My MacBook Air at home is 3 years old, but it's thin and light. I take it with me when I travel, and the battery will last through a whole trans-atlantic flight. I don't actually care about the visual design, but the 2016 MacBook Air's keyboard feels very comfortable to type on, and the battery life is awesome.
Unfortunately, when this MacBook Air dies, it will probably get replaced by a PC. I don't really want to shell an insane amount of money on a new Mac, especially in an era where you can't get one without a touchbar, and I won't get the convenience of a non-USB-C port.
This has everything to do with the unresolved problems of Linux power management. I use Ubuntu on Thinkpads too, and battery life is decent after a bit of configuration. Windows meanwhile gives all day battery life on Thinkpads.
I think the problem is that most distributions ship with no Powertop or udev rules, plus lots of unnecessary services and devices on by default.
One really nice thing Apple does is optimizing Safari for battery life. My comparison was Firefox on macOS vs Linux. With Safari, I'd get 20-30 min more.
I bet Firefox and other programs would benefit from some black-box GCC/LVM flag optimization to improve battery usage.
GPUs could consume a lot of power. > built-in Nvidia GPU (which
> I use for machine learning)
Currently I have 11 hours remaining, on 78% battery charge with a fairly dim screen (I use a setting to prevent the battery charging fully to extend its lifetime). Powertop shows a draw of 4.1W. Strangely the computer seems to run hotter in Windows and the battery lifetime is a bit shorter.
I'm using Ubuntu 18.04, running KDE. The laptop (Carbon X1 6th Gen) has a very nice keyboard, red trackpoint, 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB RAM, i7-8550U CPU and a 2560x1440 display. It also has USB-C plus a couple of USB-A and HDMI sockets.
Ideally you shouldn‘t be putting any significant pressure on any surface with your forearms, palms, or wrists while actively typing. You want your hands “floating” with the fingertips resting very lightly on the key tops. But even if you must rest your hands or arms on something, please keep your wrists as straight as possible, and especially avoid wrist flexion or extension.
The surface of your laptop should be more-or-less parallel with the plane of your forearms, with the keyboard kept close to your torso so that your shoulders can remain relaxed with your upper arms hanging down at your sides. (This reduces the torque your arms put on your shoulder, allowing you to comfortably support your arms without any need for external props.)
If you have a tall desk and a low chair, and can’t change furniture, the way to work around the poor furniture design is to either (a) move the laptop to a low tray or directly onto your lap, or (b) prop the back side of the laptop up so that the base of the laptop is tilted toward you, with the keyboard parallel to your forearms. Keep the laptop (or whatever other keyboard) near the edge of the desk.
If you come up with a body shape and context and I guarantee you we can come up with a more comfortable way to position the laptop than anything requiring wrists bent downward.
This is not about the design of the Macbook: the same goes for any other laptop, however smooth and soft its front edge might be.
You also shouldn’t drive your car into other cars. But we still put seatbelts and bumpers on for those who do.
I said people who are digging their forearms into their laptop edges are probably bending their wrists down in a way that puts strain on the tendons used for typing (not to mention putting direct pressure on the tendon sheaths for the finger flexors), so they should be careful about RSI.
People should do whatever works for them and listen to their own bodies, but should be really careful with computer keyboards. I know many professional computer-users who did themselves serious harm with significant impact to their careers.
If something hurts even a little bit, please don’t try to work through the pain.
In none of these cases should your forearms be digging into the edge of the laptop. If they are something else is wrong about the position.
I occasionally type sitting on a couch, lying on my back on a bed, sitting at crappy furniture at a coffeeshop, sitting on the floor, with one hand on a tall table while tending to toddlers, etc.
In any of those contexts, it is possible to find a way of typing with straight wrists.
This really has nothing to do with the computer case design; the previous poster should adjust his or her posture irrespective of laptop choice. RSI is no joke.
* Multitasking was allowed
* Good maps app for navigating
* Rhapsody subscription service for all your music needs
* 3G support
* Built-in SIP client
The iPhone had none of this, but it had the superior UI. It took years for Apple to catch up to the technology of the klunky N95.
However, the Nokia N95 suffered from a small screen 2.6 inches relative to the iPhone’s 3.5 inch display. It mostly sucked for web browsing, which seemed less import because all phones sucked for web browsing.
What separated the iPhone was a useful touch screen enabling large screens, an acceptable web browser even if it lacked flash etc, and an unlimited bandwidth option. If anything it was really bandwidth that changed how people used their phone.
(I did not own an iPhone 1, only a 3G one, but I skipped on MMS as hard as I could)
Blackberries were good at email, but otherwise they lost to Apple badly.
WiFi and the companion iPod Touch made me feel it wasn't as much a phone as a goddmaned computer with a phone app that mostly didn't suck.
The text input took a while but I still charge up and unlock my OG iPhone and am amazed at how well it fares (yes, iOS3).
Huh? Windows CE and, later, Windows Mobile had quite a large number of apps for its era since the programming model was similar to desktop Windows (pre .NET) meaning that there was a ready-made base of developers for it. They weren't necessarily easy to find since the idea of an app store (and Apple/Google eating 30% of your revenue) didn't exist yet but they were there.
- First phone emphasizing Wi-Fi
- Full web browser
- Integrated iPod
http://allthingsd.com/20070626/the-iphone-is-breakthrough-ha...
It also sported a screen comparable to a "retina" display.
Obviously, Apple did something (likely marketing, imho, and of course extreme ease of use) right to make the iPhone as popular as it is, but I would need to be convinced that it had something to do with functionality.
The version of IE was unusable for most of the web. But you don’t think “extreme ease of use” made the iPhone more functional?
The devices we use to deploy were $1000-$2000 (ruggedized devices) so they definitely weren’t cheap devices for the time.
IE eventually got pretty useless, but unlike iPhone you could always load alternative browsers, shells, and what not.
Sorry, I am still seeing that yes, iPhone is easier to use, as long as you don't need to do much, but functional? Not back then. And whether capacitive or resistive screen is better is a big question -- at least resistive is far more precise.
if only i could find a more lightweight version the same size as the x230, then i'd probably stop using the mac.
Personally that's the aesthetic I want in a laptop.
I'll accept minimalism, though. Or anything that's not too flashy and doesn't scream GAMER.
There's no such thing as a non-functional design! If it's non-functional, than it's either a piece of art or a piece of crap.
The thing is, laptops aren't satellites. I've never understood the obsession with saving even a pound of weight for a laptop. (OK, maybe if you're one of those people who flies a million miles a year.)
It's a tool, not an objet d'art or a satellite. The Thinkpad was the best expression of this idea. I've never liked using a Mac more than a Thinkpad. Maybe I'm strange that way, or maybe I'm just that much further skewed toward utility that it makes all the difference for me.
the only time when weight is not a consideration is when getting a machine that i don't intend to move but just keep at home/work. but even then, i get annoyed when i occasionally have to carry around, or decide to change the purpose of the device.
I'd much rather look at a mac book pro than a thinkpad. Next to the minimalist design of the mac, a thinkpad looks like you ripped out part of a server and started carrying it around.
But, I'd rather type on a thinkpad than on a mac. The keys are better (if not as good as they once were), the surface is neither too cold nor too hot to rest my wrists on, and the edge of the laptop isn't sharp like the edge of a mac pro. Once you start using a thing, the visual details melt away and the functional details take over.