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FCKGW posted:faster processors and touch ID? Hell, this alone will make me happy. Touch ID is the one thing that I can see as becoming an important feature down the road that current mac tablets don't have, and it's the thing I'm waiting for before I upgrade.
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Oct 10, 2014 09:44
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Electric Bugaloo posted:I didn't know Apple made those. You know what I mean. It's what I get for posting at 5 am. 
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Oct 10, 2014 14:12
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8-bit Miniboss posted:That's really weird that happen to 4 logic boards and an entirely new machine. I'd start looking at your other equipment at that point. There has to be a cause. That's what I was thinking. What's your physical space like? Where is your laptop sitting and what kind of ventilation is it getting around it? MBPs from the 08-12 period tend to run a bit warm in general. I've got a mid 2009 set up with an external monitor as a secondary display. I keep it on a desk with a foot of clear space open behind it and on a USB-driven cooling pad and even with all that I still can put my hand on the case/keyboard over where the GPU to warm up a bit if I get cold while working.
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Oct 14, 2014 14:06
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Here's a kind of odd question: I'm going to be upgrading my laptop sometime in the next year or so. Right now I'm on a 15" mid 2009 MPB and while it's still happily chugging away it's getting long enough in the tooth that it's time to start planning. I spend basically all day in front of my computer. Most of that is spent staring at words. If I'm not writing, chances are I'm reading something in preparation for writing. If I have a bit of time off even money that I'm loving around on the forums. It's pretty shameful, really. I also tend to move around enough that I'm more or less the poster child for the laptop as mobile desktop replacement. 4 days out of the week I work from my home, 3 days out of the office (weekends aren't really part of my life right now). On my office days I'm also teaching, which means hauling my laptop to a class in order to plug it in and run presentations etc. off it while I lecture. I very briefly played with the idea of multiple desktops and cloud storage, but that was just a nightmare. Having everything in one (very well backed up) place just works a thousand times better for me. All that said the glossy screens on modern mac notebooks drive me loving NUTS. I inevitably can either see my own reflection or that of the room behind me. Back in '09 I paid extra to get my current laptop with a matte screen, but that isn't even an option any more. I can kind of live with it if I'm watching video, and I can sort of get past it if I'm playing a game or something, but less visually active activities that require attention to detail (like reading/writing) just leave me staring at my own goddamned reflection all the time. Some googling around turns up this matte screen protector. Does anyone have any suggestions for other products that I might be overlooking? Any kind of experience with this kind of thing and what it's like looking at it for multiple hours on end? My other option is to go full out with a dock and multiple monitors, but I'm pretty happy with the setup I've got now and would prefer to change it as little as possible.
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Oct 14, 2014 17:50
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Electric Bugaloo posted:I would have a look at the rMBP in person before drawing any significant conclusions on the matter. Apple has dramatically reduced the glare on their displays several times over the last 5 years, both thanks to advances in screen coatings and in display manufacturing and laminating processes. I'm talking like ~50% reductions between generations in some cases. I've looked at the new rMBPs quite a bit. In the store at least it still bugs the hell out of me. I'm really, really hoping that when I get it into my usual work spaces it's just a non issue, but I'd still like to know anyone's experiences with those films and filters before I go out and drop $2k+ on a new laptop based purely on fervent hope that I can use it for work.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:00
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Ninja Rope posted:The Airs still ship with matte screens, don't they? Yeah, but frankly if I'm getting an Air I might as well just buy a RAM upgrade for this machine and keep it. Which, admittedly, is always an option.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:15
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Virtue posted:I would really like to purchase a macbook pro retina for my next laptop but the majority of software I use doesn't have a mac version (excel, access, sas). How is the performance of windows on these machines? Excel, word, powerpoint, etc. are all on mac now. In addition to the virtualization stuff, there's always the bootcamp option. I dual boot Win7 for game purposes and it works just fine.
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Oct 17, 2014 02:49
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eddiewalker posted:Just find the config you want on prices.appleinsider.com So, what's the deal with the crazy loving discounts that B&H place is listing on that site? Call me cynical, but someone offering $500 off apple store retail on a top-end MBPr throws a few warning flags for me.
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Oct 18, 2014 17:59
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Martytoof posted:I use it as my main work computer, though I have a Mac Mini at home with a 23" monitor. At work I use it as my main "desktop" as I'm on the go a lot and I find it entirely usable for 5-8 hours, lots of Safari windows, fullscreen Mail, fullscreen Teamviewer and RDP sessions. I have the screen set to "look like 1440x1050" (I think that's the one, I don't have it open in front of me) and it's pleasant to use. I'll throw in that I've got a old as poo poo 15" MBP running at 1440 as my main machine and am basically strapped to it for 10+ hours a day between work and entertaining myself. The size makes things a little more restrictive in what kinds of bags I can get for traveling, but on the other hand I really, really like the increased screen size. I do a lot of word processing and having the added size is a godsend around hour 5 of staring at text. My wife has a 13" and no way could I move back down to that size for any length of time. I've yet to be in a situation in 8 years of running 15" MPBs where the size as prevented me from taking one anywhere or doing anything with it. If you do go the laptop-as-portable-desktop route consider also hauling around an iPad with you. There is some pretty decent software out there for turning even the humble original iPad into a secondary monitor. Of course you're going to get frame rate stuttering and it will look like a remote desktop session ca. 2002 if you do anything more intensive than arrange the windows, but for relatively static applications (say if you need more screen real estate to keep a couple extra documents open for quickly consulting but won't be actively entering poo poo into them) but it's pretty impressive for a multi-display solution you can pull out of your bag and set up at a coffee shop. edit: VVVVVV yeah, I'll bet. I'm just saying, even with my old dinosaur it gets around well enough that I value the extra size enough to put up with the bulk. I'm getting a replacement at the next refresh cycle at the latest and really look forward to the lighter design. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Oct 24, 2014 |
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Oct 24, 2014 06:46
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Electric Bugaloo posted:Also, if you're willing to put up with a tiny amount of extra hassle, I'd buy third party RAM and save $200-$400 over buying it straight from Apple. I'm sure you probably already know this, but there's a little door on the back of the 27" iMac for RAM swaps that the 21" version doesn't have, making it a 2 minute job. I agree with you in theory, BUT you also have to not be a lazy rear end (like me) and actually order the loving ram. This exact logic is what got me to order 4MB with my MBP back in 2009, and once I got it set up it ran pretty well with 4MB so I put off upgrading so I could do other things with the money that the upgrade would cost. . . . fast forward to now and I finally got around to ordering 8MB yesterday. But for an extra couple hundred bucks five years ago I could have enjoyed 8MB of ram for the full life cycle of my machine, rather than just at the tail end as an upgrade to keep it kicking for one more update cycle. I know I'm an idiot, but I doubt I'm the first person to fall prey to this particular type of false economy either.
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Oct 28, 2014 22:18
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Housh posted:He doesn't even know if it's gigabytes or megabytes of RAM he's ordering. flavor posted:Apparently it made no difference to you whatsoever over that whole time. Also apparently you have no issue investing more money into that machine now, when it's really beyond its reasonable lifetime. I don't get the point of going to "8 MB" now instead of selling the whole thing. Eh, I wouldn't say it's made no difference. Back when I had time I used to spend a lot of time playing games on a windows partition on it, and the extra ram would have been nice there. On the work end of things probably not so much, that's true. As for upgrading now? Because I can't afford to be buying a new computer right now. I can afford $80 for a couple ram sticks though. Is it an ideal solution? No. But if $80 helps kick that particular can down the road a bit then it's a solution I can live with for now. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Oct 29, 2014 |
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Oct 28, 2014 23:54
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Pivo posted:remember that $2800 rMBP i bought last month? Got renters/ homeowners? Personal electronics are covered under a lot of those policies.
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Oct 30, 2014 05:31
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Pivo posted:do have tenant insurance. may be covered, but not likely... should read over the policy in detail. Just call them. Accidental damage, theft, fire etc and replacing the stuff contained in the home/apartment/whatever is specifically what that kind of insurance is for. The basic idea being that if the crazy cat lady upstairs from you floods her apartment you aren't up poo poo creek. A friend had a big rear end lamp fall over and really gently caress up a MBP she owned a few years ago and was covered. Sometimes they cover things that happen outside the apartment if it's a portable item. I know you can get electronics riders to explicitly cover any issue, anywhere that are fairly cheap (we're talking a couple bucks a month) and should really be a must-have item for anyone who owns more than a cell phone these days. If it's a spilled glass of water you will probably have better luck if you spilled the water on your laptop in your living room than if you were at a library or starbucks or something. Good luck with all that.
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Oct 30, 2014 13:50
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Pivo posted:I am covered! $1k deductible though and we'd lose the 5% claim-free benefit on our next renewal. Hey, think of it this way: $1k and 5% is still a hell of a lot better than ~$3k. You might also inquire with your insurance agent about adding an electronics specific rider to your policy if you don't have one already. A lot of the times those will extend the coverage to damage, theft, etc. while outside the residence and knock the deductible down significantly. There is also frequently a maximum limit on electronics in a lot of plans and riders will often remove those caps. That can get important in the case of a catastrophic event like a fire where you lose laptop, media center, TV, phones, etc. all at once. Remember: it's not just the current value of your poo poo (aka what it's depreciated to) that you need to worry about, it's the replacement cost. Those riders are usually pretty damned reasonable, too. I haven't looked at that part of our policy in years, but I think it adds something like $5 or $10 a month. I just remember having that conversation with my wife and our conclusion being "it's what a fast food meal costs, gently caress it let's get it."
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Oct 30, 2014 21:45
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Jack's Flow posted:Yeah, Netflix and NBA League Pass run super smooth without any fan action. I've read stuff about "cooling pads" and got worried for a minute, but I guess that's more for people who buy gaming laptops or whatever. Thanks for the answer. For what it's worth, I use a cooling pad with my aging mid-2009 MBP. That era machine in general just kind of ran warm and firing up anything even semi-modern on it of course kicks the fans in. The heat management under Windows 7 is also kind of all-or-nothing as far as ramping up the fans goes, and some of the places I've lived in the last 5 years have been pretty unforgiving environments for electronics. Think 5th story, non-air conditioned, garret apartments in the Central European summer, routine daytime temperatures hovering around 85F indoors. When I was traveling more the pad was pretty necessary sometimes if I was going to do any kind of game playing at all in my spare time, otherwise I'd get temperature-related shutdowns. These days I still use it mostly out of habit. The one I've got angles the machine nicely for typing at a desk which I've found helps a lot with wrist strain. Like most work station setup a lot of it just comes down to individual needs and preference. This is the one I use now, and I've had it for about 4 years. I had a cheaper one before it but something happened to it - I forget what. Regardless, they're reasonably durable, can be had cheaply enough, and if you find yourself in a situation where heat (or even just non-stop internal fan use) is a concern they work reasonably well.
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Nov 4, 2014 20:46
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ShadeofBlue posted:I still use my 14 year old clamshell occasionally. It's actually surprisingly useful to have a computer that can have email plus a tab or two of Internet open but no more, it really cuts down on the distractions when I need to get some work done. Half the fun of ancient hardware is figuring out something to do with it. I've got a first gen iPod touch kicking around that's long since been jailbroken into being a glorified pocket-sized kindle with a handful of kid friendly games on it and some super-basic web functionality. It was way past obsolete when I was given it for free, but it's long since justified the space it takes up in one of my misc. crap drawers. It only gets used once a year or so, but having something that you care so little about that you'll take it into a hottub to relax while reading or that you don't mind if someone else's ill mannered 3 year old throws it across the room can come in handy.
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Nov 6, 2014 13:55
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Housh posted:I wish my 2nd gen iPod mini still held a charge. I could fill it with audio books for my mom when she goes on walks. Can you change/find batteries for those things? Google indicates yes, but it requires a tiny bit of soldering. On the one hand a bit of a PITA, on the other hand a pretty simple operation all things considered and a cheap way to learn the basest of basics about soldering.
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Nov 6, 2014 17:05
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Think of it this way: how much of your day/week/life do you spend in front of that particular display? If you do a lot of work from home or are a student plus you use your computer for most of your entertainment needs, that can be a really loving huge lump of time, in which case the cost shouldn't be that big an issue. Something that makes an object you interact with that much better is worth spending money on. If it's an office computer that you check email on maybe 5x a day and ignore for the rest of it? Arguably a complete waste of money.
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Nov 25, 2014 18:29
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Facepalm Ranger posted:
Probably not as much as you're hoping. I've got a 7200 RPM HDD in a 2009 MBP and the grey loading bar is still a thing. You're not going to see anything like SSD speeds, not even close. You shouldn't even compare them, really. Before running out and buying a new HDD I would take a good close look at the one you have in there to see if it's hosed up in any way. If it isn't just save up for a SSD if the loading speed bugs you. SSDs are a lot more expensive for the amount of hard drive space you get, but it also depends on how much space you need. Do you need 1TB of storage space on your laptop, or can you make do with 256GB? 128GB? etc.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:25
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Pivo posted:You can have booooooooooooooooooth. Yes, but it also seems like cost is a major concern for this guy, so I'm not going to assume he's going to go to all the extra expense to yank the optical drive and slap in a high capacity HDD alongside an SDD or that he's just going to throw down and spend the money on a really high capacity SDD. The context of the problem is pretty important for offering a potential solution.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:35
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Pivo posted:sure I mean if he wants the extra space now, he can feel free to get the platter drive and then grab an SSD/OptiBay when he can afford it. Seems like it would make more sense to go the opposite direction - get a smaller SSD now and upgrade the platter down the road. Fewer OS installs at the very least, assuming he doesn't 110% need the platter storage right this minute. Then again I just loving hate migrating data so that might just by my own hang up showing. On the other other hand by this point we're talking about dumping not insignificant resources into a ~5 year old machine and are getting to where saving up just a few hundred more puts you into 1-2 year old refurb territory, or brand new low-end-ish MBA territory.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:43
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100YrsofAttitude posted:I don't really feel like running bootcamp. I should be able to get a cheap 360 controller and give it a try. Thanks. You really should give this a second thought. The performance difference is unbelievably huge. I love my Mac but the video driver situation is pretty poo poo.
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Dec 25, 2014 22:49
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Sad Panda posted:Unfortunately you are right. That's an easy to scratch screen! http://www.amazon.com/ShaggyMax-MacBook-Retina-Screen-Protector/dp/B009D7GQ04 Probably the best mac-related accessory I ever spent money on.
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Jan 13, 2015 00:25
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Feenix posted:I have those. I was asking if there were other alternatives that might have been known to be better. Short answer: Apple seems to adopt new drivers at a nearly glacial pace and basically whatever the latest OEM windows driver is is usually going to be better. This is one of the bigger reasons why game performance is almost always better in a bootcamped windows partition than under OSX. Will the driver be as stable, play as nicely with some random 2nd monitor, or whatever other concern you have? I dunno, install that poo poo and find out, if it gives you problems roll it back. You're getting the full windows experience under bootcamp for better and for worse. I wouldn't rely on whatever the official Bootcamp drivers are into perpetuity any more than I'd rely on never updating the drivers that shipped on some random Dell.
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Jan 17, 2015 21:44
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flavor posted:Really? In any event, I know that its' an act, but after a while it's just dumb. Particularly if some people go out of their way to write whole paragraphs and then to end their last sentence without a period u mad about punctuation bro lol  In more hardware related news what's the latest on Intel's chip drama? I tried googling around but I'm getting kinda conflicting sources and I was just wondering if anyone's seen anything semi-concrete about whether the MBPr's are finally getting a refresh this summer. I'm puttering along on my 2009 vintage MBP and while it's been a fine workhorse and then some it's getting way past time to put it out to pasture. At this point I'm mostly just concerned with timing an update right to get on as they shift to the next chipset and graphics card.
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Jan 18, 2015 03:36
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Electric Bugaloo posted:Or you could just take care of your poo poo like a reasonable adult and not literally drag it across various surfaces in your day-to-day. God forbid someone use their laptop for work and move it from place to place as required. Five plus years of daily commutes, shuffling between my office and classrooms, not to mention the occasional library or state archive. gently caress yes my laptop has scratches, and the next one will to. Then again I also dont care about resale value. Buy it, use it until it doesn't do the job any more, buy another, retask the old one to something it can do.
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Feb 4, 2015 16:34
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Sad Panda posted:The Stormfront store that I took it to (here in the UK These guys must have an absolutely lovely time with people googling their name.
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Feb 4, 2015 22:57
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While we're on hard drive chat: I'm going to be upgrading sometime in the next year from a fairly ancient MBP. I haven't followed hardware advances in forever, so I'm doing a lot of catchup reading. One of the questions I still have about SSDs relates to how they handle error checking and it getting propagated to backups. What, exactly, happens when an SSD starts to poo poo the bed? Let's say I bought a brand new retina MBP tomorrow and two years down the road the SSD just craps out. Manufacturer defect, too many overwrites, heat related wonkiness, whatever. Is it a binary "it works / it doesn't work" situation where my latest time machine backup is fine and I just need to restore from that, or is it more of a slide into obscurity where I've got to worry about whether important files were corrupted and then sent on up to the backup drive? Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Feb 9, 2015 |
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Feb 9, 2015 17:37
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Bob Morales posted:They're supposed to gracefully fail to read-only mode but normally they just don't appear to exist anymore or freeze your computer up a bunch of times So what are the implications of this for a somewhat-continusingly running backup system like Time Machine? Maybe I'm overthinking things or being overly paranoid, but I'm just concerned about data corruption while it's in the process of dying becoming part of the backup. If the drive dies it's no big deal, but how that affects the backup (if at all) might mean I need to make some adjustments to how often I do manual backups of the really important stuff, etc.
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Feb 9, 2015 17:52
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Ninja Rope posted:The time machine backups to the local disk probably won't end up with silent data corruption. If the SSD goes bad it will probably become read only or completely uselessly dead, so either your local on-disk backups are fine or are gone. Since SSDs don't give you warning like HDDs often do, you really need to backup to an external device, and doing so with time machine is fine. Get a USB hard drive, NAS, Airport Extreme, etc, and backup there, and/or use an online backup service. Good to know, thanks. I've been backing up to a external drive (just went the easy route and threw money at apple via a Time Capsule) for years now, so that won't be an issue. Well, it will be a minor issue because that Time Capsule is loving ancient and I need to replace it, but I'll just buy a new one the same time I get the new laptop.
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Feb 10, 2015 20:58
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mkasu posted:Another thing, which I was worrying about : I want to buy a new 15" Retina MBP, like, tomorrow. Do you think there would be any chance for a refresh next week? I read speculations like that in other forums but I'm not really sure what the odds are, as the Broadwell Intel CPUs for mobile haven't even been released as far as I know. I'm way in the market for a new 15" MBP (old faithful from 2009 here is rapidly falling apart) and I'm fully expecting to wait until at least WWDC for any major refresh of the line. They're due for one, but not so due that they're going to just spring a surprise. The real question is whether they do the refresh of the computers before or after they do the '6s' refresh.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:55
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Huh. So they updated the 15" MBPr without touching the amount of storage on it or really updating the graphics on it at all. That loving blows.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:03
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TheQat posted:Did they? I don't see anything about anything but the Air, the new 12", and the 13" rMBP anywhere. Should be the case because the quad-core Broadwell parts aren't available yet. No, I'm just an idiot who mis-heard the address. It sounded to me like he was saying that these changes were coming in across the entire MBPr spectrum, not just the 13" If he didn't touch the 15" at all that actually gives me a lot happier, as I'm wanting to upgrade from my old 2009 model and was hoping for a substantial boost in the summer/fall.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:32
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Did they stick the new keyboard in the 13" MBPr? I do a lot of typing and am a bit worried about how many reviewers seem to dislike the feel of the new keyboards.
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Mar 10, 2015 00:45
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seems like a lot of extra effort to let people use gloves with a trackpad.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:49
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Malf posted:Alternatively can anyone recommend a relatively cheap USB3 external drive that is pretty much silent? Toshiba makes some USB-powered external drives that use laptop hard drives and run really damned quietly. The one I have is a TB but it's also something like 4 years old now. I forget the name of the line right now and I'm not somewhere that I want to be hitting my amazon account from, but they're quiet enough that if the noise bothers you you're a pretty major edge case. The internal fans in my 2009 MBP completely drown out the sound of the drive spinning up and doing its thing, if that gives you any point of reference.
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Mar 21, 2015 16:29
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ufarn posted:Is there anything to do with "Service Battery"? I've reset SMC (I think), but my Air's battery isn't removable, so there seems to be little to do about the dying battery. :/ Note that the "dying battery" is probably just fine, it just isn't a brand new battery with the full capacity that you had when it was right out of the box. If you're OK with only getting half the battery life that you had when it was new, or you mostly use it plugged in, just ignore that. I've had a service battery notification for something like 3 years on my 2009 MBP. According to Coconut Battery I'm down to about 60% of my initial battery capacity (it varies slightly day to day) and it's been down at that level for the last two years. No other issues with it, and I can live with the shorter battery life given that its such an old machine. If it's worth $150 to you to get a new battery and have that full capacity go for it, but if you ignore it your laptop isn't going to explode or anything. 713 loadcycles if anyone cares.
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Apr 4, 2015 23:34
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Mac Hardware megathread - your MacBook can act as a sex toy
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Apr 15, 2015 15:08
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What's the general consensus on the GPU in the upper tier MBPr that was announced today? It's been basically forever since I paid close attention to the GPU wars, but I seem to remember being a little leery of AMD. Is apple's moving to AMD chips something to be concerned with here? I've got a mid-2009 MBP that's been an absolute trooper, but it's way past time to replace it and I'm looking really closely at this latest update.
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May 19, 2015 17:48
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Electric Bugaloo posted:So is that an upgrade/sidegrade/downgrade from the Nvidias that they had there before? (AFAIK, they kept the same 750m between 2013 and 2014 right?) Can someone comment on this? I asked earlier if the Nvidia -> AMD shift was a good or bad thing and didn't get a response. I've got a mid-2009 15" MBP (the model with a discrete GPU) that was a trooper all through grad school, but I really want to replace it soon. Ideally I'd like to get the latest version of what I had - probably a 15" MBPr with the discrete GPU. I don't mind paying the extra since I only buy a new computer about every 4-6 years. The problem is that if the dGPU in the new one is a dog I might just go another direction. I really don't want to pick up something for a few thousand today that I have to replace two or three years down the road.
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May 26, 2015 15:34
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