ANYWAY for the built-in speakers

Battery? Headphones take power from the USB / Lightning connection. Clearly you've looked into this Mage.

Cost? I'm looking at my first DAC right now - a Gravis Ultrasound card. Its 16 bit playback and wavetable synthesis cost around £200 in the nineties. Last DAC I bought was a USB jobbie for £3 - though it is a bit shit. Still, a half decent DAC and amp won't add too much to the cost of a pair of headphones, and allow you other niceties such as battery-free noise-cancelling.

I don't know why you think a pair of headphones will incorporate a poorer DAC than any given phone. Who would you trust more - Sennheiser or Alcatel? It is only recently that phone vendors have started using sound quality as a differentiator - I think there was a variant of the Samsung S3 that used a Wolfson DAC, and LG have been pushing it since their G2.

Some people hold on to a favourite pair of headphones for years, even if they change their phone every 2-3 years (its usually only the cable that fails, and good headphones let you swap that). In any case, the inside of a phone isn't the ideal place for the analogue stage - back in the days when we still bought HiFi, we called the units 'separates' for a reason. The analogue output in my Dell laptop is poor - I can hear the cursor move. My phones have varied - my Sony Z3 was pretty good.

I wasn't - and I'm not - defending Bluetooth audio (though it doesn't necessarily require re-encoding if source and target play nice together... one would hope that Samsung > Samsung will for some codecs, just as we would Apple > Apple). I was merely stating, contrary to the OP's claim, that fact that some decent Lightning headphones do exist. Amusingly, this statement of fact seems to have upset some folk.

Re: Why?

>There are no decent headphones available with a Lightning plug.

The Philips Fidelio M2L headphones use Lightening. The Fidelio range has previously been well received, and first reports suggest that letting the headphones use their own DAC (thus shortening the analogue path) only makes them sound even better.

Down the line, more headphones with their own DAC and amp will be available (on USB as well as Lightening), rendering the quality of the source device moot (as long as it can stream the data without hiccup) as regards sound quality.

Re: Why are you giving them ideas?

>Apple would remove the keyboard if they thought they could get away with it.

Like the Macbook Wheel?

It uses predictive sentence technology:

http://www.theonion.com/video/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-laptop-with-no--14299

>it appears no different from being prosecuted for having an encrypted file for which you cannot offer the decryption key to the police when requested.

It's not an encrypted file, it's just a log of some atmospheric noise I recorded.

Shit, the 'Forgotten your password? Click here to send reset email' button gets a lot of use from me.

Turns out my 1024 bit keys are themselves just ascii art of kittens.

Re: Apricot?

>This is approaching being a tablet with keyboard, the I/O is so poor.

Eh? It has 4 USB Type C ports, each one of which can do power, USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt 3, DisplayPort and HDMI.

The I/O is broad, fast and versatile.

True, there will be a bit of a faff for a while you're still using USB-A memory sticks and the like, but there's a good selection of 3rd party hubs and dongles thanks to the USB-C-only Macbook last year.

Re: "Oh look!! It has a display. And a keyboard."

>No USB sockets. Was a joke. Now a fact.

No USB [Type A] sockets.

Re: Strip or screen...

> ...tiny strips for DJing, how cool. Couldn't help but think 'just put your hands on the bloody screen man'.

It was just to demonstrate that the touchstrip had ten-point multitouch, and had low latency. If the DJ wanted more room for virtual knobs and sliders, he could use a variety of kit, including an iPad - which, like the original iPhone, has low latency and wireless MIDI baked into its OS (so the iPad can easily control the software on the Macbook).

In essence, the touchstrip is a thin iPad screen. Indeed, Adobe have had an iPad app for Photoshop tool palettes (controlling the host application on OSX) for a few years now.

It's curious that in two days we've had two different answers to 'How can I change the size of my Photoshop brush on the fly?' - MS's Knob, and Apple's Touchstrip.

Re: I'm confused.

>Why does a desktop computer, designed to be placed with its back against a wall or tilted so that its back goes down to the desk, have both front _and_ back mounted cameras?

It could be handy for snapping handdrawn sketches ( or small objects you want to sell on eBay or Etsy) at a 'good enough' resolution. If so, then Microsoft should supply it with an 'L' shaped power connector, so that the cable doesn't stray into the shot.

>Isn't the Professional Edition supposed to be the one people create on?

We used to have professional (Pro) titles such as 'product designer', 'carpenter', 'steel fabricator' and the like, but these days the term 'maker' (read: Creator) is widely used for amateurs, hobbyists and small-scale manufacture.

Generally, for hobbiest CAD, CAM, CNC and interfacing with old bits of kit, Windows is the OS to use, despite its idiosyncrasies and frustrations.

Re: The silver hockey puck works on and off the screen.

>Why do almost no screens (and none on laptop) support portrait, though many graphics drivers do?

The screen (and GPU + drivers) on my laptop support Portrait orientation just fine. The issue is that I find the keyboard difficult to use when my laptop is sat on its side. :)

Re: I want!

You have two main issues:

1 - Protecting the screen area from scratches (bits of metal, dust from diamond tools etc). This could be done with a sacrificial plastic sheet, as many people use on their phone screens.

2 - Dust ingress into the base unit. You should be able to knock yourself up a slim enclosure with dust filtering, though you might have to actively drive air through the filters in order to provide sufficient cooling. Still, some 9 mm plywood, some vacuum-cleaner filters and a couple of fans won't break the bank.

The hinge areas can be protected with - at minimum - a plastic bag and some duck tape.

Re: Perfect for the wannabe creator market

>this specs seem to fall short of anything really useful for professional use , especially the weird screen resolution.

What the hell are you talking about? Damned near every non-Surface Windows laptop is 16:9, which isn't great for many purposes. Macs are 16:10 (the same as my ageing Dell) which is handy - even for editing full-res 1080 video you have some spare vertical pixels for a timeline.

Professional applications - CAD, Photoshop - tend to allow the user some freedom in how toolbars and palettes are arranged in the workspace. If you were a professional, you would know that.

Re: They fluffed it ages ago

Whilst it would have been nice if MS had made an ARM version of Windows that could run any Windows application (without performance penalties), it isn't possible. Mark this one down to 'technical hurdle', instead of 'strategic fumble'.

Re: How about a watch that...

>To be honest, I do have a bit of a problem with the idea that people are to friggin' lazy to reach for their phone to read texts and pick up a call.

I'm too lazy to reach into my pocket for my phone if all I want to do is read the time. That is why I wear a watch (currently a £5 Casio, though I have a windup for when I scrub up). It is simply quicker and more convenient.

Every time I pull my phone out of my pocket there is a small (but real) chance I will drop it, and other the lifetime of a phone those chances add up. There is also a chance there will be water, mud, oil or some other grime on my hands, substances I would rather keep on the outside of my clothing and off my phone.

Re: Batteries

>The watch form factor is just too small to do anything much other than well be a watch.

A small display can communicate the time just fine - as traditional watches do by hands or segmented LCD display. However, there are other data or states that can also be communicated just fine on a small display, such as a message notification. Even if only using watch hands, lots of useful info can be read - speed, altitude, direction, time. Even a single RGB LED can communicate useful info (type of incoming message, battery level etc, as seen on Blackberry and some Android phones already).

Casio and Citizen both makes watches with this sort of functionality, both with 1 year + battery life.

Personally, I'll wait til SoC and battery tech allow a smartwatch to be smaller, and the cost of selective laser sintering of titanium becomes cheap enough to let me design (or rather, copy a 1969 Omega Chronostop) my own watch case. It will communicate to me by vibration and through its hands ( the hands will 'dance' at 6 o'clock for a text message, for example).

Re: Garmin

>I would have thought that doing anything based on wrist flicking may be prone to error, as in introducing a very badly timed variant of butt dialling :).

It's only to turn on the display :)

Even some conventional LCD watches have used a similar mechanism to temporarily turn on the back light (thinking of a late-nineties Casio G-Shock).

Re: 4 Kelvin Moles?

Grampa: "The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!"