Apple’s new laptops: Ugly, unusable crap
I’m sure you couldn’t tell, but I’m not happy about Apple’s announcements today.
They’re Ugly
Apple’s new MacBook/MacBook Pro
Really. These things just look bad. I hated the nasty black bezel on the aluminum iMac, and I hate it on these. It hasn’t grown on me. They’re plain ugly, eschewing clean minimalism for a terrible retro throwback design. I mean, we’ve been here before. What’s next, Snow White?
Apple’s new Mac Mini
And why can’t they keep their stuff unified? The iMac and iPhone come out with the silver/black/gloss design, then the iPhone goes back to the MacBook style black/white, then they kill that design entirely. What are they smoking?
No Matte Screens
The only computer Apple sells with a matte screen is now the 17” MacBook Pro. I know that the mouth-breather faction just loves them some glossy, but they’re truly god-awful unusable crap. I’m sure they’re great if you’re sitting in your mom’s basement watching ST:TOS, but for those who need to use them outside an inky grotto, the gloss is a huge negative. Many people agree with me on this.
I mean, really. Look at this photo. It’s awful.
They’re Really Dumb
The Pro laptops have two graphics cards; one for when you’re plugged in and want to push as many polygons as possible, and one to conserve power when you’re on battery. Now, this sounds pretty cool, actually. It would be better if you had a single card that could just scale down, like modern CPU cores can, but it sounds pretty neat. Well, until you find out that to switch, you have to log out. Seriously. Log out? What is this, Windows? May as well require a reboot.
Let me ask you: when was the last time you logged out of your computer? Can you even remember? I never log out; it’s too big an interruption to my workflow. Macs have this slick sleep mode that lets you take them anywhere and never interrupts what you were doing. This breaks all of that, and I don’t even see the point of having a laptop that works that way. You may as well go buy an iMac to keep on your desk, since it’ll be faster to resume working there than log out and back in to your laptop.
For a company with a reputation of making things that Just Work™, this is a major screwup.
There’s no way I’m going to be sporting one of these things. I just hope my late 2007 MacBook Pro lasts until Uncle Steve’s recto-cranial inversion is reversed.
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